READIN

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

🦋 Identifying with poetry

I'm very taken with this idea from "Pierre Menard" about total identification with the author. I've written before about striving for that reading fiction and essays, but haven't really thought about it in connection with poetry. But just now I had the thought (while experimenting with FB statusses), Why not try the final bit of Bolañ's "Resurección" in the first person -- substituting myself for "poetry"?

I slip into the dream
like a dead diver
into the eye of God

posted evening of May 9th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

🦋 Fragments

I was looking at the beginning of "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" (in Anthony Bonner's translation) this evening and was a bit surprised to find two statments that both appeal to me strongly, and neither of which I have noticed in previous readings. Borges attributes to Menard the opinion that "censuring and praising were sentimental operations which had nothing to do with criticism." (Menard ­recuerdo­ declaraba que censurar y alabar son operaciones sentimentales que nada tienen que ver con la crítica.) This is a fairly commonplace idea and a useful one; I like the way it is stated here a lot (the adjective "sentimental" is just right), and it seems like there is a mnemonic quality to this formulation. And the narrator says that part of what inspired Menard's project was "that philological fragment of Novalis... which outlines the theme of total identification with a specific author." According to Daniel Balderston (in Out of Context: historical reference and the representation of reality in Borges), the fragment referred to is:

I only show that I have understood an author when I can act in his spirit; when, without diminishing his individuality, I can translate him and transform him in many ways.*

*Efraín Kristal also quotes this line in his Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, as does Daniel Balderston in Menard and His Contemporaries.

posted evening of May 6th, 2009: 1 response
➳ More posts about Jorge Luis Borges

Monday, September 15th, 2008

🦋 Connective Tissue

In the video that A White Bear linked yesterday, Mark Leyner is asked his thoughts about the audience he's writing for; he responds to the effect that he does not think about audience at all -- writing for him is an obsessive activity like chess for Bobby Fischer, with no object other than the text. David Foster Wallace takes exception to this:

Sometimes it's an act of communication. What makes the analogy ok but also makes it break down, is that part of the Fischer-like obsession Mark's talking about consists in a kind of mental and emotional dance with a constructed reader that you figure has a life more or less like yours, and whom in a weird way you're talking to. Again, I'm like totally with you about 50% of it; the thing about it is that the light and fun and all that stuff is definitely, that's part of what makes art magical for me; but there's another part. There's the part -- and I'm afraid I'm going to sound like a puritan or a critic -- but there's this part that makes you feel full. This part that is redemptive and instructive, where when you read something, it's not just about -- you go "My God, that's me!" you know, "I've lived like that, I've felt like that, I'm not alone in the world..."

I felt excited listening to Wallace saying this because it matches up with some things I have been thinking about since last year, specifically to describe my experience of reading Pamuk and more broadly as a way of talking about art in general -- I wrote a brief note about this last November.

A White Bear says,

Wallace is grasping to understand the possibilities of art as transformational, connective tissue between all these lonely people. For most 20th-c writers, that possibility is a sentimentality that died out around the time that Romanticism did.

Update: and I guess obviously, duh, this is a strong sign that I should read Wallace's essays and criticism. Will get right on that.

posted morning of September 15th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about David Foster Wallace

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

🦋 Notes on identity confusion in Pamuk

...as he read, he identified first with the usher, then with the brawling audience, then with the çörek maker, and finally -- good reader that he was -- with Celâl.

-- The Black Book

• Identity confusion is important in Pamuk.
  • I started to formulate this statement while I was reading Other Colors, and have since seen it borne out in The White Castle, The New Life, and especially The Black Book.
  • Does this statement also apply to Snow and My Name is Red, which I read before it occurred to me? (beyond the obvious detective-story aspects of Red) -- the answer may well be yes but I think I would need to reread them with this in mind, to be sure. If not, it might seem appropriate to think of this as something Pamuk had "outgrown".
  • The confusion that I'm talking about is (frequently) a confusion between the roles of Author and Reader. So it's an easy step to take, to confuse yourself-as-reader with Pamuk-as-author. Or so I think.
  • As a side note, I wonder how this plays into my impression of these 5 novels, which is that each of them is written in a distinctly different style and voice -- though I think I can hear shades of the same voice underlying each -- if Pamuk is serious about giving up his identity when he writes that would help explain the differences. An alternate explanation is that there are four different translators involved in creating English versions of these five books -- only Maureen Freely has two translations. But I don't think those two are particularly more similar to each other than any other pair.
• I think the experience of losing track of one's identity while reading a story is a wonderful thing; it might be the primary reason I read novels. Understanding this is something I am taking away from reading Pamuk. Is this the same as saying "I read for escape from my everyday life", which seems banal and not really worth thinking about at length the way I have been doing? In Pamuk's novels it seems to be doing a lot more work than that.
• What larger ideas if any does this lead to? How is the beauty of Pamuk's books explicable in these terms? Would such an explication be "criticism"? (Note: I've had an ongoing conversation with myself about what is criticism, and is it something I would be able to write, for a while now.)

posted evening of April 5th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about The Black Book

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

🦋 Idea for a longer essay

So I've been having this idea, one which I've posted about here several times, that the most important part of my experience of reading Pamuk is a conscious identification of myself with the author and with the narrators. Now I've also posted in the past about how I love singing along with the music I listen to. Hmm -- singing along is a kind of identification with the singer, right? I wonder...

I also wonder whether my identification-with-the-author idea is already ground well trodden among people who think professionally about novels. Reckon I have probably alienated most of the people I could ask about that.

posted evening of March 23rd, 2008: 2 responses
➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

🦋 Identity and Escapism

As long as I'm tackling big ideas, something I want to throw out there is the idea that in reading novels/watching movies/listening to music I am attempting a form of escapism which is not strictly escaping from my surroundings, but rather escaping from my own head -- that by "identifying strongly with" these works of art, by pulling them into my consciousness and stamping them with my mark, I am attempting to get myself outside of my self. But I find that I can't phrase this in a way that is simultaneously coherent and not banal.

posted evening of November 14th, 2007: Respond

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

🦋 Being Orhan Pamuk

Reading Pamuk's essay "How I Got Rid of Some of my Books", this evening, I was identifying almost completely with its author. The reader's complaint about having too many books and not wanting the ownership attachment to the contents of his library is, well, kind of commonplace* -- I've heard it voiced by many different people, felt it myself too; but Pamuk's voice is so distinctively concise, rings so true, I felt like the essay was me speaking. This is something I get with a lot of the books and stories and essays that I really enjoy, I will identify myself strongly with the author/narrator (or sometimes with a character) and perceive the book as being about me. Egotistical maybe but it can be very pleasant.

So then I was reading his next essay, "On Reading: Words or Images", where he lists three pleasures he takes from reading:

1. The pull of the other world I mentioned earlier. This could be seen as escapism. Even if only in your imagination, it is still good to escape the sadness of everyday life and spend some time in another world.
2. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six, reading was central to my efforts to make something of myself, elevate my consciousness, and thereby give shape to my soul...
3. Another thing that makes reading so pleasurable for me is self-awareness. When we read, there is a part of our mind that resists total immersion in the text and congratulates us on having undertaken such a deep and intellectual task...

And I thought (note that I was here not identifying strongly with the text, I was outside it taking notes) Hmm, I would agree with all of those points -- but I would add 4. The opportunity to identify with the author. But well, this is really in opposition with point (3), identifying with is the same as immersing yourself totally in the text -- so they are opposite poles both with some attraction for me. I think immersing myself too quickly and uncritically in a text can lead to lazy reading, and that this journal is in part a way of working to keep myself from reading that way. Real immersion of the kind that comes through understanding the text, is a consummation devoutly to be wished -- I had a lot of this when I was reading Snow. In "How I Got Rid of Some of my Books", Pamuk references Flaubert, whose works I have never read, but this statement makes me want to:

Flaubert was right to say that if a man were to read ten books with sufficient care, he would become a sage. As a rule, most people have not even done that, and that is why they collect books and show off their libraries.

*As is the opposite sentiment, expressing the exhilaration of having books and the love of books as physical objects -- the two sentiments can coexist quite contentedly within one reader -- indeed Pamuk gives voice to the latter one just a few pages later in "The Pleasures of Reading", when he says:

After finishing certain pages of this wondrous book, my eyes would pull back from the old volume in my hand to gaze at its yellowing pages from afar. (In the same way, when I was drinking a favorite soft drink as a child, I would stop from time to time to gaze lovingly at the bottle in my hand.)

-- which image reminds me strongly of Sylvia.

posted evening of November 7th, 2007: Respond
➳ More posts about Other Colors

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

🦋 Imperfection

Here is a very interesting passage from Chapter 4 of My Name Is Red. The master illuminator is showing his apprentice a classic example of the genre:

"This is by Bihzad," the aging master said... "This is so Bihzad that there's no need for a signature."

Bihzad was so well aware of this fact that he didn't hide his name anywhere in the painting. And according to the elderly master, there was a sense of embarrassment and a feeling of shame in this decision of his. Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

Fearing for my life, I murdered my unfortunate victim in an ordinary and crude manner. As I returned to this fire-ravaged area night after night to ascertain whether I'd left behind any traces that might betray me, questions of style increasingly arose in my head. What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.

A couple of reactions:

• I wonder whether Erdağ Göknar is an inferior translator to Maureen Freely. Some of the constructions here seem a little bit strained. (Whereas for Snow, I found the easy fluency of the language to be a major selling point.)
• I of course disagree with the narrator about the æsthetic status of style; I believe I have already made stabs, here and elsewhere, at stating that I think the ultimate goal of good art is to achieve complete identity between the artist and the audience -- to "put you in his head". So style is a primary criterion of great art.
• That said I like the way the narrator states his case a lot. My first thought is that it demonstrates a Platonic world view; each individual artist is striving to transcend -- or "is judged by how far he can transcend" -- his identity to approach the ideal Artist, to create the ideal Work of Art.
• The juxtaposition of "failure to create the ideal Work of Art" and "failure to commit the Perfect Crime" is fun.

posted morning of August 25th, 2007: Respond
➳ More posts about My Name is Red

Friday, April 8th, 2005

🦋 The Experience of Reading Foucault's Pendulum

I have been reading Foucault's Pendulum for a week now. (I started it last Friday, when I had a long train ride, because I thought I was going to need a long period of concentration in order to get into it.) This is another book that has been on my shelves for years, taunting me and intimidating me. But guess what: it is not difficult to read. Quite the contrary -- it is difficult to put down! I was anticipating a Gravity's Rainbow-type of experience where I get a lot out of reading the book, but only after putting huge amounts of effort and concentration into it. But this book is like a clear pool of warm water on a sunny day.

Early in the book I was identifying strongly with Belbo and wondering how sincere that identification was. I am still not sure quite how to put into words, what my suspicion was -- somehow I was afraid that I was being conned into liking Belbo, that I was buying an incomplete characterization. I am not thinking about that as much anymore, since the section where Casaubon was in Brazil.

I am assuming that the citations at the head of each chapter are genuine though I don't know that I'll ever actually check that out. If they were inventions, that would be kind of disappointing.

I was thinking this afternoon, that reading the book is giving me a curious time-dilation effect, and that this effect is common to the books I have really enjoyed.

posted evening of April 8th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Foucault's Pendulum