The Domain of the Novel

Reflections on Some Historical Definitions

A. N. Kaul

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000260281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires

The Domain of the Novel: Reflections on Some Historical Definitions discusses the genre of the novel and its dialogic and dialectical characteristics through an in-depth analysis of some classic English, Russian, American and Indian novels. A collection of lectures by the distinguished scholar of literature, A. N. Kaul, it analyses the exploration of personal voices and histories within a larger socio-political landscape in these works.

Drawing examples from the works of Fielding, George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, R.K. Narayan and others, who defined and redefined the territories of the novel, this book examines the articulation of the lived social, political and material realities of ordinary individuals in this genre. The lectures situate the novels within their cultural, socio-political, and historical contexts while focusing on their historical continuity and relevance. They further demonstrate how the domain of the novel brings together a multitude of voices while discussing conflicts of class, identity, nationalism, and historiography.

The volume includes an insightful critical introduction by Sambudha Sen. It will be of great interest to researchers and scholars of literature, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, literary theory, creative writing, history, and sociology. It will be especially useful for readers interested in studying forms of fiction and the 18th, 19th, and 20th century novel.

1‘A new province of writing’

I am grateful to Sri Venkateswara College, the English Department, and especially Pradip, Anwer and Sambudha, for inviting me to give these lectures on the novel.

Almost every literate person today, if he or she reads anything apart from newspapers, reads novels. Worse, many literate persons also either write novels or harbour secret thoughts of writing them. The general idea seems to be that if you have lived a life you can write at least one story, preferably your own. One man/woman, one vote; one life, one novel!

Fiction is the most democratic, not to say narcissistic, of literary genres, also anarchistic inasmuch as no kind of discipline seems to be called for, no apprenticeship or training, no rules of the game. It is hardly a literary genre any longer but, as an American might put it, a jungle out there, which literary jungle has hosted, on top of itself, a parasitical critical jungle of its own.

This being so, it would be not only pretentious but futile to attempt anything like mapping the Domain of the novel. My purpose in these lectures is rather to go back in time to the earliest novelists’s and focus on a handful of old and old-fashioned novels in order to see where and how it all began, starting out in each case with these novelists’ own demarcation or definition of their domain, the territory they thought they were staking out for themselves, and the signposts they were hanging out for their own and future times. I shall begin with their definitions and understanding but our understanding will include but also, naturally, go beyond those definitions and, in the present case, this broader understanding will be based on (a) reading the novels together, synchronically, as it were, and (b) more important, focussing on the domain of the novel in and through the surrounding interactive domains of history, society and politics.

I would like to make two further prefatory points. One, when I say old and old-fashioned, I mean the 18th and early 19th centuries when the novel first emerged in Europe, to my way of thinking, as a part of the general process of overhauling the older formations of life as well as the old forms of literature. Second, if there is any single thesis running through these lectures, it is a simple one: namely, that the domain of the novel is, and was from the outset, an internally conflicted, a dialogical or dialectical domain – three fashionable words all at once! – fascinating to me not because of the polarities themselves but the way in which various novelists try to manage or resolve these polarities.

My lecture today will focus largely on some well-known English novels. The second lecture, under the rubric of ‘Nationality and the Novel’, will focus mainly on novels produced in a few countries which had what I term a sense of ‘belated nationality’ such as early 19th-century Russia and late 19th-century India. The focus of the third lecture will be on a few 19th-century American novels under the general rubric of ‘Ideology and the Novel’, which is in itself a concept that in a preliminary way bridges the polarities where the individual and the political, the psychological and the social, are identically one and the same.

The subject today being the English novel, the beginning point inevitably is Henry Fielding who, when he turned from stage comedies and farces to prose fiction, thought of himself as ‘the founder of a new province of writing’ (Tom Jones, Bk. 2, Ch. 1, 53), and, accordingly, considered it incumbent upon himself to define this new literary territory, which he did in his prefatory writings. Repetitiously and almost exclusively through the use of oxymorons, right at the outset, some of the polarities I spoke of a moment ago get expressed in contradictory meanings within Fielding’s definitions of the novel, most famously in the definition ‘a comic epic poem in prose’ in the Preface to Joseph Andrews (Preface, 60), varied later in Tom Jones to such phrases as ‘prosai-comi-epic writing’ (Bk. 5, Ch. 1, 137) and a ‘heroic, historical, prosaic poem’ (Bk. 4, Ch. 1, 100). In Tom Jones he also defined his work as ‘the narrative of plain matter of fact … a newspaper of many volumes’ (Bk. 4, Ch. 1, 99–100), but at the same time ranked himself not with the journalists of the day but with historians of the same order as Homer and Milton. At other places he defined the novel as ‘domestic history’ or simply as the history, that is to say, the life or biography of one individual.

At one level, these linguistic contortions, these contradictions, can be seen as a neo-classical writer’s awe of the ancient classics. The references to Homer and other writings of antiquity, including the lost Aristotelian treatise on Comedy, suggest the awareness of the Augustan writer that whatever may seem new will in fact turn out to be merely a new version of the old. But the matter is not so simple. And, indeed, there is a point here, for the domain of Fielding’s novel can be seen as much the colonization of a new territory as the rehabilitation of an old literary terrain in various ways. The epic may be rejected but it gets reinscribed, or, in Shelley’s dialectical imagery, may be eclipsed but is extinguished not (Adonais, Stanza 44).

This is, I think personally, the crux of Fielding’s oxymoronic definition of the novel as a comic epic, and this, in varying ways, as I shall argue, suggests the doubleness between the comic and the epic, the individual and the socio-historical, private life and the epochal, which underlies a great many novels after Fielding up to our own day. But at present I would rather look only at one side of the argument and consider what is new and, indeed, revolutionary in Fielding’s theory and practice as a novelist, namely his rejection of the epic. Not only his rejection of the epic protagonist of sublime-divine, mythological, or superhuman power and character, but more so, his epos as a fable involving not just his personal fortune but the whole history or destiny of some larger, collective entity – a tribe, a race, a community, a polis, a whole society or nation: the fall of Troy as in The Iliad, the founding of Rome as in Virgil’s Aeneid, the story of a whole country as in The Mahabharata, the eternal destiny of all mankind as in Milton – ‘In Adam’s fall, we sinned all’.¹

On the other hand, the installation of the Comic, in the sense of the commonplace, the ordinary, the topical, the matter of fact, protagonists of low, even at times marginal, rank, engaged in living ordinary lives in commonplace pursuits of the commonest of commonplace goals – marriage and the means of livelihood – in middle-class parlance, love and fortune, their fable involving no larger destiny than their own domestic, personal, private life, biographies of individuals rather than of history-making epic heroes.

All kinds of characters hitherto excluded from literature make their appearance centre-stage – Richardson’s maidservant Pamela, Defoe’s picara Moll Flanders, Fielding’s own footman in Joseph Andrews, as well as the bastard Tom Jones. We remember how Edmund in King Lear had cried out, ‘Now, gods, stand up for bastards!’ (1.2.22), not too prematurely, I think, since by the time of Tom Jones, the gods of literature themselves were already standing up for bastards and rewarding bastards and other such common people, rewarding them with upward mobility through the fable of love and marriage – Richardson’s maidservant Pamela ending as the wife of a country squire and Tom Jones winning not only the beautiful Sophia but also her estate as well as Squire Allworthy’s estate called Paradise Hall.

The bastardy is, of course, to be understood socially rather than biologically, signifying the breaking in of the NEW man into the preserves of the older hierarchical classes. Glancing ahead, as we move into the 19th century, while these so-called common people in the so-called age of the common man become more respectable, more acceptable to society and literature, their mainstream fable remains essentially the story of love, marriage and private concerns. Indeed, 120 years after Tom Jones, George Eliot in Middlemarch raises again precisely this issue of the reduction of the novel’s domain from the epic to the domestic, to mere stories of love and marriage, with a pointed reference in Chapter 15 to Fielding – a ‘great historian, as he insisted on calling himself’ (George Eliot’s words, Bk. 2, Ch. 15, 96), and more specifically to Fielding’s ‘copious remarks and digressions’ (Bk. 2, Ch. 15, 96) and especially the prefatory chapters in Tom Jones – in short, exactly the place where Fielding had elaborated his definition of the novel as comic epic.

George Eliot herself uses the word ‘epic’ constantly – ‘epic deeds’, ‘epic life’, ‘epic destiny’ – although in her case an equally appropriate word would be ‘epochal’ or ‘epoch-making’, that is, as the dictionary explains it, marking the beginning of an era in history, in science, in life. And it is this common element of the frustration of the epochal that made her combine two stories in Middlemarch as we have it today, the stories of her two protagonists, Dr. Lydgate and Dorothea Brooke, which, as we know, were originally conceived and partly written as separate works. So that one can read Middlemarch as a novel about novel-writing to the extent that its combined narrative engages as a narrative, the question of what novels have traditionally narrated as against what they may or should narrate. As she puts it in Chapter 15 – which was the first chapter of the original Middlemarch and where she had first invoked Fielding – with regard to one of her heroes, Dr. Lydgate’s story:

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman’s ‘makdom and her fairnesse’, never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of ‘makdom and fairnesse’ which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires?

(Bk. 2, Ch. 15, 98)

The passion for a larger, an epic destiny, a world-altering passion, which, in Lydgate’s case, is a passion for scientific discovery leading to a revolution in medical science.

The epic paradigm for her second protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, is outlined in the ‘Prelude’ through the example of St. Theresa, the 16th-century Spanish girl (1515–82) who joined the Church, whose heart, as George Eliot puts it, beat from the outset ‘to a national idea’ demanding ‘an epic life’, and who, though thwarted at first by ‘domestic reality … in the shape of uncles’, eventually ‘found her epos in the reform of a religious order’ (xiii).

Now here are these two anti-Fielding paradigms. Why ‘comic epic’? Why not ‘epic’ per se? Why not protagonists whose fable involves not only their destinies but all our destinies? In Dorothea’s case as much as in Lydgate’s, however, the paradigm functions in the end only as a sad or tragic underlining of their actual life-struggles. For these latter-day Theresas, although equally imbued with passionate epic inspiration, accomplish no epic destiny, no ‘far-resonant action’ or ‘long-recognizable deed’ (xiii–xiv). They become the founders and foundresses of nothing and their stories, too, get reduced to the personal and the domestic.

Invariably a modern reader asks, ‘Why?’ George Eliot did not write lengthy prefaces in the manner of Fielding. As she says, he lived in an ample age ‘when the days were longer … when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings’. If ‘belated historians’ like herself lingered ‘after his example’, their ‘chat’ would probably sound ‘thin and eager’. And in any case she had work enough to show the weaving and interweaving of the many ‘human lots’ that constitute the web of life that she calls Middlemarch (Bk. 2, Ch. 15, 96). Indeed, it is the specific working out of character, circumstance and destiny in Middlemarch, it is the novel itself rather than the authorial commentary, which constitutes a critical intervention on this issue of the comic-domestic versus the epic, at an appropriate moment in the development of the English novel, exactly midway between Fielding’s time and our own age. Middlemarch may thus be said to embody in itself as a novel, both a challenge to and an acceptance of a limited domain for the novel.

Discursively, the answer to the question ‘Why?’ is given in the last two pages – that though potentially epoch-making personalities continue to be born, ‘the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone’. Epoch-making is no longer possible; the modern world, it would seem, defeats all aspiration to fundamental world alteration. Historic deeds being impossible, the only hope for the future lies in what George Eliot calls the ‘diffusive’ influence of examples and individual good deeds, of small unhistorical changes:

For the growing good of the world is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 ‘A new province of writing’
• 2 Nationality and the novel
• 3 Ideology and the novel
• 4 ‘What is past, or passing, or to come’: Hawthorne and the idea of historical continuity
• Index