I like my you-tube, internet-streaming, mp3, google world. It took me 6 months to become used to not having it at my fingertips. I have been reading lately - a lot. Something I haven't done in a while. And it has reminded me of how much I enjoy a main character unfolding before my imagination, the way seeing words like crisp, uttered and blowing make me happy...
When I was 12 and 13, I devoured Don Quixote, followed by Anna Karenina, after which I read at least 4 Dickens books whose snivelling, poor, dirty, brave, cowering characters created their own rooms in my mind. Those rooms are now covered in dust and cramped by Madam Flaubert, Barnabas, Sylvia Plath's Esther Greenwood...
So I like stories. And I've been wondering where the "written word" stands these days. Could it ever be eroded into sand by cyberspace? (Yes. I actually do wonder this.) Milan Kundera, in his book Immortality kind of gave me my answer. And since I'm sure you are all as equally interested in the fate of novels, you too get to read what he wrote.
“ If a person is still crazy enough to write novels these days, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold […]
“[…]I regret that almost all novels ever written are much too obedient to the rules of unity of action. What I mean to say is that at their core is one single chain of causally related acts and events. These novels are like a narrow street along which someone drives his characters with a whip. Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to the final resolution, in which the meaning of everything that preceded it is concentrated. The novel is consumed in the fire of its own tension like a bale of straw.
“[…]Do you think that everything that is not a mad chase after a final resolution is a bore? As you eat this wonderful duck, are you bored? Are you rushing towards a goal? On the contrary, you want the duck to enter into you as slowly as possible and you never want its taste to end. A novel shouldn’t be like a bicycle race but a feast of many courses.” (266).
3 comments:
yay milan kundera.
howd you write this yesterda if you gave me the book back on sunday?
haha.
ps just an fyi. my "word to type in for posting" or wahtever it is....
is "SWOOKIN"
what?
"A novel shouldn't be like a bicycle race, but a feast of many courses."
-While I think he could have come up with a better metaphor than a bicycle race (which can be about the journey as well as the goal), I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that a novel isn't (or shouldn't be) about the goal, but the experience. If one can't put a novel down and play with it in one's head for a while because the end is so enticing, there is something wrong. I am reminded of The Da Vinci Code as I write this...I couldn't put the book down, but because I had to know how it ended, how the tension resolved, not because I was so completely wrapped up in the lives of the characters. I don't remember much of the book, because I never really became part of it.
Hey RJ! I have been reading some PCV blogs and keep seeing the diclaimer and I thought I would check if your had written the same. I suppose that is mandatory.
Did you bring a lot of books with you to Vama? Or does family refresh your library and send you some?
Cheers
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