Further Thornts on the Novel

theory and the novel

 

The divide between those who take a theoretical approach to the novel or poetry and those who take an empirical one might appear to be unbridgeable, especially given my heated rejection of any a priori theoretical determination of a novel’s composition. But I am not a dogmatist in this and recognize, first of all, that different people approach the world differently, and that there are not simply two types of orientation, but many. And as an empiricist, you know, anything that works is fine. I also see a dialectical relation between the two. in reality, as an artist, I am always shifting back and forth between theory and practice, and one informs the other. I approach a writing project with aesthetic biases, philosophical and emotional dispositions, political passions, spiritual persuasions, psycho-sexual obsessions, agendas hidden and exposed. I do not know the entire extant of this terroire, nor do I wish to. it is the territory to be explored, the mysterium, the energy, the knowledge unfolding in the work.

 

But as an empiricist I see the real importance of theory for the interpretation of the novel. I may not need it much to write a book, but to understand a book it is indispensable and always there. I also don’t believe a writer can achieve much in the novel without a thorough historical and developmental knowledge of the art form, but that is a bias of my own theories.

 

My theories tend to be aesthetic, though I believe firmly that the novel in impulse, history and orientation is social. it is a creature of the marketplace, from its obscure origins in the days of oral storytellers and performers, to its first European bourgeois buddings in the 17th and 18^th centuries, to its salad days in the 19^th-20^th centuries, before film, radio and television displaced it. I am of course talking about narrative, and the great 19^th century novels were all influenced in one way or another by theatrical conventions. Shakespeare and Lopa de Vega are as much the fathers of the novel as Jane Austen is the mother. Realism is an entirely different story. Narrative novels have always had an unruly, imaginative vein running through them, from Rabelais, to Cervantes, to Swift and on. But these are still recognizably narrative fictions.

Non-narrative writing is nothing new. Lyrical poetry, as opposed to epic or dramatic, does not have to be narrative to be effective. But the Ode is the longest successful form for the lyric poem. A 300 page lyrical poem would be tedious.

 

Even Finnegans Wake is in some senses both narrative and realistic, though it requires stretching these terms almost beyond their limit. Finnegans Wake tells the same story over and over and over again. And it is mimetic of a Bardo state of consciousness.

 

Realism is a moving target. To see Joyce for instance as progressing from realism to whatever we want to call Finnegans Wake is a simplification. It also doesn’t recognize that Dubliners, and indeed all realist fiction of the time, was quite radical and subject to censorship. What is developing in Joyce is a greater and greater range of mimesis, an expansion of the human subject and of the novels grasp way beyond domestic crises and descriptions of working class Dublin. Joyce’s roots are in the 19^th century: French symbolism and the realist drama of Ibsen. They are an unlikely combination but the energy of the juxtaposition (to use an aesthetic theory of the time) launched him into the most remote and commanding perspective of any writer since Shakespeare.

 

While novels have changed the world, I don’t believe that is their primary purpose, nor can they fulfill that expectation. The novel, like any art form, is a way of understanding ourselves, where we are, and of understanding others, and it does so best by being the personal expression of an individual artist. The novel is a consolation and an entertainment, and at least in the field of language, can be a laboratory for changing concepts. I like to think one social purpose the novel can contribute to, for instance, is that of finding an emotive, exciting, suspenseful, scary, beautiful language that is not misogynistic or racist; that the novelist has an opportunity to recreate all of the genres of fiction in a way that is not belittling to others or that perpetuates ideas and languages that have been used to destroy others, while remaining rollicking, violent, sexy and fun. A tall order. But it only will do this because the demand was created elsewhere and we novelists embraced these ideas before we picked up our pens to write scintillating and titillating entertainments. And, of course, there are those who will feel that any descriptive prose will objectify, since communication depends to a degree on stereotype. But they should probably not read novels, or at least, not read great ones. Because the other characteristic of fiction is its Tourette’s Syndrome. Novelists cannot help but blurt out the forbidden, and that is why we love them.