Ian Warden | When it takes some guts to read a book

Before you all unthinkingly chorus "The heart, of course, beloved but sometimes perplexing and overly-analytical columnist!" do read this horizon-widening excerpt from a timely piece in the online The Critic magazine.

Kit Wilson's piece Read For Pleasure is timely because his subject is the New Year's resolutions so many folk have just taken about what and how much they will read in the new year.

On his way to his theme Wilson suggests that "we read for pleasure, for joy, for wisdom, for insights that can't be gained elsewhere" and that this uniquely rewarding experience is summed up neatly in Vladimir Nabokov's description of the experience of reading Dickens.

"All we have to do when reading [a Dickens' novel] Nabokov insisted, "is to relax and let our spines take over."

"Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder-blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science.

"Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame.

"The brain only continues the spine, the wick really runs through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos ..."

It is mischievously challenging of Nabokov to nudge us into thinking outside the box (and in this context, outside the heart) in these things.

All passionate readers know that it's a truism that the reading of fine, emotion-stoking fiction does generate physiological goings-on in the body. To just refer all of this traffic to the heart (an admirable and hardworking giblet but just one body part in a cast of thousands) seems vague and lazy and inaccurate.

For example these days, trendily, there is so much discussion of the "gut-brain connection", of the alleged ways in which the gastrointestinal tract is sensitive to emotions. Anyone who has not experienced at least some gastrointestinal turmoil (if only the famous "butterflies" in the stomach) while reading a super novel is a poor, emotionally alienated soul in urgent need of therapy.

This subject has some special resonance for your columnist. It is not only that my New Year resolution to at last read the novels of Australian-American writer Shirley Hazzard is well underway. It is also that these mighty and humane novels are doing some of the sorts of physiological things to me that Nabokov found done to him by reading Dickens.

But Nabokov's notion of the spine as "the seat of artistic delight" doesn't seem to apply to me. And, although I never thought the day would come when I would disagree with beloved and usually breathtakingly wise and right-about-almost-everything Emily Dickinson (America's and this columnist's favourite poet) even her diagnosis of these things doesn't work for me.

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry," Dickinson murmured in a letter.

MORE IAN WARDEN:

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

It has taken me an unforgivably long time to read Shirley Hazzard's novels (they include The Transit of Venus, The Great Fire and The Afternoon Of The Holiday) given that whenever I found them being discerningly discussed they seemed to be stoking a breathless admiration in the bosoms (even, perhaps in the spines?) of those discussing them.

I am fiction-besotted and (for I am 77 now and have had the time to read a library-load of books) but somehow have never cared so much about tormented characters in novels as I find myself caring about the tormented characters in Hazzard's novels.

Love, sometimes impossible, sometimes unrequited, sometimes malignant, always a cliff's edge being teetered on, is one major tormenter of Hazzard's characters.

We've no room here to analyse why Hazzard's portrayals of these soul's plights is so plausible and affecting but my point in this column's context is to report their physiological impact on me.

Sorry, Vladimir, but there is nothing going on in my spine. Sorry Emily, but it is not that my body is left feeling unwarmably cold or that the top of my head feels lifted off. Rather, as if confirming gut-brain liaisons (one writer has called it "the hidden conversation within our bodies") there is a kind of sorrowful, sympathetic, empathic ache felt somewhere (without an emotional-physiological equivalent of a GPS tracker it is hard to be precise about its location) in the rough general direction of the gastrointestinal nether regions.

Yes, one reads for pleasure, but sometimes one reads for the pain that comes from feeling the pain of those we read about.

Yes it is an ache but it is a precious ache, a proof that one has, with a gut, a fully-functioning "seat of artistic delight".

To paraphrase Nabokov, let us worship the gut and its aches and tingles and butterflies. Let us be proud of being monogastric omnivores.