Chiasm (Ian Davis)

So. In responding to this prompt I find myself turning again toward old thoughts. I will lay them out here in hope of setting them in some semblance of order, and, of course, in hope of communicating them.

I want to rephrase these notions of the seduction effect and the experience effect, in the hope of deepening them. They sound a little cheap, like tricks a text can turn on a hostile high schooler. I mean I know we’re not trying to give a thorough phenomenological account of what it is to read a literary text. I don’t want to do that. I couldn’t do that if I tried. What I want to do is talk about the effect literature has on me. Perhaps all this really is is a snobbish attempt to make these notions sound more beautiful in my head. If I am only repeating things everyone has already thought about (as the insecure part of me is nervously informing me that I am), forgive me. And if I get a bit taken away with it all, forgive me that too. Listen, just forgive me any trespasses I happen to make.

I have come to think that much of the joy of reading literature is in the series of syntheses a text allows a reader to make, in the sensation of harmonious beauty that arises from those syntheses. Synthesis is the fundament of reading, of language: the initial movement of reading is that in which the signifier is combined with the reader’s sense of what is signified, those combinations are collected, and ‘sense’ is made. After or along with this initial movement one searches for other threads to interweave with this sense: the connotations of the words, their rhythms, their sounds, recurrent words, phrases, ideas, images, metaphors, etc. I would argue even that the most jarring notes add only to the sense of synthesis and combination, that the dominant term in the “harmony”/“discord” binary is “harmony” (though I imagine that any really serious argument over such a thing would quickly exceed my reach). Each reader, solitary since birth, finds different threads, and each word reverberates in her differently than it does in everyone else. The reader brings her own warp of emotion and meaning to the weft of the text. There is a powerful sense of beauty that springs up in one as syntheses accumulate and the textile thickens and spreads. This much seems clear. It begins to seem trite, even. But true, I think.

Let me rephrase that. In searching inside of herself for the strings, the reader is caught up in a strange movement between the abstract and the particular. How do I say this? I must return to Proust. She pulls a word inside of herself and rummages around for things to match with it. Each of those things, those images, so to speak, is self-made, an old sensory experience that was once transformed by the mind into an abstraction in order for the mind to comprehend and remember it (this last sentence is all Proust's idea; I don't have a copy of la recherche on me at present and can't properly annotate it). Have I said that clearly? We do not remember the past, only those things which we have extracted, abstracted, from it (Proust as well). But literature works in particulars, in characters, events, physical descriptions, etc. The reader must take those particulars into herself, abstract them, take them and interweave them with her memory. And this interweaving sometimes resonates. It resonates along with the plethora of sensory experiences that always accompanies us in this world. “A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it” (Proust again).

The difference mentioned in the prompt seems to me to be this: most literature works in particulars, and most philosophical writings work in the abstract, only delving into particulars for examples or counter-examples of those abstractions. It is difficult and tiring to work so much in that sort of abstraction. Particulars, for myself and for the notion which I have in my head of the common reader, have more emotional power than abstractions. We can more easily turn them into mirrors in which we can see ourselves.

I have used too many words to say this.

I haven't really said anything here. Perhaps a little, but this telling of it is empty, hot air. What more is there? The infusion of emotion into a text is something, but it would be folly for me to try to tell it. The holding of the book in one's hands is something, but that's all that can be said about it unless one is a poet and not an undergraduate student writing in the margins. There's more. There's more but I don't know what it is. Oh no, oh well.