Storms Over the Novel

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007
Storms Over the Novel
By Hermione Lee

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
by Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher

HarperCollins, 168 pp., $22.95
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
by Jane Smiley

Knopf, 591 pp., $26.95
The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About
the Stages of Life
by Edward Mendelson

Pantheon, 260 pp., $23.00
How Novels Work
by John Mullan

Oxford University Press, 346 pp., $24.95
How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide
by John Sutherland

St. Martin's, 263 pp., $21.95
The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography and Culture
edited by Franco Moretti

Princeton University Press, 916 pp., $99.50
The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes
edited by Franco Moretti

Princeton University Press, 950 pp., $99.50
Nation & Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day
by Patrick Parrinder

Oxford University Press, 502 pp., $45.00

What good is the novel, the long story told in prose? Hegel called the
contingent, the everyday, the mutable, "the prose of the world," as
opposed to "the spiritual, the transcendent, the poetic." "Prosaic"
can mean plain, ordinary, commonplace, even dull. Prose fiction,
historians of the novel tell us, has had to struggle against the sense
of being a second-rate genre. Heidegger said that "novelists squander
ignobly the reader's precious time." In late-eighteenth-century
Britain, when large numbers of badly written popular novels were being
published, "only when entertainment was combined with useful
instruction might the novel escape charges of insignificance or
depravity."

In pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea, the general word for fictional
writing was xiaoshuo (in Chinese), meaning "trivial discourse."
Socialist critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
have accused the novel of bourgeois frivolity. By contrast,
aestheticians of the novel, like Flaubert, proposed the ideal novel as
"a book about nothing," or, like Joyce, as a game which would turn the
everyday world into the most concentrated and highly designed prose
possible. Moral writers of novels like George Eliot or D.H. Lawrence
believed in the novel as the book of truth, teaching us how to live
and understand our lives and those of others.

The novel's entanglement in "the prose of the world" can also be its
justification and its pride. The novel's virtue, it has often been
argued, lies in its egalitarianism, its very commonplaceness. And the
novel's everydayness need not be an enemy to its aesthetic integrity.
In his wise, deep, and witty essay on the novel, The Curtain, Milan
Kundera, a follower of Flaubert in his critique and practice of the
European novel, celebrates "the everyday" ("it is not merely ennui,
pointlessness, repetition, triviality; it is beauty as well") while
writing in praise of the novel's essential self-sufficiency:

    It...refuses to exist as illustration of an historical era, as
description of a society, as defense of an ideology, and instead puts
itself exclusively at the service of "what only the novel can say."

Kundera's celebration of the novel's freedom and self-sufficiency
makes essential reading in a long history of debates about the genre.
Ethical and aesthetic controversies over the novel have gone on for
many centuries—the number of centuries depending on whether you think
the novel came into being in the early eighteenth century, or (as
Walter Benjamin does) coincided with the invention of printing at the
end of the fifteenth century, or was lurking in Egyptian demotic
narratives of the seventh century BC or Greek romances from the first
century AD. Every so often these long-running debates are accompanied
by prophecies of doom: the novel is dead, the novel is drowning in a
dizzying virtual universe of instantaneous, interactive information,
the novel is having to compete for readers in "a world in which
millions of books are dumped in the market place at once."

But 2006 seemed, to me at least, to be a year when the novel's
survival and significance were not in question....

The year 2006 also saw the publication, in America and Britain, of a
number of books on the novel, as widely varying as the genre they
describe. They ranged from the personal to the magisterial, from the
historical to the technical (and from the chatty to the portentous).
They were aimed at reading groups, students, scholars, browsers,
theorists, anti-theorists, would-be novelists, and that slippery
individual, "the common reader." They spoke a great many different
critical languages. But they all, in their fashion, paid tribute to a
phrase from Virginia Woolf (used for the title of one of these books),
"A thing there was that mattered."

[...]

Edward Mendelson, Columbia professor and Auden expert, in The Things
That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of
Life, is more interested in the ethical than the political meanings of
the novel. He makes heartfelt, idiosyncratic, and illuminating
diagnoses of seven novels by women writers (Mary Shelley, Charlotte
and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf) as humane lessons
in how (or how not) to live a moral life. One example will serve to
illustrate his strong, didactic tone. Jane Eyre, Mendelson teaches us,
is a story about learning how to believe, as much or more than
learning how to act ...

[...]

In How Novels Work, John Mullan, a British scholar of the eighteenth
century and literary journalist, has collected the weekly pieces he
has written for the London Guardian newspaper on the mechanics and
tactics of novel-writing into a modest, helpful, and sensible
diagnosis of novelistic strategies—beginnings and endings, paratexts
and intertexts, first- and third-person narratives, present and past
tenses, inadequate and multiple narrators, and the like, drawing on
mainly well-known examples from Samuel Richardson to Philip Roth. The
Cambridge father of "practical criticism," I.A. Richards, is his
acknowledged mentor, but his intended audience is reading groups
rather than English literature students. With this in mind, Mullan
keeps his prose jargon-free, though he likes to gesture occasionally
toward theoretical terms, as in his useful account of "skaz." The term
is used of "a first-person narrative that seems to adopt the
characteristics of speech," and is derived from Russian formalist
criticism (originally meaning a type of folk tale). Mullan links
Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, and Martin Amis's Money as
examples of "skaz," pointing out how "artificial and brilliantly
contrived" such narratives can be....

[...]

At the opposite end of the critical spectrum comes Franco Moretti,
professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, who has
edited an epic, two-volume, multiauthored encyclopedia definitively
titled The Novel. The first volume of this mighty project, History,
Geography and Culture, covers the centuries-long evolution of the
genre and its worldwide crossing of borders and cross-fertilizations.
The second volume, Forms and Themes, examines

    a morphology that ranges euphorically from war stories,
pornography, and melodrama, to syntactical labyrinths, metaphoric
prose, and broken plot lines.

Then there are further divisions and subdivisions into large themes
("Space and Story," "The European Acceleration"), narrower themes
("Inconceivable History: Storytelling as Hyperphasia and Disavowal";
"The Long Nineteenth Century of the Japanese Novel"), individual
case-studies, and "critical apparatus" ("The Semantic Field of
Narrative").

[...]

As in all these books, there is a great deal of discussion about the
relation between the aesthetic and the ideological. In the long
history of attacks on the novel for being more pleasurable than moral,
or more about style than ethics, the image of the "sugared pill" has
been a recurring metaphor (as Walter Siti tells us here in an
absorbing essay called "The Novel on Trial"). As with fiction, so with
criticism. Moretti maintains that "pleasure and critique should not be
divided," but there were many times, wading through The Novel, that I
wished the pill had been better sugared.

It's all (as all these critics tell us) a matter of taste....

[...]

... coming to conclusions about the novel is as impure a process as
writing one. Indeed that is one of the few aspects of the novel
generally agreed on in all these books. "The novel thrives on the
impurity of its forms." "Novel writing is not pure." Impurity makes
categorization and classification difficult. Yet this is one of the
favorite activities of commentators on the novel, at every level....

At their most methodical and scholarly, classification systems of the
novel proliferate with Nabokovian obsessiveness. The most
awe-inspiring example of this in Moretti is the Society for the
Analysis of Novelistic Topoi (described by Nathalie Ferrand), a
worldwide group of scholars

    engaging in systematic research to recover the topoi of French
novels from the Middle Ages through the revolution and of generating
an inventory in the form of a computerized database based on that
research.

Ferrand, who sweetly calls this "a magnificent, but, we might note,
rather mad idea," gives various examples of such topoi—"Beauty held
captive in a harem," "Retreat to a convent occasioned by despondent
love," "Overheard conversation"—within which you can refine your Web
search to "Someone overhears a conversation in a garden." I began to
fantasize this as a contemporary party game. A prize for the most
examples, in novels written in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, of the following topoi: real estate agent has midlife
crisis; teacher charged with racial or sexual misdemeanor expelled
from academic community; child grows up with telepathic powers
transmitted through the nose.

The classification of the novel, with which these critical volumes
abound— into romance, epic, postcolonial, realist, socially committed,
picaresque, idealist, bourgeois, fantastical, and so on—can be
helpful, but needs to come with a warning: "All genres are hybrid, but
some are more hybrid than others." The most interesting pursuit of
categories comes when they are seen crossing cultural borders ....
Classification can be valuable, too, when the category is seen as a
shape-shifter, as in a brilliant essay by Bruce Robbins on how the
"upward mobility story" in fiction shifted from social climbing to the
making of a writer.

[...]

Among otherwise widely differing critics, there is general agreement
that one of the novel's main functions, whatever its shape or style,
is to tell the story of vulnerable, ordinary, eccentric, or obscure
individuals so that we will better understand them....

[...]

Theorists of the novel haven't much acknowledged the possibility of
reading for story and character, or of thinking of "characters" as "an
implied person outside the parameters of the narrative text," a habit
regarded as "the most glaring sign of readerly naïveté." Yet, as
Mendelson puts it,

    a reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not
reacting in a naive way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but
is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.

And that, he adds, is because the novel presents one of "the most
intellectually and morally coherent way[s] of thinking about human
beings," which is "to think of them as autonomous persons...instead of
as members of any category, class, or group."

Most of the authors of the books under review are interested in the
duplicity and doubleness of the novel, its acts of disguise,
contradiction, and suppression. One of Mendelson's main themes is that
novelists often speak in

    two contradictory voices in the same book. One, the writer's
official voice, expresses views the writer wants to believe but half
secretly doubts. The other, unofficial voice expresses views the
writer wants to deny but half secretly believes.

[...]

The idea of the novel as contradictory, double-dealing, and secretive,
the secret agent of literature, is matched in all these critical
commentaries by an equally strong idea of the novel as multifarious,
polymorphous, expansive, and superfluous, the behemoth of literature.
For the prose of the world to be turned into the world of prose,
superfluity, spilling-over, and generous abundance are called for.
These critics show how even the most formal and aesthetically
stringent of novelists also have appetites for excess....

Often, in reading fiction, or reading about it, one comes on the idea
of a journey: a worn path, a day's walking through a city, a quest, a
progress, a journey through time, with deviations and stoppages—at its
most extreme, a journey into the coffin, or a description of one's own
death. It is permissible to think about characters in novels as
people, and it is not necessarily sentimental or naive to think about
what might happen to them after we stop reading—since the novel, as
Mullan observes, "is a genre that would have us believe that its
characters might have a life beyond its pages." ...

[...]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20172