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December
16, 2002, Monday
THE
ARTS/CULTURAL DESK
WRITERS ON WRITING; Carried From the
Couch on the Wings of Enchantment
By REBECCA GOLDSTEIN ( Series ) 1270
words
Soon after I learned to read, I was given a library card,
and I made a strict rule for myself. On each trip to the library I would take
out two books: one would be a ''good for me book,'' meaning science or
history or at the very least biography; and the other would be a ''fun
book,'' which meant a storybook, pure make-believe.
I loved pure make-believe: what child doesn't? What was a bit odd about
the child that I was was that I did not altogether approve of make-believe or
of myself for loving it so much. So I dutifully took out books on American
history and science -- lots of science because I both liked and approved of
it -- reading these first before I would allow myself the bliss of a
storybook.
I kept the rule for many years. I would get my books on Friday afternoon,
since Saturday was pretty much reading day. In my family we were Orthodox
Jews, and there was not a whole lot other than reading that I was allowed to
do until sundown on Saturday, when the Sabbath officially ended. (There was
not a whole lot that I was allowed to do after sundown on Saturday either.)
At least my family never controlled my reading material. Only I did that,
restricting my intake of stories as if they were chocolates on which I'd get
ill if I gorged. Fiction for me was enchantment, plain and simple. Even
telling stories to my roommate younger sister, for whom I created a saga that
lasted perhaps years, I would lose myself completely, carried outside myself
by the force of a story whose ending I could not see even as I was telling
it.
The saga, by the way, had the politically incorrect title, ''The Stinky
Yiddishe Maidel.'' My sisters and I were constantly admonished to be fine
yiddishe maideleh, good Jewish girls, and I guess the saga about this
embodiment of female virtue, who happened also to reek, was a sign of the
skepticism to come. My sister Sarah and I would roll around our beds choking
on laughter, as each episode brought the righteous little paragon more
tsoris, or trouble. I certainly had no idea that there was any hint of
rebellion in me back then, but my stories sure knew.
It was through one of the ''good for me books'' that I first got a taste
of enchantment of a different sort. The book was Will Durant's ''Story of
Philosophy,'' and I was 12 or 13 when I carried it home from the library one
wintry Friday afternoon.
I cannot even remember the novel that accompanied it. But I remember that
I was curled up on our beat-up old couch, the one with the huge embarrassing
rip where my older sister would position me to sit demurely, my dress fanned
out over the damage, when her dates arrived. I was reading Durant's section
on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in
inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and
I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)
The Forms are abstract but real, I read, graspable only through the eyes
of the mind, pure reason. And it seemed to me, that dark winter afternoon as
I read, that I was grasping them; that I, a yiddishe maidel of questionable
worth, was seeing with the eyes of my mind exactly what that ancient Greek
philosopher had seen; that just like him I was out beyond the phantasmagoria,
suspended in formal perfection; that I was out beyond myself, had almost lost
all touch with who I even was, and it was . . . bliss.
After that Sabbath afternoon of rapture among the Forms, it was philosophy
for me, and I eventually got my doctorate in the field. During the period of
intense concentration when I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation, I had to
forgo novels altogether. The very day that I finished my dissertation, I went
out and splurged on a bunch of yummy, high-caloric novels -- great, big, fat
19th-century works (always my favorite) -- and I gorged myself. I would read,
say, the last page of Henry James's ''Portrait of a Lady,'' sigh with
pleasure and open up Thomas Hardy's ''Jude the Obscure.''
So for me there is some serious explaining to do, at least to myself, as
to how it is that, in addition to being a professor of philosophy, I am also
a novelist. I used to have a procedure to follow before I would allow myself
to read those marvelous things, novels. How can I justify actually producing
them?
And it does not help that my first and enduring philosophical love, Plato,
so completely disapproves. He famously banished all the artists from his
imagined utopia, finding them incorrigibly disruptive of the perfectly
rational society he was trying to devise. There were not any novelists per se
in ancient Athens; the closest approximations were the epic poets. But what
Plato has to say about them leaves no doubt that he would really have hated
us modern novelists.
Plato himself was a literary artist of the highest rank. He skillfully
shaped literary devices like dialogue, metaphor and allegory into his
seductive arguments. But Plato is wary of all forms of rapture other than
reason's. He is most deeply leery of, because himself so susceptible to, the
literary imagination. He speaks of it as a kind of holy madness or
intoxication and goes on to link it to Eros, another derangement that joins
us, but very dangerously, with the gods.
A novelist at work hears many voices in her head. There are the voices of
the characters of course and, less distinctly, the overall tone of the
narration: is it dreamy and associative, detached and ironic, fever pitched?
Sometimes even the setting in time and place seems to speak in a low distinctive
murmur. In the mix in my head, there is almost always the chastening voice of
Plato, challenging me for an explanation for all this laborious devotion to
the cause of make-believe.
And so I argue with Plato, and of course he always wins, since after all
he is Plato. Sometimes I argue straight with him, in philosophical articles
or lectures, but more often I try to write fiction that will silence his
voice inside of me.
I suppose that what I try to do, in writing to silence Plato, is to pay
homage to both the forms of enchantment that took hold of me at such an early
age.
What I always remember is the rush of ideas
that had carried me away beyond myself while I lay on that couch with its
stuffing spilling out. I learned there that reason is not cold and without
passion. And so I try to write fiction that does justice to this other bliss,
to reason's bliss, and hope to propitiate Plato.
Writers on Writing
Articles in this series are presenting writers' exploration of literary
themes. Previous contributions are online:
nytimes.com/books/columns
CAPTIONS: Photos: Rebecca Goldstein remembers discovering
Plato at the age of 12 or 13 in Will Durant's ''Story of Philosophy'' and
feeling ''that I was out beyond myself, had almost lost all touch with who I
even was, and it was . . . bliss.'' (John Patrick Naughton for The New York
Times)(pg. E2)
Copyright
2003 The New York Times Company
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