Reading and writing

So the latest Angus Ross Prize winner read only three novels in two years (from mrbrown and Nicholas Liu). And they were Dan Brown novels, which are less literary than mass market fiction. From what I've read and heard, mass market fiction is more entertainment than anything else. Okay, perhaps you learn a couple of things too - that some people out there believe Jesus got married and that if you look hard enough, you can find hidden secrets in Rome's famous sculptures and paintings.

It's been some 10 years since I was an Arts student in Singapore, but from what I recall, you don't really need to have read a whole bunch of books to write a damn good Literature paper. You need to know the required texts really well, possess excellent critical reading skills, and write smooth prose in a timed examination.

I couldn't read the main article in The Straits Times (because I refuse to pay for it), but according to Nicholas Liu, Ms. Wan says, "As I've grown older, I've developed my own style of writing poems and short stories, and no longer need to read novels for ideas or to emulate techniques." Good for her that she's developed her own style at age 17 or 18. After all, Jane Austen wrote her first novel at 14. My beef is with her statement about not needing to read novels for ideas, which reeks of arrogance and indifference. Surely the reasons for reading aren't limited to ideas and emulation. Literature allows us to learn and to know - to know others, the past, the present, and possibly the future. How will she understand other peoples and cultures if she doesn't appreciate the literature that they create? And perhaps she doesn't realize that it's still important to care about ideas and questions that aren't her own.

Susan Sontag wrote in her essay, "Writing as Reading" - "If the reason (for reading little) is anxiety about being influenced, then this seems to me a vain, shallow worry." She quotes another great writer, Virginia Woolf - "the state of reading consists of the complete elimination of the ego." Though Sontag admits it is hard to lose the ego, "that disembodied rapture, reading, is trance-like enough to make us feel egoless." Even if both writers use "ego' to mean "the self," the theory still works if "ego" also refers to "a great feeling of your own importance and ability"; if Candice comes across as arrogant, it's because she's read only three novels in two years!

Candice may think there's no further need for emulation but even Saul Bellow believes that "A writer is a reader moved to emulate." In any case, reading is still very much a part of learning and writing. In writing classes at all levels, we read as we write. Learn to write; write to learn. Read to write; write to read. Here again, I must quote Sontag - "Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. And, long after you've become a writer, reading books others write - and rereading the beloved books of the past - constitutes an irresistable distraction from writing. Distraction. Consolation. Torment. And, yes, inspiration."

Too, I'm not sure how much of a literary writer Candice is - whether she writes stories and poems that she hopes will be read one day - but if she does expect the public to read her work, she should at least be courteous enough to read novels by other authors. Imagine an interview -

"So what do you think of Edward P. Jones' latest novel?"
"Don't know. Didn't read it."

Or worse, "Who's that?"

Posted by Monoceros at March 28, 2005 10:12 AM