Love
An Element of Fiction
I am not talking about erotic sentiments here, I am talking about affinity; I’m talking about you, as a writer, loving your craft, and about the reader loving the fruits of that craft.
And I don’t think that love is too strong a word for the sometimes to-the-death love a writer feels for words and sentences and story; it is what makes his or her life worth living — and his or her writing worth reading.
I’m thinking of Christina Rossetti for some reason when I write this, for I think she lived for her poetry, I think her words and musing about them and her catching the vicissitudes (dark or not so dark) of her life in her poems is what her life was all about.
And I’m thinking of the reader who still shuns movies or television in favor of the well-written book, the well-told story that gives his or her imagination free reins to charge through the fields and (vicariously) live the splendor of story. There really is no feeling like it.
It really is too bad that John Gardner died so young, I would have loved to sit down and talk with him about the craft, and I have a feeling that he would agree with me about love.
He once said, “We read or listen to or look at works of art in the hope of experiencing our highest, most selfless emotion, either to reach a sublime communication with the maker of the work, sharing his affirmations as common lovers do, or to find, in works of literature, characters we love as we do real people.”
About loving the craft, the ever-practical and to the point John Fowles says, “If you wonder whether you should be a novelist, the answer is no, but if you find that you can’t stop writing, the answer is yes.” John Fowles
Virginia Woolf certainly agrees, “I feel refreshed. I become anonymous, a person who writes for the love of it.”
And back to Gardner, with this amazing view, “For great art, even concern is not enough. Great art celebrates life’s potential, offering a vision unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love. ‘Love’ is of course another of those embarrassing words, perhaps a word even more embarrassing than ‘morality,’ but it’s a word no aesthetician ought carelessly to drop from his vocabulary. Misused as it may be by pornographers and the makers of greeting cards, it has, nonetheless, a firm, hard-headed sense that names the single quality without which true art cannot exist.”
Let me repeat that: The single quality without which true art cannot exist.
I mean, how do you top that? Well, perhaps with this (Gardner again): “True art’s divine madness is shot through with love: love of the good, a love proved not by some airy and abstract high-mindedness but by active celebration of whatever good or trace of good can be found by a quick and compassionate eye in this always corrupt and corruptible but god-freighted world.”
Truly, love is the single quality without which true art cannot exist.
© Wolfstuff
More Elements of Fiction here:
More Wolf Stuff here:
