From Word To Word

I try to read promiscuously, to read attentively, to read continually.  This means, often, that the books I read in proximity to each other are not otherwise alike in any substantial way.  This is not to say that they are unrelated, but that they relate to each other differently, not just cumulatively to create a sense of an author’s corpus or a culture’s ethos, but also contrastingly to create a sense of the broader range of literary possibility.  This kind of reading functions as a sort of oppositional practice, calling into question the kinds of narrow and pseudo-scientific reading that are too often practiced by the professional readers of our culture, the professors and the critics and the theorists. This broader approach to reading permits different kinds of connections to appear, and also prevents particular kinds of connections from becoming overemphasized at the expense of others.

There is the temptation, however, when reading in this way, to impose on texts a unifying structure that they cannot actually sustain.  Even when there is no textual justification for it, there remains in the reader, or, at least, there remains in me as a reader, a strong drive to manufacture points of relationship between the books that I am reading.  It is precisely this temptation to which I found myself succumbing as I was thinking about the books that I have been reading and about the things that I would like to say about them.  So, in order to resist this tendency in me, here are some notes on what I have been reading, kept as distinct as possible and organized only in the order that I read them.  This is a false representation of my experience also, of course, but perhaps it can stand as a correction to my usual practice.

Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion – I was forced during my undergraduate to read another of Winterson’s novels, Sexing the Cherry, and, perhaps merely because I was forced, I did not enjoy it very much.  I appreciated the mode of humour that Winterson was employing, but it had too sharp an edge for me to laugh along with it.  I felt somehow that even Winterson was not really laughing, that she was only wielding humour as the weapon of a deeper anger or frustration.

The Passion, however, seems to employ a gentler kind of laughter, a laughter that is mixed very closely with the kind of love that has become a passion, the kind of love that needs laughter as its perspective and as its release.  Winterson says in various ways throughout the text that passion is what lies between fear and sex, and I think that the humour of the novel finds a similar place, between the wholly earnest and the wholly cynical, between the wholly naive and the wholly bawdy.  Though it has at times the same sharpness, it is not often used to wound, and the book is more subtle and more effective because of it.

Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall – This was my first experience of Waugh, and I found myself mostly ambivalent about it.  It is certainly very funny at times, and it is also very deft in its satire, but it lacks a sense of gravity and purpose.  Its irony falls closer to the flippancy of P. G. Wodehouse than to the commentary of Oscar Wilde, and its appeal, at least for me, suffers for it.  It is, as a confection, quite tasty, but only because it has so much sugar, and I prefer even my pastries to have a little more substance.

Malcom Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong -This book reminds me strongly of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, another story about a socially and culturally confused professor.  Bradbury’s book may suffer a little through this comparison, his characterization leaning closer to caricature than Nabokov’s, but I think that the connection is justified by the similarities in sensibility between the two books.  There is in them both a genuine sympathy for the uniquely awkward position of academics who discover themselves to be socially and morally irrelevant to the cultures around them, and this commonality interests me very much.

The role of the academic, particularly in the humanities, is a problem that is carelessly posed far more frequently than it is seriously confronted.  Academics themselves seem to take an almost perverse pride in decrying their increasing cultural irrelevance, all the while doing everything possible to ensure that this irrelevance remains entirely undisturbed.  There is, after all, no real necessity for them to be relevant, not so long as they are necessary to grant degrees, and not so long as they are content to have academic careers rather than to have educational vocations.  Those who are not content with this situation, those who feel that they should in fact be having a moral and social influence on their students and their surrounding cultures, find themselves in an uncomfortable position.

Bradbury and Nabokov both explore this situation in different ways, and Bradbury’s most significant contribution is to show how academic irrelevance functions to alienate academics from themselves as well as from their social contexts.  The central character, a professor named Stuart Treece, is constantly noting how his vaguely liberal ideals are no longer capable of definition or application, and this situation is always forcing him either to act according to social norms that he does not accept or to be entirely passive.  This representation of the academic’s role is incisive, I think.  At least in my own experience, it is to one degree or another the fate of any academic who is unwilling merely to have a career but who is also unable to abandon the academic institution.

Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth – This was one of the many novels that I have suggested to students in my novel course without actually having read it.  It is much less and much more than I expected.  It is less as a cultural and historical depiction of pre-revolutionary China, not because it represents these things inaccurately, which I do not have the knowledge to judge in any case, but because these things are not essential to the story and are mentioned only in passing to provide a context for the story.  It is also less as a traditional novel, its characterization and its plot often feeling closer to the mode of a parable than a novel strictly speaking.  It is more, however, precisely as a kind of parable, as the stylized representation of a life that will be recognizable to anyone, despite the story’s historical and cultural remove.  It is also more as an argument for the significance of the relationship between people and the earth, affirming the goodness of being on the land and of tending the land and of making the land fruitful.