It's okay to take a book seriously

You know something? I don’t think it’s wrong for an author to have a political standpoint or ideology that they seek to advance with their books. Nor do I think it’s wrong to take a book’s ideas at face value. When I read Tolstoy, I don’t think, “Oh, I’m not supposed to take this Christianity stuff seriously–it’s only here because the characters are Christian.” That flies against logic and common sense. Usually if an author has some wisdom to impart, they’re pretty happy to tell you about it! Most authors have some thoughts about how people ought to live, and one major reason for reading fiction is to glean those thoughts!

Even when an author probably isn't endorsing the ideas in the book, I think it's okay to take the book at face value. I mean look at Starship Troopers. I don’t think Heinlein was a fascist, or that he seriously thought that only soldiers ought to be given a stake in governing society. But the book certainly advances those points in a rather serious manner, and I don’t think a fascist would be wrong if they read and enjoyed Starship Troopers and saw it as a defense of fascism.

I’ve referred a few times to John Barth and his literature of exhaustion. In his view postmodernism arose from the desire to wring a few drops of meaning out of the novel, by deconstructing and exhausting the conventions of the novel itself (the ideas of character, story, theme, etc).

Postmodernism, in Barth's telling, is very concerned with the idea of how to do something new: how to advance. As he puts it:

Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony or the Chartres Cathedral if executed today would be merely embarrassing. A good many current novelists write turn-of-the-century-type novels, only in more or less mid-twentieth-century language and about contemporary people and topics; this makes them considerably less interesting (to me) than excellent writers who are also technically contemporary: Joyce and Kafka, for instance, in their time, and in ours, Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges.

But my view is not the same as Barth’s view. I do not think it would be embarrassing if someone built the Chartres Cathedral today. In fact, I think the major barrier to artistic progress nowadays is our insistence that art needs to progress. Because if we’re not allowed to circle back around and revisit the past, then the range of allowable art is inevitably going to become narrower and narrower and narrower.

And I also think the idea that art and life are separate spheres, and that narrative art has nothing to do with the problems of living a good life–this is yet another ossified idea. Both of these notions–the idea of an art that progresses and the idea of art without ideology, they both foreclose the possibilities of art, keeping us locked within a very tiny set of possibilities. In fact, it seems to me, more and more, that fiction’s whole bag of tricks has turned into a set of dead conventions, and that we can rejuvenate literature by, you know, starting to ignore some of those conventions.

I was at a reading a few months back, and a person was reading from the opening of their novel, and they did everything correctly: they had a close first-person point of view, told in a near retrospective (i.e. from shortly after the events in question). The narrator and the protagonist were the same person. The narrator summarized for a paragraph, then dove into scene, and within the scene, their camera eye expanded and contracted, zooming in on, say, the love interest’s sleeve of tattoos, then zooming out to describe the way he moved, then moving back into a sentence of analysis, then giving us a short exchange of dialogue, then jumping forward a bit, filling in with a little summary until the next scene, when we can repeat the whole thing all over again.

This is, generally speaking, how contemporary literary novels are told: a careful mix of seeing, describing, and analysis, almost always anchored very carefully to the viewpoint of a major participant in the events being described.¹

But when I look at pre-modern stories, they’re mostly not told that way. For one thing, pre-modern prose has almost no image-making. The Icelandic sagas take place amidst scenes of startling natural beauty: tall glaciers, rocky harbors, and the large interior wastes of the island. But you wouldn’t know any of that from reading the sagas. They’re all events. The same is true for, say, Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Other stories build images, but there’s little interiority (I’m thinking here of Tale of Genji). Others have lots of interiority, but little in the way of events or narrative–an example would be the Sarashina Diary, where the narrator gets married and lives for decades in a few sentences, but then dwells for four pages on one chance meeting with a stranger in a snowy field.

The modern literary novel is a fusion of realism and Romanticism. It’s a combination of the 19th-century novel of sentiment (a chronicle of the development of a person’s character) and the 19th-century novel of manners (about their progress in achieving their social goals within society). The modern commercial novel is even more woolly and strange: it’s a fusion of the novel of manners, novel of sentiment, and the prose romance.

This has led to a dizzying array of conventions and expectations that, frankly, kinda get in the way of storytelling. It’s like with the reading I attended–everything about the book is so carefully “what it needs to be” that there is no room for the living impulse that is, presumably, the reason for telling this story in the first place.

In the Sarashina diary you don’t need to know why the narrator is describing this snowy field: she is writing this diary precisely because of the snowy field. Without the snowy field, there would be no diary. The impulse to tell the story arises first, and then it gets arranged into a form.

Similarly, sometimes the impulse to tell a story arises because you have some truth to impart, and I think it’s a mistake to create another convention (“a story shouldn’t have an overt or readily identifiable politics”) that can only serve to choke off an avenue through which living and vital literature might flow.

I’ve been reading a lot of Herman Hesse lately–he’s a writer who got a bad rap even during his own lifetime. The latest and most complete biography of Hesse opens with a dizzying array of critics talking about how they don't care for his work:

Robert Musil is a representative example, writing in the late 1930s: “[Hesse] tolerates no noise in the house, no irregularity in the strict division of his day into periods for working, reading, walking, mealtimes, and sleep. That’s all very understandable; the only funny thing about it is that he displays the foibles of a greater writer than he actually is. Nowadays, it seems, you can be a great writer without evincing any greatness in your writing.”

This disdain has continued to this day! Just the other day on Twitter, Ryan Ruby wrote that Hesse was fit only for adolescents

Hesse is uncool because he's serious. His books are not just art objects–they're sincerely-meant lessons in how to live well.

His books are both formally strange and entirely artless. Take The Glass Bead Game. This is a 600 page novel about a guy living in the 25th-century who is shipped off as a child to join this order of intellectuals that studies knowledge for its own sake. They collect and categorize knowledge, but produce nothing creative and do not seek to interfere in world affairs. For hundreds of pages, this guy rises in the ranks of the order, goes through extremely minor crises and problems, and very slowly becomes disillusioned with the order’s inaction. It’s a complex book, because it clearly starts out as a sort of utopia. It’s about intellectuals who study knowledge for its own sake, without instrumentalizing it. But the book itself strains against the contours of that utopia–there’s a persistent feeling that there must be something more–there must be some way of unifying knowledge and action.

The book is about exactly what it’s about. You could read it allegorically, I suppose, and say these intellectuals represent intellect without wisdom. But in reality the meaning is pretty clear–it’s very much on the surface. And yet it’s a good book, a vibrant book, and one that hold’s a person’s interest much better than its contemporary The Magic Mountain, a book covering similar terrain, but which remains resolutely ambiguous in terms of its ultimate meaning. I really like The Magic Mountain, don’t get me wrong, but in the modern critical understanding, The Magic Mountain is an unambiguously superior novel, and I simply don’t think that’s true. Yes, I like the part as well where Hans Casthorp stares at X-rays, or the parts where he looks out at the clear mountain alps. I also like how the novelist holds both Naptha and Settembrini at a remove, and makes both of them a little incoherent and a little tedious. They are archetypes, without being ideals.

But The Glass Bead Game is a more enjoyable book and, frankly, it has more to offer the reader. It describes the intense pleasure of intellectual study, but doesn’t shy away from the sense of futility inherent in the endeavor, and it’s unapologetic in positing that there is some way forward, some way of integrating the active and intellectual (even if Hesse's imagination fails a bit when it comes to imagining what that integration might look like in practice).

The problem with contemporary fiction isn’t that so much of it has such overt politics, it’s that the politics are so silly and shallow. Anna Karenina is great precisely because Alexei Karenin, even after his saintly turn, is such a drip, and Vronsky remains virile and appealing. In his fictions, Tolstoy always stacks the deck against himself, which is what makes it so convincing when his viewpoint comes out on top. Ivan Ilyich has a religious epiphany, but instead of alleviating his suffering, this newfound clarity actually makes his existence even more intolerable (“From that moment began a three-day ceaseless howling, which was so terrible that it was impossible to hear it without horror even through two closed doors. The moment he answered his wife, he realized that he was lost, that there was no return, that the end had come, the final end, and his doubt was still not resolved, it still remained doubt.”).

But in modern fiction the Ivan Ilyich’s are always saved from death at the last minute, and the Vronsky’s always turn out to be abusers and cowards—we hate overtly political books because we can sense the authors lying to us and refusing to examine the full implications of their own ideas. Having a viewpoint isn’t a sin; what’s a sin is when you pretend your viewpoint doesn’t have any downsides and that there’s no arguments to be made against it.

1. It’s how my own novel was told! And I’ll note this did not happen by accident. I originally wrote The Default World in a much more distant point of view, but it was beaten to me by rounds and rounds of agent rejections that the agents “didn’t feel connected" to the narrator. It’s not that authors don’t want to write differently—it’s simply that if you write differently it’s almost impossible to get published.