The function of geographical descriptions—naming of counties, rivers, and so forth—and social topography is to make the reader feel comfortable in the vehicle he has boarded, like passengers in a plane having landmarks below pointed out to them and receiving bulletins from the pilot on altitude and cruising speed. Yet it was not essentially different from the function performed by ideas. Both gave depth and perspective. And the analogy to air travel is illustrative. The briefings supplied by the pilot (“On your left, folks, you’ll see the city of Boston and the Charles River”) are a relic of earlier days of aviation—a mere outworn convention we “put up with” in a contemporary airbus. Scarcely anybody bothers any more to rise in his seat to try to make out the landmark being mentioned—you cannot see anything anyway—the plane is going too fast and the view is obstructed. Besides, who cares? The destination is the point. But if you put yourself back in fancy to the propeller plane, you will see, as with the novel, what has been lost. So intrinsic to the novelistic medium were ideas and other forms of commentary, all tending to “set” the narration in a general scheme, that it would have been impossible in former days to speak of “the novel of ideas.” It would have seemed to be a tautology.
Now the expression is used with such assurance and frequency that I am surprised not to find it in my Reader’s Guide to Literary Terms, which is otherwise reasonably current. For example, under “NOVEL,” I read: “In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the novel, as an art form, has reached its fullest development. Concerned with their craft, novelists such as Flaubert, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, and Thomas Mann have used various devices to achieve new aesthetic forms within the genre.” I do not know what Flaubert, who died in 1880, is doing there, but the tenor of the list is clear. If the “NOVEL OF IDEAS” does not figure as an entry (though “NOVEL OF THE SOIL” does), it may be that the authors were not sure what the term covered. I must say that it is not clear to me either, though I sense something derogatory in the usage, as if there were novels and novels of ideas and never the twain shall meet. But rather than attempt to define a term that has never been in my own vocabulary, I shall try to discover what other people mean by it.
Does it mean a novel in which the characters sit around, or pace up and down, enunciating and discussing ideas? Examples would be The Magic Mountain, Point Counter Point, in fact all of Huxley’s novels, Sartre’s Les chemins de la liberté, Malraux’s Man’s Fate. The purest cases would be Peacock—Headlong Hall, Nightmare Abbey, Crotchet Castle—if they could be called novels, which I doubt, since they lack a prime requisite—length—and another—involvement of the reader in the characters’ fates. You might also count Flaubert’s unfinished Bouvard et Pecuchet, where the joint heroes are busy compiling a Dictionary of Received Ideas, and Santayana’s The Last Puritan, by now forgotten. But though the term would seem clearly to apply to the works just mentioned (The Magic Mountain being the one everybody remembers best, having read it at nineteen), there are not very many of them and they are rather out of style.