I’ve read nineteen books this year, and that’s just what I read for fun, and that’s just the books. This morning I finished the nineteenth, collapsed, and burst into tears. I felt exhausted — that experience of internalizing an authorial voice, weaving the concerns that make up the architecture of their plot into my own life, that experience that I have professed to love so much, is starting to feel like a way to auto-generate something that resembles, but isn’t, meaning. I was aghast to find myself thinking about these narratives as potted meaning, containers that you can buy at the store with meaning inside. You read them, use them up, buy more. If meaning itself becomes accessible and arbitrary like this, then is anything meaningful at all?
I have loved to read for so long, have always appreciated this sense of interaction between meaning in the book and meaning in my life. But lately I have been having some kind of strong emotional reaction, a sense of allergy, against this way of constructing meaning. I suppose this is the culmination of a long process. I haven’t been able to watch TV comfortably now for years — the streams of narrative, flowing seamlessly through my everyday life, make me feel sick with anxiety. Movies are fine, sometimes, but often they make me feel as if I’m being held hostage by the emotional implications of the plot. Now books, too. What is going on?
I’m reminded of — what else — a book, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. The main character of the novel is ‘allergic’ to branding. I realize now that this means, in a sense, that she is allergic to a certain kind of narrative, to objects that are eclipsed by the architecture of story and continuity built around them by their brands. The character, Cayce, is soothed by things that feel brandless — things that don’t import so much narrative baggage with them, things that don’t feel so out of control. This makes me wonder — am I anxious because I feel that, within this proliferation of narratives, I have no narrative of my own? To own a bowl that you’ve made yourself is to exist in a sort of closed system with the bowl. To own a bowl that I bought at John Lewis is to exist in a much more open matrix — me, the bowl, John Lewis, everyone else who shops there, everyone who doesn’t…
A piece of narrative media, like a bowl, is a commodity. Maybe that’s what’s bothering me. In that case, the solution is probably to get over it. But I can’t seem to do that. I’ll probably continue to read, because I still get so much out of it, and continue to feel this terrible, gnawing sense of meaninglessness. I do wish, however, that I could find a way to make things feel different.
this sounds a lot like what i went through with movies a few years ago (or maybe am still going through, it's hard to tell). at some point after i got my masters i started to really notice that movies, these things that had defined both my intellectual work and how i spent my free time for more or less my entire adult life, just did not make me feel like they used to anymore. not even that they had become less interesting necessarily, just that *something* had changed while i wasn't paying attention. i think it's like, a blank page is infinite possibility, right, but once you start writing words down things become very constrained very fast, and i think something similar happens with reading words (or looking at images) – the possibility of a text becomes, after being read, the fact of it, and as you accumulate those facts they begin, slowly, incompletely, to define the contours of the possibilities of all texts, and eventually your awareness of these contours is going to start affecting how you read texts in the first place. if that makes sense. anyway, i haven't stopped watching movies or anything, but i have had to learn to be okay with experiencing them in a way that will usually feel more distant and abstract than it used to. i found that watching a lot of stuff that had almost no "story" to speak of, stuff where the subject was really just images themselves more than anything, helped with this a lot, because it kind of let me get back to basics and be like, okay, if i can't watch stuff "the old way" way anymore, what other kinds of viewing are there. maybe reading some concrete poetry, or work that's similarly text-as-text oriented, might be useful for you? getting serious about my fiction/poetry definitely helped me as well, but ymmv.