Some Words

There will now be a short break from what I had thought would be the next bit about the novella, as I address the five points Colin posted in the comment thread of the previous post. I responded briefly in the comments, but have decided to go into more detail.

“1. I read quickly.”

Well wow, all of us who read slowly, and take a while to work through a long novel are duly shamed by your ability to out pace us. I am trying to say that authors should be careful to only write long novels when there is no other way to write what they want to write about. But I’ve been put in my place, I just don’t read fast enough. It’s a character flaw.

“2. Modernism.”

What the fuck?! No, seriously. What the fuck kind of argument is that? Are you saying that modernism justifies length? Are you trying to say that modernist novels need to be long? Is the word meant to stand alone as some sort of modernist statement? I don’t know, because that isn’t an argument. It’s a word, totally removed from the context that would normaly grant it meaning.

“3. The Great Gatsby is overrated and trite.”

I don’t care how highly rated Gatsby is. That has no bearing on my argument that it does exactly what it means to do, and does so quickly. And further, just to take a moment to defend the novel, part the reason people think it is trite is due to the heavy use of its material by other storytellers.

“4. But there are some world-changing novellas out there.”

Fine.

“5. Supreme arrogance is not an undesirable trait in an artist. See Joyce, Warhol, Milton, Davis.”

I might not have been clear enough in saying that I don’t hold all long novels in contempt, I find many of them frustratingly over long. Underworld was used as an example. Editing could trim many long novels down. I implied that there was an arrogance to writing long novels, and arrogance is indeed often justified. Only two of those artists you mentioned were writers, so it’s harder to work them in. Though Miles Davis and Andy Warhol did produce works that were abnormally large for the format they worked in, neither Warhol’s art movies nor Davis’s later fusion era works (some droning in at over 45 minutes) claim as much of your time as an 800+ page novel will.

Joyce wrote several very long works. I’ll be honest. I haven’t read them yet, though I will probably be tackling Ulysses later this year. Does Joyce, or for that matter many of the Russian novelists, have material that justified the comparatively enormous size of their individual works? Maybe. The reader must decide on a case by case basis.

The argument that I’m working toward, and will be fleshing out in later posts, is that an author should be very careful to only write long novels when the ability to express their intent is compromised by shorter forms. I used Underworld as an example because I feel that it would have been better released as a series of short stories, possibly over the course of multiple collections. The effect of mashing all the stories in Underworld together, I feel, ultimately subverts what is good in the stories it contains.