NOVELISTS ON THE NOVEL

An excerpt from the beginning of:

INTRODUCTION

I The Novel and the Marvellous
THERE is plenty of support from other novelists for Hardy's account of the 'real, if unavowed, purpose of fiction'—that is, 'to give pleasure by gratifying the love of the uncommon in human experience'—and for his argument that this purpose will be best realized when the novelist persuades the reader of the 'truth' of his characters. The novelist's natural desire to indulge our sense of wonder is modified by his knowledge that he must also compel our assent—'we must first believe before we can be affected', says Hurd in his Letters on Chivalry — and so whenever he is drawn into a discussion about the question of probability, a harassing problem troubling the artistic conscience ever since Aristotle, the novelist's argument usually proceeds from the value of 'the marvellous' to the necessity of maintaining verisimilitude and consistency in his characters' behaviour. He gives special emphasis to these ideas when he is conscious of evolving a new kind and is not yet quite certain of where he stands in relation to existing forms of narrative such as Epic or Romance.

'Every writer may be permitted to deal with the wonderful as much as he pleases', says Fielding, provided the actions of his characters are 'within the compass of human agency' and 'likely for the very actors and characters themselves to have performed'. A M"rchen element survives in all his own stories; the poor boy makes good, the foundling turns out to be the Squire's nephew, the hard-pressed family comes into a fortune. Regret that modern fiction seemed 'to stoop with disenchanted wings to truth' compelled many of Fielding's successors in the eighteenth century to heighten the element of 'the marvellous' in their stories. Horace Walpole is an early example, but, as he tells us in his preface to The Castle of Otranto ( 1765), he is anxious to avoid the implausible characterization of the old romances, where people were given absurd dialogue to speak and seemed 'to lose their senses' whenever they witnessed marvellous happenings. He tries, without perhaps much success, to persuade his readers of the truth of his characters by making them behave 'as it might be supposed mere men and women would do' when confronted with a giant in armour or a statue bleeding at the nose. His admirer, Clara Reeve, seeks to follow his example in "The Old English Baron": A Gothic Tale ( 1778). Another eighteenth-century novelist, Richard Cumberland, believes that the author may travel a good distance into 'the fields of fancy' for his own and his reader's enjoyment, but he tries not to make his characters behave unnaturally: although events 'closely bordering on the marvellous' call for heightened effects in character-drawing, there are limits which are not to be transgressed.

Many novelists other than the Gothic romancers came to feel that their best means of reconciling 'the uncommon and the ordinary' was to set their stories in the past. Scott explains his choice of the reign of James I as a setting for The Fortunes of Nigel ( 1822) on the grounds that this period seemed distant enough in time to allow him to introduce incidents which are 'marvellous and improbable' but was also near enough to the present for the behaviour of his characters to carry conviction for his modern readers. Hawthorne, with the greater meticulousness of a later age, explains that The House of the Seven Gables ( 1851) must come 'under the Romantic definition' because in attempting 'to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us' it dispenses with complete fidelity to the possible and probable. He is careful to add that even a Romance 'sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart'. He himself prefers to 'mingle the Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate and evanescent flavour, than as any portion of the dish offered to the public', but an author can hardly be said . . . to commit a literary crime even if he disregard this caution'. Novelists who do not write about the past but are nevertheless haunted by it often 'mingle the Marvellous' in their stories by introducing elements of fantasy and the supernatural which leave us with the impression that their 'ordinary world . . reaches back'. The phrase is used by E. M. Forster in connection with Dostoevsky, and in Mr. Forster's own novels the presence of Pan may upset an English party of sightseers in Italy or Greece, or a ghost cause a car to swerve on an Indian highroad. Henry James, whose novels and stories are filled with his 'sense of the past', encourages his imagination to conjure up ghosts and presences, believing that these best serve the storyteller's fundamental appeal to wonder. But his ghosts, no less than the people whom they haunt, must behave as we might reasonably expect them to behave...