Sex and Modern Fiction

Extract

The novel has always told us about the world, not by offering verifiable case-histories, or presenting statistical analyses of behaviour, but by showing us the typical in the individual, the general in the specific. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina might be narrowly and unsympathetically described as an account of adultery among a small restricted segment of upper-class Russian society about a hundred years ago. As crude description this is not incorrect; yet it conveys nothing whatever of the actual quality of the book. Although remote from us in time and setting, Anna Karenina is still a great and moving account of the human condition, is still valid for us here and now. Anna is both a particular woman in a particular society and a representative figure whose tragedy one can immediately apprehend and respond to. By living through her situation one understands one’s own more fully. This extension of human sympathy gives a particular importance to literary experience; in some fine words of C. S. Lewis, ‘it heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality’. It also offends the tidy-minded by emphasizing the essential messiness and complexity of the human condition. It not only shows us, but lets us feel with all our senses, the dilemmas and tensions of a nature that is both fallen and created by God, which is in Pope’s words:

Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole Judge of truth, in endless error hurled;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!