Philosophy and the Novel: Six Points of Contact, Part 1

Editor’s Note: This is the first part of a two-part series. The second part can be found here.

Philosophy, Literature, Fiction, and the Novel

Ever since Plato banned the poets from his Republic, and indeed long before, the relationship between philosophy and literature has been a complicated and contested one. Recent posts to the APA Blog, including those by Sara L. Uckelman, by Nathan Eckstrand and K. K. Edin, and by Skye Cleary, have touched on some of the complications at issue. Along with these previous contributions, a preliminary caveat is needed to contextualize the remarks that follow: namely, that without comparative study of philosophico-literary traditions around the world, and not just those in the West, it will be impossible to grasp the full scope of the issues touched on here.

In this brief intervention into a longstanding and many-sided discussion, I consider a subset of the relevant issues by narrowing the focus to (western) philosophy’s relationship with the (western) novel in particular. This narrower focus has the disadvantage of bracketing off important questions: To what extent, and in what specific ways, are philosophy and the novel (and literature more generally) interinvolved in African, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other traditions, and what questions are most salient in the context of those interinvolvements? What issues do the sound properties of poetry, or literary uses of language not restricted to the novel, raise for the philosophy of language? How does the staging of philosophical dialogue in dramatic works bear on the practice of philosophy, if at all, and vice versa? How do fables and folktales depicting the lives of nonhuman animals relate to work in the domain of interspecies ethics? In constraining the scope of the discussion, however, the approach adopted here may also make the larger debate more tractable, by providing entry-points into a more extensive investigation of the matter at hand.

My overall aim in proposing this approach is threefold: first, to promote theory building in this area, i.e., to encourage readers of the blog to build on (or partially or completely replace) the foundations for studying the novel-philosophy nexus that I try to establish here; second, to encourage readers to identify other relevant examples, i.e., to advance the project of assembling a fuller corpus of novels (including those from non-Western traditions) that need to be considered in order for the first aim to be accomplished; and third, to encourage readers to undertake new novel-writing projects themselves, to create works that, by exploring the philosophy-novel nexus, will further extend the corpus of pertinent examples.     

To these ends, after outlining approaches to the study of novels, I sketch six points of contact between philosophy and the novel, providing examples in each case. Although there are, as I go on to note, some areas of overlap among them, the points of contact are offered as wayfinding devices, guideposts for explorers of the historical interactions–and conceptual affiliations–between these intertwined discourses, or modes of practice. I label the six points (1) philosophy in the novel, (2) philosophy of the novel, (3) novels illustrating or exemplifying philosophical schemes, concepts, or models, (4) novels about particular philosophers, (5) the philosophical resonance of novelistic form, and (6) polygeneric discourse in which the novelistic and the philosophical intermix. 

I should underscore here that my focus is on points of contact between philosophy and the novel specifically, rather than between philosophy and fiction as such. For one thing, philosophers such as Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Jukka Mikkonen, John Searle, and Kendall Walton, and literary analysts such as Dorrit Cohn, Gérard Genette, Käte Hamburger, and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, have already outlined strategies for investigating this second, larger area of intersection. (See also, on the philosophical side, a 2012 special issue of the Revue internationale de Philosophie [vol. 4, no. 262] devoted to “Analytic Philosophy of Fiction,” and, on the literary side, the overviews provided by David Gorman and  Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen.) What is more, considering the fiction-philosophy nexus opens the door to questions that are at once too diffuse and too fiction-centric for my purposes. The questions are too diffuse because they lead beyond the domain of literature (let alone the novel) into the much larger realm of the “what if,” or Hans Vahinger’s Als Ob; this realm encompasses the fictionalized scenarios used in thought experiments, counterfactuals, fictionalized imaginings of philosophers’ chains of reasoning, and other modalities of fiction that, although they may enter into the particular species of fiction-making corresponding to the novel, extend beyond it. At the same time, the questions raised by the what if are also too fiction-centric, because they do not engage specifically with the way novels, in contrast with children’s game play, movies, dramatic performances, or fables and short stories, create—or rather enable readers to co-create—fictional worlds of various kinds. It is telling, in this connection, that Lamarque’s Fictional Points of View has no entry in the index for “novel.”

Further Context: Approaches to the Novel

In the present post, then, my focus is on the novel viewed as one type of fictional discourse. The novelist Anthony Burgess, in his article on “Novel” published in the Encyclopedia Britannica (accessed in the Britannica Library edition from 2018), presents an admirably compact gloss of the form: “an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting.” On closer inspection, however, the novel has proven notoriously difficult to define, even ostensively—as demonstrated by a recent literary controversy in Norway. As described by Lauren Collins in her article in the October 7, 2019, issue of the New Yorker, the Norwegian writers Vigdis Hjorth and her sister, Helga Hjorth, have published bestselling texts that trade accusations about a dark family history, and that may or may not be romans à clef. Are these texts best thought of as novels that purposely blur the line between factual and fictional discourses, à la Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939)? Or are they, rather, moves in an ongoing historical (or historiographical) dispute, with Helga countering, through her own follow-up quasi-fictional creation, the unflattering portrayal of the character generally assumed to be based on Helga in Vigdis’s original quasi fiction? In any event, as these two mutually incompatible contributions to the emergent novelistic mode that Norwegians call “reality literature” (virkelighetslitteratur) suggest, you don’t always know a novel when you see one. Complications of this kind have led some commentators to give up on definitions, in the manner of Terry Eagleton:

The truth is that the novel is a genre which resists exact definition . . . The point about the novel, however, is not just that it eludes definitions but that it actively undermines them. It is less a genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together.

But working toward a rough definition of the novel is perhaps less hopeless a task than Eagleton in his more despairing moods would suggest. One route to take, in this connection, is the historical, or diachronic, route, even though, as literary scholars like Margaret Doody and Arthur Heiserman have argued, the story of the novel has been told in different ways at different times.

Doody points out that in the late Renaissance, the novel was traced back much farther in time (to Roman and Hellenistic authors and texts) and hence more capaciously defined than it was at the beginning of the 19^th century, for example. Evolving notions of the novel’s history, however, have not prevented commentators from drawing at least a dotted line between what came before the novel and what came after. Thus, Eagleton, departing from Doody’s claim that Romance and the novel constitute part of a single literary tradition, draws a sharp contrast between the pre-novelistic, more or less idealized quests of Romance and the muddlings-through of multidimensional characters that constitute the novel’s stock in trade. Thomas Pavel, in The Lives of the Novel, hews closer to Doody’s position. Extending the conclusions of Franco Moretti, he argues that the novel has emerged from, and fed back into, an age-old interplay between idealist (heroizing, celebratory) and anti-idealist (comic, deflationary) discourses and traditions. From this perspective, the history of the form involves not two radically distinct textual economies, one without and one with novels, but rather a set of longstanding narrative proclivities some of which are then accelerated or intensified as the novel form becomes increasingly important.

Georg Lukács, meanwhile, argues that the novel is the clear successor to epic, and Erich Auerbach positions it as the follow-up to myth. Other historians of the form, such as Ian Watt and Michael McKeon, have linked the emergence of the novel with the advent of Protestantism, the emergent capitalist bourgeoisie, and, interconnected with these developments, a new emphasis on individual experience. Watt’s claims have been particularly influential. Suggesting that “from the Renaissance onwards, there was a growing tendency for individual experience to replace collective tradition as the ultimate arbiter of reality,” he argues that “this transition would seem to constitute an important part of the general background of the rise of the novel . . . the plot had to be acted out by particular people in particular circumstances, rather than, as had been common in the past, by general human types against a background primarily determined by the appropriate literary convention.” The basic premise of the form, Watt writes, is that the novel should provide (or convey the sense that it is providing) “a full and authentic report of human experience,” i.e., of “the actual experiences of individuals.”

The other approach to developing a working definition of the novel is synchronic, whether through contrastive analysis, via comparisons between the novel and other textual forms, or through componential analysis, via identification of the novel’s constituent features—and their presence or absence in a given text. M. M. Bakhtin, for example, characterizes the novel in opposition to the lyric poem. He contrasts the centripetal energies of the lyric, viewed as the prime exemplar of monologic discourse, with the centrifugal energies of the novel, viewed as the genre in which the dialogic potential of language is maximized and the play of voices orchestrated by novel writers creates full-on polyphony. The componential approach is exemplified by J. Paul Hunter’s study of the 18th-century context in which the British novel emerged. For Hunter, constituent features of the novel in this tradition, and at this stage of its development, include familiarity and contemporaneity (novels focus on known worlds, close in space and time to the worlds inhabited by authors and readers); credibility and coherence (they portray believable scenarios and are marked by an overall unity, even if they contain multiple narrative strands); they reject both elevated diction and the recycled plots used by earlier writers such as Chaucer; and they are produced by their authors in a spirit of self-conscious innovation.

In her discussion of Hunter’s account in The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel, Marina MacKay notes that this list of features will be more or less salient, depending on the subtype of novel, or the epoch of novelistic production, being considered. Thus, counter-examples to Hunter’s model—texts that are identifiable as novels even though they lack one or more of the features at issue—come readily to mind. Science-fiction novels, for example, violate the conditions of contemporaneity and familiarity; novels by William Faulkner, as well as some historical novels, feature elevated language; and some avant-garde texts, such as Kathy Acker’s, turn on modes of pastiche that involve a recycling of well-worn plots. Further, experimental novels often refuse credibility and coherence, even as practitioners of genre fiction avoid or at least downplay (or mask) innovation. And so on and so forth.

Synchronic approaches to the novel, however, are not always so controvertible. It can be affirmed, for example, that the novel is a generic category that finds purchase in—and sometimes between—various semiotic media. Thus, there are graphic novels (and even novels presented in the form of flip books), novels adapted as audio books, and novels remediated in sign language as well as braille, just as there are print novelizations of movies and television shows, novels based on video games as well as tabletop role playing games, and other cross-medium novelistic creations. One finds variety, as well, in any given host medium, as is attested by the existence of novels in verse (not to mention a prose form sometimes referred to as the lyrical novel) and also novels that make use of self-imposed constraints within the medium of print, like those written by Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and others affiliated with the Oulipo group. Finally, it should be stressed that the boundaries, possibilities, and qualities of the novel have themselves figured as key novelistic topics, as my sketch of the six points of contact will confirm.

David Herman

David Herman is a freelance writer, translator, and editor. His recent publications include Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives (2018) and Narratology beyond the Human: Storyelling and Animal Life (2018), and his translation of Klaus Modick’s Moos (Moss) is forthcoming in 2020. His 2019 novel Philosopher of Stories exemplifies his interest in the relationship between novels and philosophy.