Why Read Novels by Vernon Scannell There are many educated, intelligent people who do not read novels at all. They read newspapers, biographies and published diaries of figures eminent in public life, factual accounts of adventures on land, sea and in the air, of notorious crimes, of great battles fought in the remote or more recent past, books about politics, religion, philosophy, gardening, car-maintenance, life in other countries and other times, books about the stage, about music, art, architecture, science; even books about books. But when you mention novels these people will often say that they have no time for fiction. Frequently they will add that they used to read the stuff when they were young but now, with the wisdom and responsibility of maturity, they have discarded such trivial and time-wasting pursuits: the reading of fiction, they say, is a harmless pastime for those who have nothing better to do, but the serious adult should concentrate on fact, on reality, on truth. Now, if these readers are, through deficient imagination and responsiveness to language, lack of psychological curiosity and indifference to the moral bases of human conduct, unable to enjoy and learn from the reading of our major works of fiction then they must invite sympathy; if, on the other hand, they insist that novels are a frivolous preoccupation of the immature, it must be firmly stated that they are mistaken. Henry James, the American novelist, writing in an essay entitled "The Art of Fiction" originally published in Longman's Magazine in September 1884, refers to a feeling, widely spread among the reading public of the time - and, I imagine, still quite as common, except among a minority of experts, professional reviewers, professors and some practitioners - "that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it. This popular, common-sense attitude emphasizes enjoyment, and probably many readers of fiction do indeed digest their novels in precisely this way, gobbling them down without much thought, relishing the flavour and forgetting all about them until the next hunger-pang. But these readers are denying themselves the "" benefits and pleasures which all good novels offer, along with that of immediate entertainment, and which can provide a much deeper and lasting enjoyment. Good novels, like good puddings, are not only agreeable to swallow, they are nourishing and strengthening; they help to keep us alive. However, as with puddings, novels will do us no good unless we enjoy them, though literature may offer its readers two kinds of enjoyment, one of which is of infinitely greater value than the other. The poet, W. H. Auden, once wrote an essay about detective stories in which he confesses that the reading of such fiction is, for him, an addiction like tobacco or alcohol. He says that, if he has some work to do, he must remove any possibility of laying his hands on a detective novel because, once he has started to read one, he cannot stop until he has finished it. He observes, too, that if he happens to take up a 'who-dunnit' and finds, after reading a few pages, that he has read it before, he cannot go on with it. He is not interested in any aspect of it except the story and its outcome, and once these are known the book becomes worthless. This is because, in the majority of such tales, the characters are not living, breathing, contradictory human beings; they are pasteboard stereotypes, little more than flimsy embodiments of certain selected human attributes; the world they inhabit is equally unreal and formalized, like a stage-set. Murder is an abstract problem to be solved, not the complex, dark, pathetic or tragic and messy business it is in real life, and its solution is an intellectual exercise. In other words the detective story is fantasy, not art. In the act of reading fiction the reader will identify with one or more of the characters but, as Auden says, "The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is a sharing in the suffering of another. Here then, very broadly speaking, are the two main kinds of enjoyment available to the reader of novels: we can suspend our critical faculties, our knowledge of the world and its true ways, of the infinite strangeness and ambiguities of the human heart and mind and accept unquestionably the insubstantial, illusory world of the fantasy or romance, identifying with creatures or actions which are themselves the products of fantasy, and so escape briefly from the problems and anxieties of humdrum daily existence. On the other hand we can turn to those novels which reflect or re-create the real world in which we live, rejoice and suffer, and identify with the griefs, ambitions, ecstasies and tribulations of characters who, like ourselves and the people we know or know about, are unpredictable, self-contradictory, endlessly surprising in their conduct and destinies. The first kind of reading is almost effortless. No demands are made. The words engender images which unfold before us like a film; we are not disturbed or shocked because, if events take place which would be disturbing or shocking in real life, we are unaffected since, beneath our negative acceptance of the fiction, we know that there is no real pain involved, the people are actors or puppets, the events are not really taking place. The heroes behave heroically, the villains villainously; if the goodies are hurt or even killed we do not feel real pain or grief, only a pleasurable frisson of simulated emotion; when the baddies receive their just desserts our satisfaction is not impaired by the knowledge that this is not how things usually work out in actual life. The second kind of reading, the involvement with the novel as art and not as escape or fantasy, is demanding: the reader must be prepared to exercise his own imagination, his intelligence, sympathies, moral judgement and powers of concentration; the experience is challenging and, when the novel encountered is a masterpiece, it will be disturbing, even painful. The great novel may force us to question long-held assumptions about reality; we will, to some extent, be changed by it just as we would be changed by significant events in lived experience. But the pleasure from the reading will be not only far more intense than that gained from escapist fiction but it will persist long after the book has been put aside. only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the language." liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen There is a passage in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey in which a young woman is asked what she is reading. "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady with affected indifference or momentary shame. Then Jane Austen, asserting her authority, comments with asperity: "... The novel at its best can be all that Jane Austen claims and a great deal more. And, because it deals with largely imagined situations and characters, this does not mean that it cannot contain profound truths about humankind in relation to its society, its God or gods, the universe itself. As the distinguished contemporary author, Frederic Raphael, remarked: "Truth may be stranger than fiction but fiction is truer." This epigram makes a very serious point: when an author is writing directly about himself and events which have actually occurred, when all of the characters are identifiable people, he is subject to many restrains which, despite his determination to tell the absolute truth about himself and others, will inevitably impede total frankness. When we talk or write about ourselves we consciously or subconsciously conceal or disguise those aspects of ourselves which might provoke contempt or distaste, for none of us wishes to be despised or disliked; when we speak or write of others we may reveal more of ourselves than we know, but to be completely frank about our view of other people, especially when those people are friends or enemies, is not only impossibly difficult, but may lay us open to unwelcome, even legal, reprisals. Autobiographies may supply all of the facts but even the finest tell us less than the whole truth because, in his heart of hearts, no-one wishes to have the whole truth made public; biographies tell us less than the whole truth because the whole truth cannot be known. But the novelist, whose characters possess no material existence outside the covers of the novel in which they appear, is secure from retaliation however painful the truths he may reveal about them; he can tell all because he knows all, since he is his creatures' maker. In his exploration of whatever human concerns have provoked him to write he can pierce to the heart of the matter because he has distanced himself from his characters and situations so that he can see them in their entirety.
