Part I

In all ages, the base Sancho Panza triumphs, you will find, in the long run, over the sublime Don Quixote.

                                                                                                                                             Stendhal

I am aware of what has been happening in criticism and critical theory for the pat thirty years.  And because the theory that I am presenting differs so radically from present-day theories of the novel, I am presenting, in outline form, the basic critical premises which underlie it:

1. The novel is a unique art form.  Novels cannot be conflated with poems or plays.
2. Novel are written by individuals for other individuals to read.
3. A novel consists of the words chosen and arranged by the novelist.
4. A good reader is someone capable of responding to the words of a novel as they have been chosen and arranged by the novelist.
5. Freudian awareness greatly enhances the ability of the reader to understand the words in a novel as they have been chosen by the novelist.
6. A good critic is capable reader who represents his or her reading of a novel in a criticism that acknowledges his or her critical premises.
7. Novels may be genuine or counterfeit novels. Only novelists who question or rebel against the ideals of their culture can write genuine novels.
8. Readers must go wherever a genuine novel takes them, and in going there they will have no choice but to be as much at odds with their own and society’s ideals as are the novels that they are reading–at least while they are reading the novels.
9. Vivision is what makes a novel genuine.  Vision is what cuts through readers’ ideas and ideals to show them who they are and what they are up against in the real world.  In Kafka’s words, it is “the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
10. Ersatz or imitation vision (which I do not call vision) counterfeits genuine vision and produces counterfeit novels.
11. The vision of a genuine novel challenges or undercuts many or all of the reader’s values, ideas and beliefs, or, in a word, his or her ideals.  Consequently, the vision of a genuine novel always “hurts” in the sense that Lawrence and Kafka describe the “hurt”.
12. Some capable readers, usually sophisticated critics, will acknowledge that a novel conflicts with their ideals but will then proceed to downplay the significance of the conflict–usually by altering or modifying the words as arranged by the author in ways that will either erase the conflict altogether or treat it like an aberrant element that has to be disposed of before moral idealism can prevail.
13. Illumination is a subjective response that readers may sometimes have when they read certain genuine novels.
14. If capable readers experience the illumination of a genuine novel and then decide to reject it, for whatever reason, they have the right to do so.
15. Readers or critics with absolute religious or social or moral convictions will not ordinarily be capable readers of genuine novels. If, like T.S.Eliot, they nevertheless manage to read genuine novels, they will have no choice but to condemn them–as Eliot condemns Hardy and Lawrence.  Either that or they have to deny their own absolute convictions–the way Graham Greene does in  Why Do I Write?
16. The theory of fiction that I am presenting has no moral imperatives.  It merely intends to show how capable readers can read genuine novels and experience the illumination that genuine novels may provide

৯

The Panzaic theory itself is based primarily on passages from D.H.Lawrence and Jose Ortega y Gasset. 

The following quotations are from Lawrence:

You can fool pretty nearly every other medium.  You can make a poem pietistic, and still it will be a poem.  You can write Hamlet in drama:  if you wrote him in a novel, he’d be half comic, or a trifle suspicious: a suspicious character, like Dostoevsky’s Idiot. Somehow, you sweep the ground a bit too clear in the poem or the drama, and you let the human Word fly a bit too freely.  Now in a novel there’s always a tom-cat, a black tom-cat that pounces on the white dove of the Word, if the dove doesn’t watch it; and there is a banana-skin to trip on; and you know there is a water-closet on the premises. (Study of Thomas Hardy 18)

A new relation, a new relatedness hurts somewhat in the attaining; and will always hurt. So life will always hurt.  Because real voluptuousness lies in re-acting [sic] old relationships, and at the best, getting an alcoholic sort of pleasure out of it, slightly depraving. … Obviously, to read a really new novel will always hurt, to some extent.  There will always be resistance … You may judge of their reality by the fact that they do arouse a certain resistance, and compel, at length, a certain acquiescence. (Study of Thomas hardy 174-175)

The following quotations are from Ortega:

The force of the concrete in the things stops the movement of our images.  The inert and harsh object rejects whatever “meanings” we may give it: it is just there, confronting us, affirming its mute, terrible materiality in the face of all phantoms. This is what we call realism:  to bring things to a distance, place them under a light, incline them in such a way that the stress falls upon the side which slopes down towards pure materiality… Therefore, it does not actually matter what objects the realist chooses to describe.  Any one at all will do, since they all have an imaginary halo around them, and the point is to show the pure materiality under it. We see in this materiality a conclusive argument, a critical power which defeats the claim to self-sufficiency of all idealizations, wishes and fancies of man.  The insufficiency, in a word, of culture, of all that is noble, clear, lofty, … Cervantes recognizes that culture is all that, but that alas, it is a fiction.  Surrounding culture—as the puppet show of fancy was surrounded by the inn—lies the barbarous, brutal, mute, insignificant reality of things.  It is sad that it is shown to us thus, but what can we do about it!  It is real, it is there:  it is terribly self-sufficient.  Its force and its single meaning are rooted in its presence. Culture is memories and promises, an irreversible past, a dreamed future. But reality is a simple and frightening “being there.” It is a presence, a deposit, an inertia.  It is materiality (30-31)

In [Don Quixote] the epic comes to an end forever along with its aspiration to support a mythical orb bordering on that of material phenomena but different from it.  It is true that the reality of the adventure is saved, but such a salvation involves the sharpest irony.  The reality of the adventure is reduced to the psychological, to a bodily humor perhaps.  It is real as far as it is vapor from a brain, so that its reality is rather that of its opposite, the material. … So that it is not only Don Quixote which is written against the books of chivalry, and as a result bears the latter within it, but the novel as a literary genre consists essentially of that absorption. (27,28)

This offers an explanation of … how reality, the actual, can be changed into poetic substance.  By itself, seen in a direct way, it would never be poetic: this is the privilege of the mythical.  But we can consider it obliquely as destruction of the myth, as criticism of the myth.  In this form reality, which is of an inert and insignificant nature, quiet and mute, acquires movement, is changed into an active power of aggression against the crystalline orb of the ideal.  The enchantment of the latter broken, it falls into fine, iridescent dust which gradually loses its colours until it becomes an earthy brown. We are present at this scene in every novel.  There is need of a book showing in detail that every novel bears Don Quixote within it like an inner filigree in the same way that every epic poem contains the Iliad within it like the fruit its core. (40)

          Ortega’s “every novel” cannot possibly include the thousands of best-selling novels (ranging from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Love Story) that exclude Panzaic reality altogether.  Nor does there seem to be anything like complete destruction of the myth or of the crystalline orb of the ideal in the novels that E.M. Forster has defined as ‘prophetic.”  Yet these exceptions, further analysis will show, do not invalidate Ortega’s argument; they merely qualify it. “Every novel” may not bear the Don Quixote within it, but with very few exceptions, all the genuine ones do.  Moreover they bear it, as I shall try to demonstrate, in a way and to a degree and with effects that fulfill Ortega’s idealistic fears and Lawrence’s realistic hopes.

          In declaring that reality, in itself, “is of an inert and insignificant nature, quiet and mute,” Ortega is of course expressing his own idealistic bias.  And the same bias is apparent in his statement that “It does not actually matter what objects the realist chooses to describe.  Any one at all will do, since they all have an imaginary halo around them. And the point is to show the pure materiality under it.”  Yet, however biased these statements may be, philosophically, they point towards a crucial aspect of the Panzaic that cannot be too much stressed: the fact that no thing or being in fiction can be Panzaic in itself or in herself or himself.  Not even a belly!  Not even a phallus!  A phallus, presented clinically, may be just a spout to urinate through; or presented pornographically, it may be an object to thrill to.  It is only Panzaic when it functions in such a way as to cut through what Ortega has described as the “crystalline orb of the ideal”—the way the pig’s pizzle in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, for example, cuts directly through the crystalline orb of Jude’s daydreams to show the phallic reality that underlies them—the reality that is to make a shambles of his ideals.

          Whether or not something is Panzaic in a novel therefore depends not on what it is like (it may, in itself, be “inert and insignificant”) but on what it does.  More specifically, what it does to the abstract, the ideal, the “crystalline orb,” the “imaginary halo.”  The two fine ladies’ handkerchiefs that Kafka’s officer wears under the collar of his uniform (in the Penal Colony) may, for instance, be more Panzaic than “the seven bronze verges … to which the dancing women offered flowers and furious caresses … [until] shouting and howling, seven women suddenly hurled themselves upon the seven bronzes” in Octave Mirabeau’s  The Torture Garden (49).  The handkerchiefs may be more Panzaic because, “inert and insignificant” as they may be in themselves, they nevertheless function in such a way, in context, as to bring out the discrepancy between the officer’s impulses and his professed ideals; whereas Mirabeau’s seven verges bear little if any relationship to the ideal: they merely express his notion of female lust.

          Yet if the Panzaic ultimately depends on what something does, there is no denying that what something is like may to a large extent determine what it does.  In most instances handkerchiefs will not be Panzaic; verges and phalluses will.  There is no getting around the fact that, in our culture, we associate phalluses with the real and the crude, handkerchiefs with the genteel and the refined. Nor is there any denying that these associations necessarily affect what phalluses and handkerchiefs can do in any fictional context. But these are theoretical considerations that can best be clarified later on, in the discussion of individual novels.  The point here is that nothing is Panzaic in itself, that nothing can be Panzaic until it is brought into conflict with the ideal and serves to cut through or destroy “the crystalline orb of the ideal.” The necessary corollary to this point, as Ortega explains, is that the ideal is every bit as essential to the working of the Panzaic principle as the real.  In Ortega’s words: [The realistic novel] needs something of the mirage to make us see it as such.  So that it is not only Don Quixote which was written against the books of chivalry, and as a result bears the latter within it, but the novel as a literary genre consists essentially of that absorption. 

৯

          According to this formulation, then, a Panzaic character would be one who is like Sancho Panza in both character and function, which of course raises the primary question of what Sancho Panza is like; and this question—if it can be answered at all satisfactorily—raises the further and perhaps even more difficult question of what the likenesses are.  Is Sam Weller, for example, like Sancho panza because Dickens has, to some extent, modeled him after Sancho Panza, and has clearly indicated that he intends him to play Sancho Panza to Pickwick’s Don Quixote? My own answer would be “No,” on the ground that Sam Weller is not really like Sancho, that the seeming similarities in character and function are merely outward and superficial, that Sam, regardless of how Dickens consciously intended him, corresponds to a distinct Victorian type that is in most respects antithetical to Sancho Panza, a pseudo-Panzaic type sometimes defined as “The Resourceful Hero” who invariably ends up defending the mythical orb of the ideal.³  Whereupon another critic might reply that I have misunderstood Sancho (and perhaps Sam Weller too); that the similarities I have dismissed as superficial are really fundamental; that my whole conception of the Panzaic is based on misunderstanding of Sancho and his role in Don Quixote; that in point of fact I have fashioned out of my Lawrentian reading a Sancho who resembles Lawrence’s Mellors far more than he does the Sancho of Cervantes’ text.

          To such charges I might reply that my reading of Don Quixote is not at all extreme or idiosyncratic; that, on the contrary, it is in all essentials much like Ortega’s reading.  And from these beginnings I might then go on to a full-scale defense of my own reading, and more especially my interpretation of Sancho and his role in the novel.  Indeed, if my concept of the Panzaic were dependent on my interpretation of Sancho, I would be obliged to undertake some such defence.  But it is not.  I am not trying to define or establish points of literary indebtedness; rather I am trying to identify a type of character common to innumerable novels, a type that I have labeled Panzaic because, in my opinion, Sancho Panza is the first and perhaps the most successful embodiment of the type.  But if I am wrong about Sancho it does not follow that I am wrong about the type, which exists apart from Sancho and my application of his name.  Indeed the type could just as well be identified through one or another of its 20th century exemplifications, e.g., through Schweik in The Good Soldier Schweik, or Zorba in Zorba the Greek, or the mother in Vittorini’s Conversation in Sicily, or Kitten in Robert Gover’s One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding.

          Each of these characters beautifully embodies the type.  The mother in Vittorini’s novel, described by the narrator, who is her son, as a ‘Blessed Old Sow” is in her own way every bit as earthy, every bit as simple-minded, as Sancho; and it is she, in the context of the novel, who shows the nullity of the social and political ideals that her son and others would have people live by.  Zorba, too, for all his physical and sexual prowess, is naive if not simple minded in his responses, and it is primarily through his responses that the novel exposes the inadequacy of the Quixotic hero’s liberal ideals.  Schweik, unlike Zorba and Vittorini’s mother, who are for their years quite striking, and even handsome, is a man after Sancho’s own belly—a man who resembles Sancho in everything from physical features to his simple-mindedness, and while there may be some questions as to whether Schweik is actually simple-minded, or is, like Hamlet, feigning madness, the question is not, in the present context, a crucial one.  What really matters is that Schweik’s simple-minded attitudes and responses, whether real or assumed, serve to devastate the pretensions and posturings of the Don Quixotes who are, in the name of God and country, trying either to kill him or to get him killed.

          Kitten, the fourteen-year-old black prostitute in Robert Gover’s One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, provides still another beautiful example of a Panzaic character—even though the novel she appears in is rather slight.  What Kitten, “lil ol black Pickaninny me,” does to the college boy, J.C., is not just hilariously funny; it provides a contrast between her responses and his that shows how unfeeling and cruel and stupid a well-intentioned and liberal young American can be.  And this contrast could have been even more telling if Gover had created in his college boy a Don Quixote of more sensitivity and sophistication and intelligence.  As it is, Kitten has it all her own way so easily so much of the time, that she never gets a chance to exercise her Panzaic powers to the full.  She who might have devastated the highest and most precious mythical orbs of our culture ends up by devastating only a college boy version of white, middle-class, protestant Americanism.  But this is of course a criticism of the novel, not of Kitten.

          The Panzaic is not synonymous with the sexual, or the Dionysian, or Rabelaisian, or, for that matter, any of the current forms of postmodern philosophizing. The Panzaic principle is not an attempt to elevate or idealize the Panzaic or the Panzaic character at the expense of the idealistic or heroic.  By their very nature Panzaic characters cannot be so elevated—and still remain Panzaic. Inevitably they become heroic.  And when this happens they can no longer function like Sancho Panza or like Schweik. They cease being undercutters of the ideal and become embodiments of the ideal, i.e., they cease being Sancho Panzas and become spiritual Sancho Panzas or sensual Don Quixotes or, more positively Tristans or Don Juans.

          One of the first and most notable examples of this kind is Mellors in lady Chatterley’s Lover.  Even in the earliest version of this novel (reprinted by New Directions under the title of The First Lady Chatterley) Lawrence’s gamekeeper, Parkin, is as much the embodiment of Lawrence’s ideals as he is the undercutter of the conventional ideals of Lord Chatterley. And in the third and final version we know as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence makes Parkin even more heroic, giving him a new name, Mellors, and endowing him, as the occasion demands, with the speech, manners, and even the dress of a gentleman.  Consequently, Mellors is not a Panzaic character: he is a hero—in a sense that none of Lawrence’s other great novels have heroes.  He is, in short, Lawrence’s idealized self-image—a sensual Don Quixote with no Sancho Panza to challenge his sensual pretensions. He has all the right feelings, all the right ideas, and knows all the right answers.  And, like Lawrence, he is constantly exercising his rightness and his knowingness, giving Connie, the other characters, and us, the readers, the final word on everything from sex to Bolshevism to painting.

          With such a hero, the novel should be as bad as Lawrence’s detractors have declared it to be.  Why it is not, why it is, on the contrary, a masterful novel of a very special kind, I have explained in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover: A Pilgrim’s Progress for Our Time.” And I shall not repeat my arguments here, except to point out that it is Connie’s guts, not Mellors’, that first give the lie to Clifford and his “insentient iron world”: “My dear, you speak as if you were ushering it all in! [ i.e. “the life of the human body”]. … Believe me, whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.” “Why should I believe you, Clifford, when I feel that whatever God there is has at last wakened up in my guts, as you call them, and is rippling so happily there, like dawn?  Why should I believe you, when I feel so very much the contrary” (Lady Chatterley 298)

          What makes her and the other characters Panzaic, then, is not their outward or even their inward characteristics; it is their function—which is, as I have explained, to show that the senses of even a fool can give the lie to the noblest ideals of even most profound thinker. But this, of course, does not mean that the Panzaic character must be a fool (although many of the greatest have been); nor does it mean that the Panzaic character by virtue of giving the lie to the hero or heroine, then usurps the position of the hero or heroine and becomes a hero or heroine on his or her own. In life the rightness of the guts (as against the mind) will depend on one’s point of view. In Lawrence’s as in all other novels, however, the guts are always right; it is an axiom or principle of the novel that they are always right, that the senses of even a fool can give the lie to even the most profound abstractions of the noblest thinker. And it is this principle that I have designated the Panzaic principle.

          Falstaff is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of Panzaic individuality. That he appears in a play, not a novel, doesn’t really matter here. For he is expressing, in his speech on “honor,” exactly the same feelings that Connie Chatterley is expressing in her response to Clifford: “Why should I believe you when I feel so very much the contrary?” The difference is that Falstaff is expressing his feelings far more dramatically and powerfully—in words that can hardly be misunderstood. And they bear directly on the individual and society—as Franz Alexander pointed out long ago:

          We have [in the termites] the example of a perfect social organization in which the individuals have no private life and all their functions and energies belong to the state. Here is a community in which the state does not serve the welfare of the individual, but the individual lives for the state, which appears as a higher biological unit comparable with the human body, in which the individual cells have no private life but depend on each other and function for the benefit of the whole body.

          Is this the future of the human race, which is seemingly drifting towards an increasingly mechanized social organization? The state of the termites appears to us as a horrible nightmare. From this nightmare we are relieved by Falstaff, the apotheosis of self-sufficient careless individuality. So long as we applaud him and want to see him again and again and expect our writers to create him anew in a thousand different guises, we are safe from the destiny of the termites. Our applause demonstrates that the portion of our personality which stands for individual sovereignty is still stronger than our collectivist urges. It is difficult to tell whether the dynamic structure of the human personality is in the process of changing in the direction of a more collective type of man, but we may comfort ourselves by the belief that if, and when, the collective forces finally gain the upper hand in us, we will not deplore the loss of individual sovereignty because we will have ceased to understand what it means. (606)

This is, I believe, a prophetic statement. I have quoted it again and again in teaching my classes becauseI believe it foretells our ultimate fate as individuals, and because I also believe that it foretells the ultimate fate of genuine novels (and, incidentally, Panzaic criticism). Conceivably, if people could understand what is happening to them, they might evade their termitic fate. But how can they when, at the same time their feelings are being denied or dulled, society is stuffing them with stock responses designed to suppress and replace the individual feelings and impulses they still have? Bereft of individual feelings, and all individual feelings are by definition dissident feelings, and forbidden to entertain dissident thoughts, on pain of being dismissed from their jobs and their community, people lost a sense of who they are—if they are anyone. This sense of emptiness or lostness Lawrence dramatizes again and again in his novels, most directly perhaps in The Rainbow in his treatment of Skrebensky.

By this time it should be clear that, read Panzaically, novels are not verbalized art objects structures, or unities, or patterns in the sense that sculptures, or paintings, or even dramas and poetry are. In some fashion or another every novel has structure and unity and pattern, of course, but these rhetorical features cannot be abstracted from the stuff of the novel and made the test of its meaning and quality—as even Percy Lubbock, the father of organicist fictional criticism, acknowledged when, after pointing out the technical shortcomings of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, he went on to explain that he was, after all, talking only about the craft of fictions, that nothing he had said would detract from Vanity Fair as a “store of life.” Lubbock’s was a grudging admission. He wasn’t interested in stores of life. He was interested in technique. That was why he could argue that War and Peace, which he recognized as the greatest novel ever written, nevertheless lacked unity (i.e., it broke in two) and would have been still greater if Henry James had written it. A silly statement, since James not only didn’t write War and Peace but couldn’t write anything comparable to it—in part because his concern for unity was greater than his concern for life. In short, what Lubbock and James and all their critical followers were trying to do was tame the novel, purify it, and render it amenable to their own critical concepts. [ . . . ]

Up to the present, at least, […]  efforts to tame the novel, whether for art (conceived as structure, texture, and unity) or for art and morality (conceived as what is good for us, as measured by Culture and Tradition) have come up against the fact that novels, as “stores of life,” are so closely and vitally connected with the reader’s own life that he has no choice but to make the same or similar connections with the characters in the novel that he makes with the characters he encounters in his everyday living. Inevitably this is true—whether he is reading Kafka or George Eliot. And while the reader knows, or has to learn, that the characters in fiction are not “real,” in the sense that his friends, for example, are real; he also knows that they are, as he experiences them through his reading, close to real, or life-like, perhaps more life-like than some of his friends, who may be at pains to hide their life-likeness. And he also knows that the fictional world in which these characters move and feel and think is also life-like—again whether it be the world of Kafka or George Eliot. What the reader is experiencing, then, unless he has been taught to look for unity or structure or pattern or symbols, is other characters in another world. All fictional, it is true, yet like the characters he knows and the world he lives in. And he will experience, though the likenesses, connections between himself and other people, connections between his world and theirs—connections which will, if the novel goes beyond his own perceptions (as serious novels almost always do) give him a new awareness of himself and the world he lives in.

The connections that only fiction can make are therefore what counts—the connections and the awareness or illumination they give. And the connections and the awareness, though to some extent dependent on unity, structure, and pattern, do not derive primarily from these elements. The final test is the quality and amount of illumination that a novel gives the reader through the connections it obliges him [or her] to make. How it obliges [a reader] to make the connections is not finally crucial, since the “how,” in so far as it depends on unity, structure, and pattern, is only a means to the illuminative end. Hence the usual criteria for experiencing and judging an art object are secondary, or do not apply. A novel can break in the middle, like War and Peace, or be awkwardly written, like Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, or have the shape of a loose baggy monster, the way Henry James described the three-volume novels of the nineteenth century, and still induce the reader to make illuminative connections.

Why critics cannot accept this view of the novel requires more explanation than I can attempt here. I can however make a few suggestions, beginning with the fact that they believe art to be, if not an object, then an entity which has qualities which can somehow be measured or quantified in ways that will determine its permanent worth. The idea that an art form, in this case the novel, can be so loose and so dependent on what the reader brings to it and the connections he [or she] makes with it, in the ways I have suggested, strikes nearly all critics as dismaying or even horrifying. For what happens to tradition, what happens to standards, what happens to culture, what happens to morality? Aren’t we left with pure subjectivity—with nothing more than gut responses or kicks or prejudices? What is to prevent mixed-up readers from making perverse connections with a novel and then declaring these connections illuminating?

The answer, I concede, is that nothing will, in an absolute sense, prevent them. But then nothing prevents them now. Indeed I would maintain that it is easier for critics to express their sadism when they can hide behind unity or structure or morality than it is when they have to express themselves more directly, in terms of their response to characters or passages in the novel. Which is, I believe, one primary reason why critics—and in a different sense, writers too—are so loath to give up “technique” as a measure of quality. Technique is their screen, not only from what they experience in novels, but from the connections their fictional experiences induce. Without their screens they would stand naked before us.

And they not only fear nakedness in themselves, they fear the possibility that we as readers will stand naked before them and each other. So they have to try to hide from themselves and us—in the name of art and culture and morality. With nearly all art forms they have, in large measure, succeeded—though not, as yet, with the novel. Even now, with all the emphasis on technical experimentation and technical refinement, an emphasis to which novelists as well as critics have to a frightening degree succumbed, novels must still be read, finally, in the same old way. They are still slices of life, no matter how refined or elaborate the techniques of slicing, and they still demand that the reader connect up the life that they present with [her] own. More than that, as I have demonstrated in The Panzaic Principle, the connections that they demand invariably give the lie to their own and the critics’ abstractions. Yet as we all know, we live in a frightening time. Really good novels have become even more difficult to write, and perhaps equally difficult to read. What we [therefore] want are connections that will seem like connections but will not be genuine connections at all. Such novels are… counterfeit, in that they pretend to do what serious art does without actually doing it. The connections they induce are not with the passions and fears and hates and thoughts that make us what we are in our individual selves but with our rationalized versions of what we like to think we are—as we try to assume the roles which have been thrust upon us. At the lowest level; I’m O.K., You’re O.K.—all the way up, or across, to the infinitude of roles that our self-help writers and publicists and sex mechanics are providing for us.

Genuine novels, on the other hand, can never function this way. The connections they compel must always cut through our posturings, our roles; and therefore, as D.H. Lawrence long ago explained, must always “hurt.” They must always “hurt” because they must always oblige us to see what underlies our own and our society’s ideas and ideals. The illumination that genuine novels give us cannot be equated with what other art forms give us. It is not beauty, in any ordinary sense of that word; nor is it morality in any accepted sense. They do not tell us how to live, except perhaps by implication. What they do give us, if we can make the connections they demand, is a deeper, fuller sense of who we are, and can perhaps become in the world we have to live in. Or, in a word, they give us ourselves. They cannot, except in their incidental attributes, make us happy or contented or fulfilled. They can only make us realize, paraphrasing D.H. Lawrence, what is alive and what is dead in ourselves and our world.

Unfortunately, novels can only do all this—and here, I realize, I may seem to be introducing a huge Catch-22—if we, as readers, can make the connections the novels demand of us. Until it has a reader a novel is dead print. And if the reader brings only stock responses to a novel it can be little more than a story, as E.M. Forster defines “story.” Read that way War and Peace or Death on the Installment Plan will do very little for the reader—less, in fact, than the latest popular novel, which is almost certain to be a better “story” than either War and Peace or Death on the Installment Plan.

Still another and perhaps greater difficulty: the reader may get even less from these two great novels if he brings a formidable array of technical knowledge […] Looking for […]  symbols in Celine or Tolstoy will give the reader about as much understanding of the novels as looking at the statues in Central Park will, in real life, give him [or her] an understanding of New York City. Nor are the really sophisticated forms of technical criticism, as practiced by professional critics, much more helpful. For such criticism, even when it is intelligent and well-developed, almost invariably concerns itself with “craft,” (i.e., how the novel achieves its effects) whereas the reader’s first concern is, or should be, to respond to what the novel expresses. If we were all trying to study the craft of fiction, in order to write our own novels, technical criticism might be essential. But we are not trying to write novels, we are trying to read them. One doesn’t have to be a mechanic in order to be a driver—even a Grand Prix driver; nor does one have to know how to build a house in order to live in one.

While certain novels may appear to be incomprehensible without benefit of technical analysis these appearances are usually deceptive. There are images and symbols in Lawrence’s novels, for example, but if one tries to read Women in Love in terms of imagery or symbolism [one] will have the tail wagging the dog, and in the process [one] will miss the vital connections the novel is asking [the reader] to make. And so it is with every aspect of technique—every aspect of unity, structure, pattern, and even style. A reader’s sensitivity to style can actually handicap him [or her] in [their] reading if, as so often happens, [they] permit… cultivated tastes to stand between [them] and the elemental qualities the novels may be trying to express. T.S. Eliot’s strictures on Hardy’s style provide an interesting example of this type of criticism—an example that Katherine Ann Porter, herself a premier stylist among novelists, countered beautifully when she pointed out that stylistic awkwardnesses are of no consequence in Hardy’s novels, that Hardy’s scenes come through to the reader “worldless.