New Voice

“But alas, the novel too is ravaged by the termites of reduction”
(Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, p17) 

“a period of repetition in which the novel keeps duplicating its form, emptied of its spirit”
(Milan Kundera, p15) 

In his essay “The Uses of Desire”, Adam Phillips has the following to say about what psychoanalysts term “the antonym of desire” or “perversion”, but which he chooses to call “an anxious narrowing of the mind when it comes to pleasure”: 
“An intent knowingness – a determined and determining knowing what one wants – characterises so-called sexual perversions.  The person in a perverse state of mind has no conscious doubt about what will excite and satisfy him.” (Side Effects, 167) 

Whilst I have no intention of taking the analogy too far, the above description seems to apply just as accurately to those critics, reviewers, writers and readers who dismiss works, and novels in particular, for abandonning what they see as necessary conventions. 

To perverts, Phillips contrasts those who are open to “accidents of pleasure”, and reminds us that “accidents will happen”.  They take their pleasure as they come, not always recognising what they want until they experience it.  Parameters may still exist but of a more flexible variety. 

The greatest critics of the novel have, for me, been those who define the form in the broadest and most inclusive terms.  Bakhtin immediately comes to mind.  It is the formless form that takes, and does what it will, with all comers, all genres, all modes, tones, languages and lengths, from a hundred or so pages to Proust’s endless search.  

When a novelist grows tired of certain conventions, as J.M. Coetzee clearly has, they should not be attacked for leaving them behind, for seeking new, or less well-travelled, ways of storytelling.  That is not to say these attempts should be beyond criticism, but rather, difference or deviation should not form the basis of such criticism.  Although he was not primarily a novelist, Harold Pinter’s exhortation to “come towards the work” is pertinent in this regard. 

The novel, as Milan Kundera has observed, can get “weighed down by “technique,” by the conventions that do the author’s work for him: present a character, describe a milieu, bring the action into a historical situation, fill time in the characters’ lives with superfluous episodes; each shift of scene calls for new exposition, description, explanation.”  He calls this tendency, “the automatism of novelistic technique”, and clearly takes a dig at those he considers to be its proponents, his words, no doubt carefully chosen to imply they are lazy, derivative to the point of being formulaic (The Art of the Novel, p73).  Coetzee would not be of this party: 
“Realism has never been comfortable with ideas.  It 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 – walks in the countryside, conversations – in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them.  The notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal.  In such debates ideas do not and indeed cannot float free: they are tied to the speakers by whom they are enounced, and generated from the matrix of individual interests out of which their speakers act in the world…” 
(JM Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, p 9) 

One of the problems with this practice of embodying is that, not only is the idea attached to the character who articulates it, but the character then appears as a representative of that idea, not as a multifarious, complex and self-conlicted individual.  As both Emerson and his teacher, Montaigne knew, we may think one thing at one moment and wholly contradict ourselves the next.  This, as Adam Phillips implies, may not be a bad thing. 

“Usually he does not know his own mind, does not care to know his own mind.  To know one’s own mind too well spells, in his view, the death of the creative spark.”
(JM Coetzee, Youth, p131)   

Knowing ourselves, and what we want, too well, or acting as though we do, serves only to constrict, reduce and deaden.  Let us, instead, seek what Kundera calls “the wisdom of uncertainty” (The Art of the Novel, p 7), allowing literature to flourish in ever more varying forms.