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Search - The Way Of All Fish

The Way Of All Fish
Author: Samuel Butler

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH - 1903 - INTRODUCTION - The Way of All Flesh is the only novel that Samuel Butler wrote for Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited are satirical romances, and, for all their excellent narrative interest, fables rather than novels. Butler was an amateur novelist, as he was an amateur in all the many fields of thought and art in which ... more »he worked-evolution, philosophy, theology, Homeric or Shakespearean research, painting or music. He wrote because he loved to write he was the very opposite of a professional author. I never make them, he said of his books they grow they come to me and insist on being written . . . if I had not liked the subjects I should have kicked, and nothing would have got me to do them at all. As I did like the subjects and the books came and said they were to be written, I grumbled a little and wrote them. So unprofessional an author was Butler that all his books published during his lifetime, except the last, Erewhon Revisited, were published at his own expense, and he made a financial loss on all of them except the first, Erewhon. Butlers works, however, written to please himself and unsuccessful in finding a publisher in his day, have lived on, while hundreds of contemporarily successful books in his departments of literature have died. The fact is that Butler was ahead of his day. The social and psychological ideas of Erewhon, written in 1872, are still finding fresh acceptances. His great theory of creative, purposeful evolution, as opposed to fortuitous natural selection -of the unending life-stream, from the primordial cell to man--of all life as one, perpetuated by an unconscious memory that embraces an urge to change - this view, set forth with a wealth of detail and pungent argument in his series of scientific-philosophical books from Life and Habit to Luck or Cunning, is not only the obvious forerunner of Bernard Shaws Life Force and Vitalism, but also contains something of the philosophical outlook of most modern scientists. As Butler set up new sociological and philosophical values, so he set a new standard for the novel. The Way of All Flesh marks a definite turning point in the English novel probably, for one reason, because Butler was not himself a great novel reader. It differs from almost all novels before it firstly, in that the author gets inside the characters, explains their hidden motives, and reveals the influence of their ancestors and upbringing on them secondly, in that he shows conventional ideas and orthodox values as false where he believes them to be false and thirdly, in that the story is an indictment of family life, to criticize which, even mildly, would have been regarded as unthinkably vile in Butlers day had it not been merely unthinkable. Even now the most modem-minded of us may feel uncomfortable on first meeting Butlers long drawn-out patricide and matricide, as Bernard Shaw playfully described the novel but Butler does it so thoroughly and with such wit and convincing evidence that, as we read, it becomes part of the tradition in us. The story, as is now fairly well known, is autobiographical...

ISBN-13: 9781408633540
ISBN-10: 140863354X
Publication Date: 11/16/2007
Pages: 384
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Gilman Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

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