The third eye

I am angry with Alice Munro, because she has bruised my heart and ruined my sleep, and I doubt she would feel even a hint of regret. Her story ''Runaway" is the culprit in question, a piece of writing so exquisite in timing, content, and treacherous imagination that I wished upon finishing it, one recent midnight, that I had saved it for the light of day. Munro is rightly famous for constructing elaborate, seemingly desultory plots that get to their destination with missile-like precision, and ''Runaway" is testament to this narrative exactitude. It has the foreboding of Flannery O'Connor's ''A Good Man is Hard to Find," without similar promise of release, and the realized menace at the story's end, enacted by a low-life husband, is shattering. Though the story was published in The New Yorker and in last fall's collection by the same name, readers who wish to keep the awful surprise for themselves should skip ahead.

Like so much of Munro's work, ''Runaway" is a finely depicted world within a domestic tableau, this one concerning a couple who live in a trailer in semirural Canada and run a struggling horse farm. The woman, Carla, fell in love and eloped with her husband, Clark, who had been her riding teacher, when she was 18. She knew even then that she was headed for halter, ''her submission both proper and exquisite." This summer, the horses are nervous, business is down, and rain is general; to make matters worse, Flora, Carla's pet goat who keeps the horses company, has run off. Clark's sleazy idea about swindling a kind neighbor is thwarted when Carla gets the idea to escape one day, boarding a bus, with the neighbor's help, to a new life in Toronto.

She only makes it a few towns down the road before she collapses, unable to envision a life without her tormentor, and calls Clark to come and fetch her. When she returns home, he is the sleepy-eyed romantic she remembers, cheerful and flirtatious.

And then Carla realizes what has happened to Flora, the other female who tried to leave. She even knows where he put her: ''the little dirty bones in the grass." Clark has taken care of business -- he has put things right -- and so, for now at least, he is a happy man.

''Runaway" is so hideous and heart-wrenching that I wanted, still want, to kill Clark myself. Never mind that he is an invention. Munro got his pathology perfectly: ''a handsome man and a silly-looking man," with ''a contrived, self-conscious air of menace." He is dangerously weak, in other words, presiding over the captives of his tiny kingdom -- the little goat a white apparition of innocence, sacrificed to evil.

I've gone on about this story because it embodies so utterly a premise of civilized thought: the idea that reading -- the magical folie à deux between writer and audience -- is a hymn of the imagination that will not and cannot be replaced by anything else. For the past decade, a new wave of soothsayers has been sounding the death knell of reading: While publishers fling more than 100,000 new titles a year at the wall of consumerism, hoping a few will gain purchase, cultural Cassandras sing instead of the book as an obsolete form, as quaint and useful as yesterday's anvil. Still, this will not be a jeremiad about the fragmentation of culture, societal ADD, or the triumph of a video- and techno-centric world. It will not bemoan the mediocrities of contemporary fiction or the failures of imagination. All these arguments have been made before, for decades and longer, usually with ominous statistics. Instead mine will be an ode to Flora, and to the singularity of her life force within the confines of my mind -- a reality, I might add, that could take place only by way of text. If I cannot save the little goat from Munro's predatory Clark, I can at least resurrect her here to make a point.

Plot is older than Scheherazade, and we use it in all manner of ways to make sense of our world: The butcher was in a foul mood today, three local boys were killed in Iraq, a man's fall from a tree provided a liver transplant for a child. The power of narrative as organizing principle is the cellular structure of consciousness itself, so captivating that Scheherazade told stories to save her very life -- and so subversive that the novel was considered a scandalous pursuit and blight upon society as recently as 150 years ago. But its position, whether sanctified or blasphemous, has always been seen as precarious, under fire from all kinds of rivaling leisure-time pursuits, as though radio or TV or plasma screens might soon relegate the printed page to the hinterlands of the past. Wherever tatting went, it seems, they're holding a place for reading.

What all these arguments overlook (and this is as strong a case for universal literacy as I can imagine) is the eternal abstract contract between reader and print, whereupon the mind and heart must reach to translate squiggles on a page -- signs and symbols -- into human experience. In Steven Pinker's wonderful ode to language, ''The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language," he argues that the ability is hard-wired; he also describes the fact of reading with rhapsodic simplicity: It is a wonder of the natural world in which ''we can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision." Whether willful or unconscious, this surrender, I contend, is an ordinary miracle as integral as breathing. If music is the purest art form, literature, in its articulation of the near-infinite, is the most abundant.

I have been struck by these consoling, wide-brush impressions while foraging, like most inhabitants of the modern West, among several ''competing" forms: highbrow novels and lowbrow mysteries, bad prime-time television and HBO, two daily newspapers and several magazines. And because I have been intrigued with Steven Johnson's salving notions in ''Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," I have tried to think what it is that guarantees the supremacy of print in my own life. Johnson contends that the narrative complexity of good television in the past decade -- from the rapid-fire chatter of ''The West Wing" to the multilayered plots of ''Six Feet Under" -- ensures an audience participation in brain power that elevates and sanctions the medium. I agree with Johnson, up to a point; just because TV is a visual and user-passive form does not relegate it to the third circle of hell. But neither can TV or film ever presume to accomplish with narrative what reading does, which is require the reader to provide her own visual interpretation of the story.

HBO's recent production of Richard Russo's ''Empire Falls" proves this neatly: Russo's gravelly voice-over, taken from the novel, is the deepest and most instructive thing in the four-hour show. His narration explains the demise and transformation of a small town, its class-bound warfare, its easy, sad acceptance of family and community sorrows. Conversely, I have never completely bought into ''The Sopranos," an admittedly brilliant piece of television, because James Gandolfini is just too damn good. You are not supposed to like a murderer and a mob boss the way I do Tony Soprano, and no actor (well, maybe Olivier) can manage to go from monster to mensch within the confines of his own facial expressions. That breadth of territory belongs to the imagination: to Henry James's Gilbert Osmond, say, or to Faulkner's Jason Compson. The very point of fiction's delivery is that the characters are larger than life: They exist for and inside of us, unsullied by cinematic or pixel reality. In theater, this supremacy is assumed from the outset: We marvel at Helen Mirren's Lady Macbeth because the actress is meant to be a siphon for the text. The critic Charles Lamb, writing nearly two centuries ago, famously declared ''King Lear" too great to stage: ''While we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear."

Lamb's reasoning is precisely why I've avoided certain film versions of novels. I cannot bear seeing ''The English Patient," ''The Age of Innocence," or ''The Hours," no matter how accomplished these movies may be -- I have no wish to see Michael Ondaatje's Hana stripped of her sweet and noble presence in my mind's eye. This aversion is based on hard evidence: To this day I cannot think of Jane Austen's Elinor Dashwood, in ''Sense and Sensibility," without seeing her as Emma Thompson in the movie.

Even with the brilliant technical and aesthetic achievements of the past century -- from modernism's march to the cultural rethinking of time itself -- no artistic or pop-culture medium can mimic or supplant what text and language do: create an interior realm immune to and larger than the confines of reality. Which brings me back to Munro, and to the private, intimate pact between writer and reader -- to the place in my consciousness her little Flora has assumed. Years ago, I knew a young female goat named Blossom, who lived at a horse stable in Truro, and who used to dance around the horses and whinny at first light, 50 yards from where I slept in a 200-year-old Cape. That memory -- my memory -- was dormant and pristine, until Munro woke it up again and gave face to a sweetness of time and specificity.

The dance between memory and the imagination is available to every reader who ever gasped upon turning a page, or woke thinking with joy about the unfinished novel that awaited him or her. It is a collusion -- call it a conspiracy of thought -- between a stranger's ideas and a reader's grasp of them: a baseball that falls, every time and perfectly, into a waiting catcher's mitt. This arc of intent and destination is the essence of language, and no amount of 3-D graphics or prime-time high jinks can either trump or compromise that.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.