On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection by Susan Stewart
Although reading may give form to time, it does not count in time; it leaves no trace, its product is invisible. The marks in the margins of the page are the marks of writing, not the marks of reading. Since the moment of Augustine’s reading silently to himself, reading has inhabited the scenes of solitude: the attic, the beach, the commuter train, scenes whose profound loneliness arises only because of their proximity to a tumultuous life which remains outside their peripheries.(p14)
Play, and fiction as a form of play, exaggerate the capacity that all reported speech bears—the capacity to re-create contexts other than the context at hand, the capacity to create an abstract world through language… What is fictive is the “original context”; the pure fiction has no material referent. Hence fiction subverts the myth of presence, of authorial context, of origin, and at the same time asserts the ideological by insisting upon the reality-generating capacity of language.(p20)
Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack. (p23)
The oxymoron of the sign is particularly foregrounded in the book: book as meaning versus book as object; book as idea versus book as material. And because the social shape of reading has become inner speech, the book as meaning and idea is all the more distanced from the book as object and material. In this deliberate and artificial split lies the gap between the leisurely bourgeois reader and the “intellectual worker,” between the cardboard front for books and the thumbed edition. The two faces of paperback publishing, the mass-market and the academic paperback, the book is consumable, destroyed by reading, and in the academic paperback the “value” of academic discourse is displayed within the pulp of cheap materials. (p33)
(Quoting Michel Butor) When the books was a single copy, whose production required a considerable number of work hours, the book naturally seemed to be a “monument”, something even more durable than a structure of bronze. What did it matter if a first reading was long and difficult; it was understood that one owned a book for life. But the moment that quantities of identical copies were put on the market, there was a tendency to act as if reading a book “consumed” it, consequently obliging the purchaser to buy another for the next “meal” or spare moment, the next train ride. (p33)
Writing can be displayed as both object and knowledge. The possibilities for its objective display are restricted to its physical properties, to the limits of its mode of production. At the outer limits of these possibilities are transformations in the mode of its production and transformation of its physical properties. Valery records: “I remember seeing and—with a certain horror—daring to handle a ritual of black magic, or perhaps it was the text of a black mass, bound in human skin; a frightful object—there was still a tuft of hair on the back of it. All aesthetic questions apart, there was a very evident kinship between the grisly exterior and the diabolical content of this abominable book.” In this remarkable example, a series of correspondences are collapsed: binding and content, body and soul. This object inverts the value which holds that the cultural always triumphs over the natural, over labor, and over death. (p35)
…the book as talisman to the body and emblem of the self; the book as microcosm and microcosm; the book as commodity and knowledge, fact and fiction. (p41)
