Problems in Difficult Art and Difficult Music Part II
This is my meager stab at a follow-up to my post last week about difficult art and difficult music.
My daughter Kira and I were hanging out last night, doing what has become our post Christmas feast ritual: working and playing on our laptops. At one point she laughed out loud, which is her way of motioning for me to come over and read what she'd found. She shared this cartoon from the very smart web-comic Cat and Girl.
Notice the text on the scooter's rear in the last panel. When I read this, I realized that Dorothy (the author of Cat and Girl) had given me a crucial piece to the difficult art problem I'm wrestling with. Though she's careful not to explicitly state it, the artist could be accused of suggesting that Pynchon's work is interactive. It's certainly the case that my experience of reading Thomas Pynchon's work is one of interactivity, not unlike what I've experienced at the best concerts I've attended. Just as music can lead the audience and the musicians into a space in which they're negotiating and, in a sense, co-creating their experience of the performance, there's a sense in which writing can do the same thing, despite the fact that the writer may have written the words days, weeks, months, or even years earlier.
Now understand that I don't mean to say that the writer experiences this interactivity directly, in real time, as the reader reads their writing. Not at all (though I don't discount the possibility of it). I do believe, however, that certain writers are able to create texts that encourage readers to interact with the texts in ways in which the allow the reader to co-create their experience of the text, Under such a theory of reading, the writer is no longer strictly "responsible" for the reader's experience (as some very naive theories of reader response theory would posit), but the reader takes on a larger responsibility for the experience and becomes aware of the interactivity and that the writer's words are manifesting in the reader's experience. I also believe (and here's the part that ties back to last week's post) that those texts which perform this textual interactivity most reliably tend to play with signification in ways that defer--rather than gratify--our attempts at ascribing meaning to them. They resonate with plural meanings and in doing so move the reader into a space in which resonance with the reader's lived experience in the present moment is possible, though not guaranteed.
As I've noted elsewhere, Pynchon's novels, especially V and Gravity's Rainbow, have been an extremely important books for me, and this is so precisely because they were able to enact this interactivity and that I was able to experience them (in some sense) as texts that were manifesting in my world as I was reading them.
Understand, that I don't think this type of reading is likely to occur with every reader who comes along. On the contrary, my first reading of Gravity's Rainbow was a fairly typical, even pedestrian, experience. I enjoyed it--enough that I ended up rereading it less than a year after first completing it--but it didn't jolt me into the interactive space I'm describing.
I'm going to end this post with an assertion that attempts to answer some of the questions I posed in my first post on this topic: Texts that frustrate our attempts at making meaning can jar us into states of mind that, under certain conditions, bring the texts to life for the reader. I also assert that some writers consciously fashion their texts to achieve this, though not to the exclusion of other, more traditional ends.
I'm aware that this is a very risky and infinitely problematic assertion to make and that it posits an non-rationalist framework and aesthetic. So be it.
To what end this experience? If I'm right about this, why do these writers bother?