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The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt
Photo by Okey Nzelu |
To celebrate the launch of
The Novel: A Biography by
Michael Schmidt, the
International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester is hosting
a free evening of readings with a Q&A session on Thursday 15 May at 6:30pm. Please email
events@anthonyburgess.org to reserve your place.
And to help you do a little advance reading, we've got a few extracts from the prologue!
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| Ford Madox Ford |
Ford Madox Ford chose as his guide through the vast, haunted house of fiction not critics, experts, or theorists but 'artist-practitioners.' He describes them as 'men and women who love their arts as they practice them.' These people feel 'hot love' for the books they advocate [...] The forms their advocacy takes also illuminate their own lives and times. Martin Amis in this respect is of Ford’s party, going with what he calls 'artist critics,' whose 'authority has never seemed more natural and welcome' than today. They are like members of an eccentric family in an ancestral mansion—
Bleak House, say, with its looming portraits on the stairs. Each makes a different kind of accommodation (in both senses) with the heavy furniture, the figured carpets, the china, crystal, and silver, the spoils. Some are full of respect, some reserved, others bend double with laughter; the rebellious and impatient slash the canvases, twist the cutlery, raise a toast, and throw the crystal in the grate. Their damage is another chapter in the story.
[...]
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Michael Schmidt
Author photo by Ben Schmidt |
A sense of canon, though not a stable one, governs my approach. It allows me some anachronisms, when modern writers are read in a historical context, especially when their own age misvalued their work. In its first half this book follows an approximate timeline. After that there are too many geographies, too many genres and genealogies, complex, overlapping, to maintain chronology. But because the novelists are themselves the narrators and critics, by the time we do reach the chapter including Scott, for example, or James or Cather or Woolf or Martin Amis, they are already familiar companions.
[...]
In writing what sets out to be a brief life of the novel in English, it makes sense as in any biography to concentrate on things that shape, distort, and reconfigure it. What are its origins? What made the novel, after its severely moral beginnings, so promiscuous? We pass lightly over longueurs that can last for decades. Then it sets out on new adventures. It has been declared dead more than once, so we attend its funerals and chronicle its afterlives.
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Gabriel Josipovici, author of Whatever Happened to Modernism,
is the author of experimental novels admired by Muriel Spark and others |
I set out to write this book without an overarching theory of the novel. I had no point to prove. I read in a spirit of committed curiosity, the spirit of essay in the old sense of the term, exploratory, not demonstrating and proving something I already knew. I did have an instinct: that the relationships between novels, and between writers, would illuminate the properties and values of this diverse literary form, in which English-language writers in different ages and societies have excelled. If a theory were to emerge, it would be that the achieved novel belongs to an unsubornable family, that whatever use a novel is put to in its own age, it survives not because of its themes or its intentions but because of something else, to do with form, language, invention, and an enduring resistance to cliché, an irreducible
quality. A
something.
Text copyright © Michael Schmidt 2014
