The Way We Read Now: It's Earlier Than We Think

This is my final blog post, because I have to hurry up and create a substantial literary oeuvre in the next two decades (I've decided now that I have some ideas for it, which was my main reason for moving to a big city three years ago, and bizarrely, it worked), and more specifically and immediately, start writing a novel and maybe some short stories right away after my 40^th birthday happens on the final day of the month.

I actually have already created several substantial literary oeuvres, including several plays, an abundance of fan fiction, and several blogs, of which this is my third. But I gave up on the playwriting career as a rash youth, the fan fiction isn't especially marketable, and the search engines haven't brought me fame, either. I'm nevertheless astonished at the consistency of my traffic, which seems to be primarily generated by people (usually people: I have a good idea of when it's internet chicanery) with high-traffic blogs linking to my posts. So thank you, unknown people who have, here and there, found one of my posts noteworthy. Although I probably would have kept talking anyway – I mean, my traffic is negligible as it is – I do prefer to get in front of more eyeballs, as long, it seems, as I don't have to find the eyeballs.

I don't foresee a future where I'll be blogging, although some day, in another incarnation, I might be forced to have a self-promotional website. In the meantime I can be found on the interwaves on Another Kind of Distance, my podcast on time travel movies (and sometimes tangentially related movies we like, and sometimes TV episodes), co-hosted by David Fiore.

When I started this blog, it was supposed to be a literary blog, but it so happens that I can neither read fast enough, nor process what I read and produce elegant thoughts about it fast enough, for even a monthly post. So then it became my “everything that crosses my mind” blog. For the final post – coincidentally, but still – I'm returning to the topic of literature to muse about the place it holds in our present culture through the lens of the digital “reading delivery systems” that I've explored in the past year or so.

But first, some stats.

Disappearance of Reading?

It only makes sense that the more options we have for entertainment, the less time we have to devote to reading. Does that make us a less literate culture? Clearly not: the basic literacy rate in England and North American has risen to near-universality since the 19th century, which is now looked upon as the golden age of novel-reading. What's kind of surprising is that reading for entertainment has survived at all, but the YA boom proved that despite the proliferation of television choices, ordinary people still want books, as long as the books don't demand too much time or mental energy and have some kind of direct archetypal appeal.

Still, reading is certainly quickly crowded out by other activities as soon as you're out of school. For myself, I work for 7 or 7.5 hours Monday through Friday, write for an hour or two, try to fit in a TV episode so that I know what everybody else is talking about, read articles on the web for an hour or so – and that leaves me with an hour or two to read a book, which on weeknights, because I'm tired, most often ends up being one. One weeknight every week I spend with my boyfriend, or, since he has a similar schedule, we'd never see each other. We also try to have a date day on the weekend, although sometimes I spend part of it seeing my best friend; and one of my days off I have to devote to serious writing, although that gets messed with, too, because I also have to do errands on that day, like groceries and laundry. And since everyone's life is like this, unless you're a literature professor, retired (and no one of my generation is going to get to retire until they're 65 at least), a speed reader, or preferably all three, where is the time to read supposed to come from?

So there's really no need to admonish the general public for not finding a lot of time to read – unless your motivation is to shame all of us into making the time. But if we're going to make the time, we have to make it for good books. The only reason to encourage any reading is that it might lead to good reading. (I realize that I don't get to define what good reading is, but I do believe that there is good reading and bad reading.) Since nowadays you can encounter educated people who watch so much TV they can't possibly ever pick up a book, I presume that once you're educated – at the BA level, say – you will remain an articulate person and analytical thinker without ever picking up a book again (although it probably helps to sometimes read an article).

I remember when, having decided that I would not to the prestigious theatre school that had suspended me for insubordination (apparently, I wasn't given an official reason) since I'd run out of money and already had a lot of student debt anyway, I figured that my BA and an almost-MA were enough and it was time, at 32, to enter the real world, so I got a call centre job with a bank. During the training, which took place over the course of about six weeks, our supervisor not only showed us a slideshow of his home renos but also gave us such lifestyle advice as, “I read for 15 minutes every day.” Which struck me, an ex-English major, as ludicrous – as though reading were like doing the StairMaster, and not even with dedication, but as a kind of token gesture. (As you can imagine, my new career didn't work out.)

According to these Pew Research Center survey stats, the median number of books read by American adults in 2013 was 5. (I'm going by US stats because the most recent stats for Canada that I could find are from 2007.) For the college-educated, the median number was 8; by income, the number climbed higher according to income level and ranged between 3 (for under $30, 000) and 8 (for $75, 000 and over). I am college-educated and make well under $30, 000 per year, which makes me quite the anomaly (which I largely attribute to having set out on a path to become an English professor and then belatedly changed my mind), and I finished 8 books in the past 12 months. That's very slightly more than what I've been averaging since I graduated with my MA at the end of 2009, which, from memory, I'd say is about 6. 

I don't remember completing more books per year at earlier points in my life – I remember struggling with my attention span since I was in my late teens, and spending any extra reading time I had in university researching and writing essays and fooling around on the internet – but according to my Goodreads account, I must have: I found 447 books that I've read, or (for short story, essay, and poetry collections) partially read, between the ages of 12 and 39, for an average of 16.5 books per year. And that doesn't include the commercial and genre fiction (Anne Rice, V.C. Andrews, etc.) that I was still reading until my late teens, or the innumerable book chapters and academic articles I read as a university student – sometimes even (I shudder to admit it) for pleasure. 

Experimenting with Formats and Apps: Audible and LibriVox

The Pew Research Center stats are for print and e-books plus audio books. I also listened to a lot of audio books this year – about 8 again. So if you include audio books, that gets my number up to 16, which was the mean for people in the top household income tier (although someone in the second-highest income tier skewed the mean up to 18). It hardly seems fair to do that, though, because the reason I was able to listen to so many audio books is that I have a job, and bosses, that allow me to listen to my phone all day at work. This initially led to my discovery of podcasts, but since I'm picky, I'm only really interested in half a dozen or so podcasts at a time, so once I'm caught up with the show's archived episodes, I need more things to listen to for an average of 35 hours per week. That's what led me to discover Audible.

Audible, which is the only for-pay online audiobooks service I can find with a cursory search, is owned by Amazon, those internet monopolists. I guess you can also get audiobooks from iTunes, although I just learned that. Anyway, Audible hooked me in by offering a credit for any book every month for a monthly fee of around 20 Canadian dollars (it was slightly below before our present recession, and is now slightly above). Since online audiobooks are often considerably more expensive than ebooks (as their physical counterparts are than print books), this is a good deal, and definitely convenient. In the same search that uncovered Audible I also found LibriVox, which appears to be the most widely-used free audiobooks site, with the reading being done by volunteers.

How you use audiobooks, if you even have the time to use them, will depend on your personality. There's shame attached to “reading” in this way, although apparently science shows that comprehension is not affected by getting the book through the ear rather than the eye. I guess the shame stems from the stigma on illiteracy, and also “laziness”: although it takes as much effort to listen as to read, you can keep playing an audio book all the way to the end while listening to it intermittently, whereas you have to read each sentence to get through a book.

It almost seemed as though internet-savvy intellectuals were all discovering these delivery systems at the same time, because soon after I signed up for the Audible deal I started hearing ads for the service on podcasts like Partially Examined Life and Best of the Left, which was a real pisser, because I could have got a discount on my first book if I'd signed up using a promo code from one of the shows. Or I guess really it was Audible contacting these podcasters. (Or they applied to have a sponsor? No idea how it works – my podcast is not Next Level.) Anyway though, I also noticed the PEL guys talking about using LibriVox after I'd discovered it on my own.

I decided to use audiobooks for two main purposes: to familiarize myself with classics that I know I'm never going to get around to reading, with lets me feel “cultured” while freeing up time to read books that actually interest me, and to familiarize myself with massive non-fiction tomes that I'd find too boring to finish in print. This year (i.e., 12-month period from birthday to birthday), for example, the most noteworthy books I obtained through Audible were The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote (in Edith Grossman's recent translation), and Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which is not one of my 8 audiobooks, since I have 8 hours left). Because it's even easier for your mind (or at least my mind) to wander when listening than when reading, and because I'm actually doing tasks while listening, I don't expect to catch more than the gist of the books. Thanks to the internet, however, I can then fill in the gaps by with the use of SparkNotes (that's right, I have no shame – I'm not in university anymore), Wikipedia, and, in the case of new non-fiction books, in-depth articles.

There are serious flaws with Audible, however, that prevent its audiobooks from being adequate substitutes for physical books, whether audio or print, and I sincerely hope that Amazon and the makers of personal electronic devices give enough of a shit to improve these books and apps as more people get their culture this way. First: it's just about impossible to “rewind” with any accuracy to relisten to an important point, at least on my puny iPhone, which turns the most infinitesimal nudge of my big, clumsy index finger into 20 minutes of book. I'm sure it would be more precise if I were doing it with a cursor on a computer – but if your device is supposed to be able to support these books, it should do a better job of it. Second: the audio chapter divisions do not come with information from the print version. They're simply labelled “Chapter 1,” “Chapter 2,” and so on – and the numbers don't even necessarily correspond to the print book's chapter numbers, because they don't even distinguish between a chapter and a prologue or foreword. If, therefore, I want to go back to a specific chapter and listen to it again, because I was especially distracted during that part, or because Wikipedia assures me that it's an important one, Audible makes that extremely inconvenient. Considering that they're pricing these things at top dollar (unlike low-priced ebooks), it's disappointing to say the least. The Canterbury Tales audiobook, for example, heftily priced at nearly $30 US (Blackstone edition), doesn't even tell you what tale you're hearing.

I make a further distinction between Audible and LibriVox, only being willing to use LibriVox for certain books. For example: public domain non-fiction classics, like On Liberty and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Books that I should have read long ago and probably wouldn't get around to reading for a long time. Ironically, although it's free to listen to the books, LibriVox users actually enter chapter information accurately, taking it from the print edition. There are sometimes sound quality problems, and sometimes you'll get someone who reads too fast, or has a thick accent that's hard for a person from your area of the globe to understand. But just as often, you'll get a reading dramatic and gripping enough to be professional. (I loved Bob Neufeld's colourful reading of Civil Disobedience.)

Nevertheless, with however little warrant, I prefer to leave my major works of literature, which require dramatic talent to read properly, to paid readers, and therefore to Audible – especially since I don't need to buy too many books this way, only the ones that I feel a duty but not much desire to read (or revisit).

The Digital Public Library: OverDrive

Contrary to popular belief, readers seem to be extremely slow to adopt new reading methods. I'm a cutting-edge experimentalist by the conservative standards of the readers in the Pew survey: I'm almost off print books altogether. Having moved a lot in my adult life, I've gradually shed my physical library, which, I reasoned, consisted of books that I had either already read or was probably never going to read. I have no sentimental attachment to physical books whatsoever, and I've even come to almost dread reading them, since I at least have the illusion that I'm reading ebooks faster and more easily. I've definitely noticed gradations of stimulation, wherein if I'm tired (which at this age, working full time, when am I not), my laptop screen is highly stimulating (I can read on it all night), my phone screen is fairly stimulating, and a print page is not stimulating at all (I'll start falling asleep after a few sentences). I can understand bemoaning the endangerment of book cover art (like record cover art), but that's a separate issue from how one wants to read; so is the endangerment of physical spaces for lovers of reading, both bookstores and libraries.

The only limitation on my switch to ebooks is what's been converted to that format. Although almost all new books and editions since the ebook revolution (2000ish?) come in e-editions now, I have no idea who decides what from the back catalogue or public domain gets an e-edition, in what order, or how fast. The major canonical authors are represented, of course, and the major cult figures, but many omissions remain, so we're all going to be relying on physical books in libraries for some time.

However, this year I also discovered how to take ebooks out of the library, using the library app OverDrive. (Which, I just googled-learned, has a deal with Amazon. Of course. Amazon owns my electronic reading experience.) You have to be a member of the library, and then you have access to its ebook and digital audiobook collection – which is pretty desultory, if the Toronto Public Library is anything to go by. Maybe I can blame it on Rob Ford – although if you do a quick google on this issue, you'll find that there are apparently untold difficulties involved, from the practical to the philosophical, with the acquisition and lending of ebooks by libraries. For now, borrowing ebooks from libraries can only serve as a supplement to buying them. My habitual process now is: check TPL's digital collection through OverDrive; if it's not there, check Kobo (formerly iBooks, but with Canada's dollar screwed again, I'm relying more on Kobo); if it's not there, see how much the print edition costs; if it's too much, check TPL's print collection.

Really, though, the limitations on ereading aren't so much sending me back to print books as helping me make decisions about what to read next. But only when I have a choice: if it's a matter of doing research for something I'm writing, I will of course avail myself of TPL's print collection. Very occasionally I still get a craving for a book that's either not available as an ebook or out of print, but that's in the number of less than half a dozen per year. (As for ebooks, I probably purchase around half a dozen in a year.) And if I'm in an airport, I really want a print book, preferably a somewhat junky one, which is how I ended up reading Gone Girl, after seeing the movie – and the print book came in handy when my return flight was delayed and I ended up stranded in the airport for six hours with no way to charge my cell phone.

The Future of Reading?

I was surprised to learn that I'm such an early adopter of these new ways of reading, and also surprised at the correlation in the Pew survey between higher education, on the one hand, and use of non-print books on the other. It seems counter-intuitive, for example, that the same percentage of people who have completed some college and college graduates would have read at least one print book, but far fewer non-graduates would have read an ebook or used an audiobook. If audiobooks are for the “lazy” or “illiterate,” why would their use go up with education level? Does comfort with technology increase with education level? Are college graduates, like me, trying to cram extra books into their craniums by reading on portable digital devices on the fly and listening to audio books on their commute? Are only the most avid readers apt to get excited about format innovations, and curious about what they can do to enhance one's reading life?

I'm not always an early adopter. Although I've been addicted to the internet for the entirety of this century, I only got a mobile phone when I moved to Toronto in the summer of 2012, only got a smartphone when I got a job selling mobile phones in the spring of 2013, only got a good smartphone that Xmas, and only started discovering the different options for reading since around last spring. So although I probably represent the vanguard of the shift to ebooks, it's also probably the case that despite all of the alarm over that shift – especially if you've worked in the book industry, as I did for several years – it's actually happening very slowly, and only starting to pick up now. Still, in my almost complete abandonment of print, I'm in a tiny minority: only 5% of readers in the Pew survey read an ebook without also reading a print book, and I only avoided that category by my airport purchase. 

All in all, my reasons for preferring ebooks to print books are: they're usually cheaper (although going up); despite many missing titles, I'm still more likely to find the title I'm looking for than if I go to even a huge bookstore in a major city, and don't have to wait for a special order; if it's a library book, I don't have to pick it up and I can't forget to return it; I don't have to move them; my whole library travels with me wherever I go, accessible from my phone; and screens stimulate me, while the print page puts me to sleep. I hope we'll always have print books as well, and public spaces for book-lovers and knowledge-seekers, and physical picture books will always be important for children who are learning to read, but personally, I'd be just as happy if I never had to read a print book again.

As to whether we're going to “stop reading” altogether in the future – there is of course a certain artificiality in judging how much a person reads in a year by the number of books they've read. We of course now all read and write text all day long, with varying levels of literacy, in order to communicate through social media or our mobile phones. Even sticking to discursive prose (not recipes or IMDb entries, then), I read for far more than 15 minutes per day, every day, but a lot of that reading consists of: short articles, long articles, blog posts, Wikipedia entries, movie reviews, and on and on, all of it online and most of it encountered through Facebook shares and Google searches, although I'll also go straight to certain authors, publications, and sites. Goodreads, too, artificially divides your units of reading into books, because its database collects editions of published books – even though the actual works may be poems, plays, essays, or short stories, or collections of poems, plays, essays, or short stories.

Even if there's a decline in book reading, that may not mean that there's a decline in reading. A lot of internet reading may be frivolous, but a lot of book reading is frivolous too, so counting the number of books read can only give you the roughest measure of a person's annual reading – if “reading” means “serious reading,” and I'm not sure why we'd be trying to measure annual reading, or using books as the measure, if that's not what we were trying to measure. Books – as distinct from anthologies – do remain central to intellectual culture, with their sustained arguments, their narrative ambition and complexity, their inducement (in reader and writer) of reflection. And if internet reading is one of the things pushing out book reading, as it may well be, that's something that should be fought. But before waving our arms around about cultural decay, we should still distinguish a decline in book reading from a decline in reading (and knowledge, and thoughtfulness), as well as being aware that all books aren't created equal.

One definite limitation on ebooks: lending the book. For example, today I read an eerie time travel story, "Real Estate," in Rivka Galchen's collection American Innovations, and I wanted to lend the book to David Fiore so he could read it. However, I can't just lend him my phone (or tablet if I had one, and some would be pissed to have to lend their ereader). That would be fine if he was going to read the story right now, but maybe he just wants me to lend him the book so that he'll remember to read it when he gets around to it, and that I can't do. I checked and it's available through OverDrive, but he'd have to download the app – to his Kobo, since he doesn't like reading on his phone. So I guess it won't be a big deal once everyone is used to getting ebooks from libraries and libraries have better ebook collections. Still, recommending that someone read something, even if they can download it for free, isn't the same thing as just lending them the damn book. I've bought the book, I should be able to lend it. It seems that Amazon actually has a way to do this, although it's like a library loan, which means the borrower only has a certain window within which to read it, which is kind of annoying, but at the same time does solve the problem of friends or exes never returning your book. Which is another thing – you can't gift an ebook that you own. Unless Amazon has, or develops, a way to do that, too.

The future of reading, it seems, will be much like the past, but with different annoyances. For now, though, I find exploring the new reading delivery systems a thrill. It's like when I was a kid, and there was nothing more thrilling to me than the novelization of a favourite movie, because it meant taking a favourite thing and making it even better by making it into a book. In this case, the two favourite things being combined are digital technology and books. Ultimately I'm still trying to track down some words written in a particular order by someone that some people have thought were invaluable, get access to them affordably, and find a way to squeeze them into my brain, like a diner ketchup package.

In which I discover Goodreads, Archer, and Brideshead Revisited, basically

For the past few days I've been fooling around with Goodreads, after a friend mentioned it again. I've developed a fidgety past time of cataloguing my reading, so I thought I might as well do it on the internet, like everyone else. My Goodreads account isn't a matter of boasting, though; it's more of a source of shame.

As I suspected, despite the designation “reader” being at the core of my identity, I haven't actually read that much. In the internet era, anyone who might be timidly inclined to congratulate themselves on their knowledge of literature or film has learned that the true bibliophile has read thousands, not hundreds, of books, as the true cinephile has watched thousands, not hundreds, of movies. If you exclude the picture books and children's novels I read as a child, or the popular fiction I read from 10 to 15 (probably around 80 novels), from 12 to nearly 37 I've only read around 300 “books.” I suspect, based on just how slow and picky a reader I am, that in another 25 years I will have only read another 300, at most. In fact, such is my desire to be free of the obligation to read the thousands and tens of thousands of great books out there, that I'm toying with the idea of drawing the line and not reading any more fiction after my 50s, except perhaps new works. Right now, my “to read” tag contains around a hundred books, and I don't particularly want it to grow much more; the only books I want to add to it are those I haven't heard of yet, new ones especially.

Now look at this picture, which I will come back to at the end of this post:

In the meantime, back to dry reflections that are only of interest to myself. 

Of course “books” is a dubious way to quantify one's reading. Though not so dubious that I don't think it gives a fairly accurate representation of my shame. First, individual plays and some long short stories, essays, and poems count as a “book,” but so do collections of them. I'm inclined to choose the anthology I read if I can find it in the database; however, that doesn't allow you to rate the individual works in it.

Other kinds of reading are left out entirely. It's hard to say where to draw the line, of course: do magazine articles on how to apply eyeshadow count as part of your “reading”? Does the newspaper? At the moment I follow the NYRB and LRB, and several online literary sites; in university I had to read all kinds of academic essays and book chapters; as a teenager I read a lot of criticism for pleasure. I could track down some of those books, but it seems pointless; I wasn't reading out of interest in the essay-writer, but in the book under discussion, the same way I might, now, read a blog post without taking note of the author if I find it through a google-search for a topic. Such reading is enormously important in helping me form my opinions, but authorial “anonymity” seems an essential part of it. On the other hand, I've included classics of criticism in my Goodreads catalogue.

Another inaccuracy is that I often can't find the translation I read, or not without searching through many pages, which I don't have the patience to do. The ratings seem to apply to particular works, not editions – meaning not translations either. I can't help feeling odd recommending a translation I didn't read. The difference a translation makes is obvious in the case of two different collections of Robert Walser that I rated, with different translators: one got 5 stars from me, the other 2. In rare cases I couldn't even find the work, in any edition, either on its own or in a collection – for example, I found Colette's Innocent Libertine, but not its sequel, Minne.

Other interesting quantifications that Goodreads allows me to perform on my reading: I have forgotten nearly a quarter of what I've read (mostly books I read before the age of 21); and the books I read as a teenager account for nearly a third of my reading. (Which I suppose makes sense, since that was nearly a decade of my life, and since then there has been another decade and another near-decade.) Books I read for university, on the other hand, account for only a miniscule amount of my reading, which doesn't surprise me, although it was even less than I'd thought.

Reading, Memory, Mortality

Preparing my Goodreads catalogue has made me reflect on what I've only thought about glancingly in the past: what it means to “remember,” or not remember, a book. To begin with, I was surprised and pleased to discover that in about 80 per cent of cases I remembered the covers of the books I read (which is how I knew what editions I'd read) even if I read them 20 years ago or more, no longer own them, or have them in storage and have seldom looked at them since. On the other hand, if the editions I read were clothbound volumes from the library or purchased second-hand, they'd be impossible to identify even if Goodreads included pictures of hardcovers without their dust jackets. In some cases I selected editions that I owned at one point, although I may have first read – or only read – another edition from the library.

Some prolific authors I've read in numerous collections over many years – such as Freud, whom I've read in volumes I've owned and in volumes I've taken out from the library. I know which works I've read, but I can't always remember which collection they're in. If I took the volume out from the library I was only interested in a particular essay and would have left everything else in the volume alone. With Emerson, again, I've read him in a number of editions, both owned (second-hand, new) and taken out from the library; I summarized this in Goodreads by choosing a complete works I've never touched and tagging it with “partial reads.”

Reading is, simply, much less tidy than the idea that one reads authors in the form of particular, discrete volumes assumes. Again, if I read a play in an anthology of drama for university, I'm disinclined to look up the anthology and mark it as even a “partial read,” since I may have read less than a third of it for the course; instead I'll find and review a random edition of the play; however, I will also have no idea who the translator was if it was a foreign play.

But the question of recalling the content of a book is the most fascinating, and depressing, of all. In many cases, I don't remember the book itself, but plot summaries and thematic analyses from the criticism I've read (e.g. Pale Fire). In most cases, even if I can only recall one or two scenes from the book, I do remember my reaction: it may have been violently negative (1 star), or blissful (4 or 5 stars), or indifferent and a little contemptuous (2 stars), or indifferent but respectful (3 stars): there you have my interpretation of the 5-star system for rating books (subjective in all cases, no doubt). There are two cases where I feel I can't give a book a rating even if I do remember it: if I didn't actively dislike it, but the pleasure I got from it did not outweigh the effort, and consequent frequent boredom, of reading it (the case with monsters like Paradise Lost and Middlemarch); and if I read it largely for its reputation of being sexually subversive (the case with many books I read as a teenager, such as Naked Lunch and Story of the Eye).

In almost all cases where a film adaptation (or, even better, audio book) hasn't prompted my memory and I haven't read much criticism of the book, I will not remember most of the events in any novel or play I haven't read several times without looking up a summary online. Because I'm such a slow reader, I seldom re-read; exceptions include the Shakespeare plays I've read (most of them twice or three times, Hamlet around a dozen times), Jane Austen's novels (most of them twice, Pride and Prejudice around half a dozen times), Henry James's Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove (twice each), Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies (twice), and a few other favourite plays (e.g. Importance of Being Earnest, Streetcar Named Desire, Hedda Gabler). “Pure” cases of forgetting a novel include Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which I read as a teenager and remembered enjoying, but didn't recall a single event from it, and The Brothers Karamazov, which I read in my late 20s and enjoyed, but couldn't recall a thing that happened in it almost immediately afterwards. To my mortification, I'm in that position with Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives and 2666 now: although I read both recently and loved them more than almost anything else I've read, I recall few of the characters by name and very little of what happened to them. In this case, though, I will certainly re-read.

Then there's the problem of applying ratings to books you haven't read in over a decade. As I said, I can always recall my reaction even if I can't recall anything about the book; that doesn't, however, mean I'd have the same reaction if I read it now – either again or for the first time. Many Goodreads users mention this phenomenon and give the context of their reading in their reviews. The sense of dissonance arises when trying to list one's all-time favourite books; it would be more accurate, perhaps, to list them by decade, keeping to the books read that decade. Or even by year.

Films, oddly, seem to be a different case, at least for me. It's far easier to rewatch a film than to reread a book, and while I may like a film slightly more or slightly less than the first time I saw it in subsequent decades, my tastes in film were more formed by my 20s then my tastes in literature will ever be: there is nothing I liked or loved in my 20s (in contrast to my teens) that I'm likely to repudiate now, although there are things I hated in my 20s that I may appreciate now. My taste in films follows the course that Northrop Frye considered ideal for the literary critic: an increasing catholicism. (Though, I have to admit, incrementally increasing.) I can't think of many books I've loved that I'd repudiate now, either, but I'm not sure that Pride and Prejudice would have had such an impact on me if I hadn't read it at 16, or Portrait of a Lady or Wings of the Dove if I hadn't read them in my early 20s. Often, my favourite novels are those in which I powerfully identify with the protagonist due to perceived psychological or circumstantial similarities. One may consider this a limited response to literature, but the fact is that I expect literature to translate my experience into literary terms, and in the process help me to make sense of it and help to make it more endurable. I do not have that expectation of film; I expect, from a film, to be entertained, perhaps moved, perhaps even gain a little insight into myself, but I don't expect it to explain me to myself. For one thing, movies usually only follow the main character's life for a few weeks or months; novels follow the main character or characters for years, concentrating on a period of formative development and typical experiences – growing up, struggling to acquire money or achieve fame, falling in love, falling out of love, getting married, getting divorced. Movies are a type of drama, and also (as Hitchcock, I think, pointed out) related to the short story: they deal with a particular event or episode in a character's life that changes them forever. (Often, it destroys them.) The novel is... the novel. It encourages the application of one's entire life story to the character's entire life story. In the best cases, it encourages the conscious or unconscious reassessment of one's entire life story, or large portions of it.

There is another kind of book I can't review, and those are the books that changed my life as a teenager. With the exception of Paglia's Sexual Personae, the most important of them, which I gave 5 stars; I am still reasonably confident that it's a masterpiece, though every year that I have to hear more out of Paglia shakes my confidence. I'm also reasonably confident that Ellmann's Oscar Wilde is a masterpiece of the biography genre, although some of its interpretations have since been challenged; however, I can't review it, because the 5 stars wouldn't be for that, but for the impact it had on me when I read it at 13. What one reads as a teenager has an impact that nothing ever will again, because it forms one's identity and view of the world. One is also, of course, unconsciously shaped in many little ways by the things one reads, watches, and listens to as a child and teenager; but I don't believe that any of it is as important as the conscious influences of adolescence: the books (and in rare cases, popular culture) that challenged the assumptions with which one was raised (the assumptions of parents, class, and mainstream culture) and made one aware of additional, or alternative, possibilities.

At one end, there are movies and books; on the other, music and visual art. We are expected to remember the basic plot of narrative fiction to say that we “know” it, even though we will also insist that knowing the plot a work of fiction is not equivalent to reading the work, or we could all read the Sparks notes (and anyone who thought that knowing the plot of a movie was equivalent to watching the movie would be considered crazy). But it's the texture of a novel that makes up the bulk of our experience of it – the prose, the wit, the observations, the descriptions, the dialogue – and that it what is likely to escape our memory, except in the form of a general impression. It's a rare reader who can recite prose from a novel or story; not so with dialogue-based works: most movie and play fans can recite lines from their favourites; monologues, like poems, lend themselves to memorization.

We are not, however, expected to “memorize” music or paintings. There's no shame for the classical music fan in only being able to hum a bar or two of a composition, or in having forgotten how it goes completely. And we don't know what it would mean to memorize a painting; I can vaguely call to mind most of my favourite paintings (particularly the figural ones) as well as others I've seen often, though not in any detail. (I should add that, as a Canadian who hasn't travelled much, almost all of my experience of famous paintings is through books, posters, and the internet; I think I saw one Picasso during a trip to San Francisco, but I can't remember which one.) But this is simply a fact about memory; it's not an accomplishment.

Contemplating the books I've read and haven't read, and making decisions about what I still want to read and what I have determined inessential, is one of the ways in which I come to terms with my mortality; I've started to wonder whether, since I'm not religious, it's the main way. I feel more shame and regret over the number of books I've forgotten than the amount of events in my life I've forgotten (who remembers more than a handful of days, a dozen experiences, from every year, despite the number of minute events that obsess and oppress us daily?), perhaps because reading time is time stolen from life – not time deliberately wasted, however, like watching junky TV or piddling around on the internet, but time that is supposed to be invested; the experience of art is transcendence at one's command, taking time away from one's life but, in return, giving an experience that's worth any number of mundane days spent obsessing about minute things one will not remember and watching junky TV and piddling around on the internet.

Arrested Development: Brideshead Revisited and Archer

What if readers approached books as the music fan approaches music (in the age of recorded music, at least): re-read a favourite book whenever they want to in order to experience the pleasure it gives, without expecting to remember anything about it (except that pleasure) between readings? Consider the difference between books and movies here: most cinephiles think that you must watch a good film many times in order to see all of the things in it, and that, consequently, a critic like Pauline Kael, who refused to watch movies more than once, was irresponsible, or just plain crazy. But although everyone would readily admit that a great 19^th century novel like Middlemarch is more complex than even the most complex film, I don't think any literary critic would claim that you have to read them many times in order to “get everything out of them.” A single careful, attentive reading will do.

Are film critics more pretentious than literary critics? Or are they unconsciously motivated by the fact that watching a movie is, for most people, considerably less time-consuming, as well as far easier, than reading a novel? Or is there the idea that meaning is far less contained in films – because of its visual nature – than in novels, so that, as with poetry, the meanings that can be discovered are potentially infinite? In any case, although readers who are at once faster and less ambitious than I am (slowness and ambition: what a terrible combination) are doubtless more inclined to re-read than I am, unless you're Harold Bloom – you knew that he had not only a freak speed-reading ability but a medical condition that makes it unnecessary for him to sleep – you will probably, as an adult, read most books once. Whereas, in contrast, if I like a movie I am extremely likely to watch it more than once, and I can think of dozens of favourites that I've seen anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen times.

Recently I read Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisisted for no reason except the pleasure of reading it: I went to it straight from watching the 1981 mini-series, a roughly 13-hour affair that's such a faithful adaptation that there is practically no difference between watching it and reading the book; somehow, however, it made me want to read the book anyway. The major departure was in the ending: the screenwriters wisely dramatize incidents related in the novel in dialogue. Otherwise, between Waugh's strong reliance on dialogue and the screenwriters' use of great swathes of the first-person narration in voice-over, the mini-series is practically a word-for-word, scene-by-scene adaptation. The only odd note was in the casting: Anthony Andrews as a blonde Sebastian is iconographically correct as a homoerotic beautiful boy, but it underlines how little he resembles Diana Quick as his twin, Julia. (In the novel as in the mini-series Julia is dark-haired; the colour of Sebastian's hair is not given in the novel, that I noticed.)

I gave Brideshead a miss when I read Waugh's satires as a teenager, having read that it was his most “conservative” novel. While that may be true politically, it certainly isn't true sexually: although Catholic theme of the novel is the working of grace in the lives of the main characters, Waugh's attitude (and the attitude of those main characters) towards sexuality is startlingly worldly for a novel published in 1946. Not only is Charles, the narrator, depicted as being reciprocally in love with the beautiful young aristocrat Sebastian, but he later goes to what he specifically refers to as a “pansy bar” with their flaming queen friend from Oxford, whom he specifically refers to his “pansy friend” – both to his mistress, Sebastian's sister Julia. Neither Charles's love for Sebastian nor his friendship with Anthony is ever repudiated, nor does Waugh depict Charles as feeling any shame over them – other than his early ambivalence towards the outrageous Anthony.

One of the most interesting things about the novel is how much Waugh leaves opaque about the characters and their motivations – and I don't mean just the depiction of Charles and Sebastian's relationship, which is at once elliptical and absolutely direct. We never learn precisely what causes Sebastian's disintegration, although we know that in his own mind it is connected with his family, especially his mother. From what I've seen on the internet, readers love projecting their own issues with their mothers onto Lady Marchmain, complete with early 21^st century babble about “narcissistic” parents (as if there were any other kind) – just as Anthony and Sebastian himself love to do. It almost makes me wonder if Waugh was influenced by T. S. Eliot's essay on Hamlet, Gertrude, and the objective correlative. Waugh gives no objective correlative for Sebastian's distress; it is simply the case that families do this to one; it is part of what we understand, in 20^th century literature, the family to be.

And nothing seems to bring out the pressures and repressions of the nuclear family – whether middle class or aristocratic – like the depiction of addiction: the horror of the addict's misery and uncouthness intruding upon the family's calm, respectable surface, its failure, dysfunctions, and deeply buried disorders personified; the attempts to control the addict without ever directly broaching the problem, at least to him. I found myself frequently thinking about Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and was therefore struck when, late in the novel, Charles calls the thwarted, hysterical Julia, “Cat on a roof,” and wondered if Brideshead could have influenced Williams. Waugh's blackly comic depiction of the dying paterfamilias's favouring of Julia and Sebastian, the adulterous but aesthetically pleasing scapegraces, over his pious but aesthetically displeasing eldest son and his vulgar new wife, also brought to mind the battle between Maggie and the “no necks” for Big Daddy's regard. And of course, in both play and novel, the alcoholic is also implicitly homosexual. Is Sebastian's homosexuality the sufficient cause for his depression and self-destruction? Is that what his family is trying to control? Waugh gives us very, very little indication of this, although the defender of this interpretation could argue that Waugh could not emphasize this interpretation without making the homosexual theme completely explicit. The mini-series – made 35 years later, after the legalization of homosexuality – gives a few more hints: in one Heavenly Creatures-esque scene that's not in the novel, after Charles and Sebastian are kept apart from each other in the evenings at Oxford due to their shenanigans, a drunk and sobbing Sebastian shows up outside Charles's rooms to wail pathetically, “I just want to see you!” If Lady Marchmain had allowed Sebastian and Charles to take up residence together as planned, instead of trying to put Sebastian under religious supervision, would they have lived happily ever after, with Charles – as he argues to her – able to keep Sebastian's alcoholism in check? I suspect that Waugh's answer would be the same as the Jesuitical Bridey's when Charles argues that Sebastian would be better off if he'd been raised without religion: “It's quite possible.” (On the other hand, it doesn't turn out too well when Jeremy Irons applies this logic to his homoerotic relationship to his drug-addicted twin in Dead Ringers.)

As it is, however, the novel testifies to the enigmatic nature of human character and relationships; in particular, the mystery of self-destruction, which always has too many causes and never enough. The heterosexual reader who is uncomfortable identifying with a homosexual character can argue that Charles's homosexuality was an adolescent phase (albeit one he never repudiates); the homosexual reader or more open-minded heterosexual reader can argue that Charles is bisexual or that he suppresses his homosexuality due to the social pressures of the time – the outwardly conservative Charles can't live like either Sebastian or Anthony. Whatever sociological or psychological explanation ones gives for Charles's sexuality in the novel, Waugh seems to be pursing the theme of a bisexual ideal, between Anthony's recitation from the Tiresias section of The Waste Land and Charles's transference of his love from a male to female twin (does “Sebastian” refer to Shakespeare's twins as well as the early homosexual icon St. Sebastian?); also a Platonic ideal of progression from the sensual to the spiritual in which his homosexual love for Sebastian is a forerunner of his “mature” love for Julia, which is in turn a forerunner of his fully sublimated love for God.

It doesn't quite work: mysteriously, Julia, although also conceived as a sort of charismatic androgyne, is not as successful a representation as Sebastian. Is it because the section that depicts the idyllic early days of Charles and Sebastian's relationship is drenched in nostalgia for the prelapsarian last days of youth and illusion – into which adult sexuality, to say nothing of responsibility and, worst of all, reality, is always a painful intrusion? The novel is as much in love with this adolescence, in a Gothic, regressive way (as Wuthering Heights is obsessed with the freedom of Cathy and Heathcliff's childhood) as Sebastian is with his childhood; this vision ruins Charles, as Anthony sees: he sees that charm has ruined him, just as it has led many homosexual men to destruction, starting with Wilde, who represented it as a beautiful boy in The Picture of Dorian Gray; but Charles is ruined by the charm of a family – insular and doomed.

Charles's – and Waugh's – fetishization of the upper class is made either better or worse, depending on the reader, by the fact the family, their estate, even or especially their Catholicism all stand in for the aesthetic way of life, as the aristocracy did for Wilde and Proust. Charles's bowels may shrink when his vulgar wife chatters to party guests that he “lives only for beauty,” but she's absolutely correct. There is nothing more to Charles: the modern world is vulgar and ugly; the fading past is beautiful; if the war does not bring about the end of the world, it will most certainly bring about the end of everything good and permanently usher in the modern. After reading over the years that Wilde's trial made things extremely difficult for male homosexuals for decades afterwards, it's astonishing to see, in Brideshead Revisited, 1920s Oxford represented as though it's the 1860s Oxford of Pater and Wilde's 1895 trial had never intervened. Anthony Blanche is more than up to the small amount of bullying from the macho element at Oxford that he receives, and aestheticism, hedonism, and homosexuality as a single education of the senses and cunning method of rebellion against social convention and parental expectation (with conversion to Catholicism as the seal upon one's aestheticism); it is all excitement, even the bit of shame that Blanche's shamelessness makes Charles feel; there is no fear or furtiveness.

Poor old conventional heterosexuality can't live up to this glamour, at least for some readers, though I'm not one of those who thinks there's less emotional conviction in the Julia section of the novel. On the contrary, the storm at sea drenches their affair in an atmosphere of roiling emotion and the overcoming, however briefly, of tremendous sexual repression. I don't think there's any way to get around Charles's psychosexual excitement at discovering his lost male love in the person of his twin sister, which also allows him to make an attempt to recreate that lost love and all it came to represent by entertaining fantasies of becoming the master of Brideshead. That he does not suggests the Oedipal fantasy underlying this ambition (also suggested by the adultery angle). At heart this is a Gothic novel, haunted by the ghosts of the family romance, which give it its emotional energy.

I came to the mini-series by hearing it mentioned in the same breath with Downton Abbey, which even in its first season is a poorly-written soap opera (I was too bored to go on to the second season, which I've read on the internet is supposed to be the bad one). It is also truly unfortunate in its social implications: the servants are either pure good or pure evil; they are good if they are loyal to their masters, evil if they harbour any class resentment; the only servants who are permitted to have social ambition move in the orbit of the cause-y aristocrat sister, presumably to make her look good. Fans of the massively popular series – a phenomenon in the UK, a cult hit in North America – appear to defend it as “escapism,” but I can't escape when the series keeps rubbing the ugliness of social divisions in my face with its retrograde assumptions. The character of Daisy, the simple-minded, childlike, superstitious young servant girl, is a throwback to Prissy of Gone With the Wind, but since she's white, I'm not even sure if fans have realized that this is an offensive characterization of the rural peasantry. Not that I know anything about the rural peasantry of the early 20^th century, but I did find myself wondering, as I watched the servants of Downton, “Did anyone, anywhere, ever talk or act like this?” I doubt it: Julian Fellowes is working from melodrama archetypes that haven't changed in hundreds, maybe thousands of years. If Downton was well-written I could forgive it its basis in snobbery; but then, its class condescension and poor writing are inseparable: the problem with the servant characters is that they are written like no human beings anywhere, ever. (The aristocrats don't correspond to any known human types, either, but at least they're allowed to have flaws and virtues without being depicted as strictly good or evil.)

The difference between Downton Abbey and Brideshead Revisited isn't the difference between bad and good writing; it's the difference between TV writing and real writing. Many contemporary novels, both commercial and “literary,” are so dreadful that sometimes I wonder if real writing exists or if it's something I made up; Waugh reminded me that it does exist, and it's not the unique preserve of untouchable masterpieces: the writing in Brideshead isn't flawless, nor does it exhibit Modernist difficulty; it seems to be absolutely lucid, but the characters and their dilemmas are finally opaque and their psychology murky. If Brideshead reminded me of how good even the lesser masterpieces of the early 20^th century Anglo-American novel could be, Downton reminded me, with a thud, of how bad TV writing usually is. TV is not especially good at realistic drama; it is very good at fantasy and sci-fi adventure (my own favourites are Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the revamped Battlestar Galactica), and in the best series, sneaks realistic depictions of relationships into these genres.

It is also very good at comedy; the sitcom seamlessly took over stage comedy (unchanged in its essentials since Greek New Comedy, as Frye observed) and combined it with the pleasures of the serial. Besides Brideshead, I also checked out the adult cartoon series Archer last month. It's ostensibly a spoof of the spy genre, with lots of gross-out comedy involving vomit and kinky sex, but its interest, for me anyway, lies in its satire of 21^st century masculinity in the figure of the main character, a Don Draper/James Bond type whose “retro” appeal is a cover for his thoroughly modern metrosexuality – and whose adventurous, womanizing ways are undercut by the fact that he works for his actual mother, who runs the spy agency – and who's played by the same actress who played the mother on Arrested Development. The adolescent boy's fantasy of being a misogynous, babe-magnet spy is acknowledged as such; Archer's inability to settle down, respect women, or get a real, grown-up job is attributed to his screwed-up relationship with his domineering, manipulative, cold, and neglectful mother – openly depicted as all the things readers tend to project onto Lady Marchmain. Waugh, by keeping the mother-son relationship enigmatic, sidestepped the Freudian explanation for Sebastian's arrested development; Archer, as a satire on ideas of masculinity, revels in it. Most of the reviews I've read note the quality of the voice acting, and when Archer and Malory are allowed to tear into each other with rapid-fire sitcom insults, it's a testament to the genius of H. Jon Benjamin and Jessica Walter that they manage to generate some kind of emotional truth and stakes; while the timing of the cast and the Bogey-and-Bacall energy they bring to Adam Reed's endless barrage of deliberately infantile sarcasm often produces small miracles of comedic ensemble work.

Early on, before serial plotting takes over and characters become more dramatic and less inclined to be the butt (or boobs) of the satire, much fun is had at the expense of the equivalence of Archer and the show's action girl babe, Lana, as sex objects; both are inclined to prance around in their underwear, wiggling and jiggling, but Archer is more of a narcissist and exhibitionist – or at least he's more out about it than Lana, who must cling to her feminist principles even as she prances around in post-feminist clingy mini-dresses or designer underwear “knock offs,” as Archer camply accuses her. As cartoons they can effortlessly embody the fantasy ideals for male and female bodies – which, as Mark Simpson argued in "Transexy Time!", are so similar, in the end, that it's hard to believe that they belong to opposite – or even different – sexes. I thought of that article as I watched Archer and Lana traipse across the screen in their undies and listened to them compare notes on the sleekness of their depilated genitals: these are not opposite sexes; they are one sex, the product of the pornographic imagination, which isn't interested in gender, but simply in sex – sex that has nothing to do with nature and everything to do with the perverse imagination. 

First of 2012! Orwell, Calvino, the Anxiety of Reading, and the Danger of Stories

After my shameful report on my year in reading, it occurred to me that although I will never read enough to be a top literary blogger, if I'm going to keep a literary blog at all (if only for the amusement of myself and a few friends), I really ought to read a bit more. As a child and adolescent I lived under the pleasant illusion that I was well-read, which was true compared to both the peers and adults with whom I was surrounded; in university I was disturbed to discover that I was better-read than the average English student. But I'm not a serious or “ambitious” reader (to use the adjective I came across in a literary blog the other day) by the standards of the blogosphere, where bloggers posts lists of 30 to a hundred books they've read in a year. This sort of blogging tends does tend to bleed into bragging, like telling the world how many push-ups you can do at a time, an attitude to reading reinforced by the percentage bar on e-books, constantly informing you how much progress you've made (which, incidentally, puts the emphasis on you and your agency rather than, as with old-fashioned checking how many pages remain, on the book). The difficulty, rather than the pleasure, of reading has moved to the forefront of our experience (perhaps our definition) of it, turning it into an onerous duty alternately on behalf of the Self or the Book (both supreme), and God forbid you should take a lot of pleasure in reading, and devote a lot of reflection to what you've read, without reading a lot of books. In our positivist world we have no time for intangibles like quality of experience, only for measurable tangibles.

Orwell and The Overpraise of Books

Publishers have responded to the modern reader's sense that there's too much to read and too little time with series like Penguin's Great Ideas: little, cheap books of classic essays or collections of essays by well-known authors. I impulse-bought several of these in the last couple of years and then wondered when I'd ever get around to them. Now that I've launched my project of reading The Books in My House, however, I'm starting with these, and I've already knocked down one book in 2012: the Orwell collection Books & Cigarettes. The Penguin series is sure to multiply the number of books I read in 2012, though not necessarily the number of pages (or words, if we can no longer go by pages in the era of digital reading).

I have read – probably in Harold Bloom, who is not an admirer of 1984 – that Orwell's real strength as a writer lay in his essays rather than his fiction. I have only the dimmest memories of 1984, which I read in early adolescence (along with Animal Farm, which went right over my head), but I definitely enjoyed this slim collection, many of whose subjects bear on this problem of Modern Reading, starting with the first, title essay, which laments (in 1946) the willingness of the public (including the author) to spend its money on leisure activities like cigarettes, beer, and movies compared to its reluctance to spend it on books. Nevertheless, Orwell is not sentimental (or, in stark contrast to the literary blogger, bragging) in his attitude to books, which he characterizes, “There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single setting and forgets a week later....” In the second essay, “Bookshop Memories,” in which Orwell recollects his experiences of working in a second-hand bookshop, he writes, “Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening, and in the third essay, “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” where he describes the misery and squalor of the life of this instance of the literary professional (“He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features, for all literary people are very much alike”), “It is almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them. Until one has had some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”

Misery, squalor, and Sartrean disgust are consistent presences in Orwell's essays, climaxing in the two longer essays that end the collection, one, “How the Poor Die,” describing his experiences in a French hospital in 1929, the other his childhood experiences in a boarding school. The last, longest essay is a tour de force of autobiographical writing, starting from the personal (and traumatic) to take a wider, sociological and psychological view. The result is interestingly Freudian – especially since a quick google search for Orwell and Freud turns up a 1978 Virginia Quarterly Review essay that claims, based on the biographical evidence, that Orwell considered psychoanalysis quackery and exhibited no interest in Freud.

Nevertheless, in “Such, Such Were the Joys” (written by 1947 and published in 1952, according to the note at the end of the essay), Orwell draws what can only be considered psychological conclusions – and fascinating ones – based on his recollection of childhood experiences and his subjective reactions to them, and writes about childhood sexuality (with reference to a group masturbation scandal) in the frank manner that I, at any rate, associate with the influence of Freud on intellectuals in the first half of the 20^th century (and from which I think we've largely retreated). To me, nothing could sound more Freudian than Orwell's interest in the inner life – the alien world – of the child, and his (ultimately scientific) method of approaching it through an honest recounting of his memories, undistorted by sentimentality, moralizing, or projection of adult values.

In fact, Orwell is so unsentimental on the subject of children that he argues (again, based on his experience) that children are not especially loving, and in fact may feel disgust, loathing, and incomprehension towards adults. It makes one wonder – if we do not sentimentalize the child (as Freud didn't, either), why are we concerned about the horrors he suffers due to the values of society and sadism of adults – about the shame and humiliation to which he's senselessly subjected? The only possible answer is that everyone is, at one point, a child; that children are among the class of the powerless and, although the concept is a relatively new one, human beings with rights; and that the experiences of childhood affect the adult one becomes, the society one shapes, and one's treatment of the powerless. The essay also gives the impression that although children are not kinder, more innocent, or more loving than adults, they are morally superior in one respect: they have not yet fully accepted the cruel, ugly, and incoherent values of society. Or rather, they do accept them (children are naturally conformist), but subjectively they know that these values are lies: they are still aware of the conflict between subjective, emotional experience and the consciously unquestionable truth of authority – the basic psychological conflict of childhood in Orwell's essay. Children still know, subjectively, that two and two equal four, whatever they are told; adults are no longer aware that any difference exists at all between truth and lies. (Orwell deals with totalitarian distortion of truth, or destruction of the concept, in the U.S.S.R. and its effect on infatuated leftist European intellectuals, in “The Prevention of Literature,” where he writes, “Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.”)

Calvino and the Story in Postmodern Fiction

At midnight on January 1^st, 2012, I was in the middle of the final novel fragment in Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, making it both my last read of 2011 and my first read of 2012. It seemed like an excitingly fitting way to transition into a new year, reading the protagonist's recounting of an apocalypse that's resulted from what had appeared to be his fantasy of using the power of his mind to obliterate everything he dislikes in the world around him, starting with the surrounding buildings and ending with... everything. When the feat has been accomplished, strange officials (“the men from Section D”) approach him and congratulate him on ushering in a new era that they will control, whereupon he regrets his work but find he can't undo it. To erase is easier than to create.

For those who don't know (I didn't before I started reading it, though I knew of the title), the conceit of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is that the protagonist, the Reader (addressed as “you”), tries to read the book you are reading, or one called that and written by Italo Calvino, but gets cut off by a manufacturer's defect, and his efforts to get hold of the rest of the book place a series of apparently, but not actually, related books in his hands, each of which he is also cut off from reading for increasingly absurd reasons, at the same time becoming involved in an international conspiracy to replace the truth in books with tricks and lies. The chapters of If on a Winter's Night, recounting the Reader's adventures and the progress of his romance with the Other Reader, alternate with these beginnings of novels, which are pastiches of various genres, from the crime novel to European rural realism to Japanese quasi-pornography. Not straight pastiches, however, but liberally laden with postmodern strangeness (including those hoary tropes to which Bolano pays tribute, the mirror and the void), as well as a lot of kinky sexuality. The broadest pastiche of all, however, is the plot of “the novel itself,” with its conspiracies, Manichean agents and counteragents, and incidental UFO references.

The term “postmodern playfulness” still gets thrown around a lot, even though it's been thrown around so much that its lost all meaning and, therefore, usefulness as a critical phrase, since although it's true that a certain kind of playfulness, or lighthearted self-reflexivity, characterizes a lot of postmodern fiction, not all postmodern playfulness is alike – in fact, the playfulness of any two postmodern authors is distinctly different. Calvino's self-reflexivity and playfulness in If on a Winter's Night could not, for example, be more different from Bolano's in Nazi Literature in the Americas, although inventiveness and the vignette form are central features of both works (and after “postmodern playfulness,” “inventiveness” is the primary quality that comes to mind in reference to both). Calvino's playfulness is untinged by the sinister or any interest in evil, although like Bolano he is fascinated by violence, and he repeatedly returns to the subject of death. Maybe what I mean is that Bolano's playfulness slightly mitigates his sinister subject matter and tone, the reverse is true of Calvino: one's first impression is of playfulness, which is slightly mitigated by encroachments of the sinister and a sense of dread. In addition, while Bolano's inventiveness closes in on itself and gives the impression of privacy and inscrutability, Calvino's opens out towards the reader, issuing in lucid thematics and metafictional discourses on the nature of reading.

As much as I enjoyed Calvino's reflections on reading, especially as they bear on the odd experiment of the novel, this metafiction, and the plot about truth versus lies in novels (or different kinds of novels), were for me the least interesting parts of the novel. (Naturally, they're the things you'd have to write about if you were writing an academic essay on it.) Leaving the pastiches as the most interesting parts. They are not, in fact, much like the beginnings of novels (even allowing for their postmodern elements); rather, they are complete fictions in their own right, albeit with cliffhanger endings, with thematics and protagonist psychology established more thoroughly than they would be and plot developments occurring faster and thicker than they would in the beginning of any novel. They are, in other words, performances of invention and strangeness – of interest – that could not possibly be sustained for the length of a novel. Even if the writer could keep it up, the reader would become exhausted (and, perhaps partly for that reason, partly due to the lack of a single, sustained plot, I found my attention dimming towards the end of the book, as I did with Nazi Literature). And yet we wish writers could sustain, and readers endure, that level of inventiveness; that reading could always have that intensity, without the dull bits that allow readers to rest between dramatic episodes, without lapses of attention even during the most interesting parts.

Like Orwell, writing in 1946, Calvino, writing in the late 70s, expresses the anxiety of reading that has become so oppressive in our age of information-excess and sentimentality about reading and the book. In the first chapter of If on a Winter's Night, Calvino lists the different types of books that must be considered in making the decision to buy one and not another (or many others). In part:

the Books You've Been Planning To Read for Ages,

the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

the Books Dealing With Something You're Working on at the Moment,

the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

the Books You Need To Go With The Other Books On Your Shelves,

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Unfortunately for the devoted reader, reading takes not only time but effort: for the average reader, the shortest book (coming in, say, at a little under or over a hundred pages) will take at least as much time to read as it takes to watch an average-length movie (around 90 minutes), and much more effort. If on a Winter's Night seems to anticipate the eroding attention span of the digital era – the reader can't get past the beginnings of novels and constantly switches from one novel to another. This accommodation of my roving attention is probably the main thing that allowed me to read it much faster than I'm usually able to read most linear narratives of the same length nowadays. (Calvino's protagonist, on the other hand, is a traditionalist who is quite frustrated by not being able to follow the stories through to the end. I was reminded of the Sesame Street children's book classic, There's a Monster at the End of This Book, in which lovable furry neurotic Grover breaks the fourth wall, or whatever you call it in a book, and addresses the reader, imploring her not to turn the pages, and each time making greater efforts to construct a barricade that will prevent the progress of the story. The conceit of the Calvino is like that, but in reverse. TAMATEOTB was published in 1971; postmodern literature for adults took until the end of the decade to catch up with the experimentation of Sesame Street products in their sophisticated prime.)

Without knowing much of anything about Calvino, I suspect that If on a Winter's Night (published in 1979) is influenced by structuralism, that is, the idea that all narrative works are reducible to certain archetypal structural elements and therefore constitute (as Calvino has one of his numbered readers give voice to in the metafictional commentary of the penultimate chapter) One Story or One Book (as all protagonists are one, the abstract Reader, and all love interests One Woman, the Other Reader, who also turns out to be the Ideal Reader for whom the Writer writes). Not only the overarching plot but also all of the novels-within-the-novel are, whatever other genre they belong to, also love stories, with at least one woman appearing in whom the protagonist has an erotic interest before the fragment ends. This, I assume, reflects Calvino's conviction, conscious or otherwise, that eros is the basic motivation behind narrative. Towards the end, the protagonists become more aggressive and rapey towards their love interests, with the Writer (a character in both the framing plot and the diary fragments that make up one of the chapters) even attempting to assault the Other Reader when she shows up to confront him. This does not quite achieve the effect of universality that structuralism assumes, since it's hard to imagine a work of fiction that more absolutely assumes a male perspective, and I got a little tired of the identical episodes of priapism, although to be fair, the protagonist of the Japanese fiction pastische, On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, is the only character who actually does get raped – by an older woman.

Not while I was reading, but now, in analyzing, If on a Winter's Night reminds me Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which also uses a framing plot (a couple of actors are making a movie whose script is cursed and at the same time becoming embroiled in an affair) to justify a series of vignettes that draw on archetypal scenarios – mainly involving sluttish women and brutish men – that obliquely mirror each other. Lynch is the least playful of postmodernists, veering even further to the horror side of surrealism than Bolano, although that's not to say that he doesn't have a sense of humour (I found many of the vignettes in the first half of Mulholland Dr. hilarious). I always thought that the premise of INLAND EMPIRE was derived from The Ring (whose premise was a lot more interesting to me than either the Japanese or American versions): instead of a cursed video tape, there's a cursed script. Although perhaps this was simply the zeitgeist, since Lynch had earlier explored the creepiness of video tapes in Lost Highway, which came out a year before Ringu.

In INLAND EMPIRE, the ur-story is ultimately a cursed Polish folk tale (Eastern Europe being the creepiest, most archaic part of the world according to American movies: see also Val Lewton's Cat People). All other stories are simply “adaptations” of this one, and all share its curse: storytelling is dark magic. Northrop Frye, who attempted in Anatomy of Criticism to identify all of the archetypal structures that make up “literature,” of which every individual story is an iteration, saw folk formulas like nursery rhymes, riddles, and charms as the basic units of literature, representing its basic impulses – a theory I once applied, in a graduate school essay, to The Waste Land. As fascinating as the idea of haunted technology is, the idea of the story as haunted is, for me, even more fascinating. It's the difference between thinking of the image as magic – and dangerous – and the idea of thinking of storytelling and literature that way. Perhaps it appeals to me because we are so used to thinking of books (even fiction, which used to be considered contemptible, with few exceptions – a view of fiction that comes up in Orwell's essays) as “good for us,” which is as much as to say that they're harmless, which is as much as to say that they're ineffectual.

To think of stories as dangerous returns their power to them.