Dispatches

A schoolchild studying "Sonnet 18" in a high school English classroom has no doubt lamented the rigidity of Shakespearean meter. Reducing an idea or lived experience to a few lines of verse is not trivial.

But constraint can be a prerequisite to creation. Supposedly, within the pages of a German-Italian dictionary, British poet Basil Bunting stumbled upon a curious translation the lexicographer chose for the verb “poetize”, or the act of writing poems. Together with American poet Ezra Pound, Bunting borrowed the idea, coining the maxim “dichten = condensare” Pound, 1951Pound, E. (1951). *ABC of Reading.* Faber and Faber.. To condense is to versify, yes, but what does this mean in the more general artistic sense?

Let’s begin at nonfiction and fiction literature. Though typically agreed to be well-written, it is probably also agreed upon that a work like Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson leaves little for interpretation to the reader. The text has condensed the information of a man down to a list of words, indeed allowing the reader to interpret Jobs’ life and character, but it has largely stopped there. We interpret little of Isaacson himself, and, aside from perhaps style and reputation, the author’s identity is hardly of interest.

On the other hand, oftener than not, in fiction we seek to understand the author: why has this person condensed experience into chosen literary elements? How has that bled into prose? This search for understanding is naturally the more difficult task. Take The Great Gatsby, a fictional classic grounded in very real conditions and experience, with its core messages buried in Fitzgerald’s abstractions. Were we to read Gatsby at face value, perhaps we would see only a recounting of a hopeless man’s despair, but with creative interpretive effort, we can understand why and how Fitzgerald abstracted experiences of desperate love, societal boundaries, and the American Dream (or what was left of it). Extraordinarily, what many may never live in a lifetime has been captured in just 200 pages.

A skeptic might argue that it is inherent to the purpose of objective nonfiction that the penned words bear little mark of the author’s hand. I agree; but the point is that without the author him or herself having been imprinted on the work, the reader needs simply decode raw words on a page. (The boundary here is blurry, as one finds authorial intent even in nonfiction writing.) But bear with me for an analogy in the machine learning sense: faced with nonfiction, the reader acts as more of a discriminative model, mapping text directly to meaning and approximating a conditional distribution, needing not model how the text itself was produced. Fiction offers us more because its meaning depends not only on what is said, but on the intention behind it. The reader is thus drawn into something closer to the generative task of reconstructing, however imperfectly, the process that could have given rise to the text itself. The statistician knows that the latter case where we “model the joint distribution” is more computationally intensive than the former (and of course, the choice still lies with the reader to do so); nonetheless, the fact that it is an option at all is important. The reader’s engagement with the work during its interpretation is why some writing falls flat in an artistic sense while other writing has depth.

Consider poetry, and the fact that most of us are no stranger to the tumblr or Instagram poet who writes very personally about life experience. But so did Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Edgar Allen Poe; why have we cemented them as the greats while others are forgotten?

Within the lines of Poe’s stanzas, we digest by looking past the words themselves. The important features that Poe wants us to walk away with he keeps in his 4-line “latent” representation, while the fine details are left for reconstruction to the reader. Writing under similar themes, the layperson may be able to only convey 4 lines of his or her experience in the 4 lines of rhyme. The greater the skill in compression (explicitly, abstraction of meaning, not just information), the more is required from the critic to participate in the process of decompression. When all fine details have been provided for us, we are refused the honor of self-projection and subjective interpretation, and to uniquely engage and create something that is ours.

Even in the visual arts, how many of us would struggle to name a photo-realist, but would have less or even no problem with the expressionists?

As the audience, we experience a work as more artistic when we are required to participate and reconstruct meaning (though “co-construct” is the better word here in the context of subjective interpretation). Italian semiotician Umberto Eco uses the term “opera aperta”, or “open work”, in his book sharing the same name to describe a work that is finished by the author but left open to interpretation by the audience. A popular example cited is Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, a score with different musical fragments that can be played in the order of choice by a performer. Conveniently, Eco also describes it more generally: “the form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood Eco, 1989Eco, U. (1989). *The Open Work* (A. Cancogni, Trans.). Harvard University Press., p.4.”

The artist, however, must not optimize for the open work! Openness should be not the goal, rather, a consequence. When a creator’s responsibility lies in abstraction and the enjoyer’s in interpretation, the two meet at the open work. The more a work is able to abstract an experience well, the less it constrains the inverse mapping back to meaning, allowing greater freedom for subjective interpretation. The opera condensata is in itself an opera aperta because condensation is a very condition for openness.

References

Pound, E. (1951). ABC of Reading. Faber and Faber.
Eco, U. (1989). The Open Work (A. Cancogni, Trans.). Harvard University Press.