A Life in Literature

-->

A Life in Literature

Most of us have a list of books that have somehow changed us.  Some of us have lists of books that we ourselves have changed, often with scissors or an open flame.  To have been a reader of a whole bunch of books means that any list of the most influential can never be complete, but it can be useful to single out a few for comment.  Herewith I offer a brief consideration of some titles that have affected me.  These are books that I came to live deep inside, like a basement dweller, just as they came to live inside me, like a parasite.

-----------------------

The SF novel Dune was one of the first.  While Herbert’s peculiar brand of Jungian psychohistory is only two or three steps up from Scientology, the novel’s other Big Ideas are definitely heady, invigorating stuff for the young first-time reader.  I credit the novel with two central and significant realizations.  One of these is the power of language to shape political reality.  I don’t mean Frank Herbert’s language, which is notable only for its vast superiority to Brian Herbert’s language.  Rather, Dune is a novel where characters themselves are always using language to do that very thing (shape political reality, I mean), mainly by deciphering subtle body language or speaking secret codes known only to two or three other people.  It’s like they all majored in semiotics before getting addicted to spice and hatching plans to bring down their particular far-future Byzantio-Caliphate.

The other important takeaway from Dune is a stark and cynical appreciation of the ideological basis and function of religious belief.  This is a novel where the faiths of billions are manipulated like so much silly putty—apparently with complete endorsement and approval of the novel’s author, protagonist, and fanbase.  It had a significant effect on this adolescent reader, anyway, although this may owe something to the fact that the lead character is a thirteen-year-old boy named Paul who happens to be the Messiah.

I came to crime and detective fiction late, and I believe I may have done it backwards:  I started with James Ellroy.  American Tabloid and L.A. Confidential opened my eyes to an entirely new mode of fiction that was gritty, violent, amorally ungrammatical, and unabashedly sentence fragmenty.  Ellroy’s motto is “America was never innocent,” which I believe must be substantially true, at least if it has been behaving anything like people in a James Ellroy novel.  Whatever the case, the patterns of one’s first major writer in a genre shape one’s fundamental expectations to a remarkable degree, and this was definitely true of Ellroy.  So much so, in fact, that when I finally got around to classic crime writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, I assumed that it must have been thematically significant when the characters did not actually shoot heroin before fucking.

In a more literary vein, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment affected me very strongly, as I came upon the novel at just the right time.  Like the novel’s protagonist, Raskolnikov, I was a morally tortured university student living alone in a tiny room little bigger than my bed.  Like him, I was chronically short of funds.  Like him, I had only one friend, who was (as in the novel) kind of a dork.  Like Raskolnikov, I came to believe that the murder of a Russian pawnbroker was not only ethically defensible but would also make me a lot more like Napoleon.  There were differences, of course.  I never actually murdered my Russian pawnbroker because I lived in Atlanta, and the only two pawnbrokers I could find were Serbian and from New Orleans, respectively.  Also, prostitutes would not date me.

It’s a remarkable fact that the majority of English majors get their start with T.S. Eliot’s long poem “The Waste Land.”  Perhaps this is due to the work’s wide range of allusion, running from Homer to scripture to bawdy vaudeville.  Perhaps it is the poem’s modernist, experimental style of making language new.  Perhaps it is because Eliot’s own footnotes basically write the term paper for you.

It is difficult to overestimate the effect of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom on today’s white Southern reader, particularly if that reader was never asked to read As I Lay Dying in high school.  The novel’s densely allusive, poetic, biblical style was both an awakening and a challenge to one’s assumptions about American literature.  Here was a novel that complicated the received conventional wisdom of southern race relations.  Here was a novel that explored rage and mistrust as positive virtues.  Here was a novel that richly rewarded one’s extensive knowledge of Civil War trivia.  Yet it all came at the cost of soul-searching guilt.  “I don’t hate the South.  I don’t!” wails sensitive young Quentin Compson at the novel’s close, a sentiment not shared by many readers after the novel’s 300 densely Faulknerian pages.  The only thing that kept me from jumping out of my own window at the end of the book (as the author hints that Quentin does) is the fact that I was not, like that protagonist, attending Harvard at the time.  It is one of my favorite novels.

It is my firm conviction that Moby Dick is not only America’s finest and most insightful novel of whale-hunting, but also her finest and most insightful novel of whale-gutting.  And it takes a certain gutsy Americanness to launch your whale novel with two hundred pages of anecdotes, parables, allusions, and character building before the first whale is even spotted, let alone caught, flayed, deblubbered, and rendered into those casks of whale oil by which nighttime nineteenth-century readers would be able to see the text of Moby Dick in the first place.  You may rest assured that Melville was keenly aware of this irony.  By not reading this book by whalelight yourself, you are already missing out on something, um, seminal in the American literary experience.

I cannot recall reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, although it is possible that I am mistakenly remembering not reading Remembrance of Things Past.

I have watched the rise of the memoir over the past decade with great trepidation, for I feel that it can only lead to more writing in which people talk about themselves instead of something interesting.  A predominance of memoir puts us all in grave danger of forgetting why novels were invented in the first place:  the fact that, while accounts of real life may be uplifting and inspiring, real-life dialogue is nearly always dead boring.  Thus it is that novels are to be preferred to memoirs, particularly those with the author photo on the front.  (It should be noted that a Nazi-killing exception exists to the rule of superiority, in that memoirs of Nazi-killing are always preferable to novels of the same.  This is because scientific criticism has identified a correlation between memoirs of Nazi killing and actual dead Nazis, while no such correlation exists for fiction.  This is especially true when the author is an existentialist.)

Like everyone, I eventually went to graduate school to pursue a doctorate in English literature.  At the time, post-structuralism seemed important.  Very important.  Already the first stirrings of post-post-structuralism were beginning, however, and this was also very important.  (I never did quite get a handle on what structuralism was or had been, but I assume that it, too, had once been very important.)  An education in such things naturally involved consuming a great deal of prose so important as to be nearly unreadable at the time and completely unmemorable now.  I do recall a fondness for Michel Foucault, or at least a fondness for reading about Foucault.  Of Foucault’s critical generation, now only Harold Bloom is left, and he only talks about Harold Bloom, even when he is talking about Shakespeare.  In the end, I narrowly escaped being run over by a laundry truck while leaving an S&M brothel on the way to obscuring my collaboration with Vichy authorities during 1941 and 1942.

My particular field of study was English Renaissance literature; specifically, the seventeenth-century English religious lyric; more specifically, six or seven poems by John Donne.  I also put time into Shakespeare (for who doesn’t?) and John Milton (perhaps out of guilt at the brevity of my Donne collection).  Let it never be said that studying the literary past in all its literary richness does not lend a new perspective on modern life.  I learned a terrific amount about the history of literature, and about how people once did not know that they had psychology in them, and that the world-ending antichrist spoken of in Revelations was in fact (this is proven by the very diligent scholarship of the period)  Philip II of Spain.

The most influential book of my life has been the Bible, particularly in the King James Version (also known as the 1611 Authorized Version or the Not Catholic Version).  In the American suburban milieu of my youth, of course, we cottoned to more modern and more accurate translations, but none of them approach the King James for sheer literary majesty.  Indeed, had the KJV never been produced, most literature in English wouldn’t know what to sound like, and we would have to watch BBC miniseries in which vicars, rectors, and earnest country priests all read from Tyndale instead.  Nobody wants that.

And did you know that there is a genuine school of Biblical textual criticism that considers the King James Version to have been actively and uniquely composed by God for accuracy and truth?  This is called “double inspiration,” and I think this it is an excellent move on God’s part.  Not only does it make Him sound much more Shakespearean, but it ingeniously helps to withhold salvation not just from Hindus and Confucians but from the French and Germans as well.

In my life as a high school teacher, I have been given the chance to delve deeply into a number of classic works, usually by returning to them again and again on a strict timetable, year after year.  I have also been given the chance to delve deeply into an endless stream of student exercises and writing assignments about these works.  Furthermore, I have been given the chance to delve deeply into classroom management, behavior modification, faculty meetings, and crisis conferences with students and parents.  But my love of literature has not wavered, and some of the works I’ve taught eight or nine times still have the power to move me towards enlightenment or the window.

Still, such books are invariably colored by the experience of teaching them to young people.  Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, for instance, is a rich meditation on truth and memory and storytelling.  In the classroom, however, it becomes the ground for clarification of such basic concepts as “the draft” and “the Cold War” and “wishing you hadn’t killed people.”  Certain readers of Pride and Prejudice have difficulty understanding why four hundred pages are necessary when Keira Knightly can do it in two hours.  Cormac McCarthy is a brilliant and sobering excavator of the human soul, but in classroom practice he mainly just scares the children. 

And then there is Shakespeare, our greatest writer even after four hundred years.  (That’s one full year for every page of Pride and Prejudice!)  The challenge of Shakespeare in the classroom is that of inviting students to love the language.  Not the plots, not the actors, not even the characters, but the language itself.  This is difficult, and there’s no way to force it; most of us begin as far from Shakespeare as we do from Urdu or COBOL, and students bear no blame for this.

But what many young readers fail to understand, and what blocks them I think, is that it’s really best to identify with Shakespeare’s villains rather than his heroes.  Villains are the characters he does best, not merely because they get the best lines but because they are the most human.  Shakespeare, even more than the Bible, certainly more than Frank Herbert or James Ellroy, understands that what is most interesting about us is our great and miserable sinfulness.

And this is what literature is for, I think.  We do not use Shakespeare.  Indeed, we do not use any of the books that change us, even the ones we laugh about.  Instead, those books use us.  They find us, partial and ridiculous, and make of us what they can.  They try very hard, they often fail, but even that failure leaves us somewhere other than where we started.  One thing I have learned in all this reading is that a good book, whatever its time and place, always mocks us out of precisely where we are.