THE FIRST SENTENCE OF every novel says the same thing: Read me. The tone may be one of several options, from Be my guest to Ready to ride? to I’m gonna get you, sucka, but the main message is always the same. Novels all have the same need, the same shortcoming—they’re nothing without an audience. Not every novel wants to be read by every audience, but each one wants an audience, the right audience. The second part of the message may take a bit longer to hit home: “Here’s how to read me.” But it will appear. Novels do two things consistently and ceaselessly. They ask to be read and tell us how. Think about it. A book of sixty, eighty, maybe a hundred and eighty thousand words is making a big demand on our time. The social contract between writer and reader requires that the writer check back in periodically to make sure we’re still turning pages. Hey, did you see that? Isn’t she a stinker? Watch this bit. And do you know what happens next? Hey, wanna buy a watch? Okay, I don’t remember any of them saying that, but almost: How gullible are you now? What can I get away with this time? Those are the sorts of tricks writers use to keep us reading and up to speed, right up through the end of the novel. Our part of the bargain is to keep reading or chuck the thing across the room. We get to choose and the choice is important.
Why? Because every novel needs to be read. Without that, it doesn’t mean anything. Until it rests in the hand or on the lap, a novel it’s just a stack of paper with spots. Meaning in fiction is the result of a conspiracy between two minds and two imaginations. In literature classes we often speak as if the writer is all-powerful, but he needs the reader’s imagination to let the deal go down. If you withhold yours, no meaning. Everybody’s Gatsby is going to be similar; that’s Fitzgerald’s doing. But nobody’s is going to be quite like anybody else’s. Is Daisy spoiled, abused, borderline insane, manipulative, truthful, deceitful? In what proportions? Is Gatsby just a crook and a poseur, a lonely dreamer, a guy who doesn’t get it? What about Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband? Nick? We’re never going to agree on the fine print. Which, as you know, isn’t even printed.
I recently visited a high school English class full of very bright kids. Since it was the penultimate day on which they would ever be high school kids, they were also very happy, but that’s another story. We spent an hour together talking about Katherine Mansfield and Shakespeare and the avalanche of Jane Austen films, sequels, prequels, and jonquils, and toward the end Dickens came up. The teacher mentioned that they had read Great Expectations, so I asked, less than naively, “Well, what did you think?” And being bright, motivated kids who know the expected answer, they said, more or less convincingly, “It was good.” Some used “really” in their sentence, but they all generally agreed. All but one. The class curmudgeon said it wasn’t all that great and didn’t move him deeply. I liked him better immediately. It takes courage, even on your next-to-last day of high school, to say you’re in AP English and aren’t wild about one of the established classics. For one thing, there’s the weight of more than a century of received opinion going against you. And in this case the wild popularity of those novels in the author’s own lifetime. Clearly, this kid was swimming against the literary current. And that’s fine. We can’t all like the same books, the same films, the same songs, despite what mass-marketing and American Idol might have us believe. Or even the same things about said books, films, and songs.
Anyway, as I was driving back home past newly planted cornfields and construction zones, his response made me think back on my own encounters with Great Expectations. How did I feel about it? How do I feel about it now? Let me preface this by saying that it has been nearly forty years, so I may not accurately recall everything about that first reading. I remember clearly, though, two things in particular: a sense of confusion early on, both in Pip’s encounter with the escaped Magwitch and in his domestic arrangement with his sister and her husband, and outrage at the ending. The first, I subsequently learned, is fairly typical of the opening gambits in Dickens’s novels, and nowhere near the murkiness and fog in the Court of Chancery at the outset of Bleak House. That second one, though, that’s another story. Ruined the novel for me. No kidding—absolutely ruined it. It was abrupt, suspiciously so. False. Insincere. Hokey. And just plain dumb. So what was it that triggered this venom? Merely this.
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
Even allowing for some changes in sensibility between 1861, the year of the novel’s publication, and 1969, the year of my encounter with it, this was just wrong. Had Pip learned nothing through all his suffering? Could he not see that happiness was never possible with Estella, no matter how much she had been changed by her own experiences? Didn’t he have at least a shred of pride? And et cetera.
In case you don’t know the story, here’s the gist: Pip had once been engaged as a playmate and companion for Estella by an ancient harridan named Miss Havisham, who saw the young girl as her instrument for wreaking vengeance on the male sex for having stood her up at the marriage altar (she lives out her days in her wedding dress amid the wreckage of the aborted reception feast). Pip, although neither knows it, is Estella’s practice victim, the boy on whom she can perfect cruelty. She gets rather good at it. Of course they meet later in life, of course she leads him on but marries another, of course he’s a fool of the first order to believe that he loves her, much less the reverse; otherwise, there’s no need for this famous final scene. Then, after much misery on both sides, they just happen (of all Dickens’s contrivances, one of the most contrived) to meet at the burnt-out ruins of Miss Havisham’s mansion. Some cursory apologies are exchanged, but nothing momentous enough to prepare for the hearts-and-violins ending. So naturally, my future self was appalled. Some of it, I suppose, had to do with being a teenaged male who took rejection by girls about as badly as the next guy. If memory serves, I was also what could generously be called “between girlfriends.” In fact, fairly far between. Part of it had to do with having plodded through several hundred pages of hard going, only to have them trivialized by this “easy” ending, as I saw it. Maybe that’s what my reading always is, some combination of testosterone, life history, insecurity, male ego, aesthetic judgment, and gut sense (or nonsense). Hard to judge from the inside. In any case, that’s what I felt at the time.
But there was one more thing that I felt about that ending but couldn’t have defended: Dickens didn’t believe it, either. It was an idea. A belief. A conviction. With nothing whatsoever to back it up.
Okay, then, a couple of years later, and Tom’s reading the novel again. A college class, this time; he would not willingly return to the scene of that particular crime. Same novel, different edition. Now here’s the beauty of it: this novel has the standard text and the originally intended ending. Much more Hemingway, Jake Barnes, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Also the story of sage advice from a clearly inferior novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (he gave us “It was a dark and stormy night”—no kidding), to lose the downer ending and please the punters. “Aha!” says Tom. “I knew it. That ending really was contrived.” Or words to that effect. So now the novel is merely smudged and not hopelessly blighted.
Which leads to another reading some years on. This time Tom sees something he hasn’t noticed before: “I could see no shadow of a further parting from her.” Not, “There would be no further parting.” Well, then, that’s different. That’s maybe what he sensed but missed the first reading—an out-clause. Dickens seems to be throwing a sop to readers but acknowledging that it is a sop. Pip can’t see even a shadow of another parting. So what? When could he ever see a thing before it happened to him? When was he ever attentive to signs and portents? You can believe this, dear reader, if you want, but I’m going to leave a thread of doubt with which the Properly Dubious can unravel this false tapestry.
I heard that. What do you mean, “But did Dickens intend that meaning?” He wrote it, didn’t he? Besides, his influence is limited; Elvis has left the building. It’s not his novel anymore. It’s ours. His and mine. His and yours. Chiefly, yours and mine. It stopped being his alone when he gave it to us.
Well, what about the writer’s intentions? I’m with Huck on that one: I don’t put no stock in dead people. And here’s the thing: once the writer sends the final edit back to his publisher, he’s toast. His impact on the novel is finished. Of course, a lot of the writers we read are dead, and the rest will be (sorry, just my morbid side coming through), but body temperature isn’t the issue: in terms of the text, once it’s published, he’s already past tense. The living presence in the now of the text is the reader. The novelist provides the stuff of the novel—facts, events, structure, characters, dialogue, narrative, description, beginning, middle, and end. All the hard data from “Once upon a” to “ever after.” Without which, of course, there are no readers. Readers bring interpretation, analysis, sympathy, hostility, cheers, and catcalls. Writers make novels; readers make them live.
So here’s something to live by, the Law for All Reading: Own the novels you read. (Poems, too. Also stories, essays, plays—you get the idea.) I don’t mean purchase a copy, although for self-evident and self-serving reasons, I’m not against it. I mean take psychological and intellectual possession of those works. Make them yours. You’re not a frightened schoolchild asking for extra gruel (there’s that Dickens guy again). You’re a grown-up person having a conversation with another one. That the two of you have never met and the other one may be dead is immaterial. It’s still a conversation, a meeting of minds and imaginations, and yours matters as much as the writer’s.
What’s interesting about this transaction is how readers both embrace and resist that ownership. Over the years, my work has drifted forward in the twentieth century, from Joyce and Yeats and Lawrence, which is where I began, toward postmodernism. If you can forgive me for bringing up the metafictionists one more time, one of the things they insist upon is the provisional nature of reality and, therefore, of meaning. We see this most clearly in the dual endings of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, of course, but it’s there in the rest of Fowles, as well, and especially in The Magus. When I’ve taught that novel, the most frequently asked question is, “What happened?” Followed very closely by, “Did it happen?” Is Nicholas the beneficiary, if that’s the right word, of a psychodrama staged for his improvement by the mysterious Conchis? How should he interpret it? How should we interpret him interpreting it? And so on. Needless to say, not all members of the class are happy with the lack of certainty Fowles offers in the narrative, but many, probably most, are. Again and again in Fowles and his contemporaries, readers are given opportunities, even required, to construct meaning.
That’s certainly true among the metafictional crowd—John Barth, Robert Coover, Angel Carter, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino—yet it’s also the case with those whose writing is somewhat less self-referential. While Iris Murdoch may have seen herself as providing ethical or philosophical instruction through her novels, those books are more puzzles than road maps. Definite events take place. What those events mean, however, and what they tell us about the characters, that’s another story. Is there a unicorn in The Unicorn? That question always comes up in class, and not because I ask it. Who? Why? What should we think of Hannah Crean-Smith, of Gerald Scottow, of the main character, Marian Taylor? What role are the gothic trappings playing in the novel? Is it imitation gothic, late gothic, anti-gothic? My experience is that intelligent and perceptive readers do not agree on these points. So, too, with The Black Prince. In that novel, Murdoch adds to Bradley Pearson’s first-person-central narrative several postscripts by other players in the drama: his former wife; her charlatan psychiatrist brother; the woman, Rachel Baffin, who has framed him for the murder of her husband, Arnold; and his former lover, Julian, the daughter of Arnold and Rachel. Murdoch even supplies a foreword and a postscript by a putative editor, P. Loxias, whose surname is another name for Apollo, especially as related to his connection with the Delphic Oracle. The Pythia, the priestess who reigned over the oracle, you may recall, was notoriously imprecise or ambiguous with information, and Loxias refers to Apollo’s obscuring tendencies in matters of prophecy. Murdoch has chosen a name, then, hardly designed to lend credence or solidity to the analysis of events in the novel. Her novels, right up through The Green Knight, are full of claims and counterclaims that often cannot be sifted objectively, mysterious pronouncements, true and false advisers and oracles, and uncertainties large and small. Only when readers impose their own imaginations on the novel can a full picture emerge. There are several possible motivations behind any character’s actions, and often support is available for more than one. We help shape the narrative by our agency, by keying on certain words, by accepting one explanation as more probable than another based on our understanding of events, by identifying with one character over another.
Of course, sometimes making demands on the reader backfires. If, for instance, one provides an ambiguous text to readers who despise ambiguity, trouble may ensue. Consider, if you will, a novel that is not about the founder of a major world religion but may be taken by certain readers—those, say, with a rigid adherence to writing as scripture and an extremely limited understanding of the concept of parody (or maybe an underdeveloped sense of humor), to be about that founder. You might find yourself living the next decade or so in hiding while under a sentence of death. Did the Ayatollah or his advisers misread The Satanic Verses? Of course they did. Did Salman Rushdie collude in his own difficulty? Very probably. Not so much in his subject matter, which on one level is pretty clearly not about the Prophet, but in his assumptions about his audience. The novel uses certain situations that parallel the life of Muhammad—the brothel in which the prostitutes bear the names of his wives, for instance—not to indicate that his wives were prostitutes but to underscore a sort of corruption or hypocrisy at large in the world that makes use of religion for commercial and degraded purposes. Rushdie’s intended audience would get that. He probably never anticipated acquiring a readership among the mullahs. On the other hand, mullahs can also be active and creative readers, if not always discerning ones, as he discovered to his pain. This is a special and, we could hope, singular case, although the sad truth is that there are other instances. Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed by an extremist while sitting at his favorite café. The more recent Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk was threatened with imprisonment for “insulting Turkishness.” (There was even an assassination plot for which the only appropriate word is “byzantine”: According to The Guardian, Pamuk “was targeted as part of a campaign to sow chaos in preparation for a military coup, scheduled for 2009.”) In recent times a number of writers have been assaulted or assassinated because fanatics of one stripe or another have taken issue with perceived meaning. Rarely is the perception anywhere close to the writers’ intended meaning. Yet intentions do not rule out alternative or contrary readings. All a writer can do, ultimately, is write what she means and hope for the best.
This can seem, amid the fatwas and general hubbub, a particular problem of this moment. Yet if we go back further in literary history, we see that writers have always demanded that we bring something of ourselves to the act of reading. We can go way back and have the Hamlet-and-his-problems or even Achilles-and-his-problems chat, but we’ll limit ourselves to novels and novelists. Who is Heathcliff? What does he want? What drives him? What are his limitations? How about Catherine? Do we believe or trust Nelly Dean? Why, or why not? Well, then, how about Victor Frankenstein? What do we understand about his motivations? How about his monster? Are we all in agreement here? Even fairly controlling writers, Jane Austen, say, and Dickens, since he’s already implicated here, leave a lot of room for interpretation. Dickens often gives us the opportunity to sympathize with his dark characters, if not his real villains. Bill Sikes is beyond the pale, clearly. But Fagin? How much, and on what basis? And Austen’s amatory novels, those plots aimed at the goal of marriage, may seem to have only one outcome, but the nuances are many. Do we find Mr. Darcy as interesting as we’re supposed to? How harshly do we judge Emma Woodhouse’s judgmental blunders? The third person, free-indirect style viewpoint—the point of view we can think of as generated out of the character’s thoughts but not directly said by her, that is almost-but-not-quite first person—brings us close to Emma’s own voice yet keeps us at just enough distance that we never quite settle into identification with her. How much sympathy we extend to her, then, is our call. And don’t even get me started on Henry James.
You see the problem? Except that it’s not a problem, or not in the usual sense. A conundrum, maybe. A puzzle. Ambiguity is the way of the novel, even when it is not the goal of the writer. There is simply no way to close out all possibilities except the one primarily intended while creating characters who are even remotely human. The essay can successfully restrict meaning; the novel, not so much. Why? In part, we can blame language, that rich vein of multiple meanings. As public figures often discover to their pain, it’s very difficult to make statements that are completely accurate, straightforward, and without embarrassing subtext. What are you going to do with a language that contains self-antonyms, those words that are their own opposites, where the verb “to dust” can mean “to remove particles, as from furniture” and “to distribute particles, as with powdered sugar”? And this isn’t an isolated instance; there are scores, perhaps hundreds of them. English is always shifting meanings, borrowing from other languages, getting all slanged up, verbing nouns and nouning verbs. It’s the most flexible and malleable of languages, but also the most maddeningly imprecise. Novelists can’t control that, and mostly they run with it, using that ambiguity to their advantage. In part, too, it’s the nature of the novel, which describes action rather than explaining it. Texts that attempt to explicate themselves tend to lack drama and immediacy. Besides, we would regard that as a lack of faith in the enterprise: if you have to explain it for your readers, you must have failed in the initial narration. But I think the real cause is that human beings are fundamentally ambiguous. We say one thing but mean another, fumble to explain ourselves, contradict our beliefs with our behavior, perform actions even we don’t understand, hide much of our true being from the world and perhaps from ourselves. If the novel is to be faithful to human existence, characters are going to share in that ambiguous nature.
Think it’s just me? Here’s what Erica Wagner says on the subject, “Good novels go on beyond their final pages. They leave their authors and enter the minds of readers, who will ask questions, make demands and sometimes find themselves dissatisfied, just as they do with the flesh and blood creatures who inhabit the world outside the pages of a book.” Wagner is a novelist as well as the literary editor of The Times of London, so she knows a thing or two about reading—and writing—novels. She’s right, of course: good novels do go on beyond the text. But I would shift the dynamic just a hair: good readers invest themselves in novels in ways that stretch the texts. Our readings are dialogic: we interrogate the narrative, asking the questions and making the demands Wagner suggests, pursuing some possibilities while giving others a pass and, yes, sometimes finding ourselves dissatisfied.
The novel is interactive in the fullest sense. Good reading, and by this I mean not professorial or professional but merely the kind of reading that novelists hope for and deserve, actively enters into conversation with the created narrative, bringing out nuances, developing or resisting sympathies, exploring meanings. We meet the writer on her turf, but it’s also our turf. Meaning and significance happen in that place where writer and reader confer. The result isn’t merely that we get the most out of the novels, but that we get the most out of ourselves. Great novels, certainly, and maybe all novels, change us, but not merely by giving us something special. They also change us because of what we give to them. That’s a winner all the way around.