Surviving Reading

The narrator of José Saramago’s novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, writes, “In my honest opinion, the reader of a mystery is the only survivor of the story he is reading, unless it is as the one real survivor that every reader reads a story.” I’ve been thinking about this statement. I read a great many detective novels and stream more than a handful of detective stories. I have read a great many novels in my life. It is obvious that any number of individuals survive in the novels and mystery stories I read. Indeed, in them everyone but the murdered and sometimes (but rarely) the murderer continue to live, so Saramago couldn’t be referring to physical existence when he speaks of the reader of the mystery story as the only survivor. Perhaps what the narrator meant here regarding the reader who survives is that they are the only one who remains physically unchanged by the events narrated in the book. I know that we are taught that reading changes us but I lately have my doubts. What I do know is that the reader arises from their chairs at story’s end and walks to the bookshelves or bookstore for another volume. The reader has survived.            
             I think that it is about novels and short stories (at least) about which the narrator in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis writes when he declares that the real survivor of every story read is the reader, because in any such work none of the characters are real: they are all imagined and when the current plot in which they are engaged concludes they are finished. They have not survived. An author might bring back a character, to resuscitate him or her as it were, but no character can survive the work’s end: only the reader can continue, arise from the chair and continue on in life. When the story ends, so, too, do the characters end: they do not survive the conclusion because at the conclusion of every book the characters remain trapped in it, frozen in time and place. Perhaps a novel’s characters might survive in the minds of a reader, though I think that might be a bit of a stretch not I do not think that this can be seen as survival. It is the reader who alone survives. First person narrators might be survivors because they are alive to tell the tale, but no, I consider, in order to know anything, the narrator must be already somewhere within the story and therefore, does not survive its end. When the narrative is finished so too is the narrator at an end. Ishmael does suggest that he has survived the tragedy of the Pequod, but he is never again seen anywhere by a reader. In the end Ishmael is floating on a coffin. I’m thinking of Isabel Archer: at novel’s end she is trapped, entombed as it were, in her tragic marriage and trapped, perhaps, by her own moral codes. But she can no longer act. She has not endured. No, at a novel’s end, only the reader survives even as I arise from my chair and mourn Isabel’s situation.  
            I am considering the hypothesis, then, that perhaps we read to survive. That the reader recognizes implicitly that they may arise from their chair—from their reading—and that this act gives evidence of their survival. Ironically, we sit down so that we can rise up. The characters remain and are condemned within the story. We enter a novel as a strangers: nobody knows us, not even the author—though I do not think anyone writes without an imagined audience in mind—and we know nobody, and so we all are, as it were, author, reader and characters unfamiliar with each other. Narrators don’t even feel compelled to tell the truth: readers are often lied to by an unreliable narrator. But a reader discovers the deception and moves on from it; the liar remains so. A reader feels lost. Then, at story’s end the reader can acknowledge having been found or even admits to still being lost. To acknowledge being lost is a sign of survival. We cannot be found until we are lost. The environments of stories (even those places that are somewhat personally familiar) are strange: I feel lost in the unfamiliar. Even the most careful descriptions are not enough to enable me to see the place. “Life cannot be reproduced, even the most faithful of reflections, that of a mirror, transforms right into left and left into right,” says the narrator in Saramago’s novel. At the story’s end we leave these people to whom we have been introduced and places that are unfamiliar and rise from our chairs and perhaps somewhat changed continue our lives and leave it all behind. Though a character might remain in the minds of the reader that character has not changed but been changed. The character has not survived but the reader has endured.
            I have read hundreds and hundreds of novels. I have survived my readings. Mostly, I suppose.

Leftovers

I appreciate a sparsely populated refrigerator. When I open the door of my fridge (yes, we are on a nickname basis) I like to see without obstruction whatever is stored there: on a good day milk, orange juice, fruits (these days cut up pieces of cantaloupe and pineapple), and in season assortments of berries, apples, etc.; cheeses in the labeled cheese bin; and vegetables in the appropriately designated compartment. I also like to store on the refrigerator shelves containers of yoghurt, blocks of cream cheese, in the warmer weather a slab of butter; and in all seasons a jug of maple syrup. I maintain a rotating supply (on lazy susans, of course!) of items such as miso, peanut butter, sour cream and sometimes cottage cheese. These represent the basics that occupy the refrigerator in all weathers and seasons. On a good day when I open the door I can see it all at a glance.
            But I also occasionally am constrained to add to the shelves the leftovers from meals that I have prepared. I somewhat carelessly follow the recipes that declare the recipe should serve two to four, but somehow we don’t eat enough or the columnists eat more. Or perhaps they deceive. Whatever! At the end of our meal there still remains on the table or in the serving dishes or in the Dutch ovens or soup pots the meal we haven’t finished and that cannot at present be consumed nor (heavens no!) thrown away as waste. And so, the leftovers are packed away in an assortment of containers and placed in the refrigerator. In short time they take up too much space and begin to clutter the shelves. This situation is further exasperated when we entertain and enjoy guests for dinner because, again, though I do try to follow the recipe, no one eats as much as I had expected or they were supposed to, (or like a good Jewish host I had prepared more than could possibly be eaten by a small army in a single meal), and though I can at times successfully send food home with some of the invited, still there remain leftovers and that must now be stored. But in fact, I don’t particularly relish leftovers, and so I do what I can to eat all up at the original meal, but I am not a glutton and I do watch my weight and there almost always remains food leftover to be later consumed. Well, or not! I fill glass containers with the meal and place them in the refrigerator for another day. Sometimes that day never arrives. The shelves grow heavy and cluttered. But I like the process of cooking and leftovers don’t satisfy that urge. I cook a new meal afresh thereby increasing the predictable possibility of creating more leftovers, and so the glass containers continue to pile up and the refrigerator becomes jam-packed and to my mind messy. Older items have needed to be moved to the rear of the shelves to make way for the newer and containers are stacked higher, so now, when I open the refrigerator door I cannot readily see what is stored there and opening that door produces an anxious response. 
            I propose the construction of a refrigerator map that can be affixed to the door(s) of the fridge in lieu of the multiplying photos, notices, children’s art works, cutesy knick-knacks that now cover its doors. That map with moveable and interchangeable pieces will show what and where in the refrigerator each item has been placed. Then, when I open the doors this map will have revealed what reposes (and waits?) even at the rear of the unfortunately cluttered shelf and that I can now grab without randomly pushing and pulling the items all about to discover what I seek. I will never again lose anything to time and space in my refrigerator and will have easy access to even the most rear-stored comestible. The containers of leftovers will be discoverable even as they accumulate and though the refrigerator fills and overpopulates, and at least what is stored there will be expertly charted as were the maps of Lewis, Clark and Sacajawea on their exploratory journey west.
            This does not solve the problem of what actually to do with the leftovers I have not already given away nor disappointingly eaten. But at least these artifacts will be neither lost nor forgotten, and when sought can be easily found. The most serious fate to which these items might be consigned would be the compost heap. But the refrigerator shelves, though too filled, can assume a sense of order.
            A second possibility for the cluttered refrigerator problem is offered by my dear friend who suggests that perhaps an AI holographic application could serve as an alternative to the physical map. 

Mark Me!

Sitting in my comfortable faux-Eames chair I began reading Jose Saramago’s novel The Gospel According to Jesus. He was not an unfamiliar author and I had previously read All the Names, Blindness, a and The Double, all interesting novels in both subject matter and style. Saramago remains a veritable stranger to paragraphs.  I was about two pages into The Gospel when I suddenly felt something amiss, as if I had forgotten something important that the reading required and even demanded; I actually felt like I was missing a limb!  I soon appreciated that what I lacked was a pen with which I could mark up the text as I read.
            I wonder when I began to insist on a pen-in-hand when I read. In my library there are few (if any) volumes without my markings and annotations. I suppose when I am dead whoever inherits my books will have also in their possession tracings of my consciousness over the years though exactly what year each book was read and first annotated would remain a secret. And I do wonder who would or could be really interested in my annotations or willing to decipher my scrawl. I am certain the annotative practice began when I was an English major at Roanoke College probably in 1965 or 1966. I wonder what I thought I was doing then. How did I know that I had even to mark up a text, underline and annotate it while I read. I know that in the expensive synoptic texts (well, they seemed expensive then though now I believe their cost might be considered exorbitant), I underlined with a pen and ruler making certain that the lines remained straight and the text unsullied. I suppose I underlined what spoke to my sensibility at the time or what I thought was significant but didn’t quite understand, or what I thought might appear somehow on the final exam. Sometimes they even were. When I pick up one of those college texts now, I am amused to see that sometimes I would underline an entire column—neatly, of course—thinking that something about these passages was significant or inscrutable. During class time the professor would then expound on the assigned reading and I might further annotate passages he had noted with the commentaries he spake unto us.  I was an avid reader and a devoted student.
            At some point those under linings and annotations became integral to my written papers and the pen in hand became like the shovel of the mine: the excavatory tool. I dug for gold and I often had to cut through a great deal of rock. I sometimes gathered only pyrite for my effort. And thus reading without a pen or pencil became uncomfortable. I was always looking for something in the reading of anything. I began to keep journals into which I would copy significant passages and my thoughts concerning them. These became seeds of papers I would write as I became a scholar and submitted papers to juried journals and book proposals to publishers. Some of them were even accepted.
            But I wonder what now is the purpose of my markings and annotations that demands I read with a pen in hand? I do not intend to write anymore scholarly for academic journals and I really don’t have motive or desire to learn to write for more popular periodicals. Once I aspired to be a public intellectual and thought to publish in a few of them, but I never arrived at that destination. Alas! Nevertheless, I have continued to read assiduously holding a writing implement in hand—I keep an assortment of pens for this purpose—and now mark-up not only every book I hold but sometimes even the literary and political journals I continue to read. And the books and journals pile up and I refill my pens with ink.
            I cannot remember what reading felt like sans pen, ink and a personal/scholarly journal close at hand. I hardly remember being so immersed in the text that I wouldn’t allow anything to disturb me, that there was no one who I would admit into my world as I read. Perhaps I felt that there might have been a sense of perfect calm, an complete immersion into the world of the book and a vanishing of the world outside of it and a sense of perfect calm even if over Wuthering Heights the storms raged. Whither has fled that visionary gleam? I soon learned that this state could be a perilous position: I thought of Ishmael’s warning regarding the watch on the masthead. He writes, “But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.” I had trained as a literary critic and passed through various oceans and seas of technique. “Mark me,” says the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and over the years all these oceans and seas of techniques necessitated many markings. Perhaps the various pens kept me from dropping into the summer sea. At some early moment there would be no beach books. Reading was not ever an escape, and even what are called page-turners would be forever anchored by the markings.