Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (8 page)

Emily Dickinson’s voice has always had this quality of coming from beyond the grave—certainly for me, but perhaps even for her near-contemporaries, since so much of her work was only published after her death. “’Twas just this time, last year, I died,” she begins one poem, in a rather
Rebecca
-ish,
Sunset Boulevard
-ish vein (though it was Hollywood that stole from Dickinson, of course, not she who copied from them). “I died for Beauty—but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb / When One who died for Truth, was lain / In an adjoining Room—” is the start of another of her precociously posthumous poems. But the one I have always loved best opens with the line “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” and ends:

I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable—and then it was

There interposed a Fly—

With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—

Between the light—and me—

And then the Windows failed—and then

I could not see to see—

It is the blueness of that fly’s buzz, its absolute rightness and specificity, that makes the verse so persuasive. She knows what she’s talking about, and the fly is the proof.

As further evidence from the land of the non-living, let me call on another fly. This one appears in Ackerley’s
My Father and Myself
, when he is talking about the deathward decline of his mother. “Ending up as I am with animals and alcohol,” he says, in what is surely one of the great throwaway clauses of all time,

one of her last friends, when she was losing her faculties, was a fly, which I never saw but which she talked about a good deal and also talked to. With large melancholy yellow eyes and long lashes it inhabited the bathroom; she made a little joke of it but was serious enough to take in crumbs of bread every morning to feed it, scattering them along the wooden rim of the bath as she lay in it …

Ackerley never hints that his failure to see the fly might cast doubt on its existence; if anything, he suggests the opposite, describing its physical features in microscopic detail. This fly’s “large melancholy yellow eyes” make it as tangible as Dickinson’s blue buzzer—and who is to say, at this late date, how real or unreal either fly was? They reside permanently, now, in the same landscape as Henry James’s, Javier Marías’s, and Thom Gunn’s ghosts.

The uncanny in literature is not a separate place, reserved for those who believe in the occult or the supernatural. It is there in every poem that joins us to an absent speaker, every novel that sets up a parallel between our world and its world, every essay that calls to us from the distant era of a now-dead author. That eerily bridgeable gap between the you and the me of a literary work is also a space between the living and the dead, the imagined and the real, the singular and the collective. Even the very word “space” is doing double duty here, for it points to something that is both there and not there: it is the placeholder that joins us in a sequence (like the single space between each of these words) and it is the severance, the emptiness, that keeps us apart. Like all such ambiguous connectors, it is invisible to the casual glance, but we would know instantly if it were to disappear, for in that case the sentence, the stanza, the entire literary structure, would disintegrate on the spot.

THREE

NOVELTY

There is a certain kind of writer who seems to feel that unless he is breaking apart everything that came before him, composing something that in his own view is astonishingly new, he is not writing great literature. Though he is sincere in his wish to be a great writer (and in that sense might seem almost naive), his preferred mode of public address is sarcasm or heavy irony, both of which are meant to suggest his sophistication, his superiority to banal questions about reality, authenticity, and truth. He has no interest in accurately representing human behavior, partly because he has no interest in accuracy and partly because he has very little interest in other people; what concerns him most is the working of his own mind. He hates with a passion the realist novelists and formalist poets who came just before him, and he is convinced that only he, among all the writers who ever lived, is producing work that will matter to the future. In this respect, he evidently imagines a future filled with people who are nothing like him—people who will be content to rest with the innovations he has produced and will not feel obliged to stomp on their forebears.

Writers like this have given novelty a bad name. They have led those who are wedded to old-fashioned notions of plot and character to conclude that innovations in style or structure are antagonistic to these older values, as if we could only have one of the two aspects—let us call them startling originality and enduring sympathetic gratification—so we have to choose between them. This obsessive clinging to the cherished ways of the past is almost as bad as its opposite. It is equally humorless, equally self-enclosed, and equally unlikely to lead to the production and enjoyment of great literature. I have no prescriptions for producing great works, but I have enjoyed a vast number of them, and from this outsider’s perspective I can pretty confidently say that what is entailed has an element of openness to it. Rigid rules of any kind will be of no use here. Nor will the overweening desire to achieve newness, on the one hand, or protect tradition, on the other, because both of those positions imply a goal that is separate from, and often detrimental to, the more intrinsic purpose of simply telling the truth as one sees it. I say “simply,” but it is not at all a simple matter. Literature that tells lies is not worth the paper it is written on, but a lie is not the same as a fantasy, an invention, an allegory, a myth, a dream. Fiction, drama, poetry, and even essays can be made up and also truthful.

Usefully for my purposes, one of the works of literature which most strongly expresses this complicated view is also one of the most innovative in form. I am referring to Miguel de Cervantes’s
Don Quixote
—perhaps the most stylistically ambitious novel ever undertaken, in no small part because it was one of the first. What does it mean for an author to get inside his characters’ minds and relay their thoughts, rather than simply displaying their actions on a theatrical stage? What is a “narrator,” and how does he connect with the author of a work? How do the realities of fictional characters’ lives compare to the realities of readers’ lives, and where, if anywhere, do the two planes intersect? Does the book exist in its own time or in the time when you are reading it, and does that mean it exists in a different way for each new reader? Can the reader himself inhabit more than one era, time-traveling through books? Can the past, in this sense, be made to live again, and if so, can the nonexistent, purely fictional past also be brought to life? Are dead authors different from living ones, from a reader’s point of view? How do poetry, drama, history, and fiction overlap? What is novel about the novel?

Cervantes was possibly the first person to ask most of these questions, and probably the first person to answer them—not flatly or pedantically, but with hints, suggestions, jokes, and intimations, through novelistic strategies that honored plot and character even as they worried about the existence of such things. There is no ancestor-stomping in
Don Quixote
, in part because the book had no immediate ancestors: it was
sui generis
, emerging from Cervantes’s brow like Athena from Zeus’s, whole and perfect.

The tone is sardonic but also genial, at once sharp, critical, empathetic, and companionable. The hero—a devoted reader, just like us—is the most lovable madman imaginable. (Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin perhaps runs a close second, as he was intended to do, for Dostoyevsky, despite the astonishing innovations he brought to the novel, was no enemy of the past: he deeply admired
Don Quixote
, and consciously borrowed from it for
The Idiot
.) The plot is a higgledy-piggledy series of adventures, to which we might be tempted to apply the word “plotless” if the whole book didn’t so clearly and movingly lead up to its ending. That feeling which I mentioned in relation to
Wolf Hall
, of being summarily ejected from an enticing and richly detailed world, is Don Quixote’s feeling when he recovers his sanity at the end of the novel. It is also
our
feeling when we are finally forced to take leave of him.

One of the many things Cervantes discovered was that he could repeatedly remind his readers that they were reading a book—could, in that sense, blatantly announce the fictionality of his fictional characters—and still get us to invest emotionally in these people and their story. There are apparently at least two sides to our minds in such cases: one which goes logically about its business, registering Sancho Panza’s jokes about typographical errors in previously published volumes of the knight’s adventures as patent admissions of the story’s fabrication; and another which takes Sancho, his master, and all the other characters at face value, allowing us to treat them as fellow humans, to laugh approvingly at Sancho’s earthy wisdom, to weep wholeheartedly at the Don’s death. We know the difference between reality and fiction (we are not, in that respect, as mad as Don Quixote), but that does not prevent us from feeling real emotions for these fictional characters. If anything, the fact that they sometimes comment on their own unreality makes them seem
more
real, as if they were capable of viewing their circumstances from the same perspective we do.

Cervantes was not the first writer to discover this for himself. There are numerous examples of it in his near-contemporary Shakespeare. And if we go even further back, to the Middle English works of Geoffrey Chaucer, we can find an especially pure version of it—an easygoing, entirely comfortable readiness to acknowledge the related but different planes on which authors and characters dwell. To give but one example: Chaucer ends his extremely moving account of Troilus and Criseyde’s doomed love affair (a more sympathetic account, I would argue, than even Shakespeare’s version in
Troilus and Cressida
) with the words

Go, litel bok, go litel myn tragedye …

… And kis the steppes, where as thow seest pace

Virgil, Ovid, Omer, Lucan, and Stace

as if sending his poem out into the world in this literary-ancestor-acknowledging manner won’t endanger or contradict the felt reality of his tale. As indeed it does not. What you might think of as the Wizard of Oz syndrome, that moment when the great and powerful Oz reveals himself as the little man working the effects from behind the curtain, can apparently coexist quite nicely with our continuing belief in the magic that little man produces.

Shakespeare is even braver than Chaucer in invoking this paradox, for he sometimes has his characters
themselves
deliver the envoi. At the end of
The Tempest
, when Prospero is renouncing the sorcery that has enabled him to rule his island throughout the play—the magical powers that have in essence brought the play into being—he comes forward in his final speech and asks us for our applause without in any way breaking character. Even more riskily, in
Antony and Cleopatra
, the doomed, captured Cleopatra, formerly the rebellious queen of Egypt and the proud mistress of Antony’s heart, deplores what she can already foresee as the result of her captivity: a future in which

                   … quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us, and present

Our Alexandrian revels: Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’ th’ posture of a whore.

In Shakespeare’s own time, these lines would have been delivered by the boy actor playing the female part. In other words, this actor had to criticize his own squeaking delivery at the same time as he convinced the audience of the character’s palpable existence. And the character, through her lines, had to persuade us that this existence would in some ghostly form extend forever—allowing her as well as us to “see” this performance—even as its mortal version ended tragically, and at her own hands, less than two pages later in the script.

Theater, the art form which gave us the very notion of “suspension of disbelief,” specializes in such moments of contradiction. Real humans, just like us, are standing bodily before us onstage, representing actions and emotions that cry out for our sympathy, our hatred, our anxiety, our laughter, our distress. We do not really forget that they are actors, just as we don’t forget that the sets they occupy bear little or no relationship to reality, or that the lines they speak have been written for them by someone else. All these factors, far from being detrimental by-products, are built into the effectiveness of the theatrical form. As audience members, we are indeed in a suspended state, where real emotions about non-real events can course through us. But what is being suspended is not, precisely, disbelief. Logic, evidence, empirical truth: these elements that make up scientific belief, or even juridical disbelief, do not enter into it. We are not, as audience members, being asked to weigh in on the innocence or guilt, truthfulness or falsity, worthiness or unworthiness of the people we see before us onstage—not, at any rate, in the same way we would have to make such judgments in a courtroom. Our relationship to stage actors and the characters they represent is both more remote and less antagonistic than that. Precisely because we are not a jury of their peers, we can do things for them, and they for us, that would not be possible in our normal reality. For the two- or three-hour duration of their performance, we give them life; and they, in turn, allow us to become pure vessels of feeling, afloat in a world that for the moment seems as real to us as one of our own dreams.

The theatrical work, in this sense, reinvents itself each time it is performed. However old the script may be, it impresses us with its newness, its aliveness to our own present circumstances, even as it confesses its embeddedness in the predetermined past. This is true, at any rate, of
good
theater. It all hinges on quality. And the same is true, though in a different way, if the literary work is a poem or a novel. What Chaucer succeeds in doing in
Troilus and Criseyde
—reminding us of the existence of his poetic ancestors and at the same time leaving us enthralled by the freshness of his verse tale—cannot be done by just anyone. Cervantes is not the only novelist who can call our attention to the book in our hands and still make it live for us, but he is the best of them. The level at which the trick is performed matters deeply. If it is good enough, it ceases to be deception. Formal ingenuity, practiced at this level, becomes almost transparent. Far from being an intrusion from the outside, the author’s intervention in his tale comes to seem an essential part of that tale.