Book Review: Ortega's The Dehumanization of Art
Many years before “character-driven” novels became fashionable, Ortega had already foreseen the shift from plot to character. And years before John Gardner spoke of the hermetic fictional dream, Ortega had also anticipated it:The author must build around us a wall without chinks or loopholes through which we might catch, from within the novel, a glimpse of the outside world . . . In my judgment, no writer can be called a novelist unless he possesses the gift of forgetting, and thereby making us forget, the reality beyond the walls of his novels.
Today, I say to--serious, those aiming for literature--novelists: In my judgment no writer can be called a novelist unless he or she has absorbed the lessons taught in this humble-yet profoundly philosophical-book.
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