Explore essential elements of the novel with Clifton Fadiman and actors

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ACTOR ONE: Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

ACTOR TWO: Call me Ishmael.

ACTOR THREE: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

ACTOR FOUR: On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

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CLIFTON FADIMAN: Those were four very different sentences with one thing in common: they're the opening sentences of four excellent novels, and all of them make us want to go on reading.

What about that nicens little boy named baby tuckoo from James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"? Why does the narrator of "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville call himself Ishmael so abruptly? Will that single young man with a fortune, the hero of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," get that wife? And who were the five travelers who fell into the gulf? Read "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" by Thornton Wilder.

Have you ever considered what a fantastic business reading a novel is? We hear or read a few words about some imaginary person, as we've just done, and at once we're eager to find out what happened to him. Now this imaginary person has no connection with us. He lives in an invented world; he cannot help or hinder us in our daily practical lives. And yet, as we read on, we begin to love or hate him, suffer or rejoice with him though he's never existed for us except as a combination of little black marks on a page.

It seems to be part of our human makeup, this odd, illogical desire to listen to a story that is a dream, a vision--indeed, a kind of lie. Thousands of years ago, the cavemen listened eagerly as one of their number recounted his hunting exploits, no doubt fancying up the story and so becoming the first novelist.

And, today, deeply absorbed in a good novel, we are responding much as did our primitive ancestors. We want to know what happened next. The series of answers to that question, what happened next, constitutes the simplest element in the novel, the story. What is the story? Is it the same as the plot? Not quite. One eminent novelist and critic has a neat way of distinguishing the story from the plot. He says, here's a story, the king died and then the queen died. And here's a plot, the king died and then the queen died of grief. Now, what's the difference between the first statement and the second? In the first statement the king and the queen are mere labels. In statement two they've become characters. The additional words "died of grief" are enough to tell us something important about them. The king is lovable, the queen is loving to the point that his death also destroyed her.

Now, if you are a novelist, you could write a novel about the king and the queen because you'd have two essentials of the novel--a plot, as distinguished from a story, and characters, as distinguished from labels. Now, are there any other essentials, that is, elements to be found in all novels, good, bad, or indifferent? Well, we undoubtedly like to know where and when the king and the queen lived, in what kind of country. And the answer to such questions gives us the background, or setting. Plot, characters, setting.

Now, suppose you took two novelists, and you laid out for them the same plot, the same set of characters, the same setting. You put them in separate rooms, you lock them up, and you don't let them out until each has produced a novel. Now the two novels, we know this in advance, will be entirely different. And what will cause this difference? Obviously, the fact that no two men and, therefore, no two novelists are alike. Their novels will differ in several ways. First, they'll differ in style. What is style? No one knows exactly. The French scientist Buffon once said "Style is the man himself." It is the way in which he feels and expresses what he feels. We might say that style is what happens when writer meets language. Here is one writer meeting language in her own way.

ACTOR THREE: Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters. I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life; though perhaps it was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic felicity in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly.

CLIFTON FADIMAN: And here is another writer meeting language in an entirely different way.

ACTOR FOUR: Lying on the floor of the flat-car with the guns beside me under the canvas I was wet, cold and very hungry. Finally I rolled over and lay flat on my stomach with my head on my arms. My knee was stiff, but it had been very satisfactory. Valentini had done a fine job. I had done half the retreat on foot and swum part of the Tagliamento with his knee. It was his knee all right. The other knee was mine. Doctors did things to you and it was not your body any more. The head was mine, and the inside of the belly. It was very hungry in there. I could feel it turn over on itself. The head was mine, but not to use, not to think with, only to remember and not too much remember.

CLIFTON FADIMAN: You might find it interesting to guess from these sharply different styles what manner of person it was who produced them. The first excerpt was by Jane Austen from, again, "Pride and Prejudice." The second was by Ernest Hemingway from "A Farewell to Arms." Both novelists exhibit very fine styles. But we can tell, even from brief excerpts from their work, that their novels are quite different.

Let's return now to our two imaginary novelists shut up in a room. What they come out with will differ in style, but their products will also differ in shape. Another word for shape is "form." Still another is "pattern." And we can diagram a few of these shapes. The simplest form, or shape, the one most often used, the one most readers like best is this. Now, we might call this the horizontal novel. Basically, as you can see, it's a straight line with certain variations. The English poet John Masefield once wrote a slam-bang, action-packed adventure yarn, to which he gave the strange title "ODTAA." And the title page puzzled readers until it was finally revealed that Masefield was just having his little joke, and that "ODTAA" was made up of the initial letters of the words "One Darn Thing After Another." Well, a horizontal novel is basically one darn thing after another linked, of course, by well-motivated characters. It often starts with a hero at point A. This hero is put through a series of adventures or difficulties until the end of the novel is reached at Z. His most interesting adventure, not to say difficulty, is usually a girl whom he meets not far from A. Also on the way from A to Z, he meets other characters, like this one perhaps, who complicate his life and form tributaries to the main stream of the line A through Z.

The horizontal novel is a little like history. That is, it works chronologically in a single direction. The novel we shall study, "Great Expectations," is basically a horizontal novel, tracing the adventures of Pip from childhood to young manhood.

In the horizontal novel the emphasis is usually on incident, sometimes quiet, sometimes violent. But suppose the emphasis is less on incident than on the thoughts and emotions of the characters. Of course, all novelists are interested in their characters' thoughts and emotions. Dickens is in "Great Expectations." But suppose our novelist doesn't want to trace a straight line from A to Z as Dickens does, but, instead, wants to sink a series of shafts into the minds of his characters, even into their own conscious minds. And suppose he links these characters not in a conventional time sequence but by breaking up this sequence, by flashbacks, anticipations, reveries, memories, or by various other methods that make us feel that time doesn't always flow in a straight direction and that it can be measured by means other than one darn thing after another. Then the form his novel will take will not be horizontal. It will tend to be vertical. We might picture it something like this. Each vertical line represents an exploration of the mental world of character A or B or C and so forth. The web of crisscross lines represents the ways in which these characters are connected. The novels of the English writer Virginia Woolf and the great masterpiece "Remembrance of Things Past" by the French writer Marcel Proust are, in this sense, vertical novels.

But, of course, a horizontal novel, though it stresses incident, may be rich in psychological explorations. And the vertical novel, though it stresses psychological explorations, may be rich in incident. But they assume different patterns. And, so, we might work out other patterns for other kinds of novels. Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," for example, is constructed something like this. The lives of five characters, not necessarily intimately connected, converge on the bridge. That moment of convergence is their last moment. We might call this the convergent novel. A well-shaped novel, that is, one whose form is peculiarly suited to its content, its characters, gives us pleasure just as a well-shaped work of art does, even though we may not be conscious of the shape until we've analyzed it as we've tried to do here.

Let's see now what elements of the novel we've isolated: plot, character, setting, style, form. And now I'm going to make these words disappear, so as to make clear that though they do exist as elements in the novel, the novel is not composed of them in the sense that a house is composed of bricks and mortar and other materials. No good novelist ever thinks of these elements separately. No good reader ever notices them separately. Somehow or other no one knows exactly how they form a unity, which is the novel itself and which is bigger than the sum of its parts. It's helpful for us to talk about plot, characters, setting, style, form, but let's remember that they're largely pegs on which to hang our analysis. And, sometimes they aren't necessarily even separate pegs. The novel, we must remember, is a fluid thing, like the mind that created it, like the mind that enjoys it.

But now that we've taken it to pieces and tried to put it together again, can we say what a novel is? I doubt it. The only definitions that apply to all novels are so broad as to be almost meaningless. I like best the definition one French critic gives: "A novel is a fiction in Prose of a certain extent." But to what extent? Years ago, when I was the editor of a publishing house, a harried young man with a manuscript under his arm burst into my office and blurted out, "May I ask a question?"

I said, "Sure."

"How long is a novel?"

Well, that was an odd question, but I did the best I could. I told him the length varied, but the average novel might run around 90,000 words.

"Did you say 90,000?", he burst out.

"Yes."

He wiped his brow and then said with a sigh of relief, "Thank heavens, I'm through."

Well, we've now talked about what a novel is, that is, about the elements that all novels seem to share, more or less. But we haven't talked about the content of the novel, its subject matter, its possible themes. Well, let's approach this by considering the titles of several important novels: "War and Peace" by Tolstoy, "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift, "Remembrance of Things Past" by Marcel Proust, "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoyevsky, "The Idiot" by Dostoyevsky, "Sons and Lovers" by D.H. Lawrence. These titles, you'll agree, suggest the unlimited diversity possible in a novel. There's nothing a novelist can't write about since there are no limits to the imagination. Virginia Woolf, for example, in "Orlando" has her main character appear throughout several hundred years of history. Not only that, this fine English novelist makes this character appear sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman.

On the other hand, in spite of great diversity, it is true that there are two ingredients, two kinds of content, which are common to a great majority of novels. The first is love. The old formula boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl still holds up as perhaps one of the most interesting story lines ever devised. But don't be deceived by this seemingly simple formula. It's not as shallow as you may think. For one thing, few serious novelists believe that people live happily ever after. The lovers don't marry, or they marry and they're desperately unhappy, or one of them dies, as in Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms." For another thing, the boy in the story may be a man as complicated and enigmatic as Pierre in Tolstoy's "War and Peace." And the girl may be a woman as vicious as Mildred in Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage." The point is that the serious novelist is concerned with the analysis of human character, with the exploration of the human condition. And love, or the lack of it, is one of the more important facts of human life.

A second major ingredient of the novel is adventure. Now this may be on a simple level, the hero is shipwrecked, or he's captured by pirates. But adventure can also mean, in a larger sense, the human adventure, the conflicts, the difficulties, the predicaments, which we all encounter on our journey from the cradle to the grave.

Well, thus far, we have tried to find out what a novel is and what it's about. I think we should now ask ourselves the most interesting question of all: What does a novel do? What do we get from it? What kind of work does it perform on our minds? Let's assume, from now on, that we're talking only about novels that are generally accepted as superior, as works of art, as part of the humanities. Such a work, for example, is "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville. Now, in "Moby Dick," most critics agree, Melville has created one of the supremely great novels of world literature. Let's try a short passage and see what it does to us. Ishmael, the narrator, comes on board the whaling ship, the "Pequod," and there meets an old man who seems to be in charge.

ISHMAEL: Is this the Captain of the "Pequod"?

CAPTAIN PELEG: Supposing it be the Captain of the "Pequod," what dost thou want of him?

ISHMAEL: I was thinking of shipping.

CAPTAIN PELEG: Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer--ever been in a stove boat?

ISHMAEL: No, sir, I never have.

CAPTAIN PELEG: Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say--eh?

ISHMAEL: Nothing, sir; but I've no doubt I shall learn. I've been several voyages in the merchant service, and I . . .

CAPTAIN PELEG: Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg?--I'll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the merchant service to me again. Merchant service, indeed! I suppose ye feel considerable proud of having served in merchant ships. But flukes! man, what makes you want to go a-whaling, eh?--it looks a little suspicious, don't it, eh?--Hast thou been a pirate?--Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?--Dost not think of murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?

ISHMAEL [laughs]: No! no!

CAPTAIN PELEG: Then what takes thee a-whaling, eh? I want to know before I think of shipping ye.

ISHMAEL: Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world.

CAPTAIN PELEG: Want to see what whaling is? Hast ever cast eye on Captain Ahab?

ISHMAEL: Who is Captain Ahab, sir?

CAPTAIN PELEG: Aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship.

ISHMAEL: I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself.

CAPTAIN PELEG: Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg--that's who ye are speaking to, young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the "Pequod" fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest to know what whaling is, I can put ye in a way of finding out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has but one leg.

ISHMAEL: What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?

CAPTAIN PELEG: Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured, chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat!

CLIFTON FADIMAN: Well, what about that passage, which is fairly representative of "Moby Dick"? When we come upon it, at the beginning of the book, what does it do for us? Well, the answer is quite simple: it entertains us; it holds our interest. And, unless a novel possesses this simple quality of being able to hold our interest, it will never be able to offer us anything beyond this. If a novel is dull, there's not much use in discussing its other qualities. The first thing a novel does, then, is to entertain us. Can it also instruct us? Well, there are two answers to that question: yes and no. Let's try another passage from "Moby Dick."

ISHMAEL: The ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over their heads for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so wondrously minute is it. With respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed between the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale. While the ear of the former has an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's?

CLIFTON FADIMAN: What about that passage? It's instructive, the information is interesting. But if we really wanted to be instructed in the anatomical features of the sperm whale or exactly how whales were hunted in the early 19th century, we would go to other books, written, not by a genius like Melville, but by literal-minded experts in the subject. On the other hand, if we wanted knowledge of the possibilities of human nature, we would go to "Moby Dick."

There's a passage toward the end of the book in which Captain Ahab, a man whose tortured soul is driving him to destruction, questions the meaning of life, the meaning of man's place in the universe.

AHAB: What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of itself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor no one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heavens, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windless, and Fate is the handspike.

CLIFTON FADIMAN: This passage speaks to the human mind and heart, passionately, directly, eloquently. And, so, if we give the word "instruction" a larger meaning, I believe the answer to the question, "Can a novel instruct us?", is yes.

Good novels are, or can be, a kind of shortcut to experience. They offer us revealing pictures of men and women in conflict, of men and women in action. True, they're in conflict only in the pages of a book, nevertheless, from these very pages, from these very inventions, we may get a richer sense of the possibilities of human life than we do from our own limited experience. A man who knows "Moby Dick" well is simply a larger human being than the man who has never heard of "Moby Dick."

What else can novels do for us? Well, some critics say that novels are important because they can change the world by impelling man to action, to crucial decisions. Abraham Lincoln once received Harriet Beecher Stowe at the White House. And he looked down from his gangling height at this rather dowdy person who had written "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and murmured, "So you're the little lady who started this big war." And it is true that some novels, though not many, have had startling practical consequences.

Upton Sinclair, in "The Jungle," aroused a whole nation to the necessity of seeing to it that the meat-packing industry obeyed the laws of cleanliness. Charles Dickens, in many novels--"Nicholas Nickleby" and "Oliver Twist" among them--stimulated reforms in England. Sinclair Lewis in his early novels, particularly "Main Street," by making Americans conscious of themselves, probably did a good deal to modify the national temper--to make us more mature, more self-critical.

But the purpose of a good novel is not to move men to action. Indeed those novels which have had the most immediate practical effects are not usually very good ones. The intention of the novelist is not specifically to change the mind of the reader in any given direction. It is to transfer a part of the imaginative content of his mind, his experience, into our minds. What was once his now becomes ours.

All experience, of course, enlarges us, but it is the curious power of art that it seems to enlarge our experience in jumps. The great novels, like the great dramas and the great myths and legends, make a profound appeal to our unconscious minds. On one level, they seem to deal with people in their differences. And this is the level easiest to identify. But on another level, they deal with people in their sameness, with those experiences and feelings that all men have had for thousands of years, since the beginning of human life on this Earth. Man has been asking, as Melville's tortured hero asks, "Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?"

And so, the novel entertains, the novel instructs, and the great novel, like other great masterpieces of literature and art, does something more. It tries to locate man in the scale of being, to locate him in human society, in the world, in the universe. Now the great novelist does these things in a variety of ways, by his style, the shape of his novel, his plot, his viewpoint, by the very rhythm and color of his sentences. But, primarily, he does it through a special ability, an ability of a high order, which is rare even among good writers, the ability to create and populate with believable, living characters his own world. The great novelist creates a world which is unique, complete. The world of Leo Tolstoy is not the world of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. And Dostoyevsky's world differs from the one created by Thomas Mann.

And so it is with the world of every great novelist. You can't take away from it, you can't add to it. And that's one reason we take so much pleasure in it. It's both coherent and permanent. We might illustrate this by briefly opening a door on the world of Charles Dickens. Dickens created about 2,000 characters, enough for a fair-size town. I'll show you a few of them; and as you meet them, see where the Dickens world doesn't begin to compose itself in your mind as a coherent and fascinating one. First, the majestic Mr. Micawber from "David Copperfield":

MR. MICAWBER: My other piece of advice, Copperfield, you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and sixpence, result misery.

CLIFTON FADIMAN: Next, Mr. Squeers from "Nicholas Nickleby," a teacher whose theories of education were intensely practical. His students learned, for instance, to spell "window" by washing windows. From "The Pickwick Papers" the remarkable fat boy, commenting on his favorite occupation:

FAT BOY: I likes eat'in better.

CLIFTON FADIMAN: Again from "David Copperfield," Uriah Heep, explaining the secret of his success:

URIAH HEEP: Be 'umble Uriah, says father to me, and you'll get on.

CLIFTON FADIMAN: If you had never heard the name of Dickens, wouldn't you guess, after meeting these astonishing people, that they were all created by the same person? They were. They formed part, a very small part, of a world that never existed and which is immortal.

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