Question of the day: in what ways does anger distort one’s
reading?
Followed by the second question of the day: why would a
writer want to provoke a reader to anger? Many texts, and I’m not just talking
midnight tweets here but the great texts, purposely provoke the reader. There’s
a choice here: one either makes the reader an ally in the writer’s anger, or
one makes the reader a victim of it.
Since this is a question about the overlap of two sets,
rhetoric and emotions, we should, perhaps, start in the classic way with
Aristotle. In the rhetoric, Aristotle 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. From Aristotle to Ahab, talion and its ways are the
same: “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”
The law of talion in ordinary life is one of the great figures in American
mythology. It is the Western, it is the private eye, it is the gunplay of the
heart we all recognize.
There are ways to play this. And the one that seems to make
the most sense, at first, is to enlist the reader in your anger. To make the
writer’s anger the reader’s, too. To arouse indignation, the etymological
launching pad of which is dignus, worthy in Latin. Appropriate. Honorable. The
feeling of indignation, then, is that the world in some situation is awry,
things are not as they should be. And this is what is communicated to the
reader, by various rhetorical sleights.
There is, of course, that other side to making angry – which is to anger, to insult. The writer can write to ‘slight’ the reader. From teasing to open insult, this, too, is one
of the uses to which a text may be put. It is, however, a rather uncanny or at
list risky business. To be insulted on the street one can walk away. Or one can
be forced to be angry in turn, such as in a car collision. But the collision of
the text and the reader is a different kind of encounter. If I feel I am being
treated with verbal abuse, my first impulse is to stop reading. Of course, if
this abuse is really about me personally, I might keep reading out of curiosity
or to defend myself. But if the writer is including me in a larger group, I
have to be complicit to the extent that I read his text. I have to remain with
the text in order to receive the slight. Benjamin speaks of the storytellers
gesture – his touch on the arm of the listener. Here, it is more like a poke in
the eye, or a pinch.
So if the angry writer wants to unload on a certain class of
readers, he or she will not normally use smooth tones and or assimilating
clausal complexity. Rather, the tone should have a a certain mimetic hecticness.
It should be jumpy. It should hit discordant notes. The writer, here, is
engaged in anger-arousal. The foe must be wounded, know he is wounded, and feel
angry about it. That anger is the writer’s triumph, his trophy. The text must fascinate and slight at the same
time. This text must be a certain kind of stand-up, and we can draw the line here
from the Underground man to Lenny Bruce.
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.” You have forgotten that the world can’t,
really, be awry. If it is awry, that is just how the world is. You can right a
wrong, but you cannot right the world. It holds out against you, and you are in
it.
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, Immense
Cemetaries 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
friendship or with anger, I don’t care”- in order to repent of trying to rouse
up the “anger of imbeciles”. One would
think that, obviously, there is no gain in arousing “imbeciles” to anger against
you. 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.
The modernist author, Baudelaire or Flaubert, is driven to
insult by the sense of universal stupidity that makes the dreamt of work
impossible – in as much as one is infected with that stupidity. And thus, the
best work is second best work, an endless clean up operation of cliches and
insensibility. Or, to put this in larger terms, 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 in an initiatory ritual.
To follow the provocations of a writer is to be inducted into following the
writer. Reading is, after all, 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.
Initiations are of different kinds, using different
materials. The writer who actually wants a reader to feel included in an
objectionable group has to think for a bit about what she 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 execution, 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.
