Some New Experiments in Modern Fiction

The most practised, as well as the most read, of the forms of literature today is the novel. It is customary to discourage novel-reading and some critics may turn their noses up at the novel form and refuse to permit it in the sterile walls of literary corridors. And yet it is the most robust form being practised today.

Though it is true that anything and everything can be the subject of a novel, yet the success of the novel depends not on what the author has to say, but on how he says it. A number of newer and newer experiments in fiction-writing have enriched this particular realm of gold: the gothic novels, historical novels, stream of consciousness novels, etc.

A number of recent new experiments in the field of novel-writing at once catch our eye–some are experiments in the content of the novel and some are in the technique of story-telling. The first to catch our eye is the biographical novels of Irving Stone. True, a number of novels, mostly historical, were always woven round a period of life of the hero. But very few usurped the powers of the biography to convert it into a novel. Very few told the whole life story of the hero in fictional form, till Irving Stone came out with his biographical novels like Lust for Life (a novel based on the life of Vincent Van Gogh) and The Agony and the Ecstasy in which the life of Michaelangelo is presented with a wealth of authentic details. His other biographical novels are Immortal Wife (based on the life of Gessie Benton Fremont), Adversary in the House (Eugene V. Debs), The Passionate Journey (John Noble), The President’s Lady (based on Rachel Jackson’s life) and Love is Eternal (Mary Todd Lincoln). In this way Irving Stone is the only author who has a series of biographical novels to his credit. Lytton Strachey wrote biographies which were as interesting to read as novels: Irving Stone gave the biographical novel giving full-fledged portrait of the historical protagonist.

But this fictional form of the biography has its own limitations. The reader will always ask, “How much of this story is true?” Naturally, the dialogue has to be imagined in such a novel, there have to be occasional stretches of pure fiction (otherwise the actual life story may bore the reader) unimportant fragment of the hero’s life have to be omitted for the sake of artistic unity. A life story has to deal with facts and not too much liberty can be taken with the course of the hero’s life especially when the novels attempt to portray the whole life of the protagonist from the cradle to the grave. And lastly the actual life of the hero has to be presented in an interesting and pleasing way. All this demands great skill and artistic ability. Such a story, in the hands of a minor artist, might turn out to be an utter failure.

Take for example Lust for Life. Life of any painter is not necessarily interesting or even dramatic. But Irving Stone selected the life of Vincent Van Gogh; collected facts of his life from Van Gogh’s letters and other sources and out of this dull drab and, at times, boring material he produced an extraordinary moving story–an exceptionally fine combination of original biographical research and good novel-writing.

His equally famous novel The Agony and the Ecstasy portrays the magnificent life of Michaelangelo, his lifelong friendships, his passionate loves and his unquenchable genius. It also lays bare before us a cyclorama of one of the world’s most dramatic ages. For this novel he spent several years, living and researching in the Source materials of Florence, Rome, Carrara and Bologna. He also consulted Renaissance scholars for certain details. And the result is this great novel which has transformed dull material into things of beauty. It is also an artistic novel in its own right.

Thus this experiment of giving a full length biography in fictional form stands unique in modern fiction with very few consistent imitators.

Another experiment that catches our attention is The Anderson Tapes by Lawrence Sanders. It is a suspense story and being a suspense story it has not caught the attention of serious critics. The originality and novelty lie in the manner of its story-telling.

It is a story of imaginary tape-recorded conversations only. Out of imaginary police-records, eye-witness, affidavits and ingenious detective tapes, Lawrence Sanders has built a superb thriller. It is told almost entirely in official transcripts of tapes.

Transcripts of tapes impose heavy limitations on a novel. The incidents in the novel should be such as could have been taped by somebody interested in them – otherwise, they would not be realistic. Thus the range of subjects that can be used for this type of technique is very limited – Police office investigations, T. V. studios, musicians’ lives, etc. Again reproductions of tapes are all dialogues. Descriptions have little room in such novels, which in effect become novels containing only the dialogue. Since this is a difficult type of experiment to handle The Anderson Tapes has found no imitators so far. But it is an ingenious experiment that deserves notice.

The third notable example is, not any particular experiment, but a general tendency of loading a novel with innumerable factual details. Irving Wallace’s novels The Prize, Seven Minutes, The Man, etc., are more research dissertations on a particular topic than novels. Take for example the story of The Prize. It is the story of the Nobel Prize. Mr. Wallace interviewed people, kept journals, diaries, employed researchers to collect the data for The Prize. The result is a good novel overloaded with heaps and heaps of factual data about the Nobel Prize. The author in his “After word” to the novel says, “What is factual in this novel is the following: with the exception of the characters’ residences, almost every site and sight of Stockholm mentioned is a true one, visited by the author during the autumn of 1946 and again during the summer of 1960. Also, the history of the Nobel Prize awards, the descriptions of the academies, exterior and interior, the procedures and methods of nomination and voting and politicking and awarding of the prizes, the discussions about famous laureates, their names, their behaviour, the information and gossip about them, the so-called inside stones about them, are all, to the best of my knowledge, true and accurate.”

He introduces a number of anecdotes about Nobel Prize-winners, accidents that happened to some at the time of the prize-giving ceremony, and a wealth of other authentic details. So much is the load of this research material that when the reader completes this novel, he knows almost everything about the Nobel Prize. Actually speaking the load of facts is too heavy for the story to sustain its interest. We sometimes ask, “Are we reading a novel or a thesis about the Nobel Prize?” Similarly Seven Minutes (Irving Wallace) gives you an exhaustive wealth of arguments and data for and against pornographic literature. It almost becomes a thesis on the subject: “whether pornographic literature should be legally banned.” And of course the story element suffers.

So the delicate point arises, “How much loading of details can be permissible in a novel?” True, details and factual data lendverisimilitude to a story and help that “willing suspension of disbelief.” To that extent all the details, facts, etc., are good butwhen there are too many facts, heaped within the four to five hundred pages of a novel, the novel as a work of art suffers considerably. And that is what happens to the novels of Irving Wallace though, being an excellent story-teller, he just escapes the stigma of boredome. Arthur Hailey, the author of Airport, on the other hand, uses the same painstaking research technique, but he uses the data–just enough data and no more–to add colour to the drop against which his characters act and react under the stress of dramatic situations.