It is natural for the common man in an irritable mood to pronounce on the dangers of reading novels. What is strange is to hear this from novelists, among them some of the greatest: Cervantes, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Flaubert. Of course the tone varies. With Jane Austen there is a teasing playfulness in the indictment, while for Flaubert the circulating library and its patrons are a source of pure disgust. For him, the spread of the plague of literacy to which the cabinet de lecture can be traced belongs among contemporary evils that are probably incurable. The multiplication of readers, like the mass production of cacti and oleographs, is a tedious illustration of the typically bourgeois phenomenon of repetition, adding to the universal sameness and satiety.
If the circulating library in Rouen had only nourishing books to lend culture-hungry Emma Bovary, the social effect would be even more depressing. A bad book is not harmed by circulating among the populace, but a superior one is brought down to the general level. This will be the fate of Madame Bovary; Flaubert has no illusions about raising subscribers to his own level—the iron law will not be suspended in his case. The fault is not even with future Emma Bovarys who will be tempted by Emma’s example and devour the novel for “the wrong reasons,” thus reducing it by a natural and inevitable process to merde. The fault is in “the art of the novel” itself, which copies life, which copies art, so that there is no end to the vulgarity of it. The labor of composition, the search for the mot juste, betray the novelist as grubby imitator toiling for a pointless exactitude. All forms of art, obviously, are open to that suspicion, but in the others—music, theatre, painting, sculpture—there is an element of play, of making (poiēsis), or just making believe. Even the sister art of poetry is allied to performance, i.e., to the alive; it may be declaimed or recited and in Flaubert’s time often was. But, for both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races, and, in the case of the writer, disgust is quick to supervene. How cold and dead the words are, lying unresponsive on the page.
That there is something repellent to the practitioner himself in the practice of novel-writing may have to do with the servility of the form and with the fact that so little bodily action enters into it. The poet walks about and, as we know from Nadezhda Mandelstam, his lips move. Flaubert, if I remember right, did occasionally bawl out his sentences as he composed them, and other novelists of his day (e.g., George Eliot) wept while writing their “big” climactic scenes. Their tears were matched by their readers’; grown men cried over novels then. In fact the writer’s shedding of tears—no longer admissible today—revealed the novelist as split into two, susceptible reader and methodically calculating author, conscious of his “craft.” The tears were perhaps his penance for being the unmoved mover of masses. If the novel almost from its inception seems to be divided against itself, can this be because of its capacity for moving large numbers of people to extreme states of horror, suspense, longing, apprehension, while engineering no catharsis?
Stated in the simplest terms, the novelist’s complaint against the novel is that it over-stimulates the reader, puts ideas in his head. It seems to me, looking back over what I have said, that in the past atonement for this was twofold. First, that the novelist be emotionally affected to the highest degree himself (those shouts and tears; Dickens’ dramatic readings from his works, particularly Little Nell’s death, the strain of which was thought to have brought on his own), and, second, that the novel, aware of its dangerous propensity, should compensate by factual exposition and moral instruction. Just as the biographies of so many of the great novelists bear awful witness to the agonies their writings caused them (how often, like George Eliot, like Flaubert, like Lawrence, Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, the novelist was a human sacrifice to his “heroic” creativity), so the intellectual and expository component in the novels of the great period was immense. The ratio was far larger than that in the drama and matched only, at moments, by that in the long narrative poem, say, “The Excursion” or The Scholar-Gipsy.
When, with James, the novel renounced its actuality, renounced its power to move masses—in short, its vulgarity in both senses of the word—it no longer had any need for ideas to undo the damage that verisimilitude and a high emotional involvement might do the reader tensely following its episodes. That sort of damage, genuine or imagined, could never have been caused by the theatre even at its most weepy and melodramatic, because the theatre is a public, forum-like art and its audience is not a collection of solitudes sitting in rows side by side. It was not until the invention of the moving-picture that the novel lost its supremacy as purveyor of irreality to a multitude composed of solitary units. In certain scenes (I think) of Middlemarch and Nostromo, the approach of the silent film can already be felt.
But, unlike the novel, the moving-picture, at least in my belief, cannot be an idea-spreader; its images are too enigmatic, e.g., Eisenstein’s baby carriage bouncing down those stairs in Potemkin. A film cannot have a spokesman or chorus character to point the moral as in a stage play; that function is assumed by the camera, which is inarticulate. And the absence of spokesmen in the films we remember shows rather eerily that with the cinema, for the first time, humanity has found a narrative medium that is incapable of thought.
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