Those who write and those who read ---Episode 1

          BEING A SERIOUS READER OF DECENT WRITING

                        Read, Digest, and Think DETAILS 

 In reading, one should notice and massage details. There's nothing wrong with admiring the generalization, once the reader has already collected the details and carefully arranged them. If one begins by looking at the finished collection, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book. Nothing is more boring or unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madam Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. Or, what about reading a novel by Franzen, Foer, DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, or any of the so-called post-post-modern writers, and by page 50, concluding that the author's message is some simple, general theme such as "man's cruelty to man," or "man's cruelty to the environment," or conclude that the book is just a ridiculous collection of abstruse crap, etc., etc. ?  We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first 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, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.

Another question : Can we expect to glean information about places and times from a novel ? Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from commercial best-sellers that are touted by book clubs and the New York Times Best Seller List under the heading of historical novels ? But what about the masterpieces ? Can we rely on Jane Austen's picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman's parlor ? And Great Expectations, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred, thirty-five years ago ? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels that literate people consider masterpieces.  The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales.  

Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius, not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace : these do not bother about any reinventing of the world ; they merely try to squeeze the best they can of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction. The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing in a mild way because minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise.