Since going to work for the university nine months ago I have enjoyed two extended literary conversations on campus – one with a professor of Slavic Studies, the other with my boss after she read, at my suggestion, Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel Offshore. My pleasure was rooted in the mutual pleasure we took in Zbigniew Herbert and Fitzgerald. Books can spawn enthusiastic kinship among people who otherwise are strangers.
The contrast when I have spoken with faculty or graduate students in the English Department has been, without exception, dramatic and discouraging. To them, reading seemed an odious obligation, like scrubbing the toilet. One grad student couldn’t get over her surprise when she learned that I, who work with engineers, had actually read a book from beginning to end. When I mentioned I had just reread Emerson’s essay on Montaigne, and that Montaigne was among my literary heroes, she delivered a lecture on Foucault’s dismissal of the great essayist. I countered that Foucault was a degenerate not to be taken seriously by intelligent people, and so another literary conversation foundered on the shoals of politics and fashionable theory. In The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800, John Gross ably diagnosed the malady:
“Isn’t there a certain basic antagonism between the very nature of a university and the very spirit of literature? The academic mind is cautious, tightly organized, fault-finding, competitive – and above all aware of other academic minds…Think of the whole idea of regarding literature as a discipline. Literature can be strenuous or difficult or deeply disturbing; it can be a hundred things – but a discipline is not one of them. Discipline means compulsion, and an interest in literature thrives on spontaneity, eager curiosity, the anticipation of pleasure; it is unlikely that a reader who comes to a book under duress, or weighed down with a sense of duty, will ever really read it at all, however much he may learn about it. Even the most intensely serious literature needs to be approached with a certain lightness of heart, if it is to yield its full intensity.”
This grad student and others I have met treated books as an annoyingly necessary addendum to the real subject, which was their favorite brand of politics masquerading as criticism. None displayed “spontaneity, eager curiosity, the anticipation of pleasure”-- much too bourgeois. None seemed happy to be studying what he or she had chosen to study. None seemed to have read very broadly or deeply. These unhappy thoughts came to me as I started reading Cultural Amnesia, by Clive James. Two-thousand and seven, little more than three months on, has seen publication of two necessary books – James’ and Collected Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert. Both fit the prescription James himself formulates in his introduction:
“If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. Those advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.”
Literature is a long, rewarding, mutually sustaining conversation between writers and readers, writers and writers and, of course, readers and readers. What is needed to sustain the conversation is humility, imagination and a capacity for finding pleasure in the artful arrangement of words. In that way, we might remain human in an inhuman age.
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4 comments:
Wonderful post. You say so much here: about the tensions between literature and academia; about grad students who don't enjoy reading; and about those who take Foucault (and, in general, the opinions of fashionable critics) too seriously.
I was baffled in grad school by the apparent disdain for literature among students of literature (not everyone, of course). For many, criticism seemed to precede literature: you were not supposed to read an author before reading what so-and-so had said about him. In some classes, abstract discussion of "the text" came before consideration of the actual text; close textual analysis was seen as arcane, or secondary at best.
The people who stood out for me were the ones who continued reading with absorption, intensity, and joy. Without them, I likely would never have finished. I suppose that in order to survive, in school or anywhere, one must ignore the ones who make no sense (except for the writers of exquisite nonsense), and pay close attention to those who do.
Guy Davenport on education:
"Students are refreshing," observes Davenport wryly. "Andrea said that she is writing a thesis on architecture and music. In the course of the conversation . . . I discovered that she had never heard of Mahler, Stravinsky, or Vivaldi. To name but three, I suppose. There's a whole generation in college now that has heard of nothing."
I think the best way(for me) to understand a work of literature is by reading the author's shorter works viz. short stories, essays, letters etc. For me, the author's work trumps criticism. Criticism seems to concentrate on all but the joy and beauty of the written word and the bond it establishes between the story or novel and the reader.
C. S. Lewis was talking about religion in this passage, but it could apply to deconstructive lit crit, as well:
But you cannot go on "explaining away" forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on "seeing through" things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to "see through" first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To "see through" all things is the same as not to see.
-- C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
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