Hands down, this text was one of the most difficult readings of my entire life. I thought that Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment was tough to get through. This was worse. (But in a good way).
I am not saying that I didn’t like reading this piece. It was very interesting, but very intense and long. By the time I finished, I wanted to take my computer screen, close it, and never open it again. Or gouge my eyes out because they hurt from reading all that the tiny white type. I digress though.
Like many, when I hear the word “novel,” I imagine the mass-produced, “must-have read of the summer” or people dressed in costumes lining up to read the newest book by the most recently popular author. But these things aren’t new. This reading reminded me that novel is something much more than that. This semester, I am taking English 504, which is an 18th century literature class on the development of the novel. One key thing that I’ve taken away from that class is that when the novel was first being written, it was something completely different than anything that had been written before. The novel was novel. These were long stories with meaning and depth, character development, and an entertaining quality. They were new for its time. I believe that one of the main reasons the novel has survived is because of the combination of meaning behind the text, as many of these 18th century works were written with moral principles and instructional intentions in mind. They became sensational because of the new format they were presented in; they have lasted because of the meaning that the author has placed behind the words.
"…readers expect, and search for, the identification of an author in a text at least in part as a means to assist them in their own sense of differentiation and establishment of a sense of self. … If everything embodied in a text is so novel, so new, as to be alien to and entirely external to a reader's experience then that text will likely remain opaque and difficult to engage. Readers will be unable to differentiate the author in such manner that they are able to internalise the authorial voice and establish the required internal dynamic where meaning, and differentiation of self, can arise."
In this quote from the text, Biggs is explaining exactly why there are some written works that stick around, and some that do not last beyond being scribbled in an author’s notebook: It’s all in the meaning behind the words.
When people read a text, they automatically search for meaning behind those words. This is true for 18th century novels, for experimental poetry, Shakespeare’s sonnets Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and even that must-read-summer-novel. In the self-generated texts of the piece we read, there is a lack of the identification of the author, and so there is a lack of identification with the texts. Sure, the grammar Nazi in me smiles when reading these self-generated texts, because I could sit down and dissect all the sentences for you- subject, conjugated verb, object. Grammatically, the texts are readable, yet they lack that meaning and depth behind them that can only come from the mind of an author. The words that are placed together are foreign (despite being able to be read), and so as a reader I cannot understand them. The concept of the self-generated text is so new and so different that, like Biggs said, I “cannot engage”.
In looking at experimental texts this semester, from the concrete poetry in our very own 328 to the 18th century novel in my 504, all these texts have the authorship and the meaning behind them. Sure, at first, the concrete poetry was tough to get. But in the end I could grasp a meaning behind it. Whether the meaning I understood was the same one that the author intended, I’m not sure. But the point is that I understood something. The same is true for my own work. As an author, it is my responsibility to produce things that others can understand. If I don’t do that, and I’m just trying to do something new and innovative, I’ve lost the point.
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