Tokyo Godfathers (2003): 4.5/5
“The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
“Reading in no way obliges us to understand.”
—Jacques Lacan
“Build your own pyramids, write your own hieroglyphs.”
—Kendrick Lamar
Phenomenology of Reading
or,
The Experience of Text on the Page
Introduction
This is an essay about reading. Not reading in the deconstructionist sense, or the New Critical sense, or according to any of the various critical traditions that equate ‘reading’ with ‘interpretation’, but rather reading as a physical act: reading as in eyes on the page, moving across the page, following each line of text from left to right and then jumping down and restarting at the next line. Reading as an activity that one performs in a physical space, that is informed by that physical space, and that simultaneously informs how one experiences that physical space. Reading as a process that takes place over time. And then, in a different sense, reading as the experience of text as sound and then meaning, or — sometimes — directly as meaning, or as image, or as personal presence. Reading as experience.
This essay is structured in the following manner. In the first section, I posit a phenomenology of reading fiction in as straightforward a manner as possible, using a numbered step-by-step argument to establish precisely what I mean when I talk about the experience of reading. In the second section, I illustrate this theory with applications to three notable contemporary works: Annie Baker’s “The Aliens,” Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See,” and David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Fest.” In the third section, I discuss the possibilities that this theory offers for understanding fiction as readers and as writers. The fourth section concludes.
Section One: Theory
Logic is a system of relations, not of absolutes. It can only tell you how to appropriately move from argument to argument; it cannot tell you where to start. The differences in the phenomenologies of the Heidegger, Hegel, and Husserl do not speak to an illogic in any of the three philosophers’ dissertations, but only different starting points. They each posit their own respective fundament of consciousness and then follow the course of logic from there, allowing the rules of argumentation to guide their ideas wherever they may rigorously go. As such, this section works from a number of givens that I cannot defend logically, but can only hope corresponds to your experience as well as it does mine.
Individual letters and words are literally visual, but they are not experienced primarily as visual phenomena to a fluent reader. When I see the letter v, my mind comprehends a sound rather than a shape. Yes, there is an obvious shape on the page, a \ paired with a / to form a \/, but when I see this letter on the page I see a sound, so to speak, rather than make note of its shape. This sound then links to a meaning. (Or it links to an endless chain of associations and differences with other words, if you so prefer; what is important here is that it links, not what it links to.) The only alternative to this is that the sight of a word may link directly to a meaning, skipping past its phonic aspect. But in either case, the visual feature of individual words is secondary.
Pages of words are, in contrast to individual words, experienced visually. When I turn to a new page in a book, I will often first glance over the page as a whole, looking at the shape of the paragraphs and the lines without looking at the individual words. I experience neither the meaning of the words nor the sounds of the words, but look only at the contours of the blocks of text: if a page is (1) constituted of a single massive paragraph, if it is (2) broken up into multiple paragraphs or multiple sections by white space breaks between lines (henceforth referred to as ‘white space’), or if it is (3) a page with dialogue and the concomitant dialogue formatting.
On a smaller scale we can also make these distinctions at the level of the individual lines: depending on whether it is (1) a line of text within a block of text, (2) a line of text at the end or beginning of a paragraph or before or after white space, or (3) a line of dialogue, I may note this visually prior to reading the line at hand.These two ways of experiencing text are interdependent and differential. The mental translation of the visual printed word into sound and/or meaning is informed by the formatting of the page or line. For example, I read dialogue differently than I read singular blocks of text. I am more likely to ‘hear’ the words in my mind. And moreover, when my eyes come to a dialogue tag, even if I move my eyes over the words ‘he said’ or ‘she said’, this tag makes no noise in my mind and has no significance whatsoever if I was not previously confused as to who is speaking. (And if I was previously confused, I would have already skipped ahead to the dialogue tag and then re-read the preceding spoken line.) There is no analogous section of a block of unbroken text that my eyes will similarly know to always ‘skip.’
Reading happens in a space that includes other objects of focus than the book in hand. Regardless of whether these other objects are physical or mental, there are always alternatives for attention available to the reader, and as such, the mind will almost always ‘wander’ at one point or another while reading a book. This is not a binary phenomenon; it is not just a question of looking at the page versus looking away. Attention is a spectrum. The reader’s eyes can keep moving over the words and even may keep hearing the text in mind without attempting to make any sense meaning out of the syntagms. (It is important to note the distinction between the reader not making any sense of the text, and not attempting to make any sense of the text; while related, the former is a result of confusion, the latter of attention.)
Attention, in a work of fiction, is determined by an economy of patience, interest, and the labor of making meaning from the sentences. In short, a reader enters a work of fiction with a certain degree of patience: they have not yet been interested by the words themselves but, depending on their expectations and their personality, they are prepared to be patient while they wait for the work to earn their interest. The labor of making meaning — a significant burden for certain ‘difficult’ texts, for others just a matter of the time required to read — then progressively drains the patience of the reader. If patience is rewarded with interesting passages, it can be replenished and then some; but this patience is not rewarded with aspects in the text that interest the reader (aspects we do not have the space to treat fully here, but which include tension, humor, the feeling of real human presence in the work, sonic beauty of the words, intelligible wisdom, novelty, the promise of interest to come, inter alia) then the reader’s attention falters.
The two poles of attention are complete distraction — looking away from the page — and complete immersion. For the purposes of this text, we will consider looking away from the page a singular action, and we will also treat the whole gray area of ‘inattentive reading’ as another singular state of attention, but we will distinguish between different kinds of ‘complete immersion’, depending on the kind of interest that is pulling the reader in: either (1) plot immersion, (2) immersion in the language, voice, or character(s), or (3) immersion in the world or in the ideas. (For example, a murder/mystery can produce the ‘page-turner’ immersion of (1), a work of Nabokov or of Marilynne Robinson might produce immersion (2), whereas Borges’ “Ficciones” may produce immersion (3).) Some books may offer multiple experiences of immersion to the reader, but for the purposes of this essay, we will assume that the reader’s attention can only take one form or another — we present them here as mutually exclusive states. Investigating the overlaps and interactions between different types of immersion is left for future work.
The way that reader’s adjust their reading according to their attention level is, at least in part, determined by the visual construction of the page of text. That is to say, a reader who is starting to zone out will zone out differently depending on how the book is presenting its text to us, and this will in turn determine how the reader experiences the sentences. And on the flip side, if a book has fully captured the reader’s focus, they will experience immersion differently depending on how a given page is shaped. For example, when I am completely caught up in the plot of a story, I might glance forward to the next lines of dialogue, skipping other sections of a page, ‘reading ahead’ in the conversation before I go back and read the description in between. This can be an intentional effect of the writer on the reader, and may increase the experience of verisimilitude of the written speech if the conversation is paced quickly.
The reading experience, as we are treating it in this essay, is therefore a threefold combination of the level of focus of the reader, the format of the page/line, and the words themselves.
In the following sections, we methodically treat the reading experience of each of the four above mentioned formats of the page or line in order (a solid block of text, text broken into paragraphs or by white space, dialogue), and lay out the interactions of each such format on the attention of the reader and the experience of the words themselves.
The ‘block of text’ is our default mode of text, to which all others are compared. There is, by definition, no formatting in such a page, or in an individual line formatted as such. When read linearly, eye moves across such lines of text in short rapid movements (saccades) intermingled with short stops (fixations), as understood by ophthalmologists since the 19th century.
If a reader is already starting to lose their patience, this type of page will not earn any more attention on its own. There is no stopping point in sight, nor any conclusion (or new paragraph) to skip forward and check for items of greater interest. They may take a moment to flip the pages forward, looking for how long they have to go before the next stopping point. On the page itself, though, there are few to no markings for a skimmer to know where to skim, and so if a reader’s attention is starting to wane, they may skip their eyes to different points in the text haphazardly, more or less at random, or they may give up on skimming and simply give in to complete distraction. If they do keep moving their eyes over the page in linear fashion, they may not bother to combine the disparate descriptions into image or the ideas into sense and meaning, especially if such parts do not clearly combine.
If a reader is immersed in the plot, these blocks of text may be read closely, may be skimmed and then read more closely, or they may be just skimmed. Depending on the reader, when they are on tenterhooks, their behavior may be rather similar to that of a reader whose attention is waning; they might flip forward through the pages, looking for hints at plot points to come, or may haphazardly slide their eyes over various lines, more or less at random, trying to move quickly through the lines in order to get to the next plot point more quickly. Too, if they do move their eyes linearly across the page, they may not construct image or meaning out of all of the descriptions or ideas being posited, again because they are in a rush to find release from the plot tension.
If a reader is immersed in the voice/language/character, the formatting of the page may not even register. Immersion in voice/language/character is immersion in the line, and as such, the eyes stay on the line at hand; the text is imbibed slowly, often taking time to appreciate both the sonic content and then significance of the words, and with a particular focus paid to indicators of interiority, in particular indicators of emotional interiority. The sense of personal presence is paramount in an immersive experience of this type — the feeling of intimacy between the reader and a real person within the page, whether that personhood belong to a character, the voice of the piece, or some other aspect — and since such a sense arises from the layered meanings of the line, from the lexis as much as the logos, the how as much as the what, the reader will take time to ‘savor’, so to speak, each line, in order to appreciate the various layers. Although the reader may pause or look up from the page, this not a break in their immersion, but rather an apogee of same: they may be memorizing a line, remembering a similar feeling of their own (as though inside the reader’s mind they are ‘in conversation’ with the personal presence of the page, and in these pauses, ‘speaking back’), or in some other way allowing the text a moment to sink in.
If the reader is immersed in the ideas or world of a piece, this block-of-text formatting likely will not register for them either, as they will similarly be drinking in the significance of the words line-by-line. They will do so in a different manner, however, than that of a reader who is immersed in character/language/voice; they will likely disregard the sonic or rhythmic qualities of the language and experience the words directly as content, as argument or as wisdom. They may also pause and break from their reading if the ideas in the text spark their own ideas, or just to consider some of the content some more, to try and make sense of the meaning or to clarify an internal disagreement with themselves, but this is also different than from a reader immersed in the language and character. There will not be an engagement with another presence but rather a more solitary engagement with the abstraction itself.
This type of engagement may also induce the reader’s attention to stray because the labor required to construct meaning from the words may be relatively heavy, even if the interest is also high. Or — possibly a more present danger — if the text ceases to engage with the interesting idea-content in a meaningful way, this reader may quickly switch back to a disinterested reader, or to a reader who is skimming along looking for new plot points or other expansive ideas.
I would like to digress briefly, here, to clarify precisely what I mean by ‘ideas’. Naturally, there are many brilliant ideas at work within a text that asks for immersion on the basis of character or language, and many of these ideas are possibly just as abstract as, say, a math problem. The facile distinction between thinking and feeling is antiquated and, in my opinion, wrong, and here is no exception. One might argue that fiction is precisely the medium in which abstract ideas are explicitly reunited with the emotional and personal content from which they were never fully divorced, because thinking can never be fully divorced from feeling. However, for the purposes of this essay, in order to delineate between two experiences of ideas that I believe are distinct, I will separate character and language immersion as that which deals with human- and individual-scale ideas, and that which deals with larger-scale abstractions, such as mathematics or sociology. These may be sections within a fictional work that some might designate as ‘not fiction’; all the same, such sections often arise in fictional work, such as in Borges’ work, and so we choose to treat them separately here. It is also true, though, that this reading experience may also describe certain non-fictional reading experiences, in particular that of ‘hard’ non-fiction books.
The ‘broken up’ text is the most common formatting seen in fiction today. It consists of lines of the ‘block’ text described above, but interrupted at one point or another by a paragraph break or a white space break. Because the ‘block’ text has already been treated above, the below sections will focus in particular on a line-level analysis of the breaks themselves, as well as how these lines inform a reader’s engagement with a given page.
At all levels of a reader’s attention, the breaks can give a reader a modicum of structural momentum; the pages will move by relatively quickly, as compared to a block of text, and the reader may enjoy the feeling of moving through the text at a faster clip. In one sense this is simply because there are fewer words to read on a given page, but this may also have to do with the writing that such a format naturally seems to ‘ask’ for; the ends of paragraphs or sections arguably may necessitate, in the service of smooth transitions, a clear ‘emotional point’ or other conclusive (or intentionally inconclusive) ending, and then an obverse propulsive push in the opening line of the section that follows. Such a rhythm can be rewarding to the reader, or at least it can create a sense of movement as they move through the text.
Now, admittedly, paragraph breaks and white space breaks are materially different, in ways that will shift from work to work, depending on the ‘rules’ the particular piece of fiction establishes for itself; in some stories, white space clearly denotes the passage of a certain amount of time, whereas in others it connotes a perspective switch, and so on, whereas paragraphs might connote something entirely different. For the purposes of this analysis, however, the way that they induce the eyes to move across the page is similar, and as such we treat the differences between these two breaks as a difference in degree, rather than as a difference in kind. Future work can and should seek to elaborate the distinction between these two kinds of breaks more rigorously.
If a reader’s attention is already on the wane, the breaks will guide the skimmer’s skimming. The reader’s eyes may move ahead to the end of the paragraph to check if this is all going somewhere, or similarly to the beginning of the next paragraph; and if they see something of interest there, they may either skip ahead, or return to where they were with refreshed patience, knowing that there is something interesting to come. Or a reader may gain a little more patience without looking ahead, just from the knowledge that an end to the section is coming, and will allow the text exactly as much leeway as is required to slog to this next stopping point. If this latter does occur, the text has an opportunity to regain the reader’s attention, as they return to reading the text at least somewhat closely; the reader is induced back into reading, in a way that they never would have if they were already bored and then confronted with a block of unbroken text.
If a reader is immersed in the plot, again, they will behave in a manner strikingly similar to a reader who is not attentively engaged. They may restrain themselves and continue to read the text in a linear order, or they may skip forward in the text, using the paragraph breaks as guideposts in where to skip to, looking for future plot points and other important information. If they find something engaging at the next break, they may too skip ahead, or they might go back and read quickly through the preceding text to get to the coming ‘good part.’ This is the primary difference between the plot-immersed reader and the disengaged reader: if they go back after having already skipped ahead, a plot-immersed reader may give less time or consideration to the sentences leading up to the point they’re reading towards, that they know is coming; whereas the disengaged reader may be relatively open to more nuanced meanings, seeing as they are explicitly looking to become engaged.
If a reader is immersed in either the character/language/voice or the world or ideas, these breaks will come across to readers in a similar enough fashion that we will treat them, in this case, as functionally the same. In both cases, the ends and beginnings of paragraphs or white space breaks may not be noted as soon as the page is turned, but they will be sensed in the peripheral vision of the reader some lines before they are arrived at. The reader, if they were considering taking a moment to pause and savor a line of text, as described in 9(C), will likely keep reading instead all the way until the break, to allow the passage to be completed; then they will take their moment after the break. They may subconsciously or consciously anticipate greater pathos or clarity from the end of passage and, knowing that a break is coming, they might move faster through the sentences, paying slightly less attention to the lower layers — the sonic elements, or the confusing elements, or others — in order to arrive at the complete effect that they sense is coming. A break can also be a signal for such an immersed reader that this is a good time to go back and re-read parts of the previous section.
The ‘dialogue’ mode of text is the most idiosyncratic of the three modes treated in this essay, and the farthest from our ‘default’ mode of uninterrupted lines of text. If anything, it’s closest to the broken-up format of paragraph and white space breaks, but really it’s best understood as an entirely different language game than the other two, with its own rules, its own style of being read, and its own patterns of interaction with the reader’s attention and with its component words. It asks to be understood differently. One may posit that this has roots in many children’s first engagements with fiction: when parents read storybooks to their children, one of the primary aspects that children notice (and love) is the performance of dialogue, when their parents ‘do the voices’. If the parent’s reading voice is the model for the silent reading voice that ‘speaks’ in our minds when we read words ‘aloud’ to ourselves, then the parent’s pattern of ‘doing voices’ is the model for the reader’s engagement with dialogic text. As such, the modern reader understands from the very first that these sections are to be read in a fundamentally different manner than that of non-dialogue sections, and treats them accordingly. Notably, the default for dialogue sections is to be read for layers of persona and sonic content of the words, and the exception is for such lines to be read through directly to their meaning, in a reversal of the normal order for descriptive/narrative text. And by extension, dialogue sections give descriptive passages around them the feeling that they, too, are happening with the realtime of the diegetic world, and thus can allow descriptions to embody silence and pause.
In addition, another noteworthy feature of dialogue sections, already briefly discussed above, is how readers comprehend dialogue tags. As I wrote before, when my eyes come to a dialogue tag, it rarely if ever is noted ‘sonically,’ and often has no immediate significance, since the line of dialogue I’ve just read was already understood to be in the ‘voice’ of the character marked as speaking. If I was confused about the speaker, I would have already skipped ahead to the dialogue tag and then re-read the preceding spoken line; if not, I would essentially skip past the dialogue tag once it arrived, unless it purported to contain more information with a particular verb choice for the speaking or an appositive for the character or action. (Full credit to Professor D’Ambrosio for this insight, shared during one of his classroom lectures of Spring 2017.) This is one of the reasons behind Hemingway’s assertion that ‘said’ should almost always be used; the writer is interrupting an important part of how the eyes flow over dialogue if they choose a word other than said, or if they include an appositive beside the tag, and as such, if they’re going to do it, they should have a damn good reason.
It’s important to note that we are speaking here of dialogue sections within the context of books that are not narrated by spoken dialogue. If a book consists of so much dialogue that dialogue is more a mode of narration than a special case of the text, then the dialogue will register as ‘voice-y-ness’ more than a specific place to read differently. In such cases, the dialogue must be understood as part of the narration itself, and its respective blocks of text or breaks treated as they are for other books above.
For the majority of books, however, the following distinctions apply.
If the reader is disengaged from the text, they will likely move their eyes directly to the dialogue sections, in the same way that they might move their eyes to the ends or beginnings of paragraphs to guide their skimming. However, with respect to dialogue sections, they likely will not be skimming in the same sense as for descriptive paragraphs; they may skip descriptive passages, but they will likely read the lines of dialogue fully in their search for interesting aspects of the work. In contrast to skimming, those that skip ahead to dialogue will still hear the words spoken silently in their minds in some semblance of a character’s voice. Then, if they are interested by what they have heard, they may then use the context to determine who is speaking, and then if they are still interested, they may either go back and fully engage with the descriptive passages in the text, or just keep moving along.
I have one close friend who’s an avid genre reader, who fully admits that he skips all description; if a passage qualifies as description to him, he just moves ahead. Therefore, he engages with every paragraph-style text always ready to skip ahead — but he engages with every line of dialogue without any doubt that he is going to read it fully.If a reader is immersed in the plot, once again, they will likely behave quite similarly to a reader who’s attention is slipping. They will likely skip ahead to the dialogue and read it through, noting the context only enough to determine who is speaking, and then move through to the next dialogue; I myself often have trouble, when I’m completely caught up in the plot of a work, keeping myself from glancing down at the next line of dialogue, especially if it’s on the same page. They may then come back and read through the writing before and around the lines of dialogue, but, as before, they will likely engage to a possibly lesser extent than the inattentive reader, since they know what they are looking for and they know that this isn’t it.
(This is, of course, assuming that the dialogue is moving the plot forward; but if a reader is immersed in the plot, we must assume that these pages contain gripping plot, and therefore it’s not too much of a stretch to presume that said plot also shows up in the lines of dialogue; and even if they don’t, it’s the expectation of the reader that matters most, here.)
It’s interesting to note that the plot-focused reader may, in fact, experience the dialogue in a more ‘realistic’ fashion when skipping through the text to read the whole conversation in their mind without stalling on the descriptive sections; in terms of the verisimilitude of the speech pacing, reading dialogue in such a way may resemble the ‘true speech’ that is being represented more closely than a more measured reading. Although this varies, of course, on a case-by-case basis.If a reader is immersed in the character/voice/language, the appearance of lines of dialogue are a much less significant affair than for the readers above. If anything, the dialogue represents a continuation of the closeness and intimacy between the reader and the personae within the pages, rather than a significant break. There are important differences — the voices in the dialogue may be a strong contrast to the voice of the narrator or the narrative, among other things — but the mode of reading, of moving one’s eyes across the page, is broadly quite similar. The assonance and consonance of the words are still being closely tracked, and the sense of personal presence is still being sought after. There is a greater emphasis on the realness of relationships, layered on top of the realness of the individuals, but in this these are just obverse sides of the same coin, and the same approach to reading the words.
If a reader is immersed in the ideas or in the world, dialogue will similarly not represent a particularly strong break, although in the opposite sense as above — while there will still be continuity between the narrative and the dialogue sections, the idea- or world-focused reader will not continue reading the narrative like dialogue, but may instead continue reading the dialogue like narrative. They will pay reduced attention to the individuations and characterizations and simply seek out more ideas and wisdom from the character’s mouths that can contribute to the abstractions that this reader is so entranced by. This may be abetted by certain texts’ treatment of dialogue and character as embodiments of certain idea-content within the texts, rather than as full human people, or maybe sought after by the reader over the protestations, so to speak, of the rich and fully-fleshed-out dialogue and characters.
This is obviously a grossly oversimplified notion of the reading experience, divvied up according to somewhat necessarily arbitrary lines. More work needs to be done to investigate other ways of dividing the reading experience — perhaps along a spectrum of narrative distance, rather than my own formatting-based delineation of text, which could more richly address the feeling of ‘being in the same room as the characters’ that dialogue and scene often (but not always) affords us, versus the sense of ‘talking about characters who are in the other room’ that often arises from summary. In order to keep our focus rigorously on the physical fact of the page itself, I’ve chosen to only look at truly physical features of the formatting, but other separations may prove fruitful for later work. For now, though, the above analysis will have to serve. In the next section, we will attempt to leverage this theory to better understand the different reading experiences of three well-known contemporary works, from the oft-broken-up narrative of “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr, to the famously blocky “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace, to the extraordinary modern play by Annie Baker, “The Aliens.”
Section Two: Application
Anthony Doerr — Many Breaks
One of the most immediately apparent aspects of Anthony Doerr’s masterwork, “All the Light We Cannot See,” is that the book is made up of a great number of very short chapters. As soon as you open the book to the first page, a very short chapter on leaflets greets you, with text only covering one-half of the page in the paperback version; then, on the second page, another half-page section on bombers; and then the third page is finally covered with text, but the fourth is again only half-covered as the third chapter ends after just a page and a half. The entire book is constructed like this. Although certain chapters extend considerably longer, the vast majority are just a few pages, rarely more than five.
As we suspect already from the above analysis, this structure of the text informs the reading experience in many important ways. One of the ways that people often describe “All the Light We Cannot See” is that the book is fast, and in particular that it is hard to put down. This format is instrumental in creating the ‘hard to put down’ quality of this book; readers always enjoy the satisfaction of finishing another wonderful section, and the possibility of going on and reading just one more similarly rewarding section, when it’s only a few pages more, is hard to say ‘no’ to. The reader is constantly aware that another section is coming, and moreover that another section ending is coming, and they anticipate the intimacy and pathos that comes from a satisfying section end, and this gives the book a marvelous momentum as the reader turns the pages faster and faster. Naturally, this is not just a phenomenon of the formatting; the writing itself is superb, and the characters vivid and entrancing. But at the same time, I posit that the formatting is a large part of this ‘can’t-put-it-down’ experience. The book’s plot is not particularly gripping in the way that other ‘can’t-put-it-down’ books are; if anything, it takes its time bringing the characters together and the plot to a head. And moreover, the book’s page-turner appeal was not indexed, in my reading, to the plot tension. It was this sense of another crystal of perfect prose and insight and closeness was just in the next couple pages. Kurt Vonnegut’s prose in “Slaughterhouse Five” (among other works of his) has a similar appeal to me, to a certain extent, with his many white space breaks, as does Jenny Offill’s writing in “Department of Speculation.” Both of them work without the page-breaks that Doerr uses, but have a similar construction of many small white-space breaks.
It’s possible — likely, even — that I’m conflating correlation with causation in this analysis, where the constant drip of rewards in the prose comes first, and then the authors decide to format the text with myriad breaks after the fact. But in my experience of the text, the format was still important to that experience. It was necessary to give these glittering pieces enough room to each individually shine.
David Foster Wallace — Blocks in Blocks
Most people I’ve spoken to who’ve started David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” and then given up on it have generally stopped reading around page 200. Granted, this may be a fluke of the people I talk to about this book, but it’s been strikingly consistent among the different folks with whom I’ve discussed the leaving the book behind — just about two hundred pages in, they lost their patience with the project, and they put the book down. In some ways, this can be seen as a credit to the work; two hundred pages, especially of those large-paper small-type pages, is a considerable amount of text. But in the context of the book’s 1100 pages, it doesn’t seem like very far at all. Which is, of course, a large part of why some people give up on it — they’re not even close enough to see the end in sight.
Part of this is also how the pages of “Infinite Jest” present themselves to the reader. There are so very many massive blocks of text in this book. And even worse, these blocks of texts are seeded with a number of footnotes that themselves contain, more often than not, similarly massive blocks of text, distancing the reader even further from any sense that a break is coming, that there is any crystallization-into-a-section-ending approaching soon. Yes, these blocks are often rewarding, yes, there’s some of the best writing in the world in these pages, yes, there’s excellent characterization and stunning insights and breathtaking accuracy, but there’s also a sense, a sense that builds over the first 200 pages, that the book doesn’t have a very clear focus. The book starts with a true bang, with an extraordinary propulsion of character and language and real, present plot tension, but then the plot tension proceeds to evaporate over a series of large, meandering descriptions amongst an over-peopled cast of characters; and for many readers, when they reach page 200 with no real sense of where this book is going except that it’ll be going there for 900 more pages, it’s just not enough to convince them to keep their attention on the book, let alone the text itself. And of course, they’re not wrong — the book continues to avoid meaningful plot and arc for the remainder of its text.
As before, my analysis is very open to the critique that I’m getting the order wrong; first came the writing with its meandering nature, and the blocks of text are the symptom rather than the cause. I concur that this is possible, but again, as a reader, the experience of large blocks of text on the page compounds the effect. And additionally one might wonder what “Infinite Jest” would look like if it were published in multiple books that allowed for spacier formatting, or — more radically — if it had been written with smaller sections, so that the author felt more compelled to give the reader more frequent satisfactions to keep them more consistently engaged.
At the same time, though, in some ways the whole point of “Infinite Jest” is that there’s nothing like plot or tension or whodunnit pulling you in, and this is therefore embodied, one could argue, by heavy use of large blocks of text. The kind of reader, and the kind of reading, that “Infinite Jest” demands is the reader who will move through large blocks of text without looking for any ‘ah’ or ‘ah-hah!’ moments, but will instead release the book from their prior expectations for a bread-crumb-trail of plot or pathos rewards to keep them reading, and will allow to will flow through the blocks of text for as long as they go, dipping down into another block of text when necessary, for the enjoyment of the dip; who will experience the text as it asks to be experienced: as a deep, considered, and profound meditation on culture and personhood and how to be a person, by one of the best writers of the 1990s. As the kind of friend who doesn’t really ever change or do anything especially interesting, but whose friendship has always mattered to you more than you can say, and who’s always around.
Annie Baker — Dialogue as Silence, Silence as Dialogue
I have to admit that I’m cheating a little bit, according to my own rules, by selecting Annie Baker as my example for dialogue. She’s a playwright, not a fiction writer, and while dialogue is not exactly the mode of narration of her plays, neither is it a section among other sections. At the same time, though, I would argue that the experience of dialogue within her plays (when read on the page), read in between stage direction and beneath character tags, is actually quite similar to the experience of dialogue within a work of fiction. And also, Annie Baker is, frankly speaking, one of the most accomplished writers of dialogue working in the English language today, if not one of the best ever. Her plays consist of very little but speaking, and not often speaking about all that much. A typical (and extraordinary) example is “The Aliens,” a 2010 play of hers about a couple of mid-twenties men hanging out back outside a convenience store in Vermont, one of the most powerful portrayals of everyday existence and everyday grief that I have ever encountered, in text or onstage. And moreover, her dialogue is a perfect example for my broader claim about dialogue as writing that demands that the reader recognize the layers beneath and around the words chosen, both in terms of character and in terms of sound; as well as the parts of the page that the eye naturally lands on.
The most remarkable — or at least, the most idiosyncratic — aspect of Annie Baker’s work is generally agreed to be her use of silence. She uses pauses very often in her work, sometimes for as long as 20 seconds, which is an especially long time when you think about sitting in a theater looking at just about nothing at all going on onstage. I could go on about the myriad brilliant effects that this achieves, but for this essay, the important part is that it heightens the reader’s attention to the words when they do come. When reading one of her plays, you don’t actually wait twenty seconds before moving past the pause, but the existence of such a note demands that the reader look as far into each line of text as they can. It’s ironic, because there is absolutely nothing of important being discussed, most of the time; in “The Aliens,” the two protagonists are sometimes just strumming a guitar making up, frankly, terrible songs for their band, The Aliens. But the format of dialogue, and especially the emphasis afforded by the silences, demands a layered read. Then, once we arrive at the second act, one of the characters is announced to have abruptly passed away, and the continued ordinariness and banality and ineffectiveness of speech becomes a source of immense tragedy; again the dialogue does not change appreciably, but with the format of dialogue we know to pay close attention to every word, and the banality and ordinariness itself becomes a source of immense pathos and tragedy. We appreciate simultaneously both the characters’ interiority and how impossible it is for them to communicate their interiority, and especially during those continued drawn-out silences, it all comes together for a truly stunning effect on the stage.
Now, to me, the most apparent aspect of my own paragraph, written above, is that it makes Annie Baker seem somewhat melodramatic, and in a kind of seen-before, tired sort of way; but this, I want to argue, is exactly my point about dialogue. Annie Baker gets away with this kind of story and this kind of effect because everything in her play is dialogue, and it’s such breathtakingly realistic (and often hilarious) and self-effacing dialogue, that she manages to give her characters complete and undeniable reality for us as readers or viewers before she reaches for the sentimental. I truly cannot do it justice in these narrative, paragraph-style passages — she can only achieve it because she uses dialogue to implicitly demand a layered reading without hitting us over the head with an explicit demand for a layered reading. And in this way, she’s written some of the best plays of the 21st century to date.
Section Three: Takeaways
As I’ve alluded to in the above applications, form and content have something of a chicken-and-egg problem, when it comes to the relation of the two in writing. How do you choose a form before you know what shape your section will take? Don’t section breaks arise organically out of the content, according to need, or according to the style of the writer? Or conversely, don’t writers always start with something of a format in mind — be it a section, a paragraph, a chapter, or a line of dialogue? Few writers, I imagine, start a line wondering if it’s spoken dialogue or a sentence that will become a paragraph, especially when they’re already started along a work. But then again, they might not know when they’re writing the end of a section until they start to get close.
I suggest that the use of this analysis does not rely on such a question. It can be used both ways. Many writers find constraints helpful, and if an author is considering how to format their book, this analysis will hopefully give a writer a framework for considering exactly which kinds of constraints they want to give themselves; to help them consider the kind of reading experience their work will be offering if they write a book out of a single uninterrupted block of text, versus if they write a 500-page book out of 1- to 2-page chapters. Or, conversely, it can be helpful in the editing process, when a writer is trying to figure out how to change a text to keep a reader more engaged, reformatting the page to include more section breaks (and then rearranging the text to make this reformatting sensible to the flow, possibly increasing the pacing of the story) — or, another possibility, changing the structure to include more dialogue — may be one way to move in the right direction.
There are also broader insights that apply to either side of the writing process. For example, it’s important for understanding when the reader will actually read information: if you place a surprise at the beginning or end of a paragraph or section, or in dialogue, you may want to be aware that a plot-hungry reader may skip ahead and read this information before finishing the preceding paragraph or section. This could inform your writing of the surrounding sections, or could be an incentive to place surprising information in place where the eye might not naturally glance or skim, in order to preserve the surprise. Or, more significantly, a writer may want to be aware that if they produce so much plot tension in a book that the reader is more concerned with the plot than any other aspect of the work, then the reader may gloss over the deeper intricacies of the work, speeding through the text to achieve release from the tension. Although it’s also important to note that the mutual exclusivity of ‘plot immersion’ and other types of immersion above was particularly specious on my part; all the same, it’s a danger. In some ways, I believe that this analysis reveals that the best kind of immersion is that which combines the appeals of plot with the appeals of character and voice, so that the reader is both desperate to keep reading (and maybe skips their eyes ahead in dialogue sections, in service to the experience of the textual conversation) but is compelled to leave that tension simmering so that they don’t miss out on the other offerings of the piece. But it does make me wonder whether the plotlessness that so many beautiful literary fictional works are accused of isn’t a feature, not a bug — whether the tensionless experience of these texts is important for the savoring of the beauty of the voice and character. And, on the other side of the coin, it’s interesting to note that the most prominent tradition of ‘idea fiction’ in American letters is also the most closely married to the obligations of traditional plot arcs: science fiction. It may be that the communication of relatively dry ideas is best couched within driving plot tension, to keep the reader invested in the story despite the relatively taxing demands being made upon them to consider the abstractions obviously at work in the text. Or it may be that ideas, like plot, are not necessarily reduced by a less attentive read, as long as the main points are understood, and so both may appeal to a readership looking for more ‘big-picture’ takeaways from a book and less concerned with effects that can only manifest at the sentence level.
Finally, this work also suggests a possible basis for measured experimentation with the formatting of fiction. When experimenting with different formats, thinking about how they affect the reader’s experience of the page is one way to think about what your experimentation will achieve, and also what it will lose. I recall a student story last semester in Ethan Canin’s “50-Year Story” Seminar which was written with white space breaks that came after every 1-3 sentences; the effect was that of a remarkably even and almost deadpan read, with the reader’s expectation of ‘meaningful’ conclusions both flattened and spread across each line, sometimes to wonderful effect, but sometimes in a confusing manner, as the reader no longer had any guide as to which collections of ten or more lines should constitute a larger unit of meaning. My analysis can help us anticipate such effects prior to or outside of the workshop, and help us articulate what’s happening in either case.
Section Four: Conclusion
Writing is a solitary exercise. There is an assumed audience to a writer’s ‘performance’ on the page, but this audience is specifically never perceived, by the writer, in their moment as an audience member. As such, it can be easy to forget or lose track of exactly what that audience member’s experience of one’s writing is, in the moment when the writing is experienced. It’s easy for a writer to forget just what it’s like for a reader to come across their page with no idea who they are, with no idea what the story is, with only the words on the page — and their shape on the page — to guide them. But it’s one of the most important considerations all the same. Writers need to know who their audience is, so they know which kind of attention they’re asking for; and then they need to know how to maintain this right kind of attention throughout the piece. And on a page-by-page basis, writers similarly need to appreciate exactly how their formatting choices are affecting each different kind of reader’s experience, so that they can, again, achieve the maximal possible effects. Reading is not something that happens just in the abstract, to an idea of a readership; reading is something that real people do in a real space, moving real eyes across a real page. The good writer can never afford to forget that. They may be alone, but their writing is not.
