SOURCE: “The Tension of Stalemate,” in Chaos in the Novel/The Novel in Chaos, Schocken Books, 1974, pp. 120–140.

In the following essay, Seltzer examines the inherent lack of integrity and stability in the human personality and the resultant personal and social distance and, ultimately, chaos as chronicled by Woolf in To the Lighthouse.

Many contemporary novelists have surrendered a good deal or all of their artistic control to the belief that a chaotic vision of life can be truly represented only by a chaotic form. To the extent that artifice is falsification, its presence would seem to undermine the confusion that the author is trying to project. But must all aesthetic order dissolve before a philosophical sense of disorder can be communicated? If so, then the novel may be as dead as it has been rumored to be. But if the novel is flexible enough, it may be saved...