Good Readers ans Good Writers (extraits) - Vladimir Nabokov
« Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A
good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a
rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first
time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to
right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work
upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time
what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic
appreciation. [...] There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered:
he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an
enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher,
enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes
him a major writer. [...] Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and
it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to
grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the
imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems. The three facets of the great writer—magic, story, lesson—are prone to
blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic
of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very
marrow of thought. There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized
thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a
novel like Mansfield Park does or as any rich flow of Dickensian
sensual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality
of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry
and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise
reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with
his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale
tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when
reading. »
C'est le genre de texte sur la littérature, sur ce que l'on ressent quand on lit, que j'aime lire. Parce qu'ils reflètent ce que je ressens, ce que tout le monde devrait ressentir en lisant un livre. Ils font savoir ce pourquoi je lis, et ce qui fais que j'ai beaucoup de mal à comprendre les gens qui disent, presque avec fierté - et très souvent avec mépris - qu'ils ne lisent pas.