'The Line-scanning, Page-turning Habit'

A reader has alerted me to an issue of the quarterly journal nonsite.org which includes five essays devoted to Hugh Kenner (1923-2003). Much of the language and thinking is jargon-clotted and beside the point but it’s encouraging to know Kenner is still being read by anyone, even academics. He is one of my teachers though not in a formal sense. I did interview him once by telephone. The subject was Yeats. I mean that, through his books he has served as a guide, to modernism in particular, like his friend Guy Davenport. As a sophomore I read The Pound Era when it was published in 1971. The book is a vast system of linkages. Read it attentively, follow his allusions and references, and you can call yourself an educated person. 

Kenner introduced me to previously unknown writers – Wyndham Lewis, for example – and solidified my interest in others, including Pope, Swift and Flann O’Brien, not to mention Buster Keaton. From him I first heard of Growth and Form by D’Arcy W. Thompson. Kenner invites us to take words seriously and to observe them and the energy fields they create in action. He draws examples from disparate realms and makes them cohere (another quality he shares with Davenport). Thanks to Kenner I worked hard at trying to appreciate Ezra Pound but it never took. Pound remains perhaps the most repellant writer I know – for his anti-Semitism and his pretentious incoherence – who still claims a substantial literary reputation. Still, a serious reader has to be familiar with his work, which is not the same as admiring or enjoying it.

 

One of the most clarifying passages in all of Kenner’s books is this, from A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (1974): “Beckett’s sensibility is profoundly conservative, and nowhere is he more traditional than in his regard for the integrity of the printed work, the scrupulousness of its phrasing, the accuracy of its proof-reading, the exemplary adequacy of the translations.”

 

Consider the way Kenner concludes a review of a 1978 Gerard Manley Hopkins biography by Paddy Kitchen:

 

“At his funeral there was no one to suspect that the obscure professor of Greek interred at Glasnevin Cemetery (where fifteen years later an imaginary mourner named Leopold Bloom would opine that priestly mumbo-jumbo alleviates grief, as it is a kind of poetry) would be recognized in the next century as one of the greatest of English poets.”

 

I remember reading Kenner’s essay “The Traffic in Words” in the June 1979 issue of Harper’s, and again when it was collected in Historical Fictions (North Point Press, 1990). Ostensibly, it’s a review of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew but soon it moves on to greener pastures. He takes as his subject mass production and “The Reading Public”:

 

“[P]eople with a need are the principal thing mass production produces: hence in these late days something called the Reading Public, a human subspecies imbued with the line-scanning, page-turning habit, that must at all costs not be traumatized by novelty. Much investment rides on the Reading Public’s well-being; Argentinian sheep are tended no more carefully.”

 

Kenner lauds Sorrentino and other “avant-garde” writing. You don’t have to agree with his judgments to learn something from them. The same applies to Dr. Johnson’s and Guy Davenport’s. Even when they are wrong, they are illuminatingly wrong. Another sentence:

 

“Mankind’s first mass-produced item was surely the brick, the second probably the book, the manufacture of which Gutenberg had mechanized by 1454.”

 

I’m reminded by the “brick”/”book” proximity that in Steven Millhauser’s Enchanted Night (1999) a character contemplates using a 592-page novel by Theodore Dreiser as a weapon: “Jennie Gerhardt would have laid him out cold. Good heft, hard binding: a brick of a book. Jennie to the rescue. Social value of art.”