“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights
“I once was lost but now am found”
John Newton, Amazing Grace
What do novels do?
November’s edition of The Atlantic magazine carries an article by Rose Horowitch entitled The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. She explores how the reading habits of undergraduates have changed over the past few decades. Students are apparently becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the reading load they find at university, often struggling to complete entire books.
It is very well documented how smartphones and social media contribute to diminishing attention spans and ability to focus on longer, more complex works. But a decline in book reading may also reflect a shift in values where students prioritise career-focused degrees and extracurricular activities over deep reading.
The intensive, thoughtful, quiet reading of great books is good for mental health, for developing skills of concentration and critical thinking. If that disappears, we’re all in trouble. What happens if the habit of concentrated lengthy reading disappears? Look around.
I’ve spoken on several many occasions about the value of reading. But mostly in what you might call ‘transactional’ terms. We all know it’s true that regular reading reduces stress, improves concentration and memory, expands vocabulary, strengthens writing abilities, enhances knowledge and increases imagination and creativity. We know too that it can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. And if that wasn’t enough, it’s also true that people who read regularly earn more money than those who don’t.
Between you, me, and the gatepost, if you think those are the only reasons that reading is worthwhile, you’re missing out.
What’s the point of novels? Good question.
A novel is like a portrait as opposed to a photograph. A novel enables you to think and then rethink and think and then rethink again without ever reaching a final conclusion about what it’s all about. It’s layered. In a novel then, there should be no sense in which we have reached an ultimate end. Indeed, in many ways, the novel itself grew out of a dissatisfaction with stories which presented the train of life as trundling along tracks preordained by God and heading towards some definite Providential conclusion.
The European novel is essentially a product of the dawning of a secular age, a time when neat and instructional narratives of the workings of Providence in people’s lives just aren’t cutting the mustard any more. A time when writers want to explore what it means to be a human being without the sense that every event is another signpost on Providence’s highway.
When I am teaching, I will often say that all novels are in some profound way about growing up.
And as the novel itself grew as a form, and particularly in the great age of the classical novel in the 19th century, this idea was to the fore. Often these novels feature people finding themselves and working out how to speak from their unique position, as well as exploring how to make sense of their own experience and their own trajectory. Sound familiar? Take a minute.
The great Russian writer Dostoyevsky speaks about his novels as exercises in psychological realism. He writes about the self-discovery of the self. For him, writing about the human spirit is to write of the various ways in which the human mind and heart, or the human self as it evolves, experiences itself. And Dostoyevsky famously shows us souls that are divided. That’s why one of the most impressive bits of criticism on Dostoevsky described his novels as polyphonic – lots of different voices at play altogether. Dostoevsky writes a coherent picture of the human world by reminding us just how divided the human voice, the human mind, and the human heart actually are.
Because Dostoyevsky and so many other great writers treat the human self as something other than a finished and polished thing; because they multiply voices and perspectives, we are pushed towards a question about what it means to be who we are. And what other question is really worth the asking?
The sheer fact of creating an imagined life also poses the questions of how it is that we ourselves are witnessed, how our lives are to be understood, how we love and are loved and how we are absolved for who we are. And those questions are there in everything we do, whether we are aware of them or not. Although, in my humble opinion, it’s often best to be aware of them.
Another feature of Dostoyevsky’s novels is that he invites us to think what it might mean,
as he likes to say, to take responsibility for the world we’re in. And all his great novels are in one way or another about that taking of responsibility. Which of course is what growing up is all about too. In his stories, he creates multiple characters who are running away from any idea of accountability or indeed relation to an authorship, (including Dostoyevsky’s but we won’t go there today). And that theme of what can and can’t be seen about a humanity which is always in flight from being witnessed, understood and absolved is in every novel I’ve ever read, and will ever read. Not to mention in everyone I’ve ever met. Including the Director. Not that I’ve met him that often, you understand.
Let’s take another very different 19th century novelist, George Eliot. You will recall that at the very end of her masterpiece Middlemarch she speaks about the countless unseen lives that
painfully seek meaning at the cost of comfort and which in some sense shape the human world invisibly at levels we can never arrive at. I reproduce the ending here:
But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Dorothea, a heroine in Middlemarch, is not someone who will make an impact on the public stage but the difference that her exploration, her suffering, her error and recovery makes is what in turn makes a difference in the entire human world. Eliot’s final affirmation is of the effect of a life lived in search of meaning and therefore is also an affirmation of the effect of writing about lives in search of meaning.
I could say much, but I fear I may have outlived the patience of all of my reader by now.
Let me finish by suggesting that the very act of reading a novel may be surprisingly important. Reading a novel puts back to us the question of how we see, how we love, how we judge and whether we ourselves are willing to be seen and to be judged or indeed to be found.
And the one thing we really need to do in this life is tell the story of whether it’s better to be lost or to be found.
Until next time, Happy Reading.
A Reader’s Tip #3
Did you know..?
Clear varnish makes an excellent Tippex substitute for when you haven’t made a mistake.