Ssshhh... the reader is ...

[malsperanza]

I was skimming back over recent entries in this LJ, and I noticed that an awful lot of them lately have the subject heading "Hero Torture."

How very odd. I wonder if this might give people the wrong idea about me. It implies that in the great Malsperanza Unified Field Theory of Reading (aka the Seduction Theory of Literature), the Reader/Book ship is a hurt/comfort ship--a noncon h/c ship, at that. Which, come to think of it, may even be true. (There's enough unrequited romantic tension in it, for sure.)

Gotta love the meta.

Not long ago, I was muttering about what happens to the reader who is swallowed up by the book, lost in it, absorbed into it. I have been thinking about chresimos's buddy Keats in this context. He is a fellow who understands that the reader's passion for the text is like the lover's passion for the beloved. Indeed, he seems to live much of his affective life within the pages of books, poor boy. I am thinking, of course, of the two great sonnets, On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Again and On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

Watch Keats put his book-metaphors through their paces:

Keats enters a golden realm in one book, eats the other like a bittersweet fruit. This is curious: in one sonnet he enters the book--in this case Homer ("Much have I travelled in the realms of gold"); in the other, the book (Lear) enters him, because he eats it ("Must I ... once more humbly assay the bitter-sweet of this Shakesperean fruit").

Indeed, in the Lear poem he both consumes and is consumed by the text-- burning through it when he first sits down to reread it, only to be consumed by its fire at the end. (And I think it's important that the confrontation with Shakespeare's play is not a first reading, but a rereading, in contrast to the first encounter with Homer. Though that is a subject for another day.)

When Keats turns to the Grecian Urn, and tries to read its narrative, we discover that he is--no surprise--a fan of the Gothick Romance genre:

"O Attic shape! " he exclaims passionately.

Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought...

Gothick indeed, for in what other genre of art but the bodice-ripper romance can one always count on the men to be of marble and the maidens overwrought? You see? The division between high and low culture is not so unbridgeable as we were taught.

Over in that genre-bending Gothick realm-of-gold, Cassandra Claire's Draco Veritas, strange things are happening to people when they read, especially when they read Gothick Romance novels (but also, if you have been following the story thus far) when they read museum guidebooks, family codes of ethics, and letters. Really, anything written in words on paper is dangerous, in the bittersweet golden realm of the Draco Trilogy. I will not spoil its surprises; like all good Romances, it is a cautionary tale.

Gentle Readers, you have been warned: Enter a golden realm and you will not emerge unscathed.

'But of that perilous land we have heard in Gondor, and it is said that few come out who once go in; and of that few none have escaped unscathed.'

'Say not unscathed, but if you say unchanged, then maybe you will speak the truth,' said Aragorn.

'Then lead on!' said Boromir. 'But it is perilous.'

'Perilous indeed,' said Aragorn, 'fair and perilous; but only evil need fear it, or those who bring some evil with them. Follow me!'

Fortuitously, the critic Mark Edmundson has an essay on this very subject in tomorrow's today's NY Times Magazine: The Risk of Reading. (Edmundson is the author of an excellent book about the Gothick genre, called Nightmare on Main Street.) He says:

"To me, the best way to think about reading is as life's grand second chance. All of us grow up once: we pass through a process of socialization. We learn about right and wrong and good and bad from our parents, then from our teachers or religious guides. Gradually, we are instilled with the common sense that conservative writers like Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson thought of as a great collective work. To them, common sense is infused with all that has been learned over time through trial and error, human frustration, sorrow and joy. In fact, a well-socialized being is something like a work of art.

Yet for many people, the process of socialization doesn't quite work. The values they acquire from all the well-meaning authorities don't fit them. And it is these people who often become obsessed readers. They don't read for information, and they don't read for beautiful escape. No, they read to remake themselves. They read to be socialized again, not into the ways of their city or village this time but into another world with different values. "

It is one thing for the reader to be swallowed up by the book, lost in it, absorbed into it, and to emerge changed or even scathed. But what happens when the reader swallows the book?

It can be, says Keats, a bitter-sweet fruit. No doubt he consulted those eminent authorities on book-eating, the visionary Prophets Ezekiel and John of Patmos, who both, in their hunger, or greed, or passionate desire, ate the book they craved, and found it sweet in the mouth, but bitter in the belly:

God speaks to Ezekiel (2, 3):

6: And thou, son of man, be not afraid of them, neither be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns be with thee, and thou dost dwell among scorpions: be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks, though they be a rebellious house.
7: And thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear: for they are most rebellious.
8: But thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou rebellious like that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee.

And Ezekiel recalls:

9: And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein;
10: And he spread it before me; and it was written within and without: and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe.
1: Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel.
2: So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll.
3: And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.[...]
14: So the spirit lifted me up, and took me away, and I went in bitterness, in the heat of my spirit; but the hand of the Lord was strong upon me.

Likewise, Revelations 10:

8. And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and said, Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth.
9. And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.
10. And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.
11. And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.

(King James version)

Both Ezekiel and John are filling their craws with a book of warning, woe, and foretelling: the impending destruction of Jerusalem in the Old Testament, and the Apocalypse itself in the N.T. The repetition of the image of eating the book in Revelations is John of Patmos's way of linking the End of Time to the ancient destruction of the Temple, which signified the downfall of the old order.

But why eat the book? When it is God's book, I suppose, then eating it is the same thing as reading it--only more so: The prophet hungry for knowledge and for understanding (insight) swallows God's scroll, because mere sight-reading would not be sufficient to fully absorb its meaning.

Yet however honey-sweet words may taste on the tongue, they lie uneasily in the stomach. We eat the book and are reshaped, revised, as if it were one of the cakes of Wonderland that resize Alice up and down. Mere food cannot work this change in us; but one other edible material can: to Catholics, the Host; to the Maenads, the flesh of the harvest king: when we eat the gods we partake in their divinity. Eating the book is like eating the gods.

So hush now, all of you; fingers to our lips. This our world is a library, a temple, and a kitchen. We need quiet to concentrate, and condiments to season our meal.

Bon appetit!