What twenty-first-century novelists inherit from Eliot is the radical freedom to push the novel’s form to its limits, wherever they may be. It’s a mistake to hate Middlemarch because the Ichabods love it. That would be to denude oneself of one of those good things of the world that Spinoza advised we cling to. Feeling into knowledge, knowledge into feeling… When we say Eliot was the greatest of Victorian novelists, we mean this process worked more fluidly in her than anyone else.
Four – REREADING BARTHES AND NABOKOV
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
– ROLAND BARTHES, “The Death of the Author”
Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.
– VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Strong Opinions
1
The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et cetera. It’s a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime. I know one, Pnin, having read it half a dozen times. When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through the kitchen (Pnin a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon Lolita), or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their methodology). Even the architect’s claim on his creation seems secondary to your wonderful way of living in it.
To a rereader of this type, Roland Barthes’s authorial death sentence will not seem especially polemical. Long before Barthes told them they could, rereaders had been squatting in the houses of beloved novels, each with their own ideas of the floor plan. “A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” Well, yes! And, apart from anything else, we’re already living here! On first reading Barthes, in college, the essay struck me as the confirmation of an old desire, to possess a novel entirely. Now when I teach the essay to writing students, the room splits evenly between those who take it in their stride as a perfectly obvious experiential truth and those who take it as an affront. For the first type, the kind of reader I have tried to describe above, Barthes’s apparently radical transaction of power is an exchange they have always already assumed. They have always walked into books boldly, without knocking or bothering too much about the owner. But to those students who have the tendency to feel humbled before the act of writing, “The Death of the Author” is a perverse assault on the privileges of authorship, on the possibility of fixed meaning, even upon “Truth” itself. For a polemic a mere seven pages long, it has a great power to disturb, seeming to take from a delicate student her sense of the text as an intelligible thing, as well as her sense of herself as a significant individual capable of receiving meaning:
Yet this destination cannot any longer be personaclass="underline" the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, those bold readers remain unruffled and unsurprised to find themselves described as “destinations”-on the contrary, the impersonality suits them. They were never likely to say, in a college class, “I guess, for me, as a lapsed Catholic feminist from Iowa this book didn’t really work.” All texts are grist to their milclass="underline" personal sensibilities have never come into it. They are excited to add to the text’s sudden indeterminacy, their own indeterminacy as well. To observe these two natural, unschooled reactions is fascinating: they reveal within the famous ideological debate a more intimate and important question of character, into which a teacher should not necessarily intrude. Why not allow each student to find out for himself what kind of rereader he is? No bad blood need be spilled over it (as it was when I was in college). After all, you can storm the house of a novel like Barthes, rearranging the furniture as you choose, or you can enter on your knees, like the pilgrim Nabokov thought you were, and try to figure out the cunning design of the place-the house will stand either way.
In my own reading life, I’ve been pulled first in one direction, then in the other. Reading has always been my passion, my pleasure, and I am constitutionally drawn to any thesis that gives power to readers, increasing their freedom of movement. But when I became a writer, writing became my discipline, my practice, and I felt the need to believe in it as an intentional, directional act, an expression of an individual consciousness. And the tension between these two modes grows particularly acute when I try to read the author Nabokov as the critic Barthes recommends. On the one hand there is Barthes’s radical invocation of reader’s rights (“The removal of the Author… is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text or-which is the same thing-the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all levels its Author is absent.”) On the other, Nabokov’s bold assertion of authorial privilege (“My characters are galley slaves”). You can hardly get going at all. This despite the fact that the great critic and the great author have a theme in common: both equally concerned with jouissance, with literary bliss (though they define it differently), and the creative act of reading. Barthes spoke of the pleasure of the text, Nabokov of asking his students to read “with your brain and spine… the tingle in the spine really tells you what the author felt and wished you to feel.” Barthes, though, had no interest in what the author felt or wished you to feel, which is where my trouble starts.
It’s easy to read “The Death of the Author” as a series of revolutionary demands, but it’s worth remembering that it was also simply a licked forefinger held up to test a wind already blowing. For along with authorial assassination, Barthes lays out his vision for a new kind of “text,” and it is one that the reader of 1968 would have recognized: