Chapter 5 | The Reading of Experience

Horace, the popularizer of Aristotle and the author of the most influential treatise on poetics in the West, proclaimed that poets, like orators, should seek not only to instruct and be useful but also delight. Setting standards that would endure for centuries, he stipulated that such delight and entertainment could only come from epic, dramatic, and lyric poetry. Though the Greeks had produced fantastical adventure novels and the Romans would imitate them in this area as well, Horatian poetics could not—and would not for centuries—accommodate the shapeless prose of the novel, to say nothing of the ancient novel’s erratic plot development and its often undistinguished characters. Emerging from a convergence of myth, oratory, elegy, and comedy, the ancient novel literalized the notion of ex-perience: heroes and heroines who incessantly travel, flee, err, are kidnapped, are rescued—who move through space and cross boundaries.

Delight and entertainment through reading were problematic features still in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On one hand, they polluted the air of sophistication that an increasingly secular culture valued as signs of intellectual and social distinction. On the other, nonprofessional reading remained largely confined to the Bible, which, the Song of Songs notwithstanding, has very little to offer in terms of delight and sheer entertainment. Early attempts to portray Jesus as a conquering hero in the mold of Jason or Hercules were quickly quashed by the church fathers who drew a strict line between edification and entertainment. The conversion stories that punctuate Christian apologetics—Augustine picking up the letters of Saint Paul, Petrarch opening The Confessions atop Mont Ventoux, each chancing on a passage that seems to speak directly to their circumstances—emphasize that the narrative place of a biblical episode is secondary to its moral significance.

From a narratological point of view, the Bible is the ultimate realist narrative: its beginning and its end align with the beginning and end of its subject matter—the created world. The fact that both the genesis and the apocalypse of the world could be narrated prepared readers to accept both the utter unreality of an omniscient narrator and the realism of what was being narrated. Combined with the expectation that every word and every pericope referred to something that had not simply factual but paradigmatic relevance, Bible reading in many ways conditioned lay readers for the experience of the novel.

The divinity and paradigmatic depth of the Bible required specific modes of reading to uncover its layers of meaning. Manuals of Christian interpretation stipulated that since the richness of the divine word could be captured only imperfectly in the vessels of human language, a quadrangle of “senses” would be needed to define the area of its interpretation. One side was the materiality of language and the sequence of events—the sensus literalis or historicus that would later spawn the disciplines of philology and history. In the Bible, furthermore, events relate to one another, often across long intervals, as foreshadowing and fulfillment; the simple forward direction of the story is countered by the sensus allegoricus that imbues every passage with additional meaning and turns, importantly for Christian apologetics, the Hebrew Bible into the Old Testament. Drawing this second side of the quadrangle requires a different skill set but has the element of learning in common with the first. The third side, the sensus tropologicus or moralis, appeals to the individual reader who must learn to align their life experiences with the experiences depicted, transforming textual meaning into personal guidance. Note that in this relation, the reader’s experience is supposed to be molded after the experience described and is thus confined to the area enclosed by the quadruple sense. Closing the square, the sensus anagogicus allows sufficiently inspired and learned theologians to speculate what a specific passage might tell us about the history of salvation and where in its unfolding we may find ourselves.

However secular we claim to be, it is not difficult to recognize the persistence of these senses in contemporary literary studies, both academic and extra-academic. The 1970s and 1980s, for example, saw a return to the first two senses, in an effort to scrub from the teaching of literature its moralistic and empathetic focus. At the same time, the anagogical sense—the philosophical study of the history of literature à la György Lukács and Fredric Jameson—has continued to provide a salvific, if secular, frame for these close readings.

Excluded from the canon of respectable genres and overshadowed by the normativity of religious experience and its codification in morality tales, the novel as a medium of secular experience began to thrive in the seventeenth century. Experience, we have seen, had been discounted both by religious orthodoxy that had always been uneasy with claims of mystical experience and by a rational philosophy that wanted to secure the foundations of human knowledge against the encroachment of theology. Attempts from René Descartes to Immanuel Kant to find a secure foothold for human knowledge, atheistic as they pretended to be, still agreed with religious orthodoxy that experience—often equated with the sensory perceptions of the body—was an unreliable guide to understanding the divinity of God as well as nature and its laws. In the absence of divine guarantees for knowledge, only the self-certainty of the knowing mind and its cognitive rules—Kant’s “I think”—could provide the unshakable foundation modern science needed.

The novel, however, turned its banishment from religious edification, cognitive respectability, and canonic beauty into an advantage. Its formlessness became its capaciousness: it could include—and in the Romantic era regularly did include—poems and poetic situations, while from drama it absorbed the practice of uncommented dialogue. It provoked the readers’ trained moral sense by showing its protagonists do the wrong thing again and again, with often only a perfunctory deathbed conversion toward standard virtue. And it unsettled the theological and philosophical notion of creation and authorship by playing with a particular framing device: the pretense that the narrative, as a manuscript, a cache of letters, or a diary had fallen into the hands of the author-editor who simply edited, and at most commented on, the narrative. This framing device, seemingly accidental and peripheral, cannot be overestimated in its importance for the experience of the novel. After the tone-setting example of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), all of these novels used the same device: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and the deluge of epistolary novels by Samuel Richardson (Pamela, 1740), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Julie, 1761), Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les liaisons dangereuses, 1782), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (The Sufferings of Young Werther, 1774).

The proximate, real-world function of the fictitious editor was to evade censorship and personal accountability, regardless of whether such self-distancing would hold up in the judicial reality of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this respect, the device mirrors the Enlightenment practice of printing risqué and seditious books abroad and then reimporting them with impunity into their country of origin. At the same time, however, there were distinct formal advantages to this encapsulation: claiming to have ventured upon the narrative as an object in time and space conferred a specific kind of realism on the novel—a realism not of the story told but of its having been told. This move deflected attention from recognizing signs of authorial craft—the introduction and characterization of protagonists, the scope and depth of descriptions, the disposition of dialogues, the division into chapters and books, and so forth—at a time when the novel had not yet owned up to “the art of fiction.” For readers until the end of the eighteenth century, today’s primary question of realism—could this story really have happened?—was muffled by the secondary realism of the found-manuscript device: yes, this manuscript could really have been found.

This deflection of authorship is a pivotal moment in the rise of the novel as the premier medium of experience. It accords experience to the book itself, be it a found manuscript or a cache of letters; it situates the book as a fragment of experience in the same world as the readers’, it removes the author as an intermediary and thus confronts readers—trained in their Bible study to identify with the hero or the heroine—with the passionate and tragic vicissitudes of figures in their own space of experience, however distant it may be. To be sure, this was a gradual process with many different components—gender being one of them—but the reports about the staggering impact the epistolary novels of Richardson, of Rousseau, and a little later, of Goethe had on unsuspecting male and female readers show that this new reading of experience was both overwhelming and utterly addictive. It is this realism of the reading experience that carries the novel’s success, not the degree of verisimilitude or the self-ennobling statements authors made to find acceptance among the critics.

The irony often associated with the modern novel has its discursive roots in this self-distancing of authors from their work. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when the fictional editor morphed into the omniscient narrator, readers were still regularly addressed with stage directions to help the narrative along: “we now leave our young protagonist and turn to …” Preserved in this gesture is the fiction that there is something to turn away from—but now it is not the (fictional) materiality of the found manuscript but a reality of events that the novel claims to convey and that the author arranges for our view.

This sense of realism is not the only consequence of the fictional editor device. When Cervantes, at the end of the first book of Don Quixote, interrupted the description of a sword fight because the manuscript he purported to be editing had run out and he needed to scour the bazaars for its sequel, he activated two interrelated features that shaped the novel for centuries.

The first is the manufacture of suspense. Unlike the Bible or other Christian narratives, which lack suspense because their end—temporal and moral—is preordained, the novel thrives on uncertainty. Suspense is entirely human; it is a feature of the openness and unpredictability of human experience that must be unknown to God’s omniscient perspective. Like every novelist after him, Cervantes knew that suspense is born of interruption, and that the best way to create such interruptions is to make use of the segmentations inherent in the medium of the printed book. The divisions between chapters, between books, or between volumes introduce “real” interruptions that manifest in readers’ lives. The eager anticipation for the next installment or volume is another instance where the “reality effect” of the novel is not constricted to practices of representation but reaches into the affective and daily life of its readers.

The manufacture of suspense through editorial interruptions reveals a second important feature of the modern novel: its seriability. Fictional editors with their backstories make serial publication narratively plausible, regardless of whether a novel is actually published in installments or not. In the interruption they create the very continuity that is being interrupted and serialized. Changing the setting in a new chapter, jumping across the timeline, introducing new characters—all the elements associated with the author’s craft of plotting—are made possible by the assurance of the editor that the narrative we are reading is continuous. This fictional continuity in the narrative of the novel mirrors the experience of the readers whose lives also continue beyond the focus of their immediate attention. Characters in a novel are “real” not simply because of the author’s art of characterization but because readers suppose they get on with their lives—or die, as was the case with Nell in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop—in the time between segments.

When in the 1830s this potential for serialization was actualized, the lives of the novel and the lives of the readers intersected in ever more vivid ways. The novel makes singular experiences during its publication in response to its reception, just as the reader changes in the absorption and rumination over the narrative they are reading. The novel’s representation of experience—of a protagonist’s drawn-out adventures in time and space—is met in the experience of representation, of drawn-out publication schedules, and in the drawn-out experience of reading.

These features of the novel, present from its inception, developed their full potential because the corresponding web of industrial, cultural, and social conditions came into place—increased literacy, shorter workdays, artificial lighting, endless paper, rotary printing, laxer censorship, to name the most important. Because this web became so strong, the fictitious editor was no longer needed and replaced by a new, equally fictitious, equally improbable figure, the omniscient narrator. The omniscient voice is as “unrealistic” as the fictitious editor—who is this person that knows the story from so many different angles, and from inside of so many minds?—but its interventions become less drastic, at times detectable only in a spurious “we” or in acts of recall the diegesis itself does not yield. The progressive disembodiment and ultimate disappearance of the narrating voice is not possible without the novel’s industrial conditions of production and distribution—the network of authors, publishers, printers, reviewers, reading clubs, lending libraries, public readings, and so on into which the reader is inserted by the act of reading.

The genealogy of its emergence shows that the modern realist novel is a thoroughly conventional phenomenon. It is infinitely conditioned; its proximate and distant conditions can be—and have been—empirically researched and are themselves conditioned by other conditions, and so forth: in Nāgārjuna’s parlance, there is no svabhāva, no essential cause in which the cascade of conditions terminates, however attractive it may be to assume, for example, an irrepressible need for human beings to tell and consume stories. This may or may not be so. Conditions are not producing, “causing” causes, as Nāgārjuna shows in the first chapter of MMK; the assumption of a first condition that causes or grounds a phenomenon leads into contradictions.

Nāgārjuna, as we have seen, decomposes the world into a network of necessary conditions while denying that there are sufficient conditions, or reasons, that, in an emphatic sense, bring about, or give ground to, phenomena. If sufficient reasons are reasons through which something comes about and necessary reasons those without which something cannot arise, then rotary printing presses, gaslights, or lending libraries make up the network of the realist novel’s necessary conditions. It would be hazardous to argue that any of these conditions were sufficient for the rise of the novel, though it has been tried.

However, Western literary hermeneutics evolved, as we have seen, from its biblical predecessor, and it is because of this heritage that for the longest time the author was regarded as the sufficient reason of a novel. Considerable interpretive energies went into elucidating the relation between author and work; although this paradigm has weakened considerably, for the iconic authors of national traditions, the Goethes, Fyodor Dostoyevskys, or Marcel Prousts, it is still in full force. Even alternative approaches, such as media studies or gender studies, search for reasons that would stop conditions from proliferating. For Nāgārjuna, who never laid eyes on a novel, these are retroactive attempts to stabilize and center the groundless net of conditions; with their focus on literary authorship or other sufficient causes, interpreters inadvertently replay the metaphysical and theological drama of causation and creation as the cornerstone of a meaningful world.

More profoundly, Nāgārjuna’s leveling of the barrier between truth and fiction in favor of seeing the truth of convention and the convention of truth allows for experiencing and enjoying novels unburdened by the metaphysics of representation. To pose the question whether poets lie—a dominant concern in Western aesthetics and literary theory—makes sense only under the assumption of a coherent world that predates its representation and about which lies could be told. Nāgārjuna does not deny a thought-independent reality—he is not an idealist in the mold of George Berkeley—but he denies that this reality is ordered as a world, as a cosmos, as a totality characterized by identity, repetition, and stability. For him, there is local coherence centered around lived experiences but no underlying set of relations that holds everything together.

And yet, all of Buddhism’s elaborate soteriology would be for nought if this reality had no impact on human behavior and thought. The term most apt for translating this realm—ontologically empty and psychologically efficacious—into the vocabulary of the West is fiction. Only in a metaphysics with strong commitments to ontological fullness can fiction carry the aura of falsehood or secondariness. In many other views, fiction (and such avatars as Will to Power, Ideology, Language Game) is all, or most, of what there is. Fiction accentuates, in contrast to the more static “convention,” the role we play in creating the world around us—our interpersonal relations, our engagement with institutions and state authority, intimacy with our body and our mortality. Only in moments of shock, of heightened awareness or intense therapy, do we see these relations as human made. Buddhist scholarship, without apparent irony, often uses the cognate Marxist term “reification” to illustrate that fiction is not the opposite of truth but the way meaning coagulates and solidifies both in individual relations (including relations to oneself) and in social contexts.

It is in our (Western) relation to narrative fictions that we accept the Buddhist codependency of truths: that the ultimate truth is that conventions are conventions, “mountains are mountains,” fictions are fictions. In our reading, we accept novelistic accounts of experiences as truth while remaining aware of their thoroughly conventional nature—in fact, for the language game “novel” and “fictional narrative” to work this is exactly what we must do. There is no need, no evidence that this acceptance or suspension requires an act of the will; rather, it is the absence of any willing or any controlled epistemological labor that makes the experience of narratives so compelling.

When we read novels, we do not typically wonder whether receiving a life-altering anonymous bequest, discovering one’s husband’s infidelity through a crack in a bowl, waking up as a beetle or as a disembodied voice is likely or even possible—we accept, appreciate, enjoy, and puzzle over the scenarios arranged for us within the convention “novel,” regardless of whether they are realistic in the stunted representational sense, or surrealist, magical, modernist, fantastical, or satirical. We read with parallax vision.

Ironically, then, it is from an Eastern tradition unaware of the conventions of the novel that we might learn to take literature seriously. The individual and social value of reading narrative fiction is not first and foremost that we acquire empathy for others and exercise the mind in the fields of the imagination; empathy, desirable though it is, identifies with another fully established subject in its struggle against the “ways of the world.” The Middle Way shows that we read at a deeper level—we follow how a character emerges, changes, or perishes in the struggle to distinguish self from other, truth from convention, and relate this struggle to our own. We can make this relation because the practice of reading, as the following chapter seeks to show, is itself an experience in which the distinction of self and other is in flux.

Deep reading of secular narrative fiction latches on to a character’s open-ended, failure-prone journey; often this leads into situations in which a character mistakes a convention—marriage, religious life, material success—for an essential truth that the reader recognizes as empty convention. The two sides in this experience of reading, the reader and the character, stand in a relationship similar to that between conventional and ultimate truth: while the character pursues an ultimate truth amid conventions—the truth of the self (bildungsroman) and/or the truth of the other (novels of love/adultery and ambition)—the reader can see the limitation, the emptiness of that pursuit. “Seeing,” however, is not the right term, as the understanding of experience is itself an experience: the time-consuming process of reading itself.