I wrote a piece about the other side of what writing brings, that other side of control and grammar and communication: noise. Afterward, more evidence of such noise kept coming. And in this age of the AI writer, it makes sense. When things seem so logically together, so effortless, we are drawn to the opposite. For me, a continued deliberation of the noise in writing was spurred by wonderful book called The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa.
Apart from this current drive to find the opposite of what is the norm, you have to understand that this past month of my life has been rife with connections. I am a freshman and junior English teacher, and I have just finished teaching The Great Gatsby and Fahrenheit 451. For one, it’s a great year to be teaching The Great Gatsby. It’s the book’s 100th anniversary. But it’s also a year in which a phrase from the book has been used in a in a recently published tell-all about Facebook called Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Nick’s famous line that the title alludes to about Tom and Daisy’s carelessness are there in its front pages. And it was by dint of searching for the book that I found another book called Careless People, this one written by an F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar about the possible links between historical events in Fitzgerald’s orbit and what went into The Great Gatsby.
And then Fahrenheit 451 got jealous, apparently. As if the universe was like, “Thou shalt really experience the connections of meaning in this world!”
That’s when The Book Censor’s Library came into my life. (And I should say that if you are a fan of books, I think you should read it.)
A page in the front matter (notice another connection?) of the book sets it all up:
At all times, we must stay on the surface of language.
The surface!
Beware of wading into meaning. Do you know what happens to people who sink into meaning?
An eternal mania strangles them and they’re left unfit to live.
You are a guardian of surfaces. The future of humanity depends on you.
THE FIRST CENSOR
It is Fahrenheit 451 WITH “allowable” books. The novel begins with a nameless main character becoming a book censor. We watch him try to “skim the surface of language” while also trying to find grounds to censor a book (11). But as the book censor reads, the censoring itself makes him become a reader. The books draw him in. And then he is disturbed by the possibilities of meaning: “If only he knew who he was. If only the books gave him something other than questions” (242).
It is eleven pages in when our book censor’s job and status as a law-abiding citizen comes into jeopardy:
“The image of the First Censor drumming the table came to mind, his words unforgettable: All language is smooth. There are no ripples. Stay on the surface, and you’ll be the best censor.”
He hadn’t understood a whit of it. Language is smooth? What did the First Censor mean by ripples? But of late he’d grown to understand. He’d started spending nights climbing mountains and wading through swamps, sometimes falling down holes to the bowels of a secret world. Language was no longer confined to the surface. But if he shared what he thought, he’d be branded a heretic, delusional. He didn’t want to come across as out of control. A newly appointed censor couldn’t be defeated from the start. What would people say? (11)
Not long after, this:
Perhaps the First Censor had been right. He had started reading before completing his training, even though he’d studied The Manual for Correct Reading several times over. He was sure he’d understood everything in it, but a certain something eluded him. Language was not a smooth surface–it was a roller coaster, a sponge, a gateway. But nobody here shared his opinion. His fellow censors would say that what could not be found on the surface wasn’t there at all. When the System denied the existence of a certain idea, that was because it didn’t exist. (22)
If anything were to show the noise in writing, it is what the writing causes with seemingly pure signal. In other words, this invention we have created is beautifully flawed.
We create noise in both writing and reading. To interpret the simple definitions of words is easy, but to pair them with their various connotations, this is noise. Constantly we are underestimating the duties of the reader: readers create along with the author.
The universe wasn’t done with me.
At school, we had a book club meeting on James by Percival Everett, a writer whose work I have been very interested in ever since a fellow teacher recommended him. Before James, I read Erasure and then the brilliant I Am Not Sydney Poitier. After our book club meeting, another teacher sent me this New Yorker article: “Percival Everett Can’t Say What His Novels Mean” by Maya Binyam. The following excerpt called to my current meanderings:
Everett is American literature’s philosopher king–and its sharpest satirist. The significant insignificance of language has long been a preoccupation of his fiction, which plumbs the failures of storytelling to capture (or enhance) the experience of life. In “Dr. No,” a gonzo spy thriller from 2022, a scholar who specializes in “nothing” learns his most important lesson from his one-legged dog: “What Trigo had taught me was that pure meaning did not exist, never did and never would.” Other protagonists, among them a Derrida-obsessed baby, a philandering painter, and a down-and-out gambler, take for granted that meaning-making is a dance of false promises and willful delusions. Everett himself compares it to a con: “Because we want language to mean something, it means everything.”
I have never thought of intention as a precursor to noise, but perhaps it is. Us English teachers know this perhaps too implicitly. Intention is what causes all sorts of problems in stories. But we shall leave that kind of noise alone for it is enough for now that we focus on the words that represent the workings of blood and neurons and experience in our head.
It’s enough because noise in writing is comparing two unlike things to produce a more specific meaning; the limited use of human senses with their wholly unworthy words as representative; allusions to works of total fiction as ways to find truth; digressions and sidebars for context or whimsy; and playing with the linear nature of time for beings who experience time only one way.
It is also the ragged ends of left-aligned paragraphs.
We used to be more ragged with writing when it was ink or quill or lead or gel pen. (But maybe not so much in the days of cuneiform clay tablets.) We used to find criminality in penmanship, as if our intentions could not separate from the bodily action of putting down letters we have written over and over since youth, the darkest of ourselves pouring out in swoops of language.
Let’s come at this from another way.
Before we head into a unit focused on argumentative writing, I teach my students the difference between talking to someone in person versus writing. Each of these surfaces contains a lot of communication, but conversing with another person provides more surfaces for information. As readers of humans, we focus on facial expressions, vocal tone and volume changes, posture, a jittering leg, eye contact, and body gestures. And in the reading, we feed off each other, even doing something called “mirroring” wherein we mimic the postures of people we are in conversation with.
Text on a page is 2d surface, and Al-Essa’s novel is right–labyrinths await us below. Meaning is both powerful and elusive. It is the reason why the internet is both a wonderful thing and a terror. Yes, we are frequently wrong about what is behind human expressions, but text has its own special opaqueness, especially since so much is fed to each brain and digested differently.
Without noise in writing, we skim. It is why we skip the reading of Terms of Services or scroll through various news articles. We skim so much of the internet that we have developed a necessary skill for it. The internet is noise itself, but the words on it, many of them do not have the zing of noise to them, unless noise is defined solely as grammatical error.
Why do we chase after such noise against our better wills? Against logic and reason and sunk cost fallacies and hasty generalizations and bandwagoning and slippery slope thinking? We try very hard to be wise, but we must not mistake that for supreme orderliness. Therein lies the philosophies of radicals, Nazis, fascists, totalitarianists, or any other idealistic orderly dreamers that will finally solve it all though never will. Life is noise itself. It’s a plot device; it is tension. It is what we seek in forests and generally untrammeled places. It’s the difference between being in the best virtual reality and real life. It makes things interesting.
It is also why people don’t know how to start writing because to write is to get immediately lost in the chaos of meaning and communication, of attempts at describing the world and the imperfection of experience and memory.
Why is this all worthy of English teachers to ponder? The beauty of humanity is in how we change the world. Too much order is boring, a state without beauty that randomness and chaos provide.
Learning with noise is the awkward silence and spaces felt when an answer is being sought for by a student or by most of the class; it is the abrupt transition to a conversation sprouting beyond the learning plans; it is the piece of writing that defies the rubric; it is a question that shakes up the discussion. We know these moments are prime because they are noise–unexpected, meaningful, and memorable.
What we need to give students is an experience that makes them at home in the “not knowing.” Or most importantly, knowing that an orderly tool like written language is more deep than its letters could ever communicate. This perspective is the only way to learn anything, and it means living completely amongst the noise. It is what has always been most needed in our species, this confidence amongst the unknown, the acknowledgement that there is always more. It is one of those things that we should always reach for but know we will never get. A life in noise.