I returned to the WROTE Podcast recently for a 2-part
discussion of reading and writing queerly with Dena Hankins, SA "Baz" Collins, and moderator Vance Bastian. (Previously, I did
a solo conversation there.)
The strength of the discussion is also what makes it sometimes awkward and even contentious: we all have utterly different tastes, touchstones, and experiences. I'm not a natural fit for such a conversation, as I don't think of myself as a "consumer of queer content", but rather as a reader/writer who sometimes reads/writes queer stuff. I hardly ever seek out a book
only because it's about a queer topic or has queer characters, and I only ever set out to write such a thing if I'm writing for a specifically queer market, which rarely happens.
As I say in the program, if a book's not trying to do something new and different, and if it's not
aesthetically interesting to me, I'm unlikely to read it. Why bother? I've got more books than I have time to read already, and I'd rather read an innovative and thought-provoking hetero book than a familiar, conventional queer book.
Barthes gets at this in
The Pleasure of the Text, presenting a fairly familiar Modernist case, one that describes well my own textual pleasures and (very occasional) moments of bliss:
The New is not a fashion, it is a value, the basis of all criticism.... There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it: every old language becomes old once it is repeated. Now, encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology. Confronting it, the New is bliss (Freud: "In the adult, novelty always constitutes the condition for orgasm").
...The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions — these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning. [trans. by Richard Miller]
This is not, of course, what most readers want, and what is New to one is not New to another. My pleasure is your boredom, my bliss your pain. Nonetheless, I wish more queer writers today were more interested in finding new forms and shapes and styles. I mention in one of the episodes Dale Peck's new anthology,
The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction, which is queer in that it is not heteronormative in its selections, putting Dorothy Allison, Robert Glück, and Essex Hemphill alongside Raymond Carver in a way no other anthology I'm aware of has done. What the anthology also does is show that many American queer writers were, once upon a time, interested in a truly wide range of aesthetics. Peck's anthology can only gesture toward those aesthetics, since it has to fit many different purposes between two covers, but it made me think about the ways that queer artists have for so long been the ones to embrace vanguards. (Queer Modernism is often the most interesting Modernism, for instance.) To be queer is to be outside the norm, and thus to be outside the norm's language and forms.
I ended the first episode with a point that right now seems to me the most important one: If we want to identify as a queer community (I'm not sure I do), and we really want to do something for the queer world generally, we should be advocating for queer writers from outside the U.S. and other relatively safe, progressive places. The two books I mentioned in the last moments as ones I'd be reading if I had time to read stuff other than things for my PhD are
Under the Udala Trees by
Chinelo Okparanta and
Guapa by
Saleem Haddad. There are likely many others I don't know about.
If there is a value in queer reading communities, then those communities must not replicate the
insularity of most American readers. If you want to be a politically and socially intentional reader, as describing yourself as a
queer reader (or
consumer of queer content) suggests you do, then your political and social intentions as a reader can't begin and end with you staring at a mirror.
Finally, I got into a bit of a disagreement with Baz Collins about Hanya Yanagihara's
A Little Life, and for my perspective on that book,
my initial post about it remains my most substantial declaration of love.
Recently I’ve been attending play readings for a small theatre company, where actors together with the director and producer read through plays to judge if they might be suitable for production.
Since most of the actors are coming to the plays ‘blind’, feeling their way into the roles as they go along without any idea how their character or the story will turn out, they are a bit like novel readers turning the pages to see what happens next. It’s really interesting – and awe-inspiring – to see how they manage to inhabit their parts with no preparation whatsoever.
What really strikes me, though, is the attitude of actor, director and producer alike to the text. It is one of appropriation. They are all thinking: what can I do with this? How can I bring it to life? Can I make it rewarding for me to engage with, and for an audience to watch?
The script is treated as a dynamic thing, a map from which the theatre company will create their own journey. The director tells me her first action when she’s interested in a play is to cross out all the stage directions. She and the actors look at the words of the script, of course, but just as much they look at the gaps between the words, and explore how they can fill them.
Can and should readers apply the same process to novels? These days everything is supposed to be participatory, and so novels come with author interviews, notes for book groups and lesson plans. Readers engage with the text through personal contact with the writer, through reviewing, writing fanfiction, dressing up as the characters…
Ever since Roland Barthes, we have known that the author is dead, and that every written story is created anew in the mind of every reader. But I sometimes feel that while we as writers are supposed to be engaging with our readers more than ever, opportunities for those readers to really interact with a text are often being limited.
How many of you writers out there have been told to remove words that readers might not know, spell out every step of the plot, simplify your sentences, explain in exhaustive detail your characters’ motives and internal thoughts? I know that the editorial or publishing motive behind this is to make books accessible to a wide audience, and reading in general terms more participatory. That’s an important motive. But I feel that by not demanding real input from our readers, we also deny them any power, and half the enjoyment.
I love books that make me do the work of an actor or a director. It’s a question of trust. Every playwright must start from a position of trust, that actors and directors are able and willing to take the words and make them into something – running the risk of course that the ensuing production will be awful, but isn’t risk inherent in any meaningful relationship? As a reader I want to be trusted to fill in gaps between the words, take the implications and run with them, guess, infer, appropriate: bring the story to life. As a novelist I want to trust my readers the same way.
The word ‘work’ makes this sound pretty unappealing (see Nicola Morgan’s recent post on ‘readaxation’ for contrast). But everyone really has a lot of fun at those play readings. Even the simplest, least demanding book requires work from the reader, to transform black-and-white symbols on a page into places, situations, people and ideas in the imagination. That work of transformation is the magic of reading. It’s how a book becomes a part of you.
It’s a truism that the more you put into something, the more you get out. From a reader’s point of view, I think its a truism worth repeating. What do you think, writers and readers?
This was one crazy Beth day (there's a picture of me, being crazy). Somewhere in the middle of it (between writing a chapter of the novel, rushing, with my husband, to procure the various food stuffs that our soon-to-be-home-for-a-week son will no doubt yearn for, and finishing up the second draft of a client project), I pulled a substantial portion of my personal library to the floor in search of a Roland Barthes book—
Camera Lucida. I still can't find it. I might just have to buy another copy.
I did, however, discover (the book tumbling out onto the floor)
A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel. When it fell, it fell open to the passage below. It seemed a sign. I share it:
We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.
My latest Strange Horizons column has been posted, this time a celebration of Fritz Leiber's centennary.
I mentioned last week that I needed to come up with a title for my
Strange Horizons columns. Through much of last week I was fighting off the worst illness I've had in years, so perhaps the title is simply the product of fever, but nonetheless, now in a less fevered state, I like it:
Lexias. It keeps to the pattern of the other
columnists (Scores, Diffractions, Intertitles, etc.) in being a single, plural word. And it seems mostly accurate to my project, if you think of the word as Roland Barthes used it in
S/Z: "a series of brief, contiguous fragments ... units of reading" (Richard Miller's translation). (For more on Barthes, by the way,
this is an interesting site.)
But for my purposes, "lexias" is fun, too, because it is the term Samuel R. Delany picked up (from Barthes) for
The American Shore, which can be described as a book-length study of Thomas Disch's "Angouleme" (as
S/Z can be described as a book-length study of Balzac's "Sarrasine" -- and I say "can be described as" because to say either book
is that seems to me too reductive -- each book
is an awful lot of things).
Which is not to say that I think I belong in league with Barthes or Delany (ha!), any more than anyone who picks up a term belongs in the same league with anyone who has used it before, but that I like having a title that suggests fragmentation, experimentation, close reading, and realms of both subversive (or subverted) literature and thoughtful science fiction.
what literature is: that I cannot read without pain, without choking on truth.
Quoted by Dwight Garner in
his New York Times review of Roland Barthes' posthumously published
Mourning Diary.
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Although I have a background in theatre (used to work as a wardrobe mistress) I've never really thought about this in the way you have here. Thanks for making me think.
thanks Lynne - I was approaching the readings very much as a prose writer, rather than from a theatre background, and I found the different approaches really interesting.