Why Novels Make Bad Arguments

My 12th-grade self would be appalled to learn one of my most closely guarded and damning confessions: I read very little fiction. These days, I instead help myself to a buffet of nonfiction, mostly essays with the occasional journal article. This would have bewildered the high school senior who once voraciously devoured novels like Their Eyes Were Watching God and Frankenstein.

The change in my reading palate is not accidental. I enjoy constantly learning about what Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist, has called “the Machine”: the network of markets, cultures, institutions, and technologies in which we are all enmeshed. These are the forces that shape nearly every aspect of our lives. Understanding them enables me to push and pull the Machine in the direction of my values. Through nonfiction, I form opinions, act on them, and labor to convince others of their truth, thereby participating in the Machine, however infinitesimally. On the other hand, fiction, as an instrument of persuasion, faces two significant constraints.

Pause for a moment and note how many of these books you have read, and which, either in full or in part: The Odyssey, Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment, The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

These are hallowed pillars of the literary canon—an exclusive and enduring pantheon deified by elite scholars and critics. It is upheld by schools, libraries, and publishers. Think the classics section of your library or local Barnes & Noble, the works against which generations of readers have judged literary greatness. But as the monoculture writhes in its death throes, people are scattering across a growing galaxy of alternate micro-niches and subgenres.

Ask your friends how they would fare on the survey above. There would be far less convergence in your collective answers than there would have been among previous generations. Persuasion depends in part on shared reference points. As those reference points diminish, so too does fiction’s rhetorical utility. The decline of a shared literary base makes it increasingly imprudent to anchor an argument in a work of fiction since fewer readers can be expected to recognize the allusions. How can I invoke George Orwell’s 1984 to elucidate the dangers of censorship and groupthink if you have never read it? How can I draw on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to weigh the ethics of AI griefbots if the novel proves unfamiliar?

We may be tempted to plead with people to read more classics or to petition schools to restore a few more of them to their curricula. But works of fiction, however enduring or revered, do not themselves constitute especially convincing arguments, because the truths they communicate rely on a mixture of assumptions and authorial contrivance.

Consider the following:

i. Suppose an ambitious young scientist stitches together a creature from corpses and electrifies it into consciousness, then . . . [insert commentary about scientific ambition and playing God].

ii. Assume a plane crash strands a group of English schoolboys on an uninhabited island, then . . . [insert commentary about civilization and human nature].

The force of the conclusions to which Frankenstein and Lord of the Flies invite us depends upon the particular circumstances their authors have elected to invent.

Another novelist could have reorganized the same basic elements into a tale that headed toward a different outcome and insight. An argument's thesis must follow where its independent evidence leads. In contrast, fiction permits the author to begin with a preconceived theme and orchestrate the narrative’s events to make that theme appear inevitable. Fiction does not lend itself to serving as robust evidence for a particular point of view, especially about society and human nature.

That is not to diminish fiction's value, only to differentiate the sort of work it does. As Steve Jobs insisted and demonstrated on an enormous scale, presentation is not an afterthought. It is part and parcel of the product itself. Ideas are no different. Fiction is the most exquisite packaging we have for ideas. Albert Camus, who fancied himself an artist rather than a philosopher, did not leave absurdism to be understood exclusively through his philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus; he dramatized it in his novel, The Stranger. George Orwell knew that readers could always turn to historians and textbooks to learn about the Russian Revolution. Thus, he rendered the progression of its corruption more vivid and poignant through the allegory of Animal Farm. Fiction rescues ideas from abstraction and animates them.

Yet even this is not its greatest strength. Instead, it is fiction’s peculiar gift for smuggling novel ideas past the aversion we experience when they cut against our own established beliefs. Consider, in opposition, my preferred mode of nonfiction, the essay. By laying bare the premises that lead to a specific conclusion, an essay exhibits the prized virtue of clarity. But it also makes the author’s desired destination apparent from the outset: we know which camp we are being urged to join. A story is less direct and conspicuous than a formal argument. We cannot be certain where its meandering path of characters, subplots, and dialogue will ultimately lead us. That ambiguity can disarm our resistance to ideas far afield from those we already hold. At a time when algorithms furnish us with information that reinforces our existing convictions, fiction can act as a Trojan horse. It transports unfamiliar and potentially ennobling notions past our defensive resistance. Take, for instance, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which follows the inner lives of three ostensibly plain schoolchildren before revealing that they are clones manufactured to supply organs for humans. The reader becomes at once impressed and heartbroken by their longing for connection, their vulnerability, and their innocent faith in their caretakers. By the time the cloning scheme dawns on us, our sympathies for these protagonists have already outpaced our preconceptions about who and what unmistakably counts as human. Like all great novels, Never Let Me Go estranges the familiar so that we may encounter it anew.

Fiction can never quite prove its case in the way an argument can. But changing hearts and minds seldom reduces to winning an argument. From the earliest epics to our beloved novels and mellifluous poetry, fiction has a way of writing itself into how people understand their commitments and their lives. Before ideas engage the intellect, they must first take root in the fertile soil of the imagination, where fiction is sovereign.