Theory of the Novel: A Continuation from 9/28/11

One morning, as I was sitting at my dining room table and the children were otherwise engaged, I started making notes about the paper I would write, this paper concerning the theory of the novel. I was thinking about the paper in two respects, working out some method that would allow me to get the job done, and working out some ideas about the novel genre, ideas that had already begun to dominate my thinking on the subject.

Having read McKeon's general introduction to Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach and introductory notes to the first section, I take you back in time to the hand-written notes I made that morning. Note: I'm giving you access to my mind as I set about the beginnings of the project.

I don't know whether hand-writing my notes here in my notebook will serve me better, or typing away into my computer. I expect it will be a combination of the two. Right now Parker has co-opted my computer access, so pen and paper are all I've got (and Susan Bell's The Artful Edit indicates, this may be a good thing). I wonder if I will be able to work outside to some extent and how I need to plan my schedule. If I'm going to write a seminar paper for Fred, I'm going to have to dedicate a reasonable amount of time to it, balancing the work with my other obligations. What is a seminar paper, anyway?

• What is a seminar paper? And how do I, as serious as I am, avoid “monumentalizing” it?

I looked up “What is a seminar paper” on google, and this guy's webpage seemed to give the most useful response. I don't expect to have to use the little trick he recommends near the end.

What do I know, or believe, about the novel here and now, today, without re-reading a bunch of theory about it? This is something Fred tried to do with us in class the very first day, but I didn't feel that I knew any more at the end than I did at the beginning. McKeon does something similar at the beginning of his anthology.

• What are my premises or claims?

• Novels are usually, maybe not always(?), narrative, which means they have a plot, even if only a very basic or concealed one, they are told, and they are told from a particular point-of-view.
  
• Usually they are fictional which means they are imaginative, but imaginative in what way? Because even non-fiction can engage the author's and the reader's imagination.
  
• It is a more intimate form than those that preceded it in that it deals with the doings of individuals, and invades, in a sense, their private lives, often even their private thoughts. The novel form, then, probably originates in modernism when the importance of the individual first (first?) came to prominance. How and why was the pre-modern world different, and how and why did this change? Something to do with the enlightenment? Need to think a bit about the time-line. It all comes down to philosophy, doesn't it? What is philosophy? It is anthropology which is the study of man, right? Philosophy has to do with common experience per Adler, my absent reading-tutor. What do first order questions and second order questions have to do, if anything, with the emergence of the novel? But I am getting off track. Or am I?
  
• The novel privileges the author's voice, doesn't it? Privileges individual modes of expression? Or is this contested ground? Maybe it privileges narrative voice more than the author's. These don't have to be the same thing. And it may be that the privileging of the voice is a relatively late development. Certainly the novel does not privilege narrative voice as much as does certain forms of modernist and contemporary poetry.
  
• Postmodernism, which James J.A. Smith claims is actually pre-modern, is, or can be, extremely narrative in that it recognizes the narrative nature of perception. Does this have any bearing on, or reveal anything about, the emergence of the novel in the modern era? How has postmodern philosophy changed the novel from its origins?
  
• The novel is a modernist phenomena.
  
• The novel is more likely to be a popular narrative form. (More likely than what?) It is generally accessible to the masses, and does not necessarily imply an author's mastery of narrative technique.
  
• Are there any non-narrative novels? Can there be a novel without a plot? I think of Orson Scott Card's M.I.C.E. Quotient. The melieu story, the idea story, the character story, and the event story. Would these categories be applicable to novels as well? This gets into a question of ways in which the novel may be categorized. I was just reading an excerpt from Marthe Robert that touches on categorization, and the limitations of trying to categorize a novel based on plot elements.

There's got to be more, but those are my initial thoughts. I notice I have asked a lot of questions, and the reality is most of my premises are actually questions. As I was writing, a few notes from my reading of the McKeon introduction popped into my mind. And as I typed the same notes later the same thing happened with items from The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, edited by Joseph Childers and Gary Hentzi. They're gone now. I hope that I can reclaim them later, maybe after my shower if the children don't need me too badly.

And of course on this day in October I look back on it and know that the children indeed needed me too badly to get back to those notes. I was pleased that day, in fact, with how much I was able to get down in such a small amount of time. It felt like a good beginning. Pathways of thought were already opening up. Where will those pathways lead?