In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [24]
In novels proper the central characters are placed for us in social space by being given parents and relatives, however unsatisfactory or dead these may be at the outset of the story. These central characters don’t just appear out of thin air as fully grown adults, the way adventure heroes are likely to do (Sherlock Holmes has no parents); rather they are provided with a past, a history. The past accounts in part for the character’s inner problems, or conflicts, thus making him or her round enough to pass muster. This sort of fiction concerns itself with the conscious waking state, and if a man changes into an arthropod in such a book, he’ll do so only in a nightmare.
It is up to fantasists such as Franz Kafka and Gogol to give us masterpieces in which—for instance—a man’s nose becomes separated from his face and takes up independent life as a government bureaucrat, as in Gogol’s “The Nose,” or Gregor wakes up one morning to find he has become a beetle, as in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. (There is some academic literature devoted to what sort of beetle; I myself am inclined to think it was not a beetle as such but a house centipede.)
Thus, not all prose fictions are novels in the stick-to-realism sense of the word. A book can be a prose fiction without being a novel. The Pilgrim’s Progress, although a prose narrative and a fiction, was not intended as a “novel”; when it was written, such things did not exactly exist. It’s a romance—a story about the adventures of a hero—coupled with an allegory—the stages of the Christian life. (It’s also one of the precursors of science fiction, although not often recognized as such.) Here are some other prose-fiction forms that are not novels proper: The confession. The symposium. The Menippean satire, or anatomy. The extended fable. And what, exactly, is Don Quixote? And what is Moby-Dick? They’re stories, or they contain stories, but are they novels? In fact, the further back we stand from prose fictions—taking them all in, as it were—the fewer of them are “novels” in the nineteenth-century-realist sense of that word.
Nathaniel Hawthorne deliberately called some of his fictions “romances,” to distinguish them from novels. What he might have been thinking of was the tendency of the romance form to use a somewhat more obvious degree of patterning than the novel was thought to do—the blond heroine versus her dark alter ego, for instance, as in Ivanhoe and the romances of Fenimore Cooper. The French have two words for the short story—conte and nouvelle—“the tale” and “the news”—and this is a useful distinction. The tale can be set anywhere, and can move into realms that are off-limits for the realistic novel—into the cellars and attics of the mind, where figures that can appear in novels only as dreams and fantasies take actual shape and walk the earth. “The news,” however, is news of us; it’s the daily news, as in “daily life.” There can be car crashes and shipwrecks in the news, but there are not likely to be any Frankenstein monsters; not, that is, until someone in “daily life” actually manages to create one.
Fiction can of course bring us other kinds of news; it can speak, as does Yeats’s golden nightingale, of “what is past, or passing, or to come.” When you’re writing about what is to come, you could be engaged in journalism of the dire-warning sort—elect that bastard, build that dam, drop that bomb,