Reading styles

[alice wellintown]

In perhaps his most famous lecture, Nabokov says that readers must be
kind to authors  of great works, of masterpieces, of what he calls
major works, by reading, and then re-reading them as works of magic,
because a major author is, above all else, an enchanter. Yes, Nabokov
explains, a major author must be a master of story-telling, and a
teacher, but it is, according to Nabokov, the magical act of creatng a
new world that distinguishes the major writer from the minor one, from
those who work with a formula. Of course, Nab, a teacher and
story-teller, has his prejudices, so, like most other brillian
author/critics (Poe, for example), he defines a masterpeice and a
major writer by holding the mirror up, not to nature, but to himself.

The lecture is about great authors, and supreme European Masterpeices,
but is also about how ro read them. And Nab argues that only after a
reader has read, re-read, fallen deep under the spell of the
enchanter, come to know the art on its own terms, should she turn to
other books, other ideas, like history, psychology, etc., anc connect
the magical world of the fiction to other worlds.

Like all advise to readers and writers, this one is a paradox. Nab
knows this, and his wr, self-deprecating humor admits it.

In Fosters books, How to read like a Prof, he looks into Joyce's The
Dead and Baldwin's Sonny's Blues. He argues that good reader should
not read with their eyes. He means that readers need to see the world
as the author, the enchanter, has conjured it. It is a bit difficult
for readers to imagine why an American apple is so valuable to the
women in The Dead. It is difficult for many readers to know that the
fact that the women hold their dinner on the Epiphany is essential to
the theme. Youfg readers, trained with a bag of tricks, will complain
that Baldwin's teacher brother should never give the Jazz player
brother coffeee or booze because he is re-covering from heroine
addiction, and most will miss the allusion to the "tremebling cup"
image, because most have no biblical training, no training in
Shakespeare or the tradition at all.

So, how to read? I guess we could, with Franzen, ask, why bother?

Why woud anyonme bother with Bartleby? It's so dense with allusions,
most of them biblical. Why bother to see things as the lawyer, as
Bartleby, as Melville saw the world? That was their style or, as
Berger/Bnejamin (Ways of Seeing Mechanical Reproduction) might have
it, that was their zone, their Ohio, their Kansas, and we're not in
Kansas anymore.