Young Atlantan artist Brian Dettmer doing beautiful things with discarded
library books (via Michael Dobson)

Further to my suggestion in a recent comment that "characters ‘live’ to the extent they touch the reader’s life… If you have experienced an affair that ended abruptly for example… Emma Bovary’s anguish at the garden gate will probably affect you to a greater degree than if you haven’t. So, ‘lifeness’ I think is a function of the degree to which readers can relate their lives to the lives of those depicted in fiction."

This:

"Of course, words on the page do not perfectly replicate the real world – they’re just scribbled signs – they gain their power by creating reactions in readers which approximate those experienced in their real lives. If I can get psychoanalytical for a moment, when a situation replicates something first encountered in childhood, this often triggers feelings similar to those experienced years ago."

And this from Anton Chekov’s The Student (via Books Inq. via Dave Lull)

The student thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter had been troubled, it was evident that what he had just been telling them about, [St. Peter's denying Jesus thrice] which had happened nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present — to both women, to the desolate village, to himself, to all people. The old woman had wept, not because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter’s soul.

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. "The past," he thought, "is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another." And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

When he crossed the river by the ferryboat and afterwards, mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigor — he was only twenty-two — and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvellous, and full of lofty meaning.

This from Mark Vernon, who as it turns out teaches at this school, on Rowan William’s book Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (via Frank Wilson’s superbly informative Books Inq.)

It is also notable that Williams describes Dostoevsky’s account of religion as a humanistic enterprise. It is about what human beings owe to each other and about how they can preserve their freedom. These links between humanism, freedom and religion are subtle. It is not that religion is a voluntaristic concern, as if faith were a product of an individual’s will to believe in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Rather, faith is about a commitment to a truth that is more than the truths that can be derived from the mere ensemble of all facts. To assume that all facts equals truth is to opt for a rationalistic account of the world. And pure rationalism always leads to violence, Williams continues, because its only response to the humanly irrational is to do away with it. The rational and scientific has a central role to play in the pursuit of truth, but at some point it must give way since truth is ultimately not a matter of proving but of seeing – seeing through things and events to joy and beauty. It is a kind of loving attention, and is in that sense truth is closer to freedom and faith than reason and proof.

That is how Williams interprets Dostoevsky’s famous comment about choosing Christ over truth, even if truth seemed to disprove Christ. ‘Truth’ in that sentence is scientistic. You could say that truth – understood as the ensemble of facts – is bound to disprove Christ, because Christ inevitably lies beyond the domain of truths; for the Christian, Christ is in some sense Truth transcendent. Williams writes:

Dostoevsky’s working out of what might be meant by the possibility of having to opt for the Christ who is ‘outside the truth’ turns out to be closely connected with an entire rationale for fiction itself … The attempt to approach human affairs as if they belonged to the world of evidence and determined outcome is bound to end in violence … The novel, in its narrative indeterminacy, is a statement of ‘non-violence’, of radical patience with the unplanned and undetermined decisions of agents.

To put it another way, faith is a jolt that brings about the impossible. It has nothing to do with submission to a power. This is how Williams interprets the Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov. Christ is freed by the Inquisitor but not because Christ corrects the Inquisitor’s perverse presentation of religion (as a noble lie that saves people from the truth that would be too hard to bear). He does not, but rather kisses the Inquisitor. This is a human act, not a rational act, and in that context brings an entirely new way of being into play. That way of being is what makes Christ free, and so he is literally freed. It is also a sign of the gratuity of God, of unconditional love that is disclosed.

Photo from here.

James Wood continues to champion Nobel Prize winner José Saramago (evidently they don’t get it wrong all the time) in his latest New Yorker piece. His reference to Dostoyevsky makes me want to read Jose’s The Double in tandem with Fydor’s.

Here’s Wood on Saramago’s latest novel "Death with Interruptions:"

Here’s my latest contribution to the Guardian’s Book Blog:

Sunbather at Cornell…

and at Asnieres

This arrived in the mail on Friday.

I think I’ll interview Mckillop [He's a prof at Carleton University here in Ottawa] and ask him some of the questions Dorothy at Of Books and Bicycles muses on:

Contrary to what Steve Mitchelmore might suspect, I’m certainly not a blinkered believer in biography as art’s explicator. Witness this interpretation of Robert Frost for example. Biographies, it posits,  suggest that Frost the gentle grandfatherly New England farmer had  a darker side which he masked. That he may well have been responsible for a son’s suicide and was responsible for a bitter, unhappy marriage. His vileness is affirmed by a fellow poet who is quoted as saying that he once heard Frost utter ‘when I die I want the whole world to die with me.’

This negative depiction is at variance with Frost’s popular, four time Pulitzer winning public image says Kevin Murphy, Professor of English at Ithaca College. Most readers of Frost’s famous poem The Road Less Traveled,  interpret it, he tells us, as a parable of decisions that must be made in life, of going your own way against the crowd; as an affirmation of being true to yourself; as feeding the American desire to hear affirmation of nonconformity. Murphy however suggests that the poem can be read as a comment on indecisiveness and self deception. That given a choice of thinking well about ourselves, or not, we will always in retrospect bend the facts to aggrandize our actions. The poem then, he says, can be seen as paralleling Frost’s disingenuous disguising of a deeply unpleasant character..

Okay. Fine. If this is what you get from the text, good on ya. But tying it to the man’s ‘double’ life? This is beyond tenuous. This is too much.

This from Wikipedia:

Dylan will be in Ottawa next month. I will attempt to get an interview with him to talk about his Chronicles, Vol. One, and Tarantula, an experimental novel he wrote in the mid-1960s.

Quite possibly the coolest tune, composed and performed, ever. 

 Image from here. 

Plot is a series of choices made by the author which impose artificial form on formless real life experience. This in part is why some object to plot heavy fiction. It seems fake, contrived. Novels that emphasize character seem, on the other hand, closer to life, more natural. 

Problem is, the novel is a contrived structure in itself, into which fictional characters must, unlike real people, fit. To some extent there’s a zero sum game at play here. A choice must be made between ‘lifeness’ and the artistic whole. Ian McEwan, sacrifices ‘lifeness’ for unity in Amsterdam. Very neat and tidy, but also, despite some sweet phrasing, an irritating, ultimately unsatisfying read.

So, which characters are truest to life? Those we know best: those who we can most completely relate to, regardless of how fantastical (Ed Champion’s woodpecker come to mind). The essential question to ask: is this fictitious entity relevant to me and my life? Does she encounter or answer important questions that I may have about my life?Am I affected by his situation? In short, is there something of this character alive in me? This surely is the measure of ‘lifeness’ and indeed great fiction: the amount of blood the reader and character share. How relevant the thoughts and actions of one are to the other. How applicable fictional situations are to real life ones.

The more profoundly these situations relate to eachother — the more readers [and the more of them who...] are touched or moved, or entertained or informed or motivated — the greater the work. This is why The Brothers Karamazov is a great work. Its characters grapple with fundamental questions I have about the existence of God, why War and Peace [about Love] and The Red and the Black [Ambition] are too. My blood is in these books.