Preface

The following book was created under the twin imperatives to remain short and to range far. Balancing these goals required decisions that shape both the structure of the argument and how this book can be read and utilized.

Although this is a book about the Western tradition of the modern novel, I have largely refrained from providing specific examples. For instance, I chose not to cite Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love as an example of how we can experience jealousy, or Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes as an example of how we can experience postcolonial displacement. Beyond space constraints, this decision reflects the extreme disproportion between the vast corpus of novels and the singularity of individual experiences. How could one justify selecting Proust over Leo Tolstoy, or Sarr over Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? As I argue throughout this book, novels themselves are singular, mutable experiences; they can only serve as examples on a taxonomic level (e.g., “X is an epistolary novel”), a framework outside the scope of this book. Moreover, I do not want to create the impression that following and evaluating the arguments in this book require prior familiarity with a large number of novels.

The problem of generalization extends to written reflections on reading experiences, which, for reasons I explain below, are hard to find. I include some of my own—they are, or try to be, as close to the occasion and the unfolding of my experience as possible, but precisely because they are mine and I am a professional reader, they tend toward the comparative, the general, the conceptual. I struggled, and am still struggling, with reaching the level of granularity these accounts should display. Writing and judging reading experiences are strange, somewhat elusive tasks. Originality, incisiveness, or similar qualities that we value in scholarly writing cannot serve as their criteria; in fact, such accounts may often carry a touch of the dullness we experience when listening to others telling us their dreams. Ultimately, such reflections are tentative precursors to the novelist’s craft of narrating a character’s experiences. They are, furthermore, inaccessible to the generative power of AI, which can assume identities and reproduce knowledge but never articulate the novelty experienced by a reading human body. In the final chapter I argue that despite their occasional awkwardness, articulated reading experiences are an important pedagogical tool for inviting readers into the novelty of reading experiences. The companion website, thenovelexperience.org, will collect and curate accounts of reading experiences and share prompts, classroom practices, syllabi, exercise sheets, and more.

Throughout the book I use the terms literature, narrative fiction, and novel interchangeably, but hope to clarify in the following pages why my focus is on works that are, in the broadest sense, fictional, require time to read, and are typically experienced alone. In its temporality, singularity, and exposure to fiction, reading is exemplary of the structure of human experience as this book unfolds it. That the novel became the dominant form of fictional narration in the West and that its realism implies the narration of a character’s experience such that the reading mirrors what is being read are contingent historical developments. Some of the conditions of these developments are articulated in the chapters that follow.

To make the argument of the book more readable, I have opted to quote sources sparingly in the main text. Instead, each chapter concludes with short bibliographical essays that enable the reader to explore my sources and further their understanding if they chose to do so. Given the breadth of topics and authors discussed, my selection of sources is necessarily limited. A bibliography and additional resources are available at thenovelex perience.org.