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Thursday
Yesterday I talked about how novels—and narrative in general—help us find meaning in life. According to comparative lit professor Peter Brooks, the novel “offers us our best understanding of what it means to live, to have lived, to construct a life.” He says something similar about fictional characters.
Chapter 4 of Brooks’s Seduced by Story—“The Allure of Imaginary Beings”—opens with a series of related questions:
Why do we invest so much time and emotional energy in our relationships with imaginary beings? Why are the aspirations, the errors, the inner turmoil and erotic daydreams of Emma Woodhouse and Emma Bovary so important to us. We know when we open the novels in which they figure that the persons we are going to meet aren’t “real,” yet that makes us no less eager to meet them, no less highly invested in how we feel about them, how we admire and criticize them, how we anticipate their emotional highs and lows, how we fear for their failures and hope for their successes.
Just as he follows the lead of Walter Benjamin (see yesterday’s post) when discussing the power of narrative, so in his discussion of character Brooks takes his cues from Marcel Proust. At one point, talking about his fictional painter Elstir and his fictional composer Vinteuil, the author of In Search of Lost Time explores how they appear to erase the real world. This leads Proust to reflect,
The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit a range lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.
Elsewhere Proust says that intercourse with fictional creations opens up a deeper knowing than intercourse with actual people, explaining,
A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift….The novelist’s happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts [of real persons], impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate.
One way Brooks illustrates Proust’s point is by noting the difference between imagining a character and encountering a cinematic version. Noting that he’s never seen a satisfactory Emma Bovary on film, he writes,
Emma Bovary may be very difficult to literalize because she is herself a creature of daydream, fantasy, the wish to be other and elsewhere. Her virtue for us as readers lies partly in her noncoherence as a flesh and blood creature.
On Proust’s point about the challenges presented by actual people, Brooks writes,
To be inhabited in this manner by the fictional…allows us to discover in the space of a couple of hours what it would take us years to learn in life—or that we might not learn at all since the profound changes in life are hidden from us by the slowness of their process. The heart changes in life; that is our worst sorrow; but we know this change only in reading.
And further on:
Represented persons give us an understanding of life, and of ourselves, that real persons cannot. Why is that? In daily life what Proust calls “habit” fills us with a lazy blindness; the novel as optical instrument alone restores vision.
Habit—which is to say, pre-set categories into which we can comfortably slide—aren’t the only danger to seeing clearly. For dramatic effect, Brooks quotes Adam Smith on the need for imagination to preserve our humanity. The senses, the political economist says, will take us only so far. Brooks says that Smith’s passage on torture in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) should be required reading in the CIA:
Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers…. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.
Smith here is not talking about fictional characters but one can see how they provide us with (in Brooks’s words) “a fuller realization of another kind of being in the world.” Later in the chapter, after citing a passage by Keats, Brooks writes,
Readers, like poets and novelists, are also chameleon poets, taking joy in Iago as well as Imogen, provisionally giving up personal identity in order to be in and filling some other body…
And elsewhere:
That we can talk about Dorothea Brooke or Eugene de Rastignac beyond the boundaries of the pages we have read is testimony not so much to our wish that we could invite them to dinner with us as to our need to reimagine our own existences through their eyes…The ego learns its own shape by trying on others. The more cognitively challenging the process, the better. That’s why we need the novel.
“More cognitively challenging” is a tacit acknowledgement that great literature helps us reimagine more fully than not-so-great literature. The same distinction is implied in Brooks’s assertion that,
in the novels we value most, [becoming immersed is] not a passive or escapist process but one that has a cognitive and critical function. Character in the novel gives us, in the old yet still fresh words of Matthew Arnold, a “criticism of life.”
And finally,
[W]e need fictional representation of persons in order to understand the most elusive and consequential issues of our limited human existence.
