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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 sw |
