Word: reader
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SINCE READING has become such a complicated act, the serious reader's notion of literature should embrace not only those works which have been studied, but also those which haven't: Anatole France could think of reading as "the adventure of a soul among masterpieces," but the modern reader resembles more a nervous intruder, moving among volumes which once belonged in the world, and which have since become commodities. Books, of course, are still produced and distributed, more than ever before. Like all commodities, these objects reflect the mode of production which in turn determines their character. Thus, more books...
Because the world experience mirrored in recent novels is so limited, so confined to the regions of intuition and feeling shared among a disconsolate intelligentsia, the reader is deprived of those qualities to which his addition owes its sources: qualities resembling the vision which induced a Hasidic rabbi to put on spectacles when in meditation, "for otherwise he saw all the individual things of the world...
...borrow a method which Balzac refined the physiological portrait, readers are known to be solipsistic, irritable, and insomniac; their version of the world is invented in sacerdotal studies where late at night, the loud voices competing about the lavish midnight supper tables described in Falubert's Sentimental Education in Balzac's Los: Illusions in Zola's Nana rise above the roar of traffic down in the street. Thin urban, and afflicted with nervous habits, the reader has to "put on spectacles" (and, with rare exceptions, defective in such natural endowments, he does wear spectacles) to reduce the blur which contemplation...
Even more troubling, though is the realism inherent in post-Modernist literature; in this, I mean the tedious reproduction of lived life naturalism, as opposed to the rich tradition of European Realism, which exaggerated human experience, celebrated a wide historical consciousness, and reconciled real conditions with desire. No reader, to whom what is actual is anathema, would quarrel with Osip Mandelstam's axiom that "The only thing that is real is the work itself;" when he concludes, though, that the artist "desires no other paradise than existence," Mandelstam reveals the divergence between readers and artists. Existence, which to the writer...
After The Day of the Jackal any new book by Frederick Forsyth is likely to come on as a literary conglomerate. Flaunting its paperback and film sales, Reader's Digest condensation, etc., Odessa does just that. Its list of book clubs reads like the tag end of a distinguished obituary-member of Literary Guild, Saturday Review, Book Find and Playboy. Despite such signs of prosperity, the book is a mixed offering...