Fifteen Eighty Four

What does it mean to write a novel of ideas? These are works of fiction that foreground debate and disputation-like the discussions of Zionism in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the politico-religious arguments in G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, the utopian speculations of H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia, the debates about Communism in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, or about art in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. All of these are important and enduring novels, but critics have struggled to reconcile their emphasis on ideas and argument with prevailing assumptions about what makes a good novel. Fiction, the story goes, fails when it becomes a vehicle for social, political, philosophical, or religious argument. Readers of novels want psychologically convincing characters: those characters should not act as mere mouthpieces for essays, political tracts, and philosophical hypotheses. Or so we’re told.

For at least a century-connected with advent of modernism-critics have seen the novel of ideas as an inherently flawed form. Both Henry James and F.R. Leavis influentially criticised novelists who allowed their characters to indulge excessively in philosophical or political argument. Famously, while they both admired George Eliot for her powerful psychological realism, they also complained that her novels were ruined by being excessively larded with ideas. In The Great Tradition, Leavis suggested that Daniel Deronda would have been better without the debates about Zionism, Adam Bede without the methodism, and Felix Holt, the Radical without the radicalism! More recently, in her Theory of the Gimmick, Sianne Ngai sees the incorporation of ‘readymade ideas’ into the novel as a gimmick that undermines the novel’s most distinctive artistic effects. Novels of ideas simply aren’t novelistic enough, constantly threatening to degenerate into a lecture, an essay, or a play. A broad consensus unites scholars of the novel from very different critical and theoretical traditions: the novel of ideas is doomed to artistic failure.

It is high time for a full-throated defence of the novel of ideas. Our new book The British Novel of Ideas intends to provide that defence, and to make the case for the value of novels that centre argumentative dialogue, and test the effects of ideas in fictional settings. We have brought together a group of critics who were willing to step outside of the orthodox dismissal of the novel of ideas, and who were open to exploring the possibilities of the form.

The book does two valuable things. First, it showcases the immense formal and aesthetic variety of the novel of ideas, and in so doing, develops a new critical language that will help scholars and readers to appreciate these novels on their own terms. Looked at closely, the novel of ideas is not (or at least not always or necessarily) a simplistic juxtaposition of arguments. The ways in which ideas and arguments are articulated within novels, how they move between characters’ internal thoughts and their reported speech, how they are taken up by narrators of various kinds or embodied in settings and situations—all these turn out to be matters of considerable technical interest. No doubt there are plenty of bad novels of ideas, but if we want to understand what makes the good ones good, we need to reflect on these questions, rather than judging them by the standards of the Jamesian art novel. The kind of attention that our contributors bring to these questions is a model for future appreciations of the novel of ideas.

Second, with these new critical tools in place, the book offers a striking new account of the development of modern British fiction, with a different cast of characters. As we considered which writers might be covered by our book, we quickly realised that—despite the steady stream of critical opprobrium over the course of the twentieth century—the novel of ideas had stubbornly refused to go away. A venerable countertradition was hiding, and some of it in plain sight. There are novelists, covered in our book, who seem to have been neglected partly because they were novelists of ideas: Katherine Burdekin, Storm Jameson, and Naomi Mitchison, for example, all tend to include long passages of discursive political, historical, and philosophical argument, often in extended dialogues between characters. Our book gives them a new prominence, suggesting that their ingenious uses of ideas and arguments in their novels are a major asset and a key to their originality, rather than a failure of technique.

Some of the most canonical British novelists also wrote novels of ideas, which are also explored in our book. It would be hard to claim that George Eliot, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, or Zadie Smith have suffered critical neglect. Yet too often critics have treated their argumentative or discursive tendencies as a slightly embarrassing distraction, or tried to claim that their work is more psychologically realistic, or more modernist, than it at first appears. H.G. Wells could not have been more explicit about the fact that he was trying to create a trajectory for the modern novel that was discursive, dialogistic, and deeply invested in ideas: he fell out with Henry James over precisely this issue. While James and Leavis wished for a George Eliot with ‘less brain’, The British Novel of Ideas presents reappraisals of these writers that explicitly celebrate their commitment to the discursive presentation of ideas.

If this all sounds excessively serious, then it will perhaps be worth noting that we found in this process that the novel of ideas can also be a sublimely comic form. Irony is an essential technique in the repertoire of the novelist of ideas and can be used to undermine and subvert the most earnest of speeches. The novel of ideas remains a vital form because of the ways it can position intellectual arguments within a fictional milieu, whether realistic or fanciful. By putting ideas into the mouths of fictional characters, presumed to have bodies, prejudices, desires, and dependencies, the novel of ideas opens up rich possibilities for comedy and satire, as well as for philosophical and political reflection.

The British Novel of Ideas
by Rachel Potter and
Matthew Taunton