CAN THE NOVEL BE SAVED?

• Author: ALTHER, LISA

I REGARD THE NOVEL as something of an endangered species. For a long time now, I, as a novelist, have felt the way I imagine a saddlemaker must have felt after the invention of the automobile. Before discussing how and why I fear the novel is changing in ways that seem in some ways unfortunate, I need to say a few words about its origin and function.

Scholars argue over when and where the first novel was written. Thirteenth-century Japan and 15th-century France are two of the contenders, and one can certainly make a good case for the existence of various types of extended narratives in many cultures throughout recorded history. Storytelling is, of course, one of the oldest and most popular forms of human entertainment. However, what we think of today as the novel--the highly structured, fixed story in printed form that fits between the covers of a book and attempts to provide an approximation of daily life--began in 18th-century England with Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. Earlier narratives such as the Aeneid, Icelandic sagas, or Roman de la Rose are basically epics that vaunt warrior virtues and often celebrate the founding of a dynasty or a nation. In some ways, Don Quixote is a parody of this courtly tradition. Morality plays were promulgated by the church to encourage certain traits in believers, and one way of looking at The Canterbury Tales is as a parody of this particular convention.

What is different about the 18th-century novel is its focus on individuals and on the shaping of their inner lives by social forces. Rather than attempting to instruct readers in virtues or legitimize existing power structures, the 18th-century novel is an exploration of a character's identity, aspirations, and motivations. In classical tragedy, the plot often works itself out in 24 hours or less, and this temporal constraint is considered one of the famous "unities" of drama. Its utilization is based on the assumption that fate dominates an individual's life and can strike an undeserving mortal without preparation or warning, rhyme or reason. The novel is much more causal. It shows the impact of past experience upon a character's present behavior and choices, and delineates those choices as mapping out the path an individual takes through life. In other words, individual psychology, different in everyone, becomes the determining factor in a novel, rather than some blind and impersonal destiny.

What we are really looking at with the rise of the novel is the decline of the medieval worldview of the individual in thrall to the will of God, whims of fate, or pressures of the community. We are witnessing the triumph of the Renaissance view of the individual as captain of his or her own fate. This individual is often estranged from God and from a stratified community. So, in this sense, the novel is well-named: It is, in fact, novel. It represents a conception of the human being that is entirely new on the face of the Earth. Unlike an orally presented story or a church morality play, a novel is written by a single author (in most cases) in isolation and read by a reader in isolation, and it often concerns the search for identity of those who have made a break with the traditional sources of identity such as the church, community, or family.

Several factors made the novel possible. One is Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable type. When stories were told orally, the audience was obviously limited to those who had access to the storyteller. Stories in written form were available only to the court and to the upper classes who could gain access to the valuable handwritten manuscripts. With the invention of the printing press, stories began to become more widely available to common people.

In the beginning, of course, writing was done on stone or clay tablets by hand. Once paper was invented, scribes wrote on scrolls. With a printing press, it was possible to print on both sides of a sheet of paper, which could be folded in half to form a signature called a folio that provided four sheets of type. Then, printers found they could fold these folios in half to form a quarto. Those who have bought books in France will remember having to slit open the pages at the top with a letter opener. Once you did this to a quarto, you ended up with eight pages of type. A quarto can be folded in half again to form a signature of 16 pages. With each of these folds, pages and type became smaller and the price of the resulting book cheaper. When Tom Jones was published in the 18th century, it cost the average worker one week's salary. By 1740, though, lending libraries opened in London and Bath so that the average person could rent books for a matter of pennies.

Along with the increasing availability of books came a rising readership. As people moved off the farms and into cities, the middle class grew, and often the wives of merchants, tradesmen, and artisans didn't work outside the home. In the home, they often had domestic servants, so they had some leisure time, part of which they occupied by reading novels. The domestics themselves, although they worked very hard, also had some leisure time, and they too began to read novels. Most of these readers were women. Pamela, which many consider the first real novel, features a servant girl who is being seduced by her master, which is probably the situation some of the readers of this book were themselves facing.

The mode of the novel is realism, a literary form that places recognizable characters in recognizable settings in a time frame that attempts to approximate real time. The characters are dealing with real-life dilemmas. Surveys indicate that this is the literary mode which most appeals to readers even now. Readers seem to like to be able to recognize themselves in the characters of novels, to feel the emotions they are feeling and watch them as they deal with dilemmas that may be close to dilemmas they themselves...