DEATH IN SPRING, part 3

there's a habit i have -- and it's a bad one -- of putting off reading at the many websites and blogs that i should be -- and honestly do like -- following until i've accumulated a day's worth of reading covering two weeks of nearly lost (and impendingly irrelevant) information. i don't spend any less time on the internet as a result, and i probably have less fun too. even if it promises to be interesting, if the reading seems also important, i'll put it in the queue (and then visit brownpapertickets.com one more time to wonder again over whether i should shell out for the erotic memoir writing workshop). acknowledging that one of the benefits of keeping up with reading online is keeping up, i have to admit that mine is a particularly futile and dead end brand of procrastination.

i knew that i wanted to read arthur phillips' guest blogs at powells.com when i noticed his picture at the left side of the site last week, but i still hadn't gotten rid of a note to myself to read an older guest blog on dangerous writing at the same site. so i put phillips off. i never did read the dangerous writing post, but i did finally get around to reading (the first two of) phillips', and on top of the relief that came with catching up to where i could see the present just a few steps ahead of me, one of phillips' posts echoed a recent sense of mine as regards reading, and the validation was enough to help me keep on not keeping up.

i can tell you the story of death in spring by mercè rodoreda, but i can't say that i could tell you what it's about. shit is weird in that village. deformity is terrorized, and so is dissent. but there's chaos in the execution of the terror as well, and it was impossible for me to identify any defensible analogues between the individuals in that society and any historical one that the author might have known. a knowledge gap on my end, maybe. i don't know. i stopped trying. which doesn't mean that rodoreda didn't write death in spring about something specific, but the book is so sensually and evocatively written that it stopped mattering to me whether i got any possible point and had to let myself appreciate it anyway.

i consider myself a careful reader, so i was hesitant to engage anyone in conversation on the book: despite having been captivated by its language, i wasn't sure i had anything appreciable to say. for shame. although the second of arthur phillips' blog posts that i read was incredibly validating of that strife, i also couldn't help but feel chastised.

There is such thing as didactic literature, of course; I can't deny it. I even love some of it. But that hardly means that all literature is didactic. Animal Farm is certainly saying something beyond the story of a pig or two, but that doesn't mean Lolita is saying anything beyond the story of Humbert and Lo. (Molestation is bad? I think we could have expressed that in some other form than Lolita, whereas the magic and wealth of Lolita cannot be expressed in any other form than itself.)

if we decide to read death in spring allegorically, should we end up with just the simple conclusion that oppression (specifically the francoist brand) is bad? that certainly could have been expressed in some other form than rodoreda's book. in other words (and rodoreda's are truly brilliant), "the point" of the book is beside the point.

But the payoff, the beauty of reading non-didactic literature, and reading it non-didactically (reading it without asking what the author is saying), is that you can nevertheless extract something from your reading, something that feels not like a lesson or a moral, but like a communication devised -- in great detail and astonishing specificity -- just for you. As if the author has intended to say something to you about your very specific thoughts, life, actions, aspirations. When the writer lets the moral go, gives up on relevance or applicability -- stops trying to say something easy or hard or true or distillable about life, the country, capitalism, health care, molestation, war, etc. -- then, magically, a spontaneous moral education is possible, brought out of the reader by a unique reaction between text and that one unique reader, a magic from which the imaginary notion of a "writer," a writer trying to "say" something, is totally removed, and totally unnecessary.

thanks, arthur. i almost want to cry. i did cry, actually, the day i read most of death in spring, which seemed particularly poignant after hearing the stations of the cross delivered on the first sunny day of the season. rodoreda's lush prose, which quietly and impressionistically layers its images of violence over equally febrile descriptions of the natural environment and its cycles, was just the sympathetic hand in a certainly contemplative mood. "for a time that was not time, i lay with the cold and heat, a rattle in my throat, on top of the rock, as if i had turned to rock...during that time when Time did not exist, the pain in my forehead had grown." something like that. rodoreda's way with words makes it possible to read profundity into even her simplest descriptions, although those descriptions do lose some of their force when they're removed from the total emotion of the ("musical," "rhythmic") whole.

i hope that lets me off the hook for not giving more examples and, in general, for not having said anything about what death in spring is trying to say. i'd appreciate the favor, because i still have quite a bit of reading to do -- as always, but now with my resolve maybe somewhat renewed.

you all found out last week when the deal was announced, but i was excited this morning to read that elif shafak will be putting out a new book. i bet it's about ethnic identity.