Novel No Longer

Richard Crary finds the term "novel" too confining, and wonders:

Why should contemporary prose works necessarily be treated as novels? Why do we insist that of course a given work is a novel, just not the kind of novel some readers expect? Why, indeed, should adventurous or exploratory or so-called experimental prose writing be subject to the same expectations as a novel? Why called a novel at all? (As always, I am ignoring the needs of the publishing industry.) Are Thomas Bernhard's works novels? Or might it be better to call them, simply, "prose works"? What about Blanchot's récit? Is Josipovici's Everything Passes a novel? David Markson's This Is Not A Novel was titled, so I understand, in response to a what one reviewer reportedly actually wrote in dismissing Reader's Block, his previous work. But what if we just saw the title as simply accurate and then worked from there?

There's no doubt that life could be made easier, for both writers and critics, if the identifying tag "novel" were confined to that plot- and character-heavy sort of narrative into which the novel evolved between 1850 and 1950 and which a majority of readers still steadfastly associate with the term. Devotees of "exploratory" prose would not have to contend, or would have to contend less, with objections that a particular work of experimental fiction is not "really" a novel, because it would indeed not be such and could perhaps be more honestly assessed according to criteria appropriate to what it is rather than what it is not. Many of the currently contentious critical debates about the purpose and proper form of the novel would presumably disappear, and those who insist it continue to be what it's always been and appeal to the widest possible audience would have the field to themselves.

Such a dispensation would have the added benefit of eliminating obtrusive discussions of "art" where the novel is concerned, since whatever art it would still be granted would be confined to minor variations on pre-established methods, and everyone still reading novels would be able to concentrate their attention on the "ideas" they supposedly express, the political efficacy they're claimed to have, the sociological observations they're said to make, or just the nice stories they're counted on to tell, all of which, as far as I can tell, are of much greater interest to readers of conventional novels than aesthetic values or formal ingenuity. "Style" might remain a relevant consideration, as long as it's used to identify especially pretty prose. Otherwise "art" can be safely relegated to the "experimental prose writing" Richard invokes, along with the latter's contrarian habit of representing experience in ways that aren't appropriately "realistic."

I confess I find this potential reinforcement of boundaries, and subsequent realignment of the literary sphere, initially attractive and possibly liberating. The reduction of the novel to its simplist form--or at least its most readily accessible--would allow adventurous writers to follow their creative bliss in whatever directions they wished (to the extent that they, too, are finally willing to "ignore the needs of the publishing industry") and critics to extend their horizons beyond the already known. Yet I think I would ulimately resist abandoning the classification "novel" as an umbrella term naming a still-evolving literary form. For one thing, a hardening of the boundary defining the novel would surely give whatever lies outside it a bracing freedom to explore new territory, but eventually it seems likely that either new boundaries would be erected around certain kinds of "prose works," boundaries that could prove just as restrictive, or that something like literary anarchy would ensue. Perhaps this anarchy would still be tolerable, depending on the quality of what some writers manage to produce, but such a state of affairs would make it more difficult to maintain a critical perspective on new writing, which might in turn make it more difficult for "prose writers" to gather an audience.

In addition, although I am clearly enough a partisan of experimental fiction, my appreciation of the experimental in literature is still pretty firmly rooted in literary history itself, and I am hesitant to conclude that those impulses that motivated writers to begin writing what we now call novels, and that has guided the development of fiction in general, are entirely spent. Fiction, at least in the modern literary tradition, began as an experiment itself, an offshoot of "narrative poetry" that began to test out the possibilities of extended narratives written in prose. Indeed, many of the early works of prose fiction, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Jacques the Fatalist, could be described as "prose works" seeking their own conventions rather than novels per se. The history of the novel, in my view, is the continued search for subjects, strategies, and techniques that would redeem the artistic potential both of the form and of prose itself as a literary medium. Many people seem to think that this search effectively ended in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, when novelists discovered realism, enhanced by modernist experiments in "psychological realism," and thus added these approaches to the earlier emphasis on storytelling, but I think that such an arbitrary circumscription of the novel's further development is effectively a renunciation of the form's own history as an "exploratory" practice.

Perhaps, given both the adamacy with which the gatekeepers of the "novel" in its ossfied version insist on its right to the designation and the sheer abundance of alternatives to this version offered up over the last sixty years (including those written by the authors Richard mentions), we ought just to accept this renunciation and get on with writing and reading whatever fresh "prose works" continue to appear. Maybe this is the price to be paid for the novel's brief period of popularity as a mass entertainment before the arrival of movies and television to usurp that role: the "book business" expropriated the label "novel" as a marketing device and has continued to force all subsequent efforts at expanding the form back into its slim container. (Although in light of what seems to be the imminent implosion of this "industry," it may no longer be able to devote many resources to any but the most gaudily commercial novels at all.) The novel has effectively been severed from its place in the unfolding of literary history and tied instead to the imperatives of capitalism.

But would we have to discard as well the more elastic term "fiction" while we're giving up on "novel" as hopelessly constraining? "Fiction" doesn't just mean "something made up"; it's a signal that, as a prose composition that shouldn't be judged by its conformity to the prescripts of "reality," the work at hand is free to distort, embellish, pare away, redirect, transmute, or transcribe the "real" in whatever way provides the work its integrity, at whatever length, and in whatever style or form. Or at least it could mean this if we didn't insist that "fiction" is synonymous with "story." Much of the "experimental prose writing" of the past few decades has, in fact, moved fiction closer to the practices of poetry (back, as it were, to the origin of prose fiction in poetry), away from narrative toward various other arrangements and rearrangements of language. If this tendency were to result in some hybrid form somewhere between poetry and prose narrative, and were to inspire a new name to solidify its status, I myself wouldn't complain, but I'm content to stick to "fiction" and to challenging unnecessarily narrow conceptions of its scope.

Comments

[Jacob Russell]

I begin my composition classes by asking my freshman students why Montaigne called his writings "essays." I like to compare what I want them to do in an essay to a "try out" for a sports team. That leads to interesting questions: what or who is "trying out?" Who or what is the judge of success? My aim is to make the idea-as-writing central. Yes, I will have to give them grades, but in their writing, they are not what is being judged, and though I don't pretend that we are equals in this effort, to succeed, they must learn how to both let the writing be a genuine exploration of an idea--to take risks, to write without knowing where the words will lead them, and to themselves become the first judge of their success. They are not in class to perform for my benefit, but the the writing is to perform for us together as readers. Only then can we discuss what constitutes success.

I too am troubled by "novel" as a necessary lable. I called my first effort, a "semi-comic literary fiction in seven movements," which seemed more accurate, given the priviledge of its loosly musical structure over the narrative. Why not, I wonder, go back to Montaigne? By acknowledging the experimental quality in the name, the essay has continued to evolve and branch out such that nothing else would capture its essence but that open ended designation--an essay, a exploration, a "try-out."

Why not...
Fictional Essays?

I like that... "essay" as Montaigne used the word in its French sense.

A much better description of the "novel" I've been working on...

Ari Figue's Cat: a Fictional Essay in 72 chapters.

[Jim H.]

Lit crit is not and never has been an exact science. And it's hardly the equivalent a social science either, as there is no general agreement over the precise definitions of terms. That may not be a bad thing—creative ferment, no calcifying of forms, and all that.

'Novel' can have any of several meanings, from the broad 'fictional text of a certain length' to a specific fictional form. Northrop Frye attempted a distinction of fictional forms: the Novel, the Romance, the Confession, and the Menippean satire (a/k/a the Anatomy). It is a classification that works when one is attempting to make some precise distinctions—say, between Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (Anatomy) and Banville's Book of Evidence (Confession). Frye hoped to recuperate/rehabilitate any number of works of fictional prose that had been slighted by the critical establishment because they did not fit the traditional definition of the novel (Austen, James) or the romance (Hawthorne, Scott).

You can read his essay, beginning at pg. 303, here: http://www.archive.org/details/anatomyofcritici001572mbp.

I recently posted a hyperlinked summary of it here, if you're interested: http://wisdomofthewest.blogspot.com/2009/01/frye-on-forms-of-fiction.html

I suppose usage of the term 'novel' matters in the context in which it is being used. If I'm talking to a general populace (or the marketer thereto), it's okay to use 'novel' broadly to refer to that fictional work of a certain length. It has currency there. But, for purposes of understanding the varied traditions of fictional prose, beginning, say, with Xenophon's Cyropaedia or Chariton's Chaireas and Kallirrhoe or Petronius, and including Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy and Pilgrim's Progress and The Anatomy of Melancholy, and up through Finnegans Wake and Invisible Cities and Only Revolutions and 2666, it makes sense to identify the specific, conservative form that is the novel for purposes of distinction, classification, and, more importantly, understanding.

Happy New Year, Dan.

Best,
Jim H.

[Bianca Steele]

The same paragraph struck me as well. I give the n+1 editors credit for recognizing that and feeling uncomfortable with it.

Dan: The history of the novel, in my view, is the continued search for subjects, strategies, and techniques that would redeem the artistic potential both of the form and of prose itself as a literary medium.

What you describe here is fine as philosophy, as definition and elaboration of the term “novel,” but unless tortured into a nonstandard reading you give no sign you would support, it leads to a theory that has no place for what novelists actually think they are doing when they are doing what they do. I’m not calling for a sociology of novelists in the technical sense. However, what you describe seems to say to any existing novelist, “It’s fine that you like what you like, but what you’ve already decided you like is in the past, and for the novel to be a living thing, we need new things instead.” Just saying.

Dan: the "book business" expropriated the label "novel" as a marketing device and has continued to force all subsequent efforts at expanding the form back into its slim container

To my mind, what constitutes a novel at any time is what established novelists, people who no longer have to worry about publishers’ shifting opinions to the same degree, think they are doing -- though it is obvious that there’s a conflict if those novelists’ theories have no influence on or relationship to what the publishers believe. My tentative guess would be that the novelists you’re calling experimental are trying to evade “the established novelist/publisher hegemony” entirely. I wonder if it makes more sense to think in terms of two different kinds of “novels,” rather than continue to insist that only the experimental line is still evolving, much less that it is just like the other kind of novel except that it is more evolved. (Is a 1960s experimental novel more evolved than a 1990s “mainstream” novel, or only than a 1960s mainstream novel?)

I disagree with some details of your analysis (esp wrt the relative weight to put on story, idea, society, and aesthetic qualities), but it looks like a good basis for starting to work out a definition (and maybe I’ll someday have time to do so). I do have some beginnings of thoughts on what a novel ought to be and do at my blog,

http://biancasteele.typepad.com/bianca_steele

in a discussion of what I’m ambivalent about, regarding the kind of novel Doris Lessing’s The Cleft is -- it sounds like you would not agree with the criticisms of this novel that I’ve heard, though, if you also would not agree with my own description of it.

[Dan Green]

"However, what you describe seems to say to any existing novelist. . ."

Ultimately all I'm really saying is that if a writer calls his/her work, or agrees to call it, a "novel" then it's a novel. This doesn't mean that, from within the existing tradition of the novel, some can't be praised for expanding its scope and others be criticized for staying with the tried and true. If the novel as a whole remains with the tried and true, it dies.

[Jacob Russell]

This is not 'theory' to me.

It's personal.

As a writer, I don't try to be "experimental." The short fiction I wrote when I started--by way of breaking my teeth, getting my chops, was fairly conventional... but with each story I wrote I realized how much work I put into reigning myself in--not consciously, but by some internalized stricture--and that what I wanted to do was... something else.

What most satisfied me in those early stories was what felt to me most subversive... like I was getting away with something... and when they were published, it was only because no one else seemed to notice!

My first novel gave me room and time to work out what it was I was after (it took me eight years). Then I found myself up against the commercial gatekeepers... agents and publishers who told me they LIKED what I'd done... but they didn't know how to sell it.

I wanted, just to see if I could, write something more "mainstream." Less than a page into the second novel and I found myself gleefully heading into outer (or inner) space... no matter. This is why I write. This is what I want to write... heading always into the dark, never knowing where the words will lead. Each new chapter, joyfully pulling the rug out from under what I did in the last.

All I can say is, I've come to the point where attempting to stay within the tried and true... feels like dying to me.

No writer can be the judge of the ultimate merit of their own work. I neither seek nor desire the stuff of fame and fortune. I carry no sense of entitelment--but to be locked out of the theater, outside the stage door, because one's writing defies commercial cataloging is enough to sorely try one's patience.

[Jim H.]

Dan,

You said: "all I'm really saying is that if a writer calls his/her work, or agrees to call it, a "novel" then it's a novel."

I'm not sure you really mean that. You don't allow that, e.g., she could just be wrong. Not know what she's talking about.

Then, think about James Frey calling his work a memoir or autobiography—when clearly it wasn't. He was either disingenuous or delusional. The same could be true of your writer: what if she's playing a joke on you?

I can be as relativist as the next guy (probably more so), but, it seems to me, there have to be—no, there are—some standard criteria for calling a thing a novel. The question is how flexible and inclusive the standards are. And the debate is over what those standards are—and, as your statement intuits, who gets to decide. There are plenty of constituencies: the market (e.g., agents, editors, the sales department), the community of readers, the community of writers, critics, or, as your statement implies, each individual in each of these various communities.

Best,
Jim H.

[Humpty Dumpty]

"Novel" is a marketing term. It means 'fiction longer than approx. 100 pages'. And even then there are counterexamples. That's the end of it. Any further pursuit of the true meaning of 'novel' is a misguided essentialist quest. Novels are whatever you want, or stipulate, them to be.