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What
is a Novel??
“A fictitious narrative . . . accommodated to the ordinary train of
human events” —Sir
Walter Scott (1824)
“I could [make one of her characters, a clergyman, more spiritual
than he is] if I held it
the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never
been and never will
be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely
after my own liking; I
might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman, and put my
own admirable
opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on
the contrary, that my
strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary, and to give a faithful
account of men and
things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror
is doubtless defective;
the outlines wil sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused;
but I feel as
much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is,
as if I were in the
witness-box narrating my experience on oath.” — George Eliot, Adam
Bede (1858)
“A Romance originally meant anything in prose or in verse written in
any of the
Romance languages; a Novel meant a new tale, a tale of fresh interest
. . . now, when we
speak of a Romance, we generally mean ‘a fictitious narrative, in prose
or verse, the
interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents’; an
when we speak of
a Novel, we generally mean ‘a fictitious narrative differing from the
Romance, in
asmuch as the incidents accommodated to the incidents are accomodated
to the ordinary
train of events and the modern state of society.’ If we adopt this
distinction, we make the
prose Romance and the Novel the two highest varieties of prose fiction,
and we allow in
the prose Romance a greater ideality of incident that in the Novel”
—David Masson
(1859)
“How then are we to attack the novel–that spongy tract, those fictions
in prose of a
certain extent which extend so interminably? Not with any elaborate
apparatus.
Principles and systems may suit other forms of art, but they cannot
be applicable here–or
if applied their results must be subjected to re-examination.
And who is the re-examiner? Well, I am afraid it will be the
human heart, it will be this
man-to-man business, justly suspect in its cruder forms. . . . The
intensely stifling human
quality of the novel is not to be avoided; the novel is sogged with
humanity; there is no
escaping the uplift or downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism.
We may hate
humanity, but it it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts;
little is left but a bunch
of words.” — E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927)
“The novel tells the adventure of interiority; the content of the novel
is the story of the
soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures, in order to be
proved and tested by
them, and, by proving itself, to find its own essence. The inner
security of the epic world
excludes adventure in this essential sense: the heroes of the epic
live through a whole
variety of adventures, but the fact that they will pass the test, both
inwardly and
outwardly, is never in doubt; the world dominating gods must triumph
over the demons.
Hence the passivity of the epic hero . . . : the adventures that fill
and embellish his life
are the form taken by the objective and extensive totality of the world;
he himself is only
the luminous centre around which this unfolded totality revolves. .
. . By contrast, the
novel hero does not have to be passive: that is why his passivity has
a specific
psychological and sociological nature and represents a distinct type
in the structural
possibilities of the novel.” —Georg Lukács, The Theory
of the Novel (1963)
“More than any other literary form, more perhaps that any other type
of writing, the
novel serves as the model by which society conceives of itself, the
discourse in and
through which it articulates the world. And it is no doubt for
this reason that
structuralists have concentrated their attention on the novel.
It is here that they can most
easily study the semiotic process in its fullest scope: the creation
and organization of
signs not simply in order to produce meaning. For the basic convention
that governs the
novel–and which, a fortiori, governs those novels which set out to
violate it–is our
expectation that the novel will produce a world. Words must be
composed in such a way
that through the activity of reading there will emerge a model of the
social world, models
of the individual personality, of the relaitons of the individual to
society and, perhaps
most important, of the kind of significance which these aspects of
the world can bear.
‘Our identity,’ Sollers continues, ‘depends on the novel, what others
think of us, what we
think of ourselves, the way in which our life is imperceptibly moulded
into a whole.
How do others see us if not as a character from a novel?” (Logiques
p. 228) The novel is
the primary semiotic agent of intelligibility” — Jonathan Culler, “Poetics
of the Novel.”
Structuralist Poetics (1975)
“To begin at the beginning with the physical aspects of the book, the
novel as book, its
conditions of production and use. The linearity of the written
or printed book is a
puissant support of logocentricm. The writer . . . sits at a
desk and spins out on the page
a long thread or filament of ink. Word follows word from the
beginning to the end. . . .
The reader follows, or is supposed to follow, the text in the same
way, reading word by
word and line by line from the beginning to the end. The physical,
social and economic
conditions of the rinting and distribution of Victorian books, that
is, the breaking of the
text into numbered or titled parts, books, or chapter, and [ublication
in parts either
separately or with other material in a periodical, interrupts this
linearity but does not
transform it into something else. The text of a Victorian novel,
. . . is like bits of sting
laid end to end. Its publication in parts over a period of time,
that, in the case of
Dickens’s big novels, was almost two years in length, only emphasizes
this linerarity.
Publication in parts gives that lineraity a temporal dimension, a dimension
already
present in the time it takes to follow a novel word by word, line by
line, page by page.
Victorian readers had to read on part of Bleak House and then, after
an interval, the next
part, and so on.” — J Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines
(1992)
“Not only as reading, then, but as writing the novel is inextricably
entangled in gender
codes; more specifically the utility that justified the form was very
much a matter of
femininity. This is not to dismiss the role of other critical
articulations in the novelistic
field . . . but the critical project in which the novel was prominently
featured was that of
the problem of reading, and in this project gender was central. . .
.
The figurative ground for gender chosen by discourse is typically
the social
body, for in order to enact the kind of reform and discipline sought
by reviewers (and
proper novelists), the novel could not be abstracted from the temporal
and mundane
realm of social and historical process. Standing as it did under
the sign of utility, the
novel was defined as less a literary than a social act, both as a form
of writing and as a
form of reading; and the critical idiom through which novels were mediated
kept
constantly in the foreground the link between writing and world on
which their value in
the discourse depended. Thus the vocabulary used for proper novels
(and for ‘feminine’
writing in general) is marked by the referential doubleness whereby
its charateristic
terms (“delicate,” “amiable,” “gentle,” and so on) apply equally to
persons and to texts,
so that texts in this discourse begin to assume the worldly and bodily
configuration.
—Ina Ferris “The Rhetoric of Gender in Critical Discourse” Re-writing
the Victorians
(1992)
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