[The novelist] wishes to give you a sustained experience of that register of mental activity, metaphor, which best approximates eros. Think how it feels. As you read the novel your mind shifts from the level of characters, episodes and clues to the level of ideas, solutions, exegesis. The activity is delightful, but also one of pain. [. . .] The narrative insists on distracting your attention from exegesis. Yet your mind is unwilling to let go of either level of activity, and remains arrested at a point of stereoscopy between the two. They compose one meaning. The novelist who constructs this moment of emotional and cognitive interception is making love, and you are the object of his wooing. “The book and its author was our pimp!” cries Francesca in hell, or so we read in the Inferno (5.137).
[. . .]
Other, similar scenarios come to mind, for example, that of Pushkin’s heroine in Eugene Onegin:
Tatiana is besotted by romantic fiction:
with what attention she now
reads a delicious novel,
with what vivid enchantment
drinks the seductive fiction!. . . sighs, and having made her own
another’s ecstasy, another’s melancholy,
she whispers in a trance, by heart,
a letter to the amiable hero.
(3:9)
Readers in real life, as well as within fiction, bear witness to the allure of the written text. The novelist Eudora Welty says of her mother: “She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.” Dickens himself would not have been discomfited by such a spirit in a reader, if we may judge from a letter he wrote to Maria Beadnell in 1855. Here he speaks of his novel David Copperfield to the woman who inspired Dora: “Perhaps you have once or twice laid down that book and thought ‘How dearly that boy must have loved me and how vividly this man remembers it!’” Through Francesca, through Tatiana, through Maria Beadnell, through Eudora Welty’s mother, some current of eros leapt from a written page. You have felt it yourself, reading Montaigne or Heliodoros or Sappho. Can we arrive at a more realistic appraisal of this phenomenon? Just what is erotic about reading and writing?