A NEW PROVINCE OF WRITING’, FROM THE DOMAIN OF THE NOVEL: REFLECTIONS ON SOME HISTORICAL IMPORTANT QUESTIONS FOR BA HONS ENGLISH 2023

 A NEW PROVINCE OF WRITING’, FROM THE DOMAIN OF THE NOVEL: REFLECTIONS ON SOME HISTORICAL Prof. A.N. Kaul (1930-2017) was a renowned scholar and teacher at Delhi University, who served as Professor of English, and, later, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University. The Domain of the Novel, the book from which the prescribed reading is taken consists of four posthumous essays, that have been put together from a series of lectures Prof. Kaul delivered at Sri Venkateshwara College in the year 1998. The book has been edited by Sambudha Sen and Mythili Kaul. In his ‘Introduction’ to the book, Sen, describing Kaul’s project in the lecture series, states that it is to “uncover the multiple and complicated ways by which the novel achieved the two breakthroughs with which it revolutionised the world of letters: ‘to taxonomize the social body and individualize the character’.” That is, Kaul’s project is to analyse this new literary form – that of the novel – in terms of the individual as well as the social, and how through various narrative maneuvers, the novel succeeds in representing both. “A New Province of Writing” is the first of four essays in the book The Domain of the Novel, and in it, Kaul focuses on certain 18th and 19th century novels, through which he comes to certain general conclusions about the novel form. The novel is a ‘new province of Section 1: Pages 20-22, “I am grateful to… we sinned all” Kaul begins by pointing out the difficulty inherent in his project, that of mapping out the novel form, a form which he calls “narcissistic” and “anarchistic”. Unlike the epic, which is a much older literary form, the novel does not have any fixed rules. Therefore, attempting to come up with a satisfactory and all-encompassing definition of the novel is an impossible project right from the outset. Kaul suggests coming to a broader understanding of the novel form by reading some of the earliest novels synchronically (as he goes on to do in this chapter and in the other essays in the book), and by studying the relationship between the novel and its social, historical, and political context. Right from the 18th -19th centuries when the novel form emerged, Kaul points out, it has been “an internally conflicted” and “dialectical” terrain – that is, there are novels of all kinds of persuasion, sometimes contradictory to each other, and yet, subsumed under the same form – the novel. Kaul starts his project of defining the novel by analysing various definitions of the novel form by the 18th century novelist, Henry Fielding, who is considered a pioneer of the novel form. Fielding famously defines the novel as “a comic epic poem in prose”, and “a heroic, historic, prosaic poem” as well as “a newspaper of many volumes.” He emphasizes therefore, the prosaic quality of the novel, which, unlike the epic, tells a “domestic history” – stories of commonplace, often bourgeois individuals – and not of noble heroes or gods. 3. ANALYTICAL SUMMARY 2. LEARNING OBJECTIVES 95 | P a g e © Department of Distance & Continuing Education, Campus of Open Learning, School of Open Learning, University of Delhi Introduction to Literary Studies Fielding’s definition of the novel, as Kaul points out, is also oxymoronic. The novel is both “comic” and “epic” – and herein lies the uniqueness of the novel form. It replaces the epic as the dominant form of story-telling in British culture, but it retains various aspects of the epic form. While “epic” suggests the universal and the epochal, “comic” suggests the ordinary and the commonplace. The novel form successfully merges the two. It includes both the concerns that have traditionally been of the epic form - panoramic stories of the destinies of not just individuals but of entire nations and cultures, and the concerns that arise out of modernity - bourgeois individualism, privacy, and an emphasis on the ordinary. The novel form is rightfully said to be the literary form of modernity, and it contains within itself all the contradictions and vastness that modernity is often characterised with 1. Why does Kaul call the novel form ‘anarchistic’? 2. How does Henry Fielding define the novel? Why does Kaul claim that Fielding’s definition of the novel is oxymoronic. 3. What according to Fielding, is the relationship between the novel and the epic? 2. Section 2: Pages 22-29, “On the other hand … diagnostic test of society” Discussing Henry Fielding’s novels further, Kaul comments on the entry of new kinds of characters into literature, the kind that have before then been excluded from the centre-stage. In classical epics and plays, the protagonists are more often than out noble and heroic figures. They are gods, Demi-gods, kings or noblemen. The common characters are often confined to comedy, but are excluded from more serious and more universal stories like those of epics and plays. That changes, however, with the emergence of the novel form. In Fielding’s novels, the protagonists are often common people, middle class people, and sometimes even bastards. Tom Jones is an example of one such novel. In this novel the protagonist Tom Jones is an illegitimate child and illegitimate child and throughout the novel, is on a quest to find his true ancestry. To highlight his status even further, the novel is subtitled “A Foundling.” Kaul suggests that one must understand this bastardy as not just a biological feature, but as a social symbol as well – it signifies the entry of a new kind of character into literature, as well as into the social order. The novel form has made way for characters like these to not just be represented or mentioned, but to be the protagonists of stories. 3. Kaul then briefly discusses George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch written in the 19th century, or, as he points out, exactly between Fielding’s age and ours, as a perfect example of the two planes at which the novel form works – that of the domestic-comic and that of the epic. As he states, Middlemarch “[embodies] in itself as a novel, both a challenge to and an acceptance of a limited domain for the novel.” That is, while working at the level of the domestic or the local, the novel at the same time has aspirations of being socio-historical (therefore, going beyond the individual) or even universal. This is evidenced by the fact, according to Kaul, that Middlemarch was initially written as two different novels - both with very different kind of storylines - one more domestic and the other more epic. For Kaul, the fact that Eliot decided to merge the two together, is largely symbolic of a similar maneuver performed by the novel form itself. Kaul goes on to claim that the novel form contains within itself various polarities – “individual/collective, private/public, psychological/social, biographical/cultural, domestic/national, topical/historical/universal etc.”, which make the novel form internally contradictory or dialogical. To understand how this movement from the individual to the social to the universal happens, Kaul then talks about Fielding’s Tom Jones in more detail. Fielding himself claims that the subject of his novel is human nature itself. As Kaul points out, while the novel “emphasizes the individual aspect throughout, Tom Jones comes across equally as an epic”. It is not epic in the sense that it covers a large expanse of space or time, but in the sense that it represents human life in the 18th century. Through individual characters and local situations, what is presented is human beings and society in general. Kaul states that the socio-historical aspect of the novel is not surplus or a “bonus”. It is not extra to the representation of individuals. Instead, it is precisely through the individual that the socio-historical is presented. Through stories of individual characters, larger comments about the society, or even the epoch, are made. Moreover, this representation of the social is often a “critical” representation, since it is inevitably analytical and interpretive. Focusing on the theme of love and marriage in Tom Jones, Kaul points out that the “motive analysis” of characters in the novel reveals truths about the larger society that they inhabit. That is, understanding the ways in which individual characters function and relate to their society, tells the reader facts about society at large. The central aspect of all Fielding novels is his cutting irony. Kaul claims that it is through irony that Fielding manages to merge all the various polarities within the novel form that were listed earlier. Kaul calls Fielding’s technique “ironic motive analysis” – “from beneath people’s professions, their real and sordid motivations” are revealed. For example, in the novel, Sophia’s father locks her up in order to stop her from marrying Tom. His sister protests and demands that Sophia be set free. However, while they are so opposed in their personalities, their motivation is the same – neither wants Sophia to marry the poor Tom. This is one example of what is a trend in 97 | P a g e © Department of Distance & Continuing Education, Campus of Open Learning, School of Open Learning, University of Delhi Introduction to Literary Studies Fielding’s novels. Through revealing the sameness behind very diverse and often contradictory motivations of very different characters, he gives the reader an overview of the “sordid texture of society itself”. Section 3: Pages 29-34, “I shall now turn …anarchic domain” Following this discussion, Kaul moves on to Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens and Vanity Fair by William Thackeray, two 19th century novels, and analyses how in these two as well there is a movement from the individual to the socio-historical, and ultimately to the universal or the epochal. These novels, Kaul claims, go beyond Austen’s novels that had made clear the intricate relationship between money and matrimony. Austen’s novels are known for their trenchant critique of 19th century marriage as a relationship of transaction and materialist desires. While Austen’s novels astutely revealed the nexus between money and romance/marriage, these two novels of Dickens and Thackeray claim that the commerce is the basis of “not just marriage but of morality at one end, …, and, at the other end,… the basis of all family and social relations, class interaction, and class mobility.” Commerce, then, is the basis of all society itself – something made clear by the way these two novels represent individual characters and local situations. The movement from the individual to the socio-historical is effected in two ways: 1) Matrimony becomes a symbol of class relations. Matrimonial alliances between very different classes show the transformation taking place within the British class system itself. This is present in a proto-form in Austen’s novels too. A lot of anxiety about money and class in Austen’s novels comes from the nobility’s awareness that the class system of England is transforming fast. Marriages between diverse classes are not only happening, they are made necessary by these changes. 2) Irony is used to juxtapose the personal with the socialcommercial. Another shift that these novels represent is the shift from a rural setting to an urban one – the new protagonists are representatives of the new Check Your Progress 1. How does Kaul use ‘bastardy’ as a metaphor for the early novel form? What diverse impulses are submerged in the novel form? 2. What is the relationship between the individual and the social in 18th century novels? 3. How does irony function in Fielding’s novels to resolve the polarities of the novel form? 4. What does Kaul mean by ‘ironic motive analysis’ as applied by him to Fielding’s novels? 98 | P a g e © Department of Distance & Continuing Education, Campus of Open Learning, School of Open Learning, University of Delhi B.A. (Hons.) English/B.A. (Programme) merchant and bourgeois classes. Kaul takes issue with Barbara Hardy’s pronouncement that Thackeray is a “sociologist” and claims that if Thackeray is in fact a sociologist, his sociology is not a study of culture, but of ideology. Calling Thackeray a “pre-Althusser Althusserian”, (Althusser was a 20th century Marxist theorist whose theory of the interrelation of the subject is seminal in literary theory), Kaul sees in Thackeray’s work an awareness that human beings are products of their cultures and environments – “their desires and ambitions dictated by the general ideas of the society that includes them” - an idea that becomes central to Karl Marx and many other Marxist theorists. Thus, while these novels are narrow in terms of scope, they are vast in terms of what they imply. The actual stories might revolve around individuals or their families, but their actions, behaviour, and ideas and reveal truths about the age which they occupy. Finally, Kaul compares the narratorial voice of these early novels as that of the Clown more than that of the Preacher. In particular, this is in reference to the narrative persona of Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, in which the author himself represents the narrator figure as wearing the livery of a Clown on the cover page. Since the Elizabethan age, the Clown is a character through which a critique of the ruler is mounted and voiced. Just like that of a preacher, a Clown’s function is also to educate and moralize. Both the Clown and the Preacher function to tell bitter truths to society about itself – the only difference is in their tone. The shift from the Preacher to the Clown is analogous to the shift from earlier literary forms to the novel form. Kaul ends the chapter with the following conclusion about the novel form, that it takes “traditional moraluniversal categories – human nature, pride, vanity – and [redefines] them in terms of contemporary, material realities”, thus both breaking away from and retaining certain features of older forms, and remaining a “theoretically wide-open, heterogeneous, anarchic domain”. Check Your Progress 4. 1. According to Kaul, what characterizes the shift from Austen’s works to those of Dickens and Thackeray? How do these novels differ in their assessment of the role of commerce in society? 2. What does Kaul mean by calling Thackeray a writer of ideology? 3. What does Kaul mean by characterizing the narratorial voice of a novel in terms of a preacher or a clown? 4. How does Kaul define the novel for