Reader's Block

***Spoilers***
When it comes to experimental fiction, no one outshines David Markson. David Foster Wallace revered him, and in a 1999 article for Salon.com, said of Markson's “Wittgenstein's Mistress:” a novel this abstract and erudite and avant-garde that could also be so moving makes "Wittgenstein's Mistress" pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.

Much the same could be said of “Reader's Block,” written eight years later, as well. It is comprised of a disjointed mishmash of cultural and literary quotes and anecdotes. Interspersed with these entries is a running commentary on the nature of the book itself, as well as “Reader” trying to work out the details of a book he is having trouble writing. show more “Reader” is how the narrator sometimes refers to himself, which is explained by the introductory quote from Jose Luis Borges: First and foremost, I think of myself as a reader.

However, it is not all as simple as that, as narrator = Reader = Protagonist (main character of Reader's book.) This trichotomy of Markson's is exploited and explored thoughout the book, making for a fascinating conundrum of who is who.

With respect to what is what, as in what this book actually is, the narrator is not exactly sure.
Nonlinear? Discontinuous? Collage-like?
An assemblage?
And later:
A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel?

Many of the entries have to do with isolation, mental illness, death, incest, the Holocaust, etc… However, the frequency of two particular categories far exceeds any others:
1.So-and-So was an anti-Semite
2.So-and-So committed suicide (sometimes going into detail, sometimes not.)

With respect to the first category, it is not altogether clear what Markson is striving for. Those he brands as anti-Semites run the gamut from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Dostoevsky, with scores and scores of writers, philosophers, artists and scientists in between. It is never stated why they could be called as such; all we have is just the statement that So-and-So is.

In addition, there does seem to be a preponderance of entries that deal with the Holocaust. So, is Markson saying that anyone he classes an anti-Semite would have approved of the Holocaust, thereby making them as much of a monster as the Nazi’s actually responsible? If so, this would in turn nullify any contributions they might have made (which, by the sheer number of those “outed,” would be a very large percentage of the Western canon—i.e. all of the books that narrator/Reader/Markson has enjoyed reading over a lifetime.)

However, not all is Holocaust and suicide. Many of the entries are just little tidbits he has picked up among the books he has read, and he often creates interconnections between them, sometimes playing them against each other to great comic effect. For example, in one entry, it is revealed that Mallarme learned English for the specific purpose of reading Poe. Then, five entries later, there is a quote from Henry James, who said, “an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

As for the book Reader is contemplating writing, he does not yet have a name for his main character, Protagonist, so starts trying on names of characters from famous books: Raskolnikov, Bloom, Mr. Kurtz, Mersault, Harry Haller, Molloy/Malone/Estragon, etc… He constantly shifts back and forth between them and others, and then back to just plain Protagonist as Reader tries to make up his mind. He never does.

Also changing constantly is the setting of the novel. Does Protagonist live in a house in a cemetery or in an isolated house on the beach? Both are explored, making up storylines to go with each, but again, he never settles on one.

What is Protagonist’s background? Having trouble creating a world for protagonist, Reader starts giving him scenes from his own life (having a son and daughter, having written books, etc…) Also, the statements of isolation (nobody comes, nobody calls, etc…), which are pervasive throughout the book concerning narrator and Reader are also projected onto Protagonist, further blurring the lines between narrator, Reader and Protagonist.

By the end of the book, all of the dark ruminations on isolation, suicide and death have built up to a deafening crescendo. The Protagonist is gone, being replaced by an elderly man (Markson?), and it is asked what if the elderly man in the house at the beach were to walk unremarkably into the ocean? Or if the elderly man in the house at the cemetery were to turn unremarkably to the gas?

The last line of the book:

Wastebasket

Wastebasket. What does it mean? Is the wastebasket where all of this nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like assemblage should go? No, I don't believe so. I believe another conclusion has been arrived at: The world is a bleak, hopeless place where even the so-called giants of literature are really just monsters in disguise. For someone who has built his life around books, this is not a welcome conclusion. And so now all of the entries concerning suicide finally make sense.

Wastebasket.

Stand on the wastebasket and hang himself. Have I misread it? I don't think so. And what makes the ending even more of a punch in the gut is knowing that David Foster Wallace would certainly have read this book. show less

You might say, if you look at the number of books Goodreads lists me as "currently reading" that I suffer from reader's block but I am not really suffering and it's just that I tend to start new books before finishing the old ones. Sometimes all I read for days at a time is the World Wide Web. Therein, at any point one can continue or follow a link and be reading something else, likely with links of its own to follow or not follow as one wishes.

Reader's Block is like this, only you have to supply your own links to follow up on what it offers. Someone should fix this!
But meanwhile, I am cutting and pasting what it offers into a search engine. Not always--sometimes I already understand the reference and other times am too lazy or simply show more don't care. Is this a novel or just a novelty? Maybe it is a kit from which a novel can be built. Maybe it should say on the cover "Some assembly required."

Why this lists of factoids? Is it because "Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre."? (Mallarmé said that.)
At one point he says: "I have a narrative. But you will be put to it to find it" But it turns out this is just a quote from the novel Nightwood. (Thank you Google.)

It has a protagonist, named Reader. Reader is, or wants to be, a writer and the work he plans has a protagonist named Protagonist who is a reader. Reader may or may not be speaking. That is, the book may or may not be in the first person. Certainly it's often unclear who is speaking and whether he is or is not actually quoting someone else--even quoting someone else quoting. Or, as Heidegger, an anti-semite, says (or thought) "We do not come to thoughts. They come to us." What he actually said (in German) has been so translated. Or has it? Best I can find on the internet is that a book about Heidegger paraphrases his thought with that sentence (in German.) The book's author knew Heidegger but lived twenty years longer. Markson points out that biographies that end with the death of their subject don't allow the other characters in the story to "live on" in this way. Or so I am paraphrasing him.

I have now obtained the book about Heidegger. That's how it works with this "novel." I am following the links. There are many artists/writers/musicians mentioned/quoted/referenced within. And scientists and philosophers and generals and performers and so on. I counted 86 such people that Markson says are anti-semites. Wikipedia tells me that Markson was born a Jew. The Jewish Review of Books tells me that Robert Lowell, who Markson lists as anti-semitic, was not particularly so, unlike the rest of Lowell's family. In fact he was one eighth Jewish, but perhaps that's that just shows the kind of anti-semite he is. Karl Marx is listed though he is against all religions. Still I'm following the links. After all, I see no virtue in being uninformed. (That being a quote from Gandhi that appears in the book.)

The artists and scientists, etc are all suffering humans.

"Napoleon and Karl Marx had hemorrhoids.
As did Wordsworth.
As did Tennessee Williams."
"Milton suffered from constipation."
"Moses spoke with a stutter. As did Virgil.
And Somerset Maugham. And Philip Larkin."

They love each other, they have contempt for each other, they were underpaid for their work--or paid to have it published, have no sex or a whole lot, and suffer from mental illnesses. They are distant (or close) relatives of each other. They committed crimes or were the victims of it. They died in non-ordinary ways, commonly suicide or murder. It's almost like Reader is evaluating himself (as a writer, as a human) by comparing himself to these notables. Or collecting details for the life he will give his protagonist. We are presumably being invited to evaluate our own lives. In the end, they are amazing or amazingly horrible. If there's a theme, that's it. So why bother? Or, equivalently, why *not* bother? There's much to be gained. Hemingway got that Swedish thing (what he called the Nobel prize). Wallace Stevens's wife Elsie was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar.

Reader decides that his Protagonist has pretty much withdrawn from life to live in an disused cemetery.

Recommended for reading during a pandemic. show less

A ton of interesting factoids with no real coherent approach. Took to skimming. Do I need to know how a given relatively unknown writer did in his final moments? Or that all the old time Christian saints were anti-semites? (Well, this was an obvious one).
No.
For a while the snippets are intriguing. I felt the writer’s urge to write them down, add them to my memory palace- but like so much trivia, it is, in the end, trivial.
No outbreak of wisdom here, but an amusing way to spend an hour or so.

Another tour de force by the author of Wittgenstein's Mistress. This time the text consists of notes for novel to be written by someone who would much rather read than write.

The bulk of the notes, literary anecdotes from the lives of famous writers, create a verbal tapestry of odd and poignant notes. They give voice to writers who in their lifetimes enjoyed little or none of the honor their names posthumously acquired, who instead often suffered the worst poverty and most painful deaths.

The voices join together (or at least did for me) into a chorus calling for recognition of suffering that was the real-world payment for the highest creativity their work exemplified. As readers enjoying their fruits, we should not allow ourselves to be show more blocked from feeling and making this acknowledgement. show less

Reader’s Block by David Markson

A novel, poem, encyclopedia, a list of artistic accomplishments and failures, human potential and depravity, probably all of the above and more.

Markson has created a new medium, a captivating read that takes place inside the author’s head.

This is a book that will stay with you; clearly it has addictive qualities stimulating one’s curiosity to explore. An antithesis to not knowing as he writes:
“I count religion a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance… I do not believe in God, though I do believe in Picasso, said Diego Rivera.”

On page 61, Markson appears to self-describe this effort as:
“a novel of intellectual reference and allusion so to speak minus much of the novel.”

Indeed show more there appears just a glimpse of a narrative, a “protagonist” and a “reader” as Markson intersperses his lists of curiosities, suicides, anti-Semites, musings, historical events and facts, illegitimate children, coincidences of dates, almost questioning if there are coincidences or that all these items are interrelated, presenting a history of human exceptionalism and deceit.

Through this accumulation of facts (“the Mona Lisa has no eyebrows”)-he questions is this an insignificant fact or a reflection on beauty; as is a later statement:
” I think you’re more beautiful now than then, rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”

Near the end he reveals that the protagonist has both lung and prostate cancer and comments “why do you always wear black, I am mourning my life”.

This is a work of fiction worthy of an index. If one were to Google each reference it would take several months, maybe a full year to complete. A friend of mine, familiar with Markson, said it “would be like a wormhole”.

Markson is an acquired taste one which I enjoy imbibing. show less

Representing Ruined Minds, And a Note About How Google Ruins Reading

This book is a series of short paragraphs, some a single word, few more than five lines. The paragraphs are separated by double spaces, so the book looks like poetry, or like Wittgenstein's Tractatus, or like Rochefoucauld.

There are, principally, two kinds of entries: miscellaneous notes about artists (mainly novelists, some poets, virtually all North American or European); and author's notes about a novel he's thinking about writing. This second kind of note divides the author into at least three voices:

1. Markson, the real author, insofar as we glimpse him
2. Reader, the principal narrator, who thinks or writes "Reader's Block." He's called Reader because he's spent show more his life reading, and his mind is filled with thoughts about novelists.
3. Protagonist, the character in the novel that Reader is contemplating writing.

In the second kind of note, Reader imagines a Protagonist who lives next to a cemetery, near a beach, in winter, with no friends. It seems there wouldn't ever be much of a story there: it's quite Beckettish in its stasis and emptiness. As "Reader's Block" proceeds, a contrast develops between these notes and the ones about novelists. The desultory notes about Protagonist's empty life, to which he's been driven by a lack of events, people, and meaning in his actual life, begin to seem terminally vague, uninteresting, lacking in imagination (always the cemetery, always the beach), and, for me, bathetic. They seem unintentionally more sentimental and self-indulgent than they may have been intended: I have the impression Markson thought of them as desolate, existential in the Beckett mold, with a paralysis brought on by Reader's inability to energize his imagination, which had been ruined by the "clutter" of anecdotes about novelists from his lifetime of reading. But the notes come across slightly differently--more as a reliance on a uniform kind of desolation, a weakness the author prefers to ascribe to a mind ruined by reading.

These Reader's notes on his unwritten novel have huge potential: in a couple of places he imagines characters, and then effectively drops them, and those moments can be as poignant as the deaths of characters in more developed narratives. But Markson doesn't play on that theme. He seems not to really notice it.

On the other hand, the notes about authors are consistently interesting. I think they cannot be imagined simply as "clutter" (p. 42), because they come in three or four quite distinct varieties, which indicate different directions of Reader's mind:

1. Notes about artists' deaths, about oblivion, about the ways writers are forgotten:

"Fragonard died completely forgotten.

"Nicolas de Stael committed suicide." (p. 84).

This first sort of note presents itself as Reader's probable fate, and it fits with Protagonist's fate, since he's pictured as a former author whose books have been forgotten.

2. Notes about genius, aspiration, and fame:

"Carlyle's Sartor Resartus was damningly abused by reviewers. Once he became famous he had it reissued. And included the reviews as an appendix.

"A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope. But you must not call is Homer." (p. 45).

This second kind of note is often about authors misappreciating other authors:

"Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last.
Said Johnson.

"Who also determined that time was too precious to be wasted on Fielding." (pp. 161-62)

From this second kind of note we have the impression of a different Reader, one who is aggrieved, and especially misses the praise of his fellow writers. A pettier and scrappier writer than the one who collected the first kind of note.

3. Notes on the surprisingly unethical or immoral behavior of otherwise good or interesting artists: notes on infidelity, cruelty, incest, and so forth. In this third category I include the standard-format refrain, throughout the book, in the form "X was an anti-Semite," with X varying from the usual suspects (Heigedder, De Man, Wagner, Celine) to less common examples. This third category is pettier yet than the second, and indicates another side to Reader: he's sour and righteous as well as wounded and envious.

4... This listing could be multiplied: there seem to be several Readers here, who are more or less sympathetic characters, more or less reconciled to fate and oblivion. In my reading there is one other principal sort of note: the one that marks the passage of time: writers who were exact contemporaries, although they don't seem so or although they never met (Melville and Whitman); writers who lived unexpectly long lives, or brief ones; writers who are separated much further in time than we may have thought. These notes are, for me, the most sustaining: they stretch and compress time in ways that fit the author's sense of his impending oblivion. One of the longest notes in the entire book, and one of the few which clearly identifies Markson with Reader, is this one:

"Lorenzo Ghiberti devoted twenty-eight years to the East Door of the Florence Bapistry. Michelangelo would say it could have served as the entrance to Paradise.
Five hundred years later, Reader would stand staring where five of the door's ten panels lay heaped in the muck after having been wrenched away in the Great Flood of November 4, 1966. The night before." (p. 56)

It's not clear in the typesetting of the book whether that last sentence is a separate paragraph: I hope it was.

In short, in sum: this is a book about a ruined career, and the author's impending death, but it's also about two ruined minds: the Reader's mind is "cluttered" so it can no longer work as it should; and at the same time Markson's mind is "cluttered" by unresolved and I think partly unnoticed conflicts between his ambition, his jealousy, and his acceptance of the end of his own life and his own writing.

- - -
Appendix: on reading "Reader's Block" after Google

I wonder if we may have lost the ability to read this novel now that we have Google. I am not the ideal reader of "Reader's Block," but I'm not too far off either. On any given page there will be one or two references I don't get, and the temptation is to look them up. That's clearly not Markson's intention. Google has made it seem as if allusions are things that are to be solved, as if lacunae in memory or knowledge can be filled in by a couple minutes on a search engine. Markson wants his many allusions to authors to resonate: he clearly didn't expect people would try to look them up, and he also didn't expect readers for whom too many of these would be puzzles. He isn't showing off his erudition, bemoaning the decline of literacy, or advocating for a good classical education. He's simply inventorying his own mind, and searching for allusions on Google is absolutely not an appropriate response to the book. And yet. We have Google, and now that I've finished the book I'm going to permit myself to look up some of the many lines I don't recognize. They're tantalizing:

"Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante." (p. 102)

"Que no quiero verla!" (p. 46)

"The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done." (p. 106)

"Thesmophoriazusae." (p. 180)

"Was willst du, fremder Mensch?" (p. 180)

"O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!" (p. 156)

I have deferred looking up these and others until I finished reading, because I know that my encounter with these texts will be fresh, and incomplete -- lacking the context of the full books or poems from which they're taken -- and that in Markson's novel allusions are retrospective and ruminative, signs of a sense of culture that just can't be solved by Google. show less

Markson's Reader's Block is a novel composed entirely of pieces that would usually be left on the cutting room floor (or, in Markson's terms, "Wastebasket"). Much like John Cage's 4'33" ("four minutes, thirty-three seconds"), a piece of music composed entirely of rests, Reader's Block works with negative representation to compose, from elements that are not a novel, a self-referential novelistic story.

The levels of metanarrative are really quite complex. Reader, the protagonist of Markson's story, is trying to write a story about Protagonist, but running into the same sort of roadblocks we can imagine Markson himself, literary savant as he is, encountering in his own writing process. Protagonist's story takes shape through his show more interaction with authors (mostly dead), just as Reader's story takes shape through his memories of interactions with authors (through their books), just as Markson's story takes shape through his use of the words of other authors, just as the real-life reader's story experience takes shape through his/her recognition of and interaction with these different quoted and referenced authors.

By the end, the real-life reader comes away from the novel with a sense of having been told a tale. We learn something about Reader and his life aspirations and fears, and can make inferences about his background based on his body of knowledge and the questions he asks. Reader's Block is almost a detective story in that sense, causing the reader to pause again and again to try to draw connections and build a story from scattered pieces of a puzzle. How much can we ever really know about the characters of whom we read? It is all based on guesswork anyhow, and on the connections we draw based on our own experiences, knowledge, and past.

Some of Markson's literary allusions are more apt than others. While all seem carefully situated in order to express a logical progression through Reader's mental ramblings, some allusions, taken out of context or perhaps inaccurate altogether, may represent errors in judgment on the part of Reader or perhaps on the part of Markson himself. (One can't really be sure to just what extent this is indeed an autobiographical text.) For example, Reader, possibly Jewish, seems stricken by the number of artists who were anti-Semitic, and repeats often "X was an anti-Semite." But Markson/Reader never offers the full story of why any one of these individuals was considered an anti-Semite, and some, including Chaucer, may only have treated Jews in an unfavorable light within their art, without actually espousing those unfavorable views themselves.

On the other hand, perhaps the inaccuracy is intentional, and meant to indicate the critical side of the reading experience -- we each approach subjects of interest to us from the perspective of our own unique prejudices. Reader has a lot to say about literary criticism, and none of it seems favorable. Literary criticism seems just one of the stultifying influences preventing Reader's intended success as a writer; others addressed are some of the more negative trends among "successful artists," including suicides, odd deaths, incests, and January-May marriages. With the threat of such happenstances looming on the horizon of the successful artist, is there really any call to strive for literary success?

Markson's story, then, is aptly named. Reader's Block may indeed represent the block any creative soul experiences when faced with the challenge and danger of creation. Nothing is asserted, but only ever suggested, leading each reader to draw his/her own conclusion about the meaning and exigence of the creative experience. Overall, a fascinating read, and ever more so if the reader is able to engage with the myriad literary and artistic allusions. show less