OK but what is a novel anyway? A weirdo mystical take

Thoughts on the latest literary beef, via a cheeky tour of a few thousand years of literary history

Jun 06, 2024

There’s been a lot of talk about novels lately: in Esquire, Kate Dwyer wrote that debut novels are failing to launch. There followed many articles and posts: debut novels are selling; they’re not selling like they used to but not for those reasons; here’s what a debut novelist really needs to do to sell books—you get the picture.

As Elif Shafak pointed out in her recent piece The Death of the Death of the Novel, hand-wringing about the state of the novel ain’t new.

Ever since early 20th century, the novel has been proclaimed dead multiple times. Some of these claims were made by beloved writers who were novelists themselves:
In 1902 Jules Verne maintained that now that there were mass newspapers, no one would wish to read novels anymore.
In 1930 beloved Walter Benjamin worried that the novel was experiencing a crisis.
In 1950s Norman Mailer and Jose Ortega y Gasset respectively declared the novel no longer alive.
1970s… 1980s… 1990s… 2000s….2010s… 2020s… over and over the same argument was made, albeit the murderer seemed to change each time:
Newspapers killed the novel.
Internet killed the novel.
Netflix killed the novel.
TikTok killed the novel.
Clearly there are several potential perpetrators out there, but we must insist on seeing the body first. The evidence. Are we really convinced that the novel is dead?

So why all this worry? Why have we been lamenting the death of the novel for more than a century, why does the landscape seem to be shifting yet again, and what does it all say about the current state of the human race?

I don’t think we can answer those questions unless we step back. Way back, further back than I see anyone doing. Reading all these pieces, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the novel was an age-old literary form that humanity has never functioned without, but when we step back, we see that in truth—relative to oral storytelling, poetry, and theatre, not to mention other forms of expression like music, dance, painting, and sculpture—it only arrived a heartbeat ago. And we see, moreover, in the last few hundred years of the rise and ever-threatened fall of the novel, a picture of a species wrestling and reckoning with what it is to be human, meaning: the extent to which we are (or are not) self-determining individuals walking through a more-or-less predictable, empirically knowable world.

But wait. What the hell am I talking about? Well. Most literary scholars agree that the first novel was Don Quixote, published in 1605, and what was happening then? Europe—the birthplace of the novel—was a couple of centuries into its love affair with humanism, inspired by the revival of classical texts and particularly by the classical concept of humanitas, or (and yes I’m going to quote the encyclopedia here, forgive me): “the development of human virtue, in all its forms, to its fullest extent.”

To cut a very long story almost nonsensically short, the spotlight had shifted. Until then, and certainly still in the Middle Ages that preceded the rise of humanism, Europeans searching for meaning had tended to locate it in forms of worship that emphasized submission to the overwhelming power of the divine, as well as mystery and the numinous. But now, as the modern era began to emerge, the determining factor in the shape of a man’s life was increasingly seen to be his own conduct, the extent of his humanitas. (Incidentally, this developing tendency is very much borne out in the first novel, Don Quixote. And also incidentally, of course it was always a man in the modeling. No accidental pronouns here.)

This new conception of life on Earth was always going to need a new form of storytelling. Because myths and oral stories and poetry and drama—they’re not cut out to chart this kind of human path through life. In his fantastic book Wisdom of the Mythtellers, Sean Kane emphasizes that the earliest humans encountered their stories by listening to the living world and all the voices speaking through it, until its patterns formed into the shape of stories:

The proper subject of myth is the ideas and emotions of the Earth… The Australian mythtellers joined their songs with vast, intangible vibrating fields of energy in which they could narrate the form—or one of the changing forms—of a particular supernatural being who could appear variously as human, plant, star, mountain, or animal. The Haida mythtellers used a word, sghaana, that best translates as “power,” in the sense of a greater than human power.

This is why the old myths and folk tales often seem so strange and exotic to modern sensibilities: because the story will be sideswiped by forces that don’t come out of the human being’s human mind or soul or intentions, and which refuse to explain themselves or be assimilated into the human scale.

This was the way humans found and told stories for millennia. Then the Ancient Greeks invented democracy and needed to figure out how to be a new kind of human in a new world, so they developed and popularized theatre. This new form of storytelling allowed them to bring the voting public together at regular intervals to watch stories that repeatedly dramatized the polarity between divine and human powers. As we see in the divine punishments meted out time and again in Greek tragedy, theatre allowed the Greeks to hold the judgments of the gods in their minds and hearts, even as they set about self-determining en masse.

Here’s an interesting thing that can show us how much storytelling changed when the novel was born around two millennia later. It was Ancient Greek theatre that first gave us the deus ex machina—literally “god from a machine.” The “machine” in question was a sort of crane that would introduce a god onto the stage, seemingly from nowhere, to decide the fate of the play. And this was not frowned upon, not seen as bad literary form. Rather, it was an accepted illustration of the way fate truly unfolds.

Nowadays, several centuries into the age of the novel, the term “deus ex machina” is used to describe any event that enters a story unexpectedly and alters or resolves the plot, and it’s seen as a literary sin. Editors, writing coaches, and story consultants will wag their fingers and say that a deus ex machina ruins a story, because it’s contrived, because it doesn’t emerge organically from the internal logic of the story, which makes it unrewarding for readers.

This is another way of saying that it’s an event not wrought by the characters themselves, which is a sin because the defining logic of the novel has always been that “character is fate,” in the words of the eighteenth-century German novelist and polymath Novalis. Character is fate; your life will be determined by what you do and who you are and by nothing else.

So as humanism rose and conquered at least the European world, it gave us a literary form in which the events of life can only rightly be dictated by human conduct. It’s a world away from those strange stories overheard from the Earth herself, in which all the agency is given to sghaana, or “a greater than human power.”

But we seem to have been worried for at least a hundred years that this way of living in and conceiving of the world was somehow fragile or endangered. And here we are again, today, worrying that its days are numbered.

I’m not here to prognosticate about the future of the novel. Not really. And my own feelings about all this are complicated. I see the pitfalls with the novel’s way of conceiving of the world. I see the way this form has skewed our sensibilities about the meaning of life on Earth, with perhaps disastrous consequences. And yet novels have saved my life. I quite literally would not be alive today if I hadn’t had the company of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf and so many others through my darkest hours. I’ve devoted my life to reading and studying and editing and writing novels. I never go to sleep or leave the house without one.

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