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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.

Nobel prize-winning American author, Pearl S. Buck, at her home, Green Hills Farm, near Perkasie, Pennsylvania, 1962. (Pearl Buck)

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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.

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.

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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.

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