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The novel is a genre of fiction, and
fiction may be defined as the art or craft of contriving, through the written
word, representations of human life that instruct or divert or both. The various
forms that fiction may take are best seen less as a number of separate
categories than as a continuum or, more accurately, a cline, with some such
brief form as the anecdote at one end of the scale and the longest conceivable
novel at the other. When any piece of fiction is long enough to constitute a
whole book, as opposed to a mere part of a book, then it may be said to have
achieved novelhood. But this state admits of its own quantitative categories, so
that a relatively brief novel may be termed a novella
(or, if the insubstantiality of the content matches its brevity, a novelette),
and a very long novel may overflow the banks of a single volume and become a roman-fleuveor river novel. Length is very much one of the dimensions of the genre. (see
also literary
genre, short story)
The term novel is a truncation of the
Italian word novella (from the plural
of Latin novellus, a late variant of novus,
meaning "new"), so that what is now, in most languages, a
diminutive denotes historically the parent form. The novella
was a kind of enlarged anecdote like those to be found in the 14th-century
Italian classic Boccaccio's Decameroneach of which exemplifies the etymology well enough. The stories are little
new things, novelties, freshly minted diversions, toys; they are not reworkings
of known fables or myths, and they are lacking in weight and moral earnestness.
It is to be noted that, despite the high example of novelists of the most
profound seriousness, such as Tolstoy, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, the term
novel still, in some quarters, carries overtones of lightness and frivolity. And
it is possible to descry a tendency to triviality in the form itself. The ode or
symphony seems to possess an inner mechanism that protects it from aesthetic or
moral corruption, but the novel can descend to shameful commercial depths of
sentimentality or pornography. It is the purpose of this section to consider the
novel not solely in terms of great art but also as an all-purpose medium
catering for all the strata of literacy.
Such early ancient Roman fiction as Petronius'
Satyriconof the 1st century AD and Lucius
Apuleius' Golden Ass of the 2nd
century contain many of the popular elements that distinguish the novel from its
nobler born relative the epic
poem. In the fictional works, the medium is prose, the events described are
unheroic, the settings are streets and taverns, not battlefields and palaces.
There is more low fornication than princely combat; the gods do not move the
action; the dialogue is homely rather than aristocratic. It was, in fact, out of
the need to find--in the period of Roman decline--a literary form that was
anti-epic in both substance and language that the first prose fiction of Europe
seems to have been conceived. The most memorable character in Petronius is a nouveau
riche vulgarian; the hero
of Lucius Apuleius is turned into a donkey; nothing less epic can well be
imagined. (see also Latin
literature, "Golden Ass,
The," , anti-hero)
The medieval chivalric romance
(from a popular Latin word, probably Romanice,
meaning written in the vernacular, not in traditional Latin) restored a kind
of epic view of man--though now as heroic Christian, not heroic pagan. At the
same time, it bequeathed its name to the later genre of continental literature,
the novel, which is known in French as roman,
in Italian as romanzo, etc. (The
English term romance, however, carries a pejorative connotation.) But that later
genre achieved its first great flowering in Spain at the beginning of the 17th
century in an antichivalric comic masterpiece -- the Don Quixote of Cervantes, which, on a larger scale than the Satyricon
or The Golden Ass, contains many of the elements that have been
expected from prose fiction ever since. Novels have heroes, but not in any
classical or medieval sense. As for the novelist, he must, in the words of the
contemporary British-American W.H.
Auden, (see also "Don
Quixote," )
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the
Just
Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of
Man.
The novel attempts to assume those
burdens of life that have no place in the epic poem and to see man as unheroic,
unredeemed, imperfect, even absurd. This is why there is room among its
practitioners for writers of hardboiled detective thrillers such as the
contemporary American Mickey Spillane or of sentimental melodramas such as the
prolific 19th-century English novelist Mrs. Henry Wood, but not for one of the
unremitting elevation of outlook of a John Milton.
The reader may also be interested in the
analogous treatment of a comparable genre in the section Short
story which follows. Critical
approaches are discussed in the section Literary criticism
below.
The novel is propelled through its
hundred or thousand pages by a device known as the story or plot. This is
frequently conceived by the novelist in very simple terms, a mere nucleus, a
jotting on an old envelope: for example, Charles Dickens' Christmas
Carol(1843) might
have been conceived as "a misanthrope is reformed through certain magical
visitations on Christmas Eve," or Jane Austen's Pride
and Prejudice (1813) as "a young couple destined to be married have
first to overcome the barriers of pride and prejudice," or Fyodor
Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866)
as "a young man commits a crime and is slowly pursued in the direction of
his punishment." The detailed working out of the nuclear idea requires much
ingenuity, since the plot of one novel is expected to be somewhat different from
that of another, and there are very few basic human situations for the novelist
to draw upon. The dramatist may take his plot ready-made from fiction or
biography--a form of theft sanctioned by Shakespeare--but the novelist has to
produce what look like novelties. (see also
English literature)
The example of Shakespeare is a reminder
that the ability to create an interesting plot, or even any plot at all, is not
a prerequisite of the imaginative writer's craft. At the lowest level of
fiction, plot need be no more than a string of stock devices for arousing stock
responses of concern and excitement in the reader. The reader's interest may be
captured at the outset by the promise of conflicts or mysteries or frustrations
that will eventually be resolved, and he will gladly--so strong is his desire to
be moved or entertained--suspend criticism of even the most trite modes of
resolution. In the least sophisticated fiction, the knots to be untied are
stringently physical, and the denouement often comes in a sort of triumphant
violence. Serious fiction prefers its plots to be based on psychological
situations, and its climaxes come in new states of awareness--chiefly
self-knowledge--on the parts of the major characters.
Melodramatic plots, plots dependent on
coincidence or improbability, are sometimes found in even the most elevated
fiction; E.M. Forster's Howards End (1910)
is an example of a classic British novel with such a plot. But the novelist is
always faced with the problem of whether it is more important to represent the
formlessness of real life (in which there are no beginnings and no ends and very
few simple motives for action) or to construct an artifact as well balanced and
economical as a table or chair; since he is an artist, the claims of art, or
artifice, frequently prevail.
There are, however, ways of constructing
novels in which plot may play a desultory part or no part at all. The
traditional picaresque novel--a
novel with a rogue as its central character--like Alain Lesage's Gil
Blas (1715) or Henry Fielding's Tom
Jones (1749), depends for movement on a succession of chance incidents. In
the works of Virginia Woolf,
the consciousness of the characters, bounded by some poetic or symbolic device,
sometimes provides all the fictional material. Marcel
Proust's great roman-fleuve, À
la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27; Remembrance
of Things Past), has a metaphysical framework derived from the time theories
of the philosopher Henri Bergson,
and it moves toward a moment of truth that is intended to be literally a
revelation of the nature of reality. Strictly, any scheme will do to hold a
novel together--raw action, the hidden syllogism of the mystery story, prolonged
solipsist contemplation--so long as the actualities or potentialities of human
life are credibly expressed, with a consequent sense of illumination, or some
lesser mode of artistic satisfaction, on the part of the reader.
The inferior novelist tends to be
preoccupied with plot; to the superior novelist the convolutions of the human
personality, under the stress of artfully selected experience, are the chief
fascination. Without character it was once accepted that there could be no
fiction. In the period since World War II, the creators of what has come to be
called the French nouveau roman (i.e.,
new novel) have deliberately demoted the human element, claiming the right
of objects and processes to the writer's and reader's prior attention. Thus, in
books termed chosiste(literally "thing-ist"), they make the furniture of a room more
important than its human incumbents. This may be seen as a transitory protest
against the long predominance of character in the novel, but, even on the
popular level, there have been indications that readers can be held by things as
much as by characters. Henry James could be vague in The
Ambassadors(1903) about the provenance of his chief character's wealth; if he
wrote today he would have to give his readers a tour around the factory or
estate. The popularity of much undistinguished but popular fiction has nothing
to do with its wooden characters; it is machines, procedures, organizations that
draw the reader. The success of Ian Fleming's British spy stories in the 1960s
had much to do with their hero, James Bond's car, gun, and preferred way of
mixing a martini.
But the true novelists remain creators
of characters--prehuman, such as those in William Golding's Inheritors (1955); animal, as in Henry Williamson's Tarka
the Otter (1927) or Jack London's Call
of the Wild (1903); caricatures, as in much of Dickens; or complex and
unpredictable entities, as in Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Henry James. The reader
may be prepared to tolerate the most wanton-seeming stylistic tricks and formal
difficulties because of the intense interest of the central characters in novels
as diverse as James Joyce's Ulysses (1922)
and Finnegans Wake (1939) and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-67).
It is the task of literary critics to
create a value hierarchy of fictional character, placing the complexity of the
Shakespearean view of man--as found in the novels of Tolstoy and Joseph
Conrad--above creations that may be no more than simple personifications of some
single characteristic, like some of those by Dickens. It frequently happens,
however, that the common reader prefers surface simplicity--easily memorable
cartoon figures like Dickens' never-despairing Mr. Micawber and devious Uriah
Heep--to that wider view of personality, in which character seems to engulf the
reader, subscribed to by the great novelists of France and Russia. The whole
nature of human identity remains in doubt, and writers who voice that
doubt--like the French exponents of the nouveau roman Alain
Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie
Sarraute, as well as many others--are in effect rejecting a purely
romantic view of character. This view imposed the author's image of himself--the
only human image he properly possessed--on the rest of the human world. For the
unsophisticated reader of fiction, any created personage with a firm position in
time-space and the most superficial parcel of behavioral (or even sartorial)
attributes will be taken for a character. Though the critics may regard it as
heretical, this tendency to accept a character is in conformity with the usages
of real life. The average person has at least a suspicion of his own complexity
and inconsistency of makeup, but he sees the rest of the world as composed of
much simpler entities. The result is that novels whose characters are created
out of the author's own introspection are frequently rejected as not "true
to life." But both the higher and the lower orders of novel readers might
agree in condemning a lack of memorability in the personages of a work of
fiction, a failure on the part of the author to seem to add to the reader's
stock of remembered friends and acquaintances. Characters that seem, on
recollection, to have a life outside the bounds of the books that contain them
are usually the ones that earn their creators the most regard. Depth of
psychological penetration, the ability to make a character real as oneself,
seems to be no primary criterion of fictional talent.
The makeup and behaviour of fictional
characters depend on their environment quite as much as on the personal dynamic
with which their author endows them: indeed, in Émile
Zola, environment is of overriding importance, since he believed it
determined character. The entire action of a novel is frequently determined by
the locale in which it is set. Thus, Gustave
Flaubert's Madame
Bovary(1857) could
hardly have been placed in Paris, because the tragic life and death of the
heroine have a great deal to do with the circumscriptions of her provincial
milieu. But it sometimes happens that the main locale of a novel assumes an
importance in the reader's imagination
comparable to that of the characters and yet somehow separable from them. Wessex
is a giant brooding presence in Thomas
Hardy's novels, whose human characters would probably not behave much
differently if they were set in some other rural locality of England. The
popularity of Sir Walter Scott's "Waverley" novels is due in part to
their evocation of a romantic Scotland. Setting may be the prime consideration
of some readers, who can be drawn to Conrad because he depicts life at sea or in
the East Indies; they may be less interested in the complexity of human
relationships that he presents.
The regional novel is a recognized
species. The sequence of four novels that Hugh
Walpole began with Rogue Herries (1930)
was the result of his desire to do homage to the part of Cumberland, in England,
where he had elected to live. The great Yoknapatawpha
cycle of William Faulkner,
a classic of 20th-century American literature set in an imaginary county in
Mississippi, belongs to the category as much as the once-popular confections
about Sussex that were written about the same time by the English novelist
Sheila Kaye-Smith. Many novelists, however, gain a creative impetus from
avoiding the same setting in book after book and deliberately seeking new
locales. The English novelist Graham
Greene apparently needed to visit a fresh scene in order to write a fresh
novel. His ability to encapsulate the essence of an exotic setting in a single
book is exemplified in The Heart of the Matter(1948); his contemporary Evelyn
Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book replaced the true
remembered West Africa of his own experience. Such power is not uncommon: the
Yorkshire moors have been romanticized because Emily Brontë wrote of them
in Wuthering
Heights(1847), and
literary tourists have visited Stoke-on-Trent, in northern England, because it
comprises the "Five Towns" of Arnold Bennett's novels of the early
20th century. Others go to the Monterey, California, of John Steinbeck's novels
in the expectation of experiencing a frisson
added to the locality by an act of creative imagination. James Joyce, who
remained inexhaustibly stimulated by Dublin, has exalted that city in a manner
that even the guidebooks recognize.
The setting of a novel is not always
drawn from a real-life locale. The literary artist sometimes prides himself on
his ability to create the totality of his fiction--the setting as well as the
characters and their actions. In the Russian expatriate Vladimir
Nabokov's Ada(1969) there is an entirely new space-time continuum, and the English
scholar J.R.R. Tolkien in his Lord
of the Rings(1954-55)
created an "alternative world" that appeals greatly to many who are
dissatisfied with the existing one. The world of interplanetary travel was
imaginatively created long before the first moon landing. The properties of the
future envisaged by H.G. Wells's novels or by Aldous
Huxley in Brave New World (1932)
are still recognized in an age that those authors did not live to see. The
composition of place can be a magical fictional gift. (see also fantasy fiction)
Whatever the locale of his work, every
true novelist is concerned with making a credible environment for his
characters, and this really means a close attention to sense data--the
immediacies of food and drink and colour--far more than abstractions like
"nature" and "city." The London of Charles Dickens is as
much incarnated in the smell of wood in lawyers' chambers as in the skyline and
vistas of streets.
Where there is a story, there is a
storyteller. Traditionally, the narrator of the epic and mock-epic alike acted
as an intermediary between the characters and the reader; the method of Fielding
is not very different from the method of Homer. Sometimes the narrator boldly
imposed his own attitudes; always he assumed an omniscience that tended to
reduce the characters to puppets and the action to a predetermined course with
an end implicit in the beginning. Many novelists have been unhappy about a
narrative method that seems to limit the free will of the characters, and
innovations in fictional technique have mostly sought the objectivity of the
drama, in which the characters appear to work out their own destinies without
prompting from the author.
The epistolary method, most notably used
by Samuel Richardson in Pamela(1740) and by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau in La nouvelle Héloïse
(1761), has the advantage of allowing the characters to tell the story in
their own words, but it is hard to resist the uneasy feeling that a kind of
divine editor is sorting and ordering the letters into his own pattern. The
device of making the narrator also a character in the story has the disadvantage
of limiting the material available for the narration, since the
narrator-character can know only those events in which he participates. There
can, of course, be a number of secondary narratives enclosed in the main
narrative, and this device--though it sometimes looks artificial--has been used
triumphantly by Conrad and, on a lesser scale, by W.
Somerset Maugham. A, the main narrator, tells what he knows directly of
the story and introduces what B and C and D have told him about the parts that
he does not know. (see also epistolary
novel, "Julie: or, The
New Eloise," )
Seeking the most objective narrative
method of all, Ford Madox Ford
used, in The
Good Soldier(1915), the device of the storyteller who does not understand the
story he is telling. This is the technique of the "unreliable
observer." The reader, understanding better than the narrator, has the
illusion of receiving the story directly. Joyce,
in both his major novels, uses different narrators for the various chapters.
Most of them are unreliable, and some of them approach the impersonality of a
sort of disembodied parody. In Ulyssesfor example, an episode set in a maternity hospital is told through the
medium of a parodic history of English prose style. But, more often than not,
the sheer ingenuity of Joyce's techniques draws attention to the manipulator in
the shadows. The reader is aware of the author's cleverness where he should be
aware only of the characters and their actions. The author is least noticeable
when he is employing the stream of
consciousness device, by which the inchoate thoughts and feelings of a
character are presented in interior monologue--apparently unedited and sometimes
deliberately near-unintelligible. It is because this technique seems to draw
fiction into the psychoanalyst's consulting room (presenting the raw material of
either art or science, but certainly not art itself), however, that Joyce felt
impelled to impose the shaping devices referred to above. Joyce, more than any
novelist, sought total objectivity of narration technique but ended as the most
subjective and idiosyncratic of stylists.
The problem of a satisfactory narrative
point of view is, in fact, nearly insoluble. The careful exclusion of comment,
the limitation of vocabulary to a sort of reader's lowest common denominator,
the paring of style to the absolute minimum--these puritanical devices work well
for an Ernest Hemingway (who, like Joyce, remains, nevertheless, a highly
idiosyncratic stylist) but not for a novelist who believes that, like poetry,
his art should be able to draw on the richness of word play, allusion, and
symbol. For even the most experienced novelist, each new work represents a
struggle with the unconquerable task of reconciling all-inclusion with
self-exclusion. It is noteworthy that Cervantes, in Don Quixote, and Nabokov, in Lolita
(1955), join hands across four centuries in finding most satisfactory the
device of the fictitious editor who presents a manuscript story for which he
disclaims responsibility. But this highly useful method presupposes in the true
author a scholarly, or pedantic, faculty not usually associated with novelists.
No novel can theoretically be too long,
but if it is too short it ceases to be a novel. It may or may not be accidental
that the novels most highly regarded by the world are of considerable
length--Cervantes' Don Quixote, Dostoyevsky's
Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy's War
and Peace, Dickens' David Copperfield,
Proust's À la recherche du
temps perdu, and so on. On the other hand, since World War II, brevity has
been regarded as a virtue in works like the later novels of the Irish absurdist
author Samuel Beckett and the ficciones
of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, and it is only an aesthetic based on
bulk that would diminish the achievement of Ronald Firbank's short novels of the
post-World War I era or the Evelyn Waugh who wrote The
Loved One (1948). It would seem that there are two ways of presenting human
character--one, the brief way, through a significant episode in the life of a
personage or group of personages; the other, which admits of limitless length,
through the presentation of a large section of a life or lives, sometimes
beginning with birth and ending in old age. The plays of Shakespeare show that a
full delineation of character can be effected in a very brief compass, so that,
for this aspect of the novel, length confers no special advantage. Length,
however, is essential when the novelist attempts to present something bigger
than character--when, in fact, he aims at the representation of a whole society
or period of history.
No other cognate art form--neither the
epic poem nor the drama nor the film--can match the resources of the novel when
the artistic task is to bring to immediate, sensuous, passionate life the
somewhat impersonal materials of the historian. War
and Peaceis the
great triumphant example of the panoramic study of a whole society--that of
early 19th-century Russia--which enlightens as the historian enlightens and yet
also conveys directly the sensations and emotions of living through a period of
cataclysmic change. In the 20th century, another Russian, Boris Pasternak, in
his Doctor Zhivago (1957), expressed--though on a less than Tolstoyan
scale--the personal immediacies of life during the Russian Revolution. Though of
much less literary distinction than either of these two books, Margaret
Mitchell's Gone
with the Wind(1936)
showed how the American Civil War could assume the distanced pathos, horror, and
grandeur of any of the classic struggles of the Old World.
Needless to say, length and weighty
subject matter are no guarantee in themselves of fictional greatness. Among
American writers, for example, James
Jones's celebration of the U.S. Army on the eve of World War II in From
Here to Eternity(1951), though a very ambitious project, repels through indifferent
writing and sentimental characterization; Norman Mailer's Naked
and the Dead(1948),
an equally ambitious military novel, succeeds much more because of a tautness, a
concern with compression, and an astringent objectivity that Jones was unable to
match. Frequently the size of a novel is too great for its subject matter--as
with Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My
Darling (1965), reputedly the longest single-volume novel of the 20th
century, John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (1966),
and John Fowles's Magus (1965).
Diffuseness is the great danger in the long novel, and diffuseness can mean
slack writing, emotional self-indulgence, sentimentality.
Even the long picaresque novel--which,
in the hands of a Fielding or his contemporary Tobias Smollett, can rarely be
accused of sentimentality--easily betrays itself into such acts of
self-indulgence as the multiplication of incident for its own sake, the coy
digression, the easygoing jogtrot pace that subdues the sense of urgency that
should lie in all fiction. If Tolstoy's War
and Peace is a greater novel than Fielding's Tom Jones or Dickens' David
Copperfield, it is not because its theme is nobler, or more pathetic, or
more significant historically; it is because Tolstoy brings to his panoramic
drama the compression and urgency usually regarded as the monopolies of briefer
fiction.
Sometimes the scope of a fictional
concept demands a technical approach analogous to that of the symphony in
music--the creation of a work in separate books, like symphonic movements, each
of which is intelligible alone but whose greater intelligibility depends on the
theme and characters that unify them. The French author Romain
Rolland's Jean-Christophe(1904-12) sequence is, very appropriately since the hero is a musical
composer, a work in four movements. Among works of English literature, Lawrence
Durrell's Alexandria
Quartet(1957-60)
insists in its very title that it is a tetralogy rather than a single large
entity divided into four volumes; the concept is "relativist" and
attempts to look at the same events and characters from four different
viewpoints. Anthony Powell's Dance
to the Music of Time, a
multivolume series of novels that began in 1951 (collected 1962), may be seen as
a study of a segment of British society in which the chronological approach is
eschewed, and events are brought together in one volume or another because of a
kind of parachronic homogeneity. C.P.
Snow's Strangers and Brothers, a
comparable series that began in 1940 and continued to appear throughout the '50s
and into the '60s, shows how a fictional concept can be realized only in the act
of writing, since the publication of the earlier volumes antedates the
historical events portrayed in later ones. In other words, the author could not
know what the subject matter of the sequence would be until he was in sight of
its end. Behind all these works lies the giant example of Proust's roman-fleuve,
whose length and scope were properly coterminous with the author's own life
and emergent understanding of its pattern.
4.6.1.6
Myth,
symbolism, significance.
The novelist's conscious day-to-day
preoccupation is the setting down of incident, the delineation of personality,
the regulation of exposition, climax, and denouement. The aesthetic value of the
work is frequently determined by subliminal forces that seem to operate
independently of the writer, investing the properties of the surface story with
a deeper significance. A novel will then come close to myth, its characters
turning into symbols of permanent human states or impulses, particular
incarnations of general truths perhaps only realized for the first time in the
act of reading. The ability to perform a quixotic act anteceded Don
Quixote, just as bovarysme existed
before Flaubert found a name for it. (see also
symbolism)
But the desire to give a work of fiction
a significance beyond that of the mere story is frequently conscious and
deliberate, indeed sometimes the primary aim. When a novel--like Joyce's Ulysses
or John Updike's Centaur (1963) or
Anthony Burgess' Vision of Battlements (1965)--is
based on an existing classical myth, there is an intention of either ennobling a
lowly subject matter, satirizing a debased set of values by referring them to a
heroic age, or merely providing a basic structure to hold down a complex and, as
it were, centrifugal picture of real life. Of UlyssesJoyce said that his Homeric parallel (which is worked out in great and
subtle detail) was a bridge across which to march his 18 episodes; after the
march the bridge could be "blown skyhigh." But there is no doubt that,
through the classical parallel, the account of an ordinary summer day in Dublin
is given a richness, irony, and universality unattainable by any other means.
The mythic or symbolic intention of a
novel may manifest itself less in structure than in details which, though they
appear naturalistic, are really something more. The shattering of the eponymous
golden bowl in Henry James's 1904 novel makes palpable, and hence truly
symbolic, the collapse of a relationship. Even the choice of a character's name
may be symbolic. Sammy Mountjoy, in William
Golding's Free Fall (1959), has fallen
from the grace of heaven, the mount of joy, by an act of volition that the title
makes clear. The eponym of Doctor Zhivago is so called
because his name, meaning "The Living," carries powerful religious
overtones. In the Russian version of the Gospel According to St. Luke, the
angels ask the women who come to Christ's tomb: "Chto vy ischyote zhivago mezhdu myortvykh?"--"Why do
you seek the living among the dead?" And his first name, Yuri, the Russian
equivalent of George, has dragon-slaying connotations.
The symbol, the special significance at
a subnarrative level, works best when it can fit without obtrusion into a
context of naturalism. The optician's trade sign of a huge pair of spectacles in
F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great
Gatsby (1925) is acceptable as a piece of scenic detail, but
an extra dimension is added to the tragedy of Gatsby, which is the tragedy of a
whole epoch in American life, when it is taken also as a symbol of divine
myopia. Similarly, a cinema poster in Malcolm Lowry's Under
the Volcano (1947), advertising a horror film, can be read as
naturalistic background, but it is evident that the author expects the
illustrated fiend--a concert pianist whose grafted hands are those of a
murderer--to be seen also as a symbol of Nazi infamy; the novel is set at the
beginning of World War II, and the last desperate day of the hero, Geoffrey
Firmin, stands also for the collapse of Western civilization.
There are symbolic novels whose
infranarrative meaning cannot easily be stated, since it appears to subsist on
an unconscious level. Herman Melville's Moby
Dick (1851) is such a work, as is D.H. Lawrence's novella St.
Mawr (1925), in which the significance of the horse is powerful and
mysterious.
Novels are not expected to be didactic,
like tracts or morality plays; nevertheless, in varying degrees of implicitness,
even the "purest" works of fictional art convey a philosophy of life.
The novels of Jane Austen, designed primarily as superior
entertainment, imply a desirable ordered existence, in which the comfortable
decorum of an English rural family is disturbed only by a not-too-serious
shortage of money, by love affairs that go temporarily wrong, and by the
intrusion of self-centred stupidity. The good, if unrewarded for their goodness,
suffer from no permanent injustice. Life is seen, not only in Jane Austen's
novels but in the whole current of bourgeois Anglo-American fiction, as
fundamentally reasonable and decent. When wrong is committed, it is usually
punished, thus fulfilling Miss Prism's summation in Oscar Wilde's play The
Importance of Being Earnest (1895), to the effect that in a
novel the good characters end up happily and the bad characters unhappily:
"that is why it is called fiction."
That kind of fiction called realistic,
which has its origins in 19th-century France, chose the other side of the coin,
showing that there was no justice in life and that the evil and the stupid must
prevail. In the novels of Thomas Hardy there is a pessimism that may be taken as
a corrective of bourgeois Panglossianism--the philosophy that everything happens
for the best, satirized in Voltaire's Candide (1759)--since the universe is presented as almost impossibly
malevolent. This tradition is regarded as morbid, and it has been deliberately
ignored by most popular novelists. The "Catholic" novelists--such as
François Mauriac in France, Graham Greene in England, and others--see
life as mysterious, full of wrong and evil and injustice inexplicable by human
canons but necessarily acceptable in terms of the plans of an inscrutable God.
Between the period of realistic pessimism, which had much to do with the
agnosticism and determinism of 19th-century science, and the introduction of
theological evil into the novel, writers such as H.G. Wells attempted to create
a fiction based on optimistic liberalism. As a reaction, there was the depiction
of "natural man" in the novels of D.H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway.
For the most part, the view of life
common to American and European fiction since World War II posits the existence
of evil--whether theological or of that brand discovered by the French
Existentialists, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre--and assumes that man is
imperfect and life possibly absurd. The fiction of the former Communist Europe
was based on a very different assumption, one that seems naïve and
old-fashioned in its collective optimism to readers in the disillusioned
democracies. It is to be noted that in the erstwhile Soviet Union aesthetic
evaluation of fiction was replaced by ideological judgment. Accordingly, the
works of the popular British writer A.J. Cronin, since they seem to depict
personal tragedy as an emanation of capitalistic infamy, were rated higher than
those of Conrad, James, and their peers.
In a period that takes for granted that
the written word should be "committed"--to the exposure of social
wrong or the propagation of progressive ideologies--novelists who seek merely to
take the reader out of his dull or oppressive daily life are not highly
regarded, except by that reading public that has never expected a book to be
anything more than a diversion. Nevertheless, the provision of laughter and
dreams has been for many centuries a legitimate literary occupation. It can be
condemned by serious devotees of literature only if it falsifies life through
oversimplification and tends to corrupt its readers into belief that reality is
as the author presents it. The novelettes once beloved of mill girls and
domestic servants, in which the beggar maid was elevated to queendom by a king
of high finance, were a mere narcotic, a sort of enervating opium of the
oppressed; the encouragement of such subliterature might well be one of the
devices of social oppression. Adventure stories and spy novels may have a
healthy enough astringency, and the very preposterousness of some adventures can
be a safeguard against any impressionable young reader's neglecting the claims
of real life to dream of becoming a secret agent. The subject matter of some
humorous novels--such as the effete British aristocracy created by P.G.
Wodehouse, which is no longer in existence if it ever was--can never be
identified with a real human society; the dream is accepted as a dream. The same
may be said of Evelyn Waugh's early novels--such as Decline
and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies
(1930)--but these are raised above mere entertainment by touching, almost
incidentally, on real human issues (the relation of the innocent to a
circumambient malevolence is a persistent theme in all Waugh's writing).
Any reader of fiction has a right to an
occasional escape from the dullness or misery of his existence, but he has the
critical duty of finding the best modes of escape--in the most efficiently
engineered detective or adventure stories, in humour that is more than
sentimental buffoonery, in dreams of love that are not mere pornography. The
fiction of entertainment and escape frequently sets itself higher literary
standards than novels with a profound social or philosophical purpose. Books
like John Buchan's Thirty-nine Steps
(1915), Graham Greene's Travels with My
Aunt (1969), Dashiell Hammett's Maltese
Falcon (1930), and Raymond Chandler's Big
Sleep (1939) are distinguished pieces of writing that, while diverting and
enthralling, keep a hold on the realities of human character. Ultimately, all
good fiction is entertainment, and, if it instructs or enlightens, it does so
best through enchanting the reader.
The desire to make the reader initiate
certain acts--social, religious, or political--is the essence of all propaganda,
and, though it does not always accord well with art, the propagandist purpose
has often found its way into novels whose prime value is an aesthetic one. The Nicholas
Nickleby (1839) of Charles
Dickens attacked the abuses of schools to some purpose, as his Oliver Twist (1838) drew attention to the horrors of poorhouses and
his Bleak
House (1853) to the abuses of the law of chancery. The
weakness of propaganda in fiction is that it loses its value when the wrongs it
exposes are righted, so that the more successful a propagandist novel is, the
briefer the life it can be expected to enjoy. The genius of Dickens lay in his
ability to transcend merely topical issues through the vitality with which he
presented them, so that his contemporary disclosures take on a timeless human
validity--chiefly through the power of their drama, character, and rhetoric.
The pure propagandist novel--which
Dickens was incapable of writing--quickly becomes dated. The "social"
novels of H.G. Wells, which
propounded a rational mode of life and even blueprinted utopias, were very
quickly exploded by the conviction of man's irredeemable irrationality that
World War I initiated and World War II corroborated, a conviction the author
himself came to share toward the end of his life. But the early scientific
romances of Wells remain vital and are seen to have been prophetic. Most of the
fiction of the former Soviet Union, which either glorified the regime or
refrained from criticizing it, was dull and unreal, and the same can be said of
Communist fiction elsewhere. Propaganda too frequently ignores man as a
totality, concentrating on him aspectively--in terms of politics or sectarian
religion. When a didactic attack on a system, as in Harriet Beecher Stowe's
attack on slavery in the United States in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), seems to go beyond mere propaganda, it is
because the writer makes the reader aware of wrongs and injustices that are
woven into the permanent human fabric. The reader's response may be a
modification of his own sensibility, not an immediate desire for action, and
this is one of the legitimate effects of serious fiction. The propagandist
Dickens calls for the immediate righting of wrongs, but the novelist Dickens
says, mainly through implication, that all men--not just schoolmasters and state
hirelings--should become more humane. If it is possible to speak of art as
possessing a teaching purpose, this is perhaps its only lesson.
The division in the novelist's mind is
between his view of his art as a contrivance, like a Fabergé watch, and
his view of it as a record of real life. The versatile English writer Daniel
Defoe, on the evidence of such novels as his Journal
of the Plague Year (1722), a recreation of the London plague of 1665,
believed that art or contrivance had the lesser claim and proceeded to present
his account of events of which he had had no direct experience in the form of
plain journalistic reportage. This book, like his Robinson
Crusoe (1719) and Moll
Flanders (1722), is more contrived and cunning than it appears, and the
hurried, unshaped narrative is the product of careful preparation and selective
ordering. His example, which could have been a very fruitful one, was not much
followed until the 20th century, when the events of the real world became more
terrifying and marvellous than anything the novelist could invent and seemed to
ask for that full imaginative treatment that only the novelist's craft can give.
In contemporary American literature, John
Hersey's Hiroshima
(1946), though it recorded the actual results of the nuclear attack on the
Japanese city in 1945, did so in terms of human immediacies, not scientific or
demographic abstractions, and this approach is essentially novelistic. Truman
Capote's In
Cold Blood (1966) took the facts of a multiple murder in the
Midwest of the United States and presented them with the force, reality, tone,
and (occasionally) overintense writing that distinguish his genuine fiction.
Norman Mailer, in The
Armies of the Night (1968), recorded, in great personal detail
but in a third-person narration, his part in a citizens' protest march on
Washington, D.C. It would seem that Mailer's talent lies in his ability to merge
the art of fiction and the craft of reportage, and his Of
a Fire on the Moon (1970), which deals with the American lunar project,
reads like an episode in an emergent roman-fleuve
of which Mailer is the central character.
The presentation of factual material as
art is the purpose of such thinly disguised biographies as Somerset Maugham's Moon
and Sixpence (1919), undisguised biographies fleshed out with supposition
and imagination like Helen Waddell's Peter
Abelard (1933), and many autobiographies served up--out of fear of libel or
of dullness--as novels. Conversely, invented material may take on the lineaments
of journalistic actuality through the employment of a Defoe technique of flat
understatement. This is the way of such science fiction as Michael Crichton's Andromeda
Strain (1969), which uses sketch maps, computer projections, and simulated
typewritten reports.
Novelists, being neither poets nor
philosophers, rarely originate modes of thinking and expression. Poets such as
Chaucer and Shakespeare have had much to do with the making of the English
language, and Byron was responsible for the articulation of the new romantic
sensibility in it in the early 19th century. Books like the Bible, Karl Marx's Das
Kapital, and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf
may underlie permanent or transient cultures, but it is hard to find, except in
the early Romantic period, a novelist capable of arousing new attitudes to life
(as opposed to aspects of the social order) and forging the vocabulary of such
attitudes.
With the 18th-century precursors of
Romanticism--notably Richardson, Sterne, and Rousseau--the notion of sentiment
entered the European consciousness. Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse fired a new attitude toward love--more
highly emotional than ever before--as his Émile
(1762) changed educated views on how to bring up children. The romantic wave in
Germany, with Goethe's Sorrows of Young
Werther (1774) and the works of Jean-Paul Richter a generation later,
similarly aroused modes of feeling that rejected the rational constraints of the
18th century. Nor can the influence of Sir Walter Scott's novels be neglected,
both on Europe and on the American South (where Mark Twain thought it had had a
deplorable effect). With Scott came new forms of regional sentiment, based on a
romantic reading of history. (see also "Emile:
or, On Education," )
It is rarely, however, that a novelist
makes a profound mark on a national language, as opposed to a regional dialect
(to which, by using it for a literary end, he may impart a fresh dignity). It is
conceivable that Alessandro Manzoni's I
promessi sposi (1825-27; The Betrothed), often called
the greatest modern Italian novel, gave 19th-century Italian intellectuals some
notion of a viable modern prose style in an Italian that might be termed
"national," but even this is a large claim. Günter Grass, in
post-Hitler Germany, sought to revivify a language that had been corrupted by
the Nazis; he threw whole dictionaries at his readers in the hope that new
freedom, fantasy, and exactness in the use of words might influence the
publicists, politicians, and teachers in the direction of a new liberalism of
thought and expression.
It is difficult to say whether the
French Existentialists, such as Sartre and Albert Camus, have influenced their
age primarily through their fiction or their philosophical writings. Certainly,
Sartre's early novel Nausea (1938)
established unforgettable images of the key terms of his philosophy, which has
haunted a whole generation, as Camus's novel The
Stranger (1942) created for all time the lineaments of "Existential
man." In the same way, the English writer George Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-four (1949) incarnated brilliantly the nature of the political
choices that are open to 20th-century humanity, and, with terms like "Big
Brother" (i.e., the leader of an authoritarian state) and
"doublethink" (belief in contradictory ideas simultaneously), modified
the political vocabulary. But no novelist's influence can compare to that of the
poet's, who can give a language a soul and define, as Shakespeare and Dante did,
the scope of a culture.
The novelist, like the poet, can make
the inchoate thoughts and feelings of a society come to articulation through the
exact and imaginative use of language and symbol. In this sense, his work seems
to precede the diffusion of new ideas and attitudes and to be the agent of
change. But it is hard to draw a line between this function and that of
expressing an existing climate of sensibility. Usually the nature of a
historical period--that spirit known in German as the Zeitgeist--can be understood only in long retrospect, and it is then
that the novelist can provide its best summation. The sickness of the Germany
that produced Hitler had to wait some time for fictional diagnosis in such works
as Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947)
and, later, Günter Grass's Tin Drum (1959). Evelyn Waugh waited several years before beginning,
in the trilogy Sword of Honour, to
depict that moral decline of English society that started to manifest itself in
World War II, the conduct of which was both a cause and a symptom of the decay
of traditional notions of honour and justice.
The novel can certainly be used as a
tool for the better understanding of a departed age. The period following World
War I had been caught forever in Hemingway's Sun
Also Rises (1926; called Fiesta in
England), F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels and short stories about the so-called
Jazz Age, the Antic Hay (1923) and Point
Counter Point (1928) of Aldous
Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence's Aaron's
Rod (1922) and Kangaroo (1923).
The spirit of the English 18th century, during which social, political, and
religious ideas associated with rising middle classes conflicted with the old
Anglican Tory rigidities, is better understood through reading Smollett and
Fielding than by taking the cerebral elegance of Pope and his followers as the
typical expression of the period.
Similarly, the unrest and bewilderment
of the young in the period after World War II still speak in novels like J.D.
Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951)
and Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim (1954).
It is notable that with novels like these--and the beat-generation books of Jack
Kerouac; the American-Jewish novels of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip
Roth; and the black novels of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin--it is a
segmented spirit that is expressed, the spirit of an age group, social group, or
racial group, and not the spirit of an entire society in a particular phase of
history. But probably a Zeitgeist has
always been the emanation of a minority, the majority being generally silent.
The 20th century seems, from this point of view, to be richer in vocal
minorities than any other period in history.
Novels have been known to influence,
though perhaps not very greatly, modes of social behaviour and even, among the
very impressionable, conceptions of personal identity. But more young men have
seen themselves as Hamlet or Childe Harold than as Julien Sorel, the protagonist
of Stendhal's novel The Red and the Black
(1830), or the sorrowing Werther. Richardson's novel may popularize Pamela, or
Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga (1906-22)
Jon, as a baptismal name, but it rarely makes a deeper impression on the mode of
life of literate families. On the other hand, the capacity of Oscar Wilde's Picture
of Dorian Gray (1891) to influence young men in the direction of sybaritic
amorality, or of D.H. Lawrence's Lady
Chatterley's Lover (1928) to engender a freer attitude to sex, has never
been assessed adequately. With the lower middle class reading public, the effect
of devouring The Forsyte Saga was to
engender genteelisms--cucumber sandwiches for tea, supper renamed dinner--rather
than to learn that book's sombre lesson about the decline of the old class
structure. Similarly, the ladies who read Scott in the early 19th century were
led to barbarous ornaments and tastefully arranged folk songs.
Fiction has to be translated into one of
the dramatic media--stage, film, or television--before it can begin to exert a
large influence. Tom Jones as a film
in 1963 modified table manners and coiffures and gave American visitors to Great
Britain a new (and probably false) set of expectations. The stoic heroes of
Hemingway, given to drink, fights, boats, and monosyllables, became influential
only when they were transferred to the screen. They engendered other, lesser
heroes--incorruptible private detectives, partisans brave under
interrogation--who in their turn have influenced the impressionable young when
seeking an identity. Ian Fleming's James Bond led to a small revolution in
martini ordering. But all these influences are a matter of minor poses, and such
poses are most readily available in fiction easily adapted to the mass
media--which means lesser fiction. Proust, though he recorded French patrician
society with painful fidelity, had little influence on it, and it is hard to
think of Henry James disturbing the universe even fractionally. Films and
television programs dictate taste and behaviour more than the novel ever could.
The Romantic
movement in European literature is usually associated with those social
and philosophical trends that prepared the way for the French Revolution, which
began in 1789. The somewhat subjective, anti-rational, emotional currents of
romanticism transformed intellectual life in the revolutionary and Napoleonic
periods and remained potent for a great part of the 19th century. In the novel,
the romantic approach to life was prepared in the "sentimental" works
of Richardson and Sterne and attained its first major fulfillment in the novels
of Rousseau. Sir Walter Scott, in his historical novels, turned the past into a
great stage for the enactment of events motivated by idealism, chivalry, and
strong emotional impulse, using an artificially archaic language full of remote
and magical charm. The exceptional soul--poet, patriot, idealist, madman--took
the place of dully reasonable fictional heroes, such as Tom Jones, and sumptuous
and mysterious settings ousted the plain town and countryside of 18th-century
novels.
The romantic novel must be seen
primarily as a historical phenomenon, but the romantic style and spirit, once
they had been brought into being, remained powerful and attractive enough to
sustain a whole subspecies of fiction. The cheapest love story can be traced
back to the example of Charlotte Brontë's Jane
Eyre (1847), or even Rousseau's earlier Nouvelle
Héloïse. Similarly, best-selling historical novels, even those
devoid of literary merit, can find their progenitor in Scott, and science
fiction in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
(1818), a romantic novel subtitled The
Modern Prometheus, as well as in Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. The aim of
romantic fiction is less to present a true picture of life than to arouse the
emotions through a depiction of strong passions, or to fire the imagination with
exotic, terrifying, or wonderful scenes and events. When it is condemned by
critics, it is because it seems to falsify both life and language; the
pseudopoetical enters the dialogue and récit
alike, and humanity is seen in only one of its aspects--that of feeling
untempered with reason.
If such early romantic works as those of
Scott and of the Goethe of The Sorrows of
Werther have long lost their original impact, the romantic spirit still
registers power and truth in the works of the Brontës--particularly in
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights,
in which the poetry is genuine and the strange instinctual world totally
convincing. Twentieth-century romantic fiction records few masterpieces. Writers
like Daphne du Maurier, the author of Jamaica
Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938), and
many others, are dismissed as mere purveyors of easy dreams. It is no more
possible in the 20th century to revive the original romantic élan in
literature than it is to compose music in the style of Beethoven. Despite the
attempts of Lawrence Durrell to achieve a kind of decadent romantic spirit in
his Alexandria
Quartet, the strong erotic
feeling, the exotic setting, the atmosphere of poetic hallucination, the pain,
perversion, and elemental force seem to be contrivances, however well they
fulfill the original romantic prescription.
Certain major novelists of the 19th
century, particularly in France, reacted against romanticism by eliminating from
their work those "softer" qualities--tenderness, idealism, chivalric
passion, and the like--which seemed to them to hide the stark realities of life
in a dreamlike haze. In Gustave Flaubert's works there are such romantic
properties--his novel Salammbô; (1862), for instance, is a sumptuous representation of a remote
pagan past--but they are there only to be punctured with realistic irony. On one
level, his Madame Bovary may be taken
as a kind of parable of the punishment that fate metes out to the romantic
dreamer, and it is the more telling because Flaubert recognized a strong
romantic vein in himself: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ("Madame
Bovary is myself"). Stendhal and Balzac, on the other hand, admit no dreams
and present life in a grim nakedness without poetic drapery.
Balzac's
mammoth fictional work--the 20-year succession of novels and stories he
published under the collective title La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy)--and
Stendhal's novels of the same period, The
Red and the Black (1830) and The
Charterhouse of Parma (1839), spare the reader nothing of those baser
instincts in man and society that militate against, and eventually conquer, many
human aspirations. Rejecting romanticism so energetically, however, they swing
to an extreme that makes "realism" a synonym for unrelenting
pessimism. Little comes right for the just or the weak, and base human nature is
unqualified by even a modicum of good. But there is a kind of affirmative
richness and energy about both writers that seems to belie their pessimistic
thesis.
In England, George
Eliot in her novel Middlemarch (1871-72) viewed human life grimly, with close attention
to the squalor and penury of rural life. If "nature" in works by
romantic poets like Wordsworth connoted a kind of divine benevolence, only the
"red in tooth and claw" aspect was permitted to be seen in the novels
of the realists. George Eliot does not accept any notion of Divine Providence,
whether Christian or pantheistic, but her work is instinct with a powerful moral
concern: her characters never sink into a deterministic morass of hopelessness,
since they have free will, or the illusion of it. With Thomas Hardy, who may be
termed the last of the great 19th-century novelists, the determinism is
all-pervasive, and his final novel, Jude the Obscure (1896), represents the limit of pessimism. Behind
him one is aware of the new science, initiated by the biologists Charles Darwin
and T.H. Huxley, which displaces man as a free being, capable of choice, by a
view of him as the product of blind mechanistic forces over which he has little
control.
Realism in this sense has been a
continuing impulse in the 20th-century novel, but few writers would go so far as
Hardy in positing man's near-total impotence in a hostile universe, with the
gods killing human creatures for their sport. Realism in the Existentialist
fiction of 20th-century France, for instance, makes man not merely wretched but
absurd, yet it does not diminish his power of self-realization through choice
and action. Realism has frequently been put in the service of a reforming
design, which implies a qualified optimism. War novels, novels about the
sufferings of the oppressed (in prison, ghetto, totalitarian state), studies of
human degradation that are bitter cries against man-made systems--in all of
these the realistic approach is unavoidable, and realistic detail goes much
further than anything in the first realists. But there is a difference in the
quality of the anger the reader feels when reading the end of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and that generated by Upton
Sinclair's Jungle (1906) or Erich
Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western
Front (1929). In Hardy's novel, pessimistic determinism, reducing human
character to pain, frustration, and impotent anger,
was--paradoxically--appropriate to an age that knew no major cataclysms or
oppressions. The novels of Sinclair and Remarque reflect the 20th century, which
saw the origin of all wrong in the human will, and set on a program of diagnosis
and reform.
The naturalistic novel is a development
out of realism, and it is, again, in France that its first practitioners are to
be found, with Émile Zola
leading. It is difficult to separate the two categories, but naturalism seems
characterized not only by a pessimistic determinism but also by a more
thoroughgoing attention to the physical and biological aspects of human
existence. Man is less a soul aspiring upward to its divine source than a
product of natural forces, as well as genetic and social influences, and the
novelist's task is to present the physical essence of man and his environment.
The taste of Balzac's and Stendhal's audiences was not easily able to
accommodate itself to utter frankness about the basic processes of life, and the
naturalists had to struggle against prejudice, and often censorship,
before their literary candour was able to prevail. The 20th century takes the
naturalistic approach for granted, but it is more concerned with a technique of
presentation than with the somewhat mechanistic philosophy of Zola and his
followers.
Naturalism received an impetus after
World War I, when novelists felt they had a duty to depict the filth, suffering,
and degradation of the soldier's life, without euphemism or circumlocution.
Joyce's Ulysses, when it appeared in
1922, was the first novel to seek to justify total physical candour in terms of
its artistic, as opposed to moral, aim--which was to depict with almost
scientific objectivity every aspect of an ordinary urban day. Though Joyce had
read Zola, he seems to invoke the spirit of a very much earlier naturalistic
writer--the ribald French author of the 16th century, François
Rabelais--and this is in keeping with the Catholic tradition that Joyce
represents. Zola, of course, was an atheist.
It would have been a sin against his
aesthetic canons for Joyce to have shown Leopold Bloom--the protagonist of Ulysses--eating
breakfast or taking a bath and yet not defecating or masturbating. The technique
of the interior monologue, which presented the unedited flow of a character's
unspoken thought and emotion, also called for the utmost frankness in dealing
with natural functions and urges. Joyce, it is now recognized, had no prurient
or scatological intention; his concern was with showing life as it is (without
any of the didactic purpose of Zola), and this entailed the presentation of
lust, perversion, and blasphemy as much as any of the traditionally acceptable
human functions.
The naturalistic novelists have had
their social and legal problems--obscenity indictments, confiscation,
emasculation by timid publishers--but the cause was ultimately won, at least in
Great Britain and the United States, where there are few limits placed on the
contemporary novelist's proclaimed right to be true to nature. In comparison
with much contemporary fiction the pioneer work of Zola seems positively
reticent.
The desire to present life with frank
objectivity led certain early 20th-century novelists to question the validity of
long-accepted narrative conventions. If truth was the novelist's aim, then the
tradition of the omniscient narrator would have to go, to be replaced by one in
which a fallible, partially ignorant character--one involved in the story and
hence himself subject to the objective or naturalistic approach--recounted what
he saw and heard. But the Impressionist painters of late 19th-century France had
proclaimed a revision of the whole seeing process: they distinguished between
what the observer assumed he was observing and what he actually observed. That
cerebral editing which turned visual data into objects of geometric solidity had
no place in Impressionist painting; the visible world became less definite, more
fluid, resolving into light and colour.
The German novelists Thomas Mann and Hermann
Hesse, moving from the realist tradition, which concentrated on closely
notated detail in the exterior world, sought the lightness and clarity of a more
elliptical style, and were proclaimed Impressionists. But in England Ford Madox
Ford went much further in breaking down the imagined rigidities of the
space-time continuum, liquidating step-by-step temporal progression and making
the visual world shimmer, dissolve, reconstitute itself. In Ford's tetralogy Parade's
End (1924-28), the reader moves freely within the time
continuum, as if it were spatial, and the total picture is perceived through an
accumulation of fragmentary impressions. Ford's masterpiece, The
Good Soldier, pushes the
technique to its limit: the narrator tells his story with no special
dispensation to see or understand more than a fallible being can, and, in his
reminiscences, he fragments whole sequences of events as he ranges freely
through time (such freedom had traditionally been regarded as a weakness, a
symptom of the disease of inattention).
In the approach to dialogue manifested
in a book that Ford wrote jointly with Conrad--The
Inheritors (1901)--a particular aspect of literary impressionism may be seen
whose suggestiveness has been ignored by other modern novelists. As the brain
imposes its own logical patterns on the phenomena of the visual world, so it is
given to editing into clarity and conciseness the halting utterances of
real-life speech; the characters of most novels are impossibly articulate. Ford
and Conrad attempted to present speech as it is actually spoken, with many of
the meaningful solidities implied rather than stated. The result is sometimes
exasperating, but only as real-life conversation frequently is.
The interior monologue, which similarly
resists editing, may be regarded as a development of this technique. To show
pre-articulatory thought, feeling, and sensuous perception unordered into a
rational or "literary" sequence is an impressionistic device that,
beginning in Édouard Dujardin's minor novel Les
Lauriers sont coupés (1888; We'll
to the Woods No More), served fiction of high importance, from Dorothy
Richardson, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett.
Novelists like Ronald
Firbank and Evelyn Waugh
(who studied painting and was a competent draftsman) learned, in a more general
sense, how to follow the examples of the Impressionist and Postimpressionist
painters in their fiction. A spare brilliance of observation, like those
paintings in which a whole scene is suggested through carefully selected points
of colour, replaced that careful delineation of a whole face, or inventorying of
a whole room, that had been the way of Balzac and other realists. In four or
five brief lines of dialogue Waugh can convey as much as the 19th-century
novelists did in as many pages.
Expressionism was a German movement that
found its most congenial media in painting and drama. The artist's aim was to
express, or convey the essence of, a particular theme, to the exclusion of such
secondary considerations as fidelity to real life. The typical Expressionist
play, by Bertolt Brecht, for
example, concerns itself with a social or political idea that is hurled at the
audience through every possible stage device--symbols, music, cinematic
insertions, choral speech, dance. Human character is less important than the
idea of humanity, and probability of action in the old realist sense is the
least of the dramatist's concerns. The emotional atmosphere is high-pitched,
even ecstatic, and the tone is more appropriate to propaganda than to art.
Expressionistic technique, as the plays of Brecht prove, was an admirable means
of conveying a Communist program, and it was in the service of such a program
that John Dos Passos, in the
trilogy of novels U.S.A. (1937), used
literary devices analogous to the dramatic ones of Brecht--headlines, tabloid
biographies, popular songs, lyric soliloquies, and the like.
But the Austro-Czech Franz
Kafka, the greatest of the Expressionist novelists, sought to convey what
may crudely be termed man's alienation from his world in terms that admit of no
political interpretation. Joseph K., the hero of Kafka's novel The
Trial (1925), is accused of a nameless crime, he seeks to arm himself with
the apparatus of a defense, and he is finally executed--stabbed with the utmost
courtesy by two men in a lonely place. The hallucinatory atmosphere of that
novel, as also of his novel The Castle
(1926), is appropriate to nightmare, and indeed Kafka's work has been taken by
many as an imaginative forecast of the nightmare through which Europe was
compelled to live during the Hitler regime. But its significance is more subtle
and universal; one of the elements is original sin and another filial guilt. In
the story The Metamorphosis
(1915) a young man changes into an enormous insect, and the nightmare of
alienation can go no further. (see also "Trial,
The," , "Castle,
The," )
Kafka's influence has been considerable.
Perhaps his most distinguished follower is the English writer Rex
Warner, whose Wild Goose Chase
(1937) and Aerodrome
(1941) use fantasy, symbol, and improbable action for an end that is both
Marxist and Freudian; the filial guilt, however, seems to be taken directly from
Kafka, with an innocent hero caught in a monstrously oppressive web that is both
the totalitarian state and paternal tyranny. More recently, the American writer
William Burroughs has developed his own Expressionistic techniques in The
Naked Lunch (1959), which is concerned with the alienation from society of
the drug addict. His later novels Nova
Express (1964) and The Ticket That
Exploded (1962) use obscene fantasy to present a kind of metaphysical
struggle between free spirit and enslaved flesh, evidently an extrapolation of
the earlier drug theme. Burroughs is a didactic novelist, and didacticism
functions best in a fictional ambience that rejects the complexities of
character and real-life action.
Many innovations in fiction can be
classified under headings already considered. Even so revolutionary a work as
Joyce's Finnegans
Wake represents an attempt to show the true nature of a dream;
this can be regarded as a kind of Impressionism pushed so far that it looks like
Surrealism. The brief novels of Samuel Beckett (which, as they aim to
demonstrate the inadequacy of language to express the human condition, become
progressively more brief) seem to have a kind of Expressionist derivation, since
everything in them is subordinated to a central image of man as a totally
deprived creature, resentful of a God he does not believe in. The French
anti-novel, dethroning man as a primary concern of fiction, perhaps represents
the only true break with traditional technique that the 20th-century novel has
seen. (see also avant-garde)
Dissatisfaction not only with the
content of the traditional novel but with the manner in which readers have been
schooled to approach it has led the contemporary French novelist Michel Butor,
in Mobile, to present his material in
the form of a small encyclopaedia, so that the reader finds his directions
obliquely, through an alphabetic taxonomy and not through the logic of
sequential events. Nabokov, in Pale Fire (1962), gives the
reader a poem of 999 lines and critical apparatus assembled by a madman; again
the old sense of direction (beginning at the beginning and going on to the end)
has been liquidated, yet Pale Fire is
a true and highly intelligible novel. In England, B.S. Johnson published similar
"false-directional" novels, though the influence of Sterne makes them
seem accessible, even cozily traditional. One of Johnson's books is marketed as
a bundle of disjunct chapters--which may thus be dealt aleatorially and read in
any order.
Available avant-garde techniques are
innumerable, though not all of them are salable. There is the device of
counterpointing a main narrative with a story in footnotes, which eventually
rises like water and floods the other. A novel has been written, though not
published, in which the words are set (rather like the mouse's tail or tale in Alice
in Wonderland) to represent graphically the physical objects in the
narrative. Burroughs has experimented with a tricolumnar technique, in which
three parallel narratives demand the reader's attention. But the writers like
Borges and Nabokov go beyond mere technical innovation: they ask for a
reconsideration of the very essence of fiction. In one of his ficciones,
Borges strips from the reader
even the final illusion that he is reading a story, for the story is made to
dissolve, the artist evidently losing faith in his own artifact. Novels, as both
Borges and Nabokov show, can turn into poems or philosophical essays, but they
cannot, while remaining literature, turn into compositions disclaiming all
interest in the world of feeling, thought, and sense. The novelist can do
anything he pleases with his art so long as he interprets, or even just
presents, a world that the reader recognizes as existing, or capable of
existing, or capable of being dreamed of as existing.
For the hack novelist, to whom speedy
output is more important than art, thought, and originality, history provides
ready-made plots and characters. A novel on Alexander the Great or Joan of Arc
can be as flimsy and superficial as any schoolgirl romance. But historical
themes, to which may be added prehistoric or mythical ones, have inspired the
greatest novelists, as Tolstoy's War and
Peace and Stendhal's Charterhouse of
Parma reveal. In the 20th century, distinguished historical
novels such as Arthur Koestler's The
Gladiators (1939), Robert Graves's I,
Claudius (1934), Zoé Oldenbourg's Destiny
of Fire (1960), and Mary Renault's The
King Must Die (1958) exemplify an important function of the fictional
imagination--to interpret remote events in human and particular terms, to
transform documentary fact, with the assistance of imaginative conjecture, into
immediate sensuous and emotional experience.
There is a kind of historical novel,
little more than a charade, which frequently has a popular appeal because of a
common belief that the past is richer, bloodier, and more erotic than the
present. Such novels, which include such immensely popular works as those of
Georgette Heyer, or Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel stories in England in the
early 20th century, and Forever Amber
(1944) by Kathleen Winsor in the United States, may use the trappings of history
but, because there is no real assimilation of the past into the imagination, the
result must be a mere costume ball. On the other hand, the American novelist John
Barth showed in The Sot-Weed Factor
(1960) that mock historical scholarship--preposterous events served up with
parodic pomposity--could constitute a viable, and not necessarily farcical,
approach to the past. Barth's history is cheerfully suspect, but his sense of
historical perspective is genuine.
It is in the technical conservatism of
most European historical novels that the serious student of fiction finds cause
to relegate the category to a secondary place. Few practitioners of the form
seem prepared to learn from any writer later than Scott, though Virginia
Woolf--in Orlando (1928) and Between
the Acts (1941)--made bold attempts to squeeze vast tracts of
historical time into a small space and thus make them as fictionally manageable
as the events of a single day. And John Dos Passos' U.S.A., which can be taken as a historical study of a phase in
America's development, is a reminder that experiment is not incompatible with
the sweep and amplitude that great historical themes can bring to the novel.
In Spain, the novel about the rogue or pícaro
was a recognized form, and such English novels as Defoe's The
Fortunate Mistress (1724) can be regarded as picaresque in the etymological
sense. But the term has come to connote as much the episodic nature of the
original species as the dynamic of roguery. Fielding's Tom Jones, whose hero is a bastard, amoral, and very nearly
gallows-meat, has been called picaresque, and the Pickwick Papers of Dickens--whose eponym is a respectable and even
childishly ingenuous scholar--can be accommodated in the category.
The requirements for a picaresque novel
are apparently length, loosely linked episodes almost complete in themselves,
intrigue, fights, amorous adventure, and such optional items as stories within
the main narrative, songs, poems, or moral homilies. Perhaps inevitably, with
such a structure or lack of it, the driving force must come from a wild or
roguish rejection of the settled bourgeois life, a desire for the open road,
with adventures in inn bedrooms and meetings with questionable wanderers. In the
modern period, Saul Bellow's Adventures of
Augie March (1953) and Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums (1959) have something of the right episodic, wandering,
free, questing character. But in an age that lacks the unquestioning acceptance
of traditional morality against which the old picaresque heroes played out their
villainous lives, it is not easy to revive the novela picaresca as the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) conceived it, or as such lesser Spanish
writers of the beginning of the 17th century as Mateo Alemán, Vicente
Espinel, and Luis Vélez de Guevara developed it. The modern criminal wars
with the police rather than with society, and his career is one of closed and
narrow techniques, not compatible with the gay abandon of the true pícaro.
The term sentimental, in its
mid-18th-century usage, signified refined or elevated feeling, and it is in this
sense that it must be understood in Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768). Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Rousseau's Nouvelle
Héloïse (1761) are sentimental in that they exhibit a passionate
attachment between the sexes that rises above the merely physical. The vogue of
the sentimental love novel was one of the features of the Romantic movement, and
the form maintained a certain moving dignity despite a tendency to excessive
emotional posturing. The germs of mawkishness are clearly present in Sterne's Tristram
Shandy (1760-67), though offset by a diluted Rabelaisianism and a certain
cerebral quality. The debasement by which the term sentimental came to denote a
self-indulgence in superficial emotions occurred in the Victorian era, under the
influence of sanctimony, religiosity, and a large commercial demand for
bourgeois fiction. Sentimental novels
of the 19th and 20th centuries are characterized by an invertebrate emotionalism
and a deliberately lachrymal appeal. Neither Dickens nor Thackeray was immune to
the temptations of sentimentality--as is instanced by their treatment of
deathbed scenes. The reported death of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843) is an example of Dickens' ability to
provoke two tearful responses from the one situation--one of sorrow at a young
death, the other of relief at the discovery that the death never occurred.
Despite such patches of emotional excess, Dickens cannot really be termed a
sentimental novelist. Such a designation must be reserved for writers like Mrs.
Henry Wood, the author of East Lynne
(1861). That the sentimental novel is capable of appeal even in the Atomic Age
is shown by the success of Love Story
(1970), by Erich Segal. That this is the work of a Yale professor of classics
seems to indicate either that not even intellectuals disdain sentimental appeal
or that tearjerking is a process to be indulged in coldly and even cynically.
Stock emotions are always easily aroused through stock devices, but both the aim
and the technique are generally eschewed by serious writers.
The first Gothic fiction appeared with
works like Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1765) and
Matthew Gregory Lewis' Monk (1796),
which countered 18th-century "rationalism" with scenes of mystery,
horror, and wonder. Gothic (the spelling "Gothick" better conveys the
contemporary flavour) was a designation derived from architecture, and it
carried--in opposition to the Italianate style of neoclassical building more
appropriate to the Augustan Age--connotations of rough and primitive grandeur.
The atmosphere of a Gothic novel
was expected to be dark, tempestuous, ghostly, full of madness, outrage,
superstition, and the spirit of revenge. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which maintains its original popularity and even
notoriety, has in overplus the traditional Gothic ingredients, with its weird
God-defying experiments, its eldritch shrieks, and, above all, its monster.
Edgar Allan Poe developed the Gothic style brilliantly in the United States, and
he has been a considerable influence. A good deal of early science fiction, like
H.G. Wells's Island
of Doctor Moreau (1896), seems to spring out of the Gothic
movement, and the Gothic atmosphere has been seriously cultivated in England in
the later novels of Iris Murdoch and in the Gormenghast sequence beginning in
1946 of Mervyn Peake. It is noteworthy that Gothic fiction has always been
approached in a spirit of deliberate suspension of the normal canons of taste.
Like a circus trick, a piece of Gothic fiction asks to be considered as
ingenious entertainment; the pity and terror are not aspects of a cathartic
process but transient emotions to be, somewhat perversely, enjoyed for their own
sake. (see also "Frankenstein;
or, the Modern Prometheus")
The psychological novel first appeared
in 17th-century France, with Madame de La Fayette's Princesse de Clèves (1678), and the category was consolidated
by works like the Abbé Prévost's Manon
Lescaut (1731) in the century following. More primitive fiction had been
characterized by a proliferation of action and incidental characters; the
psychological novel limited itself to a few characters whose motives for action
could be examined and analyzed. In England, the psychological novel did not
appear until the Victorian era, when George Eliot became its first great
exponent. It has been assumed since then that the serious novelist's prime
concern is the workings of the human mind, and hence much of the greatest
fiction must be termed psychological. Dostoyevsky's Crime
and Punishment deals less with the ethical significance of a
murder than with the soul of the murderer; Flaubert's interest in Emma Bovary
has less to do with the consequences of her mode of life in terms of nemesic
logic than with the patterns of her mind; in Anna
Karenina Tolstoy
presents a large-scale obsessive study of feminine psychology that is almost
excruciating in its relentless probing. The novels of Henry James are psychological in that the crucial
events occur in the souls of the protagonists, and it was perhaps James more
than any serious novelist before or since who convinced frivolous novel-readers
that the "psychological approach" guarantees a lack of action and
excitement.
The theories of Sigmund
Freud are credited as the source of the psychoanalytical novel. Freud was
anticipated, however, by Shakespeare (in, for example, his treatment of Lady
Macbeth's somnambulistic guilt). Two 20th-century novelists of great
psychological insight--Joyce and Nabokov--professed a disdain for Freud. To
write a novel with close attention to the Freudian or Jungian techniques of
analysis does not necessarily produce new prodigies of psychological revelation;
Oedipus and Electra complexes have become commonplaces of superficial novels and
films. The great disclosures about human motivation have been achieved more by
the intuition and introspection of novelists and dramatists than by the more
systematic work of the clinicians.
To make fiction out of the observation
of social behaviour is sometimes regarded as less worthy than to produce novels
that excavate the human mind. And yet the social gestures known as manners,
however superficial they appear to be, are indices of a collective soul and
merit the close attention of the novelist and reader alike. The works of Jane
Austen concern themselves almost exclusively with the social surface of a fairly
narrow world, and yet she has never been accused of a lack of profundity. A
society in which behaviour is codified, language restricted to impersonal
formulas, and the expression of feeling muted, is the province of the novel of
manners, and such fiction may be produced as readily in the 20th century as in
the era of Fanny Burney or Jane Austen. Such novels as Evelyn Waugh's Handful
of Dust (1934) depend on the exact notation of the manners of a closed
society, and personal tragedies are a mere temporary disturbance of collective
order. Even Waugh's trilogy Sword
of Honour is as much concerned with the minutiae of surface
behaviour in an army, a very closed society, as with the causes for which that
army fights. H.H. Munro ("Saki"), in The
Unbearable Bassington
(1912), an exquisite novel of manners, says more of the nature of Edwardian
society than many a more earnest work. It is conceivable that one of the
novelist's duties to posterity is to inform it of the surface quality of the
society that produced him; the great psychological profundities are eternal,
manners are ephemeral and have to be caught. Finally, the novel of manners may
be taken as an artistic symbol of a social order that feels itself to be secure.
The novels of Samuel
Richardson arose out of his pedagogic vocation, which arose out of his
trade of printer--the compilation of manuals of letter-writing technique for
young ladies. His age regarded letter writing as an art on which could be
expended the literary care appropriate to the essay or to fiction, and, for
Richardson, the creation of epistolary
novels entailed a mere step from the actual world into that of the
imagination. His Pamela (1740) and Clarissa
(1748) won phenomenal success and were imitated all over Europe, and the
epistolary novel--with its free outpouring of the heart--was an aspect of early
romanticism. In the 19th century, when the letter-writing art had not yet fallen
into desuetude, it was possible for Wilkie
Collins to tell the mystery story of The
Moonstone (1868) in the form of an exchange of letters, but it would be hard
to conceive of a detective novel using such a device in the 20th century, when
the well-wrought letter is considered artificial. Attempts to revive the form
have not been successful, and Christopher
Isherwood's Meeting by the River
(1967), which has a profoundly serious theme of religious conversion, seems to
fail because of the excessive informality and chattiness of the letters in which
the story is told. The 20th century's substitute for the long letter is the
transcribed tape recording--more, as Beckett's play Krapp's
Last Tape indicates, a device for expressing alienation than a
tool of dialectic. But it shares with the Richardsonian epistle the power of
seeming to grant direct communication with a fictional character, with no
apparent intervention on the part of the true author. (see also
"Clarissa: Or, The
History of a Young Lady")
Fiction that presents rural life as an
idyllic condition, with exquisitely clean shepherdesses and sheep immune to
foot-rot, is of very ancient descent. Longus'
Daphnis
and Chloe written
in Greek in the 2nd or 3rd century AD, was the remote progenitor of such
Elizabethan pastoral romances as Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia
(1590) and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde
(1590), the source book for Shakespeare's As
You Like It. The Paul et Virginie
of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1787), which was immensely popular in its day, seems
to spring less from the pastoral utopian convention than from the dawning
Romanticism that saw in a state of nature only goodness and innocence. Still,
the image of a rural Eden is a persistent one in Western culture, whatever the
philosophy behind it, and there are elements of this vision even in D.H.
Lawrence's Rainbow (1915) and, however
improbable this may seem, in his Lady
Chatterley's Lover (1928). The more realistic and ironic pictures of the
pastoral life, with poverty and pig dung, beginning with George Crabbe's
late-18th-century narrative poems, continuing in George Eliot, reaching sour
fruition in Thomas Hardy, are usually the work of people who know the country
well, while the rural idyll is properly a townsman's dream. The increasing
stresses of urban life make the country vision a theme still available to
serious fiction, as even a work as sophisticated as Saul Bellow's Herzog
(1964) seems to show. But, since Stella Gibbons' satire Cold
Comfort Farm (1932), it has been difficult for any British
novelist to take seriously pastoral lyricism. (see also
pastoral literature)
The Bildungsroman
or novel about upbringing and education, seems to have its beginnings in Goethe's
work, Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre (1796), which is about the processes by
which a sensitive soul discovers its identity and its role in the big world. A
story of the emergence of a personality and a talent, with its implicit motifs
of struggle, conflict, suffering, and success, has an inevitable appeal for the
novelist; many first novels are autobiographical and attempt to generalize the
author's own adolescent experiences into a kind of universal symbol of the
growing and learning processes. Charles Dickens embodies a whole Bildungsroman
in works like David Copperfield (1850)
and Great Expectations (1861), but
allows the emerged ego of the hero to be absorbed into the adult world, so that
he is the character that is least remembered. H.G. Wells, influenced by Dickens
but vitally concerned with education because of his commitment to socialist or
utopian programs, looks at the agonies of the growing process from the viewpoint
of an achieved utopia in The Dream
(1924) and, in Joan and Peter (1918),
concentrates on the search for the right modes of apprenticeship to the
complexities of modern life. (see also apprenticeship
novel )
The school story established itself in
England as a form capable of popularization in children's magazines, chiefly
because of the glamour of elite systems of education as first shown in Thomas
Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days
(1857), which is set at Rugby. In France, Le
Grand Meaulnes (1913) of Alain-Fournier is the great exemplar of the school
novel. The studies of struggling youth presented by Hermann Hesse became, after
his death in 1962, part of an American campus cult indicating the desire of the
serious young to find literary symbols for their own growing problems.
Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh, which was written by 1885 but not published until
1903, remains one of the greatest examples of the modern Bildungsroman; philosophical and polemic as well as moving and
comic, it presents the struggle of a growing soul to further, all unconsciously,
the aims of evolution, and is a devastating indictment of Victorian paternal
tyranny. But probably James Joyce's Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which portrays the
struggle of the nascent artistic temperament to overcome the repressions of
family, state, and church, is the unsurpassable model of the form in the 20th
century. That the learning novel may go beyond what is narrowly regarded as
education is shown in two remarkable works of the 1950s--William Golding's Lord
of the Flies (1955), which deals with the discovery of evil by a group of
shipwrecked middle-class boys brought up in the liberal tradition, and J.D.
Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951),
which concerns the attempts of an adolescent American to come to terms with the
adult world in a series of brief encounters, ending with his failure and his
ensuing mental illness.
Real, as opposed to imaginary, human
life provides so much ready-made material for the novelist that it is not
surprising to find in many novels a mere thinly disguised and minimally
reorganized representation of actuality. When, for the fullest appreciation of a
work of fiction, it is necessary for the reader to consult the real-life
personages and events that inspired it, then the work is a roman
à clef, or novel that needs a key. In a general sense, every work of
literary art requires a key or clue to the artist's preoccupations (the jail in
Dickens; the mysterious tyrants in Kafka, both leading back to the author's own
father), but the true roman
à clef is more particular in its disguised references.
Chaucer's "Nun's Priest's Tale" has puzzling naturalistic details that
can be cleared up only by referring the poem to an assassination plot in which
the Earl of Bolingbroke was involved. Swift's Tale
of a Tub (1704), Dryden's Absalom and
Achitophel (1681), and Orwell's Animal
Farm (1945) make total sense only when their hidden historical content is
disclosed. These, of course, are not true novels, but they serve to indicate a
literary purpose that is not primarily aesthetic. Lawrence's Aaron's
Rod requires a knowledge of the author's personal enmities, and to
understand Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point fully one
must know, for instance, that the character of Mark Rampion is D.H. Lawrence
himself and that of Denis Burlap is the critic John Middleton Murry. Proust's À
la recherche du temps perdu becomes a richer literary experience when the
author's social milieu is explored, and Joyce's Finnegans
Wake has so many personal references that it may be called the most massive roman
à clef ever written. The more important the clef
becomes to full understanding, the closer the work has come to a special kind of
didacticism. When it is dangerous to expose the truth directly, then the novel
or narrative poem may present it obliquely. But the ultimate vitality of the
work will depend on those elements in it that require no key.
The movement away from the traditional
novel form in France in the form of the nouveau
roman tends to an ideal that may be called the anti-novel--a
work of the fictional imagination that ignores such properties as plot,
dialogue, human interest. It is impossible, however, for a human creator to
create a work of art that is completely inhuman. Contemporary French writers
like Alain Robbe-Grillet in Jealousy
(1957), Nathalie Sarraute in Tropisms
(1939) and The Planetarium (1959), and Michel Butor in Passing Time (1957) and Degrees
(1960) wish mainly to remove the pathetic fallacy from fiction, in which the
universe, which is indifferent to man, is made to throw back radar reflections
of man's own emotions. Individual character is not important, and consciousness
dissolves into sheer "perception." Even time is reversible, since
perceptions have nothing to do with chronology, and, as Butor's Passing
Time shows, memories can be lived backward in this sort of novel.
Ultimately, the very appearance of the novel--traditionally a model of the
temporal treadmill--must change; it will not be obligatory to start at page 1
and work through to the end; a novel can be entered at any point, like an
encyclopaedia.
The two terms most heard in connection
with the French anti-novel are chosisme and tropisme.
The first, with which Robbe-Grillet is chiefly associated, relates to the
novelist's concern with things in themselves, not things as human symbols or
metaphors. The second, which provided a title for Nathalie Sarraute's early
novel, denotes the response of the human mind to external stimuli--a response
that is general and unmodified by the apparatus of "character." It is
things, the furniture of the universe, that are particular and variable; the
multiplicity of human observers melts into an undifferentiable mode of response.
Needless to say, there is nothing new in this epistemology as applied to the
novel. It is present in Laurence Sterne (in whom French novelists have always
been interested), as also in Virginia Woolf.
Such British practitioners of the
anti-novel as Christine Brooke-Rose and Rayner Heppenstall (both French
scholars, incidentally) are more empirical than their French counterparts. They
object mainly to the falsification of the external world that was imposed on the
traditional novel by the exigencies of plot and character, and they insist on
notating the minutiae of the surface of life, concentrating in an unhurried
fashion on every detail of its texture. A work like Heppenstall's Connecting
Door (1962), in which the narrator-hero does not even possess a name, is
totally unconcerned with action but very interested in buildings, streets, and
the sound of music. This is properly a fresh approach to the materials of the
traditional novel rather than a total liberation from it. Such innovations as
are found in the nouveau roman can
best show their value in their influence on traditional novelists, who may be
persuaded to observe more closely and be wary of the seductions of swift action,
contrived relationships, and neat resolutions.
The novel, unlike the poem, is a
commercial commodity, and it lends itself less than the materials of literary
magazines to that specialized appeal called coterie, intellectual or elitist. It
sometimes happens that books directed at highly cultivated audiences--like Ulysses,
Finnegans Wake, and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood
(1936)--achieve a wider response, sometimes because of their daring in the
exploitation of sex or obscenity, more often because of a vitality shared with
more demotic fiction. The duplicated typescript or the subsidized periodical,
rather than the commercially produced book, is the communication medium for the
truly hermetic novel.
The novel that achieves commercial
publication but whose limited appeal precludes large financial success can
frequently become the object of cult adulation. In the period since World War
II, especially in the United States, such cults can have large memberships. The
cultists are usually students (who, in an era of mass education, form a sizable
percentage of the total population of the United States), or fringes of youth
sharing the student ethos, and the novels chosen for cult devotion relate to the
social or philosophical needs of the readers. The fairy stories of Tolkien, The
Lord of the Flies of Golding, the science fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,
have, for a greater or lesser time, satisfied a hunger for myth, symbols, and
heterodox ideas, to be replaced with surprising speed by other books. The George
Orwell cult among the young was followed by a bitter reaction against Orwell's
own alleged reactionary tendencies, and such a violent cycle of adoration and
detestation is typical of literary cults. Adult cultists tend, like young ones,
to be centred in universities, from which they circulate newsletters on Finnegans Wake, Anthony Powell's Music of Time sequence, and the works of Evelyn Waugh. Occasionally
new public attention becomes focussed on a neglected author through his being
chosen as a cult object. This happened when the novellas of Ronald Firbank, the
anonymous comic novel Augustus Carp, Esq.,
and G.V. Desani's All About Mr. Hatterr
got back into print because of the urging of minority devotees. Despite attempts
to woo a larger public to read it, Malcolm Lowry's Under
the Volcano obstinately remained a cult book, while the cultists performed
their office of keeping the work alive until such time as popular taste should
become sufficiently enlightened to appreciate it.
The terms detective
story, mystery, and thriller
tend to be employed interchangeably. The detective story thrills the reader with
mysterious crimes, usually of a violent nature, and puzzles his reason until
their motivation and their perpetrator are, through some triumph of logic,
uncovered. The detective story and mystery are in fact synonymous, but the
thriller frequently purveys adventurous frissons
without mysteries, like the spy stories of Ian Fleming, for example, but not
like the spy stories of Len Deighton, which have a bracing element of mystery
and detection. The detective novel began as a respectable branch of literature
with works like Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), Dickens'
unfinished Edwin Drood (1870), and
Wilkie Collins' Moonstone (1868) and Woman
in White (1860). With the coming of the Sherlock
Holmes stories of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, at the beginning of the 20th century, the form became a kind
of infraliterary subspecies, despite the intellectual brilliance of Holmes's
detective work and the high literacy of Doyle's writing. Literary men like G.K.
Chesterton practiced the form on the margin, and dons read thrillers furtively
or composed them pseudonymously (e.g.,
J.I.M. Stewart, reader in English literature at Oxford, wrote as "Michael
Innes"). Even the British poet laureate, C.
Day Lewis, subsidized his verse through writing detective novels as
"Nicholas Blake." Dorothy
L. Sayers, another Oxford scholar, appeared to atone for a highly
successful career as a mystery writer by turning to religious drama and the
translating of Dante, as well as by making her last mystery novel--Gaudy
Night (1935)--a highly literary, even pedantic, confection.
Such practitioners as Agatha Christie,
Ellery Queen, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, to say nothing of the
highly commercial Edgar Wallace and Mickey Spillane, have given much pleasure
and offended only the most exalted literary canons. The fearless and intelligent
amateur detective, or private investigator, or police officer has become a
typical hero of the modern age. And those qualities that good mystery or
thriller writing calls for are not to be despised, since they include economy,
skillful sustention of suspense, and very artful plotting.
The mystery novel was superseded in
popularity by the novel of espionage, which achieved a large vogue with the
James Bond series of Ian Fleming. Something of its spirit, if not its sadism and
eroticism, had already appeared in books like John Buchan's Thirty-nine
Steps and the "entertainments" of Graham Greene, as well as in the
admirable novels of intrigue written by Eric Ambler. Fleming had numerous
imitators, as well as a more than worthy successor in Len Deighton. The novels
of John Le Carré found a wide audience despite their emphasis on the less
glamorous, often even squalid aspects of international espionage; his works
include The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
(1963) and Smiley's People (1980).
(see also spy
story)
Man's concern with taming wild land, or
advancing frontiers, or finding therapy in reversion from the civilized life to
the atavistic is well reflected in adventure novels, beginning with James
Fenimore Cooper's novels of the American frontier The Pioneers (1823) and The
Last of the Mohicans (1826). As the 19th century advanced, and new tracts of
America were opened up, a large body of fiction came out of the men who were
involved in pioneering adventure. Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872) may be called a frontier classic. Bret Harte
wrote shorter fiction, like "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868), but
helped to spread an interest in frontier writing to Europe, where the cult of
what may be termed the western novel is as powerful as in America. Owen Wister's
Virginian (1902), Andy Adams'
near-documentary Log of a Cowboy
(1903), Emerson Hough's Covered Wagon
(1922), from which the first important western film was made in 1923, Hamlin
Garland's Son of the Middle Border
(1917), and O.E. Rölvaag's Giants in
the Earth (1927) all helped to make the form popular, but it is to Zane
Grey--who wrote more than 50 western novels--that lovers of frontier myth
have accorded the greatest devotion. The western is now thought of predominantly
as a cinematic form, but it arose out of literature. Other frontier fiction has
come from another New World, the antipodes--South Africa as well as the
Australian outback--but the American West has provided the best mythology, and
it is still capable of literary treatment. Sophisticated literary devices may be
grafted onto the western--surrealistic fantasy or parallels to Shakespeare or to
the ancient classics--but the peculiar and perennial appeal of the western lies
in its ethical simplicity, the frequent violence, the desperate attempt to
maintain minimal civilized order, as well as the stark, near-epic figures from
true western history, such as Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, Annie
Oakley, and Jesse James.
A distinction should be made between
novels whose high sales are an accolade bestowed on literary merit and novels
that aim less at aesthetic worth than at profits. The works of Charles Dickens
were best-sellers in their day, but good sales continue, testifying to a
vitality that was not purely ephemeral. On the other hand, many best-selling
novels have a vogue that is destined not to outlast the time when they were
produced. It is a characteristic of this kind of best-seller that the writing is
less interesting than the content, and that the content itself has a kind of
journalistic oversimplification that appeals to unsophisticated minds. The
United States is the primary home of the commercial novel whose high sales
accrue from careful, and sometimes cold-blooded, planning. A novel in which a
topical subject--such as the Mafia, or corruption in government, or the election
of a new pope, or a spate of aircraft accidents, or the censorship of an erotic
book--is treated with factual thoroughness, garnished with sex, enlivened by
quarrels, fights, and marital infidelities, presented in nonliterary prose, and
given lavish promotion by its publisher may well become a best-seller. It is
also likely to be almost entirely forgotten a year or so after its publication.
The factual element in the novel seems to be necessary to make the reader feel
that he is being educated as well as diverted. Indeed, the conditions for the
highest sales seem to include the reconciliation of the pornographic and the
didactic.
A novel with genuine aesthetic vitality
often sells more than the most vaunted best-seller, but the sales are more
likely to be spread over decades and even centuries rather than mere weeks and
months. The author of such a book may, in time, enrich others, but he is
unlikely himself to attain the opulence of writers of best-sellers such as
Harold Robbins or Irving Wallace.
The term science
fiction is a loose one, and it is often made to include fantastic and
prophetic books that make no reference to the potentialities of science and
technology for changing human life. Nevertheless, a novel like Keith Roberts' Pavane
(1969), which has as a premise the conquest of England by Spain in 1588, and the
consequent suppression rather than development of free Protestant intellectual
inquiry, is called science fiction, though such terms as "fiction of
hypothesis" and "time fantasy" would be more fitting. The
imaginative novelist is entitled to remake the existing world or present
possible future worlds, and a large corpus of fiction devoted to such
speculative visions has been produced in the last hundred years, more of it
based on metaphysical hypotheses than on scientific marvels. Jules Verne and
H.G. Wells pioneered what may be properly termed science fiction, mainly to an
end of diversion. Since the days of Wells's Time
Machine (1895) and Invisible Man
(1897), the fiction of hypothesis has frequently had a strong didactic aim,
often concerned with opposing the very utopianism that Wells--mainly in his
nonfictional works--built on the potentialities of socialism and technology.
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932)
showed how dangerous utopianism could be, since the desire for social stability
might condone conditioning techniques that would destroy the fundamental human
right to make free choices. Toward the end of his life Huxley produced a
cautious utopian vision in Island
(1962), but the dystopian horrors of his earlier novel and of his Ape
and Essence (1948) remain more convincing. Orwell's
Nineteen
Eighty-four (1949) showed a world in which a tyrannic unity is
imposed by a collective solipsism, and contradictions are liquidated through the
constant revision of history that the controlling party decrees. Anthony
Burgess' Clockwork Orange (1962) and Wanting
Seed (1962) portray ghastly futures that extrapolate, respectively,
philosophies of crime control and population control out of present-day
tendencies that are only potentially dangerous. (see also
fantasy fiction, utopian
literature)
A large number of writers practice
prophetic fantasy with considerable literary skill and careful factual
preparation--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Ray Bradbury, Italo Calvino, Isaac Asimov, J.G.
Ballard, to name only a few--and novelists whose distinction lies mainly in more
traditional fields have attempted the occasional piece of future-fiction, as in
the case of L.P. Hartley with his Facial Justice (1961) and Evelyn Waugh in Love Among the Ruins (1953). The fantasist who fantasizes without
prophetic or warning intent is rarer, but works such as Nabokov's Ada,
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings cycle, and Christine Brooke-Rose's Out
(1964) represent legitimate and heartening stretching of the imagination,
assurances that the novelist has the right to create worlds, as well as
characters, of his own. However, the dystopian novel can have a salutary
influence on society, actively correcting regressive or illiberal tendencies,
and Brave New World and Nineteen
Eighty-four can be cherished as great didactic landmarks, not just as works
of literary art.
The novel that, like Dickens' Hard
Times (1854), presents the lives of workingmen or other members of the lower
orders is not necessarily an example of proletarian fiction. The category
properly springs out of direct experience of proletarian life and is not
available to writers whose background is bourgeois or aristocratic.
Consequently, William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), or Robert Bage's Hermsprong (1796), although, like Hard
Times sympathetic
to the lot of the oppressed worker, is more concerned with the imposition of
reform from above than with revolution from within, and the proletarian
novel is essentially an intended device of revolution. The Russian Maksim Gorky, with works like Foma Gordeyev (1900) and Mother
(1907), as well as numerous short stories portraying the bitterness of poverty
and unemployment (in fact, the pseudonym Gorky
means "Bitter"), may be taken as an exemplary proletarian writer. The
United States has produced a rich crop of working-class fiction. Such Socialist
writers as Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and Edward Dahlberg,
however, did not witness the triumph of the workers' revolution in their own
country, as Gorky did in his, and it is the fate of the American proletarian
novelist, through literary success, either to join the class he once dreamed of
overthrowing or to become anarchic and frustrated. In the Soviet Union the
proletarian novel was doomed to disappear in the form that Gorky knew, for it is
the essence of the revolutionary novel to possess vitality and validity only
when written under capitalist "tyranny." (see also
American literature)
England has produced its share of
working-class novelists exuding bitterness, such as Alan
Sillitoe, with his Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning (1958), but conditions apt for
revolution have not existed in Britain for more than a century. British
novelists who emerged after World War II, such as John Braine (Room
at the Top), Keith Waterhouse (There
Is a Happy Land), Kingsley Amis (Lucky
Jim), and Stan Barstow (A Kind of
Loving), provided a solution to working-class frustration in a fluid system
of class promotion: revolution is an inadmissible dream. Generally speaking, in
the novel, which is preoccupied with individuals rather than with groups, it is
difficult to make the generalized political statements that are meat and drink
to the revolutionary propagandist.
The categories briefly discussed above
are among the most common fictional forms. Theoretically there is no limit to
the number available, since changing social patterns provide fresh subjects and
fresh taxonomies, and new metaphysical and psychological doctrines may beget new
fictional approaches to both content and technique.
Other categories of fictional art
include the erotic novel (which may or may not be pornographic), the satirical
novel, the farcical novel, the novel for or about children, the theological
novel, the allegorical novel, and so on. Types of fiction no longer practiced,
since their real-life referents no longer exist, include the colonial
novel--such as E.M. Forster's Passage to
India (1924), Henri Fauconnier's Malaisie
(1930), and the African sequence of Joyce Cary--and space fantasy like H.G.
Wells's First Men in the Moon (1901).
One may read examples of a departed category with pleasure and profit, but the
category can no longer yield more than parody or pastiche.
New kinds of fiction fill in the gaps,
like the novel of negritude, the structuralist novel (following the linguistic
sociologists and anthropologists), the homosexual novel, the novel of drug
hallucination, and so on. So long as human society continues to exist, the novel
will exist as its mirror, an infinitude of artistic images reflecting an
infinitude of life patterns.
England's chief literary achievements
lie in the fields of drama and poetry, and the attitude of English novelists to
their form was, for a long time, cheerfully empirical and even amateurish.
Elizabethan novels, novelle rather,
imitated the Spanish picaresque story, and Thomas
Nashe's Unfortunate
Traveller (1594) is a good, bustling, vital example of a
rapidly composed commercial work more concerned with sensational incident and
language than with shape or character. Daniel Defoe (1660?-1731) is often
considered to be the true progenitor of the long English novel, but his Robinson
Crusoe and Moll Flanders are loosely constructed, highly episodic, and
presented as mock biography rather than real fiction. It is with Pamela,
by Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), that the tradition of serious, moral fiction
in English may be said to begin, but later 18th-century novelists reverted to
the picaresque and comic. Henry Fielding (1707-54) wrote his first novel, Joseph
Andrews, as parody on Pamela, but
his masterpiece, Tom Jones, is
original if shapeless, an example of English literary genius sinking thankfully
back into the casual and improvisatory. Laurence
Sterne (1713-68) produced a great mad work, Tristram
Shandy, that, in its refusal to truckle to any rules of structure, remains
still a quarry for avant-garde novelists; and Tobias
Smollett (1721-71) wrote picaresque satire in Roderick
Random and Peregrine Pickele, full-blooded portraits of the age that impress
more with their vigour than with their art. (see also English literature,
Elizabethan literature)
The Romantic Age brought, rather
paradoxically, the cool and classically shaped novels of Jane Austen
(1775-1817), a major practitioner and still a model for apprentices in the
craft. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), a Scotsman who wrote about romantic
historical Scotland, must be regarded as an international figure whose influence
was greater even than Richardson's, since he more than anyone established the
historical novel as the primary fictional form in Europe. In Scott's work,
nevertheless, the traditional faults of the British novel may be
descried--namely, episodic formlessness, an ebullience of texture rather than a
clean narrative line.
The Victorian Age moved out of the
romantic past, or, as with William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63), stayed with it
only to deromanticize it. Charles Dickens (1812-70) was indebted to the
picaresque tradition but turned reformist eyes on his own age. Thackeray and
Dickens are complementary in that the first attacks the upper classes while the
second showers sympathy, sometimes of a mawkish kind, on the lower classes. With
George Eliot (1819-80), the first true English psychological novels appear,
strong in their moral content, and George Meredith (1828-1909) may be said to
have anticipated--in The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel and The Egoist--the
approach in depth that characterized the psychological novel of the 20th
century.
Both Charlotte Brontë (1816-55) and
Emily Brontë (1818-48) exemplify the capacity of the English novel to
achieve solitary "sports" unrelated to any current or tradition. Both Wuthering
Heights--a superb evocation of the soul of a locality, with a love story
that is fierce and primitive but recounted with poetic sophistication -- and Jane
Eyre an exceedingly
frank and still shocking study of a love that rides over Victorian conventions,
are unlike any other books of their time, or of any other time, though their
qualities have been diluted into hundreds of popular 20th-century romances.
Later Victorians, particularly Samuel Butler (1835-1902) and Thomas Hardy
(1840-1928), reflected those changes in the educated English sensibility that
had been brought about by the new science. Hardy's world is one in which the
Christian God has been replaced by a malevolent Providence--the poet-novelist's
theologization of scientific determinism. Butler's Way
of All Flesh, a work that contrives to be both bitterly realistic and highly
comic, demonstrates the working of Darwinian evolution in social institutions
such as the family and even the church. In many ways, Butler led English fiction
into the modern age.
John Galsworthy (1867-1933) showed
himself interested in the processes by which old institutions, such as a great
Whig family, decay as history advances, but in both style and characterization
he is firmly set in the Victorian Age. Of Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) it may be
said that he brought to a kind of Thackerayan social realism something of the
spirit of the French novel, particularly the anglicized tones of Balzac and
Zola. W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), though his most considerable achievements
lie in the short-story form, wrote novels, like Of
Human Bondage that
are infused with the delicious acerbities of French naturalism, and all his
work, long or short, is exalted by the influence of Guy de Maupassant. Early
20th-century British fiction needed the impact of an alien tradition to jolt it
out of bourgeois empiricism, and perhaps the two major influences were both
foreigners who had elected to write fiction in England--Joseph Conrad
(1857-1924), Polish-born, to whom English was a second language, and Henry
James (1843-1916), an American who had drunk deeply at French fountains
and brought to the exercise of his craft a scrupulousness and a concern with
aesthetic values that was almost obsessive and, it may be said, very un-English.
James's influence on such major English-born novelists as Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941), E.M. Forster (1879-1970), and Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was in
the direction of that concern with style which the English novel, unlike the
French, has always tried to resist, and this influence remains a potent one on
succeeding generations of novelists, not only in England.
Other important Englishmen have remained
more interested in content than in style, though in Graham Greene, a Catholic
convert, who is primarily known for his "theological" content, there
is a very interesting attempt to bring to this a Conradian concern for the
solitary-man theme and a Jamesian preoccupation with style. D.H.
Lawrence (1885-1930) remains the great modern English novelist who
reconciles a highly traditional style (in The
Rainbow, for example, he often resembles George Eliot) with a subject matter
that is revolutionary in the profundity of its human relationships. And Aldous
Huxley (1894-1963), though he indulged in formal experiment in Point
Counter Point and Eyeless in Gaza,
was always essentially a didactic writer who used the novel form somewhat
casually. The same may be said of George Orwell (1903-50), who eschewed
stylistic complexity in the interest of a clear message. On the other hand,
Evelyn Waugh (1902-66) and Anthony Powell, in a cautious and conservative way,
consulted the claims of allusive and evocative prose, as did Wyndham Lewis
(1884-1957), who also brought to his novels the aesthetic of an alien art--that
of painting.
Novelists like Kingsley
Amis and Angus Wilson
are seen to belong to traditions already old in the time of Samuel Butler. Amis
derives from Fielding (Amis' Take a Girl
Like You has a moral quality reminiscent of Fielding's Amelia),
and Wilson never pretends to be other than a disciple of novelists like George
Eliot and Dickens. The Victorian kind of novel, as practiced by writers like
J.B. Priestley, satisfies large numbers of British readers, and Jamesian
scrupulosity and Joycean experiment alike are regarded with amiable suspicion.
Such Englishmen as have experimented in fictional technique have usually found a
larger audience abroad than at home. Thus Lawrence Durrell found his Alexandria
Quartet (1962) hailed as a masterpiece in France, while English readers
merely liked or disliked it. A Clockwork
Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess achieved a large readership in the United
States, but it recorded little positive response in the country of its origin.
The fiction of the British Isles is not
clearly differentiated into national or regional groups, and to speak of Irish
novelists is often to do no more than refer to an irrelevant place of birth. Oscar
Wilde (1854-1900) was more French than Irish; his one novel, The
Picture of Dorian Gray,
has no progenitors in English fiction, but it owes much to the late 19th-century
French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. George Moore (1852-1933) was born in County
Mayo, Ireland, but studied art in Paris, and works like A
Modern Lover and A Mummer's Wife were intended to teach the British novel how to
absorb the spirit of Flaubert and Zola. Moore's Lake, written under the influence of the Irish literary revival, is
dutifully set in Ireland, but this essentially international writer was quick to
move back to France for Héloïse
and Abélard and on to Palestine for The
Brook Kerith. James Joyce (1882-1941), conceivably the greatest novelist in
English in the 20th century, never moves from his native Dublin in any of his
fiction, but no less parochial writer can well be imagined. Ulysses,
in the depth of its historical coverage, may be regarded as one of the last
great artistic monuments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Finnegans
Wake was stimulated by the avant-garde climate of Paris, the resting place
of so many Irish "wild geese." It is only perhaps negatively that
Ireland shaped Joyce's literary personality; the oppressiveness of the new
nationalism made him react in the direction of internationalism, and it
eventually forced him to a lifelong exile. Flann O'Brien (1911-66), possibly
Joyce's true successor, stayed in Dublin and drew, in works like At
Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and The Hard
Life (1961), on the native demotic experience, but his techniques came from
Europe, not from the Anglo-Irish bourgeois stockpot. (see also
Irish literature)
The Scottish novel hardly exists as a
national entity; there is nothing in fiction that matches the exploitation of
Lallans in the poetry of Burns or of Hugh MacDiarmid (C.M. Grieve). Scott, as
has been indicated, belongs to European literature, and later novelists like
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) and Sir James Barrie (1860-1937), though
Scottish themes and settings are featured triumphantly in their fiction, are
essentially men whose literary metropolis was London rather than Edinburgh.
Wales sedulously cultivates Welsh as a
living artistic medium, but few novels by Welshmen reach the English or
international market, unless--like Emyr Humphreys--they write their works in
English as well as Welsh. The English-language novel from Wales hardly exists,
except in the form of best-sellers like Richard
Llewellyn's How
Green Was My Valley (1940)--a deliberate capitalization on
Welsh picturesqueness--and the exceedingly Joycean prose of the poet Dylan
Thomas (1914-53), whose one novel, Adventures
in the Skin Trade, has very little of Wales in it. (see also Welsh literature)
If the American novel appears to begin
with the Wieland and Edgar Huntly of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), then the fiction
of the mother country may be said to have no start on that of the newly
independent daughter. Admittedly, Brown owes something to the English Gothic
novel, but already a typically American note is struck in the choice of a
violent and bizarre form that, in various mutations, was to prove fruitful in
the development of American fiction. James
Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) struck out, in the pentateuch called the
"Leatherstocking" tales, in another direction suitable to the American
genius and experience: The Last of the Mohicans and The
Prairie, though their prose style is perhaps overelaborate, are full of the
spirit of a young nation confronting the wilderness and advancing its frontiers.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96) produced, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, an antislavery novel whose sensational devices
owe something to the Gothic movement but whose style is rooted in that European
romantic tradition fathered by Scott. Even Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) and
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) are incompletely emancipated from Europe, though
Hawthorne's Scarlet
Letter shows a preoccupation with sin that finds no fictional
counterpart in the mainstream of the European novel. America, aware of the
darkness and mystery of a land still mainly undiscovered, was correspondingly
aware, in both Gothic and eschatological fiction, of the dark places of the
mind. (see also Stowe, Harriet
Beecher)
The true emancipation from Europe comes
in the works of Hawthorne's friend Herman
Melville (1819-91), whose Moby Dick
creates a totally American fusion by combining plain adventure with a kind of
Manichaean symbolism--implying a belief that the universe is under the dominion
of two opposing principles, one good and the other evil. Mark
Twain (1835-1910) brought the Mississippi frontier region into the
literary geography of the world with Tom
Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn,
combining very American humour with harsh social criticism, as also in the
unique Pudd'nhead Wilson. From Twain
on, the new regions of the United States become the materials of a wealth of
fiction. Thus, while Bret Harte (1836-1902) wrote about California and George W.
Cable (1844-1925) on Louisiana, Indiana was celebrated in The Hoosier Schoolmaster of Edward Eggleston (1837-1902) and the Penrod
stories of Booth Tarkington (1869-1947).
But America could not wholly turn its
back on Europe, and the early 20th century was characterized by the discovery of
the phenomenon called American "innocence" in confrontation with the
decadent wisdom and sophistication of the Old World. If, in Innocents
Abroad, Mark Twain and his fellow travellers remained unimpressed by Europe,
Henry James (1843-1916) devoted millions of words to the response of
impressionable Americans to the subtle deciduous culture their ancestors had
abandoned in the search for a new life. Zolaesque realism entered the American
novel with William Dean Howells (1837-1920). Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
shocked his audiences with the candour and pessimism of Sister
Carrie and An American Tragedy,
while Stephen Crane (1871-1900) and Frank Norris (1870-1902) made realism enter,
respectively, the traditionally romantic field of war (The Red Badge of Courage) and the pastoral life of the promised land
of California (The Octopus). American
innocence ceased to be a fictional property. The brutality in Jack London
(1876-1916) joins hands with the depictions of "natural man" in the
works of Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), while the urban fiction of James T.
Farrell (1904-79) and John O'Hara (1905-70) has a wholly American realism that
leaves the naturalism of Zola far behind.
The 20th-century American novel is
"compartmentalized" in a manner that seems to give the lie to any
allegation of cultural unity. The cult of the regional novel has continued. Ohio
came under the microscopic scrutiny of Sherwood
Anderson (1876-1941) in Winesburg,
Ohio just as the
small-minded hypocrisy and materialism of the Midwest fired the brilliant
sequence of Sinclair Lewis
(1885-1951) from Main
Street on. But the best regional fiction has come from the
South, with William Faulkner (1897-1962), whose technical master is Joyce, Ellen
Glasgow (1874-1945), Flannery O'Connor (1922-64), Eudora Welty, Erskine
Caldwell, and Robert Penn Warren. The immigrant communities of Nebraska were the
subject of My Ántonia, by Willa Cather (1873-1947), while O.E. Rölvaag
(1876-1931) dealt with the South Dakota Norwegians in Giants in the Earth. The urban Jew has become the very spokesman of
the contemporary American experience with writers like Saul Bellow, Herbert
Gold, and Bernard Malamud; while the black American has been made highly
articulate in works like Go Tell It on the
Mountain by James Baldwin, Invisible
Man by Ralph Ellison, and Home to
Harlem by Jamaican-born Claude McKay (1890-1948).
Meanwhile, the fiction of social
criticism that derives from Howells and was made popular by men like Upton
Sinclair (1878-1968) goes on, either in "muckraking" best-sellers or
in such specialized attacks on the American ethos as are exemplified by war
books like Joseph Heller's Catch-22
and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.
American realism has gained a reputation for candour unequalled in any other
literature of the world, so that the Tropic of Cancerand Tropic of Capricorn of Henry
Miller (1891-1980) remain models for sexual frankness that encouraged
writers like Hubert Selby, Jr. (Last Exit
to Brooklyn), and Philip Roth
(Portnoy's
Complaint) to uncover areas of eroticism still closed to the
European novel.
To balance the concern with naked
subject matter, American fiction has also fulfilled the promise of its earlier
expatriates beginning with Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) to match the French in a
preoccupation with style. The distinction of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) lay
in the lyrical intensity of his prose as much as in his "jazz age"
subject matter, and writers like Truman Capote and John Updike have dedicated
themselves similarly to perfecting a prose instrument whose effects (like those
of Joyce) touch the borders of poetry. Perhaps the glories and potentialities of
American fiction are best summed up in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov
(1899-1977). His early works belonged to Europe, but when he took to writing in
English he created a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and highly poetic style. His
work, as in Lolita and Pale
Fire, concentrates with unparalleled intensity on the immediacies of
American life in the 20th century.
Canada has two literatures--one in
French as well as one in English--and, in the taxonomy of this article, it will
be as well to forget the course of history and consider French-Canadian
novelists along with those of the separated, and officially abandoned, mother
country. The Canadian novel in English begins, appropriately enough, with a
Richardson--John Richardson
(1796-1852), author of Wacousta, a
story of the Indian uprising led by Pontiac. But, with the exception of James
DeMille (1836-80), author of a remarkable novel, A
Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper
Cylinder, and William
Kirby (1817-1906), whose Golden Dog
is an interesting long romance of 18th-century Quebec, no novelist of stature
emerged in what was a great period of literary expansion in the United States.
The historical novels of Sir Gilbert Parker (1862-1932), the western romances of
Ralph Connor (1860-1937), and the world-famous Anne
of Green Gables by Lucy
Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) exhibit a stylistic tameness, along with that
jejune oversimplification of psychology that is a mark of the deliberately
"popular" novel. (see also Canadian
literature, "Wacousta;
or, The Prophecy", "Golden
Dog: A Legend of Quebec, The")
More distinctive Canadian work came in
the early 20th century, as in the prairie novels of Robert Stead (1880-1959) and
Frederick Philip Grove (1871-1948). Morley
Callaghan, a chronicler of urban life, may be seen as a writer
approaching international stature, and that tough "European" realism
that braces his work is also to be found, along with a rather exotic elegance,
in the novels of Robertson Davies. Although some younger novelists, like
Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, deal with growing up and rites of passage in
Canada, others, like Brian Moore
and Mordecai Richler, have
sought artistic stimulation outside Canada, and they show general uneasiness
about the lack of a cultivated audience in their great but underpopulated land.
A similar complaint may be heard in
Australia and New Zealand, where the fictional tradition has long accommodated
itself to the simple literary needs of unsophisticated settlers. The first true
Australian novel was probably For the Term of His Natural Life
by Marcus Clarke (1846-81),
which dealt, appropriately, considering the penal origins of the Australian
settlements, with life in prison; and Rolf
Boldrewood, the pseudonym of Thomas A. Browne (1826-1915), had a cognate
approach of excessive simplicity and melodrama to the days of the gold rush in
his Robbery Under Arms. Australian
farm life was the theme of the novels that Arthur Hoey Davis (1868-1935) wrote
under the pen name of Steele Rudd,
beginning with On
Our Selection But
something that can only be termed native Australianism--which has less to do
with trades and scenic backgrounds than with a whole new language and collective
philosophy of life--appears for the first time in My
Brilliant Career (1901), by Miles
Franklin (1879-1954). The expression of a national personality is not,
however, enough. (see also Australian
literature, "Robbery
Under Arms")
Progressive 20th-century Australian
novelists look hungrily toward Europe, aware that native conservatism will not
support the kind of experimentalism in literature that it is prepared to take
for granted in painting and architecture. The most considerable modern
Australian novelist is Patrick White,
but even such massive achievements as Voss and Riders in the Chariot
are set firmly in the Dostoyevskian tradition. Morris
West is Australian only by birth; he seeks international themes and the
lure of the American best-seller market. It seems that an Australian writer can
succeed only if he renounces his Australianism and goes into exile. It is still
a source of humiliation to Australian litterateurs that the finest novel about
Australia was written by a mere visitor--Kangaroo
(1923), by D.H. Lawrence.
New Zealand, with its much smaller
population, presents even greater problems for the native novelist seeking an
audience, and this--along with New Zealand's closer tie with the mother
country--explains why such fiction writers as Katherine
Mansfield (1888-1923) and Dame Ngaio Marsh (1899-1982) made London their
centre. Young novelists like Janet Frame, Ian Cross, and Maurice Shadbolt show,
however, a heartening willingness to render the New Zealand scene in idioms and
techniques more progressive than anything to be found in Australia, and they are
prepared to resist the temptations of the expatriate life.
Inevitably, territories like India and
Africa entered the federation of English literature very much later than those
dominions founded on the English language. With few exceptions, African and
Indian novelists employ English as a second language, and one of the charms of
their novels lies in a creative tension between the adopted language and the
native vernacular (needless to say, this is usually self-consciously
exploited--often for poetic, but more frequently for comic, effect). (see also
Indian literature)
Of Indian novelists, R.K. Narayan, in
works like The English Teacher (U.S.
title Grateful to Life and Death) and The
Man-Eater of Malgudi, exhibits an individual combination of tenderness and
humour, as well as a sharp eye for Indian foibles. Raja Rao, whose best known
novel is The Serpent and the Rope,
achieves remarkable prosodic effects through allowing Sanskrit rhythm and idiom
to fertilize English. Of younger Indian novelists, Balachandra Rajan is notable,
in The Dark Dancer and Too
Long in the West, for an ability to satirize the Anglo-American way of life
with the same suave elegance that informs his tragicomic view of the East.
Khushwant Singh presents, in I Shall Not
Hear the Nightingale, a powerful chronicle of Sikh life during that period
of imperial dissolution that began with World War II. English seems established
as the medium for the Indian novel, and it is interesting to note an ability on
the part of nonnative Indian residents who have practiced the form to be
absorbed into a new "Indo-Anglian" tradition. Rudyard Kipling's Kim is respected by Indian writers, and E.M. Forster's Passage
to India is a progenitor of one kind of Indian novel. The novels of Paul
Scott (1920-78)--such as the tetralogy The
Raj Quartet (1976)--spring out of a love of the country and an understanding
of its complexities not uncommon among former British soldiers and
administrators. The Indian novel is perhaps a product of territory rather than
of blood.
The most important of the new African
writers come from the West Coast, traditional fount of artists, and they are
mostly characterized by immense stylistic vigour, a powerful realism, and,
often, a satirical candour unseduced by the claims of the new nationalism. Chinua
Achebe, in Things Fall Apart and
No Longer at Ease, renders remarkably
the tones of Umuaro speech and thought, and exhibits, as also in Arrow
of God, a concern for that rich native culture whose extirpation is
threatened by imported Western patterns of life and government. His Man
of the People deals sharply with corruption and personality cult in a newly
independent African state modelled on his own Nigeria. A fellow Nigerian, Amos
Tutuola, has gained an international reputation with The
Palm-Wine Drinkard--a richly humorous novel permeated with the spirit of
folklore. Cyprian Ekwensi is
best known for his Jagua Nana, a wry
study of the impact of the new materialism (symbolized by the "Jagua"
car of the title) on the tribal mind. Onuora
Nzekwu, in Blade
Among the Boys has
a graver theme: conflict between Ibo religion and imported Christianity in the
upbringing of a sensitive and confused young man. (see also
African literature)
South African novels have,
traditionally, dealt with those pioneering themes still exemplified in the work
of Laurens van der Post and Stuart Cloete, but the territory has made its entry
into world literature comparatively recently chiefly because the official racist
policies have inspired a powerful fiction of protest. William
Plomer (1903-73) may be regarded as the father of anti-apartheid
literature, although his Turbott
Wolfe appeared in 1925, long before the state doctrine was
articulated. The theme of this novel was the necessity for white and black blood
to mix and ensure a liberal South African future not given over purely to white
domination. Alan Paton, in Cry,
the Beloved Country
has produced the most popular novel of protest, but Dan Jacobson, Nadine
Gordimer, and especially Doris
Lessing have amplified mere protest into what may be termed a kind of
philosophical fiction, often distinguished enough to rank with the best work of
Europe and America. Lessing's sequence Children
of Violence finds in the South African system of government a
starting point for denunciation of wrongs that turn out to be social and sexual
as well as racial.
The varied fictional achievements of the
Caribbean are large. Trinidad has produced the two best known West Indian
writers--Samuel Selvon and V.S.
Naipaul, both of East Indian descent. Selvon's work (A
Brighter Sun, An Island Is a World, The Lonely Londoners) is grim, bitter,
capable of vivid evocation of the Trinidadian scene, but Naipaul, after A
House for Mr. Biswas, has shown signs of habituation to his English exile,
so that his Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion seems to be a novel totally
nourished by the London world in which it is set. Most Caribbean novelists,
finding their publishers and their audiences in England, transfer themselves
thither and cut themselves off from all but remembered roots. This is true of
Edgar Mittelhölzer (1909-65), an ebullient and prolific writer whose later
books all had English settings. Wilson Harris has, in English exile, created an
astonishing Guianan tetralogy in which poetry and myth and symbolic difficulty
have a place. George Lamming and John Hearne are both notable for firm and
economical prose and masterly scene painting. The aesthetic prospects for the
West Indian novel seem excellent, but the absorption of its practitioners into
the larger English-speaking world represents a symptom that plagues the practice
of literature in so many Commonwealth countries--the lack of adequate publishing
facilities and, more than that, the failure of a cultivated readership to
emerge. It is undoubtedly unhealthy for an author to have to seek primary
communication with foreigners.
The Russian novel properly begins with Nikolay
Karamzin (1766-1826), who introduced into Russian literature not only the
exotic sentimental romanticism best seen in his novels Poor
Lisa and Natalya, the Boyar's Daughter
but that large Gallic vocabulary that was to remain a feature of the literary
language. But those qualities that best distinguish Russian fiction--critical
realism and spirituality--first appeared in the work of Mikhail
Lermontov (1814-41), whose Hero
of Our Time is the pioneering Russian psychological novel.
Nikolay Gogol (1809-52), satirizing provincial mores in Dead
Souls ushered in,
perhaps unintentionally, a whole fictional movement--the "literature of
accusation." Vissarion Belinsky
(1811-48), the father of Russian literary criticism, formulated the theory of
literature in the service of society, and Ivan
Turgenev (1818-83), produced a classic "accusatory" novel in A Sportsman's Sketches. But he, and the other major novelists who
emerged in the mid-19th century, can hardly be considered in terms of literary
movements. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81), with The Possessed, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and The
Brothers Karamazov, affirmed with idiosyncratic power the great spiritual
realities, and Leo Tolstoy
(1828-1910) produced two of the greatest novels of all time--War
and Peace and Anna Karenina,
revelatory of the Russian soul but also of the very nature of universal man and
human society.
The later days of the 19th century saw a
shift in fictional radicalism. The theories of Karl Marx influenced the
accusatory writers in the direction of the plight of the proletariat, not, as
had been the old way, that of the peasantry. Maksim Gorky (1868-1936), Leonid
Andreyev (1871-1919), Aleksandr Kuprin (1870-1938), and the Nobel Prize winner
(1933) Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) wrote of the Russian urban experience and helped
to create the literary climate of the Soviet regime. Generally, since the
beginning of the first five-year plan in 1928, there had been a division between
what the regime regarded as valuable in the practice of the novel and what the
rest of the world thought. Mikhail
Sholokhov (1905-84) depicted, with no evident propagandist slanting, the
Revolution and civil war in Quiet Flows
the Don, and Fyodor Gladkov
(1883-1958) was one of the few novelists readable outside the ranks of the
Soviet devout in the new category of economic or industrial fiction. The Russian
novel of the age following World War II, however, underwent a dramatic schism,
in which writers like Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn and Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) could receive the Nobel
Prize but be officially condemned in the Soviet Union, while the fictional
darlings of the regime were recognized, in the non-Communist world, as
possessing little or no aesthetic merit.
Goethe (1749-1832), who practiced so
many arts with such notable brilliance, may be regarded as the first major
novelist of Germany. His life covers the whole period of the Enlightenment, with
its insistence on a national literary spirit, the Sturm und Drang movement, and that phase of Weltschmerz which The Sorrows of Young Werther
fostered. It was Werther more than any
other work that carried German
literature into the world arena; it remained influential in Europe when
German Romanticism had already burned itself out. The German reaction against
Romanticism was expressed in the regionalism of Theodor
Storm (1817-88) and Fritz
Reuter (1810-74), who sought to render with objective fidelity the life
of their native provinces (northwestern and northeastern Germany, respectively).
Swiss writers like Gottfried Keller
(1819-90) belonged to the movement of mainstream German regional realism,
featuring the picturesque solidities of Switzerland. But the post-Goethean major
achievements in the novel had to wait for the Impressionist movement, which
produced the works of Thomas Mann
(1875-1955) and Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)--fiction concerned less with a roughly
hacked slice of life than with form and aesthetic delicacy. World War I brought
Expressionism--the nightmares of the German-Czech Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and
the psychoanalytical novels of Jakob Wassermann (1873-1934), with their pleas
for humanity and justice.
When the true historical nightmare of
the Nazi regime followed--predicted, in a sense, by Kafka and Mann--liberal
German fiction was suppressed, and liberal German novelists like Mann and Erich
Maria Remarque (1898-1970), author of All Quiet on the Western Front
went into exile. The brutal, philistine, and nationalistic novels of the true
Nazi novelists exist only as curious and frightening relics of an era of infamy.
The task of postwar novelists like Günter Grass--author of The
Tin Drum and Dog Years--and Uwe
Johnson has been to diagnose the long sickness and force German fiction
into new directions--often with the help of surrealism, irony, and verbal
experiment.
Although the mid-16th-century satirical
piece Gargantua
and Pantagruel of François Rabelais has had, and is
still having, a profound influence on the world novel, it would be wrong to
place it in the line of true French fiction, which has always manifested a
preoccupation with form, order, and economy--qualities totally un-Rabelaisian.
The first notable French novel--The Princess of Clèves
by Madame de La Fayette (1634-93)--shows none of the vices of the English novels
of a century later; it is firmly constructed and takes character seriously, as
does Manon Lescaut by l'Abbé Prévost
(1697-1763). With such works the psychological novel was established in Europe.
A keen hold on reality and a concern with the problems of man as a social being
animates even the fiction of the Romantic school--works like Indiana
and Lélia by George
Sand (1804-76) and the heavyweight romances of Victor
Hugo (1802-85). But the true glories of French fiction come with the
reaction to romanticism and sentimentality, as exemplified in the novels of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). The great fathers of realism are Stendhal
(1783-1842), Balzac (1799-1850), and Flaubert (1821-80), and their influence is
still active. Émile Zola (1840-1902) moved away from the artistic
detachment that Flaubert preached and practiced, but, in his Chronicles of the Rougon Macquart Family, he tried to emulate the
encyclopaedic approach to the novel of Balzac, whose Human Comedy is meant to be a history of society in a hundred
episodes. The leader of the Naturalist school, Zola saw human character as a
product of heredity and environment. (see also
French literature, "Chronicles
of the Rougon Macquart Family," )
It was left to the 20th-century French
novel to cast doubt on a mechanistic or deterministic view of man, to affirm the
irrational element in his makeup, and to emphasize the primacy of the will. The
temporal treadmill of Balzac and Zola has no place in the masterpiece of Marcel
Proust (1871-1922); Remembrance of Things
Past, if it has a philosophy, says more about the creative élan vital
of Bergson, the human essences that underlie the shifting phenomena of time and
space, than the social jungle the realists had taken for reality. André
Gide (1869-1951) seems to make a plea for human aloofness from environment so
that the essentially human capacity for change and growth may operate. André
Malraux (1901-76), the forerunner of the Existentialist novelists, demonstrated,
in Man's Fate
the necessity for human involvement in action as the only answer to the
absurdity of his position in a huge and indifferent or malevolent universe. Jean-Paul
Sartre (1905-80) and Albert
Camus (1913-60) similarly emphasized man's freedom to choose, to say no
to evil, to define himself through action.
Other French novelists have been more
concerned with recording the minutiae of human life as a predominantly sensuous
and emotional experience, like Colette (1873-1954), or with taking the religious
sensibility as a fictional theme, like François
Mauriac (1885-1970). The practitioners of the anti-roman--Butor,
Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute--pursue their attempts at liquidating human
character in the traditional novelistic sense. Samuel Beckett, an Irishman who
has turned himself into a major French stylist, goes his own way, presenting--in
works like Molly, Malone Dies, Watt,
and The Unnamable--mankind reduced to
degradation and absurdity but somehow admirable because it survives.
French-Canadian fiction inevitably
suffers from comparison with the glories of the mother country. Before 1900
there is little of value to record--except perhaps the historical romance of
Philippe de Gaspé (1786-1871), Les
Anciens Canadiens--but Louis Hémon
(1880-1913) produced a genuine classic in Maria
Chapdelaine a story
of Canadian pioneer life, original, moving, and sensitive. The somewhat
provincial character of French-Canadian life, dominated by the Church and by
outmoded notions of morality, has not been conducive either to fictional candour
or to formal experiment, and metropolitan France is unimpressed, for the most
part, by the literature of the separated brethren. But there is time for an
avant-garde to develop and great masters to appear. (see also
French literature)
The great age known as "El Siglo de
Oro," or the Golden Age,
produced what is conceivably (it must contest this claim with War
and Peace) the most magnificent of all novels--the Don
Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra (1547-1616). A satire on chivalry that ends as a humane
affirmation of the chivalric principle, it encloses--in tender or comic
distortion--other fictional forms that flourished in the Spanish Golden Age. The
no- vela
picaresca fathered a whole European movement, and its best monuments are
perhaps the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes
(1554), Guzmán de Alfarache by
Mateo Alemán (1547-c. 1614),
and El diablo cojuelo (The Limping Devil) by Luis Vélez de Guevera (1579-1644). The
pastoral novel, another popular but highly stylized form, was less true fiction
than a sort of prose poem, in which lovers in shepherd's disguise bewailed an
unattainable or treacherous mistress. But here, since the fictional lovers were
often real-life personages in the cloak of a rustic name, the germs of the roman
à clef are seen stirring. The novela
morisca was an inimitable Spanish form, a kind of fictional documentary
about the wars between Christians and Muslims, as in Guerras
civiles de Granada (Civil
Wars of Granada) by Ginés
Pérez de Hita (c. 1544-c. 1619). (see also Spanish
literature, "Don
Quixote," )
The decline of Spain as a European power
is associated, in literature, with feeble nostalgia for the Golden Age or
feebler imitations of French classicism. The Spanish novel began to reemerge
only in the early 19th century, when a journalism celebrating regional customs
encouraged the development of the realistic regional novel, with Fernán
Caballero (1796-1877), Armando Palacio Valdés (1853-1938), and the
important Vicente Blasco Ib衰ez
(1867-1928), whose Sangre y arena (Blood
and Sand), Mare nostrum, and Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) achieved universal fame and
were adapted for the screen in the 1920s.
The fiction of the Generation
of '98--which took its name from the year of the Spanish-American War, a
cataclysmic event for Spain that bereaved it of the last parts of a once great
empire--wasted no time on national nostalgia or self-pity but concentrated on
winning a new empire of style. Ramón
María del Valle-Inclan (1866-1936) and Ramón Pérez
de Ayala (1880-1962) brought a highly original lyricism to the novel, while Pío
Baroja (1872-1956) concentrated on representing a world of discrete events,
unbound by a unifying philosophy. The fiction that came out of the Civil War of
1936-39 returned to a kind of didactic realism, as with the novels of José
Mariá Gironella, who depicted a ravaged and suffering Spain. Camilo
José Cela, perhaps the most important modern Spanish novelist,
combines realism with a highly original style. His Familia
de Pascual Duarte--harrowing, compassionate, brilliantly economical--is a
novel of towering merit. (see also "Family
of Pascual Duarte, The," )
Though Italy originated the novella,
it was slow in coming to the full-length novel. There is little to record before
I promessi sposi (The
Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni
(1785-1873), a romantic and patriotic novel that describes life in Italy under
Spanish domination in the 17th century. That combination of regionalism and
realism already noted in the fiction of Germany and Spain did not appear in
Italy until after the unification in 1870, when Giovanni
Verga (1840-1922) celebrated his native Sicily in I
malavoglia (The
House by the Medlar Tree) and Antonio Fogazzaro (1842-1911)
showed life in northern Italy during the struggle for unification in Picolo
mondo antico (The
Little World of the Past). Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) and
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936)
were too original for easy classification, and both worked in all the literary
media. Pirandello, especially, helped to bring Italian
literature into the modern world through such philosophical novels as Il fu Mattia Pascal
(e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Late Matthew Pascal),
which raises profound questions about the nature of human identity and yet
contrives to be witty, sunny, and essentially Italianate. The importance of Italo
Svevo (1861-1928) was obscured for some time because of the difficulty of
Italian literati in accepting his relatively unadorned style, but works like La
coscienza di Zeno (1923; Confessions
of Zeno) and Senilitá (a
title that James Joyce, Svevo's friend and English teacher, translated As
a Man Grows Older) are
generally recognized as major contributions to the international novel.
The significant fiction of the Mussolini
regime was produced by anti-Fascist exiles like Giuseppe Borgese (1882-1952) and
Ignazio Silone (1900-78), whose Pane e
vino (Bread and Wine) is accepted
as a 20th-century classic. Alberto
Moravia, with La romana (The Woman of Rome)
and La noia (The Empty Canvas), is perhaps the most popular Italian novelist
outside Italy, but he is probably less important than Giuseppe Berto, Cesare
Pavese (1908-50), and Elio Vittorini (1908-66). Giuseppe di Lampedusa
(1896-1957) created a solitary masterpiece in Il gattopardo (The Leopard).
The experimental writing of Italo Calvino and Carlo Emilio Gadda has become
better known outside Italy, but the Italian novel remains linguistically
conservative and needs the impact of some powerfully iconoclastic literary
figure like James Joyce.
Norway is better known for Ibsen's
contribution to the drama and Grieg's to music than for fiction of the first
quality. Nevertheless, the novels of Knut
Hamsun (1859-1952) earned him the Nobel Prize in 1920, and Sigrid
Undset (1882-1949) received the same honour in 1928, though the work of
both has failed to engage the lasting attention of world readers of fiction. In
Denmark, Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
(1873-1950), another Nobel Prize winner, Isak Dinesen (the pen name of Baroness
Karen Blixen, 1885-1962), and Martin
Nexö; (1869-1954) have contributed to their country's fictional
literature but made little mark beyond. Except for the Nobel Prize winners
Eyvind Johnson (1900-76) and Harry Martinson (1904-78), the achievement of
Sweden's novelists is inconsiderable. The novels of Halldór
Laxness have restored to Iceland some of the literary fame it once earned
for its sagas. (see also Norwegian
literature, Icelandic
literature)
The greatest novelist of Czech origin,
Franz Kafka, wrote in German, but writers in the vernacular include world-famous
names such as Jaroslav Hasek
(1883-1923), whose The Good Soldier
Schweik is acknowledged to be a comic masterpiece, and Karel
Capek (1890-1938), best known for the plays R.U.R.
(which gave "robot"
to the world's vocabulary) and The Life of
the Insects but also notable for the novels The
Absolute at Large, Krakatit, and The
War with the Newts. The Czech fictional genius tends to the satirical and
the fantastic. Serbian fiction gained international recognition in 1961 when Ivo
Andric won the Nobel Prize for his novels, notably those dealing with the
history of Bosnia, which he had written during the second World War. Poland can
claim two Nobel prizewinning novelists in Henryk
Sienkiewicz (1846-1916), the author of Quo Vadis?, and Wladyslaw
S. Reymont (1868-1925), whose novel The Peasants is an aromatic piece of bucolic realism. Witold
Gombrowicz (1904-69) wrote a novel, Ferdydurke,
that was subjected to two separate modes of suppression--first Fascist, later
Communist. A remarkable surrealist essay on "anal tyranny" and
depersonalization, it still awaits the acclaim that is due. Romania, which
produced outstanding novelists in Eugen Lovinescu and Titu Maiorescu, suffered,
like other Balkan countries, from the totalitarian suppression of the free
creative spirit; but Dumitru Radu Popescu, author of The Blue Lion, was bold enough in the 1960s to question Communist
orthodoxy through the medium of fiction. The work of the Hungarian Gusztáv
Rab (1901-66) awaits recognition. His brilliant Sabaria
develops very courageously the theme of the conflict between Communism and
Christianity and reaches conclusions favourable to neither. It is a disturbing
and beautifully composed book. (see also Czech
literature, Serbian literature,
Polish literature, Romanian
literature)
Modern Greece, perhaps more famous for
its poets George Seferis and Constantine Cavafy, has produced at least one major
novelist in Níkos Kazantzákis
(1885-1957), whose Zorba the Greek
became famous through its film adaptation. The
Last Temptation of Christ, which presents the life of Jesus as a struggle to
overcome "the dark immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and
pre-human," glows with the writer's personality and bristles with the
dialectic that was one of the first Greek gifts to Western civilization.
The literature of the Diaspora--the
dispersion of the Jews after their exile from ancient Babylonia--records many
large achievements in the languages of exile and that dialect of Low German--
Yiddish--which the Ashkenazi Jews have taken around the world. Perhaps the most
interesting of modern Jewish novelists in Yiddish is Isaac
Bashevis Singer, a naturalized American who refuses to be absorbed
linguistically into America, unlike Bellow
and Malamud, who have brought to the Anglo-American language typical tones and
rhythms of the ghetto. (see also Yiddish
literature)
Israel, which is producing its own rich
crop of national writers, began with an existing corpus of literature in modern
Hebrew, a language promoted and nurtured by such scholars as Eliezer ben Yehuda
(1858-1923) and the members of the neologizing Hebrew Academy of Israel. Among
the early Hebrew novelists is Abraham Mapu (1808-67); among the later ones is
the brilliant Moshe Shamir. The first Nobel Prize for Literature ever awarded to
a Hebrew novelist went, justly, to Shmuel
Yosef Agnon (1888-1970). The contemporary Hebrew novel is notable for a
fusion of international sophistication and earthy homegrown realism. (see also
Hebrew literature)
The tradition of storytelling is an
ancient one in China, and the full-length novel can be found as far back as the
late 16th century. The fiction of the 18th century shows a variety of themes and
techniques not dissimilar to those of Europe, with social satire, chivalric
romance, and adventure stories. Ts'ao Chan (1715?-63) wrote a novel called Hung
lou meng (translated as Dream
of the Red Chamber in 1892), which has features not unlike
those of Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga
and Mann's Buddenbrooks--a story of a
great aristocratic family in decline, garnished with love interest and shot
through with pathos. The early days of the 20th century saw the foundation of
the Chinese republic and the development of popular fiction written in the
vernacular style of Chinese called pai-hua.
(see also Chinese
literature)
From 1917 until the Sino-Japanese War
(1937-45), a period of social and intellectual ferment, there was a great influx
of Western novels, and, under their influence, movements like those devoted to
realism and naturalism in Europe produced a great number of didactic novels.
Novels like Lao She's Rickshaw Boy and
Pa Chin's Chinese Earth appeared in
the postwar period, but the Communist regime has quelled all but propagandist
fiction. Such novels as Liu Ching's Wall of Bronze, Chao Shu-li's Changes
in Li Village, and Ting Ling's Sun
Shines over the Sangkan River are typical glorifications of the Maoist
philosophy and the socialist achievements of the people.
A literature that admires economy, like
the Japanese, is bound to favour, in fictional art, the short story above the
full-length novel. Nevertheless, some of the ancient pillow-books, with their
diary jottings and anecdotes, have the ring of autobiographical novels; while Murasaki
Shikibu's Tale of Genji,
produced nearly a thousand years ago, is a great and sophisticated work of
fictional history. The 20th-century Japanese novel has been developed chiefly
under Western influence, like the work of Akutagawa
Ryunosuke (1892-1927), whose short stories "Rashomon"
and "Yabu no naka" became the highly applauded film Rashomon.
Tanizaki Jun-ichiro
(1886-1965) is well known in America and Europe for The
Key, The Makioka Sisters, and Diary of
a Mad Old Man. His novels, all set in a modern, Westernized Japan, are
assured of universal popularity because of their frank and lavish sexual
content. Mishima Yukio
(1925-70), who committed ceremonial suicide at the height of his reputation, was
perhaps the most successful, and certainly the most prolific, of all modern
Japanese novelists. Ten of his fictions had been filmed; he had won all the
major Japanese literary awards and appeared to be destined for the Nobel Prize.
His works are characterized by ruthless violence and a perversity that, however
much it seems to derive from the pornographic excesses of Western fiction, is
certainly in the Japanese tradition. His work is hard to judge, but he was the
most considerable literary figure of the East. (see also
Japanese literature)
The Indian novel is a branch of British
Commonwealth literature. That is to say, it is practiced by writers who have
received a British literary education and, for the most part, publish their
books in London. There is no evidence of any great development of fiction in any
of the native Indian tongues: a taste for reading novels, as opposed to seeing
films or reading short stories in the Hindi or Punjabi press, is acquired in
India along with an education in English, which is still the unifying tongue of
the subcontinent. In Malaysia, where the same tradition holds, short stories are
being written in Malay, Chinese, and Tamil, but the full-length novel is almost
exclusively written in English. It is as much a matter of literary markets as of
literary education. No novel in any of the tongues of the peninsula is likely to
be a remunerative publishing proposition, as Han Suyin--a best-selling Chinese
woman doctor from Johore, who found large fame with A
Many-Splendoured Thing--would be the first to admit, for all her dislike of
the British colonial tradition. Indonesia's abandonment of all vestiges of its
Dutch colonial past is associated with the encouragement of a literature in
Bahasa Indonesia, a variety of Malay, and there are a number of Indonesian
novelists still looking for a large educated audience--inevitably in
translation, in the West. Among these Mochtar Lubis is notable; his Twilight
in Djakarta is a bitter indictment of the Sukarno regime, which promptly
sent him to prison. This was not the kind of fiction that the new Indonesia had
in mind. (see also Indonesian
literatures)
What applies to India and the East
Indies applies also to Africa: there is still an insufficiently large audience
for fiction written in any of the major African languages, and African novelists
brought up on English are only too happy to continue working in it. Other
European languages--chiefly Afrikaans (a South African variety of Dutch) and
French--are employed as a fictional medium. Arthur Fula, who wrote Janie
Giet die Beeld (Janie Casts the Image),
is an Afrikaans novelist whose reputation has not, as yet, stretched to Europe
or America, but the novelists of the former French possessions are gaining a
name among serious students of the African novel. Mongo
Beti, from Cameroon, is known for his Pauvre Christ de Bomba and Le
Roi miraculé; the Ivory Coast has Aké Loba, and Hamidou Kane
represents Senegal. This new African French deserves to be regarded as a
distinct literary language, unrelated to that of Paris or Quebec, but the
critical and linguistic tools for appraising the fiction of French-speaking
Africans are not yet available.
One of the greatest contemporary writers
of fiction, Jorge Luis Borges,
is an Argentinian, but his ficciones
are very short short stories and must, with regrets, be excluded from any survey
of the novel. It is significant, however, that the circumstances for the
creation of a great fictional literature are in existence in Latin America,
signifying (unlike the case in many former British dependencies) a shedding of
the old colonial provincialism, which relied on the opinion of Madrid or, in
Brazil, of Lisbon. The first Latin American novel was probably El periquillo sarniento (1816; The
Itching Parrot), by the Mexican José Joaquín
Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827), a picaresque work satirizing colonial
conditions. In Argentina, José Mármol (1817-71) published the
first major novel of the continent--Amalia
(1851-55), a powerful study of the fear and degradation that were rife in Buenos
Aires during the dictatorship of the corrupt and tyrannical Juan Manuel de
Rosas. The Romantic period in Europe had its counterpart in the sentimental wave
that overtook such novelists as the Colombian Jorge
Isaacs (1837-95), while the new humanitarianism found a voice in Birds
Without a Nest, a protest-novel on the conditions forced on the Indians of
Peru, written by Clorinda Matto de
Turner (1854-1901). Juan León
Mera followed the same trend in Cumandá,
a novel about the oppression of the Ecuadorian Indians. As Latin America moved
toward the modern age, the inevitable novels of urban social protest made their
appearance. Alberto Blest Gana (1830-1920) of Chile, Carlos
Reyles (1868-1938) of Uruguay, and Gustavo Martínez Zuviría
of Argentina are names of some historical significance; and Reyles's
naturalistic novel La Raza de Caín
(Cain's Race) is original in that it
finds a parallel between the breeding of stock and the building of a human
society.
A 20th-century reaction against the
bourgeois novel led to the movement known as nativism, with its concentration on
the land itself, the lot of the indigenous peoples, the need for an anti-racist
revolution with the aim of true egalitarianism. Los
de Abajo (1915; The Underdogs), by the Mexican Mariano
Azuela (1873-1952), and El
Señor Presidente (1946), by Miguel
Angel Asturias of Guatemala, typify the new revolutionary novel. Much of
the didactic energy that went to the making of such work resulted in a lack of
balance between subject matter and style: the literature of revolt tends to be
shrill and crude. The inevitable reaction to a more sophisticated kind of
literature, in which the individual became more important than society and the
unconscious more interesting than the operation of reason, led to the highly
refined experimentation that is the mark of Borges, the Brazilian Érico
Veríssimo, and Eduardo Barrios
of Chile.
The fiction of Brazil is in many ways
more interesting than the fiction of the mother country, which has produced only
one major novelist in the realist José Maria de Eça de Queirós
(1845-1900). Gregório de Matos
Guerra, as early as the 17th century, wrote bitterly of colonial
administration and painted a realistic picture of Brazilian life. Irony and keen
observation have been characteristic of the Brazilian novel ever since--as in
the Memórias Póstumus de Brás
Cubas (1881) and Dom Casmurro of Joaquim
Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908); the Canaã
(1902; Canaan ) of José
Pereira da Graça Aranha (1868-1931), a remarkable study of the
disillusion of German settlers in a new land; and the Os
Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands) of Euclides
da Cunha (1866-1909), an account of a revolt against the newly formed
Brazilian republic. The social consciousness of Brazilian novelists is
remarkable, especially when it is associated with a strong concern for stylistic
economy and grace. Monteiro Lobato
(1882-1948), with his rustic hero Jeca Tatú; José Lins do Rêgo
(1901-1957), chronicler of the decay of the old plantation life; Jorge
Amado, a socialist novelist much concerned with slum life in Bahia; Érico
Veríssimo, an experimental writer grounded in the traditional
virtues of credible plot and strong characterization--these attest a vigour
hardly to be found in the fiction published in Lisbon.
Though publishers of fiction recognize
certain obligations to art, even when these are unprofitable (as they usually
are), they are impelled for the most part to regard the novel as a commercial
property and to be better pleased with large sales of indifferent work than with
the mere unremunerative acclaim of the intelligentsia for books of rare merit.
For this reason, any novelist who seeks to practice his craft professionally
must consult the claims of the market and effect a compromise between what he
wishes to write and what the public will buy. Many worthy experimental novels,
or novels more earnest than entertaining, gather dust in manuscript or are
circulated privately in photocopies. Indeed, the difficulty that some
unestablished novelists find in gaining a readership (which means the attention
of a commercial publisher) has led them to take the copying machine as seriously
as the printing press and to make the composition, mimeographing, binding, and
distribution of a novel into a single cottage industry. For the majority of
novelists the financial rewards of their art are nugatory, and only a strong
devotion to the form for its own sake can drive them to the building of an oeuvre.
The subsidies provided by university sinecures sustain a fair number of major
American novelists; others, in most countries, support their art by practicing
various kinds of subliterature--journalism, film scripts, textbooks, even
pseudonymous pornography. Few novelists write novels and novels only. (see also
publishing)
There are certain marginal windfalls,
and the hope of gaining one of these tempers the average novelist's chronic
desperation. America has its National Book Award as well as its book club
choices; France has a great variety of prizes; there are also international
bestowals; above all there glows the rarest and richest of all accolades--the Nobel
Prize for Literature. Quite often the Nobel Prize winner needs the money
as much as the fame, and his election to the honour is not necessarily a
reflection of a universal esteem which, even for geniuses like Samuel
Beckett, means large sales and rich royalties. When Sinclair Lewis
received the award in 1930, wealth and fame were added to wealth and fame
already sufficiently large; when William Faulkner was chosen in 1949, most of
his novels had been long out of print in America.
Prizes come so rarely, and often seem to
be bestowed so capriciously, that few novelists build major hopes on them. They
build even fewer hopes on patronage:
Harriet Shaw Weaver, James Joyce's patroness, was probably the last of a breed
that, from Maecenas on, once intermittently flourished; state patronage--as
represented, for instance, by the annual awards of the Arts Council of Great
Britain--can provide little more than a temporary palliative for the novelist's
indigence. Novelists have more reasonable hopes from the world of the film or
the stage, where adaptations can be profitable and even salvatory. The long
struggles of the British novelist T.H. White came to an end when his Arthurian
sequence The
Once and Future King (1958) was translated into a stage
musical called Camelot, though, by
treating the lump sum paid to him as a single year's income instead of a reward
for decades of struggle, nearly all the windfall would have gone for taxes if
White had not taken his money into low-tax exile. Such writers as Graham Greene,
nearly all of whose novels have been filmed, must be tempted to regard mere book
sales as an inconsiderable aspect of the rewards of creative writing. There are
few novelists who have not received welcome and unexpected advances on film
options, and sometimes the hope of film adaptation has influenced the novelist's
style. In certain countries, such as Great Britain but not the United States,
television adaptation of published fiction is common, though it pays the author
less well than commercial cinema.
When a novelist becomes involved in
film-script writing--either in the adaptation of his own work or that of
others--the tendency is for him to become subtly corrupted by what seems to him
an easier as well as more lucrative technique than that of the novel. Most
novelists write dialogue with ease, and their contribution to a film is mostly
dialogue: the real problem in novel writing lies in the management of the récit.
A number of potentially fine novelists, like Terry
Southern and Frederic Raphael, have virtually abandoned the literary
craft because of their continued success with script writing. In 70-odd years
the British novelist Richard Hughes
produced only three novels, the excellence of which has been universally
recognized; fiction lovers have been deprived of more because of the claims of
the film world on Hughes's talent. This kind of situation finds no counterpart
in any other period of literary history, except perhaps in the Elizabethan, when
the commercial lure of the drama made some good poets write poor plays.
The majority of professional novelists
must look primarily to book sales for their income, and they must look
decreasingly to hardcover sales. The novel in its traditional format, firmly
stitched and sturdily clothbound, is bought either by libraries or by readers
who take fiction seriously enough to wish to acquire a novel as soon as it
appears: if they wait 12 months or so, they can buy the novel in paper covers
for less than its original price. This edition of a novel has become, for the
vast majority of fiction readers, the form in which they first meet it, and the
novelist who does not achieve paperback publication is missing a vast potential
audience. He may not repine at this, since the quantitative approach to literary
communication may safely be disregarded: the legend on a paperback cover--FIVE
MILLION COPIES SOLD--says nothing about the worth of the book within.
Nevertheless, the advance he will receive from his hardcover publisher is geared
to eventual paperback expectations, and the "package deal" has become
the rule in negotiations between publisher and author's agent. The agent,
incidentally, has become important to both publisher and author to an extent
that writers like Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson would, if resurrected, find
hard to understand. (see also paperback
book)
The novelist may reasonably expect to
augment his income through the sale of foreign rights in his work, though the
rewards accruing from translation
are always uncertain. The translator himself is usually a professional and
demands a reasonable reward for his labours, more indeed than the original
author may expect: the reputations of some translators are higher than those of
some authors, and even the translators' names may be better known. Moreover, the
author who earns most from publication in his own language will usually earn
most in translation, since it is the high initial home sales that attract
foreign publishers to a book. The more "literary" a novel is, the more
it exploits the resources of the author's own language, the less likely is it to
achieve either popularity at home or publication abroad. Best-selling novels
like Mario Puzo's Godfather (1969) or
Arthur Hailey's Airport (1968) are
easy to read and easy to translate, so they win all around. It occasionally
happens that an author is more popular abroad than he is at home: the
best-selling novels of the Scottish physician-novelist A.J.
Cronin are no longer highly regarded in England and America, as they were
in the 1930s and '40s, but they continued to sell by the million in the U.S.S.R.
several decades later. However, a novelist is wisest to expect most from his own
country and to regard foreign popularity as an inexplicable bonus.
As though his financial problems were
not enough, the novelist frequently has to encounter those dragons unleashed by
public morality or by the law. The struggles of Flaubert, Zola, and Joyce,
denounced for attempting to advance the frontiers of literary candour, are well
known and still vicariously painful, but lesser novelists, working in a more
permissive age, can record cognate agonies. Generally speaking, any novelist
writing after the publication in the 1960s of Hubert
Selby's Last
Exit to Brooklyn or Gore Vidal's Myra
Breckenridge can expect little objection, on the part of either publisher or
police, to language or subject matter totally unacceptable, under the obscenity
laws then operating, in 1922, when Ulysses
was first published. This is certainly true of America, if not of Ireland or
Malta. But many serious novelists fear an eventual reaction against literary
permissiveness as a result of the exploitation by cynical obscenity mongers or
hard-core pornographers of the existing liberal situation.
In some countries, particularly Great
Britain, the law of libel
presents insuperable problems to novelists who, innocent of libellous intent,
are nevertheless sometimes charged with defamation by persons who claim to be
the models for characters in works of fiction. Disclaimers to the effect that
"resemblances to real-life people are wholly coincidental" have no
validity in law, which upholds the right of a plaintiff to base his charge on
the corroboration of "reasonable people." Many such libel cases are
settled before they come to trial, and publishers will, for the sake of peace
and in the interests of economy, make a cash payment to the plaintiff without
considering the author's side. They will also, and herein lies the serious blow
to the author, withdraw copies of the allegedly offensive book and pulp the
balance of a whole edition. Novelists are seriously hampered in their endeavours
to show, in a traditional spirit of artistic honesty, corruption in public life;
they have to tread carefully even in depicting purely imaginary characters and
situations, since the chance collocation of a name, a profession, and a locality
may produce a libellous situation. (see also
English law)
It has been only in comparatively recent
times that the novel has been taken sufficiently seriously by critics for the
generation of aesthetic appraisal and the formulation of fictional theories. The
first critics of the novel developed their craft not in full-length books but in
reviews published in periodicals: much of this writing--in the late 18th and
early 19th centuries--was of an occasional nature, and not a little of it casual
and desultory; nor, at first, did critics of fiction find it easy to separate a
kind of moral judgment of the subject matter from an aesthetic judgment of the
style. Such fragmentary observations on the novel as those made by Dr. Johnson
in conversation or by Jane Austen in her letters, or, in France, by Gustave
Flaubert during the actual process of artistic gestation, have the charm and
freshness of insight rather than the weight of true aesthetic judgment. It is
perhaps not until the beginning of the 20th century, when Henry James wrote his
authoritative prefaces to his own collected novels, that a true criteriology of
fiction can be said to have come into existence. The academic study of the novel
presupposes some general body of theory, like that provided by Percy Lubbock's Craft
of Fiction (1921) or E.M. Forster's Aspects
of the Novel (1927) or the subsequent writings of the critics Edmund Wilson
and F.R. Leavis. Since World War II it may be said that university courses in
the evaluation of fiction have attained the dignity traditionally monopolized by
poetry and the drama. (see also literary
criticism)
A clear line should be drawn between the
craft of fiction criticism and the journeyman work of fiction reviewing. Reviews
are mainly intended to provide immediate information about new novels: they are
done quickly and are subject to the limitations of space; they not infrequently
make hasty judgments that are later regretted. The qualifications sought in a
reviewer are not formidable: smartness, panache, waspishness--qualities that
often draw the attention of the reader to the personality of the reviewer rather
than the work under review--will always be more attractive to
circulation-hunting editors than a less spectacular concern with balanced
judgment. A thoughtful editor will sometimes put the reviewing of novels into
the hands of a practicing novelist, who--knowing the labour that goes into even
the meanest book--will be inclined to sympathy more than to flamboyant
condemnation. The best critics of fiction are probably novelists manqués,
men who have attempted the art and, if not exactly failed, not succeeded as well
as they could have wished. Novelists who achieve very large success are possibly
not to be trusted as critics: obsessed by their own individual aims and
attainments, shorn of self-doubt by the literary world's acclaim or their
royalty statements, they bring to other men's novels a kind of magisterial
blindness.
Novelists can be elated by good reviews
and depressed by bad ones, but it is rare that a novelist's practice is much
affected by what he reads about himself in the literary columns. Genuine
criticism is a very different matter, and a writer's approach to his art can be
radically modified by the arguments and summations of a critic he respects or
fears. As the hen is unable to judge of the quality of the egg it lays, so the
novelist is rarely able to explain or evaluate his work. He relies on the
professional critic for the elucidation of the patterns in his novels, for an
account of their subliminal symbolism, for a reasoned exposition of their
stylistic faults. As for the novel reader, he will often learn enthusiasm for
particular novelists through the writings of critics rather than from direct
confrontation with the novels themselves. The essays in Edmund
Wilson's Axel's
Castle (1931) aroused an interest in the Symbolist movement
which the movement was not easily able to arouse by itself; the essay on Finnegans Wake, collected
in Wilson's Wound and the Bow (1941),
eased the way into a very difficult book in a manner that no grim work of solid
exegesis could have achieved. The essence of the finest criticism derives from
wisdom and humanity more than from mere expert knowledge. Great literature and
great criticism possess in common a sort of penumbra of wide but unsystematic
learning, a devotion to civilized values, an awareness of tradition, and a
willingness to rely occasionally on the irrational and intuitive.
All this probably means that the
criticism of fiction can never, despite the efforts of aestheticians schooled in
modern linguistics, become an exact science. A novel must be evaluated in terms
of a firmly held literary philosophy, but such a philosophy is, in the final
analysis, based on the irrational and subjective. If the major premises on which
F.R. Leavis bases his
judgments of George Eliot, Mark Twain, and D.H. Lawrence are accepted, then an
acceptance of the judgments themselves is inescapable. But many students of
fiction who are skeptical of Leavis will read him in order that judgments of
their own may emerge out of a purely negative rejection of his. In reading
criticism a kind of dialectic is involved, but no synthesis is ever final. The
process of revaluation goes on for ever. One of the sure tests of a novel's
worth is its capacity for engendering critical dialectic: no novel is beyond
criticism, but many are beneath it.
It is apparent that neither law nor
public morality nor the public's neglect nor the critic's scorn has ever
seriously deflected the dedicated novelist from his self-imposed task of
interpreting the real world or inventing alternative worlds. Statistics since
World War II have shown a steady increase in the number of novels published
annually, and beneath the iceberg tip of published fiction lies a submarine
Everest of unpublished work. It has been said that every person has at least one
novel in him, and the near-universal literacy of the West has produced dreams of
authorship in social ranks traditionally deprived of literature. Some of these
dreams come true, and taxi drivers, pugilists, criminals, and film stars have
competed, often successfully, in a field that once belonged to professional
writers alone. It is significant that the amateur who dreams of literary success
almost invariably chooses the novel, not the poem, essay, or autobiography.
Fiction requires no special training and can be readable, even absorbing, when
it breaks the most elementary rules of style. It tolerates a literary
incompetence unthinkable in the poem. If all professional novelists withdrew,
the form would not languish: amateurs would fill the market with first and only
novels, all of which would find readership.
But the future of any art lies with its
professionals. Here a distinction has to be made between the Joyces, Henry
Jameses, and Conrads on the one hand, and the more ephemeral Mickey Spillanes,
Harold Robbinses, and Irving Wallaces on the other. Of the skill of the latter
class of novelists there can be no doubt, but it is a skill employed for limited
ends, chiefly the making of money, and through it the novel can never advance as
art. The literary professionals, however, are dedicated to the discovery of new
means of expressing, through the experiential immediacies that are the very
stuff of fiction, the nature of man and society. In the symbiosis of publishing,
the best-seller will probably continue to finance genuine fictional art. Despite
the competition from other art media, and the agonies and the indigence, there
are indications that the serious novel will flourish in the future.
It will flourish because it is the one
literary form capable of absorbing all the others. The technique of the stage
drama or the film can be employed in the novel (as in Ulysses and Giles Goat-Boy),
as can the devices of poetry (as in Philip Toynbee's Pantaloon and the novels of Wilson Harris and Janet Frame). In
France, as Michel Butor has pointed out, the new novel is increasingly
performing some of the tasks of the old essay; in America, as Capote's In
Cold Blood and Mailer's Armies of the
Night have shown, the documentary report can gain strength from its
presentation as fictional narrative. There are few limits on what the novel can
do, there are many experimental paths still to be trod, and there is never any
shortage of subject matter.
For all this, periods of decline and
inanition may be expected, though not everywhere at once. The strength of the
American novel in the period after World War II had something to do with the
national atmosphere of breakdown and change: political and social urgencies
promoted a quality of urgency in the works of such writers as Mailer, Bellow,
Ellison, Heller, and Philip Roth. In the same period, Britain, having shed its
empire and erected a welfare state, robbed its novelists of anything larger to
write about than temporary indentations in the class system, suburban adultery,
and manners. An achieved or static society does not easily produce great art.
France, which has known much social and ideological turmoil, has generated a new
aesthetic of the novel as well as a philosophy that, as Sartre and Camus have
shown, is very suitable for fictional expression. A state on which intellectual
quietism or a political philosophy of art is imposed by the ruling party can, as
the Soviet Union and China show, succeed only in thwarting literary greatness,
but the examples of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn are reminders that repression
can, with rare artistic spirits, act as an agonizing stimulus.
Every art in every country is subject to
a cyclical process; during a period of decline it is necessary to keep the
communication lines open, producing minor art so that it may some day,
unexpectedly, turn into major art. Wherever the novel seems to be dying it is
probably settling into sleep; elsewhere it will be alive and vigorous enough. It
is important to believe that the novel has a future, though not everywhere at
once.
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