Everest vs Balbec

Mark O’Connell lays forth an interesting theory on reading long or “difficult” novels, over at The Millions. He posits that reading such books is not unlike being kidnapped by their authors, with whom we come to sympathize over the course of the journey. He writes:

Reading a novel of punishing difficulty and length is a version of climbing Everest for people who prefer not to leave the house. And people who climb Everest don’t howl with exhilaration at the summit because the mountain was a good or a well made or an interesting mountain per se, but because they’re overawed at themselves for having done such a fantastically difficult thing. (I’m willing to concede that they may not howl with exhilaration at all, what with the tiredness, the lack of oxygen and very possibly the frostbite. I’ll admit to being on shaky ground here, as I’ve never met anyone who’s climbed Everest, nor am I likely to if I continue not going out of the house.) And there is, connected with this phenomenon, what I think of as Long Novel Stockholm syndrome. …

[A long and difficult] book’s very length lays out (for a certain kind of reader, at least) its own special form of imperative—part challenge, part command. The thousand-pager is something you measure yourself against, something you psyche yourself up for and tell yourself you’re going to endure and/or conquer. And this does, I think, amount to a kind of captivity: once you’ve got to Everest base camp, you really don’t want to pack up your stuff and turn back.

I buy his premise that part of our enthusiasm over long and difficult books comes not from their inherent literary quality but from our satisfaction at having endured and finished. It does feel good. But I think it’s asking too much to simply lump “long and difficult books” together, as though Moby-Dick and Infinite Jest and Gravity’s Rainbow will strike everyone the same way (I, for one, read Moby-Dick twice, every word of it, and adored it, though not as much, or perhaps just differently, than I cherished Infinite Jest — and as for the muddle that is Gravity’s Rainbow, I never finished it nor do I have any immediate plans to do so). For some readers, the length of the text may have nothing to do with its readability, and you’d be hard put to quantify what makes a book “difficult.”

For example, Matthew Stadler over at The Stranger has a love affair with Remembrance of Things Past that is about as far removed from Everest — or from Stockholm, for that matter — as possible. He says:

I don’t mean that I am an especially skilled or hardworking reader; I am not. I am in fact poorly prepared, self-indulgent, and lazy. Rather, to fall into Proust’s work is a trackless, opiated pleasure — a surrender — which only becomes “difficult” when approached as a kind of self-improving challenge for the intellectual athlete. Reading is too often regarded as a hardship to be endured for the rewards that attend any hard work — betterment, learning, whatever. The difficulty posed is usually put as the challenge of “getting through” a book. …

But what if reading involves a dissipation into languor and ease, rather than any kind of mounted effort toward victory? What if the book is our final and only destination, a place we live in rather than “get through”? To complain that a book is “difficult” is like complaining that mornings are difficult. One cannot simply strike them from the day or refigure them as a kind of therapeutic exercise (though, tellingly, this is what many of us do with that part of the day, or those particular friends, or that season of life that we term “difficult”; rather than indulge in the fine texture of the time we spend there, we try and “work through it” — find the lessons such hardships teach us).

I can also relate to Stadler’s philosophy, particularly when it comes to Proust, whose work can seem tedious to navigate and has, after all, taken me years with little progress to show, in part because its winding sentences take me so long to parse and in part because I keep taking breaks from it to read other books; but each time I return to it, I immediately fall into its easy, languid embrace. Remembrance of Things Past always makes me feel a little sleepy, or like I’m sitting in a warm patch of sunshine on a long, lazy summer day. It’s a strange and pleasant sort of hypnosis. I honestly wouldn’t call it difficult. Just very, very long.

So I’m not picking a camp. I’m just going to keep on doing whatever it is that I’ve been doing — scaling mountains or lazing in the sun, however the mood strikes me.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

I took a trip to NYC to visit some very dear friends of mine, and I thought I’d attempt Infinite Jest (for the third time) on the five-hour bus ride.  The old cliche proved right this time, because I found myself engaging with the book in a way I wasn’t able to the first two times around.  I’m taking notes, marking important reoccurring characters, making a time line, and beginning to put together clues. This book is going to take several posts, I’ll go ahead and tell you, because I’m not going to be finished with it anytime soon.

I don’t know that I’ve ever approached a novel as a puzzle, but it seems appropriate for Infinite Jest, which is perhaps a bit of both.  It’s Pynchonesque in many ways, but I find the narrative much easier to follow than that of, say, Gravity’s Rainbow, which still languishes unfinished on my shelf.  It’s also Proustian, as Dave Eggers says in the introduction, in that it captures the tone and manner of thinking and speaking of a generation.  Also perhaps in the way it can carry on for pages in an unbroken paragraph.

The best part, though, was when I arrived at my friend’s apartment and we prepared to head back out to grab some pizza (brussels sprouts with pancetta) and some Brooklyn Brown Ale, and I hefted the tome out of my bag to leave behind, partly to impress my friend and partly to lighten the load, but when she saw it she said, “You’re reading Infinite Jest?” as she reached into her own bag and produced her own dog-eared copy, which she was attempting for the second time, complete with marginalia and chronology.

And that is how I know true love exists.

 

Pynchon vs. Dos Passos

I’m taking a break from Gravity’s Rainbow.  I know I shouldn’t because of the risk that I won’t ever pick it up again, but it wears me out.  It strikes me so far as a mix between Ulysses and Catch-22.  It’s got the sort of playful mockery of the modern military that Heller did so well, but it’s dense and confusing and names some 400 characters.  I never made it to the end of Ulysses, I’m sad to say, mostly because I couldn’t renew the book from the library enough times to finish it.  Doesn’t bode well for Gravity’s Rainbow, which has failed to knock my socks off — except perhaps with that bizarre toilet scene, when Slothrop falls in and goes swimming through the shit (“Jeepers Slothrop, what a position for you to be in! Even though he has succeeded in getting far enough down now so that only his legs protrude and his buttocks heave and wallow just under the level of the water like pallid domes of ice. Water splashes, cold as the rain outside, up the wall of the white bowl. ‘Grab him fo’ he gits away!’ ‘Yowzah!’ Distant hands clutch after his calves and ankles, snap his garters and tug at argyle socks Mom knitted for him to go to Harvard in, but these insulate so well, or he has progressed so far down the toilet by now, that he can hardly feel the hands at all…”).  It was very Ralph Ellison for a second there, very Invisible Man (if you haven’t read it, do it now), and I was so pleased, I had to read that section over twice.

In the meantime, I’ve picked up volume one of John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy, The 42nd Parallel.  Unlike Gravity’s Rainbow, The 42nd Parallel knocked my socks off right away — like, in the prologue, right away.  What could have been so astounding, you ask?  It was this:

“U.S.A. is the slice of a continent.  U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a black-board, a public library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled in the margins in pencil.  U.S.A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills.  U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts.  U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery.  U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home.  But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.”

The narrative is intercut with “Newsreels,” which are bits of actual headlines from newspapers of the time, fragments of news stories, advertising slogans, popular song lyrics, etc., all sort of thrown together in a post-modern American jumble.  “The speech of the people,” so to speak.  Like I said, I’m only a few pages in, but I’m already completely taken with Dos Passos’ writing and style.  More to come!