A New Province of Writing , from the Domain of the novel: Reflections of some historical definitions. ( Pg 20-36)
The Domain of the Novel
The Domain of the Novel: Reflections on Some Historical Definitions
discusses the genre of the novel and it's characteristics.
A. N. Kaul (1930–2017)
Former Professor of English and former Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Delhi. His dissertation,
The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society in Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, won both the John Addison Porter and George Egleston History
Prizes and was published by Yale University Press in 1963.
Summary of the Text
A New Province of Writing
- Kaul gave a general idea that if you have lived a life you can write at least one story, preferably
your own. One man/woman, one vote; one life, one novel!
- fiction is the most democratic Literary genre.
- In this lectures Kaul states that his purpose is to go back in times to earliest novelist and focus on old fashioned novels to see where and how this all began. When he mentions old fashioned novels he meant 18th and 19th century when the novel first emerged in Europe.
- domain of the novel is, and was
from the outset, an internally conflicted, a dialogical or dialectical domain
-his prime focus is on some well known English writers
Here Kaul gives brief of his lectures, saying his 2nd lecture is ' Nationality and Novel' focusing on the novels produced in few countries example - 19th century Russia or late 19th century India. His 3rd lecture talks about 'Ideology and Novel'.
He begins his first lecture on English novel with Henry Fielding who, when he turned from stage comedies and farces to
prose fiction, thought of himself as ‘the founder of a new province of writing’ (Tom Jones, Bk. 2, Ch. 1, 53), but his definations got contradictory. He defined the novel as ‘domestic history’ or simply
as the history, that is to say, the life or biography of one individual says Kaul.
At one level this contradictions can be seen as neo-classical writer’s awe of the ancient classics. The references to the classics like Homer or Aristotle proves that whatever seems new to us may just be the newer version of the old. As much as the novels of Fielding represents colonising of the new territory also the rehabilitation of the old literary terrain in several ways.
- Kaul argues that epic may be rejected but it gets reinscribed.
- Fielding called novels as a comic epic because it suggests the doublness betweencomic and the epic, the individual and the socio-historical, private life and the epochal which is seen in Fielding's as well as other novels upto the day. There is something Revolutionary in Fielding's theory of his rejection of epic hero as supernatural, mythological and extraordinary.
-Another thing is the installation of comic in the sense of the
commonplace, the ordinary, the topical, the matter of fact, protagonists of
low, even at times marginal, rank, engaged in living ordinary lives in commonplace pursuits of the commonest of commonplace goals etc. All the characters which were excluded from the stage in the epic were given opportunities like Richardson’s maidservant Pamela, Defoe’s picara Moll Flanders, Fielding’s own footman in Joseph Andrews, as well as the bastard Tom Jones.
- As we move into the 19th century, the common people and the so called age of common man became very respectful more acceptable to society and literature,
their mainstream fable remains essentially the story of love, marriage and
private concerns.
- George Eliot herself uses the word ‘epic’ constantly but the correct describing word for her work would be epochal
Kaul gave two anti- Fielding paradigms Why ‘comic epic’?
Why not ‘epic’ per se? Why not protagonists whose fable involves not only their destinies but all our destinies?
When the readers asked George Eliot Why?’ George Eliot did not write lengthy prefaces in the manner of Fielding. She answered that "he lived in an ample age ‘when the days were longer . . . when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings" . So every writer has his own history, condition and style of writing.
Joyce’s hugely comic novel of consciousness, Ulysses, is not only titled after, but alludes constantly to, and reinvents, so to speak, one of the two or three founding epics of Western civilization. Kaul considers Lawrence's novels full of notorious sex as novels of cultural and class differentials. E.M. Forster's novels are first and last novels of culture-conflict and mutual critique.
Fielding has been much praised for his irony. It not only represents the individual but rather the collective portrait of the society of his time. Fielding’s novel is crowded. It is – but it is crowded not just by variety but by opposites, the opposite positions of the characters representing the two sides of some of the central political, social, intellectual and religious debates of the 18th century: Whig and Tory; Court and Country; the uncouth, fiercely independent country squire, Squire Western,
and his sister etc.
Novels of 19th Century
- these novels
become openly recognizable – and are indeed commonly recognized – as
‘pictures of society’, not so much a moral critique as in Fielding but rather
a representation through individual stories of the very structure of 19thcentury British bourgeois society
- The most visibly important shift is, of course, the shift from the rural to
the urban, the foregrounding of the dominant bourgeoisie and the emergence of merchants, the merchant princes, as the new protagonists
- Barbara Hardy sees the 19th-century English novel as sociology and describes Thackeray as a ‘great sociologist’, ‘a great accumulator
of social symbols of class and money’ (20)
-What these early English novels do is to start with traditional moraluniversal categories – human nature, pride, vanity – and redefine them in
terms of contemporary, material realities.
