My post today continues from the last one in the sense that I want to consider here why the novel occupies the first position in the ranks of all the literary texts. In fact, I want to consider how come we have confused narrative with literature, additionally reducing fiction only to the novel, the novella, and the short story (and forgetting that drama and poetry can also be narrative). As I maintained in my last post, narrative non-fiction cannot compete in general public esteem with the novel because of the general fixation with narrative fiction, which to me is harder and harder to explain, particularly if we take into account than often narrative fiction is based on real-life facts (as Moby-Dick is) whereas narrative non-fiction borrows plenty of narrative techniques from fiction, including the novel, the novella, and the short story.
I’ll begin with a very basic observation regarding an issue that we often take for granted. Whenever someone is described as a ‘writer’, we immediately assume that this person must be a novelist. Whenever someone claims they like reading, they usually mean that they enjoy reading novels. Yet, not all writers are novelists and not all reading consists of reading novels. When I first saw myself referred to as a ‘university lecturer and writer’, I was mystified, for I don’t call myself a writer even though at this point I have authored 8 books, apart from editing a longish list of volumes, and even doing some translation. Emily Brontë, let’s recall this, only published Wuthering Heights (1848). However, the reason why she is universally regarded as a writer and I am not (not even in my own personal regard) is that she wrote a novel (and beautiful poetry) and I write essays.
Ms. Brontë was not a professional writer, and nor am I, yet that is immaterial, for what counts towards being a ‘writer’ is not an ability to commercialize one’s writing, but following a vocation that is supposedly artistic (I appear to be a vocational writer, but not of the artistic type). Ms. Brontë did certainly produce literary art in her novel, but the vast majority of novelists active today are not at all capable of writing artistic prose, being mostly proficient in the craft of storytelling. There is nothing wrong in producing and enjoying a tale well told written in functional prose, but that kind of novel should be enjoyed and studied as narrative, not as literature. Before I get lost in my own argumentation, I must make the point that not only are authors of essays (academic or otherwise) also writers, but some of them are capable of writing literary prose of a much higher quality than most novelists. As an example, read any of Robert Macfarlane’s exquisite essays on nature, and then read any recent Booker Prize winner and tell me where the better literary prose can be found.
An even more basic point than the ones I have raised is that all writing is produced either in verse or in prose. We now identify verse with poetry, and all poetry with lyrical poetry, but in fact poetry can be used in any kind of writing. I could be writing this blog in verse rather than prose. Verse has been used in narrative, from ballads to epic poems running to many pages, and indeed in novels. Verse used to be of common usage in drama, but, if I’m not wrong, T.S. Eliot was the last major author to write plays in verse, setting them besides in contemporaneous times. We associate verse to centuries old plays, like the ones by Shakespeare and company, but tend to forget that nobody has ever spoken in verse, and that poetry (especially blank verse) was of great mnemotechnic use to actors. To sum up this point, writing in verse is far more time-consuming than writing in prose but there is actually no reason why verse should not dominate over prose. Please, note that not all verse is literary, that is to say, successful in creating an artistic impression, even though we accept that poetry (the texts purposefully created to use verse artistically) is part of literature. Not all poetry, of course, manages to be artistically pleasing, hence literary.
So, whatever is not written in verse is prose, a style of writing in which rhythm is secondary and rhyme not used (even though the blank verse mostly used in Elizabethan drama, and by Milton in Paradise Lost, has no rhyme, either). Prose can be a very blunt instrument (read any set of instructions) or a very sophisticated tool, capable of sustaining from a witty tweet to all of Wikipedia. Here is where the word ‘creative’ complicates matters. Nobody would expect a newspaper or a journal article to use prose in a creative fashion, for the main purpose of the prose in those types of texts is transmitting information and ideas. The more creative segment of prose writing is to be found in literary texts which include, let me stress this again, drama (for the stage for also for the screen) and what we stubbornly call fiction, as if fiction could not be found in narrative poetry and in plays. Once Eliot’s experiment in writing verse plays was over, I should say that any literary impulse was lost in drama. By this I mean that authors from Beckett onward saw no point in cultivating creative prose of the kind that tickles the brain with the genius in stringing words together, preferring instead to focus on the situational, whether narrative or non-narrative. Thinking of the best 20th and 21st century plays I have seen, it strikes me that I love them either for the story they tell or the experience they offer, but one would hardly quote them as examples of linguistic art as we still quote Shakespeare (both his verse and his prose).
It would be absurd for me to claim that the prose used in short stories, novellas, and novels is no longer artistic but I certainly believe that most novels are appreciated for their plot rather than for the quality of their prose. I have recently read Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog (1967), which Jane Campion adapted so amazingly well for the screen, both as screenplay writer and director. This novel has been my most pleasing experience in reading this kind of book of the whole year (so, the best novel in 20 I have read so far) and as I read it I was wondering why it worked so well. I believe it is due to a happy overlapping of total narrative control (Savage knows when to provide apparently trivial details that later are seen to be crucial) with a prose that is above the basic needs of the story. There are no poetic flights but Savage’s prose is precise and insightful in its descriptions, and in its dialogue. Does this mean that The Power of the Dog is great literature? The answer is that it is great narrative, superior to many other novels, though it does not necessarily provide a better reading experience that some great non-fiction books I have read. But is Savage’s novel literature? No, if we think that the author was not particularly interested in writing artistic prose. Yes, if we use the concept ‘literature’ as a synonym of narrative, as it is done today.
There is an intriguing possibility that literature is dead with the exception of poetry if we regard literature as the artistic use of language. Both in drama (stage and audiovisual) and in prose fiction (novel, novella, shot story) any attempts to call attention to language itself are perceived as obstacles, and regardless of the degree of fantasy in the plot all works use functional dialogue, description, and authorial comment. No narrative writer is now making an effort (or just very few) to make the most of the possibilities of language, preferring instead to put their energies on situation (characterization is dying or almost dead). Whether we go to the theatre, watch the latest Netflix series, or lie down on the sofa with a novel in our hands, we don’t want to be offered bursts of elaborated language but narrative that flows well and is cleverly built, and dialogue that is as close to possible to real life (no verse please!) even when the work in question is set on 24th century Mars.
If, as I am arguing, the novel is not really a repository of artistic prose there is, therefore, no reason to give it so much room in Literature degrees, criticism, reviewing and reading. If novelists are not more capable than, say, scientists, to write the kind of prose that makes you wonder about the artistic flexibility of language, then why are they so highly valued? If we claim to love literature and not just fiction, how come so very few people enjoy poetry and hardly nobody reads plays? In our English Literature degrees, poetry and drama occupy just a small corner, and if the presence of short fiction is more or less stable, this is because the students bingeing on TV series for hours no longer have patience for novels. Much less for other genres. The course on Victorian Literature that I teach focuses on four novels. It used to be called Genres of Victorian Literature and last for two semesters. When it was reduced to one semester, we lost the play (Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest), the poetry and the selection of passages from Victorian essays. I still give students the booklets with the poems and the essay selections but the time I need to help them read the novels has reduced the time I could use for the other genres to nothing. Here’s the joke: the true best-sellers of Victorian times were the religious books. Victorian readers love sermons, it seems.
To sum up my argumentation, I wish we could acknowledge that what we call literature is actually narrative, and that the novel is no better than narrative non-fiction in offering interesting stories told in prose of similar quality. Essays, as Robert Macfarlane shows, can be of higher literary quality than novels if we look at the beauty of his prose, whereas the increasing pull of realism is making it harder and harder for all kinds of fiction to use literary language. I am not engaging here in the old debate of whether popular and so-called literary creative novelists are all part of the canon and so on. I am calling attention to the extraordinary amount of commitment that novels receive even in Literature degrees in comparison to other genres which do care for literary artistry (such as poetry) and other genres written in prose of similar quality and by authors as competent as novelists or even more.
If you disagree with me, please send me examples of beautifully crafted prose in recent fiction and we’ll continue the conversation. Thanks.
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