14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
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Plain talk
I am the quintessential bookworm; I will read books, magazines, newspapers and even publicity materials which people usually throw -- unopened -- into the wastepaper basket. Reading, contrary to what some writers claim, is an important source for writing.
Some years ago I wrote an article in one of our Arabic papers with the title "Our writers and reading." Its opening sentence read: "Many of our writers believe that reading ends when creative writing begins," which upset many indeed. I then went on to deplore the discrepancies one found between our writers and foreign writers who visited Egypt. That was back in the 1970s when we had an intensive exchange programme with a number of European, American and Asian writers. At that time there were active writers' organisations, like PEN and the Afro-Asian Writers Union. It was for us a period of discovery, including the discovery of writers about whom we had previously known nothing.
Reading has a fundamental role in enriching any writer's imagination. It is through reading that we get to know the experiences of myriads of writers, and to see the world through the eyes of others, an exercise in empathy that is essential for the creative writer.
True, a writer's life is one source that contributes to his ideas, but there is no doubt that the lives of other writers add to the personal experience of others.
I personally owe a great deal to the writing experiences of others and am perfectly ready to admit that I have been influenced by some of them. I remember when I first read Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up, a book that concerns his development as a writer. I still keep the book and pick it up from time to time, turning to a favourite passage. And sometimes I catch myself using a sentence, a phrase or an image created by other writers. I am surprised at my use of certain expressions that are not mine, but belong to others. Could I be accused of plagiarism?
Talking about plagiarism reminds me of an interesting story which I read a couple of years ago. Two writers, one English and one Australian, produced two almost identical novels. The two had never met or read each other's writing. Accusations were exchanged, of course, but ultimately died down.
How does one explain this? Is it some kind of creative telepathy? Are there certain magic connections between writers? This is a subject that needs to be studied by psychologists for I am sure there must be a scientific explanation for this.
I personally believe that the cause behind such creative similarities can often be explained by the effect of accumulated reading. Good books are read everywhere and I am sure that just as I was influenced by Maugham there are others who have been influenced by him or by Hemingway or Joyce, and that such influence operates at a subconscious level. One never sets out to deliberately copy another writer -- though imitation, it is undoubtedly true, is one of the most sincere forms of flattery. But one never quite writes in a vacuum. It is almost inevitable, this being the case, that the influence of other writers, indeed, the accumulated influence of all one's reading, will inform the final product, even if only on the most subliminal of levels.
So reading will go on, and whether this involves books or surfing the Internet makes, in the end, very little difference. Sometimes, when we talk or write about the eventual demise of books, a subject that has gained a certain fashionable currency, we think in terms of reading. But there should be a distinction made between the two. Reading will never die and I for one believe that books are likely to outlive us all, and that in the end this will be no bad thing.
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