Systems novels
Sep. 15th, 2011 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeThere is an article in the Globe and Mail on the death of the "systems novel", referencing another article in the Sydney Morning Herald. The classification is interesting, but I think a few points can be made:
First, Freeman's argument in the SMH is just wrong on the facts. The systems novel has not disappeared since 2001; in fact, one of the fullest examples would be Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, published from 2003 (Quicksilver) to 2004 (The System of the World).
Secondly, I have a question as to whether, from a standard critical point of view, many of these are novels at all.
It's been fairly clearly agreed for decades what the mainstream of the novel is: not as narrow as Leavis's Great Tradition, but similar to it: Richardson, Fielding, Austen, Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, James, (some of) Joyce, Woolf, etc.[1] The novel's main focus is on small-scale interpersonal relationships, and its focus is almost entirely social. There's been a little less agreement on the bounds of the prose romance, which is older than the novel (Arcadia is an example, and so is The Castle of Otranto) but I think there's a clear affinity of much genre fiction (SF and Westerns, especially) to the prose romance form: action and adventure, suspense, and a focus on plotting around events are characteristic of the romance, in verse or prose. (Most modern "genre romances" are, on this classification, actually novels, just to confuse things, although they have an ancestry in the Gothic Romace by way of Jane Eyre.)
The "systems novel" has affinities with both (depending on the instance cited -- Stephenson differs from Pynchon, and both from David Foster Wallace) but it's not clear that in any normal sense these are "novels" or "romances". This accounts for part of the number of readers who give up on them in frustration. The reader with novelistic expectations may find some social and interpersonal relationships -- there's a definite influence of the roman-fleuve, from Proust through Powell -- but these aren't the main focus of the work. On the other hand, although they include (frequently) events and plot lines which on the surface fit into the model of the romance (war! piracy! symbolic death and rebirth!) the reader who comes to them expecting plot-based excitement will grind to a halt while expansive digressions take over (one set of ancestors for the form runs through Burton's Anatomy, Swift, and Sterne).
One reason they tend to be rare is that they're hard to write well. They require a polymath author with an engaging prose style (if you're going to hold people's attention through that sort of discursive tour, modelling yourself on Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis is Right Out) and usually a keen sense of the satiric. The advent of the Web has helped a bit -- research has become a shade easier.
Here's a test of the thesis. On September 20, Neal Stephenson's Reamde (review by Cory Doctorow) is being released. At 1056 pages, I'm betting that, as well as being a "techothriller", it also fits the criteria for a "Systems novel". (And near-future SF to boot, at least if you count Cryptonomicon, This is Not A Game, and Halting State as SF.)
[1] Yes, I'm aware of recent attempts to push the origin and classification back well beyond Fielding, and notably to include The Tale of Genji; and that there is also the well-defined classification of the Greek Novel. However, the age (or cross-cultural breadth) of the novel as a form seems to me to be of less import than its essential characteristics and issues regarding influence.
First, Freeman's argument in the SMH is just wrong on the facts. The systems novel has not disappeared since 2001; in fact, one of the fullest examples would be Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, published from 2003 (Quicksilver) to 2004 (The System of the World).
Secondly, I have a question as to whether, from a standard critical point of view, many of these are novels at all.
It's been fairly clearly agreed for decades what the mainstream of the novel is: not as narrow as Leavis's Great Tradition, but similar to it: Richardson, Fielding, Austen, Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, James, (some of) Joyce, Woolf, etc.[1] The novel's main focus is on small-scale interpersonal relationships, and its focus is almost entirely social. There's been a little less agreement on the bounds of the prose romance, which is older than the novel (Arcadia is an example, and so is The Castle of Otranto) but I think there's a clear affinity of much genre fiction (SF and Westerns, especially) to the prose romance form: action and adventure, suspense, and a focus on plotting around events are characteristic of the romance, in verse or prose. (Most modern "genre romances" are, on this classification, actually novels, just to confuse things, although they have an ancestry in the Gothic Romace by way of Jane Eyre.)
The "systems novel" has affinities with both (depending on the instance cited -- Stephenson differs from Pynchon, and both from David Foster Wallace) but it's not clear that in any normal sense these are "novels" or "romances". This accounts for part of the number of readers who give up on them in frustration. The reader with novelistic expectations may find some social and interpersonal relationships -- there's a definite influence of the roman-fleuve, from Proust through Powell -- but these aren't the main focus of the work. On the other hand, although they include (frequently) events and plot lines which on the surface fit into the model of the romance (war! piracy! symbolic death and rebirth!) the reader who comes to them expecting plot-based excitement will grind to a halt while expansive digressions take over (one set of ancestors for the form runs through Burton's Anatomy, Swift, and Sterne).
One reason they tend to be rare is that they're hard to write well. They require a polymath author with an engaging prose style (if you're going to hold people's attention through that sort of discursive tour, modelling yourself on Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis is Right Out) and usually a keen sense of the satiric. The advent of the Web has helped a bit -- research has become a shade easier.
Here's a test of the thesis. On September 20, Neal Stephenson's Reamde (review by Cory Doctorow) is being released. At 1056 pages, I'm betting that, as well as being a "techothriller", it also fits the criteria for a "Systems novel". (And near-future SF to boot, at least if you count Cryptonomicon, This is Not A Game, and Halting State as SF.)
[1] Yes, I'm aware of recent attempts to push the origin and classification back well beyond Fielding, and notably to include The Tale of Genji; and that there is also the well-defined classification of the Greek Novel. However, the age (or cross-cultural breadth) of the novel as a form seems to me to be of less import than its essential characteristics and issues regarding influence.
