In Part 3 of the IB Literature course, students engage in a detailed investigation of one literary genre and its conventions, exploring and comparing a selection of works from the chosen genre. The focus of this part is very much on the selected genre, its conventions and how different writers have used, developed and challenged these techniques. Students are asked to develop some expertise in this genre in order to produce detailed and insightful comparisons as to how and why different writers have expressed themselves in this form. Part 3 is assessed through the Paper 2 examination. In this examination, both HL and SL students are given a choice of three questions for each literary genre from which they choose one and write an essay that compares at least two of the texts studied.

What is a NOVEL?

What differentiates it from other genres?

The novel is "an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an extensive range of types and styles: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic, romantic, realist, historical—to name only some of the more important ones."

Unlike its ancient literary predecessor, the epic, " the medium is prose, the events described are unheroic, the settings are streets and taverns, not battlefields and palaces. There is more low fornication than princely combat; the gods do not move the action; the dialogue is homely rather than aristocratic. It was, in fact, out of the need to find—in the period of Roman decline—a literary form that was anti-epic in both substance and language that the first prose fiction of Europe seems to have been conceived. . . Novels have heroes, but not in any classical or medieval sense.

Elements of the Novel

Plot

The novel is propelled through its hundred or thousand pages by a device known as the story or plot. This is frequently conceived by the novelist in very simple terms, a mere nucleus, a jotting on an old envelope: for example, Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol (1843) might have been conceived as 'a misanthrope is reformed through certain magical visitations on Christmas Eve,' or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) as 'a young couple destined to be married have first to overcome the barriers of pride and prejudice,' or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) as 'a young man commits a crime and is slowly pursued in the direction of his punishment.' The detailed working out of the nuclear idea requires much ingenuity, since the plot of one novel is expected to be somewhat different from that of another, and there are very few basic human situations for the novelist to draw upon. The dramatist may take his plot ready-made from fiction or biography—a form of theft sanctioned by Shakespeare—but the novelist has to produce what look like novelties.

The example of Shakespeare is a reminder that the ability to create an interesting plot, or even any plot at all, is not a prerequisite of the imaginative writer’s craft. At the lowest level of fiction, plot need be no more than a string of stock devices for arousing stock responses of concern and excitement in the reader. The reader’s interest may be captured at the outset by the promise of conflicts or mysteries or frustrations that will eventually be resolved, and he will gladly—so strong is his desire to be moved or entertained—suspend criticism of even the most trite modes of resolution. In the least sophisticated fiction, the knots to be untied are stringently physical, and the denouement often comes in a sort of triumphant violence. Serious fiction prefers its plots to be based on psychological situations, and its climaxes come in new states of awareness—chiefly self-knowledge—on the parts of the major characters.

Melodramatic plots, plots dependent on coincidence or improbability, are sometimes found in even the most elevated fiction; E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) is an example of a classic British novel with such a plot. But the novelist is always faced with the problem of whether it is more important to represent the formlessness of real life (in which there are no beginnings and no ends and very few simple motives for action) or to construct an artifact as well balanced and economical as a table or chair; since he is an artist, the claims of art, or artifice, frequently prevail.

There are, however, ways of constructing novels in which plot may play a desultory part or no part at all. . . In the works of Virginia Woolf, the consciousness of the characters, bounded by some poetic or symbolic device, sometimes provides all the fictional material. Marcel Proust’s great roman-fleuve, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; Remembrance of Things Past), has a metaphysical framework derived from the time theories of the philosopher Henri Bergson, and it moves toward a moment of truth that is intended to be literally a revelation of the nature of reality. Strictly, any scheme will do to hold a novel together—raw action, the hidden syllogism of the mystery story, prolonged solipsist contemplation—so long as the actualities or potentialities of human life are credibly expressed, with a consequent sense of illumination, or some lesser mode of artistic satisfaction, on the part of the reader.

Character

The inferior novelist tends to be preoccupied with plot; to the superior novelist the convolutions of the human personality, under the stress of artfully selected experience, are the chief fascination. Without character it was once accepted that there could be no fiction. In the period since World War II, the creators of what has come to be called the French nouveau roman (i.e., new novel) have deliberately demoted the human element, claiming the right of objects and processes to the writer’s and reader’s prior attention. Thus, in books termed chosiste (literally “thing-ist”), they make the furniture of a room more important than its human incumbents. This may be seen as a transitory protest against the long predominance of character in the novel, but, even on the popular level, there have been indications that readers can be held by things as much as by characters. Henry James could be vague in The Ambassadors (1903) about the provenance of his chief character’s wealth; if he wrote today he would have to give his readers a tour around the factory or estate. The popularity of much undistinguished but popular fiction has nothing to do with its wooden characters; it is machines, procedures, organizations that draw the reader. The success of Ian Fleming’s British spy stories in the 1960s had much to do with their hero, James Bond’s car, gun, and preferred way of mixing a martini.

But the true novelists remain creators of characters—prehuman, such as those in William Golding’s Inheritors (1955); animal, as in Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter (1927) or Jack London’s Call of the Wild (1903); caricatures, as in much of Dickens; or complex and unpredictable entities, as in Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Henry James. The reader may be prepared to tolerate the most wanton-seeming stylistic tricks and formal difficulties because of the intense interest of the central characters in novels as diverse as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake(1939) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–67).

It is the task of literary critics to create a value hierarchy of fictional character, placing the complexity of the Shakespearean view of man—as found in the novels of Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad—above creations that may be no more than simple personifications of some single characteristic, like some of those by Dickens. It frequently happens, however, that the common reader prefers surface simplicity—easily memorable cartoon figures like Dickens’ never-despairing Mr. Micawber and devious Uriah Heep—to that wider view of personality, in which character seems to engulf the reader, subscribed to by the great novelists of France and Russia. The whole nature of human identity remains in doubt, and writers who voice that doubt—like the French exponents of the nouveau roman Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, as well as many others—are in effect rejecting a purely romantic view of character. This view imposed the author’s image of himself—the only human image he properly possessed—on the rest of the human world. For the unsophisticated reader of fiction, any created personage with a firm position in time–space and the most superficial parcel of behavioral (or even sartorial) attributes will be taken for a character. Though the critics may regard it as heretical, this tendency to accept a character is in conformity with the usages of real life. The average person has at least a suspicion of his own complexity and inconsistency of makeup, but he sees the rest of the world as composed of much simpler entities. The result is that novels whose characters are created out of the author’s own introspection are frequently rejected as not “true to life.” But both the higher and the lower orders of novel readers might agree in condemning a lack of memorability in the personages of a work of fiction, a failure on the part of the author to seem to add to the reader’s stock of remembered friends and acquaintances. Characters that seem, on recollection, to have a life outside the bounds of the books that contain them are usually the ones that earn their creators the most regard. Depth of psychological penetration, the ability to make a character real as oneself, seems to be no primary criterion of fictional talent.

Scene, or setting

The makeup and behaviour of fictional characters depend on their environment quite as much as on the personal dynamic with which their author endows them. . . The entire action of a novel is frequently determined by the locale in which it is set. Thus, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) could hardly have been placed in Paris, because the tragic life and death of the heroine have a great deal to do with the circumscriptions of her provincial milieu. But it sometimes happens that the main locale of a novel assumes an importance in the reader’s imagination comparable to that of the characters and yet somehow separable from them. . . The popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley” novels is due in part to their evocation of a romantic Scotland. Setting may be the prime consideration of some readers, who can be drawn to Conrad because he depicts life at sea or in the East Indies; they may be less interested in the complexity of human relationships that he presents.

The regional novel is a recognized species. . . The great Yoknapatawpha cycle of William Faulkner, a classic of 20th-century American literature set in an imaginary county in Mississippi, belongs to the category as much as the once-popular confections about Sussex that were written about the same time by the English novelist Sheila Kaye-Smith. Many novelists, however, gain a creative impetus from avoiding the same setting in book after book and deliberately seeking new locales. The English novelist Graham Greene apparently needed to visit a fresh scene in order to write a fresh novel. His ability to encapsulate the essence of an exotic setting in a single book is exemplified in The Heart of the Matter (1948); his contemporary Evelyn Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book replaced the true remembered West Africa of his own experience. Such power is not uncommon: the Yorkshire moors have been romanticized because Emily Brontë wrote of them in Wuthering Heights (1847), and literary tourists have visited Stoke-on-Trent, in northern England, because it comprises the “Five Towns” of Arnold Bennett’s novels of the early 20th century. Others go to the Monterey, California, of John Steinbeck’s novels in the expectation of experiencing a frisson added to the locality by an act of creative imagination. James Joyce, who remained inexhaustibly stimulated by Dublin, has exalted that city in a manner that even the guidebooks recognize.

The setting of a novel is not always drawn from a real-life locale. The literary artist sometimes prides himself on his ability to create the totality of his fiction—the setting as well as the characters and their actions. In the Russian expatriate Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada (1969) there is an entirely new space–time continuum, and the English scholar J.R.R. Tolkien in his Lord of the Rings (1954–55) created an “alternative world” that appeals greatly to many who are dissatisfied with the existing one. The world of interplanetary travel was imaginatively created long before the first moon landing. The properties of the future envisaged by H.G. Wells’s novels or by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932) are still recognized in an age that those authors did not live to see. The composition of place can be a magical fictional gift.

Whatever the locale of his work, every true novelist is concerned with making a credible environment for his characters, and this really means a close attention to sense data—the immediacies of food and drink and colour—far more than abstractions like “nature” and “city.” The London of Charles Dickens is as much incarnated in the smell of wood in lawyers’ chambers as in the skyline and vistas of streets.

Narrative method and point of view

Where there is a story, there is a storyteller. Traditionally, the narrator of the epic and mock-epic alike acted as an intermediary between the characters and the reader; the method of Fielding is not very different from the method of Homer. Sometimes the narrator boldly imposed his own attitudes; always he assumed an omniscience that tended to reduce the characters to puppets and the action to a predetermined course with an end implicit in the beginning. Many novelists have been unhappy about a narrative method that seems to limit the free will of the characters, and innovations in fictional technique have mostly sought the objectivity of the drama, in which the characters appear to work out their own destinies without prompting from the author.

The epistolary method, most notably used by Samuel Richardson in Pamela (1740) and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in La nouvelle Héloïse(1761), has the advantage of allowing the characters to tell the story in their own words, but it is hard to resist the uneasy feeling that a kind of divine editor is sorting and ordering the letters into his own pattern. The device of making the narrator also a character in the story has the disadvantage of limiting the material available for the narration, since the narrator-character can know only those events in which he participates. There can, of course, be a number of secondary narratives enclosed in the main narrative, and this device—though it sometimes looks artificial—has been used triumphantly by Conrad and, on a lesser scale, by W. Somerset Maugham. A, the main narrator, tells what he knows directly of the story and introduces what B and C and D have told him about the parts that he does not know.

Seeking the most objective narrative method of all, Ford Madox Ford used, in The Good Soldier (1915), the device of the storyteller who does not understand the story he is telling. This is the technique of the “unreliable observer.” The reader, understanding better than the narrator, has the illusion of receiving the story directly. Joyce, in both his major novels, uses different narrators for the various chapters. Most of them are unreliable, and some of them approach the impersonality of a sort of disembodied parody. In Ulysses, for example, an episode set in a maternity hospital is told through the medium of a parodic history of English prose style. But, more often than not, the sheer ingenuity of Joyce’s techniques draws attention to the manipulator in the shadows. The reader is aware of the author’s cleverness where he should be aware only of the characters and their actions. The author is least noticeable when he is employing the stream of consciousness device, by which the inchoate thoughts and feelings of a character are presented in interior monologue—apparently unedited and sometimes deliberately near-unintelligible. It is because this technique seems to draw fiction into the psychoanalyst’s consulting room (presenting the raw material of either art or science, but certainly not art itself), however, that Joyce felt impelled to impose the shaping devices referred to above. Joyce, more than any novelist, sought total objectivity of narration technique but ended as the most subjective and idiosyncratic of stylists.

The problem of a satisfactory narrative point of view is, in fact, nearly insoluble. The careful exclusion of comment, the limitation of vocabulary to a sort of reader’s lowest common denominator, the paring of style to the absolute minimum—these puritanical devices work well for an Ernest Hemingway (who, like Joyce, remains, nevertheless, a highly idiosyncratic stylist) but not for a novelist who believes that, like poetry, his art should be able to draw on the richness of word play, allusion, and symbol. For even the most experienced novelist, each new work represents a struggle with the unconquerable task of reconciling all-inclusion with self-exclusion. It is noteworthy that Cervantes, in Don Quixote, and Nabokov, in Lolita (1955), join hands across four centuries in finding most satisfactory the device of the fictitious editor who presents a manuscript story for which he disclaims responsibility. But this highly useful method presupposes in the true author a scholarly, or pedantic, faculty not usually associated with novelists.

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. . .

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 sky high.” 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’sGreat 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. . .

Uses

Interpretation of life

Novels are not expected to be didactic, like tracts or morality plays; nevertheless, in varying degrees of implicitness, even the “purest” works of fictional art convey a philosophy of life. The novels of Jane Austen, designed primarily as superior entertainment, imply a desirable ordered existence, in which the comfortable decorum of an English rural family is disturbed only by a not-too-serious shortage of money, by love affairs that go temporarily wrong, and by the intrusion of self-centred stupidity. The good, if unrewarded for their goodness, suffer from no permanent injustice. Life is seen, not only in Jane Austen’s novels but in the whole current of bourgeois Anglo-American fiction, as fundamentally reasonable and decent. When wrong is committed, it is usually punished, thus fulfilling Miss Prism’s summation in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), to the effect that in a novel the good characters end up happily and the bad characters unhappily: “that is why it is called fiction.”

That kind of fiction called realistic, which has its origins in 19th-century France, chose the other side of the coin, showing that there was no justice in life and that the evil and the stupid must prevail. . .

For the most part, the view of life common to American and European fiction since World War II posits the existence of evil—whether theological or of that brand discovered by the French Existentialists, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre—and assumes that man is imperfect and life possibly absurd. . .

Other uses include but are not limited to the following:

entertainment or escape

propaganda

reportage

agent of change in language and thought

expression of the spirit of its age

creator of life-style and arbiter of taste

taken from Britannica.com's overview of the novel