Nabokov as Rereader
Why don’t readers exist?
New York 2015
Desk Notes explores writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
In his lecture notes, Vladimir Nabokov famously denied the existence of readers, noting that a person can only reread books. A first reading is insufficient.
When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.
To describe the barrier as physical might come as a surprise, but Nabokov takes painting—and the initial glimpse of a painting—as his contrast.
When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.
The claim is that rereading removes those physical barriers; until you’re able to digest the entire book, you’re merely skimming across the surface.
The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.
Rereading good novels has always felt instructive to me, as the repetitions frequently uncover something new. Yet what strikes me on those additional readings isn’t simply overlooked details—it’s the features that are only visible with second glances.
Explore writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
If I walk the same streets consistently, I’ll discern new details with each walk, but I won’t assume that those new details were simply missed in earlier walks. Each walk changes my perception. What I notice during one walk affects what I notice later. New sights creep to the surface of my attention partly because I’m reexamining old ground.
Nothing has changed about the walk itself, but I’m able to see the street differently, which is similar to the old trope about novels: the text waits while you change. A common experience, for instance, is to find Holden Caulfield a thrilling, rebellious character when you’re young, then to reread The Catcher in the Rye in adulthood and discover that he’s pitiful, or more saddening than inspiring. Both interpretations should be cautious about labeling the other as wrong. The reader has transformed so much over the years that it’s not quite rereading, as an entirely new person is doing the second shift.
The walking analogy can apply in a different manner, too, for there’s something intriguing about your first walk on an old path. A few years ago, for instance, I took a trip up the Acropolis of Athens on a hot and windswept day. Although it was an inaugural walk, and every sight appeared fresh and vivid, I couldn’t help but recognize that contemporary Athens is probably more similar to ancient Athens than I might first assume. The wisps of diesel were certainly new. As was the endless whirl of motorbikes on nearby streets. But those seem closer to superficial features within the landscape, contemporary ephemera—adjacent to the mobile phone, a blaring radio—and not intrinsic to the core of the streets. It would almost be easier to list the many similarities in the nearby structures, the city grid, even the panoramic views. I may have noticed a few different features in the landscape, or thought something antithetical to an Athenian of previous centuries, but I was looking at precisely the same stones and following the same trails, and the only crucial difference on that well-stomped path was the person walking.
There’s a commonality here between traveling to a place where many have traveled, and reading an ancient text that many have read. With the latter, if you’re careful and considerate and laborious, you can slip into the mind of a rereader; you can incorporate generations of thought into your own reading. With the former, there’s an abrupt awareness that your feet are planted in a spot that’s relatively stagnant in appearance—only the viewer has changed.
I find extrapolating this toward the horizon a pleasant notion: if we’re fortunate enough to have people climbing to the Parthenon in a distant future, I expect their opinions—how they interpret the structure, what they believe, what stories they tell—will be rather different than those of today, even if the site itself remains the same.
In a similar projection, my thoughts, opinions, and conclusions about particular novels will surely change over time. And only by rereading those novels—which are stagnant, rooted, unyielding—will I observe how I’ve changed.
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