Volume 5, Number 6 · October 28, 1965
Life and Death of the Novel
By Frank Kermode
Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast
by Andrew Wright
California, 214 pp., $3.50
The True Patriot
by Henry Fielding, edited by Miriam Austin Locke
Alabama, 263 pp., $12.50
Radical Dr. Smollett
by Donald Bruce
Houghton Mifflin, 240 pp., $4.95
Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development
by A. Walton Litz
Oxford, 198 pp., $5.75
The special fate of the novel, considered as a genre, is to be always dying; and the main reason for this is that the most intelligent novelists and readers are always conscious of the gap, consisting of absurdity, that grows between the world as it seems to be and the world proposed in novels. Of course, only the novelists and their more intelligent readers ever say that the novel is dying; the public for popular novels is happy enough with the familiar sights and landmarks of what Scott, looking at the English novel of the late eighteenth century, called 'the land of fiction.' This is a place in which all its accomplished in terms of unvarying myth and convention; its 'adventures' have to do, in Scott's words, 'not with those of real life, but with each other.' We are always—and by 'we' I mean those of us who scorn to have dealings with the merely popular—we are always emigrating from the land of fiction. We object precisely to its absurdity; if that's a novel, we say, I'm going to write an anti-novel. Then the anti-novel—Joseph Andrews, Love and Freindship I regard as anti-novels avant la lettre—points the way to a new novel, a new convention; once again strong minds are revolted by arbitrariness and absurdity. Again they proclaim the imminent death of the novel, the one genre without which modern literature is unimaginable.
Review, 2512 words
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