on representation in fiction
on representation in fiction
Symposium on the Novel: Part VI
[Note to our readers: this essay concludes our Symposium on the Novel, but our next post will contain an audio conversation—our first ever—on the topics of the Symposium, featuring Phil Christman and Trevor Cribben Merrill, who contributed guest essays to the Symposium, alongside the two of us. —T. & Dh.]
I don’t remember exactly when I became a Janeite. I remember watching the BBC mini-series adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth with my family when I was young and being absorbed by it. I must have got round to reading Pride and Prejudice at some point in high school, as I recall snobbishly turning down the chance to see the Keira Knightley film adaptation on the grounds that it departed too much from the book.
Enthusiasm for British literature has been passed down in my family—a colonial legacy. My grandparents were all born under the British Raj. Still, time with them showed me that the Gandhian movement for self-rule and the boycotts of British goods that shaped their early lives—and that led to Indian independence in 1947—did not demand a wholesale rejection of British culture. We could be proud Gandhians and yet be lovers of Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, George Bernard Shaw, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and, of course, Jane Austen.
That is part of why I am bemused by calls for ‘representation’ in novels, the recent and, I find, distinctly American idea that readers deserve in the fiction they consume counterparts who share their identities. Apart from a dim and typically second-hand awareness of certain online dust-ups, my main encounter with this way of thinking is in the classroom, where I teach Austen, Dostoevsky, Woolf, and Morrison as part of a culminating unit on the novel in our required freshman ‘Literature Humanities’ core course.
My students typically welcome our turn to modern literature (and many of them comment on the appearance of women as authors at this late point in the syllabus). But, as I try to show them right from the start of the course, such familiarity can be double-edged. We tend to read better when we think we know less, and encounters with texts that stand outside our cultural categories are often more fruitful for engaging with the core questions of the course: Who are we as human beings? What is our purpose? How can we live alongside one another?
Time is perhaps the most radical form of alterity. As one of my colleagues likes to say, Homer and the Gilgamesh-author might as well be aliens from our point of view.
More generally, while the call for representation in literature gets something right about the cultural importance of narratives, it draws on the wrong framework—the left-liberal framework of identities that lie beyond our control and that determine and bound our affinities—to make that case.
My mother’s love of Jane Austen probably plays a significant part in explaining my own. I am grateful to her for never assuming I wouldn’t be interested in stories centered on the sentiments and experiences of young women. At home, Austen was spoken of in the same breath as Milton and Shakespeare, as among the greats of a literary tradition I ought to know.
Accordingly, I first read Pride and Prejudice with interest simply because it is a brilliant novel. But I suspect that growing up in a limiting sort of place—a small town in East Texas that felt far distant from the sorts of places where things happened—gave me a particular insight into the lives of the Bennet sisters. Lydia running off with Wickham has always seemed to me an understandable—if unreasonable—response to the strictures placed on her own life. While readers are, of course, brought to favor Jane’s patient good sense and Elizabeth’s spirited intelligence over Kitty’s vain frivolity, Lydia’s precipitous folly, and Mary’s ill-humored pedantry, all five sisters reflect aspects of their environment, not least the unhappy marriage of their parents.
It took many readings before I saw how the novel’s plot turns on the cowardice of Mr Bennet—dear sweet Mr Bennet! And Jane’s and Lizzy’s eventual happiness owes something to the schemes of Mrs Bennet at the outset, however embarrassingly executed, to acquaint Mr Bingley with her daughters when he takes Netherfield for his residence. Each parent is loving and foolish, neither malevolent. That even well-meaning parents can fail you was an important lesson for me to learn.
In thinking back on why I came to love Austen’s novels, I cannot ever remember it mattering to me that the characters were bourgeois or British or white. Nor are the stories simply universal. There is cultural knowledge one needs to appreciate the social world of Austen’s novels, and I understand why some of my students recoil from entering into it. But the questions the novels pose are nevertheless ones we can recover without a fine-grained grasp of that social world, to which in fact they help to introduce us.
Pride and Prejudice, like others of Austen’s novels, uses the ordinary texture of life to raise serious questions about the nature of happiness and how it depends not only on fortune but also on integrity and on self-knowledge.
Should it matter, politically or personally, to have the opportunity to read fiction in which your experiences are represented? I’m not sure how to answer this question, but I found that the Bennet sisters did represent me—as young people growing up in a backwater place and trying to work out what happiness might look like for them. No one, meanwhile, is likely to write a novel centered on a child of Indian parents who move from Jamaica to East Texas. But, then, we don’t read novels to learn the stories we already know.
It is true, of course, that the commercial enterprise of literary fiction has excluded some people from telling the stories that matter to them for the wrong reasons. But this injustice isn’t primarily due to the content of the stories or even whether those stories are drawn from the authors’ own experience.
The quality of a novel has nothing to do, intrinsically, with the racial or ethnic or cultural identity of its author. In fact, I find the idea that Jane Austen might not belong to me—or anyone else—as a reader because of their cultural or ethnic background (or, indeed, their gender) rather dispiriting, and it is one I caution my students against adopting as a substitute for thoughtful exploration.
In general, the logic of identity that lies behind talk of representation in contemporary fiction (or in the syllabuses of literature classes) demands that we characterize and taxonomize experience in a way that I, at least, find alien. It is surely true that some of my experiences depend on my cultural and ethnic and racial identity, but only because some of the things that have happened to me were only possible because of social facts to do with that identity. (To take a straightforward case, I and other immigrants can experience real xenophobia in the US in a way that native-born Americans simply can’t.) But it is perfectly conceivable to bear those identities and yet not to have had precisely those experiences.
Moreover, much more of my life—and, I would wager, the lives of most people—is shaped by experiences that belong to a broader class of human experience that is sufficiently widely shared to enable even ancient literature to move us inwardly and to make us feel a sense of recognition, of knowing and being known, that is one very great reward of reading literature (in addition, of course, to pleasure).
We should celebrate diversity in fiction because human experience is remarkably diverse, not only in the sense denominated by cultural and ethnic identities, but by the sheer variety of human lives, the very fact that no two are alike. Indeed, as anyone with siblings knows, even two people raised in the same household may come to have radically different lives, something we of course see play out in Pride & Prejudice: Lydia is saved from ruin when Wickham is made to marry her, but we learn that they live chaotically, moving from place to place, and that their passion turns quickly to indifference, an exact contrast to the steadier affection between Elizabeth and Darcy and the solidity of life represented by Pemberley. Good fiction preserves and heightens our appreciation for such variety in human life—variety not only of circumstance but also of character and conduct.
The liberatory power of the novel, then, lies not its refracting back to us just who we are but in its openness to other possibilities not realized in our own lives. We can learn, in this way, to see through another’s eyes and, thereby, to find our own perspective transformed.