End In Sight

In some ways I've felt recently as if my intended reading has been hijacked by having to read Anna Karenina again for teaching purposes. But this is nonsense. I didn't have to read the novel again. It was still reasonably fresh from a fairly recent reading and I could easily have homed in on a few crucial sections to have brought myself sufficiently up to speed, as it were.

The fact that I didn't, I find of interest on two levels. First of all, in what it suggests about me as a reader. It's no real news that I easily forget what I've read, especially when it comes to details of plot. I've mentioned this here before and find it of sterling advantage to me as everything remains so wonderfully fresh. The fact is I never feel I've finished reading anything as within six months I want to read it again. And the truth is I was given an excuse to reread Tolstoy's masterpiece in unusually quick time and took it. As I've been reading I've been experiencing the pangs of wanting to re-experience War and Peace and the other lesser fiction. I brought back an old copy of Resurrection from the selves at Maison KL and can hardly hold myself back from it. I suppose this is a mild echo of the way junkies feel.

On another level, I find myself considering the experience of fiction, especially in the form of the extended novel, as art. Going back to the idea that I could easily have glanced over a few key sections of the novel to prepare myself for the classroom, I find a sense that anything other than actually reading a text is a form of somehow avoiding the experience of the actual work of art. No matter how good the discussion, or how insightful the criticism, it is not the thing itself.

But you can never get to the thing itself with a novel as it's impossible to read the whole thing at once, as it were. You're always missing something. A novel like Anna Karenina is a fierce reminder of this. It is so beautifully patterned, such that each section has weight and resonance within the design of the whole, yet you can never quite hold the entirety in mind at one time - unlike the total impact of a painting, say. The novel unfolds in time and cannot, therefore, transcend time. At best its art is fallen, sullen. But that will do for me.