Lord, I have strayed away from the realm of an average reader into the dark, subterraneous waters of literary criticism. It’s a dark and dreadful place where people shoot arrows at you from ivory towers and with the snap of a finger take away your existence along with your fabricated purpose in life. God is dead; our creed relativism, not pluralism, and the literary canon is a cigar box filled with dried-up classics, foisted on you by a self-perpetuating old boy’s club of scotch-drinking, ass-slapping, jazz-loving white men who wear sweater vests and read Dylan Thomas poems for bed time stories to put their listless kids to sleep.
Alright, that is only partly true. I have encountered a good worth of literary theory and criticism this semester. And it’s not as abysmal as one may have feared. The myth has been dispelled. My mind has been rolling like a snowball down a mountain slope, amalgamating substance and groups of substance into itself before it crashes into some honeymooner’s cabin. It’s difficult to keep things separated and in the right place, but the experience has been welcomed. Some key questions: Why do we read books? What is it about the essence of literature and its function that’s kept us on our knees, awake late at night, fired up, or chilled frozen? Supposedly it begins with Plato and the Greeks and all thought since has been variations on the same theme. Imitation of the world. Passion captured. Imagination unrestrained.
Alas the issue of taste comes barreling down on us. It confounds us. Our palates differ; we get fussy over cake. Chocolate or lemon? Strawberry filling? Ice-cream. Mousse. One flavor. Multi-flavored. Textures. The writing on the top. Number of candles. Trick candles? A stripper inside.
One literary battle rages over the accessibility of a text. Jonathan Franzen, in his essay “Mr. Difficult” capitulates one side of the conflict:
“My small hope for literary criticism would be to hear less about orchestras and subversion and more about the erotic and culinary arts. Think of the novel as lover: Let’s stay home tonight and have a great time; just because you’re touched where you want to be touched, it doesn’t mean you’re cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it.”
I agree with Mr. Franzen for the most part. A lot of work has become pretentious – difficult for the sake of being difficult, and even at times masking its lack of mattering. In other words, fuck subversion. Have something to say and say it well. William Gaddis is Franzen’s top suspect of erudition. He comments on the malaise of contemporary literature with such symptoms as a humanistic, calculated, self-aggrandizing attitude and masking vacuity with fancy dress.
We have lost our capacity for wonder. We are no longer surprised. I hope for the same thing as Franzen: we are familiar with what pleases us, but we still get weak in the knees when we come before it.
Jews and Christians have it right in their approach Scripture. The awe-striking reverence for the Torah during a commemoration of the Sabbath at a synagogue illustrates this perfectly. There is something profound to these words spoken, they speak to our hearts, souls, and minds, to our human condition and to timeless truths. I think of a work entitled Eat This Book by Eugene Peterson. Reading the word of God is much a phagorgasmic process. There is a very sensual nature to literature and language. We digest the sacred. I like how Ben Marcus puts it: “Plot would be another name for our bodies, carved hollow to receive something amazing.”
Marcus continues to describe a reader’s involvement in a story differently from Franzen:
“When plots are revealed they cease being plots. They are uncovered, as tedious as a fully nude person. Good fiction is busy keeping secrets, protecting its plots. The story, then, is what the story is hiding, and the hide is indeed a piece of skin, whose effect is to conceal the body.”
His emphasis on the undressing of a story is much appreciated. Artfulness and craft are critical parts of telling a story. Yes, there are times when a direct style is most profitable, but there is room for well-designed, unique forms of telling stories. Stories that reward upon multiple readings. As long as the method does not obscure the nature of the story completely, I enjoy an intelligent, challenging piece of literature. I think Franzen would agree. One of my favorite pastime activities is reading in between the lines. Both in literature and conversation.
Thus my own lofty ideas of literature are being formed and reconstituted throughout my reading endeavors. I am tattooed by traditional notions of literature, fundamentals of storytelling, character, conflict, but contemporary movements also have imprinted themselves on my mind. I enjoy existential angst. I enjoy flipping genres and readers’ expectations over and tickling their exposed bellies or punching them in the gut.
Reading Percy Bysshe Shelley’s defense of poetry, I was struck by some of his exuberant romantic reflections:
“Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them or in language or in form sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide – abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.”
This passage reverberates. We try to make sense out of a senseless world, and literature is one of the primary facets of this struggle. Desperate for redemption, we search for atonement. Akin to the plots of many tales, we are strangers in a strangeland, searching for signposts to lead us home. Our yearning is co-mingled with most characters in the novels we read, with the voices of poetry, with Dante's Virgil we journey through hell, only to arrive at paradise.
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