On Thursday, on the campus where I work, a graduate student in English asked, “Do you read much post-colonial literature?” As an opening gambit for conversation, the questioned stymied me. It felt like a Charlie horse in my mind or like trying to answer a question in a language I don’t speak. I don’t think in such categories. She reminded me of a woman I once worked with who said she only read books written by women. George Eliot? Christina Stead? Great! But no Dickens? No Joyce? I felt bad for her.
Like all human creations, books are acts of individual genius or its absence, not products of arbitrarily defined political categories. I told her the only African writers I could remember reading were Camus, Gordimer and St. Augustine, and the best novels about that continent were written by Conrad and Naipaul – non-Africans. She asked about J.M. Coetzee and I said, yes, I forgot, I had read a couple of his books but they were dull and I see no reason to try another. Now it was her turn to have a Charlie horse. I didn’t want to sound snotty and I wasn’t interested in starting an argument. We are both readers but we had nothing to talk about, because literature is about love and we do not love the same things.
I defer again to Alfred Kazin, in Writing Was Everything:
“For many years now, academics high and low have preempted serious criticism, have been riding herd on students who are so unused to general reading that they have little taste of their own and are glad to be told how to read, especially what to discount. This will get them closer and closer to the work of art. What nonsense. What gets us closer to a work of art is not instruction but another work of art.”
The key here is “general reading,” not reading as a form of political indoctrination, vocational training or cryptanalysis. I suspect it has never occurred to my grad student that the foremost reason for reading is pleasure, and that to read more books is to experience more pleasure and to enlarge one’s capacity for pleasure. Some people have a vacuum – or a propaganda poster -- where their aesthetic sense ought to be.
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4 comments:
I think the perils of categorization are that often you can take shortcuts in finding the next leap to another work you will love by investigating the artificial categories ascribed to certain literature. But it is just as dangerous as generalizing about a particular race of people, because while sometimes the prejudice holds true, it often does not, and ultimately leads to racism. Likewise, taken to an extreme, relying on categorization leads you into absurd situations like the lady you mention who won't read work by men.
Thanks for a thoughtful post.
Here, here.
No. Books are not SHEER "acts of individual genius." Nor are all political, historical, and gender-based categories defined "arbitrarily."
It is no accident that twentieth-century imagists like Ezra Pound, H.D, Amy Lowell, Thomas Ernest Hulme, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, despite their differences, have very little in common with the English sonneteers of the Renaissance such as Spencer, Sidney, and Shakespeare.
It is a shame, but individual genius has always been shaped, encouraged, or thwarted by social circumstances. A lot of genius must have been crushed to dust under the debris of the Globe, pulled down by the Puritans.
Whether or not we like it the bulk of what we know as "the arts" today and refer to as aesthetic standards have been, unfortunately, political. When we talk about medieval architecture, we don't usually mention rural cottages of the time. We describe the material walls of Augustine's THE CITY OF GOD, churches. It is not an accident that George Eliot is "George" Eliot and D. H. Laurence is the first working class English novelist.
Some political categories have been defined for tonnes of good reasons. And, more importantly, they are worth studying, advocating, and getting furious about, although—I couldn't agree more—they may not add much to our aesthetic pleasure.
We can't help categorizing literature based on history, race, politics, and gender. I'll try and list here the ones you have made, or approved of, in your next post about Alfred Kazin:
1- "[T]he Brooklyn-born son of Jews who fled tsarist Russia." Or “Russian-Jewish-American”
2- "[T]he poet of American nationality"
3- "Jewish intellectuals."
4- "America’s Protestant thinkers."
5- "[L]onely reporters."
6- "[M]y favorite period of cultural history in America – from the Civil War to the nettlesome nineties."
7- "[H]is final decade."
u cannot make a student read book. there is a saying, "give a hungry man 2 fish he will eat for a day. teach him how to catch a fish he will eat all his life"
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