on trying to write a novel
Symposium on the Novel: Part I
I spend a lot of time suspicious of speculation. I have argued, in my academic and theological writing, that there is something inherently alienating about our human relationship with the artificial, with the imagined, with the unreal. I have taught and cited Plato’s allegory of the cave; taught and cited, too, the aesthetic retreats of the French decadents — the subject of my doctoral dissertation — for whom the love of art doubled as a theological statement about the desiccation of nature. I’ve written extensively about my conviction that there is, in fact, such a thing as art — be it a film or a text or a painting — that can morally or spiritually warp us, even if, especially if, it possesses the power to move us aesthetically. One of the worst things we can do as human beings, I think, is lie about the nature of reality.
There is only one problem. I am also a novelist. I am a Christian novelist — whatever that means — and a novelist who spends a lot of time fretting over theological implications of things, but I am also a novelist who loves novels; insofar as I have a vocation, and I think I do, it lies primarily in my fiction. And yet, still I sit here, trying to write this novel I’ve been mulling over for years about Trieste and Duino and Habsburg nostalgia and disillusioned writers and dissolute expats.
I joke, often, that one of these days I’m going to ‘meme myself’ out of writing novels. I don’t want to do this. Not just because I, personally, want to write them, but because I do have an instinctive sense, reading, say, The Brothers Karamazov or Middlemarch or any of the novels that make me want to write novels, that what I am experiencing is not a kind of aesthetic distraction from reality — something I do and have experienced elsewhere, including from more indulgent novels — but rather a fuller, richer, sense of it.
I could, of course, be wrong. But insofar as one of my theological convictions is to err on the side of hope, and on the reconciliation of apparent opposites, I will hope that I am right. The question, then, is why are novels not lies? Or, to put it another way, what can a novel reveal that simply being in the world, cannot?
My instinct is that novels, at their best, are fundamentally about sin; and the very best novels are the very best novels because the truth of what they get at is also a truth about the sinful human heart: both its frailties and its foundations. I acknowledge there’s something circular in this — it’s awfully convenient for me to think that the best novels are the ones with the best theology — but I think that a worldview that holds novels as more than idle entertainment, that believes in the potential of the novel for artistic transcendence that is genuinely good, is inherently theological (though not necessarily Christian, or even theist). As Charles Taylor put it in his excellent recent book, Cosmic Connections, we can at least hold that there is a kind of aesthetic experience that has the “depth dimension of value”, even if we lack the certainty to elucidate what that value is.
I think the best novels are asymptotic: which is to say, they work because they are about the limitations of the novel; they are about the attempt to approach an account of our selves, our lives, our place in the world, that we can never fully tell, both because we are limited beings who cannot encompass the entire story of the universe sub specie aeternatis, and because we are sinful beings who, in seeing the world from our self-serving point of view, inherently tell only the stories we can bear.
From Don Quixote to Sense and Sensibility, from Madame Bovary to To The Lighthouse, so many of the novels I love most are about people who, in telling themselves and others incomplete stories, in thrall to stories and accounts they’ve been told in turn, step by accident into the path of truth. Insofar as we are all self-deceiving creatures, as human beings, and all novels, which always slightly deceptive, are about self-deceit, the form of the novel is one that allows us to explore the limitations of human narrative — the way we both can know, and say, so much, and how as the gap between what we can say and the truth narrows, it deepens too.
I think, too, there is another way good novels are truthful about sin. They are, in a way that a lot of bad novels are not, honest both about the depths of human potential depravity — often magnified in the service of plot — and about the ache of our awareness of it. We know what we should do and we don’t do it. We are in the gutters and looking at the stars. A certain cynical genre of novel where human beings are bleakly wicked bores me as much as flat hero-and-villain stories where our pure-hearted protagonists are simply Good.
They are honest, too, about the ways in which our failings and our flailings alike corrupt our ability to apprehend what is true, whether literally (the suspicious husband in Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right who falsely accuses his wife of adultery) or emotionally (the interpersonal misapprehensions of Pride and Prejudice). At their best, we might say that novels are less about, and represent, deliberate lies, than they are, in form and content, about warped visions of the world: stories told by people who cannot stop themselves telling stories, even as — especially as — it is also in our nature to want to express something of what is true. We are both self-disclosing and self-justifying beings, at all times, constantly trying and failing both to express ourselves and to explain.
I have never committed most of the great novelistic acts of sin (murder, etc.). But, I think, I have, in my deeply warped internal monologue, held in my heart the same kinds of wrath or lust or pride or envy or gluttonous incontinence that motivate, say, Marmeladov to drink away his penniless family’s farthings even when his daughter is selling herself into prostitution, or Dorothea Brooke to make a spectacle of her self-renunciation and martyr herself to a marriage to someone she never truly sees. The recognition of myself in these distinct characters — both in their worst impulses and in their fractured awareness of them — is at once an aesthetic and a moral experience: a sense that I am participating in this great, flawed, project of human life, that none of us can get away from. Which is to say, insofar as novels are about sin, they’re also about the particular tension of being human: a tension that our facility with language — words, storytelling, images, and other forms of imagined-reality-creation — makes all the more evident.
There is one more thing that, I think, novels do particularly well, and that is directing our attention. We cannot, much as we’d like to, pay attention to everything, and insofar as we want to know and apprehend everything about reality we cannot do so directly. The novels I love most are also invitations to pay attention, through the non-literal process of fictional transliteration, to moments or thoughts or tendencies or human phenomena we might otherwise, consumed with our own self-regard, ignore. Somehow, the process of reading about other people who cannot get out of our own selves does, in fact, direct us out of our own selves, even if it culminates only in self-recognition. We are not alone in the world. Novels remind us of that, too, in a manner all the more intimate because we tend to read them alone.
None of this means necessarily that I will write a theologically defensible novel, or even a good novel — although I hope I will. But I think, maybe I have to think, that writing a Good Novel, in the sense of the artistic project of thinking about beauty theologically, and writing a Good Novel, in the sense of writing something people actually want to read, is the same project. There is a purpose to all of this typing — and that purpose, I hope, isn’t just illusion.
Note: this is the first essay in our Symposium on the novel, which will feature a couple essays by each of us as well as essays by featured guests over the coming months.
Tara, this is really lovely.
Really enjoyed this.