I was queued to read Pale Fire by Nabokov at the recommendation of friend who is a retired high school literature teacher. Then S. happened.
It's a clever text in that there are readers who will be content with the story at the surface; and there will be readers desiring to delve into its mysteries. Either approach is possible and completely viable. The choice that the reader is going to make is based on the interactions they will personally have with S. No two readers are going to have the same experience. The proliferation of blogs for this one book is a ready example of several different approaches a single reader may take.
S. is a book lover's nirvana, but the text can be unsettling and frustrating when too many synchronicities in the real world, perhaps with a touch of apophenia, make it best to step away from the text for a brief period; or when you've hit a dead end and aren't even sure you want to start anew. I can say unequivocally that both have happened to me.
I started this blog originally to really keep track of my own thoughts. As a result of this blog, I've had fabulous email correspondences with other readers and bloggers of S. I've waffled several times over my enthusiastic embrace of Borges' short story The Aleph, first thinking perhaps I was too enthusiastic. I now wonder that perhaps I was not enthusiastic enough. And quite disturbing and awesome are the times a book or another link seem to fall from the sky into my eager hand; such was the day The Gulag Archipelago showed up in a local used bookstore on the very day I had just discovered it via the internet.
I hope that my personal experiences illustrate that these are the kinds of transactions with the world that literature creates.
The Power 15 ad in the McKay's review of Ship of Theseus published by Rose & Blatt Publishing is a pretty bold reference. Most references in S. aren't so easily found; the reader must have some familiarity with the text and the references in order to begin sussing out the clues, hints and threads the author has so cleverly hidden.
Rose & Blatt is a reference to Louise Rosenblatt, who in the 1920's met Gertrude Stein and Robert Penn Warren in Paris. During World War 2, she work for the war department analyzing reports from or about German-occupied France.
Most importantly, to us as readers, she first advanced her transactional theory of literature in the 1930s which is considered a reader-response literary theory. To Rosenblatt, every reader is going to have a different interaction with any given text because no two people are going to be identical in experiences and temperament.
Readers aren't just readers. They are authors and bloggers, philosophers and professors, journalists and editors. Each person will have a unique experience with the text they have chosen to read.
Hero with a Thousand Faces is well-documented as being a primary source for inspiration for George Lucas and his film Star Wars. The Invention of Morel is reputed to be an inspiration for the game Myst.
These interactions are dynamic. How often has a good book stayed in your thoughts after you've finished reading it? Text may be panned by critics, lauded as a great new scientific theory, adapted into movies and plays, or used as a political weapon. Authors wouldn't write pastiches or mash-ups if they weren't readers of other texts by other authors. The opportunities for engagement with the written word are endless.
Perhaps this is what Doug Dorst wants us seekers to keep in mind as we continue to dive even deeper.
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