Posts Tagged ‘War and Peace’

Rereading ‘War and Peace’

Thursday, April 17th, 2014

When I first read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, I was nineteen, in my sophomore year of college, and wasn’t having my particularly best year. But when I began reading that text, I forgot about anything that was occurring around me and in my own world; so much that I sat in one spot for fifteen hours and read the entire text in one sitting. Afterwards I was in a daze. It had pulled me in to a point where nothing in my own world escaped the shine of War and Peace. In the character of Prince Andrei I found one of the great loves of my life and to him I will owe more than I can know. That year I wrote numerous papers on different scenes, but my final project was on Prince Andrei; on his scenes and his attempt to live in his world. I found him struggling with issues that were on my own mind, and watching him lead his life allowed me to live my own. In that first reading I found reflections of myself, and the words that I put together in the text allowed me to put together images of myself.

After that semester I did not read the entirety of War and Peace again for two years. I would read passages whenever my mind and body needed them, but until my senior year I did not attempt to dive back into the world that had gripped me once before.

When I started rereading it in my senior year, we were only assigned 119 pages for the next class. But from the moment my eyes fell upon the thin black streaks on the first page, the salon at Anna Pavlovna’s, every crystal detail from the world reflected off itself and once more I was in the most beautiful world I could imagine. That night I read 350 pages before a friend convinced me to stop. And when I did, I felt like I was betraying someone I loved, leaving them when I knew that all I should be doing was spending every waking moment in their arms. That’s what reading War and Peace was for me; being in love. But that night I realized that one cannot binge on love. I’d already played the game of throwing oneself into it until there’s nothing left. Now I had to learn how to take in little bits, and then learn to comfortably turn away and participate in another activity.

When I first read War and Peace, I needed it to help me construct myself. Now that I have a construction of myself and understand how I constructed myself, I turn to constructing the world. In my rereading of War and Peace I found not only a construction of the world, but a plurality of methods of constructing the world and one’s own freedom. And it is just as necessary to my thought as it was two years ago. The text itself hasn’t changed, but my own thinking has changed, my construction of the text and what I understand from it has changed drastically. I compare my two copies and passages and I find crucial point which went by unnoticed and without underlining two years ago. Going back to something is not about reinforcement; it’s about rediscovery. You want to prove yourself wrong because if nothing has changed then something is wrong. You are constantly becoming, and if the world is a reflection of you, it should also be in a constant state of becoming.

 

 

 

 

 

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Marina Manoukian, Sarah Lawrence College

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Rereading the Text

Sunday, March 16th, 2014

Rereading is underrated. Why do you think all those coupon clippers keep looking back over their pages; because college savings and college discounts will only show themselves to you when you realize you need them, not when they’re just there.

The rereading of a text is one of the most important, and yet most overlooked, part of reading. Not only is the text read differently each time, but the reader also reinterprets one’s previous interpretation of the text. Rereading will not only produce a different understanding of the text, but will always have a different effect on the reader. Rather than being a repetitive action, rereading provides a new construction of the text, resulting in practically a new text. This is why a text cannot be given an objective definition; with what reading does one define a text? The text itself is different in every reading not because the text itself changes, but because the reader’s constructs and mental rules of construction have changed, along with the reader’s lifeworld. The lifeword, originally Lebenswelt in German, is the universe for what is self-evident or given.

During my rereading of War and Peace, I had to force myself to read more slowly and allow the world to be exposed to me bit by bit. Many of the same things that had struck me during my first reading stood out to me again; I fell in love with Andrei all over again, the scene at the opera made me nauseous once more. But other sections, which my eyes hadn’t even noticed the first time, captivated me this time around. Words such as ‘form’ and ‘content’ stand out with a newfound meaning for me, and when I looked at my first copy, I found that I hadn’t even bothered to underline sections which now struck me as undeniably important. As my understanding and associations with language changed, so did my construction of the text. And since my mentality has changed since the first reading, I am no longer stuck revolving around the most individuated being in the novel; instead I become focused on understanding the balance between freedom and inevitability.

Not to say that one should constantly doubt everything that has come to be understood, but it is important to keep in mind that everything you have learned from the world was understood in a specific moment in time, under a specific context. Nothing in the world remains stagnant, so allowing your opinions to remain so would be an inadequate image of the world. Your opinions are the images that you’ve created of the world. If the world is changing but the images you’ve created don’t change, you will be acting upon incomplete grounds.

In order for the act of reading to be accurately represented, the dichotomy of subject/object[1] must be left behind in favor of an intersubjective frame of reference so that the plurality of subjectivity and value judgments can be accorded into the understanding of reading. The different constructions of a text are all like a gestalt picture; only one picture can be seen at a time, and when one sees a picture, all other pictures appear nonexistent and absurd to even consider. A text can have multiple possibilities of gestalts[2]. The reader selects a gestalt, excluding all the others, based on one’s disposition, point of view, and experiences. Gestalts in the text work similarly to the gestalt of the picture of the old woman and the young woman. One can only see either the old woman or the young woman at one time, unable to see the transition from one to the other. And without the viewer, it’s neither an old woman nor a young woman; it’s just lines on a page.

 

 


[1] The Act of Reading, 25
[2] The Act of Reading, 123

 

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Marina Manoukian, Sarah Lawrence College

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The First Time You Meet the Text

Thursday, February 27th, 2014

Experience is like that river that can’t be stepped in the same way twice. Just as college discounts and college savings are perpetually in a state of motion, so is a text.

The experience of reading can be split into three sections based on time; the first reading of the text, the aftermath and residue, and the rereading of the text. Each reading is particular, while the general text stays the same. It’s like that line in the song from Pocahontas, “You can’t step in the same river twice”. But instead of just the water flowing and changing, the reader is constantly changing and becoming, and because the reader is constantly changing, their constructions of the same text change as well. After reading a text, the direct effects and impressions begin to fade, but when a text profoundly affects the reader, the relationship that the reader forms with the text will change the reader. It’s like meeting a new person, falling into a deep and complex relationship immediately, and then having to say goodbye to them, because they do not exist without you. There will always be the memory of the experience, and you are changed by that memory from that moment on.

The first reading is just like meeting someone for the first time. And different books inspire different first impressions. The first time I read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, I could not put it down and stop reading until I had finished—roughly fifteen hours later. The words on the page pulled my eyes and my mind in to a point where my eyes could not keep up with my mind wanting to ingest every last morsel on the page. When I had finished, it was as though I had donned glasses and every particle of light that hit my eye was refracted by War and Peace.

I read novels quickly, preferring to absorb the novel as rapidly and intensely as possible rather than dragging the experience out over months. This applies especially to nineteenth century novels, mainly Russians works. I’ve been able to read War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment in a single sitting because once I’ve stepped into the world I cannot bear to leave it until it had come to fruition.

On the other hand, when I read The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett for the first time, it was necessary for me to put it down and take a day or two before I picked it back up. It took me three separate sittings to finish it because of the physical toll it would take on me due to the overwhelming nature of the novel. His novels have always plainly spelled out the undercurrents of my own thoughts, and watching them be thrust to the surface and spelled out in language made me need to take a step back.

The beauty of these first readings is that when you look back at them, you realize that what struck you in the first reading is what you held as a priority when you first read it. When I spoke with Ilja Wachs, a teacher of nineteenth century literature at Sarah Lawrence College, he related his experiences reading Anna Karenina for the first time. He noted that in his early readings of Anna Karenina, “whenever Levin came in the scene, I’d say ‘Get out of here, I want my Anna!’ Anna was beautiful, Anna was hot, I was in love with Anna, really”.[1] As a young adult, the vibrant and lovely character of Anna was what drew him, and his reading was centralized around Anna. Now when he rereads, “every time Anna comes in the scene I feel depressed, ‘Get out of here, I want my Levin’. I want Levin mowing, I want Levin in the spring. You get there real changes”.[2] As a grown man, now in his 80s, he is no longer attracted to Anna’s tragic beauty; instead he wants the collectivity, universality, and “grounded substantiality”[3] of Levin. “I can no longer stand Anna, now I want Levin on the scene all the time”[…] the way he extracts meaning from work, I mean, I think that’s very fundamental for me, and wasn’t then”.[4]  As his priorities and way of looking at the world changed as he grew older, so did his readings and experience of reading. He compares it to a “wonderful mirror”,[5] reflecting back at you your values. As one changes, so does the readings of the text; the text initially offers a plurality of possible readings, and the reader ascribes to one and reconstructs it for oneself. The reader “relates the different views and patterns to one another [and he] sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion, too”.[6] This is why the definition of the text is not in the text itself, but in the experience of the reading and the actualization of the interaction between the text and the reader.

 


[1] Wachs, Ilja. Personal interview. 18 Apr. 2013.
[2] Wachs, Ilja. Personal interview. 18 Apr. 2013.
[3] Wachs, Ilja. Personal interview. 18 Apr. 2013.
[4] Wachs, Ilja. Personal interview. 18 Apr. 2013.
[5] Wachs, Ilja. Personal interview. 18 Apr. 2013.
[6] Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. 21. Print.

 

 

 

 

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Marina Manoukian, Sarah Lawrence College

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