May 17, 2021
The Meaning of Novels: What’s so “Novel” about a Novel?
“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.
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A novel is a chance to push the limits of life. Most of the time, these things don’t happen, and people don’t have adventures or wonder-full things happening to them. But what if (sometimes what if with a few specific suspensions of disbelief) – and off we are on an adventure they would never have in real life, but maybe can have if they identify with the story or characters.
Including the author.
I think another dimension is about recognizing the adventure in life. In that sense, a novel can help us see things a different way, discover a new reality in the mundane, appreciate anew something we took for granted.
And yes, that definitely includes the author.
There is a particular dimension of adventure that is often ignored: the adventure of thinking. To succeed in conceptualizing something that before remained obscure to us is an expansion of our being, an addition of life, an adventure of thinking. Surely a novel allows us to live another life, because a novel is something other than a life, in that it opens us and our life to something other than itself, other than the mere repetition of itself, therefore to another life through that which is something other than life. In the specific case of the novel there is a mediation of this process by thought and emotions — which are, at bottom, the same dimension. It is clear that language is a violence, a brutalization, because to try to cram so many bodily pulses, sensations, shudders, tremors, in short, immense affects, into small noises and throat-scratches, simple repeatable graphic forms, well, that is an almost infinite, immeasurable violence. But it is this that has allowed us to go beyond everything, that is, to go beyond ourselves — I say in both senses, each one going beyond themselves, their individuality, but also us as a totality going beyond our limits. If language is the transcendental limit beyond which there is nothing (nameable), it is also the constant expansion of this limit and the going beyond of everything (we call human). This is not about being a hallucinating delusional completely out of touch with reality. It is about how the new is born from the old, that is to say, the old carries within it the seeds of its own overcoming and its surpassing towards the new. The supramundane is only born from the mundane, because we have no other, we have nothing beyond. Spirit is matter folded on itself. If adventure is an impossible life, then it is an impossible of life, an impossibility of life, that is, a life that is literally not possible, that cannot be lived by anyone at all. But if the adventure is lived in some way, even if it is by the characters — these fictional doubles of people, so similar to them — then life itself contains within itself the adventure, that is, it contains within itself its own negation, its impossibility. This means that adventure is the grain of death that is in life, the shadow of death that accompanies each and every moment of life. Under capitalism only one life is possible, that is infinitely boring. So capitalism not only forces us to die and to die always the same death, always equal to itself and equal among all, but it also forces us all to live the same life, equal to itself, infinitely repeated and unbearable for that reason. In this way, capitalism quiets and stabilizes the dialectical struggle between the forces of vitality and mortality in every instant of living. We could say that it is defined by the administration of life, by completely administered life. That is why time comes to be understood as clockwork, chronometry, measurement of time, no longer as an instant, as fright or surprise, as untransferable, unrepeatable, inimitable intensity. That is why, under capitalism, living and dying are the same, there is no more dealing with the dead because we and they are already one and the same continuity. This is why artists, under capitalism, become ascetic mystics, their procedures for producing their work are full of practices upon themselves, full of asceticisms, of transformations of themselves. The work becomes a way, not of providing a ready and given adventure for the reader, for the public, but a method of teaching the public, the reader, to seek their own asceticisms and make their life more bearable. The artist takes the place of the old master, instead of teaching a content, the artist teaches a way, a method, a mode or manner of being, a possibility. The artist (re)opens the doors to the future (of one’s life, of life in general, of society, of meaning, of art itself).
What an amazing take, imaginative and mature at the same time (and I wonder now, why would I instinctively consider the two quasi-incongruent).
One reason might be that I feel I’ve known this all this all along, yet it required language to be understood as a reality. In a sense, language doesnt describe it, but rather instigates it.
Fascinating stuff!