Jane Smiley, On the Structure of the Novel

00:08 [Jane Smiley] I think there's two ways to look at a novel. One is that it's entirely linear. That means that one word always follows another, and that comprehension or the sense of the ongoing narrative has to be linear. It's not like any other art form. Almost every other art form you can have

00:30 two things happening at once. You see that in a movie, where you're supposed to pay attention to the story line but also notice the way the shot is set up, what things are in the frame. There might be two people talking at once. There might be something happening in the foreground and something happening in the background that you're also to notice. But a novel can't be that way. It can only be linear, so you have to think of it as the most linear of the art forms. But another

01:00 way to think of it -- of the structure of the novel is a pyramid. This is a pyramid of the way the parts fit together. At the bottom of the pyramid is the language. You have to be able to be adept at the very most basic things about language like punctuation and grammar.

01:30 So the language is your tool, and it has various levels. One is a punctuation level, one is a grammar level, one is simply a word-richness, a richness of words level. And every writer has to have that. Every novelist has to have that. The next layer of the pyramid is story and character. Stories, in order to be interesting, have to have characters.

02:00 Characters, in order to be interesting, have to interact with the story. The character has to be able, has to -- most novels are built from the idea that something happens to a character. Either he does something and something happens to him as a result, or something happens to him and he reacts. As the character and the story, as the character and the plot interact,

02:30 the plot becomes unique to him or her, and the character becomes changed in specific ways by the action of the plot. And then, above that layer of the pyramid are setting and theme. Setting is the thing that makes any plot and characters specific. The reader instinctively knows this, that

03:00 The Odyssey can take place one way in Greece in 1200 B.C., but it would have to take place a slightly different way in Dublin in 1906. Setting makes the plot and the characters specific. The themes are the general things that the plot and the characters draw out of the setting, so that

03:30 if you're having trouble with your themes -- are they too namby-pamby? Are they too general? Are they too boring? -- then you dive more deeply into the setting. But if you're having trouble with the setting -- am I having a hard time figuring out what this means? -- then you ponder your themes more.  At the top of the pyramid, at the very top of the pyramid, is the thing that the novel offers,

04:00 in my view, almost uniquely among all the art forms, which is complexity. The fact that you can read some novels over and over and over and get a new feeling about them, new insights into the characters or insight into the plot or whatever, means that the complexity of many novels simply cannot be fathomed.

04:30 And that's why you can go back and read them over and over again. For people who love novels, that's the greatest pleasure of the novel. If you read Lolita, for example, if you read one of those texts of Lolita where all of the footnotes tell you what each of the possibly obscure references is, then that's an honoring

05:00 Nabokov's intense pleasure in complexity. And people who love Lolita love that thing about it, the complexity of it. It's not just a story about a man and a 14-year-old girl traveling around trying to escape the authorities. It also has a multitude of references both into itself and to other works.  As you become more and more

05:30 adept at reading novels and at writing novels, you get more and more interested in the complexity of the novel. That's why the novel has a hard time translating to film because a 2-hour film can kind of get through the plot, but it really can't give the reader or the viewer that sense of complexity that the reader

06:00 or viewer enjoys in a novel. We just read -- or we just watched, excuse me, Brideshead Revisited, which is probably the longest filming of a novel that I've ever seen, at any rate. It's wonderful to watch it, but it palls because it's too long. Because in an attempt to get at the complexity of the situation, the filmmaker is reduced to "Here they go, here they're walking here, here they're walking

06:30 here, here they're walking here." He can't make use of the complex layers that the novel just automatically makes use of. So there's this paradox. While I'm experiencing the novel as I'm reading it as purely linear, my mind is constructing it in a more spatial way, with inter -- with parts that fit into one another and interact with

07:00 one another. And I'm retaining in my mind the nature of this character, the look of this setting, the what's important about these people, and also how it is all expressed by the author. So I'm retaining all these things in my mind simultaneously, but I'm reading one word after another. So to me, that's one of the fascinating paradoxes of the novel,

07:30 that it is entirely linear and yet spatial at the same time.