Against Rereading

I was ten years old when I forgot how to sleep. I’d get into bed and focus very hard on trying to switch my conscious mind off, but the effort was self-defeating. I didn’t like spending so many hours alone, so I started waking my older sister up in the middle of the night to play the Game of Life, a board game in which you traverse a one-way highway leading from graduation to retirement in a tiny plastic car, amassing capital as you go. My sister enjoyed the game, too, but didn’t want to be woken up at 1 A.M. to play it. The solution my parents came up with was to allow me to read with the lights on for as long as I wanted. I didn’t like reading, at the time, but I pretended I did, to receive praise, like my sisters, who were known as “voracious readers.”

My sister, who was fourteen, had just finished reading a novel called The Power of One by a South African Australian author named Bryce Courtenay. I told my sister that I wanted to read this book. She said it was not a good choice. The book was for adults. I was too young. I wouldn’t get it. That night, I took the book upstairs with me, without telling my sister, and started reading. This is what I remember. There was a boy named Peekay. He lived in South Africa. He was sent to a boarding school somewhere in the desert where he was bullied. He met a Zulu man who taught him how to fight back. One evening, the man was beaten to death by a white prison guard. He battered the man’s face with a blunt object and then penetrated him with that same object until he hemorrhaged to death. I didn’t know what the word hemorrhaged meant. I was mostly ignorant of the political context within which the murder took place. I lay in bed trying to figure it all out and by the time I came close to finishing The Power of One, I felt like I had been through some major ordeal and come out the other side a new person.

I didn’t want the novel to end. I worried, as I approached the final pages, that I was going to lose everything I had experienced while reading it. I was anxious that, without The Power of One, my life would return to how it was before. One obvious solution was to immediately reread the novel and relive it all over. But there was something about rereading The Power of One that struck me as wrong or even perverse. I intuited that rereading this book would in some way ruin what had made the first time so profound and transformative. To my ten-year-old mind, reading the book once was a sign of love and reverence for the life force that seemed to animate its pages. I thought I had discovered how real reading worked: once, intensely, and then never again.

It was only years later, when I began studying literature, that I found out I had it backward. The correct and virtuous way to read, according to those who knew about reading and writing, was to reread. Rereading was that which separated the real reader from the average book consumer. Vladimir Nabokov, in his Lectures on Literature, said “a good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” On the first reading, you form vague impressions of the action based on broad and subjective intuitions. You skip sentences, miss details, and stumble forward through the plot in passive expectation. When rereading, you have time, according to Nabokov, to “notice and fondle” the particularities of the world that an author has rendered in words, like the texture of Gregor Samsa’s shell or the hue of Emma Bovary’s eyes.

As a student, I came to appreciate such granularity. Going over a text many times allowed me to fine-tune my initial intuitive judgments into something more comprehensive. There was an intellectual satisfaction in this, but I also felt, quietly, that rereading was not really reading. There was an immediacy, intensity, and complete surrender involved in the initial experience that could never be repeated and was sometimes even diminished on the second pass. Louise Glück wrote,“We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.” I felt the same about reading. I still feel like this. And, to this day, when I read something that functions as a hinge in my life—a book that rearranges me internally—I won’t reread it. The Neapolitan Novels I won’t read again. Nor Swann’s Way. Nor 2666. And several others that I won’t mention because it’s embarrassing. After all these years, I still haven’t reread The Power of One. (It’s possible that if I did go back and reread The Power of One, I wouldn’t find the murder scene. Did I make it up entirely? Am I confusing it with another book or movie?)

This disinclination to reread the books I treasure alienates me not just from Nabokov, but from a vast pro-rereading discourse espoused by geniuses who regard rereading as the literary activity par excellence. Roland Barthes, for instance, proposed that rereading is necessary if we are to realize the true goal of literature, which, in his view, is to make the reader “no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.” When we reread, we discover how a text can multiply in its variety and its plurality. Rereading offers something beyond a more detailed comprehension of the text: it is, Barthes claims, “an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed (‘devoured’).” I’m not so sure.

If we take Barthes’s argument to its limit, we can imagine an ideal literary culture in which there is only one book and a community of avid readers returning to it over and over, unfurling its infinite field of potential in ever-more-elaborate interpretations. It reminds me of the Orthodox synagogue I attended growing up, where each year, sometime in October, the old men would finish reading the final portion of the Torah—with Moses standing on the mountain overlooking the Promised Land—and then start again at the Beginning. At the time, this hardly felt like “an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society.” More a timeworn method for reaffirming tradition and safeguarding community. It could also get boring.

Rereading is, when you think about it in another light, a basically conservative pursuit: it is what makes canon formation possible, and canons are what keep the base structure of a tradition or a culture intact. This is why Harold Bloom was a rereading fanatic, and why rereading evangelists are always rereading the classics. One time through, for the great books, is not enough. They are “revisiting Proust” or “returning to Moby-Dick” or “dipping back into” Paradise Lost, as the English writer William Hazlitt does in his 1819 essay “On Reading Old Books.” He begins this essay by declaiming: “I hate to read new books” and then suggests that reading them is for women, who “judge of books as they do of fashions or complexions, which are admired only ‘in their newest gloss.’ ” Hazlitt, a man, has “more confidence in the dead than the living.” He returns to Milton, over and over, because he believes that this will inure him against the laziness, vapidness, and shallowness of modern culture.

This principle—that rereading might be a balm to society’s cultural decline—persists among contemporary rereaders, too. Within the wide array of pro-rereading literature—essays about rereading, memoirs about rereading, polemics about rereading—rereading is a kind of sacred discipline that is slowly being forgotten due to a surfeit of disciplined intellectualism. Elaine Scarry, for instance, laments in a recent Paris Review interview how students “these days” are no longer required to subject themselves to “Olympic feats of reading.” And by reading, she often means rereading; she says, in the same interview, that she is a slow reader but nevertheless, she persists. “It takes me many, many hours even to reread a book,” she says, but she does so anyway, to feel closer to those historical geniuses, like Newton, Hobbes, and Oppenheimer, who built the bomb and could also “recite passages of Proust verbatim.” Rereading, thus conceived, begins to sound a bit like a punishing self-improvement regime. I can imagine a life coach promoting rereading as part of a lifestyle package, along with nootropic supplements. “In this age of algorithmically powered novelty,” the Instagram ad might say, “reclaim your attention and build wisdom by rereading the Western Canon.”

In Vivian Gornick’s book-length meditation on the subject, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, she describes returning to Sons and Lovers across the decades. In her teens, she sees herself in Miriam, the girl who only wants to be desired, then later as Clara, who has passions but is afraid of following them. In her mid-thirties, Gornick finds herself in Paul, the desiring seducer. And finally, when reading it again in her “advanced maturity,” she realizes that she has been reading the book wrong all along. The “richest meaning” of the text is not that sexual adventure is the central experience of life, as she had once imagined, but the opposite: sex is false liberation when pursued without constraint. For Gornick, the goodness of rereading is almost Aristotelian: she progresses from primitive ignorance toward a “richest meaning,” as if guided by a hermeneutic telos. And yet I find myself wanting to argue that her first interpretations of Sons and Lovers were just as rich and true as the latter ones, and in fact, perhaps by rereading and by all this painstaking reconsideration she has lost access to that specific type of youthful wisdom and intensity we bring to bear when we read something the first time.

Though great writers hold rereading in highest esteem, the most committed rereaders are those who are just learning how to read, i.e., toddlers. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud hypothesized that the toddler’s insistence on rereading derives from the infantile belief that pleasurable experiences can be repeated without loss: “he will remorselessly stipulate that the repetition shall be an identical one and will correct any alterations of which the narrator may be guilty.” Weshould grow out of this, Freud says, when we learn that “novelty is always the condition of enjoyment” and that the impression made by a first cannot be repeated and may ruin the once-loved story altogether. As Barthes admits, “To repeat excessively is to enter into loss.” (This seemingly self-contradictory quote can be found in “The Pleasure of the Text,” in which Barthes quotes also quotes Freud: “In the adult, novelty always constitutes the condition for orgasm.” I’ll return to this.)

Is the compulsion to reread a regression to this infantile state? A denial of maturation? Margaret Atwood suggests that it might be when she compares it to “thumb-sucking” and “hot-water bottles”; she admits that she does rereads only for “comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.” This also might be the reason why so much rereading apologia is written by those for whom the glow of youth has long passed by, as Hazlitt’s had when he wrote his essay. He admits that at least part of his enthusiasm for rereading familiar classics is a yearning to revisit “the scenes of early youth” in the hope that “may breathe fresh life into me, and that I may live that birthday of thought and romantic pleasure over again.” Like the loveless narrator in Dostoyevsky’s short story “White Nights,” he seeks to return to places where he was once happy, to try and shape the present in the image of the irretrievable past. It’s futile. He can’t recapture that first pleasure, and in fact, through repeating, ends up ruining reading more generally. “Books have in a great measure lost their power over me; nor can I revive the same interest in them as formerly,” he admits. He might have been better off reading something new, for a change, to help pull him out of his depressive reveries. Falling in love with a new book might be one of the adventures left to available to us as the flesh weakens—the spirit, hopefully, remains willing.

In the end, maybe the crucial difference between those who read once and those who reread is an attitude toward time, or more precisely, death. The most obvious argument against rereading is, of course, that there just isn’t enough time. It makes no sense to luxuriate in Flaubert’s physiognomic details over and over again, unless you think you’re going to live forever. For those who do not reread, a book is like a little life. When it ends, it dies—or it lives on, imperfectly and embellished, in your memories. There is a sense of loss in this death, but also pleasure. Or as the French might put it, la petite mort.

Yet, to rereaders, this might sound like nonsense. Why constrain a book to a mortal pulse when it could live forever, revived over and over through repeated readings? Rereading, they might argue, is a miracle, because it brings a book back to life. We see the characters breathe again. We see a world end and then be reborn. We experience the romance and seduction of a scene on repeat, unlike in life, where you do it once and then it’s over. In a life that marches relentlessly forward toward its end, rereading can seem like a weapon against the inevitable. But, of course, it isn’t. The same fate awaits us all, whether you’ve reread Proust or not.

Oscar Schwartz is a writer and journalist. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

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