The novel changes
Novels are influenced by the pressures-religious, technological, political, social-of the periods in which they are published. In the years bridging the 19th and 20th centuries, for instance, the novel became dominated by the literary philosophy of naturalism. It stressed the role played by heredity and the climate in restricting man's freedom of will and his moral obligation.
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| Franz Kafka was an exponent of expressionism in the novel. Expressionists distorted actuality to hint at deeper truths. "Metamorphosis" (1916), illustrated above, is a short story, but its fantastic theme (a man becomes an insect) is typical of Kafka's novels in its picture of human frustration. |
This, for example, was the subject of the "Rougon- Macquart" novels by the French poet Émile Zola (1840-1902), in which the influences of fate and heredity were shown working on the members of a single-family. In England, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)-in novels like The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1896) depicted his characters as the powerless victims of impersonal natural forces. In the United States, Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) in The Financier (1912) and An American Tragedy (1925) portrayed society as a jungle in which the ruthless and wealthy preyed on the weak and helpless.
Following the collapse of mainstream Christian values in the late 19th century, many novelists turned to socialism. Notable among these was H. G. Wells who wrote several novels that attacked modern culture and gave insights into the future.
Some other novelists viewed art itself as a replacement for religion: the only thing that gives sense and value to life. This novel view was first championed by Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary. Henry James was the earliest writer to express similar viewpoints in English. James modeled Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Ambassadors as "fictive pictures," a term that means sculpture in the spirit of the painter. He developed an extraordinarily complex prose-style of great richness at the same time.
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| This illustration from Thomas Mann's brief political novel Mario and the Magician depicts Cipolla, the sinister and repulsive showman who symbolizes fascism, giving a terrifying display of his hypnotic powers. |
The French novelist Marcel Proust wrote his long novel Remembrance of Things Past during the first 20 years of this century, in which his hero seeks to recover his entire past in memory and to enshrine what time has killed in art. As with James, Proust had to rely on what is traditionally the language of poetry-image and metaphor-to capture the mind's complex movements in thought and feeling. James Joyce did so in Ulysses too.
Naturalism had been enhanced by symbolism in James, Proust, and Joyce. That also rings true for Thomas Mann. The story of a young man caught in the morbid environment of a tuberculosis sanatorium in his The Magic Mountain (1924) symbolizes the nature of Western civilization prior to World War I.
Joyce tried to portray characters through the uninhibited flow of feelings and thoughts. There is an obvious relation between this device and Sigmund Freud's free association technique at the turn of the century used in psychoanalysis. More firmly than in line with Freud 's unconscious psychology was D. H. Lawrence in novels such as The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), works of great poetic quality that seek to delineate the real feelings of men and women in their sexual lives.
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| Stories by such skilled writters as America's Raymond Chandler, |
story one of the most popular forms of modern fiction.
The main influences on the novel were political and economic theories during the 193os, overshadowed as that period was by mass unemployment and the threat of fascism. Characteristic works of the period include John dos Passos's U.S.A., and The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (born 1902), all of which attacked facets of the American political and social climate, and The Human Condition, by the French writer André Malraux (born 1901), a dramatic tale about the 1924 rising Chinese Communist. Also inspired by Conrad, Malraux was strongly influenced by cinematic techniques in his realistic rendering of the story's action, as the British writer Graham Greene was in such "entertainments" as Brighton Rock and more serious plays as The Strength and the Glory (1940).
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| Russian writer Boris Pasternak (1890-1960). In his novel Dr. Zhivago (proscribed in Russia and published in Italy in 1957) Pasternak came to grips with the problems of life in Russia in a period before and after the Revolution. Through the central character, Yuri Zhivago, he asserted his faith in spiritual values, showing that human life cannot be measured merely in terms of materialist dogma. |
The existentialism theory, a reaction against the naturalism of the late nineteenth century, argued that man was master of his own life and could do everything of his own will. It was prominent in Western Europe immediately after the Second World War and was vigorously expressed in the novels of Albert Camus (1913-60) and Jean-Paul Sartre (born 1905) in France.
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| American author Ernest Hemingway (1898- 1961) expressed his love of action both in his life and in his powerful novels and short stories. Many unfold in wartime or in such violent settings as big-game hunts and bull.fights. |
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