flitting on fiction

I know you were all dying to read a bit of my homework Well okay… maybe not… maybe only 1/2 people but still…. hubby & I are spending some (OMG I am so bored but trying not to show it TV time together) …but I don’t want to break my streak of posting every day….so here’s my first draft of a short position paper for this week’s Viral Contagion class. The passage I was writing about is posted. 

The Virtues of a Solitary Bird by Juan Goytisolo is a postmodernist novel, forgoing the use of typical capitalization, punctuation and structure, and using language that many readers are likely to find challenging, particularly given the lack of familiar structures. The author’s use of the text results in an experience of being continually challenged, displaced, and caught up in mysterious and inexplicable events which may serve as an apt experience of being diagnosed with a serious illness such as the HIV/AIDS characters in the novel are facing. In a passage on page 55 , the narrator provides insight into this experiential approach to texts.

The passage consists of three paragraphs or sentences. The Readability Statistics shown here clearly speak to the difficult nature of the work; Flesch Reading Ease is 0.0, and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 26.7. The work is not meant to be easily understood, but rather, it is to be experienced - and this is the content of the passage.

In the first section, the narrator speaks about deciphering “the obscurities of the texts” and describes the process of explicating it, and suggesting that even with a great deal of work, understanding all of the nuances of a text might not even be possible - and even if it were, he suggests, the end result is likely to be “leaden observations, stodgy syntactical arrangements, filtered exegeses, pages and pages of dull and redundant prose.” His suggestion, in the second section of the passage, is that it is preferable to “plunge” into the text, enjoying the mysteries and the possibility of multiple meaning and interpretations.  The final section of the passage reads:

passage after passage of enigmatic beauty, incoherency revealing of the intoxication and joyful consummation of the soul, esoteric connection to the Kabbala and Sufi experience, daring appropriation of the Other in the verse Beloved transformed into Lover!

Here the narrator suggests that the experience of a text can be intoxicating even in its incoherency, and draws connections to the Kabbala and Sufi , both of which are defined as being ‘mystical’ texts; the former is Jewish, while the latter is Muslim. It seems likely that Goytisolo intends that The Virtues of a Solitary Bird should be also regarded as a mystical text to be experienced rather than explicated. By burying this guidance in the complicated language and structures - or lack thereof - however, the experience is unlikely to find any but the most determined reader, since few of us read at a grade 26 level.

                While I do think that the author would have done well to move this particular passage to the front of the book to serve as a guide for how to read the text, the overall impact of the work, once read as an experience without the tension of trying to understand everything as one goes, is very effective. Its lack of familiar structure and clarity create a sense of confusion and powerlessness, much as one stricken with HIV/AIDS or other terminal or debilitating illnesses might well experience. The narrator of the work often describes a sense of being lost. One example occurs on page 27, where he writes “I had lost my sense of direction and didn’t even know where my footsteps were taking me”. In another, he writes of a “labyrinth of passageways and staircases” which require an interpreter (100). The narrator, like the reader, is unable to clearly describe what is happening to whom and to put his observations into a meaningful context without considerable difficulty.

                The Virtues of a Solitary Bird is far from an easy read. Without the signposts that we as readers are accustomed to in our texts, it creates an experience of inexplicable events that are difficult if not impossible to comprehend or explain. It accomplishes what I think the author set out to do - to create a bewildering and mystical text that provides the reader with an experience of the inexplicable nature of viral contagion.

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