What turns me on

That got your attention, didn’t it? This blog post is, unfortunately, not about sex, but about what I look for when reading, what I value and consider important in literature. 

If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I’m interested in details. Not themes, not big ideas, not messages, but details. Some readers only care about the story, some are more interested in structure and the overall shape of a literary work, I myself pay attention to details: descriptions, images, metaphors, motifs, some subtle gestures or moments of things left unsaid—like the glances in Persuasion, light in The House of Mirth, things left unsaid in The Age of Innocence, the asparagus in In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, or the ship motif in Bleak House. I don’t like novels of ideas, moralism, preaching, and spoon-feeding, and don’t particularly like intrusive narrators. All that is the influence of Nabokov. 

But am I an aesthete? Not really, no. Between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I prefer Tolstoy (and see myself as a Tolstoy person), but between Tolstoy and Flaubert, or Tolstoy and Proust, or Tolstoy and Nabokov, I’d still pick Tolstoy. I do care about the writing and dislike bland prose (such as Stoner or Sally Rooney), and do love the prose of Melville or Proust or Edith Wharton or R. L. Stevenson, but to me style isn’t everything. I don’t enjoy style and language and wordplay just for the sake of style and language and wordplay; I don’t love metaphors just for the sake of metaphors; to some readers, style alone brings pleasure, style is all, but I’m more interested in what it conveys. 

I’m interested in characters, and the author’s vision. I don’t mean that I identify with characters—characters don’t have to be relatable or likable or strong or sympathetic—but over time, the books that have stayed with me and meant the most to me are the ones with complex, memorable characters. Characters are the reason, over a year later, Hong lou meng has come to mean more to me than The Tale of Genji. 

Generally speaking, my preference is for multifaceted, psychologically complex characters, characters who are full of contradictions, characters who feel like flesh and blood. That’s why my favourite novelist is Tolstoy, as he can inhabit his characters’ minds and depict the minute changes in their consciousness better than anyone else.

But I do love Dickens’s characters. Many readers complain that Dickens only creates caricatures, two-dimensional characters, but first of all, Dickens does create well-rounded characters (such as Esther Summerson, Lady Dedlock, and Sir Leicester in Bleak House), and more importantly, his two-dimensional characters are brilliant creations with a vivid existence within the world of his books. It is not a failure, but a different approach to characters. The Dickensian caricatures are too striking, too vivid, too individualised to be mere types—Harold Skimpole, for example, is not a type, the way that Monsieur Grandet in Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet is a type (a miser). 

Questions about identity don’t interest me. I don’t read in order to find myself in books (don’t I have enough of myself in my non-reading time?), and don’t need characters to be the same sex, race, nationality, or whatever in order to relate to them. Nor do I necessarily relate to characters who supposedly belong to the same group—this shouldn’t have to be said, but we’re living in a backward age. I’m also not a fan of the Strong Female Character trope, which is tedious and has been done to death.

Rather than identify with characters, I identify with the authors (or try to). The author’s vision is important. I don’t like Elfriede Jelinek or Joyce Carol Oates, for example, for the same reason I don’t like Lars von Trier in cinema: I don’t share their dark, hopelessly bleak view of life and human nature. I don’t get along with Balzac, or at least the author of Eugénie Grandet, because he is cynical and to me, a cynical view of humanity is not a deep view of humanity. I love writers who say yes to life, to borrow Joseph Epstein’s phrase; writers who give me glimpses of beauty when I don’t find it in life. I love writers who see people as complex individuals, not just types or members of a group or products of their environment. 

It’s because of vision (not just style) that I think more highly of, and feel closer to, Jane Austen than George Eliot. I can see that many readers see George Eliot as deeper, larger, and more intellectual, but to me, George Eliot is moralistic and her ethics are built around the central idea of sympathy, whereas Jane Austen’s ethics are more sophisticated—she deals with different moral values and principles, as well as different shades and degrees of the same values, and focuses on introspection, self-understanding, and balance. George Eliot’s greatness is easier to see, Jane Austen is more subtle. 

It’s because of vision that I now prefer Shakespeare to Tolstoy, even though in many ways I have been shaped by Tolstoy. If I have to name Tolstoy’s main fault, it wouldn’t be didacticism, because he’s not as didactic or preachy as people often claim; and it wouldn’t be misogyny, because the artist in him always triumphs over the sexist, and I think Tolstoy is the greatest at writing female characters. Tolstoy’s main problem (which is not in Shakespeare) is his complex and troubled relationship with sex, his unhealthy view of sex, which occasionally gets in the way and interferes with his writing, and in this case, I don’t think the artist in him triumphs.

Having said that, I place Shakespeare and Tolstoy at the top, above everyone else. You may disagree—different readers may value different things in literature. I personally place Shakespeare and Tolstoy at the top because of their depth and breadth, because of their deep understanding of human behaviour and the wide range of characters that they depict, because of their ability to see and understand and depict very different points of view, because of their compassion. That is the quality I value most highly.  

Literature lovers and book bloggers, join in the discussion! Perhaps write your own blog posts (and share the links below). What do you look for when you read? What is important? What do you most value?