In a Nutshell

by Donald Hall (1928 – )

What’s Good, What’s Bad

The claims I make for fiction are large: that it alerts and enlarges our minds, our connections with each other past and present, our understanding of our feelings.  These claims apply to excellent literature only.  This suggests that some fiction is better than other fiction, and that some narratives are not literature at all.  Even if judgments are always subject to reversal, even if there is no way we can be certain of being correct, evaluation lives at the center of literary study.

When I was nineteen, I liked to read everything: science fiction, Russian novels, mystery stories, great poems, adventure magazines.  Then for six months after an accident, sentenced to a hospital bed and a body cast, I set myself a reading list, all serious books I had been thinking about getting to.  Of course there was a background to this choice: I had been taught by a good teacher who had directed and encouraged and stimulated my reading.  I read through Shakespeare, the Bible in the King James version, novels by Henry James and Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Toward the end of six months, taking physical therapy, I hurried to finish the books I had assigned myself; I looked forward to taking a vacation among private detectives and adventurers of the twenty-fourth century.  I thought I would take a holiday of light reading.

When I tried to read the light things, I experienced one of those “turning points in life” we are asked to describe in freshman composition.  I remember the dismay, the abject melancholy that crept over me as I realized – restless, turning from book to book in search of entertainment – that these books bored me; that I was ruined for life, that I would never again lose myself to stick-figure characters and artificial suspense.  Literature ruined me for light reading…

I don’t mean to say that I was able to give reasons why Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel about a murder was better than Agatha Christie’s or why Aldous Huxley’s view of the future, thought less exciting, was more satisfying than Astounding Science Fiction’s.  But I began a lifetime of trying to figure out why.  What is it that makes Chekhov so valuable to us?  The struggle to name reasons for value – to evaluate works of art – is lifelong, and although we may never arrive at satisfactory explanations, the struggle makes the mind more sensitive, more receptive to the next work of literature it encounters.  And the mind becomes more sensitive and receptive to literature, it may become more receptive to all sorts of things.

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Posted on August 15th, 2009 under DeVry, Literature • Tags: Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Literature, meaning, reading, science fiction. • • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback