Topical Guide 502
Mark Dorset
Novelty: As a Source of Pleasure
Allusion
Identification of Author with Reader
B. W. Beath in Reservations Recommended, Chapter 4:
We always come here, we realize, expecting to be surprised, hoping that the surprise will be good. Isn’t that really why we want to go back to youth, after all? We are not talking about nostalgia now. Forget the cozy fires, your mother’s kisses, your father’s pipe tobacco — what you really long for is what you found in your first olive, your first drink, first kiss, first whatever: surprise. When you went home for the holidays looking for some remembered flavor of youth, you expected to find it in the old house, in the remembered things, places, and people, and you were disappointed, weren’t you? Of course you were. Only the echoes of the past were there, diminished and disappointing. You were looking for the wrong thing! You were looking in the wrong place! What you miss most from the past, from your youth, is novelty. […]
Perhaps we now know the secret. We’ve been rowing the damned rowboat of life for a long time. Our hands are sore, and we’re tired body and soul. We stop rowing. We drift. We say, “I can’t go on.” A voice from somewhere says, “But you must go on.” We say, “Why? What lies ahead but death? Why row toward death? Why not just drift and let it come to us?” But here, in the Black Hole, that little voice, speaking with an outlandish accent, says, “Taste this. See? There are surprises ahead.” “Well, then!” we say, and we take up the oars and row with the vigor of youth.
And that, nôtre lecteur, nôtre semblable, nôtre frère, is why so many people, when they reach what our dedication to frankness forces us to call middle age, are attracted to ethnic restaurants.
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable:
Perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, “Au Lecteur”:
Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères, les lices,
Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents,
Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants,
Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices,II en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde!
Quoiqu’il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris,
Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris
Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde;C’est l’Ennui! L’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,
II rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
William Aggeler, translation of Baudelaire’s “Au Lecteur”:
But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,
The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters,
In the filthy menagerie of our vices,There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!
Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries,
He would willingly make of the earth a shambles
And, in a yawn, swallow the world;He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
You know him reader, that refined monster,
— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead”:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
See also:
Allusion; Quotation TG 140; TG 455; TG 462
Author as God or Magician or Puppeteer TG 17, TG 94, TG 117
Reading and Readers TG 98; TG 99
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