Reading at the Horizon

By Nathaniel Hendrix

I haven't been able to read novels for over a year now. And if that fact elicits any sympathy from you, indulge me as I explain that there are two layers of irony therein: that I have, one, finished the coursework for a Master's degree in English; and, two, that the situation announces itself so obviously as novelistic. Having honed a keen sense for what is literary, I can see, down to the cheeky cover with a picture of a book (charred? flayed?) on it, the perfectly horrible best-seller that my predicament makes.

Nor do I think I'm making too much of a stretch when I say that you could do the same. Try: a happy love that, via exhaustion, turns to scorn, followed eventually by rapprochement, realizations, the renewal of old habits - meaning. Perhaps the ease with which you followed this experiment is directly proportional to how much you can understand my parting ways with novels. Because here, a third irony, is that the modern literary novel, which many critics say was created in imitation of, and as a means of habituation to the incessant rhythms of bourgeois life, has brought me, precisely by the way the familiar arc of its plots has penetrated me to the point of an almost behavioralist reflex, to the point where its repetition is unbearable.

Even so, this situation has not been entirely without its consolations. In an altogether difficult meeting with the professor who might best be called my mentor, I forced myself first to admit that all of the Ph.D. programs I'd applied to had rejected me, then, that I had found myself unable to read novels for, at that point, a couple of months. "Good," she said, "You've moved on already. It's actually a good thing that you got rejected from these English programs: they would have constrained you too much." If this alone was what I needed to hear, how much better was the relief on her face of having some fact on which to build something other than helpless, if sincere, sympathy? I went on my way feeling less guilty at least, lightened by the idea that I was skillfully ditching a raft once I'd gotten to some other shore.

For all the comfort I got from that meeting, though, I was a little disturbed by the fact that my distaste for novels was essentially involuntary. What does grad school teach if not how to find the interesting bits in even the most tiresome writings? I found myself even incapable of that. I started entertaining the theory that I was recovering from some surfeit, countering the gluttony with which I'd consumed novels for the past two years by something analogous to an allergy; the extremes would, I hoped, find an equilibrium before long, and I could regain the enjoyment that had been pretty reliably in store for me every time I had previously chosen a novel.

Months passed and there was no assuaging of this allergy. But don't think, either, that it concerned me too much; I was far too busy reading from genres that I had never been interested in before: I read economic history, South American anthropology, theories about play and complexity. In short, it was a minor renaissance (one I may have felt better about not qualifying had I been reading about Florentine history rather than Venetian) after which I chose a couple novels to read.

The first of these was Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, chosen because it was used in Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse. To the degree that Barthes made it sound like the original encyclopedia of love - his being only a second, abecedarian attempt at the same goal - I read into it all the faults of a solipsistic romanticism. This, combined with the fact that I was failing badly at my attempt to like it, made me repeatedly put off reading the slim volume, to the point of denying myself other reading. It took me a week to get through its hundred pages.

It's never been unheard of for me to dislike a book of any sort that I'm excited about reading, so that failure was not altogether surprising. I chose my next novel more carefully, as a chaser to two more theoretical texts which I'd just read: Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens and Mark C. Taylor's The Moment of Complexity; I chose Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Almost everything about this book suggested that I would like it, from the interest Hesse and I share in monasticism to a very interesting Wikipedia article cataloguing attempts at creating a glass bead game from the scant details that Hesse gives about it.

Predictable - by the very fact of my including it here - as the outcome of my attempt at reading The Glass Bead Game was, it did join with one as yet undisclosed fact to hint at why I felt such repulsion toward novels. The fact was that: even though my distaste for the genre has not, to this day, waned, but steadily increases in the face of any attempt at curbing it, one novelist alone requires no rapprochement; that my fondness for him continues still, almost as if it were never interrupted, and that I was able to pick up a novel of his and scarcely remember that I had ever, in some forgotten but evidently binding moment, abjured his genre so completely. That author is Henry James.

To explain even partially why it is that the man commonly referred to as "The Master" has escaped my otherwise catholic disgust with the novel, I need to conjure an image of the author as exegete-pope, prescribing ex cathedra, from a set of precepts acknowledged as immanent to our experience as humans, a set of rituals that he claims are contained logically therein. When our pope manqué lights the censer, his novel's characters might fall in love or break a leg; or at the sign of the cross, his characters writhe out a morbid exeunt - all as, the theory goes, a natural outpouring of their beings. This is all very good for blueprints, but I can't help feeling that we should be speaking in the specie of experience: about senses, preoccupations, moments when we pay more attention to the celebrants around us than the ritual at hand.

So as Hesse slathers mortar onto the façade of his holy man, Joseph Knecht, all the while devising the rituals that will, naturally, bring about their end inside of him, Henry James might stroll. He might follow his curiosity down whatever alley it leads him, constructing with hands in his pockets an architecture from the path he takes as he negotiates permissions and intimacies, inside and outside - his path as he creates a theory of the bourgeois native's curious religion.

In the same meeting with my professor-mentor that I mentioned earlier, she charged me with "seeing what is just over the horizon - what's still latent in our thought." Though I'm sure I'll find James there too, I can't help reflecting that the horizon always moves with the traveler; I can't help seeing my instinctive disgust with the novel as a charge to find new ways of expressing our shared curiosity.



nhendrix.jpg Nathaniel Hendrix reads and writes in Albany, NY. He can be reached at dymaxion@gmail.com.