You Are What You Read As Much As What You Eat

Most readers are probably familiar with the expression "you are what you eat."  It can be taken either literally or figuratively: that the biochemical composition of your body changes on the basis of what you consume (possibly affecting your health), or that your diet reflects your values -- not eating meat because it is wrong to slaughter animals, rather than because it may be unhealthy.

Alternatively, perhaps you are what you read. That, at least is the opinion of one New York Times editor who, not surprisingly, deals with books.

At the moment, The Times is embroiled in a controversy over a recent "By the Book" column in which black American author Alice Walker, who most notably wrote "The Color Purple," is said to have exhibited anti-Semitism. This is because she listed as being on her bookstand a 1995 book by David Icke called "And the Truth Shall Set You Free" that includes material suggesting that a small Jewish elite, contemptuous of the Jewish masses, was responsible for the Holocaust.

Walker, whose only marriage was to a white Jewish lawyer, has been viewed as anti-Semitic on other occasions, in part because she has refused to allow "The Color Purple" to be translated into Hebrew on the grounds that Israel practices a form of apartheid with respect to the Palestinians.

In any event, Pamela Raul, editor of The Times' book review section, said Walker was chosen for an interview because that particular week's section was devoted to poetry and politics.

"She is both a poet and someone known to be very political in her work," Raul said, explaining that The Times does not choose people to interview on the basis of the views that they hold.

"If people espouse beliefs that anyone at The Times finds to be dangerous or immoral, it's important for readers to be aware that they hold those beliefs. The public deserves to know, That's news," the editor said. "The intention of By the Book is to be a portrait of someone through his or her reading life. What people choose to read or not read and what books they find to be influential or meaningful say a lot about who they are."

In other words, you are what you read as much or more than you are what you eat.

It's an interesting idea in part because if one is writing fiction -- and particularly fiction that doesn't rely heavily on plot -- the question of how one builds character is always present.

E.M. Forster on Virginia Woolf and Vice Versa

E.M. Forster was a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury group and a friend of Virginia Woolf although not a particularly close one. But they had a lot in common being not just novelists but critics of other writing.  So it is interesting to read what they had to say about each other. Each greatly admired the other, but not without qualifications. 

For instance, in a lecture on Woolf delivered on May 29, 1941, at Cambridge, two months after her death, Forster said that in her writings, Woolf “has no great cause at heart.”  Her works, he argued, are not “about something.”  Rather, as largely a form of poetry, they “are something” and when the poetry is absent, such as is the case with her second novel Night and Day and her penultimate novel The Years, her efforts fail, Forster said. 

Woolf wrote an essay entitled “The Novels of E.M. Forster” that was first published by her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1942. Virginia may have been reluctant to release it herself,  observing in the first couple of sentences that there are many reasons for hesitating to criticize one’s contemporaries including “the fear of hurting feelings” and “the difficulty of being just.” 

Whereas Forster felt Woolf had “no great cause at heart,” Virginia felt the opposite about him. She depicted Forster as “highly conscious of a message” and said “he believes that a novel must take sides in the human conflict.” 

 “Behind the rainbow of wit and sensibility there is a vision which he is determined we shall see,” she said. But she wasn’t convinced he was successful in getting it across, describing his message as “elusive in nature.”  Forester fails, she argues, to successfully connect his very satisfying depiction of actual things with the larger message he evidently wants them to convey. “We feel something has failed us at the critical moment,” Woolf said. 

Why, Woolf wondered, when Howards End was such a “highly skillful book” and she wanted to declare it a success did she feel it was instead a failure? While elaboration, skill, wisdom, penetration and beauty are all present in the book, “they lack fusion, they lack cohesion, they lack force,” Woolf declared. 

That’s a fairly damning critique for a work often described as Forster’s masterpiece and especially if one is supposed to come away from it with a message. 

But one can view Forster as equally disparaging of Woolf. 

Early in the afore mentioned lecture, Forster depicted Woolf “is not a great creator of character.” And later, he elaborated on that. As a modernist novelist, Woolf strays from the fictional norm in various ways.  Among them, “she does not tell a story or weave a plot, and can she create character?  That is her problem’s center.” 

While her characters worked on the page and seldom seemed unreal, “life eternal she could seldom give; she could seldom so portray a character that it was remembered afterwards on its own account,” Forster said, pointing to Jane Austin’s “Emma” and George Eliot’s “Dorothea Casaubon” as successes on that score. 

Were there any exceptions? “Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay do remain with the reader afterwards, and so perhaps do Rachel from The Voyage Out, and Clarissa Dalloway. For the rest [and there are many], it is impossible to maintain that here is an immortal portrait gallery,” Forster said. 

When one largely dispenses with story and plot, isn’t character what supposedly remains?