On the evening of Wednesday February 17, 1762, Kitty Hunter, aged 22, was introduced to Henry Herbert at a society ball at the house of Lord Middleton in London. Herbert was the 10th Earl of Pembroke, 27 years old and married with a two-year-old son. Afterwards he skipped dinner with his wife’s family, saying he would dine at a tavern, but instead spent the night composing resignation letters and procuring a sailor’s outfit and a black wig. The next day he and Kitty eloped to the Netherlands, thrilling England. Nine months later the affair was over. Kitty returned home, alone and pregnant, to begin child support negotiations with the earl and his family. What possessed her to run away with a married man she’d known for a few hours? An acquaintance, Elizabeth Montagu, had a theory. Too many novels were to blame.
Are novels bad for you? That’s what people thought when they were new. Literacy was spreading downward in the 18th century, summoning forth the novel to feed the tastes of common readers. And in the novel’s wake spread tales of fallen women, mostly. Some struggled to leave the house, it was said, or even their chair, so paralyzed were they by reading. That’s if they did not spontaneously elope.
Novels took the noble pleasure of reading and made it something quick and dirty. They told exciting stories in simple prose, not poetry. Their heroes were not kings or demigods, but maidservants and mariners, who instead of going on magical quests faced the inward challenges that readers knew from their own lives. Accordingly, the English novel of the 18th century is virtually all sex and social climbing, set in haunted castles later on. The reputation of the books was low, but circulating libraries kept their addict audience supplied.
By the end of the century, things had reached a kind of panic among the educated classes. The widespread feeling was that, besides being a waste of time, novels warped young people’s view of real life. “They impair [the mind’s] general powers of resistance,” wrote the philanthropist Hannah More in 1799, “which lays the mind open to error and the heart to seduction.” You might remember Mr. Collins piously refusing to read a novel to the Bennet family in Pride and Prejudice, to Lydia’s disgust.
And it wasn’t just prigs like Mr. Collins who took fright. The early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, a novelist herself, wrote that novels—along with music, poetry and “gallantry”—“tend to make women the creatures of sensation, and their character is thus formed in the mould of folly.” Forewarned, her own daughter went on to conduct a teenage affair with a married, philandering radical poet beside Wollstonecraft’s grave, then ran away with him to Switzerland, then wrote Frankenstein.
How quaint these worries about novels seem today, when reading one by the fire is a picture of wholesomeness, and young bookworms are the subjects of sly boasting from their parents. History indeed makes a hero of the novel, telling us of the victories won so bravely, so dirtily, by Madame Bovary, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, American Psycho and the rest. Unlike More or Wollstonecraft, we’ve also seen the novel’s golden age in all its glory.
And we’ve seen it fade. Without wishing to add another opinion on the alleged death of the novel, a discussion which itself seems more or less immortal, I think it must be fair to say that when people look around for domestic entertainment, novels are less prominent than they were. It is hard to measure the popularity of books in general, let alone novels in particular, but US figures plainly show that they claim a shrinking share of people’s time. It would be baffling if they didn’t, frankly, given the arrivals of the phonograph, the radio, the television, the games console and the smartphone to compete for space by the fireside, or on the train.
Still, the novel is not close to disappearing. Novels are compulsory in schools, and enough people read them voluntarily to support a multi-billion-dollar industry. They dominate a large creative writing industry as well. In short, the novel is doing fine. It’s just getting used to a smaller role and, with it, the protected status of an artform on the downswing.
By the end of the century, things had reached a kind of panic among the educated classes. The widespread feeling was that, besides being a waste of time, novels warped young people’s view of real life.Today it’s championed by campaigns like World Book Night in the UK, or with inspirational quotes beside the hashtags #amwriting or #amreading. “I am a reader not because I don’t have a life, but because I choose to have many.” “I’m not addicted to reading. I can quit as soon as I finish one more chapter.” “Books have the power to change your thoughts and life.” Funny that being able to create addicts and manipulate them, once charges against the novel, are now points in its defense.
Funny but not surprising, because these points are true. Novels are extraordinary. Without sounds or images, they use words alone to induce a kind of directed dreaming, like software for the mind. When novels are tedious they are more tedious than anything. Good ones give a feeling of intimacy surpassed by nothing but real life.
Far from being harmful, some research now suggests that reading novels might be good for you, perhaps enhancing your ability to empathize, or strengthening what psychologists call your “theory of mind.” This is by no means proven. Several researchers have failed to replicate a famous paper from 2013, which found that people who read literary short stories were better at reading facial expressions afterwards. However it is a growing field of study, in which fans of the novel can find plenty of friendly data, if they need it.
Besides, the research seeks only to confirm what always seemed like common sense. Novels help us to understand people. They show us “the possibility of what it is like to be someone else,” as Ian McEwan said years ago, which, he added, “is the basis of all sympathy, empathy and compassion. Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.” If it is true that novels increase empathy, and thereby reduce cruelty, then they are not just good for readers, they are good everyone.
Take this a step further. Maybe novels could improve our empathy for the types of people who are most often misrepresented or ignored. If I understand correctly, this is what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and a number of other authors hope for. In a popular TED talk, Adichie explained her view that novels can help to dispel the stereotypes that cover “Africans,” in her case, by taking people beyond the “single stories” of famine and war. Despite being fiction, novels in this role can give readers information that is essentially “true,” like history or journalism.
Again, this is certainly what many novels seem to do. I remember reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and feeling afterwards that I knew what it was like to live in rural Nigeria in the 1890s. After reading Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way, I felt I knew what it was like to fight in the trenches. If pushed, I would have to admit that I only knew how Achebe and Barry imagined these experiences, but I also knew that their guesses ought to be a good deal better than mine.
But if novels can do good, they can do harm, which is not felt so easily at first. Consider Pride and Prejudice again. We feel deeply what it is like to be Elizabeth Bennet, who is beautiful and brilliant, but trapped by laws that threaten her family with poverty. We share her spirited rejection of the odious Mr. Collins, and her exasperation with Mary and Lydia, her more annoying sisters. So this is empathy. But is it not the opposite as well? The book does little to evoke how Mr. Collins feels, or Mary or Lydia. Likewise, Mr. Wickham is an irreparable bounder, and Mrs. Bennet a chronic fusspot. We never imagine their points of view. Indeed, we learn to dismiss them.
There is another problem. If novels can show us the truth about the world, they had better get it right. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe was the best-selling novel of the 19th century, and remains perhaps the most influential ever written. It fired the feelings of the abolition movement, and hastened or even helped to cause the civil war by making millions of white readers believe they knew what it was like to suffer slavery. Stowe insisted on the novel’s accuracy. She met several former slaves, and read the autobiography of Josiah Henson, who had escaped from a plantation in Maryland. For a long time it seemed certain that if ever a novel had done good, and been essentially true, it was Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Today the book is infamous, a storehouse of black stereotypes, which it bears much blame for exporting to the world. Stowe did direct her readers to empathize with slaves, and with tears in their eyes they thought they had. Only later did it become clear that they’d been misdirected. Stowe’s black characters are more like mistreated pets than mistreated people, as “confessedly simple, docile, childlike and affectionate” as she said she believed “the negro race” to be. This was false and harmful information.
That’s the problem with novels as instruments of progress. You can only show the truth that readers want to see, not necessarily the one they need to.Many real slave memoirs were published at the time, and those by Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown and Solomon Northup were bestsellers, but nothing could compete with the sentimental caricatures in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Perhaps the scale of empathy required by reality was more than readers could manage in one go. In order to avoid noticing the failure of their imagination, they eagerly imagined something else. That’s the problem with novels as instruments of progress. You can only show the truth that readers want to see, not necessarily the one they need to. If there is a novel spreading pernicious falsehoods now, it will be one that everybody thinks is accurate and wise.
There is another problem, more fundamental still. Lionel Shriver raised it forcefully in a speech two years ago, and you may be straining to join her. Fiction isn’t true! Characters are inventions! Any debate about whether they are accurate is bogus, because there’s no target to miss. If you insist that no person of a given kind would feel the way the way that they’ve been written, then you’re the one distributing stereotypes. Or, if you allow your encounters with Elizabeth Bennet or Uncle Tom or Okwonko or Willie Dunne to shape your view of the real world, then it’s your fault if you’re misled.
There’s no arguing with this, but that doesn’t make it reasonable. Of course novels aren’t true, but dammit they feel true. That’s novels. Novelists should know that. You can’t spend your life crafting the world’s most vivid lies then blame people for believing them. Although this is a natural mistake for novelists to make, because we’re more familiar than anyone with our characters’ invented-ness. It can be quite disconcerting how alive our bundles of words become to other people. I often fancy that an author’s guilty conscious on this point makes them confess their trickery in reader-characters, like Don Quixote, Catherine Morland and Emma Bovary, who warn us not to put our trust in fiction. Ultimately, this is the power of novels, to make everyone involved misunderstand what novels are.
So why write them? That question obsesses me. I love and hate it. No one asks why write television, because people love television. No one asks why write poems. They seem so pointless that they must be art. Novels arrive in the world with a half-wantedness that owes us explanations. Some of the world’s most celebrated novelists plainly have their doubts about fiction, and instead write near-memoirs, which I read eagerly and nearly believe. Still they seem written for the same reason that I write mine, the same reason that every novelist does, I’d guess, though some would deny it. I do not write novels because I want to tell people about the world. I want to tell them about me. And why would they read? That’s literature, giving them a reason.
If this feels sinister, like some kind of trick or trap, then listen to that feeling. There is one true encounter to be found in every novel, but one only. As you read, the software turns a portion of your mind into a fuzzy, flickering simulation of the author’s. It’s strangely pleasant. It has to be, or you wouldn’t volunteer for the experience, or you might stop. There are pleasures on the other side as well. It’s nice, the thought of occupying people’s minds. Is it bad for you? For either of us? Who cares? All that matters is that we felt together for a little while, you and I.
