the place of the novel

Hiatus

2008-12-02T10:41:00.001-06:00

Due to the events of September, we have entered hiatus, with a hopeful eye toward January 2009, a new name, and attempts at regularity.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008

2008-08-03T20:34:00.000-05:00

from the
Nobel Lecture in Literature 1970

I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes. And perhaps under such conditions we artists will be able to cultivate within ourselves a field of vision to embrace the WHOLE WORLD: in the centre observing like any other human being that which lies nearby, at the edges we shall begin to draw in that which is happening in the rest of the world. And we shall correlate, and we shall observe world proportions.

And who, if not writers, are to pass judgement - not only on their unsuccessful governments, (in some states this is the easiest way to earn one's bread, the occupation of any man who is not lazy), but also on the people themselves, in their cowardly humiliation or self-satisfed weakness? Who is to pass judgement on the light-weight sprints of youth, and on the young pirates brandishing their knives?

We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world - but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.

And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness - and violence, decrepit, will fall.

That is why, my friends, I believe that we are able to help the world in its white-hot hour. Not by making the excuse of possessing no weapons, and not by giving ourselves over to a frivolous life - but by going to war!

Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience:

ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.

And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.

Steven Moore's Upcoming History of the Novel

2008-07-29T13:03:00.001-05:00

It's a delight to find an interview with Steven Moore here.

ST: Since it’s not yet published, could you summarize the thesis of your work in progress?

SM: It's that the experimental, artsy novel that [reviewer Dale] Peck and others feel began with Ulysses actually began thousands of years ago, and that today's experimentalists are continuing in that venerable tradition. The conventional, realistic novel that dominates the best-seller lists today is a very late development in the long history of the novel, not the novel's default setting. So I begin at the beginning—ancient Egypt, "The Tale of Sinuhe" (c. 1950 BCE)—and show that all early fiction writers were innovative, making up the rules as they went along. At early stages in every culture's history, literary theorists like Aristotle in Greece (and his counterparts in India and China) established rules and expectations for poetry and drama, but ignored prose fiction. Consequently, novelists were free to do whatever the hell they wanted, so I survey the results from around the world up to the year 1600 (right before Don Quixote, 1605). That's where my Volume 1 ends, which is circulating among publishers right now. Volume 2 will begin with Cervantes and end with the most interesting novel of 2012.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today. . .

2008-07-09T15:59:00.003-05:00

Can it really be 20 years since DeLillo's Libra? Troy Jollimore writes in Critical Mass:

Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone, according to "Libra"? No: because no one ever does anything alone in the crazy quilt of paranoid consciousnesses, stunted consciences, and misguided intentions that composes the world of this novel. The work of history is the work of groups: loose, shady, poorly organized groups, half of whose members do not know the identities of the other half, or, when they do, know enough not to call them by their real names. And yes: because in the final analysis each consciousness is its own solipsistic world, its own "inward-spinning self." In DeLillo's universe each of us is, in the deepest sense, alone. And the gunman and perennial misfit Lee Harvey Oswald may well be the lonest of the lone.

Cognitive Science and New Journalism

2008-07-03T12:02:00.002-05:00

Michael Ganzaniga asks Tom Wolfe in Seed Magazine:

But it's a fascinating thing to think of the role that fiction and make-believe play. Do you feel, when you create a body of fiction, that you're opening up possibilities for people to think about problems in a different way? To confront things they don't yet know about?

Too bad there's no answer forthcoming; the interest of a cognitive neuroscientist seems to trump that of a novelist in this case.

Is a novel a model?

2008-07-01T10:26:00.005-05:00

Tyler Cowen's paper explores the notion of the novel as a model, and can be found here.

excerpts:

Novels are more like models than is commonly believed. Some novels present verbal models of reality. I interpret other novels as a kind of simulation, akin to how simulations are used in economics.

"Why don't those authors just come right out and say what they mean?" One of my economist colleagues offered this query when we were discussing the so-called "Great Books." Shortly thereafter the question came why we need the classics when we can work with formal models. Few economists today read Homer, much less work on the problems he raised. On the other side of the divide stand many individuals from the humanities. These individuals spend much of their careers reading the Great Books. They may not reject the idea of formal modeling in the social sciences, but it is distant from their concerns. These individuals believe that models are forced to oversimplify in a way that a literary text does not.

Giambattista Vico (1976 [1744]), in his New Science, struck out the extreme position that myth and “poetic wisdom” are more fundamental means of knowledge than is science. He saw politics and economics as flowing from this more primeval source of wisdom. He writes of myth as a kind of “matrix,” in which other categories of the human understanding, including science, are made intelligible. We need not accept Vico's extreme view about the primacy of story and myth, but nonetheless the two methods of communication and discovery -- model and story -- are not so neatly separable.

The emphasis here is upon economic models, but the notion is ripe for further exploration in regard to models in general.

Uh, no, but . . .

2008-06-30T08:40:00.003-05:00

Junot Diaz in the WSJ:

So it's 2008 and the latest edition of the Grand Theft Auto franchise has come upon us like corporate lightning. The new game took in more than $500 million in world-wide sales in its first week. The critical reaction has been widespread and adulatory and in certain corners beyond over-the-top: GTA IV is better than "The Godfather," better than "The Sopranos," better than say, a novel!

Diaz goes on to rebut this, but believes it is not impossible to do so, given the proper imagination.

The Death of the Novel is Alive and Well

2008-06-27T15:16:00.002-05:00

"Whatever the causes of its demise—technological or theoretical, overproduction or underconsumption—the putative death of the novel forms the heart of the anxiety of obsolescence. By depicting the genre as an endangered species, critics and novelists alike have built a protected space around the novel—and, not incidentally, the novelist—in which the form and its practitioners are kept safe from the encroachments of the changing contemporary world. By carefully reading the novel of obsolescence, one can begin to uncover how the representations of the novel’s “enemies” function to create that protected space, as well as how technological changes in contemporary culture serve as convenient masks for other, more threatening, social and political changes that confront the novelist. We must begin, however, by taking claims of the novel’s passing with a grain of salt; as Paul Mann points out, “perhaps the avant-garde needs its death to go on living” (38). In this, the historical avant-garde, whose nominal front-lines orientation demanded a continuous rooting out of the belated, and the novel, whose claims to newness require its repeated exhaustion, are not so different. Paraphrasing Mann, we can suggest that the postmodern novel is indeed living out its death for discourse: the death of the novel is alive and well."

from Kathleen Fitzpatrick's The Anxiety of Obsolescence.

China, again

2008-06-26T09:43:00.004-05:00

From NPR.org:

Fu doesn't have to worry about the publishing censors. She has been writing novels exclusively for the Internet for more than a year. She now has thousands of loyal readers. They come to find her books on a Web site called Xidian.

Xidian has grown from a small coterie of literature fans to a staff of 70. Many of them are editors who sort through the thousands of novel submissions posted on the site every month. They try and figure out which writers are the best and the most popular, and move those up to the front page.

Wu Wung Xao, one of the site's founders and its general manager, says Xidian gets about 200 million page views a day and is one of China's most popular literary sites.

Thousands per month? Just one of the sites? Is this where the MFAs are going?

Why Writers Can't (?) Go It Alone

2008-06-25T14:49:00.004-05:00

A novelist and journalist with mainstream publishing credentials, David Barnett writes in The Guardian:

But there's a sea of dross in the worlds of pop music and movies, too. Quality rises to the surface there, so if the literary industry can relax its perceived inherently snobbish attitude to the output of anything other than the established, traditional publishers, perhaps the same will happen with independent, small press and even self-published books.

The Golden Bowl

2008-06-24T08:56:00.001-05:00

Colm Toibin on Henry James in The Guardian:

This language enacts levels of feeling and knowing in ways that are both precise and indirect, both poetic and forensic. This late style of James suggests that feeling and knowing are open-ended and can lead, even in the bleakest circumstances, to something like forgiveness, the glossing over of impure motives, the creation of harmony based on language as a beautiful and ambiguous way of healing pain.

The Novel in the Marketplace

2008-06-24T08:38:00.001-05:00

Another victory for the do-it-yourselfers:

Thousands of readers like Mr. Nowak, a regular churchgoer, have helped propel “The Shack,” written by William P. Young, a former office manager and hotel night clerk in Gresham, Ore., and privately published by a pair of former pastors near Los Angeles, into a surprise best seller. It is the most compelling recent example of how a word-of-mouth phenomenon can explode into a blockbuster when the momentum hits chain bookstores, and the marketing and distribution power of a major commercial publisher is thrown behind it.

Article at the NYTimes.

A Death in the Family Redux

2008-06-16T14:36:00.004-05:00

There's a new restored version of James Agee's A Death In The Family. Will Blythe looks at it in the NYTimes:

“One by one, million by million, in the prescience of dawn, every leaf in that part of the world was moved.” Why don’t our novelists write in Agee’s tender high style these days? Either something has gone out of the world, or something has gone out of them. His book reads like a prayer, an attempt to breathe life into the dead through mighty exertions of language. Everything is consecrated. Trees move in their sleep, stars tremble like lanterns, and a butterfly — yes, a butterfly — alights on a coffin.

Then Wyatt Mason takes issue with Blythe in Harper's Onlin e:

Nothing, in a novel, is needed, whether technical or material. Rather, a novel can admit of anything, breaking with convention or recycling it. Naturally, the success of such admissions depends on the talent of the writer. Blythe, I suspect, would agree, and would say only that the weaker parts of Agee’s enterprise depended too heavily and too transparently on the endeavor of another author. This is fair enough, as a point of view. Whereas the exhausted trope argument is, itself, a trope exhausted–novels would be nowhere without them.

The Unfortunates

2008-06-10T09:12:00.004-05:00

B.S. Johnson's 1969 novel consists of loose pages collected in a folder/box, to be read in any order. From John Lingan's review:

"That's the theoretical bit, and it's a grand slam, but The Unfortunates is also a generous book in its characterization and emotional engagement, two things that most experimental writers aren't known for."

Available now the the US from New Directions.

New Book on the Novel

2008-06-10T08:46:00.002-05:00

"The Novel, that most accessible, democratic of literary forms, must establish its contract with the reader."

How Novels Work, by John Mullan, is available.

Maps and Legends

2008-06-05T13:34:00.005-05:00

From The Valve, extracts out of Michael Chabon's book of essays:

‘All novels are sequels; influence is bliss,’ and

‘all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction.’

Contra the etymology of novel, yes? but points taken.

Fitzgerald's Trimalchio

2008-06-02T15:34:00.003-05:00

Trimalchio is an earlier draft of The Great Gatsby, and the small differences between the versions allow a look at the mystery of alchemy in major novels. Outwardly, the major difference is found in substantially different takes of Chapters 6 and 7; but missing also is the absolute sense of inevitability to the chain of events we're handed in the final draft. Hard to put your finger on exactly what makes the difference, but it's there. Worth further study.

OnFiction

2008-05-23T13:20:00.001-05:00

from the source: OnFiction Is the creation of three writer-researchers in Toronto, and deals with the psychology of fiction. It contains a blog updated weekly, and archives of academic papers, magazine articles, book reviews, and film reviews on this subject. As an additional resource, we include a list of books on the psychology of fiction, with short reviews.

Novelists Strike

2008-05-22T12:20:00.002-05:00

A belated and funny note from The Onion.

In Preparation for an Upcoming Sentinel Post:

2008-05-20T14:15:00.002-05:00

Alain Robbe-Grillet:

There is no question. . .of establishing a theory, a pre-existing mold into which to pour the books of the future. Each novelist, each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual reflection. The book makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone. Indeed the movement of its style must often lead to jeopardize them, breaking them, even exploding them. Far from respecting certain immutable forms, each new book tends to constitute the laws of its functioning at the same time that it produces their destruction. Once the work is completed, the writer's critical reflection will serve him further to gain a perspective in regard to it, immediately nourishing new explorations, a new departure. ("The Use of Theory," in For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard) (cribbed from "The Reading Experience" blog.)

Beyond the Wall

2008-05-09T11:30:00.003-05:00

Webnovels aside, coverage of the contemporary Chinese Novel is increasing. This tip on Paper Cuts points us to a recent NYTimes Book Review full of recent developments. And this too: "Asian History Inspires New Online Games."

Shadow Unit

2008-04-25T10:10:00.001-05:00

We've been remiss in pointing to Shadow Unit, a collaborative webnovel/blog reminiscent of the well-executed EdReport. The twist is a TV Show framework, something like CSI. Well written. Check it out.

Courses We Would Prefer to Attend If We Could

2008-04-21T12:40:00.002-05:00

Course description for Franco Moretti's The Theory of the Novel, going on at Stanford now.

The novel is the most variable of literary genres: how can a single system of concepts explain its diversity in time and space? And what should be the relationship between theory and history of the novel? We will focus on three major theories of the novel [Lukacs; Bakhtin; and the formalist-structuralist lineage], and on more recent work on morphology, fiction, realism and so on.

from The Atlantic

2008-04-10T11:57:00.004-05:00

Interesting moments in the May Atlantic Magazine.

From "Unforgiven": On Thursday, August 10, the day after Olmert’s cabinet authorized the invasion, Israel’s three most prominent writers, Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman, held a press conference to call for a cease-fire. This was not an entirely marginal exercise. Writers in Israel play a role in the moral and political life of their country that is unfamiliar to writers in the United States.

And a good roundup for Brian O'Nolan: (Who?)

The author pseudonymously known as Flann O’Brien (1911–1966) is the shadowy and indeed overshadowed hero of modern Irish fiction, the bronze medalist on a podium otherwise occupied by Joyce (gold) and Beckett (silver). Flann O’Brien’s relative inferiority is as much a matter of style as of substance. The top two were glamorously exilic, highly photogenic, eminently stern of artistic purpose. By contrast, Brian O’Nolan (the fellow behind the pseudonym) stayed put in Dublin, and very seedily so. In pictures he looks like yer man without qualities: a hat, a coat, a blur of dark little features. And except perhaps in the matter of drinking, sternness of purpose was precisely the quality he lacked: if his ambition was to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, he never mentioned it. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” the protagonist in Beckett’s The Unnamable famously asserts. When Brian O’Nolan couldn’t go on, he didn’t.

Conrad's Preface

2008-04-07T15:22:00.003-05:00

In looking over Fitgerald's goals for Gatsby, we are reminded once again of the power of Conrad's Preface.

"A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line."

How then, to reconcile this with the impact of the novel-as-a-whole, particularly the 19th Century triple-deckers of Dostoevsky, Eliot, Tolstoy & Dickens? And the encyclopedic ala Pynchon, Gaddis, DF Wallace. Further, such minute-ness of perception would seem to argue against the possibility of translation.

Maybe Fitzgerald again, the mark of genius to hold two opposing ideas in hand at once? Mark this for further investigation.

In Defense of D.H.

2008-04-02T11:10:00.003-05:00

Responding to a post by David Kelly in the NYTimes' Paper Cuts on overrated books, Barry Gewen writes an eloquent rebuttal for the honor of Women In Love:

Sometimes his syntactical rhythms are so idiosyncratic, so bizarre, as to exist beyond good and evil: “The first to run across the lawn was the little Italian, small and like a cat, her white legs twinkling as she went, ducking slightly her head, that was tied in a gold silk kerchief.” Little wonder that Anthony Burgess, in his book on Lawrence, said, “No potential writer would ever take Lawrence as a model.”

But his clumsiness, I think, comes from Lawrence’s sense of urgency. He was writing to save the world. These days we don’t expect our novelists to save the world (even if, not so long ago, we did expect it from our folksingers), so that Lawrence can come across not only as awkward but also as preachy and bombastic (much as the early Dylan was accused of being preachy and bombastic). This sense of prophetic mission in Lawrence is outdated today, though, it must be said, when he was at the height of his powers in the period around World War I, the world desperately needed saving. But what is not outdated — and what, I would say, makes him our contemporary — is the means by which he thought the world could be saved.

Against the Day, in brief:

2008-03-19T13:52:00.001-05:00

"The soul itself is a memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light. The first step in our Discipline here is learning how to re-acquire that rarefaction, that condition of light, to become once more able to pass where we will, through lantern-horn, through window-glass, eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is an expression in crystal form of Earth's velocity as it rushes through the AEther, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction. . . ." He paused at the door. "Atonement, in any case, comes much later in the journey. Do have something to eat, there's a good chap."

Thos. Pynchon, ATD, p 688.

Truth, Memoir, and Novel

2008-03-13T22:18:00.003-05:00

If memoirs are hot circa 2008, then it stands to reason that supply will rise to demand. But given that the range of the possible mathematically dwarfs the range of the actual by uncountable orders of magnitudes, it's not surprising that the NY Times is running a followup story on current and historical faked memoirs.

What needs to be explained, then, is why something "real" is perceived to be or is more commercial than something made up. Book in hand, something true reads the same from first to last page, But something outside the text in the presentation changes our perception of the book

What lies there is a mystery, and a disheartening one at that.

Nouveau Roman after all?

2008-03-11T08:42:00.003-05:00

For someone who thoroughly enjoyed Robbe-Grillet's For a New Novel some years ago in a public library, we were surprised to find his work had proved so deadly to the the contemporary novel. The idea of continual reinvention of the novel is a point worth making repeated, but really is no recent notion. (Cf the relationship between novel and new, right?) But making writing willfully obscure for the sake of obscurity is another charge altogether.

Steven Marche has a provocative take on the legacy in Salon; Scott Esposito and Dan Green offer some welcome dissents and affirmations.

More Fraudulent Memoirs

2008-03-05T08:48:00.002-06:00

We must consider what it is about something reputedly "true" that makes it more fiscally viable in the bookselling market.

from the New York Times: In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true. . . Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.

For A Short Time Only

2008-02-29T10:09:00.004-06:00

We have noted a strong marketing push for Charles Bock's first novel, Beautiful Children. Random House is giving away free pdf copies for a few days. No DRM either. A good idea, we think, to draw attention and spur sales of the physical book. It will be interesting to see how successful the experiment proves to be.

UPDATE: The Millions has a look at the success of said above venture.

And now, HarperCollins is in on it with free access to Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

In Memoriam: Alain Robbe-Grillet

2008-02-19T14:25:00.003-06:00

Seems like we are always the last to hear these things. We can remember perusing a rare (for our area) copy of For a New Novel in the library over many days in the 1980s: here's to an always newer novel. From the exemplary site The Modern Word:

His call for a new novel crowned Robbe-Grillet as one of the leaders of this artistic movement which became known as the nouveau roman or the New Novel. The essays were compiled into a book called Por une nouveau roman (1963) or For a New Novel. The book examines the state of the novel as an art form and explores why and how the art of the novel must progress or die of stagnation: "The art of the novel, however, has fallen into such a state of stagnation -- a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of critical opinion -- that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change. To many, the solution seems simple enough: such a change being impossible, the art of the novel is dying" (17).

For a New Novel is a timeless challenge for all artists to continue exploring and pushing the envelope of their art.

Tree of Life

2008-02-18T12:19:00.002-06:00

Sometimes the best new novel at any given interval is a film, and we expect as much from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, being shot now. A sneak underhanded preview is to be found here.

The Beginning of the Picaresque

2008-02-15T10:55:00.003-06:00

It has been called to our attention that a bilingual text of Lazarillo de Tormes exists on the web at this link.

From Wikipedia:

Besides its importance in the Spanish literature of the Golden Centuries, Lazarillo de Tormes is credited with founding a literary genre, the picaresque novel, so called from Spanish pícaro meaning "rogue" or "rascal". In these novels, the adventures of the pícaro expose injustice while amusing the reader. This extensive genre includes Tom Jones by Henry Fielding and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and shows its influence in twentieth century novels, dramas and films featuring the "anti-hero".

Samedi the Deafness

2008-02-14T11:28:00.004-06:00

This review has us intrigued, along with Garth Risk Hallberg's sober assessment; the book in question is Jesse Ball's Samedi the Deafness.

Birds were diving back and forth between the limbs of trees, and an ephemeral greenness cast by the morning hung over the late-autumn park. He would have liked to tie strings to all the birds, to all the branches of trees, to all the whirling leaves and the swells upon the river, and pull with his hand, here and there, the glad enormity of morning, of that very Sunday morning. To take up in his hand the paths across which he had come, the boy running ahead upon the path, the boy behind, face covered, the bald shopkeeper with his regimented monies, the small door in the side of his house . . . But what then would he do with them?

(Kafka and Hitchcock have been mentioned, but this excerpt notwithstanding, does anyone think of Paul Auster?)

Samizdat in Texas

2008-02-08T11:56:00.000-06:00

The importance of novels for distributing thought in repressive regimes often exceeds their importance in so-called free countries. Subjugation via censorship then can become an empowering notion for writers. American novelists may see their relative impact rise, if a recent incident in a Huntsville, Texas prison is any indicator. Slate.com reports on a prisoner who received a copy of Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives and found the novel confiscated before he could read it due to "objectionable material." The book was found to possibly encourage "deviant criminal sexual behavior," an offense equal to containing "information regarding the manufacture of explosives, weapons or drugs."

Bring out the mimeographers.

Clive Thompson Pontificates on the Boringness of Reality

2008-02-07T13:52:00.000-06:00

"Which brings me to my point. If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

From where I sit, traditional "literary fiction" has dropped the ball. I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago, I found myself getting — well — bored.

Why? I think it's because I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I'd read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, "OK. Cool. I see how today's world works." I also started to feel like I'd been reading the same book over and over again."

Clive Thompson, perpetrator of the above, does have a good point regarding literary fiction's general reluctance to reach beyond the quotidian. But that doesn't necessarily mean Sci-fi is the answer. Reality really is strange enough, which should be evident if you've ever read Pynchon or DeLillo or David Foster Wallace. MFA schools do have a tendency to flatten the more ambitious (and horrors, embarrassing) writing. But only so many ways to describe reality?

Really. But this should be a challenge, rather than an affront. A challenge to write compellingly about our lives in their full range, ie lives of the mind. And further, to find the contemporary novels that do so and give them their due.

Pulp Novel Revival

2008-02-06T16:24:00.000-06:00

Where do old novels go when they're out of print? Mostly they moulder in used book stores or get boxed away in basements, but sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, they see new life. Role playing game company Paizo Publishing has released a new line of reprints called Planet Stories.

Wired reports on a positive trend of republishing older works. This is one solution for books that are out of print, but not out of copyright. We as a country would do well to pass a law that reverts copyright back to the author when the original publisher no longer supports the book, yet does not allow the author to resell or publish on her own.

On Your Shelf too

2008-02-04T09:52:00.000-06:00

From the newly-liberated Atlantic Monthly online:

Some years ago, Tom Wolfe called on novelists to abandon the cul-de-sac of modern “literary” fiction, which he saw as self-absorbed, thumb-sucking gamesmanship, and instead to revive social realism, to take up as a subject the colossal, astonishing, and terrible pageant of contemporary America. I doubt he imagined that one of the best responses to this call would be a TV program, but the boxed sets blend nicely on a bookshelf with the great novels of American history.

The article refers to a TV show that we have not seen, but the likening of The Wire to Dickens' Bleak House is intriguing.

The Codex Seraphinianus

2008-02-01T11:30:00.000-06:00

About time we mentioned our fascination with this. From last year, an intriguing article in The Believer by Justin Taylor.

"One day Dr. Harpold came to class visibly excited. He said he had found a very rare, delicate, and expensive book just sitting on the shelf at the university library. It was typical, he said, because the few libraries that owned a copy of this rare book didn’t know how valuable it had become, so it got shelved with the general collection and subsequently stolen by the first savvy person who came upon it. Harpold had caught our university library’s grievous error and had had it corrected, but not before pulling faculty privilege and checking it out himself. After admonishing us to make sure our hands were clean, he passed it around. “It” was a book called Codex Seraphinianus, by one Luigi Serafini, published in an extremely limited edition in Italy in 1981. The book was an oversize black hardback. . . Text accompanied these images—or what looked like text. But the text wasn’t in English, and it wasn’t anything recognizably foreign like, say, Arabic or Sanskrit, though those analogs immediately came to mind. Though impenetrable, a kind of meaning was suggested by the layout of the script on the page. This was reinforced by the visual resonances of the two images and their apparent or implied relationship to one another."

An interested person has claimed to have deciphered the text here, but we would like to believe this is yet just another Borgesian layer of mystery.

The Moviegoer in the 21st Century

2008-01-23T09:11:00.000-06:00

One of the benchmark novels of the second half of the the 20th Century is the subject of discussion at the New York Times now--quite gratifying for the Walker Percy admirers we are. It's odd to think that this particular novel, his first, may well be the one that lasts the longest, as it is most atypical stylistically. The Percy voice reaches its apogee in his second novel, The Last Gentleman, and continues for the rest of his career. The Moviegoer manuscript was re-worked more than the others, and shows the continental hand of Stanley Kaufmann, steering it more to an existentialist tone reminiscent of French translations of the period, particularly The Stranger. At any rate, The Moviegoer has both the deep structure and engaging surface patina to stay strong for the coming generations. Here's to a Percy renaissance.

A Novel is a Novel is a Novel

2008-01-21T12:21:00.001-06:00

The phenomenon of novels written on and for cell phones has been reported before, but this article in the NYTimes stands as a good introduction. Cell novels are now making an impact on print book sales in Japan. Among the obvious connotations of novel and novelty, there is one observation which stands out:

"Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers."

A claim for the notion of a purer beginning than some others (e.g. movies) can be made here. To read novels where none have been read before indicates an intrinsic need to fill something like novel-space within us. For traditionalists to feel dismay at any particular form a novel might take remains misguided, rising from the mistaken notion that anything new wipes out historical form, or even the historical physicality of existing books.

Evidence for the Inoculation Theory

2008-01-18T16:17:00.000-06:00

Stanley Fish and certain recent studies notwithstanding, it may be that reading has some benefit.

In Search of the Mimetic

2008-01-17T14:16:00.000-06:00

In The Wilson Quarterly, Max Byrd writes:

"One answer may be that the ultimate goal of the novelist, any novelist, is not “creation” or “creativity,” as those words are so carelessly used. The goal is mimesis—imitation so complete and faithful to experience, so widely connected to the larger order of things, even of sun, moon, and stars, that imitation at its furthest point of accuracy passes over and becomes truth."

Or to create a new world, even? How does mimesis factor into that? Perhaps a better but less attractive word would be "believability"—or beyond that, "immersiveness." Achieved by any means necessary.

Byrd also trots out an old warhorse: "For some years, I’ve been convinced that the late novelist John Gardner was right when he said that there are only two basic plots in fiction: someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. In fact, that’s only one plot, seen from two different points of view."

Leave it to Gardner to take it from a multitude, or even seven or so, down to two. And to Byrd to make the possibilities even fewer.

Fields of the Ascended

2008-01-16T13:29:00.001-06:00

A friend of the Center of Studies for the Post-Dialogic Novel has made the semifinal rounds at Amazon/Penguin's Breakthrough Novel Award. Visit the site for a preview.

A Look at Berlin Alexanderplatz

2008-01-15T16:15:00.000-06:00

Ian Buruma takes another look at Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz in The New York Review of Books, and calls for a new translation, even if it's a doomed task due to the inventive and idiomatic use of German.

"The greatness of Döblin's novel lies not in the plot but, as Rainer Werner Fassbinder observes in his essay on the book, in the telling.^[2] Franz Biberkopf is one of the modern world's richest literary characters, as memorable as Woyzeck, Oblomov, or Madame Bovary. We get to know him not just from the outside, as a fat, muscular, working-class Berliner, a lover of schnapps, beer, and women, an "unpolitical" man, a fixture of the bars and cheap dance halls around the "Alex," but from the inside too, in a constant stream of interior monologues filled with his dreams, anxieties, confusions, hopes, and illusions."

Incidentally, 1929 was a significant year for novels bearing the impress of Ulysses (1922) : The Sound and the Fury, The Wave, A Farewell to Arms, and Look Homeward, Angel.

Coetzee and the Weight of the Novel

2008-01-12T18:53:00.000-06:00

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, is receiving much favorable attention and bears this description by a novelist somewhat like himself, Senor C:

"A novel? No. I don't have the endurance anymore. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today. (p 54)"

Work themselves out. Suggestive of a remarkable degree of autonomy.

James Woods on the Novelist's Languages

2008-01-10T13:05:00.000-06:00

A quote here, courtesy of The Elegant Variation, from James Woods' upcoming book on fiction:

"So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we would call the language of the world - the language that fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into a novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere, and text messaging. In this sense, the novelist is a triple writer, and the contemporary novelist now feels especially the pressure of this tripleness, thanks to the omnivorous presence of the third horse of this troika, the language of the world, which has invaded our subjectivity, our intimacy, the intimacy that James thought should be the proper quarry of the novel, and which he called (in a troika of his own) 'the palpable present-intimate.' "

Imagination is Real

2008-01-09T13:53:00.000-06:00

There's not much out there positing an intimate relationship between novels and the practice of science, but we have found edge.org to be a treasurehouse of writing and speculative thinking. Currently, they are querying their contact files in regard to the question "What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?" and we find psychologist Alison Gopnik's entry to be provoking.

"In fact, I think now that the two abilities - finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds - are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don't just tell us what's true - they tell us what's possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don't think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing."

Among the Many Futures of the Novel

2008-01-08T12:01:00.000-06:00

From time to time we will highlight new iterations of the novel that we find ourselves in sympathy with. While the traditional novel has tended to spring from the sensibility of a single author (admittedly splintered in the post-dialogic era), the sense of place is surely not diluted by the efforts of multiple contributors.

From "About Flightpaths": "The initial goal of this project is to create a work of digital fiction, a ‘networked book’, created on and through the internet. The first stage of the project will include a web iteration with, at its heart, this blog, opening up the research process to the outside world, inviting discussion of the large array of issues the project touches on. As well as this, Chris Joseph and Kate Pullinger will create a series of multimedia elements that will illuminate various aspects of the story. This will allow us to invite and encourage user-generated content on this website and any associated sites; we would like to open the project up to allow other writers and artists to contribute texts - both multimedia and more traditional – as well as images, sounds, memories, ideas."

Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra de Gredos

2008-01-07T11:08:00.000-06:00

The not-uncontroversial Peter Handke's new novel has been published in English translation.

". . .the considerable reputation Handke commands has less to do with politics than with his undeniable talent as a writer. Handke has a keen ear for exposing the clichés that cloud people's thinking. And when he's in form, his ability to describe nature scenes is such that it has reminded many a Continental critic of the magnificent landscape scenes limned in classic German prose by the 19th-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter." From the review in The Weekly Standard.

The Hamzanama

2008-01-06T00:31:00.000-06:00

The Mahabharata we knew about, but another ancient epic of some 46,000 pages in the original? NYTimes has a review and excerpt of a new Modern Library translation (and redaction).

As William Dalrymple notes, "To read “The Adventures of Amir Hamza” is to come as close as is now possible to the world of the Mughal campfire — those night gatherings of soldiers, sufis, musicians and hangers-on that one sees illustrated in Mughal miniatures, a storyteller beginning his tale in a clearing of a forest as the embers of the blaze glow red and the eager faces crowd around. . . At this perilous moment in history, the Hamza epic, with its mixed Hindu and Muslim idiom, its tales of love and seduction, its anti-clericalism (mullahs are a running joke throughout the book), its stories of powerful and resourceful women, and its mocking of male misogyny, is a reminder of an Islamic world the West seems to have forgotten: one that is imaginative and heterodox — and as far as can be from the puritanical Wahhabi Islam that the Saudis have succeeded in spreading throughout much of the modern Middle East."

Canonical Cormac

2008-01-02T17:27:00.001-06:00

Called to our attention: the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine contains an interview with Cormac McCarthy in which he cites a shortlist of personal favorites:

Moby Dick

The Brothers Karamazov

Ulysses

The Sound and the Fury

titular

2008-01-02T17:12:00.000-06:00

For those familiar with or having an interest in The Center of Studies for the PostDialogic Novel or The (defunct) Museum of the Novel (including the archives of The Society for the Appreciation of the PostDialogic Novel), look here for news and original opinion on The Place of the Novel, reference being to the status of the novel in culture, and to the function of the novel as place in and of itself.