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May 2 - May 22, 2024
Basically, we’ve all read the same story, but we haven’t used the same analytical apparatus.
Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.
Literature is full of patterns, and your reading experience will be much more rewarding when you can step back from the work, even while you’re reading it, and look for those patterns.
Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 (1965).
James Joyce’s story “The Dead” (1914).
take Dr. Jekyll’s other half. The hideous Edward Hyde exists to demonstrate to readers that even a respectable man has a dark side; like many Victorians, Robert Louis Stevenson believed in the dual nature of humans, and in more than one work he finds ways of showing that duality quite literally.
Because there was so much the Victorians couldn’t write about directly, chiefly sex and sexuality, they found ways of transforming those taboo subjects and issues into other forms. The Victorians were masters of sublimation.
My guess is that as long as people act toward their fellows in exploitative and selfish ways, the vampire will be with us.
there’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature.
To me, literature is something much more alive. More like a barrel of eels.
we’ll simply note that newer works are having a dialogue with older ones, and they often indicate the presence of this conversation by invoking the older texts with anything from oblique references to extensive quotations.
reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer’s alone.
To be east of Eden, as we shall see, is to be in a fallen world, which is the only kind we know
The thing about loss-of-innocence stories, the reason they hit so hard, is that they’re so final. You can never go back.
that’s the problem with being best pals with a hero. They have needs, or perhaps the narrative has needs on their behalf, but they cannot fulfill those requirements directly, not if the story is to continue.
Literature has its own logic; it is not life. Not only that, but (and this is key): characters are not people. Oh, they may seem like people, skipping and raging and weeping and laughing and all the rest, but they aren’t actually people, and we forget that at our peril.
Characters are products of writers’ imaginations—and readers’ imaginations.
Two powerful forces come together to make a literary character. The writer invents him, using such elements of memory and observation and invention as she needs, and the reader—not readers collectively this time but each individual reader in private—reinvents him, using those same element of his memory, his observation, and his invention. The first, writerly, invention sketches out a figure, while the second, readerly, invention receives that figure and fills in the blank spaces.
a major motion picture isn’t much if the main character dies well before the end. Instead, his lieutenant (or, occasionally, his rival; sometimes both) must do the dying for him. Then we get drama, death, and guilt: the movie trifecta.
book Aspects of the Novel:
In fictive works, some characters are more equal than other characters. A lot more equal.
More recently, Jon Clinch gave us the novel Finn (2007), which examines in full the life of one of American literature’s most odious specimens, Huck Finn’s Pap. If anything, he’s even worse when given more space. Then there is the cottage industry that seems determined to cover every aspect of all things Austen, including giving minor characters more room to run amok. This trend may be one of the first for which the twenty-first century will need to apologize.
It’s useful to keep in mind that any aspiring writer is probably also a hungry, aggressive reader and will have absorbed a tremendous amount of literary history and literary culture. By the time she writes her books, she has access to that tradition in ways that need not be conscious.
Violence is one of the most personal and even intimate acts between human beings, but it can also be cultural and societal in its implications. It can be symbolic, thematic, biblical, Shakespearean, Romantic, allegorical, transcendent. Violence in real life just is.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) is popular among many readers precisely because it’s relatively easy to figure out what it all means. Orwell is desperate for us to get the point, not a point. Revolutions inevitably fail, he tells us, because those who come to power are corrupted by it and reject the values and principles they initially embraced.
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Twain sends Huck and the escaped slave Jim down the Mississippi on a raft. The river is a little bit of everything in the novel. At the beginning it floods, killing livestock and people, including Huck’s father. Jim is using the river to escape to freedom, but his “escape” is paradoxical since it carries him deeper and deeper into slave territory. The river is both danger and safety, since the relative isolation from land and detection is offset by the perils of river travel on a makeshift conveyance.
We tend to give writers all the credit, but reading is also an event of the imagination; our creativity, our inventiveness, encounters those of the writer, and in that meeting we puzzle out what she means, what we understand her to mean, what uses we can put her writing to.
I hate “political” writing—novels, plays, poems. They don’t travel well, don’t age well, and generally aren’t much good in their own time and place, however sincere they may be.
Overtly political writing can be one-dimensional, simplistic, reductionist, preachy, dull.
I love “political” writing. Writing that engages the realities of its world—that thinks about human problems, including those in the social and political realm, that addresses the rights of persons and the wrongs of those in power—can be not only interesting but hugely compelling.
Christ figures are where you find them, and as you find them. If the indicators are there, then there is some basis for drawing the conclusion.
the act of falling from vast heights and surviving is as miraculous, and as symbolically meaningful, as the act of flight itself. As thrilled as we are by the prospect of flying, we are also frightened at the prospect of falling, and anything that seems to defy the inevitability of a plummeting demise sets our imaginations working overtime.
Okay, so here’s the general rule: whether it’s Italy or Greece or Africa or Malaysia or Vietnam, when writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok.
All the great poets know how to use the seasons.
When our writers speak of harvests, we know it can refer not only to agricultural but also to personal harvests, the results of our endeavors, whether over the course of a growing season or a life.
The ancient Romans named the first month of our calendar after Janus, the god of two faces, the month of January looking back into the year gone by and forward into the one to come.
authors, as a rule, are chiefly interested in their characters’ humanity. Even when the humanity isn’t very humane,
Compelled belief is no belief at all.
Some readers find relentless irony difficult to warm to, and some writers find that being ironic carries perils.
How do you know if it’s irony? Listen.
Readers need to deal with the obvious—and not so obvious—material of the story before going anywhere else.
if you’re observing carefully and meditating on the possibilities, you’ll reach valid conclusions of your own that will enrich and deepen your experience of the story.
Some of my worst reading experiences have involved books that “everyone” was reading and praising. Time and again, experience has shown that while I might be “just anyone,” I’m definitely not “everyone.”
take ownership of your reading. It’s yours. It’s special. It is exactly like nobody else’s in the whole world.
Don’t cede control of your opinions to critics, teachers, famous writers, or know-it-all professors. Listen to them, but read confidently and assertively, and don’t be ashamed or apologetic about your reading.
