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In his extraordinary new book The Things that Matter, Edward Mendelson devotes a few sentences of his introduction to a discussion of pronouns. "A book could be written about the way critics use … pronouns," he comments. There is the "presumptuousness" of the way critics use "we" to suggest like-minded (and therefore right-minded) people; there is "the evasiveness of one"—and, I would add, the implicit universalizing of the critic's own opinions: "One sees in Middlemarch…." But if those tics and strategies are rejected, "That leaves I and you. Parts of this book are written in the second person singular, but that doesn't mean I assume you will agree with everything I say about you, just as I would not assume such a thing if we were talking face to face." One begins this book, then—doesn't one?—a little startled to hear a literary critic so directly acknowledging his own humanity.
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But it is as a human being addressing other human beings that Mendelson writes. In treating seven novels—Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts—as explorations of key stages of human life—birth, childhood, growth, marriage, love, parenthood, "the future"—Mendelson assumes that the vast majority of readers of novels over the past two centuries have done well to read fiction in light of their own lives. "This is a book about life as it is interpreted by books"; so goes the first sentence of The Things That Matter, and I think it's important to note the boldness of that sentence's main clause: "This is a book about life."
I call attention to this boldness because I have rarely seen a work of literary criticism that takes such pains to disguise its own ambition, and to do so because it seeks to serve something more important than its own ambition: "the things that matter." George Steiner noted many years ago that, while we may have to work to compile a list of great readers, it's easier to come up with a list of great critics because "critics advertise." Mendelson has no interest in advertising his own aspirations. Only one sentence, also from the introduction, gives away the game: "Taken as a whole, [this book] is designed to provide something on the order of a brief (extremely brief) history of the emotional and moral life of the past two centuries, an inner biography of the world of thought and feeling that came into being in the romantic era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."
This goal only makes sense if novels are at or near the heart of "the emotional and moral life of the past two centuries"—but I think it's fair to say that they are. The rise of the novel from an uncertain, fumbling, and generally despised form of cheap popular entertainment to the central and dominant genre of Western literature, all in little more than a century, is one of the more remarkable events in the history of human sensibility. Over the past two hundred years whole generations of readers have learned to measure themselves according to standards set by their favorite books—something that actually becomes a major theme of novelistic fiction itself, most notably in Emma Bovary's obsessive reading of Bernardin De Saint-Pierre's Paul and Virginia, and Anna Karenina's absorption in an unnamed English novel whose heroine's life she wishes she could live.
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