I don’t mind you thinking me a scaremonger. Scaremongering has a respectable history. The fact that we’re still here after so many prophecies of doom doesn’t, to my mind, prove the prophets were mistaken – only that the worst hasn’t happened yet. That state of “savage torpor”, for example, into which Wordsworth saw the “discriminating powers of our mind” descending – did he get that so wrong? Wrong about the torpid, maybe. We are too hectic to be torpid. We troll, wear trainers and fulminate. But is “savage” so wide of the mark? Wordsworth was describing what made his age unpropitious to poetry. Need I state what makes our age unpropitious to the novel?
The rival calls on our time and attention. The infinite distractions of the Jumpin’ Jack Flash screen, so deceptively alluring compared to the nun-like stillness of the page, whose black marks you can neither scroll through nor delete. The brutalism of those means of expression which the unironic internet has put at our disposal: our thumbs up/thumbs down culture in which everything is forgotten, discourse is reduced to statement, dramatic speech is inconceivable, words denote nothing but what is on our minds, writers are only as good as the side they’re on, and meaning is what we intend to mean. Intention is a good place to start.
Busy fixity
“You start a painting”, Picasso said, “and it becomes something different altogether. It’s strange how little the artist’s will matters.” Every artist asks the question: Where the hell did that come from? The distinction Picasso draws is between the intentional and the involuntary self. Art is the child of the involuntary. And it matters to remind ourselves of that in this age of busy fixity, when obduracy is thought a virtue, uncertainty is thought a vice, and creativity means doing stuff.
As it is for the artist, so it is for the reader. If we go in search of novels that contain characters with whom we can easily “identify”, a way of looking at the world with which we readily concur – it isn’t really art we’re interested in. It’s still ourselves. “A book”, wrote Proust, “is a product of a different self from the one we display in our habits, in society, in our vices.” So who is this different self and how do we come by him?
“I was ecstatic”, Stendhal reported after his visit to the Basilica of Santa Croce. “As I emerged from the porch I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart . . . . I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.” Was he ill or simply experiencing the sensation of being someone else? The greatest art can do that to us. We see God. We become God. Under the illusion of reciprocity, we might even become the artist. We stagger, palpitating, from the gallery, or close the book with trembling fingers, and return – if we return at all – to being someone we only dimly recognize, like a half-sibling encountered on a foreign staircase.
Creative energy
It’s not unknown for people of no remarkable genius to come away from reading, say, Anna Karenina, fancying that if only Tolstoy hadn’t done it, they could. I’d go so far as to say that it’s peculiar to the novel to empower readers in this way, stirring in them intimations of creative energy. The better a novel is, the more we feel it’s been found among the ruins of the language we share. Whatever is made of words belongs to us too. “Do not forget”, Proust warned, “books are the creation of solitude and the children of silence. The children of silence can have nothing in common with the children of speech, those thoughts born of the wish to say something, to censure, to give an opinion . . . .” There are, of course, noisy novels. What’s quiet about The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel or Catch 22? Philip Roth’s novels are tumultuous. Céline spits bile. Steve Tesich’s Karoo (read it if you haven’t) explodes with bitter disappointment. None of these fits the bill as Proust’s child of silence.
But the noisiest novels still moderate their clamour, parting the rivers of their own cacophony, now by the dispersing influence of comedy, mocking hyperbole even as they exult in it; now through the dramatic interpenetration of sound – one character challenging or confounding another, as in an orchestra. Novels cannot by nature fail to be dialogic. No one gets the final word. Even in a spite-intoxicated monologue such as Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground the narrator is bound by dramatic obligations. He cares what we think. The reader is his interaction. But isn’t all that equally true of the best box set? In which case might it be time to let the novel go?
I am not snobbish about box sets. I even own some. But I think something of value happens when we read, say The Ambassadors – of value as an affective stimulus, I mean – that doesn’t when we watch, say, The Sopranos. Don’t tell me The Sopranos is more fun. That might only mean that Tony Soprano is more engaging than Lambert Strether. He’s certainly got a more engaging name. There is, though, more than one kind of fun. And to say that reading more closely resembles study is not to be a killjoy: concentration and enjoyment are not opposites. Strange that when everyone’s running marathons and otherwise raising sweat for the hell of it, working hard at a novel is thought to take the fun away.
Unexpected ways
To read a novel by D. H. Lawrence is to acquire – not always without resistance – a language of the feelings that is new to us: words we thought we knew well already are made to work in unexpected ways, locating places in the human heart we didn’t know existed, even changing what we understand by human nature. What else, we now ask, were those words ever for? To read Henry James is to inhabit an unaccustomed grammar of thought.
Some readers find James’s style tortuous; but those snaking parentheses sharpen our wits; without them we will not keep up with the moral quandaries and vacillations of his characters. They are markers, not just of our penetration, but of our emotional largesse. We are inclined to believe it’s the characters in a novel that extend our sympathies.
“We are all of us born in moral stupidity”, George Eliot tells us, whereupon, chastened, we practise acts of reflective empathy on Mr Casaubon. But it is truer to say that it is first of all a novel’s language – its syntactical orchestration of our thinking and feeling faculties – that enables us to go where George Eliot wants us to go, to conceive another person’s equivalence of self with what she rather wonderfully calls “that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling”. - Times Literary Supplement
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