"Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel" by Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Thousand Acres which updated King Lear and transported it to Iowa. In this book she reads a hundred novels, written over a thousand years, and tries to distil from her reading ideas of what makes a novel.

Are there 13 ways? I rather lost count. There are thirteen chapters but they include the Introduction and an explanation of how she set about her three year readathon. The clock that she imagines in chapter 9, the Circle of the Novel, lists 12 aspects of a novel. My notes on her ideas combine rather more than thirteen ideas. I must have missed the tabulation.

But some of her ideas are fascinating and inspiring to one who, like myself. aspires to write a novel (and to write worthwhile critiques of the novels I have read in this blog).

However, I would sound a note of caution. In the final analysis, Smiley appears to believe that the novel is fundamentally individualistic and stands up for the rights of the individual against the conformity-seeking group. For example, in her chapter on the art of the novel she asserts that “The novel is always about freedom” and argues that “societies have only a few basic categories of work, and four of them are government, religion, daily survival, and nurturing the next generation. Each of these functions requires group effort, and in each it is essential that the individual subordinate himself or herself to the discipline of the group. A fifth category, apparently present in almost every human society, is the making of art (including the telling of stories). In this category, idiosyncrasy is prized, in part because art is perceived as play and is supposed to be ... fun.” Her arguments are persuasive; her examples all suggest that this is so. I just wondered whether Smiley would have been quite so certain of this thesis if she hadn't been brought up in the USA with its emphasis on the individual and freedom and the rights of the individual against the state, and was brought up instead in a society such as China and Japan where the needs of the group may be paramount. The history of western literature may support Smiley, and of course she could define the novel as quintessentially an artistic work within the canon of western literature, but perhaps there is another way of looking at extended prose fictions outside of that particular box.

She starts by defining the novel as “a (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist.” Each of these aspects affects what novels are and what they can do. For example, prose becomes possible because the novel is written; lengthy oral traditions such as epic require poetry as an aid to memory. Prose, she says later, "is for exploring what is unique about situations and characters - we might say that prose is ‘Aristotelian’. Poetry is for exploring what incidents and persons typify - it is ‘Platonic’.” The length also enables in-depth studies of characters within contexts.

She identifies twelves styles of discourse that a novel may contain, and she suggests that the great novels contain many of these styles: Travel, History, Biography, Tale, Joke, Gossip, Diary or letter, Confession, Polemic, Essay, Epic, and Romance.

Plots, she says, come in four bits:

• Exposition in the first 10%
• Rising action during which “Something that seems implausible at the time of the exposition - the climax - is being prepared for. ... The novel becomes more and more different from life.”
• Climax (at the 90% point). This is where, for example, Tom Jones is about to be hanged and Madame Bovary poisons herself
• Denouement.

But she also points out that (and here she is very precise) “Almost every novel gathers itself at the 62% 

mark, changes strategy, and freshens. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Bob Ewell lies on the stand about seeing Tom and his daughter having sex. ... In Madame Bovary Emma ... goes to see her first opera ... which quickens her romantic yearnings.”

It is interesting to compare these ideas with, for example, The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler, Inside Story by Dara Marks, and Into the Woods by John Yorke which borrow from film the idea of a three-act structure in which the turning points come at the 25%, 50% and 75% points.

This is a fascinating and thought-provoking book about novels.

Some great lines:

• “My philosophical stance was one of not knowing any answers and not believing that there were any answers.” (Introduction)
• “It was like dating someone new who was nice enough but not nearly as exciting as the old boyfriend who had moved to Europe.” (Introduction)
• “The historian is required to give up dramatic interest in the pursuit of accuracy, but a novelist must give up accuracy in the pursuit of narrative drive and emotional impact.” (What is a novel?)
• “The novel integrates several forms of human intelligence - verbal intelligence (for the style), psychological intelligence (for the characters), logical intelligence (for the plot), spatial intelligence (for the symbolic and metaphorical content as well as the setting), and even musical intelligence (for pacing and rhythm).” (Who is a novelist?)
• “A novel is a hypothesis. A novelist shares with a scientist the wish to observe. The novelist also shares with the scientist a partial and imperfect knowledge of the phenomenon he wishes to observe. And so both novelist and scientist say ‘what if?’” (Who is a novelist?)
• “The novel ... is a theory of being. A novel proposes that the world has a certain mode of existing. It doesn't propose this by asserting it explicitly, but by depicting it implicitly.” (Who is a novelist?)
• “The novelist has many pleasures to offer - the unusual pleasure of the exotic, the intellectual pleasure of historical understanding, the humane pleasure of psychological insight into one or more characters, the simple pleasure of entertainment and suspense, the exuberant pleasure of laughter and trickery, the guilty pleasure of gossip, the tempting pleasure of secrecy and intimacy, the confessional pleasure of acknowledged sin and attempted redemption, the polemical pleasure of indignation, the rigorous pleasure of intellectual analysis, the reassuring pleasure of identification with one's nation or people, and the vicarious pleasure of romance.” (The psychology of the novel)
• “Heathcliff is rude by choice. Since charm is one of the qualities that keeps readers reading, Heathcliff's rudeness has to be compensated for, and it never is.” (Morality and the novel)
• "When the literary culture at large tries to impose an answer by insisting that ‘authenticity’ resides in the sex or the ethnic or national origin or biographical experience of the author, it kills the very thing that makes the literary culture vibrant, which is the sense of freedom, vitality, and power the author feels while he is creating his work.” (The art of the novel)
• “The underlying assertion of almost every novel is that meaning exists and can be understood because it can be arranged in a sequence that then takes on some sort of logic.” (The novel and history)
• “We seem to live in a world now where all thoughts are focused on the idea of prevailing, of imposing one's beliefs on others, and no thoughts, no thoughts are given to the costs of prevailing, or even what it means. Have these people never read Moby-Dick? well, no, they haven’t.” (The novel and history)
• “Those who don't read novels are condemned to repeat the oldest mistakes in literature - the mistake of hubris, a Greek mistake, and the mistake of attributing one's own emotions to God, a Judeo-Christian-Islamic mistake.” (The novel and history)
• “If the novel has died for the bureaucrats who run our country, then they are more likely not to pause before engaging in arrogant, narcissistic, and foolish policies.” (The novel and history)
• “Freud maintained that the two great human endeavours are love and work. ... In many novels work exists more as furniture than motivation.” (The circle of the novel)
• “Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.” (A novel of your own (I))

August 2019; 570 pages