John Richetti - The Columbia History of the British Novel

INa memorable and ringing affirmation, D. H. Lawrence called the novel "the one bright book of life." For Lawrence the novel was much more than a literary genre; it was a means to intensely vital knowledge, far superior to science or philosophy or religion. In place of their abstract and partial views of life, the novel offered the "changing rainbow of our living relationships." But at about the same time that Lawrence was celebrating the power of the novel to give its readers the full and authentic feel of human experience, the Hungarian literary critic Georg Lukács more somberly traced its degenerative descent from classical epic. Describing the novel in gloomy and decidedly melodramatic terms as the epic of a world "abandoned by God" and as a record of modern humanity's homelessness in The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (1920), Lukács looked back to the immediacy and communal integrity of ancient epic and saw the novel as the expression of what he called a dissonance in modern life whereby individuals are estranged from the external world. The novel records, he said, a profound irony at the heart of modern experience "within which things appear as isolated and yet connected, as full of value and yet totally devoid of it, as abstract fragments and as concrete autonomous life, as flowering and as decaying, as the infliction of suffering and as suffering itself." During the 1920s Lawrence saw the novel as the unique record of concrete and living experience, whereas for Lukács, writing in Central Europe during the bitter aftermath of World War — ix- World War, it was symptomatic of the ironic and contradictory confusion peculiar to modern life in the West.

Whether taken as a rapturous affirmation of the possibility of individual fulfillment or as a depressing rendition of modern emptiness and alienation, the novel has invariably been understood by critics and novelists alike as the distinctively modern literary form, a response to uniquely modern conditions. Lawrence and Lukács agreed that modern life was deeply unsatisfactory, but they had opposite notions of what the novel could do to ameliorate it. For Lawrence the novel could transfigure and vivify life; for Lukács the novel eloquently but helplessly recorded its despair and emptiness. A third and to my mind more relevant attitude regarding the purpose of the novel, and one that takes a broader historical and literary perspective, has since emerged for modern criticism. For M. M. Bakhtin, a Russian critic whose neglected writings from the Stalinist period were rediscovered by Western readers in the 1970s, the novel was not only the unique marker of European modernity but a literary mode that expressed, in its essential and defining formal qualities, revolutionary and, potentially, utterly liberating linguistic energies.

According to Bakhtin, the novel represented an absolute and thus exhilarating breakthrough from older literary forms and from the hierarchical and repressive view of life he felt they embodied. In one of his essays Bakhtin distinguished the novel as being radically distinct from other literary genres in its rendering of a new "multi-languaged consciousness," which made contact as literature never had before with "the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness." The epic offers the world as a finished and frozen entity, an event from the distant past evoked in a special, specifically literary language appropriate to its inspiring grandeur and remoteness. But the novel, in Bakhtin's most influential formulation of his thesis, is defined by its rendering of the dynamic present, not in a separate and unitary literary language, but in the competing and often comic discord of actual and multiple voices-what he termed polyglossia or heteroglossia-whereby language is used in ways that communicate a "relativizing of linguistic consciousness." Speech in the novel, whether that of characters or narrators or authors, is thus always for Bakhtin "dialogical," representing the process of shifting and contested signification peculiar to language itself, or at least to modern notions of the way language works. The novel is dialogical in Bakhtin's special sense because it renders the incessant shap- x- ing of reality as perceived by human beings through rival forms of language, which itself is not a static or ahistorical entity but rather finds dynamic and diverse embodiment in the competing dialects of particular social groups that struggle for dominance. In its evocation of the novel's subversion of static and hierarchical notions of language and reality, Bakhtin's version of the novel's positive and liberating function in the modern world seems to me more convincing, or at least more useful, than Lawrence's utopian intensity or Lukács's post-Great War gloom. Bakhtin's theory shifts the critical emphasis from the novel's subject matter, the nature of modern life and consciousness, to its form, the expressive relativizing of language. For readers of The Columbia History of the British Novel, it is interesting that Bakhtin singles out the British comic novelists, notably Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Dickens, for their instinctive grasp of the dialogical principle. When they described the purpose of the novel, Lukács and Lawrence were thinking primarily of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel of personal development, the bildungsroman, but Bakhtin took an inclusive historical view that looked back as far as François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1552) and traced the novel's evolution through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and into the modern period. In thus broadening the novel's scope and historical reference in order to explain its peculiar power, Bakhtin saved readers from modern self-pity and enabled critics and literary historians to look beyond the modern predicament as the novel's only subject.

Nonetheless, the issue of the value and meaning of the novel from our present situation remains unresolved for many readers and critics. Clearly, the novel has become in the last three hundred years many different things for many readers as well as for novelists themselves. But for all that, the term itself remains both simple and elusive. So various and so multiple, the novel can be described but never, it seems, adequately defined. A minimalist description of the novel might say that it is an extended (too long to read at one sitting) narrative in prose about imaginary but vividly particularized or historically specific individuals. But however one describes it, the novel has been from its beginnings (themselves a subject of much dispute) for its writers and readers an aggressively and self-consciously new literary category. For many twentieth-century critics and historians of the novel, it is the narrative form that uniquely expresses the condition of Western culture and consciousness since the emergence of what everyone recognizes as the — xi- modern age-an age in which we still live and that lacks clear definition or any sense of single or simple self-consciousness but that nonetheless situates itself, like the novel, as somehow separate and distinct from all that has preceded it.

Crucial to the culture of the modern age is individualism, an understanding of the world that the Western European tradition takes for granted as part of the natural order of things but that in fact represents the fairly recent historical development of a consciousness or sense of self that remains strange and even incomprehensible to people outside that tradition. Novels both promote and mimic the values intrinsic to this individualism. In most novels that come to mind, particular persons in their individualized immediacy are presented as being more important or more immediate than communities or cultures with their long traditions and accumulated ways, and the novel is most often about the clash between such individuals and the larger social units that necessarily produce them.