Parul Sehgal's "Bloodlines": Two Objections

Illustration by Anagh Banerjee, from Parul Sehgal's "Bloodlines"

Two objections to Parul Sehgal’s absorbing “Bloodlines” (The New Yorker, January 2 & 9, 2023):

1. Sehgal's definition of literature is too restrictive. She says, “A sturdy consensus long held that the fullest account of 1947 could be found not in facts and figures—not in nonfiction at all—but in texts like “Tamas,” in literature.” That “not in nonfiction … but in literature” grates. Surely we’re at a point now when literature can be given a more capacious meaning, one that includes, say, Thoreau’s Walden, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia – just to name three nonfiction works that quickly come to mind.

2. Sehgal gives novels way too much credence. She overlooks or disregards their fictionality. She says, “This is the work of the novel: to notice, knit, remember, record.” Okay, but what about its most defining ingredient – imagination? Novels are works of fiction. As Peter Brooks says in his Seduced by Story (2022), "One must use fictions always with the awareness of their fictionality." To treat them as fact is a recipe for delusion. It is delusion.