When a musically gifted person hears a piece by Leo Janacek, he experiences the joy described in Keat's immortal definition of how one enjoys art: It is a joy forever. A person without an ear for music will fall asleep. When someone with an ear for fiction reads a few magical sentences by William Faulkner, he will go through a similar Keatsian epiphany. People not endowed with a sense of linguistic beauty will stop reading mid sentence.
Since a teacher has to try with students both equipped and not equipped with a literary ear, his profession is often frustrating. Once I tried to explain to a class whose hard core were members of the college rugby team - they play rugby in Canadian colleges - what pleasures one can still derive from James Fenimore Cooper's double-decker romances, despite all the asinine plots and cardboard characters justly ridiculed by the realistic mind of Mark Twain. The truly beautiful evocations of the virginal forests of eighteenth-century America, enveloping in their fragrances and bird songs Niagara Falls, which are now enveloped by revolving restaurants, wax museums, souvenir shops, and endless plains of parking lots….When I was done, one of the rugby enthusiasts stood up and said, "Sir, what I don't understand is why I have to read six hundred pages of boring nonsense if I can watch The Deerslayer on TV, like I did the other night, and get everything that's in the book in forty minutes. Including the virginal forests."
Is there an answer to a question of this kind? I am sure that perfect zoom lenses and the chemical wonders of modern film stock created on his small screen colorful images of forests whose virginity probably ended just outside the frame. Ready-made beauty. The beauty of Cooper's evocations is, of course, encoded in small black letters on a white page. They require, as the platitude goes, cooperation from the reader. He or she has to exert the power of imagination, of memory, to perceive through the inner eye those immaterial beauties that truly are a joy forever. The little black letters plus imagination, the sensitivity for language plus reminiscence, bring out the artist in every reader capable of rejoicing over art. The images in the readers' souls are individual. Jennifer Jones was a pretty Hollywood star, but Hemingway's Catherine Barkley, in the manifold forms of human vision, is beautiful.
Good fiction brings out the artist in every sensitive reader to a much greater extent, I believe, than do the ready-made beauties of Technicolor.
But there is something else, and it is also connected with the teacher's frustration. Trying to explain the depth of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" to my class, I was unable to enlighten another thick-skulled youth who, despite my hints and circumlocutions, could not find out "what the story was all about." Finally, I was forced to utter the word abortion, and the amazed youth said, with the candid look of the literary innocent, "Well, why doesn't Hemingway say so?"
Indeed, why?
Thinking about it I realize that the principle is the same. Uttering the word informs the reader. Hinting at what is behind the word turns him into a cocreator, a filler of meaningful lacunae. I first figured out the great method for myself when translating Henry James' Aspern Papers. Sure, the main plot is an amusing story, full of ironies, supported by
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