I would enjoy being able to write coherently about the interrelation of a fiction writer’s mindset and biases and a reader’s. Or to read something coherent about it. I don’t mean the explicitly polemical stuff, or the reader who insists that his fiction meet certain political standards. I mean the way that a author (like anyone) perceives a certain universe, necessarily incomplete, and is more likely to match some patterns than others, and have sympathy for some people and so on, and through good writing, can perhaps superimpose some of that onto the reader’s own biases, leading to a kind of double vision. It’s more complicated than that, of course—the author’s biases are not transmitted exactly to the reader, but through an interpretive process, which will be different, one reader from another, for one thing. For another, the text is set in time, and doesn’t change, while the reader does. That not only affects re-reading but the reader’s memory of the text over time. The point is that the reader’s perception of the world changes, or at least I claim it does, through that superimposition, but not in any readily predictable way. If the differences in mindset are too extreme, the reader will be so uncomfortable he may reject the book or react against its filter. If the differences are slight, the reader may be able to easily reject the differences without rejecting the book.
Anyway. Very complicated stuff, and I think about it a fair amount, but don’t really think I can communicate it very well. It comes to mind with Robertson Davies; I recently reread Cunning Man, and found myself more aware of the double vision than I usually am with his stuff.
Mr. Davies and I have, I think, mindsets that are similar in some important ways. We are both, in our hearts, conservative, in the sense that we have a bias for age-hallowed tradition, and place a romantic importance on passing along the past to the future. We are also well-informed enough (Mr. Davies far more so than YHB, of course) to view the past skeptically, knowing that much supposedly age-hallowed tradition is bollocks. I also think Mr. Davies was humane enough to have little truck with Conservative politics; I don’t get the sense he had any enthusiasm for Liberal/left politics (and had a low opinion of trades unions), but that’s not exactly what I’m talking about, here. I mean that the narrow-minded Conservatism that gains political power through demonizing the Outsider would clearly have outraged him, as would the Golden-Age Conservatism that harkens back to something that never was. The hallowed traditions Mr. Davies views with fondness include public drunkenness, the abuse of younger boarding school students by older ones, street prostitution, widespread malnutrition and ignorance—not that these are good things, in his eyes, just that they are as hallowed as anything else, that he prides himself on knowing that there was no halcyon time while still, by nature, mourning the passing of whatever passes.
And YHB has more than a touch of that as well. That disposition to mourn the past, I mean. And I wonder, at this late date, to what extent that disposition was affected by reading a lot of Robertson Davies in my early twenties.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.