So, last week I wrote what turned into
a real downer of a post about history and about monstrosity. That
isn't where it started. I began that post with the title that I have
added to this. It was going to be a post about letting go and moving
past things. But then when it turned out that I really wanted to
write about terrible things – well, the title seemed less
appropriate. I didn't want to imply that we needed to just let go of
historical wrongs or national traumas, so I decided to split off the
more personal part of things for a separate post. So this post is
nominally about Libra as
well, but it is about more than that as well. What I meant to get
into was putting away books for what may be the last time. As I have
mentioned elsewhere, I avidly reread my favorite books. I have
always done this because I like experiencing the narratives fresh.
But there comes times when I think that the time I reread something
will be the last. Usually this happens when something changes about
a book for me. This happens with authors too.
As I
was finishing reading Libra
this week, I thought that this might be the last time that I pick it
up. This doesn't really have anything to do with DeLillo, but about
the kind of postmodern metahistorical novel that Libra is.
After all, I have reread DeLillo's Underworld
three or four times, I have reread his White Noise
more times than that, and I think I read Falling Man
6 or 7 times when I was working on one project in graduate school,
and again when I taught the book to undergrads. I still might return
to some of these, and I already plan to reread Ratner's
Star and Zero K
fairly soon.
The
reason that I bring all of this up is that putting an author, or a
book, to bed this time felt different. As I was reading this novel,
I didn't get as excited by it as I had in the past. At the time I
thought that it was a piece of my own scholarly past that I was
giving up. I thought that maybe I was just losing interest in these
kinds of books. But then, when I sat down to write about it I
realized that I was wrong. The books still do what they always did,
I just need to rediscover that part of myself that engages with them.
Libra , like a lot of
DeLillo's work, can be plodding. This isn't a complaint, this is an
observation. He is purposeful in this kind of thing. I thought that
the post was going to be about letting go parts of our lives that are
past. But now that I think about this, maybe there is still more
underneath it. Like the trauma that I wrote about in my last post,
maybe these parts of our lives are here for keeps. It is less a
matter of letting go of something because it is no longer a part of
our lives, but of letting it sink a little deeper until it needs to
come back up.
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