The Dictated Worth of Intensive Texts

Let us labor and lose our way.

Jan 20, 2022

Writer-editor’s note: The following will wander and wonder, while experimenting with literary density. It is not avant-garde, but it does exemplify all that I am about to argue.

Due to its length, you may want to read it in the browser rather than your inbox.

“Floor Scrapers,” by Gustave Caillebotte. Image courtesy of Art History Teaching Resources.

In 2019, I stopped recommending books to other people.

Not because my tastes are especially well-refined, but mostly because I wanted to spare myself the shrivelled reactions I got from other people when I described my favorite books. You can only sense that the words “stylistic” or “atmosphere” are vaguely-rude missteps so many times before you stop saying them aloud, you know?

Unrelatedly, I began working as a content writer that same year. As an English graduate, I had written dense treatises where I could reasonably assume I had the reader’s full attention, because scholarship held an inherent value to scholars (or at least to my professors). As a content writer, I wrote skimmable, scroll-ready articles that hewed closely to marketing copy.

Writing for the Internet, it turned out, means writing for search engines as much as it means writing for actual readers. These search engines do not distinguish between the written words and the behind-the-curtain tools that put words in front of readers, whether that’s SEO or alt text or metadata or the other things that websites need to successfully bob atop the online sea.

Content writing plays by these unwritten rules and others because search engines bring our work where the readers are. Adhering to the best practices for optimization and the written style helps our content to find and keep readers’ attention. That maxim, more and more often, is how I must justify Internet writing to myself.

Because—the catch was always coming—writing Internet-first content hollows me out, and so does reading it. There’s plenty of high-quality content at my company and more widely, content that people enjoy because it holds just what they want, how they want it.

That said, I can never shake the sense that, generally, Internet content lacks the power of worth I find in other texts, primarily in novels, poetry, select nonfiction, and the Scriptures. It doesn’t feel written in confidence but, rather, from a defensive ploy to be seen, since it’s written for maybe the most fleeting human attention spans of all time.

Slow Labors and Full Fruits in Punishing Texts

“the night was clere though i slept i seen it. though i slept i seen the calm hierde naht only the still. when i gan down to sleep all was clere in the land and my dreams was full of stillness but my dreams did not cepe me still

“when i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time. a great wind had cum in the night and all was blown then and broc. none had thought a wind lic this colde cum for all was blithe lifan as they always had and who will hiere the gleoman when the tales he tells is blaec who locs at the heofen if it brings him regn who locs in the mere when there seems no end to its deopness”

So begins The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth, and no, not of a word of that excerpt is misspelled. It introduces Buccmaster and the 11th-century England devastated beneath the Norman invasion, all with a visceral, textured immediacy from the very first words. It’s due first and foremost to the alien language that Kingsnorth devised for the novel, an updated blend of Old English that he called the “shadow tongue.” It is earthy and discolored and ambling and acute, and impossible upon first reading it—I’ll bet some of y’all skipped that passage for this unitalicized, plainer English instead.

The prose of the shadow tongue teaches you to read it, if you give yourself over to learning its distinct rules. “Clere” means clear, perhaps the first and last clear night that Buccmaster enjoys. “Hierde naht” means heard nothing, just as “in the mergen all was blaec” translates to in the morning all was black and “who locs at the heofen if it brings him regn,” who looks at the sky if it brings him rain, respectively. Every word of the novel has its recognizable counterpart, but every word also carries an ancient, shadowed terror that our English doesn’t reflect. Buccmaster mourns the rural lands of his people and his Anglo-Saxon deities, even as he attempts guerrilla resistance and sees visions of those deities among trees sunken beneath black waters, all beneath the sky that lowers, crushingly, overhead. How else could he narrate his fomenting, hallucinatory crusade if not in this tangled landscape of his own terms?

I labored over the language of The Wake, just as I later labored over the unreeling rants of its sequel, Beast. I labored over them because, however much they punished my speed and ease of reading, they soon rewarded my attention with clarity, ghostly clarity beyond mere understanding. The labor was slow, but its fruits were full.

And yet, in between these reeling sentences and sometimes even between words, I was also reading short snippets of text matched specifically to my flitting attention span. That is, if I’m reading text and not watching five-second video clips. Snapchat is the prime candidate. That’s where the text is easy to sip. So are the videos.

These are not labor. They’re light winds. They breeze through me. And that’s on purpose.

Writing for the Attention Deficit

I read lots of texts that seduce my thin attention span. I also write many texts that suit those attention spans in others. I’d like to think that the second should undo the first.

Just as a survey of what I have read and written, here are some familiar faces that suit attention deficits more than attention spans:

Memes
Political slogans
Twitter posts
Instagram captions
Banner ads
Pop-up ads
Marketing emails
Corporate taglines
Website copy
Bulleted lists

I write the last eight entries of that list daily. They all require short sentences. They forgo too much repetition. But bullet points are welcome. Including easy-on-the-eyes white space is great.

Short paragraphs are even better.

And images are the greatest.

“Taking His Ease,” by Thomas Hovenden. Image courtesy of Ocean’s Bridge.

Editing attention-deficit texts means shortening them. And adding paragraph breaks.

Ease is the point. The reader’s ease.

But not the writer’s ease. Making breezy words is harder than it looks. You have to remove things. Sand down every sentence. And you must always keep your goal in mind. (For the record, I replaced objective with goal instantly.)

Because attention-deficit writing always has a goal. It could be just to entertain. Or to inform. But ultimately these attention-deficit texts are written to sell.

Here’s a snippet from The Copywriter’s Handbook (4th Edition) by Robert Bly, my professional homework last August:

“But as a professional, your obligation to your client or employer is to increase sales and gain new customers at the lowest possible cost.” More succinctly: “the goal of advertising is selling.”

Bly only describes advertisements. But other copywriting has self-interested goals too: email sign-ups, discount buys, likes, retweets, shares, comments. These texts want things from the readers. Not for the readers. Things for the writers.

Ease is most of what readers get from these texts. Information, yes. But mostly just lowest-denominator ease. And in return, these texts want buy-in.

The Givens

Now, tentatively but consciously, I have edged toward that abyss of definitions, the one that claims to divide “high” arts from “low” arts. The abyss does and should exist, even if by different terms, because surely there are differences in the range of different arts, not only in form and skill but also in aim and effect, and pretending like milquetoast egalitarians that they’re all equal, interchangeably digestible, fails to meet any of them on their own terms.

Today I’ll not opine on anything other than what I’ve already named: attuned fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose at one end of the well-grassed plain, with the self-interested copywriting across attention-deficit media on the other. That landscape today doesn’t include the usual suspects seen skirting through, begging to be targets for the definition wars: television, films, holograms, NFTs, and other innovations that threaten the end of the novel every few months. My definitions and differentiations hinge on the amount, placement, and intensity of attention that a text requires of a reader. If y’all want to convince me that those other suspects work by that same metric, let me know. In the meantime, I have far too many of my favorite European novels to quote from, at great length and with malicious disregard for my word count.

Each weekday, I read Proverbs and write fiction before 6:30, read and write attention-deficit nonfiction from 8:30 until 5, and am lucky to read a novel any time after 8:30. Living and working my life pulls me taut between intensive texts and attention-deficit texts, to the point of feeling whiplashed by each one. The former gives to readers, and so too does the latter (otherwise I’d be out of a job). But attention-deficit texts lack something for me, and surely for others, in their ever-present, smoking sensation of the ephemeral.

What is that lacuna, exactly? What can’t these omnipresent, mass-produced texts for attention deficits give, that belabored, intensive reading can?

The Taken for Granted: Clarity-by-Simplicity

High difficulty, when many people discuss what they’re reading, becomes synonymous with low quality. I figure that’s why the ease of the reader became the currency in the realm of the internet. It’s a given among many readers, writers, and editors that when a work is deemed difficult or inaccessible, it has flaws (unless you’re that species of reader that enjoys skilled mystification, in which case the work is flawless instead—if I can mock myself and every literature professor I’ve encountered).

Most readers take for granted that, in whatever they have deigned to read, clarity should greet them before any other element of the text. Say what you mean and mean what you say, if I may hijack a poignant interpersonal maxim from my dad because I see its disfiguring cousin in conversations where it doesn’t belong. Certain texts should be clear, of course, since we like to operate machinery and cook recipes and assemble bookshelves without dying of injury or frustration. But in other texts, clarity of language overpowers key ingredients like mystique, irony, suspense, and true meaning.

“Labor of St. Sergius,” by Mikhail Nesterov. Image courtesy of Ocean’s Bridge.

Y’all already know I’m about to plunge into the contours of novels you might know of but have never read, but there’s another text closer to home where the requirement of simplified language would fail the meaning we need from it.

In Luke 14: 26-27, speaking before the attention of a large crowd that was hanging upon His every word, Jesus unleashed this stark set of promises: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Verses 31-33 spring up without warning, as Jesus continues in this vein but bounds further away from plain clarity, into a series of the parables that were His favorite pedagogical technique: “Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.”

The entire span of verses 25-35 is worth reading in full, because they contain language elusively complex enough to elicit a head-scratch or pouting ponder, rather than a straightforward amen, from the reader. Christians are supposed to hate their nearest and dearest, in order to love Christ? Is Christianity, then, a zero-sum game of finite love? By Christ’s final declaration in verse 33, must we also give away our clothing and possessions, since entry to heaven seems to demand naked poverty?

Forgive the wide-eyed hyperbole of my questions, if they bare too much iris. But I choose their hyperbole because Christ chose hyperbole first—His words in verses 25-35 aren’t to be taken literally, nor without a hearing ear for the rest of His teachings. He had already preached love for others, which undercuts a literal reading of the word “hate” He uses here but does emphasize the priority of care underlining His words. We’re not to love anyone more than Christ, not our parents or spouses or children, though we are certainly still to love them.

Y’all can see that Christ Himself did not practice the clarity-by-simplicity speech that we expect by rote today. Here, as in the rest of His teachings, acknowledging that His often un-straightforward words require their fuller context is non-negotiable.

Practically every area of Scripture demonstrates that thorny language, tuned by echoed metaphors and seasoned with translations, is the vessel of God’s truths, which is one reason that plenty of atheists, agnostics and (yes) Christians call the Word self-contradictory or nonsensical. It’s not that their mindsets or critical faculties are simple; it’s that God’s living Word, recorded across centuries, languages, and cultures, rarely has simple truths to give via simple readings.

Simply put (know that I giggled just now, y’all), Corinthians 1:19 promises, “For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent will I frustrate.’” This paradox was centuries old by the time Paul referenced it, thanks to the declaration of God through the prophet Isaiah: “The wisdom of the wise will vanish, and the intelligence of the intelligent will be hidden.” Not always but often by paradox and hyperbole, by innocuous yet cutting parables, God unfurls His meaning and instruction for us, unsettling the clarity-by-simplicity that we’d like to take for granted.

My continued case for complexity: the freedom of multiple meanings, and the dexterity to catch them.

Another defense of intensive reading and the difficult texts that require them comes, if y’all don’t mind the whiplash, from The Point, where Dr. Kamran Javadizeh, professor of English at Villanova University, joined the “Criticism in Public” series to speak at length on writing. Among an interview stocked with bejeweled insights, Dr. Javadizeh touched on something worth repeating in full:

“So when a person says that someone’s writing is difficult and means that as a complaint, what I take them to mean is that writer has an idea in mind but that they haven’t found the words to make that intellectual transfer efficient … what I want to give my reader is an idea that isn’t reducible to paraphrase. And sometimes that makes the idea difficult, not because it means nothing or its meaning is cloudy, but because it means ambiguously, or it means multiple things, or it has a sort of irony in it, or it has a kind of opacity to it in the sense that a poetic image can have opacity to it.”

As a professor of Modernist poetry, he no doubt lives and breathes ideas that aren’t “reducible to paraphrase.” It’s certainly a description I’ll commandeer for the intensive texts of this essay—much of what makes them laborious, even punishing, is the fact that we can’t paraphrase them accurately, owing to their fine-tuned construction, their ambiguous meanings, their irony, or their opacity. They don’t submit to anything less than full focus, because they weren’t written for anything less than full focus.

Dr. Javadizeh names these things clearly, but they appear in full movement and texture in Austerlitz, the 2001 novel from W.G. Sebald. I had never found prose as layered and graceful as the long sweeps of sentences that fill this book—not “graceful” as in full of grace, but “graceful” as in skilled in their hypnotic, sinister dance. Here (y’all surely dreaded its coming) is an early sample, one sentence before the eponymous Austerlitz appears on the scene:

“Like the species in the Nocturama [zoo exhibit], which had included a strikingly large number of dwarf species—tiny fennec foxes, spring-hares, hamsters—the railway passengers seemed to me somehow miniaturized, whether by the unusual height of the [train station’s] ceiling or because of the gathering dusk, and it was this, I suppose, which prompted the passing thought, nonsensical in itself, that they were the last members of a diminutive race which had perished or had been expelled from its homeland, and because they alone survived they wore the same sorrowful expression as the creatures in the zoo.”

The Nocturama photos included in *Austerlitz*. Image courtesy of Fulana Detail.

In my edition, this sentence spans the end of page six and the birth of page seven. There are nearly 300 pages still to come, and the sentences only grow longer, denser, more recursive once Austerlitz himself begins to recount the monologues that form the novel’s spine, organs, and consciousness. They, like the memories of the afflicted refugee Austerlitz, like the years that have settled over the unspeakable Holocaust he tries to recount through the testimony of parents he hardly remembers, layer digressions and depths atop themselves. They could never be paraphrased; only quoted, for their full effect.

Attention-deficit texts don’t share this inimitability, because they’re meant for sharing, not bathing. Dissemination to new readers is always something their writers want. The more easily they are shared, the wider their network. The range of ironies or multiplicities do not matter.

What Punishing Texts Give by Intensive Reading

(At Last, the Awaited Answer)

These texts I’ve quoted, and those still to come, have given away the long-gestating answer to my own question, if only in your experience of reading them. These excerpts likely strained you, brought on unexpected rereading, mystifying and irritating rather than propelling and clarifying things—perhaps even moving you by some collision you can’t articulate. They demand of you, as they demand of me and all others who read them, and their ability to demand is our glimpse of their inherent value.

Intensive texts, by their unruly insistence on demanding a certain way that readers must meet them, relocate importance upon themselves—they shift the emphasis from the reader to the read. Because attention is the priceless commodity of the mind, its source and direction are crucial: the onus of earning attention leaves the text, so that the onus of giving and sustaining attention settles onto the reader instead. However uncomfortable, this paradigm better respects the texts as things that dictate our attention, rather than relegating them to meager droplets of content, lucky that we read them at all out of the gorged, unending stream of our other options.

Attention-deficit texts would rather be lucky. Their writers—me on most days, y’all—assume that readers won’t be willing or able to give and sustain attention. So they write and optimize words that will catch what little attention there is to be had online. This strategy is practical. It is effective. It coaxes out the returns the writer wants from the reader.

But it does, beneath the pragmatic and technical rationalizations, betray where the writer believes actual value to be: in the reader’s eyes. Not their mind, nor in the text they’re reading. Just in the measured-by-the-second attention they might give the text.

That’s why the text can’t risk being unruly or dictatorial. Many readers won’t read it, if they spot such audacity in it. And they certainly won’t share or comment or subscribe to or buy from it.

Like I said, it is practical. But it is hollowing, not hallowing, because it assumes that no text could claim its own value, and it writes as if ease-by-simplicity is what will, for every reader and every subject, speak most truly.

Let Us Go to the Dogs the Hounds, Setters, Shepherds, Terriers, and Pointers for Illustration

But we cannot assume that. Ease and simplicity are only tools from the hoarder’s workshop of potential language, and for most intriguing subjects available to the page and screen, they’re not even the most adequate.

Take history, as if it could fit within two human hands. While many readers and writers are lately in the habit of simplifying History through attention-deficit texts online, the texts that record and interpret history are no place for ease and simplicity. History simply contains too much.

Frankly, I’d like to never again suffer another attention-deficit “take” on a historical subject that garners (Twitter) attention and news cycles by its sheer shareability and ease of digestion. I’d rather suffer the labor of dense novels that take up History in both hands, because, if the novelist treats the subject as the gargantuan unruly mass that it is, History is the subject best suited to the novel.

Tolstoy’s War and Peace does this self-consciously, by way of gentle-polemic essays that interrupt the grand narrative to envision theories of History that better incorporate the incompetence of “great men” and the accretion of minute actions by minute people that actually drive events (this is roughly Tolstoy’s vision of how both History and fiction work).

But I won’t quote from War and Peace today, forgive the feint—a more-recursive, anti-summary illustration of a novel un-simplifying History by belabored language is instead Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. The two novels undertake similar visions, but Faulkner colors his prose and structure with fabulist mirrors rather than the realism of Tolstoy, a flourish that punished and rewarded me for sinking into it (though y’all could call the length of War and Peace a punishment and be correct).

“…at the time his age could not be guessed because at that time he looked like a man who had been sick.” So begins the introduction of Thomas Sutpen, who is one day to become Colonel Sutpen. “Not like a man who had been peacefully ill in bed and had recovered to move with a sort of diffident and tentative amazement in a world which he had believed himself on the point of surrendering, but like a man who had been through some solitary furnace experience which was more than just fever, like an explorer say, who not only had to face the normal hardship of the pursuit which he chose but was overtaken by the added and unforeseen handicap of the fever also and fought through it at enormous cost not so much physical as mental, alone and unaided and not through blind instinctive will to endure and survive but to gain and keep to enjoy it the material prize for which he had accepted the original gambit.”

Faulkner sculpted this cliff-face of a sentence early in the appearance of the novel’s primary antagonist, and its surface is as craggy, as unwelcoming but elaborate, as Sutpen himself.

He extends this description, almost twitchily, to correct an impression that the previous sentence might have given the reader. The extensive metaphor of the “explorer,” determined “to gain and keep” what he set out to take despite the fever which exacted an “enormous cost not so much physical as mental,” sprouts from the redefinition at the start of the sentence—“not like a man who been peacefully ill”—which itself responds to the phrase “like a man who had been sick.” Faulkner poses one metaphor for the uncanny Sutpen but then thoroughly unmakes it by winnowing its definition, deepening the image of the self-punishing explorer who maintains his inner driven desire at the expense of his sickness and others. By the word “gambit,” the original metaphor of a sick man has been forgotten—Faulkner has plunged the reader into the unfriendlier intensity of a man sick and alone and recovered and manic. The sentence propels us by its word-to-word energy, and it also introduces the feverish drive of Thomas Sutpen that will anchor the novel through its decades, descendants, and descent into madness. Meeting the meaning and mechanism of the sentence requires obsessive attention, along with pinpointed intensity—just as meeting the rest of Absalom, Absalom! does.

The rewards of Faulkner’s intensity and obsession—transferred into the mind of the reader—thrill me, utterly and unexpectedly. It’s not a religious experience, but the sense of new sight is comparable. I had not seen, though after reading the text now I do see, now renewed and different.

Sad Fun Facts: The Omission of Detail

One sad fun fact is that I’ve heard “Faulknerian” used as an insult at work. That means the sentence is too long. Too difficult. At least by our standards. We would flag the sentence I quoted. We would flag every sentence of every Faulkner novel.

Faulkner writes all wrong for attention-deficit texts.

He accumulates detail
He specifies his details beyond the breaking point of the attention span
He weighs his words down
The eye that reads them becomes strained but strong

Another sad fun fact is that attention-deficit texts omit detail on purpose. To write copy for them is to excise many things. Especially things the reader would like to know. They conceal to attract the reader elsewhere. You don’t subscribe or reply or react if you can get all you need up front for free (so goes the logic and practice).

“Fish Hook,” by Kelly Morgan. Image courtesy of Fine Art America.

These half-written texts need to lure the buyer into their self-interested responses. It’s why we call its key phrase the “hook.”

As a writer, I detest this half-writing for sheathed persuasion because it constrains on the act of writing, all its possibilities for construction. But as a reader, omission of details is even more heinous, because the details are the fount of the new vision I mentioned, and of all the enjoyment of reading. Exactitude in word choice—the syntax of vocabulary—is most pleasurable when it has no other end than, well, itself. The exactitude of the details, and their strange alchemy when read in concert with one another, and the way their microcosms of sound and meaning can contain the elements of the larger text, gurgles happily with the renewing sight of intensive reading. The vision and the pleasure require deft specificity from the words that craft them in the readers’ minds.

Texts purposely left half-formed, by design and for their own ends rather for than readers’ pleasure, frustrate me. They meet the readers’ attention deficits but stop short of exactitude. They are hardly texts at all.

The Fulfilled Civilization; or, Losing My Way

If I ever manage to end this essay, it will by the hand of Ulysses, by James Joyce, of course. Did y’all think I could contemplate, imitate, the texts that demand everything and more without mentioning the most revered “difficult” novel of all time?

Summary of Ulysses, especially those written in shortened attention-deficit copy, is often laughable for sounding too philosophical or too mundane. There’s no honest way to reflect Ulysses via plot summary, though because February 2, 2022 celebrates the novel’s centenary, many diligent readers and canny booksellers are absolutely trying. But summary, in the x characters do y activities while z context happens vein, isn’t the primary language that Joyce or his finicky polyglot prose speaks. Yes, I have read the novel through, twice, and no, I am not uniquely qualified to speak about it. Though I doubt it’s a “qualifications” novel, either. To hazard a guess, Ulysses is a defiance-of-definition text, as well as a total-explication-of-momentary-consciousness-laced-with-cosmic-scope text. Here, laboriously, is an ambling visit to the novel and, perhaps, what I mean.

I very nearly included a certain section from the 11th episode from Ulysses, the one informally called “Sirens,” the first but not only section that moved me nearly to tears, with inevitable surprise. For reference, “Sirens” begins like this: