Writing: The Philosophical Novel

I was curious when I saw Ideas: Finding Something Deeply Personal in the Philosophical Novel on LitHub. David Hollander does so much define the philosophical novel as give examples (which should be read) and explain the importance to him of such fictions.

And what I discovered—at least partly through my exposure to certain kinds of fiction I had not known, as a student of the 19th-century novel, existed—was that while philosophy could beautifully describe the shape and dimensions of our human cage, only art could rattle its bars.

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This isn’t an essay about how great fiction looks or behaves; it’s an essay about how a person like me—skeptical of systems and at risk of lapsing into dangerous nihilism—can be saved by texts that hint at something bigger than what we can know directly.

Having wallowed in nihilism in the past, this paragraph got me thinking. 

Over at Book Riot there was 20 GREAT WORKS OF PHILOSOPHICAL FICTION by Rebecca Hussey. She does define the genre:

For me, philosophical fiction deals with ideas in a direct way. Sometimes this fiction contains actual philosophizing in it: characters might argue over ideas or a narrator might make a case for a certain way of looking at the world. Sometimes this fiction embodies ideas in its storytelling, so the philosophizing is implicit rather than explicit.

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...But I would argue that philosophical fiction highlights or foregrounds its ideas in some way. It’s a matter of degree. Any fiction contains ideas, but philosophical fiction encourages the reader to ponder big questions....

And I would like to have ideas in my writings be worth reading and reaf.differently than if I put them in an essay.

sch

1/16/22