Conclusion: Drawing Circles in the Sea: Un-Defining the ‘Mystical Novelist’

Abstract

It is the artist’s job, said William Golding, to ‘scrape the labels off things,’ but it is usually the critic’s job to do the opposite. In this case, though, it seemed contrary to the sensibility of the subject to engage in anything so egregious as overt categorization. I have consequently attempted to try and share these authors’ own resistance to exclusive classification yet without denying them their unique existence; in doing so I hope, at the very least, to have brought into question the recurring narrative that considers the mid-century novel form to be bifurcated into either documentary realism or solipsistic experimentalism. This has inevitably involved the drawing of some new circles in the sea, but hopefully the ripples will misbehave enough to balance out any gross punctiliousness.

[A]nything that tries to establish itself as a real or positive, or absolute system, government, organization, self, soul, entity, individuality, can so attempt only by drawing a line about itself, or about the inclusions that constitute itself, and damning or excluding, or breaking away from, all other ‘things.’

…[I]f it does not so act, it cannot seem to be;

…[I]f it does so act, it falsely and arbitrarily and futilely and disastrously acts, just as one who draws a circle in the sea, including a few waves, saying that the other waves, with which the included are continuous, are positively different, and stakes his life upon maintaining that the admitted and the damned are positively different.

Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned