Consortium on the Novel
September 15, 2015
Excerpts: Reading Time
1. Yet the most classical narrative (a novel by Zola or Balzac or Dickens or Tolstoy) bears
within it a sort of diluted tmesis: we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading: a
rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for
knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as “boring”) in order to get
more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote (which are always its articulations: whatever
furthers the solution of the riddle, the revelation of fate): we boldly skip (no one is watching)
descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations: doing so, we resemble a spectator in a
nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer’s striptease, tearing off her
clothing, but in the same order, that is: on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening the
episodes of the ritual (like a priest gulping down his Mass). Tmesis, source or figure of pleasure,
here confronts two prosaic edges with one another; it sets what is useful to a knowledge of the
secret against what is useless to such knowledge; tmesis is a seam or flaw resulting from a
simple principle of functionality; it does not occur at the level of the structure of languages but
only at the moment of their consumption; the author cannot predict tmesis: he cannot choose to
write what will not be read. And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read
that creates the pleasure of the great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and
Peace, word for word? (Proust’s good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the
same passages.)[...]
Whence two systems of reading: one goes straight to the articulations of the anecdote, it
considers the extent of the text, ignores the play of language (if I read Jules Verne, I go fast: I
lose discourse, and yet my reading is not hampered by any verbal loss—in the speleological
sense of that word): the other reading skips nothing; it weighs, it sticks to the text, it reads, so to
speak, with application and transport, grasps at every point in the text the asyndeton which cuts
the various languages—and not the anecdote: it is not (logical) extension that captivates it, the
winnowing out of truths, but the layering of significance; as in the children’s game of topping
hands, the excitement comes not from a processive haste but from a kind of vertical din (the
verticality of language and of its destruction); it is at the moment when each (different) hand
skips over the next (and not one after the other) that the hole, the gap, is created and carries off
the subject of the game—the subject of the text. Now paradoxically (so strong is the belief that
one need merely go fast in order not to be bored), this second, applied reading (in the real sense
of the word “application”) is the one suited to the modern text, the limit-text. Read slowly, read
all of a novel by Zola, and the book will drop from your hands; read fast, in snatches, some
modern text, and it becomes opaque, inaccessible to your pleasure: you want something to
happen and nothing does, for what happens to the language does not happen to the discourse:
what “happens,” what “goes away,” the seam of the two edges, the interstice of bliss, occurs in
the volume of the languages, in the uttering, not in the sequence of utterances: not to devour, to
gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover—in order to read today’s writers—the
leisure of bygone readings: to be aristocratic readers.
— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1975) 10-13.
2. What were habitually his final meditations?
Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster
novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms
not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.
What did the first drawer unlocked contain?
A Vere Foster's handwriting copybook, property of Milly (Millicent) Bloom, certain
pages of which bore diagram drawings marked Papli, which showed a large globular head with 5
hairs erect, 2 eyes in profile, the trunk full front with 3 large buttons, 1 triangular foot: 2 fading
photographs of queen Alexandra of England and of Maud Branscombe, actress and professional
beauty: a Yuletide card, bearing on it a pictorial representation of a parasitic plant, the legend
Mizpah, the date Xmas 1892, the name of the senders, from Mr and Mrs M. Comerford, the
versicle: May this Yuletide bring to thee, Joy and peace and welcome glee: a butt of red partly
liquefied sealing wax, obtained from the stores department of Messrs Hely's, Ltd., 89, 90 and 91
Dame street: a box containing the remainder of a gross of gilt `J' pennibs, obtained from same
department of same firm: an old sandglass which rolled containing sand which rolled: a sealed
prophecy (never unsealed) written by Leopold Bloom in 1886 concerning the consequences of
the passing into law of William Ewart Gladstone's Home Rule bill of 1886 (never passed into
law): a bazaar ticket No 2004, of S. Kevin's Charity Fair, price 6d. 100 prizes: an infantile
epistle, dated, small em monday, reading: capital pee Papli comma capital aitch How are you
note of interrogation capital eye I am very well full stop new paragraph signature with flourishes
capital em Milly no stop: a cameo brooch, property of Ellen Bloom (born Higgins), deceased: 3
typewritten letters, addressee, Henry Flower, c/o P. O. Westland Row, addresser, Martha
Clifford, c/o P. O. Dolphin's Barn: the transliterated name and address of the addresser of the 3
letters in reserved alphabetic boustrophedontic punctated quadrilinear cryptogram (vowels
suppressed) N. IGS./WI.UU. OX/W. OKS. MH/Y. IM: a press cutting from an English weekly
periodical Modern Society, subject corporal chastisement in girls' schools: a pink ribbon which
had festooned an Easter egg in the year 1899: two partly uncoiled rubber preservatives with
reserve pockets, purchased by post from Box 32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, W.C.: 1 pack of
1 dozen creamlaid envelopes and faintruled notepaper, watermarked, now reduced by 3: some
assorted Austrian-Hungarian coins: 2 coupons of the Royal and Privileged Hungarian Lottery: a
lowpower magnifying glass: 2 erotic photocards showing: a) buccal coition between nude
senorita (rere presentation, superior position) and nude torero (fore presentation, inferior
position): b) anal violation by male religious (fully clothed, eyes abject) of female religious
(partly clothed, eyes direct), purchased by post from Box 32, P. O., Charing Cross, London,
W.C.: a press cutting of recipe for renovation of old tan boots: a 1d. adhesive stamp, lavender, of
the reign of Queen Victoria: a chart of measurements of Leopold Bloom compiled before, during
and after 2 months of consecutive use of Sandow-Whiteley's pulley exerciser (men's 15/-,
athlete's 20/-) viz., chest 28 in. and 29 1/2 in., biceps 9 in. and 10 in., forearm 8 1/2 and 9 in.,
thigh 10 in. and 12 in., calf 11 in. and 12 in.: 1 prospectus of the Wonderworker, the world's
greatest remedy for rectal complaints direct from Wonderworker, Coventry House, South Place,
London E. C., addressed to Mrs L. Bloom with brief accompanying note commencing: Dear
Madam.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 17.17691823.
3. Yet if only by virtue of the characteristic length that prevents it from being read in a single
sitting, the novel inevitably enjoins not one, but several withdrawals to the private sphere. Poe,
who first raised the issue of the effects of this length, considered the discontinuousness of novelreading one of the liabilities of the form, which thereby had to forego "the immense benefit of
totality." In the novel state, Poe thought, the autonomy of "literary concerns" was always being
frustrated by the foreign intervention of "worldly interests."' If, however, novel-reading
presupposes so many disparate withdrawals to the private sphere, by the same token it equally
presupposes so many matching returns to the public, institutional one. An important dimension
of what reading a novel entails, then, would lie outside the moment and situation of actual
perusal in the times and places that interrupt this perusal and render it in the plural, as a series.
Just as we read the novel in the awareness that we must put it down before finishing it, so even
when we are not reading it, we continue to "live" the form in the mode of having to get back to it.
Phenomenologically, the novel form includes the interruptions that fracture the process of
reading it. And the technical equivalent of this phenomenological interpenetration of literary and
worldly interests would be the practice of various realisms, which, despite their manifold
differences, all ensure that the novel is always centrally about the world one has left behind to
read it and that the world to which one will be recalled has been reduced to attesting the truth (or
falsehood) of the novel. It is not quite true, therefore, that the novel is simply concerned to attach
us to individuality and domesticity, to privacy and leisure. What the form really secures is a close
imbrication of individual and social, domestic and institutional, private and public, leisure and
work. A drill in the rhythms of bourgeois industrial culture, the novel generates a nostalgic desire
to get home (where the novel can be resumed) in the same degree as it inures its readers to the
necessity of periodically renouncing home (for the world where the novel finds its justification
and its truth). In reading the novel, one is made to rehearse how to live a problematic always
surrendered, but then again always recovered privacy.
— D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988), 82-83.
4. There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste
compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which
the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in
the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the
greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later. This process
of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation which is becoming rarer
and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental
relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. His nesting-places -the activities that are intimately associated with boredom -- are already extinct in the cities and
are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of
listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost
when the stories are no longer retained. [...]
A man listening to a story is in the company of the story-teller; even a man reading one
shares this companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other
reader. (For even the reader of a poem is ready to utter the words, for the benefit of the listener.)
In this solitude of his, the reader of a novel seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone
else. He is ready to make it completely his own, to devour it, as it were. Indeed, he destroys, he
swallows up the material as the fire devours logs in the fireplace. The suspense which permeates
the novel is very much like the draft which stimulates the flame in the fireplace and enlivens its
play.
It is a dry material on which the burning interest of the reader feeds. “A man who dies at
the age of thirty-five,” said Moritz Heimann once, “is at every point of his life a man who dies at
the age of thirty-five.” Nothing is more dubious than this sentence -- but for the sole reason that
the tense is wrong. A man -- so says the truth that was meant here -- who died at thirty-five will
appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five. In
other words, the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for
remembered life. The nature of the character in a novel cannot be presented any better than is
done in this statement, which says that the “meaning of his life is revealed only in his death. But
the reader of a novel actually does look for human beings from whom he derives the “meaning of
life.” Therefore he must, no matter what, know in advance that he will share their experience of
death: if need be their figurative death -- the end of the novel -- but preferably their actual one.
How do the characters make him understand that death is already waiting for them -- a very
definite death and at a very definite place? That is the question which feeds the reader’s
consuming interest in the events of the novel.
The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else’s fate to us,
perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it
yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the
novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.
— Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936), in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New
York: Schocken Books, 1968), 91; 100-101
5. What is infinite, it appears, what is always imaginable, always subject to analysis, adventure
and creation is past time. Even our definitions of the period we are living in have prefixes
pointing backwards: post-modern, post-structuralist, post-colonial, post-Cold War. Our
contemporary prophecies look back, behind themselves, post, after, what has gone on before. It
is true, of course, that all knowledge requires a grasp of its precedents, Still it is remarkable how
often imaginative forays into the far and distant future have been solely and simply opportunities
to re-imagine or alter the present as past. And this looking back, though enabled by technology’s
future, offers no solace whatsoever for humanity’s future. Surrounding the platform from which
the backward glance is cast is a dire repulsive landscape….
What becomes most compelling therefore, are the places and voices where the journey
into the cellar of time does not end with a resounding slam of a door, but where the journey is a
rescue of sorts, an excavation for the purposes of building, discovering, envisioning a future. I
am not, of course, encouraging and anointing happy endings - forced or truly felt - or anointing
bleak ones intended as correctives or warnings. I mean to call attention to whether the hand
which holds the book’s metaphors is an open palm or a fist….
Cocoons from which healed women burst, dreams that take the terror from time… some
writers disagree with prevailing notions of futurelessness. That they very much indeed not only
have but insist on a future. That for them, for us, history is beginning again.
I am not ferreting out signs of tentative hope, obstinate optimism in contemporary fiction;
I believe I am detecting an informed vision based on harrowing experience that nevertheless
gestures toward a redemptive future. And I notice the milieu from which this vision rises. It is
race inflected, gendered, colonialized, displaced, hunted.
There is an interesting trace here of divergent imaginaries, between the sadness of no
more time, of the poignancy of inverted time - time that has only a past - of time itself living on
“borrowed time,” between that imaginary and the other one that has growing expectations of
time with a relentless future. One looks to history for the feel of time or its purgative effects; one
looks through history for its signs of renewal.
Literature, sensitive as a tuning fork, is an unblinking witness to the light and shade of the
world we live in.
— Toni Morrison, “The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations.” The
25th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (NEH), 25 March 1996.