“Literariness, as I understand it, does not necessarily entail any particular set of formal qualities. What makes a work literary is the ability to be understood and appreciated outside the context of its origin. That is why a literary work, however valuable as a document of its time, is more than documentary.”
I have no
interest in yet another rumble over the meaning of literature. Justice Potter Stewart said of obscenity, “I
know it when I see it,” and the same test applies to literature. Any seasoned
reader recognizes the good stuff and does what he can to avoid the mediocre and
worthless.
The author
of the passage quoted above is Gary Saul Morson in The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture (Yale University Press
2011). I recently described Uncle Tom’s
Cabin as “part melodrama, part sermon and all unreadable as literature,
though its importance in history is undeniable.” Yes, it has enormous historical
value and must be read by anyone who hopes to understand slavery, the history
of abolitionism and the origins of the American Civil War. A reader took
offense at my characterization of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel and,
inevitably, called me “racist.” Let’s put that aside for now. I have no
interest in telling people what they should or shouldn’t read. I would
encourage you to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, if
you can muster the gumption, and make up your own mind. Morson is helpful:
“We might
say that a work’s literariness begins precisely where its documentary value
ends. If one reads Gibbon as a textbook on Roman history, as one surely can,
one is not reading it as literature. If one turns to Herodotus as a model of
storytelling, one is. No matter what inaccuracies or documentary shortcomings
may be discovered in Boswell’s Life of
Johnson, it remains a literary masterpiece.”
[This is a
good place to again plug Morson’s most recent book: Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions
and Why Their Answers Matter (2023), and the rest of his work. This past
weekend he published a review of Joseph Epstein’s latest, Familiarity Breeds Content: New and Selected Essays.]
An alternative way of describing "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is as all but unreadable for pleasure. Nobody should sit down to read "Uncle Tom'a Cabin" expecting to enjoy it. Any 21st century reader sophisticated enough to persist work his or her way through the conventions of 19th century prose cannot earnestly participate in the bathos, or feel what the book's original readers were meant to feel. Stow does not have a prose style that transcends her time. When you think that she was a contemporary of Hawthorne, Twain, Melville, Poe ... My gosh, she was awful.
ReplyDeleteThen again, Edmund Wilson pointed out that style is not everything when he said that Uncle Tom's Cabin is "a much more impressive work than one has ever been allowed to suspect. The first thing that strikes one about is a certain eruptive force...Out of a background of undistinguished narrative, inelegantly and carelessly written, the characters leap into being with a vitality that is all the more striking for the ineptitude of the prose that presents them...they come before us arguing and struggling, like real people who cannot be quiet."
ReplyDeleteSounds like it's worth reading, to me. Then again, having read Theodore Dreiser, I believe that someone with an atrocious prose style can still be a great writer. There are no rules, there are only books.