An Essay on Innovation

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Rudolf Arnheim tells of the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz gazing at one of Juan Gris's cubist pictures, one "in which the layman discovers little but an agglomeration of building material." Lipchitz exclaims to the artist, "'This is beautiful! Do not touch it any more! It is complete.'" Gris, "flying into a rage," shouts, "'Complete? Don't you see that I have not finished the moustache yet?'" Arnheim makes the "point": "To [Gris] the picture evidently contained the image of a man so clearly that he expected everyone to see it immediately in all its detail" (117-18).

Originality, invention, the "new"—what I call innovation in this book—imply the discovery of a form perfectly expressive of some new way of seeing the world. In the novel, as in painting, the task is to find "the exact equivalent of the objects," although such a prescription raises more questions than it answers. One kind of innovation, then, is "the unsought and unnoticed product of a gifted artist's successful attempt to be honest and truthful" (Arnheim, 117), although this may be the serene view of the matter, and the novelist's insight is as often misperceived as Gris's moustache. Often—innovation not being a single activity or kind of product—only the occasion for a new structure comes upon the writer unsought, and it provokes an almost frantic attempt to break out of tried and reassuring methods of composition into new territory. The innovative "moment" may be anything but tranquil, as Irving Howe, speaking of Daniel Deronda, implies: "Toward the end of their careers, great writers are sometimes roused to a new energy by thoughts of risk. Some final stab at an area of human experience they had neglected or at a theme only recently become urgent: this excites their imagination" (Howe, vii). Over several years of thinking about the development of the novel, I noticed that a number of texts, especially those written late in novelists' careers, exhibit this kind of "urgency," a sense of too much to say in too short a time, and I began to wonder whether these final novels might not compose a distinct group.

It is clear, of course, that the accidental fact of a novel being an author's last is not necessarily crucial, although it might be interesting. With many authors, the career begins with innovations that are then refined or even "spent" along the way, only to be reestablished later; in the case of Ernest Hemingway, for example, after the misadventure of To Have and Have Not. I eventually came to see that Daniel Defoe, Oliver Goldsmith, Jane Austen, and George Eliot were all infected late in their careers with a similar strong desire to break new ground. Hemingway's crisis was earlier in his life, but it might form a useful contrast, especially since the urgency in his case was forced upon him. It certainly seems to be as fretful a "site" of innovation as any of the others, and it has the added virtue of allowing me to talk about what happens after the "crisis" has passed. I also came to see that the anxiety I found in these books was probably owing to a desire to do something completely new, something that had to be done. Might it be possible to construct a "poetics" of urgent innovation, or innovative urgency? Or, since authors, despite numerous attempts to banish them from the text, seem to be an important part of the process, was what I needed more like a "rhetoric" or a "philosophy" of innovation?

Before I could even begin to sort through these projects, however, I had to address some preliminary problems. I needed to see whether I could locate a site of inquiry, at a time when "author" and even "reader" are questionable doctrines. Jan Mukarovsky offers a plausible direction: "Experimental aesthetics, as founded by Fechner, began with the axiom that there exist universally necessary conditions for the existence of beauty, and that to ascertain them it is sufficient to isolate, through a number of experiments, the chance deviations of individual taste. As we know, further development forced experimental aesthetics to respect the changeability of norms and to take into account their bases" (24). Where, after all, does a new literary structure take place? Since the disappearance of the author as a valid consideration in postmodernist criticism and the demotion of the text (in the work of critics who still believe in the existence of texts) to the status of historical repository, where was I to look at innovation, unless I was willing to assume that it is a product of changing readers—always a possibility—or resides in the mind of God?

Second, did I too quickly dismiss the fact that Roxana, The Vicar of Wakefield, Persuasion, and Daniel Deronda are all "last novels"? In the simple sense, no. Usually a novelist, like a plumber, a painter, or a dealer in junk bonds, is unaware that the present task, which looks like all the others, is really the last. Of the authors I ended up studying, only Jane Austen may have been fighting against time, although Eliot was not in good health in the mid-1870s. Defoe went on to write much more, although nothing that took him past what he discovered in Roxana. Vicar is Goldsmith's only novel, and his further attempts at comedy, in drama, did not push his experiment further. Hemingway was barely into the middle of his career when he wrote To Have and Have Not, and although it is a kind of ignis fatuus, it still lit the path back to his earlier success. The question of a terminal work would not go away (perhaps pointing up how problematic the notion of "last" might be). I noticed, for example, that Roxana, Persuasion, and Deronda are, of each writer's works, the least discussed in the critical literature and, a more subjective judgment, the most "difficult," spawning a large number of readings and exhibiting a wider span of disagreement. There is something about them that puzzles critics and puts them off. Each, for example, has been called incoherent, a common verdict on Goldsmith's pastoral comedy and Hemingway's "proletarian" novel as well. If critics habitually read these novels through the lens of the earlier careers, whence the distortion—from the works themselves, the careers, or the critics?

What I came to see, to jump ahead, was that these works all invite "misreading" because the early careers of each novelist school readers to expect an angle of vision that was no longer acceptable to the author. When momentous personal change occurs, what often happens is that the way one sees changes drastically. Whatever metaphor one selects—framework, perspective, or vision—what changes is the way the outside world is related to consciousness. Urgent innovation comes about because one is suddenly seeing not just with new glasses but with new eyes as well.

When I began to wonder about how new novelistic forms originate, I thought I already possessed a number of explanations, and my debt to the many writers on novelty, especially in regard to the concept of genius, with which it is often allied, can be traced in the Notes. The first explanation is that innovation just happens and there is no way to say how. It is countergeneric and essentially ahistorical, which is why, in T. S. Eliot's view, the truly new work always changes previous ones, modifies the entire map of the literarily "possible," an idea to which I return more than once in this book. Since there can be no science—not even at the level of probability of a poetics—of the accidental, or of the unique (a "truth" some social sciences have been foundering on from the beginning), I was determined to ignore this possibility even if it seemed likely. If Croce is right and all works represent unique intuitions, then the best one can do is to set about compiling an "atomistic" history. Another direction to explore, somewhat uncomfortably close to the unacceptable one, is that new forms usually occur at the beginning of careers and represent the uncharted territory of an accidental discovery that takes already developed materials and subjects them to a new kind of energy. One might, therefore, compose separate anatomies of innovative situations but never explain them. One of the reasons critics like Ian Watt insist upon seeing Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as entirely new, even though its formal features recall an older tradition, is that Crusoe is so incomparably more developed than his literary predecessors such as Selkirk, springing wondrously unexpected from Defoe's sixty-year-old mind (Watt 1957). Yet this ignores literary history: to the extent that Defoe's first "novel" is new, it is because he perfected what dozens of pseudohistorians before him had done. About this sort of innovation I have little to add, except to suggest what pressures to innovate might have come to influence a Defoe, writing at the end of a narrative tradition that makes a virtue of lying like the truth.

Another possibility is that new forms evolve. A novelist trudges along, finally arriving at the innovation, which then emerges as a fitting, "logical" culmination to a series of small refinements. This "genetic" model implies a number of assumptions with which I quickly became uncomfortable. First, I had long before concluded that no sum of parts, new or old, enabled me to explain whole structures. As Samuel Johnson reminds us, "Pound St. Paul's church into atoms, and consider any single atom; it is, to be sure, good for nothing: but, put all these atoms together, and you have St. Paul's Church" (Boswell, 1:440). Johnson is talking about "felicity," but his point applies as well to comedies, for example, which are commodious enough as wholes to tolerate a great deal of pain, even to make misery contribute to risibility; and to some tragedies, which may have notoriously laughable but fully functional elements.

An additional problem is that there seems no way to "pin" technique to innovation, to argue that this or that new way of telling a story had to come about because of, say, the evolution or invention of a new subject matter. For example, while Samuel Beckett's novels seem entirely new, and it is possible to argue that the particular point of view in a certain novel is appropriate, it is quite another thing to say it couldn't have been done differently. Artists of all sorts frequently devise techniques to enable them to meet one task, only to find their invention inappropriate to the very different requirements of the next one. Indeed, what works brilliantly in one novel frequently serves as a drag on a subsequent one. When I read Norman Mailer's Executioners Song, I was struck with how "right" the lifeless, flat style is as a mirror of Gary Gilmore's life. Then Mailer wrote Ancient Evenings and I realized that either he was the benefactor of a happy accident in the earlier novel, and the style became inappropriately habitual, or he mistakenly judged it suitable for a novel requiring a different technique.

Nor does it seem logical to assume that the precise configuration of an innovative structure is in any simple way invariably expressive of a shift in the author's ideology. It does not follow that because George Eliot's last novel is much more strikingly bifurcated than her earlier ones, she at some point between Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda became a Hegelian, any more than Faulkner's four parts of The Sound and the Fury suggest that he was a pre-Chicago Aristotelian.

So far, these two general possibilities have centered on authors. It is worth considering that authors are really the Muses' amanuenses, responding to unseen but powerful "laws" of development that have nothing to do with their own beliefs and intentions. There are a number of possibilities. Defoe's Roxana might be the inscription of latent generic laws not activated by the earlier fictions. For the new work to be "born" is for it to be a product of genetics, but also, by definition, to be like what came before—Plato's problem of naming and identity, of recognizing the many that issue from the one. The marked difference-within-similarity of Roxana, as compared with the earlier narratives, is that its episodes begin to take on a causal relationship—begin, that is, to resemble a progressive novelistic structure. Perhaps some generic rule involving narrative linkage provides for the eventual emergence of a "tighter" arrangement, prepared for in some mysterious way by stories based on merely additive patterns, such as Moll Flanders. Perhaps there is a similar law for subject matter, so that any novelist working her way through the possibilities of romantic comedy, like Jane Austen, must inevitably arrive at a permutation that begins to question the role of marriage as fulfillment, and something like Persuasion emerges.

This genetic model differs from my previous one, for it removes the author as an agent, except in the trivial sense of being the proximate cause of the new form. While some of my best friends are authors, this subtraction of the sentient being from the process might have to be endured, and it does seem to fit right in with some current trends in theory. Even so, the important question about the genetic model is not whether it is politically acceptable but rather whether a view of the author as a mere fixture, through which language flows, is tenable logically, historically—I stop short of "really."

This study highlights a number of narrative innovations that do not quite "work." Even so, my emphasis on the disjunctive features of these texts should not be taken to mean that I despair of narrative unity, much less that I accept any sort of radical linguistic determinacy. My assumptions in this regard are shamelessly timid: I do not see the necessity to adopt the all-or-nothing linguistic position of the Derrideans, but I do not think that radical innovations often achieve the kind of unity the New Critics liked to think they perceived. Language "works," but not because it is "grounded," and one therefore does not need to resort to a discredited logocentric model to bring the author back into serious consideration as a site of the creative process. One need only assume, as M. H. Abrams does, that what Jacques Derrida "can be said to reveal"—almost, as it were, against his own skepticism about the stability of language— "is that the communicative efficacy of language rests on no other or better ground than that both writers and readers tacitly accept and apply the regularities and limits of an inherited social and linguistic contract" (312). Like so many of our most recently erected linguistic and poetic "first principles," the infinite unreliability of language, its unmooring from intention and control—and the resultant "death of the author" announced by Barthes—remain theoretical constructs not only unproven but also self-refuting, in theory and in practice. In theory, if we could not make ourselves understood, if our "agency" as authors were a chimera, the principle of indeterminacy would itself befuddle us. In practice, authors speak to readers and are, imperfectly but successfully, understood.

The problem with the full genetic model, then, is that it does not work. If it did, all authors who submit themselves to the laws of genre—which means all authors—would be innovators. They would at least exhibit some sort of development explainable by reference to generic principles; and that is not the case. For example, since some of the principles of modernist story telling have attained almost the status of dogma—impersonality, internality, attenuated closure, complex and multiple time schemes and points of view, relativity—one might expect that one development from such practices would be reactive novels embodying a new sense of the value of, say, the unironic happy ending. Yet there seems to be no such law of genre at work, at least not in "serious" fiction. While plenty of authors rebel at the constraints of modernist fabulation—Ken Kesey was one, even though he used many familiar techniques—within the career of a writer like Bernard Malamud, it is difficult to see conventions being overturned by strictly generic pressures. One specific feature of Malamud's fiction, the attenuated closure, the muting of expectations, which is fully expressive of his thought (as it is of so many modern novelists), appears again and again. Genre, which has a perplexing relationship with ideology, is habitual, sometimes irresistibly so. Once an author develops a favorite way of representing reality, what principle of story telling demands that it be abandoned for something else?

History, Innovation, Ideology, and Authorship

"Anthropology," Pierre Macherey contends, "is merely an impoverished and inverted theology: in place of the god-man is installed Man." The idea of writer or artist as "a creator belongs to a humanist ideology" in which "man is released from his function in an order external to himself, restored to his so-called powers" (66). Macherey objects, of course, to this "profoundly reactionary" ideology. Yet, in regard to innovation, the idea of "the author" is indispensable—the idea would have to be invented if authors did not exist to be the uncertain repositories of subjectivity—because innovation, unlike the laws of production Macherey wishes to substitute for the uneven workings of volition, is neither predictable nor the expression of some "force" apart from the author. As one of the best writers on innovation—an anthropologist—H. G. Barnett notes, "It is ... often said that an invention is the expression of a need. This statement can have no meaning when it is applied to the abstraction called culture, for a culture never needed anything" (15). The general problem with theories of innovation that attempt to make it "one thing"—a function of history, for example—is that they must presume the existence of relationships of causality. "But," Albert Rothenberg reminds us, "if creations are truly unheralded and new, they are intrinsically unexpected and therefore unpredictable. More important, if there is real discontinuity in the creator's thought during the creative process, we can never predict the occurrence of creative ideas" (336). Melvin New suggests that "housing authority in an author or a text may not be linguistically feasible or justifiable, but, as Burke warned us two hundred years ago, there are modes of falsehood truer than truth" (10).