VICTORIAN NOVEL

The Realistic Novel and its Formation

The realistic novel was quite different than what has been seen with earlier literature. The most
popular form of literature had always been poetry. The realistic novel changed that. This form of
literature used journalistic techniques in order to make the literature something closer to real life
with facts and general stereotypes of human nature. The attention to detail was made to just
report the facts, not commenting or judging on the scene or character.

The novels were about the common man, which also happened to be the struggles of the lower
class. These struggles usually included a lower class citizen trying to gain upward mobility.
Thus, a subgenre called Social Realism was born. One of the most popular novels of this time is
in the Social Realism genre. In Charles Dickens Great Expectations, the novel goes through a
boy named Pip’s life, as he unexpectedly comes into money and is asked to become a gentleman.
The novel follows Pip’s struggles, and focuses on telling the whole truth about the character,
both his good and bad actions and the reasons behind them. He was meant to be a very tangible
person, one that the average person of this time could relate to. Pip was written to be very “real”,
with all his flaws and positive attributes.

The Rise of the Novel

Prior to the Victorian Era, poetry had been the dominant form of literature. However, changes in
class structure saw the novel rise in popularity. As the middle class expanded and more people
became literate, the popularity of the novel exploded. These works also became more accessible
as a result of the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of newspapers and the periodical press.
Most notably, the works of Charles Dickens were frequently serialized in newspapers or
journals, his first being Pickwick Papers in 1836. As a result of this serialization and a focus on
character rather than plot, Dickens’ works are sometimes criticized for having weak plots. The
subject matter of realistic Victorian novels also helped increase their popularity. Dickens
particularly would portray the lives of working class people, creating characters that the new
rising middle class audience could relate to. The realistic Victorian novel focused on characters
and themes such as the plight of the poor and social mobility that was being afforded to a new
middle class and the rising middle class were eager to consume these novels.

Evolution of the Realistic Victorian Novel

Queen Victoria’s reign lasted until 1901 and the literature that was being produced
closer to the turn of the century shared few characteristics with the earlier works of the
Victorian Era. Those writers at the end of the Victorian Era such as Oscar Wilde and
Thomas Hardy. The novelists at the turn of the century continued to explore the
problems in English social life, but explored other key themes as well. The greatest
departure from the early Victorian era came from these authors exploration of themes
such as sexuality and a focus on the ways in which science and technology would
revolutionize the world in the upcoming century.

Characteristics of the Realistic Victorian Novel

• An emphasis on the here and now
• Attention to specific action and verifiable consequences
• Realists evoke common actions, present surface details, and emphasize the minor
catastrophes of the middle class
• They employ simple direct language and write about issues of conduct
• Characterization is very important. There is often an abundance of characters and
social types

What is Realism?

Quite obviously, the genre of realism is dedicated to identifying what is real and what is
not. But, what exactly is “real?” Literature in Realism defines reality as something that
exists prior to, and completely separate from, human thought or speech. Therefore, it is
literature’s responsibility to accurately interpret and represent reality. As literature
attempts to do this, it simultaneously depicts the anxieties, desires, and achievements
of the Victorian time period. While Realism certainly encompasses its own unique ideas,
the genre continued to utilize the strengths of empiricism and romanticism. For
example, the topic of nature is still focused upon, but realistic literature acknowledges
the fact that the human mind is a separate entity from nature. Therefore, realistic
literature aims to answer the question of how the mind can possibly know and/or
understand nature accurately. There are two main theories that assist in answering that
question.
Realism began as a literary movement in response to and as a departure from the idealism of the
Romantic period. Realism emerged in literature in the second half of the nineteenth century,
most predominantly in novels. Realism was characterized by its attention to detail, as well as its
attempt to recreate reality as it was. As a result, plot was no longer the central to the focus of the
author, but rather creating interesting and complex characters took precedence. Realism also
placed an emphasis on describing the material and physical details of life, as opposed to the
natural world as characterized by the Romantic period. Many Realistic novelists veered away
from the softer aspects of Romanticism, such as intense tenderness and idealism, because they
believed those characteristics misrepresented the harsh realities of life. Realism emphasizes
accurate descriptions of setting, dress, and character in ways that would have appeared
inappropriate to earlier authors. Realism, which emphasizes the importance of the ordinary
person and the ordinary situation, generally rejects the heroic and the aristocratic and embraces
the ordinary working class citizen.

Criticisms of Realism

The Realistic novel was very bold compared to the literature before its time. The realistic novel
was meant to be like real life, so the literature would hold things in it that were taboo before,
such as masturbation. It also showed a lot of the unfortunate events. Critics complained of
authors only focusing on the negative, that focusing on the things that were falling apart were too
unpleasant. Realistic novels, like real life, didn’t always have a happy ending. It was also noted
that not much really happened in the plot of the novels. The attention to detail of the character
led to little plot development and payoff.
Representational vs. Revelation Theories and the Importance of the
Word “Idea”

Representational theories are specifically concerned with what separates the mind from
the world surrounding it. Revelation theories, on the other hand, are more interested in
the immediate knowledge of what is considered real, invoking either perception or
intuition to achieve that knowledge. Moreover, in this light, it is equally important to
acknowledge the word “idea.” How exactly does one define the word? In Victorian
Realism, “idea” can be interpreted in two equally meaningful ways: perceptual or
linguistic representation. From these concepts, one can see the very direct influence of
Lockean principles, which affirm that words function as representatives. To genuinely
understand Victorian Realism, it is almost necessary to first acknowledge that nothing is
“real,” (a revelation, as it were). Following that understanding is the comprehension of
the paramount concept of representation: nothing is real until the human mind perceives
it and assigns it valuable meaning.

Sometimes, Victorian realists of this time period admitted to being quite overwhelmed by the
idea of a gap existing between the human mind and the rest of the world, or reality. One such
realist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an English poet and artist, acknowledged how frightening this
doctrine was, but at the same time, he expressed attraction to it as well. It seemed that he found
these representational theories to be endlessly fascinating, as he came to realize that his artistic
products might be entirely divorced from reality and the world around him. Perhaps it can
comfort an artist, if he is able to produce something beautiful through his own subjective
interpretation of reality. It can’t be an easy feat to create such art, and subsequently allow others,
and even one’s self, to search for significance and meaning under the physical surface.

One of the most famous realistic writers, Charles Dickens, directed his attention more towards
revelation theories than the representational. On the topic of reality being understood as what is
immediately available to one’s senses, Dickens further highlighted the importance of memory,
which he described as a kind of vision, or way of seeing the world. Moreover, in his narrative-
style novel Great Expectations, memory is a key concept in the story, as Pip recalls all of the
events from memory. Some readers complain about the fact that the novel does not offer
anyone’s perspective other than Pip’s, but it is highly likely that Dickens chose to do this on
purpose. He viewed memory and revelation theories as very important to realistic literature, and
a narrative could be described as a kind of “written memory.” To write the novel from such a
perspective begs an important and highly relevant question from the readers: How do we know
that Pip’s descriptions and thoughts are accurate representations of reality? The honest answer is
that we simply do not, and this kind of ambiguity leads to very interesting discussions about
Victorian Realism.

Narratives and Suspense

Narratives were an extremely popular style of writing for Victorian Realism, as it easily
invoked all the theories described above. Along with challenging the notion of what is
real and what is not, comes the impression of suspense experienced by the readers. By
suspense, the obvious interpretation of the word means that the reader experiences
tension and anxiety throughout the perusal of a story, but an attractive one that
motivates him to read further. At the same time, though, suspense also refers to the
action of actually suspending judgment as both a Victorian reader and writer. But what
is meant by “judgment?” Of course, it is only human nature to judge a piece of literature
as one reads it, but in the topic of Victorian Realism, the judgment that should be
suspended is actually referring to judgment of what the speaker in a narrative is
portraying as “real.” Moreover, the reader is expected to take what the narrator says at
face value. Additionally, judgment must also be suspended as a reader makes
assumptions based upon his unique beliefs. Doing so brings us back to the earlier
definition of suspense, in which the reader is meant to feel anxious about the rising
action in a narrative. If a reader refuses to suspend his judgment in his assumptions,
beliefs, and subjective interpretations of reality, he will not experience the pleasures of
suspense that are meant to be felt.

For example, in Dickens’s Great Expectations, a great deal of suspense arises from the
fact that Pip does not know, for the majority of the novel, who his benefactor is. The
pleasure of reading the novel comes from readers’ guesswork about the identity of the
benefactor. In general, when a secret emerges in Victorian fiction, and the suspense is
lifted, things often turn out to be entirely different than what was expected. This
realization is meant to be enjoyable for the reader, as it has most likely kept his
attention while he has read the story. Also, in Great Expectations, the very fact that
there are two different endings to the novel serves to create suspense for readers, and
further promotes more thought-provoking discussion.

The End of Realism

Realism characterized such a valiant parting from what readers had come to imagine from the
novel. Critics, in some occasions, reasoned that Realism seemed to focus largely on any negative
views of life. Things “falling apart” was a large captivation to most, however, it was quite the
opposite for others. In some cases, readers were complaining about how in realistic fiction, there
wasn’t much of interest happening. Their concern was also about how everything seemed to be
more about talking and there wasn’t enough action to back anything up. Henry James, as a prime
example, was criticized for his loquaciousness.

Realism had turned to Naturalism towards the end of the nineteenth century. With Naturalism,
writers defined their character using their heredity and history. Qualities that people found
distasteful in Realism, which was the fixation with character and the thoroughly dull plots, was
intensified by Naturalism. The impact was uniquely because of Charles Darwin’s theory of
evolution that inspired other writers to branch out into something that differs from Realism.
Whereas Realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also endeavors to
govern “scientifically” the underlying forces, like the heredity and history, manipulating all of
the actions of the subjects.

Popularity of the Realistic Victorian Novel

The most popular novels of the Victorian age were realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with
characters, and long. Describing contemporary life and entertainment for the middle class.
According to Merriam Webster, popularity is the “state of being liked, enjoyed,
accepted, or done by a large number of people”. So the popularity of the realistic
Victorian Novel would be entirely dependent on the people who read them. For
example, Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations was originally released weekly in
newspaper publications and people enjoyed it so much that it became in high demand
quickly, and eventually it was turned into a one novel. The realistic Victorian novels
became popular because it was the first time characters in a novel were similar and
connected to the people of the middle class.

Newspapers, Press, and Publishing:

One very important source of information on the realistic novel’s popularity are the
newspapers that wrote about them. In the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times
there are two different instances, with two different articles, where Charles Dickens’s
popularity and worth are celebrated, years after his death in 1870 (1892 and 1894).

The number of periodicals that were produced were greatly increased during this time
period. By the early 19th century, there were 52 London papers and over 100 other
titles. There was a massive growth in overall circulation of major events, information and
weekly publication of literature. In 1802 and 1815 the tax on newspapers was
increased. Unwilling to pay this fee, hundreds of untaxed newspapers made their
appearance. The development of the press was greatly assisted by the gradual abolition
of the taxes on periodicals. Both of these developments made the newspaper more
affordable to a greater percentage of the population.
The book publishing industry grew throughout the 19th century. There was a dramatic
increase in literacy along with the growth of libraries and public schools. This provided a
rapidly growing market for books. The introduction of technological advances allowed
more volume at less cost. During the 19th century, big publishing firms emerged and
some of these companies remain active in the industry today.
In the 19th century practices of paying authors began to standardize. Publishers paid a
percentage based on the price of the book and number of books sold. During the
Victorian period, the communication industry including publishing and printing of books
accelerated the processes of economic, social and cultural change by dramatically
increasing the volume and speed of which information, news and entertainment flowed
through society.

Statistics

The next best source of information on the realistic novel’s popularity are the number of copies
sold over a certain number of years.
Again, Dickens will be the main focus, with his Pickwick Papers having sold 40,000 copies per
issue at the time Part 15 came into print, and then selling 140,000 copies by 1863 in book form
and 800,000 by 1879. Furthermore, The first issue of David Copperfield sold 25,000 copies
between 1849 and 1850.
To add a bit of perspective to these numbers, at the beginning of the 19th century, books were a
luxury. The price had recently rose to unprecedented heights, cutting out the middle class, even
though they could have been the biggest consumers. Between 1828 and 1853 the average price of
a book was said to have declined by forty percent, but that forty percent was off of an
abnormally high starting price. At around the time of Dickens ninety to ninety-five percent of
new publications were selling around five hundred copies or less (though this did not account for
every new publication, considering Dickens’s statistics stated above, and other best selling
authors).

Rise of Feminism and Important Female Novelists

The Victorian Era was a period of great social and political reform, especially regarding the role
of women. Women began actively seeking equal social and legal rights as men, and one of the
main ways they attempted to draw attention to their plight was through writing. Women wrote in
order to make a living, contribute to the literary world, and most importantly change British
society and fight for women’s rights. Voting and property rights, education opportunities, and
employment restrictions were all issues women of 19th century Britain faced. Many women
decided to address the issues in writing and publishing their work in order to make their voices
heard and demand equality. As a result, Feminism started to gain momentum out of the
frustration women faced with the openly unfair and worsening social and political situation (“I
Take Up My Pen”). Some of the more popular female novelists of this time include Charlotte
Bronte and George Eliot. Many women of the Victorian Era published their work anonymously
or under pseudonyms to ensure that their works would be given the same merit that works by
male authors were granted. Using gender ambiguous pseudonyms, which all of the Bronte sisters
did, allowed female novelists the freedom to create characters exactly the way they wanted
without fear of being disrespected or not taken seriously because they were created by women.

The idea of the “New Woman” was also popular during the Victorian Era and served as a
significant cultural icon. The New Woman was the opposite of the stereotypical Victorian
Woman who was uneducated, reliant entirely on a man, and led an entirely domestic life.
Instead, the New Woman was intelligent, independent, educated, and self-supporting. This
ideology played a significant role in important social changes that would lead to redefining
gender roles, improving women’s rights, and overcoming masculine supremacy. New Woman
novels generally focused on rebellious women and were known for voicing dissatisfaction with
the Victorian woman’s position in marriage and society overall. They strive to redefine a
woman’s role in marriage and other societal norms, as well as fix the relationships between the
sexes and support women’s professional aspirations (Diniejko).

Charlotte Bronte was one of the most prominent Realistic Victorian novelists and published most
of her work under the gender neutral pseudonym “Currer Bell”. In her novels, Bronte created
strong female heroines who possessed free thought, intellect, and strong moral character. She
wrote for the women she saw as being oppressed by society, which included teachers,
governesses, and spinsters. She felt that all of these women were imprisoned by society or
circumstances beyond their control, and Bronte was impelled to speak out for them in her writing
(Lowes). Unmarried, middle-class women either had to turn to prostitution or be a governess in
order to earn a living. However, a governess has no security of employment, received minimal
wages, and was isolated in the household with the label of being somewhere in-between a family
member and a servant. The large amount of middle-class women who had to resort themselves to
the ambiguous role of governess lead to a rise in popularity of the governess novel because it
explored a woman’s role in society (“The Victorian Age”). The most popular example of a
governess novel would be Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, which is a fictional autobiography
of the orphan Jane Eyre as she matures and becomes a governess at Thornfield manor. Jane is
rebellious, resourceful, and brave woman, despite all the obstacles that stand in her way in a
male-dominated society. Jane ultimately falls in love with Rochester, but breaks away from
society because she marries him out of love and not for the labels or security of a man and
money that it provides. Jane respects Rochester and doesn’t compromise her morals or her
personality just to satisfy him, which Bronte believed to be very important (Lowes).

“While we did not like to declare ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting
that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ — we had a vague
impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice;”– Charlotte Bronte on why
women writers used pseudonyms

Popular Victorian Authors and Their Realistic Novels

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)
•Jane Eyre

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

•Great Expectations
•Pickwick Papers
•Oliver Twist

George Eliot (really Mary Evans) (1819-1890)

•Middlemarch
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
•Jude The Obscure

Neo-Victorianism and The New Realistic Novel

The Neo-Victorian movement began as a revival of the social and literary elements of
the Victorian Era. A Neo-Victorian Novel is a novel written in modern times that takes
place in the 19th century and usually puts a spin on the characteristics of the Victorian
Era. More often than not, these novels will point out and bring to light some of the follies
of the Victorian Era. Another quality of Neo-Victorian writing is that it often tells the
intimate stories of those who were not the center of Victorian novels because of social
constructs, such as, women and servants. For an example, these novels bring to light
the fact that woman were sexual and powerful beings, during a time period where that
was not believed.
Charles Dickens has been thoroughly discussed throughout this page as the
representative Victorian Realistic Novelist. Therefore, “Girl in A Blue Dress” by Gaynor
will be the Neo-Victorian Novel that will represent the reimagining of the Victorian Era
because Dicken’s life is the subject of it. “Girl in a Blue Dress” was written in 2008 and
takes place in 1870. It is inspired by the life and marriage of Catherine and Charles
Dickens; represented by Dorothea and Alfred Gibson in the novel. This novel
reimagines the mistreatment and eventual exile of Catherine at the end of her and
Charles’s marriage. However, this novel sets Catherine, or Dorothea, as the narrator
and protagonist of the story; giving us the inner thoughts and feelings of this devoted
woman.

Some other Realistic Neo-Victorian Novels to look at:

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

“Mrs. Dalloway”

“The Waves”

“To The Light House”

novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals
imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving
a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has
encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic, romantic,
realist, historical—to name only some of the more important ones.

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-fleuve, or river novel. Length is very much one of the dimensions of the genre.

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 Decameron, each 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’ Satyricon of 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.

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The Literary World (Famous Novels)

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,
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.

Elements
Plot
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.

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.

Character

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.

Scene, or setting
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.

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.

Narrative method and point of view

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.

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 Ulysses, for 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.

Types of novel

Historical
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.

Picaresque
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 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.

Sentimental
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.

Gothic
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.

Psychological
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.

The novel of manners

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.

Epistolary
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.

Pastoral
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 ce, 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.

Apprenticeship
The bildungsroman, a type of 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.

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.

Antinovel
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 antinovel—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 antinovel 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 antinovel as Christine Brooke-Rose and Rayner Heppenstall
(both French scholars, incidentally) are more empirical than their French counterparts. They
object mainly to the falsification of the external world that was imposed on the traditional novel
by the exigencies of plot and character, and they insist on notating the minutiae of the surface of
life, concentrating in an unhurried fashion on every detail of its texture. A work like
Heppenstall’s Connecting Door (1962), in which the narrator-hero does not even possess a name,
is totally unconcerned with action but very interested in buildings, streets, and the sound of
music. This is properly a fresh approach to the materials of the traditional novel rather than a
total liberation from it. Such innovations as are found in the nouveau roman can best show their
value in their influence on traditional novelists, who may be persuaded to observe more closely
and be wary of the seductions of swift action, contrived relationships, and neat resolutions.