Uses

The desire to make the reader initiate certain acts—social, religious, or political—is the essence of all propaganda, and, though it does not always accord well with art, the propagandist purpose has often found its way into novels whose prime value is an aesthetic one. Nicholas Nickleby (1839) by Charles Dickens attacked the abuses of schools to some purpose, as his Oliver Twist (1838) drew attention to the horrors of poorhouses and his Bleak House (1853) to the abuses of the law of chancery. The weakness of propaganda in fiction is that it loses its value when the wrongs it exposes are righted, so that the more successful a propagandist novel is, the briefer the life it can be expected to enjoy. The genius of Dickens lay in his ability to transcend merely topical issues through the vitality with which he presented them, so that his contemporary disclosures take on a timeless human validity—chiefly through the power of their drama, character, and rhetoric.

The pure propagandist novel—which Dickens was incapable of writing—quickly becomes dated. The social novels of H.G. Wells, which propounded a rational mode of life and even blueprinted utopias, were very quickly exploded by the conviction of humanity’s irredeemable irrationality that World War I initiated and World War II corroborated, a conviction Wells himself came to share toward the end of his life. But the early scientific romances of Wells remain vital and are seen to have been prophetic. Most of the fiction of the Soviet Union, which either glorified the regime or refrained from criticizing it, was dull and unreal, and the same can be said of communist fiction elsewhere. Propaganda too frequently ignores humans as a totality, concentrating on them aspectively—in terms of politics or sectarian religion. When a didactic attack on a system, as in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s attack on slavery in the United States in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), seems to go beyond mere propaganda, it is because the writer makes the reader aware of wrongs and injustices that are woven into the permanent human fabric. The reader’s response may be a modification of one’s own sensibility, not an immediate desire for action, and this is one of the legitimate effects of serious fiction. The propagandist Dickens calls for the immediate righting of wrongs, but the novelist Dickens says, mainly through implication, that all humans—not just schoolmasters and state hirelings—should become more humane. If it is possible to speak of art as possessing a teaching purpose, this is perhaps its only lesson.

Reportage

The division in many novelists’ minds is between their view of their art as a contrivance, like a Fabergé watch, and their view of it as a record of real life. The versatile English writer Daniel Defoe, on the evidence of such novels as A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a recreation of the London plague of 1665, believed that art or contrivance had the lesser claim and proceeded to present his account of events—of which he had had no direct experience—in the form of plain journalistic reportage. This book, like his Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), is more contrived and cunning than it appears, and the hurried, unshaped narrative is the product of careful preparation and selective ordering. His example, which could have been a very fruitful one, was not much followed until the 20th century, when the events of the real world became more terrifying and marvelous than anything the novelist could invent and seemed to ask for that full imaginative treatment that only the novelist’s craft can give.

In modern American literature, John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946), though it recorded the actual results of the nuclear attack on the Japanese city in 1945, did so in terms of human immediacies, not scientific or demographic abstractions, and this approach is essentially novelistic. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965) took the facts of a murder of a family in the Midwest of the United States and presented them with the force, reality, tone, and intense writing that distinguish his genuine fiction. Norman Mailer, in The Armies of the Night (1968), recorded, in great personal detail but in a third-person narration, his part in a citizens’ protest march on Washington, D.C.

Notably, Capote and Mailer were associated with New Journalism, an American literary movement in the 1960s and ’70s that pushed the boundaries of traditional journalism and nonfiction writing and produced numerous authors whose factual prose crossed over into fiction (or vice versa), including Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. Also notable during this era was Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), an account of his genealogical quest that begins with his ancestor Kunta Kinte’s kidnapping in Africa and enslavement in America in the 18th century. The book, a massive bestseller, later came under fire for what were deemed to be fabrications, despite Haley’s forthright admission to readers that his work was “a novelized amalgam of what I knew took place together with what my researching led me to plausibly feel took place.”

The presentation of factual material as art is also the purpose of such thinly disguised biographies as W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1919), which is loosely based on the life of artist Paul Gauguin; of undisguised biographies fleshed out with supposition and imagination, such as Helen Waddell’s Peter Abelard (1933); and of many autobiographies served up—out of fear of libel or of dullness or an interest in experimentation—as novels, such as Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (2014–18). Conversely, invented material may take on the lineaments of journalistic actuality through the employment of a Defoe technique of flat understatement. This is the way of such science fiction as Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969), which uses sketch maps, computer projections, and simulated typewritten reports.

Agent of change in language and thought

Novelists, being neither poets nor philosophers, rarely originate modes of thinking and expression. Poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Shakespeare have had much to do with the making of the English language, and Lord Byron was responsible for the articulation of the new romantic sensibility in it in the early 19th century. Books such as the Bible, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf may underlie permanent or transient cultures, but it is hard to find, except in the early Romantic period, a novelist capable of arousing new attitudes to life (as opposed to aspects of the social order) and forging the vocabulary of such attitudes.

With the 18th-century precursors of Romanticism—notably Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—the notion of sentiment entered the European consciousness. Rousseau’s Julie; ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Eloise) fired a new attitude toward love—more highly emotional than ever before—as his Émile (1762) changed educated views on how to bring up children. The romantic wave in Germany, with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and the works of Jean-Paul Richter a generation later, similarly aroused modes of feeling that rejected the rational constraints of the 18th century. Nor can the influence of Sir Walter Scott’s novels be neglected, both on Europe and on the American South (where Mark Twain thought it had had a deplorable effect). With Scott came new forms of regional sentiment, based on a romantic reading of history.

It is rarely, however, that a novelist makes a profound mark on a national language, as opposed to a regional dialect (to which, by using it for a literary end, the author may impart a fresh dignity). It is conceivable that Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1825–27; The Betrothed), often called the greatest modern Italian novel, gave 19th-century Italian intellectuals some notion of a viable modern prose style in an Italian that might be termed “national,” but even this is a large claim. Günter Grass, in post-Hitler Germany, sought to revivify a language that had been corrupted by the Nazis; he threw whole dictionaries at his readers in the hope that new freedom, fantasy, and exactness in the use of words might influence the publicists, politicians, and teachers in the direction of a new liberalism of thought and expression.

It is difficult to say whether the French existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, influenced their age primarily through their fiction or their philosophical writings. Certainly, Sartre’s early novel Nausea (1938) established unforgettable images of the key terms of his philosophy, which haunted a whole generation, as Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942) created for all time the lineaments of “existential man.” In the same way, the English writer George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) incarnated brilliantly the nature of the political choices that were open to 20th-century humanity, and, with such terms as “Big Brother” (i.e., the leader of an authoritarian state) and “doublethink” (belief in contradictory ideas simultaneously), modified the political vocabulary. But no novelist’s influence can compare to that of the poet’s, who can give a language a soul and define, as Shakespeare and Dante did, the scope of a culture.