There has been a recent discussion in The Brandeis Hoot about the downfall of the novel due to capitalism. To me, this seems like a surface-level argument. The novel chosen as the pinnacle of “pre-capitalist” peak literature in this debate is George Eliot’s 1871 novel “Middlemarch,” a novel that astute readers might point out was written and released at the end of the Victorian period, a time during which capitalism had already sunk its fangs deep into the anglophone world, as demonstrated by Mark Twain referring to the period in American history as the Gilded Age. So, is “Middlemarch” truly unaffected by capitalism? Probably not, but that is neither here nor there. 

The point being made about “Middlemarch” refers to Eliot’s use of multiperspectivism and how it is a tool that modern authors have lost the art of. But truly, you can only see this as an argument if you have only read genre fiction and popular literary fiction that has been published since 1871. Eliot was far from the first to shift from character to character in a chapter (or whatever section system an author uses in their novel). For instance, Jane Austen’s works heavily use this technique through free indirect speech. 

​​This brings me to the fact that this — and other forms of experimental or unorthodox literary techniques — has not died out, and there has been much progression in the novel as a form since the publication of “Middlemarch.” As a fan of mostly American literature, I must admit that I do tend to think that Victorian literature is held up on too high of a pedestal. Victorian literature feels like the time: heavily corseted, very tight and structured. Sure, there was experimentation, but it’s obvious why, once Queen Victoria died, modernism was quick to follow.

The stated goal of the modernists was to “make it new,” and that they did. This includes authors such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Knut Hamsun, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce, among many more. It is the last author, James Joyce — who is often considered the most important of the modernists — who took the novel to new heights. 

Eschewing conventional novel writing, Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece “Ulysses” changed the novel for the better. The novel is a retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey” and is told through three main perspectives, following in Eliot’s multiperspectivism. Although novels soon to come would overtake its claim, “Ulysses” is often considered one of the most difficult novels to read — spurring many guides on how to read the novel. There is even a Brandeis course solely dedicated to it — the only novel, to my knowledge, with this distinction. This is all to say that “Ulysses” makes “Middlemarch” look conventional.

I have been talking around what makes the novel more difficult and experimental than “Middlemarch.” To begin, the novel is heavily referential, leading it to be called an “encyclopedic novel” — a term which will be important soon. The novel is written in Joyce’s signature stream-of-consciousness style, which allows us into the thoughts of these characters.          

The last episode, generally given the title “Penelope” or “Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy,” takes this to the extreme; it is 45 pages containing only eight sentences. While not shifting perspectives throughout the episode — aside from shifting from Leopold Bloom’s perspective in the third person to Molly Bloom’s first person perspective — the episode shifts topics countless times, which, to most, is much more difficult to follow than shifting which character a third-person narrator is focalizing on.

While not as actively socialist as his peers, Joyce certainly is an author opposed to capitalism, and his work, contrary to the picture of the post-1800s writer presented in the argument, wasn’t written to make him rich. This is evident by his last novel, published in 1939, “Finnegans Wake.” The novel is almost universally considered the most difficult read to ever be written — and Joyce knew it. The novel is inspired by an Irish-American folk ballad, “Finnegan’s Wake,” about an Irish man, Tim Finnegan, who falls off of a ladder and dies. At his wake they place whiskey at his feet, the whiskey falls and Tim revives; this is because of a pun in the Irish language where the word whiskey comes from water of life. In the novel, Joyce uses this story to talk about various amounts of rising and falling, including but not limited to Adam and Eve and Humpty Dumpty. 

This, coupled with Joyce’s usual stream-of-consciousness style, would make a novel difficult in its own right, but the other important aspect of note is that, in opposition to “Ulysses” being the novel of the day, with the entire novel set in one day, “Finnegans Wake” is meant to be a novel of the night — specifically, dreaming. To accomplish this, inspired by the nonsense verse of Lewis Caroll, the novel is written in its own dialect made up of words from 60 to 70 different languages. The novel is also full of puns — a feature prominent in Joyce’s writing — and oftentimes “Finnegans Wake” involves pun-filled portmanteaus. The novel feels a lot closer to poetry than perhaps any other novel I’ve read. Words here are supposed to bring you along the river Liffey in a dreamlike manner; to read the novel is not to understand every reference made, but to let the novel flow over you like water. It should be no surprise that trying to read it closely takes a long time, one might remember the headline from 2023 announcing a book club finished the novel after 28 years. The novel demands attention, it demands close reading. 

While the capitalism that is being accused of ruining the novel is not necessarily the capitalism of Joyce’s day, it certainly is the capitalism Thomas Pynchon experienced. Like Joyce is the modernist who stands above the rest of the modernists, as does Pynchon stand as the king, or, as he would probably prefer, the jester of the postmodernists. It confounds me that there could be an argument about structure in literature in which it is claimed that the novel has gotten less experimental and more reader-friendly since the Victorian period, when the postmodernists and modernists were expressly deconstructing the exact structure that the Victorians maintained in the novel. 

This kind of deconstruction of narrative structure in Pynchon is first seen in his debut novel, “V.” While you can read the novel and not notice this, a close reading of it shows that at least half of it is narrated by the character Herbert Stencil, who, like Henry Adams before him, only refers to himself in the third person, and so the chapters he narrates can be read as just third person narration, but, in reality, Pynchon wrote these with Stencil narrating in first person.

However, the novel which I think is a perfect counter example to “Middlemarch” is Pynchon’s masterpiece, and perhaps the greatest novel ever written, “Gravity’s Rainbow.” The novel, which is impossible to describe as the description would always be excluding something, is what led to Edward Mendelson coining the term “Encyclopedic Novel.” It is a novel ostensibly about the development of the V-2 rocket at the end of World War II, but, as alluded to in Mendelson’s moniker for it, is about so much more. In a summary of Mendelson’s argument, the way Pynchon achieves the encyclopedic novel is not by truly including everything, but by alluding to a number of selective things that, through use of synecdoche, alludes to the world as a whole.  

I could write about the novel forever, so I will try to keep it brief, but the novel demands a lot of attention. There are around 400 characters in the novel, it switches perspective countless times, includes metafictional jokes and talks about a number of topics extensively: rocket science, the Herero Genocide, recipes for bananas and a whole lot more. While it was unanimously recommended by the Pulitzer Advisory Board for the prize, it was considered turgid and obscene, and no award was given that year. 

I bring up “Gravity’s Rainbow” because it is a novel written under capitalism which, just like “Middlemarch,” demands attention. Two years later, there was an even more damning novel against this argument, William Gaddis’ “J R.” 

“J R” is the second novel by postmodernist William Gaddis, released 20 years after his debut novel “The Recognitions” in 1975. Both “The Recognitions” and “J R” are written in Gaddis’ signature style which is made up of mostly unattributed dialogue. “J R” is a novel that is perhaps the greatest critique of capitalism ever written. It is about a school boy who, by trading penny stocks, gets rich. The novel has no chapters and like “Middlemarch,” the perspective shifts without much signaling. This has led to Gaddis being crowned “Mr. Difficult” by novelist Jonathan Franzen.  

But this begs the question: If these sorts of techniques being held up in “Middlemarch” are present in novels written over a century later, when did capitalism kill the novel? Certainly not in the 20s and 30s when Joyce was writing his masterpieces. Certainly not in the seventies when Pynchon and Gaddis were writing their masterpieces. Was it the 90s? I can’t imagine it to be the case. 1996 brought us every pompous reader’s favorite novel “Infinite Jest,” which also uses similar techniques and forces the reader to be engaged by its use of footnotes. Is it since Trump’s first term? Again, I think not. Lucy Ellmann’s great one-sentence novel “Ducks, Newburyport” was published in 2019 and, like the rest of these novels, forces the reader to pay attention by constantly shifting events and only referring to them through the narration of the unnamed narrator. The example given in this argument for a modern novel is “Six of Crows” by Leigh Bardugo. Why? This is comparing apples and oranges. Yes, genre fiction can push the boundaries of literature, hell, “Gravity’s Rainbow” was nominated for the Nebula Award which celebrates science fiction and fantasy. But even outside of that there are novels such as William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” or Samuel R. Delany’s “Dhalgren” that too have pushed the boundaries of literature — in the time of capitalism I might add — that are also genre fiction. However, to compare Eliot to Bardugo makes no sense; of course Bardugo’s style is going to be easier to read than Eliot’s, it’s meant for a wider audience, and while, yes, popularity doesn’t necessarily negate quality (see Steinbeck), it’s not a fair comparison. 

There are lots of novels being written and published today that are experimental, that do demand something from their readers, and to say otherwise is to show an ignorance to today’s literary scene. While it would probably be difficult for, say, Pynchon’s “V.” to be published by a Big Five publisher today, that doesn’t matter. There is a third option that was totally overlooked in the argument: indie publishers. Indie publications such as Deep Vellum or New Directions are where this brand of literary fiction is being published today. Authors such as recent Nobel Prize Laureate Laszlo Krasnahorkai or Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu aren’t being published by the Big Five, but are keeping this kind of literary fiction alive. So while capitalism has ruined a lot of things, it is not ruining literature. It is just an ignorance to where this literature is being published that is ruining the image of contemporary literature.