Character Condensed

Abstract

In an interview with The Times Ivy Compton-Burnett complained that contemporary novels were not really novels but ‘tracts, or travel books, or autobiographies’, and explained her position as follows: ‘I like fact to be fact and fiction to be fiction’.¹ Although Compton-Burnett indicates here that fact and fiction are opposites that belong to separate spheres of writing, Emily Herrick’s suggestion in Pastors and Masters that tolerance is ‘only condensed intolerance’ and that ‘good is bad condensed’ complicates the relationship of fact to fiction. Perhaps we can extend the notion that concepts are distillations of their opposites to Compton-Burnett’s theory of fiction. If tolerance is condensed intolerance because it ‘holds more intolerance than anything else’, then fiction holds more of fact than anything else, even though facts, or assertions of truth, are continually challenged in Compton-Burnett’s dialogues. If we modify Emily Herrick’s formula to suit Compton-Burnett’s novelistic practice then fiction is not so much condensed fact, but condensed reality, with the qualification that the nature of reality is always open to question.