Uses

The novelist, like the poet, can make the inchoate thoughts and feelings of a society come to articulation through the exact and imaginative use of language and symbol. In this sense, the novelist’s work seems to precede the diffusion of new ideas and attitudes and to be the agent of change. But it is hard to draw a line between this function and that of expressing an existing climate of sensibility. Usually the nature of a historical period—that spirit known in German as the Zeitgeist—can be understood only in long retrospect, and it is then that the novelist can provide its best summation. The sickness of the Germany that produced Hitler had to wait some time for fictional diagnosis in such works as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) and, later, Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959). Waugh waited several years before beginning, in the trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–61), to depict that moral decline of English society that started to manifest itself in World War II, the conduct of which was both a cause and a symptom of the decay of traditional notions of honor and justice.

The novel can certainly be used as a tool for the better understanding of a departed age. The period following World War I has been caught forever in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and short stories about the Jazz Age, Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928), and D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922) and Kangaroo (1923). The spirit of the English 18th century, during which social, political, and religious ideas associated with rising middle classes conflicted with the old Anglican Tory rigidities, is better understood through reading Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding than by taking the cerebral elegance of Alexander Pope and his followers as the typical expression of the period.

Similarly, the unrest and bewilderment of the young in the period after World War II still speak in such novels as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954). It is notable that with novels like these—and the Beat Generation books of Jack Kerouac; the American-Jewish novels of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth; and the African American novels of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin—it is a segmented spirit that is expressed, the spirit of an age group, social group, or racial group, and not the spirit of an entire society in a particular phase of history. But probably a Zeitgeist has always been the emanation of a minority, the majority being generally silent. The 20th century seems, from this point of view, to have been richer in vocal minorities than any other period in history.

Creator of lifestyle and arbiter of taste

Novels have been known to influence, though perhaps not very greatly, modes of social behavior and even conceptions of personal identity. But more young men have seen themselves as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Byron’s Childe Harold than as Julien Sorel, the protagonist of Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black (1830), or the sorrowing Werther of Goethe’s novel. Samuel Richardson’s novel may have popularized the name Pamela or John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1906–22) Jon as a baptismal name, but it rarely makes a deeper impression on the mode of life of literate families. On the other hand, the capacity of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) to influence young men in the direction of sybaritic amorality, or of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to engender a freer attitude to sex, has never been assessed adequately. With the middle-class reading public, the effect of devouring The Forsyte Saga was to engender genteelisms—cucumber sandwiches for tea, supper renamed dinner—rather than to learn that book’s somber lesson about the decline of the old class structure. Similarly, readers who gorged on Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley series in the early 19th century were led to barbarous ornaments and tastefully arranged folk songs.

Fiction has to be translated into one of the dramatic media—stage, film, or television—before it can begin to exert a large influence. Tom Jones as a film in 1963 modified table manners and coiffures and gave American visitors to Great Britain a new (and probably false) set of expectations. The stoic heroes of Hemingway, given to alcohol, fights, boats, and monosyllables, became influential only when they were transferred to the screen. They engendered other, lesser heroes—incorruptible private detectives, partisans brave under interrogation—who in their turn have influenced impressionable audience members seeking an identity. Ian Fleming’s James Bond led to a small revolution in martini ordering. But all these influences are a matter of minor poses, and such poses are most readily available in fiction that is easily adapted to the mass media—which sometimes means lesser fiction. Proust, though he recorded French patrician society with painful fidelity, had little influence on it, and it is hard to think of Henry James disturbing the universe even fractionally. Films and television programs dictate taste and behavior more than the novel ever could.

Discover more

List of Byronic heroes

Diagnosing 9 of Charles Dickens’s most famous characters

List of Jane Austen adaptations

10 notable works of fan fiction