Doctor Strong, headmaster, is at work on a dictionary, or the Dictionary:
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).
W.H. Auden would agree. From “Prologue: Reading,” in The Dyer’s Hand (1962):
Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously “truer” than others, some doubtful, some obviously false, and some, like reading a novel backwards, absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts : dictionary posts (Pinboard)
[David Copperfield itself is not the most delightful book in the world. Micawber, Traddles, Micawber, Traddles — I lose patience.]
I would certainly disagree that a work of literature can be read only in a finite number of ways. For instance, the work might take on different meanings when we read it at 20 years old, 40, and then 60. The reader of Moby-Dick in 1900 read it differently than a reader in 1945, and 2026. A work of literature is not a buried sealed box that we simply have to dig and unbury to get at the one true meaning.
ReplyDeleteI’d disagree too, but entries in a dictionary can at least be read in any order, as a reader chooses. No necessary beginning, middle, or end. That would work well on a desert island.
ReplyDeleteMarc Saporta wrote a novel called Composition No.1, which I bought in the 1960s and still own, which has loose leaf pages, meant to be shuffled and read in any order.
ReplyDeleteAnd there’s Raymond Queneau’s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, ten sonnets, the lines to be combined as the reader chooses.
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