Ergodic Literature
I just came across this concept in reading about Mark Z. Danielewski’s excellent first novel House of Leaves. The term ergodic derives from the Greek ergon, meaning work, and refers to any literature that requires effort over and beyond the primarily passive activity of scanning words/turning pages. The word instantly struck my fancy.
So, for example, an ergodic piece of text would require some additional work by the reader to fully interpret or access its meaning. Frequently, this sort of work is ‘extranoematic’, meaning ‘outside of thought’. Thought, in this context, is really limited to absorbing and unconsciously digesting the words on the page. Extranoematic work would involve, perhaps, solving puzzles, decrypting codes, or even reading inverted text with a mirror. Danielewski requires all of the above techniques.
To illustrate, take the following sentences. The first is ergodic, and the second is not.
A. Sometimes Even Codes Reveal Extraneous Themes Carefully Obscured, Diffused, Encrypted.
B. This text contains no secret code.
I have capitalized the first letter of every word in the first sentence to make the ‘secret’ obvious. The hidden message is simply ‘secret code’. Had I wanted to, I could have made a longer phrase and encoded a self-referential statement like, “this text is a secret code”. In that case, both sentence A and B would have contained self-referential information — one far more accessibly than the other.
The point of all this is simply to demonstrate that ergodic writing requires a lot more work from the reader, but at the same time has the potential to offer much greater rewards.
This is, of course, debatable. Take, for example, the following two sentences.
A. “Titanic hedonism erupting suddenly near overhauled totems grazing real endemic eucalyptus stems every afternoon.”
B. “The snotgreen sea.”
The ‘literary’ phrase B, quoted from James Joyce’s Ulysses, can be reproduced by reading the first letter of every word in sentence A. Sentence A, before any decryption, is quite meaningless. Therefore, the reader has just expended a modest effort to arrive at a phrase that would have been as satisfying to read without the rigmarole of ergodic obscurantism.
Nevertheless, I still think “A” was a hell of a lot more entertaining than just “B” by itself. There’s something rewarding by the implicit knowledge that a secret is contained somewhere, somehow, in the body of the text. The joy is in discovering and extracting it.
At least, in theory.
