Part the Third: Then I put my tools away in my customary, tidy way

...and finally sat down to do my research on fiction and the art of the novel and what many a brilliant old white man has had to say about them. After I selected some pithy excerpts for my reading group friends, I wrote the reading tips that follow. I don't expect they will appeal to a whole lot of people. You may have to have spent hundreds upon hundreds of days and nights reading when you might have been doing something, as my Mama used to say, to like to think about books and the problems they set us so much as this suggests. If you are of the same tribe or merely curious about how former literature professors think about reading, then forge ahead.

And here's a clue to my method in all things literary: the picture above contains some secrets in plain sight. Remember the lumpy bag?



Strategies for Reading Fiction

Here’s a sneak-peak at the way professors and critics read and what they teach their students. Even for determined graduate students all these caveats, “remember to wear your mittens” kind of thing, seem to hinder the reading process at first. But as the reader internalizes these techniques and further shapes them to suit her own interests and character, they engender a relatively easy-going, or at least unburdened, manner for enriched reading of any text.

Read slowly. Speaking pace is the right speed. Run the words across your tongue and lips, at least imagine that you are doing so, so the assonance and alliteration, the rhythms and repetitions, the sway and speed of a sentence are palpable and enjoyable. Professionals read everything twice at least. It’s true that authors don’t expect that from their public but nor do architects expect their admirers to go poking about the foundations in an effort to find out what holds the thing up. --Grammar and word choice can slow a sentence down or speed it up. If you’re not aware of that already, just reading a good paragraph out loud should reveal the nearly musical controls a skilled writer utilizes. –

Interact with the text. Cultivate and notice your reactions, both your emotions and your thoughts. Keep notes. If you can’t or won’t write in your book, then keep a little notebook close at hand. Exclaim, question, disagree, note comparisons with other books and/or authors that come to mind and write down the page numbers. (Of course that sounds obvious but you’d be surprised how many students forget to write down the pages and come to grief later.) Notice when you are swept away or perhaps stunned with pleasure. Try to identify why. What happened there? Where in the text did it start and how did it come to a close?

Look things up. Whether it’s history or geography or fashion or custom, don’t let the chance go by. Use your dictionary, encyclopedia, or Google. Enrich your reading by researching the answers to your questions or amplifying your knowledge.

Remember that the topic of a novel is rarely its subject. The author’s primary interest (or subject) may well be quite different and even hard to ascertain—as in buried beneath or around or within the storyline.

Bear in mind that you’re examining a work of art intended, oddly enough, for upper middle class consumption. (This may pertain to all the arts, I don’t know. Certainly all art was once the exclusive domain of the wealthy and powerful since the Church and nobility were the only patrons. Our notion of the avant-garde (indicating a profound rejection of middle class mores and values) derives entirely from a society in which artists could survive on very little. There are historical cultural reasons why this happened in Paris before other places –think Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rodin, Monet, Mallarmé, Cocteau-even foreigners like Man Ray, Beckett, and Ionesco thrived in Paris.

Ask yourself what you hope to receive as a result of reading a novel and how that expectation or wish influences your appreciation or interpretation of the text.

Bring everything you’ve ever read to bear on what you read now. Novelists do the same although I’m sure they sometimes wish they could choose not to. As you do this, notice how every rhetorical device used in other literary forms has its use in ficton. Metaphor, metonymy, allusion, ambiguity, antithesis, parallelism, hyperbole and analogy. Also that the impulses behind tragedy and comedy and the narrative devices that belong to each, shape fiction. I think the only exceptions to this last are epic and saga where the heroic mode prevails. And heroes, whether alive or dead, are neither tragic nor comic. People say tragic hero and comic hero but they don't really mean it. Or, rather, they use the word "hero" to indicated the main character. But these two are not at all the same thing.

Jolly stuff, huh?

A Favorite but Much Worn Hat, Part the First

My bookgroup has me running our next two meetings. November and December pose their own obvious challenges as few have time to meet for three hours on a Friday afternoon before either Thanksgiving or Christmas, let alone read a tome.

For November I am supposed to say something intelligent about three things and in December to put my statements to the test by using them to consider, interpret, appreciate--something like that--a novel of my choosing. So I chose a short one: Jean Rhys' The Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys, who was born in Dominica, seems to have asked herself a few questions about that woman locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, the woman Rochester had married in the Caribbean and who had gone mad shortly thereafter. Rhys' answers to her questions constitute her exceptional novel. Her storyline is gripping, exquisite, ambiguous--almost Gothic--and provides dual historical lens through which to view popular conceptions regarding women and sexuality and their connection to popular conceptions regarding women and madness; Rhys manages both the Victorian perspective mid-19th century and her own one hundred years later.

I chose this book because it's beautifully written and short. (Remember the holidays' demands on leisure time.) It's also complex, one of my criteria for the November Three Things. First I am assigned to speak to the difference between literature and all the rest, the great body of not-literature, and explain how one might tell the difference and justify this difference as valuable to anyway who isn't a college professor. There, that's Thing the One.

Next I'm to say something intelligent about the novel. I might speak to its history, its practitioners, its popularity, its construction or even its topics. Thing the Second.

Third and last requires both theoretical and useful remarks about reading strategies, the variety of ways one might approach a fine novel (assuming I've set to rest the literature question) to gain the greatest pleasure.

It was a treat to be invited to labor away like a college professor again. It's been a very long time since I gave a lecture, no matter how informal, and even had the chance to follow up with the close examination of a text. Nothing so sweet as theory AND praxis. So, here's fair warning: I plan to keep track of the preparation process here over the next few days and share whatever tidbits surface as I research what many a famous critic and author have had to say about LITERATURE, THE NOVEL, and THE READER.

But the sun is shining and the willows are only half-pruned and the dogs are nudging and nuzzling for outside time. Out we go for a few hours.