Does novel-reading bring us knowledge? Novels are fictional, although they can relate factual circumstances to us through the lens of fantasy. I have learnt a lot about the nuances of pre-revolution Russia through reading Tolstoy. Equally, I couldn’t claim to have much factual knowledge of the period. I know how Count Alexei must’ve felt, trying to appease his wife’s infidelities against a backdrop of gossip and cultural change, but I couldn’t tell you the names of those in Russian Parliament in 1874.
So, novel-writing does not bring us knowledge in the narrower sense of the word, but it does impart feelings in such a way that we can take knowledge from them. I feel that my mind has been broadened by the novels I have read. I certainly feel that reading Anna Karenin was not a waste of time. To be present in Anna’s plight, to feel the swelling vortex of time within the novel, to handle the novel as a physical object of permanence amongst the temporality of history, of Russian cultural identity, of Tolstoy himself, offers a magnitude of emotional knowledge that one would not necessarily take from an academic rendering of St Petersburg in the mid-1800’s.
Like a painting, a novel captures a feeling. These feelings, we dwell in and we learn from, even if we are not able to hold our own in a seminar discussion on the reign of Nicholas I. What makes a good novel is simply, depth. What kind of depth depends on the specificities of the novel, but the ability to see time’s profundities in the words on the page is essential if a novel is to strike at the very core of its reader. What we take from the novels we read is in some way more whole than we would if we attended a lecture. What we take from novels is in some ways incommunicable through any other medium. Novels do not impart knowledge in a linear way; they huff and heave and bestow upon the reader a weighty vision from which they must take their own view.
People often assume that those who write novels must be very knowledgeable. They assume that those who write novels are very clever. They assume that, to write a novel, you must know more than the people you’re writing for. These people, I feel, do not understand the utility of a novel. To read a novel in the hopes of finding concrete knowledge must be a maddening task. I have always felt that novel-writing requires more wisdom than it does knowledge, and gives more wisdom than it does erudition. Although, I hasten to add, a bad novel requires neither nor offers neither. That is why most novels are bad ones.
There is a vastness to wisdom that goes beyond the depths of knowledge, or even of feeling. Wisdom is an expanse, whereas knowledge is a burrow. In much the same way, novels are expansive, whereas other prose forms are more marginal. Novels may mine depths but to write a novel requires more vision than simply grief, lust, or devotion can bestow. Novels are written in view of other things. Novels are not caught up in facts and figures; they capture the sagacity of whole populations. A novel may be looking somewhere - at the panic betrayed in Anna Karenin’s eye perhaps - but the novelist has two eyes, and one is always looking elsewhere.
I am not sure where wisdom comes from. From the books we read? From the lives we lead? It’s a mix of both, I think. We take our own visions from the novels we read. If we read enough, these visions mutate into something akin to wisdom, to the right person at least. Equally, we take knowledge from the people we expose ourselves to. If we expose ourselves enough, we can work toward something that might be called wisdom, if we’re lucky. It’s all luck, really.
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