Development of the British Novel 1970-1989

The title of this essay begs definition and poses questions. There is no such thing as "the novel today"; there are only novels. Several hundred works of fiction of some literary merit are published every year. They are tangible objects which may be read. "The novel," on the other hand, cannot be read; it is an idea, an abstraction. As such, it is not even the Platonic idea of which individual novels are shadowy representations. Indeed the reverse is more nearly true. It is "the novel" which represents a concept formed as a result of reading a great many quite distinct novels. All talk of "the novel" is inevitably generalization, made more impressive, but perhaps less significant, the further it is removed from consideration of particular works of fiction.

Whether a book is a novel may itself be a matter of dispute. There is no satisfactory definition of a novel. Books have been published as novels in one country and as non-fiction in another. It is sensible to consider a book as a novel if its publisher has offered it as such.

For one thing is clear: it is no longer possibleto impose narrow national categories on the novel. Thirty years ago it was still possible to write of "the English novel"; such a title would no longer make sense.

Twenty years is not necessarily a long time in terms of a novelist's career. Graham Greene, for instance, published his first novel in 1929 and his twenty-fifth in 1988. Anthony Powell's first novel, Afternoon Men, appeared in 1931; The Fisher King in 1986.

Clearly Greene and Powell are exceptional examples of longevity and the survival of talent. Death, illness, insanity, liquor, financial failure, disappointment, the malediction of critics, loss of ability,orthe decay of ambition, truncate many careers. Nevertheless, in spite of all, a writing life of thirty or forty years is common. Any survey of two decades must at least take note of many writers whose reputation was established long before the commencement of the period under review.

However sceptial one may be of the value of speaking about "the novel," it is difficult to write about fiction without giving some sort of assent to that abstraction. Twenty years ago it was fashionable to speculate about "the death of the novel." It would, we were told, become an art form that pleased only a minority; like poetry. All forms of art of course appeal only to a minority of people, but it seemed plausible then to maintain that the novel had surrendered its primacy as a means of conveying imaginative experience. In 1975, in his introduction to Beyond the Words: Eleven Writers in Search of a New Fiction, Giles Gordon wrote that "fiction is no longer a popular art." Few would now agree. The recovery may have owed something to the introduction of prizes and the consequent heightening of public awareness. It has owed more to novelists themselves, and to their ability to address themselves to interesting themes in a sufficiently interesting manner.

In 1977 Malcolm Bradbury edited a collection of essays on The Novel Today. He found that "many novelists today have become uneasy with the code of old fictional expectations, with the established history of the novel, and have sought to reexperience and remake the form by enquiring into its essentials." The codes of which he wrote had come from two sources. There was realism, emphasizing plot and character, and drawing its strength from a "real" world beyond the novel; and there was the "modernist aesthetics of the earlier part of the century, in which 'pattern,' 'form,' and 'myth' assumed a paramount importance." Both these modes had, he thought, ceased to satisfy writers, and he identified two responses to this dissatisfaction.

The first was a withdrawal from the established mode "towards the lexical surface of the text" which "becomes the sufficient event." The second "related phenomenon" was "a fascination with the fictional process as a parody of form – it becomes the games-like construct with which permutations can be played."

(From "The Novel Today " by Allan Massie)

Genre Fiction

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 655