I wrote this in 2013, before
the age of the Troll King. It was prescient, or at least I’d claim that it put
its finger on some damn thing in the national consciousness.
It concerns a question: in
what ways does anger distort one’s reading
Anger, of course, is
sometimes purposely provoked by a text. Sometimes that provocation is meant to
align the reader and the writer in a shared indignation. Aristotle, in the
rhetoric, defines anger in social and pragmatic terms:
‘Anger may be defined as an
impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight
directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what
concerns one's friends.”
According to Aristotle’s
definition, then, anger is the felt correspondent of the law of talion – the
law of eye for an eye. Its intentional structure is not: I feel hot, I can’t
breath, I have to scream, but – I have to strike out to even up the slight I
have received. This way of construing the feeling, then, is the business of the
the author who wants to arouse indignation. This author wants, in other words,
for the reader to be on his side.
There is, of course, another
side to making angry – for writing can be exactly the kind of ‘slight’ that
Aristotle mentions. From teasing to open insult, this, too, is one of the uses
to which a text may be put. It is, however, a stranger use, in a way, for
reading, unlike being subject to some verbal abuse, requires complicity on the
part of the reader. The reader, here, must remain with the text in order to
receive the slight.
This latter requirement
creates a certain hecticness in the second kind of anger-arousing text. The
text must fascinate and slight at the same time.
Marcus Aurelius, from a
stoic position, considered anger as one of the fundamental passions that must
be disarmed by the sage. It is not, for Aurelius, a matter of being good so
much as a matter of health: “the anger and distress that we feel at such
behaviour bring us more suffering than the very things that give rise to that
anger and distress.”
However, anger there will be
– Aurelius accepts that this, too, is one of the impulses to which we are
subject. But he does not accept that subjection absolutely. In the twelfth book
of the Meditations, he advocates, as a counter-power to anger, the power of
remembering. It is an extraordinary and I think quite beautiful passage:
“Whenever you take exception
to something, you have forgotten that all things come to pass in accordance
with the nature of the whole, and that the wrong committed is another’s, not
your own, and that everything that comes about always did and always will come
about in such a way and is doing so everywhere at this present moment; and you
have forgotten how close is the kinship which unites each human being to the
human race as a whole, for it arises not from blood or seed but from our common
share in reason. You have forgotten, moreover, that the intellect of each of us
is a god and has flowed from there, and that nothing is our very own, but that
our child, our body, our very breath have come to us from there, and that all
turns on judgement; and that the life of every one of us is confined to the
present moment and this is all that we have.”
The cognitive counterpart to
anger, on this reading, is not just ‘forgetting’ your better self, the self
that is above the eternal wrangle for privilege – it is a cosmic forgetting, or
forgetting the cosmos: forgetting the eternal return of the same, forgetting
who you are related to, forgetting reason itself.
From the Aristotelian and
Stoic traditions, then, we would expect that the angry reader is the defective
reader, and that the writer who tries to make his reader angry – or at least,
the writer who tries to provoke the reader, instead of making the reader
indignant – will be unread. In other words, that provocation is futile.
And yet, and yet...
provocation is, in fact, one of the hallmarks of modernity. Georges Bernanos
begins his polemical work, Cemeteries Under the Moon, by quoting another of his
polemical pamphlets in which he wrote: “J’ai juré de vous émouvoir, d’amitié ou
de colère, qu’importe! – I’ve sworn to move you, with friendly feelings or with anger, I don’t care”. He recognizes
that this desire for a pure reaction is a vice, which must be repented. It is
no good trying to make the heathen rage. It is no good trying to rouse up the
“anger of imbeciles”. The difference between
using your polemical talents for good and for bad is the difference between dentistry
and simply licking a sore tooth.
And one sees Bernanos’s point.
What is the gain from arousing “imbeciles” to anger against you? Or, to put it
in 2020 terms, owning the libtards? But
in fact, provocation – rousing the reader to anger – is perhaps the extreme
test of style. For the imbecile who stays, who continues to read, even as the
reading makes him angry, must stay for some reason. Must, in the end, find the
slighting of his opinions, his lifestyle, his existence worth staying with. Of
course, one could say that this simply proves how much of an imbecile he must
be – just as rancid meat attracts the fly, insult attracts the injured.
So: there are two ends to
the experience of anger and literature, in the broadest sense: one is in the
writing, and one is in the reading. One is the experience of reading something
that made me angry, and that I felt was designed to make me – as a certain type
of person – angry. The other is the experience of writing something to
specifically anger a certain type, a certain audience one has in one’s mind
like the buzzing from a mosquito one might have in one’s ear.
If we take Aristotle as
giving us a social definition of anger, and Marcus Aurelius as giving us a
description of the cosmic damage anger does, what are we to make of the modern
character of provocation?
Why would an author want to
provoke his readers?
In a sense, I’d argue that
modernity is tied to provocation – or I should say the aesthetics of modernity.
If one way of writing is to lure the reader to an act of identification, another
way is to lure the reader by the rather strange via negativa of alienating him
– but attaching him nevertheless to what reading has to be, an act of
following. William Gass talks about the sort of visual ‘wind” that blows
through the written page – the invisible movement of the eye, which is called
upon to deliver an image that immediately transcends itself in a concept. The
image, then, of the written word is not exactly like our tradition of the idea
– which in the empirical tradition is simply a sort of copy of a sense
impression – since the written word exists as a meaning, first. Its shape is
meaning laden and led. And not only is this so for the bare atom of the word,
but for the way the eye follows in some line or another the accumulation of words.
Left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up – it is all a matter of
following in some direction. To pull away is to break that movement, and this
is what one would expect when the movement is directed towards slighting or
insulting.
That instinctive pulling
away is, in fact, part of the reason that giving offense is a high stylistic
challenge. I began thinking about anger and reading when I was going over what
was written in 2002 and 2003, recently, mainly about politics, so let’s take an
example from that set. When I read, for example, some article by Christopher
Hitchens from 2002, arguing – ostensibly – for the war in Iraq, but really
committed simply to slagging those who are against the war, I break off
contact. I was against the war, so what is the point? It is not that I am
unpersuaded as much as persuasion is not the issue. The issue is whether or not
I am going to participate in my own lynching. And yet... if the savagery that I
was subjected to had something fascinating in it, would I have stayed, would I
have followed?
It is, perhaps, more
understandable that a writer would want to offend. Or at least that one might
write something to offend in order to project one’s own anger. But the writer
who actually wants a reader who is among those whom one wants to offend has to
think for a bit about what he is doing. Oftentimes, this second thought
sublimates the insult in the prose, turns it into an accusation, and the text
into something vaguely like a courtroom. Anger favors the courtroom as much as love
favors the bedroom. In the courtroom, the defendent has no choice but to
undergo the injury of the charge.The angry writer tends naturally to make a
courtroom out of his text. This still poses the problem of what the reader is
supposed to get out of it. Perhaps the reader is caught by a spell – or by a
curse. Josef K. never attempts to flee, although the system of the courts and
the police seem incomprehensible to him, and the charge against him is never
pronounced. Perhaps if it had been, perhaps if he’d known the charge, the spell
would have broken and he would have fled. But the difference between The Trial
and the trial one might seek to impose in a text is that the reader can flee.
It is, after all, a kangaroo court. But even a kangaroo court stages a mock
exection, a symbolic death, and perhaps it is this that both angers the reader
and keeps him from breaking off contact. He revolts at his mock effigy, he
revolts at being hustled towards a final condemnation, and in his anger he
stays.
This is, of course, the hope
of the writer whose texts derive ultimately, secretly, perhaps without his even
knowing it, from the village talent for cursing.
