SELF-PARODY
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exclusively literary cntlcs now wntmg in America or Europe. But
admiration for their thinking about literature must very often contend
with the experience of reading their novels. They all show an amused
and theoretical impatience with the fact that literary conventions
deteriorate with the passage of time. And yet in a curious way their
desire to show the factitiousness of these conventions
is
accompanied
by an illusion that their own works exist not in time but in space,
like a painting.
A novel is not a painting, however, and the perpetrated notion
of similarity has a great deal to do with some of the innocent lies
we tell ourselves about what it's like to read a book. Reading
is
a
very special activity, quite different if not more arduous than looking
intensely at a painting or listening to music. It
is
usually an alto–
gether more sequestered act, taking hours or days during which our
interest must be propelled forward by something promised in sounds
and images. We sit in a favorite chair with a favorite light and some
assurance of quiet, and we open, let us say,
Giles Goat-Boy.
Several
days later we're probably no longer infatuated with repeated illustr,a–
tions that liter.ary and philosophical structures are really put-ons, that
what we are doing is kind of silly. John Barth seems to me a
writer of evident genius; I wrote a long and enthusiastic review of
Giles Goat-Boy
when it came out and I'd take none of it back now.
Even while writing the review, however, I was conscious of forgetting
what it had been like to read the book, what a confining, prolonged
and often exasperating experience it had been. I'd often been bored
and disengaged, and if I hadn't promised to review it I might not
have finished it at all. To say this isn't really to disparage Barth or
his
achievement, surely not to anyone sufficiently honest about his
own experience of "great" books. How many would ever finish
M oby
Dick
-
read all of it, I mean - or
Ulysses,
not to mention
Paradise
Lost
or other monsters of that kind -
if
it weren't for school assign–
ments, the academic equivalent of being asked to write a review? The
university study of English and American literature, a quite recent
phenomenon, totally obscures any of the conventional questions about
the true audience for literary works. Without the academic compul–
sion which has forced
Ulysses
and
The Collected Poems of T.
S.
Eliot
onto the shelves of millions of near illiterates, what shape would the
literature of this century have assumed? What would be considered
the "important" books and what different myths would we accept
