The Novel Today

BY K. K. KAUL, New Delhi.

One of the disabilities of the modern novel is its lack of a healthy public criticism. The almost complete industrialization of the novel as commodity has produced a rackety, snippety, tip-of-the-mouth sort of criticism which provides the novelist with a rabble of customers, rather than with a relatively homogeneous and alert audience.

Those who lead us in literary judgment, our pundits and priests, are very hot against the writers who refuse to the appalling political and economic situation of our time the homage of spiritual enslavement and dream panic, The literary dictators call such writers "escapists," and critics like Jean Prevost, Edmond Jaloux and Desmond MacCarthy have protested against the word, in which they find absurdity and a kind of insult. But whatever its hint of moral shadiness, critics like Andre Therive Rene Lalon love it–for its euphony, and because of its implication of horizons. I think such writers tend to be good writers–because they are imaginative, "ergo," will write though the Heavens, fall, and all the more if Heaven is in fact falling; whereas the other gentry, the "here-and nowers," have mainly been driven into literary activity by a reaction to the immediacy which, though morally meritorious, is not an essential of the art of writing.

The modern novel inherits a tradition which turned out the cupboards in the effort of exactly relizing a room. Armed with such legacy Arnold Bennet, Somerset Mugham, Hugh Walpole, Miss. G. B. Stern, Brett Young, Tomlinson and Martin Armstrong commercialised the writing machine. They have given us just spurious popular novels. Then there are the best sellers of the priestly type–Grapes of Wrath, Chad Hanna, Kitty Foyel, and H.M. Pulham Esquire. These are wordy and feminine. Too much easy sensuousness, too much false impression, too little structural hardness, such middling novels–talented and deplorable, make no life-mark on fiction’s ‘overflooded strand’ H.G Wells is a "liberal fascist" and writes from the point of view of the detached gentlemen. Galsworthy besides D.H. Lawrence is ponderous and lifeless. In Lawrence we have sheer genius. His creative vitality and natural genius reminds one of Balzac and Zola. He is the most remarkable English novelist of modern times. Aldous Huxley suffers from too easy a glitter, a lavish display of cynical intelligence in pinning down like bugs his soiled specimens of humanity and yet Point Counter and Crome Yellow are a few of the most brilliant of modern novels. Mrs. Woolf is a mystic–contemplating the whole phenomenon of consciousness. She seems to have taken deliberately from Psychology the use of "substitution-symbols" and these recur like Wagnerian "leit-motif." E. M. Forster has not exaggerated emotion or over-elaborate diction like Galsworthy, and that makes him important. James Joyce sums up "the individualist movement." His exploration of the subtleties of civilised sensibility, his psychological realism, is always enchanting. His Ulysses is the biggest event in the history of the English novel since Jude.

One of the most striking characteristics of post-war art has been the widespread desire to entice the common man to come up to the microphone and say a few words.

So Lionel Britton in Hunger and Love, James Hanley in Drift, Ebb and Flood, Walter Greenwood in Love on the Dole, Isherwood in All the conspirators and The Lost, Edward Upward in Journey to the Border, Rex Warner in The Wild Goose Chase protest against the moral degradation that makes life dependent; they reveal the running sore in the social body. They show life scalded by horrors in the midst of squalid darkness. But these terrible indictments of our civilization have lyrical serenity. Their portrayal is executed largely in the idiom which Auden has skillfully improvised from the clinical psycho-analysis of Freud. Their characters move in a whirl of frenzy, freely splashed with high colours. They carve out the hard structure of fact and magnify the operation of the drama. In short, their work is at once terrifying and serenely beautiful.

Among the charms of the modern American novel I will mention Upton Sinclair. In his works realism has reached its summit. He has portrayed the utmost conceivable energy, fury, greed, horror, crudity, anguish majesty and delight. His The Jungle is the most outstanding realistic novel. His Oil and Boston, are books written with the blood of present day history. In Ernest Heningway and John Dos Passos, we have clipped, hardboiled prose. Passos is an effective interpreter of the disordered, pointlessly rapid life of America. W. Faulkner is the best contemporary regionalist. Sinclair Lewis smacks of the obvious fun of the hundred-percenter. His Babbit and It Can’t Happen Here show staying power. His Main Street shows how he overdoes his manner through the compulsion of an admirable indignation. Willa Cather has the dominant trait of formlessness. Edith Wharton’s Elhan Frome was a great novel, yet she was a gifted failure. Floyd Dell is very attractive and combines revolutionary social consciousness with a convincing picture of life and character.

In France, Anatole france proved to be the sceptic and satiric fictional commentator upon the whole human race. In 1920 Andra Gide imposed Proust upon public administration and he has since exerted a great influence on literature. Gide is rather lustily oriental. His best novel is the Counterfeiters. Proust gave us all the pretence, degeneracy, unsatisfied love and also the effects upon it of time’s changes. His influence is incalculable. Andre Malran is a revolutionary novelist. His Days of Hope, Man’s Fate and others reveal a feeling for the movements of man in the mass. Journey to the End of Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celines is a great novel. No more horrible vision of modern life has appeared. Joules Romain’s Men of Good Will and Death of Nobody have broadened the technique of the novelist–to include the stir in the human pool. Andre Chamsons La Galere, Jean Giono’s Les Vraies Richness and novels of Louis Guilloux, Foul Nizan, and Jean Sartre are permeated by one feeling above all others: HUMANITY.

The dominant figure in the German novels is Thomas Mann. He has a deceptively easy and fluent style, his characters are free from the dubious accretions of shadow. His Magic Mountain is the most important. Jacob Wessermann in The Word’s Illusions and the Goose Man shows his tremendous passion and vigour. Like stephan Zewing he has sparks of the divine fire. Sunderman’s Song of Songs and Franz Hollering’s. The Defenders have a leaping vitality and a kind of searching radiance. Franz kafaka has a haunting and sinister lucidity.

The end of the civil war in Russia in 1920 gave us a number of writers. Young post-revolutionary prose-writers looked most to Gogol and Leskov. The Five-year Plan gave us novels like Pilnyak’s Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea and leonov’s Sot and Skutarev Sky. This position lasted until 1932. In 1934 Gorky’s influence produced novelists like Sholokov, Bruno, yasensky-Fadeev. Kataev, and Bely. Forward, Oh Time, A Man Changing His Skin and The Upturned Soil are all great realistic novels of today.

I have mentioned the desire to entice the common man as the most striking characteristic of the modern novel. There are two explanations of this happy phenomenon of the ubiquity of virtue among common man. One is the Rousseaunist conception of the innate goodness of Man in his natural state. The other is the Marxist belief that this goodness is relatively unimpaired among those who do not exploit their fellows for profit. The general statement is that power corrupts as in Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine, Giovanni Verga’s The Defeated, Renn’s Death without Battle, Yuri Olyesha’s Liompa, and Henry Green’s Living.

Having agreed that society is abrogated and dismantled, we are examining the raw material. That, I think, is the mood TODAY.