an aside to the 'book'

an aside to the blog-proper in the name of intellectual discussion.

-written in response to Sarah Perry's fantastic article 'In Praise of Readability' < http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/in-praise-of-readability/ > for The TLS.

The Laudability of Literary Loquacity, “Unreadability” as (un)consciousness

Luke Connolly

“But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions — colour, odour, texture — in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.”

from, Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’ in Studies in the History of the Renaissance

Walter Pater, known for his ebbing Latinate sentences, with clauses unfurled effortlessly one-atop-the-other, is dense, lacks brevity, but has a certain complicated charm. His prose feels “unreadable” at times, but this is because it requires a different vision. How often a reader traces a page, overlooking its content and rather automatically following the shapes of letter, not the intent of these letters’ meaning. There is often the inclination to become lost in a page, processing it in immediate ignorance, following another train of thought outside the world of the book. “Readability” works to eschew this effect, it keeps things moving and feels efficient – something civilisation has strived for, for many years. Impermeable literature will frequently mean a reader will stray back into their own narrative: conscious of what will be cooked for dinner rather than focussing on the verbosities that so beautifully flicker on the page. Its resistance is its strength, however confined to the elite this may feel. It is however, ultimately human and realistic in its rambling.

Mark Twain once said:

“Stick to [simple prose]; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.”

But Mr Twain is missing something. The flowers that adorn simple prose, at times masking what lies literally underneath, but that which can also elucidate complex meaning, or paint images as readily as the mimetic artist, works against the steadfast sterility of plain prose. This approach to prose, despite its simplicity, is not condemned to be basic, or artistically weedy: it often rather works to the opposite effect. Hemingway, Orwell, write with a terse minimalism, pithy and precise and alluringly readable. It flows, it reads and it is inviting. What often goes unsaid is strangely expressive, and Hemingway does this with intellectual acuity, but ‘fluff and flowers’ is how one is to truly experience the subject. One can become joyfully shrouded in its sublimity, left confused but committed to finding the central kernel that lies behind the dexterity of the obtuse.

The human consciousness, the ‘con – science’ of subjective experience, revels in resistance. The rational, reasoned self: simplistic and honest and defined in readable, readily concise prose is hugely reductionist in terms of the subjective. A narrator with remove, objective and without the flowers of authorial interjection, does not represent the real. One does not think from a-to-b in laterality, but rather segways, serendipitously, swaying from literalism to a more abstracted arena. Joyce might take this too far in Finnegan’s Wake, and erects a wall to meaning similar to the wall that one puts around their personal subjectivity. It is so resistant it can leave one rueing purchase. It does however, demonstrate the absolute unreason, unreadable textures of thought. It shows a writer working against what has preceded him, discovering an artistic innovation which questions the meaning of everything: of the language that is central is life, interaction and communication.  

Arduous by nature and conceited by design, the sustained stylistic textures of “unreadable” prose often has no narrative, or juiciness of determined plot. It hangs, as Pater says, as a collection of impressions, ‘the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind’ and leaves at its base the questioning subject.

Huysmans goes Against the Grain of brevity, instead triumphantly traversing the delicate delicacy of the aesthetic eye, descriptive to such a level that one must become lost in his words to enjoy them. Taste is one of the few shared characteristics in all, differing though it may be. We might be tempted to resist a 300-word description of a jewelled tortoise, finding it essentially verbose, skim-reading it in the search for a big plot finish, or a succinct wrapping-up of plot, but this would negate the journey of consciousness and the individual discovery of meaning, or interpretation of beauty.

Unreadable, complex prose, can too change the world. It can change the world of lateral signification, from the stark strictures of definition to a world of aloof, if slightly lofty, re-presentation. This is not to say that simplistic, readable prose cannot change things: it simply does it in a way to educate, easily. Reading must err into self-teaching; where a truly complex writer does not simply impose meaning but exposes the frailties of the such literalism, rather revealing the beauty of the subjective, highly-individual mind. The ideal life, for the Aesthete like Huysmans, mimics art and art has to in some way mimic perspective. Perspectives differ and this is where the beauty lies in resistant prose, or indeed overly-meta poetry. Post-modernism comes from an abstraction of meaning and its referential form loosens the signified, which we base our external realities around: the perceived real.

Terry Eagleton says:

“Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. 

Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.”

Let us exalt the symbol, and try to resist rationality and definition. Let us keep some secrets. Art thrives not with cursory glances, but detailed study which leads a reader back to themselves. There is a magic in re-interpretation, and resistant ‘unreadability’ gives us this.