In the Novel as in Life...

In a recent interview novelist Jane Smiley, who won a Pulitzer for her novel A Thousand Acres, made the observation that novelists are not only different from other writers but different from other people. And that a person cannot really be understood apart from the information that they are a novelist.

I have been thinking a lot about the power of the novel ever since hearing Joe Orlando speak at the library recently. His observation that novelists have changed the direction of history -- think of Victor Hugo and Harriet Beecher Stowe -- has stayed with me. The difference between someone who writes a novel-length book telling a true story and a novelist is that the non-fiction writer writes about a specific group of people, in a specific situation, at a specific point in time. The novelist, at least the skillful novelist, tells a story about people who could be anyone, anywhere, at any place in time.

Novelists are watchers. They are people who pay attention to the way people talk and interact. It is an often made observation that the reason there are so many novelists who come from working class backgrounds and from rural areas, particularly in the South, is because the people in those groups tend to interact with each other more than in more affluent segments of society, and they tend to be more tolerant of individual peculiarities. Novelists are made by reading novels, not by leading interesting lives, Smiley says. But they shape characters and dialogue from their attention to the world around them.

Novelists are often controversial people because the very fact that they observe those around them the way they do can cast a pall of suspicion and speculation among acquaintances. But while most novelists may observe the behaviors and mannerisms of those around them, their use of what they observe is done on a much broader scale that may have little to do with those they watch. It is the fact that novels speak of truths far greater than any single work of non-fiction that gives the novel -- the good novel -- its power and longevity. Is it therefore any wonder that throughout history oppressors have demonized artists -- especially novelists?

I recently finished reading Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. It is a powerful book - not a novel but rather a memoir about how novels helped make sense of a world gone mad, the world in her case being life in Tehran from the time of the overthrow of the Shah, through the Islamic Fundamentalist Revolution and the war with Iraq. Much in the book disturbed me.

Under the Shah, Nafisi was a professor at a university in Tehran and, like other women in Iran at that time, enjoyed a very pleasant quality of life. They were well educated, wore clothes that were fashionable and attractive, held good jobs, and had active social lives. Over the next twenty years all that was stripped from their lives and the oppression of women we now hear so much about came to dominate these women’s lives. Through this Nafisi and her students, who gathered -- illegally -- in her home to read and discuss novels by Nabokov, Fitzgerald and Austen, made sense of the madness in their society through the universal language of these novels.

Using Humbert’s gradual usurpation of his 12 year old victim’s life in Lolita, Nafisi sorts out the usurpation of the lives of the women of Iran by the rebel Fundamentalists. Everything – the slow and then more powerful demonization of all things liberal and progressive, the rallying cry for a return to traditional values, the condemnation of protest as being unpatriotic – all the tricks that the rebel Fundamentalists used to send their society back a hundred years are chronicled in Nafisi’s book and explained in relation to the theft of Lolita’s young life by the pedophile Humbert who Nafisi says is made a villain by one fact, the fact that he has no ability to understand the feelings, wants and/or needs or another person.

If ever the power of novels was made clear it is in Nafisi’s book. Her experiences, and the novels she employs to clarify their universality, is something we would do well to pay attention to. Now more than ever.

Thanks for reading.

Postscript: If you are interested in more observations on Nabokov's Lolita, I would recommend Robert Ellis' blog entry on it. Ellis' blog, Mystics of the Ordinary, is a good blog if you are a book lover.