Each time, in fact, it becomes harder to make a book of it at all;
instead of holding together more firmly, with every successive
reconstruction, its prodigious members seem always more disparate and
disorganized; they will not coalesce. A subject, one and whole and
irreducible--a novel cannot begin to take shape till it has this for
its support. It seems obvious; yet there is nothing more familiar to a
novel-reader of to-day than the difficulty of discovering what the
novel in his hand is about. What was the novelist's intention, in a
phrase? If it cannot be put into a phrase it is no subject for a
novel; and the size or the complexity of a subject is in no way
limited by that assertion. It may be the simplest anecdote or the most
elaborate concatenation of events, it may be a solitary figure or the
widest network of relationships; it is anyhow expressible in ten words
that reveal its unity. The form of the book depends on it, and until
it is known there is nothing to be said of the form.
IV
But now suppose that Tolstoy had not been drawn aside from his first
story in the midst of it, suppose he had left the epic of his country
and "the historians" to be dealt with in another book, suppose that
the interpolated scenes of War and Peace, as we possess it, were to
disappear and to leave the subject entirely to the young heroes and
heroines--what shall we find to be the form of the book which is thus
disencumbered? I would try to think away from the novel all that is
not owned and dominated by these three brilliant households, Besukhov,
Bolkonsky, Rostov; there remains a long succession of scenes, in a
single and straightforward train of action.
Pages:
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53