4.6.4.8 Pastoral. 4.6.4.10 Roman à clef.. 4.6.4.11 Anti-novel.

4. 6. 4. 8 Pastoral.

Fiction that presents rural life as an idyllic condition, with exquisitely clean shepherdesses and sheep immune to foot-rot, is of very ancient descent. Longus' Daphnis and Chloe written in Greek in the 2nd or 3rd century AD, was the remote progenitor of such Elizabethan pastoral romances as Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590) and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), the source book for Shakespeare's As You Like It. The Paul et Virginie of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1787), which was immensely popular in its day, seems to spring less from the pastoral utopian convention than from the dawning Romanticism that saw in a state of nature only goodness and innocence. Still, the image of a rural Eden is a persistent one in Western culture, whatever the philosophy behind it, and there are elements of this vision even in D. H. Lawrence's Rainbow (1915) and, however improbable this may seem, in his Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). The more realistic and ironic pictures of the pastoral life, with poverty and pig dung, beginning with George Crabbe's late-18th-century narrative poems, continuing in George Eliot, reaching sour fruition in Thomas Hardy, are usually the work of people who know the country well, while the rural idyll is properly a townsman's dream. The increasing stresses of urban life make the country vision a theme still available to serious fiction, as even a work as sophisticated as Saul Bellow's Herzog (1964) seems to show. But, since Stella Gibbons' satire Cold Comfort Farm (1932), it has been difficult for any British novelist to take seriously pastoral lyricism. (see also pastoral literature)

4. 6. 4. 10 Roman à clef.

Real, as opposed to imaginary, human life provides so much ready-made material for the novelist that it is not surprising to find in many novels a mere thinly disguised and minimally reorganized representation of actuality. When, for the fullest appreciation of a work of fiction, it is necessary for the reader to consult the real-life personages and events that inspired it, then the work is a roman à clef, or novel that needs a key. In a general sense, every work of literary art requires a key or clue to the artist's preoccupations (the jail in Dickens; the mysterious tyrants in Kafka, both leading back to the author's own father), but the true roman à clef is more particular in its disguised references. Chaucer's " Nun's Priest's Tale" has puzzling naturalistic details that can be cleared up only by referring the poem to an assassination plot in which the Earl of Bolingbroke was involved. Swift's Tale of a Tub (1704), Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681), and Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) make total sense only when their hidden historical content is disclosed. These, of course, are not true novels, but they serve to indicate a literary purpose that is not primarily aesthetic. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod requires a knowledge of the author's personal enmities, and to understand Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point fully one must know, for instance, that the character of Mark Rampion is D. H. Lawrence himself and that of Denis Burlap is the critic John Middleton Murry. Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu becomes a richer literary experience when the author's social milieu is explored, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake has so many personal references that it may be called the most massive roman à clef ever written. The more important the clef becomes to full understanding, the closer the work has come to a special kind of didacticism. When it is dangerous to expose the truth directly, then the novel or narrative poem may present it obliquely. But the ultimate vitality of the work will depend on those elements in it that require no key.

4. 6. 4. 11 Anti-novel.

The movement away from the traditional novel form in France in the form of the nouveau roman tends to an ideal that may be called the anti-novel--a work of the fictional imagination that ignores such properties as plot, dialogue, human interest. It is impossible, however, for a human creator to create a work of art that is completely inhuman. Contemporary French writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet in Jealousy (1957), Nathalie Sarraute in Tropisms (1939) and The Planetarium (1959), and Michel Butor in Passing Time (1957) and Degrees (1960) wish mainly to remove the pathetic fallacy from fiction, in which the universe, which is indifferent to man, is made to throw back radar reflections of man's own emotions. Individual character is not important, and consciousness dissolves into sheer " perception. " Even time is reversible, since perceptions have nothing to do with chronology, and, as Butor's Passing Time shows, memories can be lived backward in this sort of novel. Ultimately, the very appearance of the novel--traditionally a model of the temporal treadmill--must change; it will not be obligatory to start at page 1 and work through to the end; a novel can be entered at any point, like an encyclopaedia.

The two terms most heard in connection with the French anti-novel are chosisme and tropisme. The first, with which Robbe-Grillet is chiefly associated, relates to the novelist's concern with things in themselves, not things as human symbols or metaphors. The second, which provided a title for Nathalie Sarraute's early novel, denotes the response of the human mind to external stimuli--a response that is general and unmodified by the apparatus of " character. " It is things, the furniture of the universe, that are particular and variable; the multiplicity of human observers melts into an undifferentiable mode of response. Needless to say, there is nothing new in this epistemology as applied to the novel. It is present in Laurence Sterne (in whom French novelists have always been interested), as also in Virginia Woolf.

Such British practitioners of the anti-novel as Christine Brooke-Rose and Rayner Heppenstall (both French scholars, incidentally) are more empirical than their French counterparts. They object mainly to the falsification of the external world that was imposed on the traditional novel by the exigencies of plot and character, and they insist on notating the minutiae of the surface of life, concentrating in an unhurried fashion on every detail of its texture. A work like Heppenstall's Connecting Door (1962), in which the narrator-hero does not even possess a name, is totally unconcerned with action but very interested in buildings, streets, and the sound of music. This is properly a fresh approach to the materials of the traditional novel rather than a total liberation from it. Such innovations as are found in the nouveau roman can best show their value in their influence on traditional novelists, who may be persuaded to observe more closely and be wary of the seductions of swift action, contrived relationships, and neat resolutions.