It’s in school that almost
everyone first experiences both the joys and the difficulties of reading
stories. And almost everyone quickly learns to associate reading fiction with all
the other abstract, impersonal, and cognitively demanding tasks forced on them
by their teachers. One of the rewards of graduation, indeed of adulthood, is
that you no longer have to read boring stories and novels you have to work hard
to understand, all those lengthy texts that repay the effort with little else
besides the bragging rights for having finished. (So, on top of being a waste of time, reading
books makes normal people hate you.) One of the worst fates for an author,
meanwhile, is to have your work assigned in one of those excruciating lit
courses students treat as way stations on their way to gainful employment, an
honor all but guaranteed to inspire lifelong loathing.
As a lonely endeavor,
reading is most enticing—for many it’s only
enticing—when viewed as an act of rebellion. (It’s no accident that the Harry
Potter books begin with scenes of life with the Dursley family, caricaturizing as it does conformity and harsh, arbitrary discipline.) So, if students’ sole motivation
to read comes from on-high, with the promise of quizzes and essays to follow,
the natural defiance of adolescence ensures a deep-seated suspicion of the true
purpose of the assignment and a stubborn resistance to any emotional connection
with the characters. This is why all but the tamest, most credulous of students
get filtered out on the way to advanced literature courses at universities, the
kids neediest of praise from teachers and least capable of independent thought,
which is in turn why so many cockamamie ideas proliferate in English
departments. As arcane theories about the “indeterminacy of meaning” or “the
author function” trickle down into high schools and grade schools, it becomes
ever more difficult to imagine, let alone test, possible reforms to the methods
teachers use to introduce kids to written stories.
Miraculously, reading
persists at the margins of society, far removed from the bloodless academic exercises
students are programmed to dread. The books you’re most likely to read after
graduation are the type you read when you’re supposed to be reading something
else, the comics tucked inside textbooks, the unassigned or outright banned
books featuring characters struggling with sex, religious doubt, violence,
abortion, or corrupt authorities. One of the reasons the market for books
written for young adults is currently so vibrant and successful is that
literature teachers haven’t gotten around to including any of the most recent novels
in their syllabuses. And, if teachers take to heart the admonitions of critics
like Ruth
Graham, who insists that “the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult
fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction,” they never
will. YA books' biggest success is making reading its own reward, not an
exercise in the service of developing knowledge or character or maturity—whatever
any of those are supposed to be. And what naysayers like Graham fear is that
such enjoyment might be coming at the expense of those same budding virtues,
and it may even forestall the reader’s graduation to the more refined
gratifications that come from reading more ambiguous and complex—or more
difficult, or less fantastical—fiction.
James Wood |
Harry Potter became a
cultural phenomenon at a time when authors, publishers, and critics were busy
breaking the news of the dismal prognosis for the novel, beset as it was by the
rise of the internet, the new golden age of television, and a growing impatience
with texts extending more than a few paragraphs. The impact may not have been
felt in the wider literary world if the popularity of Rowling’s books had been
limited to children and young adults, but British and American grownups seem to
have reasoned that if the youngsters think it’s cool it’s probably worth it for
the rest of us young-at-hearts to take a look. Now not only are adults reading
fiction written for teens, but authors—even renowned literary authors—are taking
their cue from the YA world. Marquee writers like Donna Tartt and David
Mitchell are spinning out elaborate yarns teeming with teen-tested genre tropes
they hope to make respectable with a liberal heaping of highly polished
literary prose. Predictably, the laments and jeremiads from old-school
connoisseurs are beginning to show up in high-end periodicals. Here’s James
Wood’s opening to a review of Mitchell’s latest novel:
As the
novel’s cultural centrality dims, so storytelling—J.K. Rowling’s magical Owl of
Minerva, equipped for a thousand tricks and turns—flies up and fills the air.
Meaning is a bit of a bore, but storytelling is alive. The novel form can be
difficult, cumbrously serious; storytelling is all pleasure, fantastical in its
fertility, its ceaseless inventiveness. Easy to consume, too, because it
excites hunger while simultaneously satisfying it: we continuously want more. The novel now aspires to the
regality of the boxed DVD set: the throne is a game of them. And the purer the
storytelling the better—where purity is the embrace of sheer occurrence,
unburdened by deeper meaning. Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics,
acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the
novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the
cartoon, the novel of a thousand confections and no unwanted significance. What
becomes harder to find, and lonelier to defend, is the idea of the novel as—in
Ford Maddox Ford’s words—a “medium of profoundly serious investigation into the
human case.”
As is customary for Wood, the bracingly eloquent
clarifications in this passage serve to misdirect readers from its overall
opacity, which is to say he begs more questions than he answers.
The most remarkable thing in Wood’s advance elegy
(an idea right out of Tom Sawyer and reprised in The Fault in Our Stars) is the idea that “the novel” is somehow at
odds with storytelling. The charge that a given novel fails to rise above mere
kitsch is often a legitimate one: a likable but attractively flawed character
meets another likable character whose equally attractive flaws perfectly
complement and compensate for those of the first, so that they can together
transcend their foibles and live happily ever after. This is the formula for
commercial fiction, designed to uplift and delight (and make money). But the
best of YA novels are hardly guilty of this kind of pandering. And even if we
acknowledge that an author aiming simply to be popular and pleasing is a good
formula in its own right—for crappy novels—it doesn’t follow that quality
writing precludes pleasurable reading. The questions critics like Graham and
Wood fail to answer as they bemoan the decline of ambiguity on the one hand and
meaning on the other is what role either one of them naturally plays, either in
storytelling or in literature, and what really distinguishes a story from a
supposedly more serious and meaningful novel?
The
problem with “The Goldfinch,” its detractors said, was that it was essentially
a Y.A. novel. Vanity Fair quoted Wood
as saying that “the rapture with which this novel has been received is further
proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults
go around reading Harry Potter.”
For Wood—and he’s hardly alone—fantastical fiction
lacks meaning for the very reason so many readers find it enjoyable: it takes
place in a world that simply doesn’t exist, with characters like no one you’ll ever
really encounter, and the plots resolve in ways that, while offering some
modicum of reassurance and uplift, ultimately mislead everyone about what real,
adult life is all about. Whatever meaning these simplified and fantastical
fictions may have is thus hermetically sealed within the world of the story.
The
terms used in the debates over whether there’s a meaningful difference between
commercial and literary fiction and whether adults should be embarrassed to be
caught reading Harry Potter are so poorly defined, and the nature of stories so
poorly understood, that it seems like nothing will ever be settled. But the fuzziness
here is gratuitous. Graham’s cherishing of ambiguity is perfectly arbitrary.
Wood is simply wrong in positing a natural tension between storytelling and
meaning. And these critics’ gropings after some solid feature of good, serious,
complex, adult literature they can hold up to justify their impatience and
disappointment in less ambitious readers is symptomatic of the profound vacuity
of literary criticism as both a field of inquiry and an artistic, literary form
of its own. Even a critic as erudite and perceptive as Wood—and as eminently
worth reading, even when he’s completely wrong—relies on fundamental
misconceptions about the nature of stories and the nature of art.
For
Wood, the terms story, genre, plot, and occurrence are all but interchangeable.
That’s how he can condemn “the embrace of sheer occurrence, unburdened by
deeper meaning.” But the type of meaning he seeks in literature sounds a lot
like philosophy or science. How does he distinguish between novels and
treatises? The problem here is that story is not reducible to sheer occurrence.
Plots are not mere sequences of events. If I tell you I got in my car, went to
the store, and came home, I’m recalling a series of actions—but it’s hardly a
story. However, if I say I went to the store and while I was there I
accidentally bumped shoulders with a guy who immediately flew into a rage, then
I’ve begun to tell you a real story. Many critics and writing coaches
characterize this crucial ingredient as conflict, but that’s only partly right.
Conflicts can easily be reduced to a series of incidents. What makes a story a
story is that it features some kind of dilemma, some situation in which the
protagonist has to make a difficult decision. Do I risk humiliation and
apologize profusely to the guy whose shoulder I bumped? Do I risk bodily harm
and legal trouble by standing up for myself? There’s no easy answer. That’s why
it has the makings of a good story.
Meaning
in stories is not declarative or propositional, just as the point of physical
training doesn’t lie in any communicative aspect of the individual exercises. And
you wouldn’t judge a training regimen based solely on the exercises’ resemblance
to actions people perform in their daily lives. A workout is good if it’s both
enjoyable and effective, that is, if going through it offers sufficient gratification
to outweigh the difficulty—so you keep doing it—and if you see improvements in
the way you look and feel. The pleasure humans get from stories is probably a
result of the same evolutionary processes that make play fighting or play stalking
fun for cats and dogs. We need to acquire skills for handling our complex
social lives just as they need to acquire skills for fighting and hunting. Play
is free-style practice made pleasurable by natural selection to ensure we’re
rewarded for engaging in it. The form that play takes, as important as it is in
preparing for real-life challenges, only needs to resemble real life enough for
the skills it hones to be applicable. And there’s no reason reading about Harry
Potter working through his suspicions and doubts about Dumbledore couldn’t help
to prepare people of any age for a similar experience of having to question the
wisdom or trustworthiness of someone they admire—even though they don’t know
any wizards. (And isn’t this dilemma similar to the one so many of Saul Bellow’s
characters face in dealing with their “reality instructors” in the novels Wood loves
most?)
The
rather obvious principle that gets almost completely overlooked in debates
about low versus high art is that the more refined and complex a work is the
more effort will be necessary to fully experience it and the fewer people will
be able to fully appreciate it. The exquisite pleasures of long-distance
running, or classical music, or abstract art are reserved for those who have done
adequate training and acquired sufficient background knowledge. Apart from this
inescapable corollary of aesthetic refinement and sophistication, though,
there’s a fetishizing of difficulty for the sake of difficulty apparent in many
art forms. In literature, novels celebrated by the supposed authorities, books like Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, and Infinite
Jest, offer none of the joys of good stories. Is it any wonder so many
readers have stopped listening to the authorities? Wood is not so foolish as
to equate difficulty with quality, as fans of Finnegan’s Wake must, but he does indeed make the opposite mistake—assuming
that lack of difficulty proves lack of quality. There’s also an unmistakable
hint of the puritanical, even the masochistic in Wood’s separation of the novel
from storytelling and its pleasures. He’s like the hulking power lifter
overcome with disappointment at all the dilettantish fitness enthusiasts
parading around the gym, smiling, giggling, not even exerting themselves enough
to feel any real pain.
What
the Harry Potter books are telling us is that there still exists a real hunger
for stories, not just as flippant and senseless contrivances, but as rigorously
imagined moral dilemmas faced by characters who inspire strong feelings,
whether positive, negative, or ambivalent. YA fiction isn't necessarily simpler, its characters invariably bland baddies or goodies, its endings always neat and happy. The only things that reliably distinguish it are its predominantly young adult characters and its general accessibility. It's probably true that The
Goldfinch's appeal to many people derives from it being both literary and accessible. More interestingly, it probably turns off just as many people, not because it's overplotted, but because
the story is mediocre, the central dilemma of the plot too easily resolved, the
main character too passive and pathetic. Call me an idealist, but I believe that literary language can be challenging while not being impenetrable, that plots can be
both eventful and meaningful, and that there’s a reliable blend of ingredients
for mixing this particular magic potion: characters who actually do things,
whose actions get them mixed up in high-stakes dilemmas, who are described in
language that both captures their personalities and conveys the urgency of
their circumstances. This doesn’t mean every novel needs to have dragons and werewolves,
but it does mean having them doesn’t necessarily make a novel unworthy of
serious attention from adults. And we need not worry about the fate of less
fantastical literature because there will always be a small percentage
of the population who prefers, at least on occasion, a heavier lift.
Also read: How Violent Fiction Works: Rohan Wilson’s “The Roving Party” and James Wood’s Sanguinary Sublime from Conrad to McCarthy
And: Let's Play Kill Your Brother: Fiction as a Moral Dilemma Game
And: What's the Point of Difficult Reading?
Also read: How Violent Fiction Works: Rohan Wilson’s “The Roving Party” and James Wood’s Sanguinary Sublime from Conrad to McCarthy
And: Let's Play Kill Your Brother: Fiction as a Moral Dilemma Game
And: What's the Point of Difficult Reading?