Realism, Reality, and the Novel: A Symposium on the Novel

Author(s): Bernard Bergonzi, Malcolm Bradbury, Ian Gregor, Barbara Hardy, Frank Kermode,
Mark Kinkead-Weekes, David Lodge, Tony Tanner, Paul Turner and Park Honan
Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Spring, 1969), pp. 197-211
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344931
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Realism,Reality,andthe2Novel
A Symposium on the Novel with Bernard Bergonzi, Malcolm Bradbury, Ian Gregor, Barbara
Hardy, Frank Kermode, Mark Kinkead-Weekes,
David Lodge, Tony Tanner, and Paul Turner.
Report by PARK HONAN
NOVELinvited

nine very active British critics of fiction to an informal symposium on

"Realism, Reality, and the Novel" at The Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-onAvon, England, December 7 and 8, 1968. There were no formal papers. The participants were asked to consider critical problems suggested by the central topic at
their first three-hour session, and the present literary situation at a two-hour
meeting the next day.
David Lodge launched the symposium by commenting on ten representative
critical positions. Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel has aroused "a fundamental
uneasiness about the value-implications of his position," as Mr. Lodge pointed
out. "By stressing formal realism as the prime characteristic of the novel form he
seemed to identify it by something which had neither moral nor aesthetic value.
Particularity is meaningless, ultimately. We discover meaning only through analogy and generalization. If Watt is right, the realistic novel poses a special problem for criticism."
The problem posed by Ian Watt's emphasis on "formal realism" has received a
wide variety of responses. The most extreme of these is perhaps illustrated by
Robert Scholes in The Fabulators-since Scholes seems to concede that realism
works against meaning in literature, that the realistic novel has been a mistake,
merely a blind alley. Thus he welcomes symptoms that modern novelists are
turning back to allegory and romance and giving up realism to the motion picture.
"Cinema," Mr. Lodge quoted from The Fabulators, "gives the coup de grace to a
dying realism in written fiction. Realism purports-always has purported-to
subordinate the words themselves to their referents, the things the words point to.
Realism exalts Life and diminishes Art, exalts things and diminishes words. But
when it comes to representing things one picture is worth a thousand words, and
one motion picture is worth a million. In the face of competition from cinema, fiction must abandon its attempt to 'represent reality' and rely more on the power of
words to stimulate the imagination."
The symposium's critics later took this position to task.

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g98

NOVELISPRING

1969

The particularanxiety that crystallizesin this topic about "let's

leave all that to the cinema"has been seen before. It is very puritanical.I think a
lot of criticismof the modernnovel is very puritanical:it is botheredterriblyabout
"truth," about Platonic problems of fiction as being lies. What we seem to be
heading for after Scholes and Raimond'sLa Crise du Roman (a book I first read
about in the pages of NOVEL) is very much the new approachwhich says, "Well,
look, it doesn't matter what happens at the diachroniclevel at all: let's look for
structures,let's see what actuallygives this thing the kind of truthwhich even the
novelist was unawareof. Therefore,questions of one-to-one correspondencewith
reality no longer apply. We can talk about any novel in the same sense in which
an anthropologisttalks about a myth." If we take that line we're liberatedwholly
from this problemof what realismis and how the horizontalflow of a fiction correspondsto reality.Becausethen it doesn't have to correspondat all. It's the vertical relationshipsthat becomeimportant.Now I look upon this, I must say, with a
certaindread.It seems to me a terribledevelopmentin some ways, and I'm all for
going on being diachronicas long as we possibly can.
FRANK KERMODE:

The problem with this is that it assumes you cannot apply

the conceptof realityto structure,whereasI think you can.

MALCOLM BRADBURY:

FRANK KERMODE: The real importanceof the Scholes viewpoint is that it doesn't allow for the fact that the cinemaimmediatelybegins to develop its own rhetorical
problems.In other words, there is no substantialdifferencebetween words and

images.

Another symposium critic added that the cinema reminds one of fictiveness.
"Indeedit is increasinglyabout itself now," BernardBergonzicommented.David
Lodgefelt that modernwriterswere increasinglyaware of the competitionof the
cinema, but that the cinema must face artistic problems parallel to those of the
novelist. "Cinemais now rehandlingits own stereotypes,parodyingthem, trying
to achieve a sharpersense of reality-problems the novel has had to go through."
Both the cinemaand the novel must accommodatethemselvesto man's continually
changing sense of reality and his consequentlychanging concepts of credibility,
the symposiumvirtually agreed.Subtle changes in concepts of credibilityare felt
even as one reads two or three works by differentwriters of the same period. The
differencesamong Defoe, Richardson,and Fielding owe partly to the fact that
their concepts of credibilityare not alike, Mark Kinkead-Weekessuggested. And
yet stereotypedviews persistas to what "reality"in literaturemust be.
TANNER:Reality is always thought to be composed of detail and concretions.
TONY
People are regarded as being helplessly immersed in a mass of detail. The novelist
supposedly comes along and imposes a pattern on this, and then he goes away and
people fall back into detail. But it seems to me that the instinct to perceive and
form patterns is part of reality. The pattern-discerning instinct is in reality itself.

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PARK HONANIREALISM

199

It is not only that people are capable of discerning patterns but that they are allas it were-little metaphysicians. And not only is the novelist a metaphysician, but
all of his characters are.
MALCOLM
BRADBURY:
Pattern then is not merely a matter of form. Patterns, that is to

say, involve cultural perceptions.

There is a "universalizing instinct" in people, as Mr. Bradbury put it, and the
novelist even as he sets out to write takes account of it as he makes fundamental
decisions about his work's narrative structure, its characters, its particular "patterns."
FRANKKERMODE:
But what is narrative structure?
BARBARA
HARDY:
It is the stories you tell in the process of looking ahead, looking
back, taking in. Structure is spatial.

BERNARD
BERGONZI:
A critic such as John Bayley in "Against a New Formalism" is
not interested in structure or texture, as far as I can see. He seems very much at
odds with what we have been saying so far.
A passage from Bayley in The Critical Quarterly had been quoted at the beginning of the symposium:
For it is the point about the novel that it is interesting; that it is the most
direct mode of intercommunication ever envisaged as art; that it is social
intercourse by other means. Its unprecedented

as Tolstoi said-with

flux of words is concerned-

questions of how men live and should live.

Bayley's view, David Lodge felt, "tends to blur distinctions between life and
art and to encourage various forms of critical intolerance. We are most familiar,
perhaps, with this effect in the works of Dr. Leavis and the Scrutiny school. Bayley, a critic of a very different temper, rather sweepingly dismisses a great deal of
modern fiction because it lacks the Tolstoian confidence in the capacity of art to
handle experience in a direct and straightforward way."
Another participant felt that Mr. Bayley's argument was decidedly tautological.
"He is saying 'I like Tolstoi because Tolstoi is very likeable.' As far as method
goes, what he is saying about Tolstoi could easily be said of C. P. Snow. Snow
hopes that everything he is doing will be suffused with human significance. Bayley
leaves you with the question of 'Why?' He doesn't differentiate or critically explain."
"What is Bayley trying to register, then ?"
"That Tolstoi has a satisfactory or comprehensive view of life."
"Well, what is there in Tolstoi that encourages this critical view of him ?"

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NOVELISPRING

1969

Tolstoi gives us room for so many ways of reacting, whereas Proust

in contrast dwindles down, giving us only one way of reacting. Proust has an engorging style with a single consciousness dominating-an aspect of modern literature, incidentally, that some people do not like.
TONY TANNER:

IAN GREGOR:

The whole sort of vocabularythat people have used in talking about

Tolstoi and life is perhaps unsatisfactory. I don't think in life we feel that we
can "co-habit" with every sort of experience.
Yet one does co-habit,as it were, with a largenumberof people. One
with
them, and yet one is constantly coming up against evidence that
gets along
all
they're
experiencing or scanning reality in slightly different ways. Nevertheless the extraordinary thing is that you can still maintain the social structure more
or less-though everybody is experiencing differently. This is one of the things I
find riveting in Tolstoi, or in George Eliot, as in parts of Middlemarch.
TONY TANNER:

DAVID LODGE: Thereis a nostalgiafor this. Yet it would be very difficultfor a novelist with equivalent talent to write the same kind of novel today.
TONY TANNER:

The novel has gone through various epistemologicalskepticisms.

Setting out to write a novel like Tolstoi today, you would end up writing like C. P.
Snow.
"Why can't you do the Tolstoi sort of thing now ?"someone asked.
BERNARD BERGONZI:

Becausewe have no common sense of reality. We are saddled

with all kinds of relativistic structures of consciousness. We do not believe in

there being one reality "out there" as undoubtedly Tolstoi did.

What we are getting skeptical about, and it seems to me

is
the
rightly so,
possibility of giving a single kind of qualification as to what is
"out there."

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES:

MALCOLM BRADBURY:We

no longer believe in the distinctionbetween what is "out

there" and what is "in here." The structuralist argument, for example, is that each
man creates his own world.
The symposium agreed that as certainty about any objective reality no longer
seems possible and as distinctions between inner and outer realities have broken
down, there is much in life-especially in public life-that cannot be represented
satisfactorily in fiction any more.
BERNARD BERGONZI: The political life of this country, or what goes on in large corporations or large institutions, is virtually outside the novel's territory. It seems

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PARK HONANjREALISM

201

that C.P. Snow is the only man who can do these subjects-pretty feebly. Some
kinds of sociologists,some kinds of journalistscan write about them interestingly,
but these areasseem completelybeyond the graspof any first-ranknovelist.
The modern novelist wants to give more play to his own inventive
power,and not to duplicatethe documentarywork of sociologyor journalism.
TONY TANNER:

BARBARAHARDY: But have novelists such as Tolstoi or Dickens ever describedcommittees or the civil servicein a very "documentary"way?

Americannovels do. Those recent ones about the bomb or the

next election are exhaustively circumstantialand yet they are unreadable.They
don't work because in the end-this is rathercruel-they are so hopelessly out of
touch with reality.Public life is now extremelyboring. We no longer have people
in the civil servicesitting aroundand meditatingand having intuitions about what
to do next, and so on. They're all just waiting to be replacedby computers.They
try to talk like computersas muchas possible.

FRANK KERMODE:

MALCOLMBRADBURY:This is not to say it's

not very real.

FRANK KERMODE:No, but one thing I do agree with JohnBayley about is that there
is a criterionof interestin fiction.

when politicallife reallybegins to engage the consciousness of your own identity, then you write politicalnovels. One finds good political
novels in West African or West Indianliterature.These call into question not just
fields of publiclife but the very direct connectionbetween what is happeningto a
society and what is happeninginside "me," and how "I" am to think about "myself."
MARKKINKEAD-WEEKES: So

BERNARD BERGONZI:
FRANK KERMODE:

Still, why not a novel aboutEnochPowell?

A biographywould do it.

If you get very good history and very good biography along
with the kind of psychologicalinsights which have become current only in this
century-with a whole new vocabularydiscussing the typology of people-then,
obviously,the novel can'tkeep on as it was in the nineteenthcentury.

TONY TANNER: Yes.

IAN

GREGOR:
Presumablyit is not just this man-Enoch Powell-and how he came

to hold these attitudesthat is interesting,but the fact that he is curiouslysymptomatic.This is typical of the kind of thing that novels do and that biographiesuse.
What would really knock the novel very hard would be a big dein
the
writingof psycho-biography.Thatis a realproblem.
velopment
FRANK KERMODE:

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NOVEL|SPRING

i969

Unlike most modern biographies, the nouveau roman as in Robbe-Grillet's

hands tends to "push the realismof particularityto its ultimate extreme,denying
all patternsand all meanings.Its aestheticis againstmyth, against pattern,"David
Lodgesaid.
MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES:

Just perception, perception, perception. Unrelated.'

Yes. The novel has always been a compromise between history and
fiction, and now the avant-garde is either pushing in the direction of pure fiction or
pure history-in the sense of pure factuality, if you like. We have the non-fiction
novel and the fictive novel. Is there anything in this idea, I wonder, that in English
literature the only anti-novels are comic novels? We require the serious novel to
take reality seriously?
DAVID LODGE:

MALCOLM BRADBURY:

The problemis that there are two kinds of anti-novel. One is

the kind which can set up a comic situation because it regards skeptically something
which has been taken for granted. It is an anti-novel because it dismantles something that used to be there. And there is that kind of anti-novel-it seems to me
typically French-which is basically involved with a philosophical or aesthetic
premise. It creates this particular world of expectations with no relation whatsoever
to any other world.
DAVID

There is nothing like it in English, is there?

LODGE:

We say the Englishanti-novel is comic because most Englishnovels

are comic. But don't we find the anti-novel element in Gissing and perhaps particularly in George Moore, as in Esther Waters? Moore is saying you have not told the
story of the maid-servant the way it really is, and this is the way it is. There is little
or no humor in that novel.
PARK HONAN:

IAN GREGOR:

Why do you think it is an anti-novel?

Becauseit is giving the lie to previousnovels.

PARK HONAN:

FRANK KERMODE:

PARK HONAN:

Aren't the Goncourts anti-novelists then?

I think so. Much the same might be said for the Goncourts and

Zola.
TONY TANNER:

If we get a majorityof novelists as anti-novelists,we are going to

have to reverse our terms!

1"This seems somewhat exaggerated; Lodge's statement is true, but there is a difference between the aesthetic
and the performance."-F. K.

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PARK

FRANK KERMODE:

203

HONANIREALISM

It's a cyclical movement: anti-novelists become novelists.

I can't recognize this distinction as being very fixed. C. P. Snow

then is an anti-novelist.

TONY TANNER:

But I think there is a distinction here. The novel by its very

progression persistently produces anti-novels. One generation's realism is the next
generation's romanticism: therefore you have a new realism and therefore a new
anti-novel. But there is something which is more explicitly an anti-novel. It is not
just a violation of a system of conventions but a total violation of the form as such
as it seems to accrue. Ulysses, Tristram Shandy, the French anti-novels, and John
Barth are certainly in this category.
MALCOLM BRADBURY:

But Fielding and George Eliot are not-even

ing it very clear what they are doing.

TONY TANNER:

though they are mak-

Fielding draws attention to his own artistry whereas George Eliot

draws attention to her own truthfulness.

DAVID LODGE:

They are also criticizing previous modes of fiction. I would have

thought they were anti-novelists who knew they were anti-novelists, whereas perhaps Virginia Woolf is an anti-novelist who didn't know she was.

BARBARA HARDY:

The process seems to be one of bringing fiction in a closer relationtime

each
to the generally shared assumptions about reality and the culture.
ship
an
is
exception. By not attempting to make that kind of adjustment, by
Fielding
rather increasing the distance between fiction and reality, by saying to Richardson,
"This is a naive notion you have about trying to imitate life"-he is a kick-back
against the process. This results in the otherwise unaccountable phenomenon that
sometimes fiction seems to go backwards-like Post-war British fiction, which is
more conventionally realistic than "Twenties" fiction.
DAVID LODGE:

IAN GREGOR: Don't we have in-built in our sense of fiction an idea of "progress"
in a curious way?

Many classic novelists took this evolutionary view, as James did. I

think it is something we wouldn't accept any more.

DAVID LODGE:

IAN GREGOR: Well, I believe we think of novels and their development in a rather
different way than we think about plays and poems. However untrue this way of
viewing them is, it persists. The remark, "After Proust the novel changes," or the
notion that we are able to see nineteenth-century novelists fumbling toward things
which twentieth-century novelists are to make plain, is common enough. These
thoughts don't occur when we talk about poetry.

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204

NOVELJSPRING 1969

BERNARD
BERGONZI:
There is a strongly evolutionist view about the novel built
into our criticism which we struggle against.

The symposiumwent on to considergenericdifferencesbetweennovels in different

literatures.
FRANK
KERMODE:
Why is it that nobody in England has written a story even remotely like Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"? It's very curious. There
is almost a racial differentiation between some kinds of fiction. How does one explain it?
TONYTANNER:
I think this would lead into problems of language, problems of
schema and genre, the state of society, even the geography that American novelists
have to deal with. The novel reflects these very immediately.
FRANK
KERMODE:
It is not simply a matter of satisfying different needs within a
culture because we can all see that that is a great story.
American literature relies on symbols. Quite clearly and unashamTONYTANNER:
edly their novelists try to set up a symbol-system. They don't do it deviously, as an
English novelist might try to slip in a symbol here and there, but are actually trying
to create a system. Some American novelists say they are more interested in abstractions and patterns than particulars and details. Obviously they have felt a
greater need to find abstract patterns, some sort of coherent symbol-systems which
will enable them to chart this extraordinary thing called American experience.
English writers feel more stable within the given signs.
PARKHONAN:I wonder if part of the question of the way in which novels are writ-

ten doesn't depend on early education? Hawthorne's stories are very closely associated with the symbolizing processes in the Bible, the Old Testament.
MALCOLM
BRADBURY:
Given this to be true, how do you explain the fact that so
many nineteenth-century American novels were published first in England and had
to make their way with English reviewers? Or that American literary taste was
largely created by English literary taste? I would say that what created the difference was the status of language in American culture. We can't write now even as
we did twenty years ago. English writers still manage to believe, whether they are
right or not, that there is a public written language.
TONYTANNER:
American novelists feel they have got to invent a different language. Burroughs is a symptom of this paranoia they have about the media having
completely debased language in its capacity to make any significant public communication. They have got to use the same words. But they had better use them
very differently! So you get this extraordinary acrobatics with language. The
American novelist wants to make it clear that he is not using language like the media, whereas there is still an available shared language here.

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PARK HONANIREALISM

205

FRANKKERMODE:But the American novelists who score most heavily are not
Hawkes and Burroughsbut Mailer and Bellow. For all his extraordinaryfertility,
Bellowwrites an ecriture.
TONYTANNER:Bellow is in danger.There is a whole new generationwho think he
has succumbedto the slightly schmaltzylanguageof the media.Maileris savedby a
kind of Jacobeanor extremequalityinside his language-he kicks it aroundeverywhere!-so it's stampedwith Mailerall over it!
FRANKKERMODE:It's still within a commonrhetoric.
BERNARD
BERGONZI:But even with Bellow, as in Herzog, there is a higher or more

consistent degree of verbal inventiveness than in practically any contemporary

Britishnovelist.
DAVID LODGE:There has to be a public language to communicate at all. It's a

question of tone, isn't it? When I read most American novelists they seem to be
rather battering me over the head, flexing their verbal muscles, and so on. All the
linguistic energy going on is designed to impress you and works for a very powerful
rhetoric. The English writer, though, is trying to get you into a conversation and
starting to work on you rhetorically without your knowing it. I want to go back to
the American novel a moment. It seems to me that neither Hawthorne nor Melville
really comes off in the end. They are great unfinished torsos-and this has something to do with their relation to realism and their attempt to find a language. I
would say that Twain is the first American novelist who breaks free of the pull of
Europe and finds a genuinely American idiom which expresses genuine American
experience. With Hawthorne or Melville you get a half-successful attempt to combine realistic and symbolic modes that you get much later in European fiction.
TONYTANNER:
I am surprised. To say that Melville is "unfinished" implies that
you have some kind of notion about what the finished Melville would be. Why
can't Moby Dick be "mixed"? You are imposing European schema on American
novels.
BERNARD
BERGONZI:
There is a kind of intimidation here that really worries me.
No Englishman can ever criticize an American novel!
TONY
TANNER:
What is "completion"? Is Dickens "complete"?
DAVIDLODGE:
What I really mean is "internally inconsistent."
MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES:Moby Dick is concerned

with a very factual world, but

the more you look at facts in it the more mystery they reveal. The whole book is
about contradictions. The author must say that for truth's sake he must not pretend
to know what he cannot know. The "completion" seems to me a completion of an
inquiry into the nature of authorship.

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NOVEL|SPRING

PARK HONAN:

1969

It uses great masses or blocks of matter which don't seem fully in-

tegrated when we look in a close formal way but which nonetheless have a great final effect.
TONY TANNER:

He gathers together every possible definition and descriptionof a

whale that's ever been, and what he shows is that you can never catch a live whale.
You can only have a dead whale. One needs that much of the book for this really
to come across as a profound epistemological experience.
PARK HONAN: There are models for it. One doesn't feel that Burton's Anatomy of
Melancholy is "complete." Any time you have an anatomy element you don't, if
you're really honest, ever get to the end of it because you can't fully anatomize anything. There is an anatomy element in Moby Dick.
DAVID LODGE: I would accept this. Ulysses is a kind of anatomy, too. It is openended. I would take as a model of what I am objecting to in American literature Billy
Budd, for instance, which seems to be unfruitfully ambiguous and to openly reveal
confusion in the author's mind. This is revealed in formal features such as the fact
that there is an omniscient narrator who refuses, when it's convenient to him, to be
omniscient. He is reliable at one time; he refuses to be reliable at another.

refuses to allow people to talk for themselves. There

is so little dramatization. When he gets to a crucial thing you need to know, he
won't tell you.

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES:He

But Billy Budd is about the inaccessibility of any one sinIt

is
written in at least three linguistic registers.
gle public register.

MALCOLM BRADBURY:

FRANK KERMODE:

Can you make up a moral judgment about an author, saying,

what he tells us is that there is an ambiguity in his mind which he didn't bother to
resolve and this makes him a weak character? Is that right, David?
DAVID LODGE:

I would say you can deduce a confusion of consciousness in the

author from the formal confusion of the story.

FRANK KERMODE:Why

do you want to go back and say, this confusion reflects

another confusion which interests me more?

DAVID LODGE:

How do you distinguishgood confusion from bad confusion?I sup-

pose I just perform the usual somersault by which we associate works of art with
human sources-and therefore what we say about them reflects upon their authors.
MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES:

It is the novelist who is most firmly convinced of a duty

to tell the truth, I think, who is going to be most critical in recording the contradictions of his fictional attempt to do so.

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PARK HONANIREALISM

207

Contradictionsare going on all the time in novels. In Billy Budd

you can see Melville investing a greatdeal of poetry in Billy Budd, and investing a
greatdeal of rationalunderstandingin CaptainVere, who stands for forms, for the
ship, the necessarylimits and orders.There is a recognitionof the fact that these
two things cannot co-habit.You can say Melville is "confused"only becausehe is
convincedlife is made up of intolerablecontradictions.That becomes part of his
vision. Billy Buddis pellucidly clearbecause Melville lays out all of these oppositions and contradictionsin it.
TONY TANNER:

The symposiumcriticsagreedthat it is criticallyunwise or impracticalto consider

novels as perfectlyself-containedentitiesor as disconnectedfrom theirauthorsand
dates of composition.
The work cannot be autonomous, however much we
would like to pretendit is.

MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES:

TONY

TANNER:
Postscript to the New Criticism!

BERNARD BERGONZI:

Someone wroteit, you see. You comeback to that.

TONY TANNER: Do we expect verdictsfrom novels? A great many novels are about
how men live, but they may end with all kinds of questionmarksand bewilderment
and pain. Answers to "how men should live" could be the most intolerablekind of
doctrinairemoralismin a novel.

I suppose that most of the great novelists have had some idea
of how men shouldlive.

BERNARD BERGONZI:

Yes, but when the novelist realizeshow variously men live he may
not feel it is for him to say how they should.

TONY TANNER:

It would be very difficult,though, for you to find a novel in which

therewas not presenteven some sort of ghost of this.

IAN GREGOR:

O.K. How should men live? Like Billy Budd or CaptainVere? No

verdict.Is Melvilleconfusedor is he being as clearas he can?

TONY TANNER:

It is a clear expression of mixed feelings, isn't it? Most books

are just that, in fact. If they come out very simple, we don't like them, do we? We
say this is propaganda.
FRANK KERMODE:

I don't know that that is awfully fair. I don't think you're doing justice to "howmen shouldlive."This doesn'tnecessarilytranslateitself out into a flat
didacticism.You get this pretty stronglyfromJaneAusten, don't you-how people
shouldlive?
IAN GREGOR:

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208

NOVELISPRING

1969

FRANKKERMODE:
She had some odd notions. She thought Mansfield Park was

about ordination.2
IAN GREGOR:
At any rate, I think Billy Budd is an exception. Usually involved in

"how men live" is "how men should live."

FRANKKERMODE:
Aren't there crucial passages in George Eliot which are deliber-

ately ambiguous in tone? I am just trying to find something that is like Billy Budd in
this respect. The drowning in Daniel Deronda? The sexuality of Casaubon?
BARBARA
HARDY:How ambiguous? I think Wuthering Heights is like Billy Budd.
MARKKINKEAD-WEEKES:
Yes, a good comparison: two kinds of novel fighting
in between one set of covers, and each pulling the other. A word like "love" pulls
the whole discourse of Wuthering Heights in two different directions.
PARKHONAN:Do you find this sort of thing happening in the romance, even very

simple pre-novel romances? The reader recognizes they are not like reality and yet
they have some validity and attraction in themselves. You have perhaps the same
thing that is going on in Wuthering Heights: the reader's consciousness of reality
being this way, and having some good in it, and romance being another way, and
the reader coming to the conclusion that things should be still a third way. What I
am getting at is the intriguing question of why men were satisfied for so long without the novel. Didn't one get this same kind of complexity in a sense created by the
very simplicity of other forms of literature?
BARBARA
HARDY:You get it in Shakespeare, don't you, as in Billy Budd and Wuther-

ing Heights?
PAULTURNER:It brings us back to John Bayley again, doesn't it? I mean the novel
is just a form of communication from one person to his readers. And what the novelist has to communicate will depend on the sort of person he is. This entirely undercuts the whole question of realism or reality-as we've already undercut it now
-because we are talking about expressing in a novel a muddled sense of a view
about life. All the novelist is really saying in every case is: this is vaguely what
things seem to amount to to me. It may or may not be muddled. But he never, I

should have thought, stops to say, "Am I being realistic?" or "Am I duplicating
reality?" He is saying, "From my point of view," isn't he?
TONYTANNER:I would agree. And what he can effect by this is a kind of redistri-

bution of our sympathies, but not necessarily more than that. It seems to me if you
a "It has subsequently been maintained in a T. L. S. letter that this is a canard based on a misinterpretation of
one of J. A.'s letters."-F. K.

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PARK

HONANIREALISM

209

do that you do a great deal. It is not necessarily a procuring of certain verdicts on

modes of living; an extension of sympathy and understanding is much more important.
has a lot to do with how men should live. It's not precisely
the question of presenting verdicts. All of the directing of feelings and sympathies
towards one kind of life and away from another kind of life, in a novel, is involved.
BERNARDBERGONZI:
It

TONYTANNER:I meant by "redistribution of sympathies" understanding forms of

life which hitherto one had rather casually considered as axiomatically alien. One
experience of reading a novel is to be made to understand a whole different way of
seeing and experiencing and registering.
FRANKKERMODE:
This still doesn't answer the question of why write a novel in

order to achieve that particular end. What you're really saying is that this is how
things seem to me when I find out how things seem to be by writing a novel-which
is a very different thing from just attempting straightforwardly to say how things
seem to you. No one would ever think of making up a fiction [in the form of a novel]
in order, simply, to say how things seem to him. It is a very complicated thing to do.
PAULTURNER:No, I think the making up of fiction is the most simple and deriva-

tive form of intercommunication. You tell people stories.

DAVIDLODGE:It's only a certain

kind of novelist-perhaps what Forster calls the

prophetic novelist-who wants to call your attention to areas of experience you
don't know about or wants to say this is how it seems to me. Many novelists want to
evoke something which they have a faith exists in the audience.
At the beginning of the symposium's second session, Bernard Bergonzi pointed
out that whereas British novelists typically focus upon character, and British critics
and readers "like reading about people," American novelists have never gone in
for character in quite the same way. The "mythic beings" of Melville are representative of what they seem to aim for. To be sure, in this century the shared sense of
what character is seems to be evaporating. Robbe-Grillet and other nouveau novelists dismiss the "rubbish of the nineteenth-century realistic tradition." John
Hawkes is sweepingly getting rid of "plot, atmosphere, and character," one symposium critic wistfully suggested. The American comic apocalyptic school-John
Barth, Burroughs, Pynchon, and Heller, for example-seems satisfied with twodimensional figures reminiscent of simple drawings in episodic comic strips.
Though one tradition behind them is essentially Continental and British, from Candide through Peacock to early Huxley, Waugh, and Henry Green, contemporary
British novelists do not participate in this movement. In America Nathanael West
may be a key influence.

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210

NOVELJSPRING

1969

BARBARA HARDY:Balso Snell is the most moral kind of pop novel.

Pynchon's

is somewhat similar. Burroughs, on the other hand, seems to dismember character

because he hates the human object.
TONY TANNER:Burroughs

is the extreme

American

nightmare,

giving

images

which show all the ways in which the human animal is vulnerable. Yet his characters become abstractions.
FRANKKERMODE:The disappearance

of the "old stable ego of character" in the

end has to do with the nature of an industrial epoch. The old stable ego of character
belongs to a particular stage in the history of the bourgeoisie. Dickens accepted it.
Now we're rejecting it.
MALCOLM
BRADBURY:Yes, a sociological explanation is necessary....

Ian Gregor pointed out that two contradictory meanings are involved in "the disappearance of character"-on the one hand, characters brilliantly conceived as being in a state of dissolution, and on the other, character itself disappearing. We can
generalize too easily when using the phrase in its latter meaning, the symposium
concurred. Frank Kermode noted that Americans like Updike, Salinger, and Malamud are still creating total characters.
We may have to redefine "character." But after all something has to go in its place. A novel with no concept of character is impossible,
meaningless.
MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES:

character problem is related to the problem of causality.

are
to
each
other, aren't they? The myth of causality is going out.
necessary
They
FRANK KERMODE: The

Another symposium critic suggested that we have this process in Ulysses, where
there is no authorial voice, rather little sense of causality, and characters are seen in
a state of disintegrating flux.
DAVID LODGE: Do all or most major writers

go through

a cycle, from realism

toward abstraction and stylization? Admittedly some seem to move in the reverse
direction.
MARKKINKEAD-WEEKES:
There seem to be contending

pulls in the novelist's

de-

veloping imagination. There is a dialectic. Iris Murdoch or Angus Wilson oscillate

on the scale.
Frank Kermode mentioned the problem of a "feed-back" influence on novelists
from critics and criticism. In the U.S.A., "the critics and novelists actually live together on the same campuses."

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PARK HONAN|REALISM

211

MALCOLMBRADBURY: But in England the debate between critics and novelists is

not taken very seriously. The kind of pieces that I write about fiction, for example,
are not polemics or descriptions for the kind of novels I write. Nor is David Lodge's
Language of Fiction at all a description of his novels.
FRANK KERMODE:This is partly because of James and Eliot, and partly because of
the absurd claims of autonomy in criticism. There is no real debate about the novel
in England. Novelists don't want to find out what the critics are saying. We have a
Raymond Mortimerish contempt for dons in this country.

PAULTURNER:
Surely there is something faintly comic in all this? The novelist is
writing for different people, for a much larger public than the critic is, I should
think.
DAVIDLODGE:
I am admittedly schizophrenic in my novel-writing and my criticism. Criticism is necessarily very self-conscious. If I tried to make them marry up
all the time, I'd destroy them both.
IAN GREGOR:But how do you explain the almost complete lack of experimentation in the British novel now?
MALCOLM
BRADBURY:
The British novelist himself is less confident now about
his audience, his own role, his language. New novels seem timidly technical. The
latest Amis novel is merely a scared Lucky Jim.
DAVIDLODGE:The thriller and the pornographic novel allow scope for experimentation that the great tradition doesn't allow you.
IANGREGOR:Ah, but no one ever thinks he is writing a traditional novel. If there
has been a failure of nerve in writing novels, I must say there has been a great upsurge of confidence in writing about novels!
FRANKKERMODE:We ought to be writing a book called "The Fiction of Criticism" ....

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