Perhaps the novel has lost its vital energies

All of the strands of the novel from its inception in the west to roughly the mid-19th century rise of realism share one thing in common: they're concerned with action.

The five major types of pre-realist novel were the romance, the Gothic novel, the novel of manners, the picaresque, and the chronicle. These types of novels handled interiority in different ways--the chronicle and the romance not all, while the Gothic novel and novel of manners tracked heavily in feelings and sense-impressions. But the focus was almost always on actions in the world.

And yet it's certainly possible to overstate the degree to which interiority was unimportant. Take Frankenstein--it begins with some Arctic explorers finding the monster chasing his creator across the ice (actually the whole novel, I believe, is framed as an account by one of the explorers). The focus is very much on the monster's feelings of rage and persecution. The same is true of the novels of pre-revolutionary France: although it's a unique blend of Gothic novel and novel of manners, Dangerous Liaisons (published 1782) comes across as a precursor to the 19th-century novel of sentiment--it’s a study of the dissipation and anomie of its two intoxicating aristocratic protagonists. Diderot's The Nun is also a novel with very little volition and few social relationships--its protagonist is trapped in a nunnery against her will and the focus is on the her pain and the dissipation of her psyche.

But, in general, the earlier you go, the more novels tend to be grounded by the character's actions in the real world. There is very little "why" or "to what end"—characters are explained almost entirely by how they act.

This changes with the mid-19th century, when novelists begin to play off the difference between the interior and the exterior self of the characters. Emma Bovary is outwardly in a bourgeois, respectable marriage, but is inwardly a romantic dreamer. Mr. Causubon is outwardly a respected academic, but inwardly he's a dreary, terrified bore. Fred Percy is outwardly a ne'er'do'well, but inwardly he desperately seeks respectability, etc.

The cultivation of the private self becomes a major concern—perhaps the only concern—of the novel.

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Or so I'm told anyway. I've read the books—all the examples I draw are from my own reading—but in truth I'm just retailing a theory I've heard repeated elsewhere (most notably in Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity.)

One thing I’ve learned about writing literary criticism is that you can peddle complete nonsense without ever being called out. For instance, how often have we heard people talk about Aristotle’s three unities. How, in The Poetics, he said a story ought to have unity of time, place and action. But, in reality, The Poetics isn’t even about oughts! It’s a work of analysis, talking about features he has observed within Greek tragedies. There’s very little prescription. Moreover, those concepts—unity of time, place, and action—aren’t even in the work! The three unities were the product of Italian Renaissance thinkers who were trying to relearn the “rules” of secular drama.

That's from the most famous treatise of the most famous thinker in the world. Imagine how much easier it is to misrepresent a lesser work? In semi-professional literary criticism, of the sort purveyed by the small magazines, there is nobody who's going to call you out--the world is too clubby and too collegial, and everyone else is a pseudo-intellectual too, who is afraid they could be defenestrated someday for errors just as grievous.

And when you're conveying the conventional wisdom, like the idea that modern novels center a character's interiority, then you’re perfectly safe, because even if you’re wrong, so is everybody else. You can talk nonsense all day long, so long as it's the typical nonsense.

What literary critics ignore is that all the earliest forms of the novel still exist, and that they constitute the world's most popular forms of prose fiction. The prose romance turned into the techno-thriller and the sci-fi or fantasy adventure novel; the Gothic novel became the horror or crime thriller; the comedy of manners turned into the romance (the kind with kisses, which ends in marriage); the picaresque turned into the detective novel; and the chronicle became the historical novel or epic fantasy.

Arguments that the novel "developed" in a certain way are nothing but arguments by subtraction—if you arbitrarily remove certain things from the category of “novels worth discussing” then it’s easy to make whatever arguments you’d care to. None of the types of novels in the previous paragraph are particularly interior-focused. Although all of these novels make gestures at interiority, in many cases it seems rather pro-forma. For instance, in the sci-fi or fantasy novel, the fashion is for the exterior conflict to be mirrored by an interior conflict that gets resolved right before the climax and whose resolution leads directly to the exterior climax. For instance, Frodo's interior conflict in Lord of the Rings is his increasing temptation to use the power of the One Ring for himself. To frame that temptation as being internal is a very modern device: in a chronicle like, say, King Hrolf's Saga, instead of the plot being powered by a future shame (the temptation to use the ring) it's powered by a past shame (his incest with his daughter). The character's burden is instantiated as an actually-occurring crime.

But is it really that different, in terms of how it reads? The Lord of the Rings is clearly written with an awareness of the norms of the modern novel--the characters have desires and longings, temptations and conflicts, and there is much attention to their embodied experience of the world--but one is hard-pressed to believe that the story represents a fundamental break with the past.

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What's funny is that once upon a time I was on Twitter, and I said something about how science fiction novels don't pay as much attention to the character's thoughts and desires, and another writer got very mad at me! She railed and railed at lit writers and our arrogance. It was pretty amusing, since I've been to the sci-fi version of an MFA (Clarion) and I've published in every top sci-fi journal. Most sci-fi writers I meet consider me a sci-fi writer who has, weirdly, written some realist books.

Sci-fi writers are touchy. They hate any hint of condescension, any sense that they are lesser. But at the same time, if you treat their genre like something separate from the contemporary literary novel—something with its own goodness and standards, then they get mad. Because, of course, if sci-fi has different standards then perhaps, when judged by the standards of literary fiction, sci-fi truly is bad.

The same issue comes up in the decolonial debate: if different cultures truly adhere to different standards, then why insist they are equal? There is no such thing as separate and equal. If two things are judged by the same standards, then they are not separate. And if they are separate, then wouldn’t their standards for goodness be equally separate and irreconcilable? If two things are separate, there is no reason to expect they would succeed in the same ways, according to the same lights.

I tend to think that all of this palaver about the "aims" of different genres is more talk than reality. In the realm of art and literature, there is no real separation, because we have one human nature, which all art must appeal to. The aim of all literature, imho, is to embody some unspeakable unity. I don't mean this in the formalist sense: the unity, in my imagining, is only a kind of touchstone. You can't really extract or describe the unity. You just intuit it. Basically, "it embodied an unspeakable unity" is just a fancy way of saying dis book be real gud.

I hate the journal Compact, because its editors want to annihilate people like me, but they do have really good arts and literature coverage. And recently, in a screed against the movie Chevalier (about a black composer in pre-revolutionary France), the author made the, to me, decent point that the art of a given time and place achieves greatness for reasons we don't totally understand.¹

It isn’t that no one with the genetic endowment of a Bach or Mozart is born today—musical genius is randomly but fairly evenly distributed through human populations. Rather, the golden age of European classical music occurred not simply because of the millennial evolution of the musical language, but because of the convergence of just the right institutional, cultural, economic, and social developments.

Take, say, 19th century England. Look at Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, the Brontes, Gaskell, and all the greater and lesser Victorians scribbling away in a country with a book-buying population of, what, maybe a million people.² It's easy to say, where where is the modern-day Eliot? And the truth is, no matter how great a writer is, maybe it’s simply not possible for them to write a great novel of feeling anymore (the novel of feeling being the union of the novel of manners and novel of sentiment, or what we would call the modern realist novel). Maybe there can't be. Whatever energy created that bubble of novelistic greatness might very well be spent, and we, writing novels today, may very well be reduced to writing imitations of them.

Every art-form ultimately degrades and descends into self-parody. Ever since the Renaissance, artists and thinkers have been tormenting themselves, saying, why can't we write great tragedies? Why is there no new Sophocles or Aeschylus? With Henrik Ibsen, we got a playwright who works in much the same mythic space as Euripides \, but Aeschylus, in particular, remains thoroughly unassimilated. There has never been any work of modern art that is good in quite the way of the Oresteia--quite so austere and powerful and inhuman and frenzied.

You can try to write another Oresteia all day long, but maybe it's simply not possible. Maybe it's like making bagels outside of New York—maybe the water simply isn't right.

So I'm sympathetic to the idea that the novel's power is exhausted, as a form. But that also seems like palaver. There's a kind of entitlement involved in the artist's constant desire to situate themselves within the stream of history. Who are we to decide where we belong? We might want to live for the ages, but perhaps it is only our fate to live for our own time, and for our work to mean something to just a few readers. Think of all the children who died before their first year of life. Think of all the men cut down when their cities were sacked. All the women carried off into slavery. All the writers whose books were burned. Nobody wants to be obscure and unimportant. Everybody has better shit to do. But it's not really your choice.

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Over the last week I've dipped my toe back into Twitter, with strange consequences. I posted a relatively innocuous thread about transitioning, which became the subject of intense online debate. Good for me, I guess: I gained five hundred Twitter followers and thirty substack subscribers. You can look it up if you care to, but I won’t link to it. I kind of went on a tear and did many more tweets--there's something intoxicating about getting such immediate reaction to your writing.

The culture on Twitter is so different from the culture on substack. What I've realized is there are essentially no trans women on Substack--they're all still on Twitter. Since there aren't many trans women who've achieved any success in traditional publishing, Twitter is the natural place for me to connect with my audience. But the trans women of Twitter are often young (in their twenties, certainly) and they tend to be extremely left-wing. Right now it's all Israel/Palestine on Twitter all the time. Let's just say my community on Twitter isn't really talking about the articles they've read recently in Compact.

At the same time, they seem curiously unperturbed by the possibility of a Donald Trump victory. Maybe it's because they're young, but they don't realize that the first time he was President, he didn't really target trans people. They're very much like the Sandernistas I knew during the run-up to 2016—they've convinced themselves the mainstream Democratic party is irremediably corrupt.

From my perspective, that is not true: the mainstream Democratic party has done a lot to protect trans people in California—dramatically expanding our legal protections, the ease with which we can get documents, and our access to gender-affirming care—and I expect that if they were able to get legislative majorities, they would take similar actions nation-wide. At the same time, wherever the Republican party is ascendant--even when it's in blue states where they're governing with extremely thin majorities, as in Virginia--the party has pursued viciously anti-trans policies. So I am quite confident in saying that a Biden victory would be much better for us than a Trump victory.

I could easily fill this newsletter with Trump doomerism twice a week. I had lunch the other day with a trans friend who is actively planning on leaving the country. Personally, I have hired a Swiss immigration lawyer so I can get a Swiss passport like my wife and daughter have. I am very worried that a Trump administration could jam up my access to documents by invalidating my passport (as many states have invalidated trans peoples' driver's licenses).

And yet what's the point of discussing it? People will vote as they wish. I'm not someone who believes in conspiracy theories. I don't think the Russians forced people to vote for Trump. Everyone knew exactly what he was and what he stood for, and they voted for him with open eyes. Similarly, everyone knows the stakes in the current election, and they understand, correctly, that a vote for Trump is a vote to drive a stake into the heart of the American governmental system. Some people, both left and right, are so in despair that this prospect seems exciting to them, and if their numbers are sufficiently high that Trump wins then I can only assume it means the American political class (to which I belong) has lost the mandate of Heaven.

1. In all of its aggravation at how ‘woke’ Chevalier is, the article kinda misses the point. The idea that the Chevalier was a musical genius is just a pleasant fantasy: Exactly nobody walked out of the film thinking, huh, I sure do hope the Metropolitan Opera stages that Boulogne opera, so I can go see it. The Chevalier was just a really cool dude. A swordsman, soldier, and composer? He’s the kind of person that, in any era, you make movies about. To try and take him down is like saying “Well ackshally Neal Cassidy wuzznt nearly as good a writer as Kerouac and Ginsberg made him out to be.” Like…okay? Am I supposed to be astonished? I think everyone on Earth knows that if you’ve got a square jaw and piercing blue eyes, and you’re willing to humor a bunch of queer poets, then obviously they’re going to grade your work on a curve. Similarly, if you’re a sexy, French revolutionary and swordsman who hung out with Marie Antoinette then eventually there’s gonna be a movie made about you, and in that movie you’ll damn well be a genius.

2. For the first and only time I actually did academic research to substantiate a point for this blog, and I found this article which basically says, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold a million copies in Britain, and UTC was like Harry Potter—if you read one book in the 19th century, it was UTC.”