Imagine yourself in the middle of the night, with the sky adorned with stars and shining celestial bodies, turning dusk into light.
If I asked you to describe the sky with one value, one word only, from the three great values (truth, goodness, beauty), would you say the sky is good?
Would you say the sky is true?
I believe you would say it is a beautiful sky. This is because beauty is the value that compels us to name it and to feel its pleasure inside us when we observe it.
We always search for beauty in arts and literature, and the most accurate and best judgment we give to a piece of art or literature is beauty.
Artistic works are measured by the highest value of art, which is beauty.
We read poetry, draw paintings, listen to music, and read novels in search of beauty first.
Today we will talk about beauty in the novel literature.
The novel is a narrative art characterized by a spacious literary structure, a deep plot, and rebellious characters. It is also characterized by a lively and harmonious language that moves up and down in a way consistent with the dramatic need.
What are the qualities that enable us to perceive the novel as beautiful?
All novels, with their multiple purposes and types, agree on several elements that distinguish a good novel:
The plot: The events and their cohesion should be deep, thoughtful, and consistent with the events and characters, ensuring that the author creates a lot of suspense for the reader. A novel that lacks suspense is almost unreadable, as suspense is the most important element in the novel.
The elevated language: The language of the novel is poetic, not prosaic, and it is a language that is elaborate in sentence structure to highlight the aesthetics inherent in the harmony of speech, and occasionally leaps ideologically and psychologically into the characters, excelling in describing places, characters, times, and conditions, as well as diving deep into the characters' depths.
Creativity: A good novel is one that brings something new and moves away from imitation and conformity with other works. The novelist must carve his way to gain a unique personality first, and then reflect that in his narrative work and artistic language. Creativity in the novel can be in the subject of the novel or its style, time, and place, etc.
What is the judgment on a novel?
A novel is a literary and artistic genre that a reader savors like food and enjoys with great literary appetite. The judgment of beauty and ugliness may differ from person to person, gender to gender, and from time and place. Therefore, there is no work that is absolutely beautiful, which necessitates the absence of an absolutely ugly work. It all depends on the cultural, linguistic, psychological, social, ideological, and religious background of the reader who passes judgment.
We often hear about novels that have won awards and have a wide readership, but when we taste their letters, we are shocked by their lack of aesthetic appeal.
Just as the absence of criticism in a literary work does not mean its beauty, and the consensus of critics on the beauty of a novel does not mean the consensus of readers.
The critic reads the novel completely differently from the reader.
The novel remains somewhat resistant to criticism, and the gap between the critic and the novelist is significant. This is due to the great freedom that characterizes the features of the novel, which gives the novelist great freedom to shape his literary work with great creativity, jumping over the rules and breaking the monotony.
The novel is not like poetry, a direct experience, but a long experience and journey through different times and places that leave the reader with many emotions accompanying him throughout his journey with the literary work.
Therefore, the novelist must master his craft and make his novel a creative forum and a battlefield where he confronts tradition to emerge victorious with something new. He must make every literary work a complete city full of treasures and delights that delight the soul.
By: Maher Daboul
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