欧宝娱乐

How many times have we heard about how far literature has fallen? But to my mind, the problem facing today鈥檚 reader is one of wealth, rather than dearth. There are simply too many masterpieces out there.

As Witold Gombrowizc said, it鈥檚 a matter of numbers, and an exponential one at that. Milton was the last man to know everything, and he could (or, to be more accurate, could give the impression that he could) because 鈥渆verything鈥� at that point fit on a single shelf. Compare this to a modern day encyclopedaist like Thomas Pynchon, whose writing is so clearly constipated by the effeort to encompass that we begin to look in the other direction: towards simplicity, and the wild talents that teach us how really writing means reading deeply, rather than widely. Shakespeare knew his Ovid, but was somewhat unscholastic compared to, say, Ben Johnson. So read that one book over and over again, and if it is truly great, it will transform under your attention into not a book but The Book, which you can carry around as the butler in the Moonstone carries around Robinson Crusoe.

Modern ideas of how much we should read follow an everything or nothing model: you must know it all, or limit yourself so rigorously that your ignorance is transformed into vision, your keyhole into a room. Writers especially are cagy along these lines. I remember reading a D.H. Lawrence letter, in which he asks a friend to send him the first two volumes of a history of Egypt 鈥� only the first two, though, since he wanted to imagine the rest. The implication is that you can know too much and therebye clog the aquaduct 鈥� but then doesn't this husbanding of one鈥檚 creative garden itself comes to resemble the Causabaunish quest for the Key All Mythologies? Isn鈥檛 it, in other words, simply another form of cultivation, no more real or authentic and perhaps even damaging in the way that it can slide into fear of, rather than respect for the unknown?

To my mind, books like Gilles and Jean are the midle road between these dangers and a way to think oneself out of the deadlock of husbandry. G&J is not good: actually it鈥檚 kind of shockingly bad. But its badness is so characteristic that it cannot help but throw light on both the deficiencies and the successes of Tournier鈥檚 other books. It鈥檚 a book about vision and inversion; but unlike The Ogre, or Friday, or Gemini, it鈥檚 so locked into a sort of dialectical working out of what these ideas mean that it feels less like a novel and more like an essay 鈥� or even better, a strange, in-between genre that mixes the weaknesses of both forms without gaining any new strengths (let alone retaining their original ones). Even a sympathetic reader can鈥檛 really 鈥済et into鈥� this world 鈥� if only because Tournier himself doesn鈥檛 seem to have committed to his investigation. In the other books I mentioned, philosophical structures were complicated and undermined by drama; at the same time, dramatic action was layered and enriched (veined, I want to say, like marble or a body) by patterns of thought. Here, on the other hand, dramatic episodes seem as trite and reductive as grammar book examples. Perhaps even this isn鈥檛 an a priori damning move; but the kicker is that, when we get to the end of the book, the ideas that it suggests seem trite and routine. Satan is a version of god. Heresy is a form of piety. All ethical values (or at least the ones T mentions here) are shadow-images of their opposites. Woo hoo. So the great French talent for clarity finally becomes the great French weakness for simplification. And absurdity. One longs for a little Picasso drawing of Alfred Jarry to crawl over and paint a moustache on the author鈥檚 鈥淚 have the impish, somewhat self-satisfied face of a baby who just shat itself鈥� back photo.

Still, on the other hand鈥� isn鈥檛 this great? Isn鈥檛 it wonderful to come to the end of a great author鈥檚 powers and see the monuments of those failed minor works standing there with their sandwich boards, all but announcing their humanity? Doesn鈥檛 it make you breathe a sigh of relief? At the same time, doesn't it also make you wonder even more intently at those achieved and actual masterpieces (made, you now realize, by a normal, fallible human being, rather than the superhuman creator that you'd been imagining while reading only the great books) which somehow managed to gel?

Failure is good because it reveals how difficult creation is while still encouraging us to try it ourselves. Finishing a great book I inevitably ask myself, How did this happen? How do these people do what they do - more importantly, how do I do what they did, meaning how do I make something that lives and breathes outside of me, with in and to someone else? How do I avoid that kind of involution that is actually a rot, a death, and therefore something that happens to me alone without the relief of commonality that art achieves?

Great books are inevitable and enriching and complicated. Finishing them - and then putting them to good use - requires huge amounts of wrestling and re-imagining. Finishing a bad book on the other hand, especially if it's by a great author, makes me think again that anyone can do this. Which is equally important to keep in mind, right?