This is the last post of the current academic year (2023-24), in which I have written relatively few posts (only 39) because I have been writing yet another book (Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction by Men: No Plans for the Future, Liverpool UP) and getting the Spanish translation ready, both for next year. Nothing saps blogging energy like writing a book…
I’m returning to Prof. John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? to further investigate his claim that literature is superior to all other arts both as a pleasure and an instrument to enhance our critical skills. Prof. Carey (it’s funny, but I can’t just refer to him as ‘Carey’) claims that the element that leaves “space for the reader to create” and “empowers” them is “indistinctness.” The reader “must come to some kind of accommodation with the (sic) indistinctness in order to take meaning from the text,” he claims and “For that, the imagination must operate” (213-214). Or co-operate, I would say. Although the reviews of the book mention the concept and discuss it briefly, there does not seem to be any further academic theorization of indistinctness in literature, though I’m not sure this surprises me in view of how odd the notion appears to be at first. Prof. Carey proposes that the more accomplished authors seed their texts with little gaps that call for readerly collaboration, which didn’t make any sense to me until I started thinking, by analogy, of cinema and considering how the best appreciated art-house cinema films do exactly that. They make you collaborate in the construction of meaning and even of aesthetics.
Prof. Carey offers as textual evidence plenty of passages from canonical writers in which the meaning is suggestive but unclear, which requires close reading and interpretation. He suggests that this activity is what makes reading literature so pleasing and fulfilling, as we need to create while we read, and we need to create more the more demanding a text is. This is a very beautiful concept but the problem is that it implies that the writer is playing a game with their readers when, quite often, writers claim that they don’t think much of their readers. On the other hand, if I think of an extreme case of literary ambition and difficulty such as James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and my own adamant refusal to invest time and energy in reading it, then I see Prof. Carey’s point. And the other way round: in the worst texts, the ones in which the writing is appallingly clumsy and flat, the reader’s creative imagination cannot find indistinctness; there is, metaphorically, no meat to sink in our brain hooks and nothing to get out of the text. Please, note that I’m not discussing plot content for, although the experiment has never been done, it is quite possible for the same story to be narrated in bad and good prose, just as the same feelings can result in bad or good poetry. It depends on talent.
I have wondered for many years how we see when we read, coming to no conclusion worth writing down on paper. In my Victorian Literature classes I have shown my students images of fashions, paintings, architecture, means of transport, means of communication, entertainment and a long etcetera, hoping to furnish their minds with elements they might need to understand what they are reading. Even so, this is a largely unexplored area of literary criticism, although there is a strong suspicion that people enjoy reading less and less because the large barrage of audiovisual input is making the exercise of using our imaginations more and more onerous. I saw yesterday on the bus a mother with a screaming two-year-old little girl; I first assumed the toddler was hungry or dirty, but it turned out that she wanted her mother’s smartphone to watch something, I couldn’t tell what. This image, though common, was shocking to me because I realized that there is no way a toy or a book can compete for this little girl’s attention with a screen. She’s already lost for reading, as most people are.
Prof. Carey continues his lesson, with a comment that complicates matters even further:
How we read, and how we give meanings to the indistinctness of what we read, is affected by what we have read in the past. Our past reading becomes part of our imagination, and that is what we read with. Since every reader’s record of reading is different, this means that every reader brings a new imagination to each book or poem. It also means that every reader makes new connections between texts, and puts together, in the course of time, personal networks of association. This is another way in which what we read seems to be our creation. (242)
A consequence of this subjectivity is that we have each “our own literary canon, held together by our preferences” (242). This is, in principle, also how audiovisual consumption works, but the difference is that the image, with its external material existence, is less open to interpretation than literature. If, suppose, I teach Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and select an image of the famous monolith for discussion, this cannot begin with discrepancies about the colour and shape of the object because these qualities are fixed. Of course, we can endlessly debate what the monolith stands for in the context of the film, an indistinctness is one of the key elements in the general critical reception of this film. If, in contrast, we read the passage in which Pip first sees Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, each student (and the teacher!) will come up with a different personal image, suggested by previous readings, having seen any adaptations and their experience of eccentric middle-aged women. The readers less willing to engage with Dickens’s imaginative demands page after page will not enjoy his novel; those of us who find his creative indistinctness enjoyable, just love it.
Prof. Carey’s indistinctness is not limited to description, a vast field today awfully neglected by authors and readers, but to anything transmitted by writing. What he misses, even though he is not at all a literary snob, is that literary writing can fail to engage the readers’ imagination while less ambitious writing can do the trick. In fact, if you consider his argumentation, we should celebrate philosophical prose as the highest literary genre, above poetry, for it is the one most obviously designed to awaken and sharpen our minds.
This leads me to wonder, and to ask my fellow readers, what makes us quit a book, which is the most negative kind of judgement beyond the one-star review. I’ve noticed that I don’t tell myself “I don’t like it” but “I’m getting nothing out of this book” and “I’m not investing more time and energy on this author.” I expect to get pleasure and enrichment out of a book, of any kind, and if I find myself counting the pages left to finish it, I already know that my reading is not working. I’m quite capable of plodding along to the last page if I need to teach the book or write about it, but as a rule I stop reading even after the 50% mark if a book is doing nothing for me. Perhaps the right criteria to judge a book is not the one to five-star review of its content but something along the lines of: 1) I did not finish the book, 2) I finished it but only by making a huge effort, 3) it was not a huge effort to read but I did not get much out of it, 4) I generally loved reading it, and 5) that book was absolutely worth my time and my creative engagement. Any opinions about the content rather than the experience are bound to be debatable.
I asked the person who recommended Collen Hoover to my mother why she had enjoyed that author and the reply was that she is easy to read. No comments on the content of her novels, which are romance. My mother reads for entertainment and there is no need for her to read texts that are too taxing, yet following what she reads (best-selling fiction by national and foreign authors) I find that, in general, avid readers like her are lowering their standards because the market is providing them with low-standard fiction, and not because they demand easier texts to read. Again, I’m not speaking here of content —after all, Jane Austen wrote romance and she is universally venerated as a literary icon. I speak of Prof. Carey’s indistinctness. That this is a problem beyond genre or plot can be seen in my own increasing difficulties to read science fiction, which I have always loved precisely because it challenges me to view the universe from different angles and forces me to imagine all the time. The SF I am trying but failing to read these days no longer does that; it has become clichéd in its prose, its plots and its worldbuilding.
If I don’t feel the author is working hard, I disengage. To compensate, publishers who know their books are not to strong, increase the hype around them hoping for an effect similar to cinema’s first weekend. Yet, after a year at most many new novels have lost their sheen. The more accomplished perdure, whether they are Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy or anything by Paul Auster. But who wants to read the Twilight saga today? And look at the Man Booker prize list, and see how many of the winners and finalists since 2000 you can recognize. I do agree that eating fast food now and then is convenient and that a diet based exclusively on gourmet dishes is too rich, but I have the feeling that fast-food literature is growing, that the gourmet version is disappointing (and as ridiculously overhyped as high cuisine) and that the well-cooked fared that used to be so fulfilling is losing its flavour. Alternatively, this is just the classic problem of aging readers who find it more and more difficult to get their synapses stimulated (or their stomach filled with wholesome food).
If I have made myself clear, and understood Prof. Carey correctly, the better kind if literature has something missing that the reader needs to supply using their creative imagination, whereas the worst type is missing nothing and so the reader has nothing to contribute and enjoy. This is the opposite of what we have been assuming: that the better literature is richer and loaded with gifts, and the worst empty. Prof. Carey fails to be fully convincing in his argumentation because he thinks that only canonical writers are capable of producing the challenging indistinctness he loves as a reader. Yet, being less exquisite in my tastes, I can very well say that many other texts are capable of tickling my readerly bones. The problem comes when you limit yourself to just one type of the less challenging kind of text and cannot see beyond that, or when you refuse to exercise your imagination by reading. How sad!
I’ll stop here, for I have on the table a very appealing novel that wants to play with my imagination and I just can’t resist its call.