On Readers

After Sebald

The greater the writer, the greater the trust in the reader.

That’s it, really.

I was writing something else, just now, and I thought of this one sentence.

Yesterday, on the train, with a great deal of buffering, I watched the documentary Patience (After Sebald).

Today, I’ll be teaching The Rings of Saturn.

Rereading that pale, bleak book, I like it a lot more, and think it’s a lot better, than when I first went through it.

I’m not sure if Sebald is a great writer, or if that’s a category I want to put in the effort of defending (though I probably would).

But the close readings of him by Rick Moody, Marina Warner, Iain Sinclair and others — the fading in and out voices and faces of the film — made me realise how much Sebald had taken the reader’s attentiveness as a given. How much good and satisfying thought-work he’d left for them. And how all of these brilliant people had brilliantly responded, because of his charismatic difficulty.

Readers.

If they’re not reading you, they’re not reading you. If you’ve lost them, you’ve lost them. There’s no point shouting at them, out of the next paragraph, in the attempt to bring them back. Putting on a sexy clown outfit and doing your little dance all over the page they haven’t turned, that won’t help.

But speak to them as if they are settling down with you, fully listening, ready for the beginning of a relationship (as Adam and Harry in All of Us Strangers). Treat them as if they had time for you, because they will make it if you deserve it. That’s the way, surely? That’s the lesson.

The greater the writer, the greater the trust in the reader.

And in that, I’m thinking even more of Proust and Woolf and Austen and Joyce. And Celan and Lispector and Tutuola and Garcia Marquez.

All of them lovely ones.