Meaning is so much a part of everyday life that it has become like the air we breathe: ever present but never really part of our awareness. Yet meaning is what drives our lives and without it life is hardly bearable. The same is true of a novel. It must be instilled with meaning but that meaning will require conscious scrutiny to discern it. If the novel contains little to provide meaning, it is a jumble of uninteresting events.

Some novels ooze meaning. Dostoevsky’s novels are always jammed with ideas, and his characters write papers, letters, notes and discuss the great controversies of their time that range from the intellectually sublime to the trivialities of human existence. In The Brothers Karamazov one of the brothers, Alyosha, is studying for the priesthood, Dmitri is sensual, impulsive and poetic, Ivan the atheist intellectual and Smerdyakov  the illegitimate epileptic. The father is a wicked and sentimental old profligate.  The interactions of these characters, clashes really, produce an amazingly rich philosophical novel. But even with Dostoevsky, the reader still struggles to identify Dostoevsky’s ultimate purpose, the overriding meaning behind the novel. And a novel must have a central meaning.

To convey the nature of meaning within storytelling I’ll turn to Giorgio de Santillana. In his prologue to The Origins of Scientific Thought, he gives the following example:

There is an Indian tale to explain the difference between organic and inorganic. The stone and the pumpkin had a quarrel about their respective merits. The stone at last jumped on the pumpkin and smashed it, hoping to prove its point. But right then the offshoots of the pumpkin burst forth in blossom. The price of life is death and vice versa.

In this short excerpt, de Santillana not only tells a story but also gives his interpretation of the purpose of the story up front, and then further interprets it after telling it.  This in a nutshell is the experience of reading a novel. But de Santillana carries his discussion one step further by addressing the very nature of this type of storytelling:

If we face it [life itself] as a problem, it leads nowhere. As a myth, it carries its own acceptance.

This kind of explaining is surely not science; it implies no theory or definition; but it is a kind of knowledge: mythical knowledge, which means explaining something by telling a tale about it which should show it in the light of an essential truth. The story of Genesis is such a myth.

This is what the author is after: to construct a tale that contains within it an essential truth. The novel is a long narrative form that performs the same service as de Santillana’s simple story. At the core of the novel is this bit of “mythical knowledge” that the author exposes as “an essential truth”.  This once again draws us back to Premise.

The reader experiences meaning within the pages of a novel both because of the author’s effort and because of the way he, the reader, interprets the work. The author injects the work with meaning through the use of ideas, storyline structure, and the juxtaposition of ordered events (plotting). And second, the reader contemplates the work, interpreting the information, so as to extract meaning. The total process is thus by its very nature inexact, thank goodness, and it allows the reader to perhaps interpret the work somewhat differently than the author intended. This allows some readers to love it, other to hate it, and others yet to be indifferent about it.

This then is, in a nutshell, the intellectual world of the novel. It is a world of ideas, and during this short chapter we will explore the creation of the intellectual world, both how to create and control it as much as possible. A novel is a storehouse of focused ideas interrelated by the context of the novel. The author must limit the cast of ideas because extraneous ideas lack pertinence and generate confusion in the reader. Ideas are focused, not just to provide clarity but also meaning, and the intellectual world of the novel is a “world of meaning”. The author hones the novel to only address those ideas that pertain to the central subject and thus only those of the central conflict.

MEANING

Everyday events, with their smooth-flowing continuous action as well as their fits and starts, contains no meaning. It isn't until the mind interprets the events that meaning is introduced. But meaning is always present in a story because story comes from the interpretation of life. Even if you don't intend your story to mean anything, something will still be there in the author’s unconscious piecing-together of the story and in reader’s mind as he interprets it. Meaning is inherent in the nature of storytelling, the juxtaposition of events and the relationship of characters. The way you get meaning consciously into the story is through, of course, Premise.

To convey meaning, the novel must speak on the level of revelation. What constitutes the state of containing meaning is elusive, but a novel starts to lose meaning if, through loosely connect scenes, it becomes episodic as opposed to being driven by cause-and-effect. Working from a Premise tends to keep the novel from becoming episodic and instills it with meaning because conflict is always center stage and results in what we mean by cause-and-effect. Consider this discussion:

“Why did you hit him?”

“Because he offended me.”

“How did he offend you?”

“He spit on my shoe.”

“Why did he spit on your shoe?”

“Because I slept with his wife.”

“Why did you sleep with a married woman?”

“Marriage doesn’t mean a lot to me.”

In this snippet of conversation we can see cause-and-effect and how the conflict described starts to reveal meaning. The conflict in this short narrative arises because of the differing perceptions of marriage, and it results in a sequence of events that follow a cause-and-effect scenario. The meaning of the story will be revealed by the outcome of the conflict and will make a statement about marriage. As the conflict unfolds the reader would expect to see the many sides of marriage and perhaps other marriages and how they relate to the “outside” world. Meaning will come about through the conflict and resolution inherent in the author’s Premise concerning marriage.

Carl Jung believed that with the birth of an individual "a question enters the world, to which he must provide some kind of answer." Of his own life, Jung said: 

The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world.

(Memories, Dreams, Reflections, page 318)

If we return to the analogy of the novel as a life, with a birth and a death, we can now see that it also comes into the world as a question. In the same way, meaning comes into the story through Premise. Though steeped in conflict, its essence is a question. The Premise is an answer to the question. This is the universal question raised by the Premise.

The theme of a novel is frequently defined as “what it’s about”, but as we saw earlier, this doesn’t really say much. Webster’s defines theme is “the subject” of a literary work, but “subject” is also too ambiguous to be helpful. Theme isn’t about plot but is in fact the defining feature of the intellectual world of the novel. And searching for theme is much like searching for Premise. The two are closely related. You will at some point make your own determination, but I will define theme here as, “The philosophical question presented by the central conflict.”

Now I’ve really confused you. And at the risk of leaving you in a terminal state of bewilderment, I’m going to leave the discussion there. The closer you look at some subjects the more blurred they become. Just be aware while you’re putting your novel together that if you don’t know what it’s about, neither will your reader.