Good Readers Good Writers V Essay Example for Free

Good Readers Good Writers V EssayGood Readers and Good Writers (from Lectures on Literature) Vladimir Nabokov (originally delivered in 1948) My course, among other things, is a lovely of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures. How to be a Good Reader or Kindness to Authorssomething of that sort capacity serve to provide a subtitle for these various discussions of various motives, for my plan is to deal lovingly, in loving and lingering detail, with several European Masterpieces.A hundred years ago, Flaubert in a letter to his mottleress made the following remark Commelon serait savant si lonconnaissait bien seulement cinq a six livres What a scholar one might be if one k advanced well only some half a dozen ledgers. In reading, one should nonice and fondle details.There is nothing ruin near the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book get d sustain been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade genera lization, one begins at the wrong end and travels aside from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the precedent than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie.We should everlastingly remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the startinginnate(p) thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, and then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. Another questionCan we expect to glean information just about places and times from a novel? Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she offer learn anything about the past(a) from those buxombest-sellers that argon hawked around by book clubs under the heading o f historical novels? but what about the masterpieces? Can we rely on Jane Aus decenniums count on of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergymans parlor?And Bleak Ho go for, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we environ it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels in this series. The truth is that great novels argon great fairy talesand the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales.Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius (as far as we can guess and I trust we guess right) not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of quaint surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To pincer authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace these do not bother about any reinventing of the world the y merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditionalpatterns of fiction.The various combinations these electric razor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be rather amusing in a mild ephemeral way because minor ratifiers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise. But the real writer, the fop who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the railroad ties rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal he must create them himself. The art of writing is a truly futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality offiction.The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but does not exist at all as an accepted entirety it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says go allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts . The writer is the first man to absorb it and to form the natural objects it contains. Those berries there are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed.That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more artistically, DishwaterLake. That mist is a mountainand that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.One evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted lecture tour, I suggested a subatomic quizten definitions of a reader, and from these ten the students had to choose four definitions that would combine to make a substantially reader. I havemislaid the list, but as far as I remember the definitions went something like this. Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a ripe reader1. The reader should kick the bucket to a book club. 2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine. 3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle. 4. The reader should prefer a spirit level with exercise and dialogue to one with none. 5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie. 6. The reader should be a budding author. 7. The reader should have imagination. 8. The reader should have memory.9.The reader should have a dictionary. 10. The reader should have some artistic sense. The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sensewhich sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance. Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book one can only reread it. A good r eader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why.When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eye from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated natural work upon the book, the very process of learning in toll of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really make it in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it.We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the phy sical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it isa work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind.The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book. Now, this being so, we should ponder the question how does the mind work when the sullen reader is confronted by the sunny book. First, the sullen mood melts away, and for better or worse the reader enters into the spirit of the game. The effort to begin a book, especially if it is praised by the great unwashed whom the young reader secretly deems to be too old-fashioned or too serious, this effort is often difficult to make but once it is made, rewards are various and abundant.Since the master artist used his imagination in creating his book, it is natural and fair that the consumer o f a book should use his imagination too. There are, however, at least two varieties of imagination in the readers case. So let us see which one of the two is the right one to use in reading a book. First, there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature. (There are various subvarieties here, in this first section of emotional reading. )A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone weknow or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past.Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use. So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What sho uld be established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the readers mind and the authors mind.We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this farawayness while at the same time we keenly enjoypassionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shiversthe inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. But what I mean is that the reader must know when and where to curb his imagination and this he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at his disposal.We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an authors people. The color of Fanny Prices eyes in Mansfield park and the furnishing of her cold little room are important. We all have different natures, and I can tell you right now that the best tempera ment for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one. The enthusiastic artist alone is apt to be too subjective in his attitude towards a book, and so a scientific coolness of judgment will temper the intuitive heat. If, however, a would-be reader isutterly bleak of passion and patienceof an artists passion and a scientists patiencehe will hardly enjoy great literature. Literature was born not the day when a boy crying barbarian, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important.Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmeringgo-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. Literature is invention. Fiction is fic tion. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives.From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a wondrous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Natures lead. Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little woolly fellow, we may seat it thisway the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf that he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf then the story of his tricks made a good story.When he perished at last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around the campfire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor. 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 threestorytel ler, teacher, enchanterbut it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a majorwriter.To the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time. A slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer. Propagandist, moralist, prophetthis is the rising sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts. Alas, I have known people whose purpose in reading the French and Russian novelists was to learn something about life in gay Paree or in sad Russia.Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to get the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems. The three facets of the great writermagic, story, le ssonare prone to blend in one purpose 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.There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like Mansfield Park does or asany rich flow of Dickensian sensual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall make the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.