An Antidote to Our Disenchanted Age

On Joseph Epstein's 'The Novel, Who Needs It?'
X
Story Stream
recent articles

The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on Joseph Epstein's 'The Novel, Who Needs It?'

Countless pundits have put forth theories of how to escape our current moment of social atomization and existential decay. For these philosophers, economists, activists, and sociologists, the culprit can range from systemic racism and technocratic elitism to the loss of faith and the collapse of moral values.

Yet their conceptual diagnoses and solutions fail to capture what is most essential–that is, what is most human–about the issues that plague us. “Create a concept and reality leaves the room,” as Jose Ortega Y Gasset once quipped. Rather than turning to various theoreticians whose ideas are often divorced from reality and only tell “part of the story,” Joseph Epstein insists that we should turn to novels.

“A novel,” Epstein writes in his latest book, The Novel: Who Needs It?, “can incorporate history, engage in philosophy, confront morality.” But the novel is all of these and more: “it is the book of life. More than any other literary form,” he continues, “the novel is best able to accommodate the messiness of detail that life presents. The novel, for those who love it, is the literary form of forms.”

What distinguishes the novel from other forms of writing about human existence is that its point of departure is experience–as it features the concrete details and inner musings of the lives of actual persons. “Good novels are always informing us that life is more various, richer, more surprising, more bizarre than we had thought.” The novel, then, functions as an agent that both grounds and enchants us: its capacity to portray mundane phenomena as fascinating incites us to sink our roots more deeply into the real while opening our eyes to its magical charge.

Epstein recounts having read passages in novels by Dostoyevsky, Cather, and Tolstoy (“the greatest,” in his opinion) over and over again because of their capacity to captivate his imagination. “Memory works differently when reading fiction,” he says, pointing to seemingly random scenes from his favorite novels that have stayed on his mind for decades. He cites one such scene describing a bowl of soup in Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop: “a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.” Passages like these that stay in our memories have the power to transfigure something as simple as eating soup into a quasi-religious experience.

I can recount similar memories of typically humdrum moments elevated to mystical heights after having read the disarmingly descriptive prose of novelists like James Baldwin and Evelyn Waugh, as well as more contemporary ones like Ron Hansen and Jordan Castro. While I can turn to philosophers like Charles Taylor and Max Weber to explain the process of disenchantment under secular capitalism, I turn to such novelists to recapture the awareness of the sacred in embodied realities.

One of the greatest dampeners on our sense of imagination and ability to perceive nuances, posits Epstein, is the ubiquity of the internet and screens. The “true” culture war, he fears, “will not be between generations, or between people with implacably opposed political views, or between different races or ethnic groups or social classes, but between pixels and print for cultural supremacy…Will the split-second immediacy of information gained from a search engine,” he asks, “and the sheer volume of what is available derail the slower, more deliberative processes that deepen our understanding of complex concepts, of another’s inner thought processes, and of our own consciousness?”

This descent into short attention spans and simplistic thinking is already evident in contemporary novels that offer prepackaged moral lessons and politically non-“problematic” plots. “The best novels,” Epstein contends, “are not, should not be, tendentious, expressing or promoting a special cause or program, no matter how worthy that cause or program.” Good novelists risk affording their readers the freedom to draw their own moral conclusions from their stories, even if said conclusions don’t align with the author’s personal convictions. Epstein distinguishes between “moral realism,” which “attempts to establish morality in what is often its daunting complexity,” and “moral righteousness,” which “is content to reside in its own sense of self-superiority.” Conflicts in good literature portray “the struggle not only to establish what is good, but to be good.”

A novel is neither a soapbox nor a platform for propaganda. Morality in novels should come across less like a sermon and more like a painting vivid enough to make readers contemplate the complexity of their own moral triumphs and failures. He quotes Samuel Goodwyn, who once said, “‘You want messages? Go to Western Union.’ That, for the novelist, is probably still good advice.”

One of the chief sources of moralism in today’s literature revolves around the matter of the representation of oppressed identity groups. He is wary of those who argue that any talk of a canon of “Great Books” ought to categorically include more women and persons of color, and that books written by white males will prove unrelatable to non-white males. To uphold “representation” as a value in itself will lower the bar of quality in literature. Accordingly, the canon should not be tainted by such identarian concerns–quality, and not political expediency, is the standard par excellence.

On paper, surely Esptein is “right”–yet his staunch commitment to literary integrity comes off, in my experience, as short-sighted. As an educator for nearly ten years, I’ve learned the hard way that creating an idol out of “quality” runs the risk of making young people hate reading even more than they already may.

I concur that the matter of relatability–whether in terms of the identity of characters or the level of complexity of writing and plotlines–should not be the sole litmus test of devising a curriculum. But Esptein underestimates the value of meeting people where they are at, learning to “speak their language” and attempting to slowly inculcate in them a refined taste for beautiful books. Toni Morrison (“with whose novels” Epstein has “never had any luck”) may not be Tolstoy, yet there is considerable value in the fact that she conveys the lives of predominantly black American characters–who indeed face both underrepresentation and misrepresentation in the literary landscape.

Though giving into total relativism would mark the death of education, neither should we aspire to be total purists or pharisees. It’s naive to presume that all people will automatically appreciate “great novels” upon first being exposed to them. A good educator is not someone who preaches from the pulpit, imposing the correct eye for greatness from above.

I’ve learned a lot from reading the shitty YA lit that students have presented to me as “must reads.” While not exactly discreet about my distaste for their poor quality, my students and I have benefitted from engaging in discussions about how the “great human questions” emerge in them. I’d be naive to think a student would respond well to me ripping a poorly written (and profoundly politically correct) book like Yaa Gyaasi’s Transcendent Kingdom out of her hands and replacing it with The Brothers Karamazov. Instead, I’ve found students more interested in examining the themes of faith, modernity, and human fragility in the latter after exploring how they appear in the former.

Though Epstein at certain moments runs the risk of coming across as a curmudgeonly elder who can’t (and refuses even an attempt to) wrap his head around the depravity of “kids these days,” his sheer love for reading novels radiates through the overall tone of the book. Upon finishing it, I ran immediately to pick up one of the numerous novels he mentioned just so I could savor a fraction of the joy he so exuberantly conveyed.

One may disagree with his conclusions. But I couldn’t imagine that anyone could walk away from this book without being provoked to ask: who else can really claim to be so deeply in love with reading? His nearly erotic relationship with fiction spills over into reality, making it so that even the most seemingly boring things become objects of intense attraction. If you are to draw any conclusion from this book, it should be that life, being human, simply existing, are things worth falling in love with. That, and that we should read more novels.

Stephen G. Adubato is a writer and professor of philosophy based in New York. He is also the curator of the Cracks in Postmodernity blog, podcast, and magazine. Follow him on Twitter @stephengadubato.

John Pistelli's contribution to the symposium: Afraid of the Novel | RealClearBooks

John G. Grove's contribution to the symposium: The Indispensable Novel | RealClearBooks