Structured like "a plate of mixed fruit," such works enact, celebrate, and ridicule, but do not resolve the conflicts among different characters, ideologies, literary genres, and forms of language. Moreover, such narratives subordinate the linear development of plot and character to the interests of spatial juxtaposition. Indeed, if one takes the Flaubert-James mode as a norm for the novel, carnivalesque fictions may be seen as antinovels.
Apologues, by contrast, might be called "non-novels" rather than antinovels. According to Sacks, apologues, which include Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Voltaire's Candide (1759), and Dr. Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759), are organized as fictional illustrations of "the truth of a formulable statement or a series of such statements." Such fictions are structured as persuasive arguments and subordinate character and plot to the development and exploration of certain ideas. Agreement or disagreement about those ideas replaces feelings about characters and curiosity about events as the primary pleasures of the fiction. The greatest pleasures and interests of Huxley's fictions, and the greatest contributions of these fictions to the English novel, are mirrored from these lamps: the carnivalesque novel and the apologue.
