The bildungsroman, a type of novel about upbringing and education, seems to have its beginnings in Goethe’s work, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796), which is about the processes by which a sensitive soul discovers its identity and its role in the big world. A story of the emergence of a personality and a talent, with its implicit motifs of struggle, conflict, suffering, and success, has an inevitable appeal for the novelist; many first novels are autobiographical and attempt to generalize the author’s own adolescent experiences into a kind of universal symbol of the growing and learning processes. Charles Dickens embodies a whole bildungsroman in works like David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861), but allows the emerged ego of the hero to be absorbed into the adult world, so that he is the character that is least remembered. H.G. Wells, influenced by Dickens but vitally concerned with education because of his commitment to socialist or utopian programs, looks at the agonies of the growing process from the viewpoint of an achieved utopia in The Dream (1924) and, in Joan and Peter (1918), concentrates on the search for the right modes of apprenticeship to the complexities of modern life.
The school story established itself in England as a form capable of popularization in children’s magazines, chiefly because of the glamour of elite systems of education as first shown in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), which is set at Rugby. In France, Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) of Alain-Fournier is the great exemplar of the school novel. The studies of struggling youth presented by Hermann Hesse became, after his death in 1962, part of an American campus cult indicating the desire of the serious young to find literary symbols for their own growing problems.
Samuel Butler’s Way of All Flesh, which was written by 1885 but not published until 1903, remains one of the greatest examples of the modern bildungsroman; philosophical and polemic as well as moving and comic, it presents the struggle of a growing soul to further, all unconsciously, the aims of evolution, and is a devastating indictment of Victorian paternal tyranny. But probably James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which portrays the struggle of the nascent artistic temperament to overcome the repressions of family, state, and church, is the unsurpassable model of the form in the 20th century. That the learning novel may go beyond what is narrowly regarded as education is shown in two remarkable works of the 1950s—William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1955), which deals with the discovery of evil by a group of shipwrecked middle-class boys brought up in the liberal tradition, and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), which concerns the attempts of an adolescent American to come to terms with the adult world in a series of brief encounters, ending with his failure and his ensuing mental illness. Roman à clef
Real, as opposed to imaginary, human life provides so much ready-made material for the novelist that it is not surprising to find in many novels a mere thinly disguised and minimally reorganized representation of actuality. When, for the fullest appreciation of a work of fiction, it is necessary for the reader to consult the real-life personages and events that inspired it, then the work is a roman à clef, a novel that needs a key. In a general sense, every work of literary art requires a key or clue to the artist’s preoccupations (the jail in Dickens; the mysterious tyrants in Kafka, both leading back to the author’s own father), but the true roman à clef is more particular in its disguised references. Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” has puzzling naturalistic details that can be cleared up only by referring the poem to an assassination plot in which the Earl of Bolingbroke was involved. Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704), Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681), and Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) make total sense only when their hidden historical content is disclosed. These, of course, are not true novels, but they serve to indicate a literary purpose that is not primarily aesthetic. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod requires a knowledge of the author’s personal enmities, and to understand Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point fully one must know, for instance, that the character of Mark Rampion is D.H. Lawrence himself and that of Denis Burlap is the critic John Middleton Murry. Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu becomes a richer literary experience when the author’s social milieu is explored, and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has so many personal references that it may be called the most massive roman à clef ever written. The more important the clef becomes to full understanding, the closer the work has come to a special kind of didacticism. When it is dangerous to expose the truth directly, then the novel or narrative poem may present it obliquely. But the ultimate vitality of the work will depend on those elements in it that require no key. Antinovel
The movement away from the traditional novel form in France in the form of the nouveau roman tends to an ideal that may be called the antinovel—a work of the fictional imagination that ignores such properties as plot, dialogue, human interest. It is impossible, however, for a human creator to create a work of art that is completely inhuman. Contemporary French writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet in Jealousy (1957), Nathalie Sarraute in Tropisms (1939) and The Planetarium (1959), and Michel Butor in Passing Time (1957) and Degrees (1960) wish mainly to remove the pathetic fallacy from fiction, in which the universe, which is indifferent to man, is made to throw back radar reflections of man’s own emotions. Individual character is not important, and consciousness dissolves into sheer “perception.” Even time is reversible, since perceptions have nothing to do with chronology, and, as Butor’s Passing Time shows, memories can be lived backward in this sort of novel. Ultimately, the very appearance of the novel—traditionally a model of the temporal treadmill—must change; it will not be obligatory to start at page 1 and work through to the end; a novel can be entered at any point, like an encyclopaedia.