Excerpt from “Parsing the New Illegibility” (pages 158-‐162) in Uncreative Writing
. (Columbia UP, 2011) by Kenneth Goldsmith. Earlier, I focused on the enormity ...
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Excerpt from “Parsing the New Illegibility” (pages 158-‐162) in Uncreative Writing (Columbia UP, 2011) by Kenneth Goldsmith Earlier, I focused on the enormity of the Internet, the amount of the language it produces, and what impact this has upon writers. In this chapter I’d like to extend that idea and propose that, because of this new environment, a certain type of book is being written that’s not meant to be read as much as it’s meant to be thought about. I’ll give some examples of books that, in their construction, seem to be both mimicking and commenting on our engagement with digital words and, by so doing, propose new strategies for reading—or not reading. The Web functions both as a sit for reading and writing: for writers, it’s a vast supply text from which to construct literature; readers function in the same way, hacking a path through the morass of information, ultimately working as much at filtering as reading. The Internet challenges readers not because of the way it is written (mostly normative expository syntax at the top level) but because of its enormous size. Just as new reading strategies had to be developed in order to read difficult modernist works of literature, so new reading strategies are merging on the Web: skimming, data aggregating, RSS feeds, to name a few. Our reading habits seem to be imitating the way machines work by grazing dense texts for keywords. We could even say that, online, we parse text—a binary process of sorting language—more than we read it to comprehend all the information passing before our eyes. […] While there is still a tremendous amount of human intervention, the future of literature will be increasingly mechanical. Geneticist Susan Blackmore affirms this: “Think of programs that write original poetry or cobble together new student essays, or programs that store information about your shopping preferences and suggest books or clothes you might like next. They may be limited in scope, dependent on human input, and send their output to human brains, but they copy, select, and recombine the information they handle.” The roots of this reading/not reading dichotomy can be found on paper. There have been many books published that challenged the reader not so much by their content but by their scope. Trying to read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans lineraly is like trying to read the Web linearly. It’s mostly impossible in small doses, dipped in and out of. At nearly one thousand pages, its heft is intimidating, but the biggest deterrent to reading the book is its scope, having begun small as “a history of a family to being a history of everybody the family knew and then it become the history of every kind and of every individual human being,” thus rendering it a conceptual work, a beautiful proposal that’s hard to fulfill. […] What then are we supposed to do with The Making of Americans, if not read it? The scholar Ulla Dydo proposes a radical solution: don't read it at all. She remarked that much of Stein's work was never meant to be read closely, rather, Stein was deploying a visual means of reading. What appeared to be densely unreadable and repetitive was, in fact, designed to be skimmed and to delight the eye, in a visual sense, while holding the book: “These constructions have an astonishing visual result. The limited vocabulary, parallel phrasing, and equivalent sentences create a visual pattern that fills the page…
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We read this page until the words no longer cumulatively build meanings but make a visual pattern that does not require understanding, like a decorative wallpaper that we see not as details but only as design.” Here’s an excerpt from the “Mrs. Hersland and the Hersland Children” chapter: There are then always many millions being made of women who have in them servant girl nature always in them, there are always then there are always being made then many millions who have a little attacking and mostly scared dependent weakness in them, there are always being made then many millions who have of them who have a scared timid submissions in them with a resisting somewhere sometime in them. There are always some then of the many millions of this first kind of them the independent dependent kind of them who never have it in them to have any such attacking in them, there are more of them of the many millions of this first kind of them, who have very little in them of the scared weakness in them, there are some of them who have in them such a weakness as meekness in them, some of them have this in them as gentle pretty young innocence inside them, there are all kinds of mixtures in them then in the many millions of this kind of them in the many kinds of living they have in them. (177) This quoted passage proves Dydo’s thesis to be correct. It’s an extremely visual text, with the rhythm being propelled by the roundness of the letter m and the verticality of the architectural letter formation illi of million. The word million is the driving semantic unit, with the visual correlatives—m and on—framing the illi, in an almost palindromatic way, as the on visually glues the two round humps into another m. The negative spaces of the o and n echo the negative spaces of the m. The result is the visual construction of a new word, millim, a gorgeously rhythmic, palindromatic unit. The m’s lead the eye up a step to the is, which then step you up to the twin l’s, the apogee of the unit, and then step back down the way you came. This visual sequence is echoed by the words sometimes and them. The connective tissue is the repeated use of the conjunction more of them / little in them / have in them / some of them / kind of them / many of them which permeate the passage and give it its basic rhythm and flow. Stein’s words, then, when viewed this way, don’t really function as words normally do. We can read them to be transparent or visual entities, or we can read them to be signifiers of language constructed entirely of language.
