The Novel
What is a Novel?
“A lengthy, written, prose
narrative with a protagonist.”
- Jane Smiley
Prose:
“Prose slips by, common as
water…Poetry, in its search for
concentration and sharp effect,
contracts. In prose, one thought
leads to another - it expands. [It]
is naturally narrative.” - JS
What is Narrative?
What is Narrative?
“the telling of a story.”
“As soon as we follow a subject with a
verb, there is a good chance we are
engaged in narrative discourse. ‘I fell
down,’ the child cries and in the process
tells her mother a little narrative.”
-H. Porter Abbot
Why is Narrative Important?
“Narrative capability shows up in infants in
their third or fourth year [and] coincides
roughly with the first memories that are
retained by adults of their infancy. In other
words, we do not have any mental record of
who we are until narrative is present. If this is
so, then ‘our very definition as human
beings…is very much bound up with the
stories we tell about our own lives and the
world we live in.”
-H. Porter Abbot
What is the difference between a
story and a plot?
“We have defined a story as a narrative
of events arranged in their time
sequence. A plot is also a narrative of
events, the emphasis on causality. ‘The
king died and then the queen died’
is a story. The king died and then the
queen died of grief’ is a plot.”
- E. M. Forster
Narrative and Narrator:
“Perhaps the most important thing about
narrative is that it introduces the voice of
the narrator…Some narrators offend,
some narrators appeal, but all narrators
are present, the author but not the author,
the protagonist but not the protagonist,
an intermediary that the author and
reader must deal with.” - JS
Narrative and Protagonist:
“When the protagonist enters, a novel
becomes specific and even
peculiar…The prose, like the narrative,
must be appropriate to the protagonist. It
must express something about him that it
could not express about any other
protagonist.” - JS
Narration (Example 1):
“My true name is so well known in the records or
registers at Newgate*, and in the Old Bailey*, and there
are some things of such consequence still depending
there, relating to my particular conduct, that it is not to
be expected I should set my name or the account of my
family to this work; perhaps after my death it may be
better known; at present it would not be proper, no, not
though a general pardon should be issued, even without
exceptions of persons or crimes.”
-1st sentence of The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the
Famous Moll Flanders spoken by the protagonistnarrator
*A prison * A court of law
Narration (Example 2):
“Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood
Broadway. At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975, Alfred
Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a
fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the
steering wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too
heavy upon him. He lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw
slack, arms splayed either side like some fallen angel;
scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals
(left) and his marriage license (right), for he had decided
to take his mistakes with him.”
- 1st sentence of White Teeth
Critics Say That Novels Are
More Morally Complex Than
Some Other Artforms?
Is This True? Why?
The Length of the Novel, the Protagonist
and Moral Complexity:
“A protagonist is usually interesting not because he
is someone special, but because something happens
to him. Because the novel has to be long and
organized, he has to become interesting as he deals
with the thing that happens to him. This typical
transformation from an ordinary person to someone
worth remembering comes to seem both routine and
appealing, encouraging readers to see themselves as
potentially interesting and their lives as potential
material for novels. Thus are the moral lives of
readers encouraged to develop complexity… Every
important character in a novel is portrayed as having
moral complexity.” -JS
Moral Complexity and Ontology:
“Every novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel
says to the reader: ‘Things are not as simple as you think.’”
- Milan Kundera
“All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of
the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a
character, you are automatically confronted by the question:
What is the self? How can the self be grasped? It is one of
those fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is
based.”
- Milan Kundera
Ontology:
“A novel examines not reality but existence.
And existence is not what has occurred,
existence is the realm of human possibilities,
everything that man can become, everything
that he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the
map of existence by discovering this or that
human possibility.”
- Milan Kundera
Are novels too complex?
Can we still read them?
“Books require an immense amount of energy. It is
not just pages. It is ideas, observations, many
narrative lines...I have no faith in the survival of the
novel. It is almost over. The world has changed
and people do not have the time to give that a book
requires.”
- V.S. Naipaul
Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature
Are novels too complex?
Can we still read them?
“If we citizens do not support our artists, then we
sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality
and we end up believing in nothing and having
worthless dreams” (xiv).
-Yann Martin, winner of the 2002 Mann Booker
Prize
Bibliography
Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
Martell, Yann. Life of Pi. New York: Harcourt Books, 2001.
Smiley, Jane. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. New York: Anchor
Books, 2005.