Maintaining continuityIRIS MURDOCH ONLY WROTE one novel in her lifetime. But she wrote it twenty-six times. Anthony Burgess never wrote the same book twice. And he wrote about a thousand. Are those characterizations accurate? Fair? Of course not. You will hear from time to time that criticism of Murdoch, and in fairness, they are pretty similar. The Green Knight (1993), her last novel before the Alzheimer’s-damaged Jackson’s Dilemma, isn’t all that far from Under the Net (1954). Same class, same sorts of problems, same ethical preoccupations. Strong characterization and strong plotting. All this was deemed a positive virtue during her lifetime: her fans could count on a new-yet-familiar novel every two to three years. Those novels would always be solid and, once in a while, as with the Booker Prize–winning The Sea, the Sea (1978), they would knock your socks off.
And Burgess? He has his consistencies, as well. But nothing in the early novels can prepare the reader for A Clockwork Orange (1962), which is wildly unlike the Enderby novels of the 1970s, which are formally quite distant from the experimentalism of Napoleon Symphony (1974) or the historical artfulness and Elizabethan language of his novels on Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun (1964), and Christopher Marlowe, A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), or the Maugham-like performance of what many call his masterpiece, Earthly Powers (1980), to say nothing of his novels in verse. Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?
Does it matter, this difference in uniformity? Not really. After all, each novel would have both its return audience and its newcomers, so each book had to teach its readers how to deal with it, as if for the first time, which for some it was.
It always is. Every novel is brand-new. It’s never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it’s merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other. This is the basic dialectic of literary history. The impulse to originality clashes with the received tradition of things already written. Miraculously, neither ever seems to overwhelm the other, and novels keep appearing, as do audiences to read them. Even so, some novels are more traditional, some more experimental, some impossible to classify.
Let’s go back to a time when the novel really was new. Once upon a time, there weren’t any novels. There were other things that were narrative and lengthy—epics, religious or historical narratives of the tribe, prose or verse romances, nonfictional narratives like travelogues. You know, The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Táin Bó Cuailgne in Ireland, the romances of Chrétien de Troye and Marie de France. Plenty of candidates out there. Just not novels. Then some things began emerging, sporadically. It may be that the Catalan writer Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc, first published in Valencia in 1490, is the first European novel we can recognize as such. Note the date. Columbus hadn’t sailed the sea to discover modernity yet, but he was about to. The rise of the novel coincides with the rise of the modern world—exploration, discovery, invention, development, oppression, industrialization, exploitation, conquest, and violence—and that’s no coincidence. It took more than movable type to make the novel possible; it took a new age. But I digress.
Rightly or wrongly, there are two novels we generally think of as the “first”—and they’re seventy years apart. In 1678 someone, perhaps Madame de La Fayette, published a little novel of profound significance. Its popularity was such that people lined up at the publishers waiting, sometimes for months, for their copies. Take that, Harry Potter. The book is called La Princesse de Clèves, and its chief claim to fame is not as a first novel but as the first roman d’analyse, a novel of analysis, a book that investigates emotions and mental states, pushing well beyond the mere conveying of plot. Some readers three hundred and some years later may find the tale a little clunky for their tastes, although the clunkiness largely resides in the surface details, in how persons in the novel speak and address one another and how the writer handles character presentation. The mores of the novel are not ours, but they are genuine in themselves, as are the consequences that grow out of the dictates of conscience. For its time (published within a decade of the Sturm und Drang that is Paradise Lost), the narrative is an extremely subtle performance, and writers as various as Jane Austen, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Anita Brookner couldn’t do what they do without it. Madame de La Fayette is one of the giants of the novel, but she’s just a kid.
At the yonder end of the century, 1605 to be exact, a book came out that really set the world on its ear. Here’s what I heard the amazing Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes say at a conference once: “All of Latin American literature grows out of Don Quixote.” Not fiction or novels. Literature. All of it. The Hispanic world gets to claim Miguel de Cervantes and his masterpiece, of course, but it has to share with the rest of us. The book is simply too big for any one group to own. It’s goofy and serious, hilarious and sad, satiric and original. And it’s first. Okay, okay, there are lots of “first” novels. But this is a big first. Cervantes shows everyone else what might be done. He parodies earlier narrative forms as his Quixote descends into confusion between the world of the too-many romances he has read and the dull world life has saddled him with. Cervantes uses an out-of-touch figure locked in some never-never past to make commentary on the author’s here-and-now. His hero is comic, certainly, but there’s a forlorn quality there, too, as we watch someone too far gone in fantasy to notice, whose gestures, as in his championing of Dulcinea and his tilting at windmills, are both noble and pathetic, uplifting and pointless. When a character gives his name to an entire class of enterprise, he’s really captured our imagination. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are seared into the Western imagination; they form an archetypal pairing, so much so that, three and a half centuries later, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera could build a cartoon empire on the formula. Yogi and Boo Boo, Quick-Draw McGraw and Baba Louis, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble are all variations on the clueless nobleman and his long-suffering, devoted servant. Now that’s a legacy. Cervantes takes the old and makes something completely new. More—he says to other writers, you can do this too, ignore convention, invent, make it up as you go. And make it up he does. No one had ever seen anything quite like it before. And no one has since. Everyone tries to measure up to Cervantes, of course, but the attempt is, well, quixotic.
At that time, of course, and for a number of years afterward, every novel was experimental. If a genre hasn’t been around long enough to establish conventions, then there can be no such thing as a “conventional” specimen. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, writers of this new form understood that it was new, that it was . . . novel.
A word or two on literary terms: despair of definitions. What we call a novel would nearly everywhere in non-Anglophone Europe be a roman. That term derives from romanz, the universal term for lengthy narratives in verse prior to the age of print. The word “novel,” by contrast, comes from the Italian term novella, meaning new and small. English removed the diminutive, stuck with the “new” part, and a term was born. Fictional narratives of book length would come to be known as novels. The term “romance” has been kept for a certain sort of fictional narrative, one that was more stylized, more action-driven, more reliant on character types than psychologically realistic characters, often with improbable actions. Gothic tales, adventure stories, the books of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Bram Stoker, westerns and thrillers, and, yes, bodice rippers would all come under the heading of the romance. The distinction remained in greater or lesser use for a couple of centuries, yet it was always an imprecise science. The Scarlet Letter is pretty clearly a romance, The Portrait of a Lady a novel. But what about Moby Dick? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Bleak House? You see the problem. Terms are often butter knives employed where surgical precision is demanded. These days, hardly anyone differentiates between the two. When was the last time you heard someone speak of a Stephen King romance? The problem is compounded when “romance” is instantly connected with “Harlequin.” So we’ll stick with “novel” here as our choice for book-length fictions, knowing that it doesn’t mean anything very exact. But it does mean something, and we can mostly agree on its broad definition.
But back to the early days. These new novelists did not make up their new form out of thin air. There were established forms, most of them nonfictional, for prose narrative: prose romances, letters, sermons, confessions, travel narratives, captivity narratives, histories, memoirs. And the big one, of course, the biography or “life.” Samuel Richardson’s novels are epistolary; that is, they are composed as a series of letters. His most famous novel is Clarissa (1748), which at something over a million words is a whole bunch of letters. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) follows the form of a travel narrative of a castaway—the actual model was Alexander Selkirk—while Moll Flanders (1722) uses the form of the confession and the story, very loosely, of Mary Carleton. One of the conventions of the confession is that the sinner basks in the glory of her redemption, but Moll’s narrative is much more energetic, and convincing, about her sins than about her salvation.
The bottom line, for me, is that in the early days of the novel, it was all exciting. Readers couldn’t say, “Oh, we’ve seen that before; that’s so old hat.” Every novel was experimental, every foray opened new ground. That may not have been the case, of course, but it’s certainly how it looks from the twenty-first century. Now, the thing about experimentalism is that not all experiments turn out equally well. One thing that would inevitably occur is that novelists would discover, over the course of a century or so, that some narrative structures worked better than others, that it was hard to construct compelling, organized, and direct narratives out of letters, for instance. Richardson’s epistolary adventures did not set off a tidal wave of like works. Lucky for us.
So what works best? Linear narrative, plots centering around individuals either growing up or coming apart, characters in whom readers can invest large emotional capital, and clear resolutions that give emotional pleasure. In other words, the formula of the Victorian novel.
All you need is time.
How much time? How about as much as two years? These novels (and they include most of the British novels of the era) were published monthly, either in magazines or in freestanding installments (you simply walked into your neighborhood bookstand and purchased this month’s installment, boxed, of the new William Makepeace Thackeray novel), or weekly, in such newspapers as Dickens’s Household Hints or The Graphic. This latter paper was a combination of our USA Today, The New Yorker, and People. When Thomas Hardy published his penultimate novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in the early 1890s, installments appeared each week except two: the week of the Henley-on-Thames rowing regatta and the week of the marriage of Prince Aribert of Anhalt to Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein (you can’t make this stuff up). Those two editions were wholly taken up with which famous people were there to be seen and detailed descriptions of ladies’ gowns, bridesmaids’ dresses, and the doings of the beautiful people. Some things never change.
Here’s how it worked: each installment would contain a pre-specified number of words, usually two chapters of, say, four thousand words each. This would go on month after month (or week after week), sometimes for as much as two years, until the final episode was reached. That last episode would contain twice the usual number of chapters, in part because the final chapters were often a matter of wrapping up many, many loose ends and were therefore not inevitably riveting and in part to give readers a reward for patient loyalty.
So what did the serial novel look like? Chiefly, like soap operas (with less explicit sex). And for the same reasons that soap operas look the way they do, only slower. Here are the problems of telling a story over time:
Maintaining continuity
Making information manageable
Keeping audience loyalty
Continuity is a huge issue in any sort of serial narrative. You have to have consistency, so that characters act the same way last week and this. You have to periodically renew readers’ acquaintance with characters they haven’t seen for a while or with the events to date. Often, installments start with a recap of previous happenings—kind of like elementary school, where the first month or two of every fall is spent on last year’s math.
Information management? Dickens often had scores if not hundreds of characters—with names—in his triple-decker novels. And months might pass between one appearance and the next for minor characters. How to keep them memorable: that’s the problem. Well, you would (if you were Dickens) give them odd names, weird quirks, grotesque appearances, goofy catchphrases. Magwitch, Jaggers, Wemmick, Miss Havisham, Joe Gargery and Mrs. Joe. And that’s just Great Expectations. Wemmick worries constantly about his old father, whom he calls the “Aged P.” Miss Havisham wears her fifty-year-old wedding dress and sits among the ruins of the never-consumed wedding feast. Think you’re likely to forget them? In David Copperfield, Mrs. Micawber says, virtually every time she appears, “I shall never leave Mr. Micawber.” No one ever, ever asked her to. So why does she say it? For our benefit. We haven’t seen her since March, it’s June, and we might forget her among the Barkuses and Peggottys. As if.
Audience loyalty? Give ’em a reason to come back tomorrow, next week, next month. To accomplish this, the narrative must be plot-heavy; that is, story must be the driving force, rather than theme or form or originality or anything else. And the most important element of plot is the uptick in intensity at the end of the episode. In other words, you leave something big about to happen at the end of the episode: the cliff-hanger. The most famous example we have is the season-ending question: who shot J.R. on Dallas? Well, the Victorians had their who-shot-J.R. questions, too. The most famous involves Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, where one episode left its young heroine, Little Nell, desperately ill.
We have a desire to divorce art from commerce, to decry the influence of money on movies or corporate underwriters on museums, but the fact of the matter is that most art is influenced to some degree by business issues. If it isn’t, like lyric poetry, it’s because there’s no money to be made. Maybe that’s another point in favor of the lyric.
In any case, the real money for novelists during Victorian days was in serial publication. First, many writers made a lot of money from the contract with the journals, and second, the exposure and interest led to greater sales when the novel appeared in book form. Now, length and number of installments were a matter of serious business. Writers could expect to make anywhere from £50 (that’s pounds sterling for us Yanks) for a novel by a comparative unknown to £10,000 for a work by a major author.
And negotiations could be a tricky affair. George Eliot (real name, Mary Anne Evans), the most famous author of her day, whose husband (George Henry Lewes) acted as her agent, was offered £10,000 for her novel Romola, to be released in sixteen installments. George Lewes countered with a cut to £7,000 for twelve installments. When the final version ran to fourteen installments, Eliot received no pay for the extra two. The art of the deal, indeed.
Then, assuming the novel was any kind of success, it would get published twice more, first as a three-volume novel in cheap bindings and then, if it was deemed worthy, in an expensive, leather-bound single volume. Those three-volume cheapies came to be known as triple-deckers.
Did it work, this Victorian formula?
Did it ever. The “serious” or “literary” novel has never enjoyed the mass appeal, not before and certainly not since, that it did in the Victorian era. Readers were hooked. Subscriptions could jump by tens of thousands during the run of a particularly exciting new novel. Bookstalls could be picked clean in an hour. Thackeray and Dickens and Eliot and Hardy and George Meredith became very rich indeed off the serialized novel. Even in the United States, where serialization did not catch on the same way, the conventional novel proved hugely successful for Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain and William Dean Howells and even for Herman Melville, if we except his masterpiece. Moby Dick was just too out-there for readers expecting another sea yarn in the mode of Omoo and Typee.
So what happened? Why would the modernists reject and even vilify such a sweet arrangement? In part, the economics changed. The great Victorian journals—Blackwood’s, The Edinburgh Review—lost their hold on the reading public. Without them, the serial novel became less viable. But beyond that, how many times can you write the same novel? The late Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges said he would never undertake a novel because the nineteenth-century English writers had done it so magnificently that they left nothing to do. And he meant Robert Louis Stevenson!
Naturally, the economic shift wasn’t the only change. Stuff was happening. The Victorian novel was exquisitely suited to the Victorian world, but it was wildly ill suited to this new epoch. Consider the changes in human thought that occurred in the last years of the old century and the first years of the new one: Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Henri Bergson, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, and Max Planck all produced seminal work before 1910. Dickens and Eliot never read any of them. Their novels were matched to the pace of a horse-and-buggy society. But Henry Ford mass-produced the Model T, moving us into a thirty-mile-an-hour reality. Everything was moving faster. Novels, too, had to find a new pace. Writers, and no doubt readers as well, grew impatient with the conventional novel. Maybe there’s something, they began to think, that novels can do besides plot. As a result, the extremely conventional Victorian-era novel is replaced by the wildly experimental modernist novel. Not right away, but soon. The Edwardian era—those first several years of the century when King Edward VII was monarch—produced a lot of fairly conventional fiction by people such as Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, whose names would almost immediately become synonymous among younger writers with the most ancient of old hats.
Soon, very soon, though, the experiments began. By 1920 many of the major modernists—James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford (in England and Ireland); Gertrude Stein (the United States); Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka (Germany); and Marcel Proust (France)—had made complete hash out of whatever the conventions had been. And why not? When time (Bergson), the mind (Freud and Jung), reality (Einstein and Bohr and Heisenberg), and even ethics (Nietzsche) have changed utterly, when men fly and pictures move and sound travels through air, what can you do but try something new?
And new it was. Stein wrote strange, repeating, stair-step prose that seemed to come from someone who had not quite mastered English—or any other human language. In novels like Three Lives (1909) and The Making of Americans (1925), she defamiliarized language, making it strange to native speakers so that they must reconsider their relation to it. Small wonder it took her eighteen years to find a publisher for the latter book, a nine-hundred-page behemoth. Kafka did her one better and, in dozens of stories and three novels, made the entirety of existence unfamiliar. Most readers are acquainted, at least by reputation, with his story “The Metamorphosis,” in which a young man awakens one morning to find himself changed into a gigantic insect. The tale takes a common enough figurative expression of alienation and makes it literal, thereby rendering it bizarre and, indeed, alienating in its own right. Less well known are his book-length fictions, which do much the same thing. In the posthumously published The Trial (1925), the main character, Joseph K., finds himself accused of a vague crime that he’s fairly sure he didn’t commit. The crime itself, the circumstances surrounding it, and the legal authority under which the prosecution is to take place are never revealed. Nonetheless, he submits himself to the process of the law, which ultimately results in his trial, conviction, and execution. The Castle (1926) features a similarly absurd situation, in which a surveyor, also named K. (Kafka’s all-purpose, autobiographical initial for the put-upon), has arrived in a town to conduct work authorized, allegedly, by the ruling castle of the title. When there appears to have been a mix-up and his services are not required, he attempts to reach someone in charge in the shadowing castle, which the villagers accept as the absolute authority and dare never approach or question. Answers are never forthcoming, accusations are made based on spurious information, and bureaucratic errors abound despite the castle’s insistence on, and the villagers’ belief in, infallibility. K. himself has been brought to the village because of a bureaucratic blunder that he never manages to straighten out. Like Stein, Kafka offers a radical new possibility for what the novel can accomplish. Her arena is language; his, plot and premise. But each takes fiction to a place it has never gone before.
When we speak of modernist fiction, of course, the phrase that immediately springs to mind is stream of consciousness. And indeed, several of the stars of the era—Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, in particular—worked in something we could call stream of consciousness, although they themselves did not inevitably subscribe to the term. What we can say with certainty, though, is that the exploration and presentation of consciousness is an ongoing preoccupation. Even those like D. H. Lawrence with little patience with the practices of Woolf or Dorothy Richardson spent a great deal of energy attempting to render the inner lives of their characters. There is a great deal of action and drama on the surface of Women in Love (1920), for instance, but the book’s energies are directed at the sharper drama of the four major characters’ interior lives: How do I feel about this friend, this lover, this antagonist? What is this person demanding of my psyche, and am I willing to comply or resist? What does it mean to be autonomous? Connected? Conscious? Can I survive? Do I want to?
That insistence on interiority is in many ways one of the hallmarks of modernist fiction. Here’s a passage about, ostensibly, food.
No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?
This is the response to the most famous morsel in literature, the petite madeleine dipped in tea that gives rise to seven volumes of memory in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, which translator C. Scott Moncrieff renders not very precisely into English as Remembrance of Things Past (1913/1922). What’s the action here? A guy takes a bite of a cake. In the old days, the action wouldn’t even register unless it was connected to some other, larger action. In William Dean Howells, for instance, the only response would be to take another bite, or perhaps disgrace himself in company by talking with his mouth full or something. Not here, though. No, sirree. I have it on excellent authority that, strange as it may seem, Proust never even read Howells. Can you imagine? Marcel, the narrator, will himself take another bite, but not before this bit of mental rumination. The action is all interior: sensation overwhelms him, followed by unaccountable emotion (the joy he alludes to), and then the questions about the origin and meaning of this emotion. His entire life, in other words, comes flooding back in that spoonful of soggy cake. Yes, he will “seize upon and define it,” but it will take him about a million words.
Not everyone in modernism went on at such length, although there were numerous multivolume novels, but a great many of them focused their efforts—and their narratives—inside characters’ heads. Writers as diverse as Joyce, Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, and E. M. Forster go spelunking in the caves of consciousness. Indeed, what marks Forster’s A Passage to India as more particularly modern than his novels of the century’s first decade, A Room with a View or even Howards End, is not the attitude or the form but the emphasis on the problem of consciousness, on how characters perceive, process, and respond at the most private levels to the stimuli of their surroundings. And what happens when you can’t go any further inside consciousness? Finnegans Wake. The book no one has read. And that may include its writer. Actually, I have read the Wake, if not all at one time, and have enjoyed much of it, although I won’t make any great claims to understanding. Not that there’s any real mystery to it:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
Now, how can you not want to read more? That’s merely the first two paragraphs. In a curious way, everything you need to understand the novel is there—the puns, the insistent rivers, the northern European legends and word borrowings, the encryptions of family (“gorgios” plays on the name of his son, Giorgio) and hometown (“doublin,” although my favorite is “dear dirty dumplin”), the abuse of English spelling and orthography, the circularity (“rearrived,” “recirculation,” the invocation of the philosopher of historical circularity Giambattista Vico in “commodius vicus,” and the sentence fragment to begin the book that seems to complete the one that ends it). On the other hand, for many readers those two paragraphs are all they’ll ever want to know about the strangest book in English literature. Maybe one paragraph more than all.
The Wake reminds us of the other great hallmark of twentieth-century novels: experimentalism. If Victorianism manifested a resistance to innovation, modernism and postmodernism seem to require it. Not all experimentalism is as extreme as Joyce’s, though. Hemingway was himself a great experimenter, but with short, tight sentences and limited vocabulary and how much meaning could be packed into how few words. Most fiction writers will go their whole careers and never construct a sentence as simple and rich as the question with which he ends The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” There are volumes in that seemingly innocuous sentence, which, in another context, could be the epitome of emptiness. He did that in his first novel. Jack Kerouac went the opposite way, constructing sentences in his first novel that are overcaffeinated, hyped-up, jazzed-up, charging, driving attempts to capture the entire giddy, sad, ecstatic, Beat world.
There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour it would come streaming through the Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men; and Coit Tower, and the Embarcadero, and Market Street, and the eleven teeming hills.
Now, that’s a passage Jane Austen never wrote. Kerouac strives to capture the rhythms of a new, postwar America zooming along highways at breakneck speeds in the enforced solitude of the automobile, revved up on jazz clubs and all-night coffee shops, moving away from the war years as fast as it could. What a sound, what a voice! If, like Hemingway, he proves easy to parody and in his later work sometimes seems to parody himself, it’s because that voice is so distinctive and original.
Experimentalism comes in every shape and form, even to undoing the shape and form of the novel itself. The French so-called New Novelists, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras and Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute, did away with most of the things we associate with the novel: plot, character, theme, action, and narrative. What replaced them, often, would be objects and sensations, the same scene from various perspectives or sometimes the same perspective again and again. In Jealousy, the signature novel of the movement, Robbe-Grillet’s tormented hero watches obsessively for evidence of his wife’s alleged affair with a neighbor. The husband calls his wife only by a letter and ellipsis, “A . . .” and scrupulously avoids mentioning his own presence, eschewing the first-person pronoun and often avoiding placing himself at scenes where he is clearly present. The New Novel has had later adherents as well, most notably perhaps David Markson, whose books always shy away from the conventional and expected. Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) is presented as a series of very small statements about the world she experiences and her responses to it by a woman believing herself to be the last person in that world.
One has a fairly acute inkling as to when Cassandra may be having her period, for instance.
Cassandra is feeling out of sorts again, one can even imagine Troilus or certain other Trojans now and again saying.
Then again, Helen could be having hers even when she still possesses that radiant dignity, being Helen.
My own generally makes my face puffy.
One is next to positive that Sappho would have never beaten around the bush about any of this, on the other hand.
Which could well explain why certain of her poems were used as the stuffing for mummies, even before the friars got their hands on those that were left.
Well, one can hardly expect conventional on that tale, can one? His books have become progressively less reliant on the traditional constituent elements of narrative and more dependent on moments of consciousness and perception. These, too, are traditional elements, of course, but they have rarely been foregrounded as they are in Markson.
Every era has its literary ethos, sometimes more than one. The twentieth century’s, for the most part, centers around one of a few related battle cries: “Out with the old,” “Down with convention,” “Make it new,” or “You don’t know until you try it.” That urge to experiment and make it new has taken many forms, many times rejecting the innovations of the last bunch of rebels. That’s one version, at least, of being modern. Or post.
But back to that Victorian novel. Let me ask again: so what happened? Nothing. The nineteenth-century novel never really left us. That mode of fiction—linear narrative, clearly delineated good and bad characters, and the rest—may have fallen from favor among “literary” writers, but it stayed and stayed and stayed in popular fiction. You can find it in much genre fiction, romance or horror or thriller. Open a Hollywood saga by Sidney Sheldon or Jackie Collins, a “read” by Judith Krantz or Maeve Binchy, a historical saga by James A. Michener or John Jakes or Edward Rutherford, and you’ll find the descendant of A Mill on the Floss or The Egoist. You may have a hard time recognizing it with all the sex and profanity, all the bedroom shenanigans that never appeared in (or maybe occurred to) George Eliot or Howells. The late twentieth century even produced some great Victorian novelists of its own, perhaps most notably that magnificent Canadian, Robertson Davies. Davies, who didn’t start publishing novels until his late thirties, produced three and two-thirds trilogies before his death at age eighty-two. His novels would fit uncomfortably into the 1870s or 1880s because of his greater frankness, but in terms of form and sensibility, he’s one of Them. In What’s Bred in the Bone (1985) he even asks the question, what is an artist born out of his right time supposed to do? The answer, in this as in the rest of his novels, is to produce the art he was born to make. Literary history and fashion are artificial constructs, and a Victorian should be a Victorian, whatever his era. And he was.
Which brings us, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, back to our point. Every age has experimentalists and traditionalists. Form breakers and form followers. You can call them radicals and reactionaries if you like, but their aesthetic stances don’t inevitably follow their political views. Some ages tend one way and some another, but within them there are always writers out of step with their own time. There are rebels and rebels against rebellion. That’s why every literary history is a lie, including this one. They’re overly simplistic, failing to capture the vast complexity of men and women doing their own thing in their historical moment, whether that thing comports with those of other writers or not. Mere reporting can’t capture all the facets and all the nuances of the fiction of a given year, much less of all the years, in the dizzying multiplicity of what James called the “house of fiction.” Who can possibly keep up? Your head, it simply swirls.