Remarkable wisdom from Jane Smiley in her new book "13 Ways of Looking at the Novel." So many fascinating things to say about the novel, its history and structure, and the writing life as well. She suggests that it's not necessary to read the book cover to cover but I plowed through it with delight. Because this list of quotes is so enormous, I think I might post single quotes on Facebook, one at a time, and yet enable the really hungry go-getters to read them all...
Two little asides, remarking on modern culture: when you read on a tablet with Kindle you don't get page numbers, you get "locations" which seems odd but hey. (If anyone knows how to display actual page numbers, I'd love to hear it.) Secondly, to protect my wrists from further repetitive motion injuries, I'm using dictation software now, which means two things: 1) I was able to dictate these quotes with far far less effort than if I had typed them and 2) there are sometimes odd grammatical errors of the very simplest kind (there vs their) in the copy now so please forgive me and blame it on the "Dragon" (of Dragon Naturally Speaking, the product.) Here's the wisdom of Jane:
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“The novel integrates several forms of human intelligence – verbal intelligence (for the style), psychological intelligence (for the characters), logical intelligence (for the plot), spatial intelligence (for the symbolic and metaphorical content as well is the setting), and even musical intelligence (for pacing and rhythm.)” Location 851
“If we look at our roster of novelists, we have to be struck by two facts: one is that most of them started out as nobodies, and the other is that many of them have come to be regarded as profits and sages. Their job is to develop a theory of how it feels to be alive. He depicts as much as he can of what is around him if he were more of a specialist, he wouldn’t be a novelist, he would have a field of study (if he were more a specialist of words, he would be a poet). If you were more of a generalist, he wouldn’t be a novelist, he would be a roving bore, spouting theories to anyone who couldn’t get away fast enough. A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.” Location 989
“In general, the broader a novelist’s interests and sympathies, the longer he can pursue his vocation.” Location 1066
“The novel was invented several times – most notably in 1004 by Murasaki Shikibu in what later became Kyoto, Japan, and once again in the 13th century in Iceland, in the form of the Icelandic saga – the modern novel is usually considered to have originated with Don Quixote.” Location 1177
“The Panchatantra, written in India in the Sanskrit four A.D. 500, was probably familiar to Boccaccio through a Latin translation of about 1270.” Location 1201
“Realism and psychology: two essential characteristics of the novel.” Location 1358
“The rise of the novel...organizes itself around individuals and pays attention to the inner life and its relationship to the outer life. And the novel requires conflict, especially inner conflict.” Location 1387
“Don Quixote is the first modern novel because the reader’s experience of Cervantes’s mind working over this relationship is the first modern example of undiluted authorial consciousness as it unfolds page by page.” Location 1415
“The wars, controversies, and religious movements of the 16th century required people to look within – life, death, and eternal salvation were at stake. The result was the characteristic rhythm of the realistic novel – action, reflection, action, reflection, action, reflection, for hundreds of pages. It is a hypnotic rhythm.” Location 1430
“Novels have protagonists; protagonists, like narrators, have points of view. Point of view is like perspective in a realistic painting – it changes the size and shape, the nature and identity, of characters, objects, and events in accordance with their proximity to the viewer.” Location 1824
“The novel is the only imaginative form that must have both action and point of view, suspense and reflection. In this it seems to mimic the way life feels.” Location 1834
“In every other category – government, religion, survival, and reproduction – freedom may or may not be present. History is full of conformity and enslavement in the name of politics, faith, production of food and shelter, and child-rearing. All of these institutions can exist without freedom, but art cannot.” Location 3047
“Readers of novels have an instinctive understanding of whether the novelist is exercising his freedom or whether he isn’t – that is, whether he means what he is saying or whether he doesn’t – because the novel is based in the most primal human materials, emotion and language.” Location 3057 “Ours is the only social system that always carries this freedom, so it is of a value that cannot be overestimated, as it coexists with and counteracts all of the other systems that promote conformity.” Location 3089
“When kings and queens appear in our list of novels (which they rarely do) they are demoted to minor figures with few lines, or they appear in their private capacity. Kings don’t fit because the novel is about how persons relate laterally to one another.” Location 3131
“In 1604, Cervantes came to writing a Don Quixote, the first real novel, from an eventful career as a soldier in the Mediterranean wars, a bureaucrat, and, for five years, a slave to the Viceroy of Algiers.” Location 3168
“The novel has changed the nature of human consciousness in two ways – it has made readers and audiences more receptive to the ups and downs of everyday concerns, and it has given everyday concerns more ups and downs.” Location 3295
“Identity is point of view and language functioning together, simultaneously.” Location 3313
“A tale is something that tellers and listeners agree, for the sake of entertainment, might have happened, but it always contains the possibility of impossibility – this is the charming hook…” Location 3667
“Successful observation requires detachment, and the reward of successful observation is new knowledge.” Location 3834
“Writing is writing, not planning. The sooner you put words on paper, the happier you will be.” Location 4032
“To pursue truth and interest is much more productive than to pursue originality, which will happen in any case.” Location 4076
“From the standpoint of enlarging your diction, do not be afraid of any sort of contamination of your linguistic purity by the research you pursue.” Location 4082
“Fiction is not so much about what happens as about how it happens: how it happens is intimately bound up with who does it.” Location 4093
“More complexity is more fun as well as more true.” Location 4175
“Emotional complexity is the sin qua non of the serious literary novel.” Location 4202
“Writing a novel is easy because there is nothing simpler than adding word to word, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and then going back and reading and writing it over again. To do it, the author simply has to remember that it can’t be done, that the ideal edifice that exists in his mind may not be, cannot be, and will never be communicated, but something will.” Location 4224
“Avid readers who become novelists are always a little ahead of themselves in terms of taste, but only a little ahead. Admiration for the work of other novelists should remind you of the goal, but not make the goal seem unattainable, should open up your desire to write, not shut it down. Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity. Professional readers and literary types have to be able to dispense with their professional side in order to engage in the amateurism required in the rough draft of the first novel.” Location 4381
“Sometimes vital physical labor promotes inspiration, as when Arthur Miller was building his work cabin in your left as you get both of the pit of the and she you think you get both the button and suddenly felt Death of a Salesman enter his head as a whole concept.” Location 4413
“The ultimate fact about novel writing is that you can never control whether your writing efforts will be successful, but you can control whether they will be enjoyable or satisfying.” Location 4442
“The great thing, as Henry James would say, is to do that rough draft, recognizing it as your first experience of ‘the incomparable luxury of the artist’.” Location 4458
“A plot has four simple parts: exposition, rising action, climax, and dénouement. Each of these parts has a job with regard to the action, the characters, and the themes, but its overall purpose is to organize the material to carry the reader along with at least a certain amount of suspense, giving her the feeling that her familiarity with and knowledge of the material is growing as she reads. The suspense can come in any form.” Location 4523
“The climax works not to lift the reader to the highest pitch of excitement but to lift her to the highest pitch of understanding.” Location 4538
“But you have to provide something that looks like a climax, and you have to get it going about 85 to 90% of the way into your novel.” Location 4541
“If you were asked to tell everything you learn about your novel from that one page of the climax, what with those things be?” Location 4551
“’ How’ is for the rising action.” Location 4583 The rising action is the meat of the novel.” Location 4599 “what is really going on in the rising action is that something that seems implausible at the time of the exposition – the climax – is being prepared for. It is in the rising action that the novel becomes more and more different from life.” Location 4605
“As you aim for perfection, don’t forget that there is no perfect novel, then because every novel is built out of specifics, every novel offers some pleasures but does not offer some others, and while you can try to achieve as many pleasures as possible, some cancel out others.” Location 4667
“James takes very seriously the idea that the unexamined life is not worth living. I may feel strongly that the un-lived life is not worth examining.” Location 4679
“A real climax has to seem to solve the problem the exposition poses.” Location 4789
“Almost every novel gathers itself at the 62% mark, changes strategy, and freshens.” Location 4902
“A book about a scam and a betrayal has two climaxes – the climax of the action, when big things are happening and the narrator doesn’t know what they mean, and the climax of the interpretation, when the narrator extracts the real meaning of not only the climax but also of the whole train of events.” Location 5008
“I think it is fruitful to think of novels as passing through levels of decreasing privacy.” Location 5095
“Egilssaga is exemplary in its use of the materials and techniques that were in some sense left over from the age of the epic and that had become less grand and heroic as they entered the age of history and memory.” Location 5563
“… Some of the problems that writers of other sagas run into, in particular the sense that a character’s actions are against his own interests, that plausibility is being sacrificed to plots, and that what is going on is really not understandable.” Location 5585
“Prose is for exploring what is unique about situations and characters – we might say that prose is Aristotelian. Poetry is for exploring what incidents and persons typify – it is Platonic.” Location 5677
“Lazarillo de Tormes was subversive in giving a voice to the hitherto voiceless, and demonstrates that the novel is indeed a naturally democratic form – promising not “every man a king” but rather “every man a protagonist.” Location 5710 Published in 1554, it was enormously popular. Location 5698
“Don Quixote, volume 1, is not a modern novel in the sense that it describes a distinct and significant transformation in the mental state of its hero.” Location 5788
“A novel cannot tarry too long with the meaning of events, because meaning is usually experienced as either revelation or instruction. Revelation is by nature momentary, and instruction is by nature not very entertaining. Beads of meaning, therefore, tend to be strung along a wire of actions.” Location 6042
“This religion of the middle class, the self-made protagonist, stands in strong contrast to the pattern of aristocratic literature (notably the epic) that preceded it, in which the hero is the dupe of circumstances, and his only choice is the manner in which he meets his fate.” Location 6153
“The novel is always about whether and how particular individuals fit into their social milieu.” Location 6265
“The telling sign of a great novelist of rich imaginative gifts is the ability to draw beautiful minor characters and to allow them to remain minor.” Location 6573
“Nothing is so seductive in a narrator as self-knowledge.” Location 6902
“Now we are at the heart of the dilemma of the novel. Are the stories the novel relates typical or unique? Do we expect the novel to confirm our beliefs about the world or to challenge them? Is the point of the novel the revelation of the ideal or the depiction of the real? In fact, no individual novelist can decide which side of this dilemma to adopt. Realism or idealism is native to his or her temperament and intrinsic to his or her vision of the world. But Jane Eyre reveals something about the dilemma – compelling idealistic novels, novels that grow from wishes – are beloved. Compelling realistic novels, novels that grow from astute observation of likely outcomes, are respected. A diet of too many idealistic novels comes to seem shallow. The diet of too many realistic novels comes to seem sordid.” Location 7005
“… The difference between the novel and the drama is that while the drama works by precipitating and then accelerating the action, the novel works by retarding the action.” Location 7175
“In fact, every novel requires the author to have a psychological theory – every train of logic (which in the novel is made up of actions, dialogue, and expressed thoughts) requires theory to progress from one step (one plot point) to the next. Some theories are more conventional than others, some are more profound than others, some date more quickly than others, but an author with a theory, even a theory that dates very quickly, is in general more humane and large spirited than an author with no theory or no interest in theory.) Location 7503
“The prolonged exposure to a novelist’s sensibility required by a lengthy novel is akin to a long train ride with a stranger, sometimes more demanding and uncongenial than the reader is prepared for. In that sense, every novel is, in the end, a social experience as well as an experience of solitude.” Location 7653
“No novelist can quite escape the social theories of his time, because the novel is a social investigation. So to some extent the reputation of every novelist will rise and fall according to how his social theory holds up.” Location 8360
“What is utterly original in fiction is always more private than what is original in other forms, because it is un-circumscribed by conventions (like poetry) or the presence of other people (like drama and movies).” Location 8655
“American literature has decentralized respectability. The aim is not to bring outliers into the mainstream, but to broaden the mainstream so it includes the outliers without destroying their uniqueness. It is the countervailing force against the homogenization of American life… – The part un-dissolved in the whole, representing it and reproducing it.” Location 9053
“The novel is not a good medium for portraying mass events – words and sentences are too sequential and linear to evoke the overwhelming without making it abstract by using figurative language.” Location 9147
“The underlying premise of the novel as a form is that such rationalization and reconciliation is possible, because the novel always tries to set the individual into the social context.” Location 9345
“All novels eventually become historical documents, because they either chronicle everyday life taking place all around the author as he writes, or they chronicle his ideas of what is true and important, which are always strongly determined by his circumstances.” Location 9425
#JaneSmiley, #JessWells