novel concepts

before we get started here, obligatory “of course I’m procrastinating on writing by writing about writing”

my ambitions are in excess of my abilities at present. I want to write the kind of novel that swallows the whole world up and spits it back out so that the reader sees it anew, with a sharpened understanding of where we’ve been, where we are, where we’re going. some of you know what specific model I have in mind when I say that, and we’ll get to it, don’t you worry. but first, it’s worth asking myself, what does a novel do?

for a long time, I’ve been dissatisfied with what a lot of my generation thinks a novel does: distill personal experience into simple language that eschews grand narratives or high modernist ambitions in favor of “direct” communication that verges on reportage. memoir-as-novel, autofiction, alt-lit and its offshoots all exemplify this strain of literature.

I have been known to express distaste, if not outright disdain, for this approach to literature. it strikes me as intellectually lazy, narcissistic in the excess, even irresponsible, given the “state of the world.” a certain writer who sometimes serves as metonym for all these ideas, let’s call him Towel N, goes so far as to claim he prefers autofiction because “the closer to reality it is, the more I like it. The next level of autofiction is nonfiction.” leaving aside the confused categories (what would it even mean for nonfiction to be the “next level” of autofiction? like, there’s a hierarchy? does one somehow graduate from the lower, fictional levels of literature into the higher, nonfictional levels? what exactly marks the difference then?), I fundamentally disagree with Towel N’s faith in the ability to document “reality” in a “literal/concrete” way. a maxim I prefer is that all writing is lying. a less cynical version is that we create the world through our attempts at describing it; there’s no “objective” reality to uncover. the map may not be the territory, but it does shape what borders we allow ourselves to be governed by.

however, it’s dishonest of me to say I don’t at all enjoy literature that’s more or less a representation in close facsimile to events as they’re experienced by the author. Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Anais Nin, Marguerite Duras, Jean Rhys, even Towel N, have all written books I hold in high esteem. I have friends whose writing might be called “alt-lit” or adjacent. so clearly it’s not really “narcissism” that bothers me. and even if I don’t exactly agree with what Emerson said about how novels will be supplanted by autobiography once writers know how to carefully select and describe their experience, I sniff what he’s stepping in.  

as an aside, it’s also not really apathy about the “state of the world” that bothers me either: cringey attempts at social commentary in something like Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler drive me insane, largely because they merely parrot poorly thought out punditry that seems to almost conscientiously skirt actually discussing any of what makes the modern world the way it is. this is what keeps me from reading something like The Topeka School or the Jenny Offill book about climate change. Dept. of Speculation was….fine. so, even granting that I don’t need literature to be a vehicle for social commentary, a neo-Victorian overreliance on sentimental personal narrative that obfuscates the violence lurking beneath life in the developed world is the primary mode of contemporary letters, and it pisses me off, so my instinct is to run in the opposite direction, avoiding overtly personal meditations on “trauma” or whatever the fuck, in favor of fabulist swashbuckling, absurdist black humor, modernist tectonics, and social satire. 

but alas, it is probably not prudent for me to make reaches for something “epoch-defining” in my first attempt at writing a novel, and the secret is that it’s actually a lack of confidence in my life being interesting that prevents me from writing some sort of quasi memoir. so let’s add a corrective maxim, trite as it is true: write from experience, dumbass, with the caveat that, as Henry James mentions, “experience” is the web of consciousness that collects impressions, interactions, personages, and ideas, not literal “experiences” as in “events you were present for.”

now that I’ve admitted that, I still don’t think my aesthetic project is anything like autofiction. I believe in stories too much to feel content with limp “meditations” on grief/trauma/blahblahblah, filtered through boring personal anecdotes. so what are some novels I like that appear to be divorced from the author’s biography, and what makes them work?

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood: obviously this novella draws on the author’s own relationships and life among the demimonde, but no one is confusing any of the characters with Barnes herself. propelling the narrative is the cascade of language: hypnotic, bewitching, seductive, decadent. what transpires between the covers is like a half-remembered dream, which makes it hard for me to explain exactly what happens even after having read it twice.

but one lesson to draw from Nightwood is its careful treatment of character. less important than the plot is the sense that things happen to these figures beyond the scope of the page. they all seem some strange mixture of archetype and urchin, not-quite-but-all-too human, and they’re all deeply embedded in the world Barnes conjures. so another maxim: make characters, then place them in situations.

Samuel Beckett’s Murphy: Beckett’s characters, as a counterpoint, don’t often feel like people you could encounter in the world. they are much more transparently constructs of language, mere semiotic referents. this is also true of Nightwood, but in Beckett’s novels it’s drawn to the extreme: these aren’t people so much as puppets, representatives, allegories-but-not-exactly.

more than maybe any writer other than the next one on this list, Beckett focuses on the interplay of signs, the relationship between phonemes, meaning, sound, and context. several of his stories, and perhaps the Trilogy, might better demonstrate this tendency (like “Ping,” which Adam and I discussed here) but I chose Murphy for two reasons:

1. Murphy’s horoscope operates in the plot as something Murphy uses to make sense of the world and also as a source of anxiety for him, which mimics how words function in the book overall, and in life generally. so one thing to learn here is how to use elements in a novel as holographic particles containing the whole; every object, character, symbol, action, and phrase participates in the greater structure. the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm.
2. similarly, the chess game towards the end of the book is a distillation, a comedic one, of how pieces move around the board of the text to strategically direct the reader towards certain ideas. now, that’s sort of just an explanation of how chess might be used symbolically in literature, but by including the game’s notation, rather than narrating moves, Beckett further develops the novel’s examination of language as a set of signs that only mean anything in context to someone who understands the rules of the game. chess notation is a metonym for language.

well. three. it’s the one I most recently read.

Vladmir Nabokov’s Pale Fire: like Beckett, Nabokov loved chess, and was known to practice chess problems. of chess, he said that it, like any artform, required “originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity.” I don’t really play chess, to be clear. I sometimes attempt to pick it up, and quickly find myself out of my element.

Pale Fire includes another of Nabokov’s past times, those idle linguistic puzzles he calls “word golf,” where you must find the fewest steps possible between two words of the same length, changing just one letter at a time. HATE – HAVE – HOVE – LOVE, for example. admittedly, I haven’t read that much Nabokov, but I get the impression that these puzzles are included in Pale Fire because this novel is the one most obviously involved in word play, even among the work of the arch word player Nabokov. the creeping sensation of there being some scheme afoot between Shade and Kinbote, that maybe Kinbote isn’t even real, arises out of Nabokov’s careful deployment of language, drawing attention to details via seemingly cast off puns, coincidental phrasings, etc. had I read this book more than once I’d be better equipped with examples, but I’m riding on my memory right now. the possibility that the characters are figments of one another’s psychosis, or that maybe an apparently minor character is the actual narrator, and using conscientious diction choices to tip that off, is very intriguing as a technique.

as an amusing aside, there are only three steps between WORD play and FOUL play.

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo: Reed likes to dress the things he’s preoccupied with—the ways artistic creation is coopted by the structures it criticizes, the cynicism that promotes “Black voices” while denying Black people actual power, the impotence of the liberal intelligenstia—in farcical garb and quasi-historical settings, putting the subjects at a remove from the immediate context he’s responding to. this approach manages to shed light both on the period that serves as the setting of the novel and on the time Reed is living in: many writers in the Harlem Renaissance, due to their commercial aspirations, allowed themselves to be manipulated into legitimizing bourgeois publishers, which is not all that different from the way writers in the 60s and 70s became mouthpieces for the United State’s cultural imperial propaganda. the satire in Mumbo Jumbo ranges the spectrum from burlesque to deadpan, and formalistically it assumes the methods of crank conspiracy theorists, going so far as to include an extensive “bibliography” that lists Helena Blavatsky and Erich von Däniken, which provokes the reader into wondering how much Reed buys into the alternate history he offers. to this point, I’ve encountered many later “conspiracy theory” works that earnestly quote, from Mumbo Jumbo, that “beneath or behind all political and cultural warfare lies a struggle between secret societies,” which conveniently leaves out the prefacing “Someone said” that Reed tempers the claim with.

though I suspect that Reed does believe that, justifiably.

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: in the final accounting, my neurosis about this book stems from what David Graeber says, offhand, in Debt, about how sometimes, at the emergence of a new historical era, there’s an artist who, as though gifted with supernatural foresight, captures the full implications of the new world being born, even more astutely than later generations fully enmeshed could understand. the example he offers is Rabelais, with reference to a passage about debt in Gargantua and Pantagruel. the final era that Debt covers has as its starting point 1971, and it runs through the present; we now are still discovering the implications of the neoliberal revolution; Pynchon started work on Gravity’s Rainbow in 1966 and published it in 1973; I do not know that the historical conditions have changed enough for the ideas expressed in GR to be surpassed. refined maybe, elaborated on sure, but extended into something new? I don’t know, but that’s what I want to do, what I think all artists should really strive for: to be epoch defining.

it’s not exactly that I feel there’s nothing left to say. there’s some Gordon Lish quote about how every artist has to overcome that feeling and realize that their forebears ain’t shit. his point I think involves believing yourself capable of “pissing with the big dogs” or something. I don’t hold my literary idols in such high esteem that I think I could never surpass them. not even the super genius Thomas Pynchon. I can understand rocket science if I make the effort. Pinecone ain’t shit. but when I find myself thinking through the implications of some arrangement in society, some ideological strain, some type of person I might want to treat in my fiction, it’s pretty often that I think “oh that’s already in Gravity’s Rainbow.” or otherwise I do the stupid thing of modeling my approach too tightly on Pynchon’s.

but maybe that’s not such a stupid thing. in an interview with Rick Rubin that’s frankly kind of bland, John Frusciante does make a few interesting points about art making. one thing he talks about is how all art creation is a process of drawing on influences, that being able to tackle some aesthetic problem depends on having a large catalogue of approaches. ripping other artists off is what everyone does, Emerson be damned. Frusciante mentions how he knows musicians with a lot of anxiety over making sure they aren’t copying anyone, who will unconsciously reproduce melodies, rhythms, or riffs, lifting them almost exactly, but that he and the Chili Peppers deliberately model their songwriting after things that inspire them, which gives them more control and allows them to not merely ape something.

so rather than resist how strongly something influences me, it’s better to cultivate a wider range of influences and blend them into something new.

also important to remember what most people overlook, that even with its puzzles, puppet-characters, textual games, symbolic orders, technical pyrotechnics, and the alibi of historical fiction, Gravity’s Rainbow is ultimately drawn from a human’s lived experience. and the fact is I’m not living through the turmoil of the 60s, and that’s fine. countercultures come and go.

besides, it’s not like the world right now is a very stable place, so I may just get my wish for a shakeout.