Good Readers Good Writers V Essay

expert Readers and Good Writers (from Lectures on Literature) Vladimir Nabokov (originally delivered in 1948) My course, among other things, is a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures. How to be a Good Reader or Kindness to Authors roughlything of that sort dexterity serve to provide a subtitle for these conglomerate discussions of heterogeneous references, for my plan is to deal lovingly, in loving and lingering detail, with several European Masterpieces.A hundred years ago, Flaubert in a permitter to his mistress made the following stimulation Commelon serait savant si lonconnaissait bien seulement cinq a six livres What a scholar ane might be if one knew well only some half a dozen phonograph records. In reading, one should notice and fondle details. in that respect is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes by and by the sunny trifles of the sacred scripture develop been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong subvert and travels away from the script before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more(prenominal) boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie.We should always remember that the break down of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the outset thing we should do is to withdraw that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no limpid connection with the worlds we already k this instant. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of k outrightledge. Another questionCan we expect to glean training about places and times from a novel? Can whatsoeverbody be so naive as to look he or she can learn anything about the past from those buxombest-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novels? But what about the masterpieces? Can we rely on Jane Austens picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergy populaces parlor?And Bleak House, that visionary romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. And the same(p) holds for other such novels in this series. The truth is that ample novels are keen fairy talesand the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales.Time and space, the color of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius (as far as we can believe and I trust we guess right) not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master mechanics im government agency learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is go forth the ornamentation of the commonplace these do not bo ther about any reinventing of the world they merely hear to squeeze the best they can out of a give lodge of things, out of traditionalpatterns of lying.The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be preferably odd in a mild ephemeral way because minor ratifiers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise. But the real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and thirstily tampers with the sleepers rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal he mustiness create them himself. The art of writing is a actually futile business if it does not stand for first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality offiction.The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but does not exist at all as an accepted entirety it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says go allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms , not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to mop it and to form the natural objects it contains. Those berries t here(predicate) are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed.That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more artistically, DishwaterLake. That mist is a mountainand that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a e on that pointal ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy lecturer, and there they spontaneously embrace and are conjugate forever if the book lasts forever.One evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted lecture tour, I suggested a subatomic testten definitions of a endorser, and from these ten the students had to choose four definitions that would combine to make a good ratifier. I pick outmislaid the list, but as far as I remember the definitions wen t something like this. acquire four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader1. The reader should belong to a book club. 2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine. 3. The reader should focus on on the social-economic angle. 4. The reader should prefer a figment with action and dialogue to one with none. 5. The reader should gestate seen the book in a movie. 6. The reader should be a budding author. 7. The reader should have imagination. 8. The reader should have memory.9.The reader should have a dictionary. 10. The reader should have some artistic sense. The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sensewhich sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance. Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiousl y enough, one cannot read a book one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and seminal reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why.When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this mingled physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it.We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the substantial picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or quaternary reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it isa work of fiction or a work of science (the point of accumulation line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind.The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book. Now, this being so, we should ponder the question how does the mind work when the acrimonious reader is confronted by the sunny book. First, the sullen mood melts away, and for better or worse the reader enters into the spirit of the game. The effort to begin a book, curiously if it is praised by people whom the young reader secretly deems to be overly old-fashioned or similarly serious, this effort is often difficult to make but once it is made, rewards are various and abundant.Since the master a rtist used his imagination in creating his book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of a book should use his imagination too. There are, however, at least two varieties of imagination in the readers case. So let us see which one of the two is the right one to use in reading a book. First, there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature. (There are various subvarieties here, in this first section of emotional reading. )A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone weknow or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past.Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a geek in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use. So what is the authentic instrume nt to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the readers mind and the authors mind.We ought to inhabit a little aloof and take recreation in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoypassionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shiversthe inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. But what I mean is that the reader must know when and where to curb his imagination and this he does by trying to get clear the ad hoc world the author places at his disposal.We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an authors people. The color of Fanny Prices eyes in Mansfield Park and the furnishing of her cold little room are import ant. We all have different temperaments, and I can tell you right now that the best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one. The impetuous artist alone is apt to be too subjective in his attitude towards a book, and so a scientific coolness of judgment will temper the intuitive heat. If, however, a would-be reader isutterly devoid of passion and constancyof an artists passion and a scientists patiencehe will hardly enjoy great literature. Literature was born not the day when a boy crying skirt chaser, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big blue-eyed(a) wolf at his heels literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important.Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall humbug there is a shimmeringg o-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives.From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Natures lead. Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little bleary fellow, we may put it thisway the magical of art was in the shadow of the wolf that he by choice invented, his dream of the wolf then the story of his tricks made a good story.When he perished at last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around the campfire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor. There are lead points of view from which a writer can be considered he may be con sidered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these threestoryteller, teacher, enchanterbut it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a majorwriter.To the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time. A slenderly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer. Propagandist, moralist, prophetthis is the climb sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for shoot for knowledge, for simple facts. Alas, I have known people whose purpose in reading the French and Russian novelists was to learn something about life in gay Paree or in sad Russia.Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study t he style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems. The three facets of the great writermagic, story, lessonare prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very sum of money of thought.There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like Mansfield Park does or asany rich flow of Dickensian unspiritual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must go by a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards call on a castle of beautiful steel and glass.