No More Novels

I must confess I’ve never been much for novels. Give me a good epic any day, maybe a short story or a play, or some poetry, but novels…not so much. Of course, I have my favorites but after Ulysses, Sons and Lovers, et al. my ‘best of’ list gets pretty pedestrian.

What can I say about novels that are universally true? Nothing. The genre has been so overworked, so crowded with anti-novels, that any affirmative statement is bound to elicit a list of exceptions. How do you get Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka, and Alain Robbe-Grillet in a room together?

Novels range from panoramic swashbucklers to intimate streams of consciousness. They can include 100 characters or just one. They can cover events over multiple continents and multiple generations or they can all take place in one room, in one mind, or on one day (e.g. Bloomsday, June 16, 1904).

But regardless of setting or scope, most novels have an overriding purpose, ‘to justify the ways of men (sic) to God’. They seek to account for a person’s feelings, thoughts and acts in terms of external influences: class or caste, childhood trauma, cultural heritage, etc. 

But the one thing no one can ever do is to ‘account for’ another person’s acts. Being a person means being unaccountable or, what amounts to the same thing, being accountable only to oneself. My life is not the mechanical result of unseen causes nor is it the product of my own grand designs. It is a series of free, creative responses to disconnected ‘events’, be they mundane, miraculous or absurd.

That said, I don’t experience my life as entirely random either. The appearance of continuity is generally strong but attributable to two essentially independent phenomena: (1) the continuity I choose to impose via my creative reactions to the actual world as it appears at various times and places, and (2) the continuity imparted by the interwoven fabric of objective events (Sartre’s facticity).

Life is like a word game played at a very high level. A member of the audience shouts out a phrase. I must immediately use that phrase in a sentence and then elaborate that sentence into a story that is original, well-crafted, and meaningful, all the while keeping my audience entertained, preferably laughing or crying or, even better, both. There must be easier ways to make a living! 

Happily though, there’s a trick to it! True, I have no way to control or predict what phrase an audience will throw at me. But my audience and I do share a huge volume of common knowledge, and I can rely on that shared background to act as foundation and scaffolding for my narrative. I sketch a few broad strokes in the dust, and I count on my audience to fill in with context. 

In the end, my story is a blend of creativity (me) and continuity (audience). It is a story of  ‘events’, i.e. relatively dynamic figures against relatively static ground. I am wise to alter as little as possible in my telling and to rely as much as possible on our shared background to carry my story.

In my view at least, the best performances combine the broadest possible use of common ground with the most intense flights of novelty. My categorial imperative: “Change as much as necessary but as little as possible.” 

No matter how introspective, novels look at people from outside-in. I know authors are concerned with emotions, motivations, and mental states. And stream of consciousness purports to take us into Jung’s backroom to see Freud’s sausage being made. 

But all this is external to me. It’s surface! I am neti, neti  – not this, not that (Sartre’s Neant). I begin where the world leaves off. I am not what the world is; I am what the world is not. “I dream of things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’.” (Robert Kennedy)  

Whatever you can say about a character is external to that character. As soon as you shoehorn an insight into a symbolic system, a language, for communication purposes, your insight takes on an order not organic to it. The vine-picked grape has become fine wine, you know, with ‘hints of cassis and tobacco’.

Simplistically speaking, a language consists of its vocabulary and its grammar. Grammar in turn includes a substructural infra-grammar that determines how we break down our perceptual field into semantic quanta, e.g. words, and a syntax which determines how we reassemble those words to form meaningful propositions. 

A good character is likely to have some rough edges. Stephen, Leopold, and Molly certainly do! But ‘a rough edge’ implies ‘a solid core’ and that’s something no real person possesses. In fact, we are Eliot’s hollow men and I’m not sure a novel can ever fully capture that emptiness. Even existential angst, when expressed in language, becomes superficial.

The real life of a real person is disordered, chaotic. Nothing follows automatically from anything else. It is an archipelago of events spread across an inert medium. 

How do I differentiate an ‘event’ from that medium? To be ‘real’ an event must satisfy Bateson’s Criterion, i.e. it must be a difference that makes a difference. As such, an event is a unit of information: it must differentiate itself from its medium and it must deflect the course of events going forward. 

Paradigm: Hercules cleaning the Aegean Stables.  The river’s flow is diverted and the stalls are properly mucked. 

“My life is a matrix of nodes. Each node is a bifurcation point. Like GPS: I enter my destination based on the values I wish to instantiate and a program calculates all available routes.” Who am I? Answer: Robert Frost . 

One way or another, subtly or heavily, the novelist attempts to account for my chosen values and my actions (route) in pursuit of those values. It’s a thankless task. Personally, I’ll stick to Homer: ‘a god made me do it’…and I am that god, for me.

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Carl Spitzweg’s The Bookworm shows an elderly scholar perched on a library ladder, yet surrounded by shelves full of volumes he pays no attention to, creating a quiet irony in the scene. His focus narrows to the few books he clutches—one open, others tucked under his arm or between his knees—while the vast, untouched collection around him emphasizes how much he is ignoring. This contrast turns the painting into a gentle satire of obsessive scholarship, suggesting that even in a room overflowing with knowledge, he sees only the tiny slice he already holds.