the one bright book of life
According to Franz Kafka, a novel, if it is worth reading, should be ‘the axe for the frozen sea inside us’. This experience of “being wounded or cut into by the novel,” described by Franz Kafka, is equally an experience of illumination, with D.H. Lawrence calling the novel “the one bright book of life.” The novel’s illumination involves suffering because it is precisely the idealistic underbelly of the reader’s attachment to culture that the novel illuminates.
The novel is “brought to performance” as a “revolutionary aesthetic act” in the relationship between author, work, and reader. Novels require readers’ participation–internalizing the author’s vision–in order to acquire lived meaning. Readers, in turn, require the illumination offered by genuine novels to fully see “who they are and what they are up against both in the real world and in themselves–to the extent that they have unwittingly internalized the self-destroying cultural ideals of our world. (paraphrasing Jerry Zaslove, Panzaic Theory of the Novel xxxiv).