A desperate attempt to catch the original novel

When the eminent British critic, Terry Eagleton, wanted to answer the question of what gives literary works quality, value, and thus immortality?, he quickly enumerated a number of things;

They are depth of insight, realism, formal unity, universal admiration, moral complexity, verbal innovation, and imaginative vision.

But then he paused at length when he mentioned originality, in an attempt to find the appropriate definition of the word in return for the complexity that characterizes it.

Does originality mean new?

But novelty is not a guarantee of quality, for how many new works have hardly been felt because of their poor quality or even ordinaryness.

This is if it is fully delivered with the possibility of writing a completely new work

Prior to that, the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia had written his novel "The Attention", in which the main character tries throughout the text to write a novel characterized by originality, without fully reaching what that means.

How good Moravian is, as he describes the writer's confusion and confusion as he searches for meaning that is unattainable.

There seems to be an agreement that the original novel is the one that will easily find its way into the mind and heart of the reader, and it will acquire the status of immortality after that;

But the interesting thing here is that the agreement also includes the recognition of the extreme difficulty in grasping exactly what the word authenticity means.

Does originality mean new?

But novelty is not a guarantee of quality, for how many new works have hardly been felt because of their poor quality or even ordinaryness.

This is if it is fully accepted that a completely new work can be written.

Every writing necessarily would not have taken place without a previous writing.

However, there is a valid opinion, which says that the second writing is not necessarily a repetition;

Rather, writing first, but in its own way.

This may bring us back to Eagleton again, and he points out that "the work that is eternal is not the one whose value does not change over time, but which generates new meanings each time."

Generating new meanings may not require new writing as much as re-reading.

Does originality mean uniqueness, in the sense of rarity and difference?

But even this is not accurate, for how rare it is, lonely, strange, and alienated from beauty and taste.

Difference, here, becomes a tendency to evil, not the possession of quality.

Does originality mean perfection, so that the work seems to be occupied with near-perfect precision?

But how perfect the works seemed without soul, as close to a manufactured product as it is so perfect that everyone knows it to be a copy of millions more so that it loses any individual value.

Can originality be so effortlessly released on time-honored works that all it takes is a look at the shelves of the library?

But don't immortality sometimes stand behind factors other than quality, imposed by the stage, politically, academically or in the media?

That is, the work received a discriminatory service that extended its life and gave it more than its literary value deserves.

Accordingly, it seems that the most effective way to approach the meaning of authentic writing, as Eagleton did, is to speak first of what the word does not mean;

That is, the deletion and negation of what contradicts the meaning of authenticity, in the manner “and against it things become clear.”

But this matter, no matter how much we investigate it, will not allow us to get any closer.

I think that because the original novel is based on the unique way of its internal interconnection.

There is something that, after fulfilling the apparent conditions, we feel it, we perceive it intuitively.

Intuition, as Plato described it as good madness, is the sum of insights and insights, which we do not obtain through the means of logical argument, and it is difficult to convince others of them by the same logical means.

Shall we take this idea back to the starting point, where nothing we really catch?

Probably;

But it is an effort well worth the time.

I think that this meaning helps us as individuals to see authenticity more clearly, while keeping the all-encompassing definition out of reach.

So, the original novel, according to what I understand, is the one that we feel carries within it a coherence that makes reading it something that no other book can replace. Authenticity is to feel, as soon as we read a particular book, that it is considered a classic, so that it remains, studied and re-read again and again, regardless of its novelty and the time of its publication. Authenticity is the feeling of so much familiarity with the contents of the book that we ask ourselves how did no one notice this before?

On the other hand, I find myself in a dilemma and I have referred the matter back to the feeling of the individual reader, which makes the judgment on the authenticity of a work or not very uneven, as much as the discrepancy in the knowledge, experiences, beliefs, and even taste of each reader. This will make a novel authentic and immortal for one person, while it is not worth reading it even for another. This is confusing; Because judging the authenticity of a work is more than talking about whether it is beautiful or interesting. It is a matter of the generation, the historical era, and the generality of the literature that was produced at some point, so that it is difficult not to have a reasonable minimum of consensus on the value and entitlement of immortality.