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, historicalto name only some of the more important ones. Although forerunners of the genre are to be found in a number of places, including classical Rome, 11th-century Japan, and Elizabethan England, the European novel is usually said to have begun with the Don Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes (part I, 1605). In its juxtaposition of impossible idealism and earthy practicality in the figures of the knight and his squire, this work adumbrates what was to become one of the central concerns of the Western novel, just as its playful exploitation of the authorial persona anticipates many of the technical questions raised by later novelists. Despite some interesting works in 17th-century France, it was in England that the genre first took permanent root. Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding were all writing in the first half of the 18th century, and their works did much to establish the novel as the most popular literary form in England. This popularity soon became a general phenomenon, leading in the 19th century to an extraordinary surge of fiction writing, particularly in Britain, France, Russia, and the United States. A partial explanation of the novel's popularity is to be found in the scope it gave writers to explore areas of human experience that had previously lain outside the province of literature. For the first time, the minutiae of daily life became a fit subject for the writer's attention. The heroes and heroines of this new genre were as likely to be servants as courtiers. Their lives did not have to display preeminent virtue or vice; there needed be nothing epic in their destinies. Inevitably, this shift in emphasis was helped or hindered by the social and historical context in any given country. When all the exceptions have been counted, however, it remains the case that the mainstream of the European novel has based its appeal on the claim to provide a more faithful image of everyday reality than can be achieved by any other literary form. Even the extravagant fantasies of the Gothic novel or the modern novel of science fiction depend for their impact on the detailed rendering of surface reality. The history of the novel is in part a history of the changes in conventions established to achieve this verisimilitude. Perhaps because of the novel's realist bias, its greatest period is usually held to be the mid- to late-19th century, a time when improved literacy rates had increased the size of the potential audience and the modern mass media had not yet arrived to diminish it. Across this period and just before, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot were writing in England; Honor de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and mile Zola in France; Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Russia; and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in the United States. With the coming of the 20th century the novel began to change somewhat in character. The old certainty that experience could be adequately represented by the language and structures of the conventional novel was increasingly called into question. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson began to examine the ways in which reality eluded the grasp of literature. In trying to capture the complex and fragmentary quality of experience, some of these writers stretched the limits of the conventional novel to a point at which it became more and more remote from the expectationsand sometimes the comprehension or interestof the average reader, a process that perhaps culminated in the mid-20th century in the so-called antinovel, or nouveau roman. These modernist experiments sometimes produced works of outstanding interest, but they also tended to widen the gap between the popular and the literary 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, historicalto 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 findin the period of Roman declinea 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. 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 manthough 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 masterpiecethe 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. Additional reading The following works deal in general terms with the reader's approach to the novel: Walter Allen, Reading a Novel, rev. ed. (1963); Van Meter Ames, Aesthetics of the Novel (1928, reprinted 1966); Cleanth Brooks and R.P. Warren (eds.), Understanding Fiction, 3rd. ed. (1979); Alexander Comfort, The Novel and Our Time (1948); Pelham Edgar, The Art of the Novel (1933, reprinted 1966); Wilson Follett, The Modern Novel: A Study of the Purpose and Meaning of Fiction, rev. ed. (1923); E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927, many reprintings); Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction, new ed. (1957).The following are concerned with the problems of writing fiction and are all the work of novelists: Phyllis Bentley, Some Observations on the Art of Narrative (1946); Conrad's Prefaces to His Works, with an essay by Edward Garnett (1937); Henry James, The Art of Fiction and Other Essays, ed. by Morris Roberts (1948), and The Art of the Novel, introduction by R.P. Blackmur (1934); Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction (1925); Thomas Wolfe, The Story of a Novel (1936).The various elements of the novel are dealt with in the following: Bonamy Dobree, Modern Prose Style, 2nd ed. (1964); Maren Elwood, Characters Make Your Story (1942); Manuel Komroff, How to Write a Novel (1950); W. Van O'Connor (ed.), Forms of Modern Fiction (1948); George G. Williams (ed.), Readings for Creative Writers (1938).The following studies deal with the style and philosophy of the novel in the wider sense: David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World, rev. ed. (1960); Agnes Hansen, Twentieth Century Forces in European Fiction (1934); Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (1942); Y. Krikorian (ed.), Naturalism and the Human Spirit (1944); George Lukacs, Studies in European Realism (1950), and The Historical Novel (1962); H.J. Muller, Modern Fiction (1937); and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel (1976). Social and economic aspects Though publishers of fiction recognize certain obligations to art, even when these are unprofitable (as they usually are), they are impelled for the most part to regard the novel as a commercial property and to be better pleased with large sales of indifferent work than with the mere unremunerative acclaim of the intelligentsia for books of rare merit. For this reason, any novelist who seeks to practice his craft professionally must consult the claims of the market and effect a compromise between what he wishes to write and what the public will buy. Many worthy experimental novels, or novels more earnest than entertaining, gather dust in manuscript or are circulated privately in photocopies. Indeed, the difficulty that some unestablished novelists find in gaining a readership (which means the attention of a commercial publisher) has led them to take the copying machine as seriously as the printing press and to make the composition, mimeographing, binding, and distribution of a novel into a single cottage industry. For the majority of novelists the financial rewards of their art are nugatory, and only a strong devotion to the form for its own sake can drive them to the building of an oeuvre. The subsidies provided by university sinecures sustain a fair number of major American novelists; others, in most countries, support their art by practicing various kinds of subliteraturejournalism, film scripts, textbooks, even pseudonymous pornography. Few novelists write novels and novels only. There are certain marginal windfalls, and the hope of gaining one of these tempers the average novelist's chronic desperation. America has its National Book Award as well as its book club choices; France has a great variety of prizes; there are also international bestowals; above all there glows the rarest and richest of all accoladesthe Nobel Prize for Literature. Quite often the Nobel Prize winner needs the money as much as the fame, and his election to the honour is not necessarily a reflection of a universal esteem which, even for geniuses like Samuel Beckett, means large sales and rich royalties. When Sinclair Lewis received the award in 1930, wealth and fame were added to wealth and fame already sufficiently large; when William Faulkner was chosen in 1949, most of his novels had been long out of print in America. Prizes come so rarely, and often seem to be bestowed so capriciously, that few novelists build major hopes on them. They build even fewer hopes on patronage: Harriet Shaw Weaver, James Joyce's patroness, was probably the last of a breed that, from Maecenas on, once intermittently flourished; state patronageas represented, for instance, by the annual awards of the Arts Council of Great Britaincan provide little more than a temporary palliative for the novelist's indigence. Novelists have more reasonable hopes from the world of the film or the stage, where adaptations can be profitable and even salvatory. The long struggles of the British novelist T.H. White came to an end when his Arthurian sequence The Once and Future King (1958) was translated into a stage musical called Camelot, though, by treating the lump sum paid to him as a single year's income instead of a reward for decades of struggle, nearly all the windfall would have gone for taxes if White had not taken his money into low-tax exile. Such writers as Graham Greene, nearly all of whose novels have been filmed, must be tempted to regard mere book sales as an inconsiderable aspect of the rewards of creative writing. There are few novelists who have not received welcome and unexpected advances on film options, and sometimes the hope of film adaptation has influenced the novelist's style. In certain countries, such as Great Britain but not the United States, television adaptation of published fiction is common, though it pays the author less well than commercial cinema. When a novelist becomes involved in film-script writingeither in the adaptation of his own work or that of othersthe tendency is for him to become subtly corrupted by what seems to him an easier as well as more lucrative technique than that of the novel. Most novelists write dialogue with ease, and their contribution to a film is mostly dialogue: the real problem in novel writing lies in the management of the rcit. A number of potentially fine novelists, like Terry Southern and Frederic Raphael, have virtually abandoned the literary craft because of their continued success with script writing. In 70-odd years the British novelist Richard Hughes produced only three novels, the excellence of which has been universally recognized; fiction lovers have been deprived of more because of the claims of the film world on Hughes's talent. This kind of situation finds no counterpart in any other period of literary history, except perhaps in the Elizabethan, when the commercial lure of the drama made some good poets write poor plays. The majority of professional novelists must look primarily to book sales for their income, and they must look decreasingly to hardcover sales. The novel in its traditional format, firmly stitched and sturdily clothbound, is bought either by libraries or by readers who take fiction seriously enough to wish to acquire a novel as soon as it appears: if they wait 12 months or so, they can buy the novel in paper covers for less than its original price. This edition of a novel has become, for the vast majority of fiction readers, the form in which they first meet it, and the novelist who does not achieve paperback publication is missing a vast potential audience. He may not repine at this, since the quantitative approach to literary communication may safely be disregarded: the legend on a paperback coverFIVE MILLION COPIES SOLDsays nothing about the worth of the book within. Nevertheless, the advance he will receive from his hardcover publisher is geared to eventual paperback expectations, and the package deal has become the rule in negotiations between publisher and author's agent. The agent, incidentally, has become important to both publisher and author to an extent that writers like Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson would, if resurrected, find hard to understand. The novelist may reasonably expect to augment his income through the sale of foreign rights in his work, though the rewards accruing from translation are always uncertain. The translator himself is usually a professional and demands a reasonable reward for his labours, more indeed than the original author may expect: the reputations of some translators are higher than those of some authors, and even the translators' names may be better known. Moreover, the author who earns most from publication in his own language will usually earn most in translation, since it is the high initial home sales that attract foreign publishers to a book. The more literary a novel is, the more it exploits the resources of the author's own language, the less likely is it to achieve either popularity at home or publication abroad. Best-selling novels like Mario Puzo's Godfather (1969) or Arthur Hailey's Airport (1968) are easy to read and easy to translate, so they win all around. It occasionally happens that an author is more popular abroad than he is at home: the best-selling novels of the Scottish physician-novelist A.J. Cronin are no longer highly regarded in England and America, as they were in the 1930s and '40s, but they continued to sell by the million in the U.S.S.R. several decades later. However, a novelist is wisest to expect most from his own country and to regard foreign popularity as an inexplicable bonus. As though his financial problems were not enough, the novelist frequently has to encounter those dragons unleashed by public morality or by the law. The struggles of Flaubert, Zola, and Joyce, denounced for attempting to advance the frontiers of literary candour, are well known and still vicariously painful, but lesser novelists, working in a more permissive age, can record cognate agonies. Generally speaking, any novelist writing after the publication in the 1960s of Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn or Gore Vidal's Myra Breckenridge can expect little objection, on the part of either publisher or police, to language or subject matter totally unacceptable, under the obscenity laws then operating, in 1922, when Ulysses was first published. This is certainly true of America, if not of Ireland or Malta. But many serious novelists fear an eventual reaction against literary permissiveness as a result of the exploitation by cynical obscenity mongers or hard-core pornographers of the existing liberal situation. In some countries, particularly Great Britain, the law of libel presents insuperable problems to novelists who, innocent of libellous intent, are nevertheless sometimes charged with defamation by persons who claim to be the models for characters in works of fiction. Disclaimers to the effect that resemblances to real-life people are wholly coincidental have no validity in law, which upholds the right of a plaintiff to base his charge on the corroboration of reasonable people. Many such libel cases are settled before they come to trial, and publishers will, for the sake of peace and in the interests of economy, make a cash payment to the plaintiff without considering the author's side. They will also, and herein lies the serious blow to the author, withdraw copies of the allegedly offensive book and pulp the balance of a whole edition. Novelists are seriously hampered in their endeavours to show, in a traditional spirit of artistic honesty, corruption in public life; they have to tread carefully even in depicting purely imaginary characters and situations, since the chance collocation of a name, a profession, and a locality may produce a libellous situation. Evaluation and study It has been only in comparatively recent times that the novel has been taken sufficiently seriously by critics for the generation of aesthetic appraisal and the formulation of fictional theories. The first critics of the novel developed their craft not in full-length books but in reviews published in periodicals: much of this writingin the late 18th and early 19th centurieswas of an occasional nature, and not a little of it casual and desultory; nor, at first, did critics of fiction find it easy to separate a kind of moral judgment of the subject matter from an aesthetic judgment of the style. Such fragmentary observations on the novel as those made by Dr. Johnson in conversation or by Jane Austen in her letters, or, in France, by Gustave Flaubert during the actual process of artistic gestation, have the charm and freshness of insight rather than the weight of true aesthetic judgment. It is perhaps not until the beginning of the 20th century, when Henry James wrote his authoritative prefaces to his own collected novels, that a true criteriology of fiction can be said to have come into existence. The academic study of the novel presupposes some general body of theory, like that provided by Percy Lubbock's Craft of Fiction (1921) or E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927) or the subsequent writings of the critics Edmund Wilson and F.R. Leavis. Since World War II it may be said that university courses in the evaluation of fiction have attained the dignity traditionally monopolized by poetry and the drama. A clear line should be drawn between the craft of fiction criticism and the journeyman work of fiction reviewing. Reviews are mainly intended to provide immediate information about new novels: they are done quickly and are subject to the limitations of space; they not infrequently make hasty judgments that are later regretted. The qualifications sought in a reviewer are not formidable: smartness, panache, waspishnessqualities that often draw the attention of the reader to the personality of the reviewer rather than the work under reviewwill always be more attractive to circulation-hunting editors than a less spectacular concern with balanced judgment. A thoughtful editor will sometimes put the reviewing of novels into the hands of a practicing novelist, whoknowing the labour that goes into even the meanest bookwill be inclined to sympathy more than to flamboyant condemnation. The best critics of fiction are probably novelists manqus, men who have attempted the art and, if not exactly failed, not succeeded as well as they could have wished. Novelists who achieve very large success are possibly not to be trusted as critics: obsessed by their own individual aims and attainments, shorn of self-doubt by the literary world's acclaim or their royalty statements, they bring to other men's novels a kind of magisterial blindness. Novelists can be elated by good reviews and depressed by bad ones, but it is rare that a novelist's practice is much affected by what he reads about himself in the literary columns. Genuine criticism is a very different matter, and a writer's approach to his art can be radically modified by the arguments and summations of a critic he respects or fears. As the hen is unable to judge of the quality of the egg it lays, so the novelist is rarely able to explain or evaluate his work. He relies on the professional critic for the elucidation of the patterns in his novels, for an account of their subliminal symbolism, for a reasoned exposition of their stylistic faults. As for the novel reader, he will often learn enthusiasm for particular novelists through the writings of critics rather than from direct confrontation with the novels themselves. The essays in Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) aroused an interest in the Symbolist movement which the movement was not easily able to arouse by itself; the essay on Finnegans Wake, collected in Wilson's Wound and the Bow (1941), eased the way into a very difficult book in a manner that no grim work of solid exegesis could have achieved. The essence of the finest criticism derives from wisdom and humanity more than from mere expert knowledge. Great literature and great criticism possess in common a sort of penumbra of wide but unsystematic learning, a devotion to civilized values, an awareness of tradition, and a willingness to rely occasionally on the irrational and intuitive. All this probably means that the criticism of fiction can never, despite the efforts of aestheticians schooled in modern linguistics, become an exact science. A novel must be evaluated in terms of a firmly held literary philosophy, but such a philosophy is, in the final analysis, based on the irrational and subjective. If the major premises on which F.R. Leavis bases his judgments of George Eliot, Mark Twain, and D.H. Lawrence are accepted, then an acceptance of the judgments themselves is inescapable. But many students of fiction who are skeptical of Leavis will read him in order that judgments of their own may emerge out of a purely negative rejection of his. In reading criticism a kind of dialectic is involved, but no synthesis is ever final. The process of revaluation goes on for ever. One of the sure tests of a novel's worth is its capacity for engendering critical dialectic: no novel is beyond criticism, but many are beneath it. 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), Zo Oldenbourg's Destiny of Fire (1960), and Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958) exemplify an important function of the fictional imaginationto 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 scholarshippreposterous events served up with parodic pompositycould 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 Woolfin 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 pcaro was a recognized form, and such English novels as Defoe's The Fortunate Mistress (1724) can be regarded as picaresque in the etymological sense. But the term has come to connote as much the episodic nature of the original species as the dynamic of roguery. Fielding's Tom Jones, whose hero is a bastard, amoral, and very nearly gallows-meat, has been called picaresque, and the Pickwick Papers of Dickenswhose eponym is a respectable and even childishly ingenuous scholarcan 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 Alemn, Vicente Espinel, and Luis Vlez 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 pcaro.