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Introduction
I. THE RABBIT HOLE
‘It is all true. A French student, his name was Gastoscha... with a trim black goatee, with patent leather shoes... Let lightning strike me if it isn’t true! How he loved me... Oh, how he did love me.’
Nastiah, Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths Act III (1902)
Nastiah is always reading novels. Threadbare, hungry, twenty-four, her nose (red and running) buried in a book, she carries a mop, or she heats the frugal meal, without looking at the floor she dabs or the pan she shuffles on the fire. She tends the samovar, and she is used and abused by the vagabonds, underdogs and wastrels in her cellar world. The baron fallen on hard times lives in her ‘like a maggot in an apple’. ‘Some apple!’ says the Baron. She fights back, but always from her book. Nastiah believes her book, she recites the love scenes, the disappointments and suicides, from memory, and she weeps, how she weeps for the well-heeled heartbreaks of fiction. She has no tears for herself or for her sort, the dregs of mankind, only for star-crossed lovers from another world.
No wonder Oliver Goldsmith wrote to his brother, ‘Above all things let [my young nephew] never touch a romance or a novel; these paint beauty in colours more charming than nature; and describe happiness that man never tastes. How delusive, how destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss.’ How many readers live in the expectation of a quality of love or passion learned from books, and thus misvalue or displace ‘the little good which fortune has mixed in our cup, by expecting more than she ever gave’. It is a truth universally acknowledged, even in the novels themselves. We need only adduce the fiction-deceived characters of Don Quixote, Catherine Morland, Julian Sorel, Madame Bovary to prove Goldsmith’s point.
There is a period early in the lives of most readers in which stories possess this absorbing reality, this compelling presence. We subject ourselves, we surrender hungrily and gratefully to them, we resent interruptions even for meals and bedtime; we sit or lie in the most unlikely positions for hours and never get a crick or a cramp. As soon as we finish one Franklin W. Dixon, L.M. Montgomery, C.S. Forester or Rider Haggard we are compelled to start another: we want to remain in those other worlds of adventures, with their vivid textures, smells, colours and voices, and we don’t want the books to end. Novels provide a place we can escape to and move about in, where we can be profoundly engaged and yet quite invisible. ‘How fondly do we recur, in memory, to those enchanted days of our boyhood when we first learned to grow serious over Robinson Crusoe! " when we first found the spirit of wild adventure enkindling within us...’ Once we have lived it, we put the book aside. The disposability of much fiction tells us something: that novels are for the most part consumables which we use and discard. They leave a silt of vicarious experiences, memories of excitement and pleasure, once the pulse has settled back to normal.
But the spell cast by a durable novel, the quickening it provides not only the first but the second and third time we read it, is the result of more than the paced suspense and resolution of a ‘ripping good yarn’ or an irresistible character whose fate becomes our fate: it has to do with the varying rhythms of the writing, the sustained magicking that delivers the points of climax and sustains us in the spaces between them. When you come to re-read certain passages, you suddenly remember how at one time they touched you to the quick.
‘Welcome, white men from the stars,' he said; 'this is a different sight from what your eyes gazed on by the light of last night's moon, but it is not so good a sight. Girls are pleasant, and were it not for such as these' (and he pointed round him) 'we should none of us be here to-day; but men are better. Kisses and the tender words of women are sweet, but the sound of the clashing of men's spears, and the smell of men's blood, are sweeter far! Would ye have wives from among our people, white men? If so, choose the fairest here, and ye shall have them, as many as ye will;' and he paused for an answer.
We hold our breath and wait for someone to break the silence. Such voices clear a space for the not too correct or ironical grown-up as well as for the child, despite their absurdities and posturings which are no greater than those that we encounter, as children or adults, in the turmoil of J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings with its bizarre names and creatures, or in the potent nostalgia of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, or in Philip Pullman’s resourcefully synthetic Dark Materials.
Until we were ten or eleven, each night at bedtime my parents took it in turns to read to my brother and me. I lay with my head propped on my hand and watched the reader but saw the scenes unfold before me. Growing up in Mexico, I recall the excitement in our house when we received every few months a brown-wrapped parcel tied up with string from a bookshop in London called Foyles. My father ordered for us the books that he had loved as a boy, especially those of G.A. Henty. Henty, a journalist like Kipling, was with the British army in the Crimea, a witness to Garibaldi’s struggle in Italy, to the effects of the Franco-Prussian war in Paris; he was in Spain with the Carlists, and he was present when they opened the Suez Canal. As a member of the Prince of Wales’s party he toured India, and he visited the California gold fields. He outlived Queen Victoria by one year. He was regarded as a spell-binding story-teller, dictating his later books (there are said to be 144 in total) to a secretary as he paced back and forth, his voluminous white beard pressed into his chest.
At the heart of his most memorable books is a young, apparently unexceptional protagonist who gets immersed in momentous events that test and prove his mettle. Henty laboriously teaches sound, conservative history, with studied accuracy in drawing battle scenes, places and events and with a settled, unquestioning sense of Christian and imperial verities. Henty is now (for the most part) a book collectors’ enthusiasm. The early bindings of those books for lads are bright and durable, embossed and gilded with images and textures. Each book as an object was a material delight to possess: after it was read, it remained decorative.
The Henty I loved best, and read to myself after it had been read aloud to me, was In the Reign of Terror, subtitled The Adventures of a Westminster Boy. It is prefaced with a letter to ‘My Dear Lads’: ‘My object has been rather to tell you a tale of interest than to impart historical knowledge, for the facts of the dreadful time when “the terror” reigned supreme in France are well known to all educated lads.’ He promises his account is factually correct ‘except that the Noyades at Nantes did not take place until a somewhat later period than is here assigned to them’. And after this caution, we plunge in.
The book does what many English novels do. It claims the authority of historical and factual accuracy. It is not just fiction. It foregrounds an everyman, or everyboy, hero. It addresses a specific readership, in this case the public school boy, and the social class both of its author and of his target reader are aspects of the conception and form of the book, as well as its design and production. It is, in every sense, tailored to a market, and, crude and calculating as the book appears to me today, it obviously achieved its goal. Lord Peter Wimsey declares that he ‘never read much except Henty and Fenimore Cooper at school’. He was not alone. In 1900 the Library Journal declared that when boys discovered Henty, they lost interest in all other authors.
A Henty novel was a kind of rabbit hole. It led into adventure, and also into serious emotions. For raw-hearted Nastiah, for the well-heeled Victorian boy, for the young Mexican infatuated with the idea of Europe, a novel was a means to an end. ‘The main thing is to tell a story./It is almost/very important,’ says Frank O’Hara. The excitement of reading begins in the paradoxical double action of escape and engagement; reading conventional novels takes us away from where we are and at the same time takes us into a realm which is shaped and whole, with beginnings, middles and ends. It is in the building to climaxes and resolutions that the novel engrosses us. And as our taste changes and we look for more subtle and complex novels, books that make more demands on their author and reader, so the character of the climaxes we are seeking changes. Our acquired habits seek, stage by stage, different or more complex and sophisticated satisfactions: a love of experience transformed, that transformation being precisely the element of form that a writer brings out of, or imposes upon, experience. Climaxes, epiphanies, metamorphoses of character, style or plot, there always are. It is in the nature of story-telling, from the fairy-tale and ballad to Finnegans Wake, that there should be: points of change, clarification and of release, either effected or deferred.
II. CHRONOLOGY AND CANON
Once we know where and how the magic happens, chances are we will not return to a book, at least not before we are changed by time, and the demands we make are different from those of a first-time reader. Readers grow, and good authors like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens grow with them. We can measure ourselves against Dickens, as we move on from Scrooge, Pip and Pickwick to progress through Bleak House and the more complex novels, taking a different kind of pleasure, yet without ever repenting the early enthusiasms: those early books too grow with us in complexity and suggestion. Other titles we leave ruefully behind. Certainly we less often experience in adult reading, so jaded and restive, so exacting do we become, the exhilaration of our early reading, the way it dissolved time and space, and we emerged from an engaging book reluctantly, as from a dream. There are not many novels that we re-read, that become a living part of our memory and affect the way we hear, speak, see, feel and act. It is those few novels and their authors that this book considers, alongside those others that provide them with sources and contexts, and those that imitate and cannibalise them.
Most readers come to fiction for entertainment and choose genres that suit their taste. Horror, gothic, science fiction: they like a framework of conventions for the surprises, coincidences, variations which provide their pleasure. The moralist seeks instruction of a kind that confirms and strengthens moral categories; the romantic seeks abundance of emotion and its happy or sorrowful satisfaction; the reader with erotic proclivities seeks to satisfy through language a physiological itch. Novelists know this and can write accordingly, providing a product, responding to a market. Very few novels deliver the world to us in ways we do not anticipate and yet which, once we ‘take delivery’, we recognise as complete and sufficient and, in some way, necessary. The language of such books engages reality in ways which renew a sense of the world. Thus Bunyan and the best of Defoe, the amazing Fielding and the irresistibly wheedling Sterne; thus Richardson and Austen, Jane and Charlotte Brontë, Mary Gaskell and Dickens, thus Melville, Conrad and Ford, thus Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence. And William Faulkner. And we are inevitably affected by the fiction of other languages: Stendhal, Flaubert and Kafka, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Proust and Musil. There are the giants of form, there are the exquisites of style, and then that category of writers who know how to create the illusion of truth through fiction, who make the lie come alive and include us.
An approximate time-line governs the structure of the first half of this book. And, inevitably, a sense of canon, though I hope not a closed one, governs my approach. Critics have done much to discredit the traditional canon and to undermine the value of canons tout court; if we believe the theorists of post-modernism, we live in uncanonical age. The emancipation such critics proclaim is a narrower slavery than the one from which it delivers us. It makes dialogue between readers almost impossible because it deprives them of common points of reference and definition. This book proceeds from a respect for, a love of, the canon, a canon which expands, alters and adjusts, which is not ever stable, and its very instability precludes the rhetoric of formal ‘evolution’ which bedevils earlier canonical criticism, the kind that takes change and development always to be progressive, assimilative and linear. The novel as a form does not grow like a tree but alters like a life in relation to changing languages, histories and geographies.
In writing what attempts to be, in effect, a life of the novel, it makes sense as in any biography to concentrate on those events that shape and distort the form. We will need to find an approximate birthplace for the English novel, and parents and godparents both in Britain and abroad. We will pass as lightly as we can over the longueurs which can last for decades, in which nothing much changes. And then abruptly the novel takes a detour and emerges in quite other shapes. And because the novel has been declared dead on so many occasions, we will attend its funeral, the way Tom Sawyer attended his, and follow it into its volatile afterlifes.
Every committed novelist has a sense of canon and of chronology, and for each the sense of chronology will differ, each has a personal ‘culture’ that informs the imagination. Chronology we will use to describe the order of a novelist’s own reading " Kipling before Defoe, or Emily Brontë before Jane Austen. That chronology tells us about the writer’s imagination, the patterns of its development, what it has chanced upon and what it has urgently sought out and required. Also, what gaps exist in it. Canon, on the other hand, entails the historical order of the principal works read or neglected. It is in that respect objective, with authors, titles and dates of publication, histories of reception, the fever charts of sales marking success and failure over time.
Without a sense of canon, novel readers lose their bearings. The ‘new’ is everywhere, and there is little pressure on us to hear, regard or acknowledge antecedents, the very things out of which the apparently new derives. But if we miss the play of echoes on which some of the most powerful effects of fiction are based, we lose essential qualities in the novel itself. Dickens, for example, was steeped in the King James Bible and phrases, images and cadences call to memory pertinent Biblical passages. If we do not hear them, we miss meaning and form. Melville’s Moby Dick can hardly be read without a sense of the Bible, and a vital memory of Shakespeare, who informs the rhythm and movement of the prose. Critics speak of intertextuality, the harmonies and dissonances that exist between books and passages. Joyce’s Ulysses is enriched and much more accessible for a reader who knows the Odyssey and is not entirely unfamiliar with English prose from Middle English to 16 June 1904. In a more obvious sense, it is hard to understand Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea without a knowledge of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot without Madame Bovary and the story ‘A Simple Heart’ in particular, or J.M. Coetzee’s Foe in the absence of Robinson Crusoe. The connections between writers, between fictional worlds, are important to us as readers; if we regard them as expendable, a zone reserved exclusively for high-brow critics and specialists, we impoverish ourselves.
III. RE-INVENTING THE GENERAL READER
‘Live always in the best company when you read.’
Sydney Smith
In South Wind Mr Heard declares: ‘We are rearing up a brood of crafty egoists, a generation whose earliest recollections are those of getting something for nothing from the state.’ Theirs was, and is, a widening culture of contempt for things which require effort to create and which make demands on those who want to understand them. It is this culture that impatiently dismisses hard books and long books, declaring Dickens a caricaturist whose radical vision serves the status quo, Kipling a mere imperialist, and Conrad a racist. Joyce’s Ulysses is ‘grossly over-rated’, declare some Irish novelists weary of the critical insistence on Joyce and the inevitable yardstick he represents. ‘Ulysses could have done with a good editor,’ Roddy Doyle told a pre-Bloomsday audience in New York in 2004. ‘You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top ten books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.’ Discredit not only the work, but those who purport to enjoy it... The best Irish writer, according to Doyle, is not Joyce but Jennifer Johnston, author of The Captains and the Kings.
One can understand a healthy impatience with the Joyce tourist industry in Dublin. On the centenary of Bloomsday in 2004 the Irish government, which supported half a year of festivities, contributed to a culminating celebration, ‘Bloom’s breakfast’. Ten thousand people were to convene in O’Connell Street to consume ‘fried offal and mutton kidneys washed down with Guinness’. Another sponsor of the feast was Dennys Sausages, advertised by Joyce in his book. A breakfast sponsored by Guinness was held across town. Leopold Bloom was certainly partial to kidneys, and to offal. But such celebrations tend to stick in the craw of Dubliners weary of their national writer. ‘I declare to god, if I hear that name Joyce one more time I will surely froth at the gob,’ an exasperated Flann O'Brien exclaimed, at a time when the Joyce Industry was much less vigorous than it is today. O’Brien was shaped and distorted by Joyce. In his novel Dalkey Archive he depicts an aging Joyce who never actually wrote any of his books. Yet he could not emancipate himself from so powerful an antecedent who had defined meticulously and comprehensively the matter of Ireland. He thought Joyce was a kind of devil and could not quite restrain himself from devil worship. O’Brien’s resistance is committed, informed and artistic. Roddy Doyle’s is commercial, spoken by a modern market leader, and not without a degree of hubris. The newspaper article reporting his New York lecture concludes with a pair of statistics: ‘Online bookseller Amazon.co.uk has sold 97,107 copies of Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and 2,374 copies of James Joyce's Ulysses.’ What more proof does the crafty egoist need?
We cannot answer a culture of contempt with contempt: there is much to be said, if the king is naked in his new robes, for a child to point and say so. But when the king is brilliantly costumed and the child points, it’s probably best to try and reason with him. He should, first, be assured that what a reader actually does get from Joyce’s Ulysses is pleasure, and this pleasure is not based on academic training or exegetics. We learn to read with our ears as well as our eyes and gradually draw sense in all its diversity from the book. The word Doyle and others would balk at is ‘gradually’, as though they have better things to do with their time, or better ways of wasting it. Those who take abiding pleasure in fiction are not obsessed with denouements and everafters.
Readers, book by book, build up for themselves, the way a novelist does, a chronology. Reading is a cumulative act, becoming creative, adding skills as it goes. The activity is not specialised but open to all. To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but may spend two or three years on one book (as I did on The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann), read only portions of another, devour a third at a single sitting... The reading we do for school is different from the reading we do for ourselves: geared to ‘course outcomes’, the former entails not only reading but reading about, and the novel is stunned like a giant creature in an abattoir while the class crawls all over it, prodding and appraising. If it survives at all, it is maimed and lame, no longer a text but a pretext.
The literary theorist and the ‘crafty egotist’ who abandons canonicity altogether (these are the real academics, though they pretend to belong to the crowd), who seek to emancipate us as readers from the trammels of the past, are proposing something quite different from the deliberate, creative discontinuity of Modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. In pre-Modernist times new writing, the kind that made a difference and effected changes in taste and reading habits, rose like a tide and covered older landmarks, then withdrew and they emerged again, changed and enhanced. Now it can seem that the waves burst like tsunamis over what was there before and wash it away. The urgent demand for ‘originality’, not so much of form as of story and teller; the personalisation of the product so that we know rather too much about the writer, rather too little about the book; the violence of accolades and of scrutinies; and the speed with which new readers are allowed, or empowered, or compelled to forget the informing tradition (as if ignorant originality was possible) are features of an economy of ‘disposable’ with in-built obsolescence in the arts quite as much as in white goods. The modern fiction industry is an industry like any other. Front list is what matters. We must never lose sight of the commercial aspirations of the publisher or, especially after the phenomenal success of Sir Walter Scott, of the novelist.
IV. DEATHS AND DEFINITIONS
novellus -a -um (diminutive of novus): new, young; transferred to mean fresh, unfamiliar
In 1911 the San Francisco writer and adventurer Ambrose Bierce published The Devil’s Dictionary. With the exasperated impatience of a busy journalist he defined the word
Novel, n. A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before. To the romance the novel is what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle, probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes as he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary art are imagination, imagination and imagination. The art of writing novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it is new. Peace to its ashes " some of which have a large sale.
His account is at once peremptory and comprehensive. In a way it is more useful, in what it says about the problems of narrative, and in its response to the Russian novels which were then decisively taking Europe and America by storm, than the current Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition of the form, which it calls a genre:
A fictitious prose narrative or tale of considerable length (now usu. one long enough to fill one or more volumes), esp. & orig. (frequently contrasted with romance) representing character and action with some degree of realism; a volume containing such a narrative.
As soon as that ‘harmless drudge’ the lexicographer has committed his definition to paper we begin, in defence of the form itself, to interrogate him. The novel cannot be so succinctly encompassed. Yet we will not be able to proceed with this book unless we agree to share, at least for the book’s duration, a common terminology with agreed meanings. Our terms are tentative, not restrictive. Our sense of ‘rules’ will rest on the ‘common law’ principle, that novels from Euphues to Christie Malry’s Own Double-entry have created the expanding critical space in which they exist and where they are to be read and judged, not statutory laws that stem from Aristotle. ‘Should’ and ‘must’ knock the life out of creative and readerly imagination.
The word ‘novelist’ has lived through a variety of meanings, some of them contradictory. In the late sixteenth century it meant ‘an innovator’, and it retained this meaning even in the mid-seventeenth century when it also came to mean ‘a novice’, someone without experience. Novelist: innovator and an innocent at once. (The word ‘original’ underwent its transformation at roughly the this period, from meaning something rooted in the past, attesting to its origins and precedents, to something self-originating, unprecedented.) While novelist meant innovator and novice, it also came to mean (with a pejorative inflection) ‘newsmonger’. Finally, in the late eighteenth century it acquired the meaning we apply, ‘a writer of novels’, retaining some if its earlier shadings of sense, dark and light.
A sense of newness and renewal is included in the word ‘novel’ itself, deriving as it does from the Latin novus, but in diminutive form. In late Middle English and up to the eighteenth century it meant something new, and also a piece of news. Its literary application derives from the Italian novella, diminutive still, the short tales or fictional stories that comprise a larger work, the chapters of Boccaccio’s Decameron for example (early attestation, 1566). By 1643 the sense II.3 given by the OED was established: ‘A fictitious prose narrative or tale’ etc. A century later it stood proudly with the definite article as the novel: the eighteenth century turned it, along with everything else, lapidary and categorical.
The OED alerts us to the fact that a novel is not the same thing as a romance. Yet the French word for novel is roman (the French nouvelle is a novelette or novella, closer to the original Italian meaning). Roman attests to the genre's source (at least in France) less in news and circumstantial reports, more in the verse and prose romances of the mediaeval and renaissance traditions, with distinct dynamics and readerships. The difference between novel and roman signals a cultural difference, between English pragmatism and a more abstracting approach on the Continent. Certainly, when English novels began to be composed in earnest, they were different in nature from the Continental novels of the same period.
In German, too, a novel is a Roman and there are various genre in German and French, several of which have entered our critical language: the psychological novel dealing with a character’s formative years is der Bildungsroman or development novel; a novel with a purpose is a Tendenzroman; the novella or novelette is die Novelle. A roman á clef (‘novel with a key’) includes ‘real’ characters concealed behind fictional names and lightly fictionalised incidents.
The distinction between novel and romance is a useful one, but hard to sustain especially when the novel is first taking form. The English romance is, generally, purely fictional in terms of story, and most are rooted in previous romances. Literature out of literature: Ford Madox Ford: distinguishes between writers who display artistry and those who show virtuosity. The latter is generally literature derived earlier books, a literature for bookish folk. In crucial respects a virtuoso is a performer, playing music not of his own invention. For Ford it is the artist, not the virtuoso, that matters in the long term, whatever the immediate pleasures of the virtuoso’s performance might prove to be.
Romance is more or less pure fiction, and it is usually rooted in prior fictions, many of them legends and myths which, even forty years ago, one might have said are ‘universally known’. The best-selling book of Elizabethan times and through the first half of the reign of James I was a romance (with a complicated textual history) entitled Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney, a mixture of romantic stories, poetic interludes, allegory and moral edification. I cannot resist considering it among the prototypes for the English novel, Continental though it is in allegiance and tone, and even though it hardly gets off the ground for more than a few pages at a time. The Puritans had little time for Sidney; but the great Puritan romance, categorised as a novel, is Pilgrim's Progress, deeply allegorical and formally anomalous in its day, seeming to derive its method and form from an earlier century yet able to serve in a very compelling and humanising way the Puritan interest.
Arcadia and Pilgrim’s Progress are examples of wholly fictional works that portray social and moral types whose trials (most fiction is a tale of trial, many novels use the rhetoric and even the forms of gathering and deploying evidence and inviting judgment) are 'everyman's' trials and whose foes are embodiments of the moral forces ranged against 'us'. Such works presume upon a value system " religious belief, social class, and the like " shared between the reader and the author. Since World War II no writer of English fiction has been able to presume upon such a shared culture.
The OED insists that a novel is ‘a fictitious prose narrative or tale’. Are we happy with any of these terms? Why ‘fictitious’, in the first place? Is Dickens’s London or Joyce’s Dublin fictitious? And beyond place, did not Defoe go out of his way to insist upon the factuality of his stories, from Journal of the Plague Year, an enthralling piece of journalism with some claims to being a novel, to Robinson Crusoe, based on the life of a real person, to Moll Flanders with her plausible finances? His readers required fact and he supplied it, or a convincing imitation of it. Through the eighteenth century it was conventional to affirm the factuality of a story, and this insistence was a wonderful starting-point for parody for Fielding, Sterne, Smollett and others. In modern times there are celebrated instances of novelisations of true stories, notably Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences, which he described as a ‘non-fiction novel’, Thomas Kenealley’s Schindler’s Ark with its elaborate strategies of credibility, and even books that fuse fiction and borrowed biography and poetry (in translation) like D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel. As soon as identifiably historical elements combine with invention in a novel, it is hard for a reader not to judge the work in terms of its responsibility to the facts it is fictionalising, a different kind of accountability from the more usual requirements of consistency, coherence and plausibility. The claim to historical veracity takes priority over the claim of fictionality. Capote’s book is a powerful vindication of a very difficult genre.
Do we accept the OED command that a novel need be written in prose? I would place Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage in the zone of the epistolary novel: it is complex in all the ways that a novel is, with an added dimension in the language of delivery: thrift of effect, unmediated tones of voice, a wit that inheres in the characters and their languid moods, their flickering passions. Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse shunned prose, and his example and stanza form were adapted by the Indian poet and novelist Vikram Seth in his verse novel The Golden Gate. Les Murray, the Australian poet, produced a remarkable picaresque verse novel entitled Fredy Neptune. More recently the American Brad Leithauser has published Darlington’s Fall, formally flexible and thrifty. The Canadian poet Anne Carson calls her Autobiography of Red a novel in verse, and the English poet Craig Raine describes his long sequence of poems History: the Home Movie in similar terms, but we will want to discriminate between works which really are novels in verse, and those which sport the term without earning it.
The OED demands that the novel be a ‘narrative or tale’. A story with a beginning, middle and end (not necessarily organised in that order). This is the least contestable of the terms proposed, yet even here we might cavil. In what useful sense can we say that Finnegans Wake has a narrative, or the ‘libidinal’ fiction of Hélène Cixous? Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon, in which all the tenses are unrealised and nothing quite happens, follows on a narrative of disappointment, but the novel itself defers narrative. Samuel Beckett’s novels cannot usefully be said to tell stories either.
And what does the dictionary mean when it says a novel must be ‘of considerable length’? How long is a piece of string? Bruce Chatwin’s Utz weighs in at a mere ninety six pages, while Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu exceeds a million words. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw count as novels, though they are tiny compared with these writers’ larger works. Some of the short stories of Katherine Mansfield have the matter, character and incident we look for in novels, for example ‘At the Bay’.
In the definition, what is meant by ‘characters and actions representative of real life’? The lexicographer must be aware, assuming he researched ‘c’ as well as ‘n’, that the word ‘character’ once meant ‘types’ and now is applied to individuals. From ancient times, when Theophrastus wrote his book of ethical characters, to the heyday of the English and French ‘characters’ of Joseph Hall, Sir Thomas Overbury and Nicolas Breton, culminating in John Earle’s Microcosmographie or A Piece of the World Discovered: essays and characters (1628). It is these characters that people the early drama and make their appearances in Bunyan and even in Fielding: representing virtues and vices, their being is entirely compassed in their moral and ethical nature. Such characters persist in fiction: we find them in Dickens, Eliot, Lawrence, Greene and Cather. And actions? Can aftermath or inaction count as action, can the refusal to act be action? Is disconnected action " the broken narratives of Burroughs, for example, action? What is meant by representative: typical? If so, many novel genres (fantasy, science fiction, etc) are excluded from the definition. Real life is a vexed term, philosophically begging many questions. And ‘portrayed in a plot’ detains us: are there other forms of portrayal? What is a plot? How does a plot differ from a narrative? Are they synonymous or does 'plot' describe an aspect of form?
With all these misgivings, is there anything to be done to translate the OED definition into terms which include the reality of the novel today? I hope we can agree that a novel is a narrative, generally in prose, certainly longer than a short story, probably (though not invariably) more than 20,000 words in length, often combining a number of stories, incorporating elements of invention, in which characters, individuals or voices are presented in relation to their worlds in a language appropriate to the stories and characters. Or is this definition too open-ended? Does it include things which are definitely not novels? Does it leave sufficient space for the functioning of a radical imagination? We must guard against a definition which precludes growth and change. A major new novel, one that does something new with the form of fiction, whether it is Conrad’s Nostromo or Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Proust’s A la recherche, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Kafka’s The Trial or Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, takes the novel as a form in a new direction. The novel form is always open: it takes in or takes on invention like no other literary form. The distance, generically, between Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Fielding's Tom Jones and Richardson's Clarissa is vast, though all are contemporaries and knew one another’s work; indeed Fielding’s fiction grew strong on predatory parody of Richardson. The generic distance between a book by Agatha Christie, Ivy Compton Burnett and Muriel Spark is considerable; or between Stephen King, William Burroughs and James Baldwin. The distance is reflected in each writer’s sense of character, fact and invention, the relationship of language to the things and actions it names, in style, structure and narrative voice. Yet each of these writers is a novelist and, when their works are juxtaposed, they illuminate one another.
V. THE MODERN NOVEL
Ouch. The leanto is falling over in the
firs, and there is another fatter spy here. They
didn’t tell me they sent
him. Well, that takes care
of him, boy were those huskies hungry.
from Frank O’Hara, ‘Fantasy’
Over the past century something profound happened to the novel and to poetry, something which the great Hungarian critic Georg Lúkacs writing in 1920, just after the Great War and before he became a Marxist, when the project of Modernism was getting under way, foresaw in The Theory of the Novel. The old forms could no longer hold; a writer alive to his time could no longer presume upon a common view of the world, shared values, or the kinds of relative stability which make the fiction of the nineteenth century so various and yet so ‘transferable’, so that some of the great Russian, French and German writers existed in English with almost native valency, and some English and American writers survived largely intact crossing the Channel or the Atlantic to the Continent and its languages. Lúkacs writes:
A totality that can be simply accepted is no longer given to the forms of art: therefore they must either narrow down and volatilise whatever has to be given form to the point where they can encompass it, or else they must show polemically the impossibility of achieving their necessary object and the inner nullity of their own means. And in this case they carry the fragmentary nature of the world’s structure into the world of forms.
He expresses, early in the day, the causes and formal consequences of Modernism. His modern story teller is ‘self-conscious’, to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase, not ‘natural’. It is hard for a modern story teller to be ‘natural’, because the authoritative voice that speaks to the reader effortlessly, is untenable and, if the novelist needs such a narrator, must contrive it. Writer and reader fell from grace, or were stripped of their native innocence, long ago.
Experiment can at first seem traditional and effortless. E.M. Forster understood the situation of the modern novelist and appreciated what the fall from grace entailed. He defined it as a kind of imperative, the modern imperative of irony, the ironic stance, the distance the writer creates between the saying and the thing said.
The writer’s irony is a negative mysticism to be found in times without a god. It is an attitude of docta ignorantia towards meaning, a portrayal of the kindly and malicious workings of the demons, a refusal to comprehend more than the mere fact of these workings; and in it there is the deep certainty, expressible only by form-giving, that through not-desiring-to-know and not-being-able-to-know he has truly encountered, glimpsed and grasped the ultimate, true substance, the present, non-existent God. This is why irony is the objectivity of the novel.’
That phrase, ‘a refusal to comprehend’, describes the unreliable narrator, the absent narrator; it is deliberate and artful. When Forster speaks of irony as ‘the objectivity of the novel’;, he is saying two things: that irony gives the author a purchase on his subject and subject-matter; he is able to hold it at a distance, or to push it back to a distance when it threatens to become too serious, too sincere, too conclusive in effect, in other words, to unbalance the structure of the narrative. It is the author’s way of keeping outside the narrative, to manipulate without being engulfed in the process of the story. In a different sense from, for example, Tolstoy or Thackeray, with their habits of direct address and their patent understanding of what they have created, the stand outside and occupy a place analogous to that of the reader. They are very close to us, beside us rather than above.
Forster describes ‘the ingredients of fiction’ as ‘human beings, time, and space’ He omits a chief ingredient in the modern novel, this curious, variously ironic perspective. It is here in particular that the art of the novel can to be explored. Ford Madox Ford distinguishes between artistry and virtuosity. Virtuosity describes the skills of a novelist whose writing grows out of other books, a literature for bookish folk. For Ford the primary artistry is in the creating and sustaining of a consistent, credible and yet living perspective. This is not necessarily a voice or a single point of view: it can be a subtle orchestration appropriate to the story being told in terms of the arrangement of the plot, the proportions and pace of the telling, and the singleness of the final effect. In the novel, ‘Unity, totality of effect, is impossible,’ says Ambrose Bierce. It is precisely this impossible that the functioning novel sets out to achieve. It is impossible not to observe and appraise the changing rhythms of the prose; the development of images, symbols and structures of recurrence; the way the chapters break, and the paragraphs " stanzas? cantos? " and to consider how the book was composed, because methods of composition (dictation, typewriter, word processor, biro, cut-up) affect form and structure.
And the plot? Forster says that a statement such as, ‘The king died, the queen died’, is a rudimentary story whereas, ‘The king died, then the queen died of grief’, is the beginning of a plot because it includes a sense of connection and motive. Working on a larger canvas, we might say that story is the sequence of events in time and plot is the reordering of those events for the telling, in order to bring out of the ‘objective’ subject matter the true subject of the novel, placing the emphases, drawing the parallels and paradoxes. If, in the absence of Julian Barnes, we were straightforwardly to tell the story of Flaubert's Parrot, we would say that it is about a man who is doing his utmost to distract himself from his wife's infidelity and death. But at no point does the novel tell the story in that form. The plot evades the story, and that is what the novel is about. That is its subject. In ‘Burnt Norton’ T.S. Eliot speaks of man's flitting about between tasks and pleasures: 'distracted from distraction by distraction'. Plot can be a deliberate distraction from story. The reader is engaged in the interplay between two forms of narrative, two patterns of notation. We can imagine it as two lines of musical notation which create harmonies and dissonances. Many modern and some earlier novels are about this ironic distance between the telling and the thing told.
Once the story is settled upon, the novelist has a multitude of formal calculations and choices to make. They may not present themselves in this form to the writer, but whether consciously taken or instinctively used, they are choices, and the rightness of them, more than the details of the story told, is what engages and detains the reader. The more aware we, as readers, become of what those choices are, of what they mean for the development of a novel, the more likely we are to read with pleasure and appraise with fairness. The best novels take calculated and uncalculated risks. The intense pleasure of reading is often, or usually, the excitement of a risk in style, plot, character, narrative voice, successfully taken.
The aspects of the lives of novelists that I intend to tell are those that cast light on the their work. Origins are always important, what tipped a man or woman into writing, how they got into or out of Grub Street. There are, too, metonymic anecdotes which seem to summarise a writer. The handsome youth John Gray produced a novel entitled Park, set in a future in which a number of satirical reversals, ethnic and political, have occurred. It was said that John Gray was the prototype for Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and that Wilde admired the author if not his writing: the young man had ‘a promising career behind him,’ Wilde is said to have said. True or half true, such anecdotes catch a tone and cast a light on a milieu. In the case of Gray himself, they also mask a personal tragedy of unfulfilment.
Ford Madox Ford prefers, as our sherpas up Parnassus, not the learned, the expert, the theorist, but the ‘artist-practitioners’, ‘men and women who love their arts as they practice them’. These are people who feel ‘hot love’ for the books they advocate. The forms that their advocacy takes also illuminate their lives and times. In this volume our chief guides will for the most part be novelists. Indeed, we will be moving among people who may at times seem like members of a strange family occupying the ancestral mansion of fiction, rather like Bleak House itself; they live, each making a different kind of accommodation (in both senses) with the heavy furniture, the family portraits, the china, crystal and silver. Some are full of respect, some wryly reserved, others bent with laughter; the more rebellious and impatient slash the canvases of Henry James or Dickens or Austen, sell the silver, raise a toast and throw the best crystal into the grate. The damage is another chapter in the story.
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