Against the Novel of Ideas

I don’t like the novel of ideas. I think it is overrated and betrays a failure to appreciate what art is really for. There, I said it. I feel better already.

There are five different kinds of novel, or nine or thirty-seven, or however many you need to make whatever point you want to make, but for the point I want to make today, there are five:

The novel of experience

A story is an experience. It is like going on an adventure. The brain processes a story the way it processes real experiences. The novel of experience is the default form of the novel, and every novel that is a novel at all is in some sense a novel of experience. The difference between a novel of experience and the other types in my little taxonomy is that a novel of experience is meant to be just that: an experience as real and authentic and truthful as the author can make it.

The other forms use experience as a vehicle to deliver something else. The experience becomes not an end in itself but a means to another end. You remember a novel of experience the way you remember a great vacation, for the people and the places and the way it made you feel. The novel of experience lingers, like the memory of an old friend. You remember the other forms of the novel, if you remember them at all, for something else.

The novel of appetite

The novel of appetite is designed to satisfy an appetite, to give the reader a particular experience that they crave, like the first cup of coffee in the morning. A novel of appetite is not supposed to deliver surprises or new experiences or expand the reader’s understanding of the world. It is supposed, like Coca-Cola or a Big Mac and fries, to reliably deliver a prescribed experience that satisfies a specific appetite.

Novels of appetite are exactly specified and are organized into genres and sub-sub genres, each with its own precise formula, to make sure that the novel delivers the exact desired experience, that it sates the specific appetite it is intended for. For example, genre romance novels, like hot sauce, are ranked on a graduated heat scale specifying the exact degree of titillation they provide.

Of course, all novels have to appeal to an appetite of some kind, or why would anyone read them? But there are many kinds of appetite. Some are complex and of long duration, and look outward and upward. Some, like the appetite for food and water, are simple, immediate, and repeating. Novels of appetite have no aim in mind beyond the temporary satiation of a particular common repeating appetite.

I mean no slight against novels of appetite. I simply mean that there are complex appetites that drive us towards novelty and extension and discovery, and there are simple, repeating appetites that are well understood and simple to satisfy. The novel of appetite is addressed to these simple, repeating appetites. Our daily lives are mostly consumed with, and our continued existence largely depends upon, the regular satisfaction of simple, repeating appetites. They are not wrong for being simple or repeating, but they are not the limit of our experience or ambition.

I leave it to theologians to debate which of these simple, repeating appetites it is licit to indulge and which we should strive to suppress. Similarly, I leave it to theologians and philosophers to debate which of these appetites may licitly or efficaciously be satisfied by literary rather than practical experience. A book will never satisfy the appetite for a sandwich, I suppose, though it contains fewer calories. But a book may break fewer hearts and fewer bones than romance or war encountered in the flesh. Whatever. Here, I am only interested in delineating the type.

The novel of information

The novel of information exists to give you information on a subject you are interested in, but with all the difficulties of authentication and interpretation smoothed away. It is the realm of knowledge made easy.

The desire for information is, of course, an appetite, an appetite of the mind. For good evolutionary reasons, we all have an appetite for information. People who know things tend to get more food, better mates, and fewer injuries and deadly diseases than people who don’t know as many things. Thus the gene for wanting to know things gets passed on.

This innate desire for information means that we don’t have to have an immediate practical use for information to enjoy learning it. Learning information only when we need it tends to be a poor survival strategy. It is good to know that there are sharks in the water before you go in for a swim. The gene for looking before you leap is also likely to be passed on. Rather like that box of bolts and screws in your garage, we accumulate information that might come in handy one day.

Thanks to C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian, I have all kinds of information about the ships and tactics of Nelson’s navy that I am never going to be able to put to practical use. I could have learned the same information from specialized history books, but the academic study of a subject is often tedious and beset by doubts and arguments about the interpretation of evidence that only frustrate our appetite for information. Thanks to learning it through fiction, my enjoyment of knowing how to captain a sailing frigate in battle is not disturbed by any niggling fears that I might prove, in the moment of crisis, to be ill-informed on some subtle or grand part of its operation.

Not that it necessarily matters to the information-hungry mind if information is fanciful or even imaginary. Information is information, and the hungry mind likes information that is clear and certain. Fanciful information tends to be far clearer and more certain than the factual kind. The immense interest in worldbuilding in fantasy demonstrates that information does not have to be real to be delightful. Imaginary information can be just as satisfying to the information-hungry brain as factual and quasi-factual information, or even more so since it is not beset by any shade of doubt or argument that might sour the pure pleasure of knowing.

Now, let it be said that fiction uses imaginary information all the time in order to set a stage for stories that are intended to tell the truth. A story is a lens, not a window, designed to focus attention on a particular aspect of experience. As such, it distorts in order to focus. Its imaginary elements are the curved glass that creates a clear image at the point of focus. We thus need to make a clear distinction between functional fancy that serves the mechanics of storytelling and fancy for its own sake, which has charms of its own. But my purpose here is not to choose between these things, but to delineate the types.

The novel of grievance

We live in an age of grievance. Probably not the only age of grievance, but certainly one of the more prominent ones. Perhaps this is because those who feel themselves agrieved are now well enough off and well enough educated to have time to write and read novels about how badly off they are and whose fault that is. You will enjoy the novel of grievance if you feel agrieved for yourself or for some other group, the championing of whom makes you feel virtuous.

The first problem with the novel of experience is that in pleading a case, it has every motive to lie and exaggerate to advance the cause of those claiming grievance. Thus it fails in the essential truthfulness of a novel of experience.

The second problem is that the appeal of the novel of grievance is limited to those who feel the same grievance and those who feel virtuous for sympathizing with them. And since half the world is in a contest to prove that their grievance is more grievous than your grievance, such novels tend to be of their moment and then are gone, for they have no grounding in truthfulness to attract a reader once the cause is no longer célèbre.

I’m hiding it well, but you might guess that I have no time or patience for the novel of grievance. They are almost without exception vain, dissembling, and self-righteous to an intolerable degree. And when it comes to grievances expressed on behalf of a group I belong to or sympathize with, I despise them all the more.

There are, however, great novels born of grievance. What makes them different is that novels such as The Grapes of Wrath or much of Dickens’ work avoid the tropes of grievance and highlight the experience of groups or people suffering various ills. A novel of experience is a novel truthful about the concrete nature of human experience, and that includes sorrow as much as joy, pain as much as pleasure. The observation or experience of suffering is often the seed of grievance, and perhaps justly so. To present that experience justly and truthfully is art. To milk it for politics and advantage is not art. The difference between a truthful novel born of grievance, like The Grapes of Wrath, and a novel written to promote a grievance is, quite simply, the truth of its vision.

The novel of ideas

A novel of ideas is one written to express an idea. While there may be a story in them, perhaps in some cases even a good story, the story is a contrivance designed to express the idea.

The advocates of a novel of ideas will praise it for the ideas it contains. The immediate problem with this is that when a novel is valued for the ideas it expresses, its value depends on how much you agree with the ideas and how important you think the ideas are. A good novel of ideas expresses an important idea that you agree with. A bad novel of ideas expresses a trivial idea that you disagree with.

Appreciation of the novel of ideas depends on the kinds of ideas that interest you. If you are interested in ideas about the physical world, you will like science fiction and complain that the literary establishment does not take your favorite genre seriously. If you are interested in ideas in the fields of psychology, sociology, or philosophy, you will like literary fiction and look down your nose at the people reading science fiction.

If you read novels for ideas, you will go hunting through a novel for the ideas it contains. And if it is a novel of any sort of reputation you will think, this is a great novel and therefore it must contain great ideas, and you will dig and dig until you find ideas, or what seem like ideas, because you cannot imagine that the novel deserves its reputation except because of the ideas it contains. Pride and Prejudice is a preeminent example of this, with people discovering all kinds of ideas in its pages, which they will then go on to praise and condemn according to their philosophy.

The problem with this is that no matter what ideas you winkle out of a reputed great novel by this method, you still have to face the question of why any number of novels of far lesser reputation express the same ideas, in some cases far more clearly. If lesser novels express the same ideas more bluntly, more overtly, wherein lies the superiority of Pride and Prejudice, unless a novel is to be exalted for the degree of obscurity it brings to its expression of essentially pedestrian ideas? Judging a novelist by this criteria is like judging a physician by how illegible their handwriting is.

There is a further problem with this practice. If a novel of ideas is to be praised for the correctness of its ideas, then, of course, the ideas that justify its reputation must be modern ideas of the kind held by modern people. Otherwise, as some today do believe, the entire Western canon has to be jettisoned for containing nothing but the wicked ideas of dead white men.

It is not at all uncommon, indeed, it seems to be endemic in academic circles today (and for at least the last eighty years, since C. S. Lewis complained about it in his day) for modern critics to discover in authors of the past ideas that they could not possibly have been trying to express because such ideas simply did not belong to the world or the world-view of the time and are in no way made explicit in anything the author ever said or wrote.

The problem here is that one needs to have a fair appreciation of the history of ideas, and a fair appreciation of how circumstances shape ideas, to realize that the ideas one is attributing to the authors of the past are, in fact, impossible. And so specialized are our academies and our academics today that such appreciation is a rare thing. Nor is there a lot of grant money to be won or theses to be defended by suggesting that writers of the past meant what they actually said.

Reading Novels the Wrong Way

You can read any novel for experience, for appetite, for information, for grievance, or for ideas. How satisfying you find the novel will obviously depend on the thing you are reading it for. But whatever your reason for reading, you can probably find it to a degree in most novels.

A novel at base is a story, and stories create experiences. Experiences lie at the base of everything else. If an appetite is satisfied, it will be satisfied by an experience. If information is derived, it is derived from experience. It may be transmitted in abstract language, but it originates in experience. If a grievance is felt, the grievance comes from an experience. And if an idea is formed, even the most abstract idea, it was originally abstracted from experience. A novel of experience, therefore, can always be mined for appetite, information, grievance, or ideas, whether or not the author salted the ground with those things as they wrote.

And thus there is a temptation to value a novel not for what it is in itself, not for the experience itself, but for the appetite it satisfies, the information it contains, the grievance it expresses, or the ideas to which it gives rise.

The problem with each of these approaches to value, though, is that they don’t correspond to the reverence in which the great classics are held. If Shakespeare is the greatest of our writers, what are his great ideas? What are his grievances, and how are they more grievous than any other grievances? What information does he transmit, and how is it more informative than any other information? What simple repeating appetite does he satisfy that cannot be satisfied by Stephen King or Danielle Steele?

None of these methods of valuation corresponds to the actual merit we intuitively perceive in great works of literature. What then is left to value but the experience they provide as an experience in itself?

The Priority of Experience Over Ideas

We live in an age that tends to value ideas over experience. I’m not sure why this is. Is it that most of us now lead such safe lives that we feel no need to prepare ourselves for the extremes of human experience? Is it just a turning of the wheel of discourse? Do we seek intellectual assurance in abstraction in the novel of ideas, rather like seeking information untrammeled by doubt and reservation in the novel of information? Do we find raw experience so intolerable that we cannot bear it in art unaccompanied by the comforting abstraction of an idea?

In any case, I will assert what I hold to be an unassailable truth. Experience is prior to information. All information is gleaned from experience. Even pure abstractions like mathematics can occur only to people whose minds have been brought alive by experience.

Experience has practical evolutionary value. Children are naturally driven to explore because it is through experience that they calibrate their minds to reality and thus learn to understand and anticipate the world sufficiently to feed themselves and keep themselves safe. It may be possible to translate these experiential learnings into language, but language itself is only a set of references to experience. We learn very little from language alone, and we cannot understand language itself unless we have had the experiences that language references.

The ability to use language to create new experiences through stories is one of the great wonders and mysteries of the brain. But that it exists is a testament to the fact that language is not for abstractions alone, and that abstractions alone are not adequate to calibrate our minds to reality. Abstractions are pulled from the concrete, and the concrete is known by experience.

The value of stories, then, is that they add to our stock of experiences, and thus provide us with all the virtues of experience without the danger, labour, and time required to have all these experiences in the flesh.

A mind that works with abstractions alone, with ideas alone, quickly becomes detached from the real and imagines the most bizarre and lunatic things. It is, therefore, more important that we have experiences than that we have ideas, and more important that we continue to stock our minds with experiences than to stock them with ideas. Not because ideas are not important, but because ideas are of value only as they explain experience and are rooted in it.

The insertion of ideas into a novel corrupts the experience, and the novel has more important work to do. The further ideas stray from experience, the wilder and more contentious they become. We seem to have a much better instinct for the authenticity of the experience produced by stories (not their individual truth, but their congruence with truthful experience) than we do with the logic of ideas. Stories fortify us with experience and therefore make us better able to form reasonable ideas and better able to evaluate the ideas that are presented to us.

Adding to our stock of experiences is far more valuable than adding to our stock of ideas. A person whose head is stuffed with ideas but little experience is a danger to themselves and others. A person whose head is stuffed with experience and few ideas is usually safe, sensible, useful, contented, and benevolent. A person whose head is stuffed with experience and in possession of reasonable ideas well-founded in reality is most apt to be of great value to their community and their society.

We have today far too many ideas grounded in far too little experience. The novel of ideas only makes this worse. Reading the great novels of experience from the past as if they were novels of ideas blunts any benefit we might derive from them.

The novel of appetite helps keep the habit of reading and a regard for the value of experience alive. It is a gateway to the novel of experience. By all means, let’s keep it as a gateway, but encourage people to pass through that gateway to where it leads.

The novel of information is less benign than the novel of appetite because it is closer to the novel of ideas, but the appetite for information is not harmful in itself, and the novel of information can still serve as a gateway to the novel of experience.

But fie on the novel of grievance, unless the author can look beyond the ideology of the grievance and produce a genuine novel of experience like The Grapes of Wrath.

And fie on the novel of ideas in all its forms and manifestations, both for its own sins and for the way the belief in it warps the understanding and appreciation of the novel of experience.