Owning the book

[malsperanza]

By "owning" I don't mean, in this case, purchasing a copy of it. (Though god knows I am addicted to purchasing books.) I mean taking possession of the book, and/or being possessed by it. Adopting its world, swallowing it whole.

I'm returning to a question from a few days ago: What is the purpose of seeing oneself in the role of a character? Especially if it's the hero?

Conversely, what if one cannot decide which is the right character to latch onto? (Two books that offer this dilemma, in very different ways, are LOTR and Cassie Claire's Draco Trilogy.)

But why do it?

Some books (e.g., LOTR) offer a whole spectrum of characters from which to choose, and there is no particular indication that one is better than another in terms of finding the heart of the book through that identification, or coming to a new understanding of its meaning. The author indicates no preference. (Well, in LOTR, I doubt Tolkien really wanted any of us to view the tale from the perspective of the Nazgul. And some characters, like Bombadil, aren't available to us long enough to be good vehicles for our reading. But we have quite a platter: Aragorn, Frodo, Sam, M&P, Faramir, Eowyn, and even Gandalf and Gollum are possible reader-surrogates.)

Equally interesting is the book that offers two balanced and opposing characters to choose from, and clearly tags both as being possible and appropriate surrogates for the reader. The Draco Trilogy does this beautifully (and rather sadistically, from the reader's perspective), with intriguing consequences both for the reader and for the meaning of the book. (It remains to be seen if, at the end, the story will succeed in keeping both Harry and Draco in such excruciating equilibrium, or if the reader will be compelled to choose one or the other. And whether the reader will be left to choose for him- or herself or will be directed by the events of the story and the manner of their telling.)

A couple of primary points:

-Cassie epicyclical made an interesting comment a while back about the performative nature of LJs, which led me to the comment that we all perform our lives to some extent, don't we?

-It's fun to play dress-up and make-believe. (But why is it fun?)

-In reading, we are under the influence of the author, who sometimes chooses a character for us to attach ourselves to (usually either the hero, or Aristotle's Common Man, not too low, not too high, but someone we can understand and sympathize with).

-Even so, we may choose to defy that author, and select some other character, even perhaps a perverse one--say, the villain, or an utterly minor cameo. Ha-ha! In the great Author-Reader duel, that's a hit, a very palpable hit! (OK, yes, I've been watching The Scarlet Pimpernel again, so sue me.)

* * * *

If, as I suppose, all books are an unrequited love affair, and all reading is a form and expression of desire, then the only way to resolve that desire is to either gain full possession of the beloved or lose the beloved definitively. In a post some months ago, I tried to sort out some of the series of concentric or nested power struggles that occur in reading: between the author and the reader, between the book and the reader, between the hero and the reader.

Gaining full possession of the beloved is as impossible in the reader-book love affair as it is in real life. No love worth the name is ever so unequal that the beloved is fully available for ownership by the lover. "Possession," "requited love," is a metaphor for understanding and interpretation. Possession is knowledge (as the authors of the Bible knew). To possess a book is to fully grasp its meaning--all its meanings. And if the book is a good one, then reallyreallyfull possession means to take on and acquire the knowledge, wisdom, insight the book contains. Unfortunately, as I have argued, the hapless reader is far more likely to find herself possessed by the book, and at its mercy, than the other way round.

A text is a changeable, unstable thing. It means one thing on first reading and quite another on subsequent readings. To attach oneself to a character, to insert oneself into the book from within a chosen character, is a means of gaining entry to the book's meaning from one fixed perspective. It is empowering for the reader, who is then no longer quite so hapless. Characters in books have agency within the world of the book; readers have none. The reader is a mute, passive observer of the action. In the world of the book, the reader is bound, gagged, and tied to the tracks. He or she is acted upon, influenced, moved, manipulated, and unable to control either the events of the book or their affect upon him or her. However unknown and mysterious we may be to the author, we are utterly exposed to him or her.

And yet, at the same time, it is we who turn the pages, we who decide whether the book merits our attention, and how much of our attention, and whether it deserves our love. It is we, in the end, who throw it across the room, or put it on a shelf, or lend it to a friend who won't return it. We own it. Mere paper and in, it has no value in the world at all, unless we read it.

And we want that, no? Both because it is delicious to give oneself up to the power of a book and because we instinctively know that this is how knowledge is absorbed, osmotically, and with it some of that power we covet.

Each rereading is a new reading. Yes, sometimes we reread in order simply to repeat an experience we liked before. But even so, rarely is the experience quite the same. (Obviously, the suspense works very differently when one knows the end. Speed of reading alters certain effects--e.g., in a slow reading, the descriptive passages and asides influence the tone and atmosphere more.)

So there are books that keep us at arm's length, or that we never find a way into. (Which isn't to say that we don't love them.)
There are books that offer us access to their world, but without particular attachment to any one character.
There are books that offer one clear character who is going to perform the Vulcan Mindmeld on us.
There are books that offer a difficult choice among specific characters. (And in such cases, the reader's choice has a dramatic effect on the meaning of the book, no?)
Some books offer a panoply of possibilities.

Mind you, I'm not talking about pov here. I don't think pov is necessarily the means by which we attach ourselves to a character. For example, some of Nabokov's novels are written in a first person pov, but the reader tends to resist the narrator (well, especially since he may be a plagiarist, or a pedophile or a murderer), while seeking other characters to latch onto. Emma Bovary owns the pov in Madame Bovary, and her author may have adored her and seen her as his alter ego, but I have never been able to stand her.

I do quite like Boulanger, the evil nobleman who seduces her, though.

widget_alley describes an interesting version of self-insertion into a character in a book, speaking of Neverwhere, and of the greater attraction of a secondary character to the one tagged as Hero:

I have yet to find a "mighty hero" that I cannot identify with/substitute myself for, on some level. ... While we are clearly meant to identify with the main character, Richard, a confused, lost, well-intentioned young man who is as utterly unfamiliar with the world ... that he finds himself in as we are, I admit it was very hard for me to attach myself to him. Instead, from the moment I "met" him, I latched on to a much more inconsequential character ... Later, after repeated readings, I realized how that attachment had skewed my entire perspective of the book. (emphasis added) I was looking at the events with a critical, Marquis-like eye, rather than wide-open wonder and fear as would have been the case with Richard.

I've since gone back and tried to substitute myself for each one of the characters. Each offers a slightly different take... The rest is here:

What an interesting exercise: to reread a book several times, consciously aligning oneself with a different character each time.

And this is, of course, the point. It's easy to say that we put ourselves in the hero's shoes because we like to play make-believe, and enjoy pretending to be the hero--to suffer and triumph, to contribute something beautiful to the world, to slay dragons. This is the vicarious pleasure of the voyeur (about which the critic Laura Mulvey has written).

It's easy to say, and facile, and incomplete, because we know perfectly well the whole time that the hero isn't us. What's really going on is a delicate dance between being absorbed in the book's story and being detached from it, the better to analyze and absorb its meanings and purposes. We are and are not the hero. "We are," writes Montaigne, "I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." The condition of the reader is one of eternal doubleness: hero and unhero, actor and observer.

Rereading is, in parvo, the activity of doubleness. Rereading is how we learn: the impressions of the first reading are altered by the second, and perhaps even reversed. One knows the end; one has decided which character one wants to possess (or be possessed by) and has followed the story to its completion. From that point on, any (re)reading is colored by the reader's superior knowledge: Where once we were as ignorant of the future as the characters themselves, now we have information far greater than theirs. We know what happens to them. We may even know why.

Or not. Because the world of the book remains only partially accessible to us, and our hunger is not satisfied by partial meals.

And so we seek new points of access, new ways of acquiring information; we want more. We want to know more. We want to be more.


And so we reread.