The Fabled Functions of Fiction

Abstract

RECENTLY I WRAPPED UP a lecture on a modern American novel with the statement, underlying theme of the book, then, is that in a universe shorn of transcendental values, of codes divinely ordained, each person must necessarily work out his own destiny. When one of the graduate students in my class raised his hand, I prepared either to repeat or to amplify my somewhat grandiloquent assertion. But the student proved less perplexed than querulous. He said, That's about all I got out of it, too. What it took this author four-hundred pages to get across, a good philosopher could convey, and less ambiguously, in a chapter. I think novels are basically a waste of time. It was the kind of challenge that the English professor is trained to meet, and indeed my first impulse was to let loose traditional arguments that must at last pummel the young iconoclast into an admission of the inimitable sweetness and light of belles-lettres. The hovering presences of Sidney, Shelley, Arnold, and a host of descendent apologists beckoned me to verify my professional mettle by exonerating darling poesy (using the word in its broad Aristotelian sense) from the charge of inessentiality. Instead, I sided with the heretic. With something of a guilty thing surprised, I dismissed the imagined importunities of my venerable judges, and to the student said, You may have a point. The student's plaint crystallized my own vague yet persistent dissatisfaction with fiction. Years before, I had been an avid consumer of novels of all sorts-an enthusiasm that partially accounted for my decision to pursue studies in language and literature-but as time wore on I became progressively less attached to fiction, the whole of belles-lettres in fact, and simultaneously more oriented to philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. The evolution in taste finally reached a stage where the time I spent on such disciplines was tenfold what I devoted to fiction. The disparity of attention was significative not merely of an English professor's attempt to balance his knowledge of genres, but reflected instead an intrinsic preference for analytical writing. Though I do not maintain that novels are a waste of time for everybody-each person must arbitrate his or her own tastes-they do seem virtually so for me. Given my occupational affiliation with belles-lettres, I flinch at the admission, for my fancy teems with visions of colleagues and students disdaining one so foul as to besmirch what he teaches. While my academic training and associations increase the difficulty of appraising in a disinterested fashion the bases for my literary prefer-