Entries Tagged 'fiction' ↓

JACOB: So brother, did you dream of any books last night?

WILHELM: Yes, again I dreamed of books, of authors, of words, and even ideas—ones I’ve read before and ones I can’t remember. It’s difficult to remember what I’ve read.

JACOB: And still more difficult to remember are those vast volumes from the future, those books already written and yet to be dreamed, wouldn’t you agree?

WILHELM: Yes, Lord Bacon once accurately suggested that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and a few to be chewed and digested,” (01). Like Bacon, I too have forgotten most of my readings from the piles of books in my parlor.

JACOB: Oh, come on, bruder, it can’t be that bad.

WILHELM: Ah, but I am afraid that the poets are dead, they are no longer read, and even nowadays it seems I have lost the words I once absorbed. In such a state, I am not unlike Montaigne who confesses in “On Books” (1580) to have held up a book full of strange notes only to then hesitate upon realizing that what seems foreign is actually familiar to him, because the notes are Montaigne’s own notes, and only later can he remember having already read the book (02). It is in such a state that I now find my mind in.

JACOB: Oh, but I remember in another essay entitled “On Vanity” where Montaigne compares his readings of books to “the excrements of an old mind, sometimes thick, sometimes thin, and always indigested,” (03). When I read this line, it seems as though Montaigne were about to spout a kind of “bookish bulimia”—of reading books and then vomiting up their quotes without letting them digest, never to give the mind any kind of mental-nutritional value.

WILHELM: Yes, brother, I often feel the same way.

JACOB: It is true that you and I have aged like Montaigne. Each of us is the kind of person who has “forgotten it all; for though I am a man of some reading, I am one who retains nothing,” (04). Sometimes I don’t know whether I possess a genuine love for books or merely a love for the love of books. Perhaps I don’t care much for reading so much as care for those who care about reading, because it seems that now, brother Wilhelm, after several lifetimes worth of reading, I must quote at near random whatever remnants of digested books bother to burp their way up to my attention.

WILHELM: Well, if “quoting” is type of borrowing, it should not bother us to be like Montaigne. Here is someone who wishes to “be judged from what I borrow whether I have chosen the right means of exalting my theme. I make others say what I cannot, sometimes from poverty of expression, sometimes from lack of understanding. I do not count my borrowings, I weigh them,” (05).

01. Bacon, Francis. “On Studies.” Francis Bacon, the Essays [1625]. ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford World Classics. (1999). pp. 114–115. Based upon Bacon’s Works ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath London (1857–74), New York (1968), London (1996).

02. Montaigne, Michel de. “On Books.” (1580). ed. J. M. Cohen. Penguin Classics. (1958). (1988 printing). p. 171.

03. Montaigne, Michel de. “On Vanity.” (1580). The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Vol. III. Translated by Charles Cotton. Second Edition, Revised. (1908). Ed. by W. Carew Hazlitt. George Bell & Sons, London. p. 180. [On Google Books].

04. Montaigne, Michel de. “On Books.” (1580). ed. J. M. Cohen. Penguin Classics. (1958). (1988 printing).  p. 159.

05. Ibid.

D. G. Myers of A Commonplace Blog (whom Bookbread almost always agrees with) recently observed:

The American continent no longer compels [American novelists] into an aesthetic contemplation they neither understand nor desire. What moves them are the envies and ambitions, the disdains and irritations, of their class.

Thus all their characters sound like literary intellectuals. Thus they cannot even imagine what their own non-writing spouses, nor anyone else for that matter, do every day at work.

I couldn’t disagree more when Bookbread‘s primary motivation for reading fiction is to escape the experience of things like “every day at work.” Bookbread seeks enchantment, as in “Good Readers and Good Writers” where Nabokov points out how:

There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer…. The three facets of the great writer—magic, story, lesson—are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought.” [01]

C. S. Lewis will call these three categories: “the triple equipment of the post-Renaissance poet,” in The Allegory of Love (1936). Lewis goes on to explain, in a large paragraph worth quoting in full, how the enchanter is a modern phenomenon [02]:

But the lasting consequence of all these writers, for the history of imagination, is far more certain than any assessment of their individual merits. In all of them alike, as I hinted above, we see the beginnings of that free creation of the marvellous which first slips in under the cloak of allegory. It is difficult for the modern man of letters to value this quiet revolution as it deserves. We are apt to take it for granted that a poet has at his command, besides the actual world and the world of his own religion, a third world of myth and fancy. The probable, the marvellous-taken-as-fact, the marvellous-known-to-be-fiction—such is the triple equipment of the post-Renaissance poet. Such were the three worlds which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were born to London and Warwick, Heaven and Hell, Fairyland and Prospero’s Island—each has its own laws and its appropriate poetry. But this triple heritage is a late conquest. Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find it. At the beginning the only marvels are the marvels which are taken for fact. The poet has only two of these three worlds. In the fullness of time the third world crept in, but only by a sort of accident. The old gods, when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils: that, we know, is what happened to our incalculable loss in the history of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake again in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its ‘third world’ of romantic imagining. And when they rose they were changed and gave poetry that which poetry had scarcely had before. Let us be quite certain of this change. The gods—and, of course, I include under this title that whole ‘hemisphere of magic fiction’ which flows indirectly from them—the gods were not to paganism what they are to us. In classical poetry we hear plenty of them as objects of worship, of fear, of hatred; even comic characters. But pure aesthetic contemplation of their eternity, their remoteness, and their peace, for its own sake, is curiously rare. There is, I think, only the one passage in all Homer; and it is echoed only by Lucretius [Odyssey, vi, 41 & Lucretius De Rerum Nat. iii, 18]. But Lucretius was an atheist; and that is precisely why he sees the beauty of the gods. For he himself, in another place, has laid his finger on the secret: it is religio that hides them. No religion, so long as it believed, can have that kind of beauty which we find in the gods of Titian, of Botticelli, or of our own romantic poets. To this day you cannot make poetry of that sort out of the Christian heaven and hell. The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvellous that knows itself as myth. For this to come about, the old marvellous, which once was taken as fact, must be stored up somewhere, not wholly dead, but in a winter sleep, waiting its time. If it is not so stored up, if it is allowed to perish, then the imagination is impoverished. Such a sleeping-place was provided for the gods by allegory. Allegory may seem, at first, to have killed them; but it killed only as the sower kills, for gods, like other creatures, must die to live.

Only enchantment lets readers escape the ennui of modern life.

Notes

[01] Nabokov, Vladimir. “Good Readers and Good Writers.” Lectures on Literature. (1980). Ed. by Fredson Bowers. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NY. (1982).

[02] Lewis, C. S.. The Allegory of Love. (1936). Reprinted with corrections (1946). Oxford UP. pp. 82–83.

Over at the American Enterprise Institute’s online magazine The American, John E. Calfee tries to replace one version of American Fiction with his own, in his post “Progressives, Jim Crow, and Selective Amnesia” (05-25-10). In the interest of promoting quality reading, Bookbread has provided a few samples of Calfee’s American Fiction (a.k.a. cherry picked American history) with annotations in italics:

The Jim Crow system did not start in the South. It first arose in the North (although the term dates only from the early 20th century) as a way to deal with free blacks, including ex-slaves [also I neglect to mention that the eligible voters in the South never bothered to step up to become the first American region to abolish the Jim Crow System].

…. Thus by the 20th century, the Jim Crow system was vastly diminished in the North but had become thoroughly embedded in the South—through [state and not the boogie-man federal] government action—despite the incentives of many business owners to reap the economies of scale and consequent profit from treating all customers alike.

…. One particular political party should recall, painful as it is, that when people spoke for decades of the “Solid South,” they referred to a reality in which Democratic politicians could be counted on to keep blacks from voting in the states of the former Confederacy [even though such members as Jessie Helms and Strom Thurmon were later welcomed with open arms into the Republican party].

Anthony S. Maulucci of Red Room writes in “What’s Missing from Modern American Fiction?“:

What is missing from today’s fiction I asked myself once again, and the answer I came up with is the power of simplicity and passion.

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with Maulucci’s judgment; still, it would have been nice if he provided specific examples and name some currently read authors who are neither practicing simplicity or exhibiting passion in their writings. These qualifications, according to Maulucci, are absent in most modern American fiction, and if taken as truth, an the underlying question now emerges: What is wrong with or “missing from” modern American fiction? Maulucci doesn’t list any specific examples, but perhaps Bookbread can assume he is referring to the David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon side of the shelf.

Along these lines comes a post entitled “Of Course Everyone Knows That There’s No Experimental Writing in America“, at Conversational Reading, which makes the claim:

True, as Hemon [editor of the Best in European Fiction] says there’s a lot of adventurous fiction languishing on the fringes, but that doesn’t change the fact that there’s also a lot of it getting published by the mainest of the mainstream. There’s a lot of fragmented, meta, crazy-type fiction going on out there in the U.S., and it’s getting published because American readers are pretty comfortable with it now, comfortable enough that it’ll sell in large enough volumes to make it profitable.

Really? Is there a metafiction best-seller’s list put out by Amazon? How many movies are being optioned by experimental American novelists? Is there a metafiction convention soon to be held around the corner, because I haven’t heard about it yet. Where is the experimental fiction booth at the National Book Fair? Where’s the SNL skit making fun of metafiction as a result of its apparent mainstreamness? Is Jon Stewart’s staff overly swamped trying to book experimental novelists on the show? Or are they confined to any CSPAN’s BookTV? Admittedly, Bookbread came across some minimal metafiction chatter on Twitter, but these kinds of questions are pretty much meaningless, when, according to the blogger at Conversational Reading:

After all, have you taken a look at life in the U.S. recently? I’d say it’s getting to the point that people I know are more familiar with fragmentation, multiple worlds, meta, etc than the other stuff that’s supposedly our bread and butter.

Yes, a majority of Americans may be quite “familiar with fragmentation,” but that familiarity doesn’t correlate with a claim that the majority of bookish Americans are buying and reading metafiction.

At the blog for the New York Review of Books, a post by Tim Parks headlined “The Dull New Global Novel” reports on the plight of twenty-first century non-American authors who must write in English, or in ways that can be translated into English. But this assumes all modern novelists seek a global audience. Are readers of the Review to accept that there is no such thing as niche marketing? Does no demographic segmentation of readership exist in the twenty-first century? Thankfully, a comment on Parks’ post by Patricia Wilson gets it right when she observes:

Too many think that the small audiences prior to the Victorian Era were [small] only because so few had the literacy and the money to purchase books. To a point it is true but even in the 20th and 21st centuries people having literacy skills and money prefer to read for enjoyment and entertainment, not only educational. It’s not so much that the reader knows it all but after working an 8-hour shift, working with one’s children with or without a spouse’s assistance, making dinner and cleaning the kitchen, there’s not much mental or physical energy left . Many of those that are highly educated have little or no interest in reading anything. But they are busy with their hands or in helping others do what the others can’t do. Be thankful the world is getting more literate. There are more readers—there are 6.3 BILLION people now in contrast to the short 2 billion in 1900. That means 2.1 billion now are reading in contrast to the 900 million in 1900. That keeps some bookstores, publishers and used bookstore still going. I know— I use them.

Many of those that are highly educated have little or no interest in reading anything—this is readicide—and it is not limited to modern children; it can afflict even those who formerly enjoyed reading. And regardless of Wilson’s accuracy, sources, and methods behind the statistics she provides—her point that there are exponentially more literate people with access to more printed and electronic reading material than ever before must be remembered amid the doom and gloom that blankets the current economics around publishing. Witness these recent findings in The Guardian about “India’s new middle class for English novels ” :

In the next decade, publishers forecast that India will become the biggest English language book-buying market in the world.

Parks may claim that global English fiction is “dulling down,” but Bookbread must reciprocate from Parks and ask: Is there a case to be made that American Fiction is too simple, that is, too drunk on Hemingway’s style? Perhaps the solution is an American rendering of Finnegan‘s Wake. Are there instances where modern American fiction was too passionate, in Maulucci’s terms, too “involved”? (None according to Genoways, or at least none nowadays).