Literature is the kind of writing in which you can neither lie, tell the truth nor make a mistake. Novelists don't lie because, like blatantly exagerated advertisements, they don't expect you to believe them in the first place.Sherlock Holmes never existed, but the tales about him never suggest that he did.
On the other hand, if a novelist hotly insists that something really happened, we would take this as a piece of fiction. You can't tell the truth in fiction, no matter how hard you try.
In one sense, a novel might be truer than real life, which sometimes gets things hopelessly confused or just plain wrong. It was silly of real life to have Byron die of a fever in Greece rather than in the battle for Greek independence, a blunder which no self-respecting novel about him would have committed. A novel about Michael Collins, however, would almost certainly need to have him killed in an ambush, even if in real life he had actually died of drink. Real life was astute to have Princess Diana die in a car accident, thus mixing glamour and tragedy in classical proportions. But it was obtuse of it to allow Florence Nightingale, that most eminently Victorian of figures, to survive into the 20th century, or to permit Robert Maxwell to slip gently in to the sea rather than face public disgrace and a lengthy term of imprisonment. Art handles these things so much more proficiently.
Neither can literary writers make mistakes. If you misspell "Napoleon", readers will assume that this is symbolically significant. If you make Luxor the capital of the Sudan, they will admire your space-bending postmodern strategies. Works of literature come to us with a number of invisible instructions attached to them, one of which is: "Take everything I say as intended".
Peter Gay is a distinguished historian who, in Savage Reprisals, has come up with a spot of literary criticism. He is therefore naturally interested in the contrasts and affinities between history and literary art. He sees, to be sure, that literature is not history; but he does not really recognise how literature is literature. Like most non-literary types who turn their hand to poems and novels, he fails to register what is most distinctive about literary works - their tone, texture, structure, language, formal strategies - and stares straight through these things to plot, theme and character. Since one of Gay's chosen authors is Gustav Flaubert, a writer for whom style was the supreme reality, this suppression of literary form is particularly unfortunate. It is the approach which students of literature bring with them to university, and which it is one's task as a teacher to deprive them of.
Not that Gay's readings of Bleak House, Madame Bovary and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks are imperceptive. Savage Reprisals shimmers with urbane understanding and civilised intelligence, not least in its delicate unpicking of the pact between death and Eros in Thomas Mann (though for this purpose both The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus would have been richer mines to quarry). It is just not the kind of intelligence best equipped for appreciating that novels are more than slices of historical life.
Gay knows this, to be sure; but his study of Madame Bovary risks burying the novel itself in accounts of Flaubert's sex-life and his trial for obscenity. Gay is fascinated by literary realism, but does not fully grasp that such realism is just as much an artificial convention as elegy or Expressionism. To decide whether a work of art was realist or not, we would need to know quite a bit about the society which produced it. A story which had everyone constantly referring to the size of their feet might seem at first glance like some surrealist fable, until we discovered that it sprang from a tribal culture for which foot-size was indeed a vital symbolic marker. It would then shift from surrealism to realism.
IN A persuasive essay on Bleak House, Gay demonstrates just how wildly off-target some of Dickens's reformist zeal actually was. Indeed, he might have noted that some of the novelist's closest friends were just the kind of Utilitarians he lampoons in Hard Times. Dickens, Gay concludes, was nothing like the radical he has been taken to be. This is true in one sense but false in another. Dickens's social views would indeed have been mostly acceptable to Tony Blair, apart of course from his social conscience; but there is a difference between a writer's conscious attitudes and the values implicit in his or her art. The imaginative vision of Bleak House or Little Dorrit cuts far deeper as a critique of Victorian England than their author's mildly enlightened opinions. And this is the kind of dimension to which Gay, as an historian rather than literary critic, is professionally insensitive.
Terry Eagleton's study of tragedy, Sweet Violence, is published this month by Blackwell
Savage Reprisals. By Peter Gay. Norton. 192 pp. £19.95 sterling