A novel can happen just once. After that there are only re-readings. Fiction occurs in serial time. It is an event and, like all events, is irreversible. The novelist expects his reader to be innocent, unprepared, somewhat nervous; to approach the reading as he would approach next week. Vulnerably. With precious fiction these initial readings are precious, too. It’s like cornering on a bike for the first time, centrifugation made your accomplice; the astonishment cannot be re-enacted. Funerals and oceans and orgasms and the dreadful knowledge of God’s existence have each a first time. They cannot be achieved in freshness again.
G. K. Chesterton brought out The Man Who Was Thursday more than six decades ago. If an introduction by Garry Wills had been imposed on the novel in 1908, I suspect that Chesterton would never have bothered to write it. My complaint doesn’t involve Garry Wills; he does a workmanlike job. But it’s time someone said this: the “introduction” is a shameful and stupid literary machine, invented by publishers to cash in on chic names. I’ve never read an introduction, neither have you, that was worth the necessary sacrifice of tension and surprise. These things belong in the South-Southwestern Quarterly where they will not charge a novel with some critic’s personal crotchets, insightful or blind. Wills writes that “It is a detective story that seems to solve itself too easily, and lose its mystery.” Right. And when Wills has finished recapping Chesterton’s plot in detail, the recipe for a straight shot of bourbon is more mysterious.
Comments