LET’S SAY YOU’VE HAD your great insight on the human condition. It’s about the desire for peace or happiness or tomato soup. Something major, anyway. You want to reach the largest possible audience, but PBS won’t give you a special. So you decide to write a novel to, you know, tell everybody a universal truth. Stop! Can’t be done. In the world of the novel, the universal doesn’t have a zip code. If you want to write about everywhere, you’ll have to stick to just one place. There are some medieval plays about the human condition, with names like Everyman and Mankind. Their heroes, whose names are the titles, are earnest representatives of us all—bland, generic, indistinguishable, and undistinguished. There’s a reason Stratford, Ontario, has a summer Shakespeare Festival and not a Medieval Morality Play Festival.
There’s only one novel with any staying power that is overtly about a generic figure: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). That’s short for The Pilgrim’s Progress from the World to That Which Is to Come, just so there’s no mistaking the didactic intent of the work. It details the journey of its hero, Christian, toward a place called the Celestial City. He’s helped on his way by characters called Evangelist and, well, Help, and impeded by Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Obstinate, Pliable, and Hypocrisy, among others. You get the drift. The problem, from a reader’s perspective, is that it’s an allegory. These aren’t characters or places but types, and not very interesting types, either. The names have had more lasting appeal than the things or persons to which they’re attached: Vanity Fair, the Slough of Despond, Doubter’s Castle, Giant Despair. As allegory, I suppose it does what Bunyan wanted it to do. As a novel, it just doesn’t get it. The characters lack depth or complexity, so the achievement of the journey and the places and people encountered are the only points of genuine interest. If you want tales of individual humans wrestling with their faith and with issues of right and wrong, you’ll find much more satisfying reading in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) or The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne sometimes veers perilously close to allegory, but his people feel like real humans rather than cardboard cutouts, his ethical dilemmas genuinely troubling.
And there’s the trouble with allegory: dull, stiff, two-dimensional. The allegorist means well, and he doesn’t want us to miss the point. The point, however, is usually all there is. The novel needs to be more dynamic if it wants to engage our attention and our emotions. It needs to present characters as rich and complex as those we believe ourselves to be, and they need to struggle with problems worth their effort—and ours. This richness, complexity, and individuation is what the novel’s best at. Yet novelists do sometimes want to write about “the human condition” or “the problem of the past” or any number of vexatious big themes. So, then, what to do?
First of all, get a handle on the problem. Understand the twin, sometimes opposing, pulls of the local and the general. Here’s the Law of Universal Specificity: You can’t write about everywhere or everyone, only about one person or one place. If you want to write about everybody, start with one person, in one place, doing one real thing. Bellow’s Augie March, now there’s a guy—American, hustling, morally suspect, energetic, hopeful, a little out of control at times. Representative? You bet. But individuated, not quite like anybody else. You want to show the disillusionment and loss of World War I veterans? Jake Barnes. You want a place that stands for everyplace? Joyce’s Dublin. Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Erdrich’s reservation. Bellow’s Chicago. Melville’s ship. If you get the local and particular right, the universal will take care of itself.
Partly, this is a no-brainer. You can’t describe everywhere. Where would you begin? How would it look? How many millions of pages is your novel, anyway? And what does everyone look like? So obviously the novelist can’t go in that direction and maintain anything like verisimilitude. Beyond that clear-cut problem, though, lurks a trickier one: how can you convey universality to your reader? How can you make sure that your characters stand for something like all of us?
You can’t. Don’t even try. Don’t even think about it. And yet, it happens. Vive le paradoxe! And yet, as with most paradoxes, this one can be understood. I’ll let you think about it for a bit. (Hint: the answer’s not in the book.)
Meanwhile, an example. Let’s say you want to write about a big event. A really big, earth-changing event. Something like, oh, Indian independence. At midnight on August 15, 1947, something on the order of half a billion people achieved their freedom from colonial rule. Now that’s big. Might even be worth writing about. Here’s the catch, though: how do you write about half a billion people? You don’t. You can’t. Even just saying the names would take thousands of pages. But you can write about one person. You can even give that one person a special trait, maybe connect him (it is a him) to a few others who share that trait. You could even have him be born on August 15, 1947. At midnight. He could be telepathically connected to others who share the moment of birth with him and the newly formed countries of India and Pakistan. That’s the conceit of Salman Rushdie’s brilliant evocation of the emerging nations in Midnight’s Children. His novel is a sprawling tragicomedy centered around Saleem Sinai, whose life and tangled fate parallels that of his country. The strategy proves a winner. Why? In part, we can follow the ups and downs of Saleem’s fate far better than those of a whole nation. Partly, too, by using Saleem, Rushdie can select those aspects of India’s entry into nationhood he wishes to emphasize; an individual life, however messy, is far tidier than the whole history of a country. Even if that history is very short. And finally, he tells a great story.
The novel, because of its magical realist elements, is often compared to the work of Gabriel García Márquez. The greatest similarity between the two, however, is this localizing strategy, which also places them close to William Faulkner. Faulkner spoke repeatedly of his “little postage-stamp of ground,” Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Like Rushdie, like García Márquez, Faulkner grappled with history, in his case one even more gnarled and thorny than theirs, entwined as it was with guilt, failure, pride, sin, and the inheritance of slavery. But he was too savvy to attempt to write about the entire South, or even the entire state. Rather, he whittled his concerns down to a single county, based on Lafayette County, where he lived in Oxford, the county seat and home of the University of Mississippi. Here, in The Sound and the Fury (1929), he created the Compsons, an aristocratic family on a downward spiral from the social prominence of the plantation and General Compson to grandsons Quentin, who commits suicide while a freshman at Harvard, and Benjy, the thirty-three-year-old with the mind of a small child. In Go Down, Moses (1942), he tells the story of the McCaslins, descendants of a slaveholding family, and their long-unacknowledged black cousins, the Beauchamps. In his Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959), he creates a far-flung family of ne’er-do-wells who actually do pretty well, winding up, sometimes in spite of themselves, owning pretty much the whole town. They seem to support a Faulknerian beatitude that the rascals shall inherit the earth. In novel after novel, he explores various aspects of Southern inheritance, always focusing on this one small parcel of land.
García Márquez does much the same thing in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), using the fictional coastal town of Macondo as a microcosm of postcolonial South America. Many events of the novel—civil war, the prevalence of the military, corrupt leadership, assassinations and massacres, the dominance of foreign companies (in this case, a multinational banana company)—resonate as elements of the history of many Latin American countries, yet it is the spectacular and singular nature of the town and its main family, the Buendías, that make the novel a permanent feature of readers’ memories. Everything about them is prodigious, from the tremendous age of the matriarch, Ursula, to Colonel Aureliano’s miraculous ability to escape death at the hands of others and even himself, to his brother José Arcadio’s male member, remarkable for its size and the fabulous tattoos with which it is adorned. Even the gypsy, Melquíades, who sets the family on the path to greatness and dissolution, is a figure of outsized accomplishments, claiming to have come back to life because death bored him. You’ve got to love a family like this one. Except that there is no family like this one. Part of García Márquez’s program is to create a family like no other.
So how do we get from there to a pattern of experience that can stand for the whole of postcolonial Latin America? Ah, our para dox again. The solution, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves. The business of universality can’t be found in the text. If the writer tries to place it there, the work will almost automatically sound contrived. The writer’s job is to provide a story that engages, fascinates, provokes, and above all registers as unique. Robert McLiam Wilson subtitles his novel Eureka Street “A Novel of Ireland Like No Other.” That’s what every novel aspires to be, a work of fiction about x like no other. The novelist gets to create his story and to make it specific, particular, singular. Then he’s done. We readers get to decide on significance. We may decide that it’s genuinely universal in its depictions or themes, or that it’s not, or that it’s so poorly done that we don’t care one way or the other, or any of a hundred other determinations on many topics.
To come back to Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai has to be, above all else, himself. Rushdie can supply hints or suggestions of a broader set of connections, as he does starting with the coincidence of Saleem’s birth. What he can’t do is make readers take those connections seriously. We decide that for ourselves. Does he represent some aspects of modern India? Which ones? In what ways?
Do all novels aspire to universal themes?
I don’t think so. There may be representative elements in character or situation, but a lot of novels are happy merely to tell their story. In fact, every novel needs first of all to be happy telling its story. If it doesn’t do that well, there’s not much chance it can speak to broader themes. But many novels do not seek to go beyond their story. The obvious but by no means only works here would be category or genre fiction, as if “literary” fiction didn’t belong to categories or genres. What these terms apply to are those novels that fall into one or another of the popular culture genres: mystery, thriller, horror, western, romance, science fiction, fantasy. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, for instance, can’t be said to stand for anyone beyond themselves or a sort of wish fulfillment of sure justice. The novels they occupy suggest certain aspects of the world: the prevalence of evil, the murky ethical realm where good guys and bad guys meet, or the improbable ratio of darkness to light even in sunny Los Angeles. Similarly, with horror novels, say, it’s tough to generalize from a demented car/canine/caretaker, nor is that really the point. The business of entertainments, after all, is to entertain.
Even so, we can and do learn things from them. Not direct moral lessons, but more general implications about human behavior, the desire for justice, the need to be loved, or right conduct. We can’t help it; we are an inference-drawing species. Give us a particular and we’ll generalize from it. So almost any novel can teach us, and the novel has one big lesson that lies at its very root: we matter. A human life has value not because it belongs to an owner, a ruler, a collective, or a political party, but because it exists as itself. How is this in the novel form itself? It lies in the subject matter, which has to do with the little guy. Oh, you may find one or two novels that feature kings or princes or dauphins (real ones, not Twain’s), but nearly every novel that has ever been written is about an ordinary life, be it middle-class, working-class, or down and out. The people of the novel would have been very minor figures, had they appeared at all, in Homer or Shakespeare—a name to be killed off, a messenger racing to his master, a bit of comic stage business, no one to be taken seriously. And all those novels expect us to take an interest in the lives they present, to hang around till the end just to see what becomes of their chosen person. What’s more, we do. Do care, do follow with interest, do hang around to see the finish, big or small. Because they matter, we do. And that’s pretty universal.