When I gave the Norton Lectures at Harvard University some twenty years ago, I recalled that eight years previously they were to have been given by Italo Calvino, who died before he could write the sixth and final lecture. The texts were later published in English as Six Memos for the Next Millennium. As a tribute to Calvino I used his lecture in praise of quickness as a starting point, noting, however, that his enthusiasm for speed didn’t negate the pleasures of lingering. So I devoted one of my lectures to the pleasures of lingering.
Lingering was something a certain Monsieur Humblot didn’t approve of when he rejected Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu for the publisher Ollendorff: “I may be slow on the uptake,” he wrote, “but I just can’t believe that someone can take thirty pages to describe how you toss and turn in bed before falling asleep.” A denial of the pleasures of lingering would thus prevent us from reading Proust. But apart from Proust, I mentioned a typical case of lingering in The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.
Don Abbondio is on his way home, reciting his breviary, and he sees something he didn’t want to see, namely, two bravoes waiting for him. Another writer would immediately have satisfied the reader’s impatience and told us what happens. But Manzoni takes several pages here to explain who bravoes were, and having done so, he lingers on to describe how Don Abbondio fingers his collar and looks behind him to see whether anyone might come to his aid. And finally the author asks, anticipating Chernyshevsky: “What is to be done?”
Did Manzoni have to introduce those pages of historical detail? He knew perfectly well that the reader would be tempted to skip them, and every reader of The Betrothed has done just that, at least on a first reading. And yet, even the time required to turn the pages forms part of a narrative strategy. The delay increases the torment, not only of Don Abbondio but also of his readers, and makes the drama more memorable. And isn’t The Divine Comedy also a story that lingers? The journey in Dante’s dream might last a single night, but to reach the final apotheosis we have to work our way through a hundred cantos.
Anna Lisa Buzzola’s book Letteratura lenta nel tempo della fretta (Slow Reading in Hurried Times) is about slow reading, but she doesn’t just hope for the return to a more leisurely approach to reading. She links the problem to the question of speed in modern life and to recent anthropological studies, placing her subject at the center of a series of healthy practices that include the “slow food” movement.
When it comes to literature, the author examines the theories of Gérard Genette, Viktor Shklovsky, and others, and gives a full analysis of the works of Javier Marías, Ian McEwan, Gesualdo Bufalino, Erri De Luca, José Saramago, Milan Kundera, Philippe Delerm, Paolo Rumiz, and Alessandro Baricco. Honesty requires me to reveal that she also kindly refers to me and the pleasure of lingering over the infinity of lists in my books.
This analysis gives rise to a phenomenology of techniques in the art of lingering that makes the reader want to read more slowly, even if you have to linger over thirty pages to understand how someone can toss and turn in bed before falling asleep.
2014