An important book that I dipped into years ago, but have only now read completely, is Janice Radway’s Reading the romance. It’s brilliant in its thoughtfulness about a subject—women’s reading of romance novels—that is usually dismissed without much thought.
It’s been said that these are the two most beautiful lines in Shakespeare, and I agree. They are based on a succession of synecdoches, a succession of expansions. In the first of these lines, “heart” stands not only for the life of the body but for the very core of being.
[T]he teaching of creative writing is dominated by the workshop method in which students give feedback to each other on pieces they have written. [Cate Bush] was skeptical about the value of this method, and said that teaching writing can’t really be done except by teaching reading. There’s a need to create a culture of readers.
Vermeer was interested in science. He seems to have been one of the first painters to use a camera obscura, and he seems also to have been fascinated by the geometry of the perspectives he created. In the domain of painting he seems to me to have been interested in those matters about which Elaine Scarry (1999) wrote in the domain of prose fiction: how the artist invites the reader—or in this case the viewer—not just to glimpse objects, but to construct scenes.
My view is that in general writers do well to pay attention to John Keats when, in an early statement of the principle of defamiliarization, he wrote that “poetry should surprise by a fine excess.” This goes for prose, too, I think, and even for movie scripts. Conversation in ordinary life functions to maintain and develop the relationship between the conversants. Dialogue in fiction is quite different.
Principally, what makes this lecture series good, is Spurgin’s strong and thoughtful suggestion that reading fiction is an art in something like the way that writing fiction is an art. He introduces what he calls a set of tools that can be used by the reader to think about a piece of fiction during reading.
The first keynote speaker in Utrecht will be Gerry Cupchik, who has worked for many years in psychological aesthetics, studying visual and literary art. In an interesting recent paper with Michelle Hilsher (Hilsher & Cupchik, 2005) the researchers compared responses to poetry presented in three different ways. They found that people preferred to read poetry themselves rather than to listen to it, to hear it, or to see it performed, because in reading they were better able to explore and interpret literary devices in an independent and creative manner.
I started to think of my own writing of fiction in a comparable way. I need a certain amount of quiet, a room of my own, a mental state in which my own concerns are not too pressing, and then in my writing I can enter into the life of a literary character about whom I am writing. In doing this, I think I become better able to understand both others and myself. I can’t always achieve a state of apartness but, when I can, the idea of putting aside my own concerns and entering reflectively into the life of another seems an apt description. I can sometimes lose myself in a novel or short story I am writing. In Eastern meditation, thoughts are allowed to enter and move through the mind without one becoming attached to them. Writing isn’t non-attachment. Instead, thoughts of a certain kind, for instance those of a character in a novel can become central. They are pursued, expanded, and can find their way onto the page.
The most important new book I read last year was Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. It shows how, once a nation has reached a certain level of income among its citizens (which Europe and North America have reached but which most Third-World countries have not), it’s not the absolute level of average national income that predicts health and well-being. It’s difference in income within the society: not economics but psychology.
Because of a cloud of volcanic ash, I was marooned in Europe for eight days. To start with, I was in Helsinki, where the cloud seemed determined to hover indefinitely. After difficulties in buying tickets—please take a number—I travelled by ferry and by train to Paris. Arrival there was a relief because it was nearer home. While I was there I thought I would make a little pilgrimage to places where Marcel Proust had lived.
