Smart Women Read between the Lines: A Reader's Journal
by Julie Hellwich and Haley Johnson, (Chronicle Books, 2007)
A friend writes to say how much she enjoyed a recent post, but then adds that in order to understand it fully she was obliged to read between the lines - a skill which, apparently, smart women everywhere are highly accomplished in, but a notion which I find problematic.
For whilst I might be persuaded that the silence and purity of the blank page is the very space of literature and would certainly concede that all good writing has a symbolic aspect in which meaning is often wilfully disguised via the use of rhetorical techniques such as irony and insinuation, I’m nevertheless wary of those crypto-theologians who insist that the truth of each and every text is always concealed beneath the words themselves (esoterically addressed to that discerning reader who has managed to divine authorial intent).
And, ultimately, I worry that, in reading between the lines and searching for an invisible logic, Miss Sherwood is simply taking what Henry James identified as the easier option. In other words, sometimes the careful analysis of what is actually written on the page is harder than the hermeneutic interpretation of the void between words, or the imaginative exploration of subliminal depths.
For whilst I might be persuaded that the silence and purity of the blank page is the very space of literature and would certainly concede that all good writing has a symbolic aspect in which meaning is often wilfully disguised via the use of rhetorical techniques such as irony and insinuation, I’m nevertheless wary of those crypto-theologians who insist that the truth of each and every text is always concealed beneath the words themselves (esoterically addressed to that discerning reader who has managed to divine authorial intent).
And, ultimately, I worry that, in reading between the lines and searching for an invisible logic, Miss Sherwood is simply taking what Henry James identified as the easier option. In other words, sometimes the careful analysis of what is actually written on the page is harder than the hermeneutic interpretation of the void between words, or the imaginative exploration of subliminal depths.
The idiom originates, it seems, in 19C crytopgraphy: the embedding of secret communications and below-the-radar codes (possibly of a dangerous political nature, for example) in written texts. The practice is also apparently bound up with the use of invisible ink. (In our own time of celebrity-hunger where 'everybody has to be somebody', how one longs for invisible '(black)stars' like the late Bowie - or for so many media whores just to dry up and disappear!)
ReplyDeleteThe phrase is of course of first importance to poets, whose unit of measure, like the singer, is the imaginal risk of the line rather than the end-stopped (death) sentence. She deploys - or is deployed by -'white space' as the universal solvent of her medium, which is part of what lends poetry its necromantic or spectral ambience. Perhaps the best definition I have read of Paul Celan's ritualistic poetology is that of 'articulated silence' - or, one might say, 'verbalised absence' or 'voiced whiteness'. (Poets are beings who get stuck on/in words - they are the least 'writerly' of writers. As such, the poet stands in greater need of a kind of breakout blankness.)
'It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things' - Mallarme. We are all somewhere in hiding, of course, since we all have an unconscious or something we are ashamed of. (We can also - the rare ones - hide our lights under bushels.) Our bites need more betweenesses, our prose more precarities, and our readers a greater interest in interstices than authorial insistences.
Or, to misquote Beckett, lessness is moreness.