The Great Canadian Novel

During the last fifteen years or so Canadians have been invited to recognise that there is, or should be, a Canadian literature.  The more learned critical essays, such as E. K. Brown’s On Canadian Poetry, have been followed by a succession of periodical articles, written mostly by embittered Canadian novelists.  These have attacked the economic intractability of the Canadian writer’s position; they have complained – and justly – of an apathetic public; they have raged against the parsimony and timidity of Canadian publishers.  These complaints have their point.  But even if they were all rectified overnight there would still remain the writer’s central and most unmanageable problems – problems in writing.

Problems in writing are of far less general interest than are the details of popular surgery or potted psycho-analysis.  And the control of literature by university professors would be as sinister as the control of politics by lawyers.  In the novel as in no other art-form, however, problems in writing are so intimately related to the social context that the reading public bears a very large share of the responsibility for solving or failing to solve them.

The English novel emerged as a distinct form with the rise of the solid English middle class.  By the second half of the eighteenth century the novel was firmly established on the substantial wealth and the clear-cut – if on the highest grounds impeachable – moral values of the middle class.  The novelist knew clearly for whom he was writing; and his readers enthusiastically arranged to feed him during those long periods of unlucrative gestation incidental to novel-writing.  The English bourgeois had remarkable flexibility too: they could stomach, even relish, the deplorable moralism of a Richardson, and yet not to dismiss the sly whimsicality of a Sterne.  Their artistic standards may not have been particularly high; but within quite clearly defined limits they were tolerant; they were prepared to be moved, amused, impressed, even changed.  The English novel has rarely achieved the very highest artistic perfection; but it has warmth, range, and that intense interest in the individual person which is also the stamp of the middle class in the early stages of the industrial era.  Without such favourable conditions the novel would either not have achieved distinctness of direction, or would have been long delayed.  Fortunately there existed for nearly two centuries precisely the right culture (in the biological sense).  The difficult economic problem solved itself.  It is true that there were abuses and false starts; that hacks, now forgotten, combined industry and even skill with shrewd business sense.  But, given the latitude of an uncertain and tolerant middle class taste, the serious novelist had room to develop along lines which his public would not have dreamed of, and would not have liked if they had.  The sprawling diffuseness of the novel, with its peculiar problems of organisation, the exuberance, the individualism, the clear-cut moral tone – these are the marks of the English middle class.  The social fibre was tough enough to offer creative resistance to an exceptional imagination, and to supply for a time the limits without which artistic freedom is a meaningless concept.  The history of the English novel from the middle of the nineteenth century is largely the history of the decay of the middle class, the rise of the proletariat, the progressive separation of the serious novelist from the larger public.

In the eighteenth and nineteen centuries the stable structure of moral values was rapidly disintegrating.  But a very convincing ghost lived on to give solidity and firmness to the novel in its beginnings.  Now that structure has collapsed; the spiritual culture has been progressively vulgarised; the separation between commodity-value and artistic value is now absolute.  Disintegration of social values has induced an immediate disintegration of formal values in the novel.  Again we see this first and most clearly in the English novel; not because the values collapsed earlier there, but because artists of a high order could penetrate and reflect the change more quickly.  The artist, finding the external component of social reality attenuating and vanishing, turned in upon himself to discover the vividness and certainty of experience upon which an artist’s life is built.  This inward-turning produced the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novel, with its inherent formlessness, its flatness, its mercurial and esoteric quality, its concentration upon “the luminous envelope” of the sensitive consciousness.  Joyce’s development, from his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Ulysses and on to Finnegan’s Wake, is food for serious, even sombre, thought.  What he achieved was much more than purely a triumph of technique: the magnitude of his technical achievement is some measure of the scope and stress of the agony that he resolved and objectified in his work.  We find pastiches of his method in the works of a belated but earnest avant-garde: and even in the work of the more convincing practitioners – in Dos Passos and Thomas Wolfe – the nostalgic sentimentality, and that inversion of sentimentality called ‘toughness’, is a poor substitute for Joyce’s alarming intelligence and omnivorous awareness.  Joyce’s achievement is monumental and final: his method is a dead-end because in his hands the novel has lost its social bearings.  That is a severe condemnation of the setting in which he worked; for his setting is not Ireland but Western Civilisation.

Let us pause to consider briefly what a novel is.  First of all, a novel is a work of art.  There is another way of saying that it is the embodiment or realisation of a germ.  The germ will be, not a story or an ‘idea’ in the usual sense of the word, but a penetrating grasp of some aspect of the values of life.  The germ will be known to be writer and to the perceptive reader as a complex state of consciousness; and it cannot be adequately expressed otherwise than through the complete extrication of the novel.  For a work of art is the physical embodiment of a complex feeling: the making of a work of art is a process of discovery.  In a novel, as distinct from a poem or a philosophical treatise, the germ will embody itself in a person or persons, whose lives and experiences will unfold before us, over a longer or shorter period of time; and those persons will reveal themselves through a story (probably), in a particular setting at a particular time.  The novelist as artist, however, is not concerned with writing history, but with revealing reality as given in human experience.  This he can achieve only through the significant distortion called imagination.  His people will become real to us only as they become felt people.

As long as society offers a fairly clear and stable structure of values the novelist’s task of embodying his germ is relatively straightforward: when that structure has collapsed he is thrown entirely upon his own devices.  During the last few years scholarly circles have been enlivened by much recondite discussion of symbolism and myths.  We find the usual arrangement of warring camps, of banners bearing inscrutable or trite catch-phrases; even here and there we find the odd person who assures us that symbols and myths are really not at all mysterious, but simply a matter of quasi-mathematical equations.  The term ‘myth’ is frequently used with withering scorn to imply something non-existent, imaginary, nugatory – the direct opposite to a ‘scientific fact’.  Nothing, however, is really quite so straightforward as ‘the ordinary man’ seems to think – not even a scientific fact.  As T. H. Huxley once gravely remarked, “Those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact”.  I must extricate myself at once from this metaphysical morass by suggesting, without any sort of explanation, that every form of explicit knowledge and judgement is based, and must be based, upon myth.  As a condition of resolute and consistent action the vertiginous flux of experience must be stopped.  Since it cannot be stopped actually, it must be stopped mythically.  Myth-making is, then, a vital and necessary human activity: for a myth is the structure of image or narrative in which an apprehension of reality and of the supernatural expresses itself.  What I have earlier called “a structure of moral [or social] values” might just as well be called “a communal myth about the relation between man as evanescent and creativity and value as permanent”.  To call a structure of values a myth is not to dismiss it, but rather to affirm its validity and vitality.  But in our time the vital communal myths have degenerated into, or been replaced by, debased substitutes under the pressure of obscurantist science because we blandly imagine that everything is quite easy to explain, that there is nothing supernatural.  So it comes that we are too smart to be taken in by a myth.  Cosmic impertinence of this flippant and hubristic kind does not promise well for the fate of Western Civilisation.

For the artist the general atrophy of a myth-making faculty is a sad state of affairs: it deprives him of his store of vital communal myth.  This deprivation accounts for the esoteric strain in contemporary writing, and for the artists’ careful study of primitive mythologies.  When communal myth has deteriorated into vulgarised superstition, the only vital myths are the personal fantasies of the few who can still penetrate into reality and embody their vision in fresh personal myths.  But the public at large will not recognise a vital myth when it encounters one.  For its spiritual blindness is a blindness to myth, blindness to the supernatural; a blindness which works itself out actively in an inversion of all values to the image of its own malady, and so, with no conscious desire for suicide, grows farther and farther away from reality, from the present, from life.  Popularly superstition is called fact, fact is called nonsense; and the myth-makers, the artists, the creative few who do live in the present and are in commerce with reality, are called crazy every time they open their mouths – or, what is much worse, are ignored.

The novel has always had its roots firmly in people and in human experience; and as art it has been concerned to reveal as directly and vividly as possible “the feeling of life”.  For its materials it has drawn upon social patterns.  But where there was pattern before there is now an amorphous neutrality.  Hence our contemporary novels tend to take one of three forms: very occasionally an inner portrait attempting the imaginative and intellectual integrity of a Joyce; more often the sentimental panoramic reporting of a Dos Passos; most often those archaeological anomalies, jettisoned by the quantity promoter on well advertised dates, and written in pathetic and absent-minded imitation of the eighteenth or nineteenth century.  The third group is much the largest because the mass of readers, through a vague but violent terror of the anarchic ‘new’ forms that reflect the anarchy of society, drag writers of low vitality back into obsolete modes.

“Isolated artists have survived, but like rocks battered by the sea of banality and ignorance, not like great trees in the forest.”  Augustin Cochin’s statement is as true of earlier ages as it is of our own time.  Despite the unhappy and even horrifying changes fulfilled in our own time, the writer’s problem is fundamentally the same as it has always been – the problem of personal and artistic integrity.

We have shown how closely the novel is conditioned by its social setting, and how the serious novelist has come to be separated from the mass of his public.  This separation confronts the novelist with a question.  Is he to go with the wind, lend an attentive ear to all the Gallup Polls, study the applause-meters and sample-surveys, and assess his artistic achievement by the magnitude (or minuteness) of his royalty cheques?  Or is he to exercise his duty as a member of the creative minority and write what he must write even though busy averagers slam the doors of the publishing houses in his face?  The answer is not easy to find.  It is not simply a choice between bread and no bread.  It is a choice between novel and no novel, because the novel has its roots in human society.

If we consider the public reached by the best-sellers (for in this respect Canada is not distinct from the United States) we are entitled to say that the majority could not be more wrong in the matters of taste than they are: not because they are the majority, not because they are unintelligent, but because they are sophisticated, spoiled almost beyond redemption by the insidious perversions of domestic propaganda.  Art is not a decorous entertainment for an intellectual élite.  On the contrary, most of us are too clever, too lacking in simplicity to make any appropriate response to a work of art.  We think too much in the presence of works of art.  Our minds interpose an opaque screen.  We do not let splashes of colour and bundles of noises and clusters of words make a naked impact upon us.  I am not arguing for a primitive impressionism.  I am condemning that arid intellectualism which makes us incapable of the simply excitement needed to recreate works of art.  And that arises from the sterilised instruction that passes for education, the training that leaves us complacently unaware of the immense range of our ignorance.  The greatest danger to our civilisation is apathy,[1] the complete inability to suffer, to feel, to enjoy, to create.  Without suffering there can be no creation.  We talk loudly about our material achievements, knowing that if we allow the silence to flow back for a moment we shall catch a glimpse of our spiritual sterility.

Apathy, imaginative sloth, the desire for passive amusement, the desire for time-killers that demand no contribution from the participant – these negative forces in the larger reading public have borne their fruit, fruit with a glossy rind, the true proletarian literature of our time: the pulp magazines, the soap operas and gag programmes, most Hollywood films and most best-sellers.  These are the forces that induce the writer to sell himself down the river, the river that flows to Hollywood – the most efficient corrupter of taste and artists ever devised by human ingenuousness.

Let us suppose that our Canadian novelist has solved his problem of artistic integrity on the economic side.  There still remains the question of imaginative integrity.  Presumably he will wish to write a mature novel, something other than a rollicking tale of physical or sexual adventure; perhaps a ‘novel of ideas’.  The novel of ideas is a mature and delicate matter.  Ideas by themselves will kill, not make, a novel.  To wrap up a few social or domestic problems in a novel will merely turn the book into a sociological pamphlet or a thinly disguised piece of propaganda.  A novel does not become mature by introducing a handful of puppets to discuss the French-Canadian problem or the iniquities of the Liberal (or any other) Government.  It is conceivable that when we are as far away from 1948 as we are from Vanity Fair nobody but a few scholars will know the details of any racial squabble in Canada or have the faintest notion what a Liberal was.  We should, however, be interested and grateful to know what it feels like to be a saint, or an artist, or an intellectual, or a genuinely ordinary person.

The desire to write something Canadian has its own pitfalls.  It may send us in search of what is distinctly Canadian, and make us try to form an abstract picture of what is Canadian and so far different from any other country.  But novels are not concerned with generalisations or abstractions; they are concerned with real people.  If we try too consciously to make our books Canadian we are inclined to throw the emphasis upon the subject-matter: and the subject-matter must always be as secondary in a novel as in a painting.  So long as the novel can be a work of art, the germ must come first, then the people, then the story and setting in which to embody the germ.  The germ comes from a penetrating grasp of reality.  Poeta nascitur non fit.  Nobody can plant that germ, or say when it is to stir, or whether it will stir at all.  At least the Canadian novelist has the advantage of a flexible language with a fine tradition.  He has also the advantage of two and a half centuries of novel-writing to show him that there is no formula for a good novel, and to show him how attempts to smuggle the wrong things into novels have failed.  There is no reason why those mistakes should be repeated.

This is the golden age of the hack-writer.  The hack has never had a more lively market, nor a more ingenious and determined propaganda machine behind him.  But if we are considering the possibility of a great Canadian novel – that is, a novel which will be translated into all the important languages of the world and have a steady sale for a few centuries – we are not thinking of hack-work.  A creative writer’s first concern, his first need, is to write, to ‘turn blood into ink’.  Complaining about the apathy of the public may deflect him from writing.  I am not sure how or whether a gifted novelist could maintain his integrity in this country at the present time.  There is no clear sign that the novel as we know it can survive: for the fate of the novel is the fate of society.  But every problem in writing is, and always has been, a unique problem, and in human affairs anything is possible.  Altogether the novelist is well advised to go on writing with such detachment as he can command, in the hope that while he is writing somebody will teach the public how to read.