FOR THE RECORD: I have never been a South American colonel, a Victorian coquette, a knight errant, a slave on a raft, an eighteenth-century foundling, a Chippewa reservation dweller, a soldier in Vietnam, or an English teacher in a Greek boys school. Had the opportunity presented itself, I might possibly have become a South American coquette-errant on a raft, but things didn’t work out that way. On the other hand, I have been all those things at one time or another through the agency of novels. Yes, he said with an evil chuckle, and what’s more, I’ll do it again. And again. That’s one of the beauties of reading.
For those of you of a certain age, I ask you to consider three years: 1966, 1969, and 1970, and while you do, recall that these were the years in which the death of the novel was not merely predicted with excessive confidence but announced as a fait accompli. Dead, dead, dead. No future. People are moving on and leaving the “print-oriented bastards” behind. Remember? For those of you who weren’t out and about between Monterey and Kent State, you’ll have to trust us geezers on this one. A few years ago a friend said to me that she distinctly remembers not being able to walk across campus in 1966 without seeing a copy of The Magus. The same was largely true three years later with The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which was the number one fiction bestseller of that year. It was a very good decade to be John Fowles. Then, in 1970, a very big wave crested and broke on our shores with a loud sound: Boom. The Boom, that is—the name for the young lions in the more southerly portions of this hemisphere who were suddenly everywhere and making the novel new and miraculous. Magic realism had arrived in an English translation (God bless Gregory Rabassa) and was called, in its new language, One Hundred Years of Solitude. You couldn’t avoid it, and I don’t know why you would have tried. That wave had built and built through the 1960s, with Carlos Fuentes’s Where the Air Is Clear (1959) and The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) and Julio Cortázar’s peculiar Hopscotch (1966). The Brazilian Jorge Amado had been at it even longer, publishing novels as early as the 1930s; his Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon appeared in English in 1962, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands in 1969. Sometimes, though, it takes a single event to crystallize a trend or movement, and the Boom crystallized around Gabriel García Márquez’s brilliant novel.
But back to our three years and three books. What is the common denominator among them? I’m sure there are many, including astonishing events, prose mastery that we glimpse only rarely, and great historical insights, but the one that stands out to me is exoticism. We will never have a chance to be Nicholas Urfe, teaching English to schoolboys on a Greek island and having amazing encounters with a mystery man who stage-manages a living psychodrama for our benefit, or Charles Smithson, a Victorian gentleman of leisure with modern existential issues, or any of the fabulous Buendía family living in the coastal Colombian town of Macondo, that microcosm of South American postcolonial experience. It’s not all beer and skittles. When Nicholas is befuddled, we’re right there with him, just as confused. We cringe at his misdeeds, his mistreatment of women (I’ve always wondered how women see him and never been entirely satisfied with their answers).
Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it’s over, when Huck lights out for the territories or Elizabeth marries her Mr. Darcy, we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more. Part of the allure of the novel lies in its ability to draw us into unfamiliar spaces and improbable lives, to let us become people we aren’t, if only for a little while.
Here’s something else I’ve never been: a boy wizard. Not only that, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, of the millions of fans and casual readers of Harry Potter, no one else has been, either. So what? The most amazing publishing phenomenon in history and not one person on earth has ever had the experiences of the main character. Suppose there’s a lesson in that? Quite a lot of novels for young people have heroes who are quite like their readers in both their makeup and their life stories. In fact, we find that many novels for middle-schoolers feature middle-school characters confronting events and issues that happen to, you guessed it, middle-schoolers. And many of these novels are quite good and quite popular. Kathe Koja, for instance, in Buddha Boy (2003) gives us a quite ordinary main character, Justin, who discovers bigotry and small-mindedness in his high school when someone quite out of the mainstream, the Buddha Boy of the title, moves into the district. This setup is an old friend: Tom Sawyer is an ordinary boy in an ordinary town whose wildest adventures are only mildly extraordinary, and certainly in the realm of the familiar. We know that most readers of the first edition did not live in Hannibal, Missouri, or even any town very similar, but they could easily imagine themselves there. Writers can push that envelope a bit by setting the story in the familiar past, as Christopher Paul Curtis does in his Newbery Award-winning Bud, Not Buddy, set in the Depression, or The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, whose title pretty well telegraphs for grown-ups what they will find at their destination. Most readers, certainly most of Curtis’s target audience, did not live through either the Depression (nor were they orphans) nor the turmoil surrounding the civil rights movement and the racist backlash, including the Ku Klux Klan bombing of a Birmingham church, which features prominently in the plot.
Then there is that class of tales to which Harry belongs, which I would characterize as looking-glass novels. A perfectly ordinary young person goes through the looking glass or into the wardrobe or down the rabbit hole, and suddenly they’re in a world they, like us, have never inhabited. It works for grown-up tales, also, and has since at least Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Lewis Carroll took us along with Alice into an incomprehensible world in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), where cats disappear but their smiles linger, where there are White Rabbits and Red Queens and Mad Hatters giving tea parties. When the Pevensie children stumble through the back of the old wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956), they encounter an enchanted world in which a lion can be king and an evil White Witch can freeze the world into perpetual winter. Like Alice, the Pevensies are perfectly ordinary children, no more remarkable than any other. They simply happen upon a world not of their making and in which they can barely understand the events, the rules, or the logic. Sounds rather like a description of childhood, doesn’t it?
This, then, is Harry Potter. Yes, he turns out to have remarkable powers, but he knows nothing about them. Unlike all of his Hogwarts schoolmates, he has no experience of witchcraft when he goes and knows nothing of that world. When he unwittingly causes bad things to happen to his richly deserving cousin Dudley Dursley or when he can talk to a serpent, he is as surprised as anyone and has no explanation he can offer to others or himself. What Harry has known in his first eleven years are cruelty, loneliness, failure, isolation, and bad treatment at the hands of others. Aside from being an orphan forced to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs, he is in every way perfectly normal. His normality is the thing that most drives Professor Snape crazy about him. Snape complains that he is not tremendously bright, that he doesn’t work hard, cuts corners, breaks rules, and that in general, it’s just not fair for someone so average to be the chosen one. Snape’s right. The world isn’t fair, even the magical world, and Harry is normal. It’s the world he encounters that is not. Naturally enough, he brings a good deal of mistrust, anger, and confusion with him, and what is of major interest is how he deals with his personal issues. I wouldn’t say the magical elements are window dressing, since they are the major focus, and readers may not have picked up the novels without them. But the real problems Harry encounters—aside from, you know, nearly getting killed and having his soul sucked out and such—are ordinary school problems: rivalries, bullies, girls and what to do about them, friendships, envy, loneliness, homework, and exams. If you went to school, as I assume everyone reading these words did, and you didn’t deal with these, you just weren’t paying attention. That mix—a normal person put into extraordinary circumstances—has captured readers since before there were readers, since the crowd in the palace was listening to the poet sing The Odyssey. Odysseus is the least remarkable of the Greek heroes below Troy, no astounding size or abilities, only a clever mind and a determination not to die. And a bit of luck, which in ancient Greece is portrayed as the favor of the goddess Athena. It’s the adventures on the way home, Calypso and Circe and the Cyclops and the trip to the Underworld, that are remarkable. Right there, I believe, is the key to Harry’s success: luck, pluck, a quick mind, and a sense of when to strike and what to do. It seems to have worked.
Works for hobbits, too. What is Frodo Baggins if not a representative of the little guy? Literally. Think about it. Here is a book, three books actually, with no shortage of heroes, and none of them is the focal character. Why not Gandalf the Grey, the wizard with wisdom? Why not Gimli the Dwarf or Legolas the Elf? Why, especially, not Aragorn, the once and future king? He seems custom-made for the part. He even has a love interest, unlike Frodo. In an older age this would be an epic poem and Aragorn would be the hero, no ifs, ands, or buts. Achilles gets his own epic, Odysseus his, Aeneas his, so why not Aragorn? Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? This is not an epic poem; it’s a novel. Novels aren’t about heroes. They’re about us. The novel is a literary form that arose at the same time as the middle class in Europe, those people of small business and property who were neither peasant nor aristocrat, and it has always treated of the middle class. Both lyric and epic poetry grew out of a time that was elitist, a time that believed in the innate right of royalty to rule and the rest of us to amount to not very much. Hardly surprising, then, that both forms lean toward the aristocratic in subject matter and treatment. The novel, on the other hand, isn’t about them; it’s about us, and Frodo is us, despite the hairy feet. He’s the small person caught up in the war of huge powers. He’s not heroic, preferring his own hearth to the big world with its hazards. He’s not even a volunteer. Essentially, he’s a conscript, selected not by the draft board but by circumstance in the form of a ring that has been handed to him to deal with. Talk about your raw deals. And yet, the big heroes can’t be heroes without him, evil can’t be defeated, the ring can’t be destroyed. Over and over, he says the task is beyond him, yet he keeps going even as body and mind seem to fail. How many soldiers, I wonder, would recognize their situation in his? How many civilians in Britain, which is where Tolkien is really talking about, found themselves performing useful and surprising service in the fight against Nazism and the drive for world domination? Whatever our nationality, we can recognize that struggle against evil, can see our possible selves in the little guy pushed to heroic extremes.
It isn’t always a matter, we should note, of identifying with the protagonist. No one I know, regardless of how much they love his novel, wants to be Humbert Humbert or Victor Frankenstein, although perhaps for different reasons. Or Heathcliff. Ever want to be Heathcliff? I didn’t think so. They are not the stuff of our fantasy lives, yet we may revel in their worlds, even while reviling their persons. Consider Humbert. The narrative strategy Nabokov employs is very daring, since it demands that we identify with someone who is breaking what nearly everyone will consider the most absolute taboo. Sexual violation of children is a horrible offense against the natural order, and he goes out of his way to commit that offense. Sympathy is out of the question. What the novel requires, however, is that we continue reading, something it audaciously gives us reasons to do. The word games and intellectual brilliance helps, certainly; he’s detestable but charming and brilliant. The other element is that we watch him with a sort of appalled fascination: can he really intend that; does he really do this; would he really attempt even that; has he lost all sense of proportion? The answers are, in order, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Pretty clearly, then, there are pleasures in the text that are not inherent in the personality of the main character. Nabokov’s central figures in general do not inspire warm and fuzzy feelings. We tend to find them interesting rather than lovable, tend to want to watch them rather than be them or feel with them.
This is a largely although not exclusively modern trait. For the most part, nineteenth-century novels relied first of all on an emotional response. We may not want to be Tess Durbeyfield, given all the misfortune that life throws at her, but we stick with her, follow her fortunes, suffer with her, feel for her. And Hardy puts us through the affective mill: disappointment, alarm, elation, pity, hope, pity, fear, discouragement, rage, pity, pity, pity. This is, after all, Thomas Hardy. He gives us a higher HMQ—human misery quotient—than any other three Victorian novelists combined. But his fellow scribblers are very much like him in terms of reader response. They want an emotional investment of their readers. Partly, of course, this has to do with the serial publication of so many Victorian works; readers have to be locked in on the characters if they are going to hang around reading magazine installments for two years. We could think of a hierarchy of desired reader responses for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that would look something like this.
Nineteenth |
Twentieth |
1) Emotional response |
1) Aesthetic response |
2) Intellectual response |
2) Intellectual response |
3) Aesthetic response |
3) Emotional response |
Obviously, there are mavericks and wild cards out there, but this comparison works on average. Until the very late nineteenth century, novelists did not think of their work as art. Literary art consisted of lyric or narrative poetry and drama. Fiction in prose was more or less a branch of commerce, which was not an entirely unfair characterization. Hard to feel like Michelangelo when the printer’s boy is standing impatiently in your doorway waiting for the ink to dry on your latest chapter. It’s not until fairly late in the century, in 1884, when Henry James begins writing about the novel as a serious art form in The Art of Fiction. (Defense Counsel stipulates that this shift occurred somewhat earlier in France, just after midcentury, owing to one Gustave Flaubert.) One would hardly demand an aesthetic response above all else for a form one regarded as second-tier art, if even that. Aesthetic considerations are distinctly modern, much more the province of Virginia Woolf or Ernest Hemingway. Nor were the intellectual demands terribly high on the Victorian reader; not for their novels the word games and puzzles of Nabokov, Fowles, or Italo Calvino. No, the peg on which the Victorian hat hung was emotional.
Their goal: make us love (or hate) the characters. There aren’t a lot of terribly subtle shadings of character in Dickens or Thackeray. We cheer and hiss with enthusiasm. Readers responded to these characters as if they were family members (or threats to them). Character is absolutely central to the ongoing serial. Think of J.R. and Bobby Ewing. Why has Susan Lucci been able to keep the same role for three hundred years? Because viewers respond viscerally to her character. In Victorian times, readers wrote to novelists with their thoughts on the current book, and writers listened. Thackeray was told that readers wanted “less of Amelia,” the sugary-sweet, somewhat boring girl in Vanity Fair, that they wanted to see Laura marry Warrington in Pendennis (which title has always struck me as more than vaguely obscene, but no matter). Novels were changed based on fan reaction, sometimes even to projected reaction, as in Bulwer-Lytton’s famous advice to Dickens not to attempt the more logical, unhappy ending of Great Expectations. Again, I give you Dallas: why did they miraculously revive the dead Bobby Ewing? Fan unrest.
In all these cases, the central reality is that readers wish to be involved in their novels. Wish? Nay, need. The earnestness with which nineteenth-century readers engaged with characters and their stories is touching in its naïveté. At the same time we know that, in our own day, characters on series television sometimes receive fan or hate mail (more often the latter) and stars of soap operas are often greeted with either the love or venom their characters, and not they, merit. Whence comes that need for involvement? I believe it grows out of the desire to be swept away to somewhere else, and that’s what novels do, even when the place they sweep us to looks a great deal like our own. A reader in Dorset or Wiltshire might recognize the landscapes and notable buildings of Hardy’s Wessex, might see exterior Dorchester in his Casterbridge, but the place in which Tess or Jude live and struggle bears scant resemblance to any place current or historical. Joyce’s Dublin has real place-names in it, and one can map out every story and novel (and indeed, someone has, in many cases more than once). And those of us who have been to academic conferences learn, to either our consternation or, more likely, relief, that they are neither as hilarious nor as disastrous as those in the novels of David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. They are just close enough to the originals to give a frisson of recognition, just far enough away to be entertaining. The American poet Marianne Moore characterized her poetry as the making of “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” In the case of novels, the real—or potentially real—toads are characters, persons we can react to, relate to, accept or reject, identify with, suffer over.
Sometimes those persons and their environments are quite familiar, as in the case of Iris Murdoch’s fiction. She was successful most of her twenty-seven times out of the gate with a fairly simple formula: take perfectly ordinary members of the privileged class—academics (like the author and her husband, John Bayley), television executives, publishers, stage people—place them in ordinary circumstances—summer home, retirement villa, suburban terrace house—and introduce one odd event—a surprise appearance of former friend or complete stranger, an accidental death, a crime witnessed—and watch what happens. And we did. Readers flocked to her work from Under the Net (1954) to Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), putting up with sometimes windy philosophical observations from the truly observant and the harebrained alike, just to see what happened next. It was a familiar world, as many of her readers did indeed belong to the class she portrayed, did in fact live in Murdochland, as it was often called, or its overseas equivalents. Why? Because she made us believe in her characters and want to see what they might get up to.
Do we have to love them? Want to be them? No. That’s part of the beauty of the novel, that it follows the Law of Us and Them: Readers choose the degree to which they identify with characters. We can try on experiences and identities for a few hours that we would never want as our permanent condition, or we can stand aloof from the proceedings and take only a clinical interest. We don’t have to be Heathcliff or Aureliano Buendía or Tess, but we can be if we want. Every teacher knows this, having had students in the same class divide between those who identify fully with Atticus Finch or Jane Eyre and those who wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole. The novel goes on either way, and so does the reading.
If one tweaks that formula slightly, making the event weird rather than merely odd, one arrives at Fay Weldon. Her world is quite similar to Murdoch’s (and indeed, she was a one-time worker in the vineyards of British television), but the events that befall them are distinctly peculiar. A woman wakes up one morning to find that her unfaithful husband has cloned her. Repeatedly. That, not surprisingly, is the premise of The Cloning of Joanna May (1989). In The Hearts and Lives of Men (1987), a child in a bitter divorce is kidnapped at the behest of one parent, but the crime goes awry when the plane she’s on blows up in midair and she, sitting far back in the tail section, floats gently to earth, launching her on a bizarre fairy-tale journey that is equal parts hilarity and heartbreak. The novel is a delightful satire of many worthy targets in contemporary society, most of them involving people with more money than brains or scruples. Her most famous creation, of course, is Ruth, a wronged woman who lets her dark side come to the fore in the service of revenge in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983). As far as I know, to date no one has ever been a she-devil or been cloned, and the record of tail sections of planes gliding gracefully to earth is discouragingly slim, yet that has not kept readers from identifying with Weldon’s characters or becoming absorbed in their adventures and mishaps. Perhaps that is the most miraculous thing about reading, the way in which we can become captivated by both the familiar and the alien alike.