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05/10/2008
Literary Books and the Wandering Mind
I'm about 50 pages into Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which has been in my to-read pile for at least a year now. It's one of the books that looks interesting in terms of the overall concept of the story. In general, I'm not a fan of literary novels, nor am I a fan of Canadian Literary novels. So far, this is the only book of Atwood's that I've even been remotely interested in reading.
The Handmaid's Tale, like many literary novels, is so far kind of devoid of plot. The 50 pages have been describing routine life in the Republic of Gilead and in this one Handmaid's life. It's an eye-opening environment worth describing, but the whole thing is spent describing this environment and mundane daily life rather than actually doing something. So far the plot consists of this handmaid going shopping for eggs and meat, looking around her room, and walking down the street. I hope something interesting happens soon!
In these 50 pages though, I've come to realize what it is I don't really like about literary novels. They try to make too much of my (the reader's) thought process explicit. We all know about bad novels with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, or the ones that treat the reader like an idiot by explaining the dead obvious. These are the ones containing passages like, "Kayla was backed into a corner by the machete-wielding madman, who smiled like the cheshire cat beneath his black mask. She shook like a leaf and screamed. She was really really scared." Obviously (or, Hopefully) novels like this will never sit on the bookshelf of timeless classics. To me, many literary novels are a less obvious but equally potent version of this.
As I read The Handmaid's Tale, I realize that Margaret Atwood can get away with something pretty plotless so far because she's allowing us into the Handmaid's mind, and the Handmaid is toying with random observations, snippets of thought, and out-of-the-blue comparisons in her mind. For example, the Handmaid walks past a wall where there are bodies on display, hanged. The Handmaid comments about the unoccupied hooks on the wall, "The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside-down and sideways." What's good about the whole passage where the Handmaid is observing the bodies on the wall is that it really shows how emotionless her reaction to them is. She observes how things look and makes visual connections only; she represses emotional connections. But the whole novel is like this; making random connections. This is often how my own mind operates too: I'll see or hear something, and make weird connections to other things in my mind, unusual comparisons, etc. My problem with literary novels, then, is that the author is trying to do this, and my mind would normally also be doing this, so they interfere with each other. I guess it's kind of like doing chest compressions on someone who is already living; you can interfere with the heart's natural function. When I read a novel that is constantly making the connections my wandering mind normally would, it interferes with the smooth running of my mind and it gets irritating.
I suppose those people who are not bothered by this problem, and who love this sort of literature, fall into one of two categories:
1. They can focus so intently on the novel that they can reign in the wandering mind.
2. They just don't make any connections on their own; they have to wait for authors to do it for them.
Anyway, I'm going to try to make it through The Handmaid's Tale because I am fascinated by the context, even though my semi-conscious "back of mind" is having a rough go of things!
10:53 Posted in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this