What About A Novel With Ideas?

Again, I am dipping into Processing: How Martin Riker Wrote The Guest Lecture, an interview from Counter Craft

This I found interesting because of lines I have been working on almost for the past ten years:

One novel I thought about while reading The Guest Lecture was Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, which is of course very different but also a voice-driven novel about an academic obsessing about their field. (In that case, formal poetry.) I remembered Baker claimed to have walked around his house recording himself lecturing in his narrator’s persona to discover the voice. This may be a weird question, but it made me wonder if you had any unique processes for this book. For example, did you compose any of it while lying in bed to mirror the character? Late at night?

I am happy to say I have actually read that book! Was I thinking of it when I wrote this one? I’m not sure. The point of comparison I would draw when I think about it now, though, would be Baker’s handling of intellectual material (ideas, theories). The “status” of ideas in a novel is something I think about a lot, in terms of my own work and others’. One thing I loved about The Anthologist was that the narrator’s thesis—which I remember as being a kind of conservative argument for the superiority of rhyming poetry—seemed at once kind of loony (to me) but also ardently and artfully thought-through. There was a sustained ambiguity around the status of the narrator’s “ideas,” in terms of how the reader was meant to “take” them, that I thought showed brilliant restraint on Baker’s part.

When I got around to re-reading Raintree County, I was surprised to see how Ross Lockridge, Jr. illuminated ideas in his novel. I was trying to do the same, far more obliquely, than either Lockridge or in the book cited above. Lockridge used his characters to argue over the idea of America. They are good characters, their debates emphasize their characters, and whatever criticisms of didacticism can be made they do fail in the face of the characters' liveliness.

I do not see why American novels cannot address ideas - these are what fuel our actions, personal and social and political.

The original interview pointed to The Paris Review's The Covering Cherub: An Interview with Joshua Cohen, where I think this passage is pertinent to my thoughts here:

 

INTERVIEWER

Okay, but there’s a choice here. Putting aside the question of what’s commercially viable, you didn’t accidentally include large nonnarrative sections in this book. Something about the subject, or something about the project as it initially came to you, or as it developed as you went, led you to decide that these forms—the letter, the speech—were a part of this particular book you were writing. And of course it would have been a choice not to use these forms as well. Why this choice, in this book, is what I want to know.

COHEN

Because you’re pushing, I’ll try. The novel of ideas—which is a phrase I hate and I’m going to blame you for not forcing on me, so that I have to force it on myself—is a tricky beast. Why it’s tricky is because of people. Novels can’t have an idea without a person and vice versa, of course, and though novels can contain countless ideas, the persons they contain come in two basic flavors, the author and the characters. Sure, an author can be a character, and a character can be an author, but I’m speaking about fundamentals. Who is the person expressing this idea, to whom and how and why? Newer novels are pretty antisocial—the person with the ideas is the author, wandering around somewhere that’s usually a city, thinking first-world thoughts in first person, talking to the reader and so essentially talking to themselves. Call this autofiction if you want, call this essayistic fiction, whatever—it’s antisocial, with a narrator who’s also the protagonist who’s also their own doctor, lawyer, surgeon, judge; the resident expert, through which all knowledge passes: if they didn’t read it, see it, hear it, or if they weren’t told about it, then it doesn’t exist, not for the reader. Now, contrast that to older novels like, say, The Man Without Qualities or, even better, The Magic Mountain. These are social novels. There isn’t any one person with all the ideas. Instead, the ideas are given to, spoken by, incarnated through the characters, who meet up in salons and sanatoriums and go on strolls through the snow, or to dances, or to interminable parties and meals, wearing out their quotation marks as they talk and talk and talk. Sometimes these characters converse in groups that chain—in the Musil, Ulrich and Arnheim, Ulrich and Diotima, Arnheim and Diotima—and sometimes they go back and forth dialectically—in the Mann, Settembrini, the so-called humanist, versus Naphta, the so-called radical—but mostly they do both and more, and if they’re Russian, they also perform monologues without interruption, a guest delivering six pages on metaphysics as the tea cools, and the host has switched to vodka and is already drunk.

Don’t worry—I’m getting to my point. A lot of my writing, some stuff published, a lot of stuff I’ll never publish, has to do with navigating these categories. What I like about the antisocial novel of ideas is the immediacy of first person—I like to read a mind thinking. And what I like about the social novel of ideas is other people besides the first person—I like difference and challenge and arguments with stakes. In everything I do, I’m trying to find ways of combining these categories, of juxtaposing them, blending them, mixing them up—in Four New Messages and Book of Numbers by faking emails, chats, edited and re-edited interview transcripts and drafts, and in The Netanyahus by forging letters of recommendation and lectures. My interest in this comes from my sense that this is how we live, merged with technology, enmeshed in other people’s text, even in self-generated authorless text, and unable to distinguish fact from fiction.

From my reading, Lockridge found one way of developing ideas. John Dos Passos found another way of bringing reality into the novel with his newsreels. In one respect, I do not see anything new in Mr. Cohen's devices, while in another I see a serious criticism for the novel of ideas. We must write a story, the story must carry the ideas as the ideas inform the story. 

Thinking and work needs to be done.

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