(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Nabokov was a Russian novelist and poet.
A good reader of novels is “one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense” (Nabokov 1980, 3). To profit from literature requires a collaboration between reader and writer, both of whom are kind to each other (p. 2):
Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever
It is only fair that, as the master novelist used their imagination to write, the reader uses theirs to read (p. 4). This can be difficult “when the sullen reader is confronted by the sunny book”, requiring the reader enter into the spirit of the game (ibid.). There are two varieties of imagination that a reader can bring to a book, one superior to the other. The inferior kind “turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature” (ibid.). For example, we intensely feel a situation in a book because it reminds us of an event in our experience, or evokes nostalgic memories, or we identify with a character (ibid.). Instead, Nabokov wished to teach the reader “to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author—the joys and difficulties of creation” (p. 382).
The reader, therefore, should employ “impersonal imagination and artistic delight”, achieving a harmonious balance between their mind and the author’s (p. 4). As readers (ibid.):
We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece
We must know when to curb our imaginations by visualising the world the author is creating: we need to see and hear the rooms, the clothes, and the people it contains (ibid.). Yet “great novels are great fairy tales” so we shouldn’t expect to learn information about certain places or times by reading them: “To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth” (pp. 1–2, 5).
As a fairy tale, great literature invariably creates a new world. Minor authors ornament the commonplace, but the real writer creates values themselves (p. 2). This is why coming to a novel with a preconceived notion of what it is about is unfair to the author: “If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it” (p. 1). Our responsibility as reader, therefore, is to closely study this new world, approaching it as brand new with no obvious connection to what we know of our world (ibid.). Only having done this should we examine any associations with other worlds or branches of knowledge (ibid.). Having “lovingly collected” the “sunny trifles”, noticed and fondled the details, then we’re free to generalise (ibid.).
Inhabiting this world requires that we are a re-reader (p. 3). We can only re-read, in fact, because the “the complicated physical work upon the book”, the laborious process of “moving our eyes from left to right”, prevents our artistic appreciation (ibid.). We cannot take in the author’s world because this physical reading process stands in the way. It takes multiple readings until “we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting”, i.e. take in the whole picture without the element of time (p. 1).
So, we should develop a temperament combining the artistic and the scientific: the enthusiastic artist tends to be too subjective, while the reader utterly devoid “of an artist’s passion and a scientist’s patience” won’t be able to enjoy great literature (pp. 4–5). Indeed, a “great writer is always a great enchanter”, so “a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science” (pp. 5–6). We should read great books not with our hearts, not with our brains, but with our spines because it is “there that occurs the telltale tingle” (p. 5). We need to keep slightly aloof and detached, but experiencing “that tingle in any department of thought and emotion is the”main thing” (p. 382):
We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer