No More Novels

1800 words, 8 minute read

I must confess I’ve never been much for novels. Give me a good epic any day, maybe a short story or a play, some poetry, but novels…not so much. Of course, I have a few favorites but after Ulysses things trail off rapidly.

What can I say about novels that is 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 and not expect fireworks?

Novels range from panoramic swashbucklers to intimate steams of consciousness. They can include 100 characters or just one. They can cover events over multiple continents (or galaxies) 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 actions. 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. Generally speaking, continuity is strongly felt. Recent studies involving brain scans (MRI) show our brains spontaneously configuring sensory input into coherent narratives.

An ‘event’ is a story. Like every story, an event has a beginning, middle, and end. Every story, at least every decent story, has elements of novelty. But every story, no matter how novel, is constructed on a template drawn from one’s extensive library of ‘story forms’ derived from personal experience and/or from cultural transmission. A truly ‘novel narrative’ (whatever that might mean) would be utterly incomprehensible: Finegan’s Wake meets Jean Luc Godard. 

Ever visit that “vast waste land” (Newton Minnow) known as television? Thousands of ‘stories’ are constructed on just a handful of narrative templates. How many police chases, jilted lovers, betrayed friendships, etc. can you tolerate in one evening? Often stories are so similar that you can mistake something new for something you’ve already seen.

Sidebar: Sometimes I’ll watch a show and not realize until the very end that I’ve seen it before; other times, I’ll realize early on that I’ve seen it but elect to continue, discovering new content with fresh eyes. These are marks of good TV!

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.

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 rely as much as possible on our shared background to carry my story forward. My categorical imperative: “Change as much as necessary but as little as possible.”

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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 Hot Link – 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 smooth 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 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 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.

Riddle: “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 heavy handedly, the novelist attempts to account for my chosen values and my actions (route) in pursuit of those values. It’s a thankless ask. Personally, I’ll stick to Homer: ‘a god made me do it’…and I am that god, for me!

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Neuroscience is revealing how our brains are wired for narrative (Ingrid Wickelgren, Scientific American, September 2026):

No story accurately replicates events. They deliberately streamline reality into versions that emphasize cause and effect relationships. People’s real-world experiences are similarly edited by the brain to make sense of them; these edited scripts form our memories.

Culture shapes storytelling in ways that can subtly but profoundly affect our sense of ourselves. Family and society are co-authors, even of the stories we tell ourselves.

In 1944 Austrian American psychologist Fritz Heider asked 114 subjects to watch a crude animated film in which a small triangle, a big triangle and a small circle ricochet off one another and scoot in and out of a rectangle with a doorlike flap.

When asked to describe what they saw, hardly any of the participants reported the physical movement of shapes. To some, those ‘beings’ were in a love triangle; to others, they were embroiled in a family drama or an episode of bullying.

The brain does automatically what a screenwriter does deliberately. “When you create narrative, you say, “‘Well, this caused this, or this would have caused this, but this other thing happened,’” says Pixar’s Jesse Andrews. The primary glue is cause and effect.

In a 2022 study, when people watched or recalled scenes that were causally connected, activity spiked in certain parts of the brain and that higher activity was associated with greater recall of those scenes. Even when a film makes generous use of flashbacks and flashforwards, folks retelling the story restore the causal order, ignoring the director’s artistry.

Confronted with a continuous flow of undifferentiated ‘experience’, the brain breaks the continuum into defined ‘events’ and then reassembles those events into a narrative. “The building block of the movie is the scene,” Andrews says.

As far back as the 1970s, psychologists hypothesized that people store basic scripts derived from prior experiences and analyze future experiences in terms of those scripts. Your experience of your next trip to LAX will be informed by your experience of previous trips to the airport.

Every trip to the airport is different but every trip has certain features in common: arriving, boarding, etc. Surprisingly, studies show that you better remember those experiences that are closest to the mean experience.

Storytelling projects the neural patterns associated with one person’s experience onto another individual, expanding the latter’s inventory of experiences beyond their own. Stories that appeal to broad audiences are often rooted in shared cultural narratives which in turn reflect accepted ways of thinking.

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Narrative is the glue that creates solidarity. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives enable us to maintain a sense of continuous personal identity. Somehow, I am the same person who sat, bored to distraction, gazing out the window of Sister Martha Mary’s 4^th grade classroom onto the inviting school yard below.

The stories we tell each other enable us to share a sense of cultural identity. The Hebrew Torah, the Homeric epics, the Norse Edda and the Christian Gospels are examples of collections of shared stories that strongly reinforce the cultural identities of disparate social groups, across continents and millennia.

But narrative has its limits. Admittedly, it edits raw experience to create sequences of events that highlight cause and effect relationships. Whether causality plays a similarly important role in the evolution of objective events is a moot question.

First, my proposed ‘categorical imperative’ (change as much as necessary but as little as possible) ensures a world characterized by events that form sequences that often appear causal. But any conservative ontology would likely produce a similar result.

Second, our neural structure apparently encourages us to break up the continuous flow of experience into stochastic events with causal links. Whether that corresponds to anything objective about the World is, again, moot.

Third, and most importantly, no narrative can ‘account for’ the values we freely adopt or for the actions we take in pursuit of those values. Whatever else, this is a realm beyond the reach of narrative and so I beg, “No more novels” – please!