Helprin is worth mentioning here. I only know his book of stories, “Ellis Island,” but that was a great inspiration because it applied some of the fantastic quirks of Latin American magical realism to American stories. It was one possible path in the regeneration of story or plot. But I think others less beholden to fantasy and more beholden to compelling story — one, that is, that keeps faith with Victorian conventions — might be a more promising way forward.

Happily, I do not have to find a way forward for the novel, but only to understand its conceptual significance.

Since you appreciate my charity, let’s see if by means of it we might not draw a few conclusions. Here, so far as I can tell, are the relevant facts of our disagreement:

a) We both agree that the novel is a distinct genre, the definition of whose form must include a particular kind of complex elaboration of Plot and Character.

b) The modernist novel is visibly distinct in its attributes from earlier forms of the novel, but whether this distinction constitutes a discontinuity is another matter.

c) I have argued that the modernists sought to subordinate plot to character, in many cases even to the point of trying to eliminate plot in favor of character. We are agreed that this does not mean the elimination of some kind of narrative, but only the subordination of or elimination of Plot as it was conceived in the Nineteenth Century novel.

d) You have claimed, to the contrary, that what I view as subordination or elimination is in fact just a new elaboration or extension.

e) I’m not sure the difference between these claims cannot become trivial very quickly, but here’s a brief go at how they might matter. Because several modernists thought what they were doing was killing the novel in favor of a new art form, and because they did this by the subordination or destruction of Plot, while focusing more than ever on the ellaboration of Character; because they argued they were going beyond the novel and even that the novel was a historical rather than a literary form soon to lie in the grave; because modernists expressly contrasted their work from their Victorian antecedents, suggesting that their contortions were “glosses” on or critiques of the novel form; and because some modernists labeled their own contemporaries as in some sense non-modern (e.g. Willa Cather) — because of all this, one may be tempted to suggest that the modernist novel is not a novel, but a new form, and that the reason for this is its subordination of plot without sacrificing (as no art form can) narrative.

f) Dan, you contend that Plot remains more or less continuous in the novel in all its stages, acknowledging only the distinction of the novel as a modern form from other literary forms. Plot may be distinct in the modernist novel, but not in a way that is without precedent even in the earliest stages of the novel’s existence. In support of this claim, one has to ignore the statements of the more prominent modernists (which you have no trouble doing), and to refuse the possibility that, whatever continuities are to be found in the novel, a modernist novel is verifiably distinct in anything but incidentals.

g) To part of what you claim, my essay gives immediate support. Whatever the aspriations of the modernists, we call even Joyce’s Finnegans Wake a novel; if there was hope of creating a new artistic form that would know the grandeur of the epic, perhaps, and would transcend the “bourgeois” character of the novel — it either did not come into being, or at the least we continue to call it a novel. A test case for this would be David Jones’ “In Parenthesis.” Here we have a book that resembles Ulysses in a number of ways; Jones referred to it as “a writing” rather than a novel. When scholars categorize it (and, by this I include those who produce anthologies), they include it as poetry. Having spied its many broken lines, that seems an intuitive choice in the age of free verse. A relatively late modernist work, Jones’ case for “In Parenthesis” as a post-novel art form merely got him lumped in with the poets. This was a reasonable practical “lumping” indeed, since Jones’ other writings at first glance resemble nothing so much as Ezra Pound’s Cantoes. In any case, we necessarily affirm some kind of connection between Woolf and Co., when we persist in speaking of the “modernist novel.”

h) On the above, we are basically agreed: whatever the distinctions of the modernist novel, they are not so grand as to constitute a new species. But I account for the modernist novel as having sacrificed many of the elements, certainly the prominence, of plot. Try reading “The Sun Also Rises” in comparison with Henry James’ “The American.” Although both give more attention to character development and scene-setting than plot, and while both involved almost non-events as climaxes (a leave taking or disappearance), Hemingway’s book just sort of peters out, it gradually comes to a halt or a stop. James’ Newman, however, experiences a definitive realization consequent to the story’s events. His story ends. Why are there similiarities? Because no art form, including the novel, can exist without narrative. Why are there differences? While James was the great precedent for the modernists on the subordination of plot to character, Hemingway goes considerably farther; one could well imagine someone saying, Hemingway has not plot; he just has characters moving through a chronicle, a space, and then we stop watching them. Are earlier novels ever so uninflected in their narrative arc, their plotting? As James, perhaps; as Hemingway? I cannot think of any narrative before the modernists that flattens itself out as deliberately as those of Hemingway.

i) Not incidentally, it would be worth considering the rise of the “epiphany” in Joyce and Hemingway, and in the modernists generally, to substitute concluding revelation for the kinds of conclusive and climactic events that are proper to plot in either drama or the novel. Contemporary novelist Charles Baxter’s great essay “Against Epiphanies” suggests that it is in the promiscuous proliferation of the epiphany that we see the unique attributes, and the unique weakness, of modern prose fiction narrative in contradistinction from the integrated Plots of earlier ages. It would also be worth considering what to do with Thomas Hardy’s use of coincidence to determine his plots, but frankly I haven’t any idea.

j) As I said — to much opprobrium — previously, I do not see how any of this touches on the central argument of my essay. I think it is less interesting than what I wrote about — which perhaps explains why I wrote the essay I did and not some other essay. Unless one seeks to crumble and atomize the novel in every instance to a kind of bland gruel, one must be sensitive to the differences of reading a modern novel from the reading of a Nineteenth Century one. That difference is most obvious at the level of plot and narrative. However, my essay was concerned most explicitly with the kind of moral function plot played in the Nineteenth Century as, indeed, a central form of ethical discourse in a period strained for loss of philosophy and theology (a point I take in part from MacIntyre). Insofar as it was “just” an evaluation of literary form, it proposed that the Nineteenth Century, from Austen even perhaps to James, gave us a certain perfection of the novel as story-telling-thing; that this perfection was set aside for good reasons; and that conditions are now propitious for a return to the novel as story-telling-thing precisely because the modernists engaged in archetypal and ontological explorations that drove beyond the uneasy dependence on moral narrative of the Victorians.

What is underlying everything written at FPR is an ideological project. It is a venue for the exposition of that project and engagement with its critics which requires grand sweeping statements. This is a good thing. It is also a blog which also requires grand sweeping statements. This is a bad thing (I believe the folks at FPR realize this and take steps to try to mitigate this tenancy).

As a result there is a tendency to to dismiss criticism as either a misunderstanding (charitably) or a misrepresentation (uncharitably).

Given this all should take the council of Erasmus seriously,

“But I forget myself and run beyond my bounds. Though yet, if I shall seem to have spoken anything more boldly or impertinently than I ought, be pleased to consider that not only Folly but a woman said it; remembering in the meantime that Greek proverb, “Sometimes a fool may speak a word in season,” unless perhaps you expect an epilogue, but give me leave to tell you you are mistaken if you think I remember anything of what I have said, having foolishly bolted out such a hodgepodge of words. ‘Tis an old proverb, “I hate one that remembers what’s done over the cup.” This is a new one of my own making: I hate a man that remembers what he hears. Wherefore farewell, clap your hands, live and drink lustily, my most
excellent disciples of Folly.”

“Sometimes I do feel our disputes boil down to a mere shifting of and picking over categories.”

This is true but most of our disagreements over arguments that are very much dependent on categories.

“I would suggest that you confuse plot and narrative.”

I see the distinction you are trying to make but fail to see its import to the argument. I would suggest the modernists exemplify a larger vision of plot one beyond the conversation and events that played such a prominent role in Victorian novels. The modernists aren’t the first to do this, they are merely both very good at it and consistent in its application. I think the seeds of this are found in Cervantes and Fielding, in other words, since the very beginning of the form. I believe the conviction that the modernists represent a radical repudiation or turn for the novel is the product of a combination of an ideological reading and taking the modernists own self aggrandizement to seriously.

Your Fitzgerald example is one you can routinely see in much earlier works by Dickens and Fielding. But then again I don’t think your completely willing to concede Fitzgerald as a modernist.

Mailer comes to mind as a possible example on the left. But I think Mailer was a better novelist. Also, he had a sense of humor. This I think helps, along with the alcoholism, for people to let his sheer meanness slide.

I’m conflicted about Helprin. Winter’s Tale is a fascinating read but I am reminded of what they said about Mendelssohn in that he was born a genius but died a talent. Helprin is a very disciplined writer (in both the best and the worst ways) and possesses genuine talent but I feel he is always struggling to find a story worthy of it. In the end I think his grasp escapes his reach.

I don’t think there is any problem here — does anyone? — much less half of one lodged in my craw.

But to reply directly to the challenge: I think I have answered as well as I could the objections that have been posed to my essay. So far as I have been able to deduce (and a direct response to the argument of my previous comment would have clarified things if I duced the deduction), I have insisted that the objections posed to my claims are not objections to the claims I made but to misinterpretations of the claims I made. Your own much appreciated (previous) comments, for instance, mention some very worthy distinctions in the body of work to which I refer most generally as “the Nineteenth Century novel,” and my response was that I not only included but was even especially thinking of the authors you mentioned when writing (for the record, in my own aspirant novelist days back in Ann Arbor James and Faulkner were my chief influences, after I escaped the minimalist magnet of Raymond Carver; if you want to know why I failed to become a published novelist you may be sure, given the influences, that it was not for lack of bulky manuscripts but for lack of quality in them).

Clearly, Dan does make claims that controvert my own, but I think the distinction I make between plot and narrative resolves them.

Finally, if my essay was completely reducible in significance to a claim about the history of the novel, I would not have written it. But having appreciated Lev Grossman’s essay, and having long meditated on my own disenchantment with the reading and writing of novels along with my persistent interest in them in the broader context of art and modernism, I felt it hardly a presumption or an insincerity to put an oar in. Swept.

If, by your own admission, you’re “too indifferent to the novel as a form” to make the effort that your readers require you to make to defend your very sweeping statements about said form and its history and meaning, then why make those statements at all? And why ask your readers to accept them with no further a-do? This argument — and others you have made here from time to time — would be more persuasive if they were less sweeping, or, if they must remain as sweeping as they are, made with more humility and more acknowledgement that others may disagree. The mandarin tone, which implies that “of course” the reader agrees — “doesn’t everyone?” — is half the problem here.

Sometimes I do feel our disputes boil down to a mere shifting of and picking over categories.

Since I’ve argued in several places (see Reasoning about Stories here, and the article to which I link in that essay, which appeared in American Arts Quarterly) that there is no art work that lacks narrative, but that narratives vary radically, I would suggest that you confuse plot and narrative.

I’m too indifferent to the novel as a form, frankly, to want to push these distinction much further in the comment boxes, but it seems the objections to my argument from you and AM boil down to your desire to see continuities where you think I insist upon disruptions and discontinuities. In fact, my claims have been, in some respects, the opposite: I argued that the modernist novels takes the Victorian plot form as not just a point of reference, but as an object for critique; I did not argue that there was some unique “influence” of the Victorians on the modernists that was somehow lacking between the Victorians and their own antecedents. I argued not that Dickens had the 18th Century in mind, but that one must keep the Victorians in mind when reading Woolf; if anyone disputes this, go read “Between the Acts” and get back to me.

To your particular point, Dan, again I am not denying the presence of narrative but the attempt to eschew or critique plot. And that practice in the modernists was part of a larger project to get beneath the apparent foundations of reality in plot to more profound places — places or truths that require a metaphysics rather than a narratology to be rightly explored.

Fitzgerald is a good test case. As the most popular modernist novelist — insofar as he can be included among the modernists as a movement — his books obviously bear a great deal of resemblance to the thick but nicely crafted plots of a generation or more earlier. And yet, during the last twenty years, the chief effort of the scholars on Fitzgerald I’ve read has been to highlight how craftily disjointed and disjunctive he was, even to the point of undermining plot. Off the top of my head, I would sight merely that strange elipsis during Nick’s night out on the town with Gatsby, where Nick finds himself in the bedroom of one of his drinking partners. It’s a strange scene — one that many scholars take to be a crucial formal moment in the book in terms of disrupting the intelligiblity of the plot.

George Eliot I can’t address here. Obviously Lord Acton thought she was a quintessential “Catholic” moral novelist. Had it been possible for him to conceive a society whose conscience was entirely formed on Eliot, Acton might have abandoned his Catholic faith. His admiration would make a great subject for an essay; unfortunately, whenever I propose it the would-be dissertator turns me down.

What do you think of him as a fiction writer?

I’ve met Helprin and I can tell you that my impression is that his lack of recognition stems from his abrasive personality more than his politics. Which in its own way is political but not a right or left sort of thing.

I was positively gobsmacked by his short story collection called “The Pacific,” then went on to read more of his work. His novel A Soldier of the Great War is astoundingly good, and is my favorite novel of the 2nd half of the 20th century. It is the only novel I’ve ever read which, upon finishing, I immediately wanted to begin re-reading. I’m convinced that if he were a liberal, he’d have won all the major prizes by now.

Glad to hear my plaints can be of service!

My original interjection of Faulkner was a somewhat open ended invitation to re-examine the central thesis that the Victorian’s perfected the story (plot) and the modernists abandoned it. I will defend till my dying day that the what makes the novel is its synthesis of comedy and tragedy which is to my mind uniquely modern (And perhaps modernity’s greatest contribution to the human race).

The idea that the modernist’s “destroyed plot” or “deconstructed story” is in and of itself a strong current in the conservative narrative of what happened in the last hundred years. Such a story reinforces their claims that modernity and liberalism are ultimately dehumanizing and in turn monstrous (In their ability to produce monsters and monstrous actions of all kinds). The problem with this story is that it is simply not true.

While Joyce and Woolf were certainly experimenting with new ways of writing (They are of course also two of the most extreme examples) they were conducting, how shall I say, plot and story by another means. Ulysses, as unpopular as it might be to say within earshot of those who buy into the conservative reading of history, is a really tight narrative (Not to be confused by a tightly structured series of events).

But what happens to the conservative narrative if we look at The Great Gatsby? A Farewell to Arms? Sons and Lovers?

This is what I mean with my accusation.

To return to my more cryptic and question asking form:

Are complex and dense stories (Such as the Victorian’s) really more successfully told over drinks than rambling and obscene ones (Such as told by the modernists)?

And no, Dickens is not the epitome of 19th century English fiction. Instead, he’s the great and singular exception to George Eliot’s norm. There’s no one else like him, except for those who imitated him and were tutored by him, like Wilkie Collins. Part of the reason for Dickens’s difference is, as I’ve said before, that he — like Thackeray — looked back to the 18th century, in much the way that the modernists would look back to the 19th century in their successive turn.

The argument was this: the Nineteenth Century novel, for a number of historical reasons, fulfilled the particular formal aptitudes of the genre, which I identify primarily with the achievement of a density and complexity of plot and character. The modernists critiqued all this and deconstructed it, chiefly by accentuating character while leveling and contorting plot. Grossman says this was a short lived transformation and novels must return to story; I agree. And, I provide an account of intellectual history that at once justifies the procedures of the Victorians and of the modernists while also suggesting that the concern with metaphysical realism in modernism prepares the way for a “return” of the Victorian conception of good plot and character. As an aesthetic claim, this says primarily that modernism was good, and, indeed, makes it possible for the supposedly exhausted form of the novel to revive by returning to conventions that were themselves once thought to be exhausted. That’s no small claim, but it has been blurred by the subsequent discussions in the comments. It is also not incidentally but directly tied to MacIntyre’s thought; I could as well be explaining why MacIntyre, the admirer of Austen, felt compelled to become a Thomist. That would require a different essay, but the rhymes would be obvious.

There are other matters here worth considering, i.e. the act of confusing the novel as inherent modern (a claim with which I entirely agree, despite Margaret Doody’s claims in “The Real Story of the Novel”) with the discrete literary period now called the modernist. But I would hesitate to address any such matters in this context, since I am actually having difficulty discerning of what exactly I’m being accused — and so had best rest with the above clarification.

That said, I note that here and elsewhere I promised Dan some kind of more thorough answer to objections he had made. Since responding to his plaints has generated some of my best FPR pieces, I’d happy to be reminded of any debts I need to pay in a future essay.