To Make the Reader See

About the Book

The idea for this book began in a movie theater, The Loft, a crowded, ramshackle cinema that featured “Art” films.   The movie had not begun yet, so I glanced around, waiting.  Sitting right next to me was a young man with a book on his lap.  No, he wasn’t a student, I thought.  He was wearing work clothes of some sort.  When I saw what the book was, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I couldn’t help starting a conversation.

I was right.  He was, of all things,  a railroad engineer on the Southern Pacific.  “Reading Faulkner,” I remarked, showing some surprise that must have seemed condescending.  “Yeah, I like Faulkner,” (he didn’t say “dig”) but this one is a headache.  I can’t make head or tail of it.”Then, when I professorially called his attention to the title, he perked up at once, recognizing the allusion.  “I get it!  It’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.  Right?”  But then his face clouded over for a moment.  “How could an idiot tell a tale anyway?”

Good question.  He wasn’t really “telling it,” I suggested.  He was feeling it, experiencing it.  Faulkner is letting us look into his head.  That’s the point of view.  Fortunately my tendency to lecture at the drop of a word was arrested by the commencement of the movie.

For whom did a writer like Faulkner write?  Surely not for college professors.  Not for students either.  Nor for the French writer-philosopher, Sartre, who helped discover him. The great Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas tells us he exercised his sullen craft and art in the still night, not for the intellectual élite, nor for ambition or bread, but for lovers, “their arms round the griefs of the ages,” who, incidentally, paid no heed to the poet’s efforts.  Well and good.  Faulkner was for the lovers too.  But, like Walt Whitman, he surely intended to cast his net wider.William Faulkner  is, in my opinion, the closest we Americans have come to William Shakespeare.  That is what the Frenchman recognized:  that the American could make his Yoknapatawpha County, that “little postage stamp of native soil” a microcosm of all America, and, beyond that,  of all the human-inhabited universe.

Why should not a railroad engineer, a doctor, nurse, lawyer, merchant, CEO, housewife, rich man or beggar man not have access to the best writers of his or her country or any country?  If  readers  have the intelligence and the desire to expand their universe and experience, the gate is open. But there are challenges, stumbling blocks.  Artistic experimentation led to difficulty.  As time went on, story writers, like other artists, like the impressionists, cubists, progressive jazz players, had to discover  new possibilities.  “Make it new,” was the poet, Ezra Pound’s exhortation to young writers.   Poets like e.e. cummings delighted us playing games with words.  Fiction writers played games with time, with consciousness, with the nature of reality, and with the “point of view.”  

That is a term we all use every day with no connection to literature at all.  “What is your point of view on defense or abortion or HMOs?  But in looking at how fiction is made  (the word “fiction” derives ultimately from the Latin fingere, to shape, create, invent, make, as does “poetry” from Greek poiein, meaning pretty much the same) we find the t erm becomes part of the vocabulary of literary technique, for the way the story is seen–who sees it and how the narrators  personality and circumstances affect t he way the story comes to us.

In shaping their fiction, writers moved–evolved if you wish–from  using conventional points of view, the teller being “omniscient” --knowing what happened, what is happening, what will happen and what all the characters are doing and thinkin

About the Author

Arthur Kay taught literature to college graduates and undergraduates for some 30 years. After serving in the Air Corps in WWII, he wrested a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren, Lionel Trilling and other literary luminaries He thinks some of that must have rubbed off on him. Although he has long since retired, (he is old enough to have watched Babe Ruth play baseball) the urge to teach has proved incurable and this little book is the result. He lives in Tucson, Arizona with his wife Margarita, a splendid anthropologist, and two cats, whom he tortures with his clarinet. His second trade is cabinetmaking, which gave him considerable insight into how things are best made and put together–including poems, short stories and novels.