Fiction>Philosophy

on Joseph Epstein's "The Novel" in RealClear

Many of us turn to philosophy, economics, or politics to “fix” societies problems. Joseph Epstein argues that we should turn to novels. Read my review of his new book The Novel: Who Needs It? in RealClear.

Countless pundits have put forth theories of how to escape our current moment of social atomization and existential decay. For these philosophers, economists, activists, and sociologists, the culprit can range from systemic racism and technocratic elitism to the loss of faith and the collapse of moral values.

Yet their conceptual diagnoses and solutions fail to capture what is most essential–that is, what is most human–about the issues that plague us. “Create a concept and reality leaves the room,” as Jose Ortega Y Gasset once quipped. Rather than turning to various theoreticians whose ideas are often divorced from reality and only tell “part of the story,” Joseph Epstein insists that we should turn to novels.

“A novel,” Epstein writes in his latest book, The Novel: Who Needs It?, “can incorporate history, engage in philosophy, confront morality.” But the novel is all of these and more: “it is the book of life. More than any other literary form,” he continues, “the novel is best able to accommodate the messiness of detail that life presents. The novel, for those who love it, is the literary form of forms.”

What distinguishes the novel from other forms of writing about human existence is that its point of departure is experience–as it features the concrete details and inner musings of the lives of actual persons. “Good novels are always informing us that life is more various, richer, more surprising, more bizarre than we had thought.” The novel, then, functions as an agent that both grounds and enchants us: its capacity to portray mundane phenomena as fascinating incites us to sink our roots more deeply into the real while opening our eyes to its magical charge.

Epstein recounts having read passages in novels by Dostoyevsky, Cather, and Tolstoy (“the greatest,” in his opinion) over and over again because of their capacity to captivate his imagination. “Memory works differently when reading fiction,” he says, pointing to seemingly random scenes from his favorite novels that have stayed on his mind for decades. He cites one such scene describing a bowl of soup in Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop: “a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.” Passages like these that stay in our memories have the power to transfigure something as simple as eating soup into a quasi-religious experience.

I can recount similar memories of typically humdrum moments elevated to mystical heights after having read the disarmingly descriptive prose of novelists like James Baldwin and Evelyn Waugh, as well as more contemporary ones like Ron Hansen and Jordan Castro. While I can turn to philosophers like Charles Taylor and Max Weber to explain the process of disenchantment under secular capitalism, I turn to such novelists to recapture the awareness of the sacred in embodied realities.

One of the greatest dampeners on our sense of imagination and ability to perceive nuances, posits Epstein, is the ubiquity of the internet and screens. The “true” culture war, he fears, “will not be between generations, or between people with implacably opposed political views, or between different races or ethnic groups or social classes, but between pixels and print for cultural supremacy…Will the split-second immediacy of information gained from a search engine,” he asks, “and the sheer volume of what is available derail the slower, more deliberative processes that deepen our understanding of complex concepts, of another’s inner thought processes, and of our own consciousness?”

Continue reading here.

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photo taken at the Catholic Worker Maryhouse in NYC.