“Why can’t the books we come across at thirty, or forty, or fifty, affect us in quite the same way as the book about the children who were turned into flying mice that we read when we were eight?”
I was reading this post by Ben Greenman over at Bookslut, and for some reason I glanced over at a calendar, and I realized that aside from a couple short shorts, I hadn’t written a god damned creative thing in six months. I felt guilty because I was becoming yet another person with a degree in writing who doesn’t write, but I didn’t feel sad. I felt relief that I hadn’t spent all that time working on the MFA-type rule-driven (No adverbs on pain of death!) fiction I’ve been writing but that I really, if I’m honest with myself, have little interest in.
Last week, I went to the Walt Disney Museum here in San Francisco. On the one hand, it was a terrifying experience: room after room devoted to celebrating the man, his McCarthyism on display without any real sense that the company now regrets it. It was like walking into the indoctrination chamber of a particularly wealthy cult.
But at some point, as I was watching this Christmas movie where he asked Tinkerbell to make it snow in LA, I remembered how I would watch Fantasia over and over as a child, not leaving the couch for hours. And it was then I finally admitted to myself why Disney, George Lukas, JK Rowling, and even John Grisham and Danielle Steele were to be envied not for their success but for something else: These people, like so many classic writers, remembered that this storytelling business was supposed to be fun, and they cast no aspersions on those who wanted to be taken to magical worlds.
So when did so many literary writers just hand this fun part of storytelling over to the Disneys of the world? Lev Grossman has an interesting take on this. Whatever the reason, I can’t tell you how many professors and writers I’ve spoken to who have said things like, “I can’t remember the last time I read for pleasure,” or “There’s two kinds of readers: those who read to escape and those who read to interact with the world.”
To which I say, “Why are you making your life so hard?” I can see why people in academia might think they need to make their work “serious” to satisfy their department chairs. But I counter with the thought that losing myself is serious business. I want to lose myself in stories, not to escape but because that’s the state where I’m most receptive to learning new things. Not in the sense that I could write a paper on what I learn, but in the sense that like a child, I’m rewiring my brain with the help of a new world, which is in a sense a new lens. And as a reader, as an adult, I want to lose myself in the hands of someone I respect, a literary author. Not Walt Disney or Danielle Steele.
In his Rumpus Book Club interview, Jonathan Franzen said, “… I want the writing to be an invisible medium of writer-to-reader transmission.” I love Franzen, but didn’t so many classic books have visible, beautiful sentences that still allowed readers to be lost in a story? Why can’t they now? Maybe that’s what this GIANT post about the end of lyric writing in America is dealing with. I’m not asking literary writers to become Disney; I don’t want that. Instead, they can do something new, something better. They can create worlds that leave me awestruck and feeling like I’ve gained a little bit of wisdom when I’m done with them.
So I went to the bookstore and bought AS Byatt and Jonathan Lethem and David Mitchell and others who at least I think accomplish this and I’m going into my room to get lost for awhile. Hopefully when I come out in the New Year, I’ll want to make worlds again.
Note: There’s a whole field of research on “ludic reading,” which I didn’t go into because this is long enough, but there’s a handy write-up here.
