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unintelligible canvas is eased by the fact that he doesn't have to look
very long. He may, in fact, just glance. Though he may not really
understand or enjoy the painting, he will at least know what that
painter does. But a book has to be read through, and neither ten
seconds nor a half-hour will do. Again, compare readIng a novel
with
listening to a piece of music. The music is played; the listener
on~
has to sit in the concert auditorium or be in the same room as the hi-Ii.
If
he doesn't like it, at least he need not make the effort to hear.
At worst, he has simply not enjoyed what he has heard. With the written
word, however, the situation is very different. Reading is an effort of
concentration, in a way that hearing is not. (Understanding what one
hears is another matter.) The book does not go on by itself, like a piece
of music or a film. It must be followed, the pages must be turned, the
reader must to some extent understand what he reads or he cannot go
on.
If
you don't like Stockhausen, you can still be physically present at a
conGert, and know you have heard a piece of his through; but it is next
to impossible to read through a novel that one does not enjoy or under–
stand. What I am saying is that the conditions of pleasure in reading
differ from those of seeing and hearing, and diminish the gap which,
in the case of the other arts I have mentioned, normally separates the
mass audience, with its perennial distaste for technical innovation in the
arts, from the elite audience, which prides itself on its educated open–
ness to experiment. This is the reason, not because the novel is historically
a popular or a more conservative art than painting and music, that
fewer novels have been written on the front-line of modernism.
There are some, of course- some "difficult" novels primarily con–
cerned with technique ; novels not meant to be read, but rather to
have their lessons assimilated. The first great example, and still the
purest, is
Finnegan's Wake. Finnegan's Wake
is not meant to be read
at all; it is meant to be read about, talked about, written about. By
this I don't mean to say that Joyce did not intend anybody to read it.
On the contrary, he expected his readers to devote their whole lives
to it. But this is just the point. Just what proves it to be, by ordinary
standards, unreadable.
It
is enough to read
in it,
or read quotations
from it in critical articles.
Finnegan's Wake
is the mammoth forerunner
of a number of plotless, word-heavy novels- the books of Stein, Beckett,
and Burroughs come to mind- which are best suited to be dipped into
at any point and read in for a while. But these are isolated forays.
Lately, however, the situation appears to be changing. A whole
school-should I say a battalion?--of important unreadable novels
is
being produced in France. The earlier and to me more interesting ones
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