7 posts tagged “books”
I am not much interested in questions of canonization, because a little investigation suggests that they're mostly unanswerable and boring. This might not be an exception: caveat lector. But I was thinking about the Harry Potter phenomenon and the incredible extent to which people defend the books against detractors, and lavish praise on them, and make enormous claims of importance and intrinsic value and complexity on their behalf— more so than any other book I can think of published in the last 30 years. Their public stature not only as wildly popular light reading but as bona fide good books is unparalleled. Their place in the canon of English literature, as determined by widespread and intense acknowledgement of quality and importance, seems to have been won.
What is this place? I don't want to go too far into it, but the books are, um, syncretic genre novels about a parallel universe set more or less in our time, written by a single author, released with a lot of marketing tie-ins. They have, as I have said, no peers (unless you count something like Philip Pullman's books, which are a very distant second), but many forerunners. They aren't exactly part of a literary culture, in the way that Dickens' novels were part of a literary culture. But they are enormous tokens of cultural literacy for big swaths of the population now: if you like to read, you're expected to have read them, and probably to have seen the movies too. Criticizing them is painful and demoralizing: they're not high art, of course... but since when has high art been this good? People love them. Well-read people love them. They're the best we've got.
I will simply take a minute now and let that sink in.
In the comments to this Scott McLemee piece, a translator of Dante, Robert Hollander, weighs in:
My wife and I began our translation of the [sic?] Dante’s Commedia in 1997, just as the first Potter novel was being published in Britain. A few years later we heard about Harry when I had e-mail from a couple in Chicago whose 8-year-old son had seen our Inferno on their shelf, took it, read it, and fell in love with it, too, getting their permission to take it to school, where he showed it to the other kids and told them this book was almost as good as Harry Potter. [...] As we have traveled and talked with people about our work, some we have met or heard from have seen Dante as the antidote to HP. But from early on I have been saying that Harry Potter is Dante’s friend. Indeed, exactly as most who discuss the “decline of reading” were in their fullest cry, the Rowling phenomenon blasted a hole in the center of their perception. And I wanted to add to McLemee’s correct insistence that we have several contemporary examples of the success of non-academy-approved serious writers in finding an audience a further insistence that “serious” dead writers also have a wide and vigorous following. Ask Robert Fagles, who has translated Homer & Virgil... Perhaps the “official guardians” of high culture don’t get it: the reason we are getting paid to spend our lives promulgating and explaining these rich and strange texts is that they are meaningful to millions of our fellows. I think all of us who proclaim the importance of literacy are in J.K. Rowling’s debt: She has shown us that we are right, even when some of us choose not to believe it.
There you have it. And in the end, the element of this canonization which affects me most personally is the argument that, really, you should like these books, just as you should like Homer and Dante and Shakespeare and all the other books you like: they are important and valuable and good; they are not really optional. If you resist them at first, you should really give them a chance: they grow with the experience of reading them; they are multifaceted, there's something for everyone in them, the human soul abides in them. So goes the argument of the canon itself.
I have no problem with people reading the Harry Potter books. Read them. Enjoy them. Love them. Fine. But must I also love them? I love Vergil and Shakespeare and what-I've-read-of-Dante and Goethe and Proust and Kafka and so forth; but J.K. Rowling... Honestly, I happened across a couple of spoilers for the last volume— I've read the other six, although the sixth was a real slog— and, after quickly averting my eyes, found myself wanting intensely to read a plot summary so I wouldn't have to invest the energy in the whole 600-page tome. Because, look: here are some books I haven't read:
- Don Quixote
- La commedia divina
- Tristram Shandy
- The Tale of Genji
- The Story of the Stone
- Gravity's Rainbow
- a thousand other less famous, but extremely good works
Can I please just read those before I die instead?
Er. Yes. I guess that's all I have to say. I have a lot to do, and it's making me a tiny bit unhappy. As of 6/26/07, 6:48 p.m., it is not yet done.
From the Berkeley library's copy of Charles Johnson's Being & Race: Black Writing Since 1970; the first chapter, also called "Being & Race."
I have a couple more things to say about this, I guess. I was in a local bookstore where I found a cheap set of the last 4 volumes of The Story of the Stone. (But as a result of the below— and my own, uh, poverty— I ultimately put them back. They may still be there.) As I wandered around with the books in hand, I heard the bookseller deliver a familiar, strident lecture about how much it sucks to be poor in the Bay Area and how little people here talk about money and poverty and crime, and how much he hates the Telegraph hippies, and how he may be poor but is well-educated, etc. As I said, all familiar. But there was something about the peculiar, self-satisfied tone: as though any "well-educated person" had a fucking right to expect reasonable rents, clean streets, ample well-paying employment opportunities and an engaged, ethical, intelligent polis. And of all the possible perversions of this impossible ideal, Berkeley was an especially offensive one.
I've actually met very few booksellers I've liked personally, which seems strange; but the ones I've known have tended to be very harried, irritable, cynical people without any great interest in books, which bring them as much grief as prosperity, and they share in the classic petit-bourgeois mentality on display above. I mean: yes, the cost of living is ridiculous out here; there's oodles of northern liberal racism (black people: fine, of course; poor loud black people: well my God I try but there's just no common ground you know); you couldn't pay me to work on Telegraph or Haight. It's all strictly speaking true. But if your desire for prosperity, safety, community etc. is that strong, it goes without saying that running a Telegraph bookstore is exactly the wrong means to those ends. If you've made such a counterintuitive decision, why lament it?
I'm now sitting here in front of the computer, supplying responses to my rhetorical questions, about to argue the other side of the debate— which will prevent anyone from commenting, because then this entry will end the way many others do: "I don't know, I don't get it, I know nothing." Which is invariably unanswerable. Was there something else in it all that I couldn't pin down? Maybe the resonating loudness of his speech: may you all bear witness...? Bear witness, and then buy your Chinese novel so you can say you've read anything written in Chinese, a language spoken by three hundred zillion people and probably some future students if you stay in CA, beyond half of that one Can Xue novella? (Oh, and the Little Red Book, of course. My favorite.) Nah: I didn't feel like being in on it. I'll wait until I finish volume 1.
Well, so, maybe you want to know about Charles Johnson? Oxherding Tale is pretty funny, and moving despite the artifice. The man's got a lot of talent. He's also got, through a mixture of his own and other people's confidence, a sense of authority with which I think I would be very uncomfortable. He's written a great deal about his own writing; I feel it's a temptation to be generally resisted. I have no stake in the fight over black writing waged above, but I will say that it's far from clear to me that journalism is inherently inferior to "enduring art;" nor am I an Althusserian vis-a-vis ideology; nor do I ever write shitty things in library books. And, unfortunately, I'd still rather read or write creatively than sell or comment as an evaluator.
I never seem to have time to read the lit reviews anymore; also, they arrive at the house a month late to begin with. So I was just last night catching up on the newest LRB, beginning with Jeremy Harding's review of Mike Davis's two latest books. Fascinating, but after a few paragraphs I was beginning to get visions of mid-century Futurology and comic books... which reminded me that this was Mike Davis under discussion. Gee whiz, the future looks rotten.
On to solutions: the daring observation that affluence makes us unhappy leads reviewer Barry Schwartz to recommend:
It seems to me that if Offer is right, and I think he is, then one can tackle poverty by a significant redistribution of wealth. In the old days, one would have to justify such redistribution morally by arguing that a shilling in a poor person’s pocket produced more utility than the same shilling in a rich person’s pocket. Although redistribution made some better off at the expense of others, the gains outweighed the losses. The beauty of Offer’s analysis is that if you take it to its logical conclusion, it implies that everyone benefits from redistribution. That the poor benefit is obvious; but the rich benefit also because, with less wealth, they are less plagued by choice and less tempted to succumb to loss of self-control. This is a true Pareto efficient policy.
And if you combine redistribution of wealth with policies designed to enhance ‘in-kind’ goods and services rather than GDP, you can make real social progress. Instead of giving people more money, tempting them to run for even longer on the hedonic treadmill, you could provide better schools, better health care, greener parks and more comfortable community centres from which everyone can benefit. Reduce the working week so that people will have more time to spend as citizens, partners and parents. An important step in this direction would be a new system of national accounts – one that measures what really matters to wellbeing, instead of what’s easy to measure. I’m not sure that Offer would endorse any of these proposals, but it seems to me that if he takes his own analysis seriously, he should. And so should the rest of us.
I realize that shrieking "Dis man is a pofessor?!" doesn't do any good in these postlapsarian times, but I haven't omitted the part of the review where he proves this; I have omitted the passages where he blames the iPod for destroying our relationships with friends and family. Omigod, I have to stop posting on Vox about this and spend some time with my partner! Affluence is totally ruining me. Here, let me give all my debt to charity.
I don't buy it. Without the hedonic treadmill, currently distracted neighbors would become nosy again. Bereft of the opera, we'd all have to play push-pin. The clearest solution is to try to get Offer and Mike Davis in the same room and see if they can find any common ground. I might put "Wozzeck" on the iPod while I take notes.
Okay: tell me about an amazing book that will change my life if I read it, offering equal measures of delight and clarity. Soon. Ideally within the next fifteen minutes— or, if you must, after a delay.
I know, this is my job; alas, I seem to be losing perspective.
So I pick up Air Guitar at the bookstore, and read a page of it, and think: It's one of these. I also think: I am nothing like this guy (the guy who wrote it, a Mr. Dave Hickey). And I could read it, but I've read all this stuff before, and these guys always think it's so freaking important and monumental when it is a formula, plain and simple. I live in California. I ride public transit vehicles in California every day. I see the sun. I don't need to read this book.
This was actually short-sighted. I had another go at the book, and I think I learned things from it, albeit things I wouldn't presume to teach to you in turn. Hickey is (if you don't know) an art critic who takes an anti-academic, anti-institutional angle on the arts in America, which NEA funding and professionalization and, particularly, the trendy hatred of capitalism and markets have supposedly stultified and imprisoned. It's a warm, appealing, sympathetic, encouraging account which is probably at least as false as it is true, warmth and appeal aside. He inveighs against coldness, repression and fear, but to his credit it never sounds like he gives a shit whether anyone else is saying these many familiar things. It's surprisingly good anti-anxiety medication for graduate students... surprisingly, suspiciously effective. Why suspicious, you ask? Well, I know plenty of people outside the institutions of culture and knowledge, certainly enough of them to be aware that outsider status doesn't confer any special expertise on anyone. The fact that I myself have become so invested in institutional ways of thinking as to be moved, even delighted, by a book that trades in simple and familiar truths, as well as dodgy hypotheses about Siegfried and Roy, is probably a sign that I've floated too far out from what he calls (I think) "communities of desire." No one is qualified to write a general theory of the non-academic, and only an academic would be stupid enough to try to promote one among her friends. "Guys, look at this! He says it's cool to look at art and listen to music and talk about it! Hey, uh, how are you guys?" So I'm at a total loss to praise or blame this book in any way. Oh, except in this way: as a reading experience, it beats the living tar out of Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde.
I went down to the Stanford library and was as happy as a lark.
But larks need to eat. They also need to sleep. And then they need more books books books books books
(Thank you, Florida Center for Instructional Technology, for having the only image of a lark I could find in the public domain. There is some poignant lesson here about remoteness and access, I'm sure.)
