The Reading Experience

Mediocre Novelists

Inside Higher Education reports on the discovery that a 19th century novelist named Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins (I confess to not having heard of her before) was not African-American, as previously believed.

In her [Boston] Globe article, [Holly Jackson] recounts how she made the discovery about Kelley-Hawkins, about whom relatively little had been known. In short, a tip led her to records revealing the author's parents, and that in turn led to the discovery that several generations of her family about whom records exist were all white. (Jackson explored, and rejected, the hypothesis that the family was "passing" for white.)

What's most interesting about IHE's report, however is the quoted reponse from Henry Louis Gates, who himself included Kelley-Hawkins in a series of books by African-American Women Writers that he edited:

He said Kelley-Hawkins was a "mediocre novelist" and that he thinks the primary impact of the discovery will be that people won't write about her any more. There are so few black women authors in the 19th century that every single one matters, he says. "Anyone matters," he said.

But Gates said that he doubted that feminist scholars would now start studying Kelley-Hawkins, since there are so many better writers for them to examine in the 19th century. "It's less important to add one more white woman," he said.

I've always admired Gates, but I find his reaction to this controversy rather astonishing in at least two ways.

First, why would he want to include in a high-profile library of African-American literarure a novelist he readily concedes is "mediocre"? Was the purpose of this series merely to have in print a few more books scholars could "write about" (and therefore are really just more cogs in the academic tenure machine), or did Gates believe ordinary readers might want to read these books as well? If the latter, what kind of impression of the quality of 19th century African-American writing does it leave if you implicitly encourage people to read mediocre novels simply because an African-American name is attached? Is it really the case that "anyone matters?" Matters for what? We all know why it would have been difficult for African-American women (and men) to write and publish novels in 19th century America, and we know further that plenty of talented African-American writers emerged in the 20th century. What real purpose--especially what real literary purpose--is served by preserving a "library" of books many of which presumably aren't particularly satisfying to read in the first place?

Second, how does Gates expect his comment that ""It's less important to add one more white woman" to be taken? Since he acknowledges that quality is not a particularly important criterion for "inclusion" on the list of authors academic scholars might "write about," what earthly reason does he have for excluding "one more white woman" from consideration? All those white women are the same, anyway? Same old complaints about patriarchy and the terrors of middle-class existence? And what can it possibly mean to say there are "better" women writers to study? If the purpose of constructing such lists and compiling such libraries is primarily just to identify as many writers of a specified identity as possible, what's the problem with adding "one more"? The more the merrier, at least where course syllabi are concerned.

But this whole affair only illustrates the deep-seated problems with installing identity politics as the basis of literary study in the first place. From the very beginning of this process, the "literary" drops out of consideration altogether, to be replaced by sociology and cultural history and group solidarity. Perhaps these are more worthy endeavors than the merely trifling study of literature for its own sake, but those engaging in them ought to admit they're no longer studying literature. After all, look what this very case says about the current corruption of academic literary criticism and schlolarship. In her Globe article, Jackson writes:

. . .the readings of Kelley-Hawkins's novels that have been offered over the past 20 years--as critics have labored to account for the overwhelming, almost aggressive whiteness of her characters--now seem notably strained.

Many noted black authors. . .have depicted light-skinned ''mulattos'' with blue eyes as a way of pointedly exposing race as a social construction, instead of a biological fact. Kelley-Hawkins's novels, on the other hand, lack any such political thrust. Scholars have explained this away by arguing that the abundance of white signifiers is actually politically radical, with some even going so far as to argue that this extremely white world depicts a kind of post-racial utopia.

In other words: By the current rules of academic commentary, unconstrained by silly questions of form or style or quality of execution, or any of those other outdated "literary" notions, you can take any book and, imputing to it the sociological or biographical characterstics of choice, make it mean anything you want it to mean.

In this case, literally, white is black and black is white.

Shaking You Out of Your Complacency

I generally don't much care for Gore Vidal, either the man (or at least his public persona) or his work, but all praises to him for his essay on James Purdy in this week's New York Times Book Review.

''Gay'' literature, particularly by writers still alive, is a large cemetery where unalike writers, except for their supposed sexual desires, are thrown together in a lot well off the beaten track of family values. James Purdy, who should one day be placed alongside William Faulkner in the somber Gothic corner of the cemetery of American literature, instead is being routed to lie alongside non-relatives.

It is interesting that in a time of renewed debate over sexual matters (disguised clumsily as ''moral values'') James Purdy is re-emerging from the shadows. The first shadow fell upon him with his first novel, ''63: Dream Palace'' (1956), described by the publisher as ''dealing with obsessive love, homosexuality and urban alienation,'' and ending ''with fratricide. . . . Purdy writes about men who are unable to express their love for other men because homosexuality is unthinkable to them.'' Actually, as Purdy demonstrates, it is quite thinkable to everyone else. He has gone his lonely way; sometimes darkly comic, other times tragic as he faces down the ''kindly ones'' in his path, the Greeks' euphemism for the Furies that forever dog mankind.

We can only hope that Purdy is "re-emerging from the shadows." He is the very defininition of "unjustly neglected writer," and Vidal's extended discussion of Eustace Chisholm and the Works perhaps suggesst why he's neglected, at any rate. It's a creepy but brutally honest (and compulsively readable) novel that many readers no doubt find disturbing. (The scenes depicting Daniel Haws's excruciation by Captain Stadger are as unsettling as anything you'll ever read.) Most of Purdy's books are "disturbing," but in the very best way: they shake you out of your complacency and make you think--about the kinds of lives your fellow human beings really live, about the damage we do to each other, about the ways in which American culture preys on human frailty. They also can only make you admire the skill with which Purdy manipulates the formal properties of fiction in order to accomodate his uncompromising subjects and his frequently unmoored characters.

In addition to Eustace Chisholm, these would be good introductions to Purdy's work: The Nephew (1960, in my opinion his best novel), Cabot Wright Begins (1964), In a Shallow Grave (1975), and Narrow Rooms (1978).

Picking Up the Gauntlet

I long ago reconciled myself to the fact that in the "mainstream" print press, only new works of fiction or poetry will be discussed in anything like an approach that could be called "literary criticism." Most book reviews are long on unsubstantiated judgment and free-floating attitude and short on real critical analysis, but at least they do usually concern themselves with the book--the "text"--itself rather than other superfluous items related to the author's life or the sociological context in which the book was written. With most writers from the past--even the very recent past--the situation is quite different. Rarely are the books these writers actually wrote ever regarded as worthy of ongoing consideration in themselves. Instead we get only reviews of the seemingly endless stream of biographies of such writers, themselves a symptom of the way in which talk about writers' lives sadly substitutes for accessible but informed analysis of writers' work.

One might think that real criticism could be found in publications such as the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books, both generally considered "highbrow" sources of book discussion, but even these more intellectual book reviews more often than not confine their "criticism" to reviews of new biographies. Andrew O'Hagan's review of a new biography of Robert Louis Stevenson in the LRB is a good example.

O'Hagan practically admits that interest in Stevenson has been expressed almost exclusively through an obsession with his "life-story":

Robert Louis Stevenson’s afterlife has proved to be an adventure about an adventurer. Friends fought over his belongings, his writings, and the meaning of his character, from the minute he died, and people have never stopped imagining that his life tells a story of human endeavour mounted in the face of impossible odds. Every squeak and turn of his prose has been sounded out for evidence of the living man. . . .

Stevenson is certainly not the only writer whose work "has been sounded out for evidence of the living man." Encyclopedic, multi-volume, and serial biographies of novelists and poets have become commonplace products of the "book industry," and for many readers these biographies must take the place of familiarity with the novels and the poems. Why this should be so is something I don't entirely understand. I am tempted to conclude that "people" aren't finally much interested in works of the imagination, are really much more interested in hearsay and chatter and thus gravitate toward what Steve Mitchelmore in a related post calls "gossipy biographies."

O'Hagan remarks further:

Stevenson’s life has come to seem one that can offer unlimited insight into the mysteries of literary temperament, as if he, practically alone, a hothouse plant, can indicate exactly what it takes to make a human being into a literary personality. . . .

Perhaps this is it. We're more interested in "literary personality" than literature. In the pre-Hollywood past, this is perhaps the closest analogue to a movie star? And for bookish types, obsession with "literary personality" can be safely indulged without seeming as star-crushed as the similar obsessions of the vulgar sorts who read People?

More:

. . .Stevenson’s was a life full of creative compulsions – including the compulsion to be compulsive – and more than other writers he stepped into the role, appearing always to delineate in theatrical detail what it meant to be a writer in the modern world. What it meant to be a male writer, at any rate.

For the psychologically inclined, then. "What it meant [or means] to be a writer in the modern world." I suppose this is more interesting (for some) than "what it means to be a carpenter in the modern world," but, myself, I can't think of a more tedious or inane subject. What it means to be a writer in the modern world is that one writes.

The following is as close to real literary analysis as O'Hagan gets, and, although disappointingly brief, it is exactly the sort of critical insight the further elaboration of which casual readers of Stevenson might appreciate:

For all his verses, his childhood vapours, his vagabond adventures, Stevenson’s real job was to enlarge the psychological potential of the novel. He has nothing in common with Rider Haggard or Jack London. Stevenson’s imagination was filled with the uncanny.

Robert Louis Stevenson is especially the kind of writer who could benefit from, whose books could benefit from, some focused textual analysis. (Not necessarily belabored or overly "academic" exegesis but some "close reading" with a lighter touch.) Too many people think of Stevenson as merely a writer of children's books. Those who have read (seriously read) Kidnapped or The Master of Ballantrae (or even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) know that this is a profound oversimplification. But biographies and reviews of biographies are not going to fulfill the need for extended critical appraisal, without which Stevenson's books may be consigned to the limbo of unread classics.

Are readers really allergic to the kind of modestly-ambitioned literary criticism I am talking about? Given that academic criticism has lost touch with literature itself, not to speak of the needs of general readers, is literary criticism that actually attends to the experience of reading works of literature to be dismissed as a quaint vestige of the past? Perhaps literary weblogs can pick up the gauntlet. (Perhaps they already have.)

Consciousness Raising

In his Feb. 14 column at Moby Lives, Steve Almond gets it all exactly backward:

This country's chief signifier is our staggering capacity to isolate ourselves from the effects of our political and lifestyle choices.

This is the reason, for instance, that so many people can vote for a party that believes gays are sub–human but still watch "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy," (because fags are so darn funny!). It's also the reason liberals can drive around in SUVs, while decrying policies driven by oil–dependency.

But of course it is one of the functions of art (yes, even popular art) to call people on such bullshit, to raise people's consciousness, to awaken their capacities for compassion.

William Faulkner probably put this best in his 1951 speech, upon accepting the Nobel Prize: "The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

It seems to me that the time has come answer this call.

I don't mean to suggest that writers should begin cranking out polemics. Art resides in an argument with the self, not others.

What I am suggesting is that artists need not regard their political identities as wholly separate from their artistic ones — especially given our unique historical circumstance.

Almond is upset because a number of readers, allegedly spurred on by a particular review at The National Review, objected to what Almond himself characterizes as the "lefty diatribes" in his book Candyfreak. And while he should have known that such diatribes would alienate certain readers of his book, I don't finally blame him for protesting against such responses. This is a work of nonfiction, the structure of which ("an account of my cross–country journey to various small, independent candy bar manufacturers") almost demands the sort of informal talk (the author's ramblings while rambling) these "diatribes" seem to be. Self-styled "conservatives" could surely have determined from reviews such as the one in National Review that Almond was a "lefty" and should have restrained themselves from buying Candyfreak if the expression of lefty views was offensive to them.

But I can't see why Almond would leap from this perfectly coherent defense of revealing one's polticial views in a work of nonfiction to a polemic on behalf of political art. Candyfreak was not a work of literary "art" in the first place. It was clearly some kind of hybrid of memoir and journalism, and although such a book can certainly be artfully written, it hardly warrants such a distinction-begging declaration that artists should become politicians. Does he think that the very readers who objected to his politics when expressed in nonfiction would change their minds if they read some politicized fiction? Since these are the very people who have to be persuaded that the current state of affairs in the United States has become unacceptable, to whom, exactly, would such political fiction appeal to other than those readers who already agree with it? And what would this accomplish other than further degrading the critical atmosphere in which literary art is received and discussed?

(I especially cannot see what connection the Faulkner passage Almond quotes has to do with the need to create political art. Surely Faulkner was himself not "calling" for such a thing. The "props" and "pillars" he speaks of are decidedly not of the sort that would substitute for a political soapbox. Faulkner is speaking of the much more durable qualities of art and literature as consolation and distinctive modes of understanding, the qualities that allow art to transcend historical circumstances. If Almond means to suggest that even now art might act as such a bulwark--although I don't really think our circumstances are "unique"--against frustration and outright despair, I might agree with him, but I don't think this kind of mere consolation is what he has in mind.)

The purpose of art is not to "call people" on their political derelictions. It might be about hypocrisy, but almost never directly (where it becomes a sermon) and, it is be hoped, never about liberals' hypocrisy in their driving habits (where it becomes just boring). Similiarly, while art might in some instances "awaken" our compassionate impulses, almost always when works of art or literature take this as an explicit goal the effort fails, often devolving into didacticism or sentimentality.

Moreover, artists and writers should "regard their political identities as wholly separate from their artistic ones." As soon as artists become political commentators, to that extent they cease to be artists. I know that many, perhaps most, people who care about such things disagree with me, but I simply don't understand how art can be art unless its effects are primarily "artistic." If instead they can also be "political"--that is, if the art in question also seeks to express the artist's opinions about this or that--then we might as well agree that "art" is no longer a term with much meaning. It's just a fancier way to talk about "our political and lifestyle choices" (as Almond puts it elsewhere in his essay).

Almond quotes from one of his "lefty diatribes":

. . .The Bush tax cut had sopped the rich and wiped out the federal surplus. The economy was in the crapper. Dubya was doing everything in his power to hand the planet to Exxon.

Two years earlier, I'd sat in front of another TV and watched him steal the Presidency in broad daylight. Then a bunch of vicious air–borne murderers had come along and scared the commonsense out of everyone. In one morning, they'd managed to bestow upon this evangelical simpleton an air of presidential dignity.

I don't much disagree with any of that. But believing such things to be true makes me want to express my beliefs directly, to convince others through real political argument to believe them as well, perhaps makes me want to become more active politically by joining groups or supporting candidates. It doesn't make me want to write a story or a novel to encapsulate my beliefs. I'm afraid that, under our admittedly dismal political circumstances, too many writers will take Almond's admonitions to heart, will try to merge their identities and produce equally dismal fiction that won't either make any difference to Bush voters or be very fun to read.

Critical Methodology

Scott Esposito and Dave Munger have been continuing the conversation about the role of theory in literary study and appreciation. On the latter, Dave writes:

Unfortunately, the professors aren’t teaching literature appreciation, they’re teaching literature, and contemporary literature study demands an understanding of critical theory, not just close reading. You won’t get anywhere in grad school – let alone as a professor – without an ability to apply critical theory. Faced with doing a disservice to English students who are planning to be something else (lawyers, accountants, schoolteachers, or baristas) or to those who are planning to become graduate students and professors, they favor the ones who have a chance to follow in their own footsteps.

Dave is more or less correct that "contemporary literature study demands an understanding of critical theory," but this is not because "they’re teaching literature." It's because literary study has become a self-reflexive discipline, a course of study about literary study, not about literature as such. You could say that this is unsurprising, even inevitable, given the imperatives of disciplinary study and scholarship in American universities, and you would be at least partially correct. But more about this below.

Dave links to a post at the blog Uncertain Principles that asserts the following about "theory-free" literature classes:

You could argue that this would be doing a disservice to students, that it is impossible to claim to have a meaningful understanding of modern literary scholarship without having at least some acquaintance with critical theory. And you'd be right.

Again, what I find most telling about this formulation is that denying students access to theory would impede their ability "to have a meaningful understanding of modern literary scholarship" (emphasis mine). The almost unconscious assumption is that to study literature in modern American universities is perforce to study the scholarship on literature, to become familiar with what others who have devoted themselves to the study of literature have written about the study of literature. (In fairness, it should be said that Dave goes on to question the use of theory in undergraduate literary courses, ultimately to take a position on how literature might be taught to these students with which I am entirely comfortable; it is precisely the unconscious assumptions behind the language employed in talking about theory, however, that I want ultimately to emphasize.) In many ways, what is now called "theory" is just what passes for the established mode of "literary scholarship."

There was a time, of course, when "literary scholarship" meant not theory in particular, but a wide range of approaches to literature, most of which were understood to be useful in helping us to understand literary works, to be ways of enhancing our ability to finally return to "literature itself" and read it with greater comprehension and enjoyment. But before discussing further how the one conception of scholarship mutated into the other, I want to quote Scott Esposito's gloss on this whole debate:

Dave's answer is "literature without theory" but he realizes that this approach is complicated by the fact that all readers are informed by various experiences and historical knowlege of some sort. In other words, none of us can be "tabula rasa" when reading a book. That means that anyone teaching literature will have to deal with a group of conflicting assumptions. If you don't steamroll/mitigate these assumptions with theory then what do you do?. . .

. . .Are we approaching this text as an aesthetic experience, watching how the words link and interact as one would the brushstrokes of a painting? Or are we approaching this more interpretatively, trying to teach tools to get at a meaning? I suppose we can always just answer "both" and say both approaches are worth teaching, but I'd doubt if that would mitigate argumentation.

Although Scott is also agreeable to the notion of "literature without theory" for undergraduates, his words as well bear the impression of some of the current presumptions about the relationship between literature and theory. One is that "none of us can be 'tabula rasa' when reading a book." This is unexceptionable in itself, but as I pointed out in a recent post, very often this otherwise harmless truism is used to assert further that such experiences and knowledge themselves constitute a "theory," that all reading of works of literature is preceded by a preexisting theory of literature and of reading itself. As I said in that post, I think this is a trivial argument mostly undertaken (not by Scott) to squelch all discussion about possible alternatives to theory as a way of orienting oneself to works of literature.

The second is less a presumption about theory than an altogether unexamined assumption about how we become acquainted with literature in the first place: Scott speaks of his two broadly defined approaches to reading literature as "worth teaching." Certainly we can think of the way we come to value reading works of literature as, broadly speaking, something that is learned, but in this context "teaching" means teaching literature as part of an academic curriculum. And, in my opinion, this underlying premise that literature is something to be encountered through the formal study such a curriculum imposes, that "literature" is somehow first and foremost a subject of academic study, needs to be reconsidered.

Perhaps the place to begin such a reconsideration is simply to remind ourselves that "theory" itself is a by-product of the transformation of the English department into the academic department assigned to "study" literature in the first place. And we should also remember that the establishment of literature as a reputable subject of academic study is still a relatively recent phenomenon. Literature courses were not offered on any reliable basis until the 1910s and 1920s, and really they were not consolidated into a coherent course of study widely availabe in American colleges until after World War II. Furthermore, it was under the aegis of "criticism" that literature was finally accepted into the curriculum, not as a self-evidently viable object of study in its own right. (For a further discussion of this history, see Gerald Graff's Professing Literature.) Before the advent of criticism (by which the focus of study was to be the development of critical thinking and its application more broadly), "English" was at best the discipline otherwise occupied with "philology"--literally, the study of the language.

It so happened that the dominant critical approach to literature in the 1940s, 50s and 60s became the New Criticism, a method of "close reading" that had the happy consequence of focusing the student's attention on the formal qualities of "literature itself," but it was surely inevitable that this critical method would come to be supplanted by others, since, again, the goal of studying literature was to develop critical approaches to literature, not to admire it for its intrinsic worth--although, again, New Criticism did seem to encourage this respectful attitude.

It also happens that New Criticism is a critical approach for which I have a great deal of sympathy, although I also have problems with its unstated ambitions--for many of the New Critics literary study was intended to become through its respect for "the text" almost a substitute for religion--and a number of its practices--the general New Critical disdain for writers such as Wordsworth (the Romantics more generally) and Milton, for example. But in my opinion the most destructive legacy of New Criticism has been the process it initiated whereby Critical Methodology became all-important, inevitably leading to the creation of new methodologies deemed superior to the preceding ones, finally leading to the installation of "critical theory" as we now know it as the sine qua non of literary study. As a result, we have been led to forget: Before there were departments of literature and literary study, there was no literary theory as such. Writers and readers got on perfectly well without it.

Certainly there was literary criticism before the English department became first its guardian and then its warden. But to call the critical writing of Samuel Johnson or S. T. Coleridge or Henry James "theory" is merely to engage in denotative game playing. Critics such as these (who for the most part were poets and fiction writers themselves) wanted to explain what was at stake in the reading of poetry and fiction, and they had their opinions about what was good or bad in their fellow writers, but they hardly thought of criticism as largely about itself, as a contribution not to the appreciation of worthy literature but to the perpetual shifting and expanding of critical methodology.

To return (at last) to the posts at Conversational Reading and Word Munger. Theory is important, indeed indispensable, to "those who are planning to become graduate students and professors." And undoubtedly "anyone teaching literature will have to deal with a group of conflicting assumptions." But these things are true because, essentially, becoming a literature professor, not advancing the cause of literature, has become the primary objective of the graduate student, and because teaching literature has come to be much more about teaching--that is, professing a point of view--than about the works of literature being taught. Those works are still around, waiting for such readers as are willing to take them for what they have to offer. But in this regard, curious readers would be much better served by reading, say, literary weblogs than by giving much thought to what literary theory is all about.

Meeting Strangers

Monday

This morning I woke up with diarrhea. Yesterday I'd read a book that really pissed me off. It was the memoir of a writer who began the book stating how much she hated memoirs but had decided that the day-to-day details of her own life would be plenty interesting to most readers because she, unlike all those other memoirists who just wrote about living their lives like everyone else, led a life of great interest well worth preserving in a diary format. I slogged through about 20 pages before deciding that no one's life was worth being recorded in such a format and then thrust upon the reading public, as if what one did first thing in the morning should be broadcast in the newspaper.

I knew I wouldn't write about this book in my blog, but then what would I write about? I could always write about how I went about deciding what I was going to write about!

There were no books waiting for me in the mail. There never are. Somehow putting up posts on your blog the burden of which is that most book publishers don't know what they're doing doesn't get you many free books to review.

Tuesday

I quit blogging early so I could take a trip out to the Waldenbooks at the mall, which is the only bookstore within a 150 mile radius. After finding nothing but trash to read, I decided to go back home and put in an order at Amazon. This allows me to continue pondering what I do when deciding what to write about on my blog.

Before leaving the mall, I am recognized by someone: "Dan Green, right? My brother had you for an English class. You're even uglier than he said." Before I could get out the door she added: "He said you were a rotten teacher, too!"

Wednesday

I chickened out. I didn't write about how I decided what to write about, but instead put up a post about how I hated books in which the writer just wrote about his own life without thinking clearly about how his life was really just about sitting around wondering what to write about, occasionally pausing to actually write about it. It's a very cutting edge post, I concluded, very self-revealing.

There's a talk tonight about new methods of attacking potato blight, but I can't decide if I'll go. Some of these agriculture lectures can be very avant-garde, but I'm getting a little tired of them. I let the television decide for me. If it was a rerun of the Andy Griffith Show I'd seen less than 75 times I would stay home and chill out--although it's 15 below zero outside, which is chilly enough--but if I'd seen it more than 75 I'd go to the lecture. It was the episode in which Barbara Eden (a real hot chick in 1962) wanted to give everybody in Mayberry a manicure. I'd seen it at least 100 times, but decided once more couldn't hurt.

Thursday

In looking at the New York Times Book Review I saw a review of a new novel by someone I've never heard of. I decided to write his publicist and ask for an interview. I don't know anything about this writer, but the idea of writing to a publicist seemed very exciting. Plus, I can now sit around thinking about how I'm going to interview the person I'm going to interview, the fruits of which might make an interesting blog post. Or maybe the Caribou Gazette will want to publish my musings in next week's issue!

I checked my e-mail. A really good one: "Saaxiest women in your area--Meaat now! Hi my name is roy and Id like to invite you to my favorite pick-up site. Since I fiirst sow this site, 4 months ago, I felt a MAJOR change in my ljfe - I met more womeen then I've ever dreamt of! You can enter now too, since the site is open to the public for free. Feel free to enter!"

Friday

There's just not anything to blog about today. (Although I could of course blog about how one decides there's nothing to blog about, etc.) I had almost concluded I'd spend most of the day making toast, when the doorbell rang. It was a complete stranger, very bedraggled-looking. I suddenly wondered if he knew I had a blog, and if it finally crashed in a deserted part of the blogosphere, would it still make a cyber-sound? He wanted to know if I'd been to the potato blight lecture, and was I aware of the Revolutionary Farmers Association--the RFA--and its anti-potato industry manifesto? Some days having a blog is a wonderful thing.

Literary Standards

Thanks to Scott Esposito for alerting us to this website. (Although it's actually pretty unpleasant reading; perhaps "thanks" is not exactly right, although it is certainly useful to have the ravings of these people accessible in such a form.) Since Missouri is my home state, the experience is even more disheartening.

Almost certainly there are other, although more informally organized groups like "Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools," and not just in the red states. To some extent, parents ought to be included in curricular decisions in local schools, or at least ought to be informed about them, or at least ought to take an interest in what their schools are doing. One suspects, however, that the CLSS is mostly in the control of a handful of parents or other "interested parties" who want to use such things as reading lists and assignments to wage a wider political war. (And I'm just as opposed to using reading lists in literature classes for left-wing polemical purposes as for the right-wing variety.) In this respect, it's all a pretty dismal example of what life could be like if the powers that be in Bushworld have their way.

What's most laughable about the Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools is their claim that they wish "to encourage the public schools to help our children develop a love of reading and gain a rigorous literary education through excellent literature choices" and that they wish to see "higher quality literature assignments" provided instead of the following offending books:

1. All the Pretty Horses
2. Animal Dreams
3. The Awakening
4. The Bean Trees
5. Beloved
6. Black Boy
7. Fallen Angels
8. The Hot Zone
9. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
10. Lords of Discipline
11. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
12. Song of Solomon
13. Stotan
14. This Boy’s Life

I'm not going to defend every title on this list as a great work of literature, but of course the likes of Cormac McCarthey, Kate Chopin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Tobias Wolff provide more "quality" in their work than, apparently, the small minds at the CLSS can be burdened with. (And isn't it interesting that perhaps the two most eminent black writers of the 20th century, Wright and Morrison, are included on this list, while on the CLSS's alternative list of "the best of the best" their children are not allowed to read there are precisely no black writers?) (It's also interesting that the CLSS disapproves of books "with extremely depressing messages," that "send the message that life is hopeless and meaningless," yet on this very alternative list are included Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea!)

The CLSS trots out the usual well-informed analysis when explaining its objections to books with sex in them:

While textual descriptions of heterosexual sex, oral sex, homosexual sex, anal sex, rape, and incest are not generally classified as pornography because they don't contain images, it's undeniable that descriptions of sexually-explicit scenes helps develop an appetite for more of the same. Unfortunately, that appetite easily and logically leads to pornography and sexual experimentation. (Anyone watching the news knows that students are engaging in oral sex at a greater rate than ever before.) While it may be a leap to say that reading This Boy's Life leads to increased sexual encounters among students, one thing can be said with certainty: It's not helping!

If the CLSS argument was that such books as they oppose including in the high school curriculum are simply not "age appropriate"--that is, they are adult books that adult readers might find to be of very high "quality" indeed--then I would have some sympathy for their position. It's arguable that, say, Song of Solomon and All the Pretty Horses are books that teenage readers (not all teenage readers) would fail to appreciate simply on a literary basis--they don't yet have the skills or the experience to understand the literary goals of these books. Indeed, sometimes forcing books like these on unsuspecting high school students is precisely what instills in them a lifetime hatred of "literature." (A personal illustration: I am infamous among my high school classmates for having brazenly torn up a copy of Huckleberry Finn in the presence of our English teacher as a protest against having been required to read it. I now consider it one of the greatest books ever written, but I doubt that many of my classmates have eventually come to the same conclusion.)

But of course this is not the objection. In branding the titles on their disapproved lists as essentially wicked books, they are also striking a blow against the wicked culture that has produced them. It's very hard to believe that many high school students these days are going to be shocked and appalled by the language and situations depicted in the novels in question. (Even when I was a high school student I might have been titillated by them in the usual adolescent manner, but I wouldn't have been horrified or unduly influenced by them.) It's the parents who are shocked and appalled, and fighting against all that depraved literature is a way of fighting the depravity of American society and those responsible for polluting it. By which they mean us.

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Trent Walters recently put up a very interesting post on Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "Wakefield." This is a story about a man who leaves his wife and home, only to move to a nearby street where he "dwelt upwards of twenty years" unnoticed and free to, in effect, keep observing his wife and the life he has himself left behind.

Trent interprets the story as one about depression:

Again and again, Wakefield nearly leaves, "excited to something like energy of feeling [if he had used his imagination, he could have felt his wife's pain]." Later he tries wake himself up: "Wakefield! Wakefield! You are mad!" Come on. If he's aware of his crime, what's stopping him from rectifying it for twenty years?

He is "unwilling to display his full front to the world," and "an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity. Wakefield is spell-bound." Are these not perfectly apt descriptions of depression? Perhaps in Hawthorne's day he saw the influence as other-worldly. Even when energy breaks the heavy spell of depression, it is too brief to be effective:

[He] throws himself upon the bed. That latent feelings of years break out; his feeble mind acquires a brief energy from their strength.... [His situation] so moulded him to himself, that, considered, in regard to his fellow-creatures and the business of life, he could be said to possess his right mind.

This is a perfectly coherent interpretation of the story (one of my favorite Hawthorne tales, probably one of my favorite short stories period), and I certainly would not decry finding access to such a story, which is admittedly one that invites disparate readings, through discovering in it certain personal resonances. But I would say that it is certainly not the only coherent interpretation of "Wakefield." The protagonist does indeed seem to be characterized by "solitude and self-absorption," and Hawthorne himself could indeed have been described in such terms as well. (Trent goes on to highlight other language Hawthorne uses to describe Wakefield: "his mind occupied itself in long and lazy musings, that ended to no purpose, or had not vigor to attain it; his thoughts were seldom so energetic as to seize hold of words.")

But Hawthorne is quite self-conscious in portraying Wakefield in this way. It is not the sort of portait by which the words seem to hide another, different and unconscious meaning. And Wakefield shares the attributes of some of Hawthorne's other characters, particularly the narrator of The Blithedale Romance, who agrees to join an experimental New England commune but finds himself mostly withdrawing from the whole scene in order to observe it more closely. (At one point he climbs up a tree so he can observe and listen to two of his fellow members without being noticed.) More than anything else, in my opinion, these characters embody the habitual attitude of the writer: solitary, detached, to some extent isolated from his own feelings in favor of heightened observation of others and the world around him. Although obviously he isn't a writer, Wakefield nevertheless seems to me a portait of the artist, not of the human being behind the artist's demeanor, but of the behavior the artist is almost compelled to exhibit in order to be an artist.

And insofar as this behavior can be self-destructive, oblivious to the effects it has on other people, arises from impulses the human being perhaps can't even control, Hawthorne also seems to condemn it.