In her response to listening to a reading given by John Dos Passos at the 92nd Street Y in 1965, Lydia Davis reflects on her own reading of Dos Passos as a formative experience:
The Dos Passos book, whichever one it was, was also the first, or early, in the long list of books that I never finished reading. A book whose story captivated me, I would finish. A book which, on the other hand, excited or inspired me by the way it was written, I usually would not. I would read just enough to absorb the nature of the book, understand the approach, become excited by the texture of the writing, and then I would put the book aside. I don’T think this was mere laziness, or distraction. There is a real difference between a book unfinished and a book read to the end. A book read to the end gives one a clear idea of the whole of the book, the overall structure and full content, and that is one sense of a book, a more complete sense, you might say. But a book unfinished allows you to feel you are forever afterward still inside that book, that you are part of it, live in it, continue the experience of it, and that its further continuation and conclusion remain forever mysterious.
I cannot say I have deliberately left many good books--books providing a gratifying reading experience--unfinished for the reasons Davis describes here. However, those reasons strike me as entirely cogent, especially when contrasted with finishing books and getting "a clear idea of the whole of the book" if "clarity" is understood not as knowing "what happened" in the end but as achieving something like interpretive closure, fully grasping what a literary work is supposed to "mean." A book that leaves the impression of such clarity is likely just a book that won't be worth rereading--its value as literature has been used up.
Obviously this indicates that I don't regard the "literary" as residing in what is left over after reading--call it "meaning" or "lesson" or "wisdom" or what have you--but as something that makes itself present during the reading experience itself. I would feel that I am not fully appreciating the work as a literary achievement if I voluntarily stopped reading it--except when I can already judge it a very bad book. But I must confess that in the time after I have finished reading a poem, story, or novel I often (actually almost always) do allow the particulars, beyond, say, the major characters in a novel, the broad contours of situation and story (although not really the plot details), as well as the general formal and stylistic character, to fade from memory. This is not the consequence of a porous memory but the recognition that no one reading of a literary work is authoritative, or even stable, and that a subsequent reading would not be mere repetition of the initial experience. It would be neither inferior nor superior to that first reading but a new opportunity for the "literary" to be discovered.
I have sometimes upon rereading had not simply my judgment of a particular book altered but my fundamental orientation to it transformed. It's not just that my view of a character changes or I understand particular episodes more fully or I find the writer's style more, or less, impressive: the book seems so dissimilar from what my memory retains of it that it could be called a wholly different book. (I had this experience rereading James Purdy's Malcolm--which I have since reread again--after reading it for the first time in college, when I was unable to "identify" with its protagonist; in my second reading it seemed to me something like a masterpiece in the way it made identification with the protagonist beside the point, a kind of MacGuffin, to use Hitchcock's term.) More often I just "see" things in a rereading I didn't see the first time, enough so that it is as if I actually haven't read the book before and must assess its literary qualities anew. Even then, my renewed appreciation of the work's aesthetic accomplishment must remain contingent, since a subsequent rereading might again readjust my perception of it.
Perhaps this process resembles Davis's attempt to "continue the experience" of the book she leaves unfinished, but it in fact presumes not a single experience of a literary work but multiple separate and autonomous experiences. It is possible to say that after multiple readings of a particular book that I have learned to read it better (but not necessarily), although other factors contribute to this as well--familiarity with the writer's other work, reading more widely in general, etc. Of course, it is not possible ultimately to reread every worthy book. Still, I would maintain that the best way to achieve the state of feeling "still inside that book" is to assume the first reading will not be the last.
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