Bookception

It has been stressed this year that literature has no point, it doesn’t really mean anything. Literature just is. If this is true, why is it that we find ourselves constantly looking for meaning within the pages of a book? Every piece of literature we read defines us, changes us. Every time we finish a particularly mind-blowing piece of literature, we unconsciously begin to live by what the author stated, forgetting immediately that there was no point at all to the narrative.

Life has been explained in many ways through the ages. Philosophers try to understand life, never getting anywhere, probably because there is nothing to understand. Life, like literature, just is. We live, we breed, we die. What was the point? What was the meaning? Probably it was absolutely nothing. This is why literature is the one subject which comes so close to life, it is the one subject which really understands life, because it is just as pointless.  

The brilliance of Invisible Cities is that it can be used as an allegory to life, or to literature, making them seem like they are the same thing.

“The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning.” (pg.22)

The previous excerpt from the book tells us how we will begin to understand previous pieces of the narrative and at the same time could hold an important truth on life.

In terms of literature, the phrase above is explaining how, in later chapters of the book, we will come to understand the details we have read thus far, and see them in a different way as we continue reading. In terms of life, the same meaning can be applied. As we grow older, we will learn new things and have new experiences, which will add meaning to what we have lived before and put it all in a different perspective.

As far as I know, every city in the book is mainly a small piece of our “empire”, or our world. In the book, the author is telling us about our world as he tells us about the book we are reading. I guess bookception is an accurate description for it all?