Novels teach us what it feels like to be alive
More on reading and making meaning
Back in January I wrote one of the most successful essays I’ve had on here, about the problem of developing maturity. In that piece I set up a series of oppositions—Zynternetters vs Jordan Peterson fans, hedonists vs grindset mindsets—but argued they were united by a fundamental nihilism. At the end I talked about how my experience in college reading the Great Books helped me develop my maturity, that I learned how to rise to life’s various challenges by rising to the challenge of that curriculum (a very Aristotelian position—we cultivate virtue by practicing virtue—I will never escape the Canon).
In making that argument I passed over a number of important points. I received a lot of insightful feedback on the piece, including one email from a reader pointing out a major lacuna in my resolution. In short, she asked, “Okay your solution is reading the classics but reading the classics how exactly? In your dichotomy you have mindless enjoyment on one side and instrumental self-improvement on the other—what lies between those things?” It’s a great question. The answer I sent her was fairly insane I think and I won’t reproduce it here.
The other question I left unresolved was the nihilism. I located the crisis of maturity as a subset of a more general crisis of meaning-making but after relating my personal path to maturity I didn’t move back up the ladder to address how to find meaning in our lives. The question of meaning-making and my reader’s question of how we read are closely related and lead us into a larger consideration of what literature is and what it gives back to us.
It’s easy enough to claim we’re in a crisis of meaning but let’s try to be clear with our terms. We don’t need to search too hard for reasons people might be unable to resist the feeling that nothing matters or find their lives rote, empty, and banal—worsening climate change certainly makes the future look bleak; many Americans are lonely and don’t know how to find people to connect with; the relationship many people have with their jobs goes beyond alienation to outright disgust with what they do.
All of those factors play a role, but above them I locate the source of the meaning crisis in the inescapably transactional logic of our society. If the goal of neoliberalism is the fostering of private markets in formerly public sectors, there has been a complementary movement in the personal sphere toward monetization and finding ways to leverage value in all things. This is most apparent in, for example, social media. Instagram transforms your life and your activities into currency that can be exchanged, if not for actual money, at least into the parasocial thrill of faves and validation. Think of the way people cannot mention doing some crafty hobby without someone telling them they should open an Etsy store. The encroachment of transactionalism is one of the great stories of our lives—the determined push to drain all things of intrinsic value and replace it with only exchange value.
That push has been, in my view, remarkably successful. The self has been commodified, as well as our time and our social circles. And hey, why not, right? There’s no harm in selling some extra stuff you’ve knit, no reason not to post the pics from last weekend. But it’s an insidious logic, incredibly adept at making one forget why they liked these things in the first place.
This is not to claim that most people calculate their activities in terms of potential upside (although I’m sure they do exist). But a pervasive sense that everything you do needs to be worth something, tangibly, is anathema to enjoying anything. It is a recipe for despair. It’s there in all of us; it’s in the air that we breathe. This feeling will strip the joy from all the best things in life if it goes unchecked, because all the best things in life are useless in terms of exchange value. Rereading War and Peace is not going to generate a return, watching an Ozu movie is not profitable, except to your soul. An afternoon with a friend is time lost. If you spend these moments looking for an angle, even unconsciously, you’re missing the thing itself.
If the logic of exchange value is the only framework one has ever encountered, existence itself comes under attack. One can trade one’s time and labor but the radical, astonishing experience of being alive is yours and yours alone. It is everything and, blessedly, nothing. It is good in itself, intrinsically. If such value stands outside the only paradigm society is prepared to give, things start to look bleak.
Let’s return to my reader’s question. Sorry, I’m going to talk about my college experience again I know it’s annoying and cringe but I gotta do it. The thing about a Great Books school is no one is there for the job prospects. Even during prospective student tours and freshman orientation the administration would answer parent concerns along these lines with the stat that SJC has an exceptionally high percentage of students who pursue masters and doctorate degrees. Translation: Don’t expect a lot of exchange value from your BA of Liberal Arts.
Instead, the curriculum speaks for itself. This is a way the Program’s difficulty works to its advantage. It’s a common admonishment to freshman to keep up with their Greek above all. The ancient Greek class moves so quickly through tenses and vocabulary that if you fall behind it’s almost impossible to catch up and you’re well and truly sunk. The same goes for freshman math. If you slack off for a week it’s very possible to lose the thread of the underlying logic Euclid is building up and future demonstrations at the board will turn into a nightmare. In this way, the curriculum imposes a level of dedication and a significant time commitment to the material. Even if at the outset a student was doing all this work just to keep up, for the grade, that attitude quickly shifts to doing the work for its own sake. One cannot sustain the illusion for long that there’s an instrumental end to learning ancient Greek save for the ability to read ancient Greek. Either you wash out (and plenty do) or you go all in.
It also helps that everyone is following the exact same course of study. Sit down to dinner with classmates who are cursory acquaintances and you always have that week’s seminar reading to fall back on or the latest tedious lab practicum to bitch about. When everyone is working through the same problems and the same material, the mood is infectious. It’s a communal project plumbing the depths the Canon—what could be more important than the search for truth we’re all on together?
An anecdote: I showed up early for our first seminar on Maimonides and asked some of my classmates what they thought of the reading. I wasn’t getting it, I didn’t understand what his project was, what was at stake in his philosophy, or why we were reading it. One of my professors, Mr. Stickney, was also already there, listening quietly at the head of the table to all my complaints. A few weeks later he brought this up at my end-of-semester evaluation with my other teachers. But he brought it up not to bury me but to note how impressed he was that after all that griping I was an active and constructive participant in the discussion. I was sort of flummoxed by his praise at the time because all I could think was yeah duh, that’s what we’re doing here, you think I’m just not going to try to see what I’m missing?
So how to read the Canon? With curiosity and openness, with attentiveness to the books themselves. Taking them as seriously as possible without putting them on a reverential pedestal that shuts down critical analysis. React to the texts. The Canon is far stranger than one might expect. As I like to say, Dante didn’t put nuns in the moon for readers to pass over it blankly. In Paradise Lost Adam asks the archangel Michael if angels fuck—and Michael gives him an answer! Read as if for the sake of the books, not for oneself. In mastering the material you bring the books’ full brilliance into being, and bring virtue on yourself. In putting aside your self, in putting aside concern with enjoyment or self-improvement, you benefit more than you ever could otherwise. Finding the meaning in the books, with no reference to outside definitions of value, is a first step to finding it in one’s self and one’s life.
The paradigm my studies inculcated in me has carried over through the subsequent years of my life. Even as I’ve worked jobs I didn’t like and not been plucked from obscurity for a dazzling magazine job, I’ve always felt a sense of purpose and an unshakeable faith that it’s all for something. It has been a bulwark against a sort of malaise I think I see in many people around me going through the motions of life. There was an earlier, brittler version of me that would have been broken by the first year of parenting. A me who could not have absorbed the time sink and the drudgery and the endless work of cleaning and washing and changing that’s all undone so quickly. The effort of every single nap. Walking laps of the apartment with him in the chest wrap for hours and fully dissociating because it was the only way he would sleep. But all of it mattered. All of it had meaning. It was what I was doing right then, and that can be enough.
So far, so good. I’ve now rehashed the practice thesis from my earlier essay. You make meaning by making meaning. But I want to move beyond the practice thesis. My argument could be applied to any course of study provided the student found it sufficiently profound. But I don’t think that’s the case. And as much as I’m glad to have been forced to slog through various philosophical systems and abstruse treatises, all of my most revelatory experiences, when things clicked into place and I felt myself to be more, have been with literature. I want to make the case here that it is literature specifically that opposes the logic of transactionalism and exchange value and presents us, over and over, with models for generating meaning.
I recently read The True Story of the Novel by Margaret Anne Doody. It is an astonishing book. Narrowly, her project is to refute the received wisdom that the novel was born when Cervantes published Don Quixote. She calls our attention to a number of Greek and Roman works of long prose fiction—such as Heliodorus’ Aithiopika, Daphnis and Chloé by Longus, and Apuleius’ Golden Ass, among many others—that cannot not be classified as novels if we consider them without prejudice.
But Doody, one of the most perceptive and imaginative literary critics I have ever encountered, has larger goals than simply correcting the historical record or taking Cervantes down a peg. The ancient Greek novels are her starting place for an expansive investigation into what exactly is so enriching about fiction and why the novel form has withstood two millennia of being denigrated and attacked for vulgarity and encouraging immoral behavior. As she puts it in her introduction, “No genre can claim to have given more consolation or sheer pleasure, though many genres would claim they were more edifying or profitable. The pleasure a novel gives is often considered a superficial matter; I consider it a deep one, and hope to explain why.”
By the end of the book, Doody has articulated something approaching a developed philosophy and has earned the title of philosopher. Her thought stands bravely in opposition to entire strands of Western philosophy. Most notably, she has a low opinion of Plato (as well as taking potshots at Nietzsche throughout). She detests the abstraction of Platonism and its veneration of the world of Forms over the here and now. She does not reject the distinction between Being and Becoming but whereas Socrates/Plato are firmly on the side of the eternal, unchanging and pure ideal of Being, Doody is an unapologetic partisan of Becoming.
In advocating for our living world of mud and pain and sex and food, Doody turns the (Neo)Platonic paradigm around on itself. She brings up Porphyry of Tyre, a student of Plotinus, whom she praises as “experienced, sensitive, and sophisticated in his allegorizing,” referring to an exegesis of his cataloging the levels of symbolism of the Cave of the Nymphs where Odysseus first shelters on his return to Ithaca. The cave is full of numerous symbols of generation—murky water, blood-red cloth, honey—all of which are detestable to him as reminders of our bodily, imperfect, and transient existence, the way our souls are corrupted by comingling with the flesh. Doody agrees completely with interpretation, just not the judgment: “Porphyry gives us, if not a Key to All Mythologies, a very good key to the mythologies of the Novel—but it will work only if we reverse Porphyry’s reading. The cave, the honey, the water, are terrifying images to Porphyry, signifying the dirty imbecility of living. For the Novel, and thus for every novelist (even if the writer may be a Neoplatonist in daily life) the world is good.”
Reading a novel is durative, and experiential. It is to be thrown into another reality and live alongside the characters. It can take long enough to read a great novel that one’s own life will have changed alongside that of one’s fictional companions. Perhaps it is only natural then that the Novel has always been in a fundamental way about experience of time passing, of life happening, which at a deep level is the experience of change:
The Ancient Novel is—as the Novel has forever been—interested in moral life, in relations between one person and another, in trying to evolve some new responses or definitions… Of all the products of the Late Antique period aside from Christianity, the Novel seems the most heartily to endorse the possibilities of change. Here novels decidedly part company with Neoplatonism, for Neoplatonism deals with the eternal and unchanging and is hostile to all forms of earthly revolution. Change is in itself a symptom of corruption. Novel-characters accept birth, which is change, and biological time. They travel—it is one of the duties of characters in all novels to travel, even if, like Elizabeth Bennet, they get only as far as Derbyshire. Note that travel too, however greatly analogous to travail, is also a stimulant to continued existence; there is an Eros of travel, as Plotinus knew when he persuaded suicidal Porphyry to leave Rome and take a trip to Sicily. In traveling novel-characters encounter strangers, foreigners, the “other.” Not only do they encounter them (for encountering can be done aggressively, as in war-epics); they also make friends with these barbarians, outlanders, people speaking foreign tongues. “Write to me often in Syracuse.” The endorsement of this life as valuable—as of spiritual value and promise—includes a suggestion of the possibility of new forms of political and social life.
Paired with this celebration of material existence is the persistent presence of allegory, an insistence by the text of its own depths and hidden layers of meaning waiting to be unlocked. “Allegory is not an academic trope,” Doody writes, “not dead matter, but a powerfully appealing mode of expression allowing one to think or sense what cannot otherwise be fully articulated.” Allegory takes place on multiple levels of the text—we can do a little symbol analysis to note that the Cave of the Nymphs is a sacred place of generation and feminine energy, but the characters themselves can come to stand in for larger categories or concepts. More than that even, fictional characters are capable of interpreting allegory and examining their own depths.
We see novel-characters as creatures endowed with meaning; they are worthy of our contemplation, of our teasing out their meanings. The characters themselves—Habrokomes, Charikleia, Pip—are engaged in teasing out their own meaning, in becoming meaningful to themselves through processes (like dreams and interpretations) that we might term “self-allegorizing.” Novels succeed (a success so often disapproved of) because their hermeneutic design, with its invitation to scrutinize for interpretive meanings, persuades us that life has meaning. We are also persuaded that there is a self to be discovered… Reading a novel does not seem like a waste of time because it indicates the possibilities of knowing and offers each reader ways of thinking about the self.
I was haunted throughout my teenage years by an abiding fear that I didn’t really have a self. I felt that I was nothing more than a haphazard collection of mannerisms and interests I’d picked up from the people around me. How had they generated these traits for themselves, I wondered, and why couldn’t I do the same? Even passions like reading that were inseparable from who I was felt incidental, as if even they didn’t connect to or prove the existence of a real, underlying self. Once in college a friend told me she had described me to someone else as “sound[ing] like the internet,” which she meant in jest but I thought was one of the meanest things anyone had ever said to me.
So I entered college with a head full of lines from Seinfeld and Always Sunny and left with a head full of lines from Homer and Joyce. Hadn’t I just swapped one set of references for another? Somehow, no. The ideas in the Great Books are a different sort of scaffolding, one that brings the self into full view rather than burying it. I had to be persuaded there was a self in me to be discovered; I was and I did. I entered St. John’s an annoying atheist and left convinced of the existence of the soul. I found a belief in my own existence on a level I couldn’t have imagined beforehand. That is what the classics have to offer.
Another quality of the Novel discussed by Doody is the presence of Eros. Sometimes this is quite literal, as in the case of his appearance as a youth raiding Philetas’ orchard in Daphnis and Chloé, or metaphorical, yet he always lurks in the margins. He is a contradictory, often paradoxical figure. In driving our attraction toward others, he threatens that realized self we have worked so hard to build. He makes us dependent, now burdened by our desire for another. “Carefully ordered lives may be seriously disarranged by this mischievous delinquent. He comes to rob the orchard—the orchard of the Self.” But desiring others, interacting with others, loving others, is a necessary, inseparable, and wonderful component of being a fully realized person. “To know more about Eros (even considering Eros as only the power of sexual love) is to know more about ourselves.”
Eros brings us into contact with the wider world and the problems of the social sphere. In the social sphere we find those problems (finally!) of self-financialization and transactionalism with which we began this essay. Any instance of love and the possibility of marriage is fraught with economic concerns—differences in wealth may be the single most common thing that stands in the way of true love in fiction. Dowries, bride-prices, inheritance, land, estates, titles, nobility, respectability, class—the boulders that must be cleared from the road to a happy ending are endless, and a product of the larger society. “Eros-Cupid does win—in stories. In the novels we notice how regularly Eros-Cupid insists on the value of individual desire. The forces arrayed against Eros include all those things that deny value to the individual and to the individual’s desires.”
If there is a force that can oppose the tyranny of exchange-value, I believe it to be Eros. He insists on desiring things in their own right, and insists on the validity of desire. Passion is real, enjoyment is real, and they have the capacity to fight back against the sneering attitude that mocks any love of the unprofitable.
Eros is perpetually the enemy of arrangements based on socioeconomic schemes. One of the things he tells us that we do not quite want to know is that we have no satisfactory arrangements, individually or collectively, for dealing with our loves and desires. He must always be charged as a “marriage-breaker,” since he subversively acknowledges female desire as much as male. Eros reflects civilization but must always be the enemy of what is called “civilization” or “respectability” at any particular point… With Eros, we know more about human potential than society can accommodate in the here and now—but it is in the here and now that Eros is encountered.
From countless directions every day we are bombarded with “exhortations to smallness,” to borrow Becca Rothfeld’s phrase, to shrink our desires and our dreams in order to fit neatly into the machinery of a leviathan society of cruelty and consumption. It is only too easy to accept the logic of the machine, to wonder why we can’t accommodate ourselves to society. We must never lose sight that it is society that cannot accommodate us, and begin looking for ways to correct things, as much as we ever can.
In her final analysis, Doody writes the following: “But if in a novel pleasure ‘comes and comes again,’ it is intermixed with recurring anxieties, rousing the desires of the reader (male or female) into perpetual motion and emotion, into increased consciousness. A novel makes us feel the sense of being alive. That, I contend, is only truly invariable ‘objective,’ while any given novel may have a number of designs or even ‘ideas’ as well as that one grand and profoundly hidden object, its real and priceless Treasure.”
What does it feel like to be alive? When you strip everything else away, what is the experience of existence? I couldn’t begin to put it into language. No one can, not fully. All we can do is keep reading, and keep trying to find the words.