Letters

The ambient novel

If it works for music, why not apply it to the other arts?

With nothing more to cognise than subjective stillness, Eno’s Ambient Music also redefined how we understand the conditions of music. These conditions relate as much to the principles of generation as to how musical sound and tonality could be manipulated to suggest a space, especially with synthesisers. Using self-complexifying patterns to generate musical structure, Ambient broadened the perception of a ‘musical’ experience, from the atmosphere up, as it were.

The idea of narrative in the novel demands an equal rethink.

The value of ambient music is its theory, as a formal problem for music, as the supposed affective remainder when the traditional idea of music is taken away. Ambient changes our understanding of rhythm and time in music by conceiving music purely as space. If the prime directive of music is rhythm, and from there on in the complexified history of music, to the traditions of vocalism, harmonic rigidity and strict, mostly major/minor scales that typify Western melody, then Ambient strips it down to the pure envelope of sound and duration, to the sound of a space generating affect.

In terms of an evolution of form, the novel has developed along equally complex lines. It has an inherited rigidity of style and structure; it has a narrative almost entirely dependent on the pacing of action, characterisation and plot. The formal expansion of the novel took on historic and Modern proportions in the works of Joyce, DHLawrence and Proust, who raised the eye of the author in representing the subjective universe of the moment with all the rich conditional interplay of secondary and phenomenal details. This was an attempt to present the manifold workings of life and perception through maximal control of the novel perspective; a near-total immersion of the writer in the world of his work. The author thus became the critical culmination of the lineage of the Hero; not merely a moral commentator or analyst of society like some 19th Century novelists, but a player in the ever widening field of writing, where fiction is all, an immersion.

The parameters of novelistic expansion and new structural possibility were set by these writers. But the history of the novel as an evolving form is not capped by Modernism and its critical appraisal or discovery of these writers; it is a history of narrative affect, of a theory of narrative that lacks all relation to spatiality.

The novel has always been a great field of integration and interdisciplinarity, even if this has only become apparent through latent criticism. But from its historical analogy in the epic poem, with its rhythm and refrain, we need to examine again the relation of formal structure and narrative time to implied novelistic spaces and affects. It is these spaces that allow for the complexity of a novel’s varied meanings, that generate a conditional space or ambience for ideas to take root. So that when we look into the state of the theory of the novel, we should not fear adopting physical or especially musical/durational modes of analysis. Neither should we fear openly engaging the fictive elements of narrative. We can only widen the definition of a novelistic affect by redefining narrative.

Plot, the most naked definition of narrative, gets in the way of a novel’s affective aspects — though it is only a minor component of narrative, and secondary to style and the textural qualities of great writing. The greatness of writing is the irreducible wholistic factor left when putting down the work; a cerebral satisfaction, the aftertaste and the perspective of another plane of reality which we have followed with avid eyes like an experience. To clothe the definition a little, plot is the placenames, but narrative the journey. The mere facts of a novel’s story do not represent the affect or enjoyment of the novel experience. So why not present only the affective contiguities of the journey — the phenomenal field of impression and location, the subjective tones of reaction and emphasis, and the perspective of the author’s moving finger as it directs the eye and the mind? All aspects of writing can then assume the normal vagueness and indirect symbolism of chance and perception, the inconsistencies and resistances of a perspective presented as an organic experience of reality.

Take away the plot and overt character development of a novel and what are you left with? A reasonably predictable if skeletal movement of narrative duration, where the intricacy and the timing of detail (impressionistic, formal and conceptual, libidinal, and external in all possible manifestations) takes centre court. Narrative is almost an innate byproduct anyway — from the theory of the cinema, context is as much generated through montage as it is from the story.

In this case the factors of a novel’s ambience become its mode and order of meaning. It calls for a greatness of writing that lies outside the idea of author as storyteller and pseudo-sadistic red-herring dropper and labyrinth-maker, approaching an author as open consciousness, a mindful intimacy. It also demands a theorisation unfamiliar with the biographic reading of consistent literariness: beyond and behind, as it were, dialogue, resolution, symbol and harmony, parallels and dualisms of meaning, and importantly, historical relation.

When treated as co-signifying codes, text and ambient texture fuse collective metaphoric properties, topographies, settings, atmospheres and spatial aesthetics. Though the aural and the textual are vastly different fields, they may form a loose, binding principle of novelistic narrative or projection, in a way that exploits a reader’s already firm familiarity with pattern and genre programming. By exploiting the humbug for identification with perspectives while at the same time engaging in speculative, exploratory flights of detail through the very conditions of narrative. Recasting existing pathways and laying new intersections and possibilities, that is, by creating new perspectives through the background of the work and its detailings, through its subjective, readerly spatiality. The reader then comes to do most of the plotwork, or idea-work — though all he is given is the tone, conditions and codes of a perspective, and the entire narrative is writer-driven, like a shared immersion. The force of narrative order can then become an open shadowing of desire, or the invitation to engage or play with a perspective, like the invitation to engage with seemingly physical objects, and hence negate the sense of external time. This writing can itself generate new treatments of duration and space. Its condition in the reader, its narrative realism, will be the feeling that action is possible or simulated within it, like ambient music induces thought, not precludes it.

A narrative novel with "everything but the story" — the writing of all facets behind and within an atmosphere. It’s like perspectivism through the back door, an idea suggested by its contiguities. A different approach to the ordering of time and the perception of the novelistic field which, in relation to the language of ideas, is like a space where the traditional boundaries of fiction and authorial reality are already blurred. For the reader, this space is one of attention and engagement or immersion and sway, a perspective which can rub off and change our outlook.

The idea of such a novel seeks to make detail central and complex by shifting action and unfolding into the text-space conditionality of the novel, with sufficient art to imply the other elements of narrative.

An ambient novel should not only be boring, it should be consistently boring, and yet almost charming in its textural restiveness. It is the boring novel par excellence, which remains utterly real in its implied physicality.

The ambient novel hasn’t the chattering of endless novelistic dialogue, but the more primal dialogue of gesture, physicality and meaning. Its narrative is free to facilitate a unique temporal motivator or organically complex drive, like in Cronenberg’s reading of Crash, where montage is driven by desire.

As a novel it is doomed to fail, but it exists purely in the atttempt, in the approach to what for ambient music is pure tonality, freedom of generative structure and rhythm etc. It must reflect the condition as well as the generation of ideas as words, and allow for the architecture, geography and physiology of meaning to immerse the reader in the field of writing.

It can also initiate novelistic forms that aren’t the inheritors of strong historical influences, as many novels after Ulysses are. So far every attempt at radically redefining the novel has referred to the work and the failings of Joyce in some way, or furthered them. But to expect every structurally innovative novel to wrestle with the immense shadow of Joyce is a gross imbalance; as, on the other hand, the not unusual descent into boredom with novelists who simply give up on challenge and idea seems equally inadequate.

The manoeuvre of the ambient novel is another way, through the resistance of space and duration’s ineffability (so essential to much of the mystery, style and rhythm of art) to approach the worlds traditionally outside the experience of the novel: those of tactility, sensibility, intimacy and movement. It initiates a reader-based immersion from outside the established code of character-plot and reaction, and their commonly held limits and subversions. And hence it is an invitation to interact, through reading, with the approach to physicality, to immerse in the writerly field of ambience, time and desire— the conditions of spatial being.

Footnote 1: From the idea of ambient music and self-generating musical forms, this formula for narrative complexity:

1. It has a generative force, of initiation in and through a field of opposites and resistances.
2. It has a force of duration, maintenance and movement, of flow and continuity.
3. It has a force of closure, resolution or limitation, a particularity of meaning towards which it must move, like a finality.

Footnote 2: To begin with an ambient theorisation is to catalogue and systemise all the affects of the novel. This is a list of what it makes us feel: duration and immersion; intimate knowledge through participation in characterisation; the counterpoint of perspective, often to moral effect; the literary cerebrality of new words, phrases and ideas well-expressed; and a richness of meaning which can often complexify and deepen on rereading, which is also a sense of timeless relation.

The production of meaning in a novel involves working with the resistance or incompleteness of meaning — a writer presents detail in such a way so that a reader aids the production of meaning, he is engaged in the perception of relations which are not explicitly spelled out but intimated, through their contiguities or secondary effects. These effects make an intimation real, physical. Complexity of meaning originates in simple relations. Often the effect of what is left out or absent, or mysteriously incomplete, is the truth of a representation.

The total subjective register of a novel is also its ambience — an immersion which guides and allows us to think. Some would say this is the domain of style or entertainment — but this is how we differentiate and interact with cultures: through stylistic signatures and fine detail. The idea is not to use this as the end of novel evolution, as though all that can remain is effects, but as the basis for new interpretation, a first point of departure.

Footnote 3: Some of the great works of narrative art include the endlessly detailed and precise definition and listings of sin gathered through confession and inquisition; they are as precise and systematicaly useless (and hence artistic) as de Sade was methodic. These express a relation to the conditional surrounds and how precisely one could detail a subject in it. These are conscious relations of the problem of time and narrative, offering a profusion of detail and durational delay, an absence of closure through detailed excess. The rhythms of narrative are crucial to this affect, which are ultimately a spatial aspect.

The rhetoric of ambience allows a spatial revitalisation of its descriptive conditions, a rewriting of the novel from its affective realities up.