The Horrible and the Miserable

Robert P. Waxler, The Risk of Reading: How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World

Bloomsbury, 200pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781623563578

reviewed by Stuart Walton

The risk that Robert Waxler refers to in the title of this unapologetically conventional homage to literature is that books might suggest something to their readers about their own lives that the readers didn't already know. Life is a journey, a ceaseless and imperfect and necessarily incomplete quest for self-identity, but novels and stories can provide the guideposts by which we navigate through it, unlike the absorbent screens of the digital age, which are perniciously distracting and addictive.

So far, so Matthew Arnold, but for the persistent references to the internet, which Waxler himself is not above using, according to his bibliography. He has at least gleaned from it a letter that JD Salinger wrote in 1957. And the Bible. He reads the New International Version of the Bible online at Bible Gateway. Other than that, what matters is print books because they offer us something that digital media never can, which is the ethical demand that linguistic narrative makes on our mortal lives, teaching us to know ourselves although we never can, and promoting an 'irreducible complexity' that is nonetheless reducible apparently to the same set of mindlessly repeated phrases, which can be applied to pretty much everything that narrative art has ever produced.

Sandwiched between strikingly similar opening and closing jeremiads about the digital age are readings of ten chronologically arranged stories, from the Creation myth in Genesis to Julian Barnes' 2011 novel The Sense of an Ending. They are mostly the kinds of texts that don't make too many hermeneutic demands on readers – Hemingway, Salinger, Ken Kesey and Fight Club – rather than Faulkner, Joyce, Bellow and George Eliot. These 'deep readings' consist largely of methodical plot summaries, exactly what literary scholars were once trained to avoid, through which are refracted the conservative humanist case that informs the whole book.

Waxler writes throughout in the universalising 'we': 'Without story, we are, at best, endlessly distracted, often by what is insignificant, by indifference, by carelessness, by the contingencies of existence. We refuse to embrace our uncertainty or the necessity of our mortality. We exist in endless illusion.' In short, as Bob Dylan put it, we are idiots, babe. Indeed, it's a wonder we can stir ourselves to write a book about the civilising effects of literature. When we do, though, we make it clear that the choice before us is one between the contingency of real life – always caricatured as 'chaotic' – and the necessity of mortality, which rings like a death-knell throughout our text. We the readers find Woody Allen's dictum in Annie Hall occurring to us: ‘Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.’

Not surprisingly, pop philosophy's favourite profundity, 'what it means to be human', which ought probably now to be subject to an international moratorium, gets an early outing here, and in this lies the book's unravelling. What-it-means-to-be-human is a flatly ahistorical concept, like the 'human nature' that it replaced. If it imperiously brushes aside the notion that the Victorian factory-worker or the indentured plantation slave might have had a different conception of what it means to be human to the CEO of a global arms corporation, or indeed the Massachusetts literature professor, it also stops its ears to the upsetting truth that what it means to be human has also included the Wars of Religion, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, human-trafficking gangs, paedophilia, and lying drunkenly recumbent on the sofa watching ex-celebrities being made to eat locusts. For all the book's talk of 'irreducible complexity', there seems disappointingly little evidence of it here.

The impulse to conceive of life as a story, which like a journey is always going somewhere, is the reflex of immaturity. It demands either that one posit oneself as the author of one's own narrative, which the much-invoked 'chaos' of our lives would seem to impede, or else that some outside agency – a predestinarian God, or Fate, to give it only two of its many names – is writing it for us, with all the senses of enmeshment, inevitability, and blind subjection to heteronomy that implies. A critic who has written of the doom of traditional narrative in postmodernity, Michael Roemer, is brought to the stand to express the paradox of it all: 'what we call “fiction” embodies a reality we cannot afford to face in life, and what we call “reality” is, in fact, a fiction that allows us a measure of consciousness without casting us into despair'. And yet despair is all around us, and much of it, as far as we can make out, appears to be anything but fictional.

It is a firm requirement of the humanist argument that it be entirely devoid of any evaluative potency. A Waxlerian reader has never heard of the idea that there might be good and bad books – for every scintillating Henry James a revolting DH Lawrence, for every inspiringly sensual DH Lawrence a regurgitant Fifty Shades of Grey – but reads on in quest of herself, flaccidly embroiled in the illuminating dialogue that all narrative offers her.

There are one or two useful insights. The proposition that narrative literature, or what the book doggedly insists on calling 'linguistic narrative', has become 'a crucial counterculture' to the dominant anti-literate cybernetic consciousness offers a potentially fruitful way of re-theorising an aesthetic tradition founded on the axioms of the canonical. And Waxler is surely correct to emphasise the uni-directional nature of much online enlightenment. '[I]cons on the screen,' as he puts it, 'only seem to talk to us; they never talk for themselves.' Who is feeding us what we look at every day, and why? But to query that would necessitate a far deeper suspicion of ideology than can be mustered by a book full of talk about our quest for 'coherent human identity'.

In a single paragraph of the opening chapter, a shadowy cohort is invoked, of lost souls who have escaped the sweep of the consensual 'we'. 'Some people today have no story; they have no context and seem to have nothing to say. They cannot rely on themselves, so they cannot be relied on ... They appear to have no future, no promise to fulfil. They have become zombies, the walking dead.' All things considered, we might have liked to hear a little more about these people. Exactly who are they, and what do they want to do to us? Do they realise they have neither future nor context, and how did they arrive at this undead condition? They sound as though they may be what's left of the industrial proletariat, since it became clear that the future imagined for them in the 1840s has fallen to bits. Or they could just be people who find that reading Hemingway makes them want to puke.
Stuart Walton is the author of An Excursion through Chaos; In the Realm of the Senses; A Natural History of Human Emotions; Introducing Theodor Adorno; Intoxicology; and a novel, The First Day in Paradise.