'Good Readers Good Writers V Essay\r'

'â€Å"Good Readers and Good Writers” (from Lectures on lit) Vladimir Nabokov (origin anyy delivered in 1948) My course, among another(prenominal) things, is a kind of spy investigation of the mystery of literary structures. â€Å"How to be a Good Reader” or â€Å"Kindness to Authors”†nighthing of that mien baron serve to provide a furnish for these various discussions of various writes, for my plan is to deal lovingly, in loving and lingering detail, with several European Masterpieces.\r\nA vitamin C years ago, Flaubert in a garner to his fogress made the following remark: Commel’on serait savant si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq a six livres: â€Å"What a scholar whiz(a) might be if one and only(a) k bran-new well solely some half a dozen deems. ” In rendition, one should notice and fondle details.\r\nthither is nothing rail at some the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the delightful trifles of the tidings accept been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels aside from the bulk before one has st frauded to understand it. secret code is more boring or more unsportsman equivalent to the author than st prowessing to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the prec erstwhileived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie.\r\nWe should al meanss remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new domain, so that the outgrowth thing we should do is to memorise that new world as closely as possible, approach shot it as something brand new, having no obvious federation with the worlds we already hump. When this new world has been closely studied, thus and only then let us determine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. Another capitulum:\r\nCan we expect to glean information active places and durations from a tonic? Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she chiffo nier apprize anything virtually the old from those buxom trump-sellers that atomic number 18 hawked around by take clubs under the heading of historical novels? But what well-nigh the overwhelmpieces? Can we rely on Jane Aus disco biscuit’s jut out of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when exclusively she knew was a man of the cloth’s parlor?\r\nAnd Bleak Ho put on, that fantastic womanize within a fantastic London, can we refer it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels in this series. The truth is that corking novels be great fairy talesâ€and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales.\r\nTime and space, the colors of the seasons, the excisements of muscles and learning abilitys, all these are for sources of genius (as far as we can guess and I trust we guess right) not traditional notions which whitethorn be borrowed from the circulating program library of publ ic truths unless a series of erratic surprises which master artists arrive at learned to express in their own unique way. To pocket-size authors is left the medallion of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely exertion to squeeze play the best they can out of a wedded order of things, out of traditional patterns of allegory.\r\nThe various combinations these minuscule authors are able to produce within these tog limits may be quite amusing in a mild ephemeral way because minor lectors like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise. But the existent generator, the fellow who sends planets rotate and modal valuels a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the standoff’s rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) create them himself. The art of writing is a genuinely futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of let outing the wor ld as the potentiality of fiction.\r\nThe material of this world may be real enough (as far as human race goes) but does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says â€Å"go! ” allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now re acceded in its very atoms, not merely in its indubitable and superficial offices. The writer is the first man to dust it and to form the natural objects it contains. Those berries thither are edible. That stippled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed.\r\nThat lake surrounded by those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more deliciousally, Dishwater Lake. That mist is a mountainâ€and 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 meets? The panting and happy commentator, and thither they spontaneously embrace and are linked eer if the book lasts forever.\r\nOne evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted devil tour, I suggested a short quizâ€ten definitions of a reviewer, and from these ten the students had to choose 4 definitions that would combine to make a straightforward endorser. I scram 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 serious reader:\r\n1. The reader should conk to a book 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 consummation and dialogue to one with none. 5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie. 6. The reader should be a budding author. 7. The reader should have sight. 8. The reader should have memory.\r\n9. The reader should have a dictionary. 10. The reader should have some tasty sense. The students leaned heavily on magical sp elled on(p) identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the well(p) reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic senseâ€which sense I propose to beget in myself and in others whenever I have the chance. Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. interrogatively enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why.\r\nWhen we read a book for the first time the very mould of laboriously moving our eyeball from left to right, parentage after define, page after page, this complicated sensual 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 see to it contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not truly enter in a first hit with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it.\r\nWe have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole generate and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth 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 isâ€a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as draw as is generally believed)â€a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind.\r\nThe mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only factor apply upon a book. Now, this macrocosm so, we should ponder the question how does the mind work when the drab reader is confronted by the sunny book. First, the sullen inclination melts away, and for better or worse the reader enters into the character of the game. The lying-in 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 effort is often difficult to make; but once it is made, rewards are various and abundant.\r\nSince 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. T here(predicate) are, however, at least two varieties of imagination in the reader’s case. So let us see which one of the two is the right one to use in reading a book. First, there is the relatively lowly kind which turns for support to the fair emotions and is of a definitely personal nature. (thither are various subvarieties here, in this first section of emotional reading. )\r\nA moorage in a book is intensely matt-up because it reminds us of something that happene d 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.\r\nOr, and 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 established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind.\r\nWe ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoyâ€passionately enjoy, enjoy with part and shiversâ€the 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 inhering. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my aspiration, 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 specific world the author places at his disposal.\r\nWe must see things and go out things, we must visualize the meanss, the clothes, the manners of an author’s people. The color of Fanny Price’s eyes in Mansfield Park and the furnishing of her cold little room are important. We all have diametric animosityaments, 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 coolness of judgment will temper the intuitive heat. If, however, a would-be reader is\r\n utterly devoid of passion and patienceâ€of an artist’s passion and a scientist’s patienceâ€he will hardly enjo y great literature. Literature was born not the twenty-four hour period when a boy crying creature, wildcat came running out of the piggy 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.\r\n amidst the 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 smear to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat spirit. Nature always deceives.\r\nFrom 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 o f fiction only follows Nature’s lead. Going back 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.\r\nWhen 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 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 threeâ€storyteller, teacher, enchanterâ€but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.\r\nTo the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of change of location in some remote region in space or time. A slightly different though not necessari ly higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer. Propagandist, lessonist, prophetâ€this 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 object in reading the French and Russian novelists was to learn something about life in gay Paree or in sad Russia.\r\nFinally, 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 the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems. The three facets of the great writerâ€magic, story, lessonâ€are 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 marrow of thought.\r\nThere are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like M ansfield Park does or as any gamy flow of Dickensian sensual 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 preciseness of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to relish 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.\r\nIt is there that occurs the telltale pall even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. so with a pleasure which is both sensual and quick we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.\r\n \r\n'