on unaffected pleasure

how we lost confidence in the value of fiction (Symposium on the Novel: Part V)

[We’re delighted to share this guest essay by Trevor Merrill as part of our Symposium on the Novel. Trevor’s debut novel Minor Indignities was published by Wiseblood in 2020 and he writes the Substack Writing Fiction After Girard. You can find more of his work on his website. Subscribers will get to hear Trevor talk about this essay in a few weeks as part of our debut ‘audio conversation’ on the topics that have come up in the Symposium. —T. & Dh.]

I like writing advice. For two or three years now, I have even kept a running list of storytelling principles in a document on my phone: “Exposition creates drama”; “Tell one story well rather than several less well”; “If the end isn’t working, the problem is at the beginning”. Such rules of thumb distill the wisdom accumulated by generations of practitioners. They are like a map through the minefield of narrative. And yet, I have found, they are powerless against one of the most serious dangers that fiction writers encounter: an inability to muster confidence in the basic value of what novels do.  

“Guilt,” writes Elif Batuman, is “the single greatest obstacle to American literature today.” She means not the pricks of conscience that lead us to regret some specific action, but a diffuse shame attending on the practice of art itself. It took me more than ten years of trial and error to write a publishable novel. If I had to point to one reason for the slow pace at which the work unfolded, it would not be my insufficient mastery of the fiction writer’s métier (although that, too, was a factor). Rather, it would be my nagging suspicion that describing an attack of indigestion in an Afghan restaurant or a conversation among students in a college common room was impossible to justify except on extra-literary grounds—as a satire of late liberalism, say, or an illustration of Girardian mimetic desire. My writing was weak (and no doubt often still is) because of an unconscious contempt. I was unable to invest fully in telling a good story and fleshing out a fictional world. 

Doubts about the novel’s value have long accompanied the form. There “seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist,” writes Jane Austen in chapter five of Northanger Abbey (1817). “‘And what are you reading, Miss——?’ ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.” Austen herself has no such misgivings. She grants the still-fledgling genre an intellectual stature that few recognized in the early nineteenth century. But while she emphasizes the mental powers and “thorough knowledge of human nature” on display in the best novels, she does not see these works as mere vehicles for the sorts of moral or philosophical insight that could just as easily be conveyed by some other means. Rather, she says, novels are above all sources of “unaffected pleasure,” a mischievous phrase that commends the delights of story while implying the self-importance of those who scorn them.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La liseuse (ca. 1874)

What I love about Austen’s poetics is its refusal to budge on this question of delight. Given that Northanger Abbey tells the story of a girl who is led astray by Gothic fiction, it would have been easy for Austen to pit escapist entertainment against high literature. She could have presented the former as casting a seductive spell without providing any moral nourishment as compensation, and the latter as reforming the genre’s intrinsic frivolity by imparting serious, edifying lessons. Instead, she suggests that giving pleasure is the essence of what novels do, and that without this capacity to enthrall, morally formative works such as her own could not attract their readers to the pursuit of virtue. 

In Northanger Abbey, Austen puts herself at the vanguard of a thoroughgoing cultural transformation. Her high opinion of fiction would soon become widespread, opening the way to still more ambitious claims on behalf of the ascendant form. Consider Balzac’s remarks in Lost Illusions (1837–1843) only two decades after Austen’s death. Lucien, a poet from the provinces, has just arrived in Paris. Anticipating his social success at the opera he has been invited to attend that evening, he goes to observe members of the smart set strolling through the Tuileries. As he compares his own appearance to theirs, he becomes aware that his coat has a “ridiculous,” “old-fashioned” cut, while his waistcoat is “grotesquely provincial.”

“Those were two wretched hours that Lucien spent in the Garden of the Tuileries,” writes Balzac. “A violent revulsion swept through him, and he sat in judgment upon himself.” The author assures us that Lucien’s sufferings, while they may seem “incredibly petty and small,” are just as worthy of our attention “as crises and vicissitudes in the lives of the mighty and privileged ones of earth.” He will treat the anguish of an ill-dressed provincial who fears looking foolish in the eyes of an elegant lady as seriously as Sophocles and Aeschylus did the agonies of kings and princes in the tragedies of antiquity. Balzac is often inclined to romantic exaggeration, and this passage is no exception. Still, setting the novel on an equal footing with classical tragedy expresses an astonishing confidence in the genre’s artistic and cultural value.

In 1937, a century after Lost Illusions, three stanzas in W.H. Auden’s poem “Letter to Lord Byron” defend the novel in terms that sound still grander than Balzac’s. The poet writes that Jane Austen “fought” for the art of the novel, a probable allusion to Northanger Abbey. By Auden’s day the fight has been won, and handily. Although he does not refer to Balzac, he does mention “four great Russians”—we can assume he means Gogol and perhaps Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky—who elevated the novel to a pinnacle of greatness. Auden accordingly deems the novel “the most prodigious of the forms” and says that “novel writing is a higher art than poetry”—assertions that would no doubt have been as shocking to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ears as Jane Austen’s revelations about “the economic basis of society” are to Auden’s.

What strikes me about Auden’s perspective is not only the magnitude of his praise but the new criteria he brings to the table. Austen, refusing to make Gothic fiction the scapegoat of her poetics, grounds her defense in “unaffected pleasure.” For Balzac, what counts is the novel’s capacity for depicting ordinary people and their daily struggles in a serious and even sublime register. Although it is itself written in comic, rhyming verse, the substance of Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron” evinces a highbrow, modernist sensibility. Auden says that “real” novels are “as rare/As winter thunder or a polar bear,” implicitly opening a chasm between authentic high art and trashy popular fiction. He presents Austen as a proto-Marxist exposing the material interests underlying courtship. And he says, approvingly, that she makes him “uncomfortable,” so much so that by comparison Joyce’s Ulysses (1920) seems “as innocent as grass.” With their social-climbing protagonists, Balzac’s novels harken back to Greek tragedy, which put hubristic heroes on stage in order to heal similar tendencies in the audience. Such intent to form the reader’s soul is missing from Auden’s account of fiction.

For Auden, instead, the novel’s status as the greatest art derives from a combination of shock-value, social critique, and aesthetic sophistication. The poet casts Austen as a high modernist avant la lettre who appears even more subversive because she advances behind a mask of spinsterish respectability. None of this has much to do with the pleasure of reading a well-told story. Austen had no doubt that the question of whether an unchaperoned young lady would be persuaded to climb into a carriage with a coarse young man was as fascinating to her readers as it was to her, and that becoming vicariously embroiled in such dilemmas was both enjoyable and worthwhile. Whatever his ostensible position, Auden’s verses suggest that he is unsure if what the traditional novel has to offer—an imitation of everyday life—is truly enough to justify our ongoing interest in it. 

The “young lady” in chapter five of Northanger Abbey is ashamed of being caught in the act of reading a novel; in our day the young novelist is ashamed to be caught in the act of writing one. In the last months of his mother’s life, Jonathan Franzen confessed to her that he had always known he wanted to be a novelist, “even when I’d pretended otherwise.” I can relate on a deeply personal level with Franzen’s unwillingness to reveal his literary ambitions. My sense is that it reflects our work-obsessed culture’s suspicion, descended from Auden’s yet still more acute, that the picturing of everyday life and its complications is a frivolous luxury, redeemable only by some utilitarian alibi. As he toiled over early drafts of The Corrections (2001), Franzen has said, he felt embarrassed to have chosen a subject as small and personal as a midwestern mother’s yearning for one last Christmas with her family: “I wanted to write a novel about the big issues of my day.” It was precisely such discomfort with the seeming irrelevance of stories that hampered my own efforts to write a novel.

Novels are not moral treatises. Yet they do have something to teach us about the sorts of attitudes and choices that withstand the test of life, and those that don’t. I’m fond of citing British writer Piers Paul Read, who says that his novels “have always shown that invariably unhappiness results from the indulgence of disordered passions.” This may sound rather cold-blooded and logical. But Read’s novels demonstrate this general truth without “overbearing didacticism,” simply by telling enthralling stories about characters struggling with temptation. As philosopher (and novelist) Daniel McInerny has brilliantly shown, the skilled imitation of quotidian reality affords an inextricable combination of delight and understanding. From this there follows a paradox: the more a work of fiction seeks its raison d’être in some ideology or theory extrinsic to story, the less capable it becomes of communicating moral truth. Strange though it may seem, the works with the most potential to be morally formative are also, from a certain angle, the most useless ones. 

A. Natasha Joukovsky has distinguished between the beautiful novels one truly wants to read and the consciousness-raising works that earn our approval because to have read them is an efficacious act of public atonement. A similar distinction might be drawn between the books one wants to write and those one is willing to be seen writing. When at Thanksgiving dinner inquisitive family members ask what you’ve been doing with your life, telling them about your searing critique of technological consumerism or woke identity politics somehow feels much easier than owning up to the fact that you’ve been working on something as socially useless as a love story. 

But we must reaffirm the value of useless love stories, embrace the novel’s vocation to represent such modest events as a country dance or an afternoon stroll through the Tuileries, even if that means losing face with our out-of-town aunts and uncles. As in Austen’s era, so in our own: affectation is the dragon to be slain, pleasure the reward for slaying it.