NPPF -- Why care about Kinbote?

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 2003-07-09 at 21:15, Terrance wrote:
> 
> 
> MalignD at aol.com wrote:
> > 
> > I must say that I find the caption of this string depressing, the idea
> > that one needs characters that are likeable, that one can identify
> > with, that one can "care" about.
> > 
> > Kinbote is pretty richly on the page:  witty, appalling,
> > narcissisitic, delusional, grandiose, a ping-pong enthusiast -- not
> > enough for you?
> > 
> > Not to pick unnecessarily on TP, but to offer an example to hand:  did
> > you find yourselves "caring" about either of those two-dimensional
> > effigies, Mason or Dixon?
> 
> Not me. I don't care about anything. But I must say, it's a wonderful
> old thread ...  the idea that a reader might care about a character in a
> fiction. In fact, N talks about it in his lectures. And so do most
> people who talk seriously about the art of fiction. So what's your
> problem?


N talks about it and takes quite a dim view of it.



" . . . there it the comparatively lowly kind [of reading] which turns
for support to the simple emotions and is of a of a definitely personal
nature. (There are various subvarieties here, in this first section of
emotional reading.) 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 this is the worst thing a reader can do,
he identifies himself with a character in the book. The lowly variety is
not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use."

Lectures on Literature, p. 4.


A few pages earlier N sez something also of possibly interest to the
p-list.

"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 heading of historical novels? But what  about the
masterpieces? Can we rely on Jane Austen's picture of landowning England
with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman's
parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic
London, can we call 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 great novels are great fairy tales--and the novels in this
series are supreme fairly tales."

p. 1-2.