Interesting post by El on the distinction between “quiet” and “noisy” novels. I made a rather glib comment that I didn’t really like either kind of novel and wished there was a third choice, to which El replied “Well, what would you like to read?”. WHY, WHAT A GOOD QUESTION! Actually this is something I’ve been thinking about a bit, since I obviously have very strong preferences in the realm of literary aesthetics but I really don’t have the first idea how to describe them. I guess that’s what comes of a decade in an insitution where the question of aesthetic judgement is considered permanently off the table. For good reasons, mind you! But still. So rather than try to reply in El’s comments box, let me start thinking things through here as a way of putting my toe back into the blogging water (aren’t you glad I wasn’t blogging during the turkey slapping incident? I know I am).
First of all, my objections to “quiet” and “noisy”. El definies “quiet” as “a beautifully written, often short-ish narrative in which not much happens”–in other words, the kind of thing that tends to spring to mind when you think of “literary fiction” or “Booker Prize winner” (forgetting for the moment that badly written, long novels where a lot of things happen have been known to win the Booker Prize). The talismanic figure in literary history for this kind of writing would be–correct me if I’m wrong–Virginia Woolf. The problem I have with “quiet” fiction (and I’m going to name names: The English Patient, everything written by Elizabeth Jolley and Anita Brookner, and I’m afraid I can’t think of any more examples because I just don’t read much of this kind of thing) isn’t that it’s bad as such, it’s just the lack of a certain kind of, I don’t know…violence (not necessarily physical)? Life and death conflict (ditto)? A reason for turning the page other than the chance to admire yet another exquisitely apt metaphor or beautifully turned phrase? Some fleeting sense that something important has changed when you finish the bloody thing (and I don’t mean the protaganist having some kind of ironic half-arsed epiphany on the last page about the evanescence of beauty or whatever)?
As for “noisy” novels (ie big, sprawling, character and plot driven epics a la Rushdie, Zadie Smith and–surely a key figure in the genealogy of this kind of writing that El doesn’t mention–Tom Wolfe), well, I really just hate all those novels filled with bloody “characters”. Actually I think it’s the loveable quaint eccentric characters I object to in noisy novels rather then the plot-driven-ness. So many of them just read like bad Dickens pastiche, and no-one does bad Dickens pastiche as well as Dickens, so I’ll just stick to him, thanks all the same. (Dickens is one of my favourite authors but he’s been such a dreadful influence on fiction that sometimes I wish he’d never been born.)
So then what do I want? Well, it seems like I want novels that can make me believe there’s a reason to read them. Really, the novel is a pretty marginal art form nowadays; it’s much easier to read nothing at all, or to stick to the nineteenth century when the novel was really kicking along (if George Eliot was alive today she’d be on YouTube etc etc). And it seems like I’m saying that these “reasons” involve some kind of conflict, just not necessarily event-driven conflict (although event-driven is fine sometimes too). So it could be a conflict between incompatible but equally tenable philosophical positions; between my expectations of what a novel should be like and the author’s refusal to pander to them; between a young person’s ambition and the disillusionment of growing up; between a character’s actions and his or her estimation of them; or just between the world and every attempt to systematise it. Most importantly, these conflicts can’t be staged in a one-sided way; the novel shouldn’t be making my mind up for me in advance.
That all sounds a bit grand and (from the little I know of Bakhtin) Bakhtinian, but it will do for starters.
Oh, and clearly a lot of what might appear at first glance to be straightforwardly “quiet” or “noisy” novels might turn out on closer inspection to IN ACTUAL FACT satisfy my demanding criteria in an impeccable manner, so as part of my effort to systematise my literary aesthetics, I hereby pledge never again to write off a novel just because it has a still life of a bowl of fruit on the cover, or just because there’s a quote from Zadie Smith on the blurb. I’ll give it at least until the end of page one before I throw it away in disgust.
