Author: George Saunders
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For the last twenty years, at Syracuse University, I’ve been teaching a class in the nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation. My students are some of the best young writers in America. (We pick six new students a year from an applicant pool of between six and seven hundred.) They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space”—the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves—their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal.
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They’re great stories, in my opinion, written during a high-water period for the form. But they’re not all equally great. Some are great in spite of certain flaws. Some are great because of their flaws.
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The stories are simple but moving. We care about what happens in them. They were written to challenge and antagonize and outrage. And, in a complicated way, to console.
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In short, Steinbeck was writing about life as I was finding it. He’d arrived at the same questions I was arriving at, and he felt they were urgent, as they were coming to feel urgent to me. The Russians, when I found them a few years later, worked on me in the same way. They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.
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We’re about to spend some time in a realm where it is assumed that, as the great (twentieth-century) Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, “no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”
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So, the aim of this book is mainly diagnostic: If a story drew us in, kept us reading, made us feel respected, how did it do that? I’m
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So, the aim of this book is mainly diagnostic: If a story drew us in, kept us reading, made us feel respected, how did it do that?
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The main thing I want us to be asking together is: What did we feel and where did we feel it? (All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)
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To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer’s) across space and time. What we’re going to be doing here, essentially, is watching ourselves read (trying to reconstruct how we felt as we were, just now, reading).
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Why would we want to do this? Well, the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.