QUICK: FRANKENSTEIN. GOOFY MOVIE about a guy with elevator shoes and bolts in his neck, right? Well, there is a monster in there. But Mary Shelley’s novel is really an expression of romantic philosophy and a treatise about the limits of science. Had she lived at the point in history where we had nuclear power or genetically modified foods or embryonic stem cell research or any of those other things that have been identified over the years as “our Frankenstein’s monster,” she might have written about them. She, however, had the great good fortune to come along at a time when medical schools were examining the bodies of the recently dead and entrepreneurs were gleefully digging up specimens for the doctors’ uses.
There’s a popular myth that English professors are all frustrated novelists, but a more interesting question is, are novelists all frustrated philosophers? Okay, maybe not Harold Robbins. But the others. The Alexandria Quartet isn’t, as my students think, merely about kinky sex. Lawrence Durrell calls his four-decker book a “novel of relativity,” although I think it owes as much to Heisenberg as to Einstein. Kinky sex probably doesn’t hurt. And then there are Nietzsche and Bergson, who are everywhere in modern fiction.
Or maybe the adjective is incorrect. Maybe the novelist as philosopher isn’t all that frustrated. The novels of Saul Bellow, John Fowles, and Iris Murdoch are more accessible, certainly more entertaining, primers and critiques of existentialism than, say, Being and Nothingness. And way more fun to read. There’s a great passage in The French Lieutenant’s Woman where Fowles has his narrator say of Charles, as he is forced to make a difficult choice, “He had not the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was really a very clear case of the anxiety of freedom—that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a situation of terror.” The passage is typical of the novel, the idea of all of his novels. Fowles has great fun in his “Victorian” novel with counterpoising the mores and crisis of the era with those of his own, finding not, as we might expect, that the Victorians were particularly quaint or hypocritical but rather that their predicaments very much mirror our own, circa 1967, the year of the novel’s composition. Their anxiety over the new threat to religious certainty posed by Darwin nicely anticipates, for Fowles, the anxiety over existence as articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Their “piety” becomes our “authenticity,” their “hell” our “nothingness.” The questions with which Charles Smithson, gentleman of 1867, must wrestle—duty, honor, dignity, purpose, honesty—still resonate with the modern person, even if the outward trappings have changed.
Fowles wasn’t just guessing that they would resonate, of course. He had already taken them for a test drive three years earlier in The Magus, where they were a smashing success. The two books are full of surface differences, but at heart they ask the same questions. Nicholas Urfe’s dilemmas are very much those of Charles Smithson, updated: How do I conduct my life? Is it meaningful? Am I being honest? What gives it meaning? Those big, existentialist terms like anxiety, absurdity, nothingness, and authenticity are in many ways the age-old issues. What gives a human life value? If the person experiences a separation from God, where, then, does meaning reside? Of what, if anything, can we be certain, and how do we live with uncertainty? How can we keep death from negating the worth of our lives? The difference between the two Fowlesian protagonists is that unlike Charles, Nicholas knows the terminology and even hides behind it. Yet his protective coloration cannot save him from the genuine issues. That he discovers the need to confront them through an elaborate fiction—the godgame, as it is called in the novel—merely announces the parallel for readers, who engage ethical problems and questions through their encounters with fictional texts. We may sit down to read story, but we stand up from the novel having wrestled with issues of personal conduct and moral behavior.
And therein lies a key to ideas in fiction. If the books are to be any good, the story and its telling must work in the first instance. Who’s the kingpin of idea-oriented fiction? There are probably numerous candidates, but my vote goes to George Orwell. His big two, 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945), are in their separate ways Big Idea novels, the former a futurist cautionary tale and the latter a barnyard fable Aesop never thought of. The thrust of both is the encroachment of the state against individual autonomy—revolutions gone wrong, principles turned inside out in the slide toward totalitarianism, obsession with enemies turning all citizens into enemies. Nothing wrong there. Ample instances in the twentieth century, and Orwell didn’t even know about Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, or genocide in Rwanda or Bosnia. But here’s the thing: none of that makes a good novel. Absolutely none. What makes a good novel, and these two are more than good, is plot, character, language, narrative: in a word, story. Immanuel Kant had wonderful, amazing ideas, but that didn’t make him a novelist. Jonathan Swift, on the other hand, had some pretty fair ideas, and in Gulliver’s Travels he set them in a sufficiently compelling story to keep people reading.
The Law of Fictional Ideation: It doesn’t make any difference how good the philosophy is if the fiction is lousy. That master of malaprop Samuel Goldwyn said of message movies: “You got a message? Call Western Union.” That may not be quite the match of “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” but it’s pretty good. But I’d go old Sam one better. If you want to write a novel of ideas, first write a novel. And make it work. Any creative-writing teacher can tell you that student fiction (bad) comes in two basic styles, the all-action-all-the-time shoot-em-up-blow-em-up and the deadly earnest message piece that is deadly dull. The first, what creative-writing guru Stephen Minot calls “mock Faulkner” (but you can substitute Stephen King or Bruce Willis movies just as easily) will have three murders, one suicide, a barn burning, a rape, and a car chase in twenty-five hundred words. The other will have absolutely nothing happening in the same space—two morose teenagers tossing around Ingmar Bergman dialogue about their boredom. At least the former provides some unintentional levity. One suspects this is why products of creative-writing classes and first novels in general wind up chiefly in desk drawers and not on bookstore shelves.
The novels that last, and have something to say, capture us with narrative, then hit us with ideas. Generally. There are no absolutes. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress has hung around since 1678, but not on the strength of narrative dazzle. It’s earnest, devout, and an absolute grind. So anything’s possible. For the most part, however, novels need to be novels. They need to engage their readers and not rely on religious or ideological fellow feeling. That The French Lieutenant’s Woman was the bestselling novel in the United States in 1969 is a testament to Fowles’s narrative prowess, not to his ideas, interesting as they are. That the novel continues to resonate, avoiding the fate of most bestsellers, does have something to do with those ideas.
The postwar years gave us dozens of writers on both sides of the Atlantic for whom ideas form a large part of the fictional enterprise. Sometimes, as with Nabokov or Alain Robbe-Grillet, those ideas are aesthetic or formal, having to do more with the shape of the novel than its thematic content; indeed, in Pour un nouveau roman (1963) Robbe-Grillet proposes eliminating theme from the New Novel as one of the outdated elements, along with character and plot, that fiction no longer requires. Writers as diverse as Italo Calvino, John Barth, Claude Simon, B. S. Johnson, and Edna O’Brien attack the problem of form in a variety of ways and in novel after novel. Fowles says that a change of narration is a change in theology, and we can extend that to say much the same about a change of literary form. But many of the postwar writers confront issues we recognize as such, questions of existence and conduct, the roles dictated to the individual by society, the presence or absence of gods in the world.
Often the greatest pressure on ideation in the novel has come from writers from “emergent” groups—minorities, women, citizens of former colonies—who understandably have a lot to say after being spoken for and spoken about for so long. Take women novelists. When I went through school—including graduate school—one had the impression that there was one woman writer per era. Nineteenth-century America? Emily Dickinson. Britain? Okay, there were two, George Eliot and one Brontë (but not two and never three). Modernist Britain? Woolf, but uneasily. And so on. And now? Two things happened. One was that pioneering feminist scholars and critics such as Bonnie Kime Scott, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Elaine Showalter among many others, changed the landscape of literary studies, so that modernism included not just the men and the token Woolf or Djuna Barnes, but also Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Dorothy Richardson, H.D., Mina Loy, Vita Sackville-West, Zora Neale Hurston, and a host of others. In other words, writers who had been there all along and who had actually had quite a lot to say for themselves.
The other element was the emergence of powerful, sometimes shocking female voices. By now it’s pretty clear that I hold Edna O’Brien in high regard. So do a great many readers, and for precisely those qualities in her fiction that got her work banned in Ireland, novel after novel. O’Brien refuses to write about “good” Irish girls, or to be one. Her Country Girls Trilogy violated a lot of taboos, one of which was that Irish women ought not be pictured as openly sexual. Showing Irish men as withdrawn, emotionally stunted, or violent probably didn’t help, but it was the sexuality that did in the saga of Kate and Baba. Yet whatever the censors may have thought in the early 1960s, the sex wasn’t there for prurient interest. It was an idea, and a very basic one at that: until women are accorded their full humanity, bodies and sexuality included, they can never be accorded their full rights as human beings. Male writing had tended to present Irish women as variants of some combination of nun, mother, the Countess Cathleen, and the Shan Van Vocht, or Poor Old Woman, who is symbolic of Mother Ireland herself. These are not people but emblems, and it’s really hard, insists O’Brien, to live one’s life as an emblem. She even has a crow to pluck with Joyce’s Molly Bloom, who is perhaps more like a real person, and certainly more sexual, than any of Yeats’s women, for instance. In the short novel Night (1972), she offers her version of a woman’s night meditation. Her protagonist, Mary Hooligan, is as engaging, full-blooded, sexual, and profane as Molly, but she also comes across as a more completely realized human being and less of an artistic conception. That’s an idea at work.
Nor is O’Brien alone. At roughly the same historical moment, Doris Lessing, the Margarets Drabble and Atwood, Muriel Spark, Erica Jong, and a host of slightly younger writers such as Barbara Kingsolver have been writing about what were once called “women’s issues,” but which are really human issues. Dignity, the right to live freely and express oneself, equal treatment by one’s fellow creatures, self-determination, the right to make one’s own mistakes—those all sound pretty basic to me. What matters, of course, is that these are novelists rather than essayists or polemicists (at least, when they are writing novels), so their fiction must succeed as fiction. Which it has, splendidly. Lessing packs ideas and issues—about social justice, women’s rights and men’s wrongs, sanity and madness—into The Golden Notebook (1962) and her Children of Violence novels (1952–1969). The first work in particular is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century writing, at once complex and direct, encompassing the personal and the political, the emotional and historical. One of the most interesting features of the novel, which is structured as four differently colored notebooks recording various aspects of a writer’s life, along with a framing gold-colored notebook, is the way that a series of compartments, the notebooks, ultimately defeat the effort to compartmentalize, arguing for unity in existence. Since the novel is concerned with the life of a fictional novelist, Anna Wulf, it ultimately reflects on the process of its own creation and the way that everything in a writer’s life comes together and exerts pressure or influence on the written work.
Both Atwood and Kingsolver have achieved great popular success while addressing important issues as well. What they ultimately reveal is that “women’s” issues simply form one thread of the broader issues that make up fiction. Atwood’s Booker-winning The Blind Assassin (2000), for example, plays with multiple narrative frames, with novels within novels and truth within fiction, even as it explores issues of female identity and personal history. From Surfacing (1966) forward, Atwood has been a major feminist voice in the world of fiction, but she is perhaps never as simultaneously subtle and pointed as in The Blind Assassin. The play among truth, falsehood, guilt, redemption, authorship, unknowability, fiction, and identity is fascinating, perhaps the more so when the novel is paired with Ian McEwan’s idea-laden Atonement, which appeared the very next year. That two such remarkable, similar, and yet very distinct novels would appear so close together probably says something very profound about our age, although we’re likely too close to it to know what that statement might be. At the very least, we can note that metafiction in these two writers has long ceased to be a mere sleight-of-pen and become a major constituent of fiction’s larger program. Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1998) is on one level clearly concerned with the wrongs committed by United States and European powers during and after African colonialism, but those concerns blend with the damage suffered by girls and women at the hands of colonizing male power. That the colonizer is at both the imperial and familial levels at least slightly mad goes perhaps without saying, that the damage leaves permanent scars is both expected and shocking. From her first novel, The Bean Trees (1988), Kingsolver has married the personal to the political and shown ethical behavior toward the world to be indistinguishable from responsibility for the self. Just as Taylor Greer, in finding her own way, must do right by the native child who is thrust into her care in that novel, so the Price girls must carve out a relationship with the world, and particularly with Africa, as they strive to sculpt their own lives.
The big, often very uncomfortable, ideas run rampant in those disquieting categories, “minority” and “postcolonial” fiction. That’s nearly inevitable. How can a novel by an African American or African Caribbean writer not take stock of the legacy of slavery and racist mistreatment? How can an African or Indian novel, or any other from a former outpost of empire, not speak to, among other things, the experience of oppression or the chaos that so often follows when the oppressor withdraws? Chinua Achebe has a famous essay of complaint against Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, itself a pretty dense little novella of ideas, but his better rejoinders are his fiction from Things Fall Apart forward. The essay states his ideas; the novels embody them. History, as I suggest elsewhere, is the one inescapable fact. Stephen Dedalus’s “History is the nightmare from which I’m trying to awake,” is merely a sign of his callowness. Writers as outwardly different as Salman Rushdie, R. K. Narayan, Kiran Desai, Caryl Phillips, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, and Edward P. Jones have in common the making of fiction filled with ideas in response to what history has handed them. Jones shocked readers of all races with his novel of black slave-owners, The Known World (2003), but that material ironically freed him to talk about issues of race, privilege, class, and right and wrong in ways that a conventional white-black slavery tale might not have. So, too, with Phillips, whose Cambridge (1991) is an astonishing experiment in voice, bringing together a nineteenth-century English woman sent to the West Indies to look over her father’s sugar plantation and the slave, freed and eventually resold into bondage, whose name gives the novel its title.
What matters most, perhaps, in all these novels, and what makes the novel matter as a place for ideas, is the ability to bring broad ranges of experience down to the individual level. Groups don’t lead lives; persons do. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children isn’t the story of “India” gaining independence; it’s the story of Saleem Sinai, one person, the family into which he is born, his experiences as an individual in an emerging nation. It is through him that the collective can be expressed.
Right there is the genius of the novel form. It is the perfect medium for capturing individual existence, and in turn to be a near-perfect medium for capturing the experience of the group. The life of the ordinary person—right there is a big idea, the first one the novel ever had. The earlier literary forms were highly elitist. Tragedy and epic are both about the ruling class, although for rather different reasons. Comedy often had lesser nobility for characters; I can’t speak for you, but my ancestors would show up in Shakespeare, if at all, as the grave diggers and comic servants, the entirely expendable class whose stage time is counted in seconds. Even the lyric was intended for the leisured classes capable of reading—it had shepherds in it but wasn’t for (or even about) real shepherds. No, if your surname indicated the work you did or where you did it—Miller, Cooper, Smith, Farrier, Forester or Forster or Foster—you were excluded from the old literature. Then this new form comes along, catering to an emerging middle class and often about its members, and it’s capacious enough that there might be room in there for someone who actually works for a living. It’s still better to own things than do things, but it’s a start. No accident about it, though: the rise of the novel coincides with the rise of a middle class, and of liberty, and of democracy. This is a form in which ordinary people just might matter. But it’s not about a class, only about individual members thereof. In fact, it’s the first form in the history of Western civilization to suggest that a single person might actually matter in the grand scheme even if that person doesn’t wear a crown. What a concept!
You doubt? What do these people have in common: Tom Jones, Clarissa, Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, George Babbitt, Augie March, Bridget Jones, Emma, Silas Lapham, Don Quixote? Eponymous characters all; that is, they give their names to the titles of novels in which they play starring roles. When did that happen before? Oedipus? Hamlet? King Lear, for crying out loud? If you wanted a title on the stage, you needed royal blood. The novel, on the other hand, goes for red blood rather than blue. This constitutes a huge change not only in literature but in the history of ideas. This chapter seems to suggest that the twentieth century has a lock on idea-centered fiction, which is too bad. Ideas, and important ones, have been invigorating fiction since its beginning, and one idea above all others. Sure, Thomas Hardy’s cosmic doubt or Dostoevsky’s investigations of man and God or of crime and punishment are indubitably philosophical, but so is Henry Fielding’s comic narrative of the foundling Tom Jones and his attempt to find his place in the world. And so is Dashiell Hammett’s mystery with a detective named Spade, digging, maybe reluctantly, for the truth.
For novelists, there is one big idea, always present and always demanding of attention. It goes something like this: what does it mean to be human? How can we conduct our lives to best effect? For many readers, the novel is as close as we ever come to philosophy. And it may be quite close enough. Ideas, big and little, should never be discounted in the novel because “it’s only fiction.” It’s fiction, all right, but not only.