Essay: The reader between fiction and non-fiction
While non fiction provides the reader with the utilitarian knowledge she believes is urgently necessary in a world in crisis, the interest in other lives is no longer satisfied by the novel
A friend was talking at a recent social gathering. He had much to say, and he was both entertaining and analytical. We listened, putting in a question or a comment once in a while. He was an engaging person, a start-up advisor, and an avid, non-traditional pursuer of knowledge, through articles, online events, and books. He referred to a few popular favourites -- Ankur Warikoo’s Do Epic Shit and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens -- and then got deeply engrossed in contemporary politics. A couple of us from the world of literature listened with a sharp admiration of what truly felt like hard knowledge of the real world -- patterns coursing through the stock market, insidious and obvious forms of crony capitalism, the control of the nation’s ports by a business house favoured by the ruling party -- things he explained with a razor-sharp logic sharpened by street-smart business sense. Eventually he got deep into the hidden structures of modern military history. In the obvious delight he took in etching out the contours of power and the frailty of national borders, I saw the unmistakably masculine obsession with might, strategy, and violence I have sensed in the conversation with many middle-aged men in today’s India. It made me uneasy -- but that’s a story for another day.

A strange and awkward thought came to my mind, one that I never articulated there. What might fiction offer to this conversation? A few books of military history were being recommended enthusiastically, but there was no talk of fiction, or even its popular cousin, film. Nor did I expect it, and neither did I bring it up. But as someone who sees quite a bit of life through literature, particularly fiction, I was haunted by this internal question. Would historical novels make the cut? Say, if we were discussing the First World War, would we turn to Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, that haunting soldierly account of pain, death, and disaster? But a historic exchange obstructed this thought.
“What did you do during the Great War?” Someone had asked James Joyce. “I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?” Joyce had answered.

For me, this reply has never implied a decadent artist’s deflection of patriotic military responsibility, for which in any case, the abysmally near-sighted Joyce, by then well-past conscription age, was no good. But Joyce’s bold claim about his irreverent, urban mock-epic as rightful wartime labour -- and the oblique but ominous shadow of the gathering storm in Western Europe in the novel, set in 1904 and written 1914-1922 -- say more about the insidious way narrative art reflects a deeper historical spirit that the pointed urgency of All Quiet on the Western Front does neither aim for nor achieve.
Ulysses, in its centenary in 2022, is one of those iconic books that mark the emergence of the novel as high art. It is sometimes forgotten today that for the longest time since its birth, particularly in the English language, the novel had little artistic prestige, unworthy to be in the elevated company of older, established art forms of poetry, drama, or even the belletristic treatise.

Even in its 19th century heyday, and even in the hands of a maestro like Charles Dickens, it was something of a populist upstart, consumed in serialised form much like soap operas of the 20th century or episodes of Netflix series in the 21st. All literary criticism took poetry and drama as their referents; the novel was not worthy of serious attention. It only started to attain the status of art with the modernists, beginning with the pioneering Henry James and his pathbreaking essay, The Art of Fiction, substantiated in his complex novels of deep psychological interiority. Soon, it would trade popularity for prestige. It felt historically inevitable that as the genre gained the height of this prestige with the likes of Joyce and Virginia Woolf, it lost its appeal as a popular form, conceding its entertaining function to the emergent genre of film, and later, to television.
The crisis that fiction faces today have moved in a direction far away from its initial artistic irrelevance. With scores of novelists on the list of Nobel recipients and prestigious literary prizes such as the Booker devoted exclusively to novels, literary prestige is not its problem anymore. Its “irrelevance” -- as obvious in my recent social experience, has to do with today’s reader’s expectation of instrumental knowledge from books. It is not just the classic dominance of textbooks in a publishing marketplace, that lifeline of grades and exams, but the value of reading in the assimilation and demonstration of urgent “worldly” knowledge in a crisis-ridden world -- something nonfiction, both journalistic and scholarly -- is squarely placed to satisfy. My start-up advising friend, clearly an avid reader of military history, would not even reach for All Quiet on the Western Front. As for Ulysses, well, let’s not even get started. How this need for utilitarian knowledge gets compounded with English books in a country like India is a whole other prickly issue -- something I’ve written about elsewhere.

Everyone knows that the core readership of fiction -- the story-seekers -- now get their narrative fix from digital media, including interactive forms of gaming. Strangely, throughout the 20th century, threatening as it initially seemed, film did not substantially steal fiction’s readership, though it certainly did steal some. In many ways, films and novels ran on parallel but symbiotic tracks, often drawing energy from each other. But the loss of fiction’s readership has been heavy in the reign of YouTube videos, Instagram reels and their innumerable cousins. There is something deeper than the reality of tiny attention spans that is at stake here. It is the interest in other lives, previously offered by fiction, now satisfied in real time and life by social media.
The loss is real even from a non-literary point of view. Educationists and cognitive scientists around the world have identified in fiction a unique confluence of personal and linguistic intelligence, to use the terms of Howard Gardener, whose theory of multiple intelligences has demolished the primacy of the notion of a monolithic IQ. The reading of fiction is the practice of a unique imaginative empathy that visual media cannot offer. It is a sustained listening with physical eyes closed, other kinds of eyes open. It is a profound hide and seek of empathy and alienness, comfort and shock, that one can play with the quotidian surprise of language.
Even the fleeting world-watcher today cannot fail to notice the pervasive diminution of the human capacity for empathy. It would be dangerous to suggest that art is unfailing in its evocation of care for others. There were many Nazi officials who spent their wait for gas chambers to do their job while listening to Wagner’s operas. The link here is correlational rather than causal. We are left to trace both the global erosion of empathy and the loss of the imaginative connections to fictional lives to kindred impulses in an angry and restless world.
Saikat Majumdar’s recent books include the novel The Middle Finger and the nonfiction College: Pathways of Possibility
The views expressed are personal