Monday, November 26, 2018

Reading As Eavesdropping

                                                                                                                                                                     Gerald Murnane

In recent years I’ve come to more fully appreciate the fact that reading literature is an exercise in eavesdropping—between characters and others, between characters and themselves, a convention certainly well-known to most avid readers. Yet to my mind the literature I so love is even more so a conversation between writers themselves, from country to country, culture to culture, generation to generation, a discussion to which, if we are attentive, we can listen, as through a keyhole or a crack in a door.


                                                                                                                                    Javier Marías

In their writing, Charles Dickens, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov chatted restlessly with Shakespeare; Virginia Woolf with Leo Tolstoy; Gabriel García Marquez and Toni Morrison with William Faulkner; Marcel Proust with John Ruskin, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens; David Foster Wallace with Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo; Jane Austen with Lord Byron and Anne Radcliffe; Haruki Murakami with Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Joan Didion with the great and inimitable Joseph Conrad. Even the case of a writer actively despising the work of another writer is part of the conversation, as when Nabokov said of Hemingway: “As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early 40’s, something about bells, balls and bulls, and I loathed it.”


Yet such conversations are not reserved for the great writers alone, but take place between all writers, every day, in every part of the world, whether their work has ever been published at all. For it is in conversation with other writers, especially with one’s favorite writers, that every writer finds her way. After many years of often dogged imitation of the work my own writer-heroes, of Proust, Woolf, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Camus, Nabokov, Gordimer, Abe, Oe, Oz, Bernhard, Sebald, Brink, Bellow, Lispector, Jelinek, Rulfo, Baldwin, Okri, Drndic, Niwa, Bolaños, Onetti, Soyinka, Benet, Krasnahorkai, Mahfouz, Saer, Énard, and Shalev, I have come to understand that my own writing is exactly and essentially that—a probing, restless conversation with other writers, a protracted, if de facto apprenticeship in language, character, subject, and form. For literally everything I have written I am indebted to the writers I love. 


                                                                                                                                                                    Nathalie Sarraute 

Presently I am at work on a novel that represents—more than anything I have written before—an explicit conversation with others writers, in this case with Gerald Murnane, Javier Marías, and Nathalie Sarraute. So intense is the conversation some days it is as if they are sitting here in the room with me, prodding me, joking, watching me work.
  
Peter Adam Nash