Writing and reading: two cases of crass infidelity

If we agree that the reader, in his distant majesty, is an unwelcomed guest (since invitation can only be extended to someone you knew beforehand), what can we say about the writer? In this landscape where the-one-who-comes-after reigns supreme, what is left to be said about the one-who-comes-before?

The reader, we say, is the great infidel of the text. His/her beliefs, his/her predetermined acceptance or refusal of texts, are issues all writers have to deal with, whether they do so consciously or not.

Two ends of a spectrum

So the central point is this commitment to the text. The text, this in-between, this only thing that matters, this only point of junction between a reader who misbehaves and a writer who should not expect anything better! This is the crux of the matter. And every approach to the text, whether from the readers' quarters or the writers' camp, will have to be situated in such a way as to ratify one of the two forms of fidelity.

Now, as I've intimated, the reader is not exactly a follower of the text. Or rather, the text formed in the reader's mind is not necessarily in conformity to the primary text.

The author, of course, stands at the other end of the spectrum of infidelities. While the reader is given to an excess of self-affirmation, he/she is one whose excess is in preparation.

The writer's table is full, and the meals are hearty and exceptionally sweet. That's because, not unlike a handler of fly-traps, the author partakes in the game so as to set a trap for readers; to bring them to the text and keep them glued there for as long as possible.

Source: Amy Wilson

In order for this feast to be acceptable the writer is required to set the table well before the encounter. The best dishes are, of course, those prepared so as to please the palate of virtual party-comers. The writer, as a chef, knowing full well that this is the case, will have to adapt their recipes so as to come as close as it gets to the dietary requirements of their paying customers, the readers.

There are secret ingredients, of course: things thrown into the pot to make the dish sweeter. Some of them are visible (and therefore easy to imitate), while others depend on downright guesswork. But the truth is one: they will have to feature on the plate. The writer will have to handle them properly, or else they’re lost in the footnotes of one’s reading list.

Generous or not: the writer’s choice

Quantities may differ, yes. At the end of the day writing is not the obstinate application of an identical recipe, since (among other things) we are not all eaters of French fries. Just by way of an example…

But if we take popularity as a measuring rod, it wouldn't be hard, would it, to recognize that the most appreciated texts are those most peppered with ingredients dear to the readers' palates. The more generous an author is in this department, the more they will reap the harvest of success. And let's not talk here about big names and pretend they have acquired their reputation by the shear value of their work. We know it's not like that. We know that popularity has to have taken place at some point along the way. Otherwise no Shakespeare would have ever shown up.

Proof? Yes. Who, outside of academic circles, has the vaguest memory of Thomas Kyd or Thomas Nashe? Would you know how to spell their names if you only heard them mentioned somewhere? Who finds it relevant to mention the names of those who collaborated with Big Will for the writing of some of his plays?

Source: WFPL News

But this may be beside the point. I was talking about writers who give generously to their readers. Parsimonious authors, on the contrary, are poorly read by others. Those who spend little time getting ready for the encounter with the reader won't fare too well; geniuses or not. As pointed out by Roland Barthes, who saw in the reader an anti-hero of misbehavior, in texts capable of generating pleasure the author is required to pay tribute to the reader's capacity to pay back in reading currency:

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.”

Now, don't think of the author as a slave who labors all day long to satisfy the appetite of a gourmand whose only business is to throw interminable tantrums. The author also has a life of their own, where the reader has no access. But the evidence is heavily one-sided. As Alberto Manguel says, just to set the record straight:

“Readers are bullies in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.”

So there.

A tale of two egotists

The author is always on the ready for the coming of the reader, which is a premediated coming, an effort to lure. So saying that he's taken by surprise by the arrival of the boor who peruses their text is utter nonsense. The author does everything in his/her power to assure that the text is read, that there are readers to partake in the pleasure of this perusal. In other words, writers do all they can to make sure they are appreciated. Sounds narcissistic? It is. Because yes, when all chips are down the author will be minding their own game. Stuff the reader! They can do their own dance all they want; I'll have my own. This is what the thinking mind of the writer thinks. Although, perhaps, not too many will admit to it.

Thinking this way is not only honorable, it is also a very practical way of putting the problem. Because way down, in the remotest recesses of their consciousness, writers know that this is their only real chance, their only true shot. If they want to achieve immortality they need to impregnate their readers with it. So readers is what they need: delivering bodies, pregnant souls, wombs that hold the offspring of their otherwise-invisible talents.

Every writer must learn this truth of their dependence on reading, and they do so very early in their career. Hence the notion of implied audience. At the same time, readers grow accustomed to their special status as soon as they figure out their ways of reading a rebours. Hence the notion of reading as a creative gesture.

Source: Huffington Post

So you can see how terribly selfish both readers and writers are. They perform their acts while their minds fall back upon their own interest. Forever and ever. As a consequence, the success of any writing venture depends on how the two egotists merge to agree first and foremost on the relation that emerges between them at a given time. The merging point is where the parties meet and greet or meet and growl. Whatever the effect of the encounter, what becomes of real importance is the negotiation of this very slippery relationship that emerged at an uncalled-for moment, in the form of an uncalled-for address.

Writing and naming (3)

In Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, God points while Adam lets his hand fall, in arrogant refusal. The real tragedy of the episode is this: Adam’s gesture loses forever the pointingness of the index finger. This is how we, humans, have grown accustomed to experiencing the world through definitions, through intermediaries, through signs. By closing the fist, man started creating the illusion of self-sufficiency.

The fist

Any enclosure is a means of delimiting what is one’s own. The closed fist encloses the index finger, which is the way things were denominated before man came about, with his language, with his understanding, with his embarrassing impotence. Fold the index finger and you’ve cut off your access to Paradise. Fold the index finger and you’ve got a revolution. The revolutionary clenched fist indicates specificity; it indicates the uniqueness of one’s beliefs.

Source: Classical Concert Reviews

The First Revolution, the revolt against the self-explanatory nature of paradisiacal objects, was, unfortunately, a success. And here we are now, fists clenched, never letting go. It’s not by accident that even the most religious gesture (the positioning of the hands in prayer) is itself a form of enclosure, of placing one’s fingers together (sometimes even knotting them together) in a way that’s anything but paradisiacal. In prayer, we ask for what’s been taken away from us. We ask, in fact, for the return of the identity between objects and signs.

To re-inhabit the Tower of Babel or, better still, the earlier glory of the world without signs, would be a form of ecstasy for us as a species.

What if

I’m fully aware of what this would mean, what this return to Paradise would entail. It would mean our definitive erasure of the arts, of sciences, of everything that makes humankind great. In order to return to Paradise we would have to forget all the things we have been admiring ever since we started making. Homo faber, man the maker, is what we have become when we lost Paradise. And as homo faber we started admiring our own creations. But this admiration is really admiration of ourselves. Of what we have been capable of. Of what we have created by ourselves ever since God rejected us from the kingdom of Everything.

Without our Fall there would have been no poetry. There would have been no chronicles, no epics, no romances, no novels. There would have been no painting, no music, no sculpture, no dance. There would have been no theories of the atoms, no arithmetic, no geometry, no invention of flying objects. There would have been no folklore and no telling of heroic deeds. There would have been no heroes, really, because they wouldn’t have been necessary. There would have been no history!

Without the Fall there would have been no wars and no lethal epidemics, no fear of death, no betrayals, no jealousy, no stupidity, no drunkenness, no vain glory, no starvation, no social injustice.

Stop. Rewind.

For a better understanding of what is good and what is bad in our life as a species, let’s list the latter part again. Without the Fall there would have been no…

• wars (the source of the Iliad and the Odyssey)
• lethal epidemics (the source of the Decameron)
• fear of death (the source of the Divine Comedy)
• betrayals (the source of almost all Shakespearian tragedies)
• jealousy (the source of the entire Arthurian Cycle)
• stupidity (the source of Gargantua and Pantagruel, of comedy and farce)
• drunkenness (the source of everything Francois Villon ever wrote, of everything that Omar Khayyam ever celebrated)
• vain glory (the source of Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina)
• fear of starvation (the source of Crime and Punishment and Knut Hamsun’s The Hunger)
• social injustice (the source of all of Emile Zola and Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

Without our Fall from the grace of the index finger, we would have had no masterpieces. We would have had no writing. No need to “justify the ways of God to man.”

Source: Dreamomania

The index finger, however, is not completely lost to us. It has been preserved by orators, who, in their attempt to persuade, have made pointing the ultimate argument: an appeal to the authority of the divine. Declamation poetry has been doing the same thing by invoking the greater powers of gods and muses, by making them their source of wisdom and truth. But there is little else left in the tip of the index finger to persuade us about. That’s because writing has taken over all other forms of expression. And writing is, of course, the work of a closed fist.

“Oh how unlike the place from whence they fell!”

I’m using this predominantly religious symbolism and I am not even a religious person. Somehow, the thought of writing makes it necessary for me to talk about things non-human, because I feel the need to have some kind of perspective. Some kind of critical distance is what it is.

Without the awareness that writing is a technology, we run the risk of not realizing that writing is not exactly the holder of truth. ‘It’s true because I’ve seen it written’ is an old argument by now. It came about with the advent of inscriptions and it hasn’t lost its force ever since: not even when visual media (painting, photographs, television, the internet) attempted, at various moments, to hijack the realm of signs. ‘It’s true because I’ve seen it written’ is the argument on which the media thrive. But in this little statement one will also find the seeds of how things go from innocent reporting to the roaring thunders of the most villainous ideologies. Tyrannies of all kinds have built their careers on the foundation of this propensity of ours to take things for granted and to grow accustomed to signs.

So having this perspective (which seems irreverent because it is irreverent) is, I think, a necessary measure of self-defence. We love the products of the spirit: the good ones, that is. And we’re so pleased, so excited by this admiration that we turn a blind eye to everything else. But the problem is that the good things originate in the same place where the evil ones are born. And so we need that perspective – we should beg for it. We should be irreverent to the point of self-exclusion. At least so long as to understand that what is human is only part of what is.

Source: The Telegraph

“Someday we must write the history of our own obscurity – manifest the density of our narcissism,” Roland Barthes ones suggested. This is not an impossible project. To materialize it, all we need is honesty and perseverance. Honesty, perseverance, and the ability to declaim, like Milton, that the place we lost when we fell is so unlike the one we have been given.