Close writing demands close reading
When I read Faulkner, Roth and Nabokov one of the things that becomes apparent is the huge gap, both intellectual and technical between myself and those authors.
Their vocabulary seems an order of magnitude larger than mine, and I notice the huge variety of words they draw upon in order to capture every nuance of the phenomena they attempt to describe. Where I would describe the impressions that a waist band or tight sweater sleeve left on the skin as a “crease”, Nabokov more precisely calls them “crenellated”1. I had never actively used the latter word and so, in my description, fumbling for a precision that I could not grasp, I simply said “creased” and missed the mark by a wide margin.
Their extensive vocabulary is not a symptom of these writers attempting to sound more intelligent than they are and therefore being overzealous in their use of a thesaurus, as I used to during creative writing classes in high school. They use a given word as though it could only have one correct place at any given time, always “judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.”2 Their vocabulary is a side-effect, instead, of their finesse and mental acuity.
The technical gap between them and lesser writers is by virtue of the depth of their thought and the intricacy of their examinations of the real world. It is wisdom that shines through the page, blinding the reader with a dazzling panoply of insight.
Each sentence has the feel of being engineered but without emerging overwrought. The novel gives the impression of having been painstakingly built with each phrase filed, burnished and manicured to perfection. There is no waste or frivolity. Everything is functional. Nothing is expendable. It all fits as it must be, like the muscles of the heart, each serving a necessary, irreducible purpose.
If these books were written this way –and it’s a challenge to imagine them being scripted any other way– then it becomes clear that they must be read in a similar manner. The infinite number of choices, retractions, deliberations and reversals that went into the choice of a single word are like the statements of an algebraic proof: Superficially simple but even a single query serves to pull back the curtain and reveal a sprawling complex machine demanding extensive effort to grasp and a lifetime to understand.
The superhuman effort expended in writing the perfect chapter, paragraph, sentence, phrase is not perceptible to someone who has never attempted to write a novel. The writer who reaches the end of a beautiful sentence carries on her back the weight of a thousand failures and an intellect that doubts itself. The casual reader never sees this. All he sees is the book, with its pages, and its arbitrary words and hopefully interesting story. But that is only the product, the gem that the author drops onto the ground before she collapses in fatigue at the end of the torrid journey she has taken.
After making a serious attempt to write a novella, I found myself going back to the books I had read with a renewed appreciation and a wide open third eye. I found myself examining each word for minutes at a time and sometimes even for many days after, as my brain struggled to recreate the entire process by which that collection of letters came to be on that page within that context.
This examination is not an idle exercise by any stretch of imagination or definition. The more I do it, the more I realise that it is the only way to read because “the value in reading [is] to be had in the close attention to wording, the expansion of the imagination, and the enhancement of one’s ability to gather meaning where it isn’t explicitly stated.”3
The only way to read is to uncover and then take the same path that the author took, to unravel the sweater and begin afresh with that unformed ball of wool in a bid to reconstruct all that the author did. Some authors, perhaps most, dislike being asked to explain their work. I can appreciate their irritation at that question because the work is its own explanation. The exhausting effort that goes into creating it forces it to be self-contained and complete unto itself. Asking an author to explain their work is the same as dismissing it and admitting that you have neither the time nor the intellectual vigour to read it for yourself. It is akin to asking for the Cliff Notes.
Now, not all writing demands close reading. But we must not concern ourselves with such work. Life is too short to read shoddy literature. And so if we are to occupy ourselves only with the best that humanity has to offer, we must reciprocate by acknowledging that close writing demands close reading, or else we do ourselves a terrible disservice and deny our minds and hearts the riches that come with full attention and a measured pace that allows reflection, absorption and appreciation.
It is the journey the author took that we are after. That is the prize: to be able to journey deep into the writer’s mind and uncover, in full, the mystery of creation.
