V. S. Naipaul on the Modern Novel

V. S. Naipaul in Reading & Writing: A personal account:

For sixty or seventy years in the nineteenth century the novel in Europe, developing very fast in the hands of a relay of masters, became an extraordinary tool. It did what no literary form—essay, poem, drama, history—could do. It gave industrial or industrializing or modern society a very clear idea of itself. It showed with immediacy what hadn’t been shown before; and it altered vision. Certain things in the form could be modified or played with later, but the pattern of the modern novel had been set, and its program laid out.

All of us who have come after have been derivative. We can never be the first again. We might bring new material from far away, but the program we are following has been laid out for us. We cannot be the writing equivalent of Robinson Crusoe on his island, letting off “the first gun that had been fired there since the creation of the world.” That (to stay with the metaphor) is the gunshot we hear when we turn to the originators. They are the first; they didn’t know it when they began, but then (like Machiavelli in his Discourses and Montaigne in his Essays) they do know, and they are full of excitement at the discovery. That excitement comes over to us, and there is an unrepeatable energy in the writing.