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.