On Developing Clusters of Texts

Tastes, Attitudes and Interests

Somewhere on the internet or social media there is a place where one is supposed to enter the books being read, movies seen, television programmes watched and so forth.  My efforts to make entries has always proved futile, frustrating and enraging, insofar as even before I make my own lists and comments the computer generates its own responses, thinking—is this the right word?—it knows better than I do what my tastes and interests are.  I don’t believe it has ever entered a title or a topic at all remotely like what my own would be if I could master the system.  The only relief from the annoyance this causes is the fact—perhaps this is the right word now—that it makes clear how out of step I am from all other list-makers and monitors that go into formulating these places in the digital world.

 It is not, of course, that I never see and occasionally enjoy films that are current, watch television shows that appear on the free-to-air channels and are available through paid-for satellite channels, or order books from the usual big retail sites online: but these are not the titles and topics I would list which are supposed to give my profile, outline my character or personality, and define my place in the world.

The books I like to read, that please me and shape my personality and character, and thus which should be read regularly, or at least thought about and dreamed on many nights; their characters, narratives and descriptions provide me with references from which the real world of my own experiences take on meaning and shape.  I do not think of them so much as single books by known individual authors, but rather as clusters, skeins of interwoven texts.  The more I think and dream about them, the more they interweave, interinanimate (as John Donne said about the lovers whose eye-beams twisted into creative new images, the babies in their eyes) each other.  Thus, for instance, I assimilate myself into the Iliad and Odyssey , as well as the Aeneid, and cannot really tell where one begins and another ends; they do not begin any more, though surely there was a time before I had read them and took them into myself and myself a part of them, and for that reason they don’t end, but always appear as commentaries and enrichment of the other.

So too is it with more modern books—note that by modern is meant, not our own contemporary authors or literature since the Renaissance or the Enlightenment or the Romantic period, but since Antiquity, the ancient and classical worlds.  I cannot red or recreate Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and his dream vision poems again without at the same time experiencing the Roman de la Rose in its two parts and its endless expansions.  They do not exist in chronological order or in separate cultural or linguistic zones, but all at once, throbbing with insights, echoes and further allusions to their mutual sources.  Nor can I read Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream without at the same time having Apuleius’ Golden Ass, and then Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Balzac’s Peau d’åne` emerge and play around and through all these texts.  While it is easy to see how Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra fits with Dreyden’s  All for Love; or, The World Well Lost and G.B. Shaw’s Cleopatra, there are perhaps special elective affinities between Cervantes’ Don Quixote in its two main parts and various expansions, and then Lasage’s Gil Blas, and then over and around and back to the Italian romances in the endless series of Roland and Orlando books of courtly love and erotic madness and high adventure, going as far back to the Chanson de Roland itself. 

From time to time, not only do I re-read and re-dream these kind of clusters of books, but new texts swim into my ken, and then almost at once they stand out, they fit into the existing clusters, or create expected additional patterns.

—To be Continued—