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QUICK: FRANKENSTEIN. GOOFY MOVIE about a guy with elevator shoes and bolts in his neck, right?
Well, there is a monster in there. But Mary Shelley’s novel is really an expression of romantic philosophy
and a treatise about the limits of science. Had she lived at the point in history where we had nuclear power
or genetically modified foods or embryonic stem cell research or any of those other things that have been
identified over the years as “our Frankenstein’s monster,” she might have written about them. She, however,
had the great good fortune to come along at a time when medical schools were examining the bodies of the
recently dead and entrepreneurs were gleefully digging up specimens for the doctors’ uses.
There’s a popular myth that English professors are all frustrated novelists,
but a more interesting question is, are novelists all frustrated philosophers?
Okay, maybe not Harold Robbins. But the others. The Alexandria Quartet isn’t,
as my students think, merely about kinky sex. Lawrence Durrell calls his four￾decker book a “novel of relativity,” although I think it owes as much to
Heisenberg as to Einstein. Kinky sex probably doesn’t hurt. And then there are
Nietzsche and Bergson, who are everywhere in modern fiction.
Or maybe the adjective is incorrect. Maybe the novelist as philosopher isn’t
all that frustrated. The novels of Saul Bellow, John Fowles, and Iris Murdoch are
more accessible, certainly more entertaining, primers and critiques of
existentialism than, say, Being and Nothingness. And way more fun to read.
There’s a great passage in The French Lieutenant’s Woman where Fowles has his
narrator say of Charles, as he is forced to make a difficult choice, “He had not
the benefit of existentialist terminology; but what he felt was really a very clear
case of the anxiety of freedom—that is, the realization that one is free and the
realization that being free is a situation of terror.” The passage is typical of the
novel, the idea of all of his novels. Fowles has great fun in his “Victorian” novel
with counterpoising the mores and crisis of the era with those of his own, finding
not, as we might expect, that the Victorians were particularly quaint or
hypocritical but rather that their predicaments very much mirror our own, circa
1967, the year of the novel’s composition. Their anxiety over the new threat to
religious certainty posed by Darwin nicely anticipates, for Fowles, the anxiety
over existence as articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Their
“piety” becomes our “authenticity,” their “hell” our “nothingness.” The
questions with which Charles Smithson, gentleman of 1867, must wrestle—duty,
honor, dignity, purpose, honesty—still resonate with the modern person, even if
the outward trappings have changed.
Fowles wasn’t just guessing that they would resonate, of course. He had
already taken them for a test drive three years earlier in The Magus, where they
were a smashing success. The two books are full of surface differences, but at
heart they ask the same questions. Nicholas Urfe’s dilemmas are very much
those of Charles Smithson, updated: How do I conduct my life? Is it meaningful?
Am I being honest? What gives it meaning? Those big, existentialist terms like
anxiety, absurdity, nothingness, and authenticity are in many ways the age-old
issues. What gives a human life value? If the person experiences a separation
from God, where, then, does meaning reside? Of what, if anything, can we be
certain, and how do we live with uncertainty? How can we keep death from
negating the worth of our lives? The difference between the two Fowlesian
protagonists is that unlike Charles, Nicholas knows the terminology and even
hides behind it. Yet his protective coloration cannot save him from the genuine
issues. That he discovers the need to confront them through an elaborate fiction
—the godgame, as it is called in the novel—merely announces the parallel for
readers, who engage ethical problems and questions through their encounters
with fictional texts. We may sit down to read story, but we stand up from the
novel having wrestled with issues of personal conduct and moral behavior.
And therein lies a key to ideas in fiction. If the books are to be any good, the
story and its telling must work in the first instance. Who’s the kingpin of idea￾oriented fiction? There are probably numerous candidates, but my vote goes to
George Orwell. His big two, 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945), are in their
separate ways Big Idea novels, the former a futurist cautionary tale and the latter
a barnyard fable Aesop never thought of. The thrust of both is the encroachment
of the state against individual autonomy—revolutions gone wrong, principles
turned inside out in the slide toward totalitarianism, obsession with enemies
turning all citizens into enemies. Nothing wrong there. Ample instances in the
twentieth century, and Orwell didn’t even know about Mao’s Cultural
Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, or genocide in Rwanda or Bosnia. But here’s the
thing: none of that makes a good novel. Absolutely none. What makes a good
novel, and these two are more than good, is plot, character, language, narrative:
in a word, story. Immanuel Kant had wonderful, amazing ideas, but that didn’t
make him a novelist. Jonathan Swift, on the other hand, had some pretty fair
ideas, and in Gulliver’s Travels he set them in a sufficiently compelling story to
keep people reading.