This is the last part of a series which I began in 2024. The first two parts bore the somewhat bombastic heading “Why I Decided to Destroy Modernism.” I’m no longer sure that’s the right framing, so I’ve dropped it from this essay, and I’ve edited the previous parts of this series for relevance.
The real question I’m trying to answer is what is the novel uniquely suited to do? In our unliterary age, the reader will be pardoned for answering “nothing.” And I agree that the novel has very little relevance today for mass culture—a relevance that will only continue to diminish over time.
And yet I believe the novel is still, potentially at least, of paramount importance, for a reason very different from the one you are likely imagining.
Our culture is in need of a religious, artistic and political rejuvenation. Those who are in a place to effect such rejuvenation, unfortunately, have been raised in the same miasma as the rest of us and are therefore without a clear idea just how this rejuvenation ought to occur. Where does one start?
I believe that the novel—not the essay, the tweet, the podcast, or the item of short for video content—is the ideal form for posing and even beginning to answer such a question. I might even go as far as to say that such question cannot be satisfactorily posed except in novelistic form. And finally, the novel’s form itself provide us the right form of the answer, as the practice of engaging with art, diminished though it is, remains the only true ritual consistently practiced by educated moderns. My rationale for these strange notions are unsystematically espoused throughout the discursive essay below.
In case the essay is to discursive, at its end I have provided a little listicle of prescriptions for the serious novelist. I call this “Dogma 26” after Lars von Trier’s 1995 list of prescriptions for filmmakers, “Dogme 95.”
What is the novel today?
Let’s look at the mundane side of things. For the American writers before my own generation—beginning with the Greatest Generation and ending with Gen X—the writing of novels was, first of all, a possible path to financial success without having to work a day job. (John Updike’s son David decided he himself wanted to be a writer when he noticed how little his father actually worked. And John Updike was one the most hardworking and prodigious of his cohort.) For writers of the Baby Boomer generation onward, the writing of novels was also a path to a sinecure at a university (for the especially famous, this started a little earlier; Robert Frost captured the gist when he referred to his position at the various universities to which he was attached as poetic radiator), where one was admired by bright-eyed young people and even got to sleep with the more adventurous of them. This is (for the most part) no longer the case, though there are still some sinecures and grants for those who tick the right boxes. Why do the rest of us persist?
Well, obviously, there is more to the writing of novels than the mundane side of things. Even among commercial authors, I suspect that very few novelists become novelists for mercenary reasons, and I suspect that none of the great novelists did so. Beyond money, fame, and sex, what is the literary artist aiming for?
At the deepest personal level, the creation of a great novel is an instance of the maxim physician, heal thyself. The novelist has a cultural or spiritual wound that he or she wishes to fix. But he or she finds a very particular and roundabout way of doing so. This is by finding the larger-scale problem that correlates with the personal wound. With truly great novels, the scale is so large as to be universal. That is to say, the artist zooms out. The insane person and the narcissist project their own personal wounds onto the world, thus transforming the world into a place that only recapitulates their own very specific sad stories. The artist takes his or her sad story and finds what’s universal in it, thereby expanding his or her vantage point enormously and breaking the spell of individual hurt.
Myth and reality
The novelist thus turns the real into myth. I realize when I use the word myth I may lose some people. So let me use a few examples to make this idea concrete. One sort of myth is that of the wounded lover. An early version of this can be found in the Italian poet Petrarch’s famous sonnet sequence—which was, at least at the moment of inspiration, about a woman who had caused him pain. But Petrarch takes this pain and aestheticizes it. “Fool, look in thy heart and write,” he advises himself in the last line of the first sonnet of the series. And that very command—to take the experience and make something artful out of it—immediately takes Petrarch out of the worm’s eye view and puts him in the bird’s eye view.1 Petrarch is seeing himself from the vantage point of someone else. This echoes the shift from Romanticism to Realism that I wrote about a few year ago on my old blog.
This process of changing one’s vantage point heals the wound by removing the ego, and in so doing Petrarch also provides the means for his reader to heal his or her own wound. This particular wounded lover myth appears again and again in Western literature. Modern instantiations that immediately come to mind are Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary and Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers (both of which are, not coincidentally, first novels). In each of these novels the narrator spends the length of the novel yearning, unrequitedly, for his beloved. In each of these novels the narrator ends the book by zooming out his perspective, renouncing his yearning and (implicitly) beginning to write the book which the reader holds in hand. The plot is not only an account of a protagonist leveling up his state of consciousness, but a symbol of the alchemical artistic process itself.
Another way of making this concept concrete is to examine the structure of Shakespeare’s plays, with the help of the poet-critic Ted Hughes’s magisterial book-length essay on the Bard, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. In his preface to this book, Hughes points out that today we tend to love Shakespeare for being a precocious realist along the lines of Dickens or Balzac and other 19th century novelists; and indeed there had been no dramatist prior to Shakespeare to inject his plays with so much earthy detail. Yet Shakespeare was also deeply mythic in his perspective, and this is why we revere him—whether we know that this is why or not.
Hughes argues that the middle and later plays of Shakespeare constitute an elaboration of a single myth, which was presaged by Shakespeare’s two early long poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece.” This myth is the rejection of a Goddess, and the Goddess’s ensuing revenge—by bringing madness, humiliation, or death to the character who has rejected the Goddess and has thus rejected Eros. For Hughes this is a perennial theme throughout the corpus of myth: “I pointed out,” he writes, summarizing his introductory chapter, “how the demonization of the Goddess, or one half of her, as a result of this rejection, was fully anticipated in the original mythic splitting of the Aphrodite figure (Mother and Sacred Bride) and a Persephone figure (Queen of Hell), in the various traditions. . . . According to this lineage, [Shakespeare’s] Equation is itself a primordial mythic structure, like an elemental law in physics.”
Hughes argues that for Shakespeare this was not only a perennial theme but a timely one: It was demonstrated by the recent anti-Erotic Puritan revolt to which Shakespeare’s plays responded. We first see this political-social theme crop up unmistakably in the person of Angelo, the strident reformer in Measure for Measure. (Within Hughes’s conception of the Shakespearean “equation,” Angelo’s incomprehensible and maddening lust for Isabella is an instantiation of the Goddess’s revenge.)
Finally, it is not too importunate to deduce some feature of Shakespeare’s biography that also aligns with this mythic and historical situation: What biographical evidence we have shows that Shakespeare abandoned his wife for many years, and the evidence from the Sonnets makes clear the author’s preoccupation with the travails of lust.
Thus Shakespeare’s Equation forming the plots of his greatest plays is derived from three separate strata: (1) historical occurrences (2) myths as they have come down to us in recorded history and (3) mythic structures themselves, which are like elemental laws in physics. This last category of inspiration is something that, presumably, any human at any time on earth can access innately, but to which Shakespeare had a particular attraction due to his sensitive artistic temperament and the circumstances of his own life.
So, when I say the novelist turns the real into myth, this is what I mean. I mean he or she accesses intuitively, through meditative exercises, through poetic trance, or through drugs or mental imbalance,2 the mythic structures behind reality which are elusive to us in our rational age. These structures are homologous with mundane reality (hence the power of symbols) while being in a deep sense are more real than it.
The novel and society
Prior to the 20th century, every society on earth was essentially theocratic. That is, every society subordinated its people’s worldly interests to some form of otherworldly interest. The 20th century was an interesting experiment, no doubt, but I believe it is safe to say that neither secularism nor material goods have produced the utopia imagined by such optimistic early 20th century liberals as H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. It is even looking increasingly unlikely that we will even achieve the kind of vaguely pleasant anhedonic post-thymos global nanny state envisioned by Francis Fukuyama.
It seems fair to me to posit that the sense of dissatisfaction experienced even by the materially comfortable can be explained by the fact that the society in which they live is insufficiently theocratic. By this I only mean that the principles that undergird religion—a sense of continuity with the past and future, a sense that our mundane world is contiguous with the transcendent, and a belief that ritual is necessary for the opening up of the membrane between mundane and transcendent—must also undergird decision-making mechanisms of those who run the society in order for that society to flourish. As odd as this may sound to the modern ear, it was a baseline assumption of earlier ages. After all, even the United States of America used to be such a country and putatively still is, which is why we still swear on the Bible and impress the words “In God We Trust” on our coins.
In a flourishing society, the transcendent must be successfully integrated into the social order, and it is through ritual that this integration takes place. It is ritual that opens up that membrane between the mundane and transcendent. Yet for modern man such ancient rituals are largely ineffective—except for art, which is to say mythic storytelling, which is the sine qua non of any religion new or old. Thus the novel is not only a tool for descriptively pointing toward an effective society, but is itself, by way of the artist’s breaking away into the transcendent and then bringing some element of it back for an audience, a ritual, and the most powerful and effective ritual still available to us in the desacralized modern world.
The ancient Egyptians maintained such an incredibly conservative art because they understood how powerful art was for influencing the people, and that the viewing of their art was a ritual action which effected the thoughts of the people who viewed it. This great responsibility lies with the modern artist, too. Even if he doesn’t create the conscience of the masses, he creates the conscience of those who still have the intelligence and imagination to read serious works; the odds are high enough that some of such people will be the leaders of tomorrow’s society.
How does the novelist enact such a ritual? Here is a brief attempt at enumerating the preconditions for doing so.
The novelist’s responsibilities
One cannot neglect the nuts and bolts, just as you can’t have a priest without a cincture. To write a good novel, one must be a good craftsman, an excellent practitioner of his or her native tongue. But this subject is covered ably in many other books.3 But there is a still more important element seldom discussed, and it is by ignoring this element that our modern novelists have largely brought the form to shame.
To write a good novel, you have to exit the reality distortion vortex that serves as the prerequisite for the emission of polite speech and for political jockeying. The novel is, in this limited sense, impolite and anti-political. And no one will write a great novel if he or she cannot afford to to embody either of these qualities. This does not apply only to matters of “political correctness.” An acquaintance with reality in general is necessary. James Joyce desperately needed to know the height of the railings at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin in order to write the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses; he required strict realism to take the imaginative flights that he did. This sounds simple enough, but unfortunately we got in such a habit of distorting reality in order to make polite conversation that it is easy for one’s work to accidentally suffer. A very simple example: In a roundup that includes a review of my own novel Stop All the Clocks, R.W. Richey writes appositely of the reality distortion vortex’s effect on a novel by the affable British comedian Richard Osman:
First, Richey quotes Osman’s book:
Amy weighs up the odds. Kevin is around six two, must weigh upwards of 260lbs. If she can unbalance him, it’s an easy win for her. But Kevin is an ex-Navy SEAL. And Kevin knows that he is six two, and heavy, so Kevin also knows that if Amy can unbalance him it’s an easy win for her. Kevin is therefore keeping his distance and letting the gun do the work. Amy hears handcuffs. The second Kevin reaches for her wrists, he will be doomed. Once she overpowers him, she can worry about what to do next.
And then Richey responds:
I point this out because in all of the modern examples of amazing, girlboss, female fighters, I can’t remember anything as ridiculous as this. And there has been a lot of ridiculous stuff. I don’t care how well trained Amy is, or if she looks like Brienne of Tarth. She’s not going to automatically win against a 6’2” ex-Navy SEAL, if he but touches her wrists. That’s basically science fiction. In reality her chances of “overpowering” him in a straight up fight are next to zero, to say nothing of a situation where he’s got the drop on her and is holding a gun. “Easy win”? “He will be doomed”? Come on!? I can’t imagine Osman is really that blinkered. I guess it must be a trap to catch out bad people like me. If so, I guess he succeeded.
Success indeed. And Osman’s book is a bestseller. But what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?
Zoom out
How else does a novelist enact the sort of ritual necessary to guide elite opinion and rejuvenate society? Obviously, the novelist needs to write about the most pressing issues of his or her age. This was obvious to Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, and Dickens. But it has been forgotten for several reasons—of which modernism was a major contributor—which were discussed in the earlier essays in this series. I won’t linger on that. A more interesting question is how it is that the novelist’s craft differs from that of the essayist or anyone else deeply concerned with the issues of his or her age.
One unique feature of the novel is its adherence to the mythico-philosophical concept of the conjunction of opposites. Mircea Eliade notes the tendency of myths to “express on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be reconciled . . . .” This tendency is also present in the religions of today; what two Gods are more irreconcilable than jealous Yahweh and generous Christ—though they be but one and the same? Within the literary arts, the novel continues this tradition. A novel is not a novel if it merely shows a superior hero’s triumph over his surroundings; this might be an epic, or a comic book, or an item of erotica. But the great novel perfectly balances competing interests; it is a concretization of ambivalence.
The novelist is free in a way other writers are not to take a longer view of the world, and to synthesize the parts that make up our daily lives into a whole. Moreover, the novelist is free not only to tell us what he or she thinks about various situations, but to imagine what it is to feel them. There is an immense power to such a way of writing, and it is the imaginative capability that the reader of novels has historically responded to so passionately. Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book primarily about the love lives of a handful of individuals, reveals more about the sort of socialism with a human face that we encounter today in the west than a dozen dry books of history could. To make ideas concrete and to imagine their effects on individual lives is already a form of thought more effective and more thorough than that which is available to the large majority of punditry today. To be able to do so on a grand social scale, as the great novelists have done, is so far beyond the powers of the average artist of today that it sometimes feels that the great 19th century novelists were of a different species.
And yet the novel’s potential power is greater still. Beyond its exoteric aim of telling a story that portrays the passions of a large social milieu, a great novel has an esoteric aim. This is the place where poetry gets mixed in, where passages make the reader’s hair stand on end. And indeed horripilation is as good a test as any for the success of a novel or any other work of art in this mysterious realm. The novel is unique in that it is sufficiently capacious to allow for the imagining of a new world in which ritual has been revived and wholeness has been restored to society, while also being sufficiently poetic that the reading of a novel might constitute participation in that ritual itself.
To put it another way: the novel is a perfect admixture of the rational and irrational.4 The novelist in this sense is the ultimate magician: he or she on the one hand reflects reality as clearly as possible, while on the other hand simultaneously induces poetic trance, leading the reader unknowingly into a realm beyond “reality.” “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” is as much a description as it is an abracadabra.
Implicit here is a comment on the structure of reality. This comment is not “mystical” but rather requires some humility with regard to our understanding of the universe; the comment theorizes the existence of features of reality which we have not fully mapped. These features include human instincts that have been called the unconscious. I tend to agree with scholars of such psychological processes such as Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade that these unconscious instincts form a part of an objective reality which we cannot yet adequately map, and moreover that they are intimately connected with the forms of reality that we have traditionally called religion when we do attempt to make the maps. Even today when the educated west is less inclined to practice religion, these forces of reality which we have not adequately mapped break through to us in the form of neurosis or psychosis, and other irrational behavior. Or in the form of literature. As the scholar and publisher Roberto Calasso puts it, “one way or another the world will go on being the place of epiphanies.”
Meanwhile, material questions of paramount importance loom: What is a human and what is machine? What are the rules around human procreation now that much of this process can be replaced by machine? What is the proper form of government in a globally connected society? What is the role of biology now that our understanding of human biology reveals many facts unflattering to the worldview that has dominated elite opinion for the last several centuries? This is just a smattering. And perhaps most pressing of all is the question concerning humankind’s relationship to the transcendent—do we exist for the sake of anything greater than ourselves? Of course anyone can participate in the discussion of these questions but it is likely only those of peculiar temperament and peculiar capacity for leisure who will actually want to engage with them in the way that the novel allows. And, more importantly, who will be able to concentrate well enough to undergo the ritual trance that the novel may induce. My hope is that future novels may both pose the right questions and induce the right trances among the right people. If this is to be the case, then the novel may be far more important than other much more ballyhooed media.
Of course I realize people will still write entertainments and self-justifying autofiction and smut. This is fine. With this essay I only wish to indicate what, in the field of novel-writing, is genuinely worthwhile.
A Listicle (Dogma 26)
Some prescriptions for the serious novelist:
Your Audience is small
You are not, primarily, an entertainer. (And yet you must be entertaining. Writing novels is hard). Your primary job is to usher forth a new era of humanity. In doing so, you will likely not appeal to distracted people reading your book on the train on their way to work.
Be Real
You can’t write a worthwhile novel if you can’t free yourself from the Reality Distortion Vortex. You can’t do it if you’re trying above all be polite and win plaudits.
Myth-make
You must be a mythmaker. This means you know what the realm of the mythic is, which means you must have found access to the transcendent, whether by spiritual practice or by accident.
Examine an Important Social Problem Deeply
Nothing Purely Subjective, No “Slices of Life.” Your novel should convey at least some characters outside your own milieu.
Ambivalence is the precondition for transcendence.
Even if, from your own point of view, the novel has a political purpose, that purpose should not be exposed to the reader. Great novelists give great lines to characters who oppose their own viewpoints (Skimpole in Dickens’s Bleak House, Ivan in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov).
I am borrowing these terms from Colin Wilson, who used them in The Art of the Novel and elsewhere.
Don’t try this at home.
I recommend James Woods’s How Fiction Works.
“Irrational” has the connotation of false or deluded but that is not what I mean. When I write “rational and irrational” I am referring to what Robert Graves called “solar knowledge” and “lunar knowledge.” Graves speculated that our ancient human ancestors possessed a far greater degree of “lunar knowledge” which included precognition, intuition, and revelation of knowledge through poetic trance. This was no airy speculation; the argument is mirrored with astonishing precision by the neuroscientist Julian Jaynes, whom Graves did not know, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.