A thousand years of the novel

From the feudal court of 11th-century Japan to its multicultural mutations of the present, it has been a 1000-year spree for the novel. A walk down the scenic route with NAMITA GOKHALE.

THE novel is essentially a social form. It explores the human condition through the use of narrative fiction. In this, it is distinct from mythology, epics and religious texts, for it records mankind's struggle with itself, rather than in a theological context. The new millenium also marks a 1000 years of the novel. It is almost 1000 years ago that Lady Murasaki Shikubu wrote The Tale of Genji, considered by many critics to be the first novel. Genji is a work of historical fiction, written as a pillow-book, a form of intimate recollection popular in feudal Japan. These pillow-books, a combination of diary jottings, confessional and imaginative license, were usually penned by high-born noble-women, and were often intelligent and perceptive musings about contemporary society. What distinguishes The Tale of Genji is the authenticity and universality of its characterisation and the enduring quality of its narrative.

These profound and enduring insights that can penetrate the barriers of time, culture-specificity and language, these stories that survive, come to constitute literature. The word novel in English is a truncation of the Italian word novella from the Latin novellus, meaning "new." There is an abiding contemporaneity about the novel, a sense and substance of the present. The literary values of a novel are often determined by a conjunction of subliminal and synchronous forces which operate independently of the author, investing the surface story with a deeper social significance. A novel then rises to the level of myth, and its characters become symbols of the consciousness of their age. Such was the case with Don Quixote de La Mancha, the satirical romance by Cervantes, published in 1605. This fable of nobility and pragmatism, and indeed the spirit of Quixoticism, has been perceived by philosophers like Unamuna Y Jugo as the embodiment of the Spanish genius.

A successful novel manages to express the spirit of its times. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe was published in 1719, when the author was nearly 60, and lays claim to be the first English novel. This vivid tale of a shipwrecked Crusoe's ingenuity and courage spawned a spate of generic imitations, which came to be known as "Robinsonnades". Robinson Crusoe extended a great degree of influence over the European mind. Rousseau recommended it as the first book that should be studied by a growing boy, Coleridge praised its evocation of "the universal man" and Karl Marx in Das Kapital considered it illustrative of economic theory in action.

Robinson Crusoe's native sidekick, Man Friday, (later devolving into Girl Friday) became a metaphor for an invaluable and underrated assistant and was retrospectively interpreted as reflecting the classical colonial bias. Essayists like Ian Watt have even related Crusoe's predicament to the rise of bourgeois individualism, division of labour, and social and spiritual alienation.

Jane Austen was a miniaturist, an observer of life who felt that "three or four families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on," and who considered her prolific novelistic output as that "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush." Her acerbic worldview quite belied Austen's genteel protestations, and the fact that her work has endured the transitions of time and the alterations of social mores is testament to her greatness. The Romantic novels of the Bronte sisters stand in absolute and complete contrast to Jane Austen, but all of them illustrate the emergence of a distinct and articulate feminine sensibility. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) provided the plot for subsequent romantic pot-boilers, all the way through to Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca and the Mills and Boon genre of romantic fiction. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is a powerful and poetic story which asserts the ascendancy of the instinctual life, an example of a novel which is timeless in its impact.

Charles Dickens (1812-70) made a profound impression upon the sensibility of his times. Dickens' characters, from the ever- optimistic Mr. Micawber to the unctuous and odious Uriah Heep - were drawn with the simplicity of a natural caricaturist, and still continue to inhabit the popular imagination. Count Lev Nikalaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a contemporary of Dickens. His epic novel, War and Peace, documents the Napoleonic invasion of Russia through the fortunes of three aristocratic families. The novel is a triumphant example of panaromic scale combined with a sense of immediacy, urgency and dramatic compression, and encompasses almost the entire range of human emotion. Anna Karenina and War and Peace are arguably among the finest novels ever written. From about 1880, Tolstoy's concern with moral questions developed into a personal spiritual crisis which precipitated radical changes in his life and writings.

Tolstoy's revolutionary spiritual views led to his ex- communication by the Orthodox Church in 1901, but they also conferred him with a unique moral authority, making his home at Yasnaya Polyana, a place of pilgrimage amongst generations of seekers, including Mahatma Gandhi. However, it is instructive to realise that Tolstoy's greatest works were penned before he adopted a set moral position, for great novelists require a degree of formlessness and moral neutrality to prevent their work from degenerating from art into propaganda.

Like Tolstoy, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-81) too, was a contemporary of Dickens, and his notebooks are full of references to Dickens's works, which had been known and translated into Russian since about 1838. Both authors shared a preoccupation with subjects such as the inner life of the city, the nature of crime and that of innocence, and the sufferings of the poor and the deprived. Dostoyevsky's greatest works, such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov deal with the deepest inner workings of the human mind and can be described as psychological novels. Gustave Flaubert's famous Madame Bovary documents the tragic life and death of a provincial heroine and traces the patterns of her mind through the method of the "psychological approach".

The novel tends to document what is known in German as zeitgest, the spirit of the age. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947) and Gunter Grass's Tin Drum (1959) portrayed the neurosis and insecurity of Nazi Germany, just as Hemingway captured the uncertain mood of the years following the first world war in The Sun also Rises (1926) and Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago conveyed the cataclysmic changes of the Russian Revolution. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936) gave a classic yet best- selling expression to the social and human dimensions of the American civil war. Another great American writer, Norman Mailer, wrote the ambitious Naked and the Dead in 1948, based on his experiences with the army in the Pacific.Periods of introspection and accelerated change bring about a search for identity which often creates stimulating conditions for a fictional narrative and the novel. Some of the greatest contemporary fiction in the world has been coming out of Latin America, where the glorious traditions of the magnificent corpus of Spanish literature find new voice. Writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Maris Vargas Llosa and Isabel Allende exemplify the intermeshing of creative, literary and cultural strands in their fiction. The energies of revolution and social change, the cynicism of colonial and post-colonial posturing, all fuel the intense magic realism of their novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is perhaps the definitive text amongst these novels.

India and the Indian subcontinent are witnessing a similar flowering of fictional realities. G. V. Desani's All about H. Hatterr was a cult novel which, more than 50 years ago, first articulated the dual consciousness and divided sensibility of the Anglo-Indian mind. Salman Rushdie has acknowledged his fictional debt to Desani's elusive yet prophetic style. Midnight's Children is the testimonial of an entire generation of post-independence voices, where Indians have appropriated the English language and made it their own. Just as Urdu evolved from an intermarriage of the Persian and Hindu tongues, so Hinglish is now a valid version of the Queen's English.

The extraordinary success of the Indian diaspora writers in the international literary scene is attributable to a variety of causes. Multi-cultural identity is a reality of the modern age. Writers of Indian origin, like Salman Rushdie or V. S. Naipaul, carry within their novels a resilient repertoire of language and tradition. Often, they trace their roots to the linguistic and literary traditions of their primary cultures. Creative voices never die, they echo and amplify through memory, through the process of re-reading, re-interpretation and translation. Novels like A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth convey the recent history of India through the means of a family saga of immense scope and depth. The God of Small Things, too has gained an iconic status in the literary canon. It is no accident that so many talented writers are flourishing at this moment in our cultural history, writing both in English and the regional languages.

Novelists are simultaneously custodians of culture and emissaries of change in the interaction between an ancient culture and a rapidly evolving new world. The novel is the one literary form capable of absorbing all others, it has no limits regarding style or subject, for it is tolerant and all-encompassing. It has been said that every human being has at least one novel in them. Every novelist brings to his or her work the intense and condensed life-experiences of the author, creating therein a complete and self-referencing world, yet one which enhances the ancillary world of the reader. The world changes, but human nature does not, and the novel will never go out of style. The challenges of technological evolution bring with it dazzling technical potentialities of interactive novels and virtual fiction, for the novel is, after all, always something perpetually new.

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