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...