Interesting take on a complex topic….The thing is that any novel that you actually read through to the end has provided at least enough of an experience to hold your attention and keep you reading. That in itself is not to be taken for granted. So any novel well-written enough to keep you reading must qualify as at least a baseline “experience.” So I would say that your categories are more like spectra according to which any novel worth reading can be evaluated. It will need some ideas and some information and an appeal to some appetite, and also some antagonist (grievance or enmity or other). These are basic elements of any readable novel. I think by “experience” you are reaching for a description of a synergistic whole that is more than the sum of these parts. A great novel stays with you and alters your perceptions going forward; shows you a view of reality that expands your understanding; keeps you coming back because it resonates at a level that you may not even be able to articulate.
I wonder if that might be one measure of the greatness of a great novel, that you can't articulate why you like it so much. There are, after all, parts of experience that declarative statements cannot reach but only stories can. It follows that you should not be able to articulate declaratively why you were so moved and changed by a great story.
But yes, my point is not that novels of appetite, information, grievance, or ideas don't provide experiences, only that they subordinate those experiences to other things. If the thing ceased entirely to be an experience, it would cease to be a novel. As to novels needing some ideas, though, I'll postpone addressing that to another post.
I think what you’re getting at is the sense of falseness when a novel twists its narrative to serve a socially-pressured end. The best novels give an experience of truth revealed: describing something accurately that is not generally spoken. Most, though, leave a sense of having forcibly imposed a false conclusion: usually one that flatters a certain subtype of reader.
In part, yes. But my main contention is the value of experience itself and thus the value of the novel -- and of art more broadly -- to deliver experience. Devaluing experience to the point where we treat it simply as a delivery mechanism for something else -- appetite, information, grievance, ideas -- does exactly as you say, it twists the narrative to serve a more socially valued end. But the heart of my protest, if you like, is that these ends are more socially valued, that we have devalued experience to the point where we are disinterested in it as a thing in itself. We are not going to have a society that values art again until we have a society that values experience. Or perhaps that's not it, perhaps the challenge is to have an art again that society recognizes as a source of experience.
Do you mean that a novel should describe the plausible experience of a character? Or that the reader should feel like the reading of the novel is an experience? Both?
It's more that, neurologically, listening to a story *is* an experience. The brain receives it in the same way as experience in the flesh. (This is why stories can satisfy appetites at all.) So it's not a description of an experience, but the creation of one. And it is not feeling like it is an experience. It *is* an experience. After all, why would we weep at the death of Little Nell if we had not come to love her and hope for her? The characters and events of a story are real enough to move us to tears. They are an experience.
But there is an interesting double effect here. While a story is both neurologically and emotionally an experience, we still know it is a story. When reading a story, we are in a kind of dual state, both engaged in the story of the moment and safely sitting back in our chair, contemplating the events. We can both weep for Little Nell and reflect on her status as a literary character at the same time.
I think that the particular power of story lies in this double effect. It means that we can read about experiences that we would never seek out in real life, engaged in all their terror and danger, emotionally charged by it, and yet also knowing that we are perfectly safe at home. It is a remarkable trick that the brain pulls on us, but I think its power to prepare us for the vicissitudes of life is enormous.
The problem with the novel of ideas is that it rejects this dual state, preferring to force us into contemplation alone, when the events of the story become merely examples in an argument, not events of our experience.
When I see “novel of ideas” I think of the French style roman philosophique (rarely produced by English language authors). But I think you mean the sort of novel where characters and plot are shoehorned into a didactic “message” for the reader.
To just push back on one element, I don’t see why an idea has to be intended by the author to be meaningful. Death of the author is hardly a novel approach to literary criticism, nor is it an unjustified one, in my opinion. Litigating authorial intent is just much less interesting and useful than discussing what a novel made you think and consider, even if that includes ideas that were clearly unintended.
An idea doesn't have to be intended by the author to be meaningful. I think that is fundamental to the novel of experience. Experiences give us ideas. They give different people different ideas, as each person weighs them against all their other experiences. A novel of experience should give people ideas that were not anticipated and intended by the author.
And I agree that in this sense the authorial intent is less interesting than your own responses to the experience. Where authorial intent does get interesting is when we ask, what experience did the author intend to create. Because it is possible to read a novel incorrectly, not because one does not have the ideas intended but because one does not have the experience intended.
A large part of the experience that the author intended is shaped by the way in which the author anticipated the reader would react to images and events in the story. But time passes, and the images and events come to provoke different reactions.
A good case in point is the song "Baby it's cold outside" which became so controversial a few years back. The line "Say, what's in this drink?" was referring to a common trope at the time of blaming one's own misbehavior on the alcohol in your drink. In a totally different social context today, some people took it for a reference to a date rape drug. In a song written today, that might be a reasonable interpretation. For a song of its time, it isn't. So to that extent the discussion about authorial intent matters. But it matters to understand the experience the author intended to create, not the ideas he wanted the reader to take away as a result of that experience.
Interesting question. My first thought is to say no. The best satire I think consists of an experience that is satirical in its contrast to actual experience. Can one also create satire in the other forms? I suppose that a weak and obvious satire that appeals to an established and repeating prejudice would fit under the novel of appetite. A heavy-handed satire in which the author cannot resist dragging their implications into the open might fit under novel of ideas. But the novel of information is too stolid a category to admit of satire, and the novel of grievance is too earnest to be anything other than self-satirizing.
I love Jane Austen. I don't care much for some of the interpretations of her.
I'm not a great fan of satire, which I think is most often prejudice in a silly hat. But I don't think of Jane Austen as being satirical, if that is what you mean.
As I noted in the piece, though, the categories, like all categorization schemes, are just for purposes of the current argument. Satire might come in as a category for making a slightly different argument.
My problem with satire, also, is that it functions largely as a shibboleth. It's not designed to make everyone laugh. It's meant to divide people into those who laugh and those who are laughed at. I'm growing too old and sentimental for that kind of thing.
You are my Substack muse, so I usually agree with everything you say. But Northanger Abbey in paritcular is surely satirical of the Gothic novel. And in general aren't many of her novels highly satirical of the vain and upper class society?
On another thought, if we can't laugh at others without ill will or at ourselves without feeling ashamed, wouldn't that be us missing out on one of the most important forms of sentimentality--one strong enough to acknowledge the ridiculous and still love those who commit it?
I might be arguing for the sake of avoiding emails at this point.
We may be drawing the bounds of satire in different places. I certainly don't think that everything that laughs at others or ourselves is satire. Satire, to me, has that element of superiority about it, an element of a sneer in its expression. Would you call Jeeves and Wooster satire? Pickwick Papers? I, at least, would not.
It's been too long since I read Northanger Abbey for me to comment on it particularly. But as to Austen in general, I think it is a misreading to say that her purpose was to satirize upper-class society. That seems to lump her in with the novelists of the early twentieth century, mostly middle-class themselves, who made careers out of mocking the declining aristocracy. Their readers, after all, came from a different class from their victims. Austen's readers were of the same class as her characters.
By the early 20th century, the rise of industrialization and the middle class had made the artistocracy obsolete and had therefore made their manners seem absurd. They were easy targets, both for satire and for sentimentality. But this was not so in Austen's time, and to read those attitudes into her work strikes me as fundamentally wrongheaded. Did she paint fools and scoundrels among the upper classes? Of course she did. But she painted characters of sense and virtue among them as well.
But I think this reading of Austen also has a lot to do with the current attitude that the value of a novel lies in its ideas, and that only modern ideas are of any value, therefore any writer of the past who we are going to consider good can only be good because they were a proto-modern, lambasting the society they grew up in for not being twenty-first century Manhatten. This is exactly the harm that reading stories through the lens of ideas does.
And I think that in this case, it misses the shrewd but affectionate good humor with which Austen treats her characters, how she can laugh at them and love them at the same time, and see their folly without setting herself above them.
Interesting take on a complex topic….The thing is that any novel that you actually read through to the end has provided at least enough of an experience to hold your attention and keep you reading. That in itself is not to be taken for granted. So any novel well-written enough to keep you reading must qualify as at least a baseline “experience.” So I would say that your categories are more like spectra according to which any novel worth reading can be evaluated. It will need some ideas and some information and an appeal to some appetite, and also some antagonist (grievance or enmity or other). These are basic elements of any readable novel. I think by “experience” you are reaching for a description of a synergistic whole that is more than the sum of these parts. A great novel stays with you and alters your perceptions going forward; shows you a view of reality that expands your understanding; keeps you coming back because it resonates at a level that you may not even be able to articulate.
I wonder if that might be one measure of the greatness of a great novel, that you can't articulate why you like it so much. There are, after all, parts of experience that declarative statements cannot reach but only stories can. It follows that you should not be able to articulate declaratively why you were so moved and changed by a great story.
But yes, my point is not that novels of appetite, information, grievance, or ideas don't provide experiences, only that they subordinate those experiences to other things. If the thing ceased entirely to be an experience, it would cease to be a novel. As to novels needing some ideas, though, I'll postpone addressing that to another post.
I think what you’re getting at is the sense of falseness when a novel twists its narrative to serve a socially-pressured end. The best novels give an experience of truth revealed: describing something accurately that is not generally spoken. Most, though, leave a sense of having forcibly imposed a false conclusion: usually one that flatters a certain subtype of reader.
In part, yes. But my main contention is the value of experience itself and thus the value of the novel -- and of art more broadly -- to deliver experience. Devaluing experience to the point where we treat it simply as a delivery mechanism for something else -- appetite, information, grievance, ideas -- does exactly as you say, it twists the narrative to serve a more socially valued end. But the heart of my protest, if you like, is that these ends are more socially valued, that we have devalued experience to the point where we are disinterested in it as a thing in itself. We are not going to have a society that values art again until we have a society that values experience. Or perhaps that's not it, perhaps the challenge is to have an art again that society recognizes as a source of experience.
Do you mean that a novel should describe the plausible experience of a character? Or that the reader should feel like the reading of the novel is an experience? Both?
It's more that, neurologically, listening to a story *is* an experience. The brain receives it in the same way as experience in the flesh. (This is why stories can satisfy appetites at all.) So it's not a description of an experience, but the creation of one. And it is not feeling like it is an experience. It *is* an experience. After all, why would we weep at the death of Little Nell if we had not come to love her and hope for her? The characters and events of a story are real enough to move us to tears. They are an experience.
But there is an interesting double effect here. While a story is both neurologically and emotionally an experience, we still know it is a story. When reading a story, we are in a kind of dual state, both engaged in the story of the moment and safely sitting back in our chair, contemplating the events. We can both weep for Little Nell and reflect on her status as a literary character at the same time.
I think that the particular power of story lies in this double effect. It means that we can read about experiences that we would never seek out in real life, engaged in all their terror and danger, emotionally charged by it, and yet also knowing that we are perfectly safe at home. It is a remarkable trick that the brain pulls on us, but I think its power to prepare us for the vicissitudes of life is enormous.
The problem with the novel of ideas is that it rejects this dual state, preferring to force us into contemplation alone, when the events of the story become merely examples in an argument, not events of our experience.
When I see “novel of ideas” I think of the French style roman philosophique (rarely produced by English language authors). But I think you mean the sort of novel where characters and plot are shoehorned into a didactic “message” for the reader.
I wonder if I could wring a whole novel of grievance out of my hatred of the so-called singular 'they'.
Fine ideas, good essay. Thanks.
That's a novel of grievance that I would read. Thanks.
To just push back on one element, I don’t see why an idea has to be intended by the author to be meaningful. Death of the author is hardly a novel approach to literary criticism, nor is it an unjustified one, in my opinion. Litigating authorial intent is just much less interesting and useful than discussing what a novel made you think and consider, even if that includes ideas that were clearly unintended.
An idea doesn't have to be intended by the author to be meaningful. I think that is fundamental to the novel of experience. Experiences give us ideas. They give different people different ideas, as each person weighs them against all their other experiences. A novel of experience should give people ideas that were not anticipated and intended by the author.
And I agree that in this sense the authorial intent is less interesting than your own responses to the experience. Where authorial intent does get interesting is when we ask, what experience did the author intend to create. Because it is possible to read a novel incorrectly, not because one does not have the ideas intended but because one does not have the experience intended.
A large part of the experience that the author intended is shaped by the way in which the author anticipated the reader would react to images and events in the story. But time passes, and the images and events come to provoke different reactions.
A good case in point is the song "Baby it's cold outside" which became so controversial a few years back. The line "Say, what's in this drink?" was referring to a common trope at the time of blaming one's own misbehavior on the alcohol in your drink. In a totally different social context today, some people took it for a reference to a date rape drug. In a song written today, that might be a reasonable interpretation. For a song of its time, it isn't. So to that extent the discussion about authorial intent matters. But it matters to understand the experience the author intended to create, not the ideas he wanted the reader to take away as a result of that experience.
Where does satire fit in? Ideas I suppose?
Interesting question. My first thought is to say no. The best satire I think consists of an experience that is satirical in its contrast to actual experience. Can one also create satire in the other forms? I suppose that a weak and obvious satire that appeals to an established and repeating prejudice would fit under the novel of appetite. A heavy-handed satire in which the author cannot resist dragging their implications into the open might fit under novel of ideas. But the novel of information is too stolid a category to admit of satire, and the novel of grievance is too earnest to be anything other than self-satirizing.
Could the Novel of Satire be a sixth category perhaps?
And am I right in assuming that you do not care for Jane Austen? That's partially why I ask about satire.
I love Jane Austen. I don't care much for some of the interpretations of her.
I'm not a great fan of satire, which I think is most often prejudice in a silly hat. But I don't think of Jane Austen as being satirical, if that is what you mean.
As I noted in the piece, though, the categories, like all categorization schemes, are just for purposes of the current argument. Satire might come in as a category for making a slightly different argument.
My problem with satire, also, is that it functions largely as a shibboleth. It's not designed to make everyone laugh. It's meant to divide people into those who laugh and those who are laughed at. I'm growing too old and sentimental for that kind of thing.
You are my Substack muse, so I usually agree with everything you say. But Northanger Abbey in paritcular is surely satirical of the Gothic novel. And in general aren't many of her novels highly satirical of the vain and upper class society?
On another thought, if we can't laugh at others without ill will or at ourselves without feeling ashamed, wouldn't that be us missing out on one of the most important forms of sentimentality--one strong enough to acknowledge the ridiculous and still love those who commit it?
I might be arguing for the sake of avoiding emails at this point.
We may be drawing the bounds of satire in different places. I certainly don't think that everything that laughs at others or ourselves is satire. Satire, to me, has that element of superiority about it, an element of a sneer in its expression. Would you call Jeeves and Wooster satire? Pickwick Papers? I, at least, would not.
It's been too long since I read Northanger Abbey for me to comment on it particularly. But as to Austen in general, I think it is a misreading to say that her purpose was to satirize upper-class society. That seems to lump her in with the novelists of the early twentieth century, mostly middle-class themselves, who made careers out of mocking the declining aristocracy. Their readers, after all, came from a different class from their victims. Austen's readers were of the same class as her characters.
By the early 20th century, the rise of industrialization and the middle class had made the artistocracy obsolete and had therefore made their manners seem absurd. They were easy targets, both for satire and for sentimentality. But this was not so in Austen's time, and to read those attitudes into her work strikes me as fundamentally wrongheaded. Did she paint fools and scoundrels among the upper classes? Of course she did. But she painted characters of sense and virtue among them as well.
But I think this reading of Austen also has a lot to do with the current attitude that the value of a novel lies in its ideas, and that only modern ideas are of any value, therefore any writer of the past who we are going to consider good can only be good because they were a proto-modern, lambasting the society they grew up in for not being twenty-first century Manhatten. This is exactly the harm that reading stories through the lens of ideas does.
And I think that in this case, it misses the shrewd but affectionate good humor with which Austen treats her characters, how she can laugh at them and love them at the same time, and see their folly without setting herself above them.