No other cognate art form—neither the epic poem nor the drama nor the film—can match the resources of the novel when the artistic task is to bring to immediate, sensuous, passionate life the somewhat impersonal materials of the historian. War and Peace is the great triumphant example of the panoramic study of a whole society—that of early 19th-century Russia—which enlightens as the historian enlightens and yet also conveys directly the sensations and emotions of living through a period of cataclysmic change. In the 20th century, another Russian, Boris Pasternak, in his Doctor Zhivago (1957), expressed—though on a less than Tolstoyan scale—the personal immediacies of life during the Russian Revolution. Though of much less literary distinction than either of these two books, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) showed how the American Civil War could assume the distanced pathos, horror, and grandeur of any of the classic struggles of the Old World.
Needless to say, length and weighty subject matter are no guarantee in themselves of fictional greatness. Among American writers, for example, James Jones’s celebration of the U.S. Army on the eve of World War II in From Here to Eternity (1951), though a very ambitious project, repels through indifferent writing and sentimental characterization; Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead (1948), an equally ambitious military novel, succeeds much more because of a tautness, a concern with compression, and an astringent objectivity that Jones was unable to match. Frequently the size of a novel is too great for its subject matter—as with Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), reputedly the longest single-volume novel of the 20th century, John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and John Fowles’s Magus (1965). Diffuseness is the great danger in the long novel, and diffuseness can mean slack writing, emotional self-indulgence, sentimentality.
Even the long picaresque novel—which, in the hands of a Fielding or his contemporary Tobias Smollett, can rarely be accused of sentimentality—easily betrays itself into such acts of self-indulgence as the multiplication of incident for its own sake, the coy digression, the easygoing jogtrot pace that subdues the sense of urgency that should lie in all fiction. If Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a greater novel than Fielding’s Tom Jones or Dickens’ David Copperfield, it is not because its theme is nobler, or more pathetic, or more significant historically; it is because Tolstoy brings to his panoramic drama the compression and urgency usually regarded as the monopolies of briefer fiction.
Sometimes the scope of a fictional concept demands a technical approach analogous to that of the symphony in music—the creation of a work in separate books, like symphonic movements, each of which is intelligible alone but whose greater intelligibility depends on the theme and characters that unify them. The French author Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe (1904–12) sequence is, very appropriately since the hero is a musical composer, a work in four movements. Among works of English literature, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (1957–60) insists in its very title that it is a tetralogy rather than a single large entity divided into four volumes; the concept is “relativist” and attempts to look at the same events and characters from four different viewpoints. Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, a multivolume series of novels that began in 1951 (collected 1962), may be seen as a study of a segment of British society in which the chronological approach is eschewed, and events are brought together in one volume or another because of a kind of parachronic homogeneity. C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers, a comparable series that began in 1940 and continued to appear throughout the ’50s and into the ’60s, shows how a fictional concept can be realized only in the act of writing, since the publication of the earlier volumes antedates the historical events portrayed in later ones. In other words, the author could not know what the subject matter of the sequence would be until he was in sight of its end. Behind all these works lies the giant example of Proust’s roman-fleuve, whose length and scope were properly coterminous with the author’s own life and emergent understanding of its pattern. Myth, symbolism, significance
The novelist’s conscious day-to-day preoccupation is the setting down of incident, the delineation of personality, the regulation of exposition, climax, and denouement. The aesthetic value of the work is frequently determined by subliminal forces that seem to operate independently of the writer, investing the properties of the surface story with a deeper significance. A novel will then come close to myth, its characters turning into symbols of permanent human states or impulses, particular incarnations of general truths perhaps only realized for the first time in the act of reading. The ability to perform a quixotic act anteceded Don Quixote, just as bovarysme existed before Flaubert found a name for it.
But the desire to give a work of fiction a significance beyond that of the mere story is frequently conscious and deliberate, indeed sometimes the primary aim. When a novel—like Joyce’s Ulysses or John Updike’s Centaur (1963) or Anthony Burgess’ Vision of Battlements (1965)—is based on an existing classical myth, there is an intention of either ennobling a lowly subject matter, satirizing a debased set of values by referring them to a heroic age, or merely providing a basic structure to hold down a complex and, as it were, centrifugal picture of real life. Of Ulysses Joyce said that his Homeric parallel (which is worked out in great and subtle detail) was a bridge across which to march his 18 episodes; after the march the bridge could be “blown skyhigh.” But there is no doubt that, through the classical parallel, the account of an ordinary summer day in Dublin is given a richness, irony, and universality unattainable by any other means.
The mythic or symbolic intention of a novel may manifest itself less in structure than in details which, though they appear naturalistic, are really something more. The shattering of the eponymous golden bowl in Henry James’s 1904 novel makes palpable, and hence truly symbolic, the collapse of a relationship. Even the choice of a character’s name may be symbolic. Sammy Mountjoy, in William Golding’s Free Fall (1959), has fallen from the grace of heaven, the mount of joy, by an act of volition that the title makes clear. The eponym of Doctor Zhivago is so called because his name, meaning “The Living,” carries powerful religious overtones. In the Russian version of the Gospel According to St. Luke, the angels ask the women who come to Christ’s tomb: “Chto vy ischyote zhivago mezhdu myortvykh?”—“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” And his first name, Yuri, the Russian equivalent of George, has dragon-slaying connotations.
The symbol, the special significance at a subnarrative level, works best when it can fit without obtrusion into a context of naturalism. The optician’s trade sign of a huge pair of spectacles in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925) is acceptable as a piece of scenic detail, but an extra dimension is added to the tragedy of Gatsby, which is the tragedy of a whole epoch in American life, when it is taken also as a symbol of divine myopia. Similarly, a cinema poster in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), advertising a horror film, can be read as naturalistic background, but it is evident that the author expects the illustrated fiend—a concert pianist whose grafted hands are those of a murderer—to be seen also as a symbol of Nazi infamy; the novel is set at the beginning of World War II, and the last desperate day of the hero, Geoffrey Firmin, stands also for the collapse of Western civilization.