Wordplay: The survival of the novel and its powerful drip-drip-drip of empathy
READ MORE
When you have a bindi-eye lodged in your foot, you stop to remove it. Every summer, from Broome to Bronte, that ritual is our dance. Yet a person living with Hansen’s disease, as leprosy is known, lacks that inbuilt alarm; their neural links fail to signal pain, any prickle remaining embedded and slowly infecting the limb, leading to the foot’s atrophy. That’s a dummy’s version of the pathology, but the analogy lit a fuse for Guevara.
Peasant workers and indigenous people were the neglected margins of the body politic, and Che wished to rewire those lost connections. Ultimately he chose the Cuban militia to wage such a campaign, whereas we have fiction as a pathway, a choice embodying its own radicalism. The novel, says writer Jane Smiley, is “the drip-drip-drip of another’s consciousness”; the feedline offers insight and experience beyond our own.
Neil Gaiman, another author to tackle the novel’s phony obituary, highlighted a sinister algorithm in America. “I was once in New York,” wrote Gaiman, “where I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America.”
“The prison industry needs to plan its future growth – how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10- and 11-year-olds couldn’t read. And certainly couldn’t read for pleasure.”
The correlations were real. For those who choose not to read, or cannot, are destined to see their minds and futures shrivel. This maxim is doubly true for novels, our chance to overhear the dead, the diverse, the disparate. We can walk in their shoes, swoon in their bonnets, run with their kites. We can suffer their burdens and savour their survival, each novel an invitation to be more human.
Article source: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/search-for-alleged-train-upskirter-at-sydney-train-station-20181011-p5096l.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed
Comments
Post a Comment