What is a novel?
Response to an inquiry
In the days when I read a lot of fiction, my answer to the question ‘What is a novel?’ was another question, ‘Does it matter?’, and my answer to that was in the negative. It’s different now.
E.M. Forster said the novel tells a story. It was thanks to Forster that the greatness of The Leopard was widely recognized. Can we really say that that great novel tells a story? Even if a story generally is one element in a novel, it’s surely not the most important. Is what makes a better novel a better story? It isn’t easy to say whether one story is better than another. I remember being much struck by the ancient Mesopotamian tale (retold by Somerset Maugham) which gave John O’Hara the title of his novel Appointment in Samarra, and I was much struck by that little parable of Kafka’s, 'An Imperial Message'. But I couldn’t say one was better than the other—how could you compare them? A very good story can be very brief, like that old Mesopotamian one, and many people expect to be told in a sentence or two what a novel is about—‘what the story is’. Yet if you try and say what the story of Ulysses is, or of War and Peace, or of Remembrance of Things Past, or of The Leopard (this isn’t true only of long books),—if you try and do this you feel it’s absurd. And if somehow you succeed, what have you conveyed? Everything essential is left out—even more surely than when you try and tell the story of an opera or a film. It’s because all it can keep intact is the story, if that, that a film even of a good novel can’t be as good as the book. ‘The most thorough knowledge of human nature’ (no mention here of any story) can be conveyed only by ‘the best chosen language’ (Northanger Abbey, 5). What makes even a novel that’s plainly a great story great isn’t the story, isn’t the relation of events. Is Kidnapped a better story than Treasure Island or even than The Coral Island? Kidnapped is great as the story of a friendship, and this is because Stevenson had that interest in character which Virginia Woolf thought the novelist’s distinctive quality. She herself had it of course, soTo the Lighthouse, though hardly a story, is certainly a novel, whereas Gulliver’s Travels or The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is not.
It’s true that playwrights and some poets also create characters (just as some also tell stories), so this quality in novelists isn’t peculiar to them. But there’s another thing that at least some modern novelists do, which seems to have interested them as much as character-drawing and more than story-telling. Stevenson said the novel is not a transcript of life, it’s a simplification of life, and here Henry James agreed with him. Still some novels have managed to render social life and some the moral life and some even both (as do Middlemarch and The Heart of Midlothian). And the modernists in fiction managed to render the actual quality of experience. Isn’t that what we admire Woolf herself for doing, as well as Proust and Joyce and Lawrence? Isn’t it what Forster was speaking of when he said that Lampedusa had made him realize how many ways there are of being alive? And can’t it give value to some books by itself, as it does to that little book of Pasternak’s called in English The Last Summer, in which there’s hardly any character-drawing and (though its author called it A Tale) no story at all?
(The short story itself in the hands not only of Chekhov but also of Kipling—that other master of the genre and contributor to modernism—contains at its best very little narrative.)
Of course you may object to calling The Last Summer a novel, if not on those grounds then because it’s too short—though we don’t say a book can’t be a novel because it’s too long. We may agree to call The Last Summer a novella, as we do A Christmas Carol, Morgan Bible or Candide, but then what is a novella but a short novel? Giacomo Joyce may be too short to be a novella, for all I know; anyhow it’s hardly a short story. But these are only names. And perhaps the problem of what a novel is is only a matter of names. If the Joyce or the Pasternak or some other work of fiction I value, Novembre or Malte Laurids Brigge, isn’t properly speaking a novel, whether because it’s too short, or not a story, or because the author shows no interest in character, I’m quite content with that designation, ‘a work of fiction’. (A novel must be fiction, I suppose, although not necessarily prose fiction—witness Clough’s charming long poem The Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich, not to mention Troilus and Criseyde and Yevgeny Onegin—, and although in this too, in being fiction, as well as in the delineation of characters, a novel is no different from a play, generally speaking.) And this designation will also cover works which seem to have all the attributes of a novel yet somehow resist the name—whether odd ones like Vathek or great ones like Rasselas, which has both characters (characters moreover who develop) and also a narrative, though as Professor Hiller said, we don’t read Rasselas for the story. Which of course shows, if Rasselas is a novel, that the story in a novel may be quite unimportant, and if Rasselas is not a novel, that a work of fiction may not be a novel even if it does tell a story.
(The best novels of course are worth reading more than once, but do we re-read any novel for the story? We can hardly re-read one for the pleasure of learning what happens next.)
Then does it matter what a novel is? They who know can tell us if a book deserves the name, and ‘work of fiction’ will do if it doesn’t. In any case, readers whom stories no longer satisfy will feel it is only worth reading if it can add to their stock. And they will find that if it can, the story, if there is one, simply reflects the author’s themes or subject—as the story of Rasselas, such as it is, reflects the theme which suggested the original title, The Choice of Life, or as the story, such as it is, reflects the subject in Loss and Gain. Still I now see that just as the question ‘What is a novel?’ prompted me to ask ‘Does it matter?’, so this question prompts another in its turn, and it’s important to ask it.
A Savoyard acquaintance once told me I wasn’t fit. Not fit for what? To be clear, for scrambling up an alp. Here the question is, ‘Matter to whom?’ I used to think that whereas people who sell books are concerned to meet what they think are readers’ expectations—that is, to keep them from reading anything different from the sort of thing they have read before—, people who write books and have something new to say should only be concerned to find the right form for it and say it as well as possible. ‘Should I call this book a novel?’ Proust asks about Jean Santeuil, and answers his own question: ‘It is something less, perhaps, and yet much more, the very essence of my life…’ And in fact this early work by the greatest of the writers whose autobiographical fictions are among European literature’s modern classics (and while I think of them let me add to the names of Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Pasternak, Rilke and Proust himself those of Jacobsen and Hamsun)—this study for the mature masterpiece, though written in the third person, is even more autobiographical, and so, like all these works, only a story in so far as anybody’s life is a story, and the weakest parts in it are those where Proust tried to write like a novelist. So why do I now think that the question what a novel is matters even to writers with something of their own to say, if they choose to write prose fiction? Well, I also used to think that it was obvious how literary productions ought to be judged. At least, I thought it an obvious statement that authors couldn’t reasonably be blamed for not doing what they hadn’t set out to do. And this is true, but as I see now, I should have asked ‘Obvious to whom?’, and qualified the statement according to the answer.