Chapter 17 On Psychological Novelists

Indeed, when we pick up What Maisie Knows, we have a strange sense of being cut off from all the worlds of past fiction, of having lost some kind of anchor, notwithstanding it in Dickens and George Eliot. In Te's work, our imagination is hindered, but it supports us and controls us.The sight which hitherto had been so active and incessant in describing fields, cottages, and faces, seemed now to have lost its potency, or was using its power to illuminate the inner mind rather than the outer world.Henry James had to find some synonymous counterpart to a mental process in order to concretize a mental state.Describing the psychology of the character, he says she is "a vessel ready to contain pain, a deep china cup into which all kinds of pungent acidic liquids can be mixed".He is always using this intellectual imagination.The usual supports, the pillars and sleepers of traditional habits expressed or observed by writers in general, are removed.It seemed that everything was out of the way, out in broad daylight, and open to discussion, though there was no visible support to hold them up.To the minds that make up the world they seem strangely free from the burdens of old encumbrances, and rise above the oppression of circumstances.

It is impossible to bring about a sudden and crucial turning point in the old fashioned way of Dickens and George Eliot.Murder, rape, seduction, and sudden death have little power over this high, distant world.Here, people are swayed only by subtle influences, including mutual opinions that everyone hardly talks about but only in their hearts, and people who have time and leisure to conceive and carry out various ideas. various judgments.As a result, these characters seem to be placed in a vacuum, with the substantial, awkwardly shaped worlds of Dickens and George Eliot, or with the precise crisscrossing social conventions that marked Jane Austen's world, are far apart.They live in a cocoon of the most delicate meanings of thought, formed by a society which has nothing to do with earning a living, and which takes ample time to weave its silk around itself.We are thus immediately aware that the author has employed hitherto dormant faculties, ingenuity, and artifice, such as that inner tact and dexterity with which to solve a riddle deftly; our pleasure splits, becomes distilled Now, its substance is infinitely divided, rather than as a whole for our enjoyment.

Maisie, the little girl whom her divorced parents fought over--they asked each to take turns supporting her for six months, only to remarry each other with a second husband and wife--she deeply Buried so deep in associations, insinuations, and conjectures, that she could affect us only so indirectly, that every sense of hers was distorted and had to skim over some other mind before reaching us.Consequently, she does not evoke in us any simple, immediate emotion.We always have time to watch the emotion come and speculate on its path: a moment to the left, a moment to the right.Calm, funny, and mesmerized, we spend every second trying to further refine our senses and mobilize all our deep and subtle intellects to form a part of ourselves, suspended above this little world far away. Come on, and with sane curiosity, come to watch and wait for that end.

Although our pleasure is not so direct, not so strongly resonated with some kind of joy or sorrow, it has a grace and sweetness that more straightforward writers cannot give us.This is partly due to the fact that in the twilight of evening and the twilight of dawn we can perceive a thousand crisscross veins of emotions which disappear in the full sun of noon. In addition to this elegance and sweetness, we also get another kind of pleasure.The novelist always wants our feelings to change with his characters, and the pleasure comes when our minds are freed from this eternal demand.By cutting off the responses that real life evokes, the novelist frees us to seek pleasure in things themselves, as we do in sickness or travel.It is only when we are no longer immersed in habit that we see the strangeness of things, and we stand outside to observe that which has no power over us.Thus, we see the mind in action.We are intrigued by its ability to devise patterns, and its ability to bring out the connections and inconsistencies between things.And all this is concealed when we act out of habit or are moved by ordinary impulses.It is a pleasure similar to that which mathematics or music give us.Of course, since the novelist uses men and women as his objects, he continually arouses emotions quite different from the depersonalization of numbers, voices; indeed, he seems to ignore and repress the natural emotions of his characters, forcing They fit into a scheme which we call, with vague dissatisfaction, "artificiality," though perhaps we are not so foolish as to express dissatisfaction with technique in art.Either through a feeling of timidity, restraint, or lack of daring of the imagination, Henry James undercuts the interest and importance of his subjects in order to produce a sense of symmetry so dear to him.His readers resented this.We feel him there, like an amiable circus master, manipulating his characters deftly; An imposing writer may let his mind run with full sails, at the perils his subject imposes on him, and perhaps he may thus acquire symmetry and pattern, which are equally lovely in themselves.

This, however, is a measure of the greatness of Henry James: he has given us a world so definite, and a beauty so distinct and strange, that we cannot rest content with it, but experiment further with these extraordinary sensations, To understand more and more, and to be free from the author's ever-present presence and his arrangements and anxieties.To satisfy this desire we turn naturally to the works of Proust, where we at once find a universal sympathy so great it almost triumphs over its own object.How are we going to know anything if we are going to be aware of everything?If, after the world of Dickens and George Eliot, the world of Henry James seems to have no physical frontiers, where everything is penetrated by the light of thought and allowed to have twenty different meanings, in The interpretation and analysis undertaken here go well beyond those boundaries.First, Henry James the Yankee himself, for all his charm and delicacy, was uncomfortable in a foreign cultural milieu, an obstacle that even the essence of his own art had never fully assimilated.Proust's novel, the product of the culture he describes, is so porous and permeable, so pliable and adaptable, so perfectly sensuous that we see it only as an envelope, thin and Elasticity, constantly stretching and expanding, its function is not to strengthen a point of view, but to accommodate a world.His whole universe was bathed in the radiance of reason.The most common objects such as telephones also lose their simplicity and solidity in that world, and become a part of life and appear transparent.The most ordinary acts, such as riding an elevator or eating a pastry, cease to be a mechanical act, but in their course rekindle a train of thoughts, emotions, ideas and memories that apparently lay dormant in the mind. on the bottom wall.

As these trophies pile up all around us, we can't help but ask: What are we to do with it all?The mind must not be content with passively containing one sensation after another; it must do something with them, it must give form to this abundance of sensations.Yet this vital force seems to have been so abundant from the start that even when we needed the most rapid progress, it placed strange objects before us, blocking the way and tripping us.We have to stop, even against our will, to gaze at them. So when his mother called him to his dying grandmother's bedside, the author wrote: "I woke up and said, 'I am not asleep.'" And so, even at this critical moment, he paused. Explain in detail why, when we wake up, we often feel for a split second that we haven't been asleep.This pause is especially notable because it is not a reflection of the character "I" himself, but is impersonally brought up by the narrator, thus leaving a strong sense of tension in the mind from a different perspective. , which is expanded by the urgency of the situation, focusing itself on the dying old woman in the next room.

Much of the difficulty in reading Proust arises from this rich, roundabout way of expression.In Proust's works, the accumulation of things around any central point is so rich, and they are so remote, so inaccessible and incomprehensible, that the process of this accumulation is gradual, difficult, and That final relationship is extremely complex and insoluble.There is much to ponder about them, much more than one might expect.A character is not only related to another character, but also to climate, food, clothing, smells of all kinds, art, religion, science, history, and a thousand other influences.

Once you begin to analyze consciousness, you will find that it is disturbed by thousands of tiny, unrelated thoughts, filled with mixed information.So, when we begin to describe such an ordinary event as "I kissed her," we may have to explain, before we approach the difficult process of describing what a kiss means, how a girl Jump over a man sitting in a chair on the beach.At any critical moment, such as on the deathbed of her grandmother, or when the Duchess steps into the carriage to hear that her old friend Swann is terminally ill, the number of emotions that make up these scenes is much greater and is not unlike a More than any other scene that a novelist has put before us, they are themselves far more incongruous and difficult to relate to each other.

Not only that, but if we ask others to help us find the way, that help does not come through any of the usual channels.The author never tells us, as English novelists so often do, that one way is right and the other is wrong.Every road is open without reservation and without prejudice.Anything that can be felt, can be said.Proust's mind, with the sympathy of a poet and the detachment of a scientist, is open to all that it is capable of feeling.Instructing and emphasizing, telling us that this is true, reminding and enjoining our attention on that, would fall like a shadow over this significant brilliance, and shut a part of it from our view.It is this deep reservoir of feeling that constitutes the general material of this book.It is from these depths of feeling that his characters emerge, forming like waves, and then the waves break and sink again into the flowing ocean of thought, comment, and analysis that gave birth to them.

In retrospect, therefore, Proust's characters seem to be composed of a different substance, though as dominant as any in any other novel.Thoughts, dreams and information are part of them.They grow to full height, and their actions encounter no setbacks.If we seek some kind of guidance to help us put them in their proper place in the universe, we negatively find that there is no such guidance—perhaps compassion is more valuable than intervention, understanding more meaningful than judgment.As a result of the combination of thinker and poet, often after we have made some precise observations with fascination, we encounter a series of images - beautiful, colorful, lifelike - as if the mind has used it in analysis as much as possible. It suddenly rises into the air, and from a certain position on a high place, it uses metaphors to give us a different perception of the same thing.This double vision makes the great characters in Proust's novels, and the whole world out of them, more like a sphere, one side of which is always hidden, rather than a piece directly presented to us. The scenery in front of us, we only need a short glance to have a panoramic view of it.

To make this clearer, it may be best to choose another writer, also a foreigner, who has the same ability to illuminate consciousness from its roots to its surface.We pass directly from Proust's world to Dostoevsky's, and we are astonished by the differences that capture our full attention for a split second.How decidedly confident the Russian was compared with the Frenchman.He creates characters or scenes out of incommunicable and very conspicuous opposites.He uses such extreme words as "love" and "hate" so recklessly that we have to let our imaginations run wild to bridge the gap between them.People feel that here, the cultural net is extremely rough and the meshes are very wide.Men and women, men and women, all sorts of beings can slip through the nets, compared to their imprisonment in Paris.They can swing freely from side to side, gesticulate, hiss, growl, and fall into sudden fits of rage and excitement.With the freedom given to them by their intense emotions, they are not fettered by the constraints of hesitation, scruple, and analysis.At first we are struck by the emptiness and crudeness of this world compared to the other.But when we adjust our gaze a little, we feel that we are clearly still in the same world--it is the human mind that fascinates us, and it is still the anecdotes of the mind that interest us.Other worlds, such as those of Scott and Defoe, are incredible.We are sure of this when we begin to encounter those curious contradictions so rich in Dostoevsky's pen.In his passions there is a simplicity that we do not find in Proust; yet the passions also reveal areas of the soul full of contradictions.Steve Rogan is "a paragon of beauty, yet seems to have at the same time a certain repulsive quality," and the contrast that marks Steve Rogan's physical features is nothing but a sin we meet in the same bosom Bale with the rough outer signs of morality.That simplification is only superficial; the author seems to be die-casting the characters in the process, putting them together, and then throwing them all into violent motion with such vigor and eagerness, when this daring When the relentless, ruthless process is complete, it shows us that beneath the rough surface everything is chaotic and complex.We at first feel ourselves in the midst of a savage society, where the emotions are simpler, more intense, and more deeply moving than any of the emotions we encounter in "In Search of Time Gone" . Since the constraints and barriers of convention are so rare (Steve Rogan, for example, climbed so easily from the bottom of society to the top), the complexity seems to be buried deeper, and the elements that make a man both holy and bestial at the same time Strange contradictions and eccentricities seem to be deeply rooted in the soul, rather than added from the outside.Hence the strange emotional effect of the book.It looks as if it were the work of a fanatic who was ready to sacrifice technique and artistry in order to reveal the confusion and turmoil of the soul.Dostoevsky's novels are full of mysticism; he is narrated not as a writer, but as a saint, wrapped in a blanket, sitting on the roadside talking, with infinite knowledge and patience. "Yes," she answered, "Our Lady is the Great Mother—she is the wet earth, where are the great joys of men. And all human calamities and fears are a joy to us." ;When your tears flow to the ground a foot deep, you will be very happy about everything, and your sorrows will disappear, this is my prophecy." At that time, those words sank to the bottom of my heart, I have made it a habit to kiss the earth when I bow my head in prayer.I kissed the earth and wept. This is a typical paragraph.In a novel, however, the preacher's voice, however lofty, is not enough.We have too many interests to consider and too many problems to face.Consider the scene at which Varvara Petrovna brought the crippled idiot Maria at that most peculiar social gathering, and Steve Logan "out of a martyr's zeal, a penitent desire and moral lust", married her.We can't read to the end without feeling as if a thumb is pressing a button inside us, and we don't have any emotion left to answer the call.It was a day of unexpected surprises, a day of shocking revelations, a day of bizarre coincidences.For several of those present—who had swarmed into the room from all directions—the scene had greater emotional weight.The author goes out of his way to suggest how strong their emotions are.They grew pale; they trembled with terror; they sank into hysterics.So they are, presented to us in a most brilliant flash—the madwoman with the paper rose in her hat; Like smooth, gigantic grains... Somehow people began to imagine that he must have had a peculiarly shaped tongue, which was extremely long, thin, and extremely red, with a very sharp, ever-active little tongue. Tongue tip". However, while they stomped angrily and screamed, what we heard seemed to be happening in the next room.Perhaps in fact the hatred, the wonder, the anger, the fear were all too intense to be felt continuously.This emptiness and noise makes us wonder whether this psychological novel, which has its dramatic design in the mind, should not--as those narrators of fact show us--make its moods varied and varied, Lest we become numb with mental fatigue.Leaving culture aside and plunging into the depths of the soul does not enrich the novel.If we turn to Proust, we get more emotion in a scene, presumably less dramatic than the one in the smoky restaurant just now.In Proust we live along a thread of observation which is always in and out of the mind of this and that character; Being with a prince, now with a restaurateur, and bringing us into contact with different corporeal experiences, such as feeling light after darkness, safety after danger, results in our imagination being stimulated from all sides, It is not driven by shrieks and violent emotions, but slowly, gradually, and completely encloses the observed object.Proust is determined to bring before the reader's eyes every piece of evidence upon which every state of mind is founded; Dostoevsky is so sure that some of what he sees In fact, he hastened to conclusions out of a spontaneity—in itself stimuli. Through this distortion, the psychologist reveals himself.His analytical and discriminating intellect is always almost immediately overwhelmed by the impulse towards feeling, be it sympathy or anger.There is therefore often a certain illogical and contradictory element in the characters, perhaps because they are subjected to tides of emotional force far beyond the ordinary.Why did he act like this?We asked ourselves again and again, and answered ourselves rather skeptically: perhaps he was acting like a madman.In Proust's novels, on the other hand, that approach is equally indirect, but it is approached through people's thoughts and what others think of them, through the author's own knowledge and thoughts, and the result is We understand them very slowly and with difficulty, but we understand them with our whole heart. Despite these differences, however, the books are similar in one respect: both have an air of unhappiness permeating them.This seems an inevitable consequence when the writer has not mastered the mind in any direct way.Dickens is in many ways similar to Dostoyevsky: he was surprisingly prolific and had a huge talent for cartooning.But Micawber, David Copperfield, and Mrs. Garp are placed directly in front of us, as if the author saw them in the same light, and found nothing but immediate amusement and amusement It can be done, and there is no conclusion to draw.The author's mind is but a pane of glass placed between us and his characters, or at best a frame around them.All the author's emotional power permeates his characters.While George Eliot created her characters, the remaining thoughts and feelings remained in her work, clouding and obscuring her pages, while Dickens put him in his characters. All thoughts and feelings are exhausted, and nothing of importance remains. But in the works of Proust and Dostoevsky, in Henry James, and in all writers who trace the workings of emotion and thought, there is always an overflowing It seems that only by turning the rest of that work into a deep reservoir of thought and emotion can such delicate, complex characters be created.Thus, although the author himself does not appear, characters like Stephen Churfimovich and Charles can only exist in a world made of the same material as they, although it has not yet been articulated. .The effect of this contemplative, analytical mind is always to produce an atmosphere of hesitation, doubt, anguish, or despair.At least, this seems to be the result of reading "Reminiscence of the Past" and "Willing Time".