Words on Words – August 2016

Disruption. A jarring scratch on the record of normality. A run in the fabric. A thing out of place. A refusal to accept things as they are, and a devotion to upsetting the balance. These are the ideas which came back to me time and again throughout my reading this month. I read four drastically different works of fiction, but each of them embodied and embraced a theme of disorder. They shared, though with varying levels of intentionality and success, a spirit of revolution – not merely in their subject matter, but in their very existence.

August kept me guessing. It kept me uncomfortable, in that hyper-productive way that never lets you settle into complacency and routine. I grappled with each of these works in a myriad of ways – grappled with them in a way I have not been forced to in a very long time. These books were disruptors. They shook me awake. This month may be the month that gets me through to the end of this project. It was becoming all to easy to just push through, to read for the sake of the page count, of hitting the goal. These books, each in their own way, refused to be trivialized. They each elicited strong responses from me, both positive and negative, and forced me to adjust my reading. It was, to understate the point, quite a month.

Here are the books I read in August, in order, and the words therein that stayed with me:

#31

“Harry, there is never a perfect answer in this messy, emotional world. Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind, beyond the reach of magic. In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again. Be honest to those you love, show your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe.” – Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by Jack Thorne

To set the record straight up front, I did not like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. In fact, I actively hated it. As a huge fan of the original series, I wished for nine years for a return to that world, for a story that revisited that place and those people. Upon finishing the script (for it is a script to a stage production, not a novel), I found myself wishing I could take it all back. I would rather have had nothing, to have never gone back to Rowling’s wizarding world, than to have had this become “canon”. But I am not here to rant and rave about my (extreme) dislike for what this work is. I want to talk about the words.

The quotation above disrupted my reading for a number of reasons. The writing throughout the play was, in my opinion, rather lacking in substance. There was no depth, no profundity. The characters brought forward from the original stories bore no resemblance to the well-developed characters of the novels, and the new characters lacked any… anything. That was why it was a revelation to suddenly come across Dumbledore speaking like Dumbledore. Finally, a character with something to say, sounding like the person they had been established to be over the course of seven novels. Just as I was ready to toss the novel across the room and shout at it for its utter lack of redeeming qualities, this wonderful disruption allowed me to buy back in, at least a little. The language, too, is disruptive. The imagery of a drop of black poison in a cup of golden happiness is jarring in all the right ways. This was, for me, a moment of blessed relief, and a disruption from an otherwise unpleasant reading experience.

#32

“My mentality, uncontrollable and wanton as always, whispered to me a scheme so magnificent and daring that I shrank from the very thought of what I was hearing. “Stop!” I cried imploringly to my god-like mind. “This is madness.” But still I listened to the counsel of my brain. It was offering me the opportunity to Save the World Through Degeneracy.”- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Boy do I wish I had read this book before I made my list of the funniest writing I had ever encountered. Like so many great comedic minds, Toole burned out fast and bright – he killed himself before his novel was even published. Fortunately for us, his work survived beyond his life, and we have been gifted this uproarious tale of the ULTIMATE disruptor – Ignatius J. Reilly. Ignatius, besides earning a place between Falstaff and Zaphod Beeblebrox in the pantheon of comedic characters, embodies disruption in everything he does. His devotion to counter-culture, his utter loathing of the time in which he lives, and his disdain for anyone who is not himself are the foundation of his inspired worldview. He uses verbosity and eloquence to confound his detractors and get out of performing any task which may accidentally become productive. He shirks responsibility in the name of good taste. He embraces degeneracy as the principle that will save the world – and by the end, we are not sure that we disagree with him. Like his hero, Batman, Ignatius may not be the hero we want, but he is certainly the disruptive, brilliant, hysterical hero we deserve.

#33

“He paused, undecided, tried to go back to the security of the rope, but he had lost his sense of direction, there are no stars in his white sky, and what could now be heard was the sergeant’s voice as it ordered those arguing over the containers to get back to the steps, for what he was saying could have been meant only for them, to arrive where you want to be, everything depends on where you are. There were no longer any blind internees holding on to the rope, all they had to do was to return the way they had come, and now they were waiting at the top of the steps for the others to arrive. The blind man who had lost his way did not dare to move from where he was. In a state of anguish, he let out a loud cry, Please, help me, unaware that the soldiers had their rifles trained on him as they waited for him to tread on that invisible line dividing life from death.” – Blindness by Jose Saramago

Just as Ignatius J. Reilly lives to disrupt the society around him, Jose Saramago writes to disrupt our reading. He writes without conventional breaks and pauses and punctuation, without distinguishing dialogue from exposition, without rhythm or tempo. He writes to make his reader as uncomfortable as his characters. The language is stark and cold, such that beautiful phrases like “there are no stars in his white sky” or “that invisible line dividing life from death” seem alien and strange. As the characters in the novel find themselves suddenly and inexplicably blind, thrust into a world that is familiar and yet utterly alien, the reader also finds themselves navigating a realm that has all the signs of the one they inhabit daily, but with everything just out of place. It is like walking into a room you have entered a thousand times, but finding that every piece of furniture has been nailed to the ceiling. It is thoroughly disruptive, and just as thoroughly effective. I read a lot of horror stories, but I don’t know if I have ever read a novel as haunting as this.

#34

“When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.” – Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Janie Crawford’s life is the very epitome of disruption. She is a disruptor: of societal norms; of racial biases; of accepted gender norms. But so too is she, herself, disrupted: her life is tumultuous and fraught with heartbreak, disappointment, and often danger. Janie’s pursuit of her personal horizon, of love, of self-actualization is no smoothly paved boulevard. It is a winding, broken path full of double-backs and unexpected detours. But the explanation Hurston offers here, not merely for why Janie pursues love and her place in the world but why we all do, is as stunning and beautiful a metaphor as I have ever come across. Hurston’s use of eloquent, entrancing prose in juxtaposition with raw and jarring dialect is disruptive in itself – a reflection, perhaps, on the distance between Janie and her horizon. I harbour no great love for most 20th century American classics, but this book deserves every ounce of praise it has ever received.

*****

Eight months down. Four months and 16 books to go! Check back every month for more Words on Words and other thoughts on An Awfully Big Adventure!