Pushing the novel

In A Gathering of Old Men (a good book with a subtle narrative drive and symbolism), Ernest Gaines uses the narrative form of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: he uses a series of first person narrators, with different characters telling the story in different chapters.

The form doesn't add a lot to the theme or the story, but it works.

Every time I read a jumping first person narration, I'll think of Faulker, who I believe invented it. But 200 years from now will readers think of that, or will it just be another literary form? When I read a novel written in an epistolary form, I don't necessarily think "Oh, this is taken from Richardson." And there are all sorts of other narrative techniques for fiction that can be traced back to a particular innovator somewhere (Cervantes and Flaubert come to mind as so influential on all novels that it's difficult to even consider the influence).

I look at it this way: the jumping first-person narration is Faulkner's contribution to expanding the novel form in all its potential. He invented that particular narrative form, and now it's there to be used. Gaines isn't the first writer to make use of this, and he won't be the last. Faulkner broke it open: first-person narration doesn't have to be limited, it can jump from character to character allowing different perspectives and ideas, and now that's just one more choice a writer can make when creating a novel.

I believe T.S. Eliot has written on the subject of poetic influence (and there's Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence). A lot of work has been done on examining how poets write with and against innovative poets of the past. A lot of work has been done on fiction, too, but less attention is given to form in fiction than in poetry. Novelists contribute concepts, and future novelists use them for their own purposes. John Fowles has his author show up as a character in a book. So does Stephen King (and King has read Fowles). Fowles got some of his metafiction ideas, as I understand, from Beckett. Beckett's relationship to theater makes for a good gateway of metafiction: all theater is metafiction, and modern theater makes that explicit. So once an innovative, creative novelist pushes the limits of form for the novel, two things happen. One, other innovative, creative novelists push those limits and try go further and further. Two, that form is now available for any writer's use. In A Gathering of Old Men, Gaines didn't do anything to push the form further; he just uses one of the available forms of narration that, I would guess, he thought would work best for the story he wanted to tell.

A few other book comments.
Luther Man Between God and the Devil: the most sickening part of Luther the man is his attitude toward the Jews. Oberman does a good job of examining Luther's attitude toward jews with an attempt to understand it while not simply explaining it way: he doesn't shy away from the subject, and remains justly harsh (calling one of Luther's tracts a call for a pogram). Luther is no saint: this aspect of his personality must be confronted, examined, and repeated.

Elliot Kalb's Who's Better, Who's Best in Basketball?: While doing a little research for an entry on my sports blog on Wilt Chamberlain (and since I forgot my notes on the subject at home, I'll probably wait to write that entry rather than use my 60 minutes here re-researching), I looked at Kalb's chapter arguing that Shaq is the greatest basketball player ever. He uses three very shoddy arguments, in my opinion. One, he argues that Shaq was clos to winning more scoring titles than he did. To that I say, so what. Two, he compares playoff series won by Shaq's teams and Russell's teams. To that, I say, "OK, so Russell missed out on a lot of easy first round victories). And finally, he talks of Shaq's "rebounding prowess," then showing his season rankings without comment. What is evident is that Shaq never led the league in rebounding--not once. In fact, you can make an argument that of the greatest centers ever, Shaq is the worst rebounder of the group. It's a chapter with poor logic and unconvincing arguments. Anyway, I guess this should be on the sports blog, shouldn't it?

Innovation and Appreciation

After hearing so much about Flaubert, I admit to being unimpressed with Madame Bovary. I just didn't see what was supposed to be special about it. As I learned, however, and as James Wood says, Flaubert can seem so typical because he essentially invented the modern narrative form:

He is the originator of the modern novel; indeed, you could say that he is the originator of modern narrative — that the war reporter and the thriller writer owe as much to him as the avant-garde fictionist. The great bear of Croisset, the monkish aesthete who spent much of his life in one house, and a great deal of that time in one room, has sired thousands of successors.

Much of the time Flaubert's influence is too familiar to be visible. We so expect it that we hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling and brilliant detail; that it privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are, paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert. And after Flaubert, it sometimes seems, this is all you can find.

I was unimpressed with Flaubert because the subject matter didn't do much for me, and the style didn't seem special. But it is clear that the reason the style didn't seem special is because Flaubert influenced all future writers of prose. It's not that he's not special--it's that he was the first to write like this, the first to be special, and was so influential that his style is now difficult to distinguish from the style of many novels written since Bovary.

We don't always appreciate the real innovations, because if they are innovations with impact, they begin to seem a lot like everything else. But we need to know enough literary history to recognize who was the first.

I feel the same way about the multiple endings of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman. Today the endings can seem gimmicky. Belonging to a generation in which everyone has seen Wayne's World, the idea of giving multiple endings to a narrative might not seem that special. But I cannot think of anybody who had done this before Fowles (if you can thing of somebody, let me know). Fowles seems to have created something entirely new with this concept.

When evaluating and interpreting a work of literature, the bulk of your interpretation should come strictly from the text. But historical context is worth something. It is only with some knowledge of historical context that we can begin to appreciate the innovators of art.