Six Personal Investigations of the Act of Reading:

Goodloe Byron's The Wraith

By Pablo D'Stair

I've no idea if it's a problem most people have when reading, but I've found more and more that I have to be on conscious guard against my own thoughts, have to actively assert a regiment of sorting out what is my own origination-full stop-and what is something I literally glean or take from a work I'm reading. Not that any harm would come from mixing the two up, nothing that would have any tangible effect, it just seems to me that if I'm reading I ought to do my best to distinguish my opinion of my own thoughts from my opinion of that which I'm reading (which only perhaps is the instigating force behind the thoughts).

***

Subtext, for me, is where it's at-that implicit, unstated thrust of a work, that thing which is said so much more potently for not being said. However, subtext, I've found, is something I easily can confuse for pawning my own ideas into the framework of a piece. Because I am feverishly against the notion that each and everything I think, merely because I have the stimulus of a piece of writing in front of me, has to do with that piece of writing-and certainly I am opposed to the idea of suggesting a shared origination, that "my thoughts came from the writing" or "the writing put X thought in my head".

Now, I've said before that I think the experience of reading a literature is that of discovering my own thoughts, of not positing the "thoughts of the literature" overtop my own-but at the same time, it is something I think I'd like to be able to differentiate.

***

Goodloe Byron's The Wraith, I would say, is a novel almost completely comprised of subtext-as odd an idea as that may be. The very motion, inertia, trajectory, and final impact of the thing was to me nothing (or largely nothing) to do with what was happening on the page. Not because nothing was happening, not even because nothing of great superficial intrigue and fascination was happening-the novel is not one of subtext-as-important-hidden-underneath-seemingly-unimportant, it is pure subtext, exemplary of the truth that meaning, import, and identity are depthless, it is a revelation that what one might say is subjectivity or relativism, is really just more and more precise actuality.

***

One of the most direct encounters with attempting to differentiate the subtextual experience of The Wraith from my own mental riffing concerns the very idea of Nature, of "What is natural?" As Hamlet would say 'There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy'-something I take to be such a literal and tactilely true statement that it takes a concerted conscientious effort to ever get me thinking in terms of a revealed supernatural, or indeed of an unnatural.

And as much of Byron's novel is built around the investigation of the "seemingly unnatural"-directly in the terms of the un-human-it was tricky for me to grapple out of myself whether the novel was making no differentiation between natural and un-natural or whether perhaps it was just me not making one.

What could it matter?

Well, I don't know. And in reality, it is this tension between myself and another (the book, the mind that is the book) that is so potently what the reading experience is. Not merely accepting the state, not saying "this is tension, this is it, full stop" but actually sorting it out.

***

Linus, the narrator of The Wraith (and perhaps the individual the title most directly refers to, though superficially this might not seem so) is repulsed by what he determines to be un-human-repulsed, indeed, to the point that he imagines the questionably "un-human" entity of Clyde to at the very least be desirous of death, and certainly deserving of it, merely for the fact that Clyde lacks the characteristics his superficial lifestyle, his chosen being, postures at possessing.

Interesting to me, in that it begs the question: which is the more un-human: 'to desire to remain so even when one has been denuded of the most basic characteristics of such', or 'to deem abominable that which shows a desire toward humanity?'

***

All interesting-and all beside the point of this investigation.

***

What did I think and what did the book think? In fact, what can a book think?

Should it be suggested that merely because some individual (the author) enacted a focused amount of energy (how much or how little it is impossible and likely irrelevant to know) that a literature actually contains anything? Does the stacking and structuring and turning of phrase amount to anything-does the fact that an artifact of someone's concentration and choice exist have anything to do with suggesting any part of the originator's ideas, feelings, intents, or anything exist, therein?

Say The Wraith-as a novel, a collection of words-is a husk containing no more remnant of life, that the literary object (book) is in fact a kind of discard. This shouldn't matter to me as a reader, any more than it should matter to a fly that the feces it nourishes itself with is the remainder of what another entity altogether kept itself sustained with. As a reader, in fact, perhaps the "invention" of subtext is just another way of saying "Well, this is what I think" but that sadly unavoidable false modesty on the part of so many individuals keeps this from being considered aloud and assented to.

Even to me, there is a certain need, a certain unconscious draw in being able to say "The writer says this, the writer states that..."-there is a talisman to this linguistic turn, a magic. But just as much, there is a cowardice, because it is just as easy to pawn off pitiable, even shameful ideas that occurred to my own self, things I might not like to associate as "my own" and to scapegoat these onto the written word, the innocent (even lifeless) thing that can neither defend nor take pride.

***

Now I've drifted somewhat far afield-let me try to re-center.

***

I find The Wraith to be an expression of anger, on many levels-and I'd like to be able to, in good conscious, state that it is not an expression of anger at anything I, personally, feel angry about, therefore my reading of it is not just a vent for my own persona but an encounter with the distilled personality (or some version of it) of another human mind. At the same time, I somewhat recognize another thing-referring to the notion of subtext-this being that the anger I don't recognize is contained wholly in the surface level, directly related elements of the novel's prose-every instance of it is something I can point to (is textual)-the subtextual elements of the novel remain as close to me as anything I can name.

***

The novel, I would say, is about a young man who encounters another man, seemingly a monster-a concrete monster somehow composed of abstraction. But, this seeming monster, as the young man defines it, is a monster because it is ugly, a nonentity, a misshapen thing devoid of place or purpose-the monster as it defines itself a monster, though, is one precisely because it knows its place and is removed from it, precisely because it is too keenly aware of the entity it is and this entity must be kept remote from others, precisely because it is all too aware of its purpose and the eternal, unavoidable apartness it must keep from even the elements of itself it still considers human.

Not a monster even such as Grendel, not such as some hobgoblin-a monster in the form of a timid old man doing nothing to harm anyone, doing his best to be unobserved and removed from the world, a monster discovered not through any impropriety on its own part, but through the maladjustment of the observer, a monster damned to die because of the insolence and juvenile aspect of a grown man still afraid of bogeys in the dark.

I call that the subtext-and the subtext is a claim, only, is something as much evidenced as its complete opposite is. The subtext might as well be nothing, the novel, again, an object I just use to unroll my own fascinations with thoughts I need hooks to hang on, nothing more.

***

Works like The Wraith remind me that I think the beauty of literature is largely in that it is nothing. I so often think that the endless breaking down and categorizing component parts of the written expression is a sickness, is the primary danger that exists in committing words to paper (or any medium). Even in finding myself referring to something as "subtext or not", I find I've become unhooked from any worthwhile pursuit-some human, important, worthwhile experience I may have had based on a read has gotten sullied in some unneeded mess of dissection.

A novel, like a thing spoken, should be read and let be-to delve into it again and again, especially to look for something that even the looker (me) is for all intents and purposes admitting is not there (by definition), is to vivisection something, to tear apart and reassemble, filling in missing pieces with God knows what.

Looking at a written artifact-novel, whatever-might be something better, I feel, if it were treated as looking at a corpse, knowing full well the eyes are not about to open, in fact being profoundly horrified were a limb to suddenly animate or some utterance to pass through lips.

The contemplations I, in private moments, wish I could have over a literature rather require this solemnity, this acceptance of something passed, some thought that belonged to someone I will never know (and even if I were by chance to know could never know so intimately as to understand the residue of their art) just in the same way that standing over the grave site of someone deceased I must understand that their existence may inform my own, but only if I will it to be so-otherwise they are a forgotten thing, might as well be imaginary.

***

My odd love of the hunt for the subtextual spooks me, maybe which is why I with such insistence put it (and reading) in terms of an "investigation of myself"-I don't want literature to be some wandering soul, some thing that is so desperately trying to pass on word from beyond the grave-I just want it to be dead.

And oddly, in writing that last remark, I realize this is what I think The Wraith most read like to me.

And I'm lost, because I can't say how I feel about that, can't even say with certainly I feel I've read it in the half dozen times I have.

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.