In 1998 my friend John Harris mentioned that he was travelling to the US so I asked if he could pick up a copy of the new translation of Peter Handke's My Year in the No-man's Bay, not available over here. He was the first to tell me about this new website called Amazon. This is also how I bought this year's book.
If buying books not published in the UK had then the minor thrill of the exotic, it is now routine. Sometimes I buy the US edition even if there is a British one, such as when the British edition of Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady deleted a key word from the title.
But now the routine is a problem, with highly recommended books, new and old, appearing on social media like a stampede of cupcakes. Even if the books are put through one's highly developed filter, it is still impossible to keep up, leading to bingeing or starvation reading patterns, equally unhappy. Reading Infernal Incipits: The Poetics of the New, the second chapter of Teodolinda Barolini's The Undivine Comedy, it's not difficult to regard this as the modern reader's contrapasso, the concept that a soul's punishment in Hell corresponds to the sin it committed on earth.
The chapter is especially illuminating on Dante's invention of the terza rima rhyming scheme. She observes how it mimics the unceasing forward motion of the pilgrim's journey while also including recurrent backward glances, which means it also mimics our existence in time, our "essential middleness" between beginning and ending. Our desire, however, as experienced in sickening after the next book, and the one after that, and the pang of longing for the perceived joy of books read long ago, is precisely for some kind of beginning or end. Contrapasso becomes "less a theological device, as it is usually considered, than, in Dante's hands, a narrative stroke of genius" as the reader is driven to descend alongside the pilgrim to see who the next soul is and the diabolical punishment meted out to it. In this way we have an innate desire for newness and as such act like the damned in Canto 3 who have the paradoxical desire to cross the Acheron into Hell:
they are eager for the river crossing
because celestial justice spurs them on,
so that their fear is turned into desire.
Is our desire for the next book really fear instead; the fear of not keeping up? Proof may appear in the lamentably regular use on social media of "I confess, I haven't read [insert book title]". Perhaps we wish, albeit subconsciously, to be like the angels in Paradiso who:
since they first were gladdened byContra Borges, Heaven could be the absence of the book. However, Heaven could also be Hell: as Barolini points out, while for Dante on his journey there are ever new sufferers and sufferings, for the sinners it is "as for the angels, but for opposite reasons, and with opposite results – there is no difference, nothing is ever new."
the face of God, from which no thing is hidden,
have never turned their vision from that face,
so that their sight is never intercepted
by a new object, and they have no need
to recollect an interrupted concept.
Notes
1: I have written about Dante's Vita Nuova in what I like to think is one of the best posts on this blog: Dante on the Beach.
2: Columbia University's Digital Dante website is a remarkable resource, containing not only Teodolinda Barolini's commentary on the Commedia but also film of her Dante Course.
I enjoyed this post a lot. I can obviously relate. So many books I've searched out via recommendations - Hilbig, Krasznahorkai etc etc - and don't regret that but the sheer volume is overwhelming and I've ceased to give a shit. I've entered a strange reading phase not caring for many of the books I pick up. For a few months, I've been reading and abandoning books halfway through. It even happened with Quignard's The Unsaddled, and I rate Quignard really highly. I'll go back to it no doubt at some point. That said, a couple of weeks ago, I read P.D.James' The Children of Men even though I didn't think it was much good at all. On a positive note, in the last couple of days, I jut read Jean-Patrick Manchette's Skeletons in the Closet. It felt like a relief just to enjoy the book. When Manchette is on form, his mix of irony, social observation, timing at the level of the sentence, and overall structure has become a rare pleasure. I look forward to reading all of your 39-post series. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just me then.
ReplyDeleteI'm writing this series partly to clear space to read more; to avoid the pressure of reading as view to writing about what I've read, which diminishes sensitivity towards what's important to me, replacing it with reviewspeak.
in lockdown i started rereading, sometimes after thirty years, books on my shelves around me. it's a good antidote to presentness.
ReplyDelete