Thoughts on Dara Horn's A Guide for the Perplexed Part II
This book is a masterpiece. Let me get the negative things out of the way so I can focus on the positive. There are plotting and structure problems and the characters are not fully developed. They aren't one dimensional but they rarely move beyond two dimensional.
But, Horn's ability to weave a tapestry (and I use that metaphor deliberately as it fits what this novel does so well) of meaning and memory across time, space and individual is amazing. In a tapestry we can see the picture or scene if we back up enough, but this picture or scene is only part of the tapestry, though often mistaken for the whole (not to mention, different viewers see the scene differently). There is no truth there. But that isn't all that must be considered. The tapestry is woven of threads. Let's say God wove the tapestry (one option that Horn offers) or we could say physics wove the tapestry, does that mean that the meaning of the tapestry is preordained? Or can we have whatever meaning we want? Could the two co-exist? Could there be a meaning intended in the tapestry but we don't get it anyway, but the meaning is still there? And what if we started to take the tapestry apart piece by piece, what would we see? Do the threads themselves have meaning or only as they contribute to the overall piece? And finally,
perhaps most engagingly, what if meaning creation is the weaving of a tapestry itself, where all the threads are the pieces an individual (or a culture or a family or a writer) brings together from his data mine. The meaning would change each time we wove it because the threads would be different because the data mine itself would have changed. In this way, meaning is not just elusive, it doesn't exist except for a moment in the current woven tapestry that is as quickly gone as it is finished. We can't even share it with another person because the way that person will see the threads will necessarily be different.
The complexity in Horn's novel defies my metaphor but it starts to get at what she offers, if we think of the tapestry as the universe, the individual and the book itself.
Horn raises that age old, unanswerable but ever pursued question of what is the meaning of life and how do we figure it out? Through God? Through Science? Through Psychology? And how reliable is any of our evidence for our perspective (memory? pictures? Genizah? letters? what others tell us? videos? metadata?). And let's zoom in from the big question of meaning of life to the little one, how do we even know our own daily reality? Is it simply our perspective? Is it a recreation of the past that drives us? A look towards the future?
All of these questions and more are raised in the novel--none are answered, which is as it should be. There are no answers.
Some other issues that Horn raised for me is the idea of reading itself. I had this idea that books have a meaning (not the "true" one, but one that a reader could tease out and prove) rather than many or none. Tim Parks recent essay in the New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/13/why-finish-books/ why finish books also contributed to my thoughts here. Do we need to finish books in order to get the meaning? And then of course the whole idea of why do we read? Is it for meaning? Meaning in Horn's sense of the tapestry is clearly an impossible if not necessarily undesirable goal. But the focus shifts from the meaning here to our responsibility and ability to weave that meaning. We get to chose what threads are used and what picture we see. In this sense, back to my original question about predetermination, the future may be predetermined but how we see it is not.
But, Horn's ability to weave a tapestry (and I use that metaphor deliberately as it fits what this novel does so well) of meaning and memory across time, space and individual is amazing. In a tapestry we can see the picture or scene if we back up enough, but this picture or scene is only part of the tapestry, though often mistaken for the whole (not to mention, different viewers see the scene differently). There is no truth there. But that isn't all that must be considered. The tapestry is woven of threads. Let's say God wove the tapestry (one option that Horn offers) or we could say physics wove the tapestry, does that mean that the meaning of the tapestry is preordained? Or can we have whatever meaning we want? Could the two co-exist? Could there be a meaning intended in the tapestry but we don't get it anyway, but the meaning is still there? And what if we started to take the tapestry apart piece by piece, what would we see? Do the threads themselves have meaning or only as they contribute to the overall piece? And finally,
perhaps most engagingly, what if meaning creation is the weaving of a tapestry itself, where all the threads are the pieces an individual (or a culture or a family or a writer) brings together from his data mine. The meaning would change each time we wove it because the threads would be different because the data mine itself would have changed. In this way, meaning is not just elusive, it doesn't exist except for a moment in the current woven tapestry that is as quickly gone as it is finished. We can't even share it with another person because the way that person will see the threads will necessarily be different.
The complexity in Horn's novel defies my metaphor but it starts to get at what she offers, if we think of the tapestry as the universe, the individual and the book itself.
Horn raises that age old, unanswerable but ever pursued question of what is the meaning of life and how do we figure it out? Through God? Through Science? Through Psychology? And how reliable is any of our evidence for our perspective (memory? pictures? Genizah? letters? what others tell us? videos? metadata?). And let's zoom in from the big question of meaning of life to the little one, how do we even know our own daily reality? Is it simply our perspective? Is it a recreation of the past that drives us? A look towards the future?
All of these questions and more are raised in the novel--none are answered, which is as it should be. There are no answers.
Some other issues that Horn raised for me is the idea of reading itself. I had this idea that books have a meaning (not the "true" one, but one that a reader could tease out and prove) rather than many or none. Tim Parks recent essay in the New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/13/why-finish-books/ why finish books also contributed to my thoughts here. Do we need to finish books in order to get the meaning? And then of course the whole idea of why do we read? Is it for meaning? Meaning in Horn's sense of the tapestry is clearly an impossible if not necessarily undesirable goal. But the focus shifts from the meaning here to our responsibility and ability to weave that meaning. We get to chose what threads are used and what picture we see. In this sense, back to my original question about predetermination, the future may be predetermined but how we see it is not.
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