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Six Personal Investigations of the Act of Reading:
Stephen Graham Jones' The Bird is Gone : a manifesto
By Pablo D' Stair
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Stephen Graham Jones
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I've never been one to stop much during the act of reading-by this I
mean that unless (as they often do) some things come up to take me away
from a piece of writing I have sat down to go through, I read in an
unrelenting flow, one word, the next, the next-if there is a word I
don't recognize, I don't find a dictionary, if there is a name I don't
know how to pronounce, I just resort to acknowledging it visually, and
if I feel lost, if I for whatever reason miss a cue, don't exactly get a
firm grounding or sense of place, pace, situation etc. well...I just go
on.
***
I've always been of a mind that literature and the act of reading
literature is a particular interface meant to stimulate and jar loose
associations, the act is one of immersion, much the same as (in a lay
sense) I would listen to a piece of music-if I don't catch the chorus of
a rock-and-roll song, I don't rewind before the song is finished, pause,
squint my ears until I have it and if I don't quite get the import of a
ballad-love or murder-I don't, during the act of listening, find
secondary resources to help me understand peculiarities in word choice
or rhythmic progression.
And I am a lay reader-as much as I admire (and truly truly I do) a
scholarly reader and awe at what they do, much like I envy at what Glenn
Gould would hear when a quartet plays versus what I would, I nonetheless
embrace my philosophy of lay readership, finding it no less pertinent or
of import than its counterpoint.
***
Rather early on in Stephen Graham Jones' novel The Bird is gone: a
manifesto, there is a sequence where a character has ingested
hallucinogenic substances and the prose of the novel carries us along
with the viewpoint of this character, making no blatant distinguishing
between tangible reality and perceived reality-the
narcotic-sequence-of-events is as real and pertinent and banal as the
non-narcotic. Much in the way Celine could drift into a feverish
mindscape, navigate it, and tack out if it without needing a word to
note the shift in perception or a word to note the shift back, this
moment is where I first felt comfortable with Jones' novel-it's also the
first moment that made me wonder if my technique of reading forward with
no reversal was one that had an effect-and possibly a detrimental
effect-on my reading of the piece, or any piece.
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What am I to do when confronted with a text that (and it seems at the
least blatantly if not flippantly, Jones' does this) eschews any call to
ordinary context, especially a text that, despite this dissociative
quality, seems to be telling a linear story-or, better to say, as is my
impression of Jones' work, "wants to be telling a linear story" (or
better still, a text that, while wholly nonlinear, "contains a linear
story")
Because, Bird is not a linear story in the same way that, for
example, The Trial is not a linear story-much as there is prose denoting
character, mood, opinion, and action, the very nature of "un-realitying"
the piece purposefully undertakes makes normal, human, interpersonal
narrative-connection completely non-essential, even ill fitting.
***
Or I thought so, at any rate. And in the many times my daily
activities took me away from the book, these thoughts took up some time
in my considerations-it could be said that these thoughts about the
nature-of-the-book became part-and-parcel to my experience-of-the-book.
Which is not, I wouldn't think, what the author intended (to use that
slightly ill phrase) and not what, generally, I intend.
My act of departing from the novel and returning, according to the
dictates of my life, is one that long ago (so much so it is
subconscious, now) I accepted-that's a flat fact, but it's also, I
realize, part of how I read. And it redoubles the difficulty of context
in a work like Jones', because the fragmented, self-consciously
constructed aspects of Bird stand precariously enough on their own
(stable, no doubt, but precarious) without the added cross to bear of a
reader (me) moving through them with no pause and then diving in every
three pages after being distracted, not even back peddling a paragraph
to get an idea "Where was I?"
***
Bird, to say a few words about it directly, is a novel that in both
plot-element and technique seems to me built upon the fascinating
premise that myth, folklore, arcane (and perhaps apocryphal) symbolic
identity and history is actually much easier and more tangibly grasped
than the nuance of the here-and-now. The here-and-now, flashing forward
two hundred, two thousand years, might as well be mythology and so it
seems that were the events of today described in a language akin to that
of myth, fable, poetic dreamscape, they would be equally as
unconsciously understood as an epic poem or piece of folklore from the
past-indeed, the sociopolitical context of the here-and-now would lose
bearing on matters just as that of ancient times does not influence a
casual understanding of stories originating there. But throughout Bird,
I found myself much more readily able to "understand" and "follow" the
abstract narratives introduced, those set outside of time and place-oral
legend, description of abstract, expressionist stage-play-than the story
set in the immediate present (a fictional future, to follow the conceit
of the novel) and this further made me conscious of how I behave as
reader.
Hadn't I ought to be taking some pains to interpret, rather than to
experience? The fact that I increasingly understood the work was not an
abstraction merely because of the circumstances of my having to read it
piecemeal, but was actually, purposefully a carefully constructed series
of (to my way of thinking) fever dream revelations, an "abstract on
purpose" seemed to be relevant, but I didn't care to interface with the
piece outside of my ordinary methods (or, perhaps I should say,
anti-methods).
***
Yet here: why would I say "carefully constructed"? Why this
assumption as a reader about the motivations or techniques of the
writer-motivations and techniques which, really, I should say I feel are
irrelevant?
***
I found the prose of the novel intelligent, cognizant of itself (even
at times arresting, beautiful) so from this I assumed there must've been
a schematic, some mathematic to decipher which could render the novel
"more ordinary" make the fact it was constructed and written with such
obvious avoidance of ordinary pattern-of-thought or narrative construct
nothing more than a fun-and-games, a personal indulgence of kink on the
part of the Jones.
But this is absurd. In the same way I could not say Bob Dylan's book
Tarantula-which I felt kin to Bird-was either calculated or
uncalculated, and couldn't (and certainly shouldn't) equate it to being
unconsidered gobbledygook, just something churned out willy-nilly
without reason merely because it seems pattern-less with regard to
generic "books", I could not say that Bird was either careful or
slapdash, purposeful or (even partially) random.
***
I will state bluntly that I think imagining or wanting context in
literature to come from the author is a pointless and irrelevant way to
experience it--this reduces art to chit-chat, reduces experience to
smiling at someone else's anecdote.
***
Do I, in fact, while I am reading think that what I read "wants me to
understand it"? Is understanding at all relevant to my experience as a
reader?
I've never found literature to be (or at least not primarily) a tool
for aiding understanding-in fact, the fever-dream sequence I considered
Bird, a writing that seemed unconcerned with itself except as expression
of mind-state, poetic, sequences-of-words that "fit-together" but meant
as little as they meant much, is something I find profoundly valuable in
reading, the act. To start a book (a pile of words) and to read them, in
sequence, regardless of whether anything is being consciously grasped is
a kind of sublime thing-much like when walking down the street I notice
only some microscopic portion of what there is yet say I know the
street, I think it is a misstep on the part of a reader to think that a
novel, merely because its order can be manipulated, can be reordered,
should be, and a bigger misstep to think the reordering is more
appropriate, or as appropriate, as letting the sequence lay.
A side-thought that kept cropping into my mind while reading Jones'
book was that sequence, in the end, is irrelevant, because the mind does
not remember things sequentially, however much it may receive input that
way. Indeed, I've often felt that it might be better to say "I watched a
book" than "I read it" -the same way one watching the performers of a
symphony orchestra or watching the specific colours of stage lighting
during a play is impactful and necessary-the way a book is watched,
under what circumstances, is as much a part of its necessary self, its
lived self, as the words, the craft, the thing.
***
Yet for all of my belief in a necessary disintegration of authorial
intent, intent-of-artwork, for all of my preferring to note my own
thought processes when confronting a piece rather than ponder the
theoretical thought processes of others, I still have to admit that I
have preferences and cannot talk my way out of them-I have preferences,
beliefs, and so my time with Bird brought up another question-Do I
consider it something I've read?
After all, if I listened to portions of a song, five seconds at a
time, over the course of a month, I would be in little position to say I
even knew what it "sounded like" let alone that I'd listened to it. In
fact, books, like music, I principally feel are built, intended,
needed-to-be read more than once. Certainly I could not think that
either Jones or (to be poetic a moment) the book itself would consider
someone who gave it a close, careful, sequential, investigative first
read in any better position to say they've read it than someone who read
it half-drunk and mad-dash if both parties only went through just the
once-going through pages slowly, keeping a notebook to assure myself of
X or Y or Z is not a way to any more make certain I have read
something-indeed, I would imagine with a piece such as Bird a
methodical, calculating reader would come away as much with a void on
them as I have.
***
The subject matter of what is read is irrelevant to the act of
reading-perhaps that is the quickest way to summarize here, and The Bird
is Gone: a manifesto, seems if not to embrace that (for who could ever
say that) but to represent it.
Jones seems to me to have rendered an instant folklore, something no
more understood than not, something to be hummed and made into separate
songs as much as the novel itself (in choice of section break and
typeface) makes itself so clearly built of components, shows all the
seams of the garment as part of the seamless whole. It's something of a
tradition-less folklore (or I think of it that way) an instantly old
story, bereft of specificity, left only to personal interaction and
interpretation-it's like something written in a lost language and
translated by guesswork, the party translating aware that all of the
important words lack context, lack the ability to be themselves-much the
same way an ancient might point smiling to a slumbering volcano to mean
"we have to be careful" but without knowledge of their worldview I might
just think they were pointing to a peaceful hill, tranquility, a symbol
of peace.
Pablo D'Stair is a writer of novels, shorts stories, and essays.
Founder of Brown Paper Publishing (which is closing its doors in 2012)
and co-founder of KUBOA (an independent press launching July 2011) he
also conducts the book-length dialogue series Predicate. His four
existential noir novellas (Kaspar Traulhaine, approximate; i poisoned
you; twelve ELEVEN thirteen; man standing behind) will be re-issued
through KUBOA as individual novella and in the collection they say the
owl was a baker's daughter: four existential noirs.
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