How Much Do We Need to Read to Have a Chance to Be Good?

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Hi Everyone,

First, two links that might be useful:

My friend and former Syracuse classmate Paul Griner, who teaches at the University of Louisville, asked me to reach out to all of you and let you know that the Calvino Prize for Fabulist Literature is open for submissions. The first-place prize package includes $2,000 and publication in Miracle Monocle, and, if the final judge selects a runner-up, that writer receives $500 and (new this year) the option for publication in Miracle Monocle. Past judges include Joyce Carol Oates, Matt Bell, Aimee Bender, and Brian Evenson, and this year’s judge is Elizabeth Crane.

Second, apropos of our recent discussion about Gertrude Stein, the Paris Review has just released this radio interview with Stein, in which she says, among many other things: “Coming back to the United States after thirty-one years everything seizes my interest and seizes it very hard. The buildings in the air and the people on the street they are all exciting and they are and I know it seems a funny thing to say but that is the way they appear to me, they are so gentle, so friendly, so simply direct and so sweet. I feel that way about the people on the street and I feel that way about the buildings in the air.“

Now, on to our question:

Hi George,

I hope this is the right place to message you. I would like to tell you how incredible Story Club is; how gracious you are in making time and space for writers; and how much I appreciate you answering our questions, but others have already done that far better than I ever will so I will merely say: Thank you. 

This might be a strange question. One of my favorite writers, Zadie Smith, recently was on a podcast over at the New York Times. There, the discussion turned to form, and how most art forms (besides maybe music) require a level of comprehension of their chronological history on the part of the artist. I am paraphrasing here, but she said something to the effect of, if you're going to write, it helps to understand the development of the novel from the 1300's of creative writing until now, how it's like eating a good diet: It creates interesting work in order. Music, on the other hand, almost works better freed from any hierarchy, that maybe it gets more interesting the more it strays. 

Ostensibly, this seems like it might be true, that a better understanding of the form of a novel could allow you to create better forms of the novel. (I'm not a musician and can't speak for that part.) And, well, I found myself wanting to do this, having a vague and imprecise understanding of the history of the novel. But I wanted to get your take on it, if you think this is true and well, how to do it?

So, does understanding the history of the novel make for a better novelist? And, a broader question, how much of what we bring to our writing stems from what we've read? Or, said differently, how much do our influencers influence us?

And then, if you wanted to understand the development of the novel, how should you just go about it? Or, what's one way to go about it? Should you just pluck novels from each era to read, like, well first Divine Comedy, then Don Quixote, Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe...and so and so forth, until you hit Pynchon or something – and as you read make an inventory of what's going on, like ah, well this is when novels were focused on moral allegories, and this is when they started to explore questions of class with realistic narratives.

Again, thank you for even taking the time to read this.

A.

Yes, I love this idea.  I think any serious artist owes it to themselves to know what came before.  (And, I’d say this is true in music too – consider this wonderful little video on the ongoing influence of Bach, by Rick Beato, on his YouTube channel). 

I say this, by the way, as someone who is not particularly well-read.  But even when I was young and in engineering school, and then working in the oil fields in Sumatra, I had the sense that if I didn’t want to waste my time doing something that had already been done better, I’d need to get at least a broad sense of what, approximately, had been done. 

And I did pretty much as you describe in your note: I got hold of the novels and stories I’d heard about, then tried to find out what had influenced those writers and read those novels and stories – but all of it in a very disorganized way.  So, I still have huge gaps in my reading. 

And I suppose, in some sense, if a person has read James Joyce (or any other well-trained writer) he is reading those writers who came before, as they have been synthesized into, say, Joyce – but better yet, the young writer should read the originals, and: the more of them, the better.

Although, however…

…re-reading your note, I might urge caution in one respect, namely this idea that “as you read make an inventory of what's going on, like: “Ah, well this is when novels were focused on moral allegories, and this is when they started to explore questions of class with realistic narratives.” 

My approach has always been just to read.  Read a book, let it do something to me; react to it by liking it or not liking it.  Maybe do some light, very opinionated thinking about it afterward, of the sort we do here – more technical and functional and classificational (Wait, is that a word?  If I’d read more widely I’d know, I bet)…and then move on. 

That is, I don’t feel the urge to draw any big intellectual conclusions about the path the novel has followed or the historical evolution of the short story or any of that – I just want that one example to enter my bloodstream.

Now, on the other hand: since that idea occurred to you, it might be exactly what you should do.  Art is weird like that.  It could be that you are, in that question, creating a hand that will scratch a certain itch, so to speak.  You never know, as we’re always saying here.  (Anything done with energy can yield results). 

But my approach has always been based on the idea that, when we experience a new work of art, it alters our path forever, even if, years later, we don’t remember what we read.  I recently had this experience with The Brothers Karamazov, which I would have cited as an influence from back when I read it in my thirties; but, reading the new translation by Pevear and Volkhonsky, I literally didn’t remember a single scene. And yet: I did read it back then, and it did move and inform me – it was a speck that my artistic being crystallized around.

So, I’m pretty generous with myself on this idea of influence. In truth, I’ve found a lineage and tend to read mostly within that lineage. I read what helps my work, rather than trying to read everything.

The danger there is that one can become incurious and trapped within one’s existing esthetic system, which can become a deepening, self-affirming rut.

And we don’t want that. :)

As a teacher, I can say that it’s hard to teach a student who hasn’t read much or…hasn’t read much beyond the immediately contemporary.  (I don’t get these students in our graduate program, of course, but used to get them when I taught undergraduate workshops).  There are so many subtle, submerged things being communicated by a work of fiction, and writers in other times had different ideas about what literature was meant to do. We, perhaps, got a taste of this the last two Sundays behind the paywall, reading “August” by Bruno Schultz.

So, yes: we should read as widely as we can, in order to know what other ways there are to think about literature than our current way. 

As Isaac Newton said: “If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”

Or, there’s T.S. Eliot’s powerful and important essay, “Tradition and the Original Talent,” in which he says: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.”

But I’m still working at this.  Because of my background, I never did a Great Book course.  When I was starting out, I’d read a little of some great work, not like it, dodge away, find another book, read from the middle…and so on.  I was just looking for whatever lit me up, gave me permission, instructed me on what to do next. So, there are truly embarrassing gaps in my reading that, even now, I am trying to correct. 

I try to think of it this way: the gaping holes in my reading mean I will always have an easy way to supply myself with a burst of growth: just read someone great and new (new to me, that is).

I remember about fifteen years ago, I read Sontag’s essays for the first time and was at a party, walking around yapping about her work like it was brand-new – which it was, to me.  And I got some good writing done in the months afterwards, reacting to this “new” writer.

So, rather than think of myself as, say, “a badly read imposter,” I try to think of myself as “someone with lots of growth-bursts ahead of me, which I will arrange strategically to last the rest of my life.”

Story Club: what do you think?  How well-read are you?  How important has wide-reading been to your artistic life, to your life in general?  Is there an approach or guidebook of syllabi you might recommend to our questioner?

And – for extra credit, let’s make a Story Club “Great Reads” list of our own: a reading list from 1300 to the present, with one novel chosen to represent every fifty years, and with that novel somehow containing the essential seed of what novels were, during that period.  (OK, this can be EXTRA extra credit.) 

By my count, that would be…sixteen novels.  Novels from any country/culture qualify.  And note that we are actually starting kind of late – many people consider the novel to have begun in the 11^th Century, with Shikibu’s Tale of Genji, or even before. 

Now, believe me: I could NOT fill this table in.  But maybe, together, we can:

1300-1350:

1350-1400:

1400-1450:

1450-1500:

1500-1550:

1550-1600:

1600-1650:

1650-1700:

1700-1750:

1750-1800:

1800-1850:

1850-1900:

1900-1950:

1950-2000:

2000-Now:

(It’s wild, when you type it out like this: ONE emblematic novel to represent 1900-1950 (?!)

But let’s give it a shot.  Remember: out goal is to inform some future novelist of what he or she needs to know to really contribute something new, that builds productively on the tradition.  And you don’t have to fill the whole chart out - even just one entry will be useful. (So, if you happen to know THE novel from 1450-1500, shout it out.)