WHEN HUCK AND JIM are floating south on their raft, where are we? How is it that we can identify with a being as monstrous, literally, as John Gardner’s Grendel? Have you ever been Lucy Honeychurch? Leopold Bloom? Humbert Humbert? Tom Jones? Bridget Jones? The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves that we would never see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again. At the same time, the novel holds out its own possibilities, narrative miracles, and tricks that are rewards in themselves, seductions for unsuspecting and even canny readers.
Much of the continuing appeal of the novel lies in its collaborative nature; readers invest themselves in the characters’ stories, becoming actively involved in the creation of meaning. At the same time, they are rewarded by pleasures that are more intimate than the essentially vicarious genres of drama and film. That give-and-take between creator and audience starts in the first line, runs through the last word, and causes the novel to stay in our minds long after we close the cover.
And it is a real give-and-take. The novel begs to be read from its opening words, tells us how it would like to be read, suggests things we might look for. We readers decide whether we’ll go with the program, even whether we’ll read the book or not. We decide whether we agree with the author about what’s important, we bring our understanding and imagination to bear on characters and events, we involve ourselves not merely in the story but in all aspects of the novel, we collude in the creation of meaning. And we carry the book with us and keep it alive, sometimes centuries after the author himself is dead. Active and engaged reading is critical to the life of the novel and rewarding and fulfilling in the life of the reader.
In 1967, the novel was in a bad way, or so it seemed. Two seminal essays by writers with distressingly similar names appeared in American publications, fortelling doom and gloom. The French critic and philosopher Roland Barthes published an essay called “The Death of the Author” in the journal Aspen. In that essay, Barthes places the whole responsibility for the construction of meaning and significance, that is to say the interpretive enterprise, on the reader, the writer (whom he prefers to call a “scriptor”) being little more than a conduit through which the accumulated culture pours its texts. Barthes is being more than a little impish in denying the author the quasi-divine authority he was accorded in earlier understandings of literary creation. But what he is chiefly supporting is the role of active and creative reading, something about which we will have occasion to discuss throughout the book. Perhaps more alarmingly, the American novelist John Barth published “The Literature of Exhaustion” in The Atlantic Monthly, in which he seemed to many readers to suggest that the novel was on its deathbed. What he in fact argued was that the novel as we had known it was pretty largely played out, the “exhaustion” of the essay’s title referring to exhausted possibilities. Fiction, he suggested, was going to have to find something new to do in order to reinvigorate itself. There was a lot of talk of the “death” of old ways in 1967, a lot of emphasis on newness, its signature event being the accumulation of outrageous humanity around the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets in San Francisco.
What Barth seemed not to know (although with him, a lot of seeming is disingenuous) was that help was on the way. That same year, a novel was being published by a writer in Colombia and another was being composed by a writer in England, and they would offer ways forward from the apparent impasse. The English novelist John Fowles was composing The French Lieutenant’s Woman, possibly the first major commercial novel to seriously address changes in the landscape of fictional theory. At the beginning of Chapter 13, he says of his faux-historical novel that it cannot be a conventional Victorian novel despite its outward appearance as such because “I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes.” Instead, the novel teases readers with Victorian characters and settings even as it reminds them that it is a fictional, twentieth-century work that is merely employing Victorian conventions for its own ends. The literary gamesmanship did not harm sales; The French Lieutenant’s Woman was the best-selling novel in America in 1969. The Colombian novel was, of course, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which would appear in English three years later. The solution it offered was not one of metafictional play but of the wild eruption of the fabulous amidst the commonplace, what would become known as “magic realism.” These works and writers changed everything, so much so that Barth returned to The Atlantic in 1979 with an essay called “The Literature of Replenishment,” in which he admitted things had changed more in a dozen years than he could have foreseen and that maybe, just maybe, this novel thing did have a future. He cites García Márquez and Italo Calvino in particular as reinvigorating the form. So what does it mean to say that they “changed everything”? Did everyone begin copying what they did? No, even they didn’t copy what they did. There is only one One Hundred Years of Solitude, and even García Márquez can’t write a second one. But those novels showed possibilities in the form that had not been tried in quite the same way before, things a writer might do with fiction that would be sufficiently new and interesting to keep readers hanging around.
I believe, moreover, that the essays and the novels in question show something else: the history of the genre. The novel is always dying, always running out of steam, and always being renewed, reinvented. We might say, following the philosopher Heraclitus, one cannot step in the same novel twice. To stay put is to stagnate. Even those novelists we value for their sameness—Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Ernest Hemingway—are constantly changing and growing. They move, if only slightly, from one novel to the next; they set themselves new challenges. Those who stand pat soon seem stale, flat, and unprofitable. As it is with individual writers, so it is with the form itself. The movement is neither inevitably forward nor backward; “progress” in matters literary is chiefly an illusion. But movement there is and movement there must be. In a genre called “novel,” readers have some right to expect novelty. That’s only fair, isn’t it?
A FRIEND OF MINE, a colleague in another discipline, noted the change between the previous book’s title and this one and asked, “So how are novels different from literature?” It’s an excellent question, one that the literature priesthood would never think to ask but that lay people will come up with right off. I was reminded of the old syllogism, “All pigs are animals, but not all animals are pigs.” We can say roughly the same thing in literary terms by substituting “novels” for “pigs” and “literature” for “animals.” Are all novels literature? We could get some disagreement here from inside and outside the academy. A sizable percentage of literary people want to maintain walls around their little corner of heaven, although rarely do they concur on whom to wall in or wall out. Would Jonathan Franzen, for instance, object to being lumped in with Jackie Collins? Nor am I suggesting that the quality of all writing is the same. There are significant differences in quality between novels, as between poems, stories, plays, movies, songs, and dirty limericks. I would, however, suggest that they all belong to the same field of human endeavor, and we can call that field “literature.” Drawing distinctions comes later. For me, there is writing (in which I would include oral forms of entertainment and instruction, since when they reach me, they’re generally written down), and writing comes in two forms, good and bad. Okay, sometimes execrable, which could be a third category but which I think we can fold into “bad” writing more generally. All right then, so all novels are literature. All literature, on the other hand, is not novels. We have lyric poetry, epic poetry, verse drama, verse romance, short story, drama, and whatever those things are that Woody Allen and David Sedaris are wont to publish in The New Yorker. Among others. That only leaves one question.
Are novels pigs?
There are many elements common to all forms of literature, many sorts of signification we can see whether the writing in question is a poem, play, or novel—pattern making, imagery, figurative language, use of detail, invention, it’s a long list. There are also, however, elements that are specific to each genre. Our discussion in this book is concerned with the specific formal elements of one genre, the novel. I know, I know, those structural components, things like chapters—point of view, style, voice, beginnings and endings, and characterization—seem dull as ditchwater. They’re the groaners in English class, right? Oh, no, not flat and round characters again. But they don’t have to be that. Because they’re also the portals to meaning, the doors and windows where possibilities establish themselves. In choosing this opening and not another, the writer has closed off some options but opened up several others. A method of revealing characters both limits and determines what sorts of characters can be revealed. The way the story is told, in other words, is as important as the story being told.
And how readers will respond. I can’t go as far as Barthes in killing off the author, but I’m with him on the importance of the reader. We are the ones, after all, who exist long after the author (the real, physical being) is in the grave, choosing to read the book, deciding if it still has meaning, deciding what it means for us, feeling sympathy or contempt or amusement for its people and their problems. Take just the opening paragraph. If, having read that, we decide the book isn’t worth our time, then the book ceases to exist in any meaningful fashion. Someone else may cause it to live again another day in another reading, but for now, it’s as dead as Jacob Marley. Who’s as dead as a doornail. Did you have any idea you held so much power? But with great power comes great responsibility. If we readers are going to hold the life and death of novels in our hands, we should probably find out more about them.