Novels: The Formless Form?

I just happened to read a book of literary criticism that I’ve owned for many years but never got around to reading: The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction, by Gabriel Josipovici (Macmillan 1971). Josipovici is a prolific writer, a novelist and a critic and a playwright. This is the only book of his that I’ve read. In this book he develops an account of the origins and characteristics of “modern” literature through looking at a few central authors and texts—Dante, Chaucer, Rabelais, Hawthorne; Proust, Nabokov, Bellow, Golding. The point of this note is not to evaluate Josipovici’s book. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but others may like it. The point is to look at a couple of short comments he makes towards the end of the book, in the last chapter, “The World and the Book”: “The novel” he says, “is the most natural literary form because in a sense it has no form; it is the nearest thing to a conversation, whether between friends or acquaintances. Provided it keeps within the very flexible limits of verisimilitude, it is entirely free to do as it pleases, to move in any direction it wants. The novelists can invent at will, bringing characters together in the most unlikely coincidences, killing off the unwanted and revealing new complications in the plot whenever the tension appears to be flagging. As Leonardo said of the painter, the novelist is truly a God, with a God’s powers and a God’s freedom. If he exercises these with skill the reader will feel satisfied: his spare time will have been effectively used up and he can return refreshed to the labours of his daily life. As one would expect, the detective story is the most popular form of fiction, for it reveals the quintessence of fiction” (286). A few pages later he remarks that the novel “is almost not a medium at all, almost like life itself. For the premises upon which the novel is based are not the formal ones of literature but rather the premises upon which most of us base our lives” (297).

 It’s not hard to find other critics and literary historians making more or less the same point; I could add quotations, for instance, from E. M. Forster, from G. K. Chesterton, from Ian Watt—but I will spare you, and just say that this claim about the formlessness of the novel is widespread and deeply entrenched. I wouldn’t say that there’s no truth in it, but at best it’s very misleading. (It’s curious that Josipivici says that detective stories reveal the quintessence of fiction, since detective stories, even very good ones, are often quite formulaic. There are certainly detective stories that are written against the conventions, but in order for these to work, there have to be conventions against which they are written.) So I thought in this post I would look at a random novel to test Josipivici’s claim that the novel is formless.

The novel I will examine is the one I just finished reading, Émile Zola’s Germinal. I read this once before, many years ago; I liked it then and I like it now. Zola is a French novelist of the later 1800s; Germinal was written in 1885. Zola was an important “naturalist” writer: he was interested in the way heredity and environment determine human behavior, and he claimed to be a sort of literary scientist. But he also was a great romancer, and his novels can be thoroughly engaging. Zola was one of the first writers to include some of the physical aspects of human life: for instance, one of the major characters in Germinal, a teen-aged girl named Catherine, gets her first period at a climactic point late in the story. I suspect that this may be the first time we see a detailed description of menstruation in literature. (If you know of an earlier one, let me know.)

Germinal is about a strike in a coal mining town in the north of France, and it gives a vivid description of the conditions of workers at that time. But in this post I won’t discuss Zola’s social and political views, or his treatment of socialism, anarchism, Marxism and the class struggle, as interesting as those topics are. I will just be interested in the question of form, as a test of Josipivici’s claim that the novel is the form without a form.

The novel begins when the central character, Étienne Lantier, arrives in the town of Montsou. He is a trained machinist, but at the time the book occurs, France is in the middle of an economic downturn, and Lantier has been unable to find a job. At the very beginning of the book he is travelling from place to place looking for work. The first paragraphs show him on the road in the middle of a cold March night: “On a pitch-black, starless night, a solitary man was trudging along the main road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten kilometers of cobblestones running straight as a die across the bare plain between fields of beets. [. . .] The man had set out from Marchinnes at about two. He strode on, shivering in his threadbare cotton coat and corduroy trousers.” He gets to Montsou and finds that a miner there has died and left a sudden opening. He takes the job, even though it’s unskilled labor, because there are no jobs for mechanics. He stays in Montsou for just over a year and plays a major role in the strike. At the end of the book Étienne leaves and heads for Paris. The book deserves—and has received—extensive attention for its depiction of the degraded condition of miners and the class struggle, for example, but I will leave all that aside for the moment.

Formally, we can note that the story begins when Étienne arrives in Montsou and it ends when he leaves. There are many books that begin with an arrival and end with a departure. Some of these are more or less realistic stories, some are fantasies. Here are a few examples—you can add more: Faulkner’s Light in August; Huxley’s Crome Yellow; Mann’s The Magic Mountain; Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Baum’s The Wizard of Oz; Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland; Burrough’s Princess of Mars; and so on. There is a whole class of stories that share this general shape.

There is something of a critical consensus that most narratives begin with some kind of disruption of an equilibrium and end when a new equilibrium is established. Probably this is true, but I must admit I’ve never found it very helpful. What counts as an equilibrium? What counts as a disruption of an equilibrium?

As it happens, there are only a few common ways to begin a novel (with a broad understanding of what “begin” means). These are: Arrival, Departure, Lack or Need, Birth, Death, and Meeting. There are also uncommon beginnings, but I suggest that these six beginnings account for a large majority of the stories that we call novels. In addition, there are a few common endings, and the end of a novel often in some way matches the beginning. Thus an arrival beginning may be matched with a departure ending, as in Germinal or The Wizard of Oz. A meeting beginning may end with a marriage. And so on.

It may not be possible to describe “the form” of a novel, but it is possible to say that almost all novels begin with one of these six beginnings. You may not be able to say much about “the novel” as a whole, but you can say some interesting things about novels that begin with an arrival, novels that begin with a meeting, and so on. I have discussed all this at length in my most recent book, From Paragraphs to Plots: Architecture of the Novel.

There’s more to be said about the form of Germinal. As I mentioned, the action of the book takes just over a year. Étienne arrives in Montsou in March, and he leaves in the following April. Zola makes quite a bit out of this contrast: he describes the bitter March weather of the arrival and the lovely spring weather of the departure. As it happens, there are quite a few novels that take about a year, give or take a few days: Hardy’s The Return of the Native; Glasgow’s The Romantic Comedians; Cather’s Shadows on the Rock, Cather’s Lucy Gayheart; Trollope’s Framley Parsonage; Austen’s Emma; Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and so on. There are also novels that take one day: Melville’s The Confidence Man; Joyce’s Ulysses; Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; Ford’s The Last Post; Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao; Barth’s The Floating Opera; Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; and so on. And there are various other ways to organize the time of a novel. Again I refer you to From Paragraphs to Plots.

I will end with just one more way we can discuss the form of Germinal. In an earlier book, Narrative Structures and the Language of the Self, I examined character sets, that is, the number of major characters in a story and their relationships. One of these sets is the three-character plot, usually two characters fighting over the affections of a third. I won’t bother to give examples; you can do that for yourself. Germinal is a three-person plot, as Étienne and Chaval fight over the affections of Catherine. At the end of the book, Étienne wins, sort of, and he kills Chaval, but then Catherine dies in the great mine accident that ends the story, so Étienne’s victory doesn’t count for much.

I have (very briefly) demonstrated three different ways to analyze the form of Germinal. It’s an arrival/departure novel; it’s a one-year novel; and it’s a three-character novel. There are other formal features as well, some of which I’m working on in my current project. Josipivici (and Forster and Chesterton and Watt) may or may not find this kind of analysis interesting, but they can’t say that the novel is a formless form.