Even though it is frequent in contemporary fiction, present-tense narration is not easily justified. People and place are no more immediate in present than in past tense; time progresses and spins out, back on itself, and suddenly forward, in any tense. The present tense, maybe, pretends that something is not settled, that the fixity of the past has been surmounted by the possibilities carried along … Continue reading 217. (Ishmael Reed)
In the fifth volume of Recherche, The Captive, Baron de Charlus refers to a visit he has recently paid to the famed writer, Bergotte, who has been for some time dead. Even after reading the explanatory note, I wanted to believe that the Baron was supposed to be shown in a lie, but even the aging Charlus would not commit such a blunder. Neither, though, … Continue reading 215. (Marcel Proust)
Aristotle, whose “hexis” is not passive habit, but whose thought of human happiness and nature turns on habituation, tells us that tragedy differs from history in that the latter is concerned with the actual and the former with the probable. By probable, he is taken to mean and likely did mean, something that could have taken place, given what we know through probabilistic reasoning. But … Continue reading 213. (Marcel Proust)
To illuminate Proust, consider Zola, who aspires, like Proust to a mythic scale, and whose novel Germinal is an epic of social change, the hero being a class of workers, a mass; like Proust, Zola is the novelist as social theorist. For Zola, all men are insects, but the insects are to pitied, admired, not despised or condescended to. The novelist, after all, is a … Continue reading 208. (Marcel Proust)
Coming to grips with Dostoevsky at all means coming to grips with the other half of the burden of art, philosophy, the study of history. I’ve always found his novels extraordinarily painful to read, and been inclined to think Nabokov’s assessment must be in part right, even while recognizing that Nabokov was being insolent and disingenuous in not going further than he does in examining … Continue reading 206. (Vladimir Nabokov)
At least in her four masterpieces–My Antonia, The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Shadows on the Rock–Willa Cather is as expansive, sensitive, generous, and understanding towards human life as a novelist could be. To plot more than she does, it comes to feel, would be to set an agenda; and she has none, though her characters, and the habits and traditions they live by, … Continue reading 169. (Willa Cather)
The other day, I wrote a post on Henry James that now seems extraordinarily muddled. I didn’t recognize the puzzle that was in my mind; now I do: The puzzle was why Nelson Goodman’s response to the question “What is philosophy good for” had, in my ears, a distinctly Jamesian ring. The response was to turn the question on its heels, reversing the current, as … Continue reading 167. (Henry James)
