Take a moment to think about your favorite book. Now ask yourself: Would you be willing to reveal your thoughts to other readers? Most people wouldn’t think twice about sharing their enthusiasms. But literature professors are not most people. One of the first lessons you learn in grad school is to hide your personal taste or risk being shamed for liking the wrong sorts of things.
Liking the wrong things, or for the wrong reasons, is a social process; it's about the in-group. Finding out some honest facts about what you like and why is worth doing for the same reason that Socrates thought 'the unexamined life is not worth living.'
I've written praise for Loius L'amour novels here, for example. These were never 'high art,' but they're good books. You can still find them for sale today on shelves in any truck stop in America; I got most of my copies of dusty MWR shelves in tents in Iraq, where they'd been deposited by soldiers who'd read them and left them for others. They're easy to read, and they're easy to follow: somewhat like how Taco Bell mixes about six ingredients in different ways on different tortillas, L'amour has around six plots that he combines and re-combines in different ways. There are even fewer protagonist types: the seriously dangerous virtuous man, the youth set on a difficult course who must learn virtue, and the backcountry man demonstrating folk virtues. Because they are all virtuous in the Aristotelian sense, however, they're really variations on a theme -- but also worthy variations on a theme.
Popular art does not have to be bad art, in other words; it too can convey very worthy things. Or not:
Still the prevailing mode of literary criticism, symptomatic reading holds that the critic’s duty is to uncover the oppressive or subversive elements within literary narratives. For many critics, though, tools of literary theory (including Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and other approaches) that once felt empowering now look routine. The inevitable disenchantment set in when novels were all read in the same way—that is, with an eye toward their political implications in the world—with no discernable impact on the world outside their covers.
The mode of criticism the 'critical' reader is being taught to bring to these works lessens them. Whereas the stated intent was to show the reader things about the work he or she had been missing, the actual effect is to compress all the various works into a single wavelength. A tremendous amount is lost by reading the books only in this one way.
Letting go of 'one way' of reading being right also allows you to admit to yourself what you do like, and that it's all right to like it.
Suspicion was far from my mind as I found myself grappling with aesthetic questions given scant attention by the literary criticism of recent years. Temporarily setting aside my habitual skepticism forced me to confront complicated feelings toward books and what draws me to them—and toward what it means to read as a critic while still being myself.
That may leave you, of course, realizing that you like simple things; or erotic things; or other kinds of things that may not attain the very heights of human excellence. To return to the last reading from the Laws, though, these things are also goods; there is no reason to live in privation from simple joys and the like. The best course is to try to create art that intertwines the lower joys with the higher ones, as Tolkien combines the earthy love of mushrooms with the powerful realization that the beauty of the stars lies forever beyond the grasp of evil. And that's only one character!
Very ggood points. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism is longish but i think you will find it rewarding, as it will show you how much farther down that unfortunate road criticism has gone
ReplyDeletehttp://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/PDFs/Experiment_CSL.pdf
Humorously, I imagine myself saying to the group of them "Wait. Why is the political aspect, and your politics in specific, the only thing that is happening in a work of literature? Is there nothing else worth attending to? What a narrow world you live in." And as you can see from my discussion with Zachriel about this, even I don't see the half of it. If my world is larger than theirs, they are impoverished indeed.
the actual effect is to compress all the various works into a single wavelength.
ReplyDeleteA couple of years ago I was talking to a friend who has a "woke" 20-something daughter. As my friend described her daughter's world and world view, all I could think was that the young woman lived in a very flat, gray world. It's a shame. When I was in my 20s, my world was almost unbearably colorful.
One of the first lessons you learn in grad school is to hide your personal taste or risk being shamed for liking the wrong sorts of things.
ReplyDeleteC.S. Lewis also warned of the dangers of the Inner Ring, and this is the appeal of the Inner Ring, the wanting to belong, and the fear of being excluded. His antidote was to be open to enchantment, to never lose wonder.
...and as you can see from my discussion with Zachriel about this...
ReplyDeleteWell, speaking of limited palates, mine doesn't run to him. I don't read his stuff if it isn't directly addressed to me, and even then I generally regret that he bothered to take the time.
Nevertheless I looked at it since you referred me to it. Your disavowal (which you acknowledge is overstated for effect) is not quite where I am; I find a great deal of value in beautiful language, especially in poetry but also in works like Moby Dick. The real point may be to what degree Kant was right. Kant's third critique turns on whether there really is a kind of dispassionate, rationally endorsed "taste" that can be arrived at by the right kind of person. I think that's what the academy has long aimed to produce, well before critical theory collapsed the effort into politics.
I'm not sure what I think about that. Obviously I find L'amour's novels to be worthy in spite of their simplicity and ease and usual lack of literary devices (I did catch him in a pun once -- discussing a pioneer in early Virginia who saw the Blue Ridge, he says that he could see far blue misty mountains 'but did not know their appelation'). Yet he really is doing something that Kant would probably claim for his model: endorsing dispassionately-approved ethical models along the Aristotelian lines.
Even if Kant is right about that, though, even the old academy missed the mark. That probably deserves more thought and work. They were right to include Beethoven, wrong to dismiss much of folk music; maybe more work ought to be done on such lines. I should think more about that.
Grim, is this the same Z that Bookworm Room officially kicked off the island a few weeks ago....
ReplyDeleteThere is a public warning about them now.
ozamataz
ReplyDeletehttp://bondwine.com/2015/10/14/ozamataz/
legosity
http://bondwine.com/2015/10/16/legosity/
Ozamataz has the power to call forth new work in the canon if the original authors cease to supply it. Oz, of course. Sherlock Holmes Star Trek, Dr Who ... The works of J. R. R. Tolkien exhibit ozamataz par excellence. Harry Potter. One fandom exhibits the strange property of anti-ozamataz. The Wheel of Time had millions of readers, but did not attract a large community of creative fans
[Greek] *Legos* ‘I put in order, I arrange, I gather’: ‘I choose, I count, I reckon’: the basic methods by which the creative process works on the raw materials furnished by the imagination. It means ‘I say, I speak,’ and even ‘I mean’. And it means ‘I tell a story’.
Things that have legosity tend to connect together easily, like Lego bricks. They are adaptable and reusable ... thousands of stories about Robin Hood, and tens of thousands about vampires. Kings and queens, heroes and villains, monsters, perils, and things of nameless dread: these are some of the simple bricks that have gone into stories from time immemorial. They are conceptual Lego, and they are free for anybody to use.
ymarsakar:
ReplyDeleteGrim, is this the same Z that Bookworm Room officially kicked off the island a few weeks ago....
Yes, the same Z. Book banned Zachriel about ten years ago- at the request of a number of commenters. Some years later he came back. Didn't know she recently re-banned him.
At one time one could, via Advanced Google Search, locate the threads back than that discussed banning Zachriel, but my recent use of it didn't locate anything. Via software changes etc. the Internet is not necessarily forever.
Gringo, the recent purge by blue media must have made her discard her appreciation for Z's "logical arguments".
ReplyDeleteAnyways, it's a good thing and other sites should know that there is a very strong chance Z is a farm aggregate account setup by pre paid Soros sources.
Anyways, it's a good thing and other sites should know that there is a very strong chance Z is a farm aggregate account setup by pre paid Soros sources.
ReplyDeleteDon't know about Soros funding for Z - though it would make sense- but consensus has long been that Z/Zachriel/Zbot/Z-Team is collective. Z sometimes uses "we" in comments, and replies are at times so voluminous and quick to make it unlikely that they come from only one creator.