The Transcendental Friend no. 10, 5/99

Issue No. 10, May 1999

Review

On the Review

For many, the review may be the closest they will ever come to the original work—a source of intelligent party discussion, a quick fix for the impatient and temporally challenged. For others, who have devoted a portion of their precious time to read a book, to inhabit a particular textual space and meld it with their personal intellect (claim it as their own), the review can be self-affirming. Reading a review, and writing a review for that matter, is an essential opportunity to test oneself, to view oneself and one's reactions to things from the outside in. In that sense, the review is a primal recognition of one's image in the puddle. It brings a sense of relief that there are others thinking too, that we have a common origin point, even if we disagree, that we meet and commingle in the purple land of the text which is both present and no longer present.

So reviews seem necessary—they help us define our own reading and writing. Reviews cannot be claimed innocent of politics however. The writing of a review is always a political act. It chooses whose writing we should gaze upon. Just as reviews can be acts of friendship, admiration and love, they can also be acts of alienation and negation. The review is at heart a vengeful old testament god; it cannot escape its critical roots. Reviews that seek to deny that critical past do so at their own peril. Yet, there are no limits on the form that the review's dialogue with its critical roots can take. It is as limitless as our capacity to reimagine the original text as a living text within the world.

The myth is that the reading experience is a unique experience in time, a cloister that can never be revisited. The idea of distancing yourself from writing, writing that was meant to nourish, be inhabited or reacted to—this, to strike a catholic pose (difficult for a Jew), is the review's original sin. It is the very untouchability of the original text, that text as it is approached from the review, that creates the possibility of an alternative space, not the original room, nor a second room (the pure critical promise of the review), but a third room, a room that is displaced from its origins, neither text nor reader, but reader-text or text-reader. Like the illusion that two voices harmonized are more than one.

Dan Machlin