Ideas and the Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lev or Lyov. In War and Peace, there is no delegated spokesman; Pierre is too young and bumbling, and Prince Andrei is morally and spiritually too old, a case of fin de race —mention of his “small white hands” occurs too emphatically not to be a signal of disapproval. Instead, throughout War and Peace, Tolstoy speaks in his own voice: in the marvelous chapters on Napoleon, on the old fox, Kutuzov, on the battle of Borodino, on the multiple causes of wars; also in the terse parentheses concerning the uses of medicine, the mysterious undercurrents in the life of the Russian peasantry; finally in the Second Epilogue beginning “History is the life of nations and of humanity,” which sets out in simple style the general conclusions on history, free will, and determinism a thoughtful reader will want to derive from all the events he has witnessed. The Second Epilogue is a kind of teaching instrument intended to sharpen the reader’s understanding of the limits between the knowable and the unknowable. Tolstoy, as spokesman here, is uncompromisingly agnostic, except in the moral sphere: we have no way of inferring First Causes; we can only be sure about very small, almost minute, acts of our own, such as our freedom (assuming no physical impairment) to raise an arm in an empty room. Similarly, as readers, we can be sure that Natasha’s going to the opera was the proximate cause of her moral fall; yet it is doubtful that she had any clear choice in the matter: a decision major in its consequences slipped by her without announcing itself as pregnant with causality.
    When Tolstoy in War and Peace speaks to us of all these matters in his own voice, he is resorting to a method that goes back to the infancy of the novel, that of the omniscient narrator. His practice in Anna Karenina, published a bit later, was different, as we know. I doubt that to his mind this represented a technical advance; it seems likely that he used the method that appeared most suitable to the material he was going to treat. Odd as that sounds to us today, he regarded himself as a rebel against the tyranny of conventional forms, announcing in an afterword to War and Peace that the book was not a novel, even less a poem, still less a historical chronicle. It was “what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.”
    In eighteenth-century England, an author, e.g., Fielding, was commonly his own spokesman. A radical break in the tradition came with the epistolary novel, and this may explain the popularity of Richardson among the avant-garde of our own century. In the nineteenth century, practice varied. With George Eliot, there was a sort of division of labor. In Middlemarch she speaks now and again in her own deeply earnest voice, now and again through Dorothea Brooke, although with Dorothea it is less a matter of homiletic thought than of “right” feeling. George Eliot has another voice, though, quite different from her customary organ tones; it harks back to the eighteenth century and is dry, pungent, short-spoken, as when she suggests of Lydgate, not unsympathetically, that his otherwise fine character was “a little spotted with commonness.” We have been advised by the curt phrase what to expect. The wonderful word “spotted,” suggesting a case of measles—an ordinary, non-fatal disease—sticks, fatally for Mr. Lydgate, in the mind. She uses that third voice rather sparingly, but whenever it speaks, we hear judgment in it and are warned to pay attention.
    In French nineteenth-century fiction, as one might expect, the division of labor between authors and characters was on the whole stricter. To the author speaking in his own voice was reserved the right of comment and general statement. Among the great luminaries jealous of place and prerogative, each a roi soleil outshining his dramatis personae, pre-eminence in this respect as in others goes to Victor Hugo. That god-like seer, mage, and prophet could not