Chapter 7 | Reading Experiences

The previous two chapters have explored the novel experience from two different sides: the first focused on the novel as a convention that, in the modern West, became the dominant form for articulating the vagaries of human experiences. It achieved this dominance by developing a rich network of conditions that reach from the kinematics of industrial machines to narratological innovations that make the reading of experience possible and desirable. In a different register, this is the side of the object, though the analysis given here has tried to show that such rigid designations fail—is the character in a novel an object?—and that novels should be understood as concretized, singular experiences. The last chapter looked at the novel experience from the side of the “subject,” the reader who intersects with the novel in the experience of reading; it urged a broadening of our understanding of reading from the notion of univocal deciphering to recognizing it as a temporally extended embodied practice in which the poles of activity and passivity remain fluid, thus aligning it with the general view of experience this essay proposes.

The following pages attempt to get closer to the multiple conditions that render the reading of experiences in a novel an avatar of experience as such. The first step on this approach is the observation that experiences in their “pure” state—in their incessant shuttling between subjective and objective termini—have no inherent form, but that the accounts we give of our experiences almost always have the structure of narratives, complete with a subject as the “owner” of the experience, obstacles that seem to oppose the intent of that subject, a beginning, middle, and end, and some continuous development between them. We tend to think of our experiences not so much as novel but as a novel.

At times—as children, as patients in therapy, or as students of meditation—we are urged to give up the impulse to turn our experiences into narratives, let go of the stories that position us as the heroes or, more often, the victims of conditions that we either overcome or that conspire against us. Friends or therapists try to convince us that our reading of a situation is far too egocentric, but letting go of the comforts of narratives is hard to do. They are our daily attempts “to save the phenomena”: giving them a place in a story the outlines of which seem to be written not by but for us. There is, not incidentally, a great deal of ruminating by characters in modern novels themselves over the correlation of fate and contingency, and whether real novelty can even be narrated. Friedrich Nietzsche has shown that the hard and soft infrastructures of our world—institutions, social relations, artworks, universities—are themselves based on or built around narratives. The first chapter of this book highlighted how even the question of how to conceive of the world has been answered in the West with powerful narratives, beginning with Plato’s demiurge and the Christian story of creation and draining into the Enlightenment idea of progress or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s and Karl Marx’s logic of history.

Under these auspices it is immensely difficult to disengage experiences from narrative form, to think of, for example, the beginning of an experience as not pregnant with its end, to distinguish proximity of conditions from causality, to think of an ending as a point in time rather than as a culmination. The three philosophers of experience we have interrogated, each in his own way and for his own reasons, have tried to untether experience from the grounding logic, the repetitiveness, and the predictability of narrative form even when they acknowledged its day-to-day utility. Their thinking of experience in this respect was literal: they urge us to gain a position outside of the established conventions to let us see our stories as stories.

It is no accident that the modern novel from its very beginning—in the startling composition that is Don Quixote—is fascinated by this difference in amplitude between the story in which the protagonist lives and the story the author gives us to read. When the knight of the woeful countenance charges the windmills, we as readers know that he mistakes preindustrial machines for monsters because he has subjected his experience entirely to the narratives he has consumed. We know this because of the form the modern novel begins to take here: the fictitious editor lets us see how, and even why, the protagonist mistakes his experiences for those in medieval narratives. These formal devices and their later descendants—the omniscient narrator and free indirect discourse—are, to repeat, not accidental to the novel but its innermost possibility.

Here already we can see that the distinction between the “truth” of a story and the narrative “illusion” capturing the characters in them, the distinction, ultimately, between a “pure” experience and its narrative capture, is not at all clear-cut. Not only is the world of the novel the result of multiple authorial choices but the actions of the characters are also, from a point of view we as critical and historically informed readers can occupy, often quite accurate in their illusoriness. Don Quixote correctly anticipates Marx’s description of industrial, rotating machines as monsters, Emma Bovary’s analyses of provincial life are not wrong; it is just that they cannot relate to their narratives as narratives.

There are some themes that for complex historical and social reasons lent themselves to novelistic narration—love, adultery, and ambition, to name the triad that dominates the Western canon—but it is more comprehensive still to say that novels in the West are particularly concerned with showing (and telling) the difference between how protagonists motivate and explain their behavior and the possible explanations the narrative frame allows us readers to arrive at. Often, this is the source of what we perceive as authorial irony, but it is much more than just a stylistic trait. Werther mistaking his envy for love, David Copperfield admiring James Steerforth, Isabel Archer marrying Osmond—we read these disastrous developments with a parallax view that allows us both to see the power self-concocted narratives hold over a character and to anticipate their inevitable failure in the world created by the novel. The discrepancy between the protagonists’ immersion in what they believe is the story of their experiences and the readers’ appreciation of the wider circumstances in which this story loses its inevitability is a rudimentary source of suspense. To call the novel the medium of experience in modernity entails that it present experiences as narratives and allow for the precariousness of this relation to be experienced by the reader.

There is little doubt that novels since antiquity play on the reader’s mimetic desires and on the pleasure of putting oneself into the position of a narrative’s protagonist. Focusing on the tension between experience and narrative does not mean to deny these pleasures but to dispute their primacy. The previous chapter proposed the attribute “deep” for this focus, without attaching any value to this spatial metaphor. The idea of such reading is to hold open, at least tentatively and as a first step, the tension rather than to evaluate the resolution. William James had tried to advocate for a similar openness of experience when he reversed the order of feeling and emotions: just as emotions judge feelings and put themselves in their place, so do empathy and mimetic projection judge experience in lieu of appreciating its imperfection.

The difference between experience and its telling, we must remember, cannot be construed as that between two unrelated “essential” poles—between a pristine experience that is subsequently denatured by the demands of narrative—but as the constant shaping and reshaping of one by the other. Though fictional characters often yearn for an experience unspoiled by their present, “adult” narrative needs—a childhood memory, or a future ideal—modern, and especially realist, novels quite pitilessly show how every new, seemingly pristine and singular experience is already shaped by the conditions that surround it. Novels of ambition often have the protagonist act consciously with a view to how an experience can be narrated. This relation between experience and its narrative uptake is an avatar of the distinction theories of the novel make between story (the linear unfolding of events) and plot (the modes of telling). Like that relation, it has both the advantage of suggesting momentary analytic clarity—here the story (experience), there the author’s way of telling it (narration)—and the disadvantage of revealing that this difference cannot really be sustained.

Just as we cannot conceive of a story that has no plot-like arrangements or, inversely, of a pure arrangement without a story—though modernist writers like Ernest Hemingway or Samuel Beckett have certainly tried—there is no experience so pure that it is untouched by the circumstances in which it emerges. In Nāgārjuna’s parlance, experiences do not have an essence, svabhāva, that would render them independent of their conditions. James’s “pure experience” was always a clinical and speculative construct to help his argument for the valence of experience before its articulation and conceptualization.

This is, then, a first pedagogical fruit of the experiential approach to narrative literature: to train and sensitize a reader’s awareness of the discrepancy between a character’s conviction of the unconditionality, the individuality of their experiences and the inevitable discovery that they have conditionally arisen. For the novel of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries—the form of which still dominates today’s narrative culture—we can describe this discrepancy as the difference between characters believing that they are subjects of their experiences, that they have their experiences, and the slow or sudden realization that they are subject to their experiences, that experiences shape them.

In the German tradition, which significantly shaped European and North American narrative culture, the process of adjusting the presumptions of the individual to the “ways of the world” was, and is, called Bildung, the notoriously multivalent notion that, just like its relative “organic” that we encountered in the first chapter, suggested that natural and cultural processes of development are conjoined. As Hegel remarked, despite its invocation of growth and natural harmony, the bildungsroman of the nineteenth century was mostly a novel of disappointment and resignation. The experiential point of view here proposed gives Hegel’s nostalgic assessment a more neutral color: its mournfulness would be justified only if one clings to the ideal of subjective ownership of experiences and to the idea of a meaningful world into which this subject may fit. If we release this nostalgia, what the novel allows us to read is another’s experience—its conditioned development, its drama and pleasures, and, most fundamentally, what James calls its “thatness.” The conflict between the striving of the individual and the resistance of the world is not one experience, it is experience. This realization, afforded by the novel, opens the reading of experiences in novels to the experience that is reading a novel, and ultimately to the awareness of our own experiences.

In the history of the novel, the tension between a character’s self-understanding and the reader’s view on their motivations, weaknesses, and strengths was initially marked by heavy authorial irony or by obvious signs to show the reader right from wrong. As the fictional editor merged into the omniscient narrator, this heavy-handedness also disappeared. Not only did the permeability of modern society make the distinction between right and wrong less obvious but also a new way of writing no longer required such judgment.

Free indirect discourse’s ubiquitous use since the middle of the nineteenth century signals the emergence of a grammatical mood no longer associated with an actual, or even a possible, speaker position; it is plausible only within the development of the genre. The collapse of description into narration, of interior and exterior viewpoint—to briefly describe this new mood—does not extinguish the possibility of understanding an experience but complicates, and often suspends, the question of agency and moral significance. Insofar as experience in the full sense here uncovered also precedes the distinction of activity and passivity, of the subject and its antagonists, free indirect discourse, by holding these dichotomies in suspense, is experience’s own language.

In the old regime of “pseudofactual” representation—in the found manuscript, the discovered epistolary, the unearthed diary—we encounter experiences either from the outside, as they are happening to the protagonist, or, in the case of the epistolary novels of the late eighteenth century, only from the inside (engendering the oft-noted problem of how to complete the narrative). In the “unspeakable” language of the omniscient narrator, by contrast, we read about experience from the outside, as other characters confront and engage with them, and from the inside, as a character ruminates, evaluates, and acts in them. The temporality of omniscient narration and the constant and inadvertent change of perspective in free indirect speech obliterate the distinction between inside and outside, between a subject that has the experience and a set of events that constrain it. In this innovative mode of narration, the modern novel thus finds a language that invites readers into regions of experiencing that have not yet congealed into separate, interpretable chunks.

This oscillation, which the French courts in Gustave Flaubert’s and Charles Baudelaire’s obscenity trials of 1857 so desperately wanted to arrest, does not simply represent experience in its state of constant change; it is that state. It asks the reader to stay alert and to sort through the many conditions that may influence and compose an event. Reading this strange, utterly unrealistic, inhuman voice, in which the separation between agent and action, purpose and obstruction, self and other must be supplied by the reader, is the moment in which reading about experience and the reading experience become one experience, become one with experience.

This is not to say that novels that do not employ free indirect discourse fall somehow short of the full potential of the genre. As a technical achievement, it is perhaps best compared with the invention of linear perspective—its absence in medieval or in cubist paintings does not detract from their value, but we post-Renaissance viewers and readers carry this absence with us and often use it to gain clarity of a particular aspect of the work.

We may doubt whether novelistic literature allows for the genuine expression of experience and whether, by reacting to it as an experience, we are not chasing chimeras. Yet this is a worry only if we read for knowledge and truth. We need not go as far as Buddhist fictionalism and declare the difference between true and fictional manifestations of experience to be naught; it is enough to say that by entering the language game called novel, we accept it as an expression of another’s experience, the truth of which we can never ascertain and anyway does not detract from, or add to, the reality of our experience reading it.

In the mutuality of the reading experience readers seek to make sense of a narrative and are themselves changed in the process. The minimal (but real) manifestation of that change is the temporal difference of having read a novel—a whole host of assumptions and expectations result from my having read, for example, Invisible Man, regardless of what I make of it. More likely, though, readers will relate the experiences they read about to the way they have, or would have, reacted in these or similar circumstances.

This need not lead to a conscious change in behavior—we may still become jealous even though we have read Swann in Love—but it opens a crack in the solidity of habit and repetition; it allows readers to disengage from their experiences and challenge their inevitability. After all, the otherness of experience not only pertains to another’s experience but also to our own. In the process of reading, the fatality of our own experiences loosens up in the relative safety of a fictional narrative. At any moment, a novel’s character could have acted otherwise; at any moment, we can act otherwise; at any moment, a novel may have a different impact on us. We can experience this loosening in other circumstances—hearing or practicing a piece of music, in a therapeutic setting, meeting someone—but during reading, as a spatial and temporally extended activity, we can reflect on it in the process. Reading novels takes time—time in which to reflect—because novels recount experiences that took time to make. In this equation lies the basis for any realism the novel may have.

While our daily experiences are constantly overlapping and, to a great extent, submerged under the habits we form and the conventions forced upon us, experiencing artworks often has a memorable beginning and end, and thus affords us the opportunity to reflect on an experience as singular. The moment when the houselights go down, when we enter a gallery space, or when we pick up a book marks the beginning of an experience that has corresponding marks at its end, when we leave the show, exit the gallery, put down the book. This is not to say that there are no antecedents or consequences that lead to and from these events, but—to take the case of reading a novel—the point where the life of the narrative and the life of the reader intersect is singular and often remains for the reader a distinct and memorable event.

This singularity reinforces the fact that other’s experiences for us only have an outside. As R. D. Laing said, “I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another.” We are, however, readable to one another. We practice this reading—in the full sense of the experience of reading, as developed above—when we seek to read how others experience. One way of doing this is to seek to read other’s behavior as an expression of the sense they have made of their experiences. Another is to read novels—for example, Invisible Man. Readers will still not experience what the narrator recounts. They will not experience what a Black man in the 1930s and ’40s experienced. But this “not” is not nothing; this impossibility is itself an experience, the experience of the otherness of someone’s experience.

Yet another way is to open a conversation about the experience of reading. Asking the participants in such a conversation to articulate their experiences will bring to the fore the irreducible singularity that is the hallmark of all experiences.