Bead on a String

[sartorias]

I've been hunkered down trying to finish this massive book, fighting heat (this room never cools down, ever) and dealing with family kafuffle, including five days there of having to walk four separate dogs. (Two dogs will kill each other on sight, one is so old and rickety he can't keep up, etc) so I'm reading here, trying to keep up with people's

Comments

[superball81]

I think about these things a lot, and appreciate your thoughts.

[sartorias]

Thank you for reading!

[whswhs]

You know, I started to comment to you on the Nabokovian approach, and what I find unsatisfactory about it (or what I've read about it), but I found myself thrashing around in an unsatisfactory way. I don't think my thoughts on it are coherent, or are at the point where they fall into coherence when I try to express them. Maybe another time.

I can say that, with movies, I remember watching the first two Harry Potter films, and always being aware of myself looking at the screen, and saying things like "Oh, nice chocolate frog!"-but when I saw Prisoner of Azkaban I got involved with the characters and fell into the story. And I consider that a damning thing to say about the first two. I can step back and think about aspects of a movie analytically while I'm involved with the story, but if I spend the whole movie at that remove, I think the director has failed

[sartorias]

Yeah, we're probably more or less in agreement--wish fulfillment being the extreme opposite of the 'realism as nasty brutish and short' school of literature. All of it can be argued, but generalizing wildly.

[sartorias]

So for example, I feel the same about Sam and "I'm home" which has an emotional resonance that seems real. Whereas it would have been a wish fulfillment story if Sam had been made King of the Shire, or Frodo had had a magic wand waved over him by a grateful Galadriel and he smiled and got married and he was made king of the Shire. There's a degree of realism in LOTR in spite of the giant spiders and the orcs and magic and all the rest.

[whswhs]

I always like to quote Marianne Moore's line about "imaginary gardens with real toads in them."

[lindahoyland]

I love Jane Austen.

[sartorias]

Yes!

[puddleshark]

Thank you for posting this - it has really set me thinking. If you had asked me before, I would have said that I avoided "powerful" writing like the plague. "Powerful" in modern short stories being code for "sudden shocking death of dog/child".

But perhaps I have been misdefining powerful, after all. Powerful doesn't have to be shock and awe. It can be much quieter. It can be funny. The mean right hook of Jane Austen or George Eliot's irony.

I couldn't disagree with Nabakov more. I read purely for escapism, and emotional engagement is absolutely the most important element in that. A good author bypasses all my critical functions and involves me utterly in the story. A transcendant author both involves me in the story and stops me in my tracks at the beauty/cleverness of the writing.

I'm going to add Nabakov to my reading list. Sometimes we need to disagree strongly in order to crystallise our own opinions!

[sartorias]

Oh, do read the lectures on literature! Especially his general essays at the end. They are quite good.

Note: he wasn't going to include any lectures on work by women, because they just don't write well enough, but Edmund Wilson, of all people, talked him into reading Jane Austen--and so there is one on Mansfield Park in there, too.