Twisted Threads of Reading: A Tradition of Implication, Inference and Indirection
by Norman Simms (February 2018)
Slowly we pushed on through the fretted network of branches and leaves. The quarry was silent. —The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells
hankfully, despite all that is said regarding the end of books—that the novel as such is finished and some new genre will have to replace it in order to capture the experiences of our contemporary writers and readers—there is no end of books to read. Faster than new titles can be churned out, old books become available. Not only that, but there are long lists of titles we once meant to read but did not get around to perusing.
Rereading and re-thinking all the books one read throughout one’s lifetime is a good way to turn away from the hurly-burly of modern noise. Yet, how does one choose those books to read from the multitude of titles on those nagging lists? Let me outline some methods that have formed themselves in the last few decades, particularly during the years since my retirement from lecturing.
.jpg "Ancient singer of tales performs to his own accompaniment")
By exercising their disastrous gift of the gab, they deepen the quasi-hypnotic trance in which human beings live and from it is the aim and purpose of all true philosophy, all genuinely spiritual religion to deliver them. —Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun.
When edited in Periclean Athens, transcriptions of the homeridae or professional singers-of-tales, became central to their educational system along with a select number of tragedies—Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides—whose events and characters tend to be drawn from the Homeric corpus. Thenceforth known under the name of Homer, the two great epics, The Iliad and the Odyssey continue at the heart of western civilization, along with, to be sure, the books of the Hebrew Bible and its Christian extensions.
The classical epics deserve to be read as often as possible and in as many translations as one can get hold of, and then there is a natural glide (or if one follows Dante’s narrator into the Divine Comedy, the guide) into Virgil Aeneid which in imitating Homer reduces the length of the two Greek poems of twelve cantos each into twelve in all for the Latin text. Then, as night follows day, comes the satirical parody of the Aeneid in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (sometimes also known as The Metamorphosis). These classical epics have much to teach us about the nature of human nature and its diverse civilizations, its many limits as well as its tenuous ideals, but also fill our minds with copious characters, actions, scenes and themes. From then on, wherever you turn, the Homeric heritage manifests itself and keeps one’s mind alive. On and on the books keep tumbling out of the traditional inkhorn, each one asserting, in its way, not just a uniqueness or eccentricity of its own, but a right to be the guardian and producer of its own individual truth.
.jpg "Mesopotamian scribe")
Our wise men say that the thoughts of men bind the whole world together, bind every creature to mankind, even God Himself. We preserve the world our thoughts. If one of us plays false to his thoughts, he plays false not only to his own life, but to the whole world, to God Himself.[1]
How the Bible has been studied over the last few millennia and how people thought it was composed—and for what purpose—has determined in many ways the attitudes assumed by whole nations about the phenomenon of literacy. Because of that, literature has come to be thought of as an underlying paradigm for all culture.
For most of my life I read the books that were in my parents’ house, not least the bookcases filled with volumes they accumulated in their early days of marriage during the Depression and where, after the War, they placed the titles they either didn’t read or had read and couldn’t bring themselves to discard. I took one tome out after another, and their order on the shelves was the order in which I perused them, not for a very long time realizing they had any intrinsic relation to one another or might be better comprehended by finding out something about where and when they were written or published, who the authors were and what they stood for. Something similar happened with texts given out in the classroom, gifts given by family and friends who assumed they knew what I was interested in, and lists of recommended readings provided at the start of university courses. The resistance to this socially acceptable or politically correct method began, however, when I started to feel uncomfortable with certain periods of literary history. This led me to the classics of Greece and Rome where there seemed to be, if not a continuation of the oral traditions of the singers of tales who began it all, then at least a subversive, cynical and satirical counter-current to the trendy innovations each age threw up around itself.
With my interests driving me toward biblical texts, I learned to care much more about the origins of context in books. Like the bearded rabbis of old commenting on their scriptures, I found myself drawn to anomalies, contradictions, apparent irrelevancies, and peculiar features in the texts—oddities in orthography, syntax, size of ciphers, even the colour of ink.
The secularized western tradition of literature and critical interpretation is based in large part on the teachings of the Church and its protesting and reforming churches. The poems, novels, plays, and essays that come in such a cultural practice follow notions of an underlying truth that then reading itself, like the writing agency, aims to go through and beyond words to higher and more everlasting realities of which words are only a temporary cover. The Hebrew traditions as continued and questioned by the rabbis assumes, contrariwise, that the creator and the energies of creation are the words themselves.
But while those classical epics in Greek and Latin grow and expand by imitation and parody through medieval, Renaissance and beyond, there are books that develop in other ways, and they form amoeba-like renewals of themselves that reflect back into the original core of narrative and dramatization insights and critiques that create a dialogue of culture. For instance, out of the various historical romances of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table come re-tellings of the original adventures that parallel and interweave quests for each of the primary characters and of their sons, cousins, friends and rivals. These are long, intricate romances in verse and prose that sometimes take on the language and customs of new host nations, and modify the dynamics of the original warrior cult, the chivalric court, and the ducie luf of a new sweet style of fin amor (refined love).
Mais remontons plus haut encore, à cette aube de la préhistoire où l’art de la parole était inconnu. Comment alors, d’un cerveau a un autre, s’opérait le traversèrent de leur contenu intime, de leurs idées et de leurs désirs? Il s’opérait en effet, si l’on en juge par ce qui se passe dans les sociétés animales dont les membres semblent se comprendre presque sans signes comme en vertu d’une sorte d’électrisation psychologique par influence.[2]
But let us go back even more, to the very dawn of prehistory where the art of the word is unknown. How then does it happen that from one human brain to another there is transference of the deepest content, ideas and desires? It seems to operate, in effect, if one may judge by what happens in animal communities where the members understand one another without signs, by virtue of psychological electricity.
There is also a way of reading early eighteenth-century novels that increasingly interiorize the action, dig out space for interior monologues, and scrape away the rust of aristocratic idealism and rhetorical artificiality. Thus, one can start with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, the confessions of an innocent housemaid seduced by her master and set next to it Henry Fielding’s mock retelling as Shamela, who cynically and seductively turns the tables by showing how the title character undermines the integrity of the naïve Squire Booby. Richardson and Fielding then go at one another with a series of novels that pick up the same or similar characters, putting them through their paces in analogous episodes and tilting at one another’s middle class puritanical values.
[3]
A spirit, to manifest itself, has to use the actual physical substance issuing from the lips of the medium. You have seen the vapour of fluid issuing from the lips of the medium. This finally condenses and is built up into the physical semblance of the spirit’s dead body. But this ectoplasm we believe to be the actual substance of the medium.[4]
Singer, thing of evil, stupid and wicked slave of the voice, of that instrument that was not invented by the human intellect, but begotten of the body, and which, instead of moving the soul, merely stirs up the dregs of our nature! For what is the voice but the Beast calling, awakening that other beast sleeping in the depths of mankind, the Beast which all great art has ever sought to chain up, as the archangel chains up, in old pictures, the demon with his woman’s face?[5]
But there are other unexpected connections between texts I read that go beyond characters, places, objects and events to unexpected convergences of idea, sometimes joined by words and phrases that leap from author to author, paying no attention to place or time of origin or genre of conception, or even the original language in which they were written. If, for instance, you read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and are struck by the first appearance of Queequeg and are told that he has been out in the streets of New Bedford “selling his head” meaning a string of smoked and tattooed heads brought from New Zealand, is it wrong to recall the little episode in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders where Gammer, the old woman servant, fears that she has sold her head to Dr. Fitzpiers who wants to chop it off and measure it after her death? If such a cluster of connected images, themes, characters, and events does exist, surely our sense of literary tradition takes on new meaning.
[4] Agatha Christie, “The Last Séance” in Herbert van Thal, ed., The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories (London: Pan, 1960) p. 63.
[5] Vernon Lee, “A Wicked Voice” in The Virgin of the Seven Daggers: Excursions into Fantasy (London: Penguin, 2008) pp. 125-126.
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Norman Simms Jews in an Illusion of Paradise; Dust and Ashes, Comedians and Catastrophes, Volume I, and his newest book, Jews in an Illusion of Paradise: Dust and Ashes, Falling Out of Place and Into History, Volume II. Several further manuscripts in the same vein are currently being completed. Along with Nancy Hartvelt Kobrin, he is preparing a psychohistorical examination of why children terrorists kill other children.
More by Norman Simms here.
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