by Joe Miller
What is the point of reading fiction?
I heard this question a lot in graduate school. Many of my peers viewed fiction as a waste of time that could be much better spent reading journal articles.
That’s not a new sentiment.
The novel as an art form arguably peaked in the 1860s. It was the decade of Great Expectations and Little Women and Alice visiting Wonderland and stepping through the looking glass.
Jules Verne shaped the genre that would become science fiction. Wilkie Collins did the same for detective stories. George Eliot, Mark Twain, Anthony Trollope and Nathaniel Hawthorne all published books in the 1860s.
And, of course, the two great Russian novels – Crime and Punishment and War and Peace – came out in the last half of the decade.
And yet, despite this embarrassment of riches, Victorians worried that novels were ruining what one Oxford professor called “the vulgar public” (aka, middle-class readers). Victorian critics worried that novel reading distracted women from their domestic duties and disrupted the social order in working class readers.
That disdain for reading fiction appears again in the so-called “techbros” of the 2010s, arguing that humanities majors should “learn to code.” We see it again in the early 2020s, when those same techbros confidently assert that AI will replace writers.
(We readers note with some schadenfreude that AI turns out to be much better at writing code than it is at writing novels.)
Last week, I came across an essay with the provocative title, “Does Reading Do Us Any Good?” The essay, by Princeton professor Flora Champy, argues that novels aid us in a search for truth.
Champy argues that today’s novels differ from those of the 1860s because the purpose of novels has shifted. The great 19th century novels explored social and class divides. Novelists explored the state of society and offered predictions about what the future might hold if current trends continued.
But the late Victorian period also witnessed the rise of entirely new disciplines.
Sigmund Freud and Émile Durkheim began laying the groundwork for the disciplines that would come to be called psychology and sociology. Those disciplines gradually became the lens through which we observed and critiqued social dynamics.
Literary fiction, Champy argues, “was left to explore more subterranean psychological realms and experimental formats.”
Or, to put the point differently, literary fiction abandoned content (plot and character development) in favor of form. Exceptional prose and stylistic quirks became the hallmarks of modern (and, later, postmodern) literary fiction.
This is the turn that gave us Joyce’s 4,391-word sentence in Ulysses and Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a 400-page French novel that is mostly known for not containing the letter e. (An English translation, titled “A Void,” also omits the letter e.)
I’ve written before of my love for weird, experimental fiction.
I’m all for the nesting doll timelines of Cloud Atlas, the hundreds of allusions in The Waste Land, the endless footnotes of Infinite Jest, the story told in the marginalia of Ship of Theseus or the wild formatting of House of Leaves.
Give me Rochester escaping the pages of the book in The Eyre Affair or Kurt Vonnegut showing up in Slaughterhouse-Five to explain how he wrote the book.
Sadly, though, a lot of experimental fiction is – not very good. Once you get past the gimmick, the underlying book ranges from forgettable (Ship of Theseus is, like all J.J. Abrams’ projects, a cool idea, indifferently executed) to terrible (Ulysses may be the worst book ever written).
My view is that the real purpose of reading fiction is to develop what is sometimes called “deep literacy.”
Deep literacy, the essayist Adam Garfinkle writes, “is what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author’s direction and meaning and engages what one already knows in a dialectical process with the text.”
That merging of reader and author, Garfinkle argues, is where original thought blooms. Or, as I’ve put the point in my own book, ideas lie in the spaces between the texts.
You can get to deep literacy with just about any book-length piece of writing. But some paths are harder than others.
I’ve recently gotten back into running after a break of several years. At first, I improved steadily, but after a few weeks, I hit a wall. When I swapped out a lot of the junk food I’d been eating for more protein and vegetables, my times started improving again.
Deep literacy works much the same way.
You can make a decent start on James Patterson, Suzanne Collins, Jack Carr and E.L. James.
But these books are the Little Debbie snacks of fiction. They’re fine as an occasional treat, but you if you really want to improve, you’ll probably have to trade in some of the Little Debbie snacks for some boiled eggs and broccoli.
