What Is a Novel? How the Long Prose Story Took Over Literature
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For most of literary history the serious forms were verse: epic, tragedy, the lyric. Prose was for chronicles, sermons and letters, and a long invented story in prose was something between a low entertainment and a contradiction in terms. Then, over about two centuries, the novel became the form in which a culture examined itself, and it has held that place since. What a novel is has never been settled, and the best definitions are the ones that explain why it took so long to arrive.
What makes it a novel
The word comes from the Italian novella, a piece of news, a new thing, and the form's distinguishing feature was originally exactly that: it told of ordinary people in a recognisable present rather than of gods, kings and knights in a legendary past. The critic Ian Watt, in 1957, called this formal realism: the novel presents particular people with proper names, in particular places, at particular times, whose experience is reported in enough detail to be believed. Epic and romance had told of types, Achilles or Lancelot, doing what heroes do; the novel told of Robinson Crusoe counting his barrels of gunpowder. Its other marks follow from that. It is in prose, because prose is the language of report; it is long, because a life takes space; and it is about individuals in society, because that is where its readers lived.
The ancestors
Long prose fictions existed before the novel. The Greeks and Romans wrote romances of shipwreck and separated lovers, and Petronius's Satyricon and Apuleius's Golden Ass are comic prose narratives with a claim to the name. The Tale of Genji, written by a lady of the Japanese court around 1010, is a thousand pages of psychological fiction about a prince's loves and has the strongest claim of all to be the first novel. Medieval Europe had prose romances of Arthur, and Spain in 1554 produced Lazarillo de Tormes, the first picaresque, the life of a rogue told by himself. The book that most histories start from is Don Quixote, 1605 and 1615, in which Cervantes sent a man who had read too many romances out into the real Spain to be beaten up by it, and in doing so wrote a story about the gap between books and life that the novel has been telling ever since.
The eighteenth century
The English novel arrived in a rush. The conditions were a growing literate middle class with money and leisure, printers who could reach them, circulating libraries, a Protestant habit of examining one's own conscience in diaries, and a philosophy, from Locke, that held that truth came through the individual's experience. Some landmarks:
- •Robinson Crusoe, Defoe, 1719: a castaway's diary of survival, presented as true, the first best-seller of the form
- •Pamela, Richardson, 1740: a servant girl's letters resisting her master, the first novel to make readers weep in public
- •Tom Jones, Fielding, 1749: a comic epic in prose, its author present on every page arguing with the reader about what a novel should be
- •Tristram Shandy, Sterne, 1759 to 1767: a novel that fails to get its hero born until volume three and mocks every convention the form had just acquired
- •Pride and Prejudice, Austen, 1813: the marriage plot perfected, with a narrator who slides in and out of her heroine's mind in a technique the form would use for two hundred years
The great age and after
The nineteenth century was the novel's empire. Serialised in magazines and read aloud in families, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Eliot, Flaubert and Dostoevsky wrote books that a whole society read together and that tried to hold a whole society inside them, and the realist novel, long, many-charactered, socially panoramic, became what the word meant. Then the form turned inward. Henry James refined the point of view; Proust spent seven volumes on memory; Joyce, in Ulysses in 1922, put a single Dublin day through every style the language possessed; Woolf dissolved plot into consciousness; Kafka wrote realism about impossible events. Since then the novel has done everything and refused to be defined, absorbing history, fantasy, autobiography and the essay, and the recurring announcement of its death, made in every decade since the 1920s, has been followed each time by a new one that people queued for.
Why it won
The novel took over because it fitted the way modern people understood themselves: as individuals with inner lives, making their way through a society that could be described, in a time that moved forward. It could contain anything, since prose has no rules of the kind that govern verse; it could be read alone and silently, which suited a culture of privacy; and it could be sold, which suited a culture of commerce. Its critics from the beginning said it was a form for women, servants and the idle, which was partly true and turned out to be a strength, since those were most of the readers there were. The form's defining quality, that it tells of particular people who did not exist as though they had, remains the oddest and most durable thing about it.
The takeaway
A novel is a long fictional narrative in prose about particular, named individuals in a recognisable world, a form with ancient and medieval ancestors, an arguable first example in The Tale of Genji and a conventional founding in Don Quixote, that took its modern shape in eighteenth-century England when a literate middle class, printing and a philosophy of individual experience came together. It dominated the nineteenth century as the realist novel, turned inward in the twentieth, and remains the form in which modern societies tell themselves what they are like.