On the question of reading a novel more than once, one of my Professors made me understand how wonderfully difficult it is, to read the novel ‘Ulysses’ to get a sense of the novel’s intricacy and extravagance. I feel it is a writer’s novel. It is not a novel for the reader as it cannot be read like a simple tale such as Anne Bronte’s ‘Agnes Grey’ which is my current read. It expects the reader to be attentive to every detail or word. It is the novelist’s literary ‘Tour-de-force’ and most of the significance may elude the reader (like me). However it brought into importance what is termed, the stream of consciousness technique, where writing is sans mediation and endeavors to hold on to every flash of brilliance, remembrance, illusion or allusion. As Virginia Woolf said, I quote
“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
As it is well established, every story has to find a mode of expression that suits its ambience and mood, and often the narrative mode can establish the story. Stream of consciousness is a modernist form of expression and it characterizes the emergence of the ‘individual in crisis.’ The beginnings can be felt in the novels of ‘Gustave Flaubert, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Proust or Kafka. But in these novels the protagonist’s crisis is moral, social, spiritual, pathological or existential which is narrated with a keen realism. In Joyce’s novel the crisis is mythical and farcical, literary and bathetic. There is no apparent structure, as thoughts and images appear to go on circuitously. In this Aurora of images the characters reflect with a richness and fertility, to keep the reader constantly busy.
What would be the reaction of a reader like me who has been fed a diet of passionate and endearing romances or dramas like ‘Les Miserables,’ ‘The Hunch back of Notre Dame’ or ‘The Count of Monte Cristo?’ about reading a novel like ‘Finnegans Wake?’ As an aficionado of fiction it will be my part to adapt to different forms of writing.
The length of a novel is another aspect which decides the possibility of reading it more than once. Mikhail Sholokhov’s ‘And Quiet flows the Don’ is a magnificent representation of the life of the Cossacks in two volumes. Yet reading it a second time would be a challenging task. Of the recent novels that I have read, ‘Shantaram’ by Gregory David Roberts was a long novel. When a novel presents a formidable density in terms of narrative mode, use of language, convolution of the plot or other devices which lend it prolixity, there is a case for reading it again. Otherwise the mere, flicking through the pages of the novel would be a futile exercise and Iam not enlightened in any further way after my reading. Although I found it extremely humorous, I had a difficulty with the novel ‘Catch-22’ mainly because of the ingenious narrative structure and how the character of Yossarian alternates between madness and apparent sanity. ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘Pillars of the Earth’ are two other novels which I can claim to have read with immense satisfaction although they are very lengthy. Three American novels, Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’ Harriet Beeches Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’ are a little on the longer side but the pleasure of reading these novels is so great that the reader will not mind the length but will be eager to turn the page to discern urgently the passage of events. ‘Tom Jones’ by Henry Fielding is an elaborate novel as is ‘Clarissa’ by Samuel Richardson. Of the two I have read the former novel and never felt it to be boring. The adventures of Squire Allworthy and Tom Jones along with several amorous escapades and interludes make this a very enjoyable novel.(To be continued)