The MATERIAL CONSTITUENTS of the NOVEL

The novel – the latest to be born, but the most vigorous of all literary species. The novel
is a meaningful structure determined by material constituents which make up its
macrostructure level.
1. PLOT may be defined as – “that which happens, narratively speaking, in a literary
work”; “the dramatization of the theme”.
The plot involves a series of episodes and their interaction and interrelation in a
dynamic structure; it develops through stages of exposition, amplification, climax
and dénouement.
A series of events become a plot only when the cause-effect relationship between the
events is pointed out.
PLOT vs. STORY
PLOT = the novel in its logical, intellectual aspect; its question is “why does it
happens?”
The story’s question is “what happens next?”
Sometimes a number of subplots are introduced to underline the main plot by
cumulative and contrastive effects.
The Aristotle’s Poetics – the remark that at the height of every good narrative lies a
process of discovery and recognition.
Classification of PLOT
A) DRAMATIC PLOT = a story of intense conflict which takes place through
gradation towards climax.
B) EPISODIC/PANORAMIC PLOT = a wide, looser frame, involving many
characters and covering a long period of time.
C) PICARESQUE PLOT = its single character (the picaro) is taken from one
adventure to another, which he relates in the 1st person singular.
18th century:
- Defoe picaresque plot in ROBINSON CRUSOE
- Richardson – dramatic plot
- Fielding -picaresque plot in Joseph Andrew
-episodic plot in Tom Jones
- Sterne – episodic plot in Tristram Shandy
 - Jane Austen – dramatic plot in pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility
19th century:
- Dickens – picaresque plot in David Copperfield
- Thackeray – panoramic plot in Vanity Fair, The Pendennis Sequence
- Elizabeth Gaskell – dramatic plot in North and Sourh
- Emily Bronte – dramatic plot in Wuthering Heights
- George Eliot – episodic plot in Middlemarch (human relationship as a whole;
many-plotted novel – 4 main stories)
- Hardy – dramatic plot (Tess) and weakness of the plot.
20th century:
- Henry James – “the best novelist is he who has no story to tell”
- Joseph Conrad – Victorian plot- dramatic plot – double plot (emphasis not on the
external event, but on the effect they have upon man- Heart of Darkness)
- Forster – Victorian plot- dramatic plot
- Virginia Woolf – plot with the experimentalists is a flux of experience rendering
the stream of consciousness; there is no plot in her writings
- Joyce – plot – flux of experience - the stream of consciousness
- Huxley – little plot in Chrome Yellow; alternated plots ( an intricate design of
main plots, subplots, parallel plots in Point Counterpoint
- Murdoch – gothic plots and double plot (one real; one in the psyche of one of the
characters) Under the Net
- Golding – no traditional characterization of plot as action; plot is the exploration
of the human characters: Lord of the Flies
- Fowles – manipulates the plot and apparently Victorian plot in the French
Lieutenant’s Woman
- Durrell - plot: a web of interhuman relationships (Victorian way)
- Spark – plot: organized in a bewildering discover.
The traditional novel concluded either in marriage or in death; the hero’s experience was
closed.
The modern novel remains unclosed.
2. TIME – at the beginning of the novel time was objective, the historical one (the
moment in history when the story is supposed to take place).
- Realistic time – chronological calendar dates (Defoe, Richardson, Austen,
Fielding)
- With Sterne in his Tristram Shandy the perspective is changed – digression and
lack of chronological sequence.
- Flash-backs alternating with present moments
- Time with Sterne is a subjective one; his innovation is that he attempted to
integrate the subjective time into the objective, historic one.
- In the 19th century one main feature of the novel was its realism; it means that
time is chronological, historical one (Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, G.Eliot, Th.
Hardy)
- With the coming of the 20th century the writers’ opinion about time in a novel
changed. Thus, many of the 20th century writers are tributary to Bergson’s concept
of duration: the narrowing of the fictional duration covered by the novel and the
expansion of the psychological duration of the characters to depict all their life in
one day or in one moment (the aim of many modern novels) – Woolf with Mrs
Dalloway
- The montage technique – shifts in space and time due to which the chronology of
the narrative does not correspond to the chronology of the story: Conrad (Heart of
Darkness), Fay Welldon (Down Among the Women), M. Spark (The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie)
- The experimentalists cultivate the numerous shifts in time and space (Woolf and
Joyce); they are interested in the subjective time, but there are modern writers
who keep the Victorian perspective of TIME (Lawrence – Sons and Lovers)
- W. Golding used the device of science-fiction choosing future as time for his Lord
of the Flies
- The postwar British novel is characterized by the demolition of traditional time
(Fowles – The Magus). However the same author chooses the objective time (the
French Lieutenant’s Woman)
- another device is the circular temporal construction employed by Durrell in
Alexandria Quartet

3. SETTING / SPACE – is used for placing the characters in an environment within

which they can act out their stories.
- At the beginnings of the novel the setting was an island (Robinson Crusoe,
Gulliver’s Travels)
- With Fielding the setting is multiple: the road, the countryside, London, the city
(Austen)
- Also in the 18th century there appeared the gothic novel which had as a setting
ruined ghost-haunted castles.
- The setting may also suggest a state of mind; it may eventually rise to the level
of a symbol (Dickens – Bleak House, G. Eliot – Middlemarch, Murdoch – The
Sea, The Sea)
- Dickens was the master of the romantic treatment of characters within realistic
settings; these were also employed by Thackeray, Gaskell (England seen as 2
nations – North and South), Bronte, Th. Hardy.
- Th. Hardy is at his best when describing a landscape or the painting of the
background
- Beginning with Henry James the human consciousness is used as a stage (Woolf,
Joyce, Lessing)
- Conrad’s novels are written either on a setting out at sea or on different settings
- Huxley uses a particular place favourable for intellectual diversity connecting
different people
- Fantastic and exotic settings are used by Golding, Fowles or Durrell (Alexandria
is used as a character in itself)

4. POINT OF VIEW – is the relation in which the narrator stands to the story.
- With 18th and 19th centuries novels – the narrator was personal and subjective.
- 20th century novel – the narrator has become objective or even has disappeared.
- According to Brooks and Warren, in Understanding Fiction, there are 4 types of
p.o.v.: a) the 1st person p.o.v. – the character tells his own story in the 1st person,
he is the participant in the plot (Defoe – Robinson Crusoe)
b) the 1st person observer – the character may tell a story which he
witnessed but he didn’t take part in it. (Dickens – Bleak House- Esther
Sommerson)
c) the 3rd person limited p.o.v. – the author tells the story as an external
observer not as a participant in the story (James, Gaskell, Huxley, Spark)
 d) the 3rd person omniscient p.o.v. – the author plays GOD, he enters the
thoughts and feelings of characters; he feels free to comment on the action
and to speak the reader in his own person as author (Dickens, Fielding,
Thackeray, Austen, Lawrence, Fowles)
- autobiographical technique: Defoe, Lawrence, Murdoch
- multiple points of view: Henry James, Conrad, Durrell (the same event is rendered bu
several characters in turn)
- free indirect style – it links the 3rd type of narrative with the 1st types (Woolf, Joyce,
Murdoch)

5. CHARACTER – is the central point of interest in fiction; the great novelists in the
classical age used various methods of characterization
a) Narrative characterization – one character is spoken about by the author or
by the other characters (Dickens, Fielding, Thackeray, Austen, Lawrence)
b) Dramatic characterization – the character is allowed to reveal himself
through behavior, speech and thought (Robinson, Tristram Shandy, Mrs.
Dallaway, Ulysses)
- Peculiar effects may be obtained by contrasting narrative and dramatic
characterization – Tom Jones
- In the modern novel we find nature as a character, humanized, while people are
devoid of human characteristics.
- Forster in Aspects of the Novel gives the following classification:
a) Flat chs – they do not change, are constructed around one single idea
or quality: Robinson Crusoe, Tristram Shandy, Huxley’s characters
b) Round chs – develop along the plot : Pamela (Richardson), Tom
Jones, Rebecca (Vanity Fair)
- Up to Laurence Sterne the characters were spoken about the author or by the
other characters. Tristram Shandy opens the series of the characters who are
revealed through their mental processes. Sterne – hobby-horse technique – each
man’s character is determined by a ruling passion.
- Dickens gave English literature an enormous gallery of living characters.
- E. Gaskell and G. Eliot – novels of characters – interested not in the characters’
external history but in their inner history.
- Th. Hardy – instead of the action being forwarded simply by confronting the
characters, there is another force at work: FATE / DESTINY. His characters stand
 in relation to other things; the weather, the season; they are laboriously
constructed from the outside.
- In the 20th century Henry James introduces the WITNESS / FICELLE = an
intelligent observer, a character involved in the story, but also a narrator. His
characters may be grouped into protagonists and ficelles (functional characters).
- Women as central, unifying characters: Woolf, Forster, Lawrence.
- Huxley – crippled characters: dissimilar people are put together, each standing
for a particular human type.
- Irish Murdoch had crippled characters (Under the Net) the hero isolates himself
not to be caught under the net – existentialism.
- Golding – exploration of human characters.
- Durrell – employs characters participating in the plot, who narrate what is
happening to other characters included in the book.
- Doris Lessing – her characters seek refuge from the catastrophic context of the
20th century – classification of characters: a) protagonists
b) background characters
c) intermediate figures