Author: Rohan Maitzen

The Company We Keep as Readers

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Following through on the thread I outlined in my last post, I have been reading Jonathan Franzen’s very interesting and thought-provoking 1996 Harper’s essay. I actually feel that in some ways this piece (and the Marcus and Ozick that follow) are having a conversation that’s not really for me, mostly because they are novelists, for one thing, and focusing on very contemporary texts and contexts about which, except as an ordinary citizen, I have no expertise and no vantage point from which I am comfortable making pronouncements. What I’m getting a better sense of, though, is how literature matters and how it is discussed outside the academic contexts these writers are so uniformly dismissive of. (Taking his turn at bat, Franzen, recalling his experience teaching creative writing, reports that some of his best students, “repelled by the violence done to their personal experience of reading, had vowed never to take a literature class again”–as far as I can tell, he is depressed, not by their solipsistic retreat in defense of their “personal experience,” but by their having had to suffer such “violence.” “Come to my classes,” I am tempted to protest, and yet how can I be sure that my own efforts will not also offend against this amorphous personal standard? Other students make fun of the “patently awful utopian-feminist novel they were being forced to read for an honors seminar in Women and Fiction,” but isn’t there value in testing your ideas of what counts as “patently awful,” even if in the end you don’t change your mind? Isn’t one reason to go to literature classes that you will read and learn about books beyond those that conform to your personal prejudices, including aesthetic ones? If they were being forced, not only to read it, but also to applaud it, that’s a somewhat different problem, of course.)

I’m still thinking and learning about the larger issues at stake in all of these pieces. For now, I ll note that I found his report of the findings of linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath on “serious readers” fascinating. In particular, she talks (by his report) about the way in which books provide a community for their readers, especially for those who being their lives as “social isolates”–willing but not entirely able to share your perceptions and experiences and interests with those around you. What do the readers she studied find in, or feel they gain from, their books? Substance, she says: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive–my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity… Reading that book gives me substance.” And their reading provides “a sense of having company in this great human enterprise, in the continuity, in the persistence, of the great conflicts.” This is something like what moral philosophers like Martha Nussbaum theorize reading complex fiction does for us, so it is interesting to find readers recognizing it for themselves.

I’m not sure how any of this material helps me see why anyone would read literary criticism, academic or otherwise, or how the kind of expertise someone like me possesses might be put in the service of these serious readers. To hear these non-academic writers talk, you’d think nobody wants academics at all…

Academic Criticism Criticized (and Defended)

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Recently, Daniel Green wrote a response on his blog to a piece by Cynthia Ozick in the April 2007 issue of Harper’s. The Ozick essay, called “Literary Entrails,” is itself a follow-up to two earlier discussions of the fate of the novel in the modern era: one by Jonathan Franzen (Harper’s, April 1996) and a reply to Franzen by Ben Marcus (Harper’s, this time in October 2005). So far I’ve read the Ozick and rounded up the Franzen piece, to be read soon. I’ve also been prompted, mostly by things Ozick says about him, to look up the work of James Wood, about which I expect I will be posting soon.

My main interest in this thread is that both Green and Ozick are roundly dismissive of academic criticism (as distinguished from literary criticism or reviewing). As noted in previous posts, I’m rounding up discussions and evaluations of these different modes of writing about literature. Also as noted in previous posts, despite my own dissatisfaction with much academic criticism, I bristle (and also wonder) at the harsh tone taken towards literary academics. Here’s Ozick, after a paragraph on book clubs (she finds them sort of sweet, it seems, innocent amateurs) and then one on Amazon’s anyone-can-do-it method of customer reviews (“a fetid sea, where both praise and blame are leveled by tsunamis of incapacity”):

(Academic theorists equipped with advanced degrees, who make up yet another species of limited reviewers, are worthy only of a parenthesis. Their confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multi-syllabic pidgin, have for decades marinated literature in dogma. Of these inflated dons and doctors it is futile to speak, since, unlike the hardier customer reviewers, they are destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.)

Green considers this desciption “accurate” and hopes her prediction (of our immanent dissipation) will be fulfilled.

There are many different possible responses to such sweeping polemical condemnations, as well as to the many other arguments and observations made in both essays. My own recent article in English Studies in Canada makes some related points, too–and also works a little with a fog metaphor. For now, though, I want to point out a contribution that at least some of the “dons and doctors” make to a project Ozick and Green support: the development of a thoughtful reading audience for literature, of readers (not just critics or reviewers) capable of engaging with literature responsibly and substantially, at the level of form (what I take Green to mean, more or less, when he asks for more attention to “aesthetics”) as well as theme and plot. Ozick in particular talks at length about the decline of readers–and she quotes a passage from a recent essay by Denis Donoghue that I think would ring true for most English professors, as it certainly did for me:

When I started teaching … many years ago, I urged students to believe that the merit of reading a great poem, play, or novel consisted in the pleasure of gaining access to deeply imagined lives other than their own. Over the years, that opinion … seems to have lost much of its persuasive force. Students seem to be convinced that their own lives are the primary and sufficient incentive. … they want to talk either about themselves or about large-scale public themes, independent of the books they are supposedly reading.

Franzen, Ozick says, believes the new generation of students “will never evolve into discriminating readers.” Yet, though teaching can include this kind of dispiriting encounter with “egotism and moralizing politicized self-righteousness,” literature classes also provide a great opportunity to challenge these limitations, to bring students into contact with not just “deeply imagined lives” but crafted forms that can startle them into looking again, at themselves, at their world, at language. I too find much recent published criticism pretty unappealing, and many aspects of professional academic discourse alienating, for a range of reasons. But I don’t think what goes on in my classroom, or in the classrooms of a great many “dons and doctors,” deserves to be so sweepingly ignored or distorted.

Here’s a similar bit from the “statement of purpose” with which Green launched his blog: “the academy, once entrusted with the job of engaging with works of literature, has mostly abandoned it altogether in favor of ‘cultural studies’ and other forms of political posturing.” Again, however accurate this may be as a description of academic criticism (and that’s surely arguable), “the academy” (not, of course, monolithic in the way Green implies) does a lot of other things too, much of which involves exposing students to a variety of writers and styles, thinking about literary history and the history of genres, learning a vocabulary to talk about how writers get different kinds of things done and to what ends–aesthetically, ethically, and yes, also (but not exclusively) politically. One thing those of us in “the academy” do is send at least some of our students out into the “real” world excited and inquring and serious about literature, and equipped with some knowledge and some expertise as readers. I like to point out to my students that they will be assigned “required” reading for only a small fraction of their reading lives–after that, the choices will be theirs, the engagement and the satisfaction only as deep as they choose to make it. It’s my goal to give them some tools and strategies to go deeper if they want to, as well as to broaden their textual horizons. Ozick (rightly, I think) laments that “Amazon encourages naive and unqualified readers…to expose their insipidities to a mass audience.” You don’t need an English degree to be insightful about books–but some education as a reader is surely one way to become the kind of reader novelists such as Ozick (or, for that matter, critics such as Green) hope to have.

 

 

Margaret Oliphant, Hester

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I am grateful for having been pointed to Hester by the anonymous responses to my earlier posting on Miss Marjoribanks It’s true: Hester is a better novel, in the depth and interest of its characterization, in the unity and momentum of its plot, and in its treatment of women’s roles and options. Catherine and Hester are both impressive characters–Catherine perhaps more so, if only in her divergence from the usual run of female roles and the non-ironic presentation of her power and business competence (can we consider her a kind of rebuttal or alternative to Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice?).

As with Miss Marjoribanks (and most Trollope novels that I’ve read), Hester leaves me feeling that thematic or philosophical interpretations are somewhat beside the point. The editors of my Oxford edition remark that Oliphant is “closer to the mysterious ordinariness of Trollope” than to George Eliot, Dickens, or Gaskell, and their introductory essay emphasizes the commitment of her realism to the ultimate complexity, inexplicability, and inconclusiveness of life. Things happen in the novel, they argue, in a sort of messy way as they do in real life, with people operating on mixed and often inarticulate motives and events unfolding in ways that reveal the limits of individual control over contexts and circumstances. On their reading, the form (or formlessness) of her stories replicates these qualities of real life and thus they have been underappreciated (as, indeed, Oliphant herself predicted). In Hester, much more than in Miss Marjoribanks, the structure of the story actually seemed quite tight, but at the end I did still feel uncertain what it was all ultimately about, just as in Trollope novels you read along (and along, and along) and end up feeling you’ve followed people’s lives from one point to another with many incidents and excursions along the way but without any guiding idea except that people’s lives are interesting and we can (and should) take a sympathetic interest in their details. To carry off such fiction and make it compelling is certainly an accomplishment– but is it a great artistic accomplishment?

I still have two days to decide for sure which Oliphant novel I will use in my “Victorian Women Writers” seminar. Miss Marjoribanks has many elements that present interesting comparisons to the other readings I’ve chosen, especially Middlemarch, as Lucilla (like Dorothea) has ambitions to do something that matters with her life and even ends up living out something like Dorothea’s philanthropic fantasy. I don’t see Hester complementing the other readings quite as clearly, but then it seems fair to have Oliphant represented by the best of her novels that I’ve read. And Hester herself stands up well to Jane Eyre, Margaret Hale, and Dorothea as a feisty heroine trying to figure out how to make a life for herself, defying expectations and facing moral crises along the way.

Philosophy and Literature; or, Proof that Everything Old is New Again…

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…even in literary criticism. Reading unsuspectingly along in David Masson’s 1859 British Novelists and Their Styles, I came across this interesting bit:

Before novels or poems can stand the inspection of that higher criticism which every literary work must be able to pass ere it can rank in the first class, their authors must be at least abreast of the best speculation of their time. Not that what we want from novelists and poets is further matter of speculation. What we want from them is matter of imagination; but the imagination of a well furnished mind is one thing, and that of a vacuum is another. [RM: hear hear!] … That a writer may be fitted to frame imaginary histories illustrating the deeper problems of human education, and to be a sound casuist in the most difficult questions of human experience, it is necessary that he should bring to his task not only an average acquaintance with the body of good current doctrine, but also an original speculative faculty. In such cases, the desirable arrangement might be either that our novelists were philosophers, or that philosophers were our novelists.

This is the first such explicitly “interdisciplinary” assertion of this kind I have come across in the 19th-century material I’ve been reading around in, although of course George Eliot’s ideas as well as her novels (most of them later than Masson’s book) work out just such an integration of speculation and aesthetics.

Trying to imagine more precisely what Masson (or anyone) might mean by (or how he might justify) putting such demands on a novelist raises what has always been a niggling question for me when I consider the whole project of literary analysis or criticism–just who do we think novelists are that we care so much about what they say about all kinds of big important issues? We put a lot of weight–or pressure–on the novels we study when we inquire into problems such as “does Charlotte Bronte advocate women’s rights in Jane Eyre at the expense of racial justice?” or “can a middle-class novelist like Elizabeth Gaskell depict working-class grievances without being patronising?” (to give hasty examples of fairly typical approaches in my own field these days). We seem to have high expectations that what Bronte or Gaskell says or does will be significant and thus is worth explicating, and that these explications or interpretations are worth arguing over (and over and over). Is the working assumption that theirs are the offerings of “well-furnished minds”? How can we tell? Is that part of what we’re trying to find out when we study them? What if we end up thinking otherwise? Can aesthetic judgments survive such a discovery? (My preliminary answer accords with what I think Masson would say too, which is, sure they can, but we have to then consider the writer below the first rank–for me, this would be what happens with Hardy, say, whose philosophy I find confused, or at least confusing, but whose novels move and interest me very much.)

In any case, I find I am quite sympathetic to Masson’s emphasis on intellectual requirements for novelistic value. Earlier in British Novelists he remarks,

the measure of the value of any work of fiction, ultimately and on the whole, is the worth of the speculation, the philosophy, on which it rests, and which has entered into the conception of it. . . . No artist, I believe, will, in the end, be found to be greater as an artist than he was as a thinker.

He goes on to explain that the resulting novel need not be explicitly philosophical or speculative, and that the philosophy may express itself indirectly “through the medium and in the language of his art” (as we would say, through its form, not necessarily through its content) and that the artist need not be self-consciously laying out a theory (as GE would say, all the better, in fact, if the novelist does not “lapse from the picture to the diagram”). But that thought, that ideas, (and not just feeling or sound or colour or other aspects) should be granted priority seems to me an admirable standard for deciding which novels really are the most valuable.

Francine Prose, A Changed Man

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I picked this novel up partly because I’ve been reading Prose’s Reading Like A Writer with some interest, partly because its premise sounded interesting and provocative (‘reformed’ neo-Nazi goes to work at human rights organization run by Holocaust survivor), and partly, I have to admit, because how could I resist a novel that takes one of its epigraphs from Middlemarch? After I finished it I felt that this last impulse was the one least fulfilled by my reading experience. Prose’s style is engaging, as is her story, but I was propelled along more by curiosity about what might happen (by plot, in other words, and to a lesser extent by character) than by any sense of unfolding moral revelation or insight. Perhaps that is too much to expect of a comic or satirical novel–but once you’ve invoked Dorothea’s belief that “by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are … widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower” you’ve rather raised your reader’s expectations about the aims and ideals of what is to follow. I wonder if choosing to approach her topics through comedy was a mistake on Prose’s part. I have some sympathy with the Victorian reviewer who was uncomfortable with Thackeray’s depiction of vice:

We don’t say that a vicious or even a degraded nature is not a fit subject for the artist,—no doubt it is [says W. C. Roscoe]; we do not say it is an unfit subject even for comedy; but we do say it ought not to be comically treated.

My reaction to Raymond in particular is about the same: his habits of mind just don’t strike me as funny, and yet they are used to comic purposes and treated with unseemly (there’s a good Victorian word) humour.

My main source of dissatisfaction with A Changed Man, though, had to do with the characterization of Vincent. I don’t think Prose motivated his initial journey to Laslow’s foundation adequately. Over the course of the novel we get many versions of the epiphany that supposedly turned him from a lukewarm neo-Nazi (already a difficult category to imagine) to an opportunistic and finally a sincere advocate for moral regeneration. Most of these versions, we learn, are not the whole truth. But the drug-induced euphoria that seems to be the real inspiration doesn’t explain enough, and just what he thinks he is doing when he first enters Laslow’s lobby is not well enough explained. In a way, it doesn’t matter all that much because we simply need to accept the premise of the book (his break from his skinhead past) and then appreciate the effects of his presence and his new role as poster boy for Laslow’s “One Heart at a Time” project on him and the other characters. But since I didn’t believe in him very fully anyway, I didn’t believe in his transformation. If he was so half-hearted anyway, too, where’s the real drama of his seeing the error of his ways? Raymond has no parallel moral breakthrough; to give him one would have put too much pressure on the novel’s serious elements, perhaps, and been too idealistic for a novel that emphasizes imperfection and ‘grey areas,’ but Vincent seems a little too easily and conveniently cured by the cognitive therapy strategies he has picked up in his anger management sessions. Is it unreasonable of me to think that given what we do know about his past, including his past moral and ideological commitments, it’s facile to set him up, even from Bonnie’s perspective, as a better father figure for Bonnie’s kids than their mid-life crisis fool of a father? In the interview material at the end of my edition of the novel, Prose remarks that the book requires us to set aside our preconceptions about the characters (based, for instance, on their histories and primary identities, e.g. skinhead, Holocaust survivor) and concentrate on who they are specifically or individually. For this approach to work for me, though, I need a deeper, better contextualized and more serious accounting of who they are. (Compare what GE does with Bulstrode’s culpability and efforts to become a new man, for instance, and if you think it’s an unfair comparison, well, Prose is the one who invokes GE in the first place…)

Is it Vincent or Bonnie who represents Dorothea’s philosophy? Both? Or is it the novel overall, in which the people are basically blundering around but trying, with mixed success and often against their own weaker and more selfish impulses, to figure out what the right thing is and do it? What’s the point about Laslow? It’s daring, in a snide sort of way, to show his faults and capacity for selfish and petty behaviour–fair enough, surviving the Holocaust does not guarantee that you will be a saint or a moral giant. The “telescopic philanthropy” thread was clever, too, though the human rights work Laslow’s foundation does is hardly comparable to the absurd efforts of Mrs Jellyby. Bonnie’s well-drawn, as are her sons, but to what thematic purpose?

I think my overall reaction is that Prose had an original conception that has great potential for developing the “widening the skirts of light” theme, but the satiric presentation or treatment of the material and the relative superficiality of both characterization and context mean the novel is lighter, more trivial, less interesting, than the issues involved deserve.

 

Back to Work

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It’s not because I haven’t been reading that I haven’t posted anything here in a couple of weeks: I’ve been on vacation in my real home town, beautiful Vancouver, and talking about books with real live people for a while–kind of a nice change, since (absent any comments on my posts) writing things up for this blog seems like speaking into a void, or just talking to myself. Anyway, I’ll be putting up some thoughts soon on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I finished just before I left (good book!), Goodnight Nobody, which I bought to read on the plane (mildly entertaining), and A Changed Man, by Francine Prose, which I am still finishing up (interesting, a bit quirky). It was a treat and a terrible temptation to browse in the many wonderful bookstores in Vancouver, especially my traditional favourites, Duthie’s and Hagar Books–and, of course, Vancouver Kidsbooks.

What does a novelist do for us?

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Partly prompted by a recent debate in the comments section of Bookninja over Yann Martel’s recent challenge to the Prime Minister (which led some contributors to the site to debate the importance of literature)–and partly just by my own interest in the question, here’s an excerpt from an essay by Leslie Stephen called “The Moral Element in Literature” that I have been editing for the anthology I’m working on. Stephen is considering, among other things, why (in his opinion) novelists fail aesthetically when they write too much “with a purpose.” Such efforts as, to use his example, Dickens’s attack on government bureaucracy by way of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit “implies a confusion of function,” he suggests. And yet “if a poet should not have the same purpose as the politician or the economist,” the conclusion is “certainly not that he should have no purpose. To have no purpose is simply not to be a reasoning being.” So if poets or novelists should have no direct practical aim or purpose, or not seek to prove particular theories about the world, what can they do for us? Here’s part of Stephen’s answer:

He shows us certain facts as they appear to him. If we are so constituted as to be unable to see what he sees, he can go no further. He cannot proceed to argue and analyse, and apply an elaborate logical apparatus. There is the truth, and we must make what we can of it. But, on the other hand, so far as we are in sympathy with him, the proof–if it be a proof–has all the cogency of direct vision. He has couched our dull eyes, drawn back the veil which hid from us the certain aspect of the world, and henceforward our views of life and the world will be more or less changed, because the bare scaffolding of fact which we previously saw will now be seen in the light of keener perceptions than our own.

Elegantly put. But how close is Stephen coming here to James’s idea of being “one of those on whom nothing is lost”? The emphasis on perception over action (currently very trendy in ethical/philosophical approaches to literature) leaves me dissatisfied, for reasons I have discussed in some of my academic writing. Still, Stephen does suggest a role for the novel in the world, albeit an indirect one. After all, if we never changed our views of life, we would never seek to change our, or others’, experience of it.

Zadie Smith, On Beauty: Disconnected

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I did not ‘connect’ with this novel at all. After I finished it, I went back and read through the two or three pages of quotations from reviewers, all full of enthusiasm and praise (“wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed”; “accomplished, substantive, and penetrating”; “an ambitious, warm and bending [bending??] portrayal”; “hilarious”; “ironic, acerbic and intelligent”…). Say what? The characters never came to life for me; each of them seemed like an embodied idea or function. It’s true that Smith has a virtuosic ability to render different voices, dialects, cadences of speech–but the conversations lacked naturalness. The prose seemed stilted and full of details that didn’t add anything to either its sound or its meaning. Here’s one small example of the kind of thing that annoyed me: during what is actually one of the most important encounters in the novel (the ‘bonding’ between Kiki and Carlene Kipps), Kiki “felt in her purse for her lip balm” and then applies “a layer of colourless gloop to her mouth” (172). There’s some motivation for her to put on the lip balm (awkward conversational moment) but “colourless gloop” is a phrase that doesn’t belong to Kiki or the narrating voice–who would describe lip balm that way? Is there some reason we should look at lip balm problematically? Is it the lack of colour? Is there some implied anti-consumerism sub-text? Or is it just a sloppy intrusion of, maybe, Smith’s own dislike of such products? (Why? What’s wrong with them?) I realize this is a small detail, but overall much of the book had this effect on me: why is this happening? why are they saying or doing this now? why does this part belong with the other parts of the book?

I also found the whole depiction of the academic context wholly unbelievable. OK, it’s meant satirically; it’s a ‘campus novel’ (among other things) but not necessarily bound to capture the realities of professional life at universities today. But in this area too I was endlessly distracted and annoyed. How is it that Howard has been at Wellington for so long and neither received tenure nor reached the end of a tenure-track contract? Even at the most elite colleges, aren’t there procedures and time-tables for these things? Part of the novel’s denouement is his acceptance of a sabbatical, conveniently, to defuse the problems that have arisen–but sabbatical leaves are not just handed out anyplace I know about; again, there are procedures and regulations. His supposedly climactic PowerPoint presentation can’t mean anything in relation to his tenure chances–does a public lecture ever? Am I missing the point of all these breaches of academic protocol in the plot? Are they confusions about the academy, versions of the academy that those of us in less privileged institutions don’t share, adaptations of academic life to suit Smith’s thematic purposes? (What exactly are these, by the way? They never coalesced for me in any striking moment or image in the novel.)

Some of the ways she worked up the ‘culture wars’ were sort of funny, but not particularly deep and, in their overall leanings, predictably left-liberal. Though she brought Kiki around to some kind of interest in Monty’s “conservative” take on issues such as affirmative action, none of the characters that might have been used for a really probing case study were used that way after all, and the politics got sidelined, I thought, by the cliched sexual escapades of both Howard and Monty. Nothing really came of Levi’s attempt to discard his actual class identity and the white part of his family background; Jerome’s relationship with Victoria also goes nowhere in particular, simply getting diffused among the other miscellaneous plot twists. I could go on with complaints and questions, it turns out, but that’s probably enough for now.

Now, given the praise heaped on the book by the reviewers, I’m open to ideas about how I might have read it better and enjoyed it more. I did find it mildly entertaining and readable, in the sense that I kept reading along happily enough waiting and hoping for it to come together in some stirring way. It just didn’t, and while some novels leave me feeling I underestimated them on a first reading and would like to go back more thoughtfully (The Night Watch, most recently), On Beauty just left me disappointed.

Robert B. Parker, School Days

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Works for me every time! There is a certain sameness about the Spenser novels, to be sure, but their consistency is usually a virtue. And in this case, there’s a good dose of social relevance (school shootings) along with the usual psychological and social commentary–admittedly, elliptical to the extreme, but one aspect of these novels that I appreciate is how much work gets done in the silences and spaces, not in any postmodern sense of the important elements being absences or anything, but simply that when Parker’s on his game, the situations and characters are conveyed strongly enough that we can fill in the blanks, come to the conclusions, ourselves. The influence of Raymond Chandler is strong, of course, with the whole “down these mean streets a man must go…” model, but Spenser’s readiness to get mean himself when his code of honour requires it is usually the most interesting aspect of the plot. I have long admired the relationship Parker establishes for Spenser and Susan (who should surely be played by Terri Hatcher, if she can control her more gawky mannerisms?) and found the sexual and the racial politics of these novels a refreshing break from PC pieties (while insistently alert to inequities and injustices, both systemic and personal). (While I’m thinking about it, I’ll just add that I’ve always admired Dick Francis for a similar ability to imagine equal, mature , independent women for putting into relationships with his male protagonists.) I do wonder, though, about Parker’s fascination with assertively sexual women, such as Rita Fiore. Her intelligence and skill are never in doubt, and in some ways it seems a positive thing to create a character who is both a powerful professional woman and a sex kitten: women have struggled long enough with stereotypes that insist intellectual prowess is incompatible with femininity or allure. And yet I also feel that Rita plays into other cliches (fantasies?) about the qualities that make women attractive to men (OK, she’s a smart lawyer, but look at those great legs!). Because I find the ethos of the Spenser novels overall so advanced, it feels carping to fret this detail, and I don’t think Parker has any obligation to match his characters up to any specific standard in this respect. I guess I’m just surprised. Maybe this is a way to put a positive spin on the sexpot characters from the hard-boiled novels–kind of an updated, she’s on our side now, verson of Brigid O’Shaunessy? Gorgeous dames aren’t necessarily dangerous?

A Reader’s Responsibilities

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Ian McEwan’s recent letter in The Guardian points to an aspect of criticism that is perhaps underestimated by those advocating a turn away from academic approaches towards more ‘aesthetic’ or ‘literary’ responses. In reply to a reviewer who attributed one of his character’s views to him, McEwan writes,

As for Saturday – a character in a novel who expresses hostility towards novels in general should not be seen as an entirely trustworthy mouthpiece of his novelist creator. For example, the pro-Iraq war views Henry Perowne expresses in an argument with his daughter are not mine and nor, for that matter, are her anti-war opinions. On the other hand, I would agree with Perowne that some – not all – peace protesters are naive. Who can forget those daft and earnest English folk parading through central London last summer with placards that read, “We are all Hizbullah now”?

I sometimes wonder whether these common critical confusions arise unconsciously from a prevailing atmosphere of empowering consumerism – the exaltation of the subjective, the “not in my name” syndrome. It certainly seems odd to me that such simple precepts need pointing up: your not “liking” the characters is not the same as your not liking the book; you don’t have to think the central character is nice; the views of the characters don’t have to be yours, and are not necessarily those of the author; a novel is not always all about you.

The complaint that readers too readily conflate characters or narrators with biographical authors is a familiar one to students of the novel (Jane Eyre, anyone?); in part McEwan is asking that his artistic freedom be respected. But he is also demanding that his work be read properly, with due attention to its technical complexities, so that, to use his own example, it is not assumed that because his protagonist in Saturday is (cautiously) in favour of invading Iraq, either the author or the novel takes the same position. Particularly if a reader is going to make public pronouncements about a novel (as in a review), the reader should be skilled enough–knowledgeable enough–to avoid misreading. And it is possible to misread: a reader’s response can be wrong, misguided, confused. All opinions are not equal: some represent a fuller, more careful, better-informed engagement with all the elements of the work. Henry Perowne, to stick with the Saturday example, is a compelling but flawed character: his world view has limits not shared by the novel overall, which, among other things, self-evidently values literature more highly than the neurosurgeon does. One of the things the novel is about is the limitations of Perowne’s materialist view of the world–though at the same time, the novel is filled with respect for the “grandeur” in that view of things (a Darwinian phrase with rich implications for McEwan’s novel). In some of the anti-academic discussions, the reader’s responsibility to the text and author in question gets sidelined because of the emphasis on responding to, rather than analyzing, a text. A responsible (rather than just responsive) reading requires, just to give one example, attention to point of view, which can include recognizing when a thought or opinion not in quotation marks nonetheless represents the views of a character (“she was only Anne,” we read in Austen’s Persuasion, but a reasonably alert reader will promptly understand that this dismissive attitude belongs to Anne’s foolish family, and one of the novel’s main points is that their inability to appreciate her signals their broader moral disabilities). Unreliable narration is another technical issue that must be rightly understood for a good reading of many books: Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, for instance, would be radically misrepresented by a reader who accepted the narrator’s deference for authority as the novel’s own. While these days nearly anybody can read a novel, that does not mean everybody reads it equally well. Academic scholarship may be of questionable public value in its more erudite forms (though it may also be of intrinsic interest and therefore arguably worthwhile nonetheless), but in my own experience at any rate, English professors spend a lot of time trying to equip their students, not with politics or Theory but with the knowledge and tools to be better readers. If we do value literature, than this kind of expertise is surely worth promoting, even demanding.

Recent discussions about Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books That You Haven’t Read prompt some of the same thoughts. While I can see many occasions on which you might be in a conversation about a book you have not read, I don’t accept that there is any value in your pronouncing on it in any way. For example, I have not read Bayard’s book myself, only reviews and commentaries on it, such as Leah McLaren’s in this week’s Globe and Mail. So I can talk about it in a limited way, and I might even get passionate about what I take to be some of its claims. But I can’t responsibly judge or review the book without reading it for myself. I think it’s outrageous if it is true, as McLaren’s column states, that Bayard “admits to giving lectures on books he hasn’t bothered to open”–unless (and you see, I can’t know this without reading more) he lectures solely on context, literary relations, historical significance, or other issues that do not depend on specific textual evidence or close reading. If he talks about the specifics or the qualities of the books themselves, he is a fraud. As McLaren points out, we live in an “era of crib culture” in which people seem ready to accept “intellectual shortcuts” whenever possible. But substituting someone’s report about a book for your own reading of it is shoddy as well as risky, and our readiness to give up on “heavy reading” is not necessarily something to be complacent about. Required reading lists have the merit of motivating students to struggle on with things they find uncomfortable, unfamiliar, even boring. As McEwan says, “a novel is not always all about you,” and in that respect education differs substantially from other ‘consumer’ products. To consider my own experience again, it’s remarkable how many students are capable of learning to like a novel, or (since ‘converting’ them to like things is not really the point of teaching them) learning to appreciate the merits, qualities, or significance of a novel, as a work of art and a contribution to pertinent cultural, social, aesthetic, or political discussions, even if their first response was boredom or confusion. Again, some expertise is required, some technical terms useful, some precision in analysis as important as visceral responses. And again I think that as readers, or as serious and responsible readers, we have an obligation to the texts and authors to study our primary source carefully before we arrive at (much less publish) our conclusions.