Why Novels

(Another excerpt blog post. Since I want to talk about the "theories" put forth, I felt like I had to quote a lot from this article. It also preserves things that I think are somewhat valuable in my quest to rediscover reading as an activity for me. And reading fiction is just a big a part of this as reading non-fiction.)

This post lists a bunch of reasons of why reading novels might be good.

Theory 1: Ye olde status

The obvious explanation is that there’s nothing intrinsically great about reading novels. The reason we think it’s great is that reading novels—at least the right ones—is high status.[…]

Theory 2: Diminishing returns

[…]Under this theory, what’s important is having the ability to read novels. But said ability is acquired by reading novels, so read some novels.

[T]his theory suggest that reading novels has diminishing returns. That fits nicely with the fact that many people push their children to read novels while not reading any themselves.[...]

Theory 3: Common language

I think Catcher in the Rye is a good but not great book. But I love talking about Catcher in the Rye because (1) all North Americans seem to have read it, and (2) whenever I ask someone to tell me how they feel about Holden Caulfield, I always seem to learn something about them.[...]

Theory 4: Legible mind-space

Maybe novels are just another form of entertainment. OK. But say you tried to tell the same story as a novel or as movie / podcast / opera / interpretive dance performance. Different formats will be better in different ways. [...] Thoughts are worth exploring. If you want to explore thoughts, maybe novels are the best way to do that. [...]

Theory 5: Purity of vision

Movies are expensive to make. To be financially viable, they need to target a large slice of the population. Movies also reflect the combined efforts of many people. Both of these mean that movies are a compromise between different visions.[...] Novels are usually written by one person.[...]

Theory 6: All these theories are stupid

[...]Maybe the point of reading War and Peace is that War and Peace is incredible and obviously one of the greatest pieces of art ever made in any medium. [...] I definitely feel like I’m living my best life when I read War and Peace. But I also feel like I’m living an OK-ish life when I read a novel about Spenser, private investigator. And most novels most people read are closer to the Spenser than to War and Peace. And I still feel better spending an afternoon reading about Spenser than I would watching 99% of TV shows.

Theory 7: Dopamine

Or perhaps the difference is that reading is a thing you do rather than something you consume. […] But if you read (or do watercolors, or meditate) you’re training yourself to calmly pursue long-term goals and to sustain attention in the face of complexity. [...] Sometimes I wonder if phones/apps are the most addictive thing ever created. I suspect that more people today are addicted to their phones today than were ever addicted to any drug [... and] that phone addiction will eat a larger part of your soul.

I think this is a big part of the explanation.

Theory 8: Non-fungible time

In the end, I don’t think novels are the best way to spend your time. In my view no novel—not even War and Peace—is as good as a truly great conversation. [... M]aybe reading a novel is the best thing you could do in the category of things you could realistically do.

I don't really like "theory listicles" because they don't integrate all these thoughts into one coherent argument. Not that that is easy or even always possible (yet), but if I get the feeling that the form is deliberately chosen as opposed to an actual interim product of an integrated theory forthcoming, I feel it's optimizing for engagement instead of exploring and a refining an argument.^[1]

Anyway, one "theory" absent of this list is the theory that literature at large is a great mine for the practice of creating theory itself. When I was a student of History of Science And Technology I was employed by one of the participating departments for this program called "Literaturwissenschaft mit dem Schwerpunkt Literatur und Wissenschaft" (more or less "literary studies with a focus on literature and science"). So in this department's classes we read (parts of) novels, journal articles and essays about novels and other literary works (or non-fiction works read through a literary lens) all in service of being able to say something about the practice of science, history, the humanities, "media" and so forth. And novels are great for exploring the possibility space of science and being exposed to inventive new ways to view human pursuits.

An example of this approach to literature would be Friedrich Kittler who wrote, for example about Aufschreibesysteme which is a term that covers the ensembles of technologies and institutions that build the base on which a culture "runs": its memory, data processing apparatus and so forth. Now, a lot of this writing is a response to a kind of against the grain re-reading of Michel Foucault's ideas around discourse. But parts of these ideas were indeed developed employing the help of actual novels.

Novels sometimes include sketches of theories that you can use for your own uses. Or (especially historical) novels and their descriptions of f.x. how a certain technology was used are valuable data coffers (about the possible, thinkable, plausible when the book was written, norms, expectations...). They can be used for illustrating a point you're trying to make, for example. Sometimes they offer a catchy term - like Kittler's "Aufschreibesystem", itself taken from the autobiographical writings of the mentally ill Daniel Paul Schreber.

Another way novels are great fodder for the theorists is that they allow us to think about how any given book fits into our broader understanding of [insert your favorite theoretical subject here]. They can tell us something about writing, about society, about art, about technology, about science, about the past, about philosophy, nature, the human mind and so forth. The question "What does this tell us about [insert your favorite theoretical subject here]?" is interesting, because it may make us question beliefs about the world and how it works or could work. "Somebody was able to think this. What does that mean?". In this way it both opens up a wealth of possible thoughts in this world and also defines what can be said about the world at some point in the past, today and, in some way, even in the future.

One of my favorite books is probably the "Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften" (Man Without Qualities) by Robert Musil. One passage in it frames this thinking about possibilities beautifully:

If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility. To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor had lived, is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justifications for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.

(source)

So, if you ask me: Novels in particular, because they take time and attention to read and are often the result of one mind (or so we like to think) and because they are less expensive to make but also because they have been a status symbol (which makes them an interesting comparison point historically speaking) and because they touch in part every and all of the "theories" that I quoted when I started this blog post make them valuable to read. It all depends in part on the reader. And trying to reduce the relationship between all of us individually to our relationship to novels to a causal reasoning chain is not that helpful, actually.

P.S. Musing About An Actual Theory About Novels

A theory of "why novels" will have to climb up in complexity a bit and should ask, how these mini-theories could be integrated into something that has a more universal character. Because if all theories are partly true at the same time we need concepts that can carry this aspect of changing priorities depending on who is exposed (and when) to our object of investigation.

I therefore think a theory of the novel would need a strong sense of historicity as well as "media-ecology" as it is the time and place, the individual reader (a problematic term) and the novel together that make the novel appear relevant in this way or that way. These parts build a system, network or biotope - or maybe it's better to say that the system, network or biotope makes these parts appear as distinguishable entities. In any case: "Why novels" would need to analyze, I think, typical contexts in which novels are read, what patterns emerge from there and how did that change over time. I am not going to write such a theory but the answer most certainly is not "plurality of mini theories".^[2]

That being said: The blog post did make me write a bunch and made me look up a quote or two. So it did something. Which makes it in some ways similar to what novels can do sometimes. Even a so-so novel may be used as food for exploring a thought. And sometimes it might even be a blog post that does something similar.

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