Mr. Sambhaji Vaman Narute. Department of English. Executive Summary of the Minor Research Project-

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1 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS BETWEEN BILDUNGSROMAN AND KUNSTLERROMAN NOVEL WITH REFERENCE TO MARK TWAIN AND JAMES JOYCE Mr. Sambhaji Vaman Narute Department of English S.S.V.P.Sanstha s Arts and Commerce College, Dhule. Executive Summary of the Minor Research Project- At the outset of early 18 th century, many writers started writing long narratives in prose form. The modern form of the novel got development initially in England with famous writers like Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and James Joyce. Most of their novels were episodic and plot driven stories such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) of Defoe; Pamela (1740) of Richardson, Henry Fielding s famous novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1747), and James Joyce s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were all in England. In other countries like Germany, America some writers attempted to write Bildungsroman, for instance Wieland s The History of Agathon ( ), Goethe s Wilhelm Meisters s Apprenticeship (1795) in Germany. In America, the classics in this genre like Mark Twain s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J.D.Salinger s The Catcher in the Rye are often considered as representative of this kind. Novel is a long work of prose fiction, containing characters and action properly directed by a plot. The novel in English literature began in 18 th century. The novel aims to present a picture of life and society relating to a particular historical period. Novel exhibits the author s views of life and some of the problems of life. It thus gives the author s criticism of life or his philosophy of life. Most of the 18 th century novelist wrote a novel to represent the lives of middle class society.

2 It shows that upper class people socially, economically and physically exploit or seduce the lower class people. The rise of the novel in England, strictly speaking an eighteenth century phenomenon, was a result of the democratic movement. The phenomenal growth of commerce and industry under Robert Walpole s rule marked the decline of the feudal nobility and the rise of the middle classes. There was a tendency to dispense with the classical rigidity and restraint and an effort to search for a medium that allowed substantial freedom of expression to the emerging middle class writers. Poetry and drama, because of the very nature of their structure, call for some discipline at least but the novel offered a fresh field in which the writers could enjoy unlimited freedom and they fell for it quite a big way. The rise of the novel also coincided with the growth of a miscellaneous reading public with women forming one of its formidable and influential sections. Most of the historians of literature believe that novel as a popular genre began with Richardson s Pamela in 1740.However, a certain amount of prose fiction did exist in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also and it should not be out of place here to make a note of it. In English fiction Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding throws light through their writings to such current and existed issues. For that, they imitated European forms in their novels such as picaresque novel, gothic novel, epistolary novel, bildungsroman and kunstlerroman novel. It is true that even before James Joyce, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson had written novels, but it is with Joyce only that the Kunstlerroman novel gets its proper shape. He made invaluable contribution to the development of this kind of genre and the characterization and explored the hidden personalities in this genre as an art form. He bade farewell to the fantastic world of romance and firmly planted the novel in his own soil making it an effective weapon of social criticism. He also tried to advocate a healthy philosophy of life and thus imbued his writing with a very solemn purpose.

3 According to W.H.Auden, Most American novels are parables; their settings even when they pretend to be realistic, symbolic settings for a timeless and unlocated (because internal) psychomachia. Then Leslie A. Fiedler opines that, To write, then, about the American novel is to write about the fate of certain European genres in a world of alien experience. America has produced during the last one hundred years such a large number of great novelists, from Mark Twain to Hemingway that the American novel appears to have reached of age. Except for the fact that there is a common language used by both the English and the American novelists, there is hardly anything common. The themes, the styles, the plots, the structures, above all the imagination, set the American Novel quite apart from its English counterpart. Sometimes even the thin bond of the language seems to wither away under the weight of dynamic energy and the raw imagination and the unique manner in which the American genius is able to fuse social, economic and political realities with moral, religious and metaphysical ideas and values. When we look for definitions of the American novel, we come upon terms like untraditional, neo-realist, hard-boiled and sometimes even naïve ; with such epithets, the critics have endeavored to approximate the truth about the experience, which shapes the American fiction. However, the American novel has violently resisted these blanket labels and has continued to baffle the critics with it is purely indigenous experience. To readers familiar with the English novel, it marks a definite break with the European tradition; for them it is an act of getting away which tends to propound a manifesto for an original genius. The American novel began as an imitation of the European novel as was the case with every other literary genre. However, in its essence and spirit, the experience it embodied, the ideals it cherished and dramatized, it quickly drifted away. Having once discarded Europe, physically as well as spiritually, the Americans were left with no alternative tradition to fall back upon; they had no

4 critical principles or values, no American point of view. At best, they were expatriates making efforts to discover a new home a new society, a new culture, a new set of values. This exploratory urge becomes the creative principle of American literature in general and the American novel in particular. Thus the novel is a process of self- discovery; it is always seeking new horizons, and its characters are always lighting out for new territories. The protagonist of the American fiction has been a man on the run shutting himself against the immediate problems and responsibilities which man s confrontation with facts and hard realities engenders. This strategy of evasion forces him to swerve either into the past, into a land of make-belief or into the dark regions of the imaginary. This exploratory vision and nostalgia generate a peculiar tension that sustains the novel, and imparts an unusual dialectic of contrary forces and attitudes. The American novel, then, has to be viewed as a tensional movement between massed polarities: individual and society on the personal, hopes and frustrations on the psychological, democracy and monarchy on the political, freedom and authority on the conceptual, Europe and America on the historical, the settlers and the frontier on the existential. All these polarities are held in the novel by a tension. What is admirable is the manner in which these contradictory elements here contribute to the shaping of the novel. Then there is the internal dialectic in the plots of the novels: between melodrama and idyl; between Puritan seriousness and the horse-humor; between Gothic romance and violent realities, between moral centrality and a complete distrust. This dialectic of action and meaning generates a radical skepticism about the ultimate questions and brings the novel closer to allegory. Harry Lavin locates the origins of the American novel in religious allegory, a form which gave ample scope to the moralistic impetus. The Twentieth-century American novel has not much drifted from its original course. The conflict and tension have increased characters have become more complex and their dimensions broadened; yet they are surrounded by a halo of

5 mystery, which distorts their otherwise human lineaments. The tendency of the novelist to slide into metaphors inexorably asserts itself. The novelists like Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Saul Bellow, rather perpetuate than alter the tradition. Intellectualization is more profound, values have come to be understood in terms of social context and human situation. However, despite the American novelist s conscious and consistent efforts, the essential spirit has not radically changed. The American fiction remains a unique phenomenon; it is in the real sense finally American. The present study is a humble effort to focus on the similarities and variables in Bildungsroman and Kunstlerroman novels with reference to American novelist Mark Twain s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the modern British novelist James Joyce s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The researcher has an attempt to compare between British culture and American culture. The researcher throws light on the modern technique, style, application and experiment on innovative ideas, which is used by James Joyce in his novel. Some innovators like Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have revolutionized the technique of the novel with their probing into the sub-conscious. The English modern novel is realistic. It deals with all the facts of contemporary life, the pleasant as well as the unpleasant, the beautiful as well as the ugly, and does not present merely a one-sided view of life. There are current and crosscurrents issues and matters, which discussed in the modern English novel. It is an extremely vital and living form of art, and we can safely predict a bright and glorious future for it. New influences, specially the Russian and the American, are daily widening its horizons and renewing its vigor and vitality. New experiments are being conducted, some temporary and fleeting, others of a more permanent significance. The caravan of the English novel goes on, ever changing, becoming and growing.

6 On the contrary, the American novel began as an imitation of the European novel as was the case with every other literary genre. However, in its essence and spirit, the experience it embodied, the ideals it cherished and dramatized, it quickly drifted away. Having once discarded Europe, physically as well as spiritually, the Americans were left with no alternative tradition to fall back upon; they had no critical principles or values, no American point of view. At best, they were expatriates making efforts to discover a new home, a new society, a new culture, a new set of values. This exploratory urge becomes the creative principle of American literature in general and the American novel in particular. Thus, the novel is a process of self-discovery.the protagonist of the American fiction has been a man on the run shutting him against the immediate problems and responsibilities which man s confrontation with facts and hard realities engenders. This exploratory vision and nostalgia generate a peculiar tension, which sustains the novel, and imparts an unusual dialectic of contrary forces and difficulties. The whole range of American writers from Cooper s to Earnest Hemingway is at best enactment of isolation. E.g., American contemporary society reflects from Nathaniel Hawthorn s The Scarlet Letter and Mark Twain s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. On the other hand, how Mark Twain wrote a boys book and represent the full of rich native humor and shrewd observation of human character. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the novelist takes us on a ride through society, but without seriously concerned about the inside of that social world. However, compared to the other American novels, Huckleberry Finn has a greater touch of social reality. Most of the time, there is, thus, a peculiar contrariness between characters and the physical world; it is the constant interplay between the two that lends a symbolic color to the American fiction. According to Dr.A.N.Kaul that the American novel does not disregard the social reality, but that it is not wholly preoccupied with it. He speaks of vital interplay between actual and ideal social values. It is only when we compare it

7 with the English novel, with Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy or James Joyce, that the American novel seems attenuated or even tangential. The basic urge, which inspires the American novel, is the search for identity; the American novelist seems to be always on the move. All heroes are downright involved in this struggle, which puts them to almost fatal tests. At the initial stage, the harshness and cruelty of this struggle was endeavored to be offset by fun and laughter gradually this funny strain withered away; now protagonist of the novel has become much more a formidable figure who is put through the extremes of endurance, which is almost destroyed, but is not prepared to accept defeat. The struggle continues, but its expanded dimensions have generated a new set of values, which are at once religious, moral, ethical and metaphysical. It is this multidimensionality of the struggle and the multiplicity of the themes and values, which sets the American novel quite apart. The American novel, on many planes, embodies and largely fulfills the great American dream. Mark Twain is an eminent American humorous novelist, whereas James Joyce is a well-known modern British writer. Though they belong to different era and country, we find much similarities, as well as differences in their writing. This aspect of this study has remained untouched in the research field. For the better understanding of this form, it is essential to study a text from comparative point of view. The researcher feels that without these two concepts it is impossible to study James Joyce and Mark Twain.