"Twentieth Century" as a Genre

Some Brief Reactions to Edwin Frank's Stranger than Fiction

If I say about a contemporary writer that “so-and-so has just published a very nineteenth-century novel,” you are likely to have a general idea of what I mean. The book you imagine will be physically thick (à la the Victorian triple-decker) and rich with incident. It will be stocked amply with vivid (if not always round) characters, and it will advance in a regular arc toward a generally satisfying conclusion. Family is likely to play a large role, meaning that marriage, inheritance, and/or adultery probably drive the plot. The setting is either distinctively metropolitan or obtrusively provincial, and if both provinces and metropolis feature, the contrast between them is likely to be a significant theme.

But if I were instead to say—again about a newly published book—that it hearkens back to “the twentieth-century novel,” would there be any kind of image in our mental storehouses of generic concepts, ready to be summoned? Not as such, although one might be tempted to grasp at a shape that is really better known as “the modernist novel,” inasmuch as it is impossible to think about “the twentieth-century novel” without Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Mann, and perhaps Hemingway or Faulkner. But among that group, only Faulkner published a novel after 1952, risking the omission of almost half the twentieth century from “the twentieth-century novel.”

I am pursuing this question because I just started reading Edwin Frank’s recently published literary history Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. Frank is a bit elusive about what he actually thinks “the twentieth-century novel” is, but it is clear that he thinks that there are good reasons to use that adjective beyond just chronology. “We [have] the novel, emerging from the nineteenth century as a robust presence with a tenacious worldly curiosity and a certain complacent self-regard, a form that was both ready to shake things up and asking to be shook up,” he writes. More directly on the next page, he refers to “the twentieth-century novel” as “a rough-and-ready category… a category of novels that have made it a point to puzzle over what they, the century and the novel, were doing together and how, in effect, they were to get along.”

Immediately after that definition, Frank concedes—or warns the reader—that this category “is by no means coextensive with every book written in the course of the century,” but that caveat opens more questions than it answers about what kind of object of analysis “the twentieth-century novel” is. Later, Frank toys with presenting “the twentieth-century novel as a fictional character in its own right and of this book as an old-fashioned picaresque, full of scrapes and capers, scares and narrow escapes, till at some point sightings of our protagonist become infrequent.” But if that is too playful, Frank also acknowledges the gravity that the twentieth-century novel both contains and struggles to support:

These are books in which the novel seeks to prove itself “equal,” in the words of the poet Charles Olson, “to the real itself”—the real being all those realities of the bedroom and the abattoir that the novel in the nineteenth century had tended to keep in the background but which, in the twentieth century, it would place front and center along with all the previously unimaginable, too often unspeakable news that the new century delivered time and again. There were these drastic realities to put into words, to attest to, and along with them—no less urgent, no less real—was as the century went on, the ever-altering, ever more searching sense of the different shapes that novels could now take.

I cannot help pointing out that in trying to describe the career of “the twentieth-century novel,” Frank reaches for a form—the picaresque—that is usually invoked to describe eighteenth-century novels, and that the words he brandishes to reveal the inner meaning of this category belong to a poet, not a novelist.

But maybe it’s just pedantic to want a tidy, rigorous account from Frank of how he imagined the subject of his book. In the title of this post/letter/entry, I suggested that we might think of “twentieth-century” as a genre, which I think of as the aesthetic equivalent of a mood—at least if we’re considering the question from the reception side. We can of course think of genres from the production side as well and examine them for the presence of specific tropes or conventions. If we were to go that route, a possible definition of “the twentieth-century novel” is simply that it is a genre in which we find two parallel features:

• the characters encounter problems generated by social, technological, or political features that are new and specific to the twentieth century; and

• the author also attempts to integrate phenomena that (again) are new and specific to the twentieth century into the form of the novel.

(“New and specific to the twentieth century” might have to be stretched quite a lot considering how many inventions that defined twentieth-century life are actually from the nineteenth century, but I think it would be very reasonable to see novels that attempt to integrate, say, telephones into both plot and form as very solidly “twentieth-century.” Then again, the example that jumps to mind is Henry James’s “In the Cage,” which was published in 1898 and is a novella, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too rigid about dates and forms either.)

Let’s say, at any rate, that we can and maybe even should start thinking about the “twentieth-century novel” as a genre. The real question I want to ask, however—the question that was at the bottom of this post the whole time—is whether “twentieth-century” is a generic category for anything else? Not just for other kinds of art objects— “twentieth-century film” seems promising, and “twentieth-century painting”—but even for scholarly or critical works. This is more of an intellectual historian’s question than anything else, but is there some coherence in the adjective “twentieth-century” that goes beyond periodization? Is there a kind of mood or “vibe” that we can differentiate out from both the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries? Intellectual historians often do exactly this thing—in fact, I think of periodizing by mood as the intellectual historian’s comparative advantage over other scholars—but generally for smaller units of time: “midcentury,” “fin-de-siècle,” “the Sixties,” “age of the crisis of man,” etc. At least that holds true for intellectual historians writing about the twentieth century. Historians writing about earlier epochs seldom blush about speaking in terms of centuries as blocks of unified intellectual climates. Is there some necessary distance we must travel beyond the twentieth century for it to take shape as a unity in a similar way? Are we approaching that point? If not, should we be? The “twentieth-century intellectual” would seem to be its own genre of historical figure already—maybe that could be our starting point.