Juvenile Pastimes and Patterning Texts

Previously, I quoted Graham Harman saying of Nietzsche that "Many consider him a sort of juvenile pastime that one has to move beyond, and this attitude is understandable. . ." I'd meant to say something more about this aspect of youth and reading, before I got sidetracked. But I've seen this kind of thing said of Nietzsche a lot. You see it said of Dostoevsky too, that he is a young person's writer. It's further said that young readers get animated by ideas in fiction, whereas presumably more mature readers can read with more distance. Maybe. Is this condescending, or simply the wisdom of age and accumulated reading? Surely plenty of good readers have remained faithful to Dostoevsky and plenty of older readers of philosophy have not abandoned Nietzsche to the dustbin of youthful indiscretion. But to look on a body of work, written over the course of a lifetime, serious work, and dismiss it from a position outside and above it as "a juvenile pastime"!

(I remember Martin Amis saying something similar of Graham Greene, that he was a writer one grew out of. Amis would probably not be happy to think that the same might be said of him: I feel I've outgrown his novels, several of which I found enormously entertaining when I was in my 20s, but which in retrospect seem a bit slight, even if the glow of entertainment has not dimmed. Is it wrong that my consignment of Amis to the status of entertainment amuses me, particularly in light of his complaint, in his review of Hannibal, that Thomas Harris was being reviewed as literature? It seems rather important to him that his writing be literature. No doubt I'm being puerile. But surely I digress.)

Linking to the post noted above, blogger friend bdr teases me a little here, and in a comment says this:

I have a friend, a linguistics prof specializing in second language acquisition, who says learning the specialized language of, say, a philosopher, *is* SLA, and like learning, say, Russian, it gets harder for each year you're older.

As I say there, I'm sure his friend is exactly right. This has been a subterranean theme for me here. Much of the anxiety I still have about reading what I want to read is not just that, being older, I fear I lack sufficient time to get to it all, but that the time has literally passed in which I could have most effectively learned to read it. In which my brain was being organized this way, as opposed to that. Bdr's comment gives me space to flesh this idea out a bit. Nearly a year ago, I wrote somewhat vaguely on the topic of "the decline of symbolic language". I was channeling a Thomas Merton essay I'd recently read which had spoken to me, but I didn't elaborate much (nor did I reference him by name). The problem I sense is not just that I lack the time to play catch-up, given my age and the other demands on that time. The problem is that even if I had the time, given my age it's too late. (And part of my frustration now is that when I had the time and was young enough, I was obsessed with baseball and Led Zeppelin, not to cast aspersions on either.)

I wrote even earlier about what Michael Dirda has called the "patterning texts": the Bible, mythology, the Greeks, the Romans, etc. These are patterning texts in the sense that they form the background of literature, the patterns of narrative, of metaphor, that can be seen across the history of literature, writers in dialogue with the past, and so on. But they are also patterning texts in the sense that they form the culture which patterns the way we see the world, which patterns our very brains.

Let's consider the Bible for a moment. In The Book of God, Gabriel Josipovici approaches the Bible from a number of different directions, including how it's presented to us, both how it's physically bound and its chapter divisions, various traditions of interpretation, and especially its narrative mode. He also talks about how we encounter the Bible as children. Usually it's read to us, and we take the stories to be "true", in the way stories are, as we do all stories when we are children. I've had to take Josipovici's word on this, because for me the Bible was never thus. Though my mother went to church semi-regularly at different times in my childhood, the Bible did not live in our house, the stories were never really told. If I heard them at all it was either in the brief period in which I went to Sunday School myself, or more likely, third-hand, as filtered through the thick layers of culture, all confused and distant. And though I've tried to argue here on behalf of Josipovici's conception of the Bible as resistant to meaning, I'm fully aware that the Bible in fact, especially in this country, is seen rather as a repository of meaning, a container of answers. The manner in which it is framed for most is geared towards particular meanings; people usually have study versions of the Bible, with "key" sections bolded or set aside as pull quotes or areas of further consideration. The point is that, though my almost total areligiosity is probably anomalous in the United States over the period of my life, my sense is that even those who are Christian have that Christianity framed for them with particular meanings in view (which, again, to my mind has less to do with faith itself than with configurations of power), and while they are no doubt much more familiar with the broad strokes of the various religious stories than I am--one would hope--I suspect that in general the patterning work that the Bible once did simply as a matter of course is not being done. And even if it is for those who are broadly religious, the point can be extended to include the mythological texts, the Greco-Roman pantheon and the related tragedies and other works, material that my education barely covered at all. What once was simply widely known to a literate or semi-literate population, is now all but lost, replaced by characters from television shows or comic books who are thin, pale descendants of these archetypal myths. (Or maybe I'm overstating the case? Perhaps I'm just describing myself, in isolation? Perhaps, but somehow I get the sense that I'm not alone in this. The generally depressing discussion that arose around Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones tell me otherwise. But it's about the Nazis and the Holocaust, right? And we all think we know enough to be able to talk intelligently about those subjects.)

I'm going to leave off there, except I will repeat some questions I asked in one of those earlier posts: To the extent that a literature is a lived tradition of a people, is such a thing doomed without a common repository of symbolic language? Or a common repository of much of anything? And is such a thing perhaps already dead, with narrative taking place only in that place of solitude, where the reader finds the text? And if we all have our various tastes, so that increasingly few of us can draw on the same body of literature, what then?

On blogging and hype and The Kindly Ones

Recently, Andrew Seal considered why he reads new books. Since my time of despair on this particular question has passed, I now read very few new books. Which is to say, I may still despair of having time to read the history or philosophy or theory or political economy I want to read, I no longer worry much about new novels. Where once I not only jumped at the new Amis or Powers or whoever, but also felt compelled to track down the latest hype-gathering novels, now I barely even notice when something new is afoot (hence Aleksandr Hemon's excellent novel The Lazarus Project almost completely escaped my attention until very late last year). I don't trumpet this as a virtue, just noting that I've allowed myself to quite happily fall out of the loop. I will still read, sooner or later, the newest works from, for example, Coetzee or Roth or Marilynne Robinson, but new books from new writers or writers of heavily hyped books are rarely of immediate interest.

There are exceptions. For example, it has been hard to avoid the hype surrounding Roberto Bolaño in recent years, and though I've been spending time mining the classics, modernist or otherwise, I have ultimately succumbed. Though in a sense Bolaño is an exception, he is also a case in point. I did not run out and immediately buy his many books that have been blog-hyped, though I took note for future reference. I ended up reading The Savage Detectives last year because a friend had left it at our house and I was between books. In the wake of reading that book, which I was somewhat less than enthusiastic about, I was still unable to finally resist all the 2666 buzz; I asked for and received it for Christmas. And yet still it sits, patiently awaiting my attention.

A clearer exception is Jonathan Littell's controversial novel, The Kindly Ones. Though it's not really the buzz that has me wanting to read this book (after all, the buzz is not altogether positive, is it?). No. There has been an excess of words written about this book, much of which I have studiously avoided. Too much of what I have seen has been depressingly literal or reductive, reducing the book to either "Holocaust porn" or otherwise about something easily captured in a quick review. The book is this or that, and can be safely dismissed as such. But why do I feel as if I can sense that the book has not been fairly treated by such treatments, when I haven't yet read it myself? The answer is that the very voices that have elevated the novel to a must-read for me have done so by arguing for its virtues in a manner that seriously calls into question most other reviews (the tiresome remarks of reductive non-readers of the book notwithstanding). These voices are primarily Steve Mitchelmore's and, returning to the blogger who touched off this post, Andrew Seal's. It was, as is often the case, Steve who first put the book on my radar, and his own response to it, in typical fashion, bears little to no resemblance to any other. Meanwhile, Andrew's two fascinating posts (one, two) have deepened my sense that this is a book I need to read; I especially appreciate the attention Andrew pays in the first of his posts to some of the arguments used by other reviewers, positive or negative, in particular some of those employed by Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books, and Samuel Moyn in The Nation (coincidentally, the only mainstream reviews of any interest to me).

I highlight Steve's and Andrew's posts not just to express my appreciation and to announce that I plan to read this particular novel, but to point out the continuing possibilities they represent. With a book like The Kindly Ones, the pressure on the reviewing establishment to respond quickly and reductively is immense. The historical and political baggage associated with the Holocaust just makes matters worse. Blogs, in theory, have the opportunity to take more time, allow more space, encourage critical exploration. Too often, it seems, bloggers get caught up in the reviewing pressure too. But there's no need to. Some books demand better attention than the newspapers are willing or able to give them--or, rather, some books bring into focus the demand made by all books of any value. As Andrew puts it, in a comment to an unrelated post of his, a comment in which he linked to the reviews of The Kindly Ones that appeared in the LA Times and the New York Times, "This is why I don't feel newspaper book review sections declining is a peril to the republic": I couldn't agree more. If it were up to newspapers to keep me informed on anything, let alone writing, I'd never have any idea what's going on.