Samuel Beckett vs. Fiction

Let us concede that “the novel” is a bore. Wyndham Lewis, the last Titan, caused one of his characters to throw Middlemarch into the sea, in default of some appropriate archive. “ ‘The historic illusion, the scenes depicted, and the hand depicting them . . . should not be handed down as a living document. It is a part of history’—with this he dismissed it.” This summary judgment on the trivialities of systematized humanism should jar us into noticing how large an assumption traditional fiction makes about the inherent interest of human beings: people who walk upstairs, walk downstairs, eat eggs, quarrel, marry, converse with clergymen, and ride in trains.

The place of such detail in a work of art has never been satisfactorily explained; Aristotle was not confronted with the problem. Its place in a work of entertainment, however, is a matter of social history. Defoe filled Robinson Crusoe with inventories and iterative chronicles to delight a new mercantile class, who were entranced with the material rewards of self-reliance, and generations of children, who like to tell over possessions. Subsequently, nineteenth-century aesthetics — of the period of Landseer and Rosa Bonheur—certified an art of middledistance detail as “verisimilitude,” and nineteenth-century liberalism certified the novel’s preoccupation with people preoccupied by trivia as art’s truest note, a proper human compassion.

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Hugh Kenner

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Let us concede that “the novel” is a bore. Wyndham Lewis, the last Titan, caused one of his characters to throw Middlemarch into the sea, in default of some appropriate archive. “ ‘The historic illusion, the scenes depicted, and the hand depicting them . . . should not be handed down as a living document. It is a part of history’—with this he dismissed it.” This summary judgment on the trivialities of systematized humanism should jar us into noticing how large an assumption traditional fiction makes about the inherent interest of human beings: people who walk upstairs, walk downstairs, eat eggs, quarrel, marry, converse with clergymen, and ride in trains.

The place of such detail in a work of art has never been satisfactorily explained; Aristotle was not confronted with the problem. Its place in a work of entertainment, however, is a matter of social history. Defoe filled Robinson Crusoe with inventories and iterative chronicles to delight a new mercantile class, who were entranced with the material rewards of self-reliance, and generations of children, who like to tell over possessions. Subsequently, nineteenth-century aesthetics — of the period of Landseer and Rosa Bonheur—certified an art of middledistance detail as “verisimilitude,” and nineteenth-century liberalism certified the novel’s preoccupation with people preoccupied by trivia as art’s truest note, a proper human compassion.