“reading itself was seen as a kind of possession: an encroachment of the ‘other’ upon the self.”
“in treating novels as the ultimate nutrition for the brain, do we risk neutralising their potency?”
“novelists and writers themselves drew attention to and critiqued the writer’s singular power over his readers.”
“Many of these authors – the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in Denmark, the Decadent novelists Julés-Amedée Barbey D’Aurevilly and Octave Mirbeau in France, or Oscar Wilde in England – were responding to a wider intellectual trend in the 19th century: the configuring of the artist as a kind of replacement Creator-deity in an age turning away from traditional authoritarian conceptions of God; a quasi-divine artist whose words, according to the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’.”
“Writer-philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schlegel drew on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to celebrate the power of the human mind to impose order and form on the chaos of the world, and envisioned the artist or storyteller figure as a kind of über-Mensch, or superman, who could wield the organising power of narrative to lend form to the void.”
“Novels, Miller says, do ‘not imitate life but reinscribe received ideas about the representation of life in art. To depart from the limits of common sense… is to risk exclusion from the canon.’”
“Historically speaking, control of narrative and language has been inextricable from notions of political and cultural control. The power of the writer is to decide which characters, which worlds, he treats as fully human, and which as reducible and other.”
“Storytelling is inextricable from power: the act of reading is, for better or worse, an act of submission to an external force granted the privilege of language, of narrative organising. At its best, reading novels might be as salutary as recent studies allege. But at worst, novels – in all their dangerousness – can erode at our sense of self”
“We assume that all books, all stories, are ‘safe’, and in so doing we deny texts their power, to paraphrase T S Eliot, to murder and create.”
“At its most fundamental level, to read is to put our selves at risk, to make ourselves vulnerable by welcoming the presence of an other into our psychic space. This can be a radically transformative experience, challenging us to reformulate our own self-understanding. But at worst, we become like the dinner-party guests in The Torture Garden or Don Juan – our ‘possession’ by a storyteller awakening our inner violence.”
“Either way, the act of reading is an act of acceptance of power: a power that, if not god-like, is nevertheless – within the sphere of the text – absolute.”