The Death of the Book

Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading

John Lurz

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823270989, 9780823270972
• eBook ISBN: 9780823270996
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Literature

An examination of the ways major novels by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf draw attention to their embodiment in the object of the book, The Death of the Book considers how bookish format plays a role in some of the twentieth century's most famous literary experiments. Tracking the passing of time in which reading unfolds, these novels position the book's so-called death in terms that refer as much to a simple description of its future vis-à-vis other media forms as to the sense of finitude these books share with and transmit to their readers.As he interrogates the affective, physical, and temporal valences of literature's own traditional format and mode of access, John Lurz shows how these novels stage intersections with the phenomenal world of their readers and develop a conception of literary experience not accounted for by either rigorously historicist or traditionally formalist accounts of the modernist period. Bringing together issues of media and mediation, book history, and modernist aesthetics, The Death of the Book offers a new and deeper understanding of the way we read now.

1. The Books of the Recherche

The description of the process by which the narrator goes to sleep that opens Proust’s seven-volume mediation on art and memory has sometimes seemed to me to be a rather inauspicious launch for the literary odyssey on which the reader is embarking: “For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say to myself: ‘I’m falling asleep.’”1 What is this fall into unconsciousness doing, I wondered, here at the inauguration of such an insightful—not to mention somewhat interminable—examination of the workings of consciousness? Why begin with something that seems, on the surface, so deliberately mind-numbing, something in which language itself is explicitly disabled? Little did I know, on my first reading, that my trek through the next three thousand pages would involve so many moments of my own readerly ennui, moments in which I would find myself emptily turning pages, bored almost out of my mind. This confession of my wandering attention is not to say that I don’t love reading Proust. It is, rather, to say that part of what I love about the experience of reading Proust is precisely the kind of sleepy distraction so assiduously produced (even in translation) by his hypnotic, rhapsodic prose. This paradoxical consciousness of unconsciousness is indeed what the narrator describes in the line that follows his opening statements: “And half an hour later the thought that it was time to sleep would awaken me.” When he continues, however, and reports, “I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands” (1: 3), his almost literal gesture to the book significantly connects his readerly unconscious to the physical relationship with this material object in a way that the rest of his novel will elaborate in equally explicit terms.

This chapter is, accordingly, an exploratory account of the connection between reading and the book that the opening of Proust’s novel announces. How does the work imagine the reader’s engagement with this object, and how do these meditations on the book’s agency in the reading experience intersect with the novel’s more obvious concerns with time, mortality, and literature? To answer these questions I examine some key moments in Proust together with the thought of Melanie Klein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which allows me to elaborate a model of literary experience that is deeply engaged with the physical and affective valences of the book object. In Proust this bookish engagement has everything to do with the passing of time. Indeed there is perhaps no better work to think about this nexus of issues than Proust’s, since it is, at bottom, an extended analysis of both sensory phenomena and the creation of a book. I look to the way the novel discusses physical embodiment—of both books and people—which I bring into conversation with the phenomenality of Proust’s own literary creation, the fact that his novel is itself made of paper, ink, and glue. The emphasis on the book’s phenomenal materiality is perhaps unexpected for a writer like Proust, who is famous for his stringent idealism. Yet in the introduction to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, he claims, “Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.”2 The image of the threshold suggests that reading links the spiritual to some other sphere, a sphere that his novel shows to be the finite and temporal world of phenomena in which books—like their readers—take their place.

This focus on objects in Proust links to and extends the recent reassessment of time’s place in the project of the Recherche by Martin Hägglund. Rather than the standard critical accounts of Proust’s work, which emphasize the narrator’s discovery of a timeless essence and see the thrust of the novel as an attempt to transcend time through the eternity of art, Hägglund argues that the narrator of the novel does not ultimately seek “to redeem the condition of temporality but, on the contrary, to mobilize it as the source of pathos . . . to intensify the sense of the passage of time” (Dying 45). In my argument I show that the object of the book is bound up with precisely this temporal mobilization by exploring two moments in Proust’s novel in which the material embodiedness of a book takes on significance for the narrator, namely the night spent reading François le Champi with his mother as a young boy and his later discovery of that volume in the Guermantes’ library. While Hägglund’s argument gestures at this temporality of objects in his discussion of the way “the duration of the past is not spiritual or immaterial but depends on the inscription of the past in a material body . . . whether the body of the self or a work of art” (43), his larger project of developing time’s fundamental role in the constitution of desire keeps him focused on what he explicitly calls “the temporality of the self” (27). To draw out what his subjective emphasis minimizes, I use the theoretical vocabulary of Klein’s “object relations” to clarify the object’s role in the complicated relational dynamics the narrator describes. As Klein’s formulation of the paranoid and the depressive positions parses the varied connections that the narrator has with the book, it articulates an implicit emphasis on the narrator’s embodied sense perception as the means by which he approaches that object.

My reliance on Klein to focus on the object thus reveals the extent to which the linguistic content of the novel is invested in its own embodiment in the book that mediates and transmits this content to a reader. At the same time, by also offering a way to account for the recognition of temporal finitude that complicates the commitment to eternity in the narrator’s concluding literary aspirations, Klein’s model allows me to draw a link between this kind of embodied reading and the temporal transience at the heart of the Proustian project. Proust’s novel ultimately stages the literary artwork not as an aesthetic transformation or transcendence of the temporal, physical world but as both an intellectual and a sensory engagement with the very limits of that world, the transmission of the temporality and finitude that the narrator seems, at times, so determined to deny. This perspective dovetails tellingly with a discussion of Proust’s own significantly idiosyncratic and complex compositional habits in his manuscript notebooks, the way his expansion of the novel entails a move away from linguistic signification (discursive directions to his editor on the placement of additional passages) to material manipulation (the creation of his paperoles via the pasting of loose sheets onto the edges of his notebook pages).

The last turns of this chapter move the discussion beyond the physical materiality of the book to show my argument’s larger ramifications for our relationship to the world external to the readerly subject. In light of the novel’s emphasis on and investigation of multiple forms of embodiment, I reexamine the narrator’s relationship with Albertine’s sleeping body in The Captive, which has traditionally been figured in terms of his attempt to “read” her. This turn to the literal body entails a move away from Klein, for whom the body ultimately plays a very limited role, to the embodied phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. By triangulating the figures of Proust, Klein, and Merleau-Ponty, this chapter revises our understanding of the role played by the books of the Recherche and offers an overview of a temporality of reading rooted in those objects that amounts to what I am calling “the death of the book.”

I

I begin toward the end of Proust’s work, which is also its own kind of ambiguous or retroactive beginning, with the series of sensory experiences that instigate the artistic project by which he hopes to redeem his lost time. Samuel Beckett describes this sequence of events succinctly, if somewhat problematically, thus: “The germ of the Proustian solution is contained in the statement of the problem itself. The source and point of departure of this ‘sacred action,’ the elements of communion, are provided by the physical world, by some immediate and fortuitous act of perception.”3 It is interesting to note that, in the list of the narrator’s “fetishes” that Beckett goes on to assemble and that extends from the taste of the madeleine and the sight of the steeples of Martinville through the feel of uneven paving stones, the clink of the spoon on the tray, the brush of a napkin on the narrator’s face, the noise of water moving in pipes, and the encounter with George Sand’s François le Champi, he includes sensory descriptions in almost all but the instance involving the volume of Sand. This omission of sensation in relation to the novel stems from the opposition that Beckett’s qualification of these perceptual acts as “immediate” sets up with the explicitly mediated nature of books themselves. In describing “immediate acts of perception,” he renders impossible the application of a sensory verb to an object like a novel: “seeing” a novel is not part of our habitual understanding of what one does with such an object. Rather, of course, we read novels, an action that is anything but “immediate.”

Beckett thus unintentionally indicates the fact that the narrator’s encounter with the novel is actually quite different from the series of perceptual acts that precede it. We will begin to see that this moment in Proust’s narrative suggests that perception itself is no more immediate than reading, that in fact it is mediated by precisely the conditions of temporality and embodiment on which my discussion focuses. Critical accounts of the encounter with the novel either follow Beckett and elide the strangeness and specificity of sensorially encountering a book by folding it into a general account of the cascading series of events that spark the closing revelations of Recherche, or they focus on the significance of the content of Sand’s novel.4 The critical homogenization of these moments takes its cue from the novel itself, which collapses each of the specific experiences into an instance of a more general resurrection of the past; though the moments themselves are different, they all function in the same way. I quote, as is so often necessary with Proust, at length:

So often, in the course of my life, reality had disappointed me because at the instant when my senses perceived it my imagination, which was the only organ that I possessed for the enjoyment of beauty, could not apply itself to it, in virtue of that ineluctable law which ordains that we can only imagine what is absent. And now, suddenly, the effect of this harsh law had been neutralized, temporarily annulled, by a marvelous expedient of nature which had caused a sensation—the noise made both by the spoon and by the hammer, even the title of a book, for instance—to be mirrored at one and the same time in the past, so that my imagination was permitted to savor it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my senses of the noise, the touch of the linen napkin, or whatever it might be [etc.], had added to the dreams of the imagination the concept of “existence” which they usually lack, and through this subterfuge had made it possible for my being to secure, to isolate, to immobilize—for a moment brief as a flash of lightning—what normally it never apprehends: a fragment of time in a pure state. The being which had been reborn in me . . . is nourished only by the essence of things, in these alone does it find its sustenance and delight. (3: 905, italics added)5

The phrase “whatever it might be” draws out, more explicitly than the “etc.” of the French original, the detachment from and indifference to the specificity of the experience that brings about this shock in the narrator. While this affect is due, in part, to the fact that the narrator cannot choose which experiences will elicit a reaction of this kind, his indifference also stems from the way that, in the end, every moment provides him with the same essential experience. As Leo Bersani tersely describes it, “in the later volumes, the phenomenal is more and more absorbed into the universally valid formula, the general law.”6 At the same time, the narrator’s emphasis on “securing” and “immobilizing” a “fragment of time in a pure state” suggests that abstracting and universalizing these experiences entails an overcoming—or at least a disregard—of time’s insistent flow, a move into the temporally static realm of the eternal that will ultimately be undercut by his encounter with the object of the book. In doing so the book offers a more specific display of Hägglund’s unorthodox argument about time’s operation in the Recherche, the fact that “when the past returns through involuntary memory, it is not because it persists in itself but because it has been inscribed as a trace that remains across time,” which, “far from being immaterial or eternal . . . is explicitly material and destructible” (38).

The overtly readerly terms that the narrative uses to explain the “process of decipherment” by which he abstracts the transcendental essence of his sensory experiences cast reading itself as an activity of idealization and abstraction that would seem to offer very little space for the “material and destructible” object on which that reading is based. He writes:

No doubt the process of decipherment was difficult, but only by accomplishing it could one arrive at whatever truth there was to read. For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material [matèrielle] because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning [l’esprit] which it is possible for us to extract. . . . The task was to interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas, by trying to think—that is to say, to draw forth from the shadow—what I had merely felt, by trying to convert it into its spiritual equivalent. And this method, which seemed to me the sole method, what was it but the creation of a work of art? (3: 912)

The unambiguous vocabulary of reading and interpretation, the conception of sensory experiences as “signs,” the call to “convert” a “material” sensation to a “spiritual” equivalent all suggest the way the narrator treats his phenomenal experience as something he must ultimately move beyond. He “reads” the world and turns it into a text that communicates, as he puts it in the previous sentence, “something of a quite different kind . . . some thought which [the signs] translated after the fashion of those hieroglyphic characters which at first one might suppose to represent only material objects” (3: 912). Moving from “objects” to “thought” recalls the slide into timeless universalization, what Bersani calls Proust’s “redemptive” project that exemplifies precisely a “devaluation of historical experience” (1). In the eyes of the narrator, lived experience is both inherently inferior to and in the service of an experience that has been translated into art. Time-bound presentation is only the handmaiden to an eternal representation.

Yet the repeatedly idealist claims that constitute the narrator’s account of a work of art overshadow the less transcendent moments of his description that stem from his “discovery of the destructive action of Time” offered by the aged faces at the Princesse de Guermantes’s afternoon party (3: 971). He writes, “The cruel discovery which I had just made could not fail to be of service to me so far as the actual material of my book was concerned. For I had decided that this could not consist uniquely of the full and plenary impressions that were outside time. . . . Time in which, as in some transforming fluid, men and societies and nations are immersed, would play an important part” (3: 974). A closer examination of the narrator’s encounter with François le Champi in the library of the Prince de Guermantes reveals the extent to which this temporality is embedded in the object of the book, an embedding that draws out the literal valence of the narrator’s figurative phrase “the actual material of my book.” As the narrator’s project of transforming the world into a timeless abstraction becomes considerably more complicated when the object whose sensation he wants to textualize is itself a printed text, the encounter with Sand’s novel outlines the singular place that the book has in his cascade of “involuntary memories.” If the majority of these memories cause him to attempt to think what he “merely feels,” the object of the book transposes this and asks him to feel what he usually thinks—which, in this case, is precisely the passing of time.

As I entered the library where I had been pursuing this train of thought [regarding the creation of a work of art] I had remembered what the Goncourts say about the magnificent first editions which it contains and promised myself that I would look at them while I was waiting. And all this while, without paying much attention to what I was doing, I had been taking first one and then another of the precious volumes from the shelves, when suddenly, at the moment when I carelessly opened one of them—it was George Sand’s François le Champi—I felt myself unpleasantly struck by an impression which seemed at first to be utterly out of harmony with the thoughts that were passing through my mind, until a moment later, with an emotion so strong that tears came to my eyes, I recognized how very much in harmony with them it was. Imagine a room in which a man has died, a man who rendered great services to his country; the undertaker’s men are getting ready to take the coffin downstairs and the dead man’s son is holding out his hand to the last friends who are filing past it; suddenly the silence is broken by a flourish of trumpets beneath the windows and he feels outraged, thinking that this must be some plot to mock and insult his grief; but presently this man who until this moment has mastered his emotions dissolves into tears, for he realizes that what he hears is the band of a regiment which has come to share in his mourning and to pay honor to his father’s corpse. Like this dead man’s son, I had just recognized how completely in harmony with the thought in my mind was this painful impression which I had experienced when I had seen this title on the cover of a book in the library of the Prince de Guermantes, for it was a title which after a moment’s hesitation had given me the idea that literature did really offer us that world of mystery which I had ceased to find in it. (3: 918–19)

The “moment’s hesitation” to which the narrator refers divides this event into two parts...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Opening the Book
• 1. The Books of the Recherche
• 2. The Reader of Ulysses
• 3. The Dark Print of Finnegans Wake
• 4. The Pages in Jacob’s Room
• 5. The Binding of The Waves
• Coda: The Afterlives of Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index