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This can seem, amid the fatwas and general hubbub, a particular problem of
this moment. Yet if we go back further in literary history, we see that writers
have always demanded that we bring something of ourselves to the act of
reading. We can go way back and have the Hamlet-and-his-problems or even
Achilles-and-his-problems chat, but we’ll limit ourselves to novels and novelists.
Who is Heathcliff? What does he want? What drives him? What are his
limitations? How about Catherine? Do we believe or trust Nelly Dean? Why, or
why not? Well, then, how about Victor Frankenstein? What do we understand
about his motivations? How about his monster? Are we all in agreement here?
Even fairly controlling writers, Jane Austen, say, and Dickens, since he’s already
implicated here, leave a lot of room for interpretation. Dickens often gives us the
opportunity to sympathize with his dark characters, if not his real villains. Bill
Sikes is beyond the pale, clearly. But Fagin? How much, and on what basis? And
Austen’s amatory novels, those plots aimed at the goal of marriage, may seem to
have only one outcome, but the nuances are many. Do we find Mr. Darcy as
interesting as we’re supposed to? How harshly do we judge Emma Woodhouse’s
judgmental blunders? The third person, free-indirect style viewpoint—the point
of view we can think of as generated out of the character’s thoughts but not
directly said by her, that is almost-but-not-quite first person—brings us close to
Emma’s own voice yet keeps us at just enough distance that we never quite settle
into identification with her. How much sympathy we extend to her, then, is our
call. And don’t even get me started on Henry James.
You see the problem? Except that it’s not a problem, or not in the usual
sense. A conundrum, maybe. A puzzle. Ambiguity is the way of the novel, even
when it is not the goal of the writer. There is simply no way to close out all
possibilities except the one primarily intended while creating characters who are
even remotely human. The essay can successfully restrict meaning; the novel,
not so much. Why? In part, we can blame language, that rich vein of multiple
meanings. As public figures often discover to their pain, it’s very difficult to
make statements that are completely accurate, straightforward, and without
embarrassing subtext. What are you going to do with a language that contains
self-antonyms, those words that are their own opposites, where the verb “to
dust” can mean “to remove particles, as from furniture” and “to distribute
particles, as with powdered sugar”? And this isn’t an isolated instance; there are
scores, perhaps hundreds of them. English is always shifting meanings,
borrowing from other languages, getting all slanged up, verbing nouns and
nouning verbs. It’s the most flexible and malleable of languages, but also the
most maddeningly imprecise. Novelists can’t control that, and mostly they run
with it, using that ambiguity to their advantage. In part, too, it’s the nature of the
novel, which describes action rather than explaining it. Texts that attempt to
explicate themselves tend to lack drama and immediacy. Besides, we would
regard that as a lack of faith in the enterprise: if you have to explain it for your
readers, you must have failed in the initial narration. But I think the real cause is
that human beings are fundamentally ambiguous. We say one thing but mean
another, fumble to explain ourselves, contradict our beliefs with our behavior,
perform actions even we don’t understand, hide much of our true being from the
world and perhaps from ourselves. If the novel is to be faithful to human
existence, characters are going to share in that ambiguous nature.
Think it’s just me? Here’s what Erica Wagner says on the subject, “Good
novels go on beyond their final pages. They leave their authors and enter the
minds of readers, who will ask questions, make demands and sometimes find
themselves dissatisfied, just as they do with the flesh and blood creatures who
inhabit the world outside the pages of a book.” Wagner is a novelist as well as
the literary editor of The Times of London, so she knows a thing or two about
reading—and writing—novels. She’s right, of course: good novels do go on
beyond the text. But I would shift the dynamic just a hair: good readers invest
themselves in novels in ways that stretch the texts. Our readings are dialogic: we
interrogate the narrative, asking the questions and making the demands Wagner
suggests, pursuing some possibilities while giving others a pass and, yes,
sometimes finding ourselves dissatisfied.
The novel is interactive in the fullest sense. Good reading, and by this I
mean not professorial or professional but merely the kind of reading that
novelists hope for and deserve, actively enters into conversation with the created
narrative, bringing out nuances, developing or resisting sympathies, exploring
meanings. We meet the writer on her turf, but it’s also our turf. Meaning and
significance happen in that place where writer and reader confer. The result isn’t
merely that we get the most out of the novels, but that we get the most out of
ourselves. Great novels, certainly, and maybe all novels, change us, but not
merely by giving us something special. They also change us because of what we
give to them. That’s a winner all the way around.