“And in belles lettres — giving that term its widest acceptance and including history, criticism, miscellaneous essay-writing, travels, and so forth, as well as poetry, drama, and fiction — to be or not to be dull is a very important question indeed. It is indeed practically the whole question.”
The point is obvious but seldom so directly addressed. Our forthright truth-teller is George Saintsbury (1845-1933) in “Dullness: A Lively Dissertation,” published in the December 23, 1922, issue of The Living Age. Saintsbury is in the running for the title "Best-Read Human in History." He acknowledges the ambiguity of “dullness.” Is the quality in the book or the reader? Some readers will find every book dull, which usually translates into them no longer being readers though probably remaining rather dull. He draws up a taxonomy of character traits that may account for the ongoing pandemic of aliteracy:
“Everybody must have noticed, if they have taken any notice of children at all, that among the class-distinctions of these engaging incumbrances, besides Liberal and Conservative, Platonist and Aristotelian, and others, there is this of self-amusing and not self-amusing. There is one kind of child which (perhaps not invariably without calling Satan to its aid) always finds something for its idle hands to do, is always more or less ‘interested.’ There is another, which, unless it is constantly talked to, played with, taken somewhere, given money to spend, provided with new toys, and so forth, is miserable, comes to its (unfortunate but perhaps not guiltless) mother, whining ‘It’s so dull!’ and (too probably this time) does not receive the invigorating, disabusing 'spank' which is its due.”
In other words, “[T]he
best safeguard against finding things dull from the selfish point of view, and
against finding them so unjustly from the moral, is to extend your own
knowledge and interests as far as possible.”
Confession time: I, too, despite a goatish appetite for books in general, have often known book dullness. There's nothing scientific or data-driven about this, just one man's experience after a life of reading. Crushingly dull are the poems of Wordsworth, novels (not the poetry) of Thomas Hardy and anything by Virginia Woolf or Lytton Strachey. Oh, hell: anyone associated with the Bloomsbury Group. Purposely and perversely dull are late Joyce and early-to-late Gertrude Stein. The uncontested Queen of Dull is Joyce Carol Oates. Entire genres are dull: science fiction, most obviously. The literature of entire languages can be dull: German. Sorry to say, some writers I still find dull despite good will and years of diligent effort: Wyndham Lewis. Dullness and snobbery are closely but inversely related among certain readers. Take the unreadable novels of Joseph McElroy (I read them all through Women and Men): cruelly dull but much prized by what’s left of the avant-garde. Impossible to read with pleasure, but lauded for precisely that reason. Damn the hoi polloi.
Referring to “dullness,”
Saintsbury writes: “I have seen the word applied, more than once or twice, to
Gibbon — whom even Mr. Boffin [in Our Mutual Friend] enjoyed for many nights,
despite or because of his amazement at the shocking character of some of the 'Declinings
and Fallings' — and whom I, impervious to such illegitimate allurements, should
call about as good an author to take down for half an hour’s
5 comments:
Saintsbury is a marvel. His "A Short History of English Literature" (1898) stayed in continuous publication until at least the 1970s (my copy is a 1960 printing), used in colleges and universities. His "The Peace of the Augustans: A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literature as a Place of Rest and Refreshment" (1916) is a tour-de-force of the literature of that century. It's easy to tell, from all his many books, how much he loved reading and discovering - not to mention that he was an expert in both English AND French literature, and wrote well about both.
Too bad there isn't, as far as I know, a full-scale biography of Saintsbury.
Whatever agenda a writer has, whatever his message or method, there should be one overriding purpose: to delight the reader (acknowledging that there are differing kinds and degrees of delight). If that solid foundation is not there, I don't much care what the building looks like. The best thing I have ever come across on this duty is by Ralph Waldo Emerson (ironically, a man many have found impossibly dull himself):
"Read proudly - put the duty of being read invariably on the author. If he is not read, whose fault is it? I am quite ready to be charmed, but I shall not make-believe that I am charmed."
So it is with the authority of Emerson that I declare Saul Bellow's much-lauded Herzog the dullest damn thing I have ever read.
Karl Kraus has a lovely aphorism -- which I've read only in English translation, and can reproduce only as well as memory permits: "Some readers blame me for asking that they read my works twice; but this was no arrogant demand: I never asked them to read me once."
Mr. Kurp: On first reading your inclusion of Thomas Hardy, I wanted to react in his defense. I recently re-read "The Mayor of Casterbridge," having first read it in college, and enjoyed rediscovering the characters. On reflection, though, Hardy is somewhat plodding in his writing. Given that he was a contemporary of Dickens, who was anything but dull, we can't blame his writing on the style of the times. (I find Jane Austen "dull," but just about every writer of that period delivers dry prose.) So, OK, Hardy wrote good stories with dull execution. I would not say the same of his poetry, though.
The only Hardy novels I've read are The Return of the Native and Tess of the D'Urbevilles. I suppose I would say I liked them; I certainly had no doubt that I was in the presence of a powerful mind and a deep sensibility. At the same time, though, I couldn't escape the feeling that Hardy was a butcher with his thumb on the scale.
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