For a long time, I have felt unequal to writing anything in response to Valerie Hsiung’s To Love an Artist. Because I keep trying to find the wording sufficient to account for what I see happening in the first half of the book. There’s my experience as reader looking for a solid entry point, and there’s Hsiung’s intention to quadrant-off my experience as a reader (as it’s something she’s already considered). And then there’s how these two reading situations relate to Roland Barthes’s notion around “literature” as a kind of writing. Namely, a piece of literature must have at least two different readings with all readings in concert with one another during the reading experience. It’s confusing. And challenging. Because I want to juxtapose Hsiung’s work with Barthes’s notion of literature. But the situation of the book with Hsiung including the reading of the book as part of the situation makes it a challenge to fully account for my fit into this reading experience.
What are the motives for opacity in poetry? Or, in Hsiung’s situation, I’ve termed this a rejection of immersion. Because I like thinking of reading, or my reading experience, in terms of how I might immerse myself in a text. I would argue Hsiung is aware this bias to be immersed in a text exists for many readers. And maybe, the book could be implicitly stating, there’s a limitation to immersion. Like even as I’m writing this, and I think about the many issues at work in Hsiung’s book, I’m aware of how difficult it would be to account for a life dealing with the simultaneous existence of these issues, and the semi- or unconscious self-interest to keep these simultaneities compartmentalized.
Consider, for instance, just a few of the issues addressed. At one point, Hsiung’s book situates her among a group of friends, but they can only ever partially understand her and are likely to misunderstand the signals she’s giving. How being a woman in the contemporary culture would be so different from the lives women historically lived. And yet the difference between these two still doesn’t exclude how women are currently treated. How urban living could undermine people’s health. And all these ways urban living influences or physically and chemically affects an individual’s life could be connected to something so invisible but also insidious as climate change. Hsiung negotiates a chaos of vectors, and registers an eagerness to explore a new vector when it’s introduced into the book, and then to stylistically or literally express the conflicts new vectors pose to other vectors. How is someone supposed to tell the story of a life except through a simultaneity of voices?
And, thus, I resort to Barthes’s definition of literature in S/Z, where he determines at least two readings exist for literature, and that’s what sets it apart from other forms of writing. But I also feel Hsiung is doing something additionally to this. Where the “additionally” in that previous sentence is intentionally modifying “doing.” And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten to explain what, for Hsiung, the additional readings really look like. What it means to intentionally reject a reader’s immersion into a text, and to explicitly notify the reader they will be rejected from, or left in a tentative state of immersive-like reading, as they move through the book. What kind of additional reading is that? It’s what I would like to write about, and I keep trying to find a foothold for.
Helpful links:
- Valerie Hsiung’s Home Page
- To Love an Artist at Essay Press