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The big, often very uncomfortable, ideas run rampant in those disquieting
categories, “minority” and “postcolonial” fiction. That’s nearly inevitable. How
can a novel by an African American or African Caribbean writer not take stock
of the legacy of slavery and racist mistreatment? How can an African or Indian
novel, or any other from a former outpost of empire, not speak to, among other
things, the experience of oppression or the chaos that so often follows when the
oppressor withdraws? Chinua Achebe has a famous essay of complaint against
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, itself a pretty dense little novella of ideas,
but his better rejoinders are his fiction from Things Fall Apart forward. The
essay states his ideas; the novels embody them. History, as I suggest elsewhere,
is the one inescapable fact. Stephen Dedalus’s “History is the nightmare from
which I’m trying to awake,” is merely a sign of his callowness. Writers as
outwardly different as Salman Rushdie, R. K. Narayan, Kiran Desai, Caryl
Phillips, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, and Edward P. Jones have
in common the making of fiction filled with ideas in response to what history has
handed them. Jones shocked readers of all races with his novel of black slave￾owners, The Known World (2003), but that material ironically freed him to talk
about issues of race, privilege, class, and right and wrong in ways that a
conventional white-black slavery tale might not have. So, too, with Phillips,
whose Cambridge (1991) is an astonishing experiment in voice, bringing
together a nineteenth-century English woman sent to the West Indies to look
over her father’s sugar plantation and the slave, freed and eventually resold into
bondage, whose name gives the novel its title.
What matters most, perhaps, in all these novels, and what makes the novel
matter as a place for ideas, is the ability to bring broad ranges of experience
down to the individual level. Groups don’t lead lives; persons do. Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children isn’t the story of “India” gaining independence; it’s the story
of Saleem Sinai, one person, the family into which he is born, his experiences as
an individual in an emerging nation. It is through him that the collective can be
expressed.
Right there is the genius of the novel form. It is the perfect medium for
capturing individual existence, and in turn to be a near-perfect medium for
capturing the experience of the group. The life of the ordinary person—right
there is a big idea, the first one the novel ever had. The earlier literary forms
were highly elitist. Tragedy and epic are both about the ruling class, although for
rather different reasons. Comedy often had lesser nobility for characters; I can’t
speak for you, but my ancestors would show up in Shakespeare, if at all, as the
grave diggers and comic servants, the entirely expendable class whose stage time
is counted in seconds. Even the lyric was intended for the leisured classes
capable of reading—it had shepherds in it but wasn’t for (or even about) real
shepherds. No, if your surname indicated the work you did or where you did it—
Miller, Cooper, Smith, Farrier, Forester or Forster or Foster—you were excluded
from the old literature. Then this new form comes along, catering to an emerging
middle class and often about its members, and it’s capacious enough that there
might be room in there for someone who actually works for a living. It’s still
better to own things than do things, but it’s a start. No accident about it, though:
the rise of the novel coincides with the rise of a middle class, and of liberty, and
of democracy. This is a form in which ordinary people just might matter. But it’s
not about a class, only about individual members thereof. In fact, it’s the first
form in the history of Western civilization to suggest that a single person might
actually matter in the grand scheme even if that person doesn’t wear a crown.
What a concept!
You doubt? What do these people have in common: Tom Jones, Clarissa,
Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, George Babbitt, Augie March, Bridget Jones, Emma,
Silas Lapham, Don Quixote? Eponymous characters all; that is, they give their
names to the titles of novels in which they play starring roles. When did that
happen before? Oedipus? Hamlet? King Lear, for crying out loud? If you wanted
a title on the stage, you needed royal blood. The novel, on the other hand, goes
for red blood rather than blue. This constitutes a huge change not only in
literature but in the history of ideas. This chapter seems to suggest that the
twentieth century has a lock on idea-centered fiction, which is too bad. Ideas,
and important ones, have been invigorating fiction since its beginning, and one
idea above all others. Sure, Thomas Hardy’s cosmic doubt or Dostoevsky’s
investigations of man and God or of crime and punishment are indubitably
philosophical, but so is Henry Fielding’s comic narrative of the foundling Tom
Jones and his attempt to find his place in the world. And so is Dashiell
Hammett’s mystery with a detective named Spade, digging, maybe reluctantly,
for the truth.