Four Big Books is the title of a course I’ll be teaching this coming term — my last as a university professor! What follows is an outline of what I’ll be saying to my student on the first day of class.
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Back in 1982, at the Cannes Film Festival, the German film director Wim Wenders brought other filmmakers, one by one, to a hotel room so that he might film them answering a series of questions he had written, all of which gathered like iron shavings around a single magnetic question: Is cinema dying? The resulting film, Room 666, is generally fascinating, but now seems an exercise from another world, since the primary threat to cinema then was television. Things have changed. Forty years later Lubna Playoust repeated the exercise, with many more filmmakers and Wenders himself: thus Room 999.
One of the most interesting reflections in Room 999 comes from the French filmmaker and writer Audrey Diwan. Diwan is the mother of teenage children who (she suggests) spend a lot of time on Instagram, and as she watched one particular Reel she asked herself: What is the appeal of this? The feature films she makes might be described as seeking to identify meaning in experience, or maybe just to provide entertainment, but Reels, she thinks, don’t do either of these things. When she asked her children what they like about these very short videos, they told her that they find them satisfying. (Diwan speaks in French, but “satisfaction” is the same in that language and in English.) Even though videos so short can only provide “crumbs of narrative,” nevertheless, “to them, it’s a few seconds of intense satisfaction.” And they prefer this satisfaction to whatever rewards might come from the movies that Diwan makes, or the older movies that mean the most to her, the ones that made her want to be a filmmaker. Her children can’t adjust to the rhythm and pace of movies: “They no longer tolerate the notion of time passing.”
At this point Diwan goes into who-am-I-to-judge mode, saying that she’s just “an old person” — she was 41 at the time of the interview — who, like all old persons, must acknowledge that “at some point, you stop feeling that the world is yours.” But nevertheless, she thinks of her children: “I wonder how they’ll orchestrate their own narratives.” So for her the most fundamental issue raised by Wim Wenders all those decades ago concerns not cinema as such, but rather the fate of “stories and storytelling.” She asks: “What will become of cinema if we have no grasp of time?” But the greater question, only implicit here: If we have no grasp of time we will have to live without narratives, without stories about ourselves or anyone and anything else — and what will that be like?
No human life offers, or ever can offer, the particular “satisfaction” — the near-instantaneous closure — of a Reel or a TikTok; but to make of your life anything more than a succession of unrelated momentary experiences requires some “grasp of time.” The identifying and unfolding of a pattern over time, perhaps over many years, is one of the key purposes of art — not the only one, but a central and essential one. In some cases a full apprehension of pattern may be possible, as when Czesław Miłosz remembers himself as a child: “he knew what was needed for some ultimate moment / When he would compose from fragments a world perfect at last.” In other cases the pattern remains inscrutable, indiscernible: “On Margate Sands. I can connect nothing with nothing” — and when that happens, it is the function of art to record the experience and make it vivid. After all, all of us have times when we can connect nothing with nothing, and can only hope that a pattern will eventually emerge: “The tight place, the dark pit in which I am now lying, of what bird is it the talon? When the design of my life is complete, shall I, shall other people see a stork?”
A few hundred years ago, a particular form of art arose that would eventually prove the most lasting and powerful means by which ordinary people, especially but not only in the Western world, discern and reflect on the patterns of their lives. This form is called the novel, and almost from the beginning it was clear that the most ambitious and serious of novels needed to be quite long. Though there are many powerful short novels, they tend not to strive for the kind of comprehensiveness — describing people behaviorally and psychologically, yes, but also embedding them in their full social contexts, sometimes over the course of several generations — that the very greatest novels pursue.
When Audrey Diwan speaks of “orchestrating” one’s narrative, the term is especially appropriate to these Big Books: they are orchestral in their sweep and scope, in their changes of tempo and mood, and perhaps above all in the number of distinct instruments they employ. But while a great symphony can be experienced in less than an hour, a big novel takes many, many hours to read. That’s because big novels are especially concerned to immerse us in the medium of time.
In this class, I am asking you to read four large, ambitious, comprehensive novels that test our patience, our determination, our memory — but that also offer some of the greatest rewards that art can offer. They are:
- Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions (1843)
- George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Middlemarch (1872)
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
The dates I have given here are the dates of complete book publication, but the first readers of these novels didn’t read them as books: they read them in installments. Lost Illusions was published over the course of six years, the first part as a stand-alone book, the rest in magazines. Middlemarch was published as eight small books over the course of a year. Each of the two Russian novels was published a chunk at a time over the course of many months in a periodical called The Russian Messenger. People had time — for many of them, far too much time! — to reflect on each installment and long for the next one to appear.
We’re going to move faster than the original pace of publication — presumably nobody wants to be in this class in 2028 – but slower than is usual in college classrooms where novels are read. We’re going to live with these characters in ways not too unlike the ways the books’ first readers did … and we’re also going to spend a good deal of time reflecting on the value of this kind of experience in our age of microvideos. Do great big novels offer a different kind of satisfaction than Audrey Diwan’s children get from their Reels? Or do they offer something altogether other?
And one more thing. We may not all be Christians in this room, but most of us are, and one of the most common features of the Christian life, as of the Jewish life, is the struggle to discern a pattern. Just read the Psalms if you don’t believe me: think of how the Psalmist in times of blessing recalls times of misery, in times of misery recalls times of blessing. What does it all add up to, though? What’s the essential shape of the story? Does the Lord really have His hand on my life? No Reel can tell.
