Check out Gary Saul Morson's excellent essay in Commentary on why college kids are avoiding the study of literature. An excerpt:
I once delivered a paper in Norway on Anna Karenina, and a prominent scholar replied: “All my career I have been telling students not to do what you have done, that is, treat characters as real people with real problems and real human psychology. Characters in a novel are nothing more than words on a page. It is primitive to treat fictional people as real, as primitive as the spectator who rushed on stage to save Jesus from crucifixion.” Here is the crux of it: Characters in a novel are neither words on a page nor real people. Characters in a novel are possible people. When we think of their ethical dilemmas, we do not need to imagine that such people actually exist, only that such people and such dilemmas could exist.
2 comments:
For what it's worth, I totally changed the way I read when I heard a lecturer (on Homer I believe) comment "let's figure out what the author is up to." Oh, of course. These characters and situations are not in fact real, even nonfiction isn't really real. They are what the author is representing.
I started to put myself into not into the mind of the characters, but in the mind of the author and began to see things in a more meta kind of way. This author was arguing the world is all power politics and the characters are perusing their goals playing by that kind of rule. This author sees the world in a Marxist kind of way, where everyone is exploiting everyone else through all means necessary. Or so on.
This kind of reading got me to realize why some of the great novelists (thinking Tolstoy here) are in fact some of the great novelists. Although as a result of this approach I can no longer enjoy some of the writers I used to enjoy, it also allows me to enjoy some writers I never could enjoy before.
Daniel,
That's an important technique.
Re Tolstoy: While reading War and Peace I often had to put the book down and just marvel at his keen insight into human nature.
Michael
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