[No, I’m not writing about Donald Trump’s victory. I don’t agree with any of the analyses I have read and there will be time enough to consider the catastrophes that his cabinet will cause in the USA and around the world. If we survive.]
A couple of my students asked me how come I have not written any novels since I have published several books. That was about ten days ago and since then I’ve been mulling what to reply. It’s not easy.
I frequently correct in students’ essays the use of ‘book’ as an equivalent of ‘novel’ (“In her book Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen indicates that…”) because it worries me that the novel is swallowing all the other genres and writing itself. This may sound basic but we need to remember that there are many other kinds of books apart from novels. And it annoys me very much when a person says they’re a writer and it is immediately assumed that they must be a novelist, or when somebody refers to the profession or the art of writing when they actually narrow it down to writing novels. For these reasons, the first time I saw myself described as a writer, I winced, thinking that I don’t really deserve the title. But, like many of my academic peers, I am indeed a writer with more books to my name than some well-known novelists. The question for me, then, is not so much why I have not written a novel (yet) but why only novelists seem to deserve the title of ‘writer.’
Novels have existed now for centuries, whether you believe they started with Miguel de Cervantes’ El Quijote (1605) or with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740). By the time Jane Austen published her works in the 1810s novels were still a dubious enough genre, of low reputation, so that not only she and other women writers but also men like Walter Scott published theirs anonymously. In Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1847), published under the pseudonym Acton Bell (by then male authors like Charles Dickens had got rid of anonymous publication and discreet pennames), the protagonist Helen chastises her loyal maid Rachel when she relays scandalous gossip: “Have you been reading novels again, Rachel?,” Helen asks annoyed. This is Anne’s barb at those who still thought that writing and reading novels were vapid pass-times for women.
The novel became the respected genre it is today beginning in the second half the 19th century, but when Literature entered the academic space it did so through poetry. It was only in 1948, when professor F.R. Leavis published The Great Tradition, that the novel started to be taken seriously as a work of art (though the illustrious professor needed twenty-two more years to promote Dickens from entertainer to artist in Dickens: the Novelist, a volume of 1970). I might be exaggerating, but the current consensus from readers, reviewers, and academic literary critics putting the novel at the centre of reading and writing is about fifty years old, not that long ago if we look at the original date of publication of El Quijote.
An article in The Conversation claims that “The first classes in creative writing were offered at Harvard University in the 1880s and were wildly popular from the beginning with over 150 students enrolling in 1885.” The author, John Dale, notes besides that “It was sometimes thought that Creative Writing lacked a theoretical underpinning although the workshop model, developed at the University of Iowa in the 1930s, has long ago reshaped, refined and incorporated theories of narrative, literature and creativity into a unified and successful pedagogical approach.” Famously, the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing Course was founded by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson in 1970 (the year Leavis declared Dickens was, after all, a novelist!). Its MA is still today one of the most prestigious in the United Kingdom, with its alumni including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright and Trezza Azzopardi.
And here’s what I want to note first: to be a novelist you need to train in the craft. Before the introduction of creative writing courses, aspiring novelists would study the genre on their own, paying close attention to the features that constituted the novels they appreciated best. Well, most still do that. This is how the canon was formed: by writers selecting a list of other writers they highly admired. Then university teachers started borrowing that canon to form their own academic canon, so that when once George Elliot was admired by fellow authors for her writing skills (from the inside, so to speak), she is now also admired by the professional readers who teach Literature (from the outside, so to speak) and by common readers.
What students miss is that when they take a degree in English Studies they are indeed trained to become writers: they are trained in the Literature courses to become academic writers. This begins with basic text commentaries, followed later by argumentative papers and culminating in the BA dissertation. If they are interested or show promise, then students may take an MA in Literature, which includes more papers and the longer MA dissertation. For those who truly enjoy academic writing the next step is the PhD dissertation, a text between 80000 to 100000 words which is already a book. If everything goes well, the new doctor will make sure their dissertation becomes their first published book, hopefully the first in a long series. Yet, funnily, we never refer to academic training as professional training in writing, preferring to call it research. The fact is that in Literary Studies (and most disciplines) our research is communicated through writing, which presupposes a minimum talent. A researcher, of any type, who is a poor writer will simply fail to publish their research.
So, to sum up: all the specialists in Literary Studies (and other disciplines) who publish regularly are writers who have received highly specific training for long years to produce academic prose. This is a type of prose which is not necessarily attractive and which might not communicate well outside academia. And this is less frequent now, but there used to be Literary Studies specialists who cared very much for developing a style of their own that could cut across the barriers between the university and the common reader, from Raymond Williams to Terry Eagleton, passing through Elaine Showalter or Janet Todd. Today, academic prose has lost its gloss, being usually flattened down by legions of peer reviewers who want everybody to sound the same. The fact is, however, that academic prose does exist as a genre, with its own specialised writers, as much as poetry. Or the novel.
Asking me, therefore, how come I don’t write novels is like asking ballet dancers why they don’t practice breakdance. Both are disciplines in contemporary dance, but the training is very different and so are the talents. You might say that ballet is superior as an art form but this is not relevant for the point I’m making: I don’t write novels because I have never taken training in that craft. I have been trained to write academic prose.
Students may assume that since I have read hundreds of novels, if not thousands, I have certainly given myself a training in how to write novels. This is a misconception. My academic training allows me to analyse novels, so that I can explain how they have been built and what makes them appealing as creative works (or the other way round, why some are so poor). Being able to produce criticism, however, has very little to do with being able to produce a novel. When I start an article, or book, I have a thesis (a central idea) that I want to develop. My academic training has taught me how to spot features in novels (and other texts) that inspire new ideas for me to develop in my research. To write fiction you may start as well with an idea, but you need, above all, a story, which needs to be developed into a plot. As happens, I have many ideas to write literary criticism, but I don’t have stories. I lack that talent.
Have I ever tried to write a story? No. I have thought of stories to tell, but they are just a concept, and I simply don’t know how to flesh out a concept into hundreds of pages, with narration, description, dialogue and so on. Many Literature teachers are, of course, novelists, but this is because they combine in their brains two types of talent: that of the writer of academic prose and that of the novelist. If they lost their jobs as teachers, they could still write novels, for this is a skill they have learned independently from their professional training. If the talent for writing novels grew with literary research, then 100% of the best current novelists would be Literature teachers, which is far from being the case.
Why, then, are novelists, so highly valued? And why do poets, playwrights, essayists, non-fiction authors, journalists and other types of authors working in print media rank below them in public interest? I could say ‘I don’t know’ and leave it here, but we can test diverse hypothesis. One is that we like novelists because we see them as magicians conjuring complete worlds out of their imagination, quietly labouring alone in their studios. Novels offer what we most love as readers: stories and characters, for we don’t like ideas that much (you need to think to appreciate them…). Plays and non-fiction also offer stories and characters, but novels are self-enclosed as texts in ways which these other genres are not (they need actors, or they borrow a lot from reality). And the other way round: ageing readers, like myself, start losing their taste for novels (which is much stronger in youth) when they learn to appreciate works that transmit knowledge and not just narrative. When I start a new novel, the first thing I ask myself now is ‘what am I going to get out of this?’, followed by ‘will I learn something?’ I rarely ask ‘will I be entertained?’ though I drop immediately any novel with low quality writing and poor narrative skills.
Would I like to write a novel? Yes, I would, why not? Yet a sign that I will never get around to writing one is that I have no urge to try. If I truly wanted to write a novel, I would have started one by now (knowing, as I do, that it may take a few tries before one manages to write a novel and that usually the first one is terrible). I am very happy writing academic books and I have some ideas for a few more before I retire. In fact, I see myself writing academic books after I retire, but I never think of retirement as, finally, the chance to write novels. I leave that to authors with the required skills, and look forward to reading them!