An Inappropriate, Indispensable Form
December 1, 2022 1:08 PM   Subscribe

Weakness, specifically literary weakness, is enlivening, challenging, and generally has the effect of compelling the reader to move, as we say, outside their comfort zone. Weak novels cause us to attend to fiction as strategy rather than as entertainment. from The Weak Novel by Lucy Ives
posted by chavenet (6 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Interesting article, I was pleased to see a couple of things I thought of early in the opening paragraphs later mentioned as examples, as it helped me feel I understood the concept.

I'm not sure why the word "weak" is chosen, however. Why is exploring the format of the novel a weak attribute? I dunno.

Anyway, I think Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler is probably the weakest novel ever written according to this thesis.
posted by hippybear at 1:31 PM on December 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


They do (briefly) explain what they mean by weak:


the quality of weak identification, or even total disidentification, with its own type or genre


It’s a little vague, but I think I see what they’re getting at. Let’s say we put all the novels ever into a giant circle, with anything at the centre 100%, unambiguously a novel, by anyone’s classification of a novel, and call those “strong novels” - weak novels would be the fuzzy penumbra of works that are novel-ish, or shade ambiguously into other categories, and are perhaps not even universally agreed upon to be novels at all.

How this idea is particularly useful vs. simply calling a thing experimental, or metafictional, or avant-garde, or an anti-novel, I am not sure.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 1:58 PM on December 1, 2022 [3 favorites]


This essay lost me a bit from the jump, in that I see relative formlessness a major aspect of the novel. Where the short story is a mechanical watch, in which all elements are more or less equally important, and timing is essential, the novel is a broad landscape with far more room for peregrination and linguistic experiments.

It's also strange to me in that the picaresque is the conventional ancestor of the modern novel. From the pícaro we derive Don Quixote, from Don Quixote we derive Huckleberry Finn and metafiction and god so infinitely much. If we disinherit the picaresque from the idea of a "true" novel, then I'm not even sure what a novel is. I'm with Zadie Smith in that it certainly shouldn't be limited to the genre rhythms of what she calls lyrical realism. The essay seems to assume that lyrical realism is the truest state of a novel, as opposed to a product of zeitgeist. This wasn't always the default format for a novel, though, and it won't always be the default form, forevermore.

Lengthy fiction evolves to whatever its audience and publisher needs to it to be. For instance, simply because authors no longer write to the demands of serial publication, that doesn't mean current market pressures aren't shaping the form of our default (or, in the essay's terms, "strong") novel just as much.
posted by desert outpost at 3:29 PM on December 1, 2022 [4 favorites]


She is talking about the critical reception of a novel.
posted by PinkMoose at 7:20 PM on December 1, 2022 [1 favorite]


Either the writer doesn't understand the word "weak" or is misusing it as a provocation. Either way, there's nothing here about meta-novels or anti-novels that hasn't been said many times before, and better.
posted by yinchiao at 10:24 PM on December 1, 2022 [2 favorites]


desert outpost: The essay seems to assume that lyrical realism is the truest state of a novel, as opposed to a product of zeitgeist. This wasn't always the default format for a novel, though, and it won't always be the default form, forevermore.

Thank you for that context, desert outpost. I was deeply confused by this essay before I read your comment. The idea that “lyrical realism” is somehow the “strong” form of the novel is pretty alien to me, but I suspect that if you’re steeped in creative writing academia in the English speaking world, that may seem natural. Having grown up reading in other traditions than the anglophone one, and not reading contemporary English language literary fiction very often, this thought would never have occurred to me.

What confused me so much is that she starts off discussing Sterne, and references Shklovsky, so I was prepared for a historical approach. Halfway through I thought maybe she was positing an ahistorical approach, centered on some idea of a books independence from its author, i.e. that a strong novel doesn’t need its author, while a weak novel is rooted in the person of its writer. Which I thought was an interesting dichotomy, before I realized that wasn’t what she was talking about at all. So I was lost again. Then I thought, okay, digressions from story are central to the concept, I guess… but then she named Victor Hugo, a writer for whom the concept of “unrelated to the central narrative” is as foreign as the moons of Neptune.

I don’t want to seem like I disliked the essay, because I found it very interesting, both in content and style. Where I landed, eventually, having read it again following the comment I quoted, was on the idea that “weak” and “strong” novels function a bit like Marshall McLuhan’s hot and cold media, that a weak novel will lead the reader to uncommon or unexpected thoughts, while a strong novel will do the thinking on readers’ behalves.

In any case, whether my interpretation is correct, it was fruitful for me to arrive at it, which makes this essay indeed “weak”, in the positive sense.
posted by Kattullus at 5:15 AM on December 2, 2022 [2 favorites]


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