Eighteenth-century English novels

 

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (I719) introduces us to some central features of novels in general. Crusoe is shipwrecked on a desert island: by presenting him in isolation Defoe can convey a full impression of how man structures his world, then, when other people appear, he can examine man in a social context. From its start, then, the English novel looks at a person coming to terms with the world in which he finds himself. The manner is realistic, with a detailed account of Crusoe's feelings and the ordinary business of life. Robinson Crusoe, however, is not just a realistic novel. There is another narrative pattern in the text. There are certain archetypal stories that predate the novel, but which some novelists continue to employ. The most basic is a story of an individual on a quest. Such stories recur because they provide an effective focus for considering man's journey through life: their presence in novels is always interesting because they hint at something grander than the novel's tendency to become absorbed in the complications of ordinary life. In Crusoe we can trace a religious story of a man sent into isolation who has to rediscover his faith. The novel holds this religious search for an ideal in tension with the distractions of daily experience. In Defoe's second novel, Moll Flanders (1722), there is a similar gap between the ideal- the heroine should be devout- and how things are in a fallen world, where people are preoccupied with the daily business of life. 

 

After Defoe the next significant novelist is a more straightforward realist. This is Samuel Richardson, author of Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748). Both novels present women whose virtue is at risk in a socially corrupt world. In Richardson's treatment of this individual and society conflict we see a characteristic strength of novels, for the details accumulate to present a very disturbing impression of the lives of these women trapped in difficult dilemmas. The stress is on the complications of real life rather than on an ideal notion of how life might be. Richardson's novels are epistolary: written in letters from the main characters. It is a method that offers us a very direct insight into the characters' minds, and Richardson can be regarded as the first psychological novelist. Curiously, Richardson's Pamela was almost immediately parodied by Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews (1742). Fielding, who also wrote Tom Jones (1749), is the first great comic novelist in England. He reacted against how seriously Richardson took his characters and their dilemmas, preferring, like all comic novelists, a stress on human folly. The realistic novelist offers a subtle analysis of his characters, but the comic novelist takes a simpler view that man's lusts and desires disrupt life: it might be a less subtle view, but it is a disturbing one, as it emphasizes the irrational impulses that motivate people. Another important aspect of Fielding's novels is his intrusive presence as narrator, where he makes it quite clear that he is making up the story. The direction in which this leads is towards mocking the whole activity of novel-writing, for, if human nature is irrational, who is the novelist to presume to order and explain life in something as contrived as a story? Such skepticism is characteristic of the eighteenth century when writers were questioning the ability of this new form to present a convincing picture of life. 

 

The realistic novel only becomes dominant in the nineteenth century. Fielding's stress on the gap between fiction and life is carried much further by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy (1760-7), where the hero tries to tell the story of his life but in his desperation to include everything can hardly make any progress at all. This is widely recognized as the greatest reflexive novel- that is a novel which constantly draws attention to its own existence as a novel. Although a realistic novel and a novel such as Tristram Shandy are very different there is some connection, for what all novels do is disrupt a neat ordered story. In the background of a novel there is always an idea of order, indeed a story is an ordering of the events in life. The realistic novelist disrupts this neat fictional pattern by the introduction of complicating detail in the narrative. The non-realistic novelist relies more on the narrator to disrupt the neat fiction as he points out that people are, in his view, too foolish ever to settle their differences, or as he points out that life is a lot more complicated than a story. This disruption of a story is evident in the other main strand in eighteenth-century fiction, the picaresque novel. Fielding's novels are picaresque tales, as are Smollett's, for example Roderick Random (1748). But the forerunner of all novels, Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605-15), provides the model of such picaresque works . It describes the events on a long journey: Don Quixote believes he is on some glorious mission, but he is repeatedly caught up in farcical situations. Picaresque takes the quest story from romance, in which somebody is in search of an ideal, and deflates it, emphasizing that there is no goal to be reached and that one is simply entangled in the complications of life.

 

A Short History of British and American Literature: Part 2

 

Victorian literature develops from, rather than reacting against, romantic literature, and the poets of this age (1830 to the end of the century), such as Tennyson and Browning, are the heirs of the romantics. They cannot, however, sustain the romantics' confidence in the autonomy of their own imaginations. There is no longer the same ability to create a vision of order and unity. Instead, there is a far more dominant impression of the world as fragmented, of life being too complicated and painful for any real sense of order to be found. The feeling of confusion and despair that characterizes a lot of Victorian poetry has much to do with the religious doubts and uncertainties of the period. Literature might have been explicitly secular from the late seventeenth century onwards, but it is only in the Victorian period that a certain traditional religious confidence disappears, and, with the disappearance of this confident faith in a controlling deity, the world begins to seem much more confusing, depressing, and even chaotic. In addition, society itself was becoming increasingly complex, something that is reflected in the Victorian novel. The Victorian period is the great age of the novel, possibly because the novel was the only form that could expand enough to cope with the scale and complexity of Victorian society as it, too, expanded and changed with the growth of industrialization. The great novelists of the age are Dickens and George Eliot, both of whom seek to create a full and intricate picture of a complex social world. They are fully aware of the disorder, injustices and hardships of the world they live in, yet at the same time there is a confidence in their writing that the novel can confront the whole of life. It is a confidence that subsequent novelists cannot sustain. 

 

As we move towards the twentieth century we find an increasing sense that life is overwhelmingly confusing and complicated. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, for example in the novels of Hardy, Conrad, Joyce and Lawrence and in the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Yeats, there is a feeling that the world has become so baffling that it is impossible to make sense of it, particularly as the decline, and in many cases the total eclipse, of religious faith robs writers of any secure perspective or framework of shared values from which they can interpret and make sense of experience. The central historical event of the early years of the twentieth century is the First World War (1914-18), a war so terrifying and tragic that it seems to sum up a world that is closer to chaos than to any sane order.

 

Yet the early twentieth century is a period of extraordinary creativity in all the arts - not only in poetry and the novel, but also in music and painting, and even drama is revitalized after many years of stagnation. What this points to again is the fact that rapid social change, an alteration in the whole structure of society, almost always stimulates the production of great art. The text which perhaps best exemplifies the age is T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922), which presents a vision of a fractured society where the poet can find no order or consolation. As with so many works of the period it is innovative and experimental in form: it seems to be built out of fragments of poetry, reflecting a world where the artist can no longer impose confident and comprehensive control over the facts he encounters. A term often applied to the formally innovative works of this period is modernist: modernist works, such as Eliot's or Joyce's , are often difficult to read, but they become less difficult If we see that the difficulty simply enacts the problems the artist is having in making sense of the world. T. S. Eliot was an American, and at this time it makes sense to start looking at British and American literature together.

 

We could trace a lengthy history for American literature, but as far as most readers are concerned American literature really comes to life around 1850. Significant works are the essays of Emerson and the poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but it is perhaps most rewarding to focus on the development of the American novel from about 1850. The most important texts in this context are Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) and Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Unlike the English novel, which emerges from and comments on a long-established society, the American novel is not immersed in society in the same sort of way. Instead it often takes the form of a symbolic journey, which can be a journey into the unknown territories of the mind.

 

American novels are often referred to as 'romances', for the writers, unlike their English counterparts, tend to turn their backs on society and go off into conjecture, dream and myth. What we witness in the second half of the nineteenth century, then, is the development of a distinctively American novel. As American literature moves into the twentieth century, however, it establishes a closer link with European culture. This is first evident in the novels of Henry James, published between 1875 and 1904, which present the lives of young American idealists and their experiences in the English social world. Later novelists such as Fitzgerald and Faulkner, while having distinctively American qualities, are heavily indebted to the example of Joyce, but it is a two-way exchange, for the American poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are domiciled in London and help shape the whole course of English poetry at this time.

 

After the modernist era, however, which can be said to come to an end in the twenties, American literature is by and large far more adventurous than British literature. It is as if British writers do not know how to advance from the experiments of the twenties, and so retreat into safer waters. W. H. Auden and Graham Greene are the two best-known names from the thirties and forties, yet neither is a writer of the first order. Throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies, the English novel, with the exception of the works of William Golding, settles down into a fairly conventional realistic pattern. Similarly, the poetry of this time, apart from the interesting work of Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney, remains unexcitingly modest.

 

In a relatively unambitious period of British literature the one exception has been in drama; the last thirty years have been an exciting period for the English theatre. There are both established dramatists such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, and newer writers such as David Hare, Howard Brenton and Trevor Griffiths who together offer an important discussion of the state of contemporary Britain. Here again the pattern that is in evidence is one of writers trying to order their impressions of a complex society undergoing change, and in Britain since the Second World War (1939-45) it seems to be the theatre that has provided the most suitable forum for discussing these changes. This is possibly because the questions that have had to be faced are political questions about the way society orders itself, and drama is the form that lends itself best to this sort of political or social debate.

 

America has also produced impressive drama in the period from 1930 to the present day, for example the works of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller. In America though, unlike in Britain, the same period has been an equally strong one for poetry and the novel. There is the poetry of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, and America continues to be the source of the most energetic and original poetry in English, for example in the works of Robert Lowell, John Berryman and John Ashbery. Even in the realistic novel a writer such as Saul Bellow offers us the impression of an author who is exploring new territory while so many British novelists seem to be retracing familiar ground.

 

America has also set the pace in experimental fiction, as in the novels of Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon can be described as a post-modernist writer: the term suggests an experimental form of writing, which can be found in poetry and drama as well as in fiction, which moves beyond the methods of the modernists in finding a new way of writing about the experience of living in a very confusing world. It is not until the late seventies that English fiction begins to catch up with these developments, when, as in the works of Ian McEwan, D.M. Thomas and Salman Rushdie the English novel moves out of its realistic rut and begins to find fresh confidence.

A Short History of British and American Literature: Part 1

 

Every work of literature has a generic context. In addition, every work has a historical context: that is, it belongs to a particular historical period. Writers at a given time tend to have similar concerns and, often, similar values. An awareness of the historical context of a writer, then, should tell you what you can expect to encounter in, for example , an eighteenth-century poet as opposed to a romantic poet. This again provides a starting point for looking at a work. What follows here, therefore, is a simple historical survey of literature in English.

 

English literature begins with Old English or Anglo Saxon literature, which mainly belongs to the period before the Norman Conquest in 1066. The language in which it is written is more like German than modern English. The greatest single poem is Beowulf (probably written around 700), which can be described as either an epic or tragic poem. A king's hall is threatened by a monster called Grendel. Beowulf comes to help, and kills the monster and its mother. Fifty years later a dragon attacks his own kingdom: Beowulf kills it, but dies himself. One way of making sense of this story is to use a simple critical idea that we can apply to a great many literary works: we can say that what the poem is about is Beowulf's attempt to establish and maintain order in a threatening and disordered world. In other words we can look at the poem in terms of its larger meaning and pattern, seeing how it makes use of a tension between the ideas of order and disorder. The same pattern is in evidence in other works from this period, such as the prose Chronicles, Christian poems such as 'The Dream of the Rood ', and 'The Battle of Maldon'. This, like Beowulf, is a narrative poem, the major mode in Old English literature, and similarly deals with the desire for order in a savage and unruly world.

 

Middle English or medieval literature belongs to the period 1066 to about 1550 (dates for literary periods can only ever be approximate). The outstanding writer is Chaucer. In this period there are narrative poems (such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, fourteenth century; and Chaucer's works, including The Canterbury Tales, around 1400), lyric poetry, and drama (the miracle and morality plays). Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the literature of this period is that it is markedly Christian. It is also often very sophisticated. A familiar pattern is the gap between the Christian ideal and the reality of life in this imperfect world. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales can be looked at in this way: the ideal is a devout band of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, all acknowledging the greatness and authority of God, but the reality is a diverse group of characters, with numerous flaws in their personalities, who tell stories that reveal what an untidy and problematic world we live in . An ideal of religious order is thus set against the reality of everyday disorder. It is important to recognise, however, that Chaucer is a comic poet: he is amused by man's folly, but not troubled by it. Confident that God's order prevails, he can enjoy the imperfections of fallen man, weighing them against the ideals of Christianity.

 

The notion of an ideal Christian existence is still in evidence after the medieval period, for example in Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596), which presents Christian knights on journeys through life encountering all manner of temptations. This essentially religious view of experience starts to disappear, however, during the period that follows medieval literature. This is the period around the beginning of the seventeenth century and is one of the richest eras in English literature: it is the time of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Jonson and many other outstanding poets and dramatists. This is often referred to as the Renaissance period in English literature (approximate dates are 1550 to 1660), but one can also talk about modern literature starting at this time : from about 1600 onwards the language resembles the language we use today, and this in itself indicates that the works are referring to a world which we can identify with in some way.

 

The literature of the Renaissance is so rich because society was changing in such a fundamental way: the world was becoming much more complex, with the whole economic and social fabric of social changing. A great gap opens up between those religious ideals which had previously dominated man's thinking and a new sort of dynamic society which no longer found it possible to focus on other-worldly concerns in the same way as had been the case in the past. What we thus find in Renaissance literature is a tension between a traditional order and disruption of this order. It is this tension which is at the heart of such Shakespeare plays as Hamlet (1600) and King Lear (1605): the old order is dislodged and displaced by the new self-interest of a new sort of worldly-wise man. The central historical event in the seventeenth century, the Civil War of 1642-51, embodies a similar conflict between old and new, between the king's traditional status and authority and new forces who wish to wrest power from the king. This tension between an old order and disorder is also evident in Milton's choice of theme for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667): the rebellion of Adam and Eve against God. Deceived by Satan they are expelled from Eden with its ideal order and have to confront the reality of life in our disordered world. Like medieval writers, seventeenth-century writers still recognize God as the only true source of order, even though so much of their attention is on how man is distracted and tempted by worldly ambition and secular concerns. Towards the end of the century, however, the focus of literature becomes almost entirely secular. Explicitly religious poetry all but disappears and is replaced by social poetry, for example the poetry of Dryden and Pope. The period from about 1660 to 1790 is in addition characterize by the rise of the novel, a genre which concentrates on social life, in particular on the lives of individuals in a complex society. What the poets and novelists (such as Richardson and Fielding) of the eighteenth century are interested in is in seeing whether harmony and balance can be created within society. The tension that is in evidence in their works, however, is between this notion of the desirability of social order and their awareness of the inevitability of social disorder. Here again it proves useful to look at the literature of a period in terms of a pattern of the tension between order and disorder, seeing how the writers deal with the gap between how things could or should be in society and how they really are. Social order, however, is not a very inspiring ideal, although it continues to be at the heart of many subsequent works of literature, particularly at the heart of realistic novels, such as those of Jane Austen, who was writing around 1800, and George Eliot, whose novels were published between 1859 and 1876. The period in which Austen writes is known as the romantic period, though Austen herself seems a slightly anomalous figure in the literature of this time (roughly 1790 to 1830), when there was a reaction against the social philosophy of eighteenth-century literature.

 

The romantic period is one of the great ages of English poetry, with Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley all publishing around 1800. Unlike earlier writers, the romantics do not turn to God as the source of order, nor is order sought in society: what the romantics seek is to find a harmony in life which is at one with a pattern that can be found in the natural world. At the same time there is a great stress on the imagination: the source of order becomes internal, as in the work of Wordsworth, where there is a stress on how his mind interacts with what he sees in the natural world, so that some pattern and harmony is created in life. Wordsworth is aware, however, that this vision is a rare thing, that it might be illusory, and that life for the most part is disordered, puzzling and fragmented.