In Our Time - The Novel

Episode Date: November 11, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the development and the future of the novel. D.H. Lawrence was proud of his job, he said: “I am a man, and alive…for this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog”. Fiction pours from the presses and in number of titles, this must be the most prolific of novel-producing ages. But are they as good as in the golden age, or the silver, or the bronze, or the steam age? And do they signify? Is technology marginalising the novel or is it still the greatest way of telling a story?Despite many premature declarations of its demise, (stretching back almost to the date of its birth), the novel has been ‘getting the whole hog’ for hundreds of years. But what makes a novel different from other literature, and can we expect it to be still around, ‘getting the whole hog’ into the next century? With D J Taylor, novelist, critic, biographer of Thackeray and author of After the War; Gillian Beer, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature, Cambridge University and Chairman of the Booker Prize judges 1997.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. DeH Lawrence was unashamedly proud of what he did. He said, I am a man and alive. For this reason, I'm a novelist.

And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of men, man alive, but never get the whole hog. That's the end of the quote. Despite many premature declarations of its demise, stretching back almost to the date of its birth, the novel has been, quote, getting the whole hog for hundreds of years. But what makes a novel different from other literature and can we expect it to be around getting the whole hog into the next century? With me to discuss the development in the future of the novel of the novelist and critic DJ Taylor,

who was in a critique of the modern novel in his book After the War and has just published his biography of the great Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. I'm also joined by Julian Beer, chairman of the Booker Prize judges in 1997 and the King Edward the 7th Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. Julian Beer, the novel is sometimes referred to as Savanty's legacy that book one was in 1605, the Don Quixote.

Where do you place the birth of the novel? I do place it around Savantos because I think he's one of the first people who raises that tremor of how do we believe things and how much is fiction controlling our lives anyhow, whether or not we're in a novel. We're able all the time to understand ourselves in terms of fiction. So I think Savantis is, I mean, some people try to take it right back to Appalachian the Golden Ass

and all those stories of transformation of it. Fiction's always around. We all need it. We all live it. But I think the novel is a particular form and that we actually do a disservice to ourselves if we try to take it right back into the Greek romances and so on. David, DJ Taylor, would you agree that there's a time when you can say this is when the novel started?

We certainly, one looks at one's bookshelves, one gets that impression that by the beginning of the 18th century these books are suddenly emerging from somewhere. You have field, you have fielding, smallot, people like that, of Richardson. And suddenly there is this great efflorescence of people writing fiction, often in forms that would be slightly curious now to ask, the epistolary novel was a great favourite in those days. But there is this kind of bursting forth, something that goes on in the English novel,

in the 18th century, then proceeds to the end of the century through Jane Austen, and then there's a kind of gap and the silver fork fiction, as it was called, comes in in the 1820s. And then suddenly, just when people were beginning to think that it was all getting very quiet again, you have the enormous explosion of the early Victorian novel, beginning with Dickens and Thackeray,

leading through to Trollope, George Elliott. and another extraordinary wave, such as up through the mid-19th century. I don't have to get there quite yet. Juliannebier, you said that there have always been fictions, but the novel gathered itself, let's say, from the tall agree around this day, from Cervantes' onwards.

So why did it gather itself then, and what was it gathering? Are we back to Hegel's idea that it's, in dispute to be linked with the rise of the middle classes because they had greater leisure, they had privacy, they'd space to read and time to read. Is it a social thing in that sense?

Savantis, of course, is a Spanish novelist, not an English novelist. We've all acclimatized him to be English, so I wouldn't feel able to say what was going on in Spain at the turn of the 16th, 17th century. But by the time we get it into English, which I think there is a delay, if we're looking at, say, Fielding Defoe, Richardson, with Defoe, who is often taken.

has been taken in the past as the father of the English novel. We've got somebody who comes to the novel extremely late in his life. And I think that's why he is such a marvellous novelist, that he's worked as a journalist for years and years. He's invented all sorts of people in other forms. He's been a spy. He's been an advocate. He's been a brickmaker.

And he takes all these things up into a single voice. And that single voice, I think, is what he gives to the novel. I don't mean that people go on writing first person all the time. Indeed, that's then one of the great rouse that breaks out because, as David is referred to you, have the epistolary novel, everything written in letters, another kind of first person, Richardson. And Fielding says, why should we believe this?

Why just because people tell us their life stories, should we believe they're telling us the truth? There's no reason why we should think that any more objective. Indeed, it's a lot less objective than if we're writing in third person. But I still would like to get this idea before, Buba and why did, I take your point completely that fictions have been around for a very, very long time, but why did they suddenly gather, or suddenly, not suddenly enough, gather into the novel form at this time?

I mean, I've suggested Hegel quite briskly, which is a obvious social thing, and perhaps too obvious and too superficial, but why do you think it gathered, and what was the novel delivering that made it so interesting for writers and readers? It has to be said that the English novel certainly confined oneself to that. The English novel is very interested in what would be called bourgeois themes. It's very interested in things like class. It's very interested in social advancement. It's very interested with people. We see this at its most advanced form, I suppose, in the mid-19th century,

but certainly quite early on. I mean, thinking of Smollett's fiction, for example, which is picaresque, obviously built on earlier European models, on Gilblah, for example. But Smollett is very interested in these young adventurers coming to London from nowhere. young Scotsman being exploited by English people observing the society of which they've suddenly become a part, and then moving through it, sometimes jumping over the hurdles that have placed before them, and sometimes crawling underneath.

And the society is spread out before them being analysed by this Scots observer, coming with all these sort of different, these kind of social systems and processes he suddenly become a part of and finding ways to exploit them and make his own way through to marriage to the luscious Norzica on page 529. Is there anything significant about the fact that the novel was written privately and read privately and read quietly, St. Augustine

said of his teacher, St. Amber, as the first person in history to read without moving his lips. But about a thousand years later, a lot of people could do that. That private, an individual engagement of the imagination, did that, as it were,

encourage and help and usher in the novel? Yes, I think that silent reading which is one of the forms of alienation that we vanish when we're reading these fictions. It's a form of power for the reader. We can also take a novel at our own pace. It's not like a communal form, like going to the cinema, going to the theatre.

You can eat it by yourself. And I do think that that's important. It's even there, I think, in the whole paradoxical form of Robinson Crusoe, Okay, so we talk about that as the first English novel of great fame. It's a novel, yes, about class, because his father has said, stay home and be a bourgeois,

and he says, Not on your life, I'm going to do something really exceptional. And he ends up all on his own in the situation, if you like, of the reader, having to remake bourgeois life with his own hands. So you actually learn what a society is like from seeing him on his own. He's creating his life and his texts, simultaneously, as well there is,

simply there in that fruitful isolation. Just to peg away at this before we move on to the 19- do you think that the fact of being able to read one-to-one, as it were, that being able to read silently, having the time, some people had, we know we're talking about a limited number, but still they did, meant, excuse me, meant that writers could deliver, could conjure up, could write in a different way of different things

which the novel could accommodate. David, DeJose Jellery, and you're writing about, You often use the word plausibility, a word of commendation, and authenticity, a particular sort of authenticity came into novel writing. Did that come into novel writing because it was around or because the novel itself and the transaction enabled that to happen? But I think there's certainly a sense, certainly in its 18th century form, that the novel is tailoring itself very closely to the concerns. to the... Well, it had a dual effect, I think. One one reads one of those sort of raucous

and it has to be said fragmentary and rambling 18th century novels of the kind that Fielding and Smollett wrote. On the one hand, it is a romance. It's providing adventure. It's a world out there which the hero is careening through

in a way that the reader sitting in quiet sequestration is not. But on the other hand, simultaneously the concerns which are being placed under the lens of the novelist and the reader's eyes, are those which the reader himself, or the reader herself, would have been very intimately concerned with,

and the question of how one lived in the society of which one was a part, how one got married, how one had children, how one conducted one's life around the family half. And these were also very serious questions for the 18th century reader. But it also isn't a conduct book, is it? I mean, I think in that way it's often oppositional, and it enlarges our lives. It tells us about lives we don't lead,

And going back to this question of class, it seems to be one of the things that the novel has always allowed is a kind of safe access into other class positions, and people have enjoyed that. But last question before I go to the 19th century, in what ways, briefly, would you say the novel when it started, late 18th century, 18th century is getting on with it with being a novel? In what way could you say it has distinguished itself already

from other forms of fiction in the following ways? is unlike the others in these ways, and in what it is unlike lies a lot of its attraction? It's a different kind of argument about lying. It's very troubled about its own status. I think that's one thing. And that, I think, comes partly out of Savantis. And that does seem to me to really distinguish it, say, from the romance or from folk tale or from storytelling, that it's a kind of equivocation at the start, as well as being robustly concerned with relationships, the social. And it's that pressure between two apparently rather different projects worrying about truth-telling and being concerned to represent actuality.

And already its consciousness of its artificiality is becoming one of its more interesting things, wouldn't you say? Even at that point, people are worrying away at the concept of the artificiality. this fiction being cognate with Tafane. And this is a subject of intense interest, even to the earliest English novelist. A great many people think that the greatest period for the novel was the 19th century.

And part of this programme, I hope, answered the question, can the 19th century survive until the 21st century? And let's take Vanity Fair as a great 19th century novel and have David Taylor, whose book on Thackeray, of course, examines Vanity Fair in detail. A lot of people might have read it

and some might have seen it on the television adaptation. Can you just say briskly, David, what qualities, say, five or six, four, three or four, whatever it is, in Vanity Fair makes it, make one say, this is what a great 19th century novel does? Well, I suppose the thing that would strike the late 20th century reader immediately about Vanity Fair and other novels like it is the spaciousness, I suppose, the sense of range, depth, panorama, not so much that this world is laid out before you, like some vast mountain range, which you can sort of, of climb over and inspect it and will. But also the novelist is in command of it

in a way that it's very difficult sometimes to see at the end of the 20th century. The fact that you have to feel that the novelist is intimate with his world, understands it, understands the sectors in which that world is divided, and therefore the psychological grasp is that much more acute in that...

So you've got spaciousness, what else? Well, sense of command. Yeah. The idea that... And I suppose also a sense on which the essential on which if the novelist

is the novelist a description of the society the novelist sees one of the things I've become very conscious of in Victorian novels is an understanding of the axes

on which that society works I mean 19th century novels are very good for example on power on who owns things on who's in charge of things of where if you like where the nerve centres of the country

and its organisation reside which is something of the modern equivalents tend I'm afraid to flounder around on I mean there are historical reasons for this And one of the things Orwell said about Thackeray about Vanity Fair was one of the things you can do is pick it up anywhere

and very quickly know where you were. That's right, yes. Now why is that a virtue, do you think? Because it's nice, I suppose, if an art form is able in some ways to disclose itself and reveal some of its secrets at various points continuously throughout the journey. I mean, it then doesn't become a kind of enclosed mass

whereby you have to start with your first course and wind away right through the dessert. There's a sense of buzz, there's a sense of noise and movement going on which the reader can pick up on. Gillian, what's your reaction to that brisk extraction and the virtues of the 19th? Well, you might just say a lot in a short time.

Yes, I think, one of the things that Sacri is best at is the way the present melts and he does that through food, the way in which there is this sapping of the present all the time, the way it's floating away into the past. And that's what gives the point, poignancy, because after all, he's not writing about his exact contemporary own society.

No, it's an historical novel. It's an historical novel with an awful lot of fast-forwarding at the same time. A lot of English novels, historical novels, in the sense of being set 30 or 40 years previously. That's almost a different thing. What I'm trying to get out here is people think the 19th century novel had such qualities. We can't do it these days. David has outlined several of those qualities. Julian, do you want to reinforce those, just so people know what we're talking about?

agree with him about the centres of power and that kind of examination of where hidden power structures lie, because it's not always the manifest ones. That, I think, is partly why there's this fascination with who inherits, and quite a strong, sharp plot turn that's frequent, where the working class or the external person is the one who, in the end, gets the goods. And this may be wishful fulfillment, but it's also looking at a society which is under stress and where its social structures are changing and where you can't rely on knowing anymore.

And where people could march through in a very distinctive way. Yes. And that I think is, I'd certainly agree with you about that. The point you made about authority, and I suppose the idea that there is a narrator who knows it all, yes, that's quite common in the 19th century novel, though it's not universal. And sometimes it's tedious because you do have the feeling that this,

person is preempting what the reader could know left to herself or himself. And that, I think, is one of the disadvantages of 19th century fiction, that it fixes your forward imaginings, because one of the great pleasures of any kind of fiction, I think, but particularly the novel, is the power of the reader to imagine different outcomes at every moment. Now, the next stage, in this brief and elliptical, what, I'd say it's brief. and vivid history of the novel is 1922 of the publication of Ulysses and a feeling

since then that not marked a time when the 19th century novel was shown the door in a way. It existed, it was fine, but the tomb was sealed and a new structures were taking place. What do you say to that, David Taylor? Well, it's all

very well to say that Ulysses, I suppose, is the great totem pole of modernism, but modernism is a great deal older than that, and in fact, I think one of the things, I'm sure Professor Beer, would agree with me is the further you go back in the English novel, the more the modernist seeds are starting to sprout. It's also possible to say, I think, about Ulysses, and it's possible to say about a lot of those modernist classics. It's also possible to say about what we would call the experimental novel that followed, is that it's all very well. And I mean,

F.R. Levis says somewhere something about, you know, one could say of Joyce that he was trying to extend his technique, whereas with Shakespeare, there's a sense of something that needed urgently to be imparted, which I think is a good distinction. But the thing about The thing about Ulysses, and of course we must remember that it was then followed by Finnegan's Wake, which is, I fear, all but unreadable to the academic scholar. The thing about many of these modernist classics is that there is, whatever the techniques involved, there is usually a pretty decent natural novel waiting to get out. And so I really wonder whether Ulysses is the, if you like, the turning point.

The last Victorian novel. I don't. I wonder if it's the last great, it may well be the last great modernist classic of that ilk because the path led to Vanity the path led to Finnegan's Wake and the people who the people who consciously picked up Joyce's Batten of which there are great many in the 1960s

40 years later the great flowering if it was a flowering of the English experimental novel and in the majority of cases it led straight up a cul-de-sac Mark Reader Borden. Do you think that the influence of Ulysses and Vinigan's Wake was has been very important in this century

and if so where has it taken the novel? I think the influence of Ulysses has been very important. I think in Finnegan's way come in, it's an example of your 90th century novel, which you can pick up at any point and either know where you are and know where you aren't, that it's page by page. It's very fascinating, but it's very difficult to get through.

And that has been one of the effects, I think, of Ulysses, a great emphasis on the text page by page so that you can flourish and weasel and turn around inside each page. But you don't necessarily feel that you're going to. to turn the next page and move on, that has certainly had its effects. I don't think the experimental novel. I mean, you dated in the 1960s.

I don't know. It has a much older heritage than that. I'm just thinking it was particularly, particular fat, wasn't it, of 60s English writing, was the experimental novel? Well, where are we now? At the end of the 20th century, are the qualities and one might even say virtues outlined by David Taylor of the 19th century novels still extant and set fair to continue for as long as any sane person wants to look into the future?

Gillian. The novel is so promiscuous and it takes up so many things that you can't foresee. I mean, in this century it's been film or right ulysses, but film, I think, has affected the novel, scientific ideas of affected the novel. And the 19th century novel is one form of it. I don't think it is all going to be the same. There's an argument that film, television, radio, and the other approaches to storytelling, character,

all that have actually marginalised. Well, yes, people have gone so far as they marginalised the novel. I mean, Gauvidel, as it was always saying, look, when he goes to American universities, the students he meets are talking about the latest film, sometimes the latest fashionable television show, they're never talking about the latest novel. The reason is because they go to the films together.

I do think that's one of the things I most enjoyed when I was a booker judge, both times, was having the chance to sit down with a group of people, rather like having just been to the cinema and talk together about a new novel. And it's very striking thing at the moment the way readers' book clubs are flourishing. And that, again, is, I think, this commonality wanting to talk with what you're reading, talk on past it. Which is something new in the world. Which is interesting because it's rather, and notwithstanding discussion such as this,

I very rarely want to talk about novels with anybody. I simply want to read them and, you know, flourish in the private world that they create. But back to the point, do you think that what you described as the great virtues of Vanity Fair, and you've also talked about in your writing about Dombey and Sir, and you've written about a lot of these novels? You think they are going to continue into the next century. And Martin Amis said that the 20th century was the century of the American novel. Well, there's a lot to contradict.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. to a very much up to a point. But the 21st century could be the century of the American, everything, the way things are going. And is this sort of, is the American novel as we see it? Is that taking forward? Yes, I think at the moment I think that somebody like Don DeLillo has hit on some themes which are new stories like living in a crowd.

What does it mean to be part of a community where you are always part of a crowd? I mean, Mao, Mao, too, is the most tremendous novel about just that thing. But then what about the South American novel? The German novel, we've been talking this morning as if it's only in English that the novel exists and we've also been talking rather as if parochially it's only in England or in the British Isles that the novel has and perhaps that's what we're invited to do.

But still when one thinks about all the new idioms of English, the ways in which across the world, England has been refigured and fed with quite other experiences. That seems to be where the novels most likely to go. I mean the multicultural novel you're talking about as well as the novel in Spanish and German and Marquez. Yes. Yes.

Well, I think it's interesting because I think looking from purely, sort of rather taking, going, stepping it back a bit and looking at it purely from the beautiful point of what's happening in Britain. I think there's a march backwards going on at the moment. I think for the last 15 or 20 years, the majority of English novels have been obsessed with what one would sort of fit into the bracket of post-modern writing, which is tremendous, usually metropolitan, and London-based eclecticism,

which I think is, I think, a great many people have begun to think, is really rather washed up. And just looking at novels as a professional reviewer of novels, what one has noticed over the last two or three years is the tendency for books to be set outside the M25. There are people writing novels in Cumbria, in Surrey, in Lincolnshire, in parts of England, which I have to think are terrifically interesting,

but which have not generally tended to feature. What about the Scottish novel? I mean, that's been, had this tremendous, it's flowering in O'Hagan's Our Fathers, which I'm reading, just finished reading, which I think is wonderful, and again, it has a new idea. There's a kind of new, I mean, one hesitates

to use the word regional or provincial, because it sounds invidious, but I think there's a new and I use the word provincial, I mean it in the best sense, I think there's a new provincialism coming to the British novel, and I think that's a good thing, because too much of it has been focused on, you know, Notting Hill and Mayfair over the last, over the last half century, and I think it's these

new directions are going to bring. And these are often quite eclectic styles of writing. I mean, I can think of Cumbrian magic realists that I know are doing all sorts of extraordinary things with what was the English regional novel. And I think those developments are extremely encouraging. Yes, I agree with that. But when we're talking about the magical realists of South America, are we still talking of novels in terms that would have been enjoyed by the 19th century writers and readers,

Julian? Are we talking about it's no, I mean things change they change they change better. They change, they change, but just as a matter of interest, do you see the line going through, do you see the line of story, linear development, character, bringing

building up an emotional state which is then released in the reader, that particular plausibility, authenticity, those sort of things, inclusiveness, which I think complement what David Teller was saying earlier. Do you think that is being

carried forward still? Yes, I do and I think what the novelists are always doing is not saying this is true but this is worse believing and that feeling of this is something worse believing is very strong in the magical realist novel and I mean

worth believing in a different sort of way isn't it? You have to believe that people survive the most outrageous, bizarre even ridiculous adventures. But however heavily disguised as well These are political novels mostly, making profound points about societies. Yes, indeed, that's perfectly true.

It's the only way you can write in sometimes, isn't it, as a magical realist in, let's say, Colombia in the 1960s because of the overt political pressure. And Guintagrazi and the founder, which I'm in the middle of reading at the moment, which takes the old, old folk tale of the fisherman and his wife and then expands it out, so it has a tremendous political resonance and also simply a sort of pleasurable, foody resonance, that it is a novel, which is, again, like Thackeray, to do with how the present melts away. One of the things almost finally that George Steiner said in an essay, an excellent essay about fiction,

was that he thought that the energy was really draining away from it into science, that actually the interest of the moment was the bright people he knew were either going into the movies and so on, but intellectually we're going into science. Now, you're a university. person. Julian, what's your view of that? I don't believe that people are leaving the novel to go into

science, but I do think that scientific ideas and the availability of them is feeding fiction. I don't know. I've always had, there's always an epigram that used to say that art upset science reassures. I've always thought it's the other way Ryan, science upsets, art reassures

and I'm sure this particular art will go on doing so for a great many years. I don't think Dostrovsky reassures. Well, I don't think is that a disturbance. But finally, Bellows, Saul Bellows, he's recently quoted to saying, where writers at the millennium must cope with a plethora of attractions and excitements.

Now, why do you think they must cope, Julian Bia? I don't think they must. I think there's absolutely no requirement that they do. Some of the finest writing, Kutzi, would be an example, is muted, frugal, lappardery, withdrawn, apparently, and yet so, in,

incisive that you can't do without it for interpretation. Do you think the novel has succeeded in finding, well I do, but obviously I wasn't questions. But your opinion were interested in there. Do you think the novel has succeeded in finding a different place for itself in the light of what could be considered an assault from other media? I think it's, I think the novel has in some ways, one can be very pessimistic about certain modern developments, but I think when one considers the pessimism and the books that were actually written

with titles like The Death of the novel, and some extraordinary gloomy stuff that was written sort of 25, 30 years ago. I think in many ways the novel has exceeded as a popular art from beyond all our expectations. And one has to be encouraged by the fact that every high street one marches down has an enormous bookshop, even if there's a rather dead certain similarity about some of the titles they start. Yes, and there's all subculture of novels that we haven't even touched on. Yes. Popular novels which are selling in there hundreds of thousands.

Well, thank you both very much indeed. I think I maintained an extraordinary silence in the face of all sorts of ways I wanted to leap in personally. I'm just going to give myself a little medal for that. Thanks to DJ Taylor and Gillian Beer. And thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash Radio 4.