The answer, of course, is that there is no reason at all, if that’s the way one feels. And it goes without saying (but let’s get it said anyhow) that some reasons for going to hear a writer read have little or nothing to do with the art of literature, however defensible they may be otherwise: innocent curiosity about the live performing presence of a literary celebrity, or of a non-celebrity whom we happen to admire or be merely curious about; curiosity about an author’s work in progress, if we’ve enjoyed earlier fruits from the same tree; the opportunity, perhaps, to ask or anyhow attend a question or two or three (as I much hope you’ll do in Part Three of our time together); to turn the monologue of printed fiction into a dialogue.
ET CETERA. BUT none of these considerations has to do with public readings as an art form. They may justify, even partially vindicate, my presence here onstage this evening and yours in the audience, or my presence in the audience some other evening to hear some other writer onstage. But is it art, or art of other than the lowest order?
IN THE CASE of a great many fine poets, it unquestionably is art, of a very high order. The utterance of lyric poetry is no doubt more intimately bound to speech than is the recitation of prose; one remembers somebody-or-other’s definition of poetry as “memorable speech,” and any of us fortunate enough to have heard the likes of Dylan Thomas or Robert Frost or Anne Sexton speak their poems has experienced an unforgettable dimension of that verbal art beyond its silent presence on the printed page. But what about poor old fiction? Here are three things that I believe:
1. That the art of reading it publicly is different from the art of writing it. The well-written story and the well-spoken story are two different entities, although a given text may happen to be suitable for both.
2. Or it may not be, since a gifted reader may breathe life into an indifferent text, and an ineffective reader can make humdrum-mery out of a passage that might quite move us on the silent page. And there are passages of world-class fiction that one would be ill-advised to choose for “performance”: the exhaustive and exhausting catalogues in Francois Rabelais’ great Gargantua and Pantagruel, for example, or those deliberately grueling, unparagraphed, relentless stretches in some of the late Thomas Bernhard’s first-rate novels.
3. That an excellent reading need not at all be histrionic or “dramatic” in the popular sense of that adjective. The art of theater is not the same as the art of public reading, and indeed some of the most memorable author-readings of my experience — the late Donald Barthelme’s, for instance — were delivered in a downright anti-histrionic, even deadpan style perfectly appropriate to the material and wonderfully effective. I have heard John Updike read memorably despite his occasional, fleeting, and actually quite endearing stammer, which only served to remind us that his extraordinary eloquence is after all human. I have heard Joseph Heller read the scene of Snowden’s dying in Catch-22 in the author’s unreconstructed Coney Island accent, which at once became for me the voice of that novel, the way Grace Paley’s New York Jewish intonations, once heard live, spring pleasurably thereafter from her pages to my ear. And my (alas!) also-late friend John Hawkes:3 Who of us who’ve relished his sonorous cadences in the flesh, so to speak, does not hear them with a smile and a wistful headshake whenever our eyes fall upon any of his pages?
Oscar Wilde once mischievously declared that anyone who can read the death of Little Nell (from Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop) without laughing must have a heart of stone. I understand what he means, but all the same I wish I could have heard the great Charles read that passage, and I’ll bet I’d have been moved if not to tears (as were the Victorian audiences of that most famous of author/readers) then at least to the exhilaration that comes from virtuoso instances of the oldest of narrative arts: the art of Homer and Scheherazade, of Uncle Remus and Garrison Keillor; the art not only of storytelling but of story-telling.
The End Of The Word As We’ve Known It?
A follow-up to “The State of the Art,” delivered here and there on the lecture/reading circuit back at the turn of the millennium.
NOW THAT WE seem to have made the transition more or less safely into the new century and millennium, it may require some effort of memory to recall that back in the late Nineteen Hundreds — especially in the year we called “1999”—the word “TEOTWAWKI” was a popular acronym for the most apocalyptic of “Y2K” scenarios: TEOTWAWKI, The End Of The World As We Know It. Difficult as it may be to believe from this historical distance (a full twelvemonth later), chronicles of the period tell us that in certain precincts of Planet Earth it was seriously believed that either widespread critical computer failures or the Second Coming of Christ, perhaps both, would precipitate the collapse of our technology-dependent society, followed very possibly by literal or anyhow figurative Armageddon. The End Time! Eschaton! The end of the world as we’d known it! Convinced TEOTWAWKIs went so far in some instances as to build well-stocked refuges out in the boondocks and to arm themselves against the expected desperate hordes of a no longer civilized civilization. A few, of the Christian-apocalyptic persuasion, put everything behind them and followed their leaders or went on their own to Jerusalem or some comparably appropriate venue to await the Rapture and its sequelae. Even among the skeptical and conservative, we’re told, many withdrew a wad of extra cash and laid in some daysworth of nonperishable food and jugged water, as their government’s Y2K advisors recommended. For such as those (my wife and me among them) these precautions amounted to a scaled-down secular version of Pascal’s famous Wager concerning the existence of God: The world as we knew it wasn’t likely to end, we figured, but at least the weekend might be messed up; no harm in hedging our bets a bit. And so we did.
TEOTWAWKI: In my tidewater-Chesapeake ears, the word sounds like a large, rather ungainly waterfowl taking flight. Great Blue Herons, for example, make a sound like that when they take off or flap in for a landing: TEOTWA W-KI! Characteristically too, on lift-off they emit, along with the squawk but from their other end, a copious white jet of birdlime. And there was certainly no shortage of that back in ’99, associated with what in our house was known as TEOTCAMATTGCACM: The End Of The Century And Millennium According To The Gregorian Calendar As Commonly Misconstrued.
ENOUGH, HOWEVER, OF all that. My advertised topic here is not TEOTWorldAWKI, but TEOTWordAWKI (with a question-mark after it): the here-and-there-speculated end of the Word — specifically the printed and bookbound fictive word — as we’ve known it. But I can’t resist wondering for another paragraph or two how red-faced (or whatever) those folks must have been, must indeed still be, who really believed back in ’99 that the show was over, the end truly at hand. The rest of us could more or less sheepishly redeposit our excess cash, draw down our hoard of trail mix and bottled water, and go on with our lives, feeling that we had after all merely been being prudent. But what of those (so my novelist’s imagination wonders) who truly burned their bridges; who put behind them, perhaps irretrievably, everything once dear in order to follow — perhaps even to lead — a gaggle of like-minded TEOTWAWKIs to wherever in preparation for The End, and then saw Y2K-night embarrassingly come and go with no other fireworks than the jim-dandy ones televised from Sydney and London, Times Square and the D.C. Mall?