Oscar Schwartz at The Paris Review:
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.
more here.
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