It's possible to write a novel without plot? Or without characters?

You can write artsy shit where nothing happens just people talk or dabble around, effectively plotless.

You can create a story without characters, look at Accelerando, that is a novel with a story that is so light on characters (not Stross's strong suit in general, but it gets a lot worse in that one) it could have been written without it. It would be a futurology mental exercise, but a good read anyway.

Plot? Sure. Characters? No, that wouldn't be a novel.

>Plot? Sure.
Examples?

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infinite jest

Yes and it has been done.

Life a User's Manual by Georges Perec.

The book avoids describing scenes of people and instead focuses on the apartments they live in and the furniture.

Johnny Got His Gun. Without spoiling any of it, you could argue there is SOME plot, but even that is not really central to what the book is about.

Picture This. Really no plot to speak of from what I remember, although it has been something like eight years since I read it.

Life a User's Manual by Georges Perec it's exactly the opposite. Tons of plots and tons of characters.

Plot
Joe Bonham, a young American soldier serving in World War I, awakens in a hospital bed after being caught in the blast of an exploding artillery shell. He gradually realizes that he has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face (including his eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue), but that his mind functions perfectly, leaving him a prisoner in his own body.

Joe attempts suicide by suffocation, but finds that he had been given a tracheotomy that he can neither remove nor control. At first Joe wishes to die, but later decides that he desires to be placed in a glass box and toured around the country in order to show others the true horrors of war. Joe successfully communicates these desires with military officials by banging his head on his pillow in Morse code. However, he realizes that the military will not grant his wishes, as it is "against regulations". It is implied that he will live the rest of his natural life in his condition.

As Joe drifts between reality and fantasy, he remembers his old life with his family and girlfriend, and reflects upon the myths and realities of war.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun

It's impossible to have a subject without events. Events are inherently a plotline of some form. Even saying that something exists involves plot.

Wtf are you talking about? Just because the character doesn't experience the outside world clearly doesn't mean there is no plot. Retard.

is the book as horrifying as that leads me to expect?

Read "Time and Narrative" by Ricoeur or kill yourself

Look up Sand County Almanac, it's similar to what you're describing.

I actually always wanted to read temps et récit but is expensive as fuck and it's more than one volume. Can you give a quick rundown of what do I will find there?

That's the purest form of a novel, but you need to write in a way that makes people say "hmmm, that's really novel"

Possible for somebody else? Sure.

Possible for you? No.

>thinking this would affect me

I'm not even a writer (or something remotely close) senpai. I'm talking exactly about someone else.

Yeah I remember Flaubert saying that he wanted to write a book about nothing i.e. not plot, no characters. A novel sustained only by his own style.

This is what I'm talking about.

I suppose you can have elaborate descriptions of environments, their histories revealed in details. Like Sherlock Holmes inferring threads of meaning from interesting bits,you could write a complex scene of a place,or a situation and its aftermath.