The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (44-154)

When you need to document your outside reading, but you don't have a blog post due, create a post with just a title. The body can be entirely blank. When Mr. Proctor looks at the titles of all your blog posts, the pages documented should add up to at least 200.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (23-43)

Each chapter in this fascinating book is about a different patient studied by Dr. Sacks, a neurologist. This chapter is about someone with amnesia, who doesn't remember anything past his nineteenth birthday, even though he's an old man. In this excerpt, Dr. Sacks is interviewing the man for the first time.

'What year is this, Mr. G.?' I asked, concealing my perplexity under a casual manner.

'Forty-five, man. What do you mean?' He went on, 'We've won the war, FDR's dead, Truman's at the helm. There are great times ahead.'

'And you, Jimmie, how old would you be?'

Oddly, uncertainly, he hesitated a moment, as if engaged in calculation.

'Why, I guess I'm nineteen, Doc. I'll be twenty next birthday.'

Looking at the grey-haired man before me, I had an impulse for which I have never forgiven myself--it was, or would have been, the height of cruelty, had there been any possibility of Jimmie's remembering it.

'Here,' I said, and thrust a mirror toward him. 'Look in the mirror and tell me what you see. Is that a nineteen-year-old looking out from the mirror?'

He suddenly turned ashen and gripped the sides of his chair. 'Jesus Christ,' he whispered. 'Christ, what's going on? What's happened to me? Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy? Is this a joke?'--and he became frantic, panicked. (25)

What I find so fascinating and scary about this anecdote is how it shows what happens when we lose our memory. People are their memories, and Jimmie has been nobody for the last fifty years. What would it be like to have this kind of amnesia? It would probably be just the same as it is for the rest of us--Jimmy has no idea he's different until the doctor asks him to look in the mirror, and he immediately forgets about. Within a few minutes, he's happy again, a nineteen-year-old with a bright future ahead of him.

Another question I'm thinking about is whether the doctor's action was indeed cruel. If Jimmy is indeed nobody, than this was not cruelty. If Jimmy is nobody now, then is there any point to his continued living? Does his life have any meaning now? These seem like questions that will be answered differently depending on whether you believe in anything transcendent. If you think people's lives matter because people matter to themselves, or because people matter to each other, then (assuming Jimmy has no family) you might conclude that Jimmy as a person no longer exists. He's just a memory of himself. But if you think people matter because they matter to God or whatever you believe in, then you'll probably say Jimmy is still just as valuable as anybody else.

Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. New York: Touchstone, 1985.

Siddhartha (3-25)

If it helps, you might want to label the parts of your blog posts. Each post needs:

• Context: A little summary of what's happening, so we can understand the quotation
• A quotation: Anywhere from a few lines to a paragraph from your book.
• Questions: You need to respond to your quotation in some way. The easiest way to do this is to ask a few questions about it and then answer the questions. You may ask literal, interpretive, or thematic questions (you don't need one of each). More advanced posts might not actually have the questions written out, but the topic sentence of each paragraph is still asking a question implicitly.

CONTEXT:

This is from the very beginning of the book. I don't know much about what is going on except that Siddhartha is a boy who seems to have a pretty happy life. His parents love him, he has a close friend, and he is good at his schoolwork. This is the first time that it seems like he might not be completely happy with his life.

QUOTATION:

Siddhartha had begun to feel the seeds of discontent within him. He had begun to feel that the love of his father and mother, and also the love of his friend Govinda, would not always make him happy, give him peace, satisfy and suffice him. He had begun to suspect that his worthy father and his other teachers, the wise Brahmins, had already passed on to him the bulk and bets of their wisdom, that they had already poured the sum total of their knowledge into his waiting vessel; that the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still. (5)

QUESTIONS:

Literal: What parts of himself did Siddhartha think might not be fully satisfied?

Siddhartha thinks his intellect, his soul, and his heart are not what they could be.

Interpretive: How might Siddhartha feel about this lack of fullness?

I imagine that he might feel a bit of resentment, because he expects the adults in his life to provide him everything he needs, and he's starting to realize that they are not going to provide that to him. It's possible Siddhartha also feels guilt. Since he knows that his family is doing their best for him, and that he's lucky to have so much love, he might feel guilty that he doesn't feel satisfied. Or maybe he just feels a little bit of teenage restlessness, a need to get away from the predictable life that has been prepared for him and discover life on his own terms.

Thematic: Does everybody feel, at some point, like there must be something more to life?

I'm really not sure. I know that I have definitely felt this way at times, particularly when I have felt like my life is too routine, like I'm missing out on a lot of fun by being too responsible. Strangely, though, I have also felt like there must be something more at times when life is so great that there's nothing left to wish for. Maybe people need to always want something more, and when they are allowed to have anything they want, they get freaked out because they still don't feel satisfied.

Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. New York: Bantam, 1951.

Book name (1-60)

This post is a model of what you must include in your reading blog posts. You will begin your post by putting the quotation in context. This means telling us what we need to know about the novel, the plot, or the characters so that we can understand the quotation. You might also want to tell us what to notice as we read, so we are ready to understand the point you will make afterwards.

You must include a block quotation in each post. Block quotations are used whenever you quote at least four lines of text. Use block quotations when you want to discuss a section of text in detail -- your discussion will generally be at least as long as the section you quote. Block quotations are seldom appropriate in essays you will write for class, but they are perfect for blog posts because they give us a real feel for the prose of you book you are reading. Note the citation's punctuation: in a block quote, the page number goes outside the punctuation of the quotation itself. (123)

After your block quotation, you will respond to it or comment on it. Make sure you are not just summarizing the quotation. When you start new paragraphs, you may choose to indent the first line, as is traditional in print, or you may choose to skip a line, which is more readable on the screen. Choose as your subject one of the following:

• Ask and answer literal questions: What did you like about the excerpt or what did you notice?
• Ask and answer interpretive questions: What is the author trying to say? How do you think the characters feel here? What kind of reaction did you have?
• Ask and answer thematic questions: What is this passage about? How does it connect to other parts of the book, other books, or your life?

Finally, end each post with a bibliographic citation, so we can find the book if we want to read it:

Lastname, Firstname. Title of book. Publication city: Publisher, Year of publication.

How Fiction Works (50-248)

I just finished How Fiction Works, and really enjoyed it from beginning to end. Admittedly, it is kind of an English teacher book, but I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in thinking about the relationship between life and art, or in reality and why it feels real, or in how we come to understand other people.

In his chapter about character, Wood takes on the traditional division of characters into round and flat -- traditionally, your major characters are round, fully fleshed out with pasts, inner lives, and development over the course of the novel, while minor characters are flat, having one fixed defining characteristic. Instead, Wood argues that we should think of characters on a spectrum from transparent to opaque. The author asks what it is that makes a character real. While Nineteenth century novels tended to focus on extremely detailed characters, with every aspect of their lives provided in detail, Wood points out that some of the most intriguing, believable characters are instead extremely sketchy, with little detail and no motives provided. (He gives lots of examples!) I was fascinated by the following situation from Jose Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis:

Ricardo Reis, a doctor from Brazil, is an aloof, conservative aesthete who has decided to return to his native Portugal. It is the end of 1935, and the great poet Fernando Pessoa has just died. Reis is himself a poet and mourns Pessoa's departure. He is not sure what to do. He has saved some money, and for a while he lives in a hotel, where he has an affair with a chambermaid. He writes several beautiful lyrics, and is visited by the now-ghostly Pessoa, with whom he converses. Samago describes these conversations in a frankly literal and direct manner [...]

But Ricardo Reis is not a "real" fictional character, whatever that means (like David Copperfield or Emma Bovary). He is one of the four pen names that the actual Pessoa [...] assumed, and in whose persona he wrote poetry. The special flicker of this book, the tint and the delicacy that make it seem hallucinatory, derive from the solidity with which Saramago invests a character who is fictional twice over [...] This enables Saramago to tease us with something that we already know, namely that Ricardo Reis is fictional. Saramago makes something deep and moving of this because Ricardo also feels himself to be somewhat fictional, at best a shadowy spectator, a man on the margins of things. And when Ricardo reflects thus, we feel a strange tenderness for him, aware of something that he does not know, that he is not real. (108-110)

I found this section fascinating and chilling. The idea of a character who does not know he does not exist appeals to me, but I was really drawn to the way in which we can believe in and sympathize with somebody we know does not exist. I imagine that after reading this novel, my emotional response to Ricardo would be undeniable -- I would care about him -- and, in that sense, he would be as real as any other character in a work of fiction. Finally, I found myself comparing myself with Ricardo. How real am I? How do I know I exist?

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Picador, 2009.

How Fiction Works (1-49)

I just started reading How Fiction Works, which is one of those beautiful, irresistible little books with a smooth matte cover, an elegant typeface, a slim profile, and ragged, uncut pages. The book is a very approachable exploration of literary theory written in short anecdotes ranging from half a page to several pages. My favorite passage so far is an explanation of the importance of free indirect style:

Thanks to free indirect style, we see things through the character's eyes and language but also through the author's eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the bridge -- which is free indirect style itself -- between them simultaneously closes the gap and draws attention to its distance.

This is merely another definition of dramatic irony: to see through a character's eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can see [...] (11)

I have enjoyed the free indirect style in works such as Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it always felt like something significant was happening, but I could never find the words to explain the phenomenon to myself until I began to read this book. This insight -- that blurring the line between authorial narration and a character's first person perspective is a stylistic manifestation of dramatic irony -- is typical of Wood's comfortable, confident explanations.

I have been toying with the idea that literature is intrinsically valuable because it teaches empathy. When we read, we "stand in other people's shoes," as Harper Lee's Atticus puts it, and this teaches us to consider how our actions will be perceived by other people. Now I can take this idea a step further: when an author lets us into a character's mind, and then retreats back into narration, this models a more subtle form of social interaction. We learn to act with dramatic irony -- to consider how others will perceive our actions, and then to consider a truth beyond their perceptions. We learn to balance empathy with our own sense of right and wrong. Applying this lesson to ourselves, we learn humility.

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Picador, 2009.