A Goodreads user
asked
Mary L. Tabor:
The generosity you talk about seems important. Not to get too sappy about this, but a generous action is going to ripple outward sort of endlessly and keep effecting the world long after the person who generated it is gone. When the writer's giving and the reader's giving meet there on the page, is this what provides literature its moral dynamic, would you say?
Mary L. Tabor
I like to call this ripple you refer to, this giving that moves and gives again and again, the Butterfly Effect. Edward Lorenz, who worked on the physics concept, the chaos theory, gets the credit for this phrase entering our vernacular. I’m no physicist but here’s my way to understand it: The unheard move of that delicate wing whispers on the wind. It ripples and is heard somewhere else. Some say a flick of the wing can start a hurricane.
You may be right that I have just defined literature’s “moral dynamic.” But I find the word “morality” to describe this effect of transformation between writer and reader a bit troubling, a slippery slope I don’t care to be sliding on. Let’s take for example Nabokov’s Lolita, a book that was once banned for its pederasty. And certainly Humbert Humbert is an awful man. So now let’s briefly examine the morality of this novel. The journey we travel on with Nabokov and Humbert Humbert’s sexual relationship with a pubescent young girl is hardly moral. But the book is a search for the “good,” as part and parcel of its horrid journey.
Nabokov closes the novel with a prose elegy to the voices of children at play and to the unheard voice of Lolita from that concord. Nabokov’s flawed hero, for lack of a better term, speaks at the end of the novel of the children’s “vapor of blended voices,” of the “spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or clatter of a toy wagon” and his elegy on the sounds of childhood ends this way:
I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the concord.
The so-called “moral” reading of this book was to ban it. The empathic read of this book is to understand that the love of childhood and its loss, stolen from the young Lolita, are palpable by book’s end.
The transformation between writer and reader is more aptly termed “love.” We love a great book, we love its author even if we never get to meet him or converse with him.
When we know that the author’s search is a search for the “good,” we want to join him on that journey and we fall in love along the way.
Full disclosure here: I wrote an essay about love and the Butterfly Effect for the Internet publication http://www.FactsandArts.com.
But the pointed answer here for me is that the gift exchange is a transformation equivalent to love.
You may be right that I have just defined literature’s “moral dynamic.” But I find the word “morality” to describe this effect of transformation between writer and reader a bit troubling, a slippery slope I don’t care to be sliding on. Let’s take for example Nabokov’s Lolita, a book that was once banned for its pederasty. And certainly Humbert Humbert is an awful man. So now let’s briefly examine the morality of this novel. The journey we travel on with Nabokov and Humbert Humbert’s sexual relationship with a pubescent young girl is hardly moral. But the book is a search for the “good,” as part and parcel of its horrid journey.
Nabokov closes the novel with a prose elegy to the voices of children at play and to the unheard voice of Lolita from that concord. Nabokov’s flawed hero, for lack of a better term, speaks at the end of the novel of the children’s “vapor of blended voices,” of the “spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or clatter of a toy wagon” and his elegy on the sounds of childhood ends this way:
I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the concord.
The so-called “moral” reading of this book was to ban it. The empathic read of this book is to understand that the love of childhood and its loss, stolen from the young Lolita, are palpable by book’s end.
The transformation between writer and reader is more aptly termed “love.” We love a great book, we love its author even if we never get to meet him or converse with him.
When we know that the author’s search is a search for the “good,” we want to join him on that journey and we fall in love along the way.
Full disclosure here: I wrote an essay about love and the Butterfly Effect for the Internet publication http://www.FactsandArts.com.
But the pointed answer here for me is that the gift exchange is a transformation equivalent to love.
More Answered Questions
A Goodreads user
asked
Mary L. Tabor:
With so much fiction being published these days it makes sense for authors to turn to the multi-novel series more and more. The idea being that Book 1 gets the reader "hooked" and guarantees the purchase of Books 2 thru 6 (or what have you). In your own work Mary, to what extent do you consider "hooking" the reader to be a part of the job?
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