[ilds] The Novel of Ideas

[Bruce Redwine]

In the current issue of Deus Loci (NS14), we have two fine reminiscences:  Ian S. MacNiven’s “Found on the Cutting Room Floor:  Left Out of the Biography” and Peter Baldwin’s “‘Sweet Undiscovered Ends’:  A Memoir of Collecting and Publishing Lawrence Durrell.”  Both have something to say about Durrell and the “novel of ideas.”

MacNiven comments on Durrell’s fallen reputation:  “Look at Durrell’s contemporaries, look at the Nobelists writing in English during his creative span.  What about Bellow and Golding?  Gifted, yes, but about as parochial as—ingrown toenails” (5).  Baldwin mentions Durrell’s choice of Thoreau’s Walden as the one book he’d put “in his baggage.”  Walden is a book of personal reflections.  So, “despite [they’re] being generically classed as ‘fiction,’ much of [Durrell’s] philosophy as he explained to me can be found directly in the pages of his later novels, collected as The Revolt of Aphrodite and The Avignon Quintet” (21).

MacNiven and Baldwin call attention to Durrell’s deep interest in philosophy.  Although Bellow and Golding are sometimes treated as “novelists of ideas,” they are only so in a very limited sense, perhaps as “ingrown toenails.”  They don’t compare with the great Europeans, the Germans/Austrians in particular, for example:  Mann, Musil, and Broch.  These writers dealt with big topics and wrote big novels.  The latter two studied philosophy.  On 9/15/2015, Pankaj Mishra and Benjamin Moser debated the following in NYT’s Sunday Book Review:  “Whatever Happened to the Novel of Ideas?”  Mishra supports the question, Moser rejects it as uninformative.  I side with the Mishra, who repeats Philip Rahv’s argument of 1940.*  (A European by birth and inclination, Rahv was the influential editor of the Partisan Review.)  There are exceptions to Rahv’s claim, of course (Melville), but I take it as basically accurate, especially as pertains to what is taught today in American MFA programs.

I’d offer that Durrell writes “novels of ideas” in the European tradition, which is no longer in favor in the English speaking world and which is one of the reasons he’s fallen out of favor.  I hope this will change.  Perhaps today’s aspiring writers should study more history and philosophy and less what—literature?  Durrell was an autodidact in his philosophical studies.

Bruce

*Rahv in “The Cult of Experience in American Writing”:  “[Henry James] searches for the whereabouts of ‘Life’ and for the exact conditions of its enrichment.  This is what makes for a fundamental differences between the inner movement of the American and that of the European novel, the novel of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Flaubert and Proust, Joyce, Mann, Lawrence, and Kafka, whose problem is invariable posed in terms of life’s intrinsic worth and destiny.”  See Rahv’s Essays on Literature and Politics, 1932-1972, ed. A. J. Porter and A. J. Dvosin (Boston:  Houghton, 1978):  11.
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