So this
barista at Starbucks asks me what I’m reading, possibly out of interest or in
order to work me for a tip. I show him the book, Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas.
“What’s
it about?” he asks.
After a
bit of pondering, I simply say: “Everything.”
Now, the
book is not about everything, though it is a wonderful, plotless book full of
literary references and digressions along the lines of the other Vila-Matas
books I’ve read and enjoyed. (If I were to write a novel, it would be in
this vein, loitering and loose and fun, a true response to other
literature.) But I couldn’t possibly describe the entirety of the book to
a barista in Starbucks what with all the people waiting to order. So I
left it at that, dropped some coins in the tip cup, and took myself,
Vila-Matas, and my tea the hell out of there.
This is
my long way of stating that I don’t care if I can’t explain a book to
someone. I had a teacher in high school who said that no book should take
you more than two weeks to get through and that if you couldn’t summarize the
plot when you were finished, you weren’t paying attention. Now that I am
older I know that this— along with so much of what one is told in high school—
is bullshit. (Now that I think of it, my junior year English teacher was
overly fond of mystery novels.) While I see the importance of plot, and
while I love a compelling narrative, I also know that there are different types
of books just as there are different types of people. This is a good
thing.
The type
of books that Vila-Matas writes are not exactly what Joyce was up to, but I
made a connection between the two writers this morning after the
encounter at Starbucks. Stands to reason: I have been thinking about
how to tackle Finnegans Wake in the year 2015 and killing time with
smaller books, like Never Any
End to Paris. Having put out the call for fellow travelers on
Facebook, which I assumed would be ignored, and which, amazingly, netted me one
other sucker crazy enough to give this a go, Mr. Chad Post, I
concocted a plan of attack. 52
pages a month (or 13 pages a week however you slice it). This will allow for a slow yet steady
read of The Wake in one calendar year. So,
after some emails and a few thoughts and a little pre-reading reading of
critical texts and intros, I decided that the best way to read The Wake is to
just read the damn thing. Sure,
some overview of the “plot” and characters and themes will help ground me as I
wade through the puns and neologisms, but I’m not so much looking for a way
into the book as MY way into the book. And
fuck it if I can’t describe the thing to anyone else.
I’m a big fan of the reader response critics and the phenomenologists,
so the idea of an individual reading of any one book appeals to me greatly.
If we are all in different, sometimes overlapping interpretive
communities, we can see how a work of art that challenges, and Finnegans Wake certainly does, is less a dirty
modernist trick and more an invitation for self-discovery, as new agey as that
sounds. I have no idea if I will
actually discover anything by reading The Wake, but it may happen. As I
try to explain to my ENG 101 students, reading is about self-discovery in the
sense that you get to react to things you read. These reactions tell you
something about yourself. The important thing is not to love or hate a
piece of writing but to address why you love or hate it. What does your
reaction mean? How can you articulate that and what might be uncovered
during the articulation?
Self-discovery
was not my intention when starting this blog but, now that I’m reconciled to a
lifelong misunderstanding of The Wake, I shall try to use this space as a means
of exploring whatever comes up during this reading.
And I really don't give a damn if I don’t understand anything
so long as I never stop trying to understand everything.
