Should Have Been a Novel

On bad guesses

There’s an old saying where I come from, meaning I made it up and I haven’t been saying it that long: should have been a novel. Often I feel this way about essays, particularly those essays (we all know the type) that gain purchase in the internet’s terminal avalanche and circulate online due to a half-cocked thesis about how, I don’t know, we should be getting into more car accidents or something. This is the type of essay with a thesis that, by virtue of its outrageousness, fires the imagination even if there’s something nihilistically dopey or non-serious about it. (Didn’t someone recently promote a revival of smoking?) Regarding that type of essay, I always think that it should have been a novel. Which is to say, appear in a novel. Don’t consciously aim, above all other things, to write “nonfiction,” which is so nonsensical a category, like “non-green,” and suggests an impossible accuracy and facticity. There is no nonfiction. There is only what is included in what you write and what is not. Write what can’t be known.

Dostoevsky knew by instinct to weave his novels out of rants and visions. Even the far more clear and controlled Count Tolstoy understood that we his readers would recall forever the passage in War and Peace in which Natasha observes the stars on an evening’s sleigh ride and speculates that if we are hereafter going to live forever, we already do. Not a rant, but the kind of quiet outpouring we should always trust fictional people with. As Woolf said, characters properly conceived ought to be capable of any feeling and any thought.

A novel is essays in drag; visions in drag. You can’t take away the novel part, meaning the characters, the drama, the desire, but for a novel to attain its vision, it ought to contain or constitute not only the routines and protocols of literary form, however vivid and well drawn they may be. It must possess or rather be possessed by some stolen bit of soul, like Promethean fire (the flame was knowledge, after all): passages of poetry, argument, rant, homily, inflamed passion, endless questions, the beautiful feelings, the ugly feelings, the follies. Nietzsche said, “Clever people are not credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!” But not even Nietzsche can improve on one of his spiritual masters, Emerson, who remarked on visions and essays/assays:

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

He adds that “the experience of each new age requires a new confession.” Each age sweats out or lives out its age-making dreams. It’s those dreams that constitute each imagined thing. (Everything is an imagined thing.) And these meter-making arguments are shown to best effect, that is, most visionary effect, not naked and bare in the sterile chamber of an op-ed-style “essay” but where they belong, in a novel that is in ironic love with the plurality of the world, its capacity to contain multitudes.

The novel stops somewhere waiting for you. Missing it one place, search another.

We should, I think, swap out Emerson’s “poem” and set in its place that work of narrative art, the novel, that puts in play the souls of its characters and its world. The condition is general, not generic, as when Emerson rouses us by saying, “We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about.” So carry away! The carrying away is the thing. We’re children of the fire and made of flame. Make it carry, though, make it move. Do the police in different voices. Novels carry the fire, essays put the fire down. (By all means write the essays; they carry the fire, too. So, I contradict myself.)

Not content with getting in the wrong end of the oeuvre with one of the era’s defining auto-fictionauts, I did it again and read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Autumn, which is the first in his autobiographical quartet of books of short essays, addressed to his unborn daughter. What was good in it was good, no denying, but somehow it had a tedious hesitation; I liked the essays that told a story but told it slant, like the “Adders” on the lasting bafflement over the killing of a snake. D.H. Lawrence knew too much about the seductive, petty, and shameful act of killing or attempting to kill snakes.

As a wunderkammer, Knausgaard’s book impressed me, perhaps even delighted me, though it made me itchy, too. While I read I kept thinking it should have been a novel. Of course, I think it is a novel, for what are the six volumes of My Struggle if not Knausgaardian observances and portraits and essays set in dramatic motion. (This clear-eyed Max Norman essay on Knausgaard’s oeuvre calls the season quartet “Nicorette for Knausgaard addicts.” I’m no addict, though.)

So: essays. We all write them. We’re soothing something when we do. What else can we do? Be as fire, carry and be carried about.