Between Experience and Exposition

Critics depend upon structured arguments to make their points. A novelist primarily structures not arguments for the reader but experiences. Unlike our more random encounters with the actual world, the experiences we find in a novel are entirely verbal in origin, and they are shaped by their creator specifically with us, the readers, in mind. As we progress through a novel, we live in its world with an intense, imaginative participation very rarely, if ever, generated in us by any kind of purely expository writing. Thus somewhere--exactly where, no artist and no critic has ever discovered--between the immediacy of a lived, concrete encounter, and the limited intellectual engagement created by expository prose, exists the mysterious participatory experience offered by imaginative literature.

The Religious Dimension of Jane Austen's Novels, Gene Koppel, 122.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Subcreation

Then I was beside Him, as a master workman; And I was daily His delight, Rejoicing always before Him, Rejoicing in the world, His earth, And having my delight in the sons of men. Proverbs 8:30-31 Isn't this what poets, artists and writers are supposed to do?
Read more

Treasures on Earth and Laying Up an Inheritance

I won a Persian rug off eBay. It arrived a week before Hurricane Michael hit the Florida coast -- only 50 miles east of us. As I cleaned up our little house, two truths lay before me in tension. The first is simply this: do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust and mold destroy, where thieves break in and steal, and where hurricanes ravage. The second is that the good man lays up an inheritance for his children's children. My momma has a Persian rug that her grandparents bought through the Sears and Roebuck catalogue when they married. She remembers dancing on that rug as a child, and I danced on that rug ... picking out step patterns by choosing which geometric element to step on next. So I bought a rug from the same region in hopes that my children and grandchildren will dance on it too. The rug by itself might not be that valuable. But more significantly, I hope that it becomes a tangible reminder of love. My paternal grandmother, although not a...
Read more

Immoral Equivalence, Self Defense, and Violence

Our descent into moral incoherence is well documented and frequently mourned. But it's still astonishing. I was reading an article about extricating oneself from Amazon's clutches because I would prefer to give Mr. Bezos a little less money. The article in question did not suggest that maybe Mr. Bezos has his fingers in too many pies and ought to have his influence curtailed before he overestimated his importance. No, the article made shooting people and offering NRATV as morally equivalent. This bothers me. Guns are  dangerous. And there are people aplenty who are much too excited about owning them. Others who own them and don't give thought to whether they ought to own them. Or whether their firearms might be accessible to the irresponsible and malicious. If I remember correctly, the Colorado movie theater shooter took his grandma's firearm. My father jettisoned his firearms when my brother became a passionate adolescent with minimal self control. (And he kept all o...
Read more