{"id":145797,"date":"2020-06-25T16:11:25","date_gmt":"2020-06-25T20:11:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=145797"},"modified":"2020-06-29T09:56:39","modified_gmt":"2020-06-29T13:56:39","slug":"the-gimmick-of-the-novel-of-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/06\/25\/the-gimmick-of-the-novel-of-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gimmick of the Novel of Ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Thomas Mann. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

Arising by most accounts in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the novel of ideas reflects the challenge posed by the integration of externally developed concepts long before the arrival of conceptual art. Although the novel\u2019s verbal medium would seem to make it intrinsically suited to the endeavor, the mission of presenting \u201cideas\u201d seems to have pushed a genre famous for its versatility toward a surprisingly limited repertoire of techniques. These came to obtrude against a set of generic expectations\u2014nondidactic representation; a dynamic, temporally complex relation between events and the representation of events; character development; verisimilitude\u2014established only in wake of the novel\u2019s separation from history and romance at the start of the nineteenth century. Compared to these and even older, ancient genres like drama and lyric, the novel is astonishingly young, which is perhaps why departures from its still only freshly consolidated conventions seem especially noticeable.<\/p>\n

The techniques that stick out against the generic norms listed above appear across modern and postmodern texts with striking regularity. They are: direct speech by characters in the forms of dramatic dialogues or monologues (The Magic Mountain<\/em>, Point Counter Point<\/em>, Tomorrow\u2019s Eve<\/em>, Iola Leroy<\/em>, Elizabeth Costello<\/em>, Babel-17<\/em>); overt narrators prone to didactic, ironic, or metafictional commentary (The Man without Qualities<\/em>, Tristram Shandy<\/em>, Elizabeth Costello<\/em>); and flat allegorical characters (Faith and the Good Thing<\/em>, The Man without Qualities<\/em>, Against Nature<\/em>, Moby-Dick<\/em>). Also prevalent, to a lesser extent, are experimental formatting (Moby-Dick<\/em>, Tristram Shandy<\/em>, Diary of a Bad Year<\/em>); sudden, unexplained, narratively isolated outbreaks of magic in a predominantly realist frame (The Magic Mountain<\/em>, Elizabeth Costello<\/em>, Artful<\/em>); and even a curious thematization of the \u201cdevice\u201d or gimmick as such (Tomorrow\u2019s Eve<\/em>, The Magic Mountain<\/em>, Clear: A Transparent Novel<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Whether executed as science fiction, bildungsroman, or more recently, the satirical form Nicholas Dames calls the \u201ctheory novel,\u201d the novel of ideas is \u201cartful,\u201d with all the equivocality this term brings. Willingness to court the accusation of relying on overly transparent stylistic devices is a consistent, perhaps even cohering feature of a notoriously unstable genre. Scholars have therefore obliquely acknowledged the novel of ideas\u2019s predilection for contrivances. Claire De Obaldia\u2019s groundbreaking study of the \u201cessayistic novel which appropriates existing material,\u201d for example, describes it as a \u201cfundamentally ambivalent product,\u201d confronting its authors with unusual \u201cdemands of literary integration.\u201d For all of their \u201ctremendous size,\u201d the novels of ideas of Proust, Musil, and Broch are paradoxically \u201cfragments,\u201d sharing German Romanticism\u2019s divided loyalties to a \u201cuniquely self\u00ad conscious intellect and an equally self\u00ad conscious anti\u00ad-intellectualism.\u201d Even in magisterial (if tellingly unfinished) works like The Man without Qualities<\/em>, the inclusion of essayistic excerpts induces \u201ca mutual interruption of theory and fiction,\u201d a disruption of \u201cnarrative continuity and totalization\u201d undermining the systematic spirit of the \u201cconceptual\u201d as much as the imaginative pleasures of mimesis. <\/p>\n

Focusing on the labor that the effort to synthesize fiction and ideas requires, De Obaldia comes close to instating the gimmick at the heart of the essayistic novel. If this move never happens, we can understand why. Predisposition to gimmickiness is just that: a predisposition. It hovers at one crucial degree of remove from gimmickiness itself, which already presents its own complications. Historical arguments about genre, such as that the \u201cnovel\u00ad essay\u201d is a response to a European crisis of modernity, as Stefano Ercolino maintains, or an \u201cart form \u2026 peculiar to twentieth-century literary history,\u201d as Hoffman argues, are contestable, as they should be; aesthetic judgments made about entire genres inevitably prove more so. But aside from ontological difficulties posed by its virtual and aesthetic character, the gimmick\u00ad-proneness of the novel of ideas seems to have been avoided primarily because it is an intellectual embarrassment. Philosophical fiction should be a serious enterprise, we think, impervious to the gimmick\u2019s compromised form. But what if a susceptibility to the gimmick\u2014and to the comedy that so often attends it\u2014is finally the one feature that consolidates this equivocal genre?<\/p>\n

In Point Counter Point<\/em>, Aldous Huxley places this doubt in the mouth of a character who is a novelist, commenting on the \u201ctiresome\u201d device of the character used as \u201cmouthpiece.\u201d In one of the several chapters titled \u201cFrom Philip Quarles\u2019s Notebook,\u201d freestanding mini\u00ad essays on the craft of fiction, \u201cmodern intellectual\u201d Quarles gives us a quick rundown of the genre\u2019s \u201cdefect[s]\u201d:<\/p>\n

Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions of soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express\u2014which excludes all but about .01 per cent of the human race. Hence the real, the congenital novelists don\u2019t write such books. But then, I never pretended to be a congenital novelist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The novel of ideas is characterized here as an intrinsically un-novelistic, \u201cmade-\u00adup affair\u201d (and once again, by one of its own practitioners): \u201cthe real, the congenital novelists don\u2019t write such books.\u201d As the \u201cmouthpiece\u201d puts it, \u201cPeople who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren\u2019t quite real; they\u2019re slightly monstrous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even late modernists undertaking the integration of \u201cneatly formulated notions\u201d into fiction feel compelled to highlight the novel of ideas\u2019s equivocality as a novel<\/em>. It is an equivocality that therefore cannot be entirely chalked up to antimodernist reactions to violations of classical narrative, bourgeois preferences for culturally consecrated forms, or mass audience preferences for literary entertainment.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In The Philosophy of the Novel<\/em>, J.\u2009M. Bernstein describes the novel as \u201ca vast schematizing procedure, a search for modes of temporal ordering which would give our normative concepts access to the world\u201d and thus a \u201cconstitutive role in our comprehending experience.\u201d This joins two ideas: Kant\u2019s claim in the Critique of Pure Reason<\/em> that pure concepts like \u201cfreedom\u201d can only be made accessible to experience if given a temporal structure; and Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s opposition of \u201cconceptual form\u201d to \u201clife\u201d in Theory of the Novel<\/em>. Since Luk\u00e1cs thinks of \u201cform\u201d in the novel as \u201cabstract and conceptual,\u201d and the \u201clife\u201d it seeks to represent as \u201csecular and causal,\u201d \u201cin order for conceptual forms to attach themselves<\/em> to empirical life they must be \u2026 routed through a temporal sequence which can be matched to empirical events which possess a different order of determination.\u201d The problem finds its solution in the relation between story and discourse, in which the novel shifts between two orders of event determination, a \u201ccausal order of events\u201d (succession or discourse) and a \u201cnarrative (formally figured) order of events\u201d (totality or story). Arguably the essence of narrative, the story\/discourse relation underscores Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s account of the novel as a \u201cdialectic of form\u00ad giving and mimesis, where form demands immanence and the world mimetically transcribed resists form.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the novel of ideas throws a wrench in this dialectic. Because it is uncertain whether the presentation of an \u201cidea\u201d in the discourse of a novel like The Magic Mountain<\/em> counts as an event in a sequence existing independently of the representation of events, the genre tends to short-circuit or simply dissipate the tension between story and discourse that makes narrative so inexhaustibly rich. Discussions of time, suffering, justice, and so on are part of the \u201clife\u201d represented in The Magic Mountain<\/em>; the same goes for the discussions of vegetarianism and animal consciousness in Elizabeth Costello<\/em>. Yet for all this, it is hard to think of the ideas presented in either novel as constituting plot. As Bernstein writes:<\/p>\n

[The] more reified the represented world of the novel, the greater will be the distance separating event and plot, which is to say, the more difficult it will be make a plot (and hence a theme) out of the presented events; and the more difficult this primitive narrative act the more meaning will come to reside at the level of form alone, and hence the more questionable will be the authority of the narrative or, at least, the less verisimilitude will be a possible source of authority.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cmore the divorce of form from life becomes manifest in the novel, the more fragile, artificial, or purely literary will novelistic schemata appear.\u201d Here the relation between story and discourse, or the reader\u2019s ability to shuttle between events and the representation of events, begins to feel weak or oddly irrelevant. Perhaps this is why novels of ideas tend to be serial rather than chronologically textured, as reflected in the disconnected, interchangeable \u201cLectures\u201d in Elizabeth Costello<\/em>, or the picaresque episodes of Faith and the Good Thing<\/em>. Perhaps it is also why in The Magic Mountain<\/em>, a \u201ctime\u00ad novel\u201d featuring characters tellingly \u201cwithdrawn\u201d from time, Mann devotes the majority of his narrator\u2019s didactic speeches to the literary handling of temporality, including the contrivances this manipulation demands. Here and elsewhere, unschematized ideas reflect the social fact of reification. The very \u201clife\u201d or experience that each novel \u201cmimetically transcribe[s]\u201d is dominated by abstractions, resistant to temporalization and thus narrative integration.<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye puts it bluntly: an \u201cinterest in ideas and theoretical statements is alien to the genius of the novel proper, where the technical problem is to dissolve all theory into personal relationships.\u201d The novelist who \u201ccannot get along without ideas\u201d or who \u201chas not the patience to digest them the way [Austen and James did] instinctively resorts to \u2026 a \u2018mental history\u2019 of a single character.\u201d Perhaps accounting for the reduced character systems of novels like Against Nature<\/em>, the use of the often solitary \u201cintellectual hero as mouthpiece for authorial justifications\u201d also commits the novel to what Hermann Broch contemptuously calls \u201cconversational padding.\u201d As De Obaldia glosses:<\/p>\n

The term essayistic novel calls into question the idea of progression; it suggests that the (initial) essayistic material has not been \u201cdissolved\u201d into the fabric of the novel after all, but plainly stands out of the narrative strand. The offence is not so terrible when the essayistic reflections are \u201cmotivated\u201d: in most novels, the essayistic appears in the form of reflections or digressions which are taken over by the characters \u2026 Yet this is the procedure which Broch, precisely, rejects. His contempt for the choice of the intellectual hero as mouthpiece for authorial justifications is unreserved: he regards this strategy as \u201cconversational padding\u201d and \u201cabsolute kitsch,\u201d and accuses not only Musil, but also Gide, Mann, Huxley of indulging in it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is here again a modernist author of a novel of ideas who is pointing out its tendency toward \u201cabsolute kitsch.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRealism has never been comfortable with ideas.\u201d In this outbreak of direct address by the recessed narrator of Elizabeth Costello<\/em>, in which Broch\u2019s disliked \u201cmouthpiece\u201d technique is unapologetically embraced, our attention is drawn once more to the problematic nature of the novel of ideas by a practitioner. The narrator\u2019s interruption happens in our reading of what we assume is a story but are eventually told is a \u201clecture,\u201d implicitly performed to an undescribed audience into which the reader suddenly finds herself conscripted. At the same moment, the narrator is vanquished by an undescribed lecturer, enacting the very strain on novelistic realism described: \u201cIt could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations\u2014walks in the countryside, conversations\u2014in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet \u201cembodiment\u201d often replicates the problem Coetzee\u2019s self-canceling narrator identifies. For this solution cannot do much when characters are as abstract as the ideas they personify. Perhaps this is why Mann\u2019s paradigmatic novel of ideas puts bodies rendered inert by ambiguous illnesses at the center of its story, highlighting the etiolation of the aspect of character Luk\u00e1cs calls \u201cintellectual physiognomy.\u201d Ideas and illness are thus not only provocatively coupled in The Magic Mountain<\/em>, as Eugene Goodheart argues. The theme of physiological weakness points to the weakness of the very appeal to characterological embodiment as a solution to the problem \u201cideas\u201d pose to narration. No character in either of these novels develops, least of all the protagonists: Coetzee\u2019s allegorical double Costello and Mann\u2019s \u201cgrotesque innocent\u201d Hans Castorp.<\/p>\n

Nondevelopment is, in fact, one of The Magic Mountain<\/em>\u2019s official ideas. Indeed, its paradoxical narrativization and the temporal monotony ensuing from it, reflexively discussed in chapters titled \u201cEternal Soup\u201d and \u201cThe Great Stupor,\u201d brings out The Magic Mountain<\/em>\u2019s experimental comedy. As Goodheart notes, the world of Mann\u2019s characters is an \u201cachieved\u201d world, in which the \u201cideas that circulate \u2026 represent forms of existence for which there is no real future.\u201d Hence the \u201cirony of Settembrini\u2019s progressivism,\u201d which takes the form of \u201can obsolete idea with no prospects.\u201d Mann\u2019s novel of modern, progressive ideas is in short a novel about the \u201cfailure of ideas.\u201d It is not just that \u201c[if Hans] and the reader learn anything, it is that the ideas that occupy such a large space in the novel are untrustworthy or worse.\u201d The narrator\u2019s irony seems to ultimately target \u201cthe character of ideas per se.\u201d<\/p>\n

Something wrong about \u201cideas per se\u201d also seems hinted by the late irruption of the supernatural in Mann\u2019s novel. In \u201cHighly Questionable,\u201d featuring the s\u00e9ance in which a medium calls up the ghost of Hans\u2019s cousin Joachim, the rationally inexplicable event is as paradoxically striking for its curious lack of impact on the narrative, which simply resumes after the incident, undisturbed. The inorganic imposition of supernatural (but narratively inconsequential) magic seems to almost ensue from the buildup of technical contrivances that the novel finds itself forced to use in its efforts to integrate similarly externally imposed \u201cideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

I could say more about magic as a deus ex machina. For now, though, we need to entertain a more basic reason for why the \u201cnovel of ideas\u201d remains an object of critical skepticism. As Mary McCarthy asks: Aren\u2019t all novels \u201cof ideas\u201d? Can one intelligibly speak of a novel without ideas? If not, why pretend to a subgenre that is somehow special for having them? In an enactment of this problem, Lionel Trilling\u2019s essays show him wavering between treating the \u201cnovel of ideas\u201d as exception and norm: at times as an emerging form endemic to late twentieth\u00ad-century \u201cmass-ideological\u201d society; at others as a synonym for the novel per usual, rooted in class conflict since the dawn of the nineteenth century. Like the gimmick on which it so frequently relies, the \u201cnovel of ideas\u201d is an equivocal thing. Is<\/em> it really a thing?<\/p>\n

But it seems time to embrace rather than continue circling cautiously around this genre\u2019s \u201cHighly Questionable\u201d nature. Rather than hunting for less embarrassing ways to stabilize it, we might define the novel of ideas precisely by its intimate relation to the gimmick form. Incorporating the suspicion that attends a genre into its definition has benefits, including that of making the definition more concrete. And so: there is a will to ideas on the part of some novels that drives them toward the use of three obtrusive techniques\u2014techniques that cannot help but<\/em> obtrude by working directly counter to the genre\u2019s diachronicity, flexibility, and other oft\u00ad-noted strengths. Allegory, direct speech by narrators, and direct speech by characters: these ancient didactic devices undermine the novel\u2019s claims to contemporaneity. They distance the novel from its m\u00e9tier\u2014narration\u2014and systematically push its form closer to those of the essay, lecture, or play. Moreover, as a genre in which storytelling strains to accommodate synchronic concepts\u2014inverting Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em>, in which philosophy rediscovers its reliance on diachronicity, narration, and a kind of free indirect style\u2014the novel of ideas recalls one of gimmick\u2019s fundamental features: its appearance of \u201cworking too hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Direct speech by characters involves privileging what narratologists call scene, in which story and discourse time coincide. This dramatic tempo contrasts with those at which the novel uniquely excels: summary (fictional events unfolding over years are briskly accounted for in a single paragraph or even sentence) and stretch (a story event taking up less than a second is recounted over several pages of text). Theater cannot do stretch without recourse to special effects like film, which has to rely in turn on special effects like slow motion. Film struggles with summary, resorting to devices like montage or peeling calendars. Summary does not come easily to theater either, which manages it through expository speeches by characters. In short, when the novel\u2019s dominant temporality becomes the \u201creal time\u201d of scene, as opposed to psychological stretch or historical summary, the novel is no longer in its technical wheelhouse but that of another genre. Indeed, stretch and summary are the only temporal modes in which an innovation entirely unique to the novel has been able to develop. Free indirect discourse, in requiring the grammatical third person, cannot take place at moments of direct speech by characters. Nor can it take place in the direct speech by narrators which gives rise to the \u201cpause,\u201d in which discourse time is maximal and story time is null.<\/p>\n

Do the techniques the novel becomes compelled to adopt to incorporate preexisting \u201cideas\u201d inevitably push its form closer toward the play? Hoffman comes close to suggesting this, noting that the novel of ideas brings out the \u201cdrama [already] implicit in an idea,\u201d when understood as \u201cpoint of view which a person holds and upon which he acts.\u201d48 The fact that the novel of ideas is more of a \u201cdrama of ideas rather than of persons\u201d commits it, moreover, to one remarkably simple contrivance that might well remind us of the default setting of the well\u00ad-made play:<\/p>\n

Each character \u2026 has given him (if little else!) a point of view drawn from the prevailing intellectual interests of his creator. On this point of view the character stands, wavers, or falls. Thus, implicit in this type of novel is the drama of ideas rather than of persons, or, rather, the drama of individualized ideas. The structural requirements of such a novel are perhaps simpler than they at first appear. One requirement is to get these people, or as many of them as is possible, together in one place where circumstances are favorable to a varied expression of intellectual diversity. The drawing-room, the party, the dinner\u2014these are all favorite points of structural focus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Similarly, in The Drama of Ideas<\/em>, Martin Puchner notes that if we broaden the definition of drama from dialogue written for performance to a looser \u201cfamily of forms\u201d privileging \u201ccharacter, direct speech, scene and action, to the exclusion of narration and interiority,\u201d one can \u201cclaim that the dramatic is realized not only in plays but also in certain novels.\u201d If one example of this is the experimental novel, such as Melville\u2019s Moby-Dick <\/em>with its Shakespearean monologues, or Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em> with its 150\u00ad-page Circe episode, the other is the \u201cnovel of ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another group would include the novel of ideas, from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Thomas Mann, which depends heavily on dialogic scenes of intellectual discussion in the tradition of Plato. Rather than calling those moments examples of \u201ctypical\u201d novelistic hybridity, it is more appropriate to think of them as dramatic moments in the novel, with the narrator, retreating into stage directions, giving over the scene to the pure action (and dialogue) of characters. If from one perspective this looks like the incorporation of drama by the stronger novel, from another, it looks like the invasion of the novel by a newly resurgent drama.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reversing a more familiar account of the novel as a form uniquely capable of assimilating others, Puchner sees the novel of ideas as a subset of an older, larger tradition he calls \u201cdramatic Platonism.\u201d In a sense, the novel\u2019s desire for \u201cideas\u201d makes it not so much philosophical as dramatic.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sianne Ngai is a professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of <\/em>Ugly Feelings and <\/em>Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, winner of the Modern Language Association\u2019s James Russell Lowell Prize. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, and she has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin and the American Council of Learned Societies.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form<\/a>, by Sianne Ngai, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright \u00a9 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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