Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
August 1st, 2020
Ah, but who needs Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery” these days when we have Twitter? Virtual human sacrifice at the click of a button, along with gaggles of Hester Prynnes carrying their digitally permanent scarlet letters, just waiting for us to scorn them. We are all well aware of the dehumanizing aspects of our culture. In fact, we seem to enjoy it. But for those who’d like to retain their humanity, how to respond?
We both seem to agree that the writing and reading of novels is a good place to start. Our differences come in whether that will help shape the nation, or become yet another niche subgroup, a Benedict Option open to secular and religious humanists alike, so long as their fingers are appropriately stained with ink.
I’m happy to bemoan that the novel doesn’t have more cultural prominence today, I’m just not so sure how grand the bargain you mention really was in earlier times. Peruse the bestselling books of the first few decades of the 20th century, the only now-familiar name that regularly appears is Winston Churchill’s (though not the Winston Churchill you’re thinking of). Great books only rarely explode on the scene. Their power to reshape the culture is not the result of their ability to reshape cocktail party conversation, but to reshape our sense of ourselves and our societies across generations, exerting a subtle yet steady influence as more ephemeral art comes and goes.
When then-President Obama mentioned my last book as “a reminder, particularly important for a commander in chief,” of the difference between “antiseptic war plans” and the experience on the ground, it was perhaps an example of immediate cultural relevance. But more important to me was the couple who told me they’d had initially never spoken of the husband’s deployment. Then he read my book, and decided to use it. Every night, he read a story aloud to his wife, after which they’d talk about his time overseas, the text a starting place and a bridge across a painful gulf in experience. The writer seeking true relevance is not aiming at presidents, but at men and women like that couple.
So I don’t doubt the novel’s status because I don’t doubt our need to have art that changes us, that helps deepen our connections to each other, and I don’t see any new form with sufficient scope for tackling modern life. Nor do I think our culture has actually given up on the deeper truths you allude to.
"Man needs a metaphysics," the poet Frank Bidart once proclaimed, "he cannot have one.” Modern man is not some new monstrosity, but the same truth-seeking animal he has always been. And as long as humans need not only a metaphysics but also a sense of belonging in structures larger than ourselves, whether those be communities or churches or nations, humans will seek out those art forms that help us to knit together our disparate, broken solitudes. Which means the novel will never die.
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