Hannah Arendt and the idea of self
Just so you know …
Men need to see that novels aren’t for losers
Fiction is ignored by young males addicted to self-improvement — but they’re missing a trick
The Times
The failings of 21st-century men — toxic, sex-starved, porn-addicted, misogynistic, naively beguiled by sinister right-wing father figures — are the subject of incessant commentary at present. A minor item on this litany of complaint, but one that provokes unusual fury whenever it surfaces, is male literary failure.
My generation of men, someone will periodically observe, has failed to produce a single important or widely read novelist. Even more distressing, as the author of a viral article in the magazine Dazed pointed out last week, men hardly even read fiction.
Almost two thirds of novels are bought by women. Men, the author intimates, are hulking literalists drawn to non-fiction by the basest motives: to acquire new material that they can “mansplain” to women or becausethey “make a fetish of practical outcomes”, knowledge and “productivity”. Worse, Dazed warns, by neglecting novels men are missing out on valuable moral instruction. Fiction “opens your eyes to uncomfortable truths” and “offers an alternative route through the masculinity crisis”.
I agree that men should read novels. I am sceptical that they can be moralised into it. The dreariest argument for fiction is that it is good for you. A number of dubious-seeming studies have purported to show that novels — with their capacity to transport us into other lives — improve empathy. After reading a short story, the subjects of one experiment were more likely to help a researcher pick pens up from the floor. Such “evidence” strikes me as thin. Certainly, it is lavishly contradicted by personal experience. I have met plenty of nasty, self-regarding novel readers.
Indeed, as a teenage boy going through my own phase of resistance to novels, nothing would have been less appealing to me than the notion that fiction was “improving”. If I could speak to my former self, I might explain that the novel’s capacity to show readers inside other lives is not interesting because it could make me more virtuous but because it is dazzling on its own terms. Vladimir Nabokov’s 300-page invitation into the consciousness of an eloquent paedophile in Lolita is far from morally straightforward. The extraordinary thing is how vividly he takes you there.
Fiction’s great trick, putting you inside other people’s minds, is one that no other art form can pull off. Cinema, video games, painting — all these are hopelessly stuck in the world of surfaces. The re-creation of human consciousnesses through words is one of our species’ most remarkable inventions. Choosing to ignore the miracle of fiction, I would have enthused (and perhaps I have now seized my former self by the shoulders), is like choosing not to visit the pyramids or try space flight when offered the chance.
Addicted like many young men to the prestige of knowledge, I might simply have shrugged at this. And indeed there is a more vulgarly practical case for the novel. Somebody should have begun by explaining to me that one of the important intellectual fallacies of our time is the idea that human beings are merely biological machines. We believe that we can be optimised and fed with data like computers. Self-improvement requires only more efficient inputting of information — hence the popularity of podcasts and of the app Blinkist, which condenses works of non-fiction into 15-minute summaries of “key insights”.
We neglect an important distinction once made by the critic John Carey, who wrote that successful works of literature “do not tell you what the truth is, they make you feel what it would be like to know it”. Novels contain a kind of knowledge that cannot be condensed or summarised. When I first read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, I knew that I had learnt something important about what it is like to be a teenage girl — the awkwardness, the embarrassment, the sudden disorienting sexual attention of men.
Obviously, I had been told about those things before. But Ferrante, to employ Carey’s useful phrase, made me feel what it was like to know it. Emotional understanding is a kind of knowledge humans can assimilate and machines cannot. It should not be underrated.
Anthony Trollope can make you feel the complexity of a huge system like a parliament or a vast financial fraud. In his sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell made me feel — through the characters of Charles Stringham and Kenneth Widmerpool — how charm, intelligence and early promise can lead to failure and how humourlessness, mediocrity and egotism can lead to success. The idea sounds banal in summary and my point is not that Powell’s novels contain anything as glib as an “insight” or a “moral”, but they do offer a deepened understanding of life. To really feel it, you have to read the books.
This case for novels is not often made, perhaps because people are wary of being confused with the kinds of unsophisticated readers who believe fiction offers “hints and tips for life”. But novels do teach you about the world. The scientific studies of novel reading I find most convincing tend to cite benefits such as emotional intelligence and a better appreciation of life’s ambiguity and complexity.
I wonder whether this might be an incentive for reluctant men. And then they can progress to the purer pleasure of marvelling that, in our age of technological wonders, the novel, a form of sustained empathetic hallucination invented in the 18th century, has still not been surpassed.