Boarding House Rules
16. Card-playing, the use of any kind of intoxicating drinks, the keeping of pistols or any kind of weapons, the reading of novels, and the using of profane or indecorous language, positively prohibited.
— Jedediah Hotchkiss, from the Annual Catalog of the Mossy Creek Academy, Mossy Creek, Augusta County, Virginia, for the Academical Year 1856-1857
What conditions, you might wonder, would lead an educator in the early Victorian Age, to classify the reading of novels with drinking, swearing, gambling, and dueling? This is where we are going this week.
This diary is not idle foregrounding, but necessary to our understanding of fiction and what fiction is, what fiction does. I don’t expect general agreement, not by a long shot, but I do want to lay out the principles of fiction and how I understand them to work. They’re central to the grand theme we’ve been circling for a year now: what is fantasy? And I write as one who has studied the novel for close to forty years, so I know a thing or two about it.
What I’m about to lay out is rendered in broad strokes. Extremely broad strokes. Yes, I know the novel is older than what I’m about to write. Except it’s not, not as I understand the essence of what the novel attempts. Prose renderings of stories exist through time, but they’re not novels. They are prose narratives that share some qualities with the novel, namely that they tell stories and they’re written in not-poetry.
It’s a tenet of Marxist literary theory that nothing happens in isolation, but is a result of a cause. (There you go — literary theory! — and it’s nowhere as fusty as you feared, right?)
What this means is that, especially in literature, before some innovation happens, the conditions have to be right for the innovation to take place, and something has to prompt it. For instance: John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Would not have been written 150 years before Milton, even if Milton had lived 150 years before he did. Why? Because before the Reformation, the authority of the Church Universal was intact and it was not possible to deviate from it. After the Reformation, with competing visions of what constitutes Christianity and no one having the ultimate authority to sanction the True Path to Salvation, for the first time it was intellectually possible to question God’s will, even God’s existence, and not get yourself burned at the stake. That’s element one: the social conditions to permit the question. Element two: Milton’s desire to “justify the ways of God to men.” Before the Reformation, such justification wasn’t needed, because there was only one vision of God’s will, but now, with the Reformation, people were starting to get restless, theologically speaking.
Marxist literary theory essentially looks to social and historic conditions as causes for artistic response. If something happens, there has to be a reason it happened; there had to be something to inspire it. Here’s a thought experiment: why did George Orwell not write 1984 until 1949? What conditions prompted Orwell? What conditions have prompted the current proliferation of post-apocalyptic fictions?
Congratulations: you’re a Marxist theorist! (Nota Bene: Marxist Theory has nothing to do with political Marxism. As if that needed to be said.)
The Novel as Art Form
Most fusty English scholars would say that the novel in English began in 1740 with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (and yes, I know. I’m being Eurocentric. I’m ignoring the rest of the world, but I have not studied the rest of the world, and the rest of the world does not affect the development of the contemporary novel in Europe and the US. I also ignore history; I ignore Malory [not a novel] and Cervantes [maybe a novel] — but indulge me. You’ll see why soon). I think the scholars who credit Richardson with the novel are wrong. I would pin the start of the novel as a realistic form with Jane Austen — and yes, I just jumped over Laurence Stern and the delightful Tristram Shandy. You can beat me up later. Here’s why:
Austen gives us a full fictional plot. Her characters are psychologically realistic. She dispenses with the let’s-fill-in-all-the-blanks direct address to the reader, that breaking of the fourth wall that we tend to find so jarring, even today, even when Deadpool does it. Austen’s novels create a coherent seamless reality separate from the “real world” of the reader and the “historic world” of the writer. Even so, despite the “timeless” quality of Austen’s fictional world, that world turns a mirror on her own society, delivering a sharp satirical view of the norms and expectations of that society. As an author, she distances herself from the reader and speaks through characters. She also draws us in as active interpreters; she doesn’t tell us everything we should know, and that marks a turning point in the development of novels. After Austen, a novel can still be philosophical at heart (shoutout to Messrs. Dostoevsky and Hugo); it can be socially critical (Mr. Dickens, take a bow, and more on this below because it becomes its own form); it can chart enormous social upheavals and revolutions (Count Tolstoy, this is for you) or the rise and fall of a culture or a dynasty (Herr Mann, your turn). It can be a grand vision as big as America itself (rise, Mr. Clemens) or distill all of life in a madeleine (Mr. Proust, my respects). In other words, the novel is immensely flexible, but it remains fixed in focus on character and especially on one essential quality: the understanding of human nature.
Unsurprisingly, the discipline of psychology rose alongside the novel, and the relationship between fiction and psychology has been one of fertile cross-pollination. Psychologists have used literature to illustrate psychological theories, and ever since 1949, when Ernest Jones got hold of Shakespeare, Hamlet and Gertrude have had an uncomfortable relationship. Don’t believe me? Watch Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and every production since and tell me that Jones’ Oedipal footprints aren’t all over the play even now. Examples of psychological readings of literary characters, and writers enacting psychology through their characters are too many to number, although you might start fruitfully with Wilkie Collins and G. K. Chesterton. Psychology is like catnip to a writer; novelists are intensely interested in human nature, and it’s not a stretch to say that the purpose of fiction is to hold a mirror up to humanity.
Let me say that again: the purpose of fiction is to hold a mirror up to humanity. To explore what it means to be human. To examine human nature. The focus of fiction is intensely personal, exploring what it is to be alive in a given situation.
At the same time, writers like Upton Sinclair (and many others) saw the novel form as a powerful tool for social criticism. A second thread of literature, pioneered by Dickens, related to psychological coherence but focused more on social ills and injustices (hello, Mr. Steinbeck!) developed and soared.
Thus, we have the novel as an art form, a literary form. A deeper look into the development of the novel is available here. Actually, there are books, college courses, scarcely penetrable volumes of authoritative discourse devoted to who did what and when to elevate the art form from something that would get you kicked out of school to something worthy of study in the academies of higher learning.
By the middle of the 20th century, things started to get stale. Formulaic. Shopworn. And so it was literary criticism to the rescue!
Taking a cue from the deconstructionists who declared the death of the text and decided it was a fruitful endeavor to critique each other’s critiques into eternity (can you tell I survived one horrific seminar on Derrida and de Man and Spivak? I did not do well. I survived.) the novel became a clever form, one that might enact the literary criticism as it unfolds, or stretch the limits of form. Eco, Calvino and early Rushdie are masters of form. Danielewski can write a fantasy that’s bigger on the inside (House of Leaves) and J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst collaborate on the Book as Artifact (Ship of Theseus) while Danielewski joins in the fun with The Familiar in its successive volumes.
So these threads remain: literature as mirror of humanity, of social norms and abuses, and of itself. Hold that thought.
The Novel as Entertainment
Because another tradition rose alongside the literary model; from the penny-dreadful, the popular novel was born. Genre was born, and genre was popular.
The vast majority of popular novels have always been considered escapist and infantile. Social scolds regarded novels the way our grandparents regarded comic books—stupid at best and probably morally dangerous. Their popularization, as imitators of Dickens proliferated, were socially declassé, leading to widespread prohibitions of novel-reading. Mr. Hotchkiss’ ban was be no means unusual; it just happened to be handy for me. Having inherited a small library of popular Victorian ladies’ novels, I have to agree with Mr. Hotchkiss’ appraisal. They’re cloying, terribly written, sentimental—in every sense of the word, awful. There’s a reason they’re forgotten.
But in their day they were really popular. So by the 20th century you have this bifurcated vision of fiction: some of it is high art (Joyce, Proust, George Eliot, etc.), some of it is trash; “serious” literature versus “escapist” (read genre) literature. Serious literature holds a mirror up to reality, escapism offers relief from reality. This division still exists, drilled into the heads of every high school student who has learned to dread the question, “what is the theme?”
There’s another difference between literature and genre: genre focuses on plot. Plot is king in popular literature. Oh, yes, plot exists in art literature, but it’s only one among many elements like theme, mechanics, philosophy, and the myriad other bits a writer juggles and chooses to showcase at one time or another. Romance: story. Adventure: story. Science fiction: story. What happened is often more important than why it happened or what it says about the human condition.
Hold on there. Is that really true?
The guardians of the Canon would probably say yes. Upstarts in Genre would disagree.
You see, post-Modern literature is in something of a slump. That, and what all this has to do with fantasy, is where we’ll pick up next week —