NOVEL (22.04.2012)

1. The definition of novel
It’s an UMBRELLA TERM (A word that groups other words into a single common category) – it covers
a wide variety of literary phenomena. The problem is that today everything could be called a novel.
We can believe that novel should tell a story, but there are some of them which actually don’t
(experimental ones).

The traditional definition tells us that novel is a long and complex fictitious narrative, written in
prose.

fictitious

a product of imagination

narrative

a story (other kinds: argumentative e.g. essay, descriptive)

The problems is these boundaries are not very clear. A novel in fact does everything: it says a story,
presents frequently writer’s opinion, sometimes the others’ opinions, but also contains narrative
passages.

(Sometimes when you read a novel, you'd like to skip narrative passages e.g. “Chłopi”.)

There’s this tendency to write essay-like novels which seems to be focused on presenting certain
opinions rather than telling a story (a story is usually sort of extra thing added). There are some
essay-like novels e.g. The Magic Mountain written by Thomas Mann.

When the novel emerged as a literary genre?

 legends, myths (religion mostly) – even today we have something like ‘urban legends’.
 epic poetry – from Ancient times. (“Iliad” and “Odyssey”. In Poland we do have something

like that: “Pan Tadeusz”, in England: “Beowulf”)

 medieval romances (for instance stories of King Arthur)
 novel emerged at the end of 16

th

and beginning of the 17

th

century.

The first European novel was “Don Quixote” written by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. This
shows clearly how novel replaces the old medieval romance. We have two important
characters: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Important is the way how Don Quixote is
presented. He’s a relic of the past – like someone taken from a medieval romance and put
into modern reality.

Medieval romance

Novel

-

it’s about idealized reality, symbols and
allegories,

-

set in the past,

-

it would be careless to base your
knowledge on romance,

-

characters are usually black and white,
certain types of characters,

-

for aristocracy (they don’t have anything
to do, so they came up with those fancy
stories).

-

more realistic,

-

set in that years,

-

the realistic one could be a source of
knowledge,

-

more complex, developed characters,
psychological aspects of characters,

-

for middle class,

English: novel=new
German: der Roman

It indicates the connection between the medieval romance and

Russian: роман /roman/

the novel. Originally these stories were even called “new romances”.

2. What is fiction and what is not?
We could not precisely tell which is which. There is this problem because the first one fictionalizes
real events. Many stories are advertised as ‘based on facts’. On the other hand, the books which are
advertised as non-fiction are mixtures of facts and fiction.

(There was this argument not long ago about the most popular Polish non-fiction writer Ryszard

Kapuściński. There was this discussion: How much historical truth is in his books and how many things

he made up? It has been discovered that some of the events could be made up, because in real life

they would occur in – let’s say – 20 years period of time and he would place them in one week like –

for instance – describing some sort of dictatorship in Africa.)

And this is what the writers do – the writers take real events and they modify the facts to make them
more attractive, dramatic, poetic. The question is how is non-fiction different if it sounds the same?
And is it possible to draw a clear line between fiction and non-fiction?

(For instance if you write a biography of e.g. Charles Dickens and to make it more interesting you feel

like including all kinds of anecdotes about which you’re not certain if they’re true or not, but you feel

they’re saying truth about the man.)