The Province of Art
Ideas and the Novel.
by Mary McCarthy.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 121 pp. $7.95.
For several decades Mary McCarthy has been warning that the novel, in the ample form in which it flourished in the 19th century, has been wasting away in the 20th, the victim of a harsh aesthetic. Plot and character, the heart of the classics of the previous century, have been dismissed as inessential in the modern novel, she once wrote. Setting, the third member of the “old triad” and one which Miss McCarthy describes as “the air the novel breathed,” has also vanished, she noticed in her essay, “One Touch of Nature” (1969). In “The Fact in Fiction” (1960), she observed that facts, which had been the flesh of those large books greedy for information about the world, have ceased to be considered important. Now in Ideas and the Novel, which contains the four Northcliffe Lectures Miss McCarthy delivered recently in London, she argues that ideas, the guiding mind of 19th-century novels, are “today felt to be unsightly in the novel.”
Miss McCarthy devotes her opening lecture to disparaging, in her ironic style, the contemporary condescending attitude toward ideas in the novel. Now (thanks to Henry James’s influence, she says) writers labor under “the canon doctrine of the novel as a fine art and the novelist as an intelligence superior to mere intellect.” Today’s refined writer is expected “to free himself from the workload of COMMENTARY and simply, awesomely, to show: his creation is beyond paraphrase or reduction.” Miss McCarthy leaves no doubt about her own lack of respect for such “art novel” creations. She then devotes the rest of her lectures to readings of an array of 19th-century classics, assessing their authors’ use of ideas and implicitly offering this century’s novelists guidance in restoring ideas to fiction.
Miss McCarthy’s dire warnings about the plight of ideas in the modern novel deserve to be heeded, but are more than slightly exaggerated. The aesthetic that has fostered the kind of fiction marked by experimentation with language and sensibility, though certainly in vogue both among some critics and in the university world, is still not the “law,” the “hard doctrine . . . imposing itself even upon those who are fervent non-believers,” that Miss McCarthy accuses it of being. And the general debate over whether fiction should primarily offer philosophical truths or aesthetic pleasures has not been settled decisively against Miss McCarthy and in favor of the aesthetes, as she seems to be convinced. Nor does it appear to be raging particularly fiercely right now. One need only name John Fowles, Shirley Hazzard, William Styron, and John Updike to refute Miss McCarthy’s claim that all novelists these days are feeling oppressed by a prohibition against ideas. (The quality of those ideas is another matter.)
Like her warnings, Miss McCarthy’s assessments of the 19th-century novelists she surveys are unnecessarily extreme. She focuses admiringly on French and Russian novelists (Stendhal, Hugo, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) but treats George Eliot and Charles Dickens briefly and disparagingly, judging that “19th-century English fiction, in comparison with that of the Continent, seems barren of ideas.” The reason Miss McCarthy makes this dismissive and dubious judgment about the English novelists (which she enters even more emphatically against Henry James) is that they missed out on what she describes as “the shaking experience of the century: the fact of seeing an Idea on the march and being unable to forget it—radiant vision or atrocious spectacle, depending on your point of view.”
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Though Miss McCarthy never pauses in the swift, elliptical course of these lectures to distinguish explicitly among varieties of ideas, she clearly is interested in the revolutionary, ideological kind—and interested more in their general power as “shaking experience” than in the particular “point of view” they elicit. She shows little concern for the calmer sort of ideas that are inconspicuously camped in the world, not on the march, which were the ones Lionel Trilling focused on in his essay, “The Meaning of a Literary Idea” (1949). There he argued that “the interflow between emotion and idea is a psychological fact which we do well to keep clearly in mind, together with the part that is played by desire, will, and imagination.” Miss McCarthy, by contrast, seems to want to isolate “rough bundles of concepts,” theories, rational principles.
The “governing idea” Miss McCarthy discovers in the Continental novels she treats {The Red and the Black, Les Miserables, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, among others) is Napoleon, who exemplified the possibility of transcending the past and rationally, willfully forging a new destiny. The fate of the Emperor left a lasting and mixed impression on both French and Russian novelists; they in turn granted him alternatively constructive and destructive but always forceful sway over many of their characters. In her allusive but insightful discussions, Miss McCarthy emphasizes how the idea of Napoleon and the related ideas of progress, of ambition, of genius dominate these novels and exert a singular authority over the natural course of their characters’ lives.
Miss McCarthy is impatient with “the homely English novel” of the 19th century because it does not testify to an obsession with “the hold of abstractions on human flesh and blood.” “There are homiletics and moralizing in plenty,” she writes, “but no sovereign concepts,” no “dark questioning” of “basic principles such as the notion of betterment or the inviolability of the moral law.” George Eliot, she condescendingly remarks, “could not have pictured ideas as baleful or at best equivocal forces. About the worst ideas can do, in her view, is to encourage headstrongness in a heroine.” Even Felix Holt, the Radical (which Lenin supposedly touted to his comrades) does not rank with Miss McCarthy as a serious confrontation with ideas. Though she grants that Dickens knew ideas could be dangerous, he too is insufficiently concerned with them as “theory or concise program.” As for the profound understanding that British novels exhibit of ideas in their less dramatic form, as they mingle with desires, intentions, dreams, delusions, and needs—with all this Miss McCarthy is unimpressed.
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Thirty years ago Lionel Trilling took care to emphasize a more various, moderate spectrum of ideas because he wanted “to defend the province of art from the dogged tendency of our time to ideologize all things into grayness.” Miss McCarthy, by contrast, is trying to defend the province of art from what she perceives as a dogged tendency to aestheticize all things into grayness. She calls for “emergency strategies . . . to disarm and disorient reviewers and teachers of literature, who, as always, are the reader’s main foe.” Her prescription of a forceful, radical brand of ideas seems to be such a strategy, designed to jolt these foes away from their preoccupation with intricate linguistic structures.
But although some critics and writers do in fact desperately need to be jarred, it is not so clear that the novel itself needs, or can benefit from, the crash diet Miss McCarthy proposes. An injection of starkly authoritative ideas seems a less effective antidote to the circumscribed aesthetic preoccupations she condemns in modern fiction than a more complex, nuanced understanding of the wayward human spirit as it manifests itself in plot, setting, and character.
