Reverie, Sensation, Effect: Novelistic Attention and Stendhal's De l'amour

Abstract

Attention, reader. Perhaps that is the demand, more or less blatantly put, that every narrative makes?a certain quantum of engrossment implicitly requested for whatever follows, of whatever length. Managing that once it has been cap tured, however, is a somewhat different matter. There are as many forms of as there might be methods of attracting it; we have some acquaintance with rapt concentration, dreamlike trance, or anxious dread, and the kinds of written forms that usually call forth these attentive responses. But of our largest form, the novel, readerly attention?which, after all, the novel requires so strenuously?has yet to be mapped in any great detail. What, in other words, is the precise quality of the atten tion a novel asks of us? In its length, its traditionally copious use of detail, and the credulity it tends to request, it would seem to need a kind of athletic attention, a fairly frequent tension of our reading muscles, that most other genres allow us to leave behind.1 More than that it is difficult to say. As much as we have learned about the kinds of affect the novel tends to produce (tears, boredom, fear, suspense), we know comparatively little about the ways we are asked to attend to it, the ways in which our often sloppy or compromised is marshaled and managed. While we have important studies of other forms of attentiveness?in civic spectacles, in the visual arts?we are as yet lacking a framework, or any critical vocabulary, for un derstanding the particular forms of attention that might be called for by the novel.2