novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specificsetting. Within its broad framework, thegenre of the novel hasencompassed an extensive range of types and styles:picaresque,epistolary,Gothic,romantic, realist,historical—to name only some of the more important ones.

The novel is agenre offiction, and fiction may be defined as the art or craft of contriving, through the written word, representations of human life that instruct or divert or both. The various forms that fiction may take are best seen less as a number of separate categories than as acontinuum or, more accurately, a cline, with some such brief form as theanecdote at one end of the scale and the longest conceivable novel at the other. When any piece of fiction is long enough toconstitute a whole book, as opposed to a mere part of a book, then it may be said to have achieved novelhood. But this state admits of its own quantitative categories, so that a relatively brief novel may be termed anovella (or, if the insubstantiality of the content matches itsbrevity, a novelette), and a very long novel may overflow the banks of a single volume and become aroman-fleuve, or river novel. Length is very much one of the dimensions of the genre.

The term novel is a truncation of the Italian wordnovella (from the plural of Latinnovellus, a late variant ofnovus, meaning “new”), so that what is now, in most languages, a diminutive denotes historically the parent form. Thenovella was a kind of enlarged anecdote like those to be found in the 14th-century Italian classicBoccaccio’sDecameron, each of which exemplifies the etymology well enough. The stories are little new things, novelties, freshly minted diversions, toys; they are not reworkings of known fables ormyths, and they are lacking in weight andmoral earnestness. It is to be noted that, despite the high example of novelists of the most profound seriousness, such asTolstoy,Henry James, andVirginia Woolf, the term novel still, in some quarters, carries overtones of lightness and frivolity. And it is possible to descry a tendency to triviality in the form itself. The ode or symphony seems to possess an inner mechanism that protects it fromaesthetic or moral corruption, but the novel can descend to shameful commercial depths of sentimentality orpornography. It is the purpose of this section to consider the novel not solely in terms of great art but also as an all-purpose medium catering for all the strata of literacy.

Such early ancientRoman fiction asPetronius’Satyricon of the 1st centuryad andLucius Apuleius’Golden Ass of the 2nd century contain many of the popular elements that distinguish the novel from itsnobler born relative theepic poem. In the fictional works, the medium is prose, the events described areunheroic, the settings are streets and taverns, not battlefields and palaces. There is more low fornication than princely combat; the gods do not move the action; thedialogue is homely rather than aristocratic. It was, in fact, out of the need to find—in the period of Roman decline—a literary form that was anti-epic in both substance and language that the first prose fiction of Europe seems to have been conceived. The most memorable character in Petronius is anouveau riche vulgarian; thehero of Lucius Apuleius is turned into a donkey; nothing less epic can well be imagined.

Themedieval chivalricromance (from a popular Latin word, probablyRomanice, meaning written in thevernacular, not in traditional Latin) restored a kind of epic view of man—though now as heroic Christian, not heroic pagan. At the same time, itbequeathed its name to the later genre of continentalliterature, the novel, which is known in French asroman, in Italian asromanzo, etc. (The English term romance, however, carries apejorative connotation.) But that later genre achieved its first great flowering in Spain at the beginning of the 17th century in an antichivalric comic masterpiece—theDon Quixote of Cervantes, which, on a larger scale than theSatyricon orThe Golden Ass, contains many of the elements that have been expected from prose fiction ever since. Novels have heroes, but not in any classical or medieval sense. As for the novelist, he must, in the words of the contemporary British-AmericanW.H. Auden,

Britannica Quiz

Famous Novels, Last Lines Quiz

Become the whole of boredom, subject to

Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just

Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,

And in his own weak person, if he can,

Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.

The novel attempts to assume those burdens of life that have no place in the epic poem and to see man as unheroic, unredeemed, imperfect, even absurd. This is why there is room among its practitioners for writers of hardboiled detective thrillers such as the contemporary AmericanMickey Spillane or of sentimental melodramas such as theprolific 19th-century English novelistMrs. Henry Wood, but not for one of the unremitting elevation of outlook of aJohn Milton.

Elements

Plot

The novel is propelled through its hundred or thousand pages by a device known as the story or plot. This is frequently conceived by the novelist in very simple terms, a mere nucleus, a jotting on an old envelope: for example,Charles Dickens’Christmas Carol (1843) might have been conceived as “amisanthrope is reformed through certain magical visitations on Christmas Eve,” orJane Austen’sPride and Prejudice (1813) as “a young couple destined to be married have first to overcome the barriers of pride and prejudice,” orFyodor Dostoyevsky’sCrime and Punishment (1866) as “a young man commits a crime and is slowly pursued in the direction of his punishment.” The detailed working out of the nuclear idea requires much ingenuity, since the plot of one novel is expected to be somewhat different from that of another, and there are very few basic human situations for the novelist to draw upon. The dramatist may take his plot ready-made from fiction or biography—a form of theft sanctioned by Shakespeare—but the novelist has to produce what look like novelties.

The example of Shakespeare is a reminder that the ability to create an interesting plot, or even any plot at all, is not a prerequisite of the imaginative writer’s craft. At the lowest level of fiction, plot need be no more than a string of stock devices for arousing stock responses of concern and excitement in the reader. The reader’s interest may be captured at the outset by the promise of conflicts or mysteries or frustrations that will eventually be resolved, and he will gladly—so strong is his desire to be moved or entertained—suspendcriticism of even the most trite modes of resolution. In the least sophisticated fiction, the knots to be untied are stringently physical, and thedenouement often comes in a sort of triumphant violence. Serious fiction prefers its plots to be based on psychological situations, and its climaxes come in new states of awareness—chiefly self-knowledge—on the parts of the major characters.

Melodramatic plots, plots dependent on coincidence or improbability, are sometimes found in even the most elevated fiction; E.M. Forster’sHowards End (1910) is an example of a classic British novel with such a plot. But the novelist is always faced with the problem of whether it is more important to represent the formlessness of real life (in which there are no beginnings and no ends and very few simple motives for action) or to construct anartifact as well balanced and economical as a table or chair; since he is an artist, the claims of art, orartifice, frequently prevail.

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There are, however, ways of constructing novels in which plot may play adesultory part or no part at all. The traditionalpicaresque novel—a novel with a rogue as its central character—like Alain Lesage’sGil Blas (1715) orHenry Fielding’sTom Jones (1749), depends for movement on a succession of chance incidents. In the works ofVirginia Woolf, theconsciousness of the characters, bounded by some poetic or symbolic device, sometimes provides all the fictional material.Marcel Proust’s greatroman-fleuve,À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27;Remembrance of Things Past), has ametaphysical framework derived from the time theories of the philosopherHenri Bergson, and it moves toward a moment of truth that is intended to be literally a revelation of the nature of reality. Strictly, any scheme will do to hold a novel together—raw action, the hidden syllogism of themystery story, prolonged solipsist contemplation—so long as the actualities or potentialities of human life are credibly expressed, with a consequent sense of illumination, or some lesser mode of artistic satisfaction, on the part of the reader.