I made the mistake of turning on MSNBC this morning. I wouldn’t say I’ve been watching it exactly. It’s more serving as background noise. It’s background noise that involves incessant mentions of Donald Trump. Apparently, the media is engaged in a debate with itself over whether or not Donald Trump is really going to run for president and whether they should or should not take his candidacy seriously. For some reason this called to mind something I read recently, which was a discussion by the author Jonathan Franzen (pdf) on the difference between the Contract and Status theories of meritorious fiction. It’s a complicated subject that boils down to one side who thinks really great fiction should require that the reader be both a genius and willing to work really hard to understand the author, and another side who thinks that the author and reader really ought to respect each other and that intelligibility is kind of a requirement for a book to be considered historically significant.
It’s probably a more interesting debate than I have given it credit for, but not interesting enough that I want to discuss it here. Franzen used the author William Gaddis as his launching point for discussing “hard-to-read” books, and he’s as good of a launching point as you could find. I read Carpenter’s Gothic and found it to be opaque and depressing, but also cleverly crafted. I’ve never attempted any of his longer works. Franzen enjoyed Gaddis’s first book, The Recognitions, but either hated or couldn’t finish the rest of his work. Near the end of his essay, he quotes one of Gaddis’s defenders in order to show how far some people are willing to go to defend an author’s cruelty to his own readers:
I imagine Gaddis’s disciples wagging their fingers at me, telling me I’m another Stupid Reader, explaining that the essays subvert my expectations of clarity, of pleasure, of edification; that I haven’t got the joke yet. They have postmodern apologies for his difficulty, such as this one by Gregory Comnes:
The narrative enactment of this epistemology shows readers how hard work is a necessary precondition for having meaning in narrative by forcing readers to participate actively in the construction of narrative meaning, requiring them to bring information to the text to read what was never written.
They tell me, in other words, that I just need to work a little bit harder. To which I can only reply that there is no headache like the headache you get from working harder on deciphering a text than the author, by all appearances, has worked on assembling it; and that I’m beginning to get that headache.
Which is to say that Gaddis eventually decided to play a joke on his readers by publishing gibberish and expecting them to make the attempt to not only make sense of it but reward him with a reputation for literary genius.
In other words, he was Donald Trump before Donald Trump
