This quotation is from Susan Schultz's extraordinarily compelling book, note that it begins lineated (Alabama, 2005):
...If being
"Absorbed" into a text is the reader's version of free-writing,
Where the reader in some sense becomes the text as it appears
On the page (as the writer extends herself into text while
Being absorbed in the process of writing), then "reader's block"
Prevents that identification between reader and language from
Occurring. That this block is necessary to the process of
Recovering, uncovering, creating meaning, is something argued
By most recent defenders of the avant-garde,
But its relationship to a prior block, experienced by the writer
Him- or herself, is a subject not as well considered. If reading
And writing are to be aligned as part of the same process...
...then consider the
Writer as reader, the writer as a blocked reader, the reader
As someone whose texts become opaque to her even as she
Produces them. The fruit of this block is silence...
...
... But if we assume
That silence is a public property, that its ownership matters,
And that any talk of silence is itself an opening out of impasse,
Then, I think, we are getting somewhere.
Getting somewhere, indeed!
Schultz's words on "reader's block" remind me of things Eve Sedgwick said to me during my graduate education about Sylvan Tomkins' long "reading block." My own recent, well, fairly on-going, problem with the subject, has been, by me, filed under "anhedonia." A thing I take intense pleasure in losing its umph, not just its umph, but its entire appeal. Actually, even its possibility. I have a great new translation of The Idiot, say, and can't bring myself to open it, or a new book by one of my favorite poets, C.D. Wright. As a writer, this means no new writing, as far as I can tell. And what could be more devastating. Reader's block followed by...um, the obvious. Or, rather, as a writer who thinks writing is the way to think. No new thinking. And reading, the absolutely prohibitive precursor.
Is this depression? Nope. Is it professional disappointment? Maybe partly (don't get me started), but not so much, whatever it is, we all will suffer it at some point.
But as Susan Schultz very astutely points out, we rarely talk about it. This is the age. This, the vocabulary we are given. We must, with her, and her fine observations, find new ways IN. Into pleasure. And into our own life productions.
Writers, know, when you don't read you don't write. When you don't feel like reading, your own silence will follow. But, that silence "is public property...and any talk of silence is itself an opening out of impasse," blisses me out. I know that naming silence has always been a political and historical act. I also know that we writers, or myself at least, never quite take this seriously enough. "O I'm just depressed, ugh, where's the new drug, &c." However, dropping the drugs, they help maybe in the short run for some of us, & for many of us they aren't optional...but losing the drugs is amazing. Not fun, but truly strange and as a poet there is nothing better than the strange. Being off valium lite and dopamine plus while on coffee is something new...
"Reader's block" is important and under-discussed. Let's.
