Diet Culture
Translated by Julia Bosson
The video game Elden Ring can be pretty frustrating. My experience was no different. When I installed the game a year or two ago, I had no idea what awaited me. From the few games I’d played, I had developed decent enough reflexes, but I lacked the almost superhuman skill of waiting for precisely the split second to execute the saving move before some gigantic hammer came crashing down on me or a grotesque mouth with too many teeth swallowed me whole. To be honest, I was pretty bad at it. And then there was something else that drove me out of my mind. Because Elden Ring isn’t just frustrating — it’s wildly confusing. In the few moments I wasn’t actively dying, I had no idea what was going on. And that didn’t change much over the course of the 200 hours I spent with my first character.
Only later did I learn that this particular narrative uncertainty, to put it mildly, was the hallmark of the game’s developer, Hidetaka Miyazaki. Sure, there might be the semblance of a story, hidden perhaps on a hard drive in the developer’s studio, but as players we discover little of it. What Miyazaki gives us are fragments. The item description of a strangely-shaped weapon I find one night in a truly dreadful castle in the middle of a (you guessed it) poisonous swamp — what could possibly have happened here? Who did it belong to? All I know is that the shape of the weapon — its innumerable blades and spikes — resembles, in a truly terrifying way, a particular creature that I — but no, that would be far too terrible, it simply could not be. Given nothing, I’m reading the illusory contours of a story, I fill the holes with what I believe, what I have had to assume, and the more I know, the more alien and sinister the whole world seems to me.
In video essays that last for hours, fans who spend even less time in the sun than I do spin improvised mythologies, offer laborious attempts at explanation, evidencing a desperate rationality, that bothersome human need for everything to make some sort of sense in the end. The videos, podcasts, and reddit discussions create a complex fabric of intertextuality, weaving in references to Japanese folklore, real or imagined, as well as, in the case of the game Bloodborne, the no-less ambiguous and unsettling worlds of the horror author H.G. Lovecraft. Traces of traces, fragments of fragments: postmodernism respawns where we least expect it.
Apparently, millions of players enjoy being taken for a ride. They expose themselves to an aesthetic of highly sophisticated uncertainty; they not only accept it but surrender to it with a perverse subservience that is unparalleled even among lovers of complicated modern novels. They sense that they are not one with what is happening, and they like it.
This reader is downright terrified of being let go, of being dropped, and clings to his good-natured narrator like a frightened child.
God forbid this were a book rather than a game. The world would be turned upside down, the feuilleton would be appalled, but not to worry: a manuscript that surreptitiously manipulates its readers in the way every good video game does would not make it past the spam filter at any publishing house. As part of an elaborate psyop, the literary establishment has convinced everyone — itself included — that unconventional narratives, confusion, and disorientation, in short, anything that deviates from the linearly told, realistic novel, are at least as terrifying and repulsive to the average German reader as the monsters from Miyazaki’s world. Generally speaking, this reader is imagined to be simple-minded: a book must read the way he himself sees through his eyes, the narrated world a gentle continuation of his own experience. He doesn’t like surprises, unless they’re familiar to him through the conventions of the genre; he wants characters and situations he can identify with, themes he can weigh in on. No distance, no strangeness. Just rehashed memories, a little discourse, a little entertainment — but not too much, or else it’s not “literature”! This reader is downright terrified of being let go, of being dropped, and clings to his good-natured narrator like a frightened child. Slowly, his hand grows sweaty. I can hardly wait to push him off the next cliff.
Especially now, in the German book prize season, this marvelous reader reappears on the scene. I encounter him in Instagram posts lamenting that the prize’s jury, the juries of every prize now and always, have recognized and nominated books without regard to the public. That you can’t get anywhere with these books, that they are inaccessible, or worse, demanding. And with that, a text is effectively sentenced to death.
Demanding literature, real literature, the great, weighty books. Somehow, all this exists now only as an idea in the minds of those who give these supposed literary monoliths a wide berth. Most of the literature published in Germany is extremely accessible. In the sphere of the prose that gets reviewed, there are virtually no texts that unduly challenge their readers in the way that some modernist or postmodernist novels have in their own, sometimes agonizing, but always exciting way. I’m thinking, for example, of the nightmarish labyrinth into which every fortunate reader of José Donoso’s Obscene Bird of Night is thrust, losing themselves in the circular corridors of the abandoned Casa until they have forgotten everything, even their own name.
I recall the naive exhilaration with which, as a student, I once threw myself into the free, sensual, and sonorous associations in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, only to have them laugh and send me back to my seat; and Faulkner’s sultry tangle of voices and flies in As I Lay Dying; and the whispering rush of the waves on the way To the Lighthouse — and isn’t that a gigantic whale swimming by? I’m not even thinking about the sky-high stack of the Great Unreadables that still lie before me, which I haven’t dared to tackle, and which, as punishment, one fine day will slay me.
There isn’t a lack of access, there’s much too much, and where there isn’t, the walls and manuscripts are simply smashed down, bent into shape, or leveled outright. The literary establishment has imposed a ruthless reign of realism, whose narrative economy couldn’t be more rigid. In this aesthetic “diet culture,” a novel is considered good when it has “not an extra gram of fat,” and with Chekhov’s gun at my back, I quickly discard the last colorful subplot. Everything is clear, everything is understandable. And horribly dull.
Evaluating literary texts based on their accessibility means viewing works solely as commodities, understanding a book only in terms of its profitability. For many in the literary world, this is certainly appropriate and correct. For readers, however, it is an absurd, bleak, and depressing approach. The distinction between books that are supposedly “too difficult” and those that are exciting and entertaining strikes me as particularly small-minded. Genre fiction is not slop. Who would earnestly claim to find the fantastical worlds Ursula K. Le Guin created accessible? Simple and undemanding? Who could claim that the thousands upon thousands of living, dead, and undead protagonists in an average fantasy novel aren’t confusing? That it doesn’t require a healthy dose of aesthetic flexibility to stomach one of Stephen King’s grotesque monsters, not to mention Lovecraft’s tedious, rambling descriptions, the dreadful small-town boredom of a Thomas Tryon or Adam Nevill, or the veritable crisis one can plunge into while reading Octavia Butler’s magnificent, moral boundary-exploding novel Fledgling?
Or by a television series. Or a horror film. Or a deeply frustrating video game. Everywhere, we are challenged, we are engaged, works of art want to do something to us — and we let them. When I see Laura Palmer scream in Twin Peaks, I am shaken and moved. But that doesn’t mean I understand the series. I can try to understand it, if I have the desire to. I can bring out every analytical tool at my disposal. Nevertheless, this understanding always remains secondary. It does not touch my immediate aesthetic experience — it might even destroy it.
But in all seriousness, if you can read, then you are a reader, then every book is written for you, and the literary world lies at your feet.
When I hear someone say, “Oh, that book, it just wasn’t for me,” I think: good, excellent, that’s exactly how it should be. What kind of person would I be if the novel I’m currently struggling with, namely Hans Lebert’s Die Wolfshaut, were “for me”? No, this book doesn’t suit me; it repels me, it challenges me, it robs me of sleep, and when I do manage to sleep, it creeps into my dreams, a dark figure, a gathering of darkness, right through the pages. I stand before it, but I do not lose myself in it. A deep chasm gapes between its world and mine, I plunge into it and savor the delicious, cold air as I fall.
Fear is good, confusion is good, frustration is good, everything I can feel is good, everything that affects me, that changes me, that makes me tremble, laugh, and cry. Everything human is good, and it is especially good to say: this book doesn’t interest me, it is awfully written, and even worse, it is conventional. Anyone who asks only if a book is accessible makes a silly double move: they overestimate an ordinary book and underestimate the intellectual faculties of its readers. But in all seriousness, if you can read, then you are a reader, then every book is written for you, and the literary world lies at your feet.
People whose opinions I value highly tell me that “weirdness” in literature is back. This era of relentless realism and its narrative austerity is slowly coming to an end, this cruel regime that prevents us from dreaming and therefore robs us of sleep. I hope, I pray that my friends are right. And I can’t help but think of one of the greatest novels of recent years, Katharina Mevissen’s Mutters Stimmbruch. Or the devastatingly beautiful maze in which I was allowed to lose myself in Fabian Saul’s Trauer der Tangente. The magical poems of Ana Tcheishvili; Joshua Groß, who awakened my prana and took away my fear of heights. I won’t even get started on games.
Literature that is strange, that challenges and speaks to us, that practically eludes us, calls into question the given world, and with it ourselves. In doing so, it fulfills its primary, perhaps its only, task. Since the world has become exceptionally terrible, this task now seems somewhat urgent to me. To hell with accessibility. I’d rather stand in awe and doubt before the tall, cold wall.
