Philosophy and the Novel: 6 Points of Contact, Part 2

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

Six Points of Contact

With these stipulations in place, and drawing on the context afforded by the previous outline of diachronic and synchronic approaches to the novel, I turn now to the six points of contact. In characterizing each of these six points, rather than aiming for exhaustiveness, I seek to give a preliminary account of the relevant issues; my goal is not to have the last word, but to promote further discussion. A more complete list would no doubt contain additional points of contact. Conversely, as previously noted and as I will discuss in more detail in what follows, there is some overlap among the six points that I have in fact included.

1. Philosophy in the novel

It can be argued that philosophy, in the broad, non-technical sense of conceptual outlook or Weltanschauung, has always been part of the novel. But the inclusion (in more or less detail) of particular philosophical concepts, claims, or methods of problem solving is, of course, something different, creating possibilities for understanding the history of the novel from an alternative vantage point. From this perspective, the novel’s history can be seen not as the unfolding of a single form over time, but rather as a history of inflection points in which that evolving form’s development came into contact with another mode of discourse, also evolving in time. At a very general level, these inflection points are made possible by—and suggest the possibility of—areas of overlap or at least convergence between narrative and argument, storytelling and analysis. Of more interest here, however, is the particular sequence in which these moments of convergence occurred, and with what effect. Here the opportunities for research are vast, best indicated, perhaps, by a few representative questions of the sort that belong to this domain of inquiry.

What elements of then-contemporary political philosophy (e.g., accounts of utopian societies), and what models of scientific experimentation, enter into Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 text The Blazing World, a polygeneric work that Jason H. Pearl places in the (emergent) tradition of the novel, among other textual kinds? To what extent do Diderot’s ideas, and the ideas of the philosophes more generally, inflect novels such as Jacques the Fataliste (written ca. 1765-80) and The Nun (written ca. 1780)? A century later, how did George Eliot’s (Marian Evans’s) translations of Spinoza and Feuerbach, her engagement with Comtean positivism, and her interactions with utilitarian philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill shape the way she portrayed social conflicts and ethical predicaments in her novel Middlemarch (1871)? In what ways do the perspectives on art voiced by Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) engage with Thomistic ideas, and how, by contrast, do the concepts of aesthetics discussed by Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury group inform Woolf’s portrayal of the painter Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse (1927)? In what particular ways does Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) engage with existentialist concepts and claims in portraying aspects of the African American experience, and how does that engagement compare with Charles Johnson’s doctoral studies in and subsequent use of ideas from the phenomenological tradition, in novels such as Faith and the Good Thing (1974)? In turn, how do Ellison’s and Johnson’s novels compare with 20^th– and 21^st-century works shaped by debates in the analytic tradition? What precise form does the philosophy-novel nexus take in, for example, Iris Murdoch’s use of Wittgenstein’s ideas in Under the Net (1954), Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s portrayal of a Saul-Kripke-like figure in The Mind-Body Problem (1983), and J. M. Coetzee’s exploration, through his novelist-protagonist, of the ideas of Thomas Nagel, Mary Midgely, Tom Regan, and other philosophers in Elizabeth Costello (2003)?

2. Philosophy of the novel

I have already touched on this point of contact, at least indirectly, in noting some of the philosophers who have studied questions of fictionality, since the novel constitutes a central example of fictional discourse. But there have also been more targeted studies of the novel by philosophers, a number of which are synopsized by Barry Stocker in his contribution on “Philosophy of the Novel” in The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (see also Stocker’s monograph on Philosophy of the Novel). Stocker reviews accounts developed in the broad tradition of Continental philosophy, ranging from Friedrich Schlegel’s at the end of the 18^th century to Georges Bataille’s, Maurice Blanchot’s, and Pierre Klossowski’s in the second half of the 20^th.

In the analytic tradition, Alan H. Goldman’s Philosophy and the Novel provides important foundations for work in this area, discussing general issues pertaining to the philosophy-novel relationship as well as specific philosophical concepts that can be teased out from particular novels. Meanwhile, the titles of both Lamarque’s The Philosophy of Literature and Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature suggest studies that are trans-novelistic in scope. Lamarque’s book, however, does discuss the novel in general as well as of some of its subgenres. Likewise, engaging with novels by writers as different as Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Samuel Beckett, Nussbaum uses Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-50) to develop an argument about “how powerful novel-reading is in and for life,” and how a reader’s love for a fictional character can indeed be love because of the nature of novels, which give rise to “an active and interactive relationship that sustains the reader for many hours of imagining, of fiction-making, beyond the time spent with the page itself.” Nussbaum’s chapter on James’s The Golden Bowl uses that text to argue, similarly, that “the universalizing tendency of the moral imagination is encouraged by the very activity of novel-reading itself.” In Object Lessons: The Novel as a Theory of Reference, Jamie Bartlett, for her part, uses one subdomain of analytic philosophy—namely, accounts of linguistic reference developed by philosophers of language in the wake of Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions—to explore novels syntactically as “engines of grammatical and linguistic reference.” Bartlett considers how, in novels specifically, “the syntactic variables in the language of referring work to produce meaningful propositions about a world of things that exist only in the language that refers to them.”  

Furthermore, the work of particular novelists with transnational and translinguistic appeal, such as Marcel Proust, has attracted the attention of philosophers in various traditions. In the case of Proust, philosophers as different as Alexander Nehamas (in “Writer, Text, Work, Author”) and Gilles Deleuze (in Proust and Signs) have considered aspects of In Search of Lost Time (1913-1922). Yet these analyses focus not so much on Proust’s development of the novel form per se as on other, broader implications of his work: for Nehamas, what Marcel’s project says about the nature of authorship generally; for Deleuze, how Proust’s work illuminates the semiotic systems underpinning not only novelistic but also other texts. (See, however, my further discussion of Nehamas’s work in connection with point 3 below.) By contrast, Vincent Descombes, in Proust: Philosophy of the Novel, focuses on the distinctively novelistic character of Proust’s multi-volume text. He argues that what is of real philosophical interest in the novel arises not from the ideas that Proust adapts from Henri Bergson and other philosophers of his day and then incorporates into his work, but rather from the ways Proust makes of the novel form itself a means for developing and elucidating concepts that emerge in dialogue with the discourses of philosophy. Other philosophical analyses of specific novelists are outlined by Martin Klebes in his monograph on the authors of novels whose works respond, more or less directly, to the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, including Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, and others. 

As Klebes’s book also suggests, there is another species of writing that fits in the present category: namely, accounts of the novel, or of particular novels, by practitioners who were themselves trained in philosophy. For example, Klebes discusses reflections on the novel that were published by the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch, who had read Wittgenstein while studying philosophy and mathematics at the University of Vienna. For Broch, the novel affords cognitive tools that complement those of science, with novelistic (and other) art therefore being necessary ingredients of a comprehensive understanding of the world. Along parallel lines, in her interview with Jeffrey Meyers published in The Paris Review in 1990, some of Iris Murdoch’s remarks about her own novelistic practice, and about the novel more generally, bring into view her understanding of the role of novels vis-à-vis philosophical work in the domain of moral theory.

3. Novels illustrating or exemplifying philosophical schemes, concepts, or models

There is considerable potential for overlap between this point of contact and (1). But if (1) refers broadly to the (history of the) appearance of philosophical ideas in the novel considered as a literary form, (3) refers to more targeted attempts to illustrate or trace through, over the course of a novel, the consequences of particular philosophical concepts, arguments, or methods of problem solving. If (1) points to instances in which philosophy provides enabling conditions for novel-writing, (3) suggests how novelists can explore the specific findings of philosophical investigations—and do so in a relatively systematic fashion, by modeling the implications of those findings in a more or less fully fleshed-out fictional world. In other words, a spectrum can be identified here, stretching between what might be called philosophy-informed or -shaped novels, at one end, to novel-sized thought experiments testing out specific philosophical concepts or claims, at the other.

Among the novels already mentioned, a text like Eliot’s Middlemarch can be situated at the philosophy-shaped end of the continuum, whereas Murdoch’s Under the Net stakes out a middle position via its intermittent allusions to Wittgensteinian concepts, and Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, in dramatizing its narrator-protagonist’s efforts to grapple with the study (and profession) of contemporary philosophy, lies closer to the novel-as-modeling-device end of the continuum. Also located toward the novel-as-model end of the continuum is a text such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938), with its fictional testing-out of such Sartrean concepts as authenticity, bad faith, and the essentializing effects of narrative itself, when it is considered in light of the existence-versus-essence polarity. Similarly positioned is Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, originally published in Norwegian in 1991, with its modeling of some of the implications of Berkeleian idealism. A more recent instantiation of the novel-as-model paradigm would be K. K. Edin’s The Measurements of Decay (2018), discussed in one of the APA Blog posts mentioned at the outset.

Furthermore, if the converse possibility is considered in this connection—that is, the possibility that philosophical inquiry might orient to the novel as a kind of conceptual lodestone, and take upon itself the task of modeling or drawing out the implications of how ideas are patterned in (certain kinds of) novelistic discourse—then the examples just listed would fall into one subcategory of (3), namely, (3a). In turn, examples of a further subcategory, (3b), could be arranged along another, parallel spectrum. At one end would be cases where novels or novelists are mentioned, more or less in passing, as reference points for philosophical arguments. An example would be Charles Taylor making passing reference, in Philosophical Arguments, to “bad historical novels” in support of his claim that “a background of available meanings” is required for a given thought to be the kind of thought it is. (Hence the jarring effect of anachronistic importations of present-day concepts back into the past in less-than-stellar exemplars of this subgenre.) Or again, Taylor’s brief allusion to William Golding’s The Inheritors (1955) as a novel that shows how a different, unfamiliar culture can be presented as “undistortively intelligible” might be cited here—though Taylor himself, it should be noted, contrasts novels with “sober and rational discourses” of the kind found in scholarly monographs. In the middle range of the continuum of category (3b) would be philosophical argumentation that grounds itself more fully in novelistic case studies; an intersection of this sort occurs in the variety of philosophical studies in which Jane Austen and her work figure, ranging from Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion of Austen in After Virtue, to some of the contributions to the volume on Jane Austen and Philosophy edited by Mimi Marinucci, to Thomas R. Wells’s blog post on “Reading Jane Austen as a Moral Philosopher.”

Finally, there is the end of the continuum of (3b) opposite to the end where Taylor’s brief allusions to novels can be located. At this end would philosophical work that treats the novel as a model for, or key to understanding, philosophical practice itself, such that the aims of philosophy converge asymptomically with those of the novel. Some of the work about Austen mentioned at the end of my previous paragraph leans toward this end of the continuum; but a paradigmatic instance of the novel-as-model-for-philosophy approach is Nehamas’s Nietzsche: Life as Literature. In arguing that Nietzsche “looks at [the world] as if it were a literary text,” and in exploring how the philosopher “sought to create an artwork out of himself, a literary character who is a philosopher,” Nehamas goes beyond discussing the influence of novelists like Dostoevsky on Nietzsche. What is more, he suggests that key Nietzschean concerns, such as his ideas about amor fati and the eternal recurrence, as well as his reliance on perspectivism and aestheticism as interpretive frameworks, can be explicated through the conceptual structure built up over the course of Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. For example, Nehamas writes that “The life of Proust’s narrator need not have been, and never was, Nietzsche’s own specific ideal [i.e., about the kind of life that made for an admirable self]. But the framework supplied by this perfect novel which relates what, despite and even through its very imperfections, becomes and is seen to be a perfect life, and which keeps turning endlessly back on itself, is the best possible model for the eternal recurrence.”

4. Novels about particular philosophers

Again, there is potential for overlap between this point of contact and others—notably, (1), (3a), and (6b)—to the extent that specific philosophical concepts, which after all emanate from philosophers, figure in the novels in question. Indeed, the overlap between (1), (3a), and (4) is, in effect, the subject of some of the contributions to a recent volume on Philosophical Presences in the Ancient Novel, whose title reflects the expanded conception of the novel advocated by commentators such as Doody and Pavel. For example, J. R. Morgan’s contribution surveys how both ancient philosophers and their ideas enter into a range of Hellenistic texts, and Ian Repath, in a contribution perhaps more aligned with (1) and (3a) than (4), discusses Platonic influences in works from this same tradition. A more clear-cut instance of (4) would be a text like Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It (1987), a historical novel centering on (a fictionalized version of) Wittgenstein and his milieu. Another example worth mentioning is Irvin D. Yalom’s 1992 novel When Nietzsche Wept, later adapted as both a film and a play. The novel focuses on an imagined encounter between Nietzsche and Josef Breuer, an early mentor to Sigmund Freud. (My thanks to Nathan Eckstrand for bringing Yalom’s novel to my attention.)

It should be noted here that novels could focus on philosophers without foregrounding or even going into any real detail at all about their philosophical work. For instance, one can imagine writing a novel about the extra-philosophical activities of René Descartes or Gottlob Frege or Elizabeth Anscombe, along the lines of (to shift from fiction to biography) the telling of Iris Murdoch’s life story in Richard Eyre’s 2001 biopic Iris, or those portions of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, a 2018 graphic memoir by Ken Krimstein, that extend beyond Arendt’s work in philosophy as such. Note, too, that the roman à clef issue comes into play in connection with (4): In Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, just how close an analogue is Noam Himmel for Saul Kripke? And how exactly does Hugo Belfounder piggyback on Ludwig Wittgenstein in Murdoch’s Under the Net? Significantly, in this case it is philosophical concepts and arguments themselves, along with other contextualizing details, that are being used by novelists as the clef or “key” that permits their texts to be read as coded narratives—specifically, as novels in which (fictionalized) versions of particular philosophers feature, more or less obliquely.

Finally, within (4), a distinction needs to be drawn between (a) novels in which particular philosophers are used, more or less fleetingly, as motifs or tropes in the ongoing narration or dialogue, and (b) novels that imagine, in a more sustained way, all or part of philosophers’ life stories. Within (b), in turn, a further subdivision needs to be made between (i) novels about real philosophers versus (ii) novels about imaginary ones.

5. The philosophical resonance of novelistic form

Much of the philosophical work on the novel mentioned in the context of (2) focuses on the thematic dimension of novels; at issue are themes broached by novelists—themes concerning ethical choices, concepts of identity, or the nature of memory—that lend themselves to philosophical analysis. But it is also fruitful to consider philosophical aspects of the novel from the standpoint of novelistic form, exploring how the form of a novel can itself carry philosophically interesting resonances. Some of the studies discussed in (2), such as Descombes’s analysis of Proust, Nussbaum’s examination of the kinds of reading experiences enabled by the novel in general, and Bartlett’s account of the referential properties of discourse in novels, already point toward a formal emphasis of this sort. As this work suggests, another continuum is at play here, this one stretching between more theme-focused points of contact and more form-focused points of contact. Examples of (5) are situated at the form-focused end of this continuum, where questions about the formal resources of the novel become philosophically salient. Formal features of novelistic subgenres, as well as formal strategies used more or less extensively in particular novels across genres, are both worth considering in this connection.

For example, novelistic subgenres such as the dialogue novel, as well as novels in which dialogues between characters invite comparisons with methods of argumentation, resonate with philosophical traditions based on the dialectical method. A parade example of such resonance can be found in the “Ithaca” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in which the narration of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus’s late-night exchange takes on the form of a catechism. More intermittently dialectic are the works of the contemporary novelists Ben Lerner and Sally Rooney. Both writers were members of competitive debate teams, as it turns out, and while some of Rooney’s multi-format dialogues (represented in the form of email- and text-exchanges, phone calls, and face-to-face conversations) bear the impress of this training in dialectic, an early chapter in Lerner’s The Topeka School (2019) explicitly stages a formal policy debate, with debate strategies and formats featuring elsewhere in the novel as well.

Another resonant formal strategy—and here I touch on issues that I revisit from another perspective in connection with (6)—involves the blending of fictional discourse with the nonfictional discourses of memoir and (auto)biography. The narrator of Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife (2009), for example, is a more or less fictionalized version of former first lady Laura Bush. By means of such blends, also evident in Édouard Louis’s fictionalized memoir/autobiographical fiction The End of Eddy (2014), Ocean Vuong’s memoir-transmuted-into-novel On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (2019), and Lerner’s trilogy of experimental texts, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), 10:04 (2014), and The Topeka School, novels can be used to pose questions about the formal characteristics and defining traits of the novel itself. More specifically, such texts raise questions, through their own modes of narration, about the role, contours, and porosity of the border between fictional and non-fictional accounts.

Other species of resonance can be found in novelists’ strategic use of formal possibilities built into narrative, of which novelistic writing constitutes one subtype. Consider, for example, the extensive use of prolepses or flashforwards in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). By virtue of these zigzags in time, made possible by the various modes of temporal ordering accommodated by narrative, occurrences in the here and now are reframed as anticipations of future events. Spark’s strategic manipulations of time-horizons resonate with philosophical discussions of fatalism and the topology of time, for example, among philosophy’s other contributions to the broader temporal ecologies that novels, too, help shape. Similarly resonant is the use of free indirect discourse, sometimes described as a “dual voice” in which characters’ and narrators’ values, perceptions, and styles of expression converge—as well as, for that matter, free direct discourse, in which a character’s mental or verbal performances are presented in a raw, unfiltered way, as though there were completely unmediated by the narration. Such techniques can be used to project perceptual processes, flows of feeling, and other cognitive phenomena in ways that resonate with accounts of those same phenomena by philosophers of mind.

Another avenue for investigating formal resonance leads through novelists’ (and novelistic subgenres’) favored styles of action representation vis-à-vis philosophical work in the domain of action theory. For example, to use part of Zeno Vendler’s classic typology, how are (i) temporally extended accomplishments and (ii) punctual, event-like achievements distributed in the novels of 19^th-century realism versus 21^st-century cyber-thrillers? If the distributional patterns differ, what difference does that difference make, when it comes to engaging with the fictional worlds projected by these two novelistic subkinds? Or, in the terms of another classic analysis by Georg Henrik von Wright, do particular novelists working within the same subgenre tend to highlight acting situations—i.e., the contexts for deciding what action to take—or do they rather highlight results—i.e., the fruits of the action so chosen? Beyond reflecting assumptions about what it means to act, how do these tendencies or preferred representational styles help shape broader understandings of agency? For instance, in novels concerned with gender-based, racial, or species-based differences, which styles predominate, and do the styles preferred in a given novel shore up or undermine cultural stereotypes concerning what sort of subjects are, or should be, agential?   

Finally, it is worth investigating the philosophical resonance of novelistic form as it plays out in various media, or, for that matter, in multi-media formats. For example, the essay collection titled Graphic Novels as Philosophy, edited by Jeff McGlaughin, highlights the formal resonance of novels using sequences of word-image combinations—that is, graphic novels. Or consider another kind of verbal-visual interplay used in novelistic contexts: namely, formal experiments involving photographic images, as in the novels of W. G. Sebald. Some of the images included in Sebald’s texts are apparently unrelated (or only very indirectly related) to the ongoing narration, undermining any assumption that the images serve an illustrative function while also raising broader questions about the referential properties of the texts’ verbal layer. 

6. Polygeneric discourse in which the novelistic and the philosophical intermix

In novels for which (3) or (4) are salient points of contact, there will, of course, be some admixture of the extra-philosophical. By the same token, by virtue of (5), it can be argued that all novels, including those that consciously eschew philosophical topics, concepts, and methods of analysis, resonate to some degree with the questions posed by philosophers. Such willy-nilly intersections between the philosophical and the novelistic, however, can be distinguished from texts marked by either (a) an inability or (b) a deliberate refusal to draw clear lines between these modes of discourse. Whereas subcategory (6a) contains texts that appeared too early for them to self-identify as novels, subcategory (6b) contains texts that, appearing after the novel had become well-established, purposely conflate or at least cross-pollinate genres of discourse, in the manner of the fiction-nonfiction blends preliminarily discussed in the context of (5).

Thus, examples of (6a) include early contributions to the novel form, such as the previously mentioned 1666 text by Cavendish, The Blazing World, in which novelistic segments sit cheek by jowl with passages that, in our current discourse ecology, align with political philosophy and the philosophy of science. Even earlier is The Golden Ass, by the second-century Roman writer Apuleius, who embeds philosophico-religious commentary into the story of his protagonist’s human-into-animal transformation. Meanwhile, Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet (1872-80) can be cited as an early instance of (6b). With the novel long since established as a dominant literary genre, Flaubert in a sense backtracks toward its prehistory. He uses his satire about the titular copy-clerks’ haphazard quest for knowledge to excavate and hold up for renewed scrutiny all the branches of learning, including philosophy, that contributed to the emergence and development of novel form.

The 20^th century produced its own version of polygeneric texts, ranging from Joyce’s Ulysses (the catechistic “Ithaca” chapter mentioned previously, for example, can be situated in category 6b as well as or perhaps better than in category 5); to Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (ten chapters of this novel from 1931-32 are devoted to a philosophical essay titled “The Disintegration of Values”); to Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (this 1999 text is admittedly more novella than novel, but its history as a self-reflexive intermixture of fictional and expository discourse that Coetzee delivered as the 1997 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University, and its novelistic afterlife as part of Elizabeth Costello, qualify it for inclusion in category 6b). Another work previously mentioned, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, can be cited as a still more recent contribution to this tradition of polygeneric writing. An example of autofiction, in which an author presents in a prismatic, fictionalized form aspects of his or her own life story, Lerner’s text, by interpolating commentary on a range of philosophical topics, further complicates the memoir-novel blend that informs the subgenre of autofiction. These topics include the nature of time (via reference points as diverse as the writings of Walter Benjamin and the 1985 movie Back to the Future), aesthetics (via an account of an installation by Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas), the differences between human and animal minds (via discussion of the proprioceptive capabilities of the octopus), and, in a further twist of self-reflexivity that reveals an area of overlap between (6b) and (5), the nature of the fiction-nonfiction distinction itself.