At this point in my so-called writing career, no one would call me a great novelist, but that doesn’t mean I can’t conceive a great novelist. I’ve done just that, faktisk, en fait, de hecho, في الحقيقة, למעשה, in a certain forthcoming publication entitled Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel. The fictional Great Novelist I’ve engendered is a composite of a half-dozen actual “great” writers I’ve witnessed in person (see the end of this for my definition of “great”). I won’t name names but, somehow, I’ve had some access to rare and elusive writer types in my life. I’ve even witnessed these entities, who’ve made their names sitting alone in silence writing their great works, interact with admirers out in the wild, often seated at tables covered in food and drink.
One such great writer over the course of a meal featuring many bottles of wine demonstrated all the colors of the character spectrum. They seemed off-putting, charming, witty, snobby, down to earth, funny, boring, pompous, insightful, kind, just about everything you could think of, all of which made me think this is why this writer is a great writer. They’re everything, and can therefore access everything in themselves to create their characters. (Note: the writer in question was too old to have preferred pronouns. That is, the great writer in question wasn’t a Millennial or Gen Alpha. I’ve used “they” as an ambiguous pronoun to obscure their identity.)
Anyway, when I created a Great Writer to star in my forthcoming work of extended fiction I had a number of real-life entities to base him on, but I’ve always been interested in the appearance of writers in novels, particularly Great Writers in great novels.
Ever since Orpheus, the bard of Greek mythology, writers have populated the writing of writers. In the modern era, we’re familiar with the appearance of writers in movies and TV series. Every once in a while, my wife finds a movie for us to stream featuring a writer of some sort, most recently the great French film about two writers married to one another, Anatomy of a Fall. Writers in such films are usually struggling, faced with an obstacle involving their writing. Or in the case of “Misery,” based on a Stephen King novel I haven’t read, an obstacle involving a reader. Or in the case of “The Shining,” based on a Stephen King novel I haven’t read, an obstacle involving a haunted remote hotel and an insidious imbalance between work and play. More recently, “American Fiction,” a pretty good movie based on Percival Everett’s Erasure, which my mother tried and failed to read, features a writer grappling with anti-intellectual market forces.
“Sex and the City” featured a writer, I suppose, or at least a journalist/proto-blogger. “Californification” featured a debauched sex addict with a beat-up Porsche 911, typical of writers of previous generations. Lena Dunham sent her “Girls” alter-ego to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Thomas Pynchon appeared on “The Simpsons,” probably the greatest writer ever to cameo on a great TV show.
And of course writers have appeared in many novels. The list is long. You can google “novels featuring writers” and dredge up any number of listicles and Reddit threads mentioning dozens of books you’ve never heard of.
Many of these are first-person autofictional-type novels, which isn’t really what I’m thinking of when I think of great novelists in great books by great writers. My Struggle is a flat-out fuckin’ great series of novels but there’s obvious overlap between the writer depicted in the books and the author. Also I’m not thinking of Nathan Zuckerman or Henry Beck, obvious alter-egos for the authors. Or the suggested appearance of Philip Roth in Asymmetry or Roberto Bolano’s appearance in Soldiers of Salimas (a great novel by Javier Cercas) or anything like that.
I’m more interested in largely fictional GREAT novelists in unambiguously GREAT novels by indubitably GREAT novelists. That list isn’t all that long . . .
The only two who meet the criteria without qualification are Bergotte in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Benno von Archimboldi/Hans Reiter in Roberto Bolano’s 2666.
I picture the “uncouth” Bergotte (apparently a fictional amalgam of Anatole France and John Ruskin) disheveled, wearing gray worn torn clothes, and I picture Archimboldi of course wearing his full-length leather jacket.
Two others I can think of nearly make it: Chester Greylag Dent in Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star (CGD is undeniably a great writer — “every published work of this humanist and polymath reflective of an incessant concern for man’s standing in the biosphere and handblocked in a style best described as undiscourageably diffuse” — but, although I loved Ratner’s Star, many would question if the book CGD appears in is truly “great”), and Paul Arnheim in Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities (the book is undeniably great but Paul Arnheim is not really a novelist, is he? He’s more of an essayist/industrialist) . . .
And then there’s probably a tier below those four writer guys above:
Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is a well-regarded writer but I wouldn’t deem Mann’s novella up there with his four major novels, particularly Buddenbrooks and Joseph and His Brothers (one of the greatest novels I’ve read, in John E. Woods’s translation).
Pierre Menard in Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths almost meets the criteria? Pierre Menard is a famous writer created by a great writer (Borges), and the idea of his replication of Don Quixote, his atemporal influence on Cervantes, is certainly GREAT, but I’m hesitant to put Pierre Menard up there with Bergotte and Archimboldi . . .
Kilgore Trout in Vonnegut is a not particularly successful sci-fi writer . . .
John Shade in Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a poet and academic, not necessarily a great writer? Pale Fire is considered a classic but not something I considered “great” when I read it ~15 years ago . . .
EI Lonoff in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer nearly meets the description but among the many Roth novels I’ve read I wouldn’t include The Ghost Writer among his best? I like it, sure, but it’s not up there with The Search or 2666 . . .
I haven’t read Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, which seems like it may fit the criteria, although the writers in it are apparently fairly closely based on Delmore Schwartz and Bellow himself, so maybe like the Roth and Updike alter-egos mentioned above? I also haven’t yet read Woolf’s Orlando, not to mention a hundred other novels that probably qualify. (I feel like I know what I don’t know at this point but I reserve the right to have no fucking clue about anything of course. Such are the wonders of nature.)
Also, some may say Bill Gray in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, which I read in late 2001 or early 2002 and don’t remember well. He seems to fit the bill but the book doesn’t seem in the same league as DeLillo’s best, let alone A Man Without Qualities or even DeLillo’s own Ratner’s Star.
So ultimately, in the end and in short, when I think about great novelists in great novels by great novelists, I can really only wholeheartedly name two winners, Bergotte and Archimboldi/Hans Reiter.
I’ll leave the comments open — if you can name some others, in books or movies, I’d love to consider them.
Also, of course, the modifier “great” needs some definition: generally, “great” for me of course means something like “capable of standing in for God.” When attempting a literary fundamentalist geometric proof, one must remember the reflective property: God is great, therefore Great is god. And, per Proust, aesthetic excellence is a representative of the divine. Insert emoji of a thousand children laughing.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).kaput).