Every January, tens of millions of Americans resolve to get into shape and millions of flat-assed bifocalists resolve to “read more books.” Embedded in that popular resolution is the belief that consuming books – specifically fiction – is as at least as good for the soul as thin broth. And that’s probably true, but the novel, forever tainted by 19th-century neuroticism, is more dangerous than English teachers lead their pupils to believe.
When cheap print and serialization turned reading fiction from a bizarre Scottish affectation into a bourgeois past-time at the turn of the 19th century, a moral panic followed. Like today’s screentime absolutists, early critics of the novel warned of addiction, idleness, and reality distortion. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the part-time romantic poetic and full-time laudanum addict, argued that fiction produced “a disordered, undisciplined, and diseased state of the imagination.” Though he lacked the term for it, Coleridge took particular issue with what we now call free indirect discourse – when a character’s thoughts are embedded unattributed in third-person narration.
Coleridge thought unattributed reflection like “She had been most unfeeling, most ungrateful – worthless, unworthy…” suggested Austen’s heroines were, if not insane, fundamentally bad at thinking. And he may well have been right.
If industry and institutionalism created the upper-middle class, the novel shaped it. And, just as Coleridge warned it would, free indirect discourse encouraged a specific strain of neuroticism by conflating thinking with having intrusive thoughts. Readers of Austen, Eliot, and James don’t just learn the perils of transgression, they learn to think like characters whose interiority is tangled in external judgments. By liberally using FID as a means of underscoring their subjects’ scrupulosity, these authors normalized a sort of obsessive self-monitoring that treat norms as laws of nature. On the one hand, the constant self-scrutiny this encouraged probably stabilized a lot of liberal institutions. On the other, it definitely destabilized a lot of liberal individuals.
For many of us who actually enjoyed our humanities requirements, self-talk has become unbearable. As Austen put it, there is “too much to be thought, and felt, and said.”
To be fair to Austen, social judgments and facts were basically the same thing in her particular corner of Regency England, which was even more crowded with precarious elites than the L-Train on a Monday morning. At that time, “the ton,” a small cabal of chinless, inbred aristocrats, operated as a reputational cartel dictating the future of cash-poor, land-rich families by denying them access to both wealthy partners (“the pleasantest preservative from want”) and credit. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor tells herself, “She must be calm,” an unattributed internal dictate that actually comes directly from the ton. Similarly in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet, upon reading Darcy’s letter, sees herself as “blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.” Earlier still, she absorbs Darcy’s insult – “She was not beautiful enough to tempt him” – as if it were a biology lesson. It’s moral ventriloquism, but just because Elizabeth is a big neurotic doesn’t mean she’s wrong.
The catch is this: An adaptive behavior can become a maladaptive behavior if circumstances change.
In 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote: “What a lark! What a plunge!” In 1941, she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse. In 1926, Hemingway wrote the unattributed question “Why had he spoken?” In 1961, he scratched his scalp from the inside with a shotgun. In 1961, Richard Yates went third-person omniscient for Revolutionary Road. In 1992, he finally finished drinking himself to death.
These tortured writers didn’t die from FID as such – but their brilliant works turn intrusive thinking into an art while modeling poor mental health. They accidentally created a form of anti-cognitive behavioral therapy before anyone had thought to create cognitive behavioral therapy in the first place.
In the 1997, Woody Allen (of all people) made this the subject of his third or fourth best film, Deconstructing Harry. In the movie, the titular Harry Block quips that “our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.” Built around intrusive voiceovers, the film follows a writer who destroys his life – and the lives of others – by habitually misplacing reality. He’s basically Elizabeth Bennet with a penchant for prostitutes. The Upper West Side has, in an odd way, a lot in common with Regency Hertfordshire.
In one scene, Harry turns to his brother-in-law and offers this assessment: “I think you're the opposite of a paranoid. I think you go around with the insane delusion that people like you.”
The thing about being the “opposite of paranoid” is that it works way better than being library and neurotic.
Zadie Smith has cleverly described Mark Zuckerberg as someone whose literalness “verges on aggression.” Tom Cruise, whose internal voice doesn't even tell him not to BASE jump, is the most popular actor on the planet. Jake Paul just made millions getting his ass beat. Lacking interiority has its advantages and – notably for the very young men that statistically speaking no longer read – its own distinct appeal. Action without introspection isn’t stupidity. It’s a defensive adaptation to a world in which the attentions of others matters far more than their opinions. If Austen trained readers to conflate norms with feelings, Jake Paul trains viewers to reject feelings altogether. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must take a private jet selfie with a stack of cash and an automatic weapon.
Austen anticipated this shift – if not the degraded specifics. She’s still popular with a specific kind of woman you’d love to have stay the weekend but no longer because she’s sincere and ironic in equal measure. Her heroines’ interior punishments are not expressions of romantic depth but symptoms of social constraint3. In Emma, she wrote: “Silly things cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.” She encouraged her readersto listen to their intrusive thoughts, but also to sometimes ignore them.
When Austen was writing, you had to govern your intrusive thoughts because you didn’t have enough media to drown them out. You can’t read a novel while commuting or making dinner, but you can listen to a podcast4 or the algorithmic gray noise of churning slop. You can slip into a one-sided parasocial interaction that doesn’t risk the kind of embarrassment that obsessed the Bennet girls. Or, alternatively, you could… not. You could resolve to listen less and to read less and to reject – at least to some degree – a neurotic interiority.
You could resolve to sit in the quiet and listen to your brain conflate the judgements of others with fact. Then you could, very politely and formally, remember that time has passed.
