What is that sharp inhale, then heart flutter, then shot of warmth, then some kind of quiet in me when I read genius writing, that high I stalk again and again?
What is it about some writing that makes me swear something inside me is expanding at a stunning rate, slowing down just long enough for me to pause inside myself and marvel at what’s happening, before whatever it is speeds off into the distance?
What makes certain books so hauntingly good—good enough to make me want to, in the words of William H. Gass, “give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them”?
In Ulysses, James Joyce writes, “The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. Paintings of Moreau are paintings of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom; Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.”
So what separates the Shelleys from the schoolboys? There’s no general definition of a great work because what we love and why we love it is a question for a therapist or biographer, but it’s interesting to ponder the qualities that make most people gasp with pleasure when they read.
What am I searching for in these hours of the kind of reading that borders on madness? On rare occasions when I stay up late reading a brilliant book, I’m blessed with the slow realization of what it really is—its second self that waits for me to earn the knowledge of it.
When I get the chills, I know it’s coming. I feel my skin prickle and my hair rise, as if in salute of this book, whose grandeur appeared over time as I read, and then became a colossus overnight. Virginia Woolf writes in The Waves, “I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific,” and many a night I have reached for just that sort of celestial particular.
But, and this is crucial, the book, just like a person, can’t try too hard, can’t shout, “look at me, I’m gorgeous!” too loud or we start to wonder how lovely it truly is. As Maggie Nelson writes in Bluets (one of the works that effectively blew my mind), her book “will not say, Isn’t X beautiful? Such demands are murderous to beauty . . . The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.”
What Nelson does (and I would argue all the greats do) is just this. It’s the old “show, don’t tell” writing advice taken to its wildest extent, a place in which the words all but fall away and leave you almost with the astounding experience itself.
At times I think a book’s brilliance has to do with the pull of opposites. This could mean something as complex as the Hegelian notion of the idea (thesis) coming into contact with its opposition that at least partially undoes it (antithesis), and the haunting composite, the new order that rushes in as a result (synthesis).
Or it could be writing with, for example, a supreme, disciplined structure mixed suddenly with a mode that’s entirely different–renegade, illegal even (in a writing sense, at least), anarchistic, inventive beyond the pale, a horse that’s jumped the fence and has no intention of ever coming back.
Or it could be as simple as the pleasing cognitive dissonance of, for instance, a supremely ugly thing written about in the most supremely beautiful language (or the other way around).
Or maybe breathtaking writing is just the kind that gestures towards another world outside or within us for which there may not even be official words.
Even if I can’t precisely define what constitutes great writing, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, via Woolf in The Waves again, how it makes me feel: “There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, ‘Consume me.’”