Abstract

Usually a novel’s subject is the individual in action. That individual must confront a set of social expectations and norms which define and limit him. In such novels the revelation of social expectations constitutes a central element in the artist’s depiction. The degree to which society limits the hero’s action, of course, varies widely. We can imagine a continuum along which the influence of society is arranged. Sociological/naturalistic novels, in which a social order is depicted as destructive, define one extreme of that continuum. The protagonists in their suffering reveal this society’s destructive force. At the opposite extreme, society’s values and norms may be important in guiding and evaluating a protagonist’s movement toward his fate without society itself becoming an obstacle to his progress. We think, for instance, of Jane Austen’s novels. In the broad middle range of the continuum, protagonists struggle to realize their potential within social limitations, and their successes are usually partial. In assessing their triumphs, we must evaluate the obstacles they have encountered both in their own natures and in the natures of their social milieu.To make society the protagonist of a novel upsets the expectations of readers, first because the novel as a genre usually depicts the growth or change of protagonists moving from complications to stability, and second because the novel customarily concludes in some alteration of the protagonist’s external state and in some expansion of his understanding. With society as his protagonist, a writer commits himself to engaging our primary interest in the life of an abstraction or set of principles. Here, too, action is crucial. This kind of novel differs from a utopian novel, however, which focuses on ideas about society and whose principal end is to criticize or espouse a particular social order, not to engage us in working out instabilities through action. In novels in which society is protagonist, we are involved with the fate of an entire social order, and it is one about which we are made to care. The principal purpose is to present a society moving from a state of instability toward a qualitatively defined fate analogous to the movement of an individual hero.To achieve this end, characters become agents through which a social order realizes its fate. This function of character entails no simple inversion of the usual relationships between individuals and society, because characters can never be reduced to a backdrop the way society can, and society cannot easily achieve the particularity of definition and identity the way a character can. In attempting to discover narrative terms for realizing the fate of a society, a novelist faces an enormous technical challenge. He must make us care as much about a social order as he would about a particular individual, and yet he cannot write directly about ideas—he must record the actions of humans. Because his plot will focus on no single individual but on abstract processes and social hopes, he must constantly minimize individual fates and aspirations and make them clearly a function of society’s larger turmoil. Our empathy must rest firmly with the social principles being threatened rather than with any single character. With this end in view, a clearly defined, circumscribed arena for action becomes necessary. Literal battles, or scenes in which battles operate as a principal metaphor, frequently appear in such novels. By bringing many of the major characters together, defining and creating allegiances, and pitting opposing social principles, such battles provide an important context for measuring the progress of those values with which we empathize