There’s never a good reason to do a bad thing, but it’s possible, and regrettable, to do a good thing for a bad reason. Reading a novel (a good thing) for sociological content, for moral or ethical norms, or even simply for the jokes or titillating parts is a little bit like only eating the “L” in a BLT, and about as inspiring. Someone who wants to read a novel, who wants to, in loftier terms, encounter literature, should read a novel as a novel. The success of a novel qua novel can’t be measured by its success in any of these other areas. The Jungle may have been a great work of social reform, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good novel. But there is another reductive way of reading a novel: to reduce the story to plot. Stefan McDaniels makes this mistake in good faith on the First Things blog, On the Square. He confesses in his first post that:
“I turned towards the philosophical and historic in my mid-teens, which gave me Plato’s kind of impatience with lying poets. At some point I found that I had to force myself to turn the next page because I really did not care in the least what happened to imaginary persons. The only narratives I now read with easy pleasure are travelogues, histories, and biographies, packed as they are with the red meat of the real.”
Just because the words in a novel aren’t (always) referring to a real person or event, this doesn’t mean they don’t deal with reality (let’s set aside, for now, Plato’s critique of the poets). McDaniels gives novels a shot, however, and starts reading Jane Austen. He finds Jane to be “as wise, perceptive, and delightfully ironic as everyone says, but I’m still having the hardest time staying interested in the plot” (emphasis mine). Amanda Shaw, who seems to be one of the more literary-minded of the On the Square bloggers (as well as an Austenphile: she has an interesting essay on Austen here), makes a witty rebuke to McDaniels’s post.
McDaniels again explains himself: “I yield to no one in my esteem for her wit or social perceptiveness…. To the extent that I can read her as a sociologist, a moralist, or a humorist I am rapt. But the desire to see what happens next does not propel me eagerly through the book as it would have done ten years ago. And it’s still tiring to keep the characters’ various relationships straight in my head. Which, I admit, is a fault I’m working on” (emphasis mine).
It isn’t that McDaniels is reducing the novel to sociology or moral philosophy. He wants to appreciate the novel as a novel. But I think he is in danger of reducing the novel to plot. The novel is a story, and a story is why we read a novel, I agree; but the novel is a versatile form, and story is not always an intricate plot. There are lots of novels where the story has few twists and turns, and only a few key events (The Stranger, The Old Man and the Sea) just as there are novels where lots of things happen all the time (Joseph Andrews, Moll Flanders, apparently all of Thomas Pynchon’s work). Some novels are full of action and exteriors, some are monologues, and some are essayistic. But they all tell stories; that is, they show the trajectory of a human person who thinks and acts and responds to the contingencies of life. Beyond Albert Camus’s dictum that a novel is a philosophy put into images, a novel is a philosophy put into images of persons in motion—characters. To get to know characters, to get to know other persons, to get to know how an author perceives other persons, and ultimately perhaps, to get to know the author himself (or herself), is what a story is about.
In order to write a novel, the Jewish novelist and philosopher Chaim Potok said in an interview, “You need a great, great passion for the human being.” To read one you do as well.