I once overheard a particularly devout friend of mine buttonholed with a list of all the ways keeping Kosher turned out to have scientifically sound principles behind it -- swine harbored trichonisis, shellfish was often contaminated, and so on -- and wasn't it remarkable that Leviticus offered the correct answers on dietetic questions, centuries before those preferences were validated scientifically? My friend listened politely, then dismissed the entire monologue with a wave of her hand. "We don't do that stuff because it makes sense. We do it because we're Jews."

This, roughly, is the dilemma the defenders of heroic novels find themselves in. It is possible to advance an argument that all that reading of novels  we've been doing all these decades turns out to be Good For You, in some USRDA-ish way. There have been many such attempts over the years -- one recent study showed humanities graduates in the middle of th epack in returning to work as the devastating recession slowly fades; another extols the novel for providing training in emotional intelligence.

If you are considering whether to pursue an advanced degree in the study of literature, "Not visibly less employable than lanscape architects!" doesn't do much to persuade, and once the reading of novels is thought of as a gateway to emotional intelligence, we can start asking if it is the best way, or if there are other ways that are more effective or less time-consuming, and all of a sudden, we're talking about emotional intelligence, not novels. The obvious problem with these kinds of rationalizations is precisely that -- they're rationalizations. They are only persuasive to people who are biased to think the reading of serious literary fiction is a good idea. The people who feel that way don't need that kind of convincing, and the people who don't feel that way won't have their minds changed.

Rendering any utilitarian rationale for reading Tolstoy is like trying to find a scientific one for keeping Kosher -- it isn't so much right or wrong as beside the point.
We don't read Tolstoy because it makes sense. We read Tolstory because we're the people who read Tolstoy. Except, increasingly, we aren't.

Now obviously, on any numerical reckoning, we don't read Tolstoy for any value of "we" that approximates the adult population of the western world.  Reading of any serious fiction has been a minority pursuit for some time now, and reading a million-word novel set during the French invasion of Russia in 1812 has been a minority of that minority. But there are -- or were -- three ways in which we were the people who read Tolstoy. First, Tolstoy's extraordinary acheivement in crafting the novel was assumed to guarantee a degree of continuity against the background of rapidly changing popular culture; it was an elite pursuti, reading Tolstoy, but the elites set the social tone. Even people who hadn't read Tolstoy and never would knew that they _should_ read it, or at least that they should _want_ to read it, which amounted to the same thing.

To give some sense of how pervasive this sense of A generation ago, it was possible for a columnist for the NY Times

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"subjects such as the Soviet Union seem to haunt Mr. Reagan the way vows to read Proust dog other Americans at leisure" - Francis X. Clines, NYT, 1984