Andrew Gallix writes in a Guardian article, In theory: the unread and the unreadable, that most of us have a backlog of difficult books we have not read and feel guilty about. He goes on to describe what happens when we read these difficult books and ends his thought in an apparent paradox: “The literary is what can never be taken as read.” A simple way of explaining the paradox would be to say that literary language resists the function of common language. It does not facilitate communication but resists closure and perhaps even understanding. We are not supposed to get it like we get more pedestrian prose. We are rather supposed to get its ungettability, or whatever is signified thereby.
Difficult literature is rarely difficult or abstract by accident. Everyday language has to twist and bend in grotesque ways to become writing that is unreadable. If your standards are high enough, much of modern literature is not writing at all in comparison, but merely a function of book-making designed to create a product that can be marketed, packaged, shipped and sold as quickly as possible. The artist’s job in the process is closer to that of a typist. And that is fine if you want to sell books, but if you are serious about literature, you know that sales figures are not everything.
Gallix points to another article, Clickthrough Culture and Difficult Literature by David Huntsperger, that looks at our changing reading habits in the age of the Internet. In our clickthrough culture, says Huntsperger, “the goal of writing is to get you from one place to another as effortlessly as possible, so that (let’s be honest here) you can buy something.” As an Internet junkie myself, I am familiar with the way we read online, but after studying and teaching difficult literature for some time I am also aware of the need for serious and thoughtful reading. There really is an actual need for difficult literature that cannot be swept under the rug of efficient communication when efficient communication itself becomes the problem.
When you defend abstract, difficult and frankly unreadable literature, it often sounds grand and idealistic, but we do read it for selfish reasons as well. When I worked as a full-time translator a few years ago, I plowed through manuals, annual reports, computer architecture descriptions, wood chipper repair guides, studies about the state of peat production in Finland and other assorted commercial and functional texts that all taught me one thing: I need Beckett’s novels and the like to wind down after a long day. I feel little guilt for not having read through my own list of unread difficult books. When I get to them, I know they will still be gloriously, beautifully unreadable.
Literary critics and theorists know all this. The wonder-inducing and elusive sublime we often talk about has been seen as an engine of intellectual discovery at least since Longinus. But there is also a neurophysiological reason why we feel the need to read things that were written not to be understood. I know very little about neuroscience, so I will quote a USC professor of neuroscience, Irving Biederman, whom I spotted on Penn and Teller’s television series Bullshit! He made a wonderful observation about UFOs and UFO hunters: “When we’re coming upon some new information, particularly something mysterious, there is a release of opioids that give us intense pleasure. We often call that an adrenaline rush, and that can become the reinforcement that keeps people on the hunt for the secrets of UFOs.” Many readers of difficult literature are also addicted to the unknown and we hunt for it especially when we know for certain that we will fail to find anything conclusive. In this case, failure is rewarding. We may be addicted to fluctuations in our own brain chemistry like UFO hunters, but at least we are honest about it.
Tommi Kakko
Plural Blog 