On the threshold of any theory of art its exponent is sure to be asked:
“On what first assumption does your theory rest?” And in fiction, as in
every other art, the only answer seems to be that any theory must begin
by assuming the need of selection. It seems curious that even now--and
perhaps more than ever--one should have to explain and defend what is
no more than the rule underlying the most artless verbal statement. No
matter how restricted an incident one is trying to give an account of,
it cannot but be fringed with details more and more remotely relevant,
and beyond that with an outer mass of irrelevant facts which may crowd
on the narrator simply because of some accidental propinquity in time
or space. To choose between all this material is the first step toward
coherent expression.
A generation ago this was so generally taken for granted that to
state it would have seemed pedantic. In every-day intercourse the
principle survives in the injunction to stick to the point; but the
novelist who applies--or owns up to applying--this rule to his art, is
nowadays accused of being absorbed in technique to the exclusion of the
supposedly contrary element of “human interest.”
Even now, the charge would hardly be worth taking up had it not lately
helped to refurbish the old trick of the early French “realists,”
that group of brilliant writers who invented the once-famous _tranche
de vie_, the exact photographic reproduction of a situation or an
episode, with all its sounds, smells, aspects realistically rendered,
but with its deeper relevance and its suggestions of a larger whole
either unconsciously missed or purposely left out. Now that half a
century has elapsed, one sees that those among this group of writers
who survive are still readable in spite of their constricting theory,
or in proportion as they forgot about it once they closed with their
subject. Such are Maupassant, who packed into his brief masterpieces
so deep a psychological significance and so sure a sense of larger
relations; Zola, whose “slices” became the stuff of great romantic
allegories in which the forces of Nature and Industry are the huge
cloudy protagonists, as in a Pilgrim’s Progress of man’s material
activities; and the Goncourts, whose French instinct for psychological
analysis always made them seize on the more significant morsel of the
famous slices. As for the pupils, the mere conscientious appliers of
the system, they have all blown away with the theory, after a briefer
popularity than writers of equal talent might have enjoyed had they not
thus narrowed their scope. An instance in proof is Feydeau’s “Fanny,”
one of the few “psychological” novels of that generation, and a slight
enough adventure in soul-searching compared with the great “Madame
Bovary” (which it was supposed at the time to surpass), but still
readable enough to have kept the author’s name alive, while most of
his minor contemporaries are buried under the unappetizing _débris_ of
their “slices.”
It seemed necessary to revert to the slice-of-life because it has
lately reappeared, marked by certain unimportant differences, and
re-labelled the stream of consciousness; and, curiously enough,
without its new exponents’ appearing aware that they are not also
its originators. This time the theory seems to have sprung up first
in England and America; but it has already spread to certain of the
younger French novelists, who are just now, confusedly if admiringly,
rather overconscious of recent tendencies in English and American
fiction.
The stream of consciousness method differs from the slice-of-life
in noting mental as well as visual reactions, but resembles it in
setting them down just as they come, with a deliberate disregard of
their relevance in the particular case, or rather with the assumption
that their very unsorted abundance constitutes in itself the author’s
subject.
This attempt to note down every half-aware stirring of thought and
sensation, the automatic reactions to every passing impression, is
not as new as its present exponents appear to think. It has been
used by most of the greatest novelists, not as an end in itself, but
as it happened to serve their general design: as when their object
was to portray a mind in one of those moments of acute mental stress
when it records with meaningless precision a series of disconnected
impressions. The value of such “effects” in making vivid a tidal rush
of emotion has never been unknown since fiction became psychological,
and novelists grew aware of the intensity with which, at such times,
irrelevant trifles impinge upon the brain; but they have never been
deluded by the idea that the subconscious--that Mrs. Harris of the
psychologists--could in itself furnish the materials for their art.
All the greatest of them, from Balzac and Thackeray onward, have made
use of the stammerings and murmurings of the half-conscious mind
whenever--but only when--such a state of mental flux fitted into the
whole picture of the person portrayed. Their observation showed them
that in the world of normal men life is conducted, at least in its
decisive moments, on fairly coherent and selective lines, and that
only thus can the great fundamental affairs of bread-getting and
home-and-tribe organizing be carried on. Drama, situation, is made out
of the conflicts thus produced between social order and individual
appetites, and the art of rendering life in fiction can never, in the
last analysis, be anything, or need to be anything, but the disengaging
of crucial moments from the welter of existence. These moments need not
involve action in the sense of external events; they seldom have, since
the scene of conflict was shifted from incident to character. But there
must be something that _makes_ them crucial, some recognizable relation
to a familiar social or moral standard, some explicit awareness of
the eternal struggle between man’s contending impulses, if the tales
embodying them are to fix the attention and hold the memory.