Through Novels We Practice Being Human

 

Novelist Rachel Kranz

Novelist Rachel Kranz

 

My friend Rachel Kranz and I have been talking and e-mailing about the value of novel reading, always a useful topic to revisit.  Rachel is as thoughtful as anyone I know on the subject—she is a novelist as well as a novel reader so she has a double perspective.  Leaps of Faith (Farrar Straus, 2000), included in the stacks of books that line this blog, is an extraordinary novel about theater life in New York, union organizing, definitions of family, gay marriage, and contemporary urban life in general.  I will have occasion to write about it in the future. (Here’s an excerpt.)

Rachel recently read Outliers (Little Brown, 2008), Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating book, and is particularly struck by his idea that, to become world class at something, you must have 10,000 hours of practice.  Genius may still be a factor, Gladwell says, but practice is the essential ingredient, whether you are Mozart, Bill Gates, or the Beatles (to cite some of Gladwell’s examples).  Rachel suggests that we think about novel reading in the way that Gladwell thinks about practice.

She says that this line of thinking was set in motion by a friend asking her why he should spend 40 hours reading a novel if there were faster, more efficient ways of learning a novel’s lessons, such as by watching a movie on the same theme or by reading nonfiction of some type.  Her friend wanted to know whether, even if a novel had more to teach than, say, a 2-hour movie, it had 20 times as much to teach?  And if not, why spend 40 hours reading it?  If a novel had a point to make about human existence, why couldn’t that point be summarized and presented more efficiently?  He concluded that, other than entertainment value and the emotional effects, the novel had nothing to contribute that couldn’t be gotten more efficiently in other ways.

 Rachel says that, after a lot of thought, she decided to stake her ground on the premise that the experience of reading a novel, like all the arts, offers the reader insights and internalization that cannot be gotten any other way.  One can take shortcuts by being told things, but through reading a novel one learns them in a different way and at a different level.  One gets different insights—into relationships, ambition, purpose, passion—and gets different levels of mastery over whatever the emotional lesson is.  It’s like the way a musician who practices achieves a different level of mastery over the instrument and the music than one who simply attends a lesson.

 So that’s how reading a book is like Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of practice (even though, granted, a single book doesn’t take 10,000 hours to read).  Just as Mozart, Gates, and the Beatles had to practice their activities—composing, computer programming, composing/performing—so, Rachel says, we humans generally have to practice the emotional and intellectual and spiritual work of being human.  Other than entertainment, the goal of reading a novel, she points out, is to keep us in the presence of an insight or experience where we get to practice human activities.  Ideally, she says, reading a novel is a holistic experience that includes fact, analysis, emotion, and as many dimensions as possible of human activity–thinking, feeling, remembering, processing, marinating, reconsidering, refusing, accepting, etc.

When we are immersed in a novel, we have the chance to practice these in a more concentrated and directed way than in “regular life.” And, Rachel notes, we can also demand more of ourselves since the stakes are lower and potentially less threatening.  Our own society is not falling apart as in, say King Lear.  We’re not dying, as in The Death of Ivan Ilych.


Rachel says that, like other types of practice, reading different novels might engage us in different kinds of activities.  With one novel, we might delve deeply into a single activity, say, forgiveness, or understanding the Other, or recognizing absurdity.  Another novel might call upon us to think broadly (Rachel mentions the mental and emotional operations required to respond to Moby Dick, from analyzing human relationships to contemplating our relationship to the universe).  Some novels move between deep and broad (say, Tolstoy’s).

Returning to the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, Rachel says the point of novel reading is not to get the same lessons more quickly.  Rather, it provides us the opportunity to practice those lessons.  It’s the work it takes to read the book that gives us the mastery of whatever the book offers to help us master.  Gladwell, she points out, asserts there are no shortcuts here.  Our brains are somehow altered by those 10,000 hours spent immersed in a particular activity.  Without that long-term immersion, we can’t excel, even if we’re born brilliant.  The long hours spent reading at least potentially offer us the chance to practice doing some of the things that humans do:  understand, forgive, condemn, mourn, let go, hold on, etc.  When we read, she says, we are filling in the gaps, we are experiencing, we are concluding, we are processing, we are responding and deciding.

 Rachel acknowledges that some novels are primarily for entertainment and emotion.  (And some, I would add, are primarily for information.) There is no need to read them if one doesn’t enjoy that version of entertainment more than any other available choice.  She then takes up the theme of my last few posts and talks about who is to blame for the fact that reading fiction is so arduous or unpleasant that some people are never going to see the benefits.  She too blames bad English classes: if novel reading were taught better, novels (especially demanding ones) would be less scary and more comfortable. 

The problems that some have with challenging novels are comparable to the problems that others have with math.  If schools taught math better (Rachel quotes Gladwell here), people would be willing to stay with a problem long enough to figure out how to solve it.  Instead, they too often panic and give up.  They conclude they’re “no good at math” or “don’t have mathematical brains,” instead of concluding that they were not comfortable enough practicing mathematical thinking long enough to show any results.  So back to fiction: Rachel says that some people never get the chance to discover their own relationship to a complex novel because they’re expected to read for the teacher’s ends, not their own. 

Finally, Rachel talks about the process from the perspective of the novel writer.  Rachel is currently writing a novel in which much of the action occurs in the antebellum south, and she examines the difference between reading a nonfiction account of a slave’s experience vs. imagining the experience through creating a slave character.  She says a deep knowing comes from writing fiction, even deeper that reading fiction.

 And she makes one last distinction, that between passive and active reading.  She notes that the more deliberate and reflective one is in one’s reading, the more one gets out of it.  (Good practicing novelists, she could have said, read very actively.)  Therefore those who simply glide through a novel, even a great novel, get less value.  If they only focus on the entertainment and emotion, resisting everything but the narcotic aspect, the novel doesn’t reveal its full riches.  Rachel concludes that the more fully readers engage their faculties, both by paying attention as they read and by thinking about the novel afterwards, the more they themselves grow as human beings. 

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

5 Comments

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.