What Now in the Novel?
BY ANTHONY BURGESS eHE future of the novel? Poor old novel, it's Tin a rather dirty, messy tight corner. And it's either got to get over the wall or knock a hole through it. In other words, it's got to grow up.' That was D. H. Lawrence in 1923. He was not, of course, thinking of his own novels, but those of 'Mr. Joyce, Miss Richard- son and M. Proust,' as well as—Lawrence always being a great man for the whole hog—`the Sheiks and Babbitts and Zane Grey novels.' Demonic novelists are ill-qualified to deliver judgments on the fiction of their own day, since the sun of their personal aspirations must always be in their eyes. But I sometimes think that a resurrected Lawrence might crow with pleasure at the way the British novel has gone in the last ten years. The pale Galilean has ccnquered; the world has grown grey with his breath. We have got over that infantile concentratior on streams of consciousness; we don't worry overmuch about form; we take the provincial lower orders seriously; we clear people's minds of cant; we try to make new myths out of the deep dark bitter belly-tension of man and woman, man and man; we go abroad.
We? I am somewhere in this decade of hope, since I took seriously to novel-writing in Malaya in 1955. New themes seemed to be coming into British fiction then. The old colonies were seek- ing self-determination, and Britain herself was one of the old colonies. The Labour regime of the post-war period held back the street fights and drawing-room belches of revolt but, after the Festival of Britain and the end of meat-rationing, it was seen that there was plenty to revolt against and that—thank God—the new writers were not, after all, to be the voices of the Establishment. If the classless society had come into being, the subject of hypergamy (i.e., bedding a superior woman) could never have been exploited by Kingsley Amis and John Brain:: The social order was changing, but the changes were to be minimal—no more academic cant, no more cultural pretentiousnesS (whether filthy Mozart or imbecilic hey-nonny-nonny), regional accents for all who wanted them, more liberal openin,g- hours, a sufficiency of beer and fags, booby- traps or a damn good crack on the chops for the enemy, the enemy's woman abducted.
It was a soldier's dream over sausage and chips in the Naafi, but it was a dream that partly came true. The so-called 'redbrick' novelists (who had all been to Oxford) prophesied the end of the hegemony of the East Midlands and spon- sored the Albert Finney accent, the jazz columns in class journals, even The Times article on the art of the Beatles. Bliss was it in that dawn— Lucky Jim, Hurry On Down: they strike one's senses today with a lavender nostalgia. The ques- tion is: what can their authors do now? One Fat Englishman has a punching randy hedonist who is a kind of consummation of Jim Dixon. The fags have become cigars and the pints of bitter Californian champagne. but physical self- indulgence, as well as schoolboy vindictiveness, becomes disgusting when it ceases to be a dream. One Fat Englishman is a brilliant exercise on the mediteval theme of the SeVen Deadly Sins.
Is that the way the novel is going to go—all moral? William Golding has only one subject— the primacy of evil—and his power derives from its non-sectarian presentation. Evil is not just a Church doctrine. It grows wild; it is. as the hero of Free Fall reminds us, as immediate as gamboge or the taste of potatoes. Perhaps novelists neglect evil (as opposed to wrong) at their peril. Iris Murdoch once seemed concerned (in The Bell) with an eschatological Lubject, but she took the dangerous way of making her own myths. A Severed Head drains both the comedy and the morality out of a Restoration dance of all the sexes; the result is a ghostly paradigm with no spume of life playing on it. Her recent attempts to put back heart into her art have produced a kind of raw melodrama tricked out with rare stylistic jewels. But, if the time for lashing at society is over, and we lack Golding's concern with the moral prof undities. what his the novelist to write about'? Our senior novelists are mor- phologists, recorders—often in the serial form of the roman fleuve---of changing social pat- terns; I think particularly of C P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers, Anthony Powell's Music of Time, the war trilogy of Evelyn Waugh and the shamefully disregarded sequence of Henry Williamson. But how about the junior novelists?
I think there is evidence among these already of a dissatisfaction with the subject-matter in- herited from the Fifties. The big social themes were set then and have hardly changed the acquisitive rat-race, apartheid. youth's need of a voice, the splendours and miseries of post-war provincial life, the jazz-man as hero the revela- tions of urban puberty, and so on. The new wave from France has douched us; Lawrence must have groaned in his sleep (`And, oh. Lord, if I liked to watch myself closely enough, if I liked to analyse my feelings minutely, as I unbutton my gloves, instead of saying crudely I unbuttoned them, then I could go on to a million pages in- stead of a thousand'). If you cannot make your theme out of the flux of society itself, then you will find the day-to-day details of social change too ephemeral. I feel that we are already swing- ing to a new interest in form rather than content, and that that is where the significant pattern of the next ten years must lie. Of writers in English, surely Vladimir Nabokov must seem to present the sharpest future auguries—not in Lolita, but in Pale Fire. We shall have to cease to feed on our native Lawrentian fat and look abroad again.
Perhaps the young novelists who are growing up now will be the more encouraged to experi- ment with form and language as they see that there is little future hope for the novel's com- peting with the other mass media. Instead of trying to become best-sellers, they may be driven back to the consolations of art. This does not mean mere verbalising, composing a novel in the shape of an encycloptedia or apparatus criticus, or going back to the macaronies of Tristram Shandy. it means expending the resources of literature in an attempt to find out more about the whole human complex, the roots on which societies are built. Only through the exploration of language can the personality be coaxed into yielding a few more of its secrets. The novel, said Lawrence, has 'got to break its way through, like a hole in the wall . . . then, of course, you're horrified when you see a new glaring hole in what was your cosy wall. You're horrified. You back away from the cold stream of fresh air as if it were killing you. But gradually, first one and then another of the sheep filters through the gap and finds a new world outside.' Well, we're wait- ing to be horrified.
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