The latest issue of The New Criterion hit the stands – or, at least, reached our humble home – recently and, as is my wont, I nicked it from Notarius’s bag as soon as I noticed it. I read faster than he does and so feel fairly ok with taking periodicals from his bag to read; often, I’ve digested whatever is in there that I want to read before he’s even noticed the thing isn’t in his bag anymore.
Now, some issues of The New Criterion entertain me no end, and others leave me incredibly uninterested. I borrowed from the library that book of collected essays from the rag that came out some months back – Counterpoints, I believe it was called – convinced that it would be worth it for me to lug the heavy thing home; surely out of all those pages there’d be at least three pieces I’d love to pieces?
No. I was bored shitless within, oh, five essays. That is to say, I tried to read five different articles, wasn’t interested in any of them, and glanced through the rest of the book concluding that this was a mission to abort. I feel bad about this, but there it is. The truth is, Miss Edith is not a brainiac. She does not read to be enlightened or to have new doors opened. She reads to be entertained, and that means the article has to be about something that’s already somewhat relevant to her existence.
Fortunately, the new issue of the magazine met me on this, and there are at least two articles I sincerely enjoyed and which even left me sort of shooting my fist into the air crying “Gabba Gabba Hey!” to Joseph Epstein and Anthony Daniels.
The Epstein piece, ‘ “The Literary Life” at 25,’ is a sort of recap of what’s been going on in the lit’ry world for the last 25 years, and to hear him tell it, the truth would be: Not as much as you would hope, because writers have gotten “workshopped” into vapidity and opt for gimmickry whenever possible. This is certainly my position, and I cringe at the use of the word “workshop” when used as a verb, to boot.
When Miss Edith was a young thing in college, studying literature, the thing to do wasn’t to study the fiction per se, but rather to study something they called literary theory. I thought it was utter bullshit and a waste of time. College, however, felt differently, and insisted I study this shit. I remember that I weighed various options and decided that the efficient thing to do would be to take a lit theory course (which my advisor said I had to take, or else) over the summer, thus lessening the number of weeks I’d have to be miserable studying the shit. To this end, I enrolled in a Yale summer program, where I studied literary theory under one of the great men of the field, I guess. I sat in a classroom with Yale students – a charming lot, I can assure you – not one of whom had ever read Jane Eyre, it turned out. If I dug up my diaries from that summer I bet I could come up with a complete list of basic stuff that, I was shocked to discover, these overachievers had never read, even though most of them were about to be juniors or seniors in college. It was amazing to me. Apparently Yale was crushing these kids to be little theorybots and had decided that it just wasn’t important to’ve read anything like, say, a novel.
The professor was singularly unimpressed by me even though I had read the novels he referred to in passing; in addition, I knew already who Foucault and Derrida were (and could spell their names correctly). This didn't earn me any brownie points, though; I think he could tell I was not one of his flock. He actually called a meeting with me one day late in the summer session and asked me exactly why I was taking this course. I explained that I had been asked to take a course in theory even though it wasn’t exactly relevant to what I would be working on. He asked what I would be working on. I explained it to him; he flinched oh-so-politely, and gave me a gentleman’s C for my grade. It was, all things considered, rather nice of him; had I failed, I would have been sort of screwed. But the truth was, really, I saw no value in what he was teaching, and I never did in years to come, either. I’m somewhat vindicated, then, by Mr. Epstein’s article: “…theory in academic literary criticism seems to be playing itself out by the sheer force of its deep inner uselessness.” Hallelujah!
Mr. Epstein has various complaints and I don’t really want to discuss them point by point here. I just wanted to express my gratitude to him for elucidating thoughts that I myself have had in the back of my head for a long time now that I haven’t been able to express very well: the dissatisfaction with so many books published today, the basic emptiness of so many of the works of fiction that are popular, relatively speaking (not Danielle Steel popular, but Michael Chabon popular) today. Mr. Epstein discusses the lack of moral backbone supporting the world-view of so many of the literary novels we see today and, reading this, it suddenly struck me that perhaps this was part of why I loved Cheryl Mendelson’s Morningside Heights so much. Because it was, yes, set in a milieu I can enjoy reading about, and it was a novel of manners, but also, at the end of the day, it was a morality tale. It was about good triumphing over evil, or, at least, the bad and annoying and sleazy (personified, yes, by a lawyer). People I know either love or hate this novel, if they’ve ever looked at it, and I can accept that. I don’t care. I love it, and shall continue to re-read it and enjoy it. I only wondered, as I finished Mr. Epstein’s article, if he had read Ms. Mendelson’s book, and, if so, what did he make of it?
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