Thoughts fallen by the wayside

First a feeling of dry, itchy tiredness. Too much staring at a screen. The next day even drier, itchier. Too little sleep. And then, waking up with eyelashes glued together with pus explains what’s been going on in the corners of my eyes.

Always when falling ill I begin to contemplate the possibility of never recovering from this particular illness. (Just like falling in love, falling ill always appears unprecedented, new, world-changing.) Now, there is something very romantic in loosing eyesight. Milton dictating out of his blindness. Woolf’s suicide in the face of its approach. And yet how little of what I do every day I could go on doing sightless. The more ironic since I spend much time each day reading and thinking and writing about the sounds of words, their sonic texture as inexpressible counterpoint to meaning. But how cold the consolation of wordsound seems when the ink on the page is gone, blotted out. Can listening replace the pleasures of type? Or the balance of printed and blank space on a page? Can the restlessness of flipping forwards, counting pages that remain to be read be expressed in minutes? Or the joy of finishing the last page just as the train pulls in at the station also be found in the silence at the end of a recording?

Reading is also listening in one’s own head.

It seems unfair that the time it takes to read something has no relation to the time it takes to write it. It is undoubtedly more common to write less than a page a day than it is to read only a page a day. (‘I have been working hard on it all day,’ said  Joyce. ‘Does that mean that you have written a great deal?’ I said. ‘Two sentences,’ said Joyce.) On the other hand, even works that take years to compose may have been conceived in a matter of seconds. (‘No,’ said Joyce. ‘I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence.’) As an act of responsible transparency between author and reader books of fiction could not only be labelled ‘A Novel’ but more along the lines of ‘ A Novel: conceived in three minutes and written in 14 years.’ So that the conscientious reader could adjust the speed of reading accordingly.

But who, today, would have time to read as slowly as something has been written? Or, indeed, to read as quickly as some works have been written? In academic circles slow reading is often seen as a virtue: an act of resistance to the acceleration of information exchange. A luxury. But if slow reading is resistance to how language is being used and abused through modern media, slow reading also responds to a resistance within the text. And it is possible that, given the endlessly growing pile of the written to be read, the aim to read as fast as possible is admirable. More precisely: reading as fast as possible until encountering texts that resist this speed, that slow you down, that make you pause. The speed of reading would then be determined by the resistance offered by the text, which would stand in a direct relation to the worthwhileness of reading it.

How long must a thought be before it may return to its beginning and encounter this beginning as something new? In other words: no longer the same thought.

In literary writing form and content are inextricably related. Part of what the story is about lies in how it is told. Literary theory, which offers a way to methodically think about this inextricable relation, is itself for the most part negligent about its own form. The form is given by academic standards: a sophisticated, measured, fully referenced prose whose only convolutions arise from the avoidance of unfounded statements. This tempered prose is a neutral container to be filled with the content of the work being studied: be it poetry, novels, or drama, the academic prose remains the same, just as a glass remains the same be it filled with water, juice, or milk.

However, sometimes a glass is not a glass. Champagne, for instance, is served in flutes. If the sparkling liquid can transform a tube of glass into a homophone of a musical instrument, is it not also possible that there are sparkling words, works of literature, that, if they are poured into academic prose, have the power to transform it into something musical? Something in which language expands and bursts? (Incidentally, both glass and flutes are blown.)

Or, would a literary theory that lives up to its own name (which seems to not merely promise a theory about literature but also a theory that is literary) begin by contemplating its own form? Paying attention to how the literary work that it takes for its content is formed by the theoretical text that it fills? Part of what the story is about would then lie in how it is read. But one could also conceive of a way of doing theory where the theoretical text does not give form to the literary material in the way that a container shapes the substance that fills it, but where form (theoretical text) and content (literary text) meet in something that is more than its parts. Not a form that is filled with content, but the fulfillment of both form and content at once.

But where does this leave the theorist? No longer interpreter, nor yet author, but someone who thinks with, or through, or against the creations of others. An unlimited generosity: to place one’s thought at the service of another. Or a limitless greed: to appropriate the thoughts of another for lack of innate genis. Those who can’t do theorise. In other words: would anyone who is capable of writing literarily choose to do literary theory?

If ‘story’ is a somewhat rounded word, ‘narrative’ seems to suggest flow: one a ball of yarn the other a river. But the two terms describe essentially the same thing – the same thing, that is, in the sense that even if one cannot step into the same river twice,  there is a sameness of river involved. Therefore the difference between story and narrative is not one of content but one of description. Which is to say, it has to do with what the speaker wants to convey in her naming of a piece of language that narrates a story. Grandmothers tell stories, literary critics investitagate narratives.

Something similar goes for the many names of writing. Much literary criticism has moved its object of study from literature to texts, while university departments of literature, forced to avertise the employability of their graduates, begin to educate writers rather than scholars of literature. The emphasis has shifted from learning methods of reading or gaining insights into the history of literature to becoming a competent user of words – a skill that is the more valued for being transferable into other, more profitable, professions. At the same time writing itself, in the professional marketplace, is often relabelled as content production. Neither a slowly unwinding string of yarn nor a meandering river of words, content is a filler that contributes to the balance of image, advertisement, and text on a webpage and is preferably presented in chunks short enought to travel well between computer, tablet and mobile displays.

But to return to the main thread of this narrative: a degree in language or literature can qualify you to produce content – often for digital media, which implies writing with an eye to how internet search engines generate search results. Unless a webpage can be easily googled, it is virtually non-existent and so there is a burgeoning need of search engine optimisation (SEO) analysts whose primary task is to optimise the relation between content and search ranking. This too a fit career for someone who has learnt the use of words. Thus, if one of the first lessons of literary study is the impossible distinction between form and content, producing content for an algorithm seems a fitting finishing stoke for such an education.