I. Complete this sentence: “A novel should make the reader…” [Use an example---positive or negative---from the Julavits novel.]
1. change majors
2. drink heavily
3. write a letter to their senator
4. get divorced
5. people watch
6. write
7. vote
8. visit the free clinic
9. act like Hunter S.
10. write a blog
Virginia Woolf:
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I believe that all novels…deal with character, and that it is to express character—not preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.
After reading this I can’t help but think about Fyodor Dostoevsky and his various journeys through the psyche, through the world. A really great novel to me has nothing to do with the aforementioned fraudulent qualities that ruin literature. I.E. the British Empire, preachers, Julavits, and singers to name a few. The greatest novels ever written often have a wonderful simplicity about their depiction of character. There is no need for example, when reading Heart of Darkness, to pull out my post-colonial kaleidascope and ruin what Conrad wrote. Indeed I also don’t need it to understand Caliban and his woes. The greatest power of the novel is it’s ability to transcend things like facts, not bring them to light. A great novel doesn’t toil in the environment it was written, it examines those inside of it.
Now of course, this is not to say that setting for example is not important, that there aren’t thousands of aspects, tools rather, importantly weilded in describing the human condition. In A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut says something to the effect of, “[Every great work is about what a bummer it is to be human].” This is what sets us apart from the rest of the living world–the human condition. This is what novels are all about.
Coming back to Woolf’s take on the novel, character is the locus of the human condition. Character is how we describe each’s own condition. When thinking about Beloved I am less drawn to the atrocity of slavery as a whole than I am to the atrocity of school teacher singularly. By using any other lens than character and emotion is to try to regulate a novel. The power of language is not quantifiable, so why the fuck do we use so much math in our meticulous breakdowns of authors’ works. There is no need. The sensation of character is what makes a novel timeless–they have all been written by human beings, about human beings.
It will not be important in one hundred years for people to read The Old Man and the Sea and look up Joe Dimaggio or even Gregorio Fuentes to grip the power of the book. It is about the human condition, it is about the character of the young boy who doesn’t leave and its about the character of the old man who wishes for salt and to catch a marlin. The brilliance in a good novel comes out when at the end, you may put the book down after having looked down into the well of another person’s psyche and thought …I’m alive too, and what a dangerous predicament that is…
October 9, 2008 at 2:42 am |
relatively off topic, but not terribly
Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
If there is no God, everything is permitted.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
The novel is priceless because it is a way to build lives, and examine them, and the only thing that really matters is character.
October 9, 2008 at 3:09 am |
I like the (m)ad libs. I’m glad someone did it. I probably should have since that was the name of my blog. But they also point out to me that my idea of the novel is a bit romanticized. I hold literature in a high regard and often expect it to create a pause or make a dent in our culture. I at least want it to linger with me or leave me with some form of catharsis.
I think I see what you mean when you talk about the simplicity of the depiction of a character, but I’m hung up on one thing. Does that mean that the character himself doesn’t have to be simple, but can be complex? If that’s the case, I’m totally with you, because I think the best writers create complex characters, and introduce them to us unabashedly as complex.
October 9, 2008 at 4:01 am |
Simple characters would be boring. What I meant was characters are often simply profound in a book, not simple themselves. They are as easy to meet as a living person, the author introduces you to them sometimes in frames or pieces or barely at all but in the end they have felt like living people.
October 9, 2008 at 4:18 pm |
Would you say that the author brings them to life in a universal way which in turn impacts the reader in a profound way?
October 10, 2008 at 7:17 pm |
I agree for the most part with your characterization of character, if you will. I know we’re meant to cite an example of a novel to illustrate your point, but I think what you say about Beloved is spot on (“When thinking about Beloved I am less drawn to the atrocity of slavery as a whole than I am to the atrocity of school teacher singularly”). You articulated exactly why Beloved (and other novels like it, if that’s not too arbitrary a classification) is more powerful than other novels under the subheading of slavery. Morrison’s characters embody the atrocities and propel the plot within the realm of history but so far outside the realm of the generic “novel about slaves.”
October 14, 2008 at 12:43 am |
Brandon,
‘The sensation of character is what makes a novel timeless–they have all been written by human beings, about human beings.”
i agree with what you say when the character of a great novel speaks to the reader about the human condition. I will go even futher to say that the timelessness is in the universality of the human condition.
I would suggest reading Nabokov’s “Lolita”. It is all about the character development. Humbert, an older man wrestles with the desire he has for a “woman-child”. It is written in the form of a prison confession, while Humbert is awaiting trial for murder of Claire quilty, a rival suitor of his Lolita. Humbert pleads a convincing case in his defense of his obsessive love for the way too young object of his desire. What constitutes as rape, or pedophilia is cleverly masked in Humbert’s eloquent transcription of how he retells how it all went down. Like Myra, it was also very controversial & considered pornographic.
On the flip side I think that one of the reasons you didn’t care for Julavits’s piece is that there really wasn’t much as far as character development.