Literary experience heals the wound, without
undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal
the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are
pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature
I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek
poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship,
in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more
myself than when I do.
In “An Experiment in
Criticism” by C. S. Lewis
Anarcho-punk,
extreme literature..... Beware the coming revolution.
All the best
writers are anarcho-punks:
-
JJ Rousseau: A Discourse On
Inequality
-
Thomas Payne: The Rights Of Man
-
Mary Wollstonecraft: A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
-
Victor Hugo 'Les Miserables'
set in the French Revolution in Paris.
Dostoevsky
wrote his first novel 'The Poor Folk' aged 29. This resulted in him and his 3
co-radicals being sentenced to death by firing squad in the main public square
in St Petersburg by the Tsar who was offended by their revolutionary contents.
At the last second the Tsar commuted the punishment to 4 years hard labour in
Siberia. Two of the writers went mad from this sadist act, but Dostoevsky kept
on writing about being on death row, psychological torture, his time in jail
and did so for the rest of his life. Orwell. 'Homage
To Catalonia' set in Spanish Revolution in Barcelona where anarchists fight
fascists.
The close reading
of novels (not, interestingly, poems, stories, plays or biographies/general
non-fiction) has come up glancingly in similar pieces over the last two
decades. It's easy to interpret it as resulting from a generalized cultural
anxiety over the apparently luxurious (or frivolous) apportioning of several
hours and days for contemplation of long-form fictitious narratives with no
obvious social or 'self-improvement' benefits, at least none that can be
vigorously attested to. Add that to an increasingly competitive cultural scene,
where every new TV show from singing to putting up wallpaper takes the form of
a contest, and you have this weird impetus to 'prove' the practical and moral
worth of an essentially solitary pursuit by subjecting it to blatantly unaesthetic
and unhelpful criteria, where a reader is essentially apologizing publicly for
an activity that can never be made socially correct - it simply isn't in the
nature of concentrated reading. While speed-reading as a technique has been
overvalued by diagnosticians (time-maximisation combined with cultural chicken
soup for the soul) and clearly has its roots in the alleviation of guilt rather
than the apprehension of art, it does have a legitimate tether to breathlessly
enthusiastic page-turning, where either personal enthusiasm or the “skimmable”
nature of the writing itself encourages faster than usual reading. But novels
are neither instruction manuals nor paper-bound substitutes for TV, and the
speed and quality of attention implicitly demanded by them cannot conform to
the expectations of demonstrable expediency demanded by extra-literary
considerations. In short, I can't reasonably claim to another person that the
reading of a novel over two or twenty hours of your valuable time is a socially
defensible act, precisely because novel-reading falls deliberately outside such
parameters. I do find myself doubting the legitimacy of the things I used to
read, and having published poems for a few years in the last decade I include my own
efforts. I hope neither were ‘all bullshit’ as I sometimes tell myself nor I
think I'm just wrongly attuned right now. Maybe the machine in my hands at this
moment in time is involved, or the heavy breakfast I didn't go near in my 20s.
Back in the day
I tended to read very fast, because I was a book glutton, i.e., I’d devour
books. It can be great but it can also be a curse. A good book is over too
quickly and I’d miss layers and complexity. I’d compensate by rereading books
where I pick up things I missed on the first read. Grinding through exams at
college left me with an overwhelming desire to get acres of really enjoyable
fiction out of the public library and gorge on it until I had cleared my head
of everything to do with the syllabus. For me, it's 'hearing' the words in my
own inner voice, as if the sentences are being spoken out loud. If I skim over
words, they're somehow lost. I've only got hold of the text in a generalised,
floaty way. If I'm reading a classic and I begin to 'float', I realise that I'm
'reading without paying attention' in my inner voice and calm myself down so I
can connect with each word. (Otherwise, what's the point of reading
well-crafted text?). It's easy to skim across the surface. It's like pacing
yourself for a marathon! Too fast and you'll get lactic burn and die. Too slow
and you'll won't get momentum going. I start slow and build up my pace can be
reading 60-80 pages a day in the main sections.
After a meaty
epic, like “Crime and Punishment” I’d purposely like to blast-read through
something pulpy or non-fiction like an appetiser for the next course. It helps
my mind relax and reboot so I do appreciate the benefits of reading quickly,
for people who are mentally tired or maybe have less time have. A lot of modern
literature embraces that reality.
