Literature, now more than ever

THERE’S a moment in the life of every writer when he or she questions the relevance of literature. Usually, this comes as a reaction to what Annie Dillard has called the “intrinsic impossibility” of composition; “I do not so much write a book,” she acknowledges in “The Writing Life,” “as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.”

Occasionally, though, it is an external disruption that provokes a literary crisis of faith. That’s what happened to Jane Smiley, who had always found writing an unencumbered, even joyful, process -- until Sept. 11, 2001. When those hijacked jets slammed into the twin towers, Smiley was in the middle of her ninth novel, “Good Faith,” which revolves around infidelity and real estate and takes place early in the Reagan years.

Suddenly, she could no longer connect to fiction: It didn’t seem to matter anymore. “I came up with all sorts of diagnoses for my condition,” she writes in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel,” a new nonfiction work that grew out of her need to reaffirm her belief in literature. “The state of the zeitgeist was tempting, but I refused to be convinced. I reminded myself that I had lived through lots of zeitgeists over the years, and the geist wasn’t all that bad in California.... [But] I felt scattered. Even after I lost my fascination with the images and the events, my mind felt dissipated and shallow.”

Four years after Sept. 11, with “Good Faith” long since published, Smiley elaborates by phone from her Carmel Valley home. “I think I underestimated what a shock those attacks were,” she says, her voice soft, textured with a Midwestern twang. “I expected to get back to work. And then, the stuff that came afterward -- anthrax, Afghanistan, Iraq -- just compounded the feeling of intrusion. It was impossible to get away.”

Part of the story of Sept. 11 is that it altered everything, although whether that’s accurate remains a subject for debate. More certain is that many writers, and especially fiction writers, have had trouble taking on the attacks and their aftermath in any convincing way. As to why this is, Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul recently told the New York Times Book Review that fiction’s time is over: “What I felt,” he argued, “was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material.... I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn’t know fully.”

Still, for all that Naipaul’s comments reflect a larger issue -- the perception that fiction or, more broadly, literature is no longer able to address our historical moment -- there’s a way in which they miss the point. Fiction, after all, has never been about history; rather, it has to do with (in E.M. Forster’s phrase) the “buzz of implication,” the subtle nuances of how we live.

“The act of reading is collaborative, conversational,” says Anne Fadiman, Francis writer in residence at Yale University and former editor of the American Scholar, whose recent anthology, “Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love,” gathers essays by, among others, Luc Sante, Vivian Gornick and Phillip Lopate. For Fadiman, who won a 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction for “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” such engagement is hardly limited to fiction but to any work that requires an emotional investment on a reader’s part.

Her new book, like Smiley’s, makes the case for our continued faith in reading as a necessary filter on the world. “I think it’s wrongheaded,” she contends, “to assume that people don’t want to use their imaginations, or that imagination has become less necessary than information, somehow. That’s what makes literature so special. It calls up that instinctive, imaginative work.”

What Fadiman is getting at is one of the inalienable truths of literature, that it depends on the relationship of two perspectives -- the writer’s and the reader’s -- as they come together in an intimate way. It’s a matter of interiority, a one-to-one connection, the idea that reading involves a mutual possession at its heart.

“The novel,” Smiley points out, “is essentially a form in which the interior of one person’s mind comes into the interior of another person’s mind. When I read Dickens or Jane Austen, word by word they’re showing me the idiosyncratic nature of their minds. It’s as if they were inside me. There’s no novel that doesn’t unfold the author’s sensibility. So the more novels I read, the more sensibilities I have in my head, and the greater my sense of empathy.”

In her view, there’s a political component here, since the more empathy we develop, the more likely we are to understand opposing attitudes. “If you have leaders who don’t read novels,” Smiley says sharply, “look what big trouble you get into. They can’t imagine other points of view.”

Yet equally important is literature’s subversive power to change our perceptions by offering ideas or experiences we might not otherwise have. In “Rereadings,” Pico Iyer recalls discovering the Penguin Modern Classics while a student at an austere British boarding school: “Canetti, Capek, Svevo, Vian: Even now the names, nearly all foreign and unpronounceable, reek of forbidden cigarettes and the cafes we weren’t allowed to visit.”

Books, in other words, encourage us to expand our frame of reference, to identify more widely, as it were. Or as Iyer puts it in an e-mail: “Reading remains for me the best way of traveling into other minds, alien sensibilities, and so of doing what it is I aim to do when getting on a plane for North Korea, Syria, or Easter Island: beginning to see the world through eyes radically different from my own.”

Through a personal prism

THE key to all this is the essential subjectivity not just of writing but of reading, the way the books we love become reflections of ourselves. “It’s almost as if you’re looking at a self-portrait,” says novelist Allegra Goodman, who writes in “Rereadings” about “Pride and Prejudice,” which she encountered as a child. Goodman’s experience is an excellent case in point, since whenever she goes back to the novel, it has an altered effect. “At nine,” she writes, “I’d loved ‘Pride and Prejudice’ for its humor; at fifteen, I’d read it with melancholy; but in college, I spurned it with feelings akin to those of my roommate when she broke up with her high-school sweetheart.”

Even so, the connection lingers, a plumb line from the present to the past. “What’s interesting about rereading,” Fadiman says by phone from her home in western Massachusetts, “is that it becomes an autobiographical exercise. Often, we reread a book when our lives are in a rough patch and we want something predictable. At the same time, it’s like re-meeting a first love -- you can’t recapture the feelings you had. You know too much, you have too much experience. So the process forces us to confront our inner changes, to see what we were like at a certain age and how we’re different now.”

That, according to Smiley, is exactly as it should be, for a great book is too open-ended, too multilayered, to be encompassed by any single reading or point of view. “The novel,” she explains, “is a form of overwhelming abundance, in which we essentially lose ourselves. We cannot grasp abundance, we can only live through it. So a great novel overwhelms our capacity to grasp it, which is why each time we read it we come away with a new response.”

Of course, if such responses are often personal, they are also universal at the core. Literature may have little to do with history, but it is all about being human, the verities of experience. For proof, we need only examine “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel,” which, in addition to framing an accessible history and theory of fiction, traces Smiley’s ambitious reading of 100 novels, from the 11th century Japanese epic “The Tale of Genji” to Jennifer Egan’s “Look at Me.” Although initially Smiley undertook this project “as an antidote to history,” she quickly realized how directly these works might speak to us.

Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” for instance -- first published in 1352, during the Black Death -- seemed to prefigure the anthrax scare, offering uncanny resonances between its characters, who leave Florence to escape the plague-struck city, and Smiley’s desire to step back from the world. By the same token, Daniel Defoe became an unlikely progenitor of modern consciousness, the first novelist to adopt subjectivity as an aesthetic, to embrace first-person as a literary tool.

“My hundred novels,” Smiley concludes, “were not outdated at all, but testified, over and over, to the perennial nature of regular human thought” -- an idea that returns us to the difference between imagination and information, the inability of facts to give us what we need.

“If I want to think about a new friend I’ve made,” explains Iyer, “knowing her height or address or resume tells me almost nothing at all worth knowing; what I want to wrestle with is what she thinks about at night, the mystery of her relation to faith, what her secrets are, or her hidden ambitions. This is the stuff that fiction teaches us.”

In many ways, that’s hardly a revelation, but why we’ve turned to reading all along. In his poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” William Carlos Williams gets at this with characteristic eloquence: “It is difficult to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Nearly 40 years later, Mona Simpson offered her own variation, noting that “after Sept. 11, I didn’t read books for the news. Books, by their nature, are never new enough.” No, what literature continues to offer is, in Goodman’s words, “a witnessing and recording, a celebration of the small, the quiet, the intimate” -- which is, as it has always been, enough.

“We don’t connect with literature in the intellect,” Smiley says. “We connect to it where we attach to dogs or boyfriends -- at the deeper level of the self. The desire we have for long narrative forms is intrinsic; it’s a natural human thing. A lot of people worry about the future of the novel, but I don’t. It’s a part of who we are.”

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In Book Review

Wendy Smith examines Jane Smiley’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.”