With Flaubert, Turgenev, Dostoevsky (as we have somewhat belatedly come to recognize), James, Conrad and Joyce, mere vicarious experience was no longer the aim of the novelist, any more than it had been of Homer in the epic of Sophocles and Shakespeare in the drama. Constructing a story now became the serious task of giving an order to experience which life itself did not directly provide; the ultimate aim of fiction was knowledge, as it could be derived from closely observed human situations when they are shaped into a symbolic structure possessing organic, not mechanical, form. This basic new principle—that form itself is an embodiment of moral insight— led to technical innovations as methods of discovering what Virginia Woolf called “the really real” in ordinary events. Devices that served to heighten tonal values, to activate sense details (Flaubert maintained that no object exists in fiction until it has been acted upon), to narrow and deepen point of view, and to transcend the mechanical barriers of time, though they tended to diminish the importance of plot, became the means by which a writer’s imagination might penetrate his material more deeply and thereby evaluate it. Thus, there emerged a body of techniques that, far from being a clog upon the writer’s creativity, offered him a variety of resources by which he could realize his story. One would think no writer of fiction coming after this major development could afford to ignore it.
Green and Golden, by Alix Taylor. Doubleday, $3.75
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