4.6.4.14 Western. 4.6.4.15 The best-seller.. 4.6.4.16 Fantasy and prophecy.

4. 6. 4. 14 Western.

Man's concern with taming wild land, or advancing frontiers, or finding therapy in reversion from the civilized life to the atavistic is well reflected in adventure novels, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper's novels of the American frontier The Pioneers (1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826). As the 19th century advanced, and new tracts of America were opened up, a large body of fiction came out of the men who were involved in pioneering adventure. Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872) may be called a frontier classic. Bret Harte wrote shorter fiction, like " The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868), but helped to spread an interest in frontier writing to Europe, where the cult of what may be termed the western novel is as powerful as in America. Owen Wister's Virginian (1902), Andy Adams' near-documentary Log of a Cowboy (1903), Emerson Hough's Covered Wagon (1922), from which the first important western film was made in 1923, Hamlin Garland's Son of the Middle Border (1917), and O. E. Rö lvaag's Giants in the Earth (1927) all helped to make the form popular, but it is to Zane Grey--who wrote more than 50 western novels--that lovers of frontier myth have accorded the greatest devotion. The western is now thought of predominantly as a cinematic form, but it arose out of literature. Other frontier fiction has come from another New World, the antipodes--South Africa as well as the Australian outback--but the American West has provided the best mythology, and it is still capable of literary treatment. Sophisticated literary devices may be grafted onto the western--surrealistic fantasy or parallels to Shakespeare or to the ancient classics--but the peculiar and perennial appeal of the western lies in its ethical simplicity, the frequent violence, the desperate attempt to maintain minimal civilized order, as well as the stark, near-epic figures from true western history, such as Billy the Kid, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, and Jesse James.

4. 6. 4. 15 The best-seller.

A distinction should be made between novels whose high sales are an accolade bestowed on literary merit and novels that aim less at aesthetic worth than at profits. The works of Charles Dickens were best-sellers in their day, but good sales continue, testifying to a vitality that was not purely ephemeral. On the other hand, many best-selling novels have a vogue that is destined not to outlast the time when they were produced. It is a characteristic of this kind of best-seller that the writing is less interesting than the content, and that the content itself has a kind of journalistic oversimplification that appeals to unsophisticated minds. The United States is the primary home of the commercial novel whose high sales accrue from careful, and sometimes cold-blooded, planning. A novel in which a topical subject--such as the Mafia, or corruption in government, or the election of a new pope, or a spate of aircraft accidents, or the censorship of an erotic book--is treated with factual thoroughness, garnished with sex, enlivened by quarrels, fights, and marital infidelities, presented in nonliterary prose, and given lavish promotion by its publisher may well become a best-seller. It is also likely to be almost entirely forgotten a year or so after its publication. The factual element in the novel seems to be necessary to make the reader feel that he is being educated as well as diverted. Indeed, the conditions for the highest sales seem to include the reconciliation of the pornographic and the didactic.

A novel with genuine aesthetic vitality often sells more than the most vaunted best-seller, but the sales are more likely to be spread over decades and even centuries rather than mere weeks and months. The author of such a book may, in time, enrich others, but he is unlikely himself to attain the opulence of writers of best-sellers such as Harold Robbins or Irving Wallace.

4. 6. 4. 16 Fantasy and prophecy.

The term science fiction is a loose one, and it is often made to include fantastic and prophetic books that make no reference to the potentialities of science and technology for changing human life. Nevertheless, a novel like Keith Roberts' Pavane (1969), which has as a premise the conquest of England by Spain in 1588, and the consequent suppression rather than development of free Protestant intellectual inquiry, is called science fiction, though such terms as " fiction of hypothesis" and " time fantasy" would be more fitting. The imaginative novelist is entitled to remake the existing world or present possible future worlds, and a large corpus of fiction devoted to such speculative visions has been produced in the last hundred years, more of it based on metaphysical hypotheses than on scientific marvels. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells pioneered what may be properly termed science fiction, mainly to an end of diversion. Since the days of Wells's Time Machine (1895) and Invisible Man (1897), the fiction of hypothesis has frequently had a strong didactic aim, often concerned with opposing the very utopianism that Wells--mainly in his nonfictional works--built on the potentialities of socialism and technology. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) showed how dangerous utopianism could be, since the desire for social stability might condone conditioning techniques that would destroy the fundamental human right to make free choices. Toward the end of his life Huxley produced a cautious utopian vision in Island (1962), but the dystopian horrors of his earlier novel and of his Ape and Essence (1948) remain more convincing. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) showed a world in which a tyrannic unity is imposed by a collective solipsism, and contradictions are liquidated through the constant revision of history that the controlling party decrees. Anthony Burgess' Clockwork Orange (1962) and Wanting Seed (1962) portray ghastly futures that extrapolate, respectively, philosophies of crime control and population control out of present-day tendencies that are only potentially dangerous. (see also fantasy fiction, utopian literature)

A large number of writers practice prophetic fantasy with considerable literary skill and careful factual preparation--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Ray Bradbury, Italo Calvino, Isaac Asimov, J. G. Ballard, to name only a few--and novelists whose distinction lies mainly in more traditional fields have attempted the occasional piece of future-fiction, as in the case of L. P. Hartley with his Facial Justice (1961) and Evelyn Waugh in Love Among the Ruins (1953). The fantasist who fantasizes without prophetic or warning intent is rarer, but works such as Nabokov's Ada, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings cycle, and Christine Brooke-Rose's Out (1964) represent legitimate and heartening stretching of the imagination, assurances that the novelist has the right to create worlds, as well as characters, of his own. However, the dystopian novel can have a salutary influence on society, actively correcting regressive or illiberal tendencies, and Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-four can be cherished as great didactic landmarks, not just as works of literary art.