How novels are smart

 

By CATHARINE MORRIS

On Monday Richard Ford gave a talk written specially for the Royal Society of Literature, to a full auditorium in Somerset House. His title was “How Novels are Smart”. “I was going to call it ‘The novelist as intellectual”, he said, “– but then I regained my senses."

But that was, in fact, his subject. He started by quoting Umberto Eco’s definition of an intellectual as “anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge . . . . Critical creativity – criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it – is the only mark of the intellectual function”. It’s a limited definition, said Ford, but when he came across it his “ears pricked up”; he thought of novels he had read. Did fiction produce new knowledge, or invent new ways of doing things?

For Ford himself writing novels is an “artisanal process” which involves a lot of “furniture-moving”. He doesn’t always know what he’s doing (which can be thrilling, he said). He thinks that readers tend to open a novel “with a sense of grave uncertainty” – they worry that their time will be wasted, or that they will fail to live up to the book – and look for reasons to stop reading. His first defence against this is action; “guns going off” etc. ("I’m just a realist”).

Eco said that “Those things about which we cannot theorize, we must narrate”. That, according to Ford, must be the aim of the intellectual writer. Ford also believes that part of a novelist’s vocation is to do good, and he sympathizes with the idea that paying close attention to particular “deaths, crimes, joys . . . .” is useful and life-affirming. Good novels, said Ford, use unexpected, well-chosen words that show the world in a different light.

We learn about New England whaling from Moby-Dick, the African diaspora from Richard Wright, the partition of India from Salman Rushdie, he said. But there is, of course, much more to it than “supplying info”: “fiction at its most subtle presents the unseen. It doesn’t reveal what’s there; it invents what was never there . . . . If that sounds bewildering, it is”. Ford quoted many writers on writing (see a selection of those quotations at the bottom of this post), and read out passages from novels that showed “brilliant word choices and emphases” – among them extracts from Light Years by James Salter (1975), The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (1980) and The Master by Colm Tóibín (2004). There were also these passages by V. S. Naipaul and Jennifer Egan:

"The story she told us was that her father, a simple serviceman with some factory experience, had had a fleeting moment of inspiration early in the war. He had hit on a new way of mounting guns in the tail of an airplane . . . . Always he was on his way to Ministry of Defense. Ministry of Defense. I heard those words all the time. I didn’t think she was romancing. Her use of the words ‘Ministry of Defense’ without the definite article – the the that the average person would have wanted to add – was convincing; it suggested that she knew the words as well as she had said . . . .” (V. S. Naipaul; from The Enigma of Arrival, 1987; p77, Vintage) 

“. . . . Doll was one of those people who seem, even to those who knew them well, digitally enhanced: the bright blond bob cut; the predatory lipstick, the roving, algorithmic eyes . . . .” (Jennifer Egan; from A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010; p132, Anchor) 

Ford concluded that “to define and detail and to push and extend what can be said is the essential genius in the great novel’s claim to intelligence". But “nothing is smarter” than revealing your basic artistic impulse – displaying what you think of as important and interesting enough to share with the reader. “Nothing a novel does is as profound as taking a risk on its own premiss . . . . All serious writing starts from within.”

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T. S. Eliot (from “East Coker”, 1940): “each new venture / Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling”.

Martin Amis (from an essay published in the New York Times): “The day-to-day business of writing a novel often seems to consist of nothing but decisions – decisions, decisions, decisions. Should this paragraph go here? Or should it go there? Can that chunk of exposition be diversified by dialogue? At what point does this information need to be revealed? . . . These decisions are minor, clearly enough, and they are processed more or less rationally by the conscious mind. All the major decisions, by contrast, have been reached before you sit down at your desk; and they involve not a moment’s thought.”

Henry James (from the preface to The Princess Casamassima, 1886): “It seems probable that if we were never bewildered there would never be a story to tell about us”. 

Walter Benjamin (from his essay “The Storyteller”, published in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 1968): “To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life.”

Randall Jarrell (from the preface to The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, 1965 edition): “A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it."

 

Photograph by Laura Wilson

 

Comments

[Andrew McCulloch]

One of my own favourite collections of critical essays is Italo Calvino's 'Six Memos for the Next Millennium' (1992), the posthumously published texts of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on which he was working at the time of his death in 1985. The last of these, 'Multiplicity', begins with an extract from Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel 'That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana' that illustrates Calvino's view - and practice - of the novel 'as an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world'. Gadda, says Calvino, 'tried all his life to represent the world as a knot, a tangled skein of yarn; to represent it without in the least diminishing the inextricable complexity or, to put it better, the simultaneous presence of the most disparate elements that converge to determine every event'. Although this may sound hopelessly over-ambitious, Calvino argues that it is precisely literature's duty to set itself 'immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes', into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.' But perhaps the novel subscribes, by its very nature, to a Theory of Everything. As Henry James says in the preface to ‘Roderick Hudson’, ‘really, universally, relations stop nowhere . . . the continuity of things is the whole matter’.

[Lord Truth]

Without the novel how much do we know people?Even with a clear encyclopaedic description we are only looking at the surface....
Only in the novel is there an attempt to create the whole personality ,its actions and feelings as it carries out those actions and the meaning behind them which the individual may not know themselves,we can see them as they take actions that will lead them to ..whatever...disaster..love..
The novel developed when at a certain point in history ,men and women had the time ,the leisure to sit and read and reflect on the human seeing people in a more three dimensional way and even more deeply,than before.The novel is a product of leisure and the criticism .--What are you reading? Only a novel.. may well be valid.
Yet without the novel we can never either see or learn to see people as complete entities.In that way the novel marks a philosophical advance...

[David Auerbach]

The writer and critic Christine Brooke-Rose makes some remarks in "Palimpsest History" that give an interesting contrast with Ford's statement that "All serious writing starts from within":

"What has been valued in this sociological and psychoanalytical century is personal experience and the successful expression of it. In the last resort a novel can be limited to this, can come straight out of heart and head, with at best a craftsmanly ability to organize it well, and write well.

"George Eliot – another knowledgeable novelist, though a woman — said it was not necessary for a writer to experience life in a workshop, the open door was enough. This is obviously true: the writer cannot do without imagination. Dostoevsky understood this. And mere homework is not enough either. But a great deal of this homework done by the classical realist was sociological, and eventually led, in the modern neorealist novel we are all familiar with, to slice-of-life novels about miners, doctors, football-players, admen and all the rest. Back to the personal experience of the writer in fact. Now personal experience is sadly limited. And the American postmodern attempt to break out of it rarely succeeds beyond fun-games with narrative conventions – a very restricted type of knowledge.

[Andrew McCulloch]

Although Calvino may have looked to literature for an all-embracing explanation of the world he knew as well as anyone that Laurence Sterne had, in ‘Tristram Shandy’, exploded the myth of completeness almost 200 years earlier. This is often regarded as a mischievously subversive anti-novel although it might be more accurately described as a proto-novel, one that recognises both the potential and the instability of this new form. Sterne cheerfully admits from the outset that he doesn’t know either where to start or to stop. In an attempt to impose some semblance of structure he even, at one point, has the narrator’s father Walter try and compile a ‘Tristrapedia’ – a gentle dig at Diderot’s Encyclopedie – which, of course, collapses comically under the weight of its own misguided aspirations. But if Sterne mocks the intellectual ambitions of the Enlightenment he also provides in the character of Uncle Toby – described by William Hazlitt as ‘one of the best compliments ever paid to humanity’ – a compensatory picture of simple human goodness. The thinkers in the family are at best muddled, at worst almost deranged, but Toby is a touchstone of sanity and sense. Sterne may look like a post-modern jester but his philosophical tail-chasing only goes to prove the limits of learning - and the lessons of the heart.