188
STEVEN MARCUS
become nervous when students seem to respond in new and mysterious
ways-I instituted an unsystematic inquiry into the matter. What I
learned was that my students- almost
all
of them seniors planning
careers having something to do with literature-no longer read novels
as a matter of course. The novels they do read are by and large either
assigned reading for classes in English literature or collateral reading
for some other field of study, such as history and sociology. (I might
add that a similar poll among graduate students at the School of
Letters in Indiana University yielded similar results. And many col–
leagues have had the same experience with their students.)
If
this were to represent anything of a general tendency, and if
it were to persist, then it is possible that we will have reached a new
stage in the novel's long crisis. For more than one hundred and fifty
years the novel has been the natural mode of reading in our culture.
And though there has been intermittent talk of the novel's decline–
and with increased frequency over the past forty-odd years-such
talk has never been known to interrupt the widespread habit of read–
ing novels. I say habit, but I really think it more accurate to say
that our culture was addicted to the reading of novels. The causes
of addiction naturally varied. There was, for example, the old, un–
modern passion, as we find it represented in Colonel Newcome, who
invariably took
The Spectator, Don Quixote,
and
Sir Charles Grandi–
son
on his travels because, as he said, he liked to be in the company
of gentlemen. A more advanced phase of addiction is confessed by
Henry Tilney in
Northanger Abbey,
who excuses away
his
illicit pas–
sion by describing novels as works "in which the greatest powers of
the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of
human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest
effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best
chosen language." Which of us has not mouthed a similar piety and
then turned to read some piece of fictional trash with shameless and
undiscriminating appetite? But of course such ritual perversity is
possible only if the novel is a going thing, only if the conventions
which inform popular and vulgar fiction maintain a vital connec–
tion with that fiction which is art.
Then the novel was read as much for its quality of truth as
for its quantity of fantasy-truth being, as Jane Austen once ob–
served, very excusable in an Historian. The novelist was looked to
