Is there anyone among us who has not at one time or
another felt a burning desire to write? The fever generally, is associated with
adolescence, caught from an over-enthusiasm for the work of a favourite author
who is worshipped as an idol; in many it subsides under the stress of growing
up. But of those in whom the fever does not abate and persists with the
advancing years, it can be said that a relationship has come to exist between
them and the adored authors,–a relationship born of a true creative
collaboration. Only an artist one whose aim primarily is to gratify aesthetic
emotions by perfection of execution, whether in creation or representation, can
evoke this collaboration, this response. The painter, the sculptor, and the
musician, through their different media, touch the secret springs of the heart
to thrilling receptivity; for the private vision and imagination of the
individual to merge with the vision and imagination of the universe; for what
is evanescent to become permanent. A veena in dry-point, cast in bronze,
carved out of marble, or moulded in wax, does not produce sound; a garden in
bloom done in exquisite water-colours fails to emit the perfume of the flowers
or raise the caress of the breeze that blows over it; but these are only
seeming limitations which can be shifted and the boundaries widened; it all
depends on the means at the beckoning of the particular medium. Thus a carven veena,
under certain conditions, is capable of producing an illusion of melody; the
painted garden the feel of coolness and fragrance. Similarly, the song of a
musician, by the magic of the raga-bhava, by the suggestions and
subtleties of its undertones and overtones, can open before the inward eye of
the listener unsuspected vistas of the corporeal, visible world, linking up his
explorations and experience, impressions and imagination.
How then can a novel whose medium is
words–language–depicting the life of the upper middle, or lower class people,
in the past or the present, of the writer’s own place or of a country
geographically far removed from his; unfolding a mythical utopia or envisaging
the future; how can a novel aspire to the level of art, and what is the role of
the novelist as artist?
Fiction, when it is art, is the offspring of pure
temperament; and temperament is infinite in variety. And it is temperament that
creates the technique and technique which stamps the artist. Fiction as art
succeeds to the degree in which the temperaments of both writer and reader
achieve harmony. Here are the views of Henry James, the famous novelist,
American born and a naturalized British subject, who today is read perhaps only
by the few–his intricate and proliferating style, indeed, always stood in the
way of his wider popularity– yet his influence on fiction with an artistic aim
has been profound. He wrote much sensitive criticism; he is difficult because
he is a phenomenon in himself; but if one has patience, one has taste, he will
amply repay for all the care one can bestow. James says: “A novel is in its
broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that to begin
with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the
intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore
no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line to be
followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation of
that freedom and a suppression of the very thing that we are most curious
about….The execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal
to him, and we measure him by that. The advantage, the luxury, as well as the
torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what
he may attempt as an executing–no limit to his possible experiments, efforts,
discoveries, and successes. Here it is especially that he works, step by step,
like his brother of the brush, of whom we may always say that he has painted
his picture in a manner best known to himself...His manner is his secret...”
I have taken this extract from James’s essay, The
Art of Fiction, because it is a candid, personal reaction of a novelist who
was a great artist toward his profession, and it draws the personality of the
novelist affirmed by his art, as fluent as a picture by Corregio for its
loveliness of relief and grace of finish.
To whatever category the novelist may
belong–traditional or experimental–the traditional novelist finds the existing
methods of expression adequate for what he has to say, while to the
experimental they are inadequate and he needs must invent new tools and
discover new forms to serve the language and rear the fabric–and whatever the
type of novel: Historical, Political,
Regional, Picaresque, Proletarian; tragedy, comedy, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,
scene individable, sagas of seven generations, trilogies and tetralogies, the
novel of incident and the novel of character, romantic, scientific, psychological,–oh
dear, how like a biologist does the literary critic go on labeling the
specimens!–whatever the type of novel and the class of the novelist, a novel to
be a work of art should mirror the personality of the author who has the vision
of an “unclouded and attentive mind” and the power to objectify emotions. And
emotions, mark you, are only means to an end: not an end in themselves; it is
in their passage from the state of “ethical fiction to ethical affirmation”
that they project the vision, the integrity of an artistic mind.
First the blade, then the ear. First the fact
observed: then the fictional transformation. Broadly speaking, everything is
grist to the mill of the novelist: the world and mankind in their manifold
aspects. But it is the elements in his intellectual and imaginative make-up
that are concordant, that constitute his authentic material to waken the mood,
endow the hue, and set the pace in the process of creation. “The detached
morsels of the surrounding universe of which he treats are no more than
symbols.” Says Phyllis Bentley: “Mr. William Saroyan, the brilliant young
American short-story writer has called one of his books: The Gay and
Melancholy Flux; and this expresses very well both life and the simulacrum
of life which constantly goes on in the novelist’s mind. A seething flux of
phenomena, constantly changing, constantly rolling and surging by. This flux of
life is what the novelist has to present in his narrative to his reader. Note
that since the novelist invented this particular flux, since it is his
creation, he is omniscient and omnipotent with regard to it. He knows
everything that goes on in it. The cries of its birds, the thuds of its
battles, the thoughts of all its people–they are all part of that seething
flux, and he knows them all!”
Leo Tolstoi insisted that the creation of the
illusion of real life is the essential task of a genuine artist. The novelist
who has made the world his own can do as he pleases with it; he evolves with
the world and the world he has made; he can give a close-up of it, or
the zoom-shot of a particular scene; he can show its entire dome of many
coloured glass or only a part of it. He can make it fly at a terrific speed; he
can turn it into a slow-motion picture, the sounds and the images synchronizing
as in a movieola. And since his object is always to represent some kind of
reality in such a way as not to outrage the reader’s sense and sensibility of
it, on the higher plane he occupies himself with international politics, atomic
fission, high finance, overpopulation, unemployment, teetotalism, tottering
morals, Bergsonian stream-of-consciousness, Freudian complexes; at the lower
level with the worst aspects of society and sex, murder, robbery, and other
forms of bloodlust and lunacy. However, at the heights and the depths alike,
the novelist as artist achieves a perfect marriage between narrative which is a
sequence of events with plot which is concerned exclusively with motives; his
dialogues do not stand by themselves nor the descriptive passages like detached
chunks; he selects and connects; he sees life steadily and sees it whole; the
strands maybe different but they are all of one warp and woof. He builds up his
story and his people with delicate lights and shadows, so polychromatic, as an
artist with his little tiles builds up his cunning mosaic, that he invests his
persons and places not only with aesthetic glamour but with moral significance.
“For human intercourse,” writes Mr. E. M. Forster in his Aspects of the
Novel, a book as grand in that realm as Mr. Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, “for human
intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not as a social
adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other,
except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want
to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an
illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly.…” In his novel, A
Passage to India, by integrating the qualities which he describes as
Pattern and Rhythm, –devices by which the different parts of the novel can be
catenated so as to form an aesthetic whole,–Mr. Forster has “endeavoured to
create a realm where he will not be haunted by the spectre of imperfect human
relations.” A Passage to India has an added interest to us, now that we
are an independent nation. No more beautiful, no more terrible picture of the
English in India has been drawn, nor ever will be. In its poetry, in its
profound overshadowing sense that time must have a stop, in its satire which
cuts here codly and sighs there with sympathy, we see good and evil, sincerity
and shoddiness, truth and hypocrisy, love and hate accentuated by racial and
social differences finding their full-throated articulation. Here is an
immaculate artist who doesn’t require–to use his own words–a new coat of
quicksilver to his mirror, to reflect humanity; his vision never for a moment
squints; “history develops, art stands still.”
Illusion of reality: it is like a floodlit stage
peopled with presence’s that fascinate and repel, that are on this earth but
not of it. Talking, walking, eating, dressing, loving, quarrelling, deceiving,
defending, dying,–in rest as in motion–they display their little
idiosyncrasies; by fidelity and clarity, by the hypnotic spell called
“Style”–and that’s what distinguishes a great artist–the novelist gives his
characters, events, and environments a reality more real and natural, the
quality of the day dream which is more consistent and logical than the dream in
sleep, with no blurring at the edges, and a sophistication that in its very
strength produces an impression of truth while striving to attain it. So true,
so real are the phantoms spun in the shining loom of language, caught in the
shimmering radium of words, words not static and in their alphabetical
isolation as in a dictionary, but dynamic words in action, in vital connection
with other words and phrases, that we mingle our hopes and fears with theirs,
as if they are blood of our blood and bone of our bone, and wonder at the
insight of the writer of genius who discovers amid humanity and its habitats
ivory towers from which to record his vision of brave new worlds.
Every novelist, it is superfluous to say, has his
own original flavour, his individual magic–artists in fiction as different as
Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Balzac, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad,
Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Flaubert, Proust, Turgenev,
Tolstoi, Dostoievsky, Thomas Mann. That beauty is a necessary condition of art,
that without beauty there is not and cannot be any art, is an axiom. The works
of the great writers have both physical and spiritual beauty; the discipline
them enforced on themselves, their willing and passionate surrender to experience
and every experience widening their range of consciousness, their emotional
chastity, their compassion, their belief in their own personal vision and the
courage with which they flung that vision in the face of the world as though
that and that alone mattered, have made fiction more strange and more true than
truth, that “Art (to quote a sentence of Oscar Wilde) is art because it isn’t
life, and Literature gets no chance to stand on its own two feet if we cut
across an author’s vision with too much of our own experience.”
Novels as works of art stay forever new. They are
at once the adventure and liberation of the soul of man. A mind that does not
allow the dust to settle on it receives, like a mirror, their inundating light
in full, quickening its awareness to more and more of their sat, chit,
and
ananda, to a contemplation
of such mysteries as what the bird on the bough may dream or the lotus murmur
to the rising sun.
1 Talk broadcast from Madras on October 29.
Reproduced by courtesy of All India Radio.