The Disease of Novelism

The one indispensable point in a sensational novel is that it should contain something abnormal and unnatural; something that induces in the simple idea a sort of thrill... This drop from the empire of reason... a consistent appeal to the animal part of our nature, and avows a preference for its manifestations, as though power and intensity came through it.
-The Christian Remembrancer

One of the few redeeming qualities of today's youth is their avoidance of novelism. Novelism, the reading and (in its advanced stages) the writing of novels, appears finally to be dying out -- and decent folk can only breathe a sigh of relief at the elimination of this degenerate pastime from the body politic.

Girls are to be kept away from those activities of civilization that over-stimulate the imagination and the senses, such as fashionable novels, paintings, music, balls, theaters... as this can lead to uterine epilepsy, sapphic tastes, and nymphomania.
- Forbidden History

The novel is no more than an extended deceit, a ludicrous lie that consumes both the reader and the writer. A novelist takes the dubious parlor trick of storytelling and attempts to breathe false life into false people -- and is praised when his "characters" approach a semblance of real humanity.

This unholy reanimation hasn't been so seriously pursued (and so sanctioned) since the days of the alchemists. Their pursuit of Elixirs of Eternal Youth were just as deranged and just as pathetic. And frighteningly, alchemy reared its deathless head across the millennia in China and then England.

In contrast, novelism is a mercifully young practice, and its natural death will be a secret relief to all. The parents, dignified Poetry and the wanton Tall Tale, will be able to divide their lives once more -- and stay on their own sides of town.

One powerful argument against the validity of alchemy is the fact that its supposedly successful practitioners do not seem to have become wealthy men.

But there is very little profit in novelism, while alchemy had an economic incentive -- this is surely the key in understanding its popularity. Turning lead into gold is a reasonable goal for any young man. While some novelists claim a similar transformation takes place when they turn the base clay of their daily existence into golden pieces of prose, we can only shake our heads in dismay. Why will some insist on pushing a metaphor past the breaking point? And can the meager advances that an average novelist commands be said to be gold? Wouldn't brass be a more accurate measure?

Mercury was a material used constantly in alchemy and it has been suggested that vapors from heated mercury may have caused hallucinations.
-Man, Myth and Magic

And here we come to a possible explanation to the grandiose claims of that pitiable anachronism, the novelist. Despite the ease and accessibility of filmic storytelling, he insists on chipping out a story through text on a page. Heedless of the engaging interactivity of the computerized world (AKA"cyber-space") he is fixated on this tired old warhorse of a medium.

He is obviously delusional. Perhaps we shall find, centuries hence, a similar mercurial reason for his condition as we have for the alchemist: it has been suggested that his stunted mindstate is a reaction to the hype-rich environment of our mediated culture.

And such a reaction! The fevered imaginings of the alchemist, bent over taffy-stoppered flasks and crusty crucibles, have nothing on the novelist. Pulling his delusional ravings from his questionable life experiences, stitching them together in a patchwork mess he attempts to pass off as whole cloth, he will work months, even years on this structure of queer imaginings. Only a man besotted, truly soaked in the liquor of lies could consider this a worthwhile pursuit -- forever laboring under the absurd pretense that what he are doing is (or could ever be)"novel."

obscurum per obsurius, ignotum per ignotius!
(the obscure explained by the more obscure, the unknown explained by the more unknown)
-an alchemist proverb

In the final stages before the mental implosion, the novelist may attempt to evade responsibility. A writer may claim that his novels are effortlessly conceived, that they are more an act of channeling than of creation. It is a short step, then, for the novelist to feel that his writings not only reflect, but predict, reality.

It's weird... things I write seem to actually come true. I don't know if it's because I'm writing about things that could happen, or I want to happen, or if I'm just plain crazy.
- a typical novelist

Alchemy sympathists today claim that the religious devotion and fervor of these misguided men was so intense that lead was changed into gold not by formula, but through a parachemical reaction. We also know, however, that their fervor induced them to stir their mixtures with hollow rods, allowing them to introduce gold by stealth. It's obvious that alchemy relied on craftiness more than craft, more on artifice than art.

We can only hope that novelism, being similarly shot through with groundless faith, untruth, and obsession, will soon crumble into a like obscurity.