I think there is a lot of valuable insights in your article, but this point is slightly confusing me: “A novel should not be read, nor should it be written, with explicit philosophical meaning intended.” If we are trying to say something true, something that would inspire reflection, emotion and insights, then how can it be empty of meaning or a philosophical (or political) agenda? Even trying not to seem philosophical/political is a philosophical/political stance in of itself.
Thank you for the comment. This is the difficult bit, yes, especially when people are taught to see everything in political terms. But A.E. Houseman has a great line: "And malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man." In other words, experiences, like drinking a good glass of beer or taking a walk along the beach, may lead us to the conclusion "life is good." The beach and the beer are not saying these things. But the experience of them makes people say these things.
On the other hand, someone else may get horribly sick on the beer and cut their foot on a shell walking on the beach and conclude that life sucks. The beach and the beer are not saying these things either. The beach and the beer are not saying anything at all. They are things, not statements. The experience of these things can lead to all kinds of philosophical and political ideas, from prohibition to the creation of national parks.
Thus, there is a world of things and a world of statements. And my point is, stories belong to the world of things, not the world of statements. This is confirmed by neurology. The same parts of the brain light up when reading a story as when having an experience. So a story, as a thing, may give rise to philosophical and political ideas just as much as a beer or a walk on the beach, but it is a thing, not a statement.
We should read a story, then, looking for an experience, not an idea. We should write stories to create experiences, not to express ideas. Of course, the author had less control over the ideas that the reader may form as a result of experiencing their story, which is where the temptation to try to slip an explicit idea into a story arises. But bending the story to try to make it support a specific idea weakens it as an experience, and thus makes it less convincing both as an experience and as an argument.
I am not sure I fully agree with you, but I understand your point. The bit about the beer makes it very clear. Thank you for the reply and the clarification!
What you’re getting at here is quite alarming to some people, including some writers. It implies that there is a creative process that the novelist is not in control of. It doesn’t mean that the writer isn’t grappling with explicit philosophy while writing the story. But the process of figuring out the story is also a journey. So, for example, when I started writing my first novel, I was Presbyterian. By the time I finished it, I had become Catholic. Looking back, I see that my trajectory in life is rendered into the plot and characters of the novel. But I had no thought of any such trajectory at the outset, nor any intention of writing about such things. What happened?? As a Christian I believe that God was guiding me in life. As a writer, well, I went where the thing had to go, even though it lost me most of my former friends (also not at all desired or expected). But not everyone who writes fiction lives (or writes) in this intuitive way.
Yes, and all kinds of things that writers say about how stories come to them seem to support this. There is the debate between plotting and pantsing. There is writers saying that characters speak to them and sometimes argue with them. So often, a story starts with an image and develops in a way that surprises the author. The classic answer to the classic question "where do you get your ideas from?" is "I don't know. They just come to me." And sometimes writers late in their careers lament bitterly that the stories just stop coming.
There must be some relationship between events in one's own life and events in one's stories, but it is not always obvious what it is. Why do I write books about teenage young women in Anglo-Saxon England? I don't know. Those are the stories that come to me.
What strikes me about this is that our reception of experiences is much more neurologically complex than it appears on the surface, and how the brain instantly organizes the light that hits the eye into a world of discrete objects with complex relationships and trajectories is a marvel almost too wonderful to notice. Much of vision is unconscious. And if so, why shouldn't much of storytelling be unconscious in the same way? Is this why it seems to the author more like discovery than invention?
But, after years in workshops and writers groups, it is quite clear to me that there are any number of aspiring writers for whom this simply does not happen. They seem to have no sense of story at all. They can learn everything the books say about structure and character and plotting, but they can't make any of it work, no matter how hard they try.
And as I reflect on that, I realize that I know exactly what that is like, because I cannot make up a tune to save my life. I have a decent knowledge of music theory, of scales and keys, of rhythm and harmony, and I would love to be able to create something as simply as a nursery rhyme tune. But I can't. I can't imagine a tune I have not already heard, and try as I might, I can only pull old tunes out of my head; I can't make a single new one.
Well, I would say that this is a description of a"gift," despite the fact that having such a non-linear way of thinking gets me into embarrassing moments plenty....I hope eventually it will turn out to have been a good thing.
This is so beautifully articulated. Your balance of the subjective and the objective truth of a novel rings very true to me, and your love of story in and of itself (ie. not strictly as a means of conveying some truth, be it religious, moral, political, or otherwise, but as a story qua story) is, I think, why your books are such fun to read. It makes them books that act upon (and create within) the reader, rather than merely books that must be acted upon by the reader.
It is certainly true that I entered into The Wistful and the Good expecting the "ship" of the Anglo-Saxon imagination, and I was thrilled to see its sails. Thank you for your work--both your essays and your novels--and for taking the time to read my little article!
I think there is a lot of valuable insights in your article, but this point is slightly confusing me: “A novel should not be read, nor should it be written, with explicit philosophical meaning intended.” If we are trying to say something true, something that would inspire reflection, emotion and insights, then how can it be empty of meaning or a philosophical (or political) agenda? Even trying not to seem philosophical/political is a philosophical/political stance in of itself.
Thank you for the comment. This is the difficult bit, yes, especially when people are taught to see everything in political terms. But A.E. Houseman has a great line: "And malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man." In other words, experiences, like drinking a good glass of beer or taking a walk along the beach, may lead us to the conclusion "life is good." The beach and the beer are not saying these things. But the experience of them makes people say these things.
On the other hand, someone else may get horribly sick on the beer and cut their foot on a shell walking on the beach and conclude that life sucks. The beach and the beer are not saying these things either. The beach and the beer are not saying anything at all. They are things, not statements. The experience of these things can lead to all kinds of philosophical and political ideas, from prohibition to the creation of national parks.
Thus, there is a world of things and a world of statements. And my point is, stories belong to the world of things, not the world of statements. This is confirmed by neurology. The same parts of the brain light up when reading a story as when having an experience. So a story, as a thing, may give rise to philosophical and political ideas just as much as a beer or a walk on the beach, but it is a thing, not a statement.
We should read a story, then, looking for an experience, not an idea. We should write stories to create experiences, not to express ideas. Of course, the author had less control over the ideas that the reader may form as a result of experiencing their story, which is where the temptation to try to slip an explicit idea into a story arises. But bending the story to try to make it support a specific idea weakens it as an experience, and thus makes it less convincing both as an experience and as an argument.
I am not sure I fully agree with you, but I understand your point. The bit about the beer makes it very clear. Thank you for the reply and the clarification!
What you’re getting at here is quite alarming to some people, including some writers. It implies that there is a creative process that the novelist is not in control of. It doesn’t mean that the writer isn’t grappling with explicit philosophy while writing the story. But the process of figuring out the story is also a journey. So, for example, when I started writing my first novel, I was Presbyterian. By the time I finished it, I had become Catholic. Looking back, I see that my trajectory in life is rendered into the plot and characters of the novel. But I had no thought of any such trajectory at the outset, nor any intention of writing about such things. What happened?? As a Christian I believe that God was guiding me in life. As a writer, well, I went where the thing had to go, even though it lost me most of my former friends (also not at all desired or expected). But not everyone who writes fiction lives (or writes) in this intuitive way.
Yes, and all kinds of things that writers say about how stories come to them seem to support this. There is the debate between plotting and pantsing. There is writers saying that characters speak to them and sometimes argue with them. So often, a story starts with an image and develops in a way that surprises the author. The classic answer to the classic question "where do you get your ideas from?" is "I don't know. They just come to me." And sometimes writers late in their careers lament bitterly that the stories just stop coming.
There must be some relationship between events in one's own life and events in one's stories, but it is not always obvious what it is. Why do I write books about teenage young women in Anglo-Saxon England? I don't know. Those are the stories that come to me.
What strikes me about this is that our reception of experiences is much more neurologically complex than it appears on the surface, and how the brain instantly organizes the light that hits the eye into a world of discrete objects with complex relationships and trajectories is a marvel almost too wonderful to notice. Much of vision is unconscious. And if so, why shouldn't much of storytelling be unconscious in the same way? Is this why it seems to the author more like discovery than invention?
But, after years in workshops and writers groups, it is quite clear to me that there are any number of aspiring writers for whom this simply does not happen. They seem to have no sense of story at all. They can learn everything the books say about structure and character and plotting, but they can't make any of it work, no matter how hard they try.
And as I reflect on that, I realize that I know exactly what that is like, because I cannot make up a tune to save my life. I have a decent knowledge of music theory, of scales and keys, of rhythm and harmony, and I would love to be able to create something as simply as a nursery rhyme tune. But I can't. I can't imagine a tune I have not already heard, and try as I might, I can only pull old tunes out of my head; I can't make a single new one.
Well, I would say that this is a description of a"gift," despite the fact that having such a non-linear way of thinking gets me into embarrassing moments plenty....I hope eventually it will turn out to have been a good thing.
This is so beautifully articulated. Your balance of the subjective and the objective truth of a novel rings very true to me, and your love of story in and of itself (ie. not strictly as a means of conveying some truth, be it religious, moral, political, or otherwise, but as a story qua story) is, I think, why your books are such fun to read. It makes them books that act upon (and create within) the reader, rather than merely books that must be acted upon by the reader.
It is certainly true that I entered into The Wistful and the Good expecting the "ship" of the Anglo-Saxon imagination, and I was thrilled to see its sails. Thank you for your work--both your essays and your novels--and for taking the time to read my little article!