Available avant-garde techniques are innumerable, though not all of them are salable. There is the device of counterpointing a main narrative with a story in footnotes, which eventually rises like water and floods the other. A novel has been written, though not published, in which the words are set (rather like the mouse’s tail or tale in Alice in Wonderland) to represent graphically the physical objects in the narrative. Burroughs has experimented with a tricolumnar technique, in which three parallel narratives demand the reader’s attention. But the writers like Borges and Nabokov go beyond mere technical innovation: they ask for a reconsideration of the very essence of fiction. In one of his ficciones, Borges strips from the reader even the final illusion that he is reading a story, for the story is made to dissolve, the artist evidently losing faith in his own artifact. Novels, as both Borges and Nabokov show, can turn into poems or philosophical essays, but they cannot, while remaining literature, turn into compositions disclaiming all interest in the world of feeling, thought, and sense. The novelist can do anything he pleases with his art so long as he interprets, or even just presents, a world that the reader recognizes as existing, or capable of existing, or capable of being dreamed of as existing. Types of novel Historical
For the hack novelist, to whom speedy output is more important than art, thought, and originality, history provides ready-made plots and characters. A novel on Alexander the Great or Joan of Arc can be as flimsy and superficial as any schoolgirl romance. But historical themes, to which may be added prehistoric or mythical ones, have inspired the greatest novelists, as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma reveal. In the 20th century, distinguished historical novels such as Arthur Koestler’s The Gladiators (1939), Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934), Zoé Oldenbourg’s Destiny of Fire (1960), and Mary Renault’s The King Must Die (1958) exemplify an important function of the fictional imagination—to interpret remote events in human and particular terms, to transform documentary fact, with the assistance of imaginative conjecture, into immediate sensuous and emotional experience.
There is a kind of historical novel, little more than a charade, which frequently has a popular appeal because of a common belief that the past is richer, bloodier, and more erotic than the present. Such novels, which include such immensely popular works as those of Georgette Heyer, or Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel stories in England in the early 20th century, and Forever Amber (1944) by Kathleen Winsor in the United States, may use the trappings of history but, because there is no real assimilation of the past into the imagination, the result must be a mere costume ball. On the other hand, the American novelist John Barth showed in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) that mock historical scholarship—preposterous events served up with parodic pomposity—could constitute a viable, and not necessarily farcical, approach to the past. Barth’s history is cheerfully suspect, but his sense of historical perspective is genuine.
It is in the technical conservatism of most European historical novels that the serious student of fiction finds cause to relegate the category to a secondary place. Few practitioners of the form seem prepared to learn from any writer later than Scott, though Virginia Woolf—in Orlando (1928) and Between the Acts (1941)—made bold attempts to squeeze vast tracts of historical time into a small space and thus make them as fictionally manageable as the events of a single day. And John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., which can be taken as a historical study of a phase in America’s development, is a reminder that experiment is not incompatible with the sweep and amplitude that great historical themes can bring to the novel. Picaresque
In Spain, the novel about the rogue or pícaro was a recognized form, and such English novels as Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress (1724) can be regarded as picaresque in the etymological sense. But the term has come to connote as much the episodic nature of the original species as the dynamic of roguery. Fielding’s Tom Jones, whose hero is amoral and very nearly gallows-meat, has been called picaresque, and the Pickwick Papers of Dickens—whose eponym is a respectable and even childishly ingenuous scholar—can be accommodated in the category.
The requirements for a picaresque novel are apparently length, loosely linked episodes almost complete in themselves, intrigue, fights, amorous adventure, and such optional items as stories within the main narrative, songs, poems, or moral homilies. Perhaps inevitably, with such a structure or lack of it, the driving force must come from a wild or roguish rejection of the settled bourgeois life, a desire for the open road, with adventures in inn bedrooms and meetings with questionable wanderers. In the modern period, Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (1953) and Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (1959) have something of the right episodic, wandering, free, questing character. But in an age that lacks the unquestioning acceptance of traditional morality against which the old picaresque heroes played out their villainous lives, it is not easy to revive the novela picaresca as the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) conceived it, or as such lesser Spanish writers of the beginning of the 17th century as Mateo Alemán, Vicente Espinel, and Luis Vélez de Guevara developed it. The modern criminal wars with the police rather than with society, and his career is one of closed and narrow techniques, not compatible with the gay abandon of the true pícaro. Sentimental
The term sentimental, in its mid-18th-century usage, signified refined or elevated feeling, and it is in this sense that it must be understood in Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768). Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) are sentimental in that they exhibit a passionate attachment between the sexes that rises above the merely physical. The vogue of the sentimental love novel was one of the features of the Romantic movement, and the form maintained a certain moving dignity despite a tendency to excessive emotional posturing. The germs of mawkishness are clearly present in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–67), though offset by a diluted Rabelaisianism and a certain cerebral quality. The debasement by which the term sentimental came to denote a self-indulgence in superficial emotions occurred in the Victorian era, under the influence of sanctimony, religiosity, and a large commercial demand for bourgeois fiction. Sentimental novels of the 19th and 20th centuries are characterized by an invertebrate emotionalism and a deliberately lachrymal appeal. Neither Dickens nor Thackeray was immune to the temptations of sentimentality—as is instanced by their treatment of deathbed scenes. The reported death of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843) is an example of Dickens’ ability to provoke two tearful responses from the one situation—one of sorrow at a young death, the other of relief at the discovery that the death never occurred. Despite such patches of emotional excess, Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist. Such a designation must be reserved for writers like Mrs. Henry Wood, the author of East Lynne (1861). That the sentimental novel is capable of appeal even in the Atomic Age is shown by the success of Love Story (1970), by Erich Segal. That this is the work of a Yale professor of classics seems to indicate either that not even intellectuals disdain sentimental appeal or that tearjerking is a process to be indulged in coldly and even cynically. Stock emotions are always easily aroused through stock devices, but both the aim and the technique are generally eschewed by serious writers. Gothic