Memorial Day is a three-day weekend, a celebration of
summer, and a much-deserved respite. But it’s important to remember to remember—commemorating
and expressing gratitude. For writers, a nice way to reflect is T.S. Eliot’s quote
about our literary ancestors: “The dead
writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they
did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”
We know them. They influence us, whether we acknowledge it
or not, so we probably ought to. Every story is different, of course: Your own
voice, scenario, nuance on classic character roles. But where would your
characters be without Mark Twain’s Jim? Where would your scenario be without
Hawthorne’s cruel and gorgeous scarlet letter? Novelists have always reflected
and changed their world—and all of them helped create yours.
To acknowledge just a few giants, start with Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse, on the universality
of human emotion:
“It was love, she thought, love
that never clutched its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear
their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world
and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it,
could Mr. Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her
reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the
solution of a scientific problem.”
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness lets us glimpse the dark places of the world—and
inside our selves:
“Going up that river was like travelling back to the
earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the
big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.
The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of
sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom
of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned
themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded
islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted
all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought
yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far
away in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one’s past came back
to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself;
but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with
wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and
water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a
peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable
intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”
Or Jane Austen, from
Persuasion,
on our man’s world:
“’I do not think I ever opened a
book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs
and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these
were all written by men.’
‘Perhaps I shall.
Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every
advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so
much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books
to prove anything.’”
In The Heart of the
Matter, Graham Greene reflects on the human capacity to give and love—and
what that costs: “If one knew, [Scobie] wondered, the facts, would one have to
pity even the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the
matter?”
Herman Melville’s ending to Moby Dick evokes the loneliness of the long-distance everyone: “On
the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the
devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing
children, only found another orphan.”
Maybe your memory of Ishmael isn’t that we’re all lost at
sea but that someone made you read the thing. Maybe you’d rather have skipped it.
Doesn’t matter. These aren’t just books we’ve read (or pretended to). These stories
shape what we are—and therefore what we write, or aspire to. What novelist
could hope for a better memorial?
Tip: Read widely
in contemporary fiction—in your own genre. But never forget those who made your
genre what it is.
Science fiction started with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the mystery story with
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Pay attention to what
brought you to your own story. Who knows what you might start?
