Dickens on 'David Copperfield': "No one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing".
Do you read between the lines, or take the novels you read as read?
Cezanne’s actual paints (from Tate Modern exhibition, 2023).
I remember I had a flash of understanding metaphor as a tool for writing in my first year of secondary school (I was wearing my huge blue school blazer) in an English lesson when studying the poem ‘The Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyes. The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over a purple moor - ah, the penny dropped! (I could see the ribbon! But it was a road! And somehow it made me understand something about the road though the ribbon!)
But of course, out in the world, semiotic understanding goes much further back than that - pre-books, we are taught that the green man is standing in for its meaning, before that that the bottle teat is a nipple. Time and again, something stands for something else. Then the first big, magic thing happens: sounds aquire meaning. Sounds signify a word which signifies something else. We join in with this worldwide eons-long game called Language. We are so wired for the game that we play it, seemingly, naturally. Then it gets trickier, the rules more mysterious. We have to learn that words often don’t mean what they are supposed to mean. All gloves and bets are off when we play Language.
My 4-year-old neice already understands metaphor without knowing she does; when her mum tells her to ‘hang on a minute’, she gets it and doesn’t try to climb her way up to dangle from the hands of the grandfather clock. When she tells me she’s ‘looking forward to her 5th birthday coming up’, she not literally moving her eyes further down the road to see her fifth birthday coming running towards her, holding balloons. Though that would be fun. She’s turning 5 and already knows to take the talky talk and the ready read with a huge pillar of salt, tongue placed firmly in cheek.
Next, the second big magic, we learn that written words unlock new worlds. That these marks of pencil, ink and digital pixels hold multitudes. (A friend once said she thinks reading books is insane when you think about it: staring at tree bark with marks on it, hallucinating wildly. I suppose it is. It’s completly mad.)
I didn’t consider a whole novel to be a metaphor until we did Animal Farm at school and Orwell made it really obvious. Then I could think back at all the other stories in my head, from The Tiger Who Came To Tea to Little Women and try to see how they might be at once about the stories they tell on the surface and about something else as well. Reading became not just about decoding the meaning of the words and the story. I could also ponder what the bigger story being told might be. It wasn’t until university that we’re really trained to see novels in that way, though.
I was a literary festival a couple of years back where an elite publishing house was promoting its newest wares. One of the speakers told us, '“this book is just brilliant - it’s a metaphor in a book”. My friend looked at me and whispered, “of course it is, what else would it be?”
Some of my students get it at a much younger age than I did. They ask questions like, “is Mary Shelley is really writing about how hard it is trying to be a mother and a woman, even though it’s told through men’s eyes?” or “Don’t you think Never Let Me Go shows how humans just have to try and create meaning where there is none using Art, and none of us is any different to the Hailsham children, grown for their organs?” Some readers instinctively want to glean meaning beyond the people, places and things of the books’ cosmologies. And some of us easily forget that Life of Pi isn’t really just about a boy on a boat who thinks there’s a tiger when there isn’t one. How far do we read into the book and how much do we take it, as we say, as read? When we read the book, we are all Pi, after all. Do we lose this ability to merge with the voice that talks to us when we study too much?
Right now I’m bereft: I’ve just finished the Künstlerroman* Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. I’m not ready to give up the feeling of living in Demon’s mind. Or Damon Fields, to call him by his birthname. He’s told me everything, as much as he can remember. I believe him. There’s no part of me striving to leave him behind and deconstruct the novel. His story had to be as it was, it made him who he is at the end. See, I’m talking about Damon like he’s someone I know in the world. (I wrote a little poem from his perspective, it’s here.)
Barbara Kingsolver wrote Demon Copperfield in the years up to 2022, using Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, serialised May 1849 to November 1850, as a roadmap. In Dickens’ preface to his novel he writes:
no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I have believed it in the writing.
For the novel to allow such transcendence, the writer had to believe in the story even more than you do reading it.
The best writers don’t show the cogs, wheels, chains and pullies - lovely metaphors for thinking, there - of their world-building. Or rather, they do show us what appear to be the operations of a mind at work, a memory system and if it’s true to what we’ve personally fathomed about how brains work from having one ourselves, then we believe them entirely. Once the telling is true, then you can tell us anything, however improbable, and we’re there.
I think of reading not as an activity; with the right books, it’s more like a state of being, like hunger, or pain or love. If you’re seeing through the eyes of a well-written protagonist, it’s most like love. It’s just sitting, imagining and really willing someone else to be happy. That’s how reading Demon Copperhead felt.
It’s the people, places and things that we’re left with in the end. In the best books, the ones that stay with you forever, you remember the characters like old friends. Damon and Angus from Demon Copperhead. Celie and Nettie from The Colour Purple. Jane from Jane Eyre.