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.