ABSTRACT
Is fiction still regarded in this odd, divided way because it is really less tractable before the critical suppositions which now seem inevitable to poetry? Let us look at some examples: two well-known novels of the past, both by writers who may be described as 'primitive', although their relative innocence of technique is of a different sort-Defoe's Moll Flanders and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights; and three well-known novels of this century-Tono Bungay, by a writer who claimed to eschew technique; Sons and Lovers, by a novelist who, because his ideal of subject matter ('the poetry of the immediate present') led him at last into the fallacy of spontaneous and unchangeable composition, in effect eschewed technique; and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by a novelist whose practice made claims for the supremacy of technique beyond those made by anyone in the past or by anyone else in this century.
