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“The meaning of novels: What’s so novel about a novel”. If you think the title is a bit insane, that’s what you get when you make a post out of a discussion between me and Igor da Silva Livramento, friend and fellow writer, academic, and creative-writing advisor. We talk about novels, language, and whatever else comes to mind. Igor is also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn, and also take a look at his blog and his page on Bandcamp.

Chris: This convo kind of started with my suggesting “No news is good news, I suppose”, which you expertly picked up.

Igor: No news is neither good nor bad, because there is no news to be valued or assessed. Yet, a certain literary background allows you to use this sentence the way you did. In a sense, it is a paradox. But it is only a paradox insofar as that paradox is the clearest and most direct way of saying what is condensed in the sentence. But how so? As I always say, but few people listen to me: Logic concerns only a very limited subset of human languages. Everything that really matters to say, that is, everything that is really interesting in the events of language lies beyond the limits of logic.

To jump to a more interesting part of the reasoning: This means that literature carries (with)in itself – encodes, someone will (wrongly) say – a knowledge (of a generative kind). But why all this? The strongest empirical (from the marketplace) evidence of what I am saying is in the growing trend of publishing houses adding “a novel” to the front cover of fiction books!

The Meaning of Novels: Beware of the Power

Chris: I must say, the first thing that came to mind when you defamiliarized “a novel” like this, was this grand question: What’s so “novel” about a novel? I mean, of course, as you suggested, there are specific factors behind such practices; marketing factors, to be exact. But the phrase “a novel” – which I use too with my own books – reemphasizes and perpetuates the fallacy we’ve been discussing often: that there is anything particularly “novel” about any story. So, what’s your take on having “a novel” decorating the book cover?

Igor: It is as if fiction has such a raw power, such a strong tendency to affect and change and mold people that they have to be warned that they are dealing with this dangerous thing called fiction! Beware! It is not true! Furthermore, it is fiction! Mind none of it, just run your eyes over the pages and think not of what you’ve read, for it is nothing serious nor deserving of such interest! No, you are overthinking, fiction is supposed to do nothing but entertain you!

No text is new, in the sense of novelty. Language is always itself and capable of absorbing innovations. At the same time, it is clear that there is novelty in art. I mean, even if it is a fitting together of pre-existing little pieces, that fitting together can be unique.

Remember that here, in Portuguese, these books carry the word “romance” on the cover, without an antecedent definite article. It seems that this usage – Romance – is linked to the chivalric romances and the Roman d’Alexandre tradition of the late medieval period. These are long narrative poems composed of various conflicts and plots linked together in sequence, with great recourse to magic and the unexplainable, as well as emphasizing the protagonism of a hero in his ordeals, from which he always emerges victorious.

Things Happening To The Characters

Chris: This reminded me of Mikhail Bakhtin, who examined such works – and chiefly François Rabelais – and pointed out the element of “chance time”, with “just-in-the-right-moment’s” and such magical coincidences, creating narratives where things happen to the characters, rather than because of them.

Igor: There are also the Romances as anonymous folk songs, the plebeian counterpart of the late medieval ballads. Besides the obvious lyrical tone, these almost ballads had an evidently historical background, but worked with a lot of fantasy and imagination, which is perhaps the origin of the term “romanticization” to refer to an unreal, untrustworthy, overloaded with personal views, way of narrating events.

For me, a Lusophone, it is not a novel (novelty), but a novel (romance). You see the issue? An issue brought forth by language, through language, via language (language difference, that is). It all becomes so plot-centered that characters lack any reality, any substance, mere conduits for the adventure to go on.

The Meaning of Novels: The Concreteness of Imagination

Chris: That’s also why I insist on downplaying plots and it both amuses me and annoys me when authors believe they have original and unprecedented ideas just because they (thought they) came up with a story. I mean, we could debate for hours on what the meaning of novels is, but I’m sure it ain’t larger-than-life plots.

Igor: In this respect there is a very common mistake made by beginning, amateur writers, especially made by those studying creative writing of an Anglophone matrix, which is largely made up of instructions for television, serial and film scriptwriting. They learn some plot of some sort, whether it’s the three-act structure of tragedy, elaborated by Aristotle in the Poetics, or any other, it doesn’t matter. When they learn it, they apply it to everything, every story comes out of their pens in the same mold, in the same format. The result is that all stories always look like the same story, it seems that we are always reading the same endless book.

A Story yet Unknown

The truth is, imagination suffers from not being concrete. All literature can only be judged if good or bad, if well or badly executed, if it exists. Without concreteness, that is, without a text effectively made, words organized along lines and more lines, there is nothing.

In imagination things are always better than in reality precisely because they have no weight, they do not exist, they are not concrete like real things are. That is why abstract imagination – like that imagination which, in the example, decides on some plot and wants to apply it to a story yet unknown – is an even worse trap than story imagination. Because a story at least has outlines of concrete, specific scenes, or certain traits for its characters’ personalities, a setting, etc. An abstract (plotting) imagination has none of such virtues, that is, none of such weights, of such approximations to reality, of such ways of becoming more real, it has to traverse a forever longer path than story (narrative) imagination.