Reading a Novel
Novels don’t only tell stories; they open up discourses. They enclose an interchange of ideas through conversations or narratives with inbuilt ideas. A novel can be described as a discursive and linguistic unit large enough to hold a story together. Another way of looking at this aspect of novels is observing how they put in order knowledge and experience rooted in language and contexts such as history, society, tradition, or change. All this happens in a novel by the coming together of a novelist and reader. The two minds become one to create meaning between them, meaning that emanates from the novelist’s world, culture, race, nationality, gender, etc., and acts upon the reader’s world, culture, and the other mentioned factors. Of course, what readers have in front of them are pages, paragraphs, lines, and words that suddenly acquire life, as it were, as they read on.
For the reader, a novel can look tempting to pick up and devour or be a mountain to climb. There are readers and readers: those who rush through or read painstakingly, trying to take in every little bit, tasting each flavor contained therein. Some get lost in the language, its texture, sound, and sense. Others look for more profound implications that lie within: the satire and message, the thrill and adventure, the mystery and suspense, the philosophy and history, and so on. The reader’s essential reading capacity, education, understanding, patience, and taste help them to absorb the novel in specific ways. What seems excellent to one reader may seem ordinary to another in the same novel. Therefore, it is necessary to arrive at some basic parameters that readers should consider to appreciate and enjoy a novel. We will discuss these a little later. The reader looks for pleasure in the novel and finds some of it in the form of ‘jouissance,’ a Lacanian term. The Indian theory discusses the various ‘rasas’ a literary text provides. Of course, Bharata speaks of drama in general and the spectator in particular when he builds his rasa theory, where rasa refers to a specific experience that a spectator derives from a play. But the same could be applied to a novel and its reader. Just as a spectator becomes a part of the drama to experience a rasa, a reader enters the world of a novel to experience its particular implications: its context, form, or genre. The meaning of what a novelist says in a novel should depend mainly on its form. Statements in comic fiction and serious novels are likely to be taken lightly or seriously, often due to the kind of reader who reads them. Q. D Leavis and her husband, F R Leavis, paid much attention to the reading public in the first half of the twentieth century.
Readers can go to novels for several reasons; some, only to pass the time. But others read novels for edification. Going through the suffering of characters in a novel can be like a particular kind of schooling. Besides, novels can be philosophical; you can visit The Buddha, Marx, Heidegger, Sartre, Gandhi, or any other significant thinker through them. In other words, novels can become structures to support serious thought. But, of course, the chief end of a novel should be to tell a story and not be a substitute for philosophy. A reader will probably not be able to escape the thought a novel contains. Still, their sensibilities and expectations will be more satisfied by the kind of people within a novel and the language employed to build its world.
What, it might be asked, is the difference between a spectator of drama and a reader of fiction? A spectator is very similar to a reader because they, too, are subjected to discourses of various kinds, and they, too, are made to think from other points of view. Besides, they, too, are affected by the tragic or comic situations in the concerned text. However, the reader has to play a more active role in absorbing the text; the spectator has something visually presented before them that they cannot escape. Readers must build this visual picture according to their ability and exposure. A novel contains much that has to be thrashed out, maybe subconsciously, before meaning can be generated. However, there are novels in which much has been done for the reader by the author, and there are novels in which the reader is made to work hard to arrive at a meaning. Roland Barthes has discussed ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts where this issue is discussed. Publishers prefer novels that give everything potted and boiled to the reader because readers don’t always like to work hard to understand what the novel is trying to get at. This happens in commercial fiction, where the story is told through a simple plot and language. In literary novels, where the reader needs to be more active, the language and characters cannot be left unattended; they draw much attention to themselves.
Readers ought to ask themselves a few questions as they read the novel. These questions are: What is the novelist trying to do? Are they simply telling a story? Are they trying to make the story a work of art while narrating? Are they interested in the political or social condition of the place they set the novel? Are they historically inclined, trying to capture a sense of the past? Are they keenly concerned about the characters they create? Are they interested in the psychology of people? Are they trying to get to the real through an unrestrained use of fancy? (Are they venturing into fantasy or magical realism?) Is language something they wish to dwell upon and show the reader the limits to which it can be stretched? Are the language and thought inextricably linked in a novel? Several other questions can come into the reader’s subconscious.
Once you can see what the novelist is trying to do, you can see how successful he or she is. They shouldn’t give the impression of being novices at employing a form or choosing a fiction genre. You should be able to build the world created in the novel in your mind, even if it does not match what the novelist had in mind when he built it. Every episode has a universe within and behind it that subconsciously needs to be constructed around it. This world must get created easily and without much effort even though the reader’s imagination I constantly at work. Is the novelist getting too descriptive for the novel to read smoothly, or are they managing the setting without seeming to contrive? E M Forster thought that the first job of a novelist was to tell the story. But, there are several parameters on which a mature reader builds an opinion of a novel. Maturity in reading novels comes from reading one book after another. It is an ongoing process that is affected by every new approach a novelist incorporates.