HOW TO READ A NOVEL
Scott Denham and Irene Kacandes, "How to Read a Novel," from A User's Guide to German Cultural Studies, ed. Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), may be reproduced as needed.
How do you read a novel? Many readers find themselves curled up in a corner of the sofa, warm mug at hand, oblivious to the passing of time or to the presence of others, alive only in the world created by some mysterious connection between the words on the page and an imagination hard at work. Others might be struggling to maintain concentration on a hard oak chair in a vast reading room, pencil and notebook close by, connected to the book only physically. At a most basic level a novel (or short story or novella) is a story, a narrative, and one that is not true -hence, the designation narrative or prose fiction. And the nature of a reader's identification or involvement or engagement with the story being told has much to do with the experience of reading. For our purposes here, by novel we can mean broadly any kind of narrative or epic (from epos) fiction, from Homer's Iliad to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or some medieval epic, say Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Isolt, to the first real novels of the eighteenth century (Fielding, von La Roche, Sterne, du Laclos, Goethe) to the grand nineteenth century novels of society and psychology (Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Melville, Fontane, Stifter, Dostoevsky) to the novels of the modernists (Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Dublin, Svevo, Faulkner, Woolf) to the postmodernists (Garcia Marquez, Pynchon, Grass, Morrison, Calvino, Gordimer)--to name just a few periods and writers.
The narrative. Let us first think about the nature of the novel--or narrative fiction--itself. Any narrative has three elements, what many narrative theorists (narratologists) call story, text, and narration. The story is the sequence of events abstracted from their specific telling in the text. A story in this sense has a chronological order that can be reconstructed, regardless how the story came to be known. One story can be told in different versions and by different people at different times. The story can be general, even universal. The text (also referred to as discourse), on the other hand, is the specific telling of a story: it is what we read, the words on the page. And the specific process of producing those words by some agent the narrator is called narration. The narration is something real to the extent that an author wrote the text, but within the world of the text there is also a fictional narrator (or several) who is responsible for the act of narration, for telling the tale to an explicit or implicit narratee. The fictional narrator is usually more worthy of our attention than the actual author of a text when we read a novel. It is through the narrator that we are presented not only with the story but also with the text of the narrator his or her words, in a way. Thus, by focusing on the narration, we have a way to gain insight into the narrator's ideas and attitudes. The complicated relationships between narrators, their narrations, texts, and stories serve to make novels exquisitely dense as carriers of meaning, ideas, and ideology.
Presented with these three aspects of a novel, all of which we learn about only by reading it, we can ask a great many questions. Is the story one already known? Is it a standard type (a fairy tale, a mystery, a love story)? How is the text itself structured; how are the characters portrayed (characterized)? How is the story narrated: through whose eyes and in whose voices? How much do the narrators know or not know about the stories they tell? Are they participants in the action or merely relayers of it? Do they tell the story in their own voice (first-person narration) or in a disembodied one (third person)? Or does the narrator tell the story as an address to someone (a less well known form called second-person narration)? Do we sense that we can trust the reliability of the narrator? Why or why not? What difference does it make? Do we find out about the inner life (unspoken thoughts and feelings) of characters, or do we just come to know them from the outside (their actions and words)? Do we know some characters and not others? How does that affect our understanding of the events? And, considering the narration of events: do we get great detail about certain events and none about others? Are certain events elided or told repeatedly? What purpose does the pace of the narration serve?
The Context. There are other questions novels raise that do not necessarily have to do with the internal workings of the book. Novels always have real authors, with real biographies, ideologies, and philosophies (although they may, of course, be unknown or collective authors). To what extent does knowledge of the author affect our understanding of a novel? Does it matter, for example, if a woman or a man wrote a certain kind of story? A native or nonnative speaker of the language in which it was written? Someone with power or someone without it? Similarly, how does a novel's place in history change its import? And what about a book's previous audience and reception? Was it popular, and why? Is it high art or pulp fiction? Who else reads it only academics and students? everyone but?
The Reader. Finally, what about you, the reader? How do you go about validating or measuring and judging your own feelings and responses to the novel? If you laugh or cry or are angered or inspired by reading a book, what does this mean? Would others react in a similar manner? Questions about what the reader brings to the text are also central to understanding what a novel means for you. Why are you reading a certain work? What have you been told about why you should read a particular novel? One teacher might have us read Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front to gain some insight into the horrors of warfare, though another might insist that the book has nothing to do with war but should be read as an example of how successful popular, mass market fiction works. Yet another might say the book is key to understanding a specific German social situation in the 1920s, when the novel was written.
Questions, then, about how a novel functions on its own terms, how it fits into some historical or literary historical context, and, finally, about how you the reader engage the novel are all productive guides to understanding what cultural work novels do.
FOR FURTHER READING
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.
Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.
Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.
Prince, Gerald. Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln, London: U of Nebraska P, 1987.
Rimmon Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London and New York: Routledge, 1983.
