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182 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1992
And at some point—it must logically happen—a writer will have a last reader. I am not asking for sympathy; this aspect of a writer’s living and dying is a given. At some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet, every writer will have his or her last reader...
And for each of us there will come the breaking of the single remaining thread of this strange, unwitnessed, yet deeply intimate relationship between writer and reader. At some point, there will be a last reader for me too... My last reader: there is a temptation to be sentimental over him or her... But then logic kicked in: your last reader is, by definition, someone who doesn’t recommend your books to anyone else. You bastard! Not good enough, eh?
. . . the study of national bibliographies made me realize what a minimal fraction of the literary field we all work on: a canon of two hundred novels, for instance, sounds very large for nineteenth-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than one percent of all the novels that were actually published: twenty thousand, thirty, more, no one really knows — and close reading won’t help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so . . .
[...] there is a considerable difference in status between having died textually but remaining alive in people's memory, and dying in that memory.The book, as a whole, is an examination of literature as mythifaction; of course, myths themselves are a part of literature – and make appearances here – just as religious figures – also appearing here – have been subsumed into literary significance, long after their religious adherents have died away. So you have gods that become myths that become literature, but you also have literature that becomes archetypal, and is incorporated into myth. All of this is fueled by the attention of The Reader; books that are no longer read, characters that are minor even in more major works, fade away into the ether, and cease to exist once the eye of The Reader is no longer on them.
[...]
That, of course, is why we are all gathered here.