Style

The naturalistic novel is a development out of realism, and it is, again, in France that its first practitioners are to be found, with Émile Zola leading. It is difficult to separate the two categories, but naturalism seems characterized not only by a pessimistic determinism but also by a more thoroughgoing attention to the physical and biological aspects of human existence. The human animal is less a soul aspiring upward to its divine source than a product of natural forces, as well as genetic and social influences, and the novelist’s task is to present the physical essence of humans and their environment. The taste of Balzac’s and Stendhal’s audiences was not easily able to accommodate itself to utter frankness about the basic processes of life, and the naturalists had to struggle against prejudice, and often censorship, before their literary candor was able to prevail. The 20th century took the naturalistic approach for granted, but it was more concerned with a technique of presentation than with the somewhat mechanistic philosophy of Zola and his followers.

Naturalism received an impetus after World War I, when novelists felt they had a duty to depict the filth, suffering, and degradation of the soldier’s life, without euphemism or circumlocution. Joyce’s Ulysses, when it appeared in 1922, was the first novel to seek to justify total physical candor in terms of its artistic, as opposed to moral, aim—which was to depict with almost scientific objectivity every aspect of an ordinary urban day. Though Joyce had read Zola, he seems to invoke the spirit of a very much earlier naturalistic writer—the ribald French author of the 16th century, François Rabelais—and this is in keeping with the Catholic tradition that Joyce represents. Zola, of course, was an atheist; Joyce rejected Catholicism but it informed his writing in all his works.

It would have been a sin against his aesthetic canons for Joyce to have shown Leopold Bloom—the protagonist of Ulysses—eating breakfast or taking a bath and yet not defecating or masturbating. The technique of the interior monologue, which presents the unedited flow of a character’s unspoken thought and emotion, also called for the utmost frankness in dealing with natural functions and urges. Joyce, it is now recognized, had no prurient or scatological intention; his concern was with showing life as it is (without any of the didactic purpose of Zola), and this entailed the presentation of lust, perversion, and blasphemy as much as any of the traditionally acceptable human functions.

The naturalistic novelists have had their social and legal problems—obscenity indictments, confiscation, bowdlerization by timid publishers—but the cause was ultimately won, at least in Great Britain and the United States, where there are few limits placed on the contemporary novelist’s proclaimed right to be true to nature. In comparison with much contemporary fiction, the pioneer work of Zola seems positively reticent.

Impressionism

The desire to present life with frank objectivity led certain early 20th-century novelists to question the validity of long-accepted narrative conventions. If truth was the novelist’s aim, then the tradition of the omniscient narrator would have to go, to be replaced by one in which a fallible, partially ignorant character—one involved in the story and hence subject to the objective or naturalistic approach—recounts what the character saw and heard. But the Impressionist painters of late 19th-century France had proclaimed a revision of the whole seeing process: They distinguished between what observers assumed they were observing and what they actually observed. That cerebral editing which turned visual data into objects of geometric solidity had no place in Impressionist painting; the visible world became less definite, more fluid, resolving into light and color.

The German novelists Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, moving from the realist tradition, which concentrated on closely notated detail in the exterior world, sought the lightness and clarity of a more elliptical style, and were proclaimed Impressionists. But in England Ford Madox Ford went much further in breaking down the imagined rigidities of the space-time continuum, liquidating step-by-step temporal progression and making the visual world shimmer, dissolve, and reconstitute itself. In Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End (1924–28), the reader moves freely within the time continuum, as if it were spatial, and the total picture is perceived through an accumulation of fragmentary impressions. Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier, pushes the technique to its limit: The narrator tells his story with no special dispensation to see or understand more than a fallible being can, and, in his reminiscences, he fragments whole sequences of events as he ranges freely through time (such freedom had traditionally been regarded as a weakness, a symptom of the disease of inattention).

In the approach to dialogue manifested in a book that Ford wrote jointly with Joseph Conrad—The Inheritors (1901)—a particular aspect of literary impressionism may be seen whose suggestiveness was ignored by other modern novelists. As the brain imposes its own logical patterns on the phenomena of the visual world, so it is given to editing into clarity and conciseness the halting utterances of real-life speech; the characters of most novels are impossibly articulate. Ford and Conrad attempted to present speech as it is actually spoken, with many of the meaningful solidities implied rather than stated. The result is sometimes exasperating, but only as real-life conversation frequently is.

The interior monologue, which similarly resists editing, may be regarded as a development of this technique. To show pre-articulatory thought, feeling, and sensuous perception unordered into a rational or “literary” sequence is an impressionistic device that, beginning in Édouard Dujardin’s minor novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888; We’ll to the Woods No More), served fiction of high importance, from Dorothy Richardson, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett.

Novelists such as Ronald Firbank and Evelyn Waugh (who studied painting and was a competent draftsman) learned, in a more general sense, how to follow the examples of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters in their fiction. A spare brilliance of observation, like those paintings in which a whole scene is suggested through carefully selected points of color, replaced that careful delineation of a whole face, or inventorying of a whole room, that had been the way of Balzac and other realists. In four or five brief lines of dialogue, Waugh can convey as much as the 19th-century novelists did in as many pages.

Expressionism

Expressionism was a German movement that found its most congenial media in painting and drama. The artist’s aim was to express, or convey the essence of, a particular theme, to the exclusion of such secondary considerations as fidelity to real life. The typical Expressionist play, by Bertolt Brecht, for example, concerns itself with a social or political idea that is hurled at the audience through every possible stage device—symbols, music, cinematic insertions, choral speech, dance. Human character is less important than the idea of humanity, and probability of action in the old realist sense is the least of the dramatist’s concerns. The emotional atmosphere is high-pitched, even ecstatic, and the tone is more appropriate to propaganda than to art. Expressionistic technique, as the plays of Brecht prove, was an admirable means of conveying a communist program, and it was in the service of such a program that John Dos Passos, in the trilogy of novels U.S.A. (1937), used literary devices analogous to the dramatic ones of Brecht—headlines, tabloid biographies, popular songs, lyric soliloquies, and the like.

But the Austro-Czech Franz Kafka, the greatest of the Expressionist novelists, sought to convey what may crudely be termed humans’ alienation from their world in terms that admit of no political interpretation. Joseph K., the hero of Kafka’s novel The Trial (1925), is accused of a nameless crime. He seeks to arm himself with the apparatus of a defense, and he is finally executed—stabbed with the utmost courtesy by two men in a lonely place. The hallucinatory atmosphere of that novel, as also of Kafka’s The Castle (1926), is appropriate to nightmare, and indeed Kafka’s work has been taken by many as an imaginative forecast of the nightmare through which Europe was compelled to live during the Hitler regime. But its significance is more subtle and universal; one of the elements is original sin and another filial guilt. In the story The Metamorphosis (1915) a young man changes into an enormous insect, and the nightmare of alienation can go no further.

Kafka’s influence has been considerable. Perhaps his most distinguished follower was the English writer Rex Warner, whose Wild Goose Chase (1937) and Aerodrome (1941) use fantasy, symbol, and improbable action for an end that is both Marxist and Freudian; the filial guilt, however, seems to be taken directly from Kafka, with an innocent hero caught in a monstrously oppressive web that is both the totalitarian state and paternal tyranny. In the mid-20th century the subversive American writer William Burroughs developed his own Expressionistic techniques in Naked Lunch (1959), which is concerned with the alienation from society of the drug addict. His later novels Nova Express (1964) and The Ticket That Exploded (1962) use obscene fantasy to present a kind of metaphysical struggle between free spirit and enslaved flesh, evidently an extrapolation of the earlier drug theme. Burroughs is a didactic novelist, and didacticism functions best in a fictional ambience that rejects the complexities of character and real-life action.

Avant-gardism and the antinovel

Many innovations in fiction can be classified under headings already considered. Even so revolutionary a work as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake represents an attempt to show the true nature of a dream; this can be regarded as a kind of Impressionism pushed so far that it looks like Surrealism. The brief novels of Samuel Beckett (which, as they aim to demonstrate the inadequacy of language to express the human condition, become progressively more brief) seem to have a kind of Expressionist derivation, since everything in them is subordinated to a central image of man as a totally deprived creature, resentful of a God he does not believe in. The French antinovel, dethroning man as a primary concern of fiction, perhaps represents the only true break with traditional technique that the 20th-century novel introduced.

Dissatisfaction not only with the content of the traditional novel but with the manner in which readers have been schooled to approach it led the contemporary French novelist Michel Butor, in Mobile, to present his material in the form of a small encyclopedia, so that readers find their directions obliquely, through an alphabetic taxonomy and not through the logic of sequential events. Vladimir Nabokov, in Pale Fire (1962), gives the reader a poem of 999 lines and critical apparatus assembled by a madman. Again the old sense of direction (beginning at the beginning and going on to the end) has been liquidated, yet Pale Fire is a true and highly intelligible novel. In England, B.S. Johnson published similar “false-directional” novels, though the influence of Sterne makes them seem accessible, even cozily traditional. One of Johnson’s books was marketed as a bundle of disjunct chapters—which may thus be dealt aleatorially (at random) and read in any order.

Avant-garde techniques are innumerable, though not all of them are salable. There is the device of counterpointing a main narrative with a story in footnotes, which eventually rises like water and floods the other, although it was achieved with great effect in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). Other novelists, such as Hungarian Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai, experimented radically with punctuation; his Herscht 07769: A Novel (2021) contains just one period across 400 pages. Burroughs experimented with a tricolumnar technique, in which three parallel narratives demand the reader’s attention. Kathy Acker, an American writer who emerged from the late 20th-century punk movement, plagiarized from earlier famous works to deconstruct and dismantle concepts of identity and authorial voice, as in her novels Great Expectations (1982), My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1984), and Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986).

Such writers as Jorge Luis Borges and Nabokov go beyond technical innovation: They ask for a reconsideration of the very essence of fiction. In one of his ficciones, Borges strips from readers even the final illusion that they are reading a story, for the story is made to dissolve, the artist evidently losing faith in his own artifact. Novels, as both Borges and Nabokov show, can turn into poems or philosophical essays, but they cannot, while remaining literature, turn into compositions disclaiming all interest in the world of feeling, thought, and sense. Novelists can do anything they please with their art so long as they interpret, or even just present, a world that readers recognize as existing, or capable of existing, or capable of being dreamed of as existing.

Magical realism

The use of fantastic elements in otherwise realistic fiction is an old storytelling strategy in literature, but in the mid-20th century, Latin American novelists mastered a style characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of the strange, incredible, or mythical. Magical realism was advanced by such authors as Borges and fellow Argentine Julio Cortázar, Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, and Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez. Many writers of other cultures later adopted the style, but it has been argued that the Latin American incarnation was a natural outcome of postcolonial writing, which must make sense of at least two separate realities—the reality of the conquerors as well as that of the conquered.

García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), for example, spans 100 years of turbulent Latin American history, from the postcolonial 1820s to the 1920s, chronicling natural disasters and sociopolitical nightmares, including the Banana Massacre of plantation workers in Colombia in 1928. Incorporating the surreal alongside political allegory, the novel exemplifies the adage, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” although it is only through fiction that the truth can be told. Other writers who documented dueling realities through magic realism include Native American novelist Louise Erdrich and Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie. However, the fanciful style that Rushdie employed in The Satanic Verses (1988), which offers a revisionist history of the founding of Islam, was overshadowed by censorship and violence he experienced after Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, deemed the book blasphemous and issued a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and the book’s editors and publishers.