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Whatever Happened to the Novel of Ideas?
9-12 minutes

Bookends

By Pankaj Mishra and Benjamin Moser

Sept. 15, 2015

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This
week, Pankaj Mishra and Benjamin Moser discuss whether philosophical novels have
gone the way of the dodo bird.

By Pankaj Mishra

Compared with the Russians, “the novelists of our own place and time look so
thematically shallow.”
Image
Pankaj MishraCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

“Everything is contained in the American novel except ideas,” Philip Rahv wrote
exasperatedly in 1940, just as the European novel achieved, in the hands of Musil
and Mann, its intellectual apotheosis. Obsessed with private experience, American
writers, Rahv charged, were uniquely indifferent “to ideas generally, to theories
of value, to the wit of the speculative and problematical.”

Rahv blamed the “peculiar shallowness of a good deal of American literary

expression” on the peculiar success of American society. The United States had
escaped the disasters and tragedies that traumatized Europe; its “sheltered and
pampered” writers had been largely exempted from examining the pressures of history
and politics on private experience.

In 1952, as an extraordinarily powerful and wealthy United States loomed over war-
ravaged Europe and Asia, Rahv worried about the onset of a deeper “complacence and
spiritual torpor” at home. Half a century later, David Foster Wallace seemed to
echo Rahv when he described Mailer, Updike and Roth as “the Great Male
Narcissists,” members of “probably the single most self-absorbed generation since
Louis XIV.”

Why was it, he wondered, that Dostoyevsky “appears to possess degrees of passion,
conviction and engagement with deep moral issues that we — here, today — cannot or
do not permit ourselves”? Compared with the Russians, Wallace lamented, “the
novelists of our own place and time look so thematically shallow and lightweight,
so morally impoverished.”

We must grant Wallace at least part of his complaint. America’s postwar creative-
writing industry hindered literature from its customary reckoning with the acute
problems of the modern epoch. It boosted instead a cult of private experience and
what Nietzsche identified as the style of “literary decadence,” in which “the word
becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and
obscures the meaning of the page, and the page comes to life at the expense of the
whole.”

It can’t be denied that the Great Male Narcissists produced some remarkable
fictions. The list of American novelists who expressed the wit of the speculative
and the problematical is long, ranging from Walker Percy to Marilynne Robinson (and
the list of American poets is even longer). Neither Flannery O’Connor nor James
Baldwin — to take two very different writers — can be accused of thematic
shallowness or moral poverty.

But it is also true that even Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” the most bracing American
novel of ideas, seems narrowly focused on private experience when compared with
“The Magic Mountain.” Unlike Rahv, Wallace didn’t probe the atypical sociology of
American society: the absence, for instance, of a truly socialist politics in its
mainstream, or the decline of (and even contempt for) religious feeling among a
predominantly secular and liberal intelligentsia.

In the postwar period, serious intellectual life retreated from the public sphere
to the university. The “campus novel” came to represent the “novel of ideas.” And
writers and intellectuals embraced by a prosperous society became more vulnerable
to the assumption identified by Rahv: that American society “is in its very nature
immune to tragic social conflicts and collisions.”

That fragile illusion of security and stability within a universal mayhem was
shattered on 9/11. “Our world, parts of our world,” Don DeLillo warned soon
afterward, “have crumbled into theirs,” condemning us to live “in a place of danger
and rage.” More shocks since — failed wars, economic crises and racial iniquities —
have further undermined old myths and pieties. Deprived of these ideological
defenses, many more Americans will be exposed early to “tragic social conflicts and
collisions,” an acute awareness of which gave much modern literature its
intellectual depth and intensity. The novel of ideas may finally achieve its
American apotheosis in America’s new age of disillusionment.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of several books, including “The Romantics: A Novel,”
which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and “From
the Ruins of Empire,” a finalist for the Orwell and Lionel Gelber Prizes in 2013.
He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and contributes essays on
politics and literature to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The
Guardian of London and The London Review of Books.

◆ ◆ ◆

By Benjamin Moser

A novel with ideas is one thing: Any novel has plenty. A novel of ideas is
something else.
Image
Benjamin MoserCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

The novel of ideas is not a naturally occurring species. It flourishes under

tyrannical regimes. In conditions of censorship, ideas must be transvested if they
are to be expressed at all: Camus’s “The Stranger” and Sartre’s “Roads to Freedom,”
for example, were both produced under the Nazi occupation of France, and stood in a
long tradition of resorting to allegory to express truths that could be stated only
ironically or obliquely.

Philosophers who cannot speak directly were forced to resort to fiction. Voltaire
masqueraded as a Babylonian noblewoman; Montesquieu placed insubordinate thoughts
in the letters of two Persian travelers; Madame de Graffigny described the
situation of Frenchwomen in the words of a shanghaied Inca princess. All published
anonymously, and usually abroad.

That is why the philosophical novel is a Continental European — and a Latin

American — genre. It never much prospered in English: not because other countries
were more sophisticated, but because they were, often, less free. When political
conditions changed, philosophical novels died a quick and generally unlamented
death. Unlamented, because most were flops — both as novels and as philosophy.

A novel with ideas is one thing: Any good novel, and indeed any bad novel, has
plenty. A novel of ideas is something else. Ideas, after all, so easily slide into
ideology. The characters in philosophical novels notoriously tend to become
caricatures of authorial positions, less people than spokespeople. And their
authors, from the genre’s beginnings, numbered far more Ayn Rands than
Dostoyevskys.

But the main problem with the genre is that it is not a genre. It is two — poetry
and philosophy — and to conflate them is to violate a law stated by Aristotle.
Since real life is often “unbelievable,” historical writing can tell fantastic
stories. But poetry — of which fiction is a subset — must never venture too far
into the exotic. It must remain plausible, precisely because the reader knows it
has been invented.

In a novel, implausibility is fatal. And fakeness almost always ensues when

situations and characters are extracted from ideas. When ideas emerge organically
from situations and characters, the opposite effect is produced. Philosophy,
however, must not seem real. It must actually be real, advancing its arguments, as
in a geometric proof, through a succession of facts.

When writers can write freely, they naturally respect these distinctions.
Philosophy and fiction usually wed only when some outside pressure forces them into
a shotgun marriage. And like a couple staying together for the sake of the
children, they separate, with relief, as soon as they get the opportunity.

In 1670, Pierre-Daniel Huet, in one of the first histories of the novel, wrote that
what made a novel different from other genres was its theme: “Novels . . . have
love as their principal subject; they deal only incidentally with politics and
war.” Three and a half centuries on, Huet’s observation mostly holds. Despite their
dazzling variety, most novels are still about relationships between people: about
love.

This is true even of novels that seem to be “about” politics and war. “War and
Peace” may take place during the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, but that is no more
than a historical setting; at this distance nobody particularly cares about the
Battle of Borodino. We care about the book because we care about Pierre and
Natasha.

It is odd that books about love are often assumed to be “light.” Anyone who has
ever fallen in love at the wrong time or with the wrong person — or at the right
time and with the right person — knows how disruptive, how illogical love is. And
it is this incomprehensible part of our lives that novels, from their beginnings,
have helped us to understand. Exact definitions elude us. But love, whatever it may
be, is not an idea.

Benjamin Moser is the author of “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector,”
a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the general editor of
the new translations of Clarice Lispector at New Directions. A former New Books
columnist at Harper’s Magazine, he is currently writing the authorized biography of
Susan Sontag. He lives in the Netherlands.

A version of this article appears in print on

Sept. 20, 2015

, on Page

31
of the Sunday Book Review

with the headline:

Whatever Happened to the Novel of Ideas?

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