Comments on OnFiction: Is Fiction Misconceived?

Thank you very much, Carolyn, for this thoughtful ...

2011-11-27T17:03:55.110-05:00

Thank you very much, Carolyn, for this thoughtful comment, and many apologies for my delay in replying. I think that you are right, that it is difficult to judge people in the past or, indeed, to make diagnoses of people one has not met. Your thought that many writers are, and have been, eccentric is probably a good way of thinking about them. In this way, their unusualness enables for us readers a wider exploration of attitudes and perceptions than any one of us could manage on our own. Best regards, Keith

I've been asking myself how the study of write...

2011-11-02T11:36:26.185-04:00

I've been asking myself how the study of writers' mental illnesses actually works: can you really judge the psychological constitution of a writer who has been dead for at least decades (if not longer)? Furthermore, one should take into account that writers who lived around 1900 fulfilled certain stereotypes (the Dandy writer, like Baudelaire). So their being eccentric, or deviant, or simply crazy was to a great deal part of their habitus. But habitus shouldn't be confused with illness, I'd assume... Not to speak of the fatal historical link between "genius" and "madness", which has been (and still might be) so powerful. Unfortunately, Currie's article reinforces this view.

I was so glad to finally find your post. Thanks, and greetings from Germany.

Yes, once again thanks, Carole. What you write is ...

2011-10-18T18:44:55.529-04:00

Yes, once again thanks, Carole. What you write is interesting. I, too, have enjoyed Proust getting into my mind, but this doesn't, to me, feel like tampering; more like extending. I think as a writer one spends a long time on a particular issue, sometimes on a particular paragraph, sometimes just on a particular sentence. Certainly Proust went over and over what he was writing, so that the words he came up with are likely to be better than his or anyone's first, off-the-cuff thoughts, and this in itself seems to me valuable.

Interestingly, I'm currently writing a chapter...

2011-10-18T14:52:48.762-04:00

Interestingly, I'm currently writing a chapter on James Merrill, who wrote his thesis at Amherst on Proust. Merrill's Changing Light at Sandover is all about "making sense" in phenomenally beautiful poetry expressing his odyssey with the "voices" (or other selves) of his Ouija board contacts.

Mark Bauer, in This Composite Voice, cites Merrill as saying: "What if somebody had not told me to read Proust? The act of sitting there reading; I mean it was is if my mind was being permanently changed and tampered with."

Literature has a major influence on us, no matter what our mental persuasions. I think we all are looking for some kind of confirmation, a "making sense" of our own reality. The author's power of expression feeds this impact on our emotional selves.

Thank you, Carole, for this comment. I think you a...

2011-10-18T12:53:55.228-04:00

Thank you, Carole, for this comment. I think you are right. Although some kinds of mental illness, notably psychoses like schizophrenia, do involve distortions of reality (at least on occasions) most emotional disorders are, as you put it, reactions to the vicissitudes of living, reactions that are not irrational but which can become perplexing. I think it is not at all unlikely that a good deal of great art comes from trying to make sense of such perplexities. I agree, too, that metaphor and evocative language are also important in literature, most of all, perhaps, in that they can enable us to think more deeply about others and our selves.

I totally disagree with Currie as well, yet like t...

2011-10-18T11:52:31.935-04:00

I totally disagree with Currie as well, yet like to cite Koestler who spoke of pathology and creativity as being two sides of a coin from the same evolutionary mint. It may well be that hypersensitivity to the environment with high emotional acuity is what produces such profound insight into the human condition.

I also believe that the ability to produce beautiful, metaphoric language is an attribute of increased right-hemispheric dominance for language, resulting from genetic predisposition, early childhood or later traumas.

Proust himself was born ill from the uterine environment of his mother's suffering from hunger in wartime France and was always highly dependent on her. In photos, he also appears to be left-handed. It may be fair in the end to say that what we consider as pathology is a normal reaction to the vicissitudes of living.

Thank you Carolyn. I rather agree with you. Reader...

2011-10-17T14:36:24.510-04:00

Thank you Carolyn. I rather agree with you. Readers do appreciate what writers have written, not because they have been led into error, but because they have attained insights that they might not otherwise have had. As you say, the reader is not passive. I think the active participation of readers is an aspect that's been very interesting in recent discussions of what happens in fiction.

Yes, thank you Jim. I imagine you mean the Pareto ...

2011-10-17T14:22:18.323-04:00

Yes, thank you Jim. I imagine you mean the Pareto principle (that in an organization 20 percent of the people make pretty-much all the difference) is to be applied to author and reader: that the 30 percent which is supplied by the author makes pretty-much all the difference to the reader. What a nice idea!

Well, I'm an author of fiction and I get too m...

2011-10-17T12:45:20.998-04:00

Well, I'm an author of fiction and I get too many emails from readers that contradict Currie's thesis.

Then again, there's a great deal wrong with a survey that focuses on the literary canon, which tends to exclude non-male, non-white writers and most other fiction.

The notion that readers passively accept the fictive world is just nonsense.

I would imagine the Pareto principle applies.
...

2011-10-17T09:48:45.922-04:00

I would imagine the Pareto principle applies.

Thanks very much, Jim, for this comment. Your Asim...

2011-10-17T09:30:40.985-04:00

Thanks very much, Jim, for this comment. Your Asimov example seems exactly right to me. What one explores in fiction is, I think, George Eliot's idea of being able to go beyond the confines of one's personal lot, and that includes not being just normal. And I agree: Currie doesn't seem to engage with the idea that it's the reader who completes the book, that is to say, brings it alive. I used to think that author and reader each contribute 50%, but I now wonder whether the ratio might be something more like: author 30%, reader 70%.

I always remember the Asimov story about the robot...

2011-10-17T08:38:48.469-04:00

I always remember the Asimov story about the robot who could create art, something outwith the parameters its normal programming, because it was, well, broken. The company were willing to fix it but its owner declined the offer. Asimov isn’t generally regarded as much more than a storyteller – that’s certainly how he regarded himself – and yet the metaphor here is a striking and powerful one. I have always felt that I was broken and that my creativity sprang from the specific way in which I was broken but I have never felt the need to get ‘fixed’. What Currie is also discounting is the fact that it is the reader who completes a book; it is a collaborative enterprise and so what if the writer is limited in some way.