1、Good Readers and Good WritersMy 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 Authorssomething of that sort might serve to provide a subtitle for these various discussions of various authors, for my plan

2、is to deal lovingly, in loving and lingering detail, with several European Masterpieces. A hundred years ago, Flaubert in a letter to his mistress made the following remark: Commelon serait savant si lon connaissait bien seulement cinq a six livres: What a scholar one might be if one knew well only

3、some half a dozen books.In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travel

4、s away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more 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 work of art is invariably the cre

5、ation 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

6、 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 those buxom best-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the headi

7、ng 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 clergymans parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hu

8、ndred years ago? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels in this series. The truth is that great novels are great fairy talesand the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales.Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers

9、of genius (as far as we can guess 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 artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation

10、of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out 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 amusi

11、ng in a mild ephemeral way because minor readers 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 eagerly tampers with the sleepers rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must cr

12、eate them himself. The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. 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

13、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 there are edible. That speckled creature

14、 that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more artistically, Dishwater Lake. That mist is a mountainand that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he

15、meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked 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 little quizten definitions of a reader, and from th

16、ese ten the students had to choose four definitions that would combine to make a good reader. I have mislaid the list, but as far as I remember the definitions went something like this. Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader:1. The reader should belong to a b

17、ook club.2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie.6. The reader should be a

18、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

19、have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense-which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread

20、it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative 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 complicated physical work upon the book, the ver

21、y 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 do

22、es 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 whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth read

23、ing 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 boundary line be

24、tween 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 sull

25、en 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, especially if it is praised by people whom the young reader secretly deems to be too old-fashioned or too serious, this eff

26、ort is often difficult to make; but once it is made, rewards are various and abundant. Since the master artist 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

27、 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 re

28、ading.) A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know 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

29、 this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be

30、established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the readers mind and the authors mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoypassionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shiversthe inner weave of a given masterpiece. T

31、o 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

32、 he does by trying to get clear the specific 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

33、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 enthusiastic artist alone is apt to be too subjective in his attitude towards a book, and so a scientific c

34、oolness of judgment will temper the intuitive heat. If, however, a would-be reader is utterly devoid of passion and patienceof an artists passion and a scientists patiencehe will hardly enjoy great literature.Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neande

35、rthal valley with a big gray 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 th

36、e wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-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

37、 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

38、for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little woolly fellow, we may put it this way: the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf that he deliberately 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 go

39、od lesson in the dark around the camp fire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor.There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these threestoryteller, teacher, enc

40、hanterbut it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.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 slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer. Propagandist, moralist, prophetthis is the rising sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts. Alas, I have known people whose purpose in reading the Fren