Writers vs. Readers: The Ultimate Smackdown

I've been thinking lately about difficult writing. That's perhaps a misnomer, actually, because I've really been thinking about difficult reading. Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, the subject of my last post, got this ball of burdensomeness rolling when it came up for discussion in a class of fellow graduate students. There's one key difference between myself and these particular fellow students, though, that I think informs the contentiousness of what is really a pretty vanilla book. They're all writers, in the making-things-up, publishing-for-the-market-that-isn't-interested-in-Frenchmen-redefining-words-all-the-time, has-Random-House-called-yet kind of way. I am not that kind of writer.

This reaction of mine is not meant as an insult. I do not define myself negatively because I find that idea of the writer to be negative. I define myself that way because I do have a degree in writing and don't want to engender any confusion on that front. I define in a reactive way because I haven't yet figured out the positive definition of what and who I am. Frankly, I'm ok with that. It goes along with my distaste for setting goals, but I'll save that discussion for after I read Barbara Ehrenreich on positivism.

Lahiri is ridiculously successful. The Namesake won the Pulitzer, for goodness' sake. But it's not a very complicated book. I enjoyed reading it, but it was breezy and light and didn't evoke strong emotions, particularly not for the characters' sakes. From my last post, it's clear the book did create memorable connections to my own experience. But that's not the same as a book forging whole new paths in my brain. I felt rather that this book merely led me more slowly along paths I've trodden before. My classmates didn't seem to get even that much from it. In the words of one woman, who always offers well-reasoned and insightful comments, "I actively disliked it."

I've been trying ever since that class to make sense of the almost uniform dislike expressed by this group of writers. During the conversation, I defended the book, as did one other student. He and I have similarly comfortable sort-of foreign, sort-of not backgrounds that might account for our attachment to a book about immigrants that focuses on feelings and assumes a stable economic and political situtation. But the more I think about The Namesake, the more I realize that it doesn't really focus on feelings. The text never lets you in, never invites you to share a titillating bit of info or the excitement of a sexual escapade. All that gets glossed over. In reading, I must have inserted all the good stuff from my own experience, and let it mix with the words and actions and characters actually on the page.

The further I get from the experience of reading, the more disenchanted I become with the book. That's usually how I judge: about three weeks later. Because those books that I truly love are the ones whose endings I can't quite remember, but I do remember one character or description or awkward moment or turn of phrase that I have incorporated into my character and ways of speaking and attitudes towards others. With Lahiri, there is nothing to incorporate. Instead, I incorporated myself into the book, and mistook that self for something deeper within the text itself.

Even in acknowledging all this though--that I don't like it as much as I thought and it certainly shouldn't have won the Pulitzer--I feel compelled to defend the book against the primary complaint I heard from my fellow students. It's too accessible. Really? As writers, considering the market, weighing what you want to write against what people want to read, searching for a publisher and devoted followers, how is accessibility necessarily a bad thing? That complaint would have surprised me far less coming from literature students, who slog through difficult writing as a matter of course. (For an example, see Michael McKeon on anything. Anything at all. Just read a paragraph. You'll get the idea.)

Full disclosure: Samuel R. Delany, the sci-fi guy, also makes the following argument, which I was excited to see someone else espouse when I read him.

Difficult writing has its place. Some ideas are intrinsically difficult, and require some verbal jumping-through-hoops and big words to express well enough and clearly enough that they can be understood correctly. Currently, I'm reading Foucault's History of Sexuality, and it's not the most transparent thing. Concomitantly, it's not the most opaque. Rather, Foucault seems to have hit on just the level of difficulty needed to convey his often non-instinctive ideas. If it was too easy, it wouldn't have the same level of insight and nuance. So difficult writing has its place.

But Lahiri isn't trying to take apart the dominate discourse. She's just trying to show us an immigrant family and some of their (admittedly minor) struggles. And if doing so in an accessible fashion gets her books just flying off the shelves of Borders and Whole Foods, then good on 'er. I'm inclined to think that people reading, no matter what, is a good thing. People reading about other cultures than their own, even if the treatment of that culture stays surface-bound, is definitely a good thing. Lahiri hasn't contributed anything to the literary conversation about the immigrant experience and what it means to write as a minority American. She has, however, contributed to the general public's conversation about what it means to be an average American. The Bengali characters Lahiri shows in Boston and New York, celebrating Christmas, dating white people, are now entrenched in her readers' minds. These readers may never have met an Indian-American in real life, but by getting to know Gogol and his family, the Indian-American experience no longer seems so foreign. Lahiri has taken the Other and through her easy and engaging writing style, made it seem not so Other at all.

That's where accessible writing has its place. Not everyone reads at the same level, and that's all fine and well. Maybe I'm in this particular camp on the subject because Mr. P, with whom I share everything else, couldn't give two red hoots for reading. I know that doesn't make him less intelligent or knowledgeable; in fact quite the opposite is true. He knows chemistry and I know criticism. Which one of us uses our brain more deeply and thoroughly and usefully? Impossible to say, but I do know the fact that I read and he doesn't means squat in answering that question.

For Lahiri's readers, then, perhaps reading isn't an intellectual activity. But it can still be an activity that acquaints them with lives they've never seen before. Those lives aren't fully explored in The Namesake, and we're always at a distance from the characters' interiorities, but we have to start somewhere, right? New things are scary, and Lahiri knows just how far she can push the new before it gets too scary.

The writers reading her book know too much. They know how to parse difficult reading, and they are offended by accessible writing that sells. It's an insult to them, who spend their time perfecting their own literary craft. To them I say, remember. Remember that not everyone is like you. Remember that reading is a skill which you have fought for and struggled with and honed into a sharp-edged tool. But you too had to start somewhere. And for millions of readers who bought Lahiri's book, maybe it will be the start of their own struggles. Even if they don't struggle on the same scope as you, their struggles can still be worth having.

Don't Genrify My Neighborhood!

The first books I can remember selecting for myself were cheap paperback versions of Dragonlance and Anne McCaffrey at the BX bookstore in Germany. As far as I recall (and we all know how murkily untrustworthy recollections can be), no one introduced me to them, told me what they were about, clued me in to their subgenre, non-literary status. Perhaps I just liked the pretty covers.

Thus began years of reading science fiction, exhaustively and--for monthlong stretches--exclusively. Sometime in college, I left science fiction behind, with few exceptions. I completely left fantasy and sword-and-sorcery to wither by the wayside. Somehow, the topics of books that had previously engulfed my mind just weren't relevant anymore, to my experiences as a woman, as a college student, as a seeker of meaning and direction for my life. Yet, the critic in me says, Hold up a moment! Science fiction and fantasy treats all those topics/themes/what-have-you's, and more! How can you simply decide it's not relevant?

I'll tell you how, or at least my half-congealed ideas of how. About the time I broke up with sci-fi, I found a new boy(girl)friend. Literature. Let me restate, making sure to emphasize the initial capital: Literature. And Literature was a jealous creature, that didn't want me going out for coffee with my ex. At those moments when I missed the delight with which I discovered new unabashedly nerdy authors, devoured descriptions of demonic meta-computers gone astray, at those moments, I reminded myself (subconsciously, of course) that I had traded all that in for a shiny new ride with reputable bucket seats and a whole host of upstanding folk ready to oo and ahh over it.

Perhaps that metaphor went a bit far. The point is, my interest in reading as something beyond escapism, beyond a hobby came together with my earnest search for a position in the world from which I could feel secure in who I was and what I was doing. And nothing provides a sense of security more easily than the codified institutional label of reputability. Literature is reputable and science ficiton is not. Therefore, since I must read, I cannot imagine not reading, I will read Literature, and it will give me all the social gratification of belonging to an intellectual (and in hindsight, elitist) group, as well as the individual gratification of running my eyes over words on a page, making sense of them, enlarging my knowledge and worldview and understanding of others without leaving my easy chair. I even found one of those 100-Greatest lists, and read through it like it was my job, highlighting with satisfaction every book I finished.

I won't deny still having that highlighting impulse today (the MA Reading List is a constant lure!), but I will claim to better understand that impulse. More importantly, I have consciously chosen to resist it, for reasons that have nothing to do with what's actually on the list and everything to do with what isn't.

You certainly won't find any science fiction on the list, but that's alright with me. I'm not losing sleep over sci-fi's lack of place in the academic canon. It would be oversimplifying to say that sci-fi is a more productive and interesting and lively enterprise because of that lack, but that's generally about half the idea I'm getting at. The other half consists of exploring why sci-fi, as a genre, has been relegated to subpar literary status. All my thoughts on this question have been heavily influenced by Samuel R. Delany's Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics, which I'm currently reading.

The problem with sci-fi's low standings does not result from its particular generic characteristics, but rather from the fact that academics sincerely believe that it has particular generic characteristics. Certainly this is true of other types of books, from the picaresque to the art novel, but something about this belief is different. I agree with Delany's supposition that critics and general readers believe that sci-fi can be wholly circumscribed by its characteristics, and that circumscription constitutes the boundaries of all that defines sci-fi. It's the old problem of demonizing the Other: If we non-nerd kids can build a semantic wall around all that is sci-fi, then we can stand on this side (the right, reputable side) of that wall, and make all our critical pronouncements from solidly socially acceptable ground. Most critical questions being asked of sci-fi assume the presence of the wall as an unassailable--in fact, necessary--condition of sci-fi. But it's not.

Just as poetry borrows from prose, and novels can borrow from epics, and a literary adventure like Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives can be an art novel, a detective story, an interview, a pornographic escapade, sci-fi is not so limited in its topical and stylistic options that it cannot cross over, lend, borrow, and thieve to and from other genres. Something about what sci-fi allows us to do to conventional social mores and rational worldviews creates discomfort that forces a restrictive labeling. In other words, if we can call our discomfort a name, put it at a distance, and compare it unfavorably to things which really aren't that different, but don't make us so uncomfortable, well then, the discomfort just doesn't matter so much anymore.

All this is to say, I'll be reading more sci-fi from here on out. But I won't choose it because it's sci-fi. I'll choose it because I like the author, or I read an interesting review, or someone recommended it to me. Precisely the way I now choose all the Literature I read. And when it comes right down to it, no matter what I choose, I'll be reading a text. A text that require me to be a reader, with all the strategies and elision of meaning and grasps at understanding that that label entails.