The Blog and the Novel

I've earlier declared my intent to use the blog as a place to gather content for a novel. But do I need to, or does that amount to thinking in terms of passe genre hierarchies?

The novel promises, to a certain extent, wholeness, roundness, totality. Some sorts of post-Aristotelian unities. The authorial or narratorial voice is supposed to wrap a world up, tie it with a bow and plunk it in front of the reader. However much the modernist and post-modernist novels may have struggled to twist and warp this paradigm, it remains in place.

And, in truth, the theory of the novel from Ian Watt to Lukacs to many a feminist has always relied upon the identification of reader, author, narrator, and character: one person sitting in a chair being communicated to by one person. Classically, ingesting the tale of another person following a similar path in life to that of the author. The 18th-century novel, some like to say, gave rise to bourgeois consciousness, which isn't far from the truth.

The blog, by contrast, is fragmentary and ongoing, rather than total. Viewed as a whole, a blog might undoubtedly look like a novel in diary form, a well known variant. There will be narrative structure and thematic consistency, and it's all held together by a single narratorial voice.

So why should I, and so many other middle aged people, care about writing a novel when I've already got a blog? Maybe because I've internalized the belief in totality and wholeness, because putting together an integrated piece of art has historically been, to some degree, validated as a worthy pursuit, a reasonable excuse for not having a job, while having a blog is social terra incognita. Uncharted coctail party waters.