The Novel’s Gifts

Abstract

When it is free from didacticism, free from ‘the imposed surprises of literary convention and the teacher’s lesson’,¹ the novel’s ethical appeal can be made tentatively apparent. The novel invites our collaboration. It asks that we re-enact its narrative course, that we enter its fictional world. From this achieved perspective, we glean little by way of facts or techniques for living. Rather we embrace a series of images of moral possibilities that show directly, or sometimes cautiously remind us, how life’s defeats and dilemmas can be faced. The novelist’s art does not represent life, nor is it wholly captured by the understandings the novelist wishes to express. Characters in the novel are not substitutes for life, intended to take authority away from the multiple, the concrete and the real. What they offer is a source of transfiguration, of so enhancing life that its unyielding nature can be recognised and confronted. We should not be disturbed by the suggestion that we think about reading as an act of collaboration. Here there is no betrayal, no collaboration with an enemy. On the contrary, such a construction enables us to dispense with those pictures of the artist’s role that exaggerate the element of individuality in creativity.