Gazing Into the ‘Secret Center’ of the Novel

Posted on Apr 28, 2011

By Cherilyn Parsons

(Page 2)

Tolstoy’s meaning, Pamuk’s ‘center’

Open the novel, and what happens? We “follow the narrative”—the story—but also, Pamuk says, we “try to figure out the meaning and main idea that are suggested by the things we encounter.” Especially if there’s no strong plotline, why do we keep scrambling among the thousands of details? Pamuk argues that we’re trying to connect the dots to discern the meaning that lies beneath the story’s surface. He likens the reader to “the hunter who treats each leaf and each broken branch as a sign and examines them closely as he progresses through the landscape. We move forward sensing that each new word, object, character, protagonist, conversation, description, and detail, all of the linguistic and stylistic qualities of the novel and the twists of its narrative, imply and point to something other than what is immediately apparent.”

This “something” is what he calls “the center,” a mystical-sounding idea that lies at the heart of his theory of the novel. The center is a particular novel’s “profound opinion or insight about life, a deeply embedded point of mystery, whether real or imagined.” We read, he says, in a state of constantly, even anxiously, seeking “a fragment of knowledge, an intuition, a clue about the deepest thing—in other words, the center, or what Tolstoy would call the meaning of life (or however we refer to it), that difficult-to-reach place we optimistically think exists.”

Does it exist? “The act of reading a novel,” he says, “is the effort to believe that the world actually does have a center, and this takes all the confidence one can muster. The great literary novels—such as Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain, and The Waves—are indispensible to us because they create the hope and the vivid illusion that the world has a center and a meaning, and because they give us joy by sustaining this impression as we turn their pages.”

At least this is the case for literary novels. With some exceptions, genre novels don’t inspire this search. They keep people reading through plot elements and suspense. They give us “the peace and security” of familiarity, which does have its value: We aren’t “drained by the constant effort,” as in literary novels, “of asking basic questions about the meaning of life.” 

A whale is a whale is a ... goon

Pamuk’s main example of a “center” is overused (I recall it from high school CliffNotes), but it does illustrate. You know what I’m going to ask: Is “Moby-Dick” really about a whale? At first, “Moby-Dick” seems to be about the tough life of whale hunters; after all, the narrative has gone into great detail about whaling. Then, as the novel delves into Captain Ahab’s madness, the book becomes about the psyche of obsession. Finally (Pamuk quotes Jorge Luis Borges, writing on Melville): “Page by page, the story grows until it takes on the dimensions of the cosmos.”

Interestingly, he says that what makes a novel especially deep and brilliant is a great distance between the surface story and its center. If the center is too obvious, the act of reading is boring. In “Moby-Dick,” the reader can “constantly feel the presence of the center” but for a long time has no idea of what it is. We “constantly ask where it might be, constantly change our mind as to the answer.” The best novels are constructed in both content and form “as an enigma—a puzzle whose solution reveals the novel’s center.”

The goal is for the reader to “have to search for and imagine the center in every sentence and every paragraph, in order to understand what is important and what is not.”

A subtle way that fiction accomplishes this is by “talking about important things as if they were irrelevant, and about unimportant things as if they were relevant.” (Don’t try that at work.)

This description is confusing, but I began to consider it while I was reading Jennifer Egan’s new novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” the latest Pulitzer and National Book Award winner for fiction. “Goon Squad” is a series of stories that are linked often just by one character who appears in an earlier stories. The surface voices (each chapter has a different narrator) are watertight, sometimes glib or seeming to ramble, engaged in the stuff of life and never overtly profound. The stories are set in or around the music business. What this book is really about: time, loss, and the way life goes so fast and is gone.

As I started reading “Goon Squad,” I was wondering what the bizarre title meant. About a third of the way through, and only once, Egan tipped her hand. I’m talking about two lines of dialogue in a 273-page novel. A washed-up guitarist, talking about how now, 20 years later, he’s a mess, says, “Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?” Another character repeats it, saying he’s never heard that phrase. That’s it, but it’s a direct clue to the book’s center. To an attentive reader, it leaps out. Rather than losing curiosity, though, I was jolted into a new level of reading the novel. Egan didn’t elaborate at all, so I was more intrigued than before. How was this novel about time? I’m not really interested in the music business, and the characters weren’t particularly likable. But I sure was keen to puzzle out the meaning in these linked stories.

 

New and Improved Comments

If you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page. Still having problems? Let us know. If you find yourself moderated, take a moment to review our comment policy.