(O’Brien)

Offering a view of literature alternative to the discursive framework of Bayard and the dissassociative philosophising of Barthes, this excerpt from O’Brien’s The Browser’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading exults in the experiential, aesthetic and sentential dimensions of encountering a text in-person.

Beginning with the interchangeable notions of construct and reality which shape the reading experience of children, O’Brien identifies a reflex of text-inhabitation – that is, the re-contextualising of fictitious events, characters and sensations within the realm of one’s own experience and family -  as a way of understanding and connecting with narratives.

Pursuing this emphasis on personal response, O’Brien continues to explore the actual physical encounter with the book-as-object, specifically, the tension between each volume’s physical smallness (both in terms of the space it occupies and the diminutive printed letters on each page) and the epic, sprawling concepts which are signified within. This is reflected, he argues, also in the temporal nature of literature, with each book representing a kind of “a victory over time” in condensing lifetimes and voyages into a few hundred pages and even fewer hours of reading. It is upon this basis of grandeur-contained-in the-microcosm that O’Brien presents the book as “a box with the world in it”, romanticising the physical entity as a kind of portal into other worlds and souls. In this sense therefore, literature becomes animated - a dynamic sphere within which “life teems”.

This aliveness, however, is not merely restricted to the reader, O’Brien argues - but also pertains to the interrelationships between books.  Collectively forming a fluid community of connections and correlations, these literary objects are to be identified as specific coordinates within a vast literary landscape – ones which reference one another with awareness of their place within the whole (just as Chandler’s protagonists read Hemingway and Proust, or Dostoevsky’s read the Bible or Bakunin). O’Brien describes this interchange as “the murmur of overlapping conversations…as if the books read each other”.

Just as books mutually illuminate one another, so too, O’Brien asserts do they reveal the interior world of the author out of which they were written. In fact, they may not be composed for a readership at all, but rather as a means by which to better absorb the world, make sense of its complexities, or escape from them. A work of literature exposes the texture of a person’s thoughts, both as a window into the mind of the writer and mirror held up the reader.

As a series of fragments and impressions itself, The Browser’s Ecstasy comes close to replicating the very experiences it describes – guiding its audience through a multiplicity of descriptions, speculations and observations with effusive and (often rapturous) prose. Not only this, but in surveying the experience of the child who imagines themself into worlds, the reader who becomes a connoisseur of foreign places, the writer who sits alone and uses words to travel deeper into reality, O’Brien effectively simulates each incarnation of the ecstatic browser’s experience for the audience of his text – thus sketching a microcosmic experience of the act of entering the microcosm.