Once is not enough: Rereading and remembering

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2002 by Lewis, Tess

La chair est triste, Ulas! et j'ai lu loos les lives.'1

-Stephane Mallarme, "Brise Marine" (1865)

THE JOYS OF REREADING might have offered Mallarme a stronger antidote to his ennui than sighing for distant, exotic lands. And yet, if his elusive poems, and most especially "A Throw of the Dice," are anything to go by, reading and rereading, for Mallarme, was an exalted and exalting-not to mention exhausting-undertaking. The evocative and ambiguous verbal clusters that make up the constellation of "A Throw of the Dice" resist any definitive interpretation. With each subsequent reading, new associations and the recollection of previous associations combine to shift one's understanding of the poem. The play of conflicting and congruent meanings can bring on a case of literary vertigo.

Nabokov, another master of the rereadable text, declared in his Lectures on Literature. "One cannot read a book, one can only reread it." Books, unlike paintings, must be apprehended sequentially, line by line, rather than instantaneously. Therefore, we can only begin to understand a novel as thoroughly as a work of the visual arts on the second, third, or even fourth reading. As if to surpass this theory, Nabokov wrote Pale Fire, a vertiginous mise en abime of his rereading paradox. The novel consists of a mediocre poem by John Shade, obsessively annotated either by Charles Kinbote, a former king in exile of Zembla, or by the paranoid Russian emigre professor V. Botkin. Furthermore, any two of these characters could be interpreted as imaginative projections of the third. Forty years after Pale Fire first appeared, critics are still rereading it and arguing, with almost Kinbotian compulsion, about the novel's hidden codes and the precise identities of the characters.

Of course, no one simply reads, or rereads, a given book. One reads a certain edition at a specific time in one's life, and the particular book's smell, typeface, and paper can be as much a part of the experience as one's physical and emotional circumstances. The spell cast by a book intensely read in childhood can be broken as easily by different illustralions as by the changes brought by adulthood. But often, revisiting a well-loved book evokes former selves with an immediacy and complexity of which photographs are incapable. The Argentinian writer Ezequiel Martinez Estrada noted that, for "those who, while reading a book, recall, compare, conjure up emotions from other, previous readings, 11 rereading not only brings pleasure, but is in fact "one of the most delicate forms of adultery."2 (lane Carlyle, even more finely attuned to the proprieties of bibliophilia, felt that reading a borrowed book, even once, had about it the aura of an illicit affair.) Pace Nabokov, you never do read the same book twice, and the betrayal of earlier selves and the flirtation with possible new ones that rereading occasions can bring relief, joy, or nostalgia as much as it can piquancy.

The pleasures in Wendy Lesser's new book, Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering,3 are many and all quite licit. She is one of the rare breed of compulsive rereaders. In Nothing Remains the Same, she measures the stages on her life's way by returning to her major literary mileposts. Her criteria in selecting the books she would return to were few but stringent. The books had to be of a caliber able to weather repeated and demanding readings. Lesser also sought out books she had read long enough ago to have herself changed between readings, but whose initial readings she remembered clearly if not viscerally. Some books, such as David Copperfield and Remembrance of Things Past, she rejected, despite their importance to her, as redundant, being too explicitly about rereading. Her ideal books were those to which, as she read, she could feel her older and younger selves reacting simultaneously but differently. This interplay of past and present is Lesser's primary source of literary vertigo, and she abandons herself to it with relish.

Lesser described herself in her autobiography, The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters (1999), as "an eighteenth-century man of letters, though one who happens to be female, and lives in twentiethcentury Berkeley." She has read widely and closely and has a tendency to identify deeply with her favorite authors, especially Henry James and Charles Dickens, as well as with their characters. Lesser is thus perfectly poised for her journey in rereading as self-discovery.

Yet, her rereading is not merely self-discovery. Lesser combines personal insights with thoughtful insights into the texts. At its best, her writing dances nimbly upon the boundary of criticism and autobiography, strikes a balance between intimacy and reserve, and never strays too far from the novel or poem at hand. This vein of criticism that is personal but not self-absorbed, serious but not sententious, and leavened with subtle wit is the trademark of the writing she has been publishing in her quarterly The Threepenny Review for twenty-two years.