This essay was written for WRRH 227: Writing and the Culture of Reading, a reading theory course, in the spring of 2021.
Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics easily differentiates itself from other contemporary young adult novels in several regards—its instinctual, unerring prose and its characters as irresistibly developed as living human beings—but one of the chief ways the novel distinguishes itself from its peers is its ability to engage with readers in what Louise M. Rosenblatt, a literary theorist of the book The Reader, the Text, the Poem calls the “literary transaction.” Rosenblatt writes that “we do not…take the organism and environment as if we could know about them separately in advance of our special inquiry, but we take their interaction itself as subject matter of study” (Rosenblatt 17); it is this interaction, an ongoing process of the reader interpreting and shaping the text within their own imaginative construction, that we define as the literary transaction, and it is this that we study through the lens of Special Topics in Calamity Physics because its prose forces us into what Rosenblatt calls “aesthetic reading,” even for the unliterary person, and through this we compare the openness and closeness of the text as it functions amongst different genres. With its wholly original descriptive language and its deceptively-woven plot structure, Special Topics in Calamity Physics presents itself as the perfect experiment grounds for studying reader response theory in practice
One idea that spearheads the early chapters of The Reader, the Text, the Poem is the ongoing discourse about language as perception, language as socially performative behavior, and the scrutinized focus that is paid attention to the relationship between the text and the reader. Rosenblatt asserts that the reader takes more of a role in the creation of literature than we give them credit for; without the reader, once the book leaves the author’s hands it is a mere text, and unlike other disciplines of art, does not assert is role as art until a reader interacts with it and imaginatively constructs abstract concepts and images out of words; she writes “the relation between the reader and the text is not linear…it is a situation, an event at a particular time and place in which each element conditions the other” (16). Thus, the artistic creation of literature would not be possible without each individual reader arriving to the text with different backgrounds, experiences, and psyches, which is how texts are able to produce endless variations of poetry and meaning. Rosenblatt writes that reading is functionally similar to a musical performance, and that a reader produces the abstract, artistic constructions as a result of interaction with the text in the process of reading, which
Another theory important to understanding a certain individual reader’s relationship with a text is the theory of the literary versus the unliterary person, laid out in C.S. Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism. Though not the focus of this study, the idea is indispensable to understanding. The unliterary crowd is one that Lewis describes as people who don’t take reading seriously, who consider reading an activity to be done simultaneously with the radio on or those who couldn’t dream of reading a book more than once. The unliterary demand swift-moving stories that are linguistically stripped of unnecessary words, who want only the Event, readers who entirely unconscious of style. It is difficult for the unliterary reader to read anything without a narrative, and the most unliterary find it difficult to read anything fiction—Lewis specifies “the most unliterary of all sticks to ‘the news’” (Lewis 28). It is then easy to imagine that the unliterary reader will interact differently with a text than a literary reader, and find it more difficult to engage with what Rosenblatt calls “aesthetic reading;” in “aesthetic reading, the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text. Imagine that the unliterary reader is not distracted by the radio during the reading event, and it is easy to imagine that the literary transaction with an unliterary versus a literary person will be very different.
Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics is unique among its contemporaries because it challenges the tropes of the unliterary reader. Lewis writes that the reader wants to see the forest, not each individual tree, and thus literary cliche and bad writing are actually preferred by the unliterary reader. Suppose we had two readers of Special Topics in Calamity Physics side by side, with their focus centered on the book alone. Pessl employs a series of tactics that force any reader into the perspective of aesthetic reading and crafts a text that makes the literary transaction open to imaginative construction in a deceptive way.
As indicated by the list of cross-genre texts in the table of contents, Special Topics in Calamity Physics evades genre categorization: it is a coming-of-age novel for protagonist, Blue; it is a tragedy, a mystery, a romance, and an epic. Pessl’s prose completely defies literary cliche, with lines like “I was forgotten like Line 2 on a Corporate Headquarters Switchboard” (Pessl 122). Descriptive language like this strengthens the literary transaction; the reader is more emotionally invested in the text the more they have to interact with it, and Pessl’s prose requires a lot of heavy investment and attention—this is not a text one could read to fall asleep at night and still understand the plot line. This language forces us into aesthetic reading; because the exposition of the novel lasts just under a third of the novel with its Dostoyevskyian prose, the unliterary reader (if they have not already put down the book and waled away) will be forced into reading the novel aesthetically; it is up to them to take Pessl’s literary pyrotechnics and construct abstract concepts and images from them. No singular reading of Special Topics in Calamity Physics could be efferent because descriptive language like this requires textual animation outside of the physical; a reader must convert the aesthetic, non-visual metaphor into sensory construction, which lies outside of the simple conveyance of information.
Like other discourse theorists of the twentieth century, Rosenblatt notes that reading is a socially performative behavior, and the literary transaction evokes a reader’s “internalized culture in order to elicit from the text this world which may differ from their own in many respects…moreover, the text may yield glimpses of the personality and codes of the author” (56). The transaction will always yield an interplay between at least two sets of codes, two sets of values; this is what a reader assumes when they participate in the literary transaction with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, that they are not only constructing abstract poetry from text, but that they are also trusting Pessl as an author because there is a residue of her in her text. This explains the concept of what Rosenblatt refers to as an “open text”: we trust the author to tell us the truth because as readers we are entrusted with the responsibility of constructing her text, and as we lengthen our relationship with the text, we are creating an emotional and psychological bond with the plot. Like all relationships, a reader’s relationship with the text—and with Pessl—is based on trust and truth-telling.
But because of its genre-bending code-switching, Special Topics in Calamity Physics cannot be called an open text—it heavily borrows literary tactics and rhetorical devices from the mystery genre and the epic drama genre, which call for a certain level of author deception in the literary transaction. Pessl reels readers in, literary and unliterary alike, in the ambling exposition of Part One, which unfurls the last chapter of her protagonist’s childhood and lays the narrative groundwork for an epic hefty as The Odyssey. Particularly observant readers may not trust Blue as a narrator because it is obvious that she is too reliant on her flaky father for her world view, but they will trust Pessl as an author—her prose and storytelling thus far give her credibility, and readers trust her to navigate them through the rest of the novel.
But by borrowing from the mystery genre in particular, Pessl writes a closed text, and deception of the reader is a key part of the literary transaction that makes the finale of the book a satisfying conclusion—because it had an ending the readers didn’t expect, because they didn’t realize they could not trust their author. Here, the literary transaction differs because authors rely on readers to construct their text into abstract images and ideas, and readers do so wholeheartedly because they believe Pessl and the text. It is critical in the construction of a closed text to have readers buy in fully to the notion that they are participating in a literary transaction with an open text in order for the author to truly pull the wool over their readers’ eyes—in a book like an Agatha Christie mystery, readers don’t trust Christie because they expect a twist ending, and thus don’t fully engage in the imaginative construction required of the reader in a literary transaction. Pessl is able to pull off the total deception because, by working across genres in Special Topics in Calamity Physics, readers will not completely expect the twist ending of a mystery and thus fully participate in their task of constructing the novel out of total abstraction.