inspiredbyactualevents.com

William James’ exploration of religious experience, primarily experience beyond the reach of reason, makes a great stab at defining fundamental (definitely not fundamentalist) nature. He almost makes one believe godless atheists can be religious too. Hell...he does make one believe godless atheists can be religious. In sum: humans experience life as imperfect and reach outside themselves looking for something like perfection or unity or transcendence. When they reach out, they find their higher self, likely hiding in their own subconscious. James was a psychologist after all. All else in religious practice, per James, is “over-belief,” the bells and whistles, some good, some devastatingly evil, added by countless institutional religions since way back. This review is a puny reduction of a expansive, hope-filled book. Read it in spite of my meager effort here.

Find the Kindle version of The Varieties of Religious Experience here

I’m now reading three books, more than I like to juggle at one time. One book in my head has always seemed enough for me, a simple reader who processes slowly.  But...if you have a hammer, you must find...and pound...a nail.

One book on my Kindle - The Alchemist.  One book on my MP3 player for reading on the walks with dogs - The Poisonwood Bible.  One book on paper...with a binding...and dustcover, you remember those, I’m sure - The Art Instinct.  I hope my one-brain head can handle assorted literature streaming at me simultaneously, channelled through three different media.

I could never do homework with the radio on.  Maybe I’ve changed.  Maybe Kindle and my MP3 have stretched me, stretched my brain. We’ll see.

Completeness seems to bother James Wood. His readerly affection for the silent parts of fiction gives his How Fiction Works a welcome portion of loosy-goosy admiration for the unround and the unresolved. I don’t know much about the range of contemporary literary criticism, but some critics, it seems, need their characters round and their resolutions complete. Piffle, says Wood.

We readers will find How Fiction Works a rich guide to the peculiarities (and conventions) of modern fiction. And it’s a helluva read. Honest. Wood has made litcrit compelling, giving us a page turner, a thriller-for-book-nerds filled with, if not exactly surprises, dozens of Aha! moments with flashing lights and clanging bells for the more excitable among us.

The cornerstone of Wood’s analysis is his discussion of what he calls the free indirect style, the third-person narrative style that enables the author to inhabit the voices of characters, shifting from an omniscient, external voice to the voice of the character, sometimes to the voice of the context in which the character lives. Wood notes other writer’s references to this style ("close third person;” “going into character;” “close writing") and provides plenty of examples from writers we know: Austen, Naipaul, Chekhov(of course), Updike. And others.

By using free indirect style, Woods observes, writers maintain their distance and inhabit their characters at the same time.

He looked at his wife. Yes, she was tirelessly unhappy, almost sick. What the hell should he say?

Only one part of this passage is strictly third person; the rest is the character speaking to us, or, rather, speaking to himself with the writer as intermediary. We can see an “objective” third-person view of the character, we can see what the character sees and we can hear the character address his problem. While not a exactly a new insight, Woods gives this style a thorough and useful treatment, at least one for us less academically endowed and encumbered.

Wood spends considerable energy and space discussing flat and round characters, frequently extolling the charms and virtues of the former. Traditionally, it seems, critics prefer round characters, at least for the big players in a work of fiction, over flat characters, who are OK and necessary to move the narrative or highlight the nature of the round characters. Round characters usually get considerable description, become rounder (I guess this is the term) as the story progresses, and sometimes change in significant ways, such change often being the core event of the novel.

Flat characters, on the other hand, get less authorial attention, rarely obtain more layers of human qualities as the novel progresses, and, since flat, have few human characteristics that could be transformed. On the other hand....

Flat characters are often reader favorites. Achilles. Polonius. Mr. Darcy (most Austen men, actually). Chauncey Gardiner. Flat characters often carry a key attribute or, even, a catchphrase, like Mrs. McCawber’s repeated avowal that she would never leave Mr. McCawber. An author’s repetition of this attribute or catchphrase turns flat characters into steady friends we often welcome as their rounder, more changeable, colleagues navigate a narrative’s twisty turns and slippery slopes.

Round characters are, of course, collections of many attributes and attitudes, skills and sensibilities. But these round characters are still not real since no novelist can represent all of what makes a person real.
The best round characters aren’t round at all and we all know it. They may be some sort of hard-to-measure geometrical shape, but they certainly aren’t, well, people.

Wood prefers the distinctions “transparent” and “opaque.” Some characters show more of themselves than others, and show more or less of themselves at different points in the story. Since fiction probably has something to do with truth or the nature of reality, these traits may be more helpful for writers and readers than the ubiquitous round/flat distinctions.

To frame the history of fictional character development, Wood traces the progression from religious, to theatrical, to fictive presentation; from prayer, to soliloquy, to free indirect style. He explores and explains much about detail, metaphor, voice, dialogue and, my favorite, language. He makes it clear that the best fiction, in falling short of answering all our questions, delivers the mysteries and the wobbly, uncertain world we need to be authentic characters ourselves.

Wood is a knowledgeable, thoughtful critic who has written a book that should help us handle, and love, the instability of the modern novel. Contemporary authors have found many ways to bring the uncertainty, ambiguity and richness of our lives into fiction. And we are better for it.

R3W

(Unfortunately, How Fiction Works is not available for our Kindles yet. I’m sure it’s just a simple oversight which will be corrected as soon as a few of us hit that button at Amazon that automatically harasses the fine folks at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)

Ever enter one of those periods when, for some uncomfortable reason, you stop reading? Or, at least, significantly reduce the time you spend reading? I did. For several years.
This period came after I had some big surgery, the kind when you have it, the family gathers. Hell, I wasn’t worried; all I had was a shadow in my lung and an aneurysm in my aorta. I guessed, through the miracles of modern medicine, I’d be fine and I was. After a few months. Well, six months…

And after that, back to work for a couple years, then retirement, then move to warmth, like an old person, which I am definitely not...he said...defensively. I took and take coumidin to keep my blood from clotting around my St. Judes valve and a slew of other meds for a slew of quarrelsome maladies that can’t decide who should be #1.
Long story short - I know, too late - my coumidin failed one day and a little clot slipped through to my brain and I had a stroke, a small one, a mini-stroke really, a strokette. The effect was minor, but led to my period of reduced reading (Remember? That’s what I’m really writing about here.) I lost 30% of my field of vision; my left peripheral vision - poof! Gone. If you want to kill me, approach from the left and I am a dead man.

Reading is a strain. After a lifetime of seeing from left to right, I now see from center to right. Oh, you make adjustments, of course, and I still drive. I recommend friends avoid my neighborhood.
But, I have dogs. Who walk. And my docs tell me to walk to keep my heart healthy. And I tell me to walk to avoid the imminant threat of weighing 350 pounds. And we walk two to three hours a day.

On our walks I read. Three hours of reading a day, seven days a week, 363...er...5 days a year and you can read a lot. Since I’m semiretired (Don’t tell my students, they’ll expect me to finish grading their papers), I’ve launched the project I’ve been waiting for...to read all those books I told myself for 40 years I would read when I retired. Middlemarch. Bleak House. Return of the Native. Heart of Darkness. Origin of the Species. You know the ones. You have a list.

I’ve had time to read others, too, you know, the ones from the 20th and 21st centuries. More on these later. Of course, on our walks, I’m reading audiobooks, which are not exactly the same as traditional books, but, hey, we’re all about non-trad books here, aren’t we?
I bought my Kinkle 2 for one reason. You guessed it, right? Big type. Big type for every book I choose to read, for every issue of the Times, for all the free crap you can get for your Kindle and you do because you can and some of it is great. And big type for rereading In Search of Lost Time, which is never going to work as an audiobook, but works fabulously on my Kindle and I’ve just finished the first book, Swann’s Way, and Proust’s world is still there and lush.

My dogs got me to read again. My Kindle multiplies my reads. Life is good, ain’t it?

Finished reading How Fiction Works by James Wood this evening. I’ll do a review for the review section of this site and Amazon in the next day or two. Beginning The Art Instinct (Denis Dutton)tomorrow. Listened to Dutton interview on The Marketplace of Ideas podcast this AM in which Dutton addressed the surprising amount of enthusiasm, mostly positive, the book is receiving.

In the tradition of E.O. Wilson and his Sociobiology, which was scorned by academics everywhere when published a few decades ago, Dutton’s work may get a kinder reception. Perhaps society is ready to get past the knee-jerk, politically-correct reactions of the 70s and face the reality that evolution ain’t just about physical traits and behaviors.

After Dutton, The Alchemist. After that, back to In Search of Lost Time (on to The Guermantes Way), my 2009 major project.