Literature's Flight from Experience

The Novel Has More Important Things to do than Hawking Your Doctrine

I got sucked into one of those strange internet discussions the other day in which it becomes impossible to tell if the other party genuinely can’t see the point you are making or is simply trolling. As strangely perverse as the discussion became, I was inclined to believe that it was the former because the seeming blank spot in my interlocutor’s thought aligned with what we were arguing about, which was the value of experience in and of itself apart from any ideas to which it might give rise.

The particular context was a discussion of whether Christian fiction should attempt to teach doctrine, but the implications are far wider. It is not just Christian fiction that is expected to teach doctrine these days. It is all fiction. The politburo demands that fiction support the party line, and you can’t support the party line if you do not clearly express the party doctrine.

On what basis could we call a writer great, my interlocutor demanded to know, other than by the ideas they expressed? You may have to help me here. This notion seems so patently absurd to me that I hardly know how to argue against it. If great writers are great because of the greatness of their ideas, what was Shakespeare’s great idea?

I tried to make the point, and I will attempt to make it here, that literature is about experiences, not ideas. Again you may have to help me hear because I hardly know how to argue a point so obvious. How do you address the misunderstanding of a point when you can’t imagine how someone could not understand it? Essays are for ideas. Novels are for experiences. How can that not be clear?

Perhaps the confusion lies in the fact that novels are made of words. Surely we would not argue that things not made of words have value only for the ideas they express. What idea is expressed by a walk in the woods, by a fine glass of wine, by a good meal, by the touch of a child’s hand placed confidently in your own? Surely, these things are valuable in their own right.

Of course, we can have ideas about these experiences. When I say that these experiences have value in their own right, I am expressing an idea about them. But this idea does not constitute or create the value of these experiences. Indeed, experiences are only worth having ideas about because they have value in themselves. We can certainly have ideas about ideas. (I am expressing one now.) But if ideas were the only thing we had ideas about, the whole project would collapse in on itself and would disappear in the idea of a puff of smoke.

My interlocutor was particularly concerned with Christian doctrine. But he seemed to entirely miss the point that Christianity is not simply a body of doctrine. St. John teaches us that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, but my interlocutor seemed to see only the words and not the flesh. No part of Christian doctrine is worth a speck of dust if Christ was not made incarnate of Mary by the Holy Spirit, died, and rose from the dead in living flesh so that Thomas (for all of us) could place his fingers in the wounds of the crucifixion. It is the experience of Christ and the experience of the Church he founded and of the Holy Spirit that he sent to guide it that matters. All the doctrine in the world matters only to help us be certain whether our experience is of these things or of something else. It is the experience of the beatific vision we long for, and the only use we have for doctrine is to help us find our way to it.

If you are not a Christian, if you are of some other faith or of none, I presume something similar must be true for you, that it is the experience of something you crave, even if it is only the pleasures of the material world. And while you may rank words and ideas among those pleasures, I presume that you do not value all the other pleasures of experience only insofar as they give rise to words or ideas. If the pleasure of a good glass of wine was only some idea that arose from it, then having drunk one glass, you would have the idea. You could then write the idea down on a piece of paper, put the paper in a frame on your dining table, and you would get all the pleasures of wine with your meal just by reading it between bites.

Do we agree then that the pleasure and the value of things not made with words lies in the experience of the things themselves and not in ideas about or arising from them? (I ask because I still can’t fully understand why the point needs to be made.)

Right then, ideas and experiences are distinct things. We can have ideas about experiences, but these ideas are not the whole of the value of the experiences. Experiences are received through the senses. Ideas are expressed and communicated in words. Does it follow that all things made with words can only be ideas? Or is it possible that things made with words can also be experiences? And if a thing made with words creates an experience, does it follow that it is received like an experience and valued like an experience and not merely for any propositional ideas that it may provoke?

My argument is, of course, that it does. And in this case, I have neurology on my side for, as Lisa Cron reports in Wired for Story, the brain processes stories in just the same way that it processes lived experience. And again, I am mystified that I should have to make this argument. For if it were not true, what would be the point of the distinction between philosophy and literature, between fiction and non-fiction? The role of philosophy, of non-fiction, is to capture and express ideas. The role of literature, of fiction, is to create experiences. If we want ideas, if we want to express ideas or receive ideas, we should read and write philosophy and non-fiction. That is the proper form for ideas. If we want to create experiences, if we want to receive experiences, we should read and write stories.

Of course, it is not that simple. You can create experiences with non-fiction, which is what I presume is meant by the phrase “creative non-fiction,” though I have never quite understood the coinage of that term. And stories can be about ideas because having ideas, receiving ideas, pondering ideas, and measuring one’s conduct against ideas are all part of the human experience and therefore fit subjects for fiction. Indeed, it would be a rare story in which the author did not have any character express an idea or ponder an idea or try to persuade another character of an idea. Stories only exist because we are by nature given to pondering our experiences and drawing ideas from them and about them.

People write books and magazines about wine. Wine generates all kinds of ideas, and people enjoy reading about and discussing ideas about wine. This does not mean (to repeat what should be the obvious point) that they value wine only because of the ideas it generates. It is quite the opposite: they value the ideas only because they value the experience of drinking wine for its own sake.

And so it is with stories also. People write books and magazines about stories and and people enjoy discussing ideas about stories. But this is only because they value the stories for the experience they create.

Thinking about the experience of wine leads people to work out ways to create better wine. And in the same way, ideas about experience lead authors to work out ways to create different kinds of experiences through stories. And wrestling with ideas is one of those experiences that an author can create in a story.

In Evelyn Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender, the third volume of his Sword of Honour trilogy, Waugh has Guy Crouchback receive a letter from his father following up on their earlier discussion of the Lateran Treaty (which established Vatican City and pledged the papacy to political neutrality). It reads in part,

When you spoke of the Lateran Treaty did you consider how many souls may have been reconciled and have died at peace as the result of it? How many children have been brought up in the faith that might have lived in ignorance? Quantitative judgments don’t apply. If only one soul was saved that is full compensation for any amount of loss of “face”.

This phrase, “quantitative judgments don’t apply,” follows Guy and shapes his thoughts through the rest of the book, and in the end, he comes to agree with it.

Are we then to suppose that the rightness of the Lateran Treaty is the point of Unconditional Surrender, or that we should value the book based on our own opinion of the Lateran Treaty? I do trust that your answer is, “Of course not!” Otherwise, I would hardly know how to go on.

I chose this example in part because it is not a subject of any present interest. I would frankly be astonished if even a handful of my readers would have heard of the Lateran Treaty, let alone have formed an opinion about it. I hadn’t before I came across it in the novel and looked it up. So present passions should not cloud our thinking here.

So the next question is, do we think that Evelyn Waugh thought the Lateran Treaty was a good thing despite its apparently being out of favor with the public during the Second World War? I think that’s likely.

Do we think that Evelyn Waugh put this and other arguments about the nature and responsibilities of the Church into the mouth of Mr. Crouchback because they were his views, and he wanted to state them? I think that’s likely too.

But, do we think that Evelyn Waugh put this argument into Unconditional Surrender because he thought a three-volume account of Guy Crouchback’s war experiences was the best vehicle for these sentiments? Again, I trust your answer is “Of course not!” if only for the obvious reason that he fully stated these views in a reported letter that occupies only half of one page in one of those three volumes.

Does that mean that his views on this matter are therefore irrelevant to the book? Not at all. Through the three volumes of the Sword of Honour, Guy is wrestling with his desire for a great deed by which to justify his existence. Mr. Crouchback’s letter is one of the many threads of ideas that Guy struggles with in trying to understand his role and the purpose of his life. And that is the key thing here: the book is about the experience of struggling with such ideas. Whether Waugh agrees with the ideas or not, though we may be reasonably sure that he does, is not actually relevant to the experience of struggling with them.

To give another example from an author whose motives for having a character express an idea in their novel I can attest to with more certainty, here is a passage from The Needle of Avocation where Edith is addressing her daughter, Hilda, who is struggling to decide whether to marry or go into a nunnery so that she can devote her life to her avocation for needlework.

Edith placed her hand on her daughter’s belly. “Right here,” she said, “your womb. It is the center of the world. Around it a woman builds her hearth, her hut, her hall, her village. The men know this in their hearts. They go out to the edges, to the fields, to the earthworks, to the battlefields. They create kingdoms and kings to rule them, all for this. This is the center. This is the hallow which they approach with fear and reverence, for which they spend their strength and courage to nurture and defend it. Here, my love, here within you, is the center of all things, the center from which all the rest flows. Without this, there is nothing.”

Why did I have Edith speak this idea? Is it because I believe it to be true, and I wanted to say it? In one sense, at least, yes. That sense is that I believe this to be how most societies are constructed and how they tacitly see themselves, traditionally at least. But did I write The Needle of Avocation simply to say this? Of course not. I could have said it much more easily in an essay in this newsletter. (In fact, at some point, I probably will.)

So why is it there? There is a degree of literary sleight of hand involved here. Edith was born a slave in a remote village and became the lady of the hall by seducing the heir of the estate. She is not an educated woman. A woman like her would be unlikely to think or express herself in such abstract terms (though philosophers do sometimes emerge in the most unlikely of places). So what I am having Edith do here is articulate something that she would have felt instinctively, that would have made sense of her whole experience of life in her time, as a means of expressing it to the reader. This is not an uncommon literary technique. Writers often give speeches to characters who would not normally give speeches specifically to get across to the reader how the character sees the world.

But again, the book is not about this idea but rather about the experience of wrestling with this idea and with the practical challenges of living out such an idea should you choose to embrace it. For this is, of course, what lies at the core of any wrestle with ideas: that what is at stake is not an abstract question of whether or not the idea is correct but the practical cost of attempting to live out the consequences of an idea in your own life.

But when it comes to living out the consequences of ideas, the ideas seldom come singly. Hilda has another confidant, Mother Wynflaed, the Abbess of Whitby.

“My mother says my womb is the center of the world,” Hilda said, her eyes fixed on the floor.

“Not yours in particular, I am sure,” Wynflaed replied, her hand wandering unbidden to rest on her belly. “I suppose she means wombs in general.”

“But that can’t be right, can it? I was told that Jerusalem is the center of the world.”

“Some might say Rome. Some might say Constantinople.”

“I’ve never heard of Constantinople. Where is it?”

“Far away.”

“Of course. It’s silly to say that the center of the world is anywhere near here.” Hilda cast her eyes around the room with its sooty rafters and its faded tapestries, before letting them fall at last on her own small belly.

“But I take your mother’s point,” Wynflaed said wistfully. “Christ came into the world through his mother’s womb. Without the wombs of women, there would be no people, and without the womb of Mary there would be no salvation.”

“If I asked the king where the center was, what would he say?”

“You should ask him. The question would be good for him. At first he would say the king’s hall at York, I think. But then that answer would worry him, like a stone in his shoe, and in the end he might come round to agreeing with your mother—that the courts and the forts and the men at arms are all just really there to protect the home and the hearth and the womb.”

“What would the archbishop say?”

“He would scold you and tell you not to trouble your betters with idle questions. I suppose if he did stop to think about it, he might say that the Eucharist is the center of Christian life.”

“What about the cross, then?”

“You are quite the theologian, child. I thought you cared for nothing but embroidery.”

“I have ears and I’m not stupid. I may not be pretty, but I’m not stupid.”

Wynflaed smiled, the sort of indulgent smile that greets the utterance of a precocious child. “If your mother were a theologian of your caliber,” she responded, “perhaps she might point out that just as Christ emerged from his mother’s womb at the incarnation, so he emerged from the tomb at his resurrection, and that these two things are very much alike. Indeed, there was another Mary present at the resurrection. We might even call her the midwife of the resurrection.”

“But which is the center, then?” Hilda asked, persistent as always for a straight and simple answer.

Wynflaed paused a moment to consider. “I think,” she said, pausing immediately after she began, as if to be more sure of herself, “I think, subject to correction, you understand, by those who have given the matter more thought than I have, but I think it might be fair to say that perhaps they all overlap—the womb and the tomb and the cross and the Eucharist—perhaps they are all at the center together, across every land and in every age.”

“So my womb is at the center?” Hilda whispered, her eyes dropping very low.

“I don’t think it is terribly wrong to say so,” Wynflaed replied. “Certainly it is closer to the center than the forts and the earthworks that the men build to protect it. I don’t want to say that it is a whole thought or a whole truth, but it certainly seems to me to be a good thought. …”

I hope that if I have done my job at all well, that at the end of that passage, your first thought is not to take issues with these ideas, nor yet to endorse them, but to feel in your heart sympathy for Hilda as she struggles with them, and with what they mean for the conduct of her life. Because I hope it is clear that the experience of her struggle could not be portrayed without the discussion of the ideas themselves. It is those ideas that lie at the heart of her struggle, and it cannot be fully presented without laying out the ideas in this fashion. And yet, the purpose of the book is not to present these ideas, but to give the reader the experience of Hilda’s struggle with them.

This goes back to my earlier essay on the moral weight of action. Arguing ideas in abstract carries very little moral weight. Students debating the fate of nations in university cafeterias carry none of the weight of the world on their shoulders. They are free to espouse the most absurd of programs and embrace the most grotesque of actors because they bear neither the responsibility of acting nor the capacity to act on these matters. An idea bears no moral weight of action until one is in a position to act on it, and particularly when you are in a situation in which you are forced to act on it and live with the consequences. Stories can give people the experience of bearing the moral weight of action and of living with the consequences of ideas, which could be a most salutary thing quite independent of the ideas themselves and even whether those ideas are right or wrong. (Again, this is not about creating a thought experiment to test an idea. It is about creating the experience of bearing the moral weight of acting on an idea.)

All of which is to say that though a novel is a thing of words, and though its characters, as human beings, will do as human beings do and argue about ideas, it exists not to advance ideas but to create human experiences, most, if not all of which, are concerned with the experience of bearing the moral weight of action, which certainly includes, among it several aspects, a struggle with ideas.

And this function of the novel is, I will suggest, far too important for us to use the novel for the more trivial purpose of advancing ideas. Returning to Unconditional Surrender again, Waugh records the following conversation between Guy Crouchback, now a liaison officer to the partisans in Yugoslavia. When an American general visits, from whom the partisans seek military supplies, they ask Guy to teach them an American song to honor the general. They are expecting the kind of official propaganda song that communist governments taught their soldiers to sing.

‘He want to know,’ explained Bakie, ‘English American anti-fascist songs. He wants words and music so the girls can learn them.’

‘I don’t know any,” said Guy.

‘He wants to know what songs you teach your soldiers?’

‘We don’t teach them any. Sometimes they sing about drink, “Roll out the barrel” and “Show me the way to go home”.’

‘He says not those songs. We are having such songs also under the fascists. All stopped now. He says Commissar orders American songs to honour American general.’

‘American songs are all about love.’

‘He says love is not anti-fascist.’

This flight from experience, from songs about drink and about love, this insistence on songs that express the party line, deadens everything. And note that the implication here is not that the partisans are wrong because they ask for songs about communist ideas rather than allied ideas or Christian ideas. No, they are wrong because they want songs that come from the censors rather than the experience of the people. They would be wrong no matter what songs they were trying to force their soldiers to sing when the soldiers want to sing about drink and about love. Wrong not because drink and love are more worthy subjects for song but because propaganda is not what soldier’s songs are for, and the censors are not who soldiers’ songs belong to.

If you want to argue for an idea, there is a proper medium for that. It is the philosophical essay. The novel is not for that but for the examination of human experience by the expedient of creating fictional experiences. Experience teaches us directly in ways that propositions cannot. The things that experience teaches us are not mere propositions and cannot be reduced to propositions in any satisfactory way. Being told that courage is good will not make you courageous. Reading stories of courage just might. Being told that self-sacrifice is noble will not make you self-sacrificing, but stories of self-sacrifice just might.

But just as experience does not need ideas to justify it, it also does not need moral fibre to justify it either. We are creatures of our senses, made to have experiences. Experiences are good in themselves, including literary experiences. Yes, we need ideas to restrain us from excess in our experiences, and we need moral fiber to keep us from selfishness and self-destruction in our experiences, but neither of those things is the point of having experiences. A good novel, like a good glass of wine, needs no justification beyond the quality of the experience itself. That it can so often give us more besides is, we might say, just the cherry on top.

So let us strive to halt literature’s flight from experience. Whether we be Christian writers or writers of another creed, let us remember that our creeds themselves exist only to explain our experiences, be those experiences physical or spiritual, be they of the mundane or of the divine. You wouldn’t wash your car with fine wine. Don’t preach your creed in a novel. There are better tools for the job and better uses for the tools.