The Craft of the Novel by Wilson
The Craft of the Novel (1975)
by Colin Wilson
256 pages - Gollancz
This book grew out of a creative writing course Wilson taught in New Jersey, where he noticed that though the students could say things well, they didn't particularly have much to say. He sees this as a problem with the novel in general, and why it seems to have reached a sort of dead-end ever since the publication of Ulysses.
He first dismisses the argument that novels are not very important, saying that the novel has had more impact 'than Darwin, Marx, and Freud combined'. He traces the birth of the novel to 1740, and the publication of Pamela by Samuel Richardson; though previous narratives like Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe talked about what people did and said, this was the first book that was mainly concerned with what a person thought and felt. He then traces out two primary movements over the history of the novel, romanticism and realism (naturalism), and how they each hit a dead end. There is some discussion of matters like form and ideas, and overall Wilson talks about how the strength of the novel is to offer us a 'wide-angle lens', to see the big picture that we can't see when we're just living day-to-day in our individual life. He believes there is a future for the novel, and he calls for a re-introduction of ideas into narrative (which were dismissed by writers like Hemingway and Joyce) as well as an embrace of genre forms, if only to give strength to the narrative that usually bogs down into irrelevancy if it stares into the gutter of what's called 'realism'.
The first half of this book is really fascinating and highly readable, as you take advantage of Wilson's wide reading to get a history of the development and evolution of the novel. And he certainly makes a strong point about the writer needing to know who he is, and what he wants to say, in order to write well (though he says less about the dangers of being guided by your propaganda instead of by the life of the narrative). The second half is more troublesome, when he gets into an analysis of things like structure and form, ideas, and elements of the plot being 'objective correlatives'. And I can't believe how much he champions the work of David Lindsay, who I found to be completely unreadable and justly ignored by the public. You feel hectored, and you begin to think that if the prospective writer packed all this stuff into his head, along with the perscribed task of pointing the way of future human evolution, they'd probably collapse into neuroticism instead of actually writing anything.
Wilson also has a disdain for humour and comedy, or at least sees it in direct conflict with being 'serious' and 'important'. Here and elsewhere he's demonstrated that he's unable to grasp the immense humour of writers like Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Gogol, accepting it at best as 'unfortunate'. Which makes him seem like a bit of a stuffed shirt, as I think some of the best writing about life is quite funny; and indeed life itself is probably best understood when you can have a good long laugh about it. Anyway, a good history, pointing to a lot of works that might otherwise be currently unappreciated, but I wouldn't take any of the theory too seriously.
by Colin Wilson
256 pages - Gollancz
This book grew out of a creative writing course Wilson taught in New Jersey, where he noticed that though the students could say things well, they didn't particularly have much to say. He sees this as a problem with the novel in general, and why it seems to have reached a sort of dead-end ever since the publication of Ulysses.
He first dismisses the argument that novels are not very important, saying that the novel has had more impact 'than Darwin, Marx, and Freud combined'. He traces the birth of the novel to 1740, and the publication of Pamela by Samuel Richardson; though previous narratives like Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe talked about what people did and said, this was the first book that was mainly concerned with what a person thought and felt. He then traces out two primary movements over the history of the novel, romanticism and realism (naturalism), and how they each hit a dead end. There is some discussion of matters like form and ideas, and overall Wilson talks about how the strength of the novel is to offer us a 'wide-angle lens', to see the big picture that we can't see when we're just living day-to-day in our individual life. He believes there is a future for the novel, and he calls for a re-introduction of ideas into narrative (which were dismissed by writers like Hemingway and Joyce) as well as an embrace of genre forms, if only to give strength to the narrative that usually bogs down into irrelevancy if it stares into the gutter of what's called 'realism'.
The first half of this book is really fascinating and highly readable, as you take advantage of Wilson's wide reading to get a history of the development and evolution of the novel. And he certainly makes a strong point about the writer needing to know who he is, and what he wants to say, in order to write well (though he says less about the dangers of being guided by your propaganda instead of by the life of the narrative). The second half is more troublesome, when he gets into an analysis of things like structure and form, ideas, and elements of the plot being 'objective correlatives'. And I can't believe how much he champions the work of David Lindsay, who I found to be completely unreadable and justly ignored by the public. You feel hectored, and you begin to think that if the prospective writer packed all this stuff into his head, along with the perscribed task of pointing the way of future human evolution, they'd probably collapse into neuroticism instead of actually writing anything.
Wilson also has a disdain for humour and comedy, or at least sees it in direct conflict with being 'serious' and 'important'. Here and elsewhere he's demonstrated that he's unable to grasp the immense humour of writers like Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Gogol, accepting it at best as 'unfortunate'. Which makes him seem like a bit of a stuffed shirt, as I think some of the best writing about life is quite funny; and indeed life itself is probably best understood when you can have a good long laugh about it. Anyway, a good history, pointing to a lot of works that might otherwise be currently unappreciated, but I wouldn't take any of the theory too seriously.