The Lost Art of Reading by David L. Ulin

Author:David L. Ulin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2018-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

Smiley may be writing about the novel, but what she’s getting at is something all books share: their sense of flow, their linearity, a condition that defines even the least linear works. Although Cain’s Book bills itself as an antinovel, it ends up offering, despite Trocchi’s best efforts to eclipse our expectations, its own odd kind of story, or a series of overlapping stories, tracing the author’s sensibility (or that of his fictional alter ego) in fits and starts. In Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne gives us a masterpiece of digression, yet he still must build the novel around its central character’s life. Even James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, perhaps the most famous, if unread—and yes, I’ll admit, I haven’t read it, not in its entirety, not even close, although I’ve done my share of dipping in and out of it, like a man on the beach tentatively touching his toes to the edge of a sprawling sea—nonlinear work in English literature, operates from the basic structural premise of the dream-narrative, where inference and association trump logic; it is a feedback loop, a Möbius strip, in which the last and first lines, unfinished fragments, link up to frame the never-ending cycle of the book. “A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eva and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs,” this backwards sentence reads, and although it probably defeats the purpose of the novel to reconstruct it in that way, it also offers a beautiful reminder that even the most apparently formless efforts come with shapes and contexts (a commodius vicus of recirculation) of their own.

At the heart of all this is the issue of time, which Joyce understood. “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” he writes early in Ulysses, and it’s a line that resonates. Who hasn’t felt that sense of being trapped, of being caught against your will between the relentless forward motion of the present and the inescapable fixedness of the past? When I first read Joyce, as a college senior in a graduate Ulysses seminar, that sentence seemed a cry in the dark, akin to Dylan Thomas’s “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Here was Stephen Dedalus, a young man in his twenties, lamenting the existential condition, that we are condemned to live and die with no say over the matter; “born, never asked,” as Laurie Anderson once sang. Later, I began to see this in a broader way, as less dirge than observation—bitter, yes, but touched in equal measure with an unconscious breath of resignation, the recognition that it was not just biology or metaphysics that stood stacked against us, but indeed time itself, not as a philosophical abstraction but as a concrete and relentless force.

“One must believe in the reality of Time,” Simone Weil wrote in her Notebooks. “Otherwise one is just dreaming.” It’s

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