The Archives-Project: Towards a New Phenomenology of the Novel
- The novel is not exactly a “static” object;
- It takes time to write and passes by many drafts before it is published;
- Even to the reader afterwards, as an “object” it changes over time in their minds and in their experience;
- The novel also does not “live” in a vacuum, but amongst a “population” of other novels, other authors, readers, critics, etc.;
- The novel is a fundamentally “historical” artifact;
- Essentially, as “reading material”, it is a subjective, literary experience;
- One thinks things, one sees its landscapes, meets and “experiences” its many characters;
- But it has a fragmentary existence as such an object or artifact in the “field of experience”;
- The novel “exists” across many fields: the field of discourse as language media, as literary object, across the field of references as object of discourse and as “social object”, and as a dynamic, phenomenological object in the field of experience;
- A true “phenomenology of the novel” must take all of this into consideration and begin to develop the conceptual tools, the framework, to treat the novel as phenomenon;
- In a sense, the novel is a dynamic “system”;
- To the reader’s mind it is a “system” of moving pictures, loosely connected together;
- To the author it is a system of themes and ideas, a system of notes and jottings-down, of editorial and rhetorical decisions made;
- To the author it is also an intentional object, i.e. novels, to my knowledge, rarely write themselves;
- As cultural artifact it is a historical object and also an object of knowledge insofar as it makes up a “moment” or “node” (“nodal point”) in the intellectual history of humankind;
- It is difficult if not impossible to determine the exact boundaries of the novel as object of experience;
- As physical artifact, the published book has definite physical attributes, its size, number of pages, and so forth;
- But in the mind one has no easy “metrics” to speak of the attributes of the object, which is in essence imaginary;
- Moreover, each individual reader who “encounters” a given novel through his or her reading-history will “picture” it differently;
- In fact, on two separate readings by a single person, nothing says that the novel will be the same novel, for the human imagination is notoriously unreliable and unstable in its imaginings (“representations”);
- There is also the question of what the novel MEANS or REPRESENTS to the reader as an object of their personal experience, as an intimate moment in THEIR intellectual history;
- The author thus loses part of their ownership of a creative work once it becomes “experienced” by others, once it is “received” by an audience;
- To complicate things further, the novel also exists as phenomenological object in the dynamic, moving, fluctuating field of experience of its author;
- It is in this sense that the work of art is an “interface” between human beings and their phenomenological experiences lying on either side of it;
- It “connects” them to a common imaginary space, if you will, or conceptual, thematic, “literary framework” (“common language”), as a kind of bridge between intellects;
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A.G. (c) 2016. All Rights Reserved.
