Reflections About Boredom And Scripture Stemming From Reflections on James Joyce's Unreadability

It's really hard to say how important and dull Ulysses is. But you kind of have to know about Joyce, who, like so many before him, was best when being brief.Today's Wall Street Journal, marking the occasion of "Bloomsday" (a celebration of James Joyce's rather difficult novel Ulysses), contained a summary of Fred Lerdahl's "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems."   The gist of the article (which I read in graduate school, funnily enough, in conjunction with a class on medieval textuality) is that some forms of composition go well past the tipping point where complexity becomes inaccessibility, and forfeits a claim on the reader / audience's time.

And while I've sat through my share of really bad orchestral works at a price of twelve dollars and two hours, it's at least a nice opportunity to look good in a suit.  I've never made a serious assault on Ulysses that didn't cost me upwards of one full day of my very short life.

In an age before television that might justify itself as a defense against boredom.  Today it's rather the reverse.

I bring it up because I have a fascination with what bores people and why, and what interests them, and why.  A medieval peasant would happily submit himself to a few hours' preaching, and by all accounts the preacher felt it worth his while to keep it fresh and interesting if he could.

And before there was a temple in Jerusalem or a god in it who demanded compliant acquiescence, the Book of Job was winding its rather cyclical arguments 'round and 'round some campfire someplace.

And that's not so strange.  All of us (in North America, anyway) know some libertarian who will talk passionately about Jefferson for hours, if allowed, and we all know some poor burned out kid who would rather eat razors than listen to that same declamation.  Tastes change.  I don't doubt there was some poor kid in ancient Israel who absolutely dreaded hearing the opening lines of the poem that would eventually be redacted into the Book of Job.

In 2000, Verlyn Klinkenborg editorialized in The New York Times on Joyce and how scholars were poring over his notebooks, uncovering what the great man had thought as he wrote and of course what he meant to write.  How upsetting, if you've staked your career on Joyce's words as they appear in print to discover that they happen to be a mistake.

How infinitely more upsetting to have no way of knowing whether that weird old genius was having one on and meant exactly what you have in print.

And if you happen to dabble in religious texts and their manuscripts to any extent, you might at this point start raising your eyebrows and nodding.

The "mistake," especially the "scribal mistake," or the "typist's error," or the "typesetters gaffe," are the category that is most reassuring when we have no way of making sense of the text.

But texts are strange things.  Sometimes, the game of interpretation goes to the writer.  Sometimes the poor reader is bereft.

In “Essay on What I Think About Most,” poet and classicist Anne Carson delivers an excursus on what she ironically agrees to call a good mistake:A private letter. If the wormholes turn "a" to "o" will you still have my back? Or did you steal my beer? Do you get the jokes? Where are the mistakes? How would you know?

There is a Chinese proverb that says,

Brush cannot write two characters with the same stroke.

And yet

that is exactly what a good mistake does.

Carson goes on in her poem to analyze Alkman Frag­­ment 20, a short Greek lyric, in terms of apparently accidental features: she argues in the poem that the “accident” is really a carefully considered choice of the poet and not really a “mistake” at all.  About the absence of a subject for a key verb, she writes:

Strict philologists will tell you

that this mistake is just an accident of transmission,

that the poem as we have it

is surely a fragment broken off

some longer text […]

But as you know the chief aim of philology

is to reduce all textual delight

to an accident of history.

In a game of hide and seek with the past, Carson asserts the existence of a “good mistake,” one concealing an authority hidden so completely that the modern authority, the philologist, baffled, turns to the only category left open to him: the accident.   The philologist thereby avoids the far more frightening truth: he / she has lost the game, badly.   One might summarize Carson’s argument (though not her poem) by saying that the modern reader, even the specialist, has only limited competence to judge the correct relationship between a text and the aesthetic pleasure it produces.

If you've been busy and haven't been reading Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, or Mikhail Bakhtin lately, what this means for you, the reader, is that you're a serious participant in this business of reading.  Your author has nothing to say without you.  (You're not the person he wrote for, but never mind.  For want of anything better, you and I will do.)  You have to play the fool for the text, to let it go where it wants to go, but you have to take pleasure in where it wants to go.  If you have no pleasure in scripture, it has no power in you.  Only power over you, like a really brilliant but dismally dull book that you're made to read and which takes 24 hours to read and produces no real pleasure or insight.

Scripture is boring until you know this.

That's why it never does to exclude yourself as the real evidence for either the Resurrection or the Redemption of creation.

Whatever or whoever or wherever or however God is, he can do no great work without your faith. 

Or perhaps without your pleasure.

Give him that, though, and watch him knock you on your ass with wonder.