Analysing the Novel
A Treatise on the Novel. By Robert Liddell. (Cape. 9s. 6d.)
"UN ROMAN," said Stendhal, " est comme un archet, la caisse du violon qui rend les sons, c'est Fame du lecteur." The critic of the novel has a more difficult task than the critic of poetry or the drama. We all know, or think we know, what constitutes a poem or a play ; but the author of "a treatise on the novel" always has to begin by defining his very elusive subject. The majority of writers have adopted the .historical standpoint, and have tried to show that the contemporary novel is a direct develop- ment of the novel of classical times. In order to prove their thesis, they have usually selected a single concept—" character," "plot," " structure " and "form," have been among the most popular —and have argued drat it has always been the novelist's main pre- occupatipn and is the key to his art. The result is that books ott the novel have been too abstract and too schematised to offer the reader much assistance in enjoying the work of particular novelists.
In a promising first chapter, Mr. Liddell begins by criticising
these assumptions. "It is true," he writes, "that it [the novel] can trace its descent from Longus, Heliodorus and Petronius, and from mediaeval romances ; it is true, but not very interesting." "For more than two thousand six hundred years," he goes on, "poetry has been written that still matters to us ; the prose fiction that matters to us has all been writteti in the last two hundred years." He thinks that the rise of the novel was due to the decline of the drama at the end of the seventeenth century and that it is the natural medium for the modern prose artist. "It is hard to see," he remarks, "what function prose Drama now retains that cannot be better performed by the Cinema or the Novel." He agrees with Mrs. Leavis that the importance of " charaaer " has been exaggerated, but he does not accept her views unreservedly. "Practical criticism," with its emphasis on the novelist's sensibility, is not enough. The novel is "the representation of character in action," and in judging a novel we have to account for "the use made of their specific talents by novelists on particular occasions." He thinks that Virginia Woolf Was "a great artist " but not "a great novelist . . . precisely beCause she lacked the novelist's specific gifts."
There is a good deal to be said for this approach, but it cannot be accepted unreservedly. There is certainly a connection between the decline of the drama and the rise of the novel, but if Mr. Liddell had tried to answer the very important and very difficult question: "Why did the drama decline at the end of the seventeenth century?" he would have been in i much better position to tell us why the novel is the natural form of the mpdem prose artist and what the specific gifts of the novelist are. His generalisation also overlooks some awkward facts. It overlooks the fact that La Princesse de Cleves, which was the first of the great " modern " novels, was published in 1678, only a year after the production of Phedre ; that Marivaux, the fourth greatest French dramatist, wrote two excellent novels in which he was clearly doing something different from what he had done in his plays ; and it fails to account for the co-existence or the drama and the novel in Russia and the Scandinavian countries during the nineteenth century.
The later chapters of the book deal with the novelist's "range," his "values," "the making of plot," "the making of character" and "background." Mr. Liddell concentrates, as his publishers point out, on "the workshop methods of novelists," and well-chosen quotations from their letters and prefaces show us what the great novelists were trying to do and how they came to write their books. While these chapters contain much that is interesting and stimu- lating, it can hardly be maintained that Mr. Liddell has produced a new aesthetic of the novel. His book suffers from the same schematisation as those of his predecessors in the same field. It is a mistake to suggest that in Emma and Madame Bovary " character " and " background " are in some way separable ; both these novels depend on the artists' unified vision of society as they knew it, while a novel like The Return of the Native fails because of the absence of a unified vision. Mr. Liddell's other categories present similar difficulties. When we add up "range," "values," "character" and "plot," we find that they come to something less than "the novelist's specific gifts:' which remain, tantalisingly, the unknown quantity. All these attempts at classification end by throwing us back on Stendhal's definition which should surely have found a place in Mr. LiddelPs classical places." The novel is the most fluid of all literary forms, and the violinist's " bow " is simply the method used by a particular novelist at a particular moment of history to evoke the response that he wants in the reader.
MARTIN TURNELL.
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