Reading’s Residue

Peter Schwenger

Abstract
Though we forget most of the fiction that we read, something remains. This essay asks
what forms that “something” might take in readers’ memories, a question that recurs in
the work of the Australian writer Gerald Murnane. When a novel’s plot lines and visual-
ized incidents have faded away, there may still linger an atmosphere peculiar to it, which
is evoked by its title.

For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very

little of what we have read. To open almost any book
a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten
well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting
from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a
fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book
away from us and tucks it under his arm.
—Siegfried Sassoon

Melbourne, Australia. A man stands before his bookshelves, letting

his eyes pass from one title to another. He is testing the titles—trying to
find out, in each case, something about the book, and about himself. He is
asking, “What does this title evoke? What do I remember about this book?”
The man is Gerald Murnane, a writer who is fascinated by what
happens to what we have read once the book has been returned to the
shelf. The scene just described is one that recurs often in his work. It’s
not just that he is taking stock of his cultural capital, what remains of his
investment in a lifetime of reading. As it turns out, very little remains: he
can remember almost nothing of books that he knows he has read. What
he does remember is, in the first instance, material: the surroundings
sensed at the periphery of the book he is reading, and then the details of
the book itself as a physical object:

© 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press and SubStance, Inc.

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022 61
62 Peter Schwenger

Whenever he remembered his having read one or another passage

in one or another book, he remembered not the words of the passage
but the weather during the hour when he had read the passage, the
sights or sounds that he had seen or heard around him from time to
time while he read, the textures of the cushions or curtains or walls or
grasses or leaves that he had reached for and had touched from time
to time while he read, the look of the cover of the book containing the
passage and of the page or pages where the passage had been printed,
and especially the images that had appeared in his mind while he had
read the passage and the feelings that he had felt while he had read.
(Emerald Blue 145)

For a long time, Murnane supposed that he was the only person
who remembered reading in this way; but of course he is not. Marcel
Proust and Virginia Woolf have both written lyrical meditations about
their memories of reading, which stress their surroundings and the ways
those surroundings were transformed by the mode of vision suggested by
the book. These are memories of reading as an action once performed, but
not of what was read in the book itself. What it means to read the book
“itself,” however, is very much in question. Far from being a straight-
forward decoding of signs, reading is a liminal experience, taking place
neither on the page nor exclusively in the mind. Elusive to begin with,
the book becomes more so when it is submerged in memory over the
years: a kind of sea-change takes place, obliterating most parts, and often
turning others into something “rich and strange.” This is the immaterial
aspect of reading, which Murnane gestures toward at the end of the pas-
sage above. In many other passages, he speculates on the nature of the
images that appear while reading; and he considers why the vagaries of
memory cause most of them to fade away shortly after they appear, yet
can preserve a few such images for a lifetime. When Murnane asks what
is left of his reading, then, something is at stake that is very different from
the concern with “reader retention” that is so prevalent in psychological
studies and school systems. What remains in the memory after a book
is closed illuminates for him—if only fitfully—something about both
memory and books, something that is not confined to an aftermath but
has implications for the experience of reading as a whole.
This essay, then, will address itself to the nature of what remains in
memory after we have closed a work of fiction and allowed it to recede
in time. The specifics of what we remember will, of course, vary with the
individual reader in relation to individual books; but we can investigate
the general attributes of the things that have stayed with us. This is not
an aspect of reading that is usually addressed by literary critics, who are
perhaps less likely than most to be aware of it. A critic, while writing
about a book, will always have it ready at hand; it will be closed and put

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022

Reading’s Residue 63

away only after the writing is finished. That writing will then provide a
sort of artificial memory of the book, consisting of what the critic has said
about it; and what was said at the time was always selective, influenced
by a conscious agenda that had less to do with reading as such than with
rereading. The ideal readers for the study I am proposing are those who
read for pleasure—which does not of course exclude literary critics in
their off hours. The pleasures of reading are not only those that might
seem most evident, such as vicarious adventure, high-level gossip, and
the lure of secrets to be unearthed. They have to do with barely recognized
desires and needs that will likely go unexamined at the time; and these
in turn will be influenced by what is retained in the individual memory
as one book after another is left behind. Before considering what a reader
is likely to remember of a book, though, we should briefly consider the
nature of what is being remembered—that is, what the reading experience
feels like while it is taking place.
Readers for pleasure will sometimes encounter in their book a de-
scription of another such reader, and in this way are allowed to share an
experience of reading enclosed within their own experience. The books
being read at that moment by the fictional reader are described, sometimes
at length, and often in terms that try to convey a sense of the reading
experience as it is happening. An example is the yellow book that Dorian
Gray reads, full of “metaphors as monstrous as orchids,” where “the mere
cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it
was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced
in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of
reverie, a malady of dreaming” (Wilde 159). For all its strangeness, the
description is a confident one; there is no need for Dorian to search his
memory for something that is absorbing him in the present moment. Or
is it? Both the past tense of the description and the eloquent prose of a
dispassionate narrator indicate an act of retrospection, or rereading. “One
thing should be immediately clear,” asserts Matei Calinescu: “when I write
about what the first reading of a literary piece is like (was like, should be
like), I cannot but place myself in a perspective of rereading” (7).
The experience of reading at the time, as Peter Mendelsund has
pointed out, is a very different matter:
When we read, we are immersed. And the more we are immersed,
the less we are able, in the moment, to bring our analytic minds to
bear upon the experience in which we are absorbed. Thus, when we
discuss the feeling of reading we are really talking about the memory
of having read. (9)
The “memory of having read,” however, may be an extremely tenuous
one—indeed it must be, if Mendelsund’s view of reading holds. We know

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022

64 Peter Schwenger

that we have read; but because we have been so absorbed in the experi-
ence, we cannot fully describe it.
Here is Nathalie Sarraute writing not about a book, or about the ex-
perience of reading a book, but about the memory of a book. In her novel,
The Golden Fruits, the narrator is hesitantly trying to recover something
of a novel she once read called The Golden Fruits:
. . . it takes shape, I can see it . . . slight . . . indeed . . . some-
what awkward . . . a bit artless, that’s quite true . . . out of date . . . like
those that must float about in the dreams of little old-fashioned girls .
. . convent-bred . . . Where is it? No matter how hard I look . . .
And suddenly there’s a sort of emanation, a radiance, a light
. . . I can’t distinguish its source, which has remained in the shadows
. . . It flows towards me, spreads out . . . something runs through me .
. . it’s like a vibration, a modulation, a rhythm . . . it’s like a frail, firm
line that is progressing, drawn with insistent gentleness . . . it’s a naïve
and skillful arabesque . . . it scintillates faintly . . . it seems to stand
out against a dark void . . . And then the scintillating line diminishes,
becomes blurred as though reabsorbed, and the whole thing fades out
. . . (123-24)

From the novel she once read, Sarraute’s narrator first tries to recover a
“shape,” but instead hovers among certain vague qualities: “slight . . .
somewhat awkward . . . a bit artless.” Then that shapeless “vibration”
achieves focus as a line, an arabesque in fact, before it fades out entirely.
Rudolf Arnheim has asserted that “a piece of music, a drama, a
novel, or dance must be perceived as some kind of visual image if it is to
be perceived as a structural whole” (__). The arabesque line is such an
image; it is plausible to think of it as a plot line. Plot is the first logical
candidate for one’s memory of a novel, yet we usually remember the plot
vaguely, as a general tendency. The notion of a “plot line” expresses such
a general tendency in terms of a diagram—which has its uses, but also
falls spectacularly short of the actual experience. The gradual, graceful
inversion of Sarraute’s arabesque might well be the equivalent of a novel’s
progression; but if this is the plot line of The Golden Fruits, it is still a line:
a uniformly thin, dimensionless movement through a neutral imaginary
space. This hardly does justice to a reader’s actual progression through
a work of fiction. For a reader’s attention is far from uniform: it waxes
and wanes. In a sense, a reader’s attention is intended to vary. There is a
certain rhythm of reading that good authors do justice to, and it demands
a relaxation of the plot line at intervals. One of the pleasures that draw
us to fiction is the awareness of significance emerging gradually from
a mass of details in the text, details that themselves provide incidental
pleasures. A novel whose events were always functioning at the same level
of significance would not be a gripping one: it would simply be intoler-

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022

Reading’s Residue 65

able. Perhaps this intermittent thickening and thinning of the reader’s

involvement is what Oskar Fischinger was trying to get at when in 1922
he rendered, on a long scroll, the plot dynamics of a contemporary play,
Fritz von Unruh’s Ein Geschlecht (Figure 1). While his drawing overall
has a roughly linear progression, it is not a single line: rather, it is made
up of several lines (compare the “scintillating” quality of Sarraute’s ara-
besque). Fischinger at one point gives us a veritable explosion of lines;
then something that begins to look like a topography; finally, lines that
evoke a three-dimensional shape like a wave or an unfurling scarf. These
variations reflect the fact that in cases when a plot line is vaguely recalled
as an overall shape, that shape is made up of incidents, incidents that are
thickened with unique qualities.

Figure 1: Oskar Fischinger, plot line of Friz von Unruh’s Ein Geschlecht (1922).

We generally forget all but a few incidents in a novel, and when we

do remember them it is likely that these incidents will take the form of
images. Here, for example, is Carlos Fuentes speaking in an interview
about his memory of Les Misérables:
Without the visual representation [of] the flight of Jean Valjean through
the sewers of Paris, persecuted by inspector Javert—if you’re not
capable of translating this into visual images—it has no power. . . . I
cannot for the life of me remember any word from that passage in Les
Misérables I’m talking about. But I could not forget the visual image of
that persecution through the sewers of Paris, ever. (Esrock 182)

Fuentes here describes his vivid memory of Hugo’s scene, while at the
same time emphasizing the complete obliteration of the words that con-
veyed it. Before considering such visual images, then, let us admit that
when we remember an incident, we do not remember it as it was expe-

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022

66 Peter Schwenger

rienced through the written page—that is, through words. Of the many
thousands of words in a book, how few of them survive in our memory!
We can quote a sentence or two, an aphorism or a striking metaphor;
and even then, we often discover later that we have in some way gotten
it wrong. Upon rereading we discover striking passages that we have no
recollection of ever having seen before this. In the extreme case, we can
even pick up a book and be halfway through it before we realize that we
have read it before. Certain phrasings from the books we read, of course,
are so compelling or meaningful to us that we can retain them for a life-
time; they carry a power that pertains to words themselves, as concrete
entities quite apart from their context. But the incidents in a work of fiction
remain in our memory through a very different power. Though they have
been evoked by words, they are retained through images.
Yet when emphasizing the importance of these images, it is all too
easy to assume, first, that whatever image we saw then has been accu-
rately recollected now; and, second, that the image we saw then reflected
faithfully what was being described on the page. On the contrary, both the
image now in one’s mind, and the image that was seen then, can never be
fully realized visual representations. Any image evoked by a fictional text
has its source not merely in words, but in the word’s associations—im-
ages already present in the reader’s mind, specific and individual to that
person. From these prior images the present image is assembled—not in
any mechanistic way, but through a vague sense of qualities belonging to
perceptions long since forgotten. The image, then, cannot ever be a clear
and focused one, though in retrospect we sometimes make the mistake
of assuming that it was just that. “When we remember the experience
of reading a book, we imagine a continuous unfolding of images,” says
Mendelsund. “We imagine that the experience of reading is like that of
watching a film” (11, 14). Only when the film version comes out do we
realize that our experience of the book was very different from that of the
filmmaker. This is not only a matter of details (“I always saw Jane Fairfax
as blonde!”) but of the greater degree to which readers participate in the
fictional experience, largely through the individuality of their image-
associations. Those associations do not perform the text so much as they
surround it. We cannot understand the word birch, for instance, unless
we have seen a birch or at least a picture of one. While this is an obvious
enough point, what is not so obvious is that the memory that allows us
to understand the word birch will always be a particular one—particular,
that is, to the individual. It may be vague, a mere aura, the resonance of
many half-remembered birches; but it will have a quality that is unique
to each reader. We do not obediently see just what the text tells us to see,
nor how we are told to see it. Indeed the “how” of what we are supposed

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022

Reading’s Residue 67

to see, according to the text, can never be detailed enough: mental im-
ages always have a certain vagueness to them. And around them, for they
inhabit a topography without a boundary. Murnane, indeed, feels that he
inhabits this same sort of internal landscape:
In his fifties, he . . . had come to believe that he was made up mostly
of images. He was aware only of images and feelings. The feelings
connected him to the images and connected the images to one another.
The connected images made up a vast network. He was never able to
imagine this network as having a boundary in any direction. He called
the network, for convenience, his mind. (Emerald Blue 87)

Associations that are already in place in a reader’s mind can combine

with the kind of images that are being created by the action of the text. The
result of combining these different kinds of memory is an image that is
simultaneously neither and both: in effect, a new image has arisen in the
mind. This is, for Murnane, the most compelling aspect of reading fiction,
though many would consider it misreading. As a young man, he did so
consider it, and was troubled at the fact that his images did not follow
the text literally. In A History of Books, he recalls the uneasiness of a young
man—the fictional version of an earlier Murnane—when he realized that
the images evoked in him by a Joseph Conrad novel, probably Nostromo,
did not fit the novel’s setting:
The man mentioned was sometimes uneasy because the image-
farmhouses mentioned resembled some or other farmhouses that he
had seen in the distance in a certain district where he had sometimes
travelled during his childhood, whereas the words that had first caused
the images to appear were part of a work of fiction [. . .] set, so to speak,
in fictional places resembling places in South America. (57-58)

Forty years later, the narrator “regretted the young man’s having
once supposed that he ought to read fiction for some purpose other than
to wait during the hours or the days after his reading for the appearance
in his mind of images never previously read about or written about”
(59). Such images are not visual transcriptions of the text, but rather
transmutations of it. The experience of fiction, then, is not only a matter
of recycling images that are already present in the mind, nor of passively
absorbing images as they are described by the author’s words. Murnane
is suggesting that the most important aspect of reading fiction emerges
after the book is closed, even long after. It is a matter of becoming aware of
new images arising in the mind, the result of a kind of alchemy involving
both the author and the reader. If the new images speak to something in
a particular reader, they will not only take their place within the reader’s
network of associations but, unlike most of those associations, will not
be forgotten, even after many years. In A History of Books, half of the
twenty-nine sections devoted to unnamed but recognizable books begin

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022

68 Peter Schwenger

with a variation on the same sentence: “In the mind of a man of x years
appeared an image of . . .”
The persistence in the mind of an image generated by a book is
not a matter of its accurate recollection, and the same holds true for the
narrative as a whole. As Murnane tries to recall his boyhood reading of
Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! he makes clear that he is not searching
for Kingsley’s sequence, but for something else:
The narrative in question is not at all the series of events that comprises
the work of fiction Westward Ho! If that were so, I could visit tomorrow
the nearest public library and could relieve my uncertainties within an
hour or two. No, the narrative is a mysterious formation that developed
I cannot say when in some or another far part of my mind. Because it
developed thus and there, I accord it, rightly or wrongly, more respect
than I could ever accord anything that I might have read in a book,
and if ever I were able to arrange in order the items of that narrative,
I would afterwards review them in my mind much more often than
I have reread the pages of any of the books that have influenced me.
(Barley Patch 64-65)
Because reading’s residue is so elusive, I have so far tried to deal
with it in a systematic way, considering separately narrative lines, words,
and images as they might be retained in memory. When none of these
are retained, we can still call up a certain feeling that has been produced
by a combination of the book’s own qualities and the qualities we bring
to it from our associative network. This feeling becomes associated with
a novel—specifically with the novel’s title. It is, after all, the titles on the
spines of his books that Murnane’s narrator takes as his touchstone. A
book’s title evokes something beyond the words that make it up. We no
longer register Pride and Prejudice as two abstract traits linked by a con-
junction: it has become a unit standing for certain qualities of that par-
ticular fictional world. This can sometimes be so even when every word,
incident and narrative sequence has been forgotten. The title conveys an
atmosphere, a certain perfume.
Now the metaphor of perfume might seem more than a little pre-
cious; but it becomes more apropos as we follow a progression that Craig
Dworkin lays out in his book, The Perverse Library—though he stops just
short of the use to which I am putting it. He first speaks of the pleasure to
be taken in the smell of books, as described by Huysmans in À Rebours,
the book that Dorian Gray is reading. Dworkin then moves on to certain
perfumes that claim to evoke libraries—such as “In the Library” by the
perfume artist Christopher Brosius, “sourced from the bindings of Rus-
sian and Moroccan leathers, worn cloth and wood polish, with the main
note mimicking the first edition of a 1927 English novel.” Kindly refrain-
ing from ridicule, Dworkin seriously considers the scent’s implications:

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022

Reading’s Residue 69

Subtle and evaporative, the perfume’s refinement would suit Huys-

mans’ character. But then even an odorless copy read by an anosmiac
would connect the text to fragrance. Perfumes are fundamentally
about essence: the heart of a scent, and a homophone for the literary
character’s family name (Esseintes). All reading matter, left for long,
becomes essential. (29)

“Left for long” is the important phrase here for our purposes—because it
addresses reading matter at a temporal distance, when the details of the
text are no longer fresh in our memory, or consciously present at all. What
is present, however, is an essence, and the identification of that essence
with a perfume –not a plot, not an incident, not even a character, but the
sense of a certain atmosphere.
Atmosphere is perhaps the most elusive component of a piece of
fiction, which is probably why its treatment is generally so perfunctory.
It would really be more accurate, of course, to speak of it not as a compo-
nent but as the product of components. Atmosphere is the distillation of
all the components of fiction I have dealt with above, in their emotional
effect. It is the feel of the world that the author has created, and which is
experienced, in a corresponding creation, by the reader. It is often felt most
strongly right after the book is closed, especially if its final sentences are
such that the entire complex experience of the book is somehow evoked
without being baldly stated. This is an essence of the book that does not
consist of summing up in a few words, but is, rather, an awareness of all
the multiple connections that have been put into motion by this fictional
experience, an awareness that almost immediately diffuses into emotion.
Only a few details will survive: an image, a sentence, the vague sense
of a face. These hover within a certain sense of the book as a whole—actu-
ally, an uncertain sense. As with perfume, the book has become distilled
into an essence, an essence that is an atmosphere, an atmosphere that is
destined to disperse into a more extensive atmosphere, the borderless
realm of the reader’s mind.
So Daphne Sawle, in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child, is
speaking for many readers when she asks herself what the point was in
having read hundreds and hundreds of books, since she can remember
almost nothing about them:
Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight,
as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a
passing vehicle: looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes
there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene: a man in an
office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the streets outside—a little
blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back
to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the
past thirty years. (383)

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022

70 Peter Schwenger

So much seems lost; yet, if the residue of reading disperses, that is not the
same thing as disappearing completely. The components of the book join
with the components of one’s personal memory, or rather that which we
do not remember, a network stretching out of sight. Shadowy recollec-
tions of one book may then become part of the penumbra that we provide
for another book. The movement through shadowy memories is itself a
source of the pleasure that we take in reading a piece of fiction—fleshing
out its words with associations that do not flatly translate a word into an
image but vibrate along the edge of our awareness as our eyes pass over
the marks on the page. In the process, one’s memory itself undergoes a
change. When the text takes its place in the mind among other images,
sensations, and experiences, it adds to the freight of memory suggestions
of richness, of elusive and as yet unrealized possibilities that go beyond
the record of our quotidian lives: “Reading,” asserts Proust in the preface
to his translation of Ruskin, “is the threshold of spiritual life” (39). This
is not because of what the words say, the wisdom they impart—that is
Ruskin’s contention, one that Proust explicitly resists. What happens to
books in one’s memory is subtler than that.
When the past is recaptured in Proust’s great work, it is not as a series
of events that have been forgotten, but as an atmosphere: an atmosphere
that constitutes the essence of a particular place and time, as experienced
by an individual consciousness. This atmosphere includes innumerable
details, any one of which, in the right circumstances, is capable of recall-
ing the whole. The list of these generative details in Proust includes, as
well as the renowned madeleine, two uneven paving stones, the clink
of a spoon, the feel of a napkin on the narrator’s face—and the title of a
book. In the “Overture” to Swann’s Way, Marcel’s mother reads this book
to him in order to calm the child’s agitation at the prospect of her absence.
Thousands of pages later, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes, the
same book concludes the sequence of sensations that each recall a mo-
ment from the past—“a marvelous expedient of nature which had caused
a sensation—the noise made both by the spoon and by the hammer, even
the title of a book, for instance—to be mirrored at one and the same time
in the past, so that my imagination was permitted to savour it, and in the
present . . .” (3: 905).1 He continues:

And yet the book was not a very extraordinary one, it was François le
Champi. But that name, like the name Guermantes, was for me unlike
the names which I had heard for the first time only in later life. The
memory of what had seemed to me too deep for understanding in the
subject of François le Champi when my mother long ago had read the
book aloud to me, had been reawakened by the title, and just as the
name of Guermantes, after a long time during which I had not seen the

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022

Reading’s Residue 71

Guermantes, contained for me the essence of the feudal age, so François

le Champi contained the essence of the novel . . . . (3: 919)

It is the title here, three times repeated, that contains the novel’s essence.
It evokes the memory of that long-ago night, of course, along with “a
thousand trifling details of Combray”; but along with that, there is a
sense of the experience of the novel itself, and not just the circumstances
surrounding that experience.
There is a telling moment in which Marcel’s revelation seems to re-
ceive a check, and it occurs when he first opens, absent-mindedly, George
Sand’s novel: “I felt myself unpleasantly struck by some impression very
much out of harmony with what I had been meditating upon, until finally,
with an emotion so strong that it moved me to tears, I came to see how
fully that impression was in accord with my thoughts” (3: 918). The un-
pleasant impression arises from the fact that the book in his hands should
be another in the list of moments that provide openings into the past; but
Marcel intuits a discordant difference from those other moments: the book
is not, like them, an “expedient of nature,” a purely material or sensuous
object. The copy that he holds in his hands is not the same physically as
the one that Mamma read, with its “reddish cover.” Indeed, the narrator
later speculates about obtaining the first edition of a meaningful book—
“but by this term I should have understood the edition in which I read it
for the first time.” The physical aspect of a book—“the way in which the
covers of a binding open, the grain of a particular paper”—is associated
with the experience of reading, but it is not that experience. Reading the
book, as opposed to looking at it, occupies a liminal position opening into
an atmosphere that is other than the one’s physical surroundings. This
then seems to challenge the idea that Marcel has been mulling over, of
the recapturing of time through material or sensuous moments, an idea
that he has indeed compared to reading the signs in a book—and now
it is reading itself, in its non-material aspect, that seems to undercut his
project. But the second reaction understands suddenly that the atmosphere
of François le Champi does not belong only to the title character, or to the
author, but has now become absorbed into the mind of the reader. So
the title of this book actually does allow him to recapture something of
himself, something that is past but also present.
This last formulation might also describe the project of psycho-
analysis, which seeks to recover a past that is present, even if forgotten.
The presence of the past need not, though, be confined to actual events.
In his pivotal letter to Wilhelm Fliess (September 21, 1897) Freud wrote,
“There is no indication of reality in the unconscious, so that it is impos-
sible to distinguish between truth and emotionally charged fiction” (The

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022

72 Peter Schwenger

Origins __). This is written in the context of Freud’s rejection of his own
seduction theory of hysteria, and so the “fiction” is in the first instance a
patient’s fantasizing. However, fiction in the literary sense can also take
its place in the unconscious, since it is an experience lived through at the
time of reading, even if at a certain distance. A work of fiction can offer
a temporary alternative life: hypotheses, experiments, correspondences,
transgressions. Distant at the time, these experiences become more distant
as more time intervenes, even to oblivion. And yet, something remains. As
the text takes its place in the mind among other images, sensations, and
experiences, it adds to the freight of memory suggestions of richness, of
elusive and as yet unrealized possibilities that go beyond both the narra-
tives of our quotidian lives, and any verbal summaries we might be able
to muster of the books that we have read. And this is so even when we
cannot recall the plot, the characters, or the details of the text. In reading,
as in so much else, being forgotten is not the same thing as being lost.
Emeritus, Mount St. Vincent University

Note
1. John Lurz has pointed out that “even the title of a book” does not appear in the Moncrieff
translation; however, it does appear (même titre de livre) in the original French (146n11).

Works Cited
Arnheim, Rudolf.
Calinescu, Matei.
Dworkin, Craig. The Perverse Library. Non Basic Stock Line, 2010.
Esrock, Ellen. The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response. Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1994.
Freud, Sigmund. The Origins of Psychanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes,
1887-1902. Edited by Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, Basic Books, 1954.
---. Sigmund Freud Briefe. Edited by Margarete Mitscherlich-Nielson. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972.
Hollinghurst, Alan. The Stranger’s Child. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
Lurz, John. “Sleeping with Proust: Reading, Sensation, and the books of the Recherche.” New
Literary History, vol. 42, no. 1, Winter 2011, pp. 129-146.
Mendelsund, Peter. What We See When We Read. Vintage, 2014.
Murnane, Gerald. Barley Patch. Dalkey Archive, 2011.
---. Emerald Blue. McPhee Gribble, 1995.
---. A History of Books. Giramondo, 2012.
Proust, Marcel.
On Reading.
Sarraute, Nathalie. The Golden Fruits. Translated by Maria Jolas, John Calder, 1965.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Norman Page, Broadview, 2005.

SubStance #158, Vol. 51, no. 2, 2022