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In an effort to combat the usual bout of melancholy I experience around November, I’ve started re-reading The Silmarillion, which is, if challenging, a book of such incredible beauty, sadness, and insight that I find myself returning to it on a near-yearly basis.  And while I may spend a post in the coming weeks writing about its many virtues, I think what is most on my mind now is more general and theoretical, dealing with why we return to books frequently, more than just reading them once for pleasure, as my thinking on this point is very much influenced by C.S. Lewis’ Experiment in Criticism, which proposes to think of criticizing books in terms of the reasons we read, and re-read, them.

See, Lewis’s thesis in the book is: while it is difficult to assess the value of a book from some theoretical objective standpoint, we may consistently judge a work of literature according to the way in which readers approach it.  A commercial mystery novel, for example, is rendered valueless as soon as the mystery is solved.  The reader will not return to the book, but instead search for a new mystery to solve.  But we read and re-read books like The Silmarillion, or Shakespeare, or the Bible for different reasons, and with different results.  I re-read The Silmarillion because I wish to see its beauty; I wish to study the way Tolkien unfolds his themes throughout the book; I wish to savor its language; I wish to spend time in his world, which even in its tragedy, often seems more just and good than my own.  I re-read the Bible to drive home its wisdom; to explore the teachings of God and Christ about Himself and ourselves; I wish to reaffirm its moral teachings and see the way it interacts with my life at this time.  Some books, like Fahrenheit 451 I re-read because they remind of my youth and because I simply like the story.  Some, like Invisible Cities, I read to inspire me and start my brain wandering.  Others, like The Man Who Was Thursday, I find a consistent source of consolation.  And others still, like Crime and Punishment or King Lear, are puzzles of human behavior I strive to understand and resolve.

If there is a weakness to Lewis’s experimental model, it is that it is too binary and the distinction it makes is superficial between the literary and unliterary – though this, too, is the fault of my simplistic summary, Lewis’s approach is more nuanced.  But one thing that I can confidently defend in his model is that one of the major criteria separating the literary from the unliterary, and the artistically meritorious from the seriously deficient is a work’s standing before multiple readings.  We must have reason to return to a work before it can be great art.  If it is easily replaceable, or shallow, or offensive, or lacks consistency, it will lessen in its impact and will become obsolete as we age and mature.  Fight Club may be compelling as a teenager or youth, but its teachings grow tawdry with time.  The new Star Trek movies may be initially entertaining, but they do not fascinate or challenge us the way the more philosophically-minded TV show once did, and they are inevitably overshadowed by the next big blockbuster – Guardians of the Galaxy, or the new Star Wars, or Avengers 2.

But this is old news and I’m banging the same drum.  The key thing I want to reach, though, is why we do this spontaneously.  There’s plenty of media being released faster than we can take it all in, and while I do subscribe to the theory that “90% of everything is crap”, and that percentage increases with one’s proximity to the Internet, life should be busy enough and the world’s body of great art large enough to justify never reading the same book twice, or playing the same video game, or watching the same movie.  The obvious answer is that we are creatures of habit, and place intrinsic worth on the familiar – the beauty of The Silmarillion is already proven to me: I can confidently return to it and expect it to be every bit as beautiful.  And that’s true, but incomplete.  Don’t we place comparable value on the shocking or surprising?  Don’t we praise the writer who produces something unexpected?  Furthermore, many of the works I return to regularly I enjoy because there is a strange fusing of the expected with the unexpected – a sense of wonder that pervades even multiple approaches, as I said of Inception and Skyrim in my discussion of Interstellar last week.  I can return to Inception multiple times, and still become excited by the scenes in which Ariadne manipulates her Parisian cityscape, or sit eagerly anticipating the coming adventure as they prepare the shared-dream machine on the plane before they enter the dream.  To say nothing of the video games that exploit randomness in multiple play-throughs: rogue-likes in the vein of Rogue Legacy and Desktop Dungeons or sandbox games like Assassin’s Creed or GTA which intentionally randomize the gameplay to provide a different, though still somewhat familiar, experience each game.

Another easy solution is to posit the diversity of experiences I hinted at before: we return to certain books for certain experiences, to live again in certain worlds or spend time again with certain characters or puzzle our way through certain questions.  And that is undoubtedly true, if a cop-out.  But there would be no reason to exclude any work on this basis, as presumably some mad person could find joy endlessly re-reading the worst, most predictable mystery novel ever written, because it is, indeed, different in some ways from every other book.  Diversity alone cannot be the basis of our desire to re-read some things more times than others, nor can subjectivity: there is too much agreement in too many cases to claim that every person will unpredictably like what they like, and that no work is inherently greater or more meaningful than another.  I’ve often referred to “depth” or “richness” of a work, with the insinuation that multiple layers of meaning require more work and therefore more readings to wade through and fully grasp, but even this is something I find challenged by the simplicity of myths and children’s stories, which resonate deeply and universally in ways that defy this understanding alone.  And yet these do not need to be opposed, either.  Tolkien is rich and still mythic in his quality: his stories are archetypal, but dense with layers of meaning and significance – that is undoubtedly one of the reasons I find myself so drawn to his work.

Perhaps there is no hard, fast rule – but I doubt it.  I think the evidence would certainly suggest that some works are somehow “greater” than others in some quantifiable or qualitative way.  Or perhaps there are several rules, the interactions of which determine our engagement.  In any case, I’m sure to come up against the subject again.

-Zeke