Saturday, October 8, 2011

Author and Reader in The Shadow of the Wind

I just finished the novel The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (in English translation). I enjoyed it very much. It reminds me of The Thirteenth Tale, which is also a novel about a novel, an ekphrastic or self-reflexive novel, where the protagonist attempts to uncover the truth about an author. (There is a bit of a spoiler in the discussion below, so stop now if you want the mystery to remain intact until you read the novel.)

In The Shadow of the Wind, set in Barcelona in 1945-1966, ten-year-old Daniel visits the Cemetery of Forgotten Books and selects the novel The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax. He enjoys the novel so much that he searches for other novels by the writer and finds someone is buying and burning them, so there are very few left. His search becomes an obsession, and he interviews various people who knew Carax, slowly uncovering the secret of Carax’s parentage and childhood, his romance with Penelope, his years of writing in Paris, his return to Barcelona to discover what happened to his beloved Penelope, and the mystery of the book-burnings. Meanwhile, the details of Daniel’s life mirror Julian’s.

While the mystery itself is worth unraveling, the novel is also interesting in its commentary on authors, readers, and books. It represents an allegory of the reading experience where an engaged reader attempts to better understand a novel by understanding the author. This search models the traditional way literary interpretation has been taught in the US. My English teacher Mrs. Jackson would lecture on the author’s background and the historical moment, and then we were supposed to read her mind to determine the kind of interpretation she wanted. Yet, in the novel, the author-biography turns out to be dangerous, as Daniel’s search begins to be shadowed by a man with a burnt face who goes by the name of Lain Coubert, the name of the devil character in Carax’s novel, and also by a sadistic police officer who arrests and attacks anyone he doesn’t like. The danger suggests that the author’s background is important but risky; therefore, other keys to understanding literature exist, including the reader’s response.

The allegory pits the author and reader against each other regarding control over the aesthetic experience. I like this quote from Isaac, the caretaker of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, who comments, “Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it” (Zafon 5). On the one hand, the text is “the soul of the person who wrote it,” which suggests the romantic view that artwork is the product of genius, of a man with “a more comprehensive soul” (Wordsworth 655), of a “specially gifted spirit” (Hegel 637), and the reader has no right to critique such a work, which “stands higher than any natural product” by virtue of its “journey through the spirit” (Hegel 638). In imagining they might challenge the right of the spiritual parent to his own offspring, readers are the “Fools [who] rush in where Angels [authors] fear to tread” (Pope 455). Readers are in this sense like young Daniel who inserts himself into the mystery of Carax’s life without understanding the threat to himself and others that his sleuthing represents.

On the other hand, Isaac suggests that the soul of books also belongs to readers, “those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.” There is something imaginative that happens in reading as well as in writing. While romantic theorists pay attention mostly to the writer’s self-expression, there is self-expression that occurs for readers in books as well. Kant describes this response as the “free play of the cognitive powers,” invoking both imagination and understanding (512). While Pope acknowledges the governing power of author intent in interpretation, “Since none can compass more than they Intend” (446), he also grants the humble, educated reader imaginative space in the interpretive process. Pope argues that “Wit and Judgment,” creativity and interpretation, are “meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife” (443), by which he means that good interpretation, with rules drawn inductively from great works, can guide authors in producing better texts. There’s an ongoing interaction between author and reader that’s valuable to improving the quality of literature overall. As it turns out in The Shadow of the Wind, Julian Carax is still alive, and to a certain extent, he helps Daniel uncover the mystery, seeing in Daniel the possibility of averting a repeat of his own tragic life. Thus, the self-reflexive allegory echoes the writer-reader collaboration Pope identifies. Without a reader, a literary son, the genius no matter how great his soul, dies alone, his texts lost in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

I am also interested in the backdrop of war in Zafon’s novel--the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), World War II (1930-45), and the peril of required military service--which emphasizes the threat of patriarchal violence also in the foreground as the legacy of fathers threatens sons, biological, adopted, and literary, as they learn to become men. Sons and readers need to negotiate the difficult terrain of their inheritance from their (literary) parents. Doppelgangers Julian and Daniel represent the tragedy or balance that may arise out of this contest, as well as the cyclical nature of the effort.

Works Cited

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. From Lectures on Fine Art. In Leitch 636-44.

Kant, Immanuel. From Critique of Judgment. In Leitch 504-35.

Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. Print.

Pope, Alexander. Essay on Criticism. In Leitch 441-48.

Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In Leitch 648-68.

Zafon, Carlos Ruiz. The Shadow of the Wind. Trans. Lucia Graves. New York: Penguin, 2001. Print.