On the Merits of Confusion
I had to read Notes from Underground twice before I understood it on any level. Both readings occurred in an academic context where I had the gentle and sagacious hands of professors to guide me. In my second go around, I zeroed in on the character Liza, always asking questions from a feminist lens. The art of reading is like writing, which is like the art of singing — your voice has to grow.
Yesterday, Kateland and I were talking about what it means to be confused, whether mildly or profoundly, by a text. Kateland made the point that literature’s use and occupation is to illuminate human nature, in all its messiness and contradictions and, yes, confusions. As someone who is enamored with humankind and its quirks, I was intrigued by her simple yet magnificent point.
I think that there are classics that have Sparknotes pages for a reason, whether it is that the language of a book has floated away from our contemporary understanding of it or because the writing was intentionally dense. In her first diary, Anais Nin talked about cities that are built like mazes (I think) to keep the secrets in, and sometimes books offer a linear line and sometimes they are the labyrinth. The thing is, I think there is merit to being confusing. If we don’t wrestle with our confusions about the world, if we are spoon fed clarity, do we grow? To borrow from Lord Byron with no context: There is pleasure in the pathless woods.
And confusion is the pathless wood. It departs trails and encourages us to stampede through the underbrush, to forge our own path with a text. To be confused is to encounter a trail that no one has encountered before, to claim what is yours by grafting your own thoughts and ideas on the open wound of the flesh that is confusion.
When I was an undergrad, I took an avant-garde film class as an elective. The thing about an avant-garde film — or a poem — is that you feel it before you understand it. But beyond that, my professor said something to our class that struck me after we had watched some film or other: “It’s alright to be bored in a film.”
It is alright to be bored. It is alright to be confused.
What a notion to unpack! A few years ago, I watched General Orders No. 9, an avant-garde film so deep into that spectrum that I did not understand it in the slightest. I appreciated its breathtaking cinematography — what beauty to splash on a camera — but sometimes things like this are akin to wafting down a lazy river. There is no real action, no real conflict in the lazy river, but one bobs in a state of rapture, taking in the lush beauty around her.
The world is confusing. Why do people do what they do? What motivates the war criminal? What motivates the bully? There are fuzzy boundaries sometimes between what is right and what requires sacrifice? Humankind is a jumble of rocks in a sack, all bounding off one another in the dark shadows where the light has not yet spilled. To be human is a sometimes confusing enterprise until we see the light. And this happens over and over again in one’s life, from childhood to adulthood.
I’ve read books where I had to do some internet sleuthing to get an opinion that will edify my own. I did this with Notes from Underground, with The Eye of the World, with anything composed by T.S. Eliot. Literature is a bank of mingling ideas, and what one thinks about a book and its confusions may or may not inform me. Big bowl of stories, and I am happy to choose the ones that have vaguely defined edges rather than crisp, clear lines, lines that walk me through what I am supposed to feel.
And, yes, there are books that are so discombobulating that I was not willing to proceed or, if I did proceed, wanted to chuck the thing across the room and would have done so had I not read it on a Kindle. Where does the art of confusion give way to just jumbled writing? I cannot say for certain that I know the answer. Maybe there has to be some intention behind confusion, whereas something too far gone is something that has plopped into confusion unintentionally. Who knows?
The human heart is a massive, pumping thing. Stories are its blood. Maybe confusion is the valve, the thing that opens and closes and regulates how far we will go. I’m eager to play with this confusion in my own work. Every feeling is valid, every human pattern of behavior to be explored.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful.
