Subway Reading
Maud Newton, who is the Pauline Kael of the literary blogosphere and gets a lot of my affection and respect, wants to know “what’s the last book that made you skip work, or stay up half the night, or forget yourself at stoplights?” I’ll come to the books in a second; what I first want to know is this: was it ever the book I was reading that made me forget my subway stop? I have done this five hundred times, and the reading matter has been so diverse, and my need for solitude so consistently the same, that it hardly mattered what I was reading.
Now, let’s take-up Maud’s question. I’m afraid that once again the answer is haunted by the same pale specter of the self. V.S. Naipaul fascinates me as a writer because he can be writing about a town in Iran or about the council homes in England—and I still feel that what I’m reading is an essay about the triumph over the difficulty of writing. I don’t exactly know why this should be so. Perhaps because it was Naipaul’s autobiographical fragment Finding the Center that gave me, during my late adolescence, my first narrative of a writer’s life. Whatever be the reason for this state of affairs, by the time I have read a few lines by Naipaul I have already slipped into a universe that is fully-realized. It is a world that exists solely to illuminate a literary life.
A few months ago, I read Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, and I gave the book a concentrated and yet expansive attention because it grappled with a writer’s response to faith. I wouldn’t have bothered with it if the novel’s protagonist was a butcher, or a doctor, or even an artist, dealing with the same questions of belief and doubt. Recently, when quizzed by the Guardian about his recommended summer reading, Pamuk mentioned Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism. I don’t remember the words exactly but Pamuk said something to the effect that when he had finished Appiah’s book he felt that he was a better person.
I was struck by Pamuk’s response. It seemed to me he had emerged at an enviable place: reading about tolerance had made him more tolerant. But I have to confess that even as I read those lines, I thought of what my own response would have been. For me, the questions of a writer’s response to a book are distinct from a citizen’s. They can be related, they often are, but they’re also separate.
One writer who understands this well is J.M. Coetzee. So many of his books, like Naipaul’s, are about writing. Several of his books often appear to be explicit rewritings of books by other writers; yet others have writers as their protagonists. Coetzee is among the foremost writers today not because he deals with the difficulty of a writer’s life: rather, it is because he always seems to be taking note of, measuring, dealing with or failing to deal with, the tensions between the life of a writer and the life of a citizen that his books retain their enormous intellectual appeal.
Apart from recommending writers like Naipaul, Pamuk, and Coetzee (and there are so many others–Baldwin, Sontag, Roth, Franzen, and even Carey who so often has approached the literary by dealing most squarely with those who are regarded unliterary and even illiterate), I’d like to mention that this summer I intend to read Colm Toibin’s The Master. I have read barely forty pages but am struck by the narrative about a writer who, even in the midst of anguish, struck by failure, retains a wonderful stillness. That is what allows him to be so observant. Discerning. It is a quality that would also provoke in the reader a corresponding sense of calm. Perfect for the subway, don’t you think?
When they write about writing, what are they really writing about? When the vocation becomes the subject, what does this solipsism generate? There comes a point in the stillness when a writer only has his process to contemplate. What then is he contemplating? Essence of himself I reckon, or something like that.
Reading Naipaul and Coetzee is absorbing despite this ‘writing about writing’ precisely because it is about the contemplation of the gaps between the writers eye and the world that allows them to measure their own consciousness and awareness of life – the rumination on that space becomes the subject. When you write, you write yourself into life, you create a self, and then you consider that self; the act of writing is the act of living and existing, the act becomes the subject.
This can be worrying, because it inevitably turns towards a degree of internal meditation that leads to a sense of debilitation and the abyss – Naipaul’s ‘The Enigma of Arrival’, a novel (amongst other things) about writing, engages with this dark anomie and obliterating self-absorption. (Remember the aspiring writer Mr Biswas and his mental collapse too). Interestingly, Naipaul has been a writer simultaneously introspective and obsessed with the writer’s life and the process of finding ‘self’ through creating literature, whilst also being a writer concerned with external analysis in the broadest terms – a writer engaged in the world through his non-fiction, the writer in the world, listening, gleaning, analysing.
When you consider his work bearing this in mind there appears to be a tension between the internal and external impulse, and the depths (heights?) Naipaul reaches may have something to do with this; simultaneously torpor and movement as he contextualises himself and this inner consideration within the frame of history and the material world. This is why he is so compelling. See also the protagonist of ‘Half a Life’ and ‘Magic Seeds’ – they are novels about debilitation, incapacity, accidie in the face of the world, about a man unable to act and create his own self. Can you see this in Coetzee too? On a certain level, this becomes metaphor for existence and life itself, the writing and finding of form, the gap between stillness and action.
Ultimately I think writers come to a point in which they must stare at their hands and some of the most interesting literature turns on this contemplation – even Beckett’s sense of the futility of language/life may be partly related to this.
Or maybe not, I don’t know, I really need to stop thinking about these things and do some work.
Comment by ~h~ — July 3, 2006 @ 9:18 am