Reading for Real
December 07, 2022
The Topeka School, Jonathan:
“I often suspected that people were only going through the motions of reading, or mimicking its stillness…Walking through the library in graduate school, I’d think to myself: Not a single one of you people, if I shut your book, would be able to tell me what you’ve just read. Shadow-reading. And when I myself was reading, I was acutely aware of other people watching me, of how I performed absorption, which of course distracted me from the page” (Lerner 161).
This quote I use more as a jumping off point than anything else.
Art cannot ultimately make change happen. Not if you’re not…
What are we really doing here?
Maybe he was just pretending to read.
Or something like that. We can’t say we haven’t read or watched something just to say we did. Obnoxiously, delusionally, obsessively, we wish to be thought of by others as people who read almost as much, if not more than, we want to be readers for ourselves. The novel ceases to mean anything when we fold it into a larger aesthetic presentation of ourselves––an ideal, and therefore nothing. A fear maybe, or a prejudice: You can’t learn what you really need to know in a book. Maybe I’m only speaking for my own extended family (ha). Cont’d: Life is not on the page, whatever’s there is inescapably inauthentic. This line of thinking is the ballast of another camp. So you have those who want to be thinkers without doing the thinking and those who thumb their noses at deep thought altogether, wish only to live (if you can’t tell, this is some real playground, smashmouth philosophizing). Then there are those who give themselves over to art, but with the expectation that it change them. They feel entitled to a transformation, and if it doesn’t happen and happen with little to no effort, kind of miraculously so, by virtue of its very being, then it lacks utility. These camps are more of a cluster than we realize and they are quite permeable. I belong to each of them. I am guilty. I am also, on occasion, an idealist.
As Ocean Vuong put it to Lerner in conversation (paraphrasing): perhaps what is beautiful about The Topeka School, what makes it inexhaustible, is that it is precarious. It is not wholly rendered, perfect; Lerner is not the all-powerful God of his fictional reality, he is barely holding it together. This is not a conventional formulation. To arrive at this kind of nuanced appreciation requires work. The greatest texts do. They are inexhaustible. But exhausting. Strap in for meaningful engagement. Unperformed absorption. This is a call to action. You didn’t hear it from me.
(7 December 2022)
P.S.
The pieces are here. The beginning quote is kind of a stunning one that Lerner casually attributed to Jonathan in the flow of things, without pomp. He gives language to a sensation I’ve often felt. It’s an indictment. It’s meta. How many readers of his are merely performing as such? It features into the concern over authenticity that courses his trilogy too. I thoroughly enjoyed the Vuong-Lerner conversation, their dynamic. A striking idea, that the precarious nature of a novel’s construction can be its greatest strength. Things can be uneven. Then I wade into things with an impossible and surface angle. Read harder! Of course we should, dude. What of it? The postscripts are angry! It’s unbecoming.