On The Relevance of the Literary Novel

By Allen M. Jones, 11-05-05

You could argue the point, but it has always seemed to me that a painter’s talent lies first in his or her palette. I’m not talking about the taste for one hue over another (their “palette"), but the actual board, the untubed colors arranged in piles and dabs and smears. In cartoons (the artist wearing a smock, a beret, a goatee) it’s shaped like a kidney bean. It has thumbholes. In reality, it’s most often an off-square sheet of Masonite. You keep having to remind yourself not to sit on it. Titanium white is a mound in the center. Most painters tend a secret pride for this unconscious creation, this improbable, inadvertent work of art. Why did you decide to put the burnt sienna next to the mauve? “You can’t explain genius." It’s as much a reflection of their personalities as what ends up on the wall.

Similarly, as a novelist I’ve always wanted to describe my own subconscious. When you spend your days mining various associations (one thought leads to another to another), what’s most interesting is the maze from which those associations arise. The dank and damp, cobwebby storm cellar of childhood’s scabbed knees, playground bullies, swingset triumphs. Missed classes in college and football’s broken ankles, the coaches you should have told to go fuck themselves. Like quarters down a machine, all the coital groans and tiny little broken hearts. Failures at the office, successes at home. Descending the stairs, there’s the empty clank of bottles, the skitter of small creatures. Doors open darkly into doors. A dimly lit dungeon that can burble up the most unsettling notions.

A couple days ago, I delivered another novel to my literary agent. I don’t know about the title. I’m unsure about the tone. Humor could read as irony, irony as cynicism; cynicism as naivete. Three hundred pages and two years of constant fretting, the tap-tap-tap of a single tiny hammer into hard marble, late night slumps (this is shit, utter shit) and early morning exultations (genius, utter genius). A million and a half tiny little decisions with regard to dialogue, pacing, structure, backstory. And now – in this most-vulnerable stage, alee of the dreadful-done, waiting for the first e-mail, the first reaction – I can’t help but consider the validity of the discipline. Never mind my own work, what about the literary novel itself? Where in a world of dramatically competing entertainments does a quiet and introspective art form fit? It feels like it should matter. But does it, really?

The end of the novel, of course, has been endlessly predicted and lamented (almost exclusively, of course, by novelists). “People aren’t reading anymore." But what if the novel did, in fact, go the way of the dodo. Would the world be a lesser place? I got a theory. One of many. Not unlike epic poetry, performance plays, fiction was birthed from a basic human need for narrative. It’s as hard-wired into us as a sense of rhythm and time, a preference for salt and sweet over bitter and bland. As organic creatures, we need stories, and we need them with distinct beginnings, middles and ends. If the hero bests the villain, if love is found rather than lost, so much the better. Over the centuries, the variety of incarnations the novel form has allowed (while still remaining a coherent “form") seems improbable: Defoe to Dickens to Duras. It’s a resilient oeuvre, and for years, it’s headlined the show. It’s shown us ourselves. It’s given voice and pattern to a formerly voiceless, patternless existence. It’s reassured us with affirmations of justice and cosmic comeuppance. As a continuing historical artifact, it’s shown us each our own generations. These days, however (and alas!), the horizon of the literary novel has a shape disconcertingly like a question mark. Is it relevant?

First, there’s a lot of competing shit out there. Blame it on the western condition, the way money has come to be life’s only real report card. Egos are being built not on physical accomplishment but on the digital displacement of dollar signs. iPod this and blackberry that. This is an observation, not a comment. Those of us who are avid readers look at a world without books as a sere wasteland indeed. But we are the rare exceptions, not the rule. Hundreds of millions of humans, indeed, billions, live content, satisfying lives without ever having wrestled their way through Ulysses. “No, I said no I won’t no, I won’t, no." The last hundred years? Freud to Einstein, Picasso to Thelonius Monk, everything has changed and it’s not changing back. The spinning world is denying both entropy and inertia to pick up speed. In order to compete, we’ve had to amoebae ourselves into a hundred thousand sub-specialties. Orthopedists, dermatologists, radiologists. Nonrepresentative art, atonal music, the postmodern novel. Rothko’s floating bars of color, Pollocks drips and drabs, Rauschenberg’s bed. In the arts, doing new things has largely meant becoming inaccessible. That is, in order to understand Rauschenberg’s achievement, you need a background not dissimilar to Rauschenberg’s (for ninety-nine percent of us, his bed remains just a bed). Art appreciation has become a full time job. The responsibilities have been displaced from the artists to the largely disinterested public. In literature, the same dynamic has occurred, albeit less visibly. You can still buy a Louis L’amour, after all. A Stephen King. The novel’s not dying, look at all the books. But at the highest levels of literature, fiction as an art form, those windows to which we have can look for glimpses at ourselves (the novel as Stendhal’s mirror walking down the road), the readership is small and growing smaller. This isn’t the fault of readers. It’s the fault of novelists.

It seems, after all, an absurd complaint: Why aren’t more people reading my difficult, perverse, inaccessible novel? Eighty-three years ago, Joyce published Ulysses. Topping every little list as the greatest fiction in the English language, Joyce didn’t write it for the guy who tended his lawn, he wasn’t writing toward the universal, biological narrative need. No, he was writing for the tiniest possible group, to wit, his aesthetic peers, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Similarly, in our day, Pynchon and Delillo aren’t writing for the people from whom they buy their groceries. They’re writing for the professional critics, Michiko Kakutani and Michael Dirda. All well and good, of course. The level of art (no matter that it’s being appreciated only by the professorial) occasionally approaches genius. But here’s the kicker: An unread novel is no novel at all. How many of us finally wrestled our way through Underworld? To the extent that fiction is meant to be read, accessibility needs to be accorded some role in the judgment of it’s stature. If a book defeats an interested, intelligent reader, it is (by definition) less of a book. Finnegan’s Wake, to precisely the extent that it can’t be read, is a lesser work of art. What does it mean when a guy like me, who revolves his entire life around the artful presentation of words, doesn’t care to read a book because it’s too difficult? Joyce’s intended audience was...whom, after all? Joyce himself. The rest of us can go to hell. A novel that can’t be read? It’s a house with no roof, a car with no engine. It might indeed still be a kind of home, a type of car, but it won’t keep the rain off, it won’t get you down the road.

If this is indeed the trend in literature (achievement in art at the expense of accessibility), then the future looks bleak indeed. Surely, it’s only a matter of time until the relevant, literary novel goes the way of silhouette-trimming, of blacksmithing. Indeed, you might say it’s already happened. When was the last time an artful novel truly mattered? Maybe when Life devoted an entire issue to The Old Man and the Sea. Or maybe back when crowds were lining up around the block for the latest serial installment of Dickens. Making matters worse, insult to injury, the atmosphere for artful storytelling has rarely, if ever, been less coherent, less receptive. As consumers of narrative, we are overwhelmed with choices. Video games, movies, television. Every ad agency in the world has recognized the visceral human response to a story well told. The world is swimming in a tales, each one crying out equally for attention. That little peep in the corner, that’s the literary novel.

And so what do we have? The novel as an entertainment is irrelevant – passive airplane reading, imminently forgettable. The novel as a supplier of basic narrative is unnecessary, drowned in the clatter and bang of competition. As a vehicle for information-supply it’s unreliable. Most of all, and most lamentably, as an art form it flirts with untouchable, unreachable, inaccessible. What is it, exactly, the contemporary novel does, or what does it aspire to do? What should it do?

Here’s where we stand in the middle of the aisle and unfold a grocery list.

Consider the simple possibilities of language, apart from narrative attachments, the aesthetic appeal in the crafting of a beautiful, emotive sentence. (These possibilities are shared with poetry, of course, but the problems of inaccessibility faced by the literary novel are compounded a thousand times in poetry.) Think about the famous opening lines of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, the simple strokes of his language. “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees." Rhythmic, painterly, musical. Parts of this still make me want to cry.

Consider as well the complicated satisfactions to be found through an extended period of concentration, a few days living with the same well-imagined people, the same intriguing problems. We’re bombarded by narratives, but we’re not bombarded by sustained narratives. A movie or a commercial, a video game versus a good long novel, it’s the difference between a quick, firecracker pop and the Fourth of July. Given this sustainability, the novel becomes an arena for the most subtle possible variations in the human condition, the intricacies of character and conflict that, precisely because they are intricate, more closely contain within them the capacity to comment on real life. In the novel I just finished writing, the protagonist (through a limited omniscient narrator) talks at key intervals about how much he admires and respects his parents. Two hundred pages later, one of his friends describes a childhood scene around the dinner table, how this same character was afraid of his father, how he would tremble to pass the buttered corn. If this works the way I imagine, the reader will see in this contradiction some measure of his or her own parental relationships: Love and respect even in the face of trembling. It’s tough to do this anywhere but inside a novel.

And finally, perhaps on a subconscious level, we’re drawn to fiction because of the opportunity to spend time with another consciousness. Reading a good novel, you are creating a very personal, very intimate rapport with someone you will hopefully like and admire. Writer-to-reader is a one-to-one relationship. It’s not art by committee, which is only what television, film, and video games have to offer. When you spend time with The Sound and the Fury, you are, in a very real sense, keeping company with Faulkner himself. How delightful (and increasingly) how rare.

Turns out, no one needs novels. They are a luxury. It's up to novelists themselves, then, to publish only those fictions that demand to be read, that push the boundaries of what the form can accomplish (character, conflict) even while remaining accessible. We need to make the reader ache to know what happens next. Culturally relevant, artful entertainments, that's where the novel should be aiming.

In the end, however, the best reason to write is simply to have written. The redemption of the discipline lies ultimately in the fact that creating is better than not-creating. Here are the days you’ve been given. Have you spent them well? The novel I put on my agent’s desk, if it’s worth a damn, could have been written only by me. I’m alone in my potential exhilarations, my potential failures, this intricate entanglement of associations. If anyone wants to read it, and more importantly if anyone wants to pay me to read it, then that’s just gravy. It’s what we tend to lose sight of as writers. Our days are spent selfishly, in pursuit of a self-indulgent goal. Shouldn’t that be enough? Shouldn’t that be reward in itself? I've lately been starting to realize, even through an habitual melancholy and insecurity, that I would rather spend two years writing a novel for nothing than I would work in corporate America for a fortune.

Is the literary novel irrelevant, is it kicking the bucket? Maybe. But novelists are going to have to kick it first.

[End of article]