It may well be … that the period of bitterly opposed [literary] factions is already over, that novelists are starting to put sides to middle, borrowing elements of naturalism, modernism, symbolism and even criticism with cheerful insouciance. In his new book of essays [Possibilities], Malcolm Bradbury—himself both novelist and critic—suggests as much. True, he is not an impartial witness; he seems to hold much the same attitude towards the nouveau roman as Professor Weightman, calling it "dehumanised, chosiste" as though he too had failed to read Simon's or Sarraute's novels except through a cloud of Robbe-Grillet's theory. He also concentrates mostly on English and American novels and probably for that reason tends to equate humanity with liberal humanism. Nevertheless, for all he often appears to be no more than another advocate for naturalism (which he calls "realism"), he does make a genuine attempt to occupy the middle ground.
He reminds us, first, in an essay called "The Open Form", of the immensely varied history of the novel … and he argues that at this particular moment in its history "in a good number of our writers there is a desire to resist formal wholeness." If I read the essay right, he is suggesting that the making of new fiction depends not on the continuous invention and development of new means of expression, but on the constant recycling of old means. Stated so baldly, this may sound suspicious: are we merely to read Nathalie Sarraute as if she was Dostoevsky or Rilke instead of as if she was Robbe-Grillet or Butor? But I don't think this is Professor Bradbury's point. He is really calling for a more empirical approach to all writers, whether of the "crystalline" or "journalistic" type, for an approach which would so far as possible release writers from their period and genre and would place less emphasis on the history of literature with its accompanying list of -isms, and more on the actual means deployed by each individual writer to support his fiction. In other words, he considers that novelists have more freedom of form at their disposal than, for instance, poets, and that critics should make some effort to appreciate the fact. (pp. 68-9)
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