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from
Remembrance of Things Past
to
Lolita
, enlist in this conspiracy with all the boldness of their virtuosity. Even as all-including and unyielding a masterwork as
Ulysses
is finally about lovers; Leopold and Molly Bloom are great lovers, great in compassion and fidelity, fidelity to each other and to their inner sensations, their authentic sentiments. Perhaps the reason Stephen Dedalus is slightly tedious in this novel is that he is not in love. Not to be in love, the capital N Novel whispers to capital W Western Man, is to be dying.
    So much for the past; what of the future? The Novel’s Victorian heyday has passed. If my impression is correct, that capitalism put sex in a treasure chest, the chest, after so many raids upon it, is battered to the point of collapse. The set of tensions and surprises we call
plot
to a great extent depends upon the assumption that bourgeois society discourages and obstructs free-ranging sex. In the 19th-century novels and the 20th-century movies, the punishment for adultery is death. Yet even in
MadameBovary
, one feels, reading it, that the heroine in swallowing arsenic is being hysterical, that there is nothing in her situation a sudden inheritance of money wouldn’t solve. In the novels, say, of Evelyn Waugh, adultery has become a dangerous pleasantry, and by now I think even the aura of danger is fading. As Denis de Rougemont has pointed out, the conventional obstructions to love no longer impress us; a somewhat extravagant situation, such as in
Lolita
, alone can bestow dignity upon a romantic passion. Freud, misunderstood or not, has given sex the right to be free, and the new methods of contraception have minimized the bail. Remove the genuine prohibitions and difficulty, and the three-dimensional interweave of the Novel collapses, becomes slack and linear. The novels of Henry Miller are not novels, they are acts of intercourse strung alternately with segments of personal harangue. They are closer to the
Arabian Nights
than to Tolstoy; they are not novels but
tales
.
    Dr. Johnson defined “novel” as a type of tale; and, though the classic Novel, the sentimental underground of bourgeois Europe, may belong to a moment of history that is passing, the appetite for tales is probably not less fundamental to the human species than the appetite for songs. Books of prose about imaginary events will continue to appear, and they will be called, out of semantic inertia, novels.
    What will be the shape of these books? Some will continue the direction of Miller, and be more or less angry personal accounts of coitus and conversation among bohemians. The tradition is not dishonorable—Dostoevsky’s
Notes from the Underground
is such a book—and will veer very close to pornography, which itself has a tradition that is, at the least, venerable. The subversive burden will shift, I fear, from sex to violence, and the threat of society, and the problem for censorship, lies not, in my opinion, with the description of sexual acts but with fantasies of violence and torture. Books like
Last Exit to Brooklyn
and
The Painted Bird
, with their unrelieved brutality, and the relish that seethes beneath their creditable surface pretensions, augur an unhappy direction. Cruel events do occur in reality, of course; but the obligation of the artist, when dealing with them, as with sex, is to be, not inexplicit, but accurately alive to their complicated human context. Today’s bohemia, or hippiedom, seems to aspire toward a political effectiveness that precludes much compass of sympathy or subtlety of craft. Rather, a fanatic and dazed narrowing of comprehension seems to be in progress. The sour riots ofthe Sixties are not likely to call forth the ebullient rapture of a Kerouac, let alone the refined anguish of a Huysmans.
    Other books of fiction will, I think, try to employ the inherited machinery of the romantic novel for drier purposes than the dramatization of erotic vicissitudes. The novels of Vladimir