Writing Around the Novel

Everything else is just flotsam and florilegia.

Last November, I was attending a formal dinner and I was placed (through the exquisite pot-luck of a randomised seating plan) next to a new tutor at my college. Let’s flesh him out a bit for you. Zealous blue eyes and a crop of light, downy hair. He could have been a placid twenty-seven, or a young thirty-three; normally I gauge ages accurately but here the project defeated me. As it was, he appeared neither extremely young nor colt-like, but was far from being old. I think given the occasion he was probably wearing a smart suit, but his regular uniform was a tweed pleasingly Oxonian in character. Sometimes people do exactly what is expected of them and it feels just right. Among the mêlée of dissident thinkers and radicals which higher education should and must produce, beneficed by our tax, there should still remain a legion of academics in worsted suits, port drinkers with gruff voices, those dieted from their prep school days on the bread and milk of Latin and Divinity; anachronism bred into the boy.

Anyway, I had been seated next to him, and arranged around us were a few other English students—none of whom were in my year nor numbered among my close friends. Nobody else’s conversation was forthcoming so I took matters into my own hands. (You would have thought the boy educated at Eton sitting opposite me would have been rather better equipped for this undertaking—but perhaps he considered the whole affair of our company beneath him. Only messing, he’s lovely.) I was naturally aided and abetted by a liberal flow of Corpus Christi College’s ‘Shiraz’, which is the cheap wine my college bulk-buys wholesale and covertly fits with a monographed label, giving the misleading impression we farmed and distilled the wine ourselves. Ah, but if you never buy into the romance of these things…

I was politely asked about my dissertation but, really, I had nothing interesting to venture about that, so instead I ploughed into jocular belligerence. The old pot-stirring impulse; the witch’s dexterous wrist, gliding the ladle round and round the perimeter of the cauldron. I looked at my tutor, blinked, and contended: ‘I think all literary critics really want to be novelists. They should be writing novels instead.’

Caught off-guard, he pressed me for my reasoning. Admittedly that which I had was unsubstantiated and spineless. I suppose, really, my point of view came from a long-standing sense of disillusionment with literary criticism. Occasionally I think it is wonderful. Literary history and scholarship I adore: writing which informs and explains something—eg. scholarship which has an argument—off the top of my head, writing like the early modernist Wendy Wall’s work on what seventeenth-century cook-books told us about female literacy rates. What I despise, however, is the verbose and directionless criticism which fidgets over an author’s use of metaphor. Which deliberates indefatigably over a close-reading of a short poem, agonising over every word as it was chosen (or not chosen, as the case may be). Formulaic: X author uses Y metaphor to create Z effect—except spruced up with some abominably abstruse literary terminology. I still don’t know what an anacoluthon is and I’m not sure I’ll ever need to. Even chiasmus I can only define half-sure of myself, and I’ve never understood poetic metre (I once almost cried in a university class when my tutor asked me to tap out the rhythm of a poem on the table-top. I wouldn’t recognise dactylic tetrameter dead or alive.)

I know people love trying to catch writers out. Expose the holes in frilly verbiage; unpick the threads of the garment to reveal it as all style and no substance. We are especially fond of doing this when said writer takes it upon themselves to opine¹ and—horror of horrors—has an argument to propound and defend. It’s great sport. Well, please don’t, or try not to. I’m only little and my musings have very little gravity; they’re not really worth trifling with. (Only joking. Chide me! Tell me all the ways that I am wrong!) I’ve read Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist and T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent and I respect critics like Harold Bloom just as much as the most earnest literature undergraduate, dog-eared, third-hand Norton poetry anthology tucked under arm, leather Cambridge satchel criss-crossed over body. Pedigree paradigm.

It might just be the physical size of the novel when viewed on the shelf (or, again, smuggled under one’s arm) that gives it its power. Bombastic thing that it is, self-aggrandising in its ungainly sprawl, often spanning upwards of eight hundred pages. Quite offensive in its loquacity, as though it had something to say which only it could, and it had to be said absolutely unhurried, in not a word fewer than it deigned to speak. A glut of unwholesome and overripe fruit. And to our modern sensibilities, maybe the novel’s length feels slightly out-of-place; a hang-up of a former time. Like a runaway king all bedecked in gold and ermine-furred capes and gilded circlets following a nation’s republican revolution. A crisis of the old order. My mum often quips of Victorian novels and their enormity: ‘Well, they didn’t have TV then, did they?’ In fairness… Still, there’s a wild amount of self-confidence bundled up in daring to write and publish a novel which seemingly takes it as granted that a) there will be a readership interested in its existence and b) interested enough to invest that much of their precious personal time in reading said novel.

And yet the novel represents the zenith of literary achievement. Skyward fingers reaching—trailing—nearly dislocating themselves from shoulder-sockets—to brush the heavenly feet of the empyrean realm. Isn’t the novel that which we write for? That which once inspired us and that which we hope with daunted hearts to emulate ourselves? The novel is the theoretical magnum opus which we strive for. What is a journal entry if not a rehearsal for the real thing, the novel? And doesn’t everyone have a novel in them? Squirrelled away, even if squashed down very small and neglected at the back of your mind’s warehouse, listlessly (and with fast-eroding hope) waiting for someone to pay it some heed? Doleful raspy brayings, bidding for attention.

If only you, the writer, would simply sit down and make the time to write with regularity! I don’t know if it takes anything special to be a novelist beyond stamina.

There is such a privilege in spending that much time as a novel mandates close-quartered with a character. Turning over their thoughts in your mind, muting your own self with something quite like selflessness to experience the character’s fictive emotions; making yourself a vehicle, a vessel, artistically and intentionally passive. The more time you dedicate to the enterprise—and surely it follows—then, the proportionately greater the remuneration? An ideal configuration of the literary economy, anyhow. (Though of course a poem read and digested in five minutes flat often has just as much of a burning claim on our memory. It too has fiery indelibility. Or sometimes we are haunted by a refrain from a favourite song immortalised, called upon, replayed.) As is habitual I digress. What I am saying is that in the very process of spending time with a novel², friendships are formed with it, bonds made. Most likely, you cannot recall exactly what was said in a novel nor quote it from memory. (The treachery of loving something and then forgetting; humans and their hostile sieves for brains). But probably you remember the way you were beckoned through the knots of the plot. You remember the ways the characters loved each other and how you rooted for them; you remember the moods evoked and the worlds you lived in for a while—perhaps on your morning commute. Or perhaps in a stealthy five minutes of under-the-table reading in a dragging maths class, perhaps in that last adieu to the day spent reading in bed. It’s that Maya Angelou quote, but instead applied to the reader’s experience: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” This sumptuous intransigence the novel achieves well and often.

Novels can be lived in like homes. That’s the joy of world-building, isn’t it? Rehoming yourself, building Rome in a day—and still finding that nothing is compromised, that your mental Rome is fully fitted with an aqueduct, sophisticated underfloor-heating, terracotta and marble architecture, remarkable plumbing and clear-watered baths to recline in. Ain’t nothing your willpower nor the hard graft of your imagination can’t raise from the ground. Children love it—world-building—they thirst for it at the break-time of their school day. Hurtling through their lessons for the pure exhilaration of being able to play pretend. As they are making sense of the world which they have inherited with its daily bewildering input of information, they copy certain facets of the real world, and supplant certain less appealing aspects of reality by configuring their own alternatives when constructing these dreamt-up polities. (Is healthcare nationalised in a fairy-tale? Has anyone checked?) But those precious make-believe games were always compromised by those truncated recess breaks, never long enough to spend idle in these magicked up lands before the teacher ushers them back indoors. (Do not mistake this for me unfairly critiquing schools. I venerate education—and teachers. In the same breath, I do not always believe imaginative play is afforded quite as much time in the school day as it deserves, but how I would level the score defeats me as yet.) Anyway, the novel has the ability to swallow its reader whole. A pretty display of phagocytosis. Swaddled and ensconced, well looked after and tended to.

And to be able to be such a liberal host, I suppose that the novel earns its long length. Its claw-footed, talon-pronged purchase on our attention. (As an aside, once upon a time, prose writing often came attended by such lengthy apologia in its prologues… pages and pages of writers begging their readers’ forgiveness for their having written so much and having so unsuccessfully availed themselves of their editor’s discretion. In some ways, it’s similar to the writerly traditions of apology we see in the modern age: when fanfiction writers disappear for months or years and then return to update the piece which they were working on, fronting their newly uploaded chapter with a ‘P.S. I’m so sorry for the unintended hiatus, school is killing me’. Well, good on you, kid, for getting back to writing anyway.

As I write this essay in the dungeon-like underbelly of the Gladstone Link library, I am very much aware of the fact that I believe I should be writing—or attempting to write—my own novel. I tried my hand once the summer I turned eighteen. The result was a mockery of the genre—although I was entirely in earnest, of course. But at least I wrote it: a hundred thousand caterwauling words, all of which could probably have borne it if they had never seen the light of day. To me, this sort of writing is like a cheaply stuffed pillow. It isn’t real reading matter; it isn’t what (for that matter) matters. (I do entertain myself.)

It’s not that the novel is the best or most rarefied example of literature, is it? It isn’t even, anymore, the dominant literary form. The essay is so hot right about now; the witty think-piece, the condemnations of cultural commentary. What is the essay if not a sort of jazzed-up, gentrified Instagram caption? Always perfectly portioned, which of course means: kept small. And yet there’s something so formidable about novels. I want them; I want to read them; I want to read your novel; I want to write mine. Why is that? Does a novel feel like a particularly satisfying legacy to leave behind beyond our human cinders? Or a rather nice thing to be able to say that one has done? Is it the achievement itself or the impression of it?

No, there’s something more to it—this diffuse and non-descript lionisation of the novel. It is real. Fantastic and miraculous though all kinds of art are—necessitous to our souls though poetry is, I remain utterly won over by the novel because of what it offers us both as readers and writers. Here is a real exercise of deliberation, intention, time-taking—everything influencers, funnily enough, exhort us to practice in our often slapdash-feeling modern world: mindful consumption. If you’re buying a sizeable novel, let alone one which is hardback, you’re probably dropping a good £12.99 (roughly $17 / €15.50) in one fell swoop. Grazing through essays online costs basically nothing, munching through the surfeits of writers’ minds without investing too much—time or money. The novel, then, seeks our trust. Trusting that it’ll return much more gratification than the dopamine delivery of algorithmically-curated online offerings, trusting that it’ll be worth our time, money, and the sustained effort of our poor handicapped attention spans.

There remains lots to (earn?) trust in with novels, but equally, lots to believe in. Closest thing to teleportation which we have, planes disregarded. And they are virtuosic lessons in empathy, although there are sceptics… Suzanne Keen claims that the ‘attractive and consoling case for fiction’ is wrongly over-emphasised: ie. she disputes the idea that reading novels is not time-wasting but actually makes us better and more empathetic people. Keen protests that ‘the case for altruism stemming from novel reading [is] inconclusive at best and nearly always exaggerated in favor of the beneficial effects of novel reading.’³ She concludes cynically that ‘[a] novel-reader may enjoy empathy freely without paying society back in altruism.’⁴ Worse, the novel-reader may believe that even without lifting a finger and contributing towards anything tangible, they might believe that simply by reading, they are doing and effecting good.

I believe, moreover, that there is still a residual fear of novels in our society. That sounds quite silly: a fear of novels. Nevertheless, for as long as we have revelled in the company of novels, our society has also nourished a fear that the novel is harmful or dangerous or unwontedly suggestive. As I say, people have been alleging for centuries—ever since the novel’s beginnings (whenever these were; I have, for my own peace, withdrawn from the fray of discourse which debates exactly which prose work was the first novel). It’s my belief that the famous Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume, was petrified of them. I’ll elaborate: David Hume was a philosopher and a historian. What he most certainly and decidedly was not was a novelist. But, one suspects that with less fear of both sympathy and the imagination, he could have been. In fact, he appears rather obsessed with the idea of fiction and imaginative writing. He was haunted by both fears and desires of literary affect, the devices of the imagination: literature calculated to make you feel, rather than adhere nervously, restrictedly, to the close-lying bounds of truth.

Hume ends his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) with a frightened denunciation of the overwhelming seductions of the imagination. Throughout this text, readers get the sense he battles wayward literary inclinations—his writing style is much too needlessly opulent for non-fictional prose—and from his panic! ‘Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.’ But then he softens. Hume relents through a charitable redux: ‘We save ourselves from this total scepticism [of life; the world; philosophising] only by means of that singular and seemingly trivial property of the fancy, by which we enter with difficulty into remote views of things’.  We need affect and sympathy, Hume concedes warily: we cannot get by for long otherwise.

A hundred years later, a man with opposite political views but that same historian’s vocation, Charles Babington Macaulay, also writes a history of England. Okay, so what, you as my reader might say. In an essay penned for the Edinburgh Review in 1828, Macaulay talks about how sincerely some of us try to record history, how accurate we try to be—how we try to capture truth and set it on the page, perfectly unadulterated and untampered with. A noble mission, though futile:

Perfectly and absolutely true it cannot be: for, to be perfectly and absolutely true, it ought to record ALL the slightest particulars of the slightest transactions—all the things done and all the words uttered during the time of which it treats. The omission of any circumstance, however insignificant, would be a defect. If history were written thus, the Bodleian Library [Oxford’s central library] would not contain the occurrences of a week.⁵

‘No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth,’ he reaffirms, but also posits that, in a ‘sketch’ if the artist creates ‘[a]n outline scrawled with a pen, which seizes the marked features of a countenance,’ then this artist ‘will give a much stronger idea of it than a bad painting in oils. Yet the worst painting in oils that ever hung at Somerset House [a London art gallery] resembles the original in many more particulars.’ Thus it is a game of give and take. Sometimes, to make for a more dynamic picture—one giving more of an idea of motion and life, the artist has to be a little looser with their brushstrokes. Conversely, a portrait which pays excruciating detail to every pore and flaw and microscopic detail present on a human face may indeed be hyper-real, absurdly life-like, but it may not convince us of its having ever been animate. This kind of art may not (or it may, beholders’ accounts vary) convince us of its sitter ever having felt a passion; loved. Meanwhile a novel, even with its long length, must omit certain details which a person would have to live out in real life. A novel does not choose to list every meal a person eats, however a real person living their own life naturally must live through each meal they eat.

Yet Macaulay is not always so positive about literary art. In another work from 1828, this time a thrilling sounding review of The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George II (by a guy named Henry Hallam), Macaulay decides now is the opportune moment to set forth his views on history-writing versus. novels. ‘History,’ he writes airily, ‘at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy.’ (We’ll generously overlook the tautology here because I do actually agree with him.) He claims, however, that this compound has been wrenched apart, meaning that nowadays, ain’t nobody writing nuffink good—nobody is writing that which is real and proper history. Nobody is writing the truth. Nowadays, then, ‘…we have good historical romances, and good historical essays.’ As a corrective measure, Macaulay takes it upon himself to pontificate that the duty of the historian or the student of history is:

To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society of a great man or on the eminence which overlooks the field of a mighty battle, to invest with the reality of human flesh and blood beings whom we are too much inclined to consider as personified qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture, these parts of the duty which properly belongs to the historian have been appropriated by the historical novelist.

I don’t know about you, but everything Macaulay describes sounds rather like the province of the novelist to me. Investing something with the quality of flesh and blood is literally an impossibility, but creating the likeness of life is the artist’s job, isn’t it? The historian—if we are being our most devilishly cynical (devil’s advocate dripped out in gown and white-powdered barrister’s wig)—isn’t their job the relating of dates and facts? Providing neat, sensible analyses for events—theorising the motivations and reasons behind certain historical actors? Applying sound methodology to somewhat unpredictable human pasts.

I think Macaulay probably wanted to write novels but convinced himself out of it, believing that the historian’s work was more laudable—because it dealt with truth and not the made-up, the imagined. His characters were not prancing sylphs magicked up, but real, mortal men whose lives (for better or for worse) materially altered our world. He dealt with reason and reality. His head was firmly screwed onto his shoulders. He was clever and logical and he was going to prove it; he was not an idle dreamer, could not be accused of the weakness of poetic sensibility.

I don’t know; I think we need fiction and that we need novels, even if we can’t measure that they do us any good. Even if we can’t correlate the reading of novels to an increase in personal empathy—or not in any meaningful, quantitative way beyond the anecdotal. I can find no suitable crutch with which to prop up my belief that novels are important. Reasoning this feels impossible for two reasons: that we need novels feels self-evident, if I am being indulgent towards myself, and secondly, somehow simultaneously defending novels feels like a fool’s game. Suzanne Graver writes heroically of the supreme novelist (she didn’t invent the realist novel as we know it, per se, but also she practically did) George Eliot that:

…[Eliot] wished for the work of the social scientist and the novelist to be complimentary. In their effort to achieve reform both were ideally to be involved in a common enterprise, the artist forcefully awakening, through the power and accuracy of their representations, the social sympathies without which the dry “generalisations and statistics” of the theorists would die still-born.⁶

Novels: 1. Hard Reality: 0.

One thing which made me smile when I read it was a twelve-year-old girl’s essay from as long ago as 1802, which won a prize in a magazine competition. In it she criticised with cut-throat glee those who enjoyed novels. (Of course, this is the more bemusing when the typical consumer of the novel in those days was a girl around her age.) A certain Miss Elizabeth Parker contended that novels were ‘extremely pernicious’ and that they ‘introduce[d] false ideas into the mind’. (I wonder which cantankerous aunt or uncle she was parroting…) Parker worries that the girl-reader of the novel will feel too much empathy, that she will ‘really participate in the various misfortunes and tragical adventures of the heroine of a romance’ and thus it will become her ‘greatest ambition to resemble some favourite character’ and, perhaps, throw herself in the way of some dark marauding suitor, have her virtue ruined, and bring disgrace on her family. Something like that? Miss Eliza Sinclaire, who came third in the competition, was similarly peevish about novels. She claimed that ‘[n]ovel-reading has also a tendency to make us unhappy, by inducing us to look forward to events which cannot happen in the common course of human affairs.’ Her natural conclusion then is that it is ‘preferable to be illiterate and good, then to be possessed by the false knowledge which Novels afford’.⁷

I could go on, ad nauseaum, if you (or indeed I) would let me, citing different dispatches of different people at different times fretting over novels, fiction, and what these terrible things signified for our society. They’ve been so controversial! The U.S. still bans books, doesn’t it?

Let’s subdue ourselves with something more hopeful about it all, figured in very beautiful words. This is from the writer Christopher Caudwell, the Marxist poet and critic who died at the tragic age of 29:

Poetry [he later qualifies that he means all art by poetry] is productive and changeful. The poetry of one age does not satisfy the next age, but each new generation (while appreciating the old poetry) demands poems which more peculiarly and specially express its own problems and aspirations. Thus we have the constant generation of a mass of songs, stories, myths, epics, novels, as a peculiarity of poetic life, which reveals art as something organic and changeful, a flower on the social plant developing and growing with the plant as a whole, because it sucks the same sap, and performs an office that benefits the whole plant.

Poetry… performing an office—ie. poetry doing something useful; something good? Hah. (When we all, you and I, know that as in the immortal words⁸ of W. H. Auden: ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Ridiculous to suggest otherwise! Poetry is profoundly useless.) Yet Caudwell extends so much belief towards the possibilities of poetry. He suggests that because of poetry—of literary, fictional writing—man dares to believe in good and in the renewed—renewing—possibility of good. Caudwell writes also:

Sweetened with a harvest song, the work goes well. Just because poetry is what it is, it exhibits a reality beyond the reality it brings to birth and nominally portrays, a reality which though secondary is yet higher and more complex.

Just because poetry is what it is. A reasoning that begins and ends with some metaphysical power of poetry; imaginative writing; affective, emotional writing. And indeed it feels annoyingly appropriate that this essay has ended up in the mire of metaphysics. Of course—for we are seeking to justify literature, writing: that which lies outside of substance and only ‘nominally’ finds form on paper, in books, on phone screens.

Yeah, I don’t have the answers and I was never going to be the one to come up with them. Maybe I was wrong about literary criticism, and it is good because it dares to take up the responsibility of trying (rather valiantly) to figure out why we love literature, why we defend it, and why—oh why?—we bother to get involved in the production of it. What I do know is that when I meet someone interesting (like the American translator living in Italy with a blue-eyed Italian husband of few words and an ebullient, fabulously charming daughter who was tall and dark with a smattering of freckles whom I met when I was working at a graduation reception), I will tell them they they should write a novel. In no uncertain terms, they should go forth and write a novel.

The Night Before the Exam by Leonid Pasternak (1895)

1. The poshest girl I know once told her sister emphatically in earshot of me: ‘Don’t opine,’ and this sound-byte is still one of my most favourite things which I have overheard. So subtle but galling. I’d never recover.

2. Highly recommend Christina Lupton’s Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century (2018; John Hopkins University Press) for more on this. Similarly, Deidre Shauna Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History (2014; The University of Chicago Press).

3. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2007. Accessed January 11, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central. (p. vii)

4. Ibid. (p. 168)

5. Charles Babington Macaulay. via Project Gutenberg - Edinburgh Review piece 1828. I’m not footnoting this correctly. I’m not a student anymore and you’re not my tutor, so you can’t tell me off for this negligence.

6. Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form. (1984; University of California Press)

7. All of these quotations were from a brilliant anthology in my old college library. The title of this eludes me and I no longer have access to said college library unless I ask a friend nicely. More to the point, my ex-boyfriend is probably in there right now. I can’t go along just to check a title for a footnote. You see my predicament…

8. As my first and very impressive professor at undergraduate delighted in telling us—these are not Auden’s words in full. This quotation is misrepresentative. Go and read the full poem and see what it actually has to say for itself, for poetry. The poem’s name is ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ and you can read it here: https://beta.poetryfoundation.org/poems/161870/in-memory-of-w-b-yeats