Theories Of The Novel

Never having been one for abstractions, I keep getting myself tangled in theories. I seem to recall reading in David Hume a passage that everyone needed to know philosophy to better understand practical operations. I am too lazy and too short of time to go hunting down the exact quotation. Besides, I am quite attached to that idea.

Below are links and quotations to articles I think reflect on writing the novel. They may all be wrong - they may not apply to some genres - but I am putting forth here. If anyone cares to disagree, then put your disagreements into the comments.

 Being the crass sort, I think of the novel as a tool. It could be just a very long story, but I prefer thinking of it as a tool to tell a long story. And it is the telling that is important to me because without a reader there is no sense in telling the story. It is the tree falling in the woods - yes, it happens, but without it being noticed by a human being the falling is unimportant. Notice, I said reader and not a publisher. What I do not tell my friends is that I never expected to get published. That fact I tell only on this blog, where it is hidden in plain sight. 

I am not sure if stepping back from the world forecloses fully inhabiting the world. Stepping back might give a fuller perspective on the world. Kornbluth, as cited below, and I seem to agree on this possibility. However, I find myself leaning more towards the words of Mr. Chambers. Why cannot I have both has been a question that has often gotten me in trouble. Why choose between the redhead and the blonde when you can date both? That kind of arrangement works when the sharing is agreed to by both of the other parties. I will leave aside the problems of a lack of agreement. Chambers is correct that the novel can let one share the redhead and the blonde.

Not being publishable, I will not forego the importance of the author. I still have that much vanity left me. Yet, if the process includes an editor who understands the story, does this not enhance the writer? It is the editors who do not understand the work that tear down authorship.

Lastly, one of my first exposures to real philosophy was to pragmatism through William James. I have lost my way many times over my lifetime, but a pluralistic universe is one thing that never quite left me. Neither has the idea that reality - knowledge - is a process of inquiry. The novel seems to me a two-fold inquiry - of the story itself and of the writer.

From What’s a Theory to Do? by Brendan Chambers:

Backlit by the flames of omnicrisis, Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism and Daniel Wright’s The Grounds of the Novel offer two answers to this question. To them, literary theory can be either avant-garde or lyric, a tool for stepping back from the world or for more fully inhabiting it. Even as crises multiply, they assert that theory remains valuable.

Kornbluh’s theory is almost a weapon: a means of severing the tightening webs of cultural and socioeconomic “immediacy” that threaten to absorb each of us at any moment. For her, theory is essential for creating distance, giving us the breathing room necessary to observe, to think abstractly, and to envision a world that is not identical to this one. This is especially important now because, according to Kornbluh, the pervasive culture of immediacy that surrounds us insists on its “reality,” even when it is anything but.

Wright’s theory, by contrast, is something like a slide: a smooth surface meant to guide you down to the fundamental characteristics of our world and of the cultural objects we build in it. For him, theory is essential for revealing felt but unarticulated foundations, and making them visible. It is what allows us to leave behind false binaries, recognizing the radical pluralism of the social world, and perhaps, he provocatively argues, of the ground beneath our feet.

In this way, Kornbluh and Wright are diametrically opposed to each other, offering competing, exclusive understandings of the purpose of theory. But what they share—as do I—is a faith in theory itself.

If faith in something as abstruse as literary theory seems absurd, consider a more familiar vehicle of human knowledge: the novel. As a form, “the novel” has the capacity to operate in two registers simultaneously, representing both the enormous breadth of the social world and the intricate minutiae of the individual life. There is no reason why theory, taken collectively, cannot or should not do the same, providing us with the language to describe the abstract operations of cultural systems and the concrete foundations of everyday experience. Given the scope of the crisis before us, we will need theory of all stripes to find our way forward.

The War on Genius: Literature and its systems by Ross Barkan goes off into a slightly different tangent - 

What is a novel, or any work of art, but the product of its time, of commerce? What is it but another colorful consumer unit, to be slid dutifully on a shelf or hawked through the internet? I’ve been mulling, of late, actions and reactions, the trope of the lone genius and the trope of systems. One held very long in the culture before being defenestrated, in academia at least, over the last several decades. The other is now dominant—at least, among those in the know, those who still analyze literature. In a systems conception, the genius of creation is disregarded and dismissed; no lone spark could truly emerge, no individual could labor, by herself, to write the novels, poems, or plays that endure across the ages, or even get remembered a decade after publication. Christian Lorentzen’s essay in Granta on Dan Sinykin’s otherwise acclaimed book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, strikes at the heart of this sociology of literature, which is well-intentioned, fascinating, and wrongheaded in an obvious enough way: it can say very little about what’s inside the actual books.

Sinykin, an assistant professor of English at Emory University, proposes reading literature through the publisher’s colophon, which is the little logo on the spine that tells you if the book came from W.W. Norton or Knopf or Penguin Random House or somewhere else. “Aesthetics double as strategy. Author and publishing house might be—often are—in tension, a tension that plays out between a book’s lines,” Sinykin writes. “I linger over books in these pages, reading them through the colophon’s portal, in light of the conglomerate era. I show how much we miss when we fall for the romance of individual genius. In novels, the conglomerate era finds its voice.”

Lorentzen calls this perspective “disgusting” and I’m inclined to agree, if I would prefer an adjective like “misguided” or “dispiriting.” Aesthetics is reduced to a sales strategy and the pleasure of reading itself, as Lorentzen argues, is equated to being duped by a marketing campaign. The professionals who work in book publishing are fine, industrious people, and a novel doesn’t merely exist because an individual conceives of it and tosses it into the world (though in the era of self-publishing, this can be true.) The conglomeration era, which began in earnest in the second half of the twentieth century—when smaller publishers began getting gobbled up by larger publishers, and corporations came to be dominant—did impact which books appeared in print and which didn’t, though it’s difficult to say a meaningful aesthetic revolution was brought about this way. The primary change in publishing, I’d argue, that has come in the new century is the diminishment of risk-taking on the side of literary fiction, the abandonment of the concept of a publishing house propping up and nurturing a young literary career, and the end of a certain trust that was invested in individual editors—Sonny Mehta, Gordon Lish, Gary Fisketjon, and a young Toni Morrison come to mind—to curate lists to their taste. This is not the focus of Sinykin’s survey, which takes a much cheerier look at the human beings who devised publicity strategies, retail models, and even book tours. “Conglomerate authorship” is what he writes about and what he believes in, ultimately. The authorship, he argues, we attribute to individual writers is merely a process diffused among the “conglomerate superorganism.”

(links omitted.)

More philosophical, if that does not surprise you, my reader, is Frameworks: Knowledge is often a matter of discovery. But when the nature of an enquiry itself is at question, it is an act of creation Céline Henne.

Notice that the enquiries I have just described both operate within a familiar domain. The definite questions, with their space of possible answers, presuppose an object of investigation that is already well defined. The correct solution to a murder case might be surprising, but it’s nothing that a clever novelist could not imagine. Scientists can enquire into the temperature on Earth over the past million years because others before them have developed the conceptual, theoretical and instrumental tools that allow us to understand and measure temperature and study its effects on a host of natural phenomena. Precisely for this reason, we should not assume that all enquiries are like this. Instead, we should turn our attention to the enquiries that create that familiarity in the first place.

***

What distinguishes these types of enquiries, and what accounts for their differences? In addressing these questions, I follow the insights of Rudolph Carnap (Logical Foundations of Probability, 1950) and of Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962), who both emphasised the role of frameworks or paradigms in our cognitive lives. Frameworks can be understood as constellations of concepts, methods and assumptions that reflect our understanding of the world around us and regulate how we think and act. The whodunnit-style investigations can be likened to what Carnap termed ‘internal questions’ – I prefer to call them ‘framed enquiries’. Their defining feature is that they rely on settled frameworks that constrain the enquiry from question to answer, from problem to solution. In asking what the surface temperature of Earth was a million years ago, scientists presuppose (among other things) the complex theoretical and instrumental apparatus that defines temperature as a quantifiable physical property. Similarly, the question ‘Who killed Ratchett on the Orient Express?’ presupposes established concepts that distinguish between different kinds of events and actions. Our folk categories, along with their more sophisticated legal counterparts, determine what counts as suicide, murder, manslaughter, life and death, how they relate to one another, and how to differentiate between them in practice.

Once the framework is settled, it delimits the questions we can ask and the range of their possible answers, although the correct answer itself is not up to us. To express this feature, Kuhn likened the research done under an established paradigm to a kind of ‘puzzle-solving’, where the structure of the problem itself allows for only one predetermined solution. We can say that there is a fact of the matter about the surface temperature of Earth a million years ago because, given our current concept of temperature and measurement methods, this question has a determinate correct answer, although scientists will probably never get more than rough and uncertain estimates.

By contrast, in what we may term ‘framing enquiries’, which include what Carnap called ‘external questions’, the framework itself is at stake. The issue is not just what to think about things, but how to think about them. Such enquiries are concerned with the creation, revision or expansion of our frameworks. In their most radical instances, they lead to what Kuhn called ‘paradigm shifts’, as when physics moved from the Newtonian paradigm of absolute space and time to Einstein’s relativistic paradigm. While these enquiries also rely on concepts, methods and assumptions – as all enquiries do – they involve the continuous revision of existing frameworks or the creation of new ones as they progress. Consequently, these enquiries are open-ended and creative in a more fundamental sense. The product itself, not just the way of getting there, involves creation.

Interesting that within those last quotes is a reference to an Agatha Christie novel.

Any thoughts, dear reader?

sch 9/26