Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

But fiction doesn’t “merely narrate”: this is one of its great potencies. In the centuries that Western fiction has taken to arise, it’s evolved to do many things, especially in the most cannibalistic form, the novel. Terry Eagleton sums it up: The point about the novel . . . is not just that it eludes definitions, but that it actively undermines them. It is less a genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together. You can find poetry and dramatic dialogue in the novel, along with epic, pastoral, satire, history, elegy, tragedy and any number of other literary modes. Virginia Woolf described it as “this most pliable of all forms.” The novel quotes, parodies and transforms other genres, converting its literary ancestors into mere components of itself in a kind of Oedipal vengeance on them.