Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering - Hardcover

9780618082933: Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering
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Writings on the author's favorite works of literature include discussions on such works as Anna Karenina, The Portrait of a Lady, Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote, The Idiot, the young adult tale I Capture the Castle, and poetry by such figures as Wordsworth and Milton. 10,000 first printing.

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About the Author:
Wendy Lesser is the author of His Other Half: Men Looking at Women through Art, Pictures at an Execution, and A Director Calls (Faber and Faber, UK, 97), a bio. of Stephen Daldry. Lesser was also editor of Hiding in Plain Sight: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography. Her latest book, The Amateur, is an intellectual biography in which she explores the intersection of art and experience (Pantheon, 99). A winner of the Pen/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing in 1997, Lesser lives in California where she is the editor of The Threepenny Review.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Reflections

It began, as things often do for me, with Henry James. I had nothing
new in the house to read (a recent spate of bad fiction having
destroyed my appetite for buying new books), so I searched my shelves
and idly chose The Portrait of a Lady, a book I hadn"t picked up in
twenty years. Rereading it turned out to be an astonishing experience.
I had first read this novel as an undergraduate, and had gone
through it again as a graduate student of English literature. Both
times I was too close in age to Isabel Archer to appreciate her
properly, and both times I read largely for the plot. The fact that I
already knew the plot the second time around did not deter me: at the
age of twenty-six, I still zoomed, suspense-driven, toward the final
pages, as if only the ending counted.
But in your forties the journey begins to matter more than
the arrival, and it is only in this frame of mind that you can do
justice to Henry James. (I say this now, but just watch me: I"ll be
contradicting myself from the old-age home, deploring my puerile
middle-aged delusions about James.) At forty-six, no longer in
competition with Isabel, I could find her as charming as her author
evidently did. Moreover, having had a life, with its own self-defined
shape and structure, I was more sympathetic with Isabel"s wish to
acquire one. As a young person, I only wanted her to marry the lord
and get it over with. Now I understood that nothing ends with such
choices—there are always additional choices to be made, if one"s life
is to remain interesting.
I cared less, this time through, about what decisions Isabel
made than about how and why she made them. And this, in turn, gave me
far more patience with the length and complexity of James"s
sentences. Once, perhaps, I had viewed them as pointlessly extended
or merely ornate; now they were useful keys to the pace and method of
Isabel"s subtly complicated mind—so that whereas I used to be tempted
to skip ahead, I now wanted to saunter through the commas, linger at
the semicolons, and take small contemplative breaks at the periods.
The book was much better than I had remembered it. More to the point,
I was a much better reader of it. Both pleasure and understanding
came more easily to me.
The idea that a simple rereading could also be a new reading
struck me with the force of a revelation. It meant that something old
wasn"t necessarily outdated, used up, or overly familiar. It offered
an escape route, however temporary, from problems that were both
personal and cultural—my own creeping middle age, the prevailing fin-
de-siècle tone of fashionable irony, and above all the speeded-up,
mechanized, money-obsessed existence that had somehow become our
collective daily life. Like many others before me (including, I noted
wryly, Henry James), I felt menaced by too-sudden change, as if
something I held dear were about to be taken away from me, or perhaps
had already been taken away when I wasn"t paying attention. I
felt . . . But I needn"t elaborate. You were there. You lived through
it too.
My own situation differed somewhat from the average, in that
I had purposely constructed for myself a life that was marginal to
and therefore shielded from the clamoring demands of the marketplace.
Well, "purposely" may not be the right word; in fact, one function of
this book will be to examine in some detail how little "purpose" one
can have, at fifteen or twenty or twenty-five, in imagining or
projecting a life. But let us say that, for whatever reason, I found
myself in the luxurious position of being able to reread. I had the
necessary background—that is, I had read a lot of books when I was
younger—and what"s more, I had the necessary time.
Time is a gift, but it can be a suspect one, especially in a
culture that values frenzy. When I began this book, almost everyone I
knew seemed to be busier than I was. I supported myself, contributed
my share to the upkeep of the household, and engaged in all the usual
wifely and motherly duties and pleasures. But still I had time left
to read. This was partly because I incorporated reading into my work
life (I run a quarterly literary magazine), and partly because I
worked very efficiently (I run my own quarterly literary magazine, so
there"s no busywork whatsoever: no meetings, no memos, no last-minute
commands from the higher-ups). I had constructed a life in which I
could be energetic but also lazy; I could rush, but I would never be
rushed. It was a perfect situation for someone who loved to read, but
it was also an oddball role, outside the mainstream—even the
mainstream of people who read and write for a living. How often have
you heard an editor or an academic or a journalist say, "Oh, I wish I
had the time to reread Anna Karenina!" (or Middlemarch, or
Huckleberry Finn, or whatever beloved book rises to the surface of
one"s memory)? Well, I thought, I have the time. I could reread on
behalf of all of us.
Of course, it never really turns out that way in practice.
Nothing demonstrates how personal reading is more clearly than
rereading does. The first time you read a book, you might imagine
that what you are getting out of it is precisely what the author put
into it. And you would be right, at least in part. There is some
element of every aesthetic experience, every human experience, that
is generalizable and communicable and belongs to all of us. If this
were not true, art would be pointless. The common ground of our
response is terrifically important. But there is also the individual
response, and that too is important. I get annoyed at literary
theorists who try to make us choose one over the other, as if either
reading is an objective experience, providing everyone with access to
the author"s intentions, or it is a subjective experience, revealing
to us only the thoughts in our own minds. Why? Why must it be one or
the other, when every sensible piece of evidence indicates that it is
both?
Rereading is certainly both, as I was to discover. You cannot
reread a book from your youth without perceiving it as, among other
things, a mirror. Wherever you look in that novel or poem or essay,
you will find a little reflected face peering out at you—the face of
your own youthful self, the original reader, the person you were when
you first read the book. So the material that wells up out of this
rereading feels very private, very specific to you. But as you engage
in this rereading, you can sense that there are at least two readers,
the older one and the younger one. You know there are two of you
because you can feel them responding differently to the book.
Differently, but not entirely differently: there is a core of
experience shared by your two selves (perhaps there are even more
than two, if you include all the people you were in the years between
the two readings). And this awareness of the separate readers within
you makes you appreciate the essential constancy of the literary
work, even in the face of your own alterations over time—so that you
begin to realize how all the different readings by different people
might nonetheless have a great deal in common.
This thing that I am calling "rereading" only succeeds under
certain circumstances, and part of my effort here has been to locate
those cases where the circumstances prevail. The book must, in the
first place, be a strong one—not just a memorable one (though that is
crucial), but also strong enough to hold up under the close scrutiny
of a second look. It would be tedious to have a series of chapters
recording how disappointing it was to reread this or that favorite
work of science fiction or adventure or humor or romance (not that
these categories would inevitably prove disappointing —but they do
seem to be the categories in which youthful enthusiasm most often led
me astray). I also hoped that each chapter would say something
different—about the process of rereading, or the nature of growing
older, or the quality of a work of art, or my own personality, or
(preferably) all of the above. As both reader and writer I felt
anxious to avoid mere repetition, which is not at all the same as
rereading.
And then, of course, I had to remember the first reading well
enough to get something new out of the rereading. This,
unfortunately, eliminated some otherwise ideal candidates. For
instance, I recently reread The Charterhouse of Parma, this time in
Richard Howard"s excellent new translation. I could remember exactly
the circumstances surrounding my first reading: it was the late fall
of 1984; I was staying at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, and
Stendhal"s book was there in the library (having been acquired
because of its associations with the region, no doubt); I was working
on my own first book; and I was pregnant with my first and only
child. Rich material for recollection, you would think. The problem
is, I couldn"t recall the slightest thing about the book itself. It
was as if, on my recent rereading, I were coming across the Stendhal
novel for the very first time—a tribute to the translator, perhaps,
and a great pleasure in any case, but no help at all to my rereading
project.
Sometimes I selected a book on the basis of its obvious
appropriateness to my topic, only to discover that my rereading
failed to produce a useful chapter. The Interpretation of Dreams, for
example. What could better represent our collective readerly
unconscious than this work that had permeated my generation"s
sensibility long before we ever read it? At twenty, I had devoured
Freud"s book with fascinated hunger, as if I both knew and yet didn"t
know everything it had to tell me (a perfect example, I remember
thinking, of "the uncanny"). On my first reading the book had caused
me to dream intensely, and to write down my dreams; perhaps that
would happen again. And how appropriate it would be, I felt, to
reread it on the hundredth anniversary of its 1900 publication date.
But all to no avail. My primary, insuperable experience when I
attempted to reread The Interpretation of Dreams was one of
annoyance. Why had Freud mucked up his lovely approach to dream
interpretation with that rabid insistence on the theory of wish
fulfillment? And why was he such a tyrant about it? Bristling under
the yoke of his oppressive manner, I tried another translation, but
with no better results. It would be unpleasant, I finally decided,
for readers to hear me yammering on against Freud"s authoritarianism—
after all, this is hardly news—and it would be even more unpleasant
for me to do the reading and writing involved in constructing such a
chapter. Since I rely on pleasure to fuel my criticism (though
sometimes it"s thwarted pleasure, in the case of negative criticism),
I had no choice but to drop the book.
Some books, precisely because they seemed so appropriate,
were never under consideration to begin with. David Copperfield and
Remembrance of Things Past are both quite explicitly novels about
rereading—so much so that I felt it would be redundant to examine
them in this light. Besides, I had written about Dickens in every
previous book of mine, and it seemed only reasonable to give him a
rest.
The rules I cobbled together, in the end, were hardly
onerous, but they were strictly enforced. I had to have done my first
reading when I was "young"; in other words, I needed to be coming at
the work anew as an altered, older self. I had to remember the first
reading well enough to draw the comparison—viscerally remember it,
not just remember that I had done it. And I had to get something new
out of each individual rereading, some fresh idea or experience that
had not appeared before, in order to make the chapters sequentially
interesting. If I could do all this, I felt, I would have a book
about rereading. It would be necessarily personal, with criticism
merging into autobiography, but I hoped that it would not be merely
personal—that what I had to say would find an echo, or at the very
least a nod of assent, in the minds of other readers.
It has occurred to me that the danger of such a project is
the danger of all escapism: we flee into the past because we can no
longer tolerate the present. But one cannot actually live in the
past, and I am certainly not ready to stop living. I never intended
my rereading book to be a purely conservative measure, keeping out
the new in favor of the old; I didn"t ever stop reading new books
while I was working on this project. For both professional and
personal reasons, I can"t imagine choosing not to read any new books.
(By "new" I mean new to me: not necessarily books that have just been
published, but books which I have only now encountered for the first
time, whether they are just out or hundreds of years old.) And in
fact my rereading project, far from making me shun new books,
stimulated my desire for all kinds of reading. During the same time I
was reading Don Quixote, for instance, I was also reading The Letters
of Henry James, in Philip Horne"s new edition; Shirley Hazzard"s
memoir Greene on Capri; J. M. Coetzee"s Age of Iron, which I turned
to after finishing his more recent Disgrace; Philip Roth"s The Human
Stain; and Alberto Moravia"s Contempt. Of these, only Age of Iron
turned out to have a direct bearing on my Don Quixote chapter, and
that was purely by chance, but the stew into which they all went was,
nonetheless, necessary to my writing. I suppose what I mean is that I
needed to feel a life of letters going on around me—drawing from past
works all the time, but also creating new ones every year, every
minute—in order to feel that a book about reading was worth writing.
I did not set out to draw any general conclusions about
rereading. General conclusions, I often feel, are the enemy of
perception, at least in the literary field. To the extent that you
can actually sense what is going on in a work of literature, you are
sensing something more particular even than life itself (since life
tends to have more repetition, more boredom, more plain old dead
space than good literature usually does). But I did, in the course of
producing this book, come upon one idea or image or tendency—I don"t
know exactly what to call it—that repeated itself over and over
again. That was the idea of vertigo. There is something inherently
dizzying in the effort to look at a still work of literature from a
moving position—that is, from two different points in time. And this
vertiginousness seems to be linked, in turn, to our directional sense
of time"s passage, to the poignancy of the fact that time only goes
one way. There is some parallel, I can"t help feeling, between that
kind of one-wayness and the one-wayness of the relationship between a
reader and a book. The characters in a novel can speak to us, but we
can"t speak to them—just as our younger selves can be heard and
understood by our older selves, but not vice versa. These are not, of
course, identical situations, but they are close enough to make us
temporarily lose our balance. Or so I found when I looked at what
Borges had to say about Cerv...

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  • PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Publication date2002
  • ISBN 10 061808293X
  • ISBN 13 9780618082933
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages256
  • Rating

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