What Intelligent Readers Know About Literature:
1. Novels and stories that are about ideas rather than people and experiences are
really thinly disguised narrative essays, not art.
When a writer has an idea --- “Abortions are bad,” “Alcoholism destroys families,” “Old
people are neglected” --- and he writes a story or novel mainly to exemplify that idea, he
is giving his readers a little sermon that preaches by example. In good stories, however,
the experience is primary, not the message. If you think of a story you admire and
someone asks what its about, you’re likely to say that it is about a lot of things. In other
words, you probably felt that the story wasn’t reducible to a single idea, and it probably
raised more questions than it answered.
2. Didactic fiction (stories and novels whose main purpose is to teach a lesson)
have an axe to grind or some kind of moral lesson to impart. Didactic writers
think they already know the answers to most, if not all human problems
before they even begin to write their stories. As a result, genuine surprise and
discovery is seldom found and the subtlety and ambiguity of actual
relationships are either overlooked or ignored.
Didactic works tend to have villains who show bad values, heroes who demonstrate good
values, long, moralistic speeches, and a plot that proves the writer’s point. Sophisticated
readers find these type of stories tiresome and boring.
3. Ideology is a belief system that a writer thinks his readers should follow but
usually has the opposite effect, especially if it is presented in simplistic,
“either/or,” “good/bad,” “right/wrong” terminology that lacks the
complexities, ironies, confusion and contradictions of real life.
4. Real art expresses complexity, ambiguity irony, and mystery. Real artists
know this deep in their marrow. As fiction writer Flannery O’Connor has stated, “The
better the story, the more resistant it is to summary or paraphrase.”
She added that “a story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes
every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would
be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing s to tell him to
read the story. The meaning of a story is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that
which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can
ever be to his reader… A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it with each
successive reading and what it is saying deepens your feelings but continues to escape you.”
Here is a quote about the supreme importance of art from one of America’s most daring and
original poets, e e cummings:
Simple people, people who don’t exist, prefer things which don’t exist, simple things. “Good” and
“bad” are simple things. You bomb me =’s “bad.” I bomb you =’s “good.” Simple people (who,
incidentally, rule this so-called world) know this (they know everything, or at least think they do) whereas
complex people –– people who feel something –– don’t really know anything but are curious about
everything.
Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.
Art is a mystery, and all mysteries have their source in a mystery-of-mysteries that is love, and if
lovers may reach eternity directly through love herself, their mystery remains essentially that of the
loving artist whose way must lie through art… From another point of view, every human being is in and
of himself or herself illimitable, but the essence of his or her illimitability is precisely its uniqueness.
Poetry is about being. It celebrates uniqueness and suggests that particular awareness without which no
human spirit ever dreams of rising from such un-mysteries as thinking and believing and knowing…
“Works of art of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism.
Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.” --- Rainer Maria Rilke
Most people haven’t the feeblest conception of being here, and now, and alone, and fully
themselves. Why (they ask) should anyone want to be here, when (simply by pressing a button) anyone
can be fifty places at once? How could anyone want to be now, when anyone can go whening all over
creation at the twist of a knob or a click of a mouse? What could induce anyone to desire aloneness when
millions of dollars are unmercifully squandered by the government lest anyone anywhere should ever for
a single instant be alone? As for being yourself ---- why on earth should you be yourself, when instead of
being yourself you can be a hundred, or a thousand, or a hundred thousand, other people? To most
people, the very thought of being oneself must appear ridiculous in our area of conforming to preestablished roles and interchangeable selves.”
from 6 Non-lectures --- e e cummings
As filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has said, “in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect
mediocrity—no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make
our friends feel comfortable.”