The Decline of the Novel in the Unipark Library

Having worked in the university library for almost two years now, – first only for the English Department, now for the whole of the Unipark – I’ve noticed that I’m getting strange. I start remembering and paying attention to weird things. Things like the exact shelf marks for nice or even not-so-nice books. Things like the general inability of art history students to find shelf marks A-D in their section of the library. Things like the belief inherent in library users that merely because there are currently no baskets available they can just walk in with their bags.

The most recent trend is much more shocking, though. It’s a notion that’s been steadily creeping into my consciousness for a few months, a notion that I’d been fiercely rejecting because of its absurdness.
Sadly, however, I feel myself forced to admit its truth: people don’t borrow novels anymore. They just don’t. Unless, of course, they need a special one for a literature class and are too cheap to buy their own copy. (How is such an attitude even possible? I use every proseminar as an excuse to spend vast sums of money on books.) They borrow secondary literature for their papers, they borrow dictionaries for their exams, they borrow loads and loads of secondary-school work books (my, how I hate those) for their didactics classes, but they don’t borrow novels just to read them.

Actually, this insight quite threw me for a loop once I was able to bring myself to acknowledge its truth. The reason why it’s so shocking to me is that it’s completely contrary to my own worldview. I can’t say that there are many things I like as much as reading novels. (Well, perhaps watching the corresponding BBC adaptations.) Not just any novels, though. While I do like many 20^th-century (mostly British) writers such as David Lodge, E.M. Forster, Daphne Du Maurier, or Margaret Drabble, those novels that make me a truly passionate reader were written predominantly in the 19^th century: Jane Austen, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy – these are my idols.

Lately, my list of favourite writers has gained a valuable addition: Frances Burney. That’s why I now feel myself obliged to extend my favourite period of English literature back into the 18^th century. What has brought on this happy incident is the fact that I signed up for a literary seminar on the 18^th-century Epistolary Novel. So for the last few weeks I’ve immersed myself into countless JSTOR articles on the novel of manners, conduct books, treatises on the rise of the novel in letters, and, most of all, in Burney’s Evelina, completely engrossed in matters of propriety and politeness.

So once again, I’m experiencing one of my “extreme reading” periods. And while these periods – like the present one – are extremely productive on an academic and personal level, on a social level, they’re not. There are a few writers that make me anti-social: I’ve experienced this with Jane Austen and JK Rowling, but I have to admit that I didn’t expect Fanny Burney to have quite such an intense effect on me. These periods are usually marked by an excessive consumption of little else than coffee, chocolate, and noodles, very little sleep, and a general feeling of indignation at anyone who interrupts my reading. (Even my cat, and this is saying something, for she profits from a list of special rules in our household.) This is also the time when I start confusing English and German and writing stuff like “sie fällt in die Liebe” for papers I have to write in German. And ultimately, I tell my friends more than they care to hear about a certain movement in English literature and writers who are representatives of this period.

Also, and this is where it gets really problematic, these periods of intense reading have an impact on my tolerance limit concerning “non-readers” using the library. While I have difficulty not taking over the 18^th-century spelling conventions (which gives you words like “uncontroulable” and “chearfulness”), I meet people in the library who refuse to even think about borrowing a novel.

I feel quite sad for them, really. Even though they have been at university for a couple of semesters, many students have no idea how to use the library simply because they are quite satisfied with xeroxing the things they find on the reserve shelf. They don’t know how much they are missing! Anybody who has ever been truly fascinated by a story must have an urge to repeat the experience! Isn’t it truly wonderful to miss your stop on the bus because you’re so absorbed in a good book? If you have to be careful to be polite if someone interrupts you while you’re reading?

There are a few people who occasionally borrow a novel only to return it a day or two later, which kind of suggests that they haven’t read it at all. Reading Jane Eyre in a single afternoon seems pretty extraordinary to me.

I’m not saying that the way I go about things is ideal. Neglecting your social life on account of reading over a longer period of time won’t do you much good ultimately. For what good can it bring to mentally live in the 18^th century where ladies wear wonderful dresses and where gentlemen are chivalrous and paragons of politeness, if you forget you have your own life to live? After all, Catherine Morland ultimately has to wake up from her dreams of a past era and live in the here and now – that is to say, her here and now, as much as I have to live in my here and now.

So in effect, I guess that a compromise would be the thing to strive for. I know that I’m being a stickler, a nerd, and a fanatic when it comes to literature. But actually, I think these waves of being a little anti-social are still a little better than categorically refusing to read. Especially if you’re a language student. Even if you’re really not interested in reading for the sake of reading (which makes no sense whatsoever, but anyway), why not see it as an indispensable means of acquiring loads of new words and phrases?  So I suppose I do concur with dashing Henry Tilney when he says that, “the person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid!”