Society in a Novel

10 elements are theorized as the Society in a novel and Characterization of fictional characters.

a. Society in a Novel

In life as is in art, what is defined as society is not a concrete thing, though exist. The emerging of society is a corollary of “patterned, formal relationships among aspects of our experience Langland, 1984:5. Such abstract thing probably leads to an uneasy consensus: it can be everything in one’s milieu. The term society in a wide sense comprehends what we call ‘medium’: not merely peoples and their classes but also their customs, conventions, beliefs and values, their institutions – legal, religious, and cultural – and their physical environment.” Langland, 1984:6. Society, as a medium, functions in an aesthetic framework. Elizabeth Langland calls this function as formal roles of society Langland, 1984:4. The possible formal roles of society depend upon form and structure in the novel. Form is the embodiment of “statement of values” Langland, 1984: 8. These values, which should be put outside ethical judgment, then affect the development of a novel’s structure. The structure includes “the elements of a work subject to deliberate manipulation within the text Langland, 1984: 8. To speak of the formal role of society, then, we speak of “the ways in which structural elements of a particular depiction are combined and evaluated to make society itself an integral part of a novels form” Langland, 1984:9. The basic scheme of novelistic form is individuals encounter with the society” Langland, 1984: 7. In this scheme, the individual’s role is primary, 11 society secondary. Explained by Maurice Shroder, the primary position of the characters puts the novels subject as an education “[for the characters] into the realities of the material world and of human life in society Langland, 1984: 7. So, the society in a novel is placed as the context of the characters’ growth and self-realization; society is not there for the sake of itself. Though its basic role is a rather antagonistic one, society can acquire protagonist role but only in thematic term: The individual characters remain central to the novels movement, but their behavior reveals social rather than individual ethics Langland, 1984: 7. The particular formal role or function of society depends on manipulation of three perspectives for judgment: that of “the protagonists, the perspective created by the medium and an evaluative framework that mediates between the other two Langland, 1984: 10. The medium to which a character responds and in which a character exists defines a set of values distinct from that of the character. Then, the narrator, interpreting the character in the medium, provides the evaluative framework for the whole. The adequacy of interpretation will depend on narrators reliability: If a narrator is omniscient, then his perspective will be definitive in interpreting the interaction of character with medium Langland, 1984: 9. In other words, an omniscient third-person point of view provides the most reliable testimony, since it knows whatever happen inside a character’s mind. While the narratorial perspective becomes the evaluative framework, society still has the prominent position in developing the plot of the story. 12 Society and social convention function as “yardsticks to measure individual moral growth and to make moral distinctions among individuals Langland, 1984: pp. 12-13. Society, despite its possibility for faults, can also be flexible enough to accommodate the full realization of individual possibility. Society can also be depicted as the destruction of human possibility. In some sociological-naturalistic novels the conflict is weighed between individuals and society in such a way that “the most admirable characters are most subject to destruction since their best qualities leave them more vulnerable Langland, 1984: 12. However, the twentieth century has also seen experiments that altered the basic relationships among protagonists, society, and narrator. The line between objective and subjective has blurred, “reality is in doubt”, but “a premise is that some essential truth, however inaccessible, remains” Langland, 1984:14. In such genre, society functions in structure as an inner imperative giving objective force in the characters lives.

b. Characterization of Fictional Characters