To Reread or Not To Reread
...what remained was like trying to pick up a glass of water without the glass.
— Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
It sometimes happens that I will pick up a book that I have been meaning to read for some time, only to discover that I have already read it—and forgotten it. And forgotten not only the book itself, its characters or plot which is understandable enough, but also the mere fact of having read it which is troubling.
I have collected and lost whole libraries decimated or devastated by divorces and long-distance moves. Yet I can remember not only where I bought most of my books (even those I no longer have) but also where I read them. And, in a few special cases, where I “set” the books in my own imagination. A bookshelf is like a memory palace, so when one of these memories is misplaced, it can be disorienting.
A case in point. The two volumes of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities have been sitting on my shelf for decades and recently they have seemed a little like a reproach. After all, the Wall Street Journal (which I suppose some people think is a valid authority on literature) has called it “the third member of the trinity in 20th-century literature,” along with Joyce and Proust.
That may explain my reluctance to take it from the shelf and dive into its 2,500 pages.
Except that my annotations are there to remind me of what must have been long periods of time—weeks or months—devoted to ingesting Musil’s tens of thousands of words, only to discover that they have gone in one eye and out the other.
Wilting at last under the spine’s reproach, I take the volumes down and start reading from the beginning. My mind wanders over the words of the opening pages, like a dragonfly over water, alighting now and then on a striking poetic image and then drifting off again finding nothing solid to land on in the pages and pages of essayistic meandering.
I am about to put the book back on the shelf, thinking “no wonder I never finished this book. Not my cup of tea,” when I flip the pages and am startled to see traces of my having been on this path before.
Imagine my surprise when, seven pages in, I happen on a sentence underlined in pencil. (I used to annotate my books by underlining passages of interest, early on in pen, later in pencil, then not at all, out of respect for future readers, who might include myself.) The narrator notes something that I can identify with, namely: “...the enormous undertaking it is nowadays merely to be a person who does nothing at all” (7). I have no doubt that those are my pencil markings because it is an observation that I remark just as enthusiastically today.
Seven more pages in, I find this, almost like a prophecy: “...in every profession followed not for money but for love there comes a moment when the advancing years seem to lead to a void” (14). This, too, I can identify with! What has my profession of literature led me to but to a void, even the void where books like A Man Without Qualities lie unrediscovered.
The evidence shows that I must have made a valiant attempt at reading this novel. Perhaps I got a few dozen pages into it before putting it down. But no, as it turns out, the entire first volume of 750 pages has underlined passages, none of which I remember highlighting but none of which I could not imagine myself emphasizing at some point. For example, “Clarisse had once said that fish were the aquatic bourgeoisie” (668). But who is this clever Clarisse and why don’t I recall a single thing about her? Or this: “...news from the Stock Exchange has quite the same effect as the higher forms of literature” (673), which may explain the praise lavished on Musil’s work in the Wall Street Journal.
I am getting on in years, okay, but my memory does not seem to be affected in any other way, and I can certainly recall almost all of the other books that have been on my shelf for years or even decades. At least I think I can. One thing is clear: the practice of annotating books, sometimes held up as a mnemonic device, is not such a sure thing.
I also find underlining, to my great surprise, in the second volume which completes the 1775-page tome. Apparently I read the first volume and kept on in the second without balking at the looming enormity of the commitment that was going to be required to complete my acquaintance with the man of no qualities. However, with still a thousand pages ahead, I now find this underlined: “...what remained was like trying to pick up a glass of water without the glass” (753). Maybe that’s where I stopped, having found an apt image of the act of reading itself? But no, there is more: “Ulrich smiled and said: ‘I’m feeling as sentimental as a dog in moonlight” (761). I howl and scratch myself and lick my paws.
Perhaps this is where I left off, because I don’t find any other underlinings beyond page 761, where there is a small bookmark inserted, a ticket stub the size of a fortune cookie slip, from Shakespeare in New Orleans City Park, a production of Hamlet, on September 26, 1999. So this clue tells me that I was reading the book after returning from five years in Romania and Bulgaria while teaching at Xavier University (1997-2007), a production that starred Tristan Codrescu in the title role.
On the back of the ticket stub, there is this mini-disquisition on Hamlet in pencil:
Isn’t an uncle a father without portfolio?
Making precise qualifications without
predicate. Therapy encourages an orgy
of self-contemplation that leaves out
only the present people who care. Talk is
the death of thought.
And on the front of the ticket stub, there is this: “Squandering resonance [or is it “resistance”?]—after all, it’s all over. So scram!” (or is it “scream”?). None of this is particularly helpful in trying to recall Musil’s masterpiece or my reading of it. This is perhaps the biggest surprise in this memory lapse because I can usually recall not only where I purchased a book but also where I read it, as well as that more intangible memory, of where I “set” the book in my own imagination. I think it is Bachelard in The Poetics of Space who discusses this phenomenon of setting fiction in familiar places of memory, even if it is only under a dining room table, or in a corner of the garden. This is an extension, no doubt, of the famous memory palace of Ricci or the memory attic of Sherlock Holmes. The point is, my attic space allotted to Musil is strangely empty, as though a thief with a moving van has absconded with the furniture.
I might try to dive back into this pool today, but maybe there is a good reason why I don’t remember Musil’s magisterial essayistic novel. If only I remembered anything about it, I might decide not to reread it. But no such luck. My memory is wiped as clean as a whistleblower’s hard drive, as the DOJ’s copy of Jeffrey Epstein’s client list.
Now I must decide. Do I go back and reread the first volume to prepare myself for the second? Or do I take the nuclear option and decide, as I did long ago with Proust, that there are some books—classics, trinities of modernism, etc—that I will never read, or at least never finish. Not because I am incapable but because they either 1) annoy me, as Proust does; or 2) bore me, as Musil does. Or do I simply begin with the second volume, as the surrealists encouraged us to do with movies, entering the theatre mid-screening so as to skip the orientation of the exposition and immerse ourselves in the magic of in medias res?