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At this summer’s International Writers’ Reunion in Lahti, the Irish writer Michael Collins spoke eloquently about how the computer age is robbing language of its complexity: the internet, after all, aims at quick, unambiguous information delivered in language which is as simple as possible.      He recalled teaching an American university course on modern literature. After trying to work through The Outsider, one of his students came to the conclusion that Albert Camus had ‘an attitude problem. He doesn’t like who he is. He needs major psychological counseling’. One of Collins’ students of literature went even further: ‘I wouldn’t like to party with this guy. He’s a real asshole!’      Instead of being straightforwardly didactic, in other words useful, Camus was unpleasantly complicated; in other words, useless. Moreover – a cardinal sin in the world of psychobabble – he was clearly unwilling to improve himself. This irritated the students: they were neither capable of nor interested in enjoying the ambiguities that fiction presents. The language of fiction differs from the quick-fix, bullet-point presentations they were used to by using too many words – and by describing the world as it is, not as it might be.      When we asked the poet Jouni Inkala to write an introduction to some short prose by Markku Paasonen, he was so inspired by the texts that he wrote in his introduction (see page 169): ‘The narrative pulse of language blows through both emptiness and satiety, wandering through a previously unknown wonderland and the mathematically mysterious creatures that populate it, living on the brink of the precipices of their own existence.’ Or we think he did. The language is prolix, its meaning opaque; Collins’s students would no doubt consign Inkala to a lengthy course of counselling. Translating Inkala’s ecstatic written journey through Paasonen’s fiction required interpreting the inspiration, trying to find words to convey this literary enthusiasm in English. Patience, staying with the text, has its rewards.      Clarity and brevity are virtues that clearly have their place. But does the trend toward short messages and the plain use of words make even those of us who still take on demanding tasks such as reading ‘difficult’ fiction just a little impatient when encountering complicated, highly original language, with surprising or even mysterious features? Do we occasionally find ourselves wishing that the writer would ‘get to the point’?      If so, we too may be on the road that leads to not wanting to party with Camus; to a world in which the only function of words is improvement of the self. And that will rapidly remove our capacity for using language as an instrument for describing and understanding the world – and each other. Assholes or not.      Soila Lehtonen & Hildi Hawkins      Editors-in-chief, 2001   Contents 3/2001 | Home