NPPF -- Why care about Zoyd

[Terrance]

> 
> 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.

While only immature readers ever really identify with any character,
losing all sense of distance and hence all chance of an artistic
experience, our emotional reaction to every event concerning [Zoyd]  
tends to become like his own. When he feels paranoid,  anxious,
frustrated, don't WE feel analogous emotions? Our postmodern awareness
that such mediated "feelings" are not identical with those we feel in
our own lives in similar circumstances has tended to blind us to the
fact that aesthetic form can be built out of patterned emotions as well
as out of other materials. It is absurd to pretend that because our
emotions and desires in responding to fiction are in a very real sense
disinterested, they do not or should not exist. 



Again, one device for inducing a parallel emotional response between the
deficient hero/heroine/narrator/character ... and the dear reader is
Inside View. 

Of course if Inside View induces a reduction of emotional distance it
has the tendency to reduce moral and intellectual distance as well. The
notion that America is Cope-Land is one of Zoyd's (and his generation's)
most tragic flaws.