Watch, listen to, read nothing new in 2023
It worked for Sisyphus
I can read you like a book, Lynn. And not a very good book. Certainly not Bravo Two Zero by Andy McNab. Which actually improves with every read!
- Alan Partridge
Who when they were young didn’t rinse a favourite VHS till the brown tape sagged and the onscreen image grew hems of static? Or play a DVD or CD to digital death, so it couldn’t get past even the first hurdle of scratches? Who didn’t re-read a favourite paperback till its spine was as lined as the tree it came from?
These associations with childhood might be why people think there’s something immature about re-reading or re-watching. As though an adult who does so is being self-indulgent - the ‘comfort read’ - or even thoughtlessly obsessive like the kid who puts on the same CGI romp for the fiftieth time. And yet only wanting new artistic experiences, and never re-reading/-watching/-listening might not be the sign of adventurousness or an avid cultural appetite you think. It might actually be a sign of a lifetime of art not even experienced… My claim is if you’ve read all of a good book once, you’ve only read half of it.
Your first read of a book is you reducing your ignorance of it from the initial total point, and therefore is necessarily incomplete. It’s like a painting you’re looking at through only a slot and from the top downwards. The slot is your attention, above is what you remember, below your ignorance. Considering the length of most books and the reliability of most people’s memories, the cloud of ignorance that the slot clears always faintly regathers. Theoretically the less time it takes to experience an artwork, the less hard it should be to keep any of it fresh in the memory: from books and whole TV shows, to films and short stories, symphonies and albums, down to individual songs. To stay with books, it’s very hard to keep a specific order of words you’ve read only once vivid (the etymology of the Japanese word for memorise is ‘dark writing’.) Sure, you can pause and go back, but motion tends to be forward into the unknown.
Past each sentence you’re first reading the text is in fact clouded twice over: obviously you don’t know how the next sentence will go, but neither do you know its relation and therefore importance to all the others. You get the sentence: you know the words’ lexical meanings, you can parse the syntax - and, relatedly, you can follow the plot. But, since this is your first read, there’s a whole troposphere of meaning you can’t yet reach. You can’t yet know how all the parts connect (or fail to connect) to one other. Until the whole work has at last been perceived, each part is indeterminate, only partially perceivable, like a jigsaw where each piece you’ve put together nonetheless doesn’t have its own shape till the final piece of the puzzle sets them all into their fixed one.
Or another analogy. Let’s say you skip ahead in a book; the plot will be harder to follow the farther you go. There are too many gaps in narrative information for you to make full sense of the story you’ve read. But words and sentences also have lots of non-narrative meanings, and these too have gaps. But in this case, the gaps aren’t intermediary points in a plot’s chain of cause and effect. They’re gaps of associations, relations, the as-yet untied threads in a pattern of imagery or theme, gaps which can’t be filled till the end of the work, which shuts off for good all the possible meanings, fulfilled or left unfulfilled. The art of any artwork doesn’t, can’t come fully out till a second time because all values are relational.
To grasp the overall design of an artwork, it’s not enough to have gotten to the end of it either, because, barring a perfect memory, you’ve already forgotten so much. And even if you did read a book, say, for the first time with a perfect memory you’d still have experienced it incrementally and not holistically, in one go. For that, you have to re-read the book, whether immediately or at some point in the future when the last read is still fresh enough in your mind. On the re-read, the ‘slot’ has gone. Now you can see the whole picture, so long as you’d read close enough and it’s well-made enough.
(A bit abstract? Let’s say a novel has a twist. It makes you see previous parts of the story in a new light, those you can remember anyway. But you’ll only fully appreciate how well the twist was set up on a second read; only then will you understand what those parts really meant. Or take a poem: meter, weird word choices, broken lines, these all resist or impair immediate comprehension—that’s how a poem’s a poem and not just prose. Most poems don’t even scan or unfold sensibly in your mind till a second read, least in my dumbass case.)
This is why you can’t fully judge a narrative or temporal artwork on a single go any more you could a painting you’ve looked at only a slot’s worth of at any one time. Compare with films, where the word reviewing already combines the senses of repetition and of evaluation. The first watch or read or listen is more just the unpacking, the primer you paint on the mind before the real job goes on, the run-through of the sheet music before you learn to play the piece.
But since most people don’t re-read/-watch/-listen (in that order; music is the most repeated of the arts), works get designed assuming they’ll only get one stab at you. Hence books with ‘hooks’, films front-loaded with busy first acts, and every TV show episode having a cold open, every actor starting with their performance turned up to 11. Meanwhile the slow or subtle or the at-first-more-obscure becomes a risk. (I’m not saying these features are superior; I’m just describing what in a world of endless novelty will have survival-value and what won’t.)
However this doesn’t mean you need to re-read even bad books to be qualified to rate them as bad, or that every book deserves a two-read minimum. Far from it. You don’t need to wait for the structure to get its capstone of the last word to tell certain books are not cathedrals but hovels. It’s only those books (films, plays, shows, albums) that you can tell are up to something, through the way they’re composed, structured, or by whichever else device stands out to be noticed by the attentive.
Re-reading / -watching / -listening is the surplus experience after the transaction, after you’ve bought and paid for the first go. Pirating and borrowing aside, you can’t have that first go without paying for it. But your re-watches, re-reads and re-listens are for free forever. They’ve cut out the middle man now. And only with him out the picture do you really get to have the experience of art as art.