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University of Madras
Syllabus with effect from 2020-2021
B.A English Literature
[2nd Year, 3rd Semester]
Background to English Literature-III
UNIT 1.5 : NOVEL
PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL:
The
psychological novel is traditionally understood as a genre of prose fiction
that focuses intensively on the interior life of characters, representing their
subjective thoughts, feelings, memories, and desires. While in its broadest
usage the term psychological novel can refer to any work of narrative fiction
with a strong emphasis on complex characterization, it has been associated
specifically with literary movements such as nineteenth-century psychological
realism, twentieth-century literary modernism, and the
“stream-of-consciousness” novel, and with narrative techniques such as free
indirect discourse and the interior monologue.
The Tale of Genji, written in
11th-century Japan, was considered a psychological novel by Jorge Luis Borges.
In the west, the origins of the psychological novel can be traced as far back
as Giovanni Boccaccio's 1344 Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta; that is before the
term psychology was coined.
The
first rise of the psychological novel as a genre is said to have started with
the sentimental novel of which Samuel Richardson's Pamela is a prime example.
In
French literature, Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Madame de La Fayette's
The Princess of Cleves are considered early precursors of the psychological
novel. The modern psychological novel originated, according to The Encyclopedia
of the Novel, primarily in the works of Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun – in
particular, Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894) and Victoria (1898).
One
of the greatest writers of the genre was Fyodor Dostoyevsky. His novels deal
strongly with ideas, and characters who embody these ideas, how they play out
in real world circumstances, and the value of them, most notably The Brothers
Karamazov and Crime and Punishment.
In
the literature of the United States, Henry James, Patrick McGrath, Arthur
Miller, and Edith Wharton are considered "major contributor[s] to the
practice of psychological realism."
Some of the famous psychological novelist
are Marcel Proust, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Leo Tolstoy was also crucial in the
development of the psychological novel.
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS:
The term “stream of
consciousness” is coined by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890) to
denote the flow of inner experiences. It refers to the technique which seeks to
depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind. It
is also known as Interior monologue. Lines in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
(1760-67) resemble this technique. Lengthy self-communing passages have been
found in some nineteenth century novels are also close to interior monologue.
The interior monologue has been
highly developed in Leutnant Gustl, a satire on the official code of military
honour by Arthur Schnitzler, a German playwright and novelist. However, it was Edouard
Dujardin in Les Laurierssont coupés (1888) used the technique in a way that
proved influential. James Joyce exploited the possibilities and took the
technique almost to a point ne plus ultra in Ulysses (1922), which presents an
account of the experiences (the actions, thoughts, feelings) of two men,
Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, during the twenty-four hours of 16 June
1904, in Dublin. The beginning of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as A
Young Man (1916) is an early indication of his interest in this technique.
Meantime, Dorothy Richardson had begun to compile her twelve-volume Pilgrimage
(1915-67) and Marcel Proust was at work on the equally ambitious A la recherchu
du temps perdu (1913-27). Henry James and Dostoievski had already indicated,
through long passages of introspective writing, that they were aware of
something like the stream of consciousness technique.
Since the 1920s many writers have
learned from Joyce and emulated him. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), To
the Lighthouse (1927) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1931) are
two of the most distinguished developers of the stream of consciousness method.
SCIENCE FICTION:
The
term “science fiction” was first used, it seems, in 1851, the year of the Great
Exhibition, in William Wilson’s A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject.
A science fiction story is a narrative of short story, novella or novel length.
Attempting to define it, M.H.Abrams says, “is applied to those narratives in
which—unlike in pure fantasy—an explicit attempt is made to render plausible
the fictional world by reference to known or imagined scientific principles, or
to a projected advance in technology, or to a drastic change in the
organization of society” (279). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is often
considered a precursor of science fiction. But, basing a work of fiction on a
concrete scientific principle did not occur until later in the nineteenth
century through the writings of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the
Earth and H.G.Wells’ The War of the Worlds.
The
term was eventually put into circulation in the late 1920s by Hugo Gernsback
(1894-67) who had originally coined the word “scientifiction.” Gradually,
Science fiction replaced the term ‘scientific romance’, and science fiction is
quite often categorized as speculative fiction. A few important authors of
science fiction are Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Ray Bradbury, J. G. Ballard,
and Doris Lessing. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle form a few examples of science fiction.
ANTI-NOVEL:
A
type of experimental novel that attempts to present the reader with experience
itself, unfiltered by metaphor or other vehicles of authorial interpretation.
The
term was taken from the French, “anti-roman,” and rose to prominence after it
was coined by twentieth-century existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre in an
introduction he wrote for Portrait d’un inconnu, in English Portrait of a Man
Unknown, by Nathalie Sarraute in 1948. But, the term had been used to some
extent dating back to 1633 and Charles Sorel’s Le Berger extravagant. Interestingly,
some have suggested that the first novels, like Don Quixote, were themselves
antinovels because they were pioneering a new format for literature.
Antinovelists
attempt to depict reality without recourse to a moral frame of reference; they
avoid the kind of subjective narrative evaluation that tends to creep into more
traditional fiction, including so-called realistic and naturalistic narratives.
Their novels are characterized by the avoidance or minimization of standard
narrative elements, including characterization, dialogue, and plot, as well as
by the creation of ambiguity and confusion through elements such as
dislocations of time and space and inconsistency in point of view.
Antinovel
is sometimes used interchangeably with the nouveau roman, which arose in France
in the mid-twentieth century and reached its height in the 1950s and 1960s. The
term may, however, be used more broadly; indeed, works ranging from Laurence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (9 vols.; 1759—67) to Uwe Johnson’s Mutmassungen über
Jakob (Speculations about Jakob) (1959) to Margaret Drabble’s The Middle Ground
(1980) have been called antinovels. Antinovel is sometimes also used
interchangeably with new novel.
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