Novel, History and TypeAuthor(s): Frank KermodeReviewed work(s):Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1968), pp. 231-238Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345163 .Accessed: 11/02/2012 17:34

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?Novel, History and Type1

FRANK KERMODE

There has been a great expansion in the number of books about the novel as a genre, but so far as I can see they stick to the prescribed terms of reference, working within the limits of the "subject" rather than asking how this kind of literature matches other activities of the modern mind. Ours is peculiarly the subject which can intensify linguistic perception, but it is nevertheless a subject which has open frontiers with almost all others. We cannot allow the traversing of these fron- tiers to be a matter of daytrips.

Our procedures are likely to be changing in so far as they are healthy and useful. It is certain that we do, and that as writers and teachers, we ought to erect and abandon explanatory and evaluative terminologies rather freely; they have no ab- solute value, and if fossilized they tend to enclose us in the subject, diminish the relevance of literature to anything else, and close our eyes to the change which is integral to our studies. Since we cannot simply dismiss this as an inexplicable movement of taste, we may often need new terminologies to explain our prefer- ences. It seems to me to make very little sense to argue that we can read Middle- march better than Leslie Stephen or Henry James, or Women in Love better than Eliot (or even that Eliot could not read it because he was not echt English as Dr. Leavis suggests). We change our critical language to explain our higher valuation, but are aware that we are thinking about the same book. How can we assume this? Presumably because there is somewhere an accessible Middlemarch structure, or a Women in Love structure, a radical set we all know, and which may suit us better than it did earlier readers. If so, it might help to consider such novels in their his- torical and typical aspects. I will try to explain what they are.

There are some obvious ways in which a novel resembles an historical narrative. A narrative is a structure imposed upon events, "grouping some of them together with others, and ruling out some as lacking relevance."2 How do we know whether or not an event would lack relevance and so be excluded either by novelist or his- torian? The relevance is determined by the interests and knowledge of the maker; it may be part of his business to establish it where it had not been suspected before. For instance, a medieval historian will relate dancing-madness, by hindsight, to the symptoms of ergotism, a diagnosis formerly impossible; or the collapse of the feudal system to the labor shortage following the Black Death. The barest chronicle is animated by some such sense of relevance, an ascribing of cause or motive. The historian postulates some kind of story, on the basis of a set of records, and then

1 This article formed part of one of the Alexander Lectures given at Toronto in 1967.

2 Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History, 1965, p. 132.

NOVELISPRING 1968

seeks further supporting evidence. The narrative link between such events is an historical explanation. It is peculiarly the work of a mind contemplating discrete events. At the time nobody knew that there was a link between diseased rye and insane dancing; and so far as the OED knows, nobody ever spoke of the "feudal system" before Adam Smith. Behind such explanations lie general laws. As Gilbert Ryle observes, to find the motive of an action is to classify it as being of a certain type.3 Explanations are not only stories; they embody some plausible view of the world accepted by the historian as in accordance with known types. They are what come between the beginning and an end of a story; the middle is an explanation, and its structure necessarily conforms to some type or set of types.

Thus it appears that we shall often ask of an historical narrative whether it ful- fills or qualifies or controverts a type. Under it there will be some "organizing scheme." The same is true of science, though the determination of philosophical analysts to abolish the difference between historical and scientific explanation won't do. Unlike science, history tells stories.

The affinities between history, thus considered, and novels, are touched on by W. B. Gallie.4 What we ask of story and of history, he says is followability. In a story this involves, as it does in a history, coherence; and we shall not want to fol- low it unless it has certain other qualities, notably theoretically predictable conclu- sions which contingencies or the manipulation of contingencies prevent us from predicting. This is what makes narrative explanations differ from scientific argu- ments and from prophecy. A different kind of following is involved. The logical structure of stories matches not that of scientific argument, but that of everyday life. In "following" them we accept or discard suggestions and leads in relation to an acceptable end. Thus the middle though at first it may appear so, is never arbi- trary; contingency is humanized (made to fit a human "set"): "there is something ... due to the peculiar set and structure of our basic interhuman feelings," says Gallie, "involved in the following of any and every story."5 So insofar as a story works, whether it is invented or based on a set of documents, we shall find that the narrative implies historical explanations, and that these embody human topics and assumptions.

But of course there are also simple differences between histories and novels. They are both stories, but novels are made up, contain material which differs from the historical explanation in that it is not hypothetical but fictive. (Too sharp a distinction, of course; War and Peace contains historical hypotheses.) And al- though this material is subject in the end to the same laws of followability as his- torical matter, the criteria of followability are different and probably more various, simply because by association with other kinds of art it is possible for novels to be relatively inexplicit; they do not have to be so overt about whatever relationship between facts they may be establishing. There is a kind of novel from which fact, "history," practically disappears. There is another kind which as far as possible does away with the "end" and so blurs the purpose of the historian's middle.

s The Concept of Mind, 1949, pp. 86 ff.

4 Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, 1964, pp. 22 ff.

s Ibid., p. 45.

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All this is true, but not simple. The fact in fiction is a vexatious matter, as critics have lately been remarking. For Fielding Tom Jones was a "history," but nobody would without premeditation call The Waves a history. The novel is palpably be- twixt and between. As Ian Watt says, the demands of realism required the novel to break with other "abiding literary values"; it lost some of the old right to a highly selective criterion of relevance, for example, since "a patent selectiveness of vision destroys our belief in the reality of a report."6 Others might say the break with abiding literary values came later and in a different manner-for instance with the "open form" twentieth-century novel; Alan Friedman observes that the abandon- ment of conventional "resting places, eminences and consummations"-the ex-

pression is Virginia Woolf's-is what we attribute to such writers as Lawrence.7 Others would argue that a progressively "open form" is a reflection of historical necessity, either relating it with Georg Lukacs, for instance, to the conditions of twentieth-century capitalism, or claiming with others, including Rene Girard, that a certain ironic allusiveness to the narrative types is our only way of asserting con- tinuity under the conditions prevailing.8

The fact remains that a degree of "historical" fidelity is something most people still ask of novels. Commending it in Scott, Lukacs speaks of that writer's faithful account of the realization of historical necessity through indeterminable human

passions;9 and most people would feel this to be a good, even if they disliked the Marxist language and said something else instead of "necessity." Mary McCarthy, in an essay that is probably too sharp in its brilliance,10 speaks of the novelist as one who has "a deep love of fact, of the empiric element in experience"; fact, she

says, "must be present in fairly heavy dosage" and there must be an absence of what shocks the sense of fact: Krook exploding is wrong and damaging, Zossima

smelling is right. Krook belongs to another mode, the fable; it would be all right to have that kind of event in, say The Dream Life of Balso Snell, but not in Bleak House, which invites us to consider the kind of historical explanations for which we prepare ourselves when we are reading a novel. Factuality is an essential of the novel, and its characteristic explanations depend upon it. We make the narrative as like an historical narrative as possible, and impose upon it by whatever means re-

latedness, coherence of a kind that depends on plausibility; the logical situation must resemble that of life.

This is evidently true of Middlemarch, for example, and also, I think, of Women in Love, despite the differences between them." These differences lie in a reduced confidence that historical narrative can match the historian's (novelist's) own "set." Or, to put that in another way, Lawrence's set is more remote from acceptable his-

6 The Rise of the Novel, 1957 (1963 ed.), p. 31.

7 The Turn of the Novel, 1966, pp. 130-131.

8 Ren6 Girard, Mensongs Romantique et Verite Romanesque, 1961, pp. 314 ff. See also Harry Levin, "Towards a Sociology of the Novel," IHI, XXVI (1965), pp. 148-154.

9 The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, 1962.

10 "The Fact in Fiction," On the Contrary, 1961, pp. 249-270.

11 See my forthcoming article on these novels in Critical Quarterly.

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torical explanations because it contains elements tending to deny ordinary criteria of followability. Thus Women in Love has a thematic rather than a narrative struc- ture. The point, touched on long ago by Forster, is made clearly by Anthony Cronin in a recent essay. Why, he asks, should creative prose-writers be enslaved to plot? Coherence need not mean more and more fabrication, more and more vulgar con- catenation, at the expense of "surfaces, fabrics or personalities."12 There are nec- essary explanations which are not narrative at all, and he thinks they are the busi- ness of the novel. He is saying, against Gallie, that the logic is not that of everyday life; that as art the novel must deal alogically in static images, which are trivialized when inserted into a narrative. There is confusion between "images which exist in their own entelechy" and those "which a necessary motion of the narrative de- mands"-and no doubt, since he is silent on Lawrence, he would find such confu- sion in Women in Love. He wants to do away with "the trumpery of causation"; his novelist will find what suffices in the random flux, eschew the "merely narrative," the "kinetic." Freed of the photograph and followability, he can render certain types of reality more immediately. We are not to have our attention "teleologically guided," as in Gallie (p. 64), but to contemplate discrete epiphanies or types.

But there may be less difference between these views than at first appears. His- torians seek their epiphanies in fact, arranging minor events around a central inci- dent, unique but complying with a type. Novelists can dwell more on the situational logic. Let us look at a specimen, Chapter IV of The Secret Agent. Chronologically it follows III after a gap in time, during which Stevie has been blown up. The novelist chooses not to recount this, the historical event upon which the story is founded. Instead he sets his scene in a small cafe of bizarre decor. Ossipon enters and asks the Professor for information about the Greenwich explosion. But at first we do not know what he is asking about. "Unless I am very much mistaken, you are the man who would know the inside of this confounded affair," says Ossipon. What affair? For answer, a player piano bursts into life, playing a waltz "with aggressive virtuosity." Ossipon is strong and yet weak-minded; the Professor fragile but en- dowed with the destructive power of a fanatic. This contrast is dwelt upon. They discuss the Professor's policy with his explosives, and his imperfect detonator, and how he has made himself safe from arrest. He could, he explains, in twenty seconds blow up the cafe. The piano mysteriously plays a mazurka. The Professor expounds absolute anarchism, and his contempt for partial anarchists and policemen. But at last they get to the topic of the Greenwich explosion. The Professor and Ossipon assume that it is Verloc, to whom the Professor has given explosives, who has blown himself up. Ossipon's misinformation, incidentally, is not corrected until he actually sees Verloc's body with the carving knife in it, near the end of the book. As the Professor is leaving, the piano strikes up with "The Bluebells of Scotland." Ossipon follows him into the sordid street: "a raw, gloomy day of the early spring ... the grimy sky, the mud of the streets, the rags of the dirty men ... the posters maculate with filth...."

12 "Is Your Novel Really Necessary?" A Question of Modernity, 1966, p. 50.

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Now of course Conrad was habitually oblique, but this is not one of the novels in which the reader finds himself bewildered about the narrative sequence-it is not Lord Jim or Nostromo. On the other hand it is hardly the sort of narrative we find in the most progressive historian. The first we hear about the accident at Green- wich is gossip, and we are not even certain that Verloc was not carrying the bomb; later we remember many hints and ironies that implied his plan to use Stevie, but we probably need to read the book again to pick them all up. Nor does this, the cen- tral episode in the book, seem to be given high importance. It happens offstage, and we study the evidence-the fragments-with Inspector Heat. Perhaps it isn't im- portant; part of the point is the mindless stupidity of the attempt, the propriety of its having been bungled by a mental defective acting on the orders of a vain diplo- mat, by the agency of an informer with pretensions to respectability. It takes place, though little is made of this, at the dead center of the human world, at meridian zero. But we are clear that it belongs not to a world marked off by meridians-are they reduced to Stevie's pointless, endless circles?-but to a world entirely without coherence, a world which already echoes the hopes of the anarchists. The chapter ends with another allusion, one of dozens planted throughout the book, to the filth and greyness, the hideous agglomeration of brick and dirt, that make up the great city at the heart of the world's darkness, eater of its light. We shall even discover that the absurd attempt took place in fog. But we first hear it discussed against the background of irrelevant frescoes ("varlets in green jerkins brandishing hunting- knives") and irrelevant, mechanical music. The frescoes and the player-piano have of course no information to convey in narrative terms. Nor are they simply descrip- tive. They establish emblematically the utter incoherence of the anarchist's world, bringing out a bizarreness new to Conrad (Nostromo cutting off his silver buttons is almost allegorical by comparison; the moon in the sky over the gulf, like a silver bar, plainly so). The relation between these properties and the thematic design of the book is an occult one.

Yet after all it is an extremely informative scene, and in its way a plausible one. It makes us see. It explains. It takes us into a region of historical explanation from which historians feel themselves debarred by their primary adherence to the docu- ments. Yet it is recognizably historical; Gibbon would have admired it. Before he ventures, in his final chapter, to set down the four causes of the decay and destruc- tion of Rome, he describes what Poggio said of it in 1430. Poggio's vision takes in the Tarpeian rock first in its original savage state, and then as it was for Virgil, crowned by the golden roofs of a temple. Then Poggio looks at the Palatine Hill, seeking "among the shapeless and enormous fragments the marble theatre, the obelisks, the colossal statues, the porticoes of Nero's palace." Thereupon Gibbon reflects upon the necessary retrogression of human affairs that do not go forward. Then he adds his own detailed account of the ruins: another layer of imperial im- agery. But he starts from a chaos of marble, an image of ruin, and imposes on it other images, the same milieu before, and during, its glory. No doubt it is what any historian might do in the circumstances. And he goes on to bridge the gap between his narrative and this image with an explanation, a theory. Conrad simply leaves

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you to infer a theory, or to collect what is said elsewhere in the book about the structures of civilization and the dark of evil. But there is a theory, somewhere in The Secret Agent, a theory which resembles Gibbon's in that it involves imperial decline, "the injuries of time and nature," the hostile attacks of barbarians, the use and abuse of materials. It predicates the retrogression of what ceases to go forward. Only Conrad deliberately falsifies the imperial type, the urbs aeterna at the heart of the world. Instead of marble gleaming in the sun, instead of the battered tri- umphal arch, we have raw London brick and the fog, the absurd fresco and the sinister piano, the government of the dark world conducted in a foggy ditch. The historian gets his effects by explanations of which the narrative content is much reduced and by chronological conflations; the novelist does it more freely. Mr. Cronin's ideal novel would not have the story, even obliquely, of an attempt on the Observatory, only the frescoes and the piano, the jingling crazy cab, Stevie's cir- cles. But for all their differences, Conrad is closer, in this highly wrought novel, to the historian than to the poet.

It seems, then, that philosophy of history is the business of people who teach novels. There are perhaps distinctions we need to make, relating for instance to the difference between hypotheses and fictions; but we cannot allow them to cut us off completely from a neglected aspect of our discipline. We can say that narrative is explanation, and that behind every narrative there is some element related to the human set: some type.

I must now explain why I have been using this word so much. I don't, of course, have in mind mythical archetypes, but use the term in a simple way. General think- ing, whether historical or not, has a typological basis, the reduction of experience to some flexible pre-existing set, rather as an alphabet reduces words to its set, or a computer reduces information to its binary terms or analogues. Historians use types whenever they explain anything, as I have suggested; and the followability of any narrative depends upon them.

Thus considered, of course, types may be extremely unimportant and obvious, but before we get to that stage of atomic reduction we have to allow for more or- ganized types, formulae of explanation or coherence which have a certain molecular quality. When of this magnitude they are less easily reconcilable with random events. Thus we have great difficulty with such historical concepts as Renaissance; the difficulty is one of matching, and also one of proliferation, for the concept is originally periodic, but acquires, from contact with the documents, stylistic over- tones. It is a familiar problem, and I suppose I am at present inadvertently illustrat- ing the difficulty of solving it.

The kind of typology we need in the present instance is a feature of all secular narratives, but we understand it best as it occurs in theology. The authentic Chris- tian typology is actually borrowed by some poets and novelists, such as Peguy and David Jones and Muriel Spark, which makes their books something of a special case, since the ordinary secular novelist has to validate his types in terms of his story, and not in terms of a transcendent model.

The types of the New Testament have of late been a more or less regular part of literary discussion, and what I have to say about them is limited to the question of

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their relevance to secular narrative of a kind that does not imply a direct mimesis of them. The function of Old Testament events, on a typological view, is simply that their full meaning is available only when they are "completed" by something in the New Testament; this is implied in the New Testament expression, "that it might be fulfilled." Ends give meaning to events which, considered rawly as they occur "in the middle," are either apparently random or have been wrongly or imperfectly explained in terms of a different and less valid philosophy of history. (It is the powerful historical element, of course, that distinguishes New Testament types from the mythological.) Before Christ nobody could know the full significance of the Exodus, or indeed of Jewish ceremony and liturgy. The plot was incomplete; the past takes on a glow of remarkable meaning from the radiance of the end. And a good deal of modern scholarship is intended to show that the New Testament was shaped by this purpose: to the fulfillment of types.

A. C. Charity in his illuminating book, Events and Their After-Life (1966) in- vokes Rudolf Bultmann's distinction between historisch and geschichtlich-that which can be established by historical criticism of the past, and that which has a vital existential reference to the present (p. 14n). On this distinction, the authors of the New Testament were entirely concerned with those parts of the Old Testa- ment which could be shown to be geschichtlich. It is for this reason that we can say the novelist is closer to the New Testament author than to the modern historian, for he too is concerned with the geschichtlich, whereas the historian has to concern himself with the historisch.

But this must not of course persuade us that the novelist has no care for the historisch, nor the historian for the geschichtlich. That has been my concern here -the overlapping. As Conrad remarked, "Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms."13 But the historian must also concern himself with the reality of forms. His is a world in which myth and ritual are no longer relevant except as material; but the radical requirement of coherence, the need for explanation, is still with him, and he cannot avoid his types.

An illustration of the historisch that must underlie every novel: the moment in Middlemarch when Mrs. Cadwallader strangely conjectures that Ladislaw might be a natural son of Bulstrode, a teaparty nonsense that could well have drifted away into the vast limbo of events, rejected as merely historisch-as, in Middlemarch, the cholera which was originally to have been important is dropped out. But Mrs. Cadwallader's remark stays in because she is able to say, after it has been refuted, that "the report might be true of some other son," which makes it a mock-oracular prefiguration or type of something that does happen in the end. The historisch sur- vives because touched by the geschichtlich. An historian confronted with a pure piece of Geschichtlichkeit, such as the identification of Napoleon with the Beast from the Land, treats it as historisch: it tells you that people sought a particular scheme for their feelings at the time. It is when he adds that the tendency to do so has always been very strong, and perhaps speaks of other such identifications in

13 "Henry James: An Appreciation" (1905), Notes on Life and Letters (1921), 1949 ed., p. 17.

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the past, referring for example to Frederick the Great and Nero, that he begins to use, as a mode of explanation, a typology, though a typology related to histori- ography rather than to myth.

The exegete, the novelist and the historian are all doing their own things, and we easily see very sharp and obvious distinctions between them; so we rarely think of them all together, rarely consider the remarkable and complicated resemblances. At a time when we are required to give scrupulous attention to factuality, to the historisch, the novelist still has a certain license in respect to types. It may be that his structure of type is in some ways analogous to a mythic event, suggesting the degree of social or psychological stability we are prepared to put up with in a reality we try to think of as structureless, the amount of cosmos we will allow in what we take to be chaos. More positively, he is concerned with "what suffices" when "ro- mantic tenements of rose and ice" are no longer habitable. And this means that there are resemblances to biblical typology, especially in its modern form (which is as much like its medieval form as Ulysses is like a Gothic cathedral). But we may also reflect that the novel belongs to an epoch of history; we may say of it what Charity says of the Jews, that it has emigrated from myth into history.14 Like the New Testament, it is on the side of contemporaneity; but it is the types that make it possible for the past to possess contemporaneity alike for the Jews, the New Testament, and the novel. Types are indices of contemporaneity, not of myth- ical content. Mr. Charity observes that this typology "brought man into encounter with God not to restore the status quo, but to make present to him an altogether new status, which takes him away from natural into historic existence, investing him with a new freedom and a new burden of responsibility."15 The patterns of Old and New Testament typology are repeated in the novel-the form of narrative most sensitive now to change and to contemporaneity, most involved with new problems of freedom and responsibility, with explanations of the unfollowable world. In it things happen as they happen, though they can be made typical; its motto might be St. Paul's "all these things happened . . . symbolically [typikos] ... upon us the fulfillment of the ages are come." But its second motto is Conrad's, "Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing."

It follows, I think, that the study of the novel ought to involve more than struc- tures of research or terminology proper to itself. In the limited instances under dis- cussion it appears already that the novel ought also to be considered a branch of a wider subject, involving other kinds of fiction, other historical and typological en- quiries. Perhaps it should even be considered in relation to the typologies of the sociologists and the psychologists, even the mathematicians. It seems possible that we have been somewhat provincial in determining the scope of our critical interests.

14 Events and Their After-Life, p. 17.

5 Ibid., p. 56.

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