What Do Books of Literature Offer Us?
Experiences through text
Why do we like reading books?
It takes a lot more of our resources — time, attention than other leisure activities. Is it not easier to flick the TV on and watch a live sport and experience some thrill?
Perhaps, in the monotonous routine of existence, we seek something more real and authentic.
One of the alluring factors of reading a fiction book, for me, particularly literature, is the promise of unique experiences, a glimpse into the writer’s life, thoughts and feelings. A spoonful from the ocean of human experiences.
How to approach a writer’s work
William Hudson, in his highly informative and easily accessible book, Introduction to the Study of Literature, advises approaching a writer’s work from the outset with a simplified intention.
We listen attentively to what he has to tell us, and we do our best to enter sympathetically into his thought and feeling. We note carefully how he looked at life, what he found in it, what he brought away from it. We observe how the world of experience impressed him, and how it is interpreted through his personality.
This is the beginning of the habit of “profitable” reading. All the formal and pedantic aspects, especially the study of literary theory and techniques, are secondary.
The necessity of dwelling even at some length upon this primary conception of good reading as fundamentally a direct contact between mind and mind, and of insisting that all other aspects of literary study are supplemental to, and not substitutes for, it.
Novelist as a historian and more
You might wonder, how then is such a conception of reading different from the understanding of history? Joseph Conrad, in his companion book, Notes on my Books(a fantastic read!) records a distinction:
Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting — on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
Creating resonance with the reader
How does this truth reach another mind? Joseph Conrad clarifies in this book that the writing for his masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, had to undergo “treatment” to resonate with the reader.
Heart of Darkness is experience, too; but it is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. There it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck.
This treatment provides and sustains the atmosphere and suspense necessary to keep us hooked to his tale. Wherever the protagonist goes, his senses tell him that something is not quite right. The word uneasiness, which is often used by him to describe his feeling, lingers on. He describes his journey deeper into the jungle.
Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild — and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country.
The passage produced a kind of haunting effect in me that is difficult to describe. My stomach churned.
Good writers produce such emotions in us in their own different and profound ways, thus allowing us to experience briefly what they experienced — in this case, what Conrad experienced in Africa in the deep jungle in the late 19th century.
The ability to evoke such emotions in the reader is just as necessary for contemporary writing as it is for any other historical literary work.
All the books mentioned in this article are available in the public domain, links below.
Introduction to the Study of Literature, William Henry Hudson
Notes on my Books, Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
