Is It a Novel

Henry James begins The Art of Fiction, “I should not have affixed so comprehensive a title to these few remarks.” C’est moi. However, though I will focus here on whether or not Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic poem about the Fall of man, “is a novel,” I hope digressions into wider questions of genre fluidity will be not only useful but delightful.

The answer to our titular question is, on a superficial level, “no.” Paradise Lost is composed in 10,565 lines of blank verse, meaning broadly that it doesn’t rhyme but the lines have a uniform meter, a rhythm to their syllables. It is a poem, an epic poem, meaning broadly that it has a narrative with a grand theme and is long: those ten-thousand-plus lines are organized into twelve sections, each with their own narrative progress. It is not made up of paragraphs or chapters, the dialogue is delivered in speeches rather than conversational. It is not a novel.

Now, that might be enough of an answer for you, all you needed, thanks. But if you’ll remain with me a bit longer, we might look for a moment at the controversial alternative that, yes, Paradise Lost is a novel, or does something of what a novel is meant to do. I don’t want to be too cute about this—the “novel” would not have been something Milton would have conceived of while writing in the later half of the seventeenth century. His intention was to write an epic poem (something indeed Homer would not have conceived of himself as writing). But at the conclusion of this cheeky inquiry is, I believe, an insight into both the poem and the possibilities of fiction.

Paradise Lost is nestled here between the epics that came before it and the Romantics that came after. It does not have the big, juicy adventure aspect of the Homeric epic. Poetry is not yet the inward-facing emotional expression of the Romantic period. The poets of this period, even when composing epics or something like them (Edmund Spenser’s very long Faerie Queene comes to mind), really did not want that much action in comparison to what had come before, and were much more bookish in their poetic pursuits; perhaps it was the result of a new class of poet who had gone to university.

What resulted was so-called metaphysical poetry, poems caught up in highly cerebral “conceits” or concepts that could often read more like intellectual exercises than anything to do with the translation of experience. Milton, however, does not fall into this category, usually has both of his feet firmly planted in the real world, and this is—and I’ll get to this presently—because of not only his religious preoccupation but his distinctly Old Testament one.

Poets just after Milton would go through a phase of calling what they’d written an “essay” even when it was clearly a poem: Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man,” John Dryden’s “Essay Upon Satire.” This was just about a century after Montaigne had put the essay proper on the literary map, so to speak, and it could simply be that everyone wanted a little plot on this fashionable new terrain. But though these forays of argumentation are done out in verse, that does not at all undermine the fact that they are functioning essayistically: they have a thesis about their subjects they set out to prove. Genre was conceptual more than concrete. (In some ways, it always has been—think of the nineteenth-century fad for calling paintings “symphonies” and “nocturnes.”)

All to say that poetry in this period was a bit of a toss-up, perhaps evidenced by the sheer amount of defending of it by its practitioners. It was in many ways a period of great experimentation not so much with form but with content, and what could be molded to fit verse: more lofty than prose—which was having a different sort of hey-dey in political pamphleteering—yet able to reason and speak frankly.

Settling the question of “what makes a novel” would preoccupy critics only after, or at the height of, realism’s pinnacle, and the result is useful work that does enlighten a reader: Henry James’s The Art of Fiction, E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, John Ruskin’s Fiction, Fair and Foul. One might qualify “Modernism” as a break with the formality of distinctions drawn by these and their contemporaries. But the novel in execution was never so rigid—and the rather practically minded interrogations of the studies just listed are perhaps examinations of craft rather than of any one essential nature to the form itself.

Something essential to the novel form is the convergence of disparate narrative parts such that they cohere into one uniform idea. Often this means bringing the internal world to bear on the external. Eric Auerbach’s essay “Odysseus’s Scar,” a deft examination of temporality in narrative and of its relationship to psychological depth, essentially sets up in comparison Homer and the Hebrew Bible to argue that the latter is “fraught with background” in a way that blooms with psychological import such that the Homeric epic cannot achieve.

The richness of Paradise Lost, its theological ranginess, is supported entirely by the fact that what will happen is known—fraught with background. And range theologically it does, both directly in long disquisitions from angels and indirectly in the narrative action. This is a poem of ideas argued by the actions of people—as solid a definition of the novel as any. It lacks the narrative suspense of later fiction that keep us reading so that we might learn, say, who Isabel Archer marries; but it grips us instead with the development of how precisely these characters will arrive at the inevitable.

There is a final turn to this screw, if you will, and that is in the much lesser-read Paradise Regained, about the temptation of Christ by Satan in the desert. This its theological imagination: basic Christian teaching links together the Old and New Testaments by claiming that Christ redeems the Fall during his crucifixion, but Milton positions it in an entirely different moment, in another act of the will, one more analogous with the goings-on in the Garden:

There, on the highest pinnacle, he set
The Son of God, and added thus in scorn:
“There stand, if thou wilt stand; to stand upright
Will ask thee skill. I to thy Father’s house
Have brought thee, and highest placed: highest is best.
Now shew thy progeny; if not to stand,
Cast thyself down. Safely, if Son of God;
For it is written, ‘He will give command
Concerning thee to his Angels; in their hands
They shall uplift thee, lest at any time
Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.’”
To whom thus Jesus: “Also it is written,
‘Tempt not the Lord thy God.’” He said, and stood;
But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell.

The examination of an act of will is the territory of the novel; I do not know if there is a novel that does not deal, in at least some small way, with in this murkiest of human capacities. I hope I do not abstract to the point of meaninglessness when I say novels are always about following the actions of some person or persons, like Adam and Eve, who could do otherwise.