Should Essays Be in Novels?

In one sense, the 1960s wave of postmodern writing was about stripping things away. Could one write a novel without coherent plot? What about a book with no rounded characters? Is it possible to write a mystery without narrative resolution? Could one write the start of a novel without the ending? While this is obviously not the only impulse in that first generation of postmodern writing, it is a theme that ties together figures as diverse as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, and Gabrielle Garcia Marquez. All were conducting simultaneous experiments in writing stories without attributes that seemed key to writing stories. What, in the end, is the plot of Naked Lunch? Is the baroque mystery of The Crying of Lot 49 ever resolved? Is there any Vonnegut character who matters beyond the dialogue he utters? (As an experiment, try finding a great line in Slaughterhouse-Five and dropping it at random into the mouth of a character in Bluebeard. My money says that you won't notice the switch. This is not to insult Vonnegut, but rather to highlight what he is able to accomplish without the traditional mechanics of character.) This experiment in stripping away reached its logical endpoint with the Oulipo school: novels without the letter "e"; novels with only one scene; and, in Oulipo mainstay Italo Calvino's later work If On A Winter's Night a Traveller, a novel with only the first chapter.

If that generation of postmodernism was about stripping away, there is a more recent effort at altering the form of the novel, this one interested in crowding out. Take, for example, the novels of the late W. G. Sebald. In some respects, Austerlitz is postmodern in the 1960s sense--while there is some semblance of a plot, the plot is hardly the point; much of the novel seems to drift in the way a Paul Auster novel drifts. This plotlessness, however, is not the result of stripping away plot. Rather, the plot is crowded out by long expository passages on architectural history and the history of the Nazi ghetto system. At least to me, those are the memorable passages of the novel. Something similar takes place in the two novels thus far published by Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole. In Everyday Is for the Thief, long passages are given over to the architectural history of Lagos; in Open City, the most memorable passages come from digressions on art history and the spectacular closing set piece on the history of the Statue of Liberty.

What I would like to suggest is that these expository passages function something like essays and, to the extent that they are essays, the essay form is finding a home within the contemporary novel.

To be sure, there is at least one obvious difference between an essay embedded in an novel and an essay qua essay: The novel-embedded essay comes from the mouth of a fictionalized narrator. Do we know that such an essay presents true information? Why should we think that what Cole's narrator tells us about the history of the Statue of Liberty and ornithology is at all true? Why should we believe Sebald's version of Czech history when it is in the middle of a fictional work?

But, then, that experience of questioning is not terribly different from the essay as we have known it previously. When Annie Dillard tells us about her experience flying with a professional stunt pilot, we have questions about the fidelity of her recollections; we wonder if she can really remember such precise sensory details about an event so far in the past. Those questions are part of the aesthetic complexity of the essay form. Right back to Montaigne, the essay presents us with an interplay between the character of the author and the factual matter being recounted. It is at least arguable that this interplay is what makes an essay an essay in Montaigne's sense of the genre.

When a novel takes on the essay form, this complexity is heightened by a textual layer not overtly present in the traditional essay form: in Cole and Sebald we have 1) a seemingly nonfictional essay, 2) a fictional narrator, and 3) a real author. If we are being precise, those three levels also exist in any nonfictional text. In general, though, nonfiction ignores the middle level, while the novel foregrounds it. In a traditional essay we assume there is a true story recounted by a real writer. But of course in any act of writing there is a narrator--that is as true in a history textbook as in Mrs. Dalloway. However, we tend to ignore the fictionality (or, perhaps, "textuality" is the better word) of nonfictional narrators. We just see the text and the author. In a novel, the fictionality of the narrator is foregrounded, and thus another layer of textual and epistemological complexity is introduced.

If the chronology I laid out at the beginning of this essay is correct, these are early days for the novel-embedded essay; perhaps the aesthetics of foregrounding the essayistic narrator are still to be worked out. If the essay might develop further in the hands of novelists (and Cole's essay for The New Yorker on the    Charlie Hebdo shootings, "Unmournable Bodies," suggests it might), the novel might also benefit from the crowding out effect of embedded essays.