Wonderlust, and Reflexive Reading

Have you ever noticed the number of analogies we have to describe our encounters with books? All of which draw attention to a different aspect of the experience.  A book is ‘a box with the world in it’. Browsing is like the exploration of a hieroglyph-inscribed tomb, by the swaying beam of an archaeologist’s lamp. We stumble into a criss-crossing maze of narrative paths. O’Brien’s analogies in particular draw attention to the unlimited potential of the literary world. Books are astonishing not simply because they can take you elsewhere, but because there is no place that they cannot take you. They are windows to infinite elsewheres.

What I like most about The Browser’s Ecstasy is the obvious joy that O’Brien gets from his encounters with books. And every encounter is a thing of awe – from merely being in the presence of books to browsing to getting lost within them. He is absolutely in earnest. To O’Brien, reading is magic - you can do anything, go anywhere, be anybody, if you can only find the right book. Reading is first and foremost an experience of wonder.

And as far as books lead you outwards, into unexplored and exotic realms, so too does the book’s trajectory lead inwards. That is – deeper into yourself. In ‘Family Romance’, O’Brien describes the involvement with which a child can read. When a work truly speaks to you, it has the potential to change the way you see the world. Critics can say what they wish about book-lovers taking the book world too seriously, about how the book is just a product to fulfil a market demand. But how then do you justify the ability of a book to leak into every aspect of your life?

I have an 11-year-old cousin who has recently developed a consuming obsession with the Broadway musical Wicked. Not a book – well, not exactly. But somehow this obsession has become more than a love of the show itself, it has become the way in which she sees the world. She takes cues from real life situations and compares them to the events of the musical, improbably finding connections in everything she does, everyone she meets. Are you a Glinda or an Elphaba, she ponders, a Boq or a Fiyero? ‘With eyes closed or open, book open or shut, (s)he reads and reads’.

Why is it that certain books speak to us while others, although they may be just as interesting in their own right, start to dim in our memories the minute we finish them? From an experiential point of view, it seems as if the story that speaks to you is somehow yours. In ‘The Book That Reads Itself’ O’Brien writes of a man who, after connecting deeply with a certain book written by an unknown female author, entertains ‘the fiction that it is indeed himself and no other that she addresses’. This, I feel, is not an uncommon sensation. Have you ever read a particular author and thought finally, someone who ‘gets’ it? The pleasant surprise when a work corresponds so perfectly to your own preoccupations, concerns and distresses it’s as if you’ve found a kindred spirit. It’s rather relieving really – somebody else understands, you are not alone. But what we often overlook in this highly personal mode of engagement is that when you read, you are not purely absorbing the text, but recreating it in your mind.

No two people read in the same way. The words will mean different things based on your personal frame of reference. As they enter your mind they inspire particular connotations based on your past experiences , your present engagements, until we are leaking so much of ourselves into what we’re reading that we are, essentially, reading ourselves. We think that we are listening to the author speak but the author that we are thinking of is not real.

When we imagine the author, they are a figment of our imaginations. Your imagination is thus the source of the image as well the receptor of the image. It is circle, a cycle hidden from obvious view – reading becomes necessarily reflexive. And I’m not saying that the actual, real-life author has no place in this sequence. The author is the influence that puts the cycle in motion. The thoughts you are thinking however, are not theirs in the literal sense – reading may be magical, but authors not telepathic.

So where does this leave us? I don't want the moral we're taking away here to be that we're all self-centred and there is no Santa Clause. I think the note to end on is the idea of reflexive reading as a creative act. Reading is usually thought of as passive. But when you consider how much you contribute as you visualise and read, it is clear that the author is not the only active mind in the literary transaction. Reading in this sense is an expression of creativity.

The Perils of Studying English

Being an English student is like growing up in book world. We all have a desire to grow up quickly, to gain all the necessary knowledge and acquire enough theoretical confidence to function as a literary adult. But somehow the more we learn, the more we reminisce about a time when reading was simple, uncritical.

For Rita Felski, the process of gaining critical skills is one that encourages the student to read with suspicion. Once you learn to read critically, you can never really trust a text again – texts keep their true meaning hidden and ‘do not willingly surrender their secrets’. One must be paranoid. It is acceptable to admire a text, but one mustn’t be seduced into taking its words at face value. Only the literary text is given any type of concession, a subgenre which Felski concedes as slightly less deserving of vigilante attention due to its own awareness of and pre-emptive response to a critical audience.

The most apparent problem with suspicious reading is the loss/gain sensation that accompanies it: while we gain a new understanding of possible meanings, we are losing our textual innocence. It is a process of disenchantment. There is also the danger that we will get so caught up in the critical mode, in the ‘shinier, sexier, more charismatic vocabularies’ of formal criticism that we will take literary analysis too far. Once you start finding meanings in the hidden, abstract gestures of a text, there is the chance that everything will begin to look potentially meaningful. It is possibly to read into parts of a text that are actually perfectly innocent, if there is such a thing. What you might think is the “key” to unlocking a particular text may be nothing more than a set of unprovable connections made ‘meaningful’ when expressed in highbrow critical terms. You’ll end up like Bunny in The Secret History, with a John Donne essay that addresses Isaac Wharton and the absurd textual concept of metahemarlism instead.

Felski’s remedy to these problems is that of affective reading, a neophenomenological approach to the text. In layman’s terms this refers to feeling first and analysing second. Felski believes that no matter how well-versed in critical commentary we are, we still possess the ability to be struck by that which appeals to us, disarmed by the unfamiliar, put off by that which we find distasteful. In the literary upper class it is cool to be detached, to be able to read things that you don’t “like” but do “appreciate”, to read things that you honestly “love” but can still “see the flaws within”. Felski says – forget this. Take what you like, what you hate, what surprises and angers and enchants you, and then ask why. There is no need to be distant, simply a need to question our attachments.

                                              

I generally agree with Felski’s ideas, but have one problem – what of the books you have already read ‘critically’, that you have already studied and pulled apart? Most people feel a certain bitterness, for example, toward many of the texts that they studied in high school, “ruined” by overanalysis and strict, criteria-based assessment methods. I worry that this experience will be akin to taking in an optical illusion – once you’ve seen the lamp you somehow cannot remember how, at first, all that appeared was two faces looking at one another. Can we truly, as Felski claims, ‘make the familiar newly surprising’? Perhaps with time, and patience. Every time you read a text, you read it slightly differently, meaning that even the most clichéd interpretation can become less cumbersome over time. With any luck the book will eventually regenerate, leaving you fresh to be affected anew.

(We Are) Living in a Material World

And Hadjiafxendi is a material girl. While other literary critics (Barthes, Foucault) dwell in the realms of possibility, Hadjiafxendi draws attention to the book as a product – of both the publishing process and the context into which it is born.

Hadjiafxendi’s edited book, Authorship in Context, contains a series of essays that look at practices of authorship over the last two centuries. The book aims to address theoretical questions of authorship (What does it mean to be an author? Does the author have sole responsibility for their text?) by providing tangible examples that consider how the ‘literary, technological, cultural and historical conditions’ surrounding a text’s production affect the final product.

From my reading of Hadjiafxendi’s introduction, it seemed that two central ideas about authorship were being put across:

1. The Author in Collaboration

Barthes is well-known for his denouncement of the Romantic image of the artist as a poetic myth that ignores the indebtedness all writers have to the creativity of language.Hadjiafxendi however has a different reason for her disbelief in the concept of the singular, authoritative author – its impracticality.

In her introduction she quotes Robert Darnton, who makes reference to a literary network that extends ‘from the author to the publisher...the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader’. This highlights the many stages of production and selection that influence and interrupt the imagined flow of the author’s thoughts onto the reader’s page.

So how much control does the author really have? In essays by Sage and Small, Authorship in Context looks back to 19^th century editorial practices to reveal the role editors necessarily play in shaping an author’s work, and how an author’s unique ‘vision’ can be affected by the opinions of their publishers. To be put into print is to be at the mercy of a system much greater than just the author, singular.

The monolithic author becomes an even more unfeasible creature in the postmodern era, as the 'literary' is expanded to include forms of media that necessitate collaboration. One example of this is the graphic novel, as explored in an essay by Punter. The creation of a graphic novel utilises a whole team of individuals – writers, artists, colourists, editors both traditional and digital – each of whom bring both their own ‘vision’ and their own set of influences to the project. The graphic novel therefore must be recognised not as a single text but a pastiche, a multiplicity of quotations layered on top of one another to give the impression of a holistic product. The idea of pastiche can also be applied to the work under consideration right now – Authorship in Context, as a collection of essays arranged into an edited book, it is both fragmented and whole at the same time.

This idea again takes on an interesting dimension when looking at online media, such as the writing that occurs within a web community. This type of writing holds the potential for an interactive experience in which readers can ‘write back’ to the original author, in doing so both challenging and adding to the original written piece, as well as becoming authors themselves.

2. The Suicide of the Author

The second idea that struck me as I read Hadjiafxendi’s introduction was also related to The Death of the Author. When considering the concept of authorial death, the author is often cast as the unwilling victim of a murder, perpetrated by the critic in the name of all other readers. However, by looking at the choices that certain authors have made in the production of their works, many cases are notable for the way in which the author has willingly partaken in their own death – an authorial suicide, of sorts.

The clearest illustration of this is in the literary pseudonym. Authorship in Context looks at both 19^th century author George Eliot and 20^th century journalist Flann O’Brien as examples. By constructing a separate identity (via the pseudonym) to fictively author a certain work, the real-world individuals detach themselves from its production. The author figure therefore exists only in relation to the text itself, perhaps the purest example of Foucault’s author-function. Although George Eliot is a problematic example of the movement away from the Author-God, seeing as the identity she created was the very embodiment of the male authority, the idea of giving up one’s rights to a book for the good of the book itself rings of self-sacrifice, thus qualifying as authorial suicide.

Another example of this can be seen in the modernist creative techniques of William S. Borroughs. Burroughs would make novels and films using the cut-up method, which involved scrambling words, phrases and scenes at random. This put the work in the hands of chance, automatically removing any the possibility of him having a superior, ‘authoritative’ understanding of the work.

Finally, related but not specifically within the category of authorial suicide is the idea of authorial decentralisation. Feminist and Post-Colonial authors have long clamoured for the destruction of the white male genius as sole literary authority, in order to open up the Literary Canon to unheard voices. Alexandru’s essay on the author Arundhati Roy engages with this idea through her consideration of what it meant for Roy to win the Booker Prize. Is this good or bad for the plight of the Other? On one hand, this can be taken as an example of a marginalised author making space for herself within the formerly homogenous canon. On the other hand, participating in the prize culture may simply add to the literary obsession with inclusion, exclusivity and the celebrated, capital-A ‘Author’. Alexandru considers the feasibility of a completely decentralised, non-hierarchical literary community.

Hadjiafxendi ends on a politicised and rather reflexive note – the final essay in the collection argues for the literary relevance of criticism itself, as well the necessity for critics to engage with global politics and the greater world they occupy. This, writes Hadjiafxendi, reflects the thrust of the entire collection. The need for authors to constantly reassess the shifting world they occupy is what Hadjiafxendi agitates for as a materialist. Materialist criticism occupies the space between purely theoretical criticism and actual writing practice, a space that mustn’t be neglected if authorship is to remain relevant over time.

Class Conflict in Book World

There is a class war being waged in the literary world. The highbrow and the middlebrow are unable to see eye to eye. The literary elite claim that the middlebrow are reading books all wrong, they have no respect and patience for the transformative experience of reading properly. The middlebrow doesn’t see what the big deal is – reading is reading, isn’t it?

There are two major points of tension that prevent highbrow society from accepting the middlebrow as a legitimate cultural group. The first is the lack of initiative the middlebrow show when dealing with all things literary. Instead of reading what speaks to them, instead of engaging with the book via browsing (à la O’Brien) and befriending (à la Edmundson), the middlebrow follow cues.

These cues can come from book clubs, recommended-reading lists, literary prizes, or even celebrities. The creation of Scherman’s Book-of-the-Month Club was met with hostility from the culturally influential not necessarily because of the threat posed to their own power, but as a reaction to the imposition of any kind of centralised power at all. These editors of magazines, authors, and other members of the literary elite took up arms against a club which they interpreted as the literary version of the totalitarian state, creating mindless followers out their subscribers.

It is notable that Radway mentions no such complaints stemming from the club members themselves. It seems as though the middlebrow have no problem with being led. Books to the intelligentsia are significant cultural artefacts that reflect not only one’s taste, but a person’s very identity. But how is it possible to judge an individual’s taste, their conception of themselves, if they are indiscriminately reading the same thing as everyone else?

The second point of tension comes from the lack of middlebrow interest in the book world as a whole, and consequent lack of reverence for that which the elite hold sacred. Being given the pre-packaged ‘best book’ each month leads to a very limited field of cultural vision. This is distressing to highbrow readers, especially as their own cultural capital is undervalued as a result. There is a fear that greater part of society will question whether you’ve read this ‘best book’ first and foremost, and only as an afterthought consider how well-versed you are in the culture and canon proper. By narrowing the scope of the literary world, the middlebrow dismiss hundreds, thousands of books and authors that are revered in highbrow culture. It is the large-scale equivalent of being told that the books you care for don't matter, to the extent that they are not even worth looking into. To the devoted reader, this can be offensive, hurtful, or simply extremely irritating.