On the Guilt of the 40-Pager; and some Postmodern Triumphalist Wankery

This last week or so I've been reading Rob Stephenson's Passes Through and Raymond Federman's Critifiction: Postmodern Essays alongside each other.

I hadn't intended specifically to read these two texts together, but as it happens they are perfect companions. In his introduction to Stephenson's book, Lance Olsen (on the board of FC2, and who I wrote my dissertation on) describes Passes Through as a critifictional text, "a mode of discourse suspended between two sorts of imagination, one theoretical, one creative." (Although Olsen notes that definition's "too easy" binaries, it is a good basic starting point for thinking about critifiction.) Olsen plays around with variations of passing, passes etc so you have the novel "passing through" various literary, musical, artistic discourses and the text just about "passing" for a novel. Getting away with it, as it were. The intro itself is called "Passes Through : Passing For : Not Knowing". The starting point is clearly Stephenson's novel itself (and there's the Barthelme reference in the last of the 3 phrases) but in its lowercase version, "passes through" is a nod to the central essay of Federman's book.

Entitled "Critifiction: Imagination as Plagiarism (...an unfinished endless discourse...)" it basically (this is pretty blatant reductionism on my part!) talks about writers never actually inventing anything but being to greater or lesser degrees plagiarists, or as Federman -- cheekily or irritatingly, depending on your viewpoint, and postmodern-wankery-threshold -- calls them pla[y]giarists. After saying that to write is "first of all TO QUOTE" (he puts things in caps and bold when he wants to make a point) Federman says that "the writer is therefore neither inside nor outside his language. He does not pause within it. He merely passes through it" (my italics/bold).

Federman's essays are far more enjoyable -- and readable! (I'll come back to that) -- than Stephenson's novel, which is difficult and dense, or, as Olsen puts it, alongside more traditionally positive descriptions ("invigorating", "liberating"), "frustrating" and "elusive". These impressions become illuminatingly ironic when you read Federman on "readability" (in the essay "What Are Experimental Novels and Why Are There So Many Left Unread?"), on those critics of experimental literature (he hates that phrase) he calls "the 40-pagers", people that only get that far into such a text before giving up and pontificating on its terrible writing and "unreadability". The message from Federman, and from Stephenson and Olsen, is that sometimes writing is SUPPOSED to be difficult, SUPPOSED to frustrate, infuriate even. Federman talks about readability being "reassuring", it is the "pleasure of recognition" that "guides us back from the text to the security of the world, and therefore gives us comfort". UNreadability, on the other hand, is the "agony of unrecognition":

"And so there we have it!" writes Federman, "Second conclusion: (a) the usual, traditional, conventional (readable) novel that which is linked to a comfortable practice of reading and preserves, guards, protects culture; (b) The experimental, innovative (unreadable) novel, that which undermines culture and brings to a crisis the reader's relation with language".

Being inferred into a status quo is just about all the encouragement one needs to plough on through a difficult book! Unable to live with my status as a "40-Pager" I carried on through Stephenson's difficult text, and it is true that it became a rewarding experience. Though there is some truth in saying that my persistence was down to Passes Through itself. Its difficulty comes from its dense, imagistic use of language -- to the extent that you feel over-powered by it, that your mind can't hold it all. But at other moments, this very denseness -- richness -- is what brings you back to it. There seems to be SO MUCH THERE! that it suddenly feels the complete opposite of difficult and unreadable, it suddenly feels eminently READABLE! (I like this caps thing). There are times when -- postmodern-wankery alert -- its very UNREADABILITY BECOMES READABLE, and vice versa.