See, the problem with these readings is that no one’s truly, honest-to-God paying attention. They’re just there to react in the moment. And sometimes that means they miss the point.
On the one hand, this has a lot to do with the self-selected audience: While many students demonstrate their cultural acumen by sharing links to New Yorker articles on Facebook, the crowd at these readings does so by showing up to hear literary masters. Where others would press “like” to demonstrate appreciation or agreement, the crowd is armed only with a well-timed chuckle or a thoughtful, agreeing “mmmm.” With these sounds, they want to demonstrate their instant, in-the-moment understanding.
In other words, the audience is desperate to show that they “get it,” whether “it” is an obscure historical reference or the always-ironic ways of contemporary literature. Like the Cambridge-educated Smith, about whom Jeffrey Eugenides remarked, “She knows everything; she’s read everything,” the crowd at these readings is hyper-educated and remarkably well read. And they want you to know it. It’s the real-life equivalent of what Goethe opined in “Faust” about theatrical audiences when he wrote that they should be served “sheer quantity of trifle” — in other words, that his “frightfully well-read and clever” audience should be given an abundance of fresh ideas, rather than an overarching point, to wrap their minds around.
This reductionist attitude means that some techniques go over like gangbusters. To name a few: lists of non-sequiturs that freely associate everything from ice cream trucks to manholes; punchy last lines; and the juxtaposition of the serious and the absurd. Last week, for example, the audience went crazy for Tate’s poem “How the Pope is Chosen” — if you were wondering, a group of cardinals drink 7-Eleven Slurpees until one of them throws up. He, naturally, becomes the new Pope. Ha ha. Or another example: When Smith read in her monotonous and coolly savvy British accent that childhood is made of verbs rather than nouns, she was met with an audience that “mmmm”-ed and nodded in appreciation. Whether nonsensically funny or brilliantly aphoristic, audiences appreciate these sorts of small moments, lines that they can immediately wrap their minds around and say, “Yes, I agree.” “Mmmm.”
But the flip side is that when confronted with meaningful but less witty content, they don’t know how to react. They aren’t interested in sifting through the words to find some implicit holistic point.
For example, other, darker moments from Smith’s reading were met with silence. (She was reading, after all, from a novel about children raised in the English projects.) If I were reading her sober descriptions on the page, I could quietly incorporate them into my larger sense of the piece. They would help to sketch an image of the harsh, grainy reality Smith was going for. But because such descriptions are part of a larger setting — one that requires more than an individual moment to understand — it’s not the kind of thing an audience listening to a work can instantly respond to. It’s just not the kind of thing that can be understood orally. The problem is this fact occasionally makes for some awkward pauses in McCosh 50, pauses that seem to devalue such literary moments.
This isn’t meant to be a criticism of creative writing readings at Princeton or of the people who attend them. Indeed, I think our creative writing resources are remarkable, and I wish more people would take advantage of them. It’s just that there’s something unfairly reductionist about the way the crowd applies meaning to — or, more importantly, sucks it out of — an author’s work. In some contexts, this reductionism makes sense — political advertisements, for example, or stand-up routines that are understandably looking for a laugh. But at readings that purport to celebrate the written word, we ought to be able to look beyond the line-by-line experience.
Luckily, there exist some on-campus groups that could remedy the problem. The new Firestone Society in Mathey College, for example, hosted a discussion last week about Smith’s novel “White Teeth.” These kinds of conversations offer an opportunity to delve into an author’s work in a communal way that still does it justice as the written word.
Because that, after all, is the point of these readings: to both bring us together and back to the page.
Cameron Langford is a freshman from Davidson, N.C. She can be reached at cplangfo@princeton.edu.
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