Why We All Have a Novel in Us (And What To Do About It)

Last night I gave a 20-minute talk at the Catalyst Club in Brighton. The club is a very interesting idea - a night club where people get up to talk on any subject they feel passionate about. This is the text - it's not a polished article but just an aide memoire, so please don't take me to task over grammar or particular expressions!

The title of this talk is “Why We All Have a Novel In Us (And What To Do About It)”. I would like to state at the outset that this talk is not an encouragement to anyone to show me their unpublished manuscript!

I used to love novels. When I got a job in publishing a few years back, I used to read a couple of novels every week. In a way it was my ideal job, and I really enjoyed the reading. After I left that job I did freelance work reading the ‘slush pile’, and after a few months of this, I found I couldn’t take any more. It would be all right if I were the kind of reader who can pick up a book and put it down two minutes later … I have to spend time with it.

And the thing is that when I start to read a novel I feel a kind of obligation to the writer to keep reading. I’m very conscious of how much work has gone into it, how much of themselves the author has put into it, and if I put it down after a couple of pages I feel guilty, as if I’ve invalidated that person’s efforts. That’s why I’m unwilling into pick up a novel these days. It’s such a commitment.

Slide of: Novels published by Michael Palin, Melvyn Bragg, Julie Walters, Alan Titchmarsh, Katie Price (Jordan)

Everyone wants to write a novel these days – comedians and light entertainers; glamour models; journalists; MPs – the novel is a kind of badge of honour. We haven’t seen the footballer novel yet, but it’s going to happen. What writing a novel says is “I’m not just a pretty face, I’ve got substance and soul” or, in the case of someone like Melvyn Bragg, it says “I’m not just a po-faced egghead: I’ve got humanity”.

It is almost as if we accept that to write a novel is truly to be ... click "read more"

The question I’d like to look at with you this evening is, WHY? Why is the novel given such importance, such credibility?

Novels and Romances

The technology that made the novel practically possible was, of course, the printing press. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this was the only cause, but without it we would not have had the novel as a mass literary phenomenon. It made books cheaper to produce and therefore to buy, making books available to a much wider audience than before. When Caxton built his first printing-press in 1475, one of his first books was Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, a collection of Arthurian romances from which we draw a lot of our stories about the Knights of the Round Table. Some people think this was the first novel, but I think this kind of collection of stories is better seen as a bridge between the oral culture and the new emerging literary one.

Nouvelle

The word “novel” was first used in England and France in the 17th Century. It was usually used to describe a cheaply-printed romance. The word derives from the same root as “news”, and it seems that the early newspapers and novels were circulated together, and they shared the same relatively low status. A lot of people attacked the newspaper writers and the novelists for not writing the truth, but it might equally be said that they represented a democratization of knowledge. The same kind of thing is happening today with the rise in blogging and camera phones. These innovations represent a liberation of the media from its traditional custodians, and they also raise concerns about the quality of what is published.

During the 16th Century the wide publication of the romances, together with rising literacy, meant that a whole new class of people were able to read books for the first time. And these romances were what they read.

Don Quixote

Don Quixote, the hero of the first ever true novel, is one such reader: a poor down at heel gentleman from a backwoods part of Spain called La Mancha, who fills his head with ideas about chivalry that he gets from his collection of romances, and convinces himself that he is a knight-errant. The humour of the book comes from the gap between reality and what Don Quixote believes and sees.

Cervantes’ book distinguishes between the ridiculous fantasy of the romance tale and a new, more probable form of fiction. Don Quixote is not literally true, of course, but nor is it a fantasy. It allows us to reflect on the actions and motivations of the characters in the book, and to enter into their world in a way not possible in a book before.

The book was written in two parts (1605/1615) and in the second part, the author Cervantes has great fun with the idea that the first part has been published and read by many of the characters in the book. Aware of Don Quixote’s affliction, some of them dress up as knights and squires and construct elaborate practical jokes to play on Don Quixote and his faithful “squire” Sancho Panza, in effect becoming part of Don Quixote’s imaginary world. As Cervantes remarks, it is hard in the end to decide who is more deluded, Don Quixote or his tormentors.

As he was writing the second part of Don Quixote, Cervantes heard the bad news that someone else had already brought out a sequel. Rather than complain about this, he simply incorporated the spurious sequel into his own. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza come across someone who has a copy of the sequel and they hear that it tells how they went to Saragossa to take part in a joust. They are indeed planning to do just this, but they immediately change their plans and go to Barcelona in order to give the lie to the sequel. Later, they meet one of the characters from the false sequel, who agrees that this Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are far superior to the ones he previously met, and must therefore be the real ones.

This is the kind of literary game that people today like to call “post-modern”, and I think it’s fascinating that the very first European novel is full of self-referential post-modernity. I think that what it shows is that our ability to be aware of ourselves as we write, to be unreliable narrators, to write books that are about writing books and reading books, has very little to do with how clever we are today, and everything to do with the act of writing a novel.

Novels, ‘Realism’ and Ordinary Life

Don Quixote is a startlingly modern (or post-modern) read, and it’s maybe not too surprising that nobody wrote anything like it, despite its huge success and the numerous imitators, for another century. Cervantes was way ahead of his time, but there were huge changes happening, most of all the great shift in religious life caused by the rise of Protestantism.

Protestantism was in tune with a move away from the hierarchical society of the past towards one in which ordinary people and ordinary life became significant. The Puritans said, “God Loveth Adverbs”, by which they meant that it was not what one did that was significant, but the spirit of faith in which one did it. A Puritan preacher like William Perkins (1558 – 1602) shocked his listeners with his radical views. He said that from the point of view of God, there was no difference between washing dishes and preaching the word of God; that if they spring from faith, “deeds of matrimony” – that is, of sexual intercourse – “are pure and spiritual”; and that even acts such as wiping one’s shoes “howsoever gross they appear outwardly, yet are they sanctified.”

This new form of spirituality had a profound influence on our culture from the 16th Century onwards, as it turned attention on to the spiritual quality and meaning of ordinary life. When ordinary life – even down to washing dishes and wiping one’s feet – became significant and worthy of attention, the way was clear for the realistic novel. And these are just the kind of details one finds in Don Quixote.

Novels and Self-Examination

Protestant sects such as the Puritans also placed great emphasis on self-examination. They taught that God had chosen certain people to be his elect, and that it was necessary to examine one’s soul to discover the evidence of the grace of God working within. Most of the Puritan Founding Fathers who emigrated to America kept a spiritual journal, recording their daily innermost thoughts and experiences. In 1678 John Bunyan, an English Puritan preacher, published the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was a book half way between a spiritual journal and a novel.

This is, I think, one of the reasons why the novel exerts such a powerful hold over our imaginations. It is a kind of pilgrim’s progress: not to the hereafter, but into the inner self. When I sit down to write “my novel”, I am simultaneously exploring and revealing my inner life. Only in a novel do we get the promise of, as the title of a recent book by Tom Wolfe has it, “A Man in Full”.

This, at least, is the aspiration. But there are dangers in this kind of journey, as we shall see.

Robinson Crusoe: Getting Lost in a Book

Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe (1719) was the first English novelist in the modern sense. Like Bunyan, Defoe was a Puritan who wrote books of spiritual instruction. It appears that he set out in Crusoe to write an allegory similar to that of The Pilgrim’s Progress, based on the Biblical story of Jonah and the story he had heard of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent four years alone on a desert island.

Robinson Crusoe runs away from his father’s house in York and gets on a ship in Hull to take him to London. In an explicit echo of the story of Jonah (in which Jonah goes to sea to escape the command of God) the ship is beset by storms and the sailors speculate
that Crusoe is the cause of the trouble, although they don’t throw him overboard. Nothing daunted, Crusoe sets off on another voyage and this time he has another Jonah-like warning when he’s captured by pirates and sold into slavery. He escapes, and goes into the slave trade himself, and this third time he finally meets his Jonah-like fate when he is shipwrecked off the coast of Brazil and finds himself at last on the famous island.

At this point, Defoe forgets all about his apparent intention to write a cautionary tale. Instead, he becomes fascinated by Crusoe’s efforts to build a shelter, domesticate animals, till the soil, and so on. By the end of his exile, Crusoe is the triumphant ruler of the island, the master of all that he surveys. The early moralizing forgotten, Defoe tells us how Crusoe returns to civilization to find that he has become rich in his absence due to some investments he left behind. So much for Jonah: running away from Dad is now just the beginning of life’s great adventure.

What is so interesting here is the way that the novelist, ostensibly in control of the book he is writing, quickly loses control. To some extent this can happen with any book, but only in a novel can it happen so dramatically.

The Pilgrim’s Progress intended by the Puritan writer turns into something quite different. It is no longer clear by the end whether it is a pilgrimage at all, or if it is a pilgrimage then Crusoe has traveled to a quite different shrine. Defoe lost interest in condemning Crusoe’s folly, and became filled with enthusiasm for the idea of being a castaway.

It seems that Crusoe represents a kind of ideal of isolation and individualism, one that the modern world finds attractive. When the book came out there were examples of people who actually voluntarily marooned themselves on desert islands, and today we still have this fantasy. One day, if we win the lottery, we’ll buy an island and live in isolation from the world.
But for the rest of us, there is another way to escape.

Reading in isolation

Slide of: Silent Reading: Vermeer's Lady Reading a Letter

There’s a fascinating passage in St Augustine’s autobiography in which he described St Ambrose reading: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still”. Augustine speculates as to whether Ambrose didn’t want to disturb those around him with the obscure things he used to read, or whether he was trying to save his voice, “but whatever his reason, we may be sure it was a good one”. Evidently in the 5th Century, it was an extraordinary thing to read silently.

Following the Middle Ages, silent reading became more commonplace. Again, Protestantism was an important motive force, as it moved us away from the old communal forms of worship and culture, and towards new, private and personal forms. The Bible was translated for the first time from Latin into the vernacular languages, allowing ordinary people to read it. Whereas before the word of God was received orally in public, it could now be studied silently and in private. People were encouraged to learn to read so that they could study the word of God for themselves.

Of course, this also meant that they could read other things, and the ready availability of lengthy works of fiction in the 18th Century meant that one really could become immersed in privately reading a book in a way that was never possible before. These new reading habits provoked a great deal of protest, because while people could now read and reflect on religious doctrine within their hearts and minds, they could also reflect on other things.

Whereas other books might be a source of edification, the novel has always been inherently enjoyable. We get lost in a novel, and forget where we are. Dr Johnson remarked in the early 18th Century: “Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim’s Progress”.

One of the most controversial books ever published came out in 1740. It was written by a printer, Samuel Richardson, and it was called Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. It was one of the first novels to feature a female central character and it dealt with questions of love. Pamela is a young serving-girl whose wealthy employer takes a shine to her. His attempts to seduce or rape Pamela fail, and in the end he is converted by her unassailable virtue to the path of righteousness, and marries her. This new kind of novel proved irresistible to readers, especially women. Serving-girls and others who longed to climb the social ladder saw in Pamela not only a paragon of virtue, but a dream of advancement.

Interestingly, the explosion in romantic novels in the 18th Century coincided with the arrival of a new piece of furniture in fashionable drawing rooms: the sofa. Ever since, the novel and the sofa have been inseparable.

Writing in Isolation

But if reading a novel is a delicious isolation, how much more isolated is the author while engaged in the long labour of writing? When I was studying English at university I was struck by a curious fact about the early novels. So far as I am aware, no-one else has noticed this.
All of the early writers of the novels and the proto-novels – Malory, Cervantes, Bunyan, Defoe – had spent time in prison. Malory and Bunyan actually wrote their books in prison. Defoe had been in prison for debt. Cervantes, like a real-life Robinson Crusoe, was sold into slavery in North Africa for five years, and much of this time he spent in jail.

These were men of action – an adventurer, a soldier, a rogue preacher and an entrepreneur – who suddenly found themselves unable to do anything. There is no such connection between later novelists and prison, suggesting that the early period of the novel required a kind of crucible of intense isolation, in which the energies turn inwards and create a new world of the mind.

Cervantes seems to have had reservations about the validity of this: as he remarked in the preface to Don Quixote, his book was “the story of a dry, shrivelled, whimsical offspring, full of thoughts of all sorts and such as never came into any other imagination – just what might be begotten in a prison”.

The novel is a work produced in isolation, and consumed in isolation.

Novels and the Written Word

The other major literary forms, drama and poetry are essentially oral, public, shared experiences. People do read poetry by themselves, but this is a recent innovation. The expectation has always been that poetry was a performance. That’s why poems have metre and rhythm and rhyme: firstly because it makes them easier to remember, and secondly because it makes them more enjoyable to listen to.

Even novels were until the 19th Century often enjoyed in this kind of situation. There’s a story of how the people of Slough listened to Pamela being read publicly in the 1740s, and when the book concluded with her marriage, they rushed with joy to the church and rang the bells to celebrate. Dickens’ novels were similarly shared by large groups of people, and he used to travel the world giving public readings, which were apparently as much theatre as literature. Book-readings do still go on, of course, but perhaps the most hopeful development in recent years has been the rise of the book-group. Most book groups concentrate on novels, but by making the novel the excuse for a social gathering, I think the book group breaks through the isolation and individualism of novel-reading and gets the reader off the sofa.

I don’t have any evidence to support this, but I’d like to end by stating my belief that the shared experience of words is inherently more healthy and positive than the private one. That’s why it’s so good for me to be able to speak to you in this way. The Catalyst Club is a place where people can speak to each other meaningfully, enjoyably and seriously.