What is it like to read?
Reading is a curious activity. We’ve been doing it for so long that we’ve all forgotten how strange it is. This project is reminding me.
When we read, we are being told a story, but the storyteller is not present. We cannot ask her questions. We cannot say “how, exactly, were her eyes when she cried?” We cannot say “did she really love him, or was she only pretending?” The writer must make some assumptions about what the reader wants to know and then meet them, or not meet them, subvert them, twist them, turn them, throw them in the reader’s face.
But fundamentally, it is a curious business. We read in private. When we read, even if we are in a busy cafe, we are essentially alone in our experience of reading. And yet we are with the writer. Alone and in company; both at once.
So there’s something shocking about exposing my reading. In the same way that, once, when I began workshopping, it was shocking to expose my writing. What will they think about me?, I think. What will they know about me that I don’t even know about myself? How can I put down my thoughts about a sentence or two in this book before I have read it all, chewed it over, put my analytical brain to work to make clever sentences about it?
And I wonder if maybe I am an idiot when I read. Or maybe just when I begin to read a new book. I remember when I was a four-year-old child, when I was just learning to read and could do it myself but it was still a little arduous I used to beg my mother to “break me into” a book. “Just read me the first ten pages,” I’d say, “just the first five, then I’ll do it myself.” Like training wheels. It’s hard to enter a new book; it’s like moving to a new city and not knowing your way around. Where’s the post office? Where’s the grocery store? Or, who are these characters? Why are they acting in this way? What are these things they’re talking about? Perhaps I am the only one who feels this way.
So I have some sympathy with this comment. The day after you’ve moved to a new city is not the time to be opining about its architecture or trying to sum up its inhabitants. But here we are; we are human beings and we have to start forming opinions even if only to knock them down again later. I write here about my own opinions as they come up; the moment I write them down I begin to disagree with myself. Apparently, this is how I read. Curious.
Lenelle Moïse November 19th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
“How can I put down my thoughts about a sentence or two in this book before I have read it all, chewed it over, put my analytical brain to work to make clever sentences about it?”
This really resonates with me, Naomi. I think something similar every single time I’m about to hit “Send” on this site. Remember when we had our first meeting and I talked about the vulnerability inherent in exposing process? One of the reasons I am a writer is because I can draft, consider, change my mind, re-draft, re-consider, edit, flesh-out, and polish before my thoughts are formally presented to the public. Like Nona, I feel like those of us who have read (and loved) The Golden Notebook have an advantage over those of us who haven’t. I don’t know where Anna is going. I still have no idea what Anna’s about.
Some readers are commenting in the Forum about pages a good 100 beyond what the 7 of us are discussing in the margins! I find myself feeling sad about this. After all, I can’t converse with folks about a page I haven’t read yet.
I want to. But I can’t.
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Harriet Rubin November 20th, 2008 at 3:15 am
Am I the only reader bored by this great work? What is Lessing doing to us? Is she telling us that story doesn’t matter, but repetition of events, minute descriptions, and ideas that trail into the ether take us beyond character, into some other state of mind or perception? It’s as if she’s cauterizing the sense of the reader that expects a grand plot on which to be swept up. It’s as if she’s trying to create a NEW KIND OF READER. But what kind of reader is that? Who is her ideal reader? What is her intent in not giving us what we expect a novel to deliver?
Does anyone know?
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Laura Kipnis November 20th, 2008 at 5:45 am
I agree about the boredom factor, Harriet, particularly in the black and red notebooks, which take a more stream-of-consciousness rather than story-driven form. I THINK that PERHAPS she’s telling us (I’m surmising at this point) that these are the raw experiences that were later filtered into a more traditional narrative, into the form of a novel (Anna’s novel, that is). It’s this question of form vs. formlessness that she brings up in the preface–but the fact is that formlessness can be boring! There are the occasional apercus but too few to sustain the length!
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Harriet Rubin November 20th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
WRITE FOR YOURSELF or for the reader?
Interesting post, Laura. Lessing appears to have a very unusual relationship to her readers. She can push their tolerances, extend a narrative to punishing extremes of detail, and in so doing test her readers as a marathon course tests a runner, sort of the way Francis Ford Coppola remakes a viewer’s sense of time (patience) with a narrative that doesn’t quit. This artistic choice seems almost a defiance of the reader which becomes more pronounced in Lessing’s esoteric science fiction, which I find tough going.
One of the fashionable MFA rules of writing is that to convey formlessness, avoid formlessness.
Is Lessing writing for herself or for the characters and not for the reader? I wonder what it’s meant for Lessing’s development as a writer to write (only?) for herself?
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Lenelle Moïse November 20th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
A quote on the back cover of my UK edition calls this novel “ambitious.” Lessing certainly is ambitious to expect/invite readers to weed through Anna’s sketchy, hesitant, process-oriented, sometimes insightful, rambling journal entries before we get to her actual novel. This book is a play within a play within a play. And the 7 of us have also become players! And so have all the patient people who log in to participate in The Golden Notebook Project. I suspect that some readers occasionally find our marginal comments boring. Will they continue to bear with us as we bear with Lessing’s Anna?
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Naomi Alderman November 20th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Not so much bored as depressed, Harriet. I’m hoping it picks up - and there are really wonderful moments - but having just sat down with it for 90 minutes I find I’m feeling really bleak. About human relationships, about the possibility for happiness in life, about whether love is always just an illusion. Right now I’m eager to toss it aside and go and remind myself of my real life, away from the misery of this book.
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Nona Willis Aronowitz November 20th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
I have this feeling that this boredom, this “formlessness” as Laura calls it, is deliberate. What I think Lessing is doing to us is making us wait until the Golden Notebook, which according to the back cover “holds the key to her recovery.” Hopefully we won’t go 500 pages before it gets good, but at least we have a clue that it is going to unfold, that the “stream of consciousness” style may be confined to a particular notebook, or moment of Anna’s life.
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Philippa Levine November 22nd, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Like Naomi, I’m more depressed than bored. I think Nona’s right that the forlorn formlessness Laura identifies here is deliberate, and maybe it doesn’t work as a fictional form though she’s hardly the first novelist to experiment with different varieties of bleakness. I think what I find most depressing overall is a nagging sense that things may not have changed as much as we like to think they have, that our brave new 2008 isn’t, when it comes to human relationships, all that much better, and that women still all too often tie themselves in knots to “get it right” in heterosexual relationships. (Lessing doesn’t give us anything other than heterosexual, so I’m running with the novel here, and not assuming all women are heterosexual.)
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