“I should confess here that there are some books, in every genre and in every period, that I find too daunting because too dazzling, in intellect or execution, to be as easily reread.”
I’ve often meditated on L.E.
Sissman’s confession in his essay “The Constant Rereader’s Five-Foot Shelf” (Innocent
Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s, 1975), but it doesn’t seem to apply to
me. I can recall dozens of books I would never consider rereading, and I’m
certain I’ve forgotten hundreds more, but that was because they disappointed me
the first time around. They were boring, unrewardingly difficult or just plain
lousy. But none comes to mind that was “too dazzling” to read again. It helps to
quote Sissman’s subsequent sentences:
“Shakespeare is almost too
rich, in his insistence on ultimates in diction, wordplay, characterization, and
dramatic event, to reread meditatively; he alarms and excites the reader into
understandings each time new, and to reread him is for me not a casual
revisiting but an expedition up Everest, crampons, pitons, oxygen, rations,
rope, and all. Ditto Milton, in another sense. Ditto Pope, in still another.”
I don’t return to Milton and
Pope very often but never find them off-putting, requiring premeditated
preparation. Shakespeare is in high rotation – most obviously the Greatest
Hits, but lately some of the more modest, less accomplished plays – Timon of
Athens, for instance.
I’d like to hear from
readers who share Sissman’s tic. Are there books you have already read, perhaps
when you were a student, that you don’t return to because they are “too
dazzling,” whatever that might mean?
Well, I have pushed off re-reading The Dance to The Music of Time sort of for this reason. I would have never read it all if I knew what I was getting into at first, as it is so overwhelming. But I stumbled on a copy of The Acceptance World in reduced barrow in 2010 while studying abroad and desperate for English reading material. This sucked me in. Later in back home I discovered more books in the series and enjoyed them except for the last book, Hearing Secret Harmonies. This eventually led to buying Powell's memoirs from a cart outside a small New York City bookstore and then to buying and reading his diaries too.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to the dazzling question. Reading Shakespeare is too overwhelming these days. Running after my kids morning and night, driving to work, driving back, there is none of the peaceful silence which I need to absorb and concentrate on Shakespeare and that I found when taking the train to work when I lived in big city and finished four or five of the plays in a few months.
Perhaps what he meant about "dazzling," is that you need the silence and quiet to enjoy being dazzled. Reading half exhausted after kids are in bed doesn't qualify too much.
While your challenge invites misinterpretation the “dazzling” notion recalls readings of un-rerendered Chaucer. The tones -right from the opening sentence—ring in my head. But I fear that to engage again in the effort to speak Chaucerian may strike hollow notes and that would be unfair to the author.
ReplyDeleteMIMESIS. An important book in grad school, but now, not so much. Likewise, THE WHITE GODDESS; having just turned 75, I have no idea what Graves was driving at.
ReplyDeleteAndrew Reinbach
Swift's Tale of a Tub. It dazzled me as an undergraduate, and shone in memory. But attempting a second reading this year, I found myself daunted. There's so much to it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not indifferent to the quality of "dazzle," but in my best books it isn't crucial as Sissman seems to find it. I can think of some good books that lack it, and a few wretched books that have it. Could it be that Sissman and I define the term differently? Yes, yes, it could.
ReplyDeleteI've read more great books than I would ever re-read even if time were not pressing. Not because of the difficulty of the challenge, although I recognize that feeling: I feel it myself, but never as something fearsome or insuperable. Rather, it's because re-reading isn't the test, for me, of a book's worth. The test is how, after a reading, it becomes part of me -- how it lives in my memory. Then if I revisit I'll probably skim, skip around, search up my highlights, or give it a randomizing shuffle -- maybe spot a detail or two that had failed to stick with me.
But I do entirely re-read favorite poems (and favorite poets), and sometimes short stories and essays too. Short forms have an artistic unity that you can apprehend with your senses; longer forms require you to construct the unity on the march; and won't yield their gold, if any, unless you spend the time and effort to do so. (Cf., Ambrose Bierce's high-handed dismissal of novels and "panoramas.)
My other re-reading? Plays: Shakespeare's, and "She Stoops to Conquer," and Moliere in Richard Wilbur's translation. A few short novels, sometimes, yes. But long novels, long histories and biographies, rarely, and by appointment only. I re-read Crazy in Berlin this past summer, my second reading of it; the first was nearly forty years ago. Nothing had prevented me all those years; and nothing finally impelled me to it but the memory of a particular flavor I hadn't tasted in a while.
I am of your mind, Mr. K. Not to reread something because it's too good? Seems odd to me. The two greatest novels I've ever read, I've also happily reread - Middlemarch and Anna Karenina. If they dazzled me the first time, I was open to deeper depths the second time.
ReplyDeleteI have never re-read any work of fiction, except for Faulkner. Poetry is the only thing I will read again and again, especially when I feel the need for music, and my own writing is out of tune.
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely group of comments. I have recently dabbled in twitter where comments merely strike fear in the heart that the sensiblity that formed them might soon rule our affairs.
ReplyDeleteI have been dazzled for too long now by a book my son infliced on me, The Rocognitions by William Gaddis. It is both torture and dazzlement, but the thought of rereading it, other than to scout out certain sections, leaves me reeling.
I do have some reticence in reading old favourites that moved me deeply when I first read them. Graham Greene's serious works, and Hermann Hesse whom I was smitten by when his star rode high. Lost horizons - not a pleasant feeling.
Finally, I can see in this blog that far from running out of interesting things to say through daily expression, the habit of discovering interesting things to say seems only to sharpen the mind and creates the greater bounty. Thank-you for your efforts.