Scope, or dimension

No novel can theoretically be too long, but if it is too short it ceases to be a novel. It may
or may not be accidental that the novels most highly regarded by the world are of
considerable length—Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov,
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dickens’ David Copperfield, Proust’s À la recherche du temps
perdu, and so on. On the other hand, since World War II, brevity has been regarded as a
virtue in works like the later novels of the Irish absurdist author Samuel Beckett and
the ficciones of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, and it is only an aesthetic based on
bulk that would diminish the achievement of Ronald Firbank’s short novels of the post-
World War I era or the Evelyn Waugh who wrote The Loved One (1948). It would seem
that there are two ways of presenting human character—one, the brief way, through a
significant episode in the life of a personage or group of personages; the other, which
admits of limitless length, through the presentation of a large section of a life or lives,
sometimes beginning with birth and ending in old age. The plays of Shakespeare show
that a full delineation of character can be effected in a very brief compass, so that, for
this aspect of the novel, length confers no special advantage. Length, however, is
essential when the novelist attempts to present something bigger than character—when,
in fact, he aims at the representation of a whole society or period of history.

No other cognate art form—neither the epic poem nor the drama nor the film—can
match the resources of the novel when the artistic task is to bring to immediate,
sensuous, passionate life the somewhat impersonal materials of the historian. War and
Peace is the great triumphant example of the panoramic study of a whole society—that
of early 19th-century Russia—which enlightens as the historian enlightens and yet also
conveys directly the sensations and emotions of living through a period of cataclysmic
change. In the 20th century, another Russian, Boris Pasternak, in his Doctor
Zhivago (1957), expressed—though on a less than Tolstoyan scale—the personal
immediacies of life during the Russian Revolution. Though of much less literary
distinction than either of these two books, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the
Wind (1936) showed how the American Civil War could assume the distanced pathos,
horror, and grandeur of any of the classic struggles of the Old World.

Needless to say, length and weighty subject matter are no guarantee in themselves of
fictional greatness. Among American writers, for example, James Jones’s celebration of
the U.S. Army on the eve of World War II in From Here to Eternity (1951), though a
very ambitious project, repels through indifferent writing and sentimental
characterization; Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead (1948), an equally ambitious
military novel, succeeds much more because of a tautness, a concern with compression,
and an astringent objectivity that Jones was unable to match. Frequently the size of a
novel is too great for its subject matter—as with Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh,
My Darling (1965), reputedly the longest single-volume novel of the 20th century, John
Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and John Fowles’s Magus (1965). Diffuseness is the
great danger in the long novel, and diffuseness can mean slack writing, emotional self-
indulgence, sentimentality.
Even the long picaresque novel—which, in the hands of a Fielding or his
contemporary Tobias Smollett, can rarely be accused of sentimentality—easily betrays
itself into such acts of self-indulgence as the multiplication of incident for its own sake,
the coy digression, the easygoing jogtrot pace that subdues the sense of urgency that
should lie in all fiction. If Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a greater novel than
Fielding’s Tom Jones or Dickens’ David Copperfield, it is not because its theme is
nobler, or more pathetic, or more significant historically; it is because Tolstoy brings to
his panoramic drama the compression and urgency usually regarded as the monopolies
of briefer fiction.

Sometimes the scope of a fictional concept demands a technical approach analogous to

that of the symphony in music—the creation of a work in separate books, like symphonic
movements, each of which is intelligible alone but whose greater intelligibility depends
on the theme and characters that unify them. The French author Romain
Rolland’s Jean-Christophe (1904–12) sequence is, very appropriately since the hero is
a musical composer, a work in four movements. Among works of English
literature, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (1957–60) insists in its very title that
it is a tetralogy rather than a single large entity divided into four volumes; the concept is
“relativist” and attempts to look at the same events and characters from four different
viewpoints. Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, a multivolume series of
novels that began in 1951 (collected 1962), may be seen as a study of a segment of British
society in which the chronological approach is eschewed, and events are brought
together in one volume or another because of a kind of parachronic homogeneity. C.P.
Snow’s Strangers and Brothers, a comparable series that began in 1940 and continued
to appear throughout the ’50s and into the ’60s, shows how a fictional concept can be
realized only in the act of writing, since the publication of the earlier volumes antedates
the historical events portrayed in later ones. In other words, the author could not know
what the subject matter of the sequence would be until he was in sight of its end. Behind
all these works lies the giant example of Proust’s roman-fleuve, whose length and scope
were properly coterminous with the author’s own life and emergent understanding of its
pattern.
Myth, symbolism, significance
The novelist’s conscious day-to-day preoccupation is the setting down of incident, the
delineation of personality, the regulation of exposition, climax, and denouement. The
aesthetic value of the work is frequently determined by subliminal forces that seem to
operate independently of the writer, investing the properties of the surface story with a
deeper significance. A novel will then come close to myth, its characters turning into
symbols of permanent human states or impulses, particular incarnations of general
truths perhaps only realized for the first time in the act of reading. The ability to
perform a quixotic act anteceded Don Quixote, just as bovarysme existed before
Flaubert found a name for it.

But the desire to give a work of fiction a significance beyond that of the mere story is
frequently conscious and deliberate, indeed sometimes the primary aim. When a novel—
like Joyce’s Ulysses or John Updike’s Centaur (1963) or Anthony Burgess’ Vision of
Battlements (1965)—is based on an existing classical myth, there is an intention of
either ennobling a lowly subject matter, satirizing a debased set of values by referring
them to a heroic age, or merely providing a basic structure to hold down a complex and,
as it were, centrifugal picture of real life. Of Ulysses Joyce said that his Homeric parallel
(which is worked out in great and subtle detail) was a bridge across which to march his
18 episodes; after the march the bridge could be “blown skyhigh.” But there is no doubt
that, through the classical parallel, the account of an ordinary summer day in Dublin is
given a richness, irony, and universality unattainable by any other means.

The mythic or symbolic intention of a novel may manifest itself less in structure than in

details which, though they appear naturalistic, are really something more. The
shattering of the eponymous golden bowl in Henry James’s 1904 novel makes palpable,
and hence truly symbolic, the collapse of a relationship. Even the choice of a character’s
name may be symbolic. Sammy Mountjoy, in William Golding’s Free Fall (1959), has
fallen from the grace of heaven, the mount of joy, by an act of volition that the title
makes clear. The eponym of Doctor Zhivago is so called because his name, meaning
“The Living,” carries powerful religious overtones. In the Russian version of the Gospel
According to St. Luke, the angels ask the women who come to Christ’s tomb: “Chto vy
ischyote zhivago mezhdu myortvykh?”—“Why do you seek the living among the dead?”
And his first name, Yuri, the Russian equivalent of George, has dragon-
slaying connotations.

The symbol, the special significance at a subnarrative level, works best when it can fit
without obtrusion into a context of naturalism. The optician’s trade sign of a huge pair
of spectacles in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925) is acceptable as a piece of
scenic detail, but an extra dimension is added to the tragedy of Gatsby, which is the
tragedy of a whole epoch in American life, when it is taken also as a symbol of divine
myopia. Similarly, a cinema poster in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947),
advertising a horror film, can be read as naturalistic background, but it is evident that
the author expects the illustrated fiend—a concert pianist whose grafted hands are those
of a murderer—to be seen also as a symbol of Nazi infamy; the novel is set at the
beginning of World War II, and the last desperate day of the hero, Geoffrey Firmin,
stands also for the collapse of Western civilization.

There are symbolic novels whose infranarrative meaning cannot easily be stated, since it
appears to subsist on an unconscious level. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is such
a work, as is D.H. Lawrence’s novella St. Mawr (1925), in which the significance of the
horse is powerful and mysterious.