`A Dicey Business'

“The ability to respond to prose and poetry hasn’t entirely disappeared, but it has been dulled. This is a dicey business to discuss. There are many people who still depend on novels and poems for enjoyment and intellectual stimulation, and they tend to dismiss someone who feels differently. Clearly, I’m either depressed or I just don’t get it. Thing is, I’m not on meds, and since I believe that I do `get’ Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Larkin, and Auden, I also believe that I’m able to appreciate what novelists and poets are doing today. And yet very little strikes my fancy. I can’t prove it, but I think the fault lies in the literary firmament and not in me.”

No, I didn’t write that though I wish I had. That’s the essayist Arthur Krystal speaking with Wyatt Mason on the latter’s increasingly essential Harper’s blog. I discovered Krystal earlier this year, wrote about him here and mentioned him here. He doesn’t strike me as a professional curmudgeon or reactionary poseur. In fact his instinct is to celebrate literary accomplishment but he finds little worth celebrating. This is said in sadness, not self-satisfied Schadenfreude.

Certain readers, of course, will resent Krystal’s unhappy conclusion. Nearly all the chatter in the literary blogosphere is devoted to contemporary writers and writing, though I’m not sure why. Most human creation in any age is mediocre or worse, though admittedly our era seems among the poorer. Why not read Laurence Sterne or Theodor Fontane rather than Denis Johnson? It only makes sense. We can trot out the usual suspects – competition from other media, university-endorsed illiteracy, the sway of fashionable ideologies – but an enterprising, discriminating reader will naturally turn to the past, where the action is. In “Closing the Books: A Devoted Reader Arrives at the End of the Story,” from Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature (2002), Krystal writes:

“What happened to the capacity to feel the possibilities in books? To answer this, I have to summon up the way books used to make me feel, and when I consider the eagerness with which I set out to read everything I could, and how a peculiar book like Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood once made me whistle in amazement, it seems to me that a necessary component of the literary life is a certain romantic attachment to life itself. But life is not very romantic these days. I’m not sure it ever was, but at least in the days before the media transformed the nature of existence by devaluing the idea of privacy, a writer’s imaginative powers and a reader’s imaginative responses were shaped by a real sense of possibility. The greater world, being further removed from the ordinary individual, required an imaginative leap to bring it home. And when the imagination succeeded through print or pigment, one felt the jolt, the power of art to transfigure one’s life.”

I still feel that literary jolt, though less often than I did at 20, and that’s probably as it should be. I don’t watch television, read newspapers or even much online. I’m busy and jealous of my time, and books reliably provide the optimum ratio of jolts per media-minute consumed. I like Krystal’s assertion that “a necessary component of the literary life is a certain romantic attachment to life itself.” That’s a prescription for mental health. In Krystal and other writers quietly working at the margins lies our hope for a sustained literary culture. It won’t come from the universities or bohemia. Rather, it will come from a reconnection with the past, a connection severed by politics, ignorance and arrogance. Krystal writes in “Closing the Books”:

“Here is the crux, absurdly simple: once you have made the acquaintance of truly interesting minds, minds such as Montaigne’s, Shakepeare’s, Goethe’s, Swift’s, Diderot’s, Nietzsche’s, Mallarmé’s, Dostoevsky’s, Wilde’s – even if you disagree with some of their ideas, and even if you detect signs of ingrained cultural bias – what do the novels and poems of today have to offer other than implicit commentary on their antecedents? Another way of saying this is: the best is the enemy of the good, and once you have become acquainted with the former, why bother with the rest?”

Not to give the wrong impression, Krystal, like many good readers, is also very funny. He tells Mason:

“Reading Auden on Dostoevsky, or Trilling on Henry James, and then reading Lacan on Poe, or Derrida on Baudelaire, is the difference between visiting Florence on a fine Spring day and being stuck on a bus in Bosnia Herzegovina in the dead of winter -- without a coat -- with nothing to eat, etc. The point is not that I stopped appreciating criticism, I simply stopped reading turgid, self-important, aggressively abstruse criticism.”