Last time we talked about the Greatest Books of All Time list—I’m reading what I’ve missed of the top 100 and chatting about it here— I mentioned the novel Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner because it made allusions to entries on the list.
One is especially special: The time being described is the 1920s and stunning redhead Charity, flirting with her future husband Sid, asks if he has brought his usual Restoration Dramas to read on his visit. He replies, “I’m taking a break from those. I’ve just got some hole-fillers. Middlemarch, The Idiot, things like that, novels I should have read but haven’t.”
Filling in holes of what one “should have read” is no longer the concern it once was. Sid was studying for his doctorate in literature, so it wasn’t portrayed as common in the early 20th century, either, but still - he knew what books he ought to have read. Today there is no longer a sense that there’s a great list in the sky which is familiar to the educated. Even here where there precisely is a great list, I assigned it myself and odd it was to do so.
Both Middlemarch (23) and The Idiot (109) are on the Greatest Books of All Time list, though only Middlemarch in the top 100. Don’t cry for Dostoyevski though, he’s got terrific spots for Crime and Punishment (13) and The Brothers Karamazov (32). Funny thing is, I’ve read all four of these, but decades ago. I remember some truly formative feelings and thoughts from all, though not much else. The good a book does us is not all in the remembering. Still, I might well go back and read again.
Having read 23 and 109 (Middlemarch and The Idiot), the ones on Sid’s hole-filling list, I know that the first is about marriage making and the second about someone both spiritually wise and worldly stupid—a Christ figure in Dostoyevski’s modern Russia.
In fact, the more I mull on it, the more I sense that I was being given important information about these two. Charity comes to life in a new way when I associate her with Middlemarch’s Dorothea who wanted a husband whose work inspired her, limited on all sides as she was on her own. And yes, Sid is enriched when I think of him as an example of Dostoyevski’s titular idiot, Prince Myshkin. In real life you do get a Prince Myshkin married to a Dorothea, and in a way that fan fiction shipping is lived out in the book, in the real people that Stegner has known.
Literature is not a code, but like life, it relies on codes. Literature is not a game, but like life it is full of games. Maybe the above losses don’t matter too much, really, we don’t need such allusions and cross pollination but what if you said “Do cats eat bats?” and “Do bats eat cats?” and no one knew you were falling down the rabbit hole with Alice?
Allison von der Lahnd and her friend Dwight Raab-Eet.
Down. Down. Down. Alice in Wonderland (22) and its sequel, Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass (405), contain some of the most iconic characters and conversations in all of literature. When a talking dodo bird tells Alice, “Everybody has won and all must have prizes,” the idea becomes everyone’s. I wrote a post last Sunday about judging literary contests and only when I needed a title did I think of “All must have prizes” and only later, needing a photo for the post, did I think of creating an Alice and Dodo artwork. I never mentioned Lewis Carroll or Alice or the name of the book. (Just as Stegner never mentioned Yeats when he quoted him.) I knew you’d know it.
Maybe we can’t expect each other to read the top one hundred greatest books of all time in order to read the next top nine hundred with more depth, but as readers and as writers we ought to remember that such messages are being sent and received.
I love Alice falling down, down, down. The beginning of the great imaginative stories first take us elsewhere, the means of travel either descending underground or planeless flying. In Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (330) it’s a cyclone that lifts us out of this world and drops us into another, and with significant violence. In J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (498) the children are transported by midnight flight to Neverland (the book never ever ever says Never Never Land) by holding hands with the magical boy, Peter.
I love that when Alice is falling it goes on so long that she has time to grab a jar of orange marmalade off a shelf and then, disappointed to find it empty, she has time to put it on another shelf as she passes by. It telescopes moments in a way that loosens us from the grip of time and lets us linger.
We read for many reasons but one of them is to be a stronger writer, either by really engaging with the allusion, for pages, as with Stegner’s use of the Yeats poem “The Lake Island of Innisfree,” or by simply setting the allusion into banter or scene description, such as putting the book on the table in a character’s home.
Whatever makes that grand illusion successful can be enhanced with a grand allusion. Literature is not a code, it’s not a game. Well, it is but, not only. What matters is that we are each locked in our own skin and while we can talk, touch, and dance at each other, trying to say what is going on inside, a book takes you into another mind in a sustained way that becomes a world.
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The book framing today’s conversation, Crossing to Safety, is not on the Greatest Books of All Time list, btw, though as we’ve seen, it mentions several books that are. It’s author however does have two books on the list, Angle of Repose (846) (Pulitzer) and The Spectator Bird (4067) (National Book Award). If you’ve never heard of him, that might be another lesson for us in the impermanence of literary success.
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I’ll mention too that in writing these posts, I’ve been scrolling through seven topics.
Map Upside-Down, Paradoxes, Perspective Shifts
Atheism
Writing, Publishing, Speaking
Art and Art Making
Intellectual Self Help
What You Should Be Reading
My Poem
I had a few more, such as:
Poetry
Current Events, Notes on the Newsletter
What I Shouldn’t Be Watching - Culture and Media
So far the 7 above have been capacious enough to include the three additional ones. If you’d like to hear from me on any of these last three in a regular way, say so and, on your say so, I will do so.
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You’re doing great, just use sunscreen and for goodness sake, reapply! That goes for grad schools, contests, and promotions as well. Har har. Stay alive and I shall return to encourage you again.
love,
Jennifer