“Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.” So says John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey. His dismissal of fiction signals his boorish character but also serves as a foil for the heroine’s Quixote-like obsession with Gothic thrillers, which leads her to cringeworthy social blunders. These two extremes mark cultural stances toward literature that are familiar today. Dwindling humanities funding reflects Thorpe’s assumption that novels are trivial distractions from the “real” business of life (which is… spreadsheets?). On the other hand, book-banning controversies belie our fear that some fictions inevitably invade our minds and warp our conduct.
Happily, the truth about fiction is more interesting than this. Joshua Hren’s latest book cuts through the oversimplifications to make an elegant case for the potential of great literature to enrich us morally. More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and The Spirit of Literature contributes to a resurgence of Catholic writings on the arts that respond to T.S. Eliot’s famous call for literary criticism crafted “from a definite theological and philosophical standpoint.” Hren is an experienced essayist with professional ties to several facets of this movement, including publishing ventures (he spearheads Wiseblood Books), college courses (he’s co-founded a Great Books program and a Creative Writing MFA), and creative output (he publishes poems, short stories, and novels). His efforts signal a fresh energy in conversations around the value of literary art from Christian and more broadly conservative perspectives.
In Taste, Hren addresses our cultural moment through the idiom of corrective: great literature can help restore things that Western societies are losing. Part 1 gathers essays united by this theme. Amid our shallow doomscrolling, great literature can counteract the crisis of curiositas; amid our shrill public discourse, great literature can balance our perspective on what matters. The trope that ties these reflections together is the loss of sight. In conscious alliance with Joseph Pieper’s famous diagnosis–“Man’s ability to see is in decline” (8)–Hren contends that our view of truth is muddied like never before. Great literature is touted as one of the medicinal options available for us as we seek to realign ourselves with the real and orient our lives toward the good. As Joseph Conrad, Flannery O’Connor, and many other writers have argued, fiction’s potential to do reality justice–to bring the truth to light–is done “primarily, by making you see” (10, original emphasis). Hren is an eloquent apologist for this function of literature. Always alert to complexities, never overclaiming for the social or religious importance of fiction, and with the caveat that fictions can corrupt as much as they can bless, Hren argues that great stories make the good attractive to us.
As Hren points out, the link between faithful “seeing” in literature and ethics proper–the way we really live when we put our books down–is complicated. His essays are wonderfully nuanced when they come to discussing the effects of fiction, a topic that is almost always oversimplified in conservative writings on stories. Book-banning rows highlight our tendency toward content tunnel vision–does this novel depict premarital sex?–rather than recognizing the formal properties and social actions that give such content its moral direction. Hren reminds us that fictions are practices more than they are static objects. Even the very best novels, those with potential to orient us toward the good, will falter in the clutches of a narrow or vicious soul. Hren describes literature as a “mediating moral force” (16), casting its role as a midwife in the process of character formation.
This book is a collection of previously published essays, and the chapters work as seedbeds of ideas rather than increments in a tight argument. Downstream from this, the most helpful descriptors of fiction’s relation to moral life (“mediating moral force,” “staging ground,”) are not explicitly theorized so much as worked with. From one angle, this makes for an easier read. We can dip in and out, finding rich food for thought as we go. The flipside is that the book offers less a systematic “guide for what it means to read with moral clarity,” as the dustjacket indicates, and more a series of soundings. While these are illuminating and inviting, they will leave some readers looking forward to seeing the ideas more fully fleshed out and brought explicitly into conversation with wider conversations in philosophy of fiction and art ethics.
This desire surfaced for me in questions of reader responsibility. Hren stresses that morally fruitful reading requires not just great books but the disposition of “right reading” (15, 34). How do we cultivate this disposition? What moral responsibilities can we say a reader has: to the author, to others, to themselves? How do we know if we’re reading poorly? These questions simmer throughout Taste but tend to be entertained more than answered. So much seems to hang on them that one wishes for more a detailed treatment of what Rita Felski dubs the “intercession” of readers.
In many ways, the rest of the book answers this request by modeling possible responses. Part 1 contains reflective essays on the nature and role of great literature in moral life, while Parts 2 and 3 explore stories from nine canonical authors with the aim of expounding their moral imaginations and spiritual insights. Each essay reflects attentive, loving engagement with the author in question, and gracefully articulates the morally salient qualities of their work. Flaubert’s Sentimental Education refracts humanity’s deep longing for monogamy. Austen’s Persuasion enacts a sort of distributive justice of attention by inviting the reader to notice the virtuous “nobodies”–the Anne Elliots and Fanny Prices–in their midst. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time becomes a potential resource for understanding our endemic self-deceit when we reflect on our own lives:
Often we place ourselves in a position of reflective distance in order to pretend that we have moved past our prior, more pathetic ways of being. I used to be so cruel and haughty, but now I am a statue of humility. . . . Proust, on the contrary, has an uncanny capacity to put himself, his narrator, and the reader on the “persecutor’s side.” By tracing the arc from childhood inaction to the “mature” rationalization of the same injustice, Proust invites us to assume the side of the persecutor, to pass through the pleasant pain by which we can really reckon with our disordered desires. (287)
Read in this way, it is hard to disagree with Hren’s appraisal of Proust’s work as “profoundly moral” (287). Those who delight in the great novels of the Western tradition will find their intuitions about why these novels matter given beautiful expression here.
In view of the book’s overall framing, one puzzle is that the works of literature Hren surveys are almost exclusively realist-aspiring stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This kind of prose fiction is certainly valuable, and the novel more broadly remains our dominant vehicle for the transmission of written stories, as his essay “The Death of the Novel?” in this volume highlights. Yet it’s not clear why the great tangled tree of literature is so consistently evoked in this book when many of its branches are hidden.
More importantly, the reading Hren models as the way toward “moral clarity” is evidently one kind of specialised reading. His reflections are those of a professional writer and educator, crystallized from hours of patient study of the texts in question, and this inflects the sorts of conclusions he reaches. The readings sparkle with sensitivity; at times they perhaps court exclusivity, a sense that they are written for those “who have ears to hear” (136). Could the idiom of literature-as-corrective sometimes risk making those outside the sphere of professional education feel that their joyful abandon in genre fiction (for example) is somehow part of the problem, or at least orphaned from the discussion of moral value?
Every account of anything is partial, and Taste will be a precious resource for educators, writers, and literary-minded lay readers. Still, the gestures at universality in the book’s framing are potentially in tension with its limited focus, and may provoke some questions: Is the moral potential of good and great fiction only tapped by the well-educated minority? And by extension, how should we reflect on the fictions of popular culture; what kinds of reading might they call forth, how might they pattern us, which should we treasure? These questions indicate the need for more reflection on readers and their responsibilities. As C.S. Lewis argued in his Experiment in Criticism, valuable books are identified by the kinds of valuable reading they call forth. Is professional literary reading the only kind that fulfils this brief, or are there modes of folk reading that do this too? Across the audience spectrum, what kinds of reading practices collude with the culture of curiositas and which might increase what Hren calls “the depth perception of our souls”? (5)
Here is where the persistent figure of visual perception (literature as a way of “seeing”) can do us less service than other metaphors. For millennia, sight has operated as a metonym for rational apprehension of reality: it channels our conversation about literature towards the kind of truth-seeking pursued by philosophers and preachers, which, while an important aspect of literary experience, doesn’t cover all the bases. Other well-worn metaphors–digesting, navigating, sheltering, dancing–can help us grasp the less conscious and more instinctive aspects to reading fiction. They can help us discuss fiction as a medium of “know-how knowledge,” the sort of knowledge we have when we know how to do something by acquaintance (the practice of patience, for example). We can pursue this without neglecting the access fictions give us to knowledge in the sense of truth-correspondence in the conscious mind (knowing that something is the way it is–such as understanding what patience is and grasping why it matters).
To this end philosophers have sometimes distinguished between modes or stages of reading experience. There is the act of reading proper–in which we submit to the guided imagining of the story, temporarily surrendering our inner world in order to receive its gift–and there is its “afterlife,” in which we replay elements of the experience in our minds, reflect consciously on the content, and assimilate things (deliberately or not) into our lives. The distinction isn’t perfect, especially given that novel reading is discontinuous and gappy, but it does aid precision in discussions of morality. There can be an enormous difference between a novel’s in-the-moment effect–how Thomas Hardy’s storyworld patterns my assumptions and desires while I am reading–and the after-effect of examples set by explicitly portrayed characters, as in “Does Tess Durbeyfield provide a good model for our daughters?” Engagement with conceptual apparatus such as this could strengthen Hren’s alliance of fiction and moral life.
One analogy in Hren’s book captures these different facets of fiction reading well:
The greatest of novels [are] like cathedrals. The harmony of plot and character, pacing and painterly attention to detail are as the awesome agreements between vaulted ceilings and winged buttresses, stained-glass windows and high altars. The only right and just response upon entering a great book is gratitude swelling into awe. As we enter into a given work of fiction’s imaginative rendering of human nature, we cannot help delving into what it implies or indirectly indicates about good and evil or God – but amid these explorations of the moral imagination, and well before we make sense of everything, we should remember, with thanksgiving, the sheer joy of inhabiting a well-made work of art. Good novels, smaller houses of fiction, are like beautiful parish churches, more modest but nonetheless elevating our souls. . . . Some good books, limited to a compelling record of natural man, have lower ceilings. Some bad ones have ceilings that are oppressive, creating a claustrophobic feeling. (98-100)
This set of images captures something crucial: the stories we read are structures that not only feast our inner eyes but constrain our inner motions. While we read it, a novel is the architecture for our mental space. It directs our internal practices, confining or expanding the movements we can make as well as the things we can see. This helps us make sense of the moral potential in all fictions, for better or worse, from Dostoevsky to Danielle Steel. As Kenneth Burke pointed out, literature is about strategy. We use it as “equipment for living,” a means of practising and navigating life.[1] This is not to say that books are simply what we make of them: as the architectural metaphor implies, certain spaces allow certain motions. If you exercise under a low ceiling you will find yourself walking with a stoop outside.
All of us routinely inhabit guided imaginings. We began with John Thorpe’s put-down about novels: “I have something else to do.” An extra layer of irony in Northanger Abbey comes as he quickly undermines himself: “Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t’other day… No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe’s.” Not only does he read novels, he reads the same novels with which Catherine is obsessed. The episode shows Thorpe’s idiocy, for sure, but it also hints at the inevitability of fiction. We all live, to an extent, in stories. The question is not whether they are shaping us, but which ones are shaping us and how.
Taste is an excellent reminder that the best questions about literature and the moral life gravitate less toward the what–have you read such-and-such?–and more toward the how. How are the stories we read (or hear or watch) directing our desires, assumptions, beliefs? How are they guiding our souls? Which books elicit practices that lead to flourishing? Hren’s spirited treatment of these issues will surely keep fertilizing the soil of Christian and conservative reflections on the literary arts.
Image Credit: Julien Leopold Boilly, “A Young Man Reading under a Tree”
