There are symbolic novels whose infranarrative meaning cannot easily be stated, since it appears to subsist on an unconscious level. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is such a work, as is D.H. Lawrence’s novella St. Mawr (1925), in which the significance of the horse is powerful and mysterious. Uses Interpretation of life
Novels are not expected to be didactic, like tracts or morality plays; nevertheless, in varying degrees of implicitness, even the “purest” works of fictional art convey a philosophy of life. The novels of Jane Austen, designed primarily as superior entertainment, imply a desirable ordered existence, in which the comfortable decorum of an English rural family is disturbed only by a not-too-serious shortage of money, by love affairs that go temporarily wrong, and by the intrusion of self-centred stupidity. The good, if unrewarded for their goodness, suffer from no permanent injustice. Life is seen, not only in Jane Austen’s novels but in the whole current of bourgeois Anglo-American fiction, as fundamentally reasonable and decent. When wrong is committed, it is usually punished, thus fulfilling Miss Prism’s summation in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), to the effect that in a novel the good characters end up happily and the bad characters unhappily: “that is why it is called fiction.”
That kind of fiction called realistic, which has its origins in 19th-century France, chose the other side of the coin, showing that there was no justice in life and that the evil and the stupid must prevail. In the novels of Thomas Hardy there is a pessimism that may be taken as a corrective of bourgeois Panglossianism—the philosophy that everything happens for the best, satirized in Voltaire’s Candide (1759)—since the universe is presented as almost impossibly malevolent. This tradition is regarded as morbid, and it has been deliberately ignored by most popular novelists. The “Catholic” novelists—such as François Mauriac in France, Graham Greene in England, and others—see life as mysterious, full of wrong and evil and injustice inexplicable by human canons but necessarily acceptable in terms of the plans of an inscrutable God. Between the period of realistic pessimism, which had much to do with the agnosticism and determinism of 19th-century science, and the introduction of theological evil into the novel, writers such as H.G. Wells attempted to create a fiction based on optimistic liberalism. As a reaction, there was the depiction of “natural man” in the novels of D.H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway.
For the most part, the view of life common to American and European fiction since World War II posits the existence of evil—whether theological or of that brand discovered by the French Existentialists, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre—and assumes that man is imperfect and life possibly absurd. The fiction of the former Communist Europe was based on a very different assumption, one that seems naïve and old-fashioned in its collective optimism to readers in the disillusioned democracies. It is to be noted that in the erstwhile Soviet Union aesthetic evaluation of fiction was replaced by ideological judgment. Accordingly, the works of the popular British writer A.J. Cronin, since they seem to depict personal tragedy as an emanation of capitalistic infamy, were rated higher than those of Conrad, James, and their peers. Entertainment or escape
In a period that takes for granted that the written word should be “committed”—to the exposure of social wrong or the propagation of progressive ideologies—novelists who seek merely to take the reader out of his dull or oppressive daily life are not highly regarded, except by that reading public that has never expected a book to be anything more than a diversion. Nevertheless, the provision of laughter and dreams has been for many centuries a legitimate literary occupation. It can be condemned by serious devotees of literature only if it falsifies life through oversimplification and tends to corrupt its readers into belief that reality is as the author presents it. The novelettes once beloved of mill girls and domestic servants, in which the beggar maid was elevated to queendom by a king of high finance, were a mere narcotic, a sort of enervating opium of the oppressed; the encouragement of such subliterature might well be one of the devices of social oppression. Adventure stories and spy novels may have a healthy enough astringency, and the very preposterousness of some adventures can be a safeguard against any impressionable young reader’s neglecting the claims of real life to dream of becoming a secret agent. The subject matter of some humorous novels—such as the effete British aristocracy created by P.G. Wodehouse, which is no longer in existence if it ever was—can never be identified with a real human society; the dream is accepted as a dream. The same may be said of Evelyn Waugh’s early novels—such as Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930)—but these are raised above mere entertainment by touching, almost incidentally, on real human issues (the relation of the innocent to a circumambient malevolence is a persistent theme in all Waugh’s writing).
Any reader of fiction has a right to an occasional escape from the dullness or misery of his existence, but he has the critical duty of finding the best modes of escape—in the most efficiently engineered detective or adventure stories, in humour that is more than sentimental buffoonery, in dreams of love that are not mere pornography. The fiction of entertainment and escape frequently sets itself higher literary standards than novels with a profound social or philosophical purpose. Books like John Buchan’s Thirty-nine Steps (1915), Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt (1969), Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon (1930), and Raymond Chandler’s Big Sleep (1939) are distinguished pieces of writing that, while diverting and enthralling, keep a hold on the realities of human character. Ultimately, all good fiction is entertainment, and, if it instructs or enlightens, it does so best through enchanting the reader. Propaganda
The desire to make the reader initiate certain acts—social, religious, or political—is the essence of all propaganda, and, though it does not always accord well with art, the propagandist purpose has often found its way into novels whose prime value is an aesthetic one. The Nicholas Nickleby (1839) of Charles Dickens attacked the abuses of schools to some purpose, as his Oliver Twist (1838) drew attention to the horrors of poorhouses and his Bleak House (1853) to the abuses of the law of chancery. The weakness of propaganda in fiction is that it loses its value when the wrongs it exposes are righted, so that the more successful a propagandist novel is, the briefer the life it can be expected to enjoy. The genius of Dickens lay in his ability to transcend merely topical issues through the vitality with which he presented them, so that his contemporary disclosures take on a timeless human validity—chiefly through the power of their drama, character, and rhetoric.
The pure propagandist novel—which Dickens was incapable of writing—quickly becomes dated. The “social” novels of H.G. Wells, which propounded a rational mode of life and even blueprinted utopias, were very quickly exploded by the conviction of man’s irredeemable irrationality that World War I initiated and World War II corroborated, a conviction the author himself came to share toward the end of his life. But the early scientific romances of Wells remain vital and are seen to have been prophetic. Most of the fiction of the former Soviet Union, which either glorified the regime or refrained from criticizing it, was dull and unreal, and the same can be said of Communist fiction elsewhere. Propaganda too frequently ignores man as a totality, concentrating on him aspectively—in terms of politics or sectarian religion. When a didactic attack on a system, as in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s attack on slavery in the United States in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), seems to go beyond mere propaganda, it is because the writer makes the reader aware of wrongs and injustices that are woven into the permanent human fabric. The reader’s response may be a modification of his own sensibility, not an immediate desire for action, and this is one of the legitimate effects of serious fiction. The propagandist Dickens calls for the immediate righting of wrongs, but the novelist Dickens says, mainly through implication, that all men—not just schoolmasters and state hirelings—should become more humane. If it is possible to speak of art as possessing a teaching purpose, this is perhaps its only lesson. Reportage