The Nature of Prose Fiction

Introduction: After looking over the various ways that scholars have divided poetry the student should not be surprised that fictional text is also divided. Remember these divisions were created by scholars not by artists Cervantes did not say "Gee, today I believe I shall write a novel" he in fact was writing an anti-romance, but what he did in that work became the hall marks of what we call a novel.

Drama: Like "the epic" in our poetry section, drama is a genre which expands beyond even the time when there was writing. The first dramas were probably enacted as a ceremony as they were also when drama returned (more on this later). Thus it in a real sense defies inclusion here. However, since most of the dramas (plays) studied by students in Introduction to Literature classes started out as texts which were written out, we will include it here. A very interesting quality of drama is that, unlike the other texts described here, it requires the listener to accept overt impossibilities in order to enjoy the work.

According to CS Lewis, drama requires the development in the human mind of the facility to be able to look at a concrete thing and see it as REPRESENTATIVE of something greater. We look at a stage made of wood and plaster and see a great castle / fortress on Cyprus. We watch a play with Lawrence Fishburne, a very human actor, and see the larger than life tragic hero Othello. This ability, according to Lewis, is tied into religion. Thus the birthplace of drama in Western thought occurs within the realm of worship twice. To worship any deity--but God especially--human viewers must be able to conceive that there is a reality which is beyond what they are seeing before them. The idol is not really Apollo; it represents Apollo. The cross is not holy in itself but is holy because of what Christ did on it. So, the first plays in Greece were developed within the worship of Bacchus. They developed into complete works of art themselves depicting stories which helped explain humanity's role in the cosmos and were finally written down, but originally they were probably part of the worship ceremony. However, with the fall of the Roman Empire much of the ancients works were locked away within the old libraries of monasteries.

Drama, however, returned on its own within the medieval church, probably as the priests re-enacted the last supper of Christ in communion. All one has to do is have one reader say the words of Christ and another read the narrative and others read the words of the disciples and suddenly there is a play before you. These developed into both mystery and miracle plays which taught common people Bible stories (stories which explain their place in the cosmos). Soon the merchant guilds took them over and did them within the church courtyard and eventually they become so secular (and a bit bawdy) that they were kicked out but by then the people were hooked on the love of drama.

The Short Story: A narrative text defined by Poe in "The Philosophy of Composition" as something which can be read in one sitting and which usually aims achieve a single effect in its resolution: i.e surprise, horror, joy, a solved problem. It is an invented prose narrative shorter than a novel usually dealing with a few characters and aiming at unity of effect and often concentrating on the creation of mood rather than plot

The Novella: Characterized by brevity, self-contained plots that end on a note of irony, a literate and facile style, restraint of emotion, and objective rather than subjective presentation, these tales were a major stimulant to the development of the modern short story in Germany. The Novella also survived as a unique form, although unity of mood and style often replaced the traditional unity of action; the importance of the frame was diminished, as was the necessity for maintaining absolute objectivity.

The Novel: This is an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. The novel has two primary qualities which separate it from other long works of fiction. First it tends to center on an average individual and the realistic portrayal of his or her mind. Unlike epic poems or romances which concentrate of a demigod or an aristocratic warrior, the novel tells the experiences of someone far more average. Even in fantasy or science fiction narratives the main character is in his or her behavior and thoughts more like the reader intellectually and emotionally than unlike the reader. Thus Frodo Baggins from Tolkien's The Hobbit may be a Hobbit, but he is also ever common individual who found himself in extraordinary circumstances, such as war or natural disaster. Second, the novel often looks at the general world of which the protagonist is a part, allowing the writer a chance to critique his or her society. When this occurs in a very broad way, it is called a picaresque novel..

Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic, romantic, realist, historical--to name only some of the more important ones.

Although forerunners of the genre are to be found in a number of places, including classical Rome, 11th-century Japan, and Elizabethan England, the European, English and American novel is usually said to have begun with the Don Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes (part I, 1605). In its juxtaposition of impossible idealism and earthy practicality in the figures of the knight and his squire, this work adumbrates what was to become one of the central concerns of the Western novel, just as its playful exploitation of the authorial persona anticipates many of the technical questions raised by later novelists.

Despite some interesting works in 17th-century France, it was in England that the genre first took permanent root. Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding were all writing in the first half of the 18th century, and their works did much to establish the novel as the most popular literary form in England. This popularity soon became a general phenomenon, leading in the 19th century to an extraordinary surge of fiction writing, particularly in Britain, France, Russia, and the United States.

A partial explanation of the novel's popularity is to be found in the scope it gave writers to explore areas of human experience that had previously lain outside the province of literature. For the first time, the minutiae of daily life became a fit subject for the writer's attention. The heroes and heroines of this new genre were as likely to be servants as courtiers. Their lives did not have to display preeminent virtue or vice; there needed be nothing epic in their destinies. Inevitably, this shift in emphasis was helped or hindered by the social and historical context in any given country.

When all the exceptions have been counted, however, it remains the case that the mainstream of the European novel has based its appeal on the claim to provide a more faithful image of everyday reality than can be achieved by any other literary form. Even the extravagant fantasies of the Gothic novel or the modern novel of science fiction depend for their impact on the detailed rendering of surface reality. The history of the novel is in part a history of the changes in conventions established to achieve this verisimilitude. Perhaps because of the novel's realist bias, its greatest period is usually held to be the mid- to late-19th century, a time when improved literacy rates had increased the size of the potential audience and the modern mass media had not yet arrived to diminish it.

With the coming of the 20th century the novel began to change somewhat in character. The old certainty that experience could be adequately represented by the language and structures of the conventional novel was increasingly called into question. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson began to examine the ways in which reality eluded the grasp of literature. In trying to capture the complex and fragmentary quality of experience, some of these writers stretched the limits of the conventional novel to a point at which it became more and more remote from the expectations--and sometimes the comprehension or interest--of the average reader, a process that perhaps culminated in the mid-20th century in the so-called antinovel, or nouveau roman. These modernist experiments sometimes produced works of outstanding interest, but they also tended to widen the gap between the popular and the "literary" novel.

Return to the Nature of Poetic: Genres and Subgenres Part One

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