Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
In the universe of academic discourse concerning how we read and why we respond -- whether the loony fourth dimension of Harold Bloom or the collapsed star of Stanley Fish -- one finds many interesting, useful and eminently debatable convictions. However, it seems to me unassailable that to read literature -- as opposed to brute informational reading, such as how one skims Newsweek or, say, literary criticism -- is primarily a form of communication: one mind seeking shelter in another. From this point, theory lifts itself, with waxen wings, toward the sun. In its purest state, the urge to read is found beyond the legislative realm of politics, beyond even taste and hype. It is imbued with something more infinitely, nakedly human -- the same methodology of hope, perhaps, that sends us bravely marching into our next blind date.
Serious readers -- by that I mean readers who are given to Jacobinical passion, readers who hate and love and argue -- are, in crucial respects, looking for what one might as well call friends. This species of reader often evolves into that of the writer, and writers, I believe, tend to feel this intense, surrogate neediness for books much more than civilians. Thus it is always faintly painful to read of one favorite writer (Lawrence, in my case) disliking another favorite writer (Conrad, whose "Lord Jim" Lawrence dismissed as "snivel in a wet hanky"). At such moments, one feels as uniquely alone as when two beloved friends, meeting for the first time, despise each other -- as insignificant as a bit of cartilage between two gnashing bones.
Nicholson Baker is the only writer I am aware of who has openly addressed the heterodox notion that this sense of perceived friendship is a determining factor in how we respond to a work of literature. In "U and I," a book-length meditation on Baker's monumental idée fixe with John Updike, he writes: "If Hippocrates or Seneca, whom I know nothing about, says that art is long and life is short, it means little to me ... But if Updike says that life is short, I feel the strength of it with something close to shock ... The force of truth that a statement imparts ... depends ... on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the room with me, does or can hold it to be compellingly true."
Rick Moody tries (I think) to say something similar in a strange essay called "Primary Sources." Here, Moody lists upward of 50 books and albums, annotating a select few with memories and experiences the works have suggested or exhumed. (Many concern graduate school and/or binge substance abuse.) Moody's list is especially effectual in light of the questions posed here: his books -- salted with titles by Barthes, Derrida and Jung, which are in turn offset by plebe-hip works such as Groucho Marx's letters and an episode of "Star Trek" -- are not in any sense mine, and they reinforce for me the puzzlement and dismay with which I have read his fiction. They allow me finally to grasp why Moody is no friend I would want to have, whatever his virtues as a three-dimensional human being.
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When reflecting upon love affairs or friendships that have gone stale, not worked or been otherwise rent asunder, we often say, with a sigh, "I just wasn't in the right place." These vague coordinates are usually taken to indicate an emotional location, but might not our actual, physical situation be just as powerful a determinant? Meeting someone in a bar tends, unfortunately, to color one's impression of that person, sometimes to a diminishing point.
The same (and almost certainly unfair) set of presuppositions stands behind an unwillingness, endemic to highly mandarin readers, to crack open a book while it is seeing any kind of popular success. (One reader I know, a justly famous writer and editor, refuses to read any book until five years after it is published.) In reading as in romance, we are all looking for something unsullied by the marketplace; we want to believe more than anything that this book and this person has been intended for us alone. One might think that such unmoored romanticism is a perfectly excellent recipe for making oneself miserable. The short answer, I'm afraid, is, It does (just as it may explain a feeling prevalent among book editors that to read for pleasure, outside the confines of work, carries with it an illicit thrill not unlike cheating on one's spouse). It is also why we keep reading.
The where of reading's importance was vividly impressed upon me one night when a young novelist whose first book I had recently signed up stopped by my apartment for a visit. For largely unconscious reasons, I had always preferred to read manuscripts in bed, and so typhoon-swept across my mattress was the usual assortment of pages, agent cover letters and scraps of glyphically scribbled paper. "The abattoir," I said, mostly joking, as we walked into my bedroom. The young novelist looked upon my bed with the troubled relief of a milk cow strolling past a slaughterhouse. "There it is," he said finally. "The arrangement of your pillows is the one thing standing between these manuscripts and publication."
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