Eight Books in Which Ignorance Is the Point

In 1893, Henry James complained about the recent publication of Gustave Flaubert’s letters. The French novelist was famous for his stylistic perfectionism. What treachery, then, to publish his casual missives, ones that he hadn’t had time to labor over. To James’s regret, the new collection left Flaubert’s “every weakness exposed, every mystery dispelled, every secret betrayed.”

James understood why the book existed. As he wrote, humans possess “an insurmountable desire to know.” When we love someone—a writer, a friend, a mistress—we want to know everything about them; when we hate someone, we want to know everything about them too. This desire applies to more than people: We start a novel and need to know how it ends; we feel a pain in our chest and head over to WebMD to determine its cause.

If the desire to know is insurmountable, so too are the consequences. Many books, including ones by James himself, dramatize the dangers of knowledge. (Adam and Eve, meet apple.) Perhaps more interesting, though, are those books that envision the joys, even, we refused this desire for certainty? What if instead we cultivated “a capacity to hold the position of not knowing yet—possibly of not knowing ever?”