Rational Creatures, Moved by Emotion

Arnold Weinstein-the author, scholar, and winsome English professor-brings two fundamental beliefs to his assessment of literature:

1. That feeling is the basic, invisible fact of life.
2. And therefore, the basic but unacknowledged fact of literature.

 Novels, poetry, and short stories, Weinstein informs his readers, provide a gateway to the full scope of man's emotions, not just today, but through the ages. This, he believes, is fiction's gift to society, and a treasure we'd be foolish to squander.

Literature, the author writes, "explodes with news about the world of feeling." It conveys the mystery and tragedy of ordinary life: "the trials of adolescence and old age; of marriage and divorce; of love and loss...." With deft analysis Weinstein illustrates from notable examples: Bronte's Jane Eyre, William Blake's beautiful poem London, James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past...to name a few.

 I read Weinstein while I also enjoyed Pat Conroy's new novel, South of Broad. Conroy's not often mentioned in the company of Proust and Bronte, but he is, indisputably, a master of cadence. His prose, even if extravagant, is too lyrical to read just one time. Sentence-by-sentence-by the force of beautifully arranged words-he entices you into the story. And through the protagonist, Leo King, he delivers every element that Weinstein describes.

•   A traumatic childhood, scarred by a brother's bloody suicide.
•  A middle age quest to rescue a boyhood friend.
• The struggle to save an irredeemable marriage.
• The tragic death of his forbidden, first love.
• A storm's destruction of treasured places.
• Finding himself haunted by malevolent forces.

And forced to wonder what might have been, if he'd pursued the right girl.

 After Conroy, I picked up an old favorite, Home Fires Burning, by the underappreciated Robert Inman. Before I got 20 pages into the story the emotional struggles simmered-in the wondering mind of 12 year-old Lonnie, in his jaded yet loving grandparents, and in his remorseful 34 year-old father-alone, wounded, and freezing to death on a WW-II battlefield.

 With Inman and Conroy-who've both written engaging, accessible, and beautiful stories-we see, through the characters' emotional lives, and by the feelings, passions, and sentiments they stir-the significance of our own, unspectacular lives.

 In Leo King and Lonnie Tibbits-as well as in the lives of Ishmael, Emma, Huck Finn, Jane Eyre, and the Cat in the Hat-we get a glimpse of "our world, seen through lenses not our own, reconfigured and reconstituted at different moments in history, yet always telling us about human feeling."

Richard Doster is the editor of byFaith, the magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America. He's also the author of two novels, Safe at Home (2008) and Crossing the LInes (2009), both published by David C. Cook Publishers.

Sources that prompted these thoughts:

Weinstein, Arnold. A Scream Goes Through the House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life. New York: Random House, 2003.