As part of V–A–C Sreda’s special New Year issue, we publish an essay on the creative nature of reading fiction by Valentin Ferdinandovich Asmus, one of the most important twentieth-century philosophers and literary specialists.
Asmus analyses the widespread misconception of the reader’s “inactivity”, which is based on the view that understanding and evaluation of a work depends on the clarity of the author’s thoughts and the power of his images. However, a full-fledged perception of an artistic text cannot take place without the reader’s own mental and spiritual activity. Asmus identifies the two necessary conditions for such a “dialogue” to be possible, and shows why the difficulty of a work is an extremely relative judgment.
“Reading as labour and creation…” To readers who have never considered the question formulated by this title, the question itself might seem questionable. “When I read a poem, a book of poems, a story, a novel, ” a reader might say, “I don’t at all want to ‘labour, ’ and I don’t ‘create’ anything. In the process of reading I am looking first of all for entertainment. I understand that the author had to ‘labour’ and to ‘create’—otherwise he wouldn’t be able to hold my attention, to fill my leisure time, to amuse me, to excite me, to move me. But what can my ‘labour’ and all the more my ‘creation’ consist of, as a reader? It can hardly be that this labour is more than what is required to read through any printed text. Most likely this ‘labour’ ought to be even easier than any other labour of reading. In order to read a book on quantum mechanics, one has, of course, to work. But what ‘labour’ and all the more what ‘creation’ is necessary for the reading of, for example, Quiet Flows the Don, Anna Karenina, or a poem by Pushkin?
This objection is perfectly understandable. It derives from the fact that the majority of readers are neither disposed nor able to follow the work of their own thought that takes place when they read a work of literary fiction. What is interesting to them is not, of course, this work, but that world, that piece of life that passes through their field of consciousness during the process of reading. They do not guess at what work is required from the reader for the life depicted by the author to arise “secondarily” and become life for his reader too.
The views of such readers on the process of reading recalls Gogol’s story about how the sorcerer Patsyuk had lunch. The sorcerer did not labour. Before him was a plate of vareniki and a bowl of sour cream. The vareniki, moved by wizardly power, jumped into the bowl themselves, turned over in the sour cream themselves, and flew straight into Patsyuk’s mouth themselves.
But the process of reading is not at all similar to Patsyuk’s lunch. During reading, no sorcerer’s force turns vareniki over in sour cream or sends them into the hungry person’s mouth. In order for reading to be fruitful, the reader must labour himself, and no miracle can free him from this labour. Besides the labour necessary for the simple reproduction of the sequence of phrases and words from which a work is composed, the reader must expend a particular, involved, and, indeed, truly creative labour.
This labour is necessary for the creation of a particular situation that makes reading the reading of a work of fiction and nothing else.
Reading of a work of fiction, the reader enters a peculiar world. Whatever might be recounted in the work, whatever it might be in terms of its genre, artistic direction—realistic, naturalistic, or romantic—the reader knows, be it even unconsciously, that the world (or the “fragment” or “piece” of the world) into which the author leads him is a truly singular world. Two features constitute its singularity. This world, firstly, is not the result of pure fabrication, is not a complete fiction without any relation to the real world. The author may have a powerful fantasy, the author may be Aristophanes, Cervantes, Hoffman, Gogol, Mayakovsky—but, however strong the power of his imagination may be, what is represented in his work must be reality for the reader, if a singular one.
For this reason, the first condition necessary for reading to occur as the reading of a work of fiction is a particular state of mind operating in the reader for the full time of reading. In this state of mind the reader relates to the read or the “seen” through reading not as the embodiment of a fabrication or fiction, but as a peculiar reality.
The second condition for the reading of a work as a work of fiction might seem opposed to the first. In order to read a work as a work of art, the reader must be conscious through the whole time of reading that the piece of life shown by the author through art is not actual life, only its image. The author may represent life with the utmost realism and truthfulness. But even in this case the reader must not take the fragment of life represented in the work for actual life. Believing the picture painted by the artist to be the reproduction of life itself, the reader also understands that this picture is not genuine life itself, only its representation.
Both the first and the second states of mind are not passive states into which the author and his work cause the reader to fall. Both the first and the second state are particular operations of the mind on the part of the reader, particular works of his imagination, empathic attention, and understanding.
The mind of the reader is active during the time of reading. It resists both the hypnosis that invites him to take the images of art for the actual manifestation of life itself, and the voice of scepticism that whispers to him that the representation by the author of life is not really life, only a fabrication of art. As a result of this activity the reader actualises a peculiar dialectic over the course of reading. He simultaneously sees that the images moving in his field of vision are images of life, and understands that they are not life itself, only its artistic representation.
That both noted states are not simple and not passive readerly “states of consciousness”, that they presume a particular operation of mind, is clearly visible in those cases where one of the two states is absent. As soon as the operation of mind necessary for the noted twofold understanding of works of art ceases, the perception of the work as a work of fiction falls apart immediately, cannot take place, “degenerates.”
Important writers have often represented the deadly results for art of an absence of both states of intellectual activity necessary for the reading of works of fiction. In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Pavlovich allows Smerdyakov to read Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. He returns the book with evident displeasure. To the question of why the book did not please him, he answers: “Everything written is about untruths.” The reason for the Smerdyakovskian verdict is a pathological stupidity of aesthetic and moral imagination. Smerdyakov is incapable of understanding that a work of art is at once “untruth” and a special kind of “truth, ” represented through the means of artistic fabrication.
The opposite flaw in the labour of the readers is infantile credulity, a loss of the understanding that what is before you is a fabrication, a work of art—put differently, the defect of direct identification of the fabrication with reality. This flaw is represented in Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The hero of the novel visits a production at a marionette theatre. Mad for tales of chivalry representing the heroic deeds of knights defending the wronged and the persecuted, Don Quixote attentively follows the action and listens to the “explanations.” At the start of the production, he is still clear on the fact that what he perceives is not reality but a work of art. He even corrects the little boy providing the explanation, exposing his historical inaccuracy. But then the dramatic situation intensifies. The princess, taken prisoner by the Moor, flees captivity with her beloved. The Moorish guard, on becoming aware of their escape, rush after them in pursuit. As soon as Don Quixote sees that the horde of Moors who have appeared on stage are catching up with the enamoured knight and his princess, he jumps up from his bench, draws his sword from its sheath, and begins to strike down the figures of the Moors.
A process opposed to what took place with Smerdyakov takes place in the perception and consciousness of Don Quixote. Smerdyakov believes in nothing, which means that he is only capable of seeing the fabrication, the “untruth” in what he tries to read. Don Quixote, on the other hand, is not capable of discerning the fabrication in fabrication, and takes everything as truth.
In neither case can reading (or perception) take place as reading and perception of a work of fiction. In both cases, the dialectics of fabrication necessary for reading and perception is absent.