(Reposted from www.earthlightbooks.blogspot.com)
Weird observation: on the one hand, books are the object of solitude par excellance.
When you read, you read alone. Chuck Palahniuk has a whole essay about
how to escape the lonesome writer's shack and how being a successful
author is composed of a cyclical flight from, and then return to, being
alone. Jonathan Franzen's essay anthology How to Be Alone is
titled after the reader's solitude as a kind of political/spiritual
attitude: the question of preserving one's integrity amid mass-culture
is the same as the question of how to be alone. Neil Postman writes of
the breakdown of individual, critical thinking under the force of mass
media. We've all had the experience of trying to read Dickens or Tolstoy
or Wallace in the library or a cafe and found ourselves utterly incapacitated by the jabbering gossip spewing
from some guy on his cell phone, one table over. Everyone's read the
same sentence twelve times without it registering, as we try in vain to
tune out lady behind us on the bus as she narrates, to no one in
particular and everyone in general, the minutia of her day. We've all
flown, like substance-starved refugees, from the toiling, yowling masses
into the blessed silence of churches, single-stall toilets, locked
cars, and after-hours offices. To read. In peace.
But then over on the left hand is the fact that reading cum books cum writing cum bibliophilia is a fundamentally communal thingy.
Let's skirt past how books are basically conversations (okay,
monologues; but still, it takes two people) on prostheses. Let's ignore
the publishing industry, libraries, book clubs, lit. classes, the
canon(s), and the new, infinite psuedo-book, the Internet. Forget all
that. I want to concentrate on one particular aspect of how books are
social objects.
I'm talking about seminars. (Disclaimer: your author is an Evergreen grad,
and hence makes liberal use of the concept and term "seminar" in all
its forms: as a noun, verb, present-progressive verb, modifier, etc.)
You've no doubt heard (or read)
the old trope that "Reading a good book is like devouring a meal" or
some such analogy. The comparison of reading to eating is obvious and
perennial: food sustains the body; books, the mind. But just as there
are different sorts of dishes, there are different flavors of book.
Writers
like Dan Brown and Michael Crichton are, as Steven King has put it,
"The literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries." They feel good while
being consumed, they're addictive, and they're basically devoid of
subtlety and nutritional content. These are the meals you eat and the
books you read while you're on the go: during a layover or pit-stop, you
wolf one down.
Then there's real food: salmon fillet
with rice and steamed greens, or yellow curry with veggies and tofu.
These take time to create, time to consume, and work to digest. Ditto
for the literary equivalent of The Magic Mountain or The Fall or Moby Dick or Lord Jim. Thomas Mann didn't bang out The Magic Mountain in a couple months; it took him years to compose. And it takes readers nearly as long to complete.
Here's where the digestion comes in: one cannot, alone, begin to properly understand The Magic Mountain,
which has next to no plot, but is a densely packed marvel of metaphor,
suggestion, intellect, and psychology. This is the kind of novel that
lit majors can (and do) spend decades unpacking. There's so much in this book.
So my suggestion is that we think of seminaring (ha HA! see?) as a sort
of collaborative stomach, in which dense, heavy books get unpacked into
their constituent parts. You can read The Pelican Brief from cover to cover and pretty much get all there is to be gotten out of it. A book like The Magic Mountain,
on the other hand, has so much more than meets the eye that it's almost
like the literary equivalent of a fractal or an iceberg. You'll never
get to the bottom of it, but with help, you can get deeper into it.
So,
oddly, it turns out that books are props for both solitude and
collaboration. The actual reading occurs in silence, alone; you cannot
read a book together (excluding kindergarden and church). But you cannot
understand most of the great books without a community of readers with
which to explore them. Like a search party, each reader ventures out
into the territory of the book, sees what they can see, and then reports
back to the seminar where everyone compares notes. To put it another
way, great novels are epistemically complex: you can't understand one at a single reading, and you can't unpack its meaning into a specific expositive statement.
Of
course, anyone who's read a great novel in a community of like-minded
explorers knows that just because there's no bottom to their meaning and
interpretation doesn't mean that they're not worth investigating. Quite
the opposite. The bottomless nature of a novel is effectively a
guarantee that however much one might get out of them, there's always
more to be had.
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