Books in Canada

WHEN WRITERS ARE ASKED in interviews about literary influences, they often trot out the names of the greats -- Austen, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, etc., etc. They may add a few of their hallowed contemporaries to the list, of course, to demonstrate that they're not living totally in the past, but the overall impression is that their work has been shaped by a taste for the uniformly good and eminently respectable. It's about time, I think, for writers to 'fess up: influence isn't only positive, and a retrospective perception of what books made the most impression isn't necessarily reliable.

Human curiosity being what it is, we all like to know more about the authors we admire. And finding out the early -- not to mention current -- reading habits of, say, Mavis Gallant is a lot more interesting than knowing what she eats for breakfast. But is it truly revealing? Even leaving aside the extra-literary factors that shape a writer's approach to language and narrative long before she or he is prowling library shelves in search of inspiration and instruction, the way that influence works is complex, and isn't confined to what authors we admire, or have teamed to admire.

First, there's the fact that the classics aren't alone -- and probably not even primary -- in affecting our development. In Classics and Trash, Harriett Hawkins quotes Gore Vidal's observation that "calculated readings of acknowledged masters" may not have nearly the impact on our imagination as the books, films, and music we encounter at an early age. Yet when writers are discussing the books that influenced them, they usually do refer to those "acknowledged masters." I don't think this is deliberate name-dropping, although obviously Proust has more cachet than Dr. Seuss. Rather, there's an unconscious impulse to honour literary reputation: Tolstoy et al. are great; I read them; I've become a writer; therefore I must have been influenced by them. (That is, how could I not have been influenced by them?) There's also the bookish equivalent of brand recognition to take into account: we remember Anne of Green Gables, for instance, but not necessarily the schlocky fantasies we devoured during the same time period.

For my own part, I have to say that favourite childhood reading material like the Eaton's Christmas catalogue, Mad magazine, and Marvel comics have probably made their lasting mark alongside Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and C. S. Lewis's Narnia books. Certainly they've affected me more than many of the classics, whose appeal I was inoculated against by having to study them. (The only writers who survived my educational encounters with them unscathed were Woolf, Faulkner, and Austen.)

There is the question, too, of how we relate to our purported models. The common assumption is that we are passively receptive to them; that their impact is positive and unproblematic. But resistance and tension can also be important factors in shaping a writer's growth. (To get Freudian about it, as critics such as Harold Bloom have, conflict and ambivalence are in fact intrinsic to it.) In an essay in her nonfiction collection Frontiers, the Black writer M. Nourbese Philip describes her colonial-style education in Tobago, in which she read the classics of white Western literature with avidity -- but also with a growing sense of estrangement, since her world was not theirs. What developed was a clash of influences, which Philip personifies in her discussion as "John-from-Sussex" and "Abiswa":

Male, white and Oxford-educated,

he stands over my right shoulder;

she is old, Black and wise and

stands over my left shoulder -

two archetypal figures symbolizing

the two traditions that permeate

my work.

What we don't read can have a determining effect, too, as many contemporary women writers have noted. In the essay "Outside History," which appeared in Brick magazine, the Irish poet Eavan Boland writes of trying to situate herself in the Irish literary tradition, which is predominantly male, and points out that "The influence of absences should not be underestimated. Isolation itself can have a powerful effect in the life of a young writer." The American writer Barbara Ehrenreich once described the talk-show tendency to simplify cause and effect when discussing complex issues as "the bowling ball theory of social change." The literary version -- fledgling writer reads Chekhov, becomes best-selling author - - is obviously reductive and absurd. We all know there isn't a reading list that can create a writer. And yet we tend to accept the notion that influences are straightforward and readily identifiable.

I'll continue to be interested in knowing admired authors' favourite books, past and present, but just out of curiosity. How a writer's imagination is shaped is, finally, mysterious. And the end product -- the work itself --is what matters.

Barbara Carey's most recent book is The Ground of Events (Mercury).