Anecdotes on Literary Popularity and Difficulty

When interviewed by a reporter from the Wall Street Journal regarding Thomas Ligotti, Jeff VanderMeer was asked: "Can Ligotti’s work find a broader audience, such as with people who tend to read more pop horror such as Stephen King?" His response was, it seems to me, accurate:

Ligotti tells a damn fine tale and a creepy one at that. You can find traditional chills to enjoy in his work or you can find more esoteric delights. I think his mastery of a sense of unease in the modern world, a sense of things not being quite what they’re portrayed to be, isn’t just relevant to our times but also very relatable. But he’s one of those writers who finds a broader audience because he changes your brain when you read him—like Roberto Bolano. I’d put him in that camp too—the Bolano of 2666. That’s a rare feat these days.

This reminded me of a few moments from past conversations I've had about the difficulty of modernist texts and their ability to find audiences. I have often fallen into the assumption that difficulty precludes any sort of popularity, and that popularity signals shallowness of writing, even though I know numerous examples that disprove this assumption.

When I was an undergraduate at NYU, I took a truly life-changing seminar on Faulkner and Hemingway with the late Ilse Dusoir Lind, a great Faulknerian. Faulkner was a revelation for me, total love at first sight, and I plunged in with gusto. Dr. Lind thought I was amusing, and we talked a lot and corresponded a bit later, and she wrote me a recommendation letter when I was applying to full-time jobs for the first time. (I really need to write something about her. She was a marvel.) Anyway, we got to talking once about the difficulty of Faulkner's best work, and she said that she had recently (this would be 1995 or so) had a conversation with somebody high up at Random House who said that Faulkner was their most consistent seller, and their bestselling writer across the years. I don't know if this is true or not, or if I remember the details accurately, or if Dr. Lind heard the details accurately, but I can believe it, especially given how common Faulkner's work is in schools.

And this was ten years before the Oprah Book Club's "Summer of Faulkner". I love something Meghan O'Rourke wrote in her chronicle of trying to read Faulkner with Oprah:

Going online in search of help, I worried about what I might find. What if no one liked Faulkner, or—worse—the message boards were full of politically correct protests of his attitude toward women, or rife with therapeutic platitudes inspired by the incest and suicide that underpin the book? But on the boards, which I found after clicking past a headline about transvestites who break up families, I discovered scores of thoughtful posts that were bracingly enthusiastic about Faulkner. Even the grumpy readers—and there were some, of course—seemed to want to discover what everyone else was excited about. What I liked best was that people were busy addressing something no one talks about much these days: the actual experience of reading, the nuts and bolts of it.

We often underestimate the common reader.

Learning to Read, Still

Joanna Scott on William Faulkner:

Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and strategies that are distinguished as innovative in their first incarnation can quickly become stale in the hands of lesser artists. It’s all too easy to conflate dense prose or jumbled narrative structures with literary ambition. But in this age of trending and blogging, with paragraphs growing shorter and the spaces between them growing larger, it’s also easy to dismiss the kind of fiction that might not yield readily, docilely, to our first attempt to comprehend it. This is the worry that [C.E.] Morgan and [John Jeremiah] Sullivan express; they know how quickly readers—and writers—will turn away from fiction that dares to cast itself as difficult. Sullivan admits that he has done the same. And when, in The New York Times, a contemporary writer derides Ulysses as “a professor’s book,” he assumes that as readers, we have nothing new to learn.

If, however, we allow ourselves to think of reading as a capacity we keep cultivating, then we have reason to turn to books that have something to teach us about the medium they use to convey meaning. While it can be pleasurable to move speedily through a work of fiction, there’s a different sort of pleasure to be had in lingering, backtracking, rereading the same page. As children know, there’s lots of fun in nonsense. We never stop benefiting from staying flexible, open and responsive, even in the midst of confusion. Now, perhaps more than ever, we need to keep learning how to read.

Scott's entire essay is lovely. Faulkner is my favorite American novelist, and his most difficult book, Absalom, Absalom!, is my favorite American novel — partly because when I first read it, I literally threw it across the room three times. But I kept going back. It's not a book I've ever written about or am likely to write about, because each time I read it it opens up new wonders and new perplexities, and I respond to it with awe and terror and humility, not analysis. To write about something that affects you in that way, to reduce it to words other than its own, feels obscene. All I can do is keep reading, and learning to read, the book itself.

The Sound and the Fury (April 7th, 1928)

I was surprised that some people left at intermission. After all, it was the final performance of Elevator Repair Service's production of The Sound and the Fury (April 7th, 1928) at New York Theatre Workshop, it was an extended run, and if you'd been exposed to any of the reviews or publicity, you would know that the script of this play was the actual, pretty much complete text of the first section of William Faulkner's novel, with the various characters recited or portrayed by multiple actors. If you want South Pacific, that's playing uptown.

Nonetheless, there was audience attrition. I sometimes forget that bewildering joys and joyful bewilderments are an esoteric taste. But I am deeply grateful to the ever-intrepid Liz G. for having the foresight to get tickets, and the great generosity to offer me one. (I should note here that NYTW has a great program called CheapTix Sundays, where tickets can be bought in advance for only $20. When the average Off-Broadway ticket these days tends to go for at least $55, it's great to have such programs helping to keep audiences at least somewhat diverse.)

The play began with the cast frozen on the set, distant sounds seeping from the radio upstage center, and some basic information about the main characters projected at the top of the stage. Then the first words, projected and then spoken: "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting."

As anyone familiar with the novel knows, the I is Benjy, the mentally-handicapped "idiot", and April 7th, 1928 is his 33rd birthday. Benjy has no conception of time, and so his memories float through his present reality with little to indicate deep-past or near-past.

It's was difficult at first to make much sense of what was going on on-stage. Before the first words, actually, came clog dancing. Then Benjy's narration. A copy of the book was on stage, and sometimes actors read from it, but often -- particularly with dialogue -- they worked from memory. Sometimes they said their own speech tags, sometimes the speech tags were uttered sotto voce by another actor. The technique soon became mesmerizing, but it was also essential to our understanding who was who -- just because an actor was the black female servant Dilsey at one moment didn't mean that same actor could not soon become the white male Jason.

For all its weirdness, the ERS production was less bewildering on a first encounter than Faulkner's text itself, because the various time shifts were delineated with changes of actors, lighting, and/or sound. This may not have been obvious at first, but once the text started returning to certain scenes, it got much easier to comprehend.

The acting ranged over various styles, sometimes realistic, oftentimes not (at times, the play felt like The Three Stooges Meet Robert Duvall). The cast was extraordinarily versatile and precise, though -- particularly Susie Sokol, who only plays Benjy. She was like a great silent movie comedian who has been transported to the present day: her performance brilliantly physical, transfixing, every gesture and every glance efficient, controlled, and richly communicative. Though Benjy is the narrator of Faulkner's text, Sokol spoke less than most of the other actors, an effect both strangely intimate and unsettlingly distant -- though his thoughts and experiences were presented to us, Benjy himself remained a fascinating cipher.

It's been more than a week now since I saw the show, and it has remained vivid in my mind, a rare example of a play doing what, really, only a play could do -- the book is an entirely different experience, and a movie of the production would be different still (and, unless a brilliant director discovered a form that could extend the production's discoveries into the new medium, a film of the production would be a vastly lesser entity). This is what keeps theatre vital -- not productions that attempt to be sit-coms or movies-of-the-week, but productions that try to exploit the particular experiences that can be created by live actors in front of an audience.