It is one thing being blamed for something you did not do – we all know how that feels – but on rare days a writer can also get undeserved praise. I have, on occasion, smiled a little wanly and just taken the compliment on my wonderful novel Room.
I don’t know whether a woman was blaming or praising me when she mentioned another thing I did not actually write (there was, I must warn you, a strange anatomical reference involved)
“I loved that bit in your book where she sees a ceiling full of dangling penises,” she said. “I thought that was hilarious.”
What could I say?
“I did not write that.”
She looked at me, full of affront, as though I was accusing her of having a weird and dirty mind. She was so insulted, I went back to the few books I had written at the time and flicked a little desperately through the pages. No. No. No. Really no. I had not written that. Perhaps I should.
I am alert to the politics of the body and careful in my references to its lower half. This does not stop some readers seeing such references on the page where they are not. But there you go. The reader is the reader and each of them is different: you can’t control what people think.
Often enough, I put down a book review and think, “that wasn’t the novel I read”. And it isn’t just a a question of taste. The book might be boxed in by the critic’s conscious “agenda”, but there can also be unconscious bias at play and also projection (which is where inaccuracies creep in). I got a double whammy once when I was described, in America, as a writer of working-class women who have a lot of bad sex. In fact, I wanted to say, the characters are not working class but merely Irish and the sex is terrific, as sex goes, it just happens with the wrong men.
But, each to their own. You could write a boring book with no room for error. Or you could write something that is open to interpretation, something that stirs the reader in ways they had not anticipated. You could write a book that lets confusion in.
The best example of such a book was, is and always will be our own Ulysses which is joyful in its confusing, delighted by uncertainty, a book that will not settle on a final meaning and constantly obliges the reader to fill in the gaps. Reading it always makes me fall asleep – because I am dreaming already, I might as well close my eyes. It makes the lines of consciousness less clear.
When ANU, Landmark and Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) came together for the ultimate Ulysses bash in 2022 I wanted to do something for them that honoured the creative confusion which makes it such a democratic book. No one understands Ulysses: we are in this respect all the same.
I wondered what a brain scan of someone reading Joyce would look like, as opposed to a scan of their brain reading the bus timetable. What happens between the mind and the page? When I researched the process of reading a little more, I discovered that we don’t read all the words on the page: eye-tracking shows how we skim and skip, our eyes land on one word and then on one further down while our brains fill in the gaps.
So Joyce is just inviting us to do what the reader does anyway. We are not “reading” as we read, so much as making our own version of the book. We fix on one word and ignore another, and the nature of this attention is mysterious and uncontrolled.
I explained all this at the first production meeting and got an amount of sage, slightly anxious nodding. I wanted to do an interactive reading of Ulysses in which eye-tracking would show someone what an amazing trick reading actually is. I wanted the reader to see and hear their unique version of the book read back to them.
One guy looked like I was either mad or talking a strange kind of sense and that was the digital producer for Landmark, Hugh Farrell. As we pushed the concept further, he admitted to knowing a guy who knew a geekier guy, who could do the thing that would make the gizmo sing. Forty-seven plugs sockets buffers motus subs switchers widgets woggets and inexplicables later that’s exactly what we have.
