Chapter One
What Is a Novel?
SIMPLICITY
An inexpensive paperback book from a reputable publisher is a small,
rectangular, boxlike object a few inches long, a few inches wide,
and an inch or so thick. It is easy to stack and store, easy to buy,
keep, give away, or throw away. As an object, it is user-friendly
and routine, a mature technological form, hard to improve upon and
easy to like. Many people, myself among them, feel better at the
mere sight of a book. As I line up my summer reading of thirty-four
novels written in the twentieth century, I realize that I have
gained so much and such reliable pleasure from so many novels that
my sense of physiological well-being (heart rate, oxygenation, brain
chemical production) noticeably improves as I look at them. I smile.
This row of books elevates my mood.
The often beautiful cover of a book opens like the lid of a box, but
it reveals no objects, rather symbols inscribed on paper. This is
simple and elegant, too. The leaves of paper pressed together are
reserved and efficient as well as cool and dry. They protect each
other from damage. They take up little space. Spread open, they
offer some information, but they don't offer too much, and they
don't force it upon me or anyone else. They invite perusal.
Underneath the open leaves, on either side, are hidden ones that
have been read or remain to be read. The reader may or may not
experience them. The choice is always her own. The book continues to
be an object. Only while the reader is reading does it become a
novel.
But it turns out that a novel is simple, too. A novel is a (1)
lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5)
protagonist. Everything that the novel is and does, every effect
that the novel has had on, first, Western culture, and subsequently,
world culture, grows out of these five small facts that apply to
every novel.
The longest novels that stand alone in one volume are just under
1,000 pages-Henry Fielding's Tom Jones would be a good example.
The shortest run under 100 pages-Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
would define that end of the continuum. Most novels run 300 to 400
pages, or 100,000 to 175,000 words. If a competent reader can read
30 or 40 pages in an hour-that is, 12,000 to 20,000 words-then
most novels take ten hours to read. Length is a bland and reassuring
quality, but it is no blander or more reassuring than any of the
other qualities. Prose, for example, is usually simpler to read and
more casual than poetry. We are accustomed to reading prose, and we
talk in a sort of prose. Narrative, too, is a natural form. People
tell stories from their earliest years and continue to narrate as
long as they can remember and care about sequences of events. Almost
always, their stories have themselves or their friends as
protagonists. A story requires a protagonist-that is, a human or a
humanlike consciousness who acts or is acted upon in the course of
the story. Most people with the normal brain development and
structure that results in a sense of self live with a protagonist
every minute of every day, and that protagonist-"one who feels
(agon) for (pro)"-is himself or herself. A protagonist is the most
natural thing in the world.
Every novel has all of these elements. If any of them is missing,
the literary form in question is not a novel. All additional
characteristics-characters, plot, themes, setting, style, point of
view, tone, historical accuracy, philosophical profundity,
revolutionary or revelatory effect, pleasure, enlightenment,
transcendence, and truth-grow out of the ironclad relationships
among these five elements. A novel is an experience, but the
experience takes place within the boundaries of writing, prose,
length, narrative, and protagonist.
The most necessary of the five qualities of the novel is writing.
The paradox of writing is that it is permanent, and so it may be
forgotten. Author and reader agree that images and ideas set down in
writing may come and go because they do not have to be stored in
memory. Hazy notions and vague pictures that have to do with the
writing certainly remain in the memories of both author and reader,
as do strong emotional impressions that author and reader alike feel
upon reading certain sections of the novel, but exact wordings can
be largely forgotten. The same is not true of poetry. A poem must be
remembered word for word or it loses its identity. In fact, poetry
is often learned and remembered word for word, as when students
memorize Hamlet's famous soliloquy ("Who would these fardels bear?")
in spite of the fact that they have only the dimmest idea of what
the words mean. The words may have the power of an incantation even
in the absence of comprehension. The memory, though, sets limits
upon what is to be remembered. The history of epic poetry, for
example, shows that poets used set forms, rhythm, rhyme, figures of
speech, and already familiar stories as mnemonic devices to aid in
both the composition and the transmission of poetry from poet to
poet and from poet to audience. Novelists have no need to do so.
Particular stylistic tricks or turns of phrase are not necessary as
mnemonic aids to the continued existence of the novel, and so the
author is free to explore language and ideas that are hard to
remember in detail. The novelist can go on and on, adding scenes,
ideas, characters, complexities of every sort, knowing that they are
safe from the effects of human memory-they will exist forever
exactly as printed and will not evolve by passing through the faulty
memories of others.
Writing allows the elaboration of prose. Since memorization is
unlikely to begin with, it may be made all the more unlikely by the
use of a style that is unmemorable. Prose slips by, common as water.
Readers have no defense against it other than boredom. But because
it is so common and often colorless, the writer can use it in many
ways, from the blandest, most objective, reportlike purposes to the
most vivid, evocative, lyrical purposes. James Joyce and Virginia
Woolf famously exploited metaphorical and lyrical possibilities of
English prose that Defoe and Trollope did not. Prose may slow down
and quicken, invoke and state, flower into figures of speech,
flatten into strings of facts, observations, assertions. It may pile
detail upon detail or summarize years of action in a few pages (as
in the middle section of To the Lighthouse). Prose usually
privileges the sentence, using punctuation to define the beginnings,
endings, and complications of thoughts, and sentences are easy. They
are what we learn and, often, how we learn it. Even though we don't
use them in speech as much as we think we do (in fact, people who
talk in whole sentences are generally thought of as pedantic or
"prosy"), when our thoughts assume formal shape, they organize
themselves into sentences. Poetry, in its search for concentration
and sharp effect, contracts. In prose, one thought leads to
another-it expands. Although thoughtless expansion is a fault to be
guarded against, inspired expansion gives us the novels of Proust
and Tolstoy, or Laurence Sterne and Halldor Laxness. Prose is both
sneaky and powerful, and is naturally narrative, since sequences of
events have some inherent organization, and it is naturally
expansive, since events can often be broken down into smaller events
and extended backward and forward in time.
In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster writes of narrative-that is,
of "what happened then?"-almost with contempt. Even the lowliest
bus driver, Forster says, could show an interest in suspense, in a
sequence of events. He almost admits to wishing that novels could be
written without narrative, without what he seems to think is the
lowest common denominator of art. But they can't be. It is not only
that the novel was invented to tell a lengthy and complicated story
that could not be told in any other way, it is also that without the
spine of narrative logic and suspense, it cannot be sufficiently
organized to be understandable to the reader. Even more basically, a
sequence of sentences, which is the only form sentences can occur
in, must inevitably result in a narrative. The very before-and-after
qualities of written sentences imply, mimic, and require the passage
of time. There are minimally narrative novels, but the more lyrical
and less narrative a novel is, the shorter it is, until it becomes a
short story, which may, indeed, dispense almost entirely with
narrative and become a series of impressions or linguistic effects
or rhetorical flourishes, as happened with American short stories in
the 1960s and 1970s. Narratives are as common as prose; they are the
way humans have chosen to pack together events and emotions,
happenings in the world and how they make us feel. Even the most
informal narratives alternate what happens and how it feels (or what
it means) to some degree. Even the most formally objective
narratives (such as police reports) imply the emotions that rise out
of the events, when at the same time they are suspending conclusions
as to the meanings of the events.
Because narrative is so natural, efficient, and ubiquitous, it, like
prose, can be used in myriad ways. The time sequence can be abused
however the writer wishes to abuse it, because the human tendency,
at least in the West, to think in sequence is so strong that the
reader will keep track of beginning, middle, and end on her own.
Nevertheless, the commonest bus driver can and often does take an
interest in what happens next, and so because the novel requires
narrative for organization, it will also be a more or less popular
form. It can never exclude bus drivers completely, and is,
therefore, depending on one's political and social views, either
perennially compromised or perennially inclusive.
Perhaps the most important thing about narrative is that it
introduces the voice of the narrator. In every novel, some voice is
telling the story. The narrator may or may not personalize his
voice. He may try to let the story seem to tell itself, as Kafka
does in "The Metamorphosis"; he may come forward in what seems to be
his own voice, and talk about the characters as if he and the reader
were observing them together, as William Makepeace Thackeray does in
Vanity Fair, or Kate Atkinson does in Behind the Scenes at the
Museum. He may tell his own story in the first person, as Ishmael
does in Moby-Dick. In every case, the reader must relate somehow to
the voice of the narrator. In every case, the story is colored by
the idiosyncrasies of the narrative voice, and how those
idiosyncrasies strike the reader. Even the blandest, or most
charming, or most skillful narrators have their detractors, because
this aspect of the novel is irredeemably social, and draws
constantly upon the reader's semiconscious likes and dislikes. Some
narrators offend, some narrators appeal, but all narrators are
present, the author but not the author, the protagonist but not the
protagonist, an intermediary that author and reader must deal with.
The most obvious hallmark of novels is length. The novel was
invented to be long, because what early novelists wanted to
communicate could not be communicated in a shorter or more direct
form, and also because length itself is enjoyable. The Tale of Genji
runs 1,000 pages. Genji lived a long life and had many wives and
concubines. His maturation and his greatness could not be depicted
in fewer pages. Don Quixote is 700 pages long. Quixote's adventures
and humiliations need to build upon one another. The paperback
edition of Ulysses is 783 pages-the intricacies of Leopold Bloom's
day out in Dublin require it. Length, too, is simple. It begins as a
mere adding on, though adding on may quickly turn into elaborating
or digressing or complicating or subordinating and analyzing. For an
author, adding on may amount to no more than keeping going, day
after day accumulating episodes and stories, getting paid by the
word and so writing more words. For a reader, adding on may offer
primarily the pleasure of familiarity-the characters or the
narrator's voice or the author's way of thinking become something
the reader wants to continue to experience. In a novel, length is
always a promise, never a threat.
When the protagonist enters, a novel becomes specific, and even
peculiar, and loses the generality that the other four elements seem
to offer. The protagonist shapes the other four elements to himself.
The narrative must be appropriate to him-it must grow out of his
circumstances and teach him something. He must interact with the
elements of the plot in a believable as well as an interesting way.
The narrative and the protagonist are the chicken and the egg, the
thesis and the synthesis. Neither precedes the other, nor exists
without the other. A generic story line-for example, "a stranger
comes to town"-becomes illuminating and interesting only as it
becomes characteristic, only as it becomes the sole property of a
particular protagonist. Similarly, the protagonist must prove
himself worthy of the length of the novel written about him. If he
is trite or blandly conceived, if he doesn't grow as the novel gets
longer, the reader will lose interest in him. (It is true, though,
that the novelist doesn't rely solely on psychological complexity to
maintain the reader's interest in the protagonist. He may substitute
sociological complexity if his theory of human nature is more
realistic than romantic.) The length of a novel can become a problem
for the protagonist-the author and the narrator may be tempted to
leave him behind (as Cervantes sometimes puts Don Quixote to sleep
when the other characters wish to talk about love problems). In some
very long novels, the protagonist's role grows nominal as the
landscape fills up with fellow characters and their stories take
precedence over his. Even so, the protagonist, as he originates the
story line and its circumstances, always remains the organizing
figure in the novel, and the main plot must resolve his dilemma,
however many other dilemmas it also resolves.
The protagonist is the fulcrum of the author's relationship to the
narrator, and the prose, or style, of the novel continuously
presents the shifting balances among the three. The prose, like the
narrative, must be appropriate to the protagonist. It must express
something about him that it could not express about any other
protagonist and demonstrate his worthiness to be the protagonist. In
some sense, the author, the narrator, and the protagonist are always
in a state of conflict that is always being reconciled as the
narrative moves forward. Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady is a
good example of this conflict.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
by Jane Smiley
Copyright © 2005 by Jane Smiley.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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