Missed It in High School

For whatever reason, one that I can't remember, I was not in the advanced  or International Baccalaureate English program in high school, ergo I missed out on the assigned reading of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. I still remember seeing the other students running around with their copies and thinking to myself that I should like to read that book. Never did. Might need to take a hiatus from my "Thriller Only" year to read that sucker, particularly after having read this little piece by A.B. Yehoshua in the WSJ entitled The Limits of Imagination.

The most compelling passage in A.B. Yehoshua's article is this one:


In every work of literature, perhaps in any work of art, we may distinguish two principal forces contending with one another. Each pulls in its own direction, and finding the right balance between them is what gives the work its unique value.

On one side is the unbridled imagination—the primal spark, the fantasy, the fresh insights, the innovations in form and language, the raw originality that entitles a book to claim the attention of the reader. On the other side is the force that constructs and connects, that imposes logic on the content, winning the reader's trust, enabling him or her to relate to unfamiliar material. As a result, the reader isn't merely impressed with the fruits of wild imagination but consumes them, internalizes and identifies with them.

That tug of war between unbridled imagination and realism. How much will the reader believe? How far will they follow the author into their imagination before they say, "eh, not worth it, not believable."

This is why I am always so humbled by writers like Vernor Vinge and Isaac Asimov. Authors like these take completely made up worlds, they provide stories that are full of imagination but provide them to the reader in such a way that it's impossible not to believe them. It's as if they dare the reader to disbelieve them. It's all a matter of how far you can push the reader.