“Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”
A Room with a View by EM Forster
If the novel is the literary form that offers freedom to speak our mind, I’m not sure it can be written with a closed mind. Clearly, there is something at stake when we ask why the novels matters.
But is it so clear? I’m guessing that sometimes, in our own lives, we prefer obscurity because it is less painful than clarity. The novel matters because it does not have to be clear or obscure. Yet, in the voyage out between these binaries – between the oil spills, thistles and phantoms a novel might pass on the way, between desire, disappointment and the people who clean offices at dawn on page 33 – a novel can reach for understanding and re-examine meaning.
It is not necessarily comforting to understand something, but I believe it is powerful to struggle into knowledge. We feel the release, relief and elation of a new understanding. This is different from scrolling, skimming and consuming information. For this reason, the endlessly declared death of the novel, like the death of God, is unlikely to happen.
To speak in the language of AI, the novel has supreme coding capabilities. When I start writing a novel, I discover there is no such thing as freedom and it does have rules, even if the writer is making them up.
An example of making up the rules is the attitude to grammar that a writer such as Gertrude Stein developed. She believed that everyone knows when something is a question, so she erased question marks from her baffling and beguiling writing. Stein also thought commas were “servile”, and that readers should be free to take a breath any time they liked. These were her rules and with them she asked pertinent questions:
“What does literature do and how does it do it. And what does English literature do and how does it do it. If it describes what it sees how does it do it. If it describes what it knows how does it do it and what is the difference between what it sees and what it knows. And then too there is what it feels and then also there is what it hopes and wishes.”
Obviously, all question marks had left the building and were smoking outside.
A novel matters when I am seduced by its language. If its language is dull and dulling, it’s hard to become interested in what is at stake for its protagonists, its experiments with form or care about its political opinions, even if I might agree with them. The novel matters to me because language gives me pleasure and purpose. I like working with it, listening to it. Language is so powerful it can sometimes frighten me. In her novel Glory, NoViolet Bulawayo writes:
“Words not only mattered but they were power. Words were muti. Words were weapons. Words were magic. Words were church. Words were wealth. Words were life.”
The proverb that children of my generation learned off by heart to see off bullies, “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me”, was so obviously not true. I remember thinking about this age seven, and feeling the lie.
A novel matters when in the words of Baudelaire, the writer has gone everywhere in the quest for “the fleeting forms of beauty in the life of our day.” A fleeting form of beauty can be the kindness in someone’s hands, a swan flipping upside down to search for fish in a canal full of rusting shopping trolleys, or when a person who appears to be very demure and very mindful, suddenly reveals a great talent for taking down the idea that human desire only means male desire.
We become more interesting to ourselves when we are attentive to writing that matters to us. We have seen things through the eyes of others and this changes the expression in our own eyes. As George Orwell discovered when he was required to step into the persona of a colonial policeman in Burma, “The imperialist wears a mask and his face grows to fit it.” It is a significant moment in life, and in the novel, when the mask slips.
Writing and reading, like all relationships, require solitude, attention and time, but more provocatively, as Italo Calvino suggests, when we begin to read a novel for the first time, it involves “confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is”. I believe this kind of confrontation is worth defending.
It is sometimes hard to nail why a novel connects with us. After all, if we could entirely explain this away it probably would not still be so lively within us. As Iris Murdoch suggested in her essay collection Existentialists and Mystics: “To be a human being is to know more than one can prove, to conceive of a reality which goes ‘beyond the facts’.”
If I write to find out something I don’t know, I have come to believe that the unconscious of the novel does know. It has gone beyond the facts and is adjusting the headlights for the long drive ahead.
A novel can drill into the facts of lived experience and come out the other side to somewhere the author never expected to land. If it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t, readers will stand alongside her to gaze at the view. Perhaps this is the only mystery about writing novels, which mostly requires stamina.
No, there are other mysteries. Why not? Are we obliged to wear sensible shoes and eat all our vegetables when we consider why the novel matters? Just as an object might hold some kind of emotional charge for us, the novels that excite me possess that same charge. My own objects include two horses that dance when I pull the tails up and a paper weight with a jellyfish blown from glass floating inside it. They have turned up in my novels in one way or another. That the jellyfish floated into my book Hot Milk and metamorphosed into the Medusa, and that her sting and venom were reconfigured as empowering rather than destructive, is somewhat mysterious. Yet it’s not as foolish as war or demolishing a water well.
I believe the novel relies on the imaginative participation of its readers, in much the same way Marcel Duchamp believed the spectator completes a work of art. This synergy is also worth defending. Even a novel that deconstructs the novel requires its readers to step into a voice, ideas, desires or fury that might be nothing like our own.
I believe that we create Anna Karenina and Jane Eyre in parallel with Tolstoy and Brontë, just as we do with the protagonists in novels as aesthetically different as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy. Robbe-Grillet might not have named the voyeuristic male narrator who obsessively observes his wife and neighbours on the banana plantation in which the novel is set, but I have definitely dressed him in a sweat-soaked white shirt that has a slightly grubby collar. As for Mrs Dalloway, I see her alone in her party dress, smoking a cigarette, trying to un-hear the dread in her own mind for years after the novel has ended.
The novels that travel with us for a lifetime endure because they have imagined something that is truthful and real. I was always encouraged that a cerebral novelist such as J G Ballard called himself an imaginative writer, but it is Ursula K Le Guin who put it most usefully: “My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
And what about pleasure? It is indeed a pleasure to sit upstairs on a bus in London while December rain falls gently on Tesco Express by the roundabout, open the book that rests on my lap and find myself in the company of Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles:
“‘True enough,’ said Mrs Copperfield, bringing her fist down on the table and looking very mean. ‘I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years. I know I am as guilty as I can be, but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now anda certain amount of daring, which, if you remember correctly, I never had before.’”
Yes, it is wise to guard one’s happiness like a wolf when reading a novel on a bus that stops for 20 minutes to “even out the service”.
I have come to believe that I want contradictory things from a novel: to recognise some of my own preoccupations, yet also to escape from them; to be intellectually engaged, yet emotionally devastated; to be comforted by its continuity, yet invigorated when it is interrupted – such as in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which a decade is compressed into a few breathtaking pages. I want to be immersed in its story, yet not to be relentlessly told that I’m being told a story. I want intimacy, distance, enigma, coherence. I long to read novels that I can’t put down and I’m receptive to being dragged into despair. The novel matters because what it is required to deliver is probably impossible.
The books I read at 14 were mostly borrowed from the library: Colette, Tolstoy, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Austen, F Scott Fitzgerald, DH Lawrence, James Joyce, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Gabriel García Márquez . The delight of reading was enhanced by the two pink sugar foam shrimps I purchased on Fridays from the pick ’n’ mix at the local newsagent. Sometimes I swapped the shrimps for three sherbet flying saucers. The big bang of that teenage reading stays with me, particularly Camus’s 1942 novel The Stranger: “It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.” As a Bowie fan, I also hoped that Ziggy Stardust would fall from the dark spangled sky to lift me away from the indifferent London suburbs to a more glamorous life.
Some of the straight white boys at school were reading Jack Kerouac and lent me On the Road and Lonesome Traveller. The nearest I got to being on the road was the route to school down the Finchley Road, so it was quite exciting to travel with Kerouac. While I read my mother’s copy of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, I was also keeping an ear out for the landline in the hallway. It had a long curly cord, a circular dial and a heavy receiver. I made sure I got to it first so that my best friend did not have to get past my family to get to me. We were all the gatekeepers of each other’s calls.
Sometimes, when a new, bold novel, full of innovation, lands in the hands of a gatekeeper who declines to publish it, I believe this person hears the call through the receiver of a telephone from another age. Where’s the plot, the story, the narrative arc? Why hasn’t a formidable housekeeper with a dodgy eye entered the novel carrying a tureen of hearty soup and a crusty loaf? Yet, what is coming through the vintage receiver are the beautiful languages and forms of our own century. I’m thinking of the new cadence and startling points of view in Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, Assembly by Natasha Brown.
It is the historic fate of this kind of gatekeeper to retire to the English countryside. On Mondays he will warm up a sausage roll in the microwave. On Thursdays he will deliver a lecture to the delicate, crazy wild-flowers in his garden. His subject will be something to do with how modernism is a silly continental experiment that refuses to go away. His audience of wild-flowers will listen for a while and then talk amongst themselves about their lecherous desire for more sunlight. If they have the energy, they will discuss a line from Lisa Robertson’s incredible novel The Baudelaire Fractal: “I’m 57 years old, I’m thinking about the immense, silent legend of any girl’s life.”
The gatekeeper has never thought about any girl’s life as a life.
“In the novel, the characters can do nothing but live.” So wrote DH Lawrence in his 1925 essay “Why the Novel Matters”. I agree with Lawrence, which makes a change. If characters are dying they are still living and if they feel dead inside they are still living, and if they are literally dead they tend to haunt the mind of the living. Furthermore, a character has a body, with all its turbulence. When James Baldwin walks the bodies of his African-American protagonists into his novels, they walk into violence and are wounded. The violence is racism and homophobia. The novel matters because from this collective wound, Baldwin made a scalding critique of immense complexity and coherence. Never mind what it means to be a character, what does it mean to be a subject?
The British psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott asked himself what made life worth living for the children he worked with so patiently and skilfully. What is there to live for? There is not one answer to this question and a novel has many ways of asking it, yet I appreciate the straight talking in A Man Asleep by Georges Perec: “It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier, that you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that, without mincing words, you don’t know how to live, that you will never know.”
It is likely that if we have reason to be invested in this most impossible enquiry, what is there to live for, we will not regard humour or human warmth in the novel as unserious. For a start it is free. And freeing.
There are some novels that are dead even if the characters are relentlessly cheerful, unbearably chatty and apparently alive. If none of it lives it’s usually because its imitation of life has flattened life, the literary equivalent of canned laughter in old-fashioned radio shows – as if there is a cultural consensus about why we laugh and at whom we are laughing. The novel matters because it can disrupt this consensus.
I was born in Africa, grew up in England, and through literature met the writers whose novels gave me many homes. This is not sentimental. Literature is much more capacious than my physical home. It was the French author Marguerite Duras who taught me the stranger dimensions of thought can be fully lived in literature.
“The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any centre to it. No path, no line,” writes Duras in her 1984 novel The Lover, translated by the magnificent Barbara Bray. It takes hard living to realise the truth of letting go of the path. I am attached to the story of the path that runs through my life. Even Hansel and Gretel made a trail of breadcrumbs through the dark forest so they could find their way home. All the same, literature that matters to me is hospitable to the idea that sometimes we must lose a story. This can be harder than creating one. Losing the story we have clung on to for decades, is a good subject for the novel. How are we going to put ourselves together without it?
When a novel is interested in the coexistence of immense power and vulnerability in its protagonists, it begins to speak in a voice or voices that I believe to be subversive in every way. It is so flattening to only be spoken to in the registers of strength and certainty.
During my father’s dying days he summoned me to his sick bed and requested I find a pen and paper. I believed that, at last, he was going to express his wishes for his funeral and its various rituals. In fact, he wanted to dictate a menu for the week. It turned out that he was not satisfied with his meals. For Tuesday he suggested fish curry, Thursday lamb chops, Friday roast chicken. My father was 91, fatally ill and could only swallow liquids. By the time he reached Saturday, I began to admire his bid to be alive for a whole week (unlikely) and to live imaginatively to the very end.
I understood that he was struggling with too much reality (imminent death) and needed a break. I accepted his language, and did not pierce it with a literal reply such as: “But you can only swallow thin soup.” We both knew this anyway. The various ways we negotiate with reality are at the core of all writing and living.
A longer version of this essay was delivered as the New Statesman Goldsmiths Prize Lecture at London’s Southbank Centre in October. Deborah Levy’s most recent book is “The Postion of Spoons” (Hamish Hamilton)
[See also: The Renaissance in drawing]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024