Reading, Re-Reading, and Un-Reading

These are three different, differently enjoyable, ways of of reading books.  The first two kinds of reading, reading and re-reading, are among the greatest pleasures of which man is capable. Just now I'm experiencing the ineffable joy of reading Guy de Maupassant's Bel Ami for the first time--to think I've gone this long not having read it!  The artistic/musical comparison that occurs to me is Mozart's second great "viola" quintet in G Minor, Köchel 516 (the first, equivalent to the first great viola quintet in C Major, Köchel 515, being Boule de Suif).  It has a certain everything-that-the-author-can-think-of richness that maybe not even Pierre et Jean (D Major, Köchel 593) equals--nothing ever will, quite.  And pleasure it will be to see how far and long this silly business of comparing things alike only in their excellence can be carried. Reading is what I mostly do in Spanish and Italian history and literature.

Re-reading is what I mostly do in French and English literature.  Sitting down with a volume of Milton, Pope, Shakespeare;  Racine, Molière, Voltaire (not Voltaire's letters, of course--that's reading!)--is, generally speaking, delicious re-reading.   Paradise Lost, The Rape of the Lock, Twelfth Night; Andromaque, Le Misanthrope, Zadig--maybe just get better and better, every time I re-read them.  So do Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse; Flaubert, Mérimée,--de Maupassant.

Un-Reading is what I do with that vast corpus of more or less fashionable horseshit, which if I read it straight, as if it weren't horseshit, I wouldn't enjoy at all:  Lesbian porn--Lesbian anything (with the exception of Sappho only because I happen to love and to have memorized Catullus' translation:  "Ille mi par esse deo videtur/ Ille si fas est divos superare/ Qui sedens adversus identidem te/ Spectat et audit dulce ridentem./ Nam simul te, Lesbia, adspexi,/ Nihil est super me!"); Viennese "depth" psychologists; Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, (Judith) Butler, Heidegger, Sartre, Rousseau, the comte de Sade, James Joyce, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Hitler, Earnest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, William Burroughs, Erica Jong; Berg, Schoenberg and their apologists; any and all postmodernists and social constructionists. Essentially (pun intended) what I do when I un-read, is skim superciliously and sneeringly, with the intention of understanding as little of what I'm reading as possible.  In this way, I have "read" whole chapters of Lesbian romance and sadomasochistic heterosexual pornography without retaining the conscious recollection of so much as a single thought, phrase, or lewd expression.  Un-reading is how I've "read," for example, Justine ou les 120 Jours de Sodome, without actually having read it at all--if anyone knows a better way to "read" the nasty crap excreted by the "Divine Marquis" I'd be pleased to hear of it.  It's not very much fun, but it gets me through it--and sometimes I find things that, in a twisted sort of way, are funny, in the way that pompous, fatuous, absurd drivel can be sometimes: Heidegger and Butler, for example, are chock-full of howlers ; sentences that get funnier and funnier the more you re-read them.  Ms. Butler did not win that Bad Writing prize for nothing.  And then, in the end, it's always best--even if you don't actually read such nasty twaddle--to know, in a general, totally non-specific way, that it's there.