Reading: O’Brien’s The Browser’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading (2000)
O’Brien posits winningly that the child reader intermingles the personal, the imaginary and the sensory. I find this compelling as it alludes to the difficulty of containing the experience of reading. This draws me to consider the child writer as well as reader. Here, Briony Tallis in McEwan’s Atonement is a case in point. Briony’s disbanded boundaries between the imaginary, the personal and the sensory are significant (dangerous actually) because her desire for an extraordinary adult secret to catapult her to literary celebrity plays out in all of these frames. Briony knows that she has no secrets. When she sees the “scene” between Robbie and Cecelia by the fountain, and the “tableau” of Robbie and Cecilia in the library, she projects onto these her deepest impressions of the mysteries of adult emotions, which will elevate her writing to another level, without regard for the meanings of “real” and “fantastic”. In this fused mass, the child writer places herself at “centre stage”, and other people become characters, and her word is final.
In O’Brien’s exclusion of adults in this dissolving of the boundaries between the personal, the sensory and the text, perhaps this is because adults’ personal and sensory environments, more vast than that of the child, stretch beyond the text at hand, and are unlikely to be consumed by it. Or because the seasoned adult reader may employ protective mechanisms and diversionary faculties to distance himself from the text.
In his third point, I see what O'Brien means about looking for something being an integral part of reading. This sense of “a unique and specific correspondence” that is, in readers’ minds, especially designed for them, permeates the experience of reading. A good book absorbs readers into it such that they feel an “uncanny” connection. Readers are looking for something that links to themselves. They are eager to find something out about themselves.
In regard to O’Brien’s final meditation about browsing bliss, with its freedom, feast and escape, I felt all of these things when I read his work. The words dripped with the possibility, craft and pleasure of reading. O’Brien’s comment, “I eavesdrop on the murmur of overlapping conversations. It’s almost as if the books read each other”, testifies to the rich and dialogic nature of literature, and hints that books browse and converse with each other, and reading provides an ‘in’ to this conversation. However, as O’Brien explicates, browsing necessarily entails lack: “the gaps”. It is like eating too quickly.
To be contrarian, re: O'Brien's conception of "...the fact that readers are looking for something. In reading about reading, readers are apt to align themselves with a character who is reading about another character in the story." I feel M John Harrison has pretty much summed up my feelings about this issue:
ReplyDelete"What I find objectionable about all these novels is how they attempt to flatter the reader by “sharing” –ie, masturbating–the readerly experience. While I’m reading them I want to say: Fuck off & curl up with a good book somewhere else, Carlos (or Pascal), it gets you no points with me, because though I’ve read a lot of books, I’d rather break my left leg than rub shoulders with your idea of what that’s all about."
That's my sense, though it's interesting that there's a distinct divide, and I wonder what exactly constitutes it.
I've a mixed response to Harrison. I don't think it's flattering the reader by sharing the readerly experience. It's more like ensnaring them. What Harrison ends up saying in the quote gels though. It's frustrating to have your idea of what a story's about pre-packaged via a persona pretending to be you in the story. Perhaps the aim (I know we aren't meant to conjecture about this but here goes) could be exactly this though. Eg..J Hillis Miller in ‘Wuthering Heights: Repetition and the “Uncanny”’, puts forward the idea that Wuthering Heights invites critics to solve the riddle of meaning in the novel by incorporating so many readers and learners of reading in the novel trying to do the same thing, and this, along with other features, including Bronte's endless repetitions of signs and symbols, leads critics to believe there must be "a hidden explanatory source" (p. 43). This is evidently nonexistent, but the critic feels trapped in the pursuit of this.
ReplyDeletePerhaps all that these 'prepackaged personas' do is to show/remind us that actually, the internal thought processes of human beings, their experiences and how they react to them and so forth, actually are all fairly similar? I think perhaps one of the reasons we find these characters/attitudes so annoying and/or disconcerting is because literary culture values individuality so much, and we don't like this reminder of how similar we are to everybody else.
ReplyDeleteThis is true. Though we may be dismissive in public about the "genius" idea, there is that secret will to special/unique thought. In Atonement, Briony considers, "Was everyone really as alive as she was?" This is to her untenable: "One could drown in irrelevance.
ReplyDeleteEmily, I affirm your comment that the character of Briony in Atonement is preoccupied with that "genius", God-like, ego, authoritative author figure idea. This is taking individuality to the extreme. To the point whereby others are discounted as individuals.
ReplyDeleteLove the use of Atonement as well. Perfect example. I also like the idea of adult readers using defense mechanisms to distance themselves from works unlike children would. Good post!
ReplyDeleteI found in preparing for my presentation on O'Brien that much of what he said rang true with me as well. This notion of 'browsing' has gaps but it is a road which leads us to discovering something which appeals to us personally, and we should appreciate this nature of literature in dialogue; not everything may necessarily appeal to us, but in its interconnectedness it should ultimately lead us somewhere satisfying.
ReplyDelete