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Hardly surprising, then, that both forms lean toward the aristocratic in subject
matter and treatment. The novel, on the other hand, isn’t about them; it’s about
us, and Frodo is us, despite the hairy feet. He’s the small person caught up in the
war of huge powers. He’s not heroic, preferring his own hearth to the big world
with its hazards. He’s not even a volunteer. Essentially, he’s a conscript, selected
not by the draft board but by circumstance in the form of a ring that has been
handed to him to deal with. Talk about your raw deals. And yet, the big heroes
can’t be heroes without him, evil can’t be defeated, the ring can’t be destroyed.
Over and over, he says the task is beyond him, yet he keeps going even as body
and mind seem to fail. How many soldiers, I wonder, would recognize their
situation in his? How many civilians in Britain, which is where Tolkien is really
talking about, found themselves performing useful and surprising service in the
fight against Nazism and the drive for world domination? Whatever our
nationality, we can recognize that struggle against evil, can see our possible
selves in the little guy pushed to heroic extremes.
It isn’t always a matter, we should note, of identifying with the protagonist.
No one I know, regardless of how much they love his novel, wants to be
Humbert Humbert or Victor Frankenstein, although perhaps for different
reasons. Or Heathcliff. Ever want to be Heathcliff? I didn’t think so. They are
not the stuff of our fantasy lives, yet we may revel in their worlds, even while
reviling their persons. Consider Humbert. The narrative strategy Nabokov
employs is very daring, since it demands that we identify with someone who is
breaking what nearly everyone will consider the most absolute taboo. Sexual
violation of children is a horrible offense against the natural order, and he goes
out of his way to commit that offense. Sympathy is out of the question. What the
novel requires, however, is that we continue reading, something it audaciously
gives us reasons to do. The word games and intellectual brilliance helps,
certainly; he’s detestable but charming and brilliant. The other element is that we
watch him with a sort of appalled fascination: can he really intend that; does he
really do this; would he really attempt even that; has he lost all sense of
proportion? The answers are, in order, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Pretty clearly, then,
there are pleasures in the text that are not inherent in the personality of the main
character. Nabokov’s central figures in general do not inspire warm and fuzzy
feelings. We tend to find them interesting rather than lovable, tend to want to
watch them rather than be them or feel with them.
This is a largely although not exclusively modern trait. For the most part,
nineteenth-century novels relied first of all on an emotional response. We may
not want to be Tess Durbeyfield, given all the misfortune that life throws at her,
but we stick with her, follow her fortunes, suffer with her, feel for her. And
Hardy puts us through the affective mill: disappointment, alarm, elation, pity,
hope, pity, fear, discouragement, rage, pity, pity, pity. This is, after all, Thomas
Hardy. He gives us a higher HMQ—human misery quotient—than any other
three Victorian novelists combined. But his fellow scribblers are very much like
him in terms of reader response. They want an emotional investment of their
readers. Partly, of course, this has to do with the serial publication of so many
Victorian works; readers have to be locked in on the characters if they are going
to hang around reading magazine installments for two years. We could think of a
hierarchy of desired reader responses for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
that would look something like this.