Reading for Enjoyment

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The reader who demands that his own moral code shall not be infringed upon, or his feelings lacerated by any unpleasant happenings in any book he reads, does not want to be made a better man as the result of reading it.

How to Read a Novel, by Caroline Gordon (Cluny Media, 250 pages)

T.S. Eliot, a good many years ago, made one of those pronouncements that cause the serried ranks of his admirers to bow in the wind like a field of ripe wheat—as he himself once put it. It is possible, he said, that the novel may be dead as an art form.

Mr. Eliot would not make such a suggestion without good reason. It is well, however, when considering the novel to keep in mind the fact that it differs from all other mediums. It is more intimately concerned with the conduct of life itself than any other art form. The nature of the medium is so peculiar that even such a bold and subtle critic as Mr. Eliot may have been deceived as to its condition, may have mistaken—shall we say?—sleep or a comatose condition for death.

But Mr. Eliot’s intuitions are not to be lightly disregarded. It is apparent that something is wrong, but I am not convinced that his is the right answer. For one thing, the novel has hardly had time to attain maturity as an art form; from Fielding’s day to Faulkner’s is not more than two hundred years, a period of time that could be spanned by the consecutive lives of three men. The novel is, perhaps, if we permit ourselves to use the figure, not the child strangled in the cradle—the fate which Baudelaire, another bold and subtle critic, prophesied for the world when it shall have become wholly mechanized—but rather a backward child, or a child who may have taken the wrong turn on the path it was appointed to follow—more than one wrong turn perhaps.

Some critics maintain that one of the wrong turns is the present misconception of the role of the hero, the preoccupation with self-expression, with being rather than doing, which is characteristic of many modern novelists. The comparison of Fielding’s Tom Jones with some present-day novels supports such a view. Fielding, if he were alive today, might not accept Mathieu Delarue, for instance, as the hero of a novel for the simple reason that Mathieu was not in love with either Marcelle or Ivich.

In Tom Jones the reader’s attention is centered on the love affair between Tom and Sophia Western but there is a great deal else going on. The passion of love is only the “core” of the action of this novel. For a passion, once unleashed, has a way of unleashing other passions—a principle adhered to as firmly by the police force of any large modern city as by the Greek tragedians.

There is, indeed, no passion to which the human soul is subject that is not fit for fiction, as Chekhov once pointed out to a lady admirer who objected to some passages in his short stories because of what she considered their immorality. When we are tempted to censure an author because the characters in his novels do not adhere to our own code of morals we ought to remind ourselves that: some of the greatest heroes of fiction—indeed of myth and legend—trespassed against the accepted code of their day. Prometheus brought fire from heaven against the express commands of his gods. Very unpleasant things happened to him in consequence; Aeschylus and the writers who came after him go to considerable lengths to see to it that their readers realize what Prometheus suffered. Suffering is one of the tasks appointed a hero. The reader who prefers that nothing happen to the characters in a novel that he wouldn’t want to happen to himself is depriving himself of a vital experience. The whole Western World would be poorer if Aeschylus had felt that the eagle’s tearing of Prometheus’ liver was too unpleasant to contemplate, or if Sophocles had been too squeamish to let Oedipus put his own eyes out with the brooch torn from his dead wife’s dress.

As for the reader who does not see why a novel cannot concern itself primarily with ideas rather than action: he, I think, fails to take into consideration that the concern of a novel is life, and that life means action. Thought, certainly, is a form of action, but the one of all others that is least easily dramatized. No matter how intelligent we ourselves are, as readers we are always more interested in what a character in a novel does than in what he thinks. All great novelists know this instinctively. As Proust put it, “A book in which there are theories is like an article from which the price mark has not been removed.”

But perhaps this question may be more easily answered by the consideration of a brilliant contemporary novel in which ideas and opinions predominate over action. Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan is a case in point. An American millionaire, who is determined not only never to die but to remain young and vigorous forever, is taken to visit the fifth Earl of Gonister, who, having the same desire, had subjected himself some years before to certain scientific experiments. The Earl and a female companion who has undergone the same treatment are found in a deep cellar beneath the Earl’s family mansion disporting themselves in a manner which now recommends itself to them as both seemly and pleasant. The American millionaire is horrified, both by their appearance and by their simian antics, but when the scientist who brought him there asks if he still wants to undergo the treatment himself, he replies that he does, “for they seem to be having a good time—in their own way.” It is one of the most entertaining pieces of contemporary writing, but neither the Earl of Gonister nor the American millionaire seems to me to qualify as the hero—or villain—of a novel. They are too unambitious, too much R. P. Blackmur’s “hero of self-expression,” incapable of the adventures that befall real heroes—or villains—since all their energies are absorbed in being—or not being—instead of in doing.

Perhaps the belief that it is possible to have a “novel of ideas” is part of a trend that is prevalent today: the inclination toward the shortcut as being not only time-saving but actually desirable in itself, as evidenced by the widespread demand for compact formulations of various kinds of knowledge which it often takes a lifetime to acquire. Mr. Huxley writes a beautiful, lucid prose and burns with some of the same fervor that animated his grandfather, the biologist Thomas Huxley. His disapproval of both the Earl of Gonister and the American millionaire is evident in every word he writes and what he has to say is morally bracing, but his book does not deal with the conduct of life in the way that Dickens or Thackeray or Stendhal or any of the great novelists deals with life. His characters tend to pale in the rarefied intellectual atmosphere in which they move. The reader knows as soon as they come on the scene what the author thinks of them and consequently has no difficulty in making up his own mind about them. But Dostoevsky’s characters, or Tolstoy’s, or Henry James’, come toward us, as it were, out of a fog of creation. We have to observe them a while before we have any idea of what they are about. It may be years before we make up our mind whether they behaved well or ill in a given situation.

There remains the reader who, like William James, feels that the author ought to write books that people want to read rather than the books he himself feels impelled to write. This argument is not new. Indeed, it has been advanced wherever and whenever readers have concerned themselves seriously with the art of fiction. R.G. Collingwood, the British philosopher whom I quoted earlier, would hold, I think, that this question and the others I have cited are all included in the argument started by Socrates and continued by Plato and Aristotle as to the distinction between “amusement art” and “art proper,” a distinction which he feels is just as important today as it was in the time of the ancients.

The reader who demands that his own moral code shall not be infringed upon, or his feelings lacerated by any unpleasant happenings in any book he reads, is actually demanding that the emotions aroused in him by the reading of any work of art shall not overflow into real life but shall be “earthed”—and not far from his easy chair. He asks only to be entertained by the reading of this or that book. He does not want to be made a better man as the result of reading it. He is like a person who prefers to picnic at the foot of a mountain and forgo the view he would get from the summit rather than undergo the rigors of the climb to the top. There is, of course, no compulsion on any of us to make us climb mountains if we do not feel like it. Indeed, there are days when it would be inadvisable, even foolhardy, to attempt the climb.

Still, if we never stir about we may eventually lose the use of our legs. If we spend all our time picnicking in the valley we may come to feel that there is nothing worth seeing outside of it, may be tempted to dismiss as vain imaginings the wonders that our more energetic friends tell us they have viewed from the mountaintop and, losing touch with reality, become prisoners of our own inanition.

Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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The featured image is “Through the Window” (1918) by Samuel Halpert, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.