When we read a novel we place ourselves in the mind of the protagonist, especially if there is a first-person narrator. It can be unsettling when we don't identify with that protagonist, when we would make different moral choices, when we have a different world view, a different sex, a different time of life, a different political philosophy. We may be tempted to abandon such books midway, as I was when reading John Boyne's The Heart's Invisible Furies a year ago. Not being a homosexual, I was uncomfortable upon discovering the novel's narrator is gay. Yet the story was so engrossing and well-written that I kept reading, and I am glad I did.
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| Vendela Vida |
Vida says she told them, "Well, you don't read novels to make friends. You can go make friends in the real world, you know. We don't read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment or Nabokov's Lolita, for example, to make friends with the protagonists. You read novels to see how other people think."
I have read similar accounts from others who teach literature — students strongly objecting to being assigned novels they find morally or politically objectionable. Just as today's students refuse to tolerate campus speakers with views they find objectionable, so they sometimes refuse to tolerate literature for the same reasons. Yet this attitude could eliminate from curriculums much, if not most, of the greatest literature ever written. Attitudes about many things have changed over the years. Young people today do not behave in the same manner as those in a Jane Austen novel. Does this mean they shouldn't read Pride and Prejudice? Should we avoid Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of one objectionable word?
As Vida says, you read novels to see how other people think. If they think just like you, what's the point? What have you learned?
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