Salam’s Reviews > Literature and Fascination > Status Update

As Anthony Munday, with recourse to Horace’s Ars Poetica, suggests:

There cometh much euil in at the eares, but more at the eies, by these open windowes death breaketh into the soule. Nothing entereth in more effectualie into the memorie, than that which commeth by seeing.48

According to myth, Amor’s arrows hit the heart, but in fact love infects through the eyes. Human eyes are both (passive) receptors and agents of love. They absorb Amor’s power and pass it on, as suggested by Scaliger who describes the eyes as ‘Cupid’s arrows; the tongue [as] the lightning of love’.218

Felski stresses the absorbing powers of reading:

Literature seems akin to sorcery in its power to turn absence into pres-ence, to summon up spectral figures out of the void, to conjure images of hallucinatory intensity and vividness, to fashion entire worlds into which the reader is swallowed up.

We react emotionally to literary texts because events or emotions depicted relate to our own experiences, our (personal and cultural) memories, and hence to our emotional repertoire.

What fascinates us robe us of our power to give sense.It abandons us of our 'sensory' nature,abandons the world,draws back from the world,draws us along . It no longer reveals itself to us,and yet it affirms itself i a presence foreign to the temporal present and to the presence in space .