No, seriously.

This is nearly a month old, but it comes from The Boston Globe: English professor Jonathan Gostchall wrote an article on why we ought to apply the rigors of the scientific method to literary analysis in order to revive literary scholarship from its current (and supposed) irrelevancy. He argues:

“We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.”

But is this really true? I’d like to see Gottschall provide some sincere examples—I’m sure a cynic could easily assemble a list of increasingly esoteric PhD dissertation titles that seem to point to the growing irrelevancy of literary thought. But I don’t think any literary scholar goes into his studies with the intention of detaching himself from reality. If there’s any fault in current literary scholarship, it’s that scholars are growing increasingly dependent on examining literature rather than examining life. I know this sounds like a facetious comment, so let me explain: It’s one thing to point out that “x” quality appears in 10 books written in Romania between 1978 and 1985. It’s another thing to explain why, to use literature as evidence of emotional movements, political happenings, and philosophical truths. From the looks of all the good lit theory that got written in the 20th century, this used to happen a lot more than it does now. Maybe this decline is the fault of college English classes, or maybe it’s the fault of the fierce criticism that gets heaped on writers when they drift away from grounded, referenced fact to rambling, uncited hypotheses. And so our current stabs at “steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition” must be yoked to books; any knowledge must be eked out, observation by observation, by the minute analysis of gayness in butlers in 18th century Welsh novels.

The situation won’t be ameliorated by applying a scientific method to literary analysis—if anything, such rigorous methodology will only make it worse. Take, for example, the author’s “experiments” to test the hypothesis that the emphasis on female beauty is a Western phenomenon or the hypothesis that the author is dead. Is the author really holding up this kind of methodology as something to be praised? It seems to me to be the hilarious endpoint of the kind of literary analysis that’s already being taught in lit classes.

But Gotschall hits gets it right on the money when he observes:

Instead of forcing professors to rigorously test their big ideas, as scientific methods do, literary methods encourage us merely to collect and highlight evidence that seems to confirm them. The result of this laxity, as Berkeley’s Frederick Crews points out, is that “our bogus experiments succeed every time.” And since it is so hard to be wrong in literary studies, it is equally hard to be right. So books and papers pile up but, more often than not, genuine advances in knowledge do not.

Good point—I’m guilty of doing exactly this. Most papers generate from having an idea and contributing pages upon pages of examples. But is this really a bad thing? I don’t set out in my papers to prove a hypothesis—I write papers to show something, and then to wonder why that something exists or occurs. There’s something fundamentally wrong with asking literary scholarship to adhere to the same ambitions of science. Authors aren’t like atomic particles—they don’t follow the same rules all the time. The patterns are varied, and the patterns are personal, and it’s more interesting and valid to explore the erratic movements of a couple of writers than it is to define a universal rule for all writers. By the way, if you did the latter, you’d just be accused of “generalizing” and “stereotyping,” a heinous crime in literary analysis.

Gotschall concludes that “setting things right will require an embrace not only of science’s theories and methods but also of its ethos—its aspiration to disinterested inquiry and its measured optimism that the world can, in the end, be better understood.”

Isn’t there that saying about college, that they desire not to teach students not what to think but how to think? Perhaps this is the difference between scientific analysis and literary analysis. In the former, you’re trying to learn concrete facts about the world. But in the latter, you’re trying to learn how to perceive literature, how the meaning of a book can change based on the lens through which you read it. I’m going to make another facetious comment, but there might be some truth in this flippancy: Science desires to make the world better understood. Literary analysis desires to make the world better at understanding.

Sorry it’s been so long between posts. I was all working overtime and subsequently vacationing in Paris. You know how it goes. In any case, I haven’t slowed on my reading—if anything, I’ve been reading more than ever. I only post on the books that elicit enough of a response that I feel I can ramble on for paragraphs, but if you’re interested to read micro-reviews of all those books that come and go in the upper right hand corner of this blog, check out my GoodReads page.

In the meantime, here’s a poem I read in a recent issue of The New Yorker that gave me pause:

A Primer

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

—Bob Hicok

I wanted to write something similar about Connecticut, and then I quickly realized that I was 1.) too lazy and 2.) such an endeavor would be hokey and very high-school English class. Sorry, Connecticut!

And speaking of The New Yorker, in last week’s issue, there was a brilliant essay on Milton entitled “Return to Paradise: The enduring relevance of John Milton.” I totally groaned when I first saw the essay, but I’m so glad I read it. Jonathan Rosen’s discussion of Paradise Lost’s function (well, partial function) as a response to then-contemporary political events is a welcome reminder of that poem’s multi-faceted importance. And a reminder of my shame in only having read excerpts of the poem. Mere excerpts! AUGH.

The General in His Labyrinth is Gabriel García Marquez’s fictionalized chronicle of Simon Bolívar’s farewell tour through a post-”liberated” South America, which he took shortly before his death. Reading this book begs the question: Has Marquez written a fictional history or a faithful rendering of history as it happens?

Let me first emphasize that The General is not Marquez for Beginners. If you haven’t already read One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, then you’re short-changing yourself by reading this book. The General is for the Marquez completist, or maybe for someone well-versed in and enthusiastic about South American history. Unlike those novels in which Marquez conjures up a self-contained family history, The General drapes itself over the sharp contours of historical fact. Though you’d think a little factual underpinning would only serve to heighten the experience of reading about Bolívar’s last days, I actually found it to detract from the drama. The emotional power of The General derives from Marquez’s description of Bolívar’s withdrawal from friends, lovers, and his legacy. When Bolívar declares, “I am not myself,” it’s as if he’s unhinged his former, recognized self from his current, deteriorating self. The past becomes someone else, something to be scrutinized and assessed through the lens of old age.

This book would be an appropriate subject for Edward Said’s book of criticism on artwork created late in life, On Late Style. As Gabriel García Marquez ages, so, too, do his protagonists. (The rumored new novel from Marquez undoubtedly features a cast of nonagenarians.) The General in His Labyrinth is suffused with a feeling of twilight; it’s a sustained goodbye to a continent. And because this is Marquez, the whole tour is redolent with an elegiac beauty.

I don’t want to commit the sin of reading the author through his protagonist, but it is impossible not to read many of the General’s edicts as issued through Marquez’s pen. In fact, I consider The General to be the most personal novel of Marquez’s that I’ve read, especially in light of confessions like this: “[H]e could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most.” It’s tempting to think of magic realism as a coping mechanism for old age. And then we have wry asides like this one: “There’s nothing more dangerous than a written memoir.” Perhaps this is why we’ve never received Volume II of Marquez’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale? When Bolívar bemoans “the fact is there are fewer and fewer good books,” it reads as much like authorial comment as like the fictional criticism of a political leader.

The General in His Labyrinth is also a defense of a life and a continent. Marquez writes of the fractured South American identity:

“The damn problem is that we stopped being Spaniards and then we went here and there and everywhere in countries that change their names and governments so much from one day to the next we don’t know where the hell we come from.”

It’s a spurious explanation for the continent’s lack of cohesion, but still a clever summation of post-colonial confusion. And of the Western perspective of South American politics:

“Don’t attempt to teach us how we should be, don’t attempt to make us just like you, don’t try to have us do well in twenty years what you have done so badly in two thousand…Damn it, please let us have our Middle Ages in peace!”

Bolívar’s exasperated outbursts are as valid now as they were then.

So where does that leave The General? Unfortunately, the book itself is not as compelling as its potential insights into Marquez and his beliefs. In the end, The General in His Labyrinth offers us the same narrative that we can find in Marquez’s other, better titles: a man near the end of his days reconciles his love for an abstraction.

I FINALLY. FINISHED. THIS BOOK.

What took me so long? Let me tell you a few things about My Name Is Red. Let’s begin with a plot summary of sorts:

A sixteenth-century sultan commissions a workshop of miniaturists to paint his portrait in the Western artistic tradition. Two of the miniaturists are killed, presumably to protest the blasphemy of illustrating from the Western perspective—that is, from depicting the world as Man sees it, rather than as Allah sees it. By summoning a variety of perspectives (including characters from a miniature hanging in a coffeeshop) and a parade of parables, Pamuk (himself a former aspiring artist) unravels a narrative that is at once a conventional mystery and a profound—at times, baffling—exploration of the Turkish mind.

The most rewarding aspect of My Name Is Red is the opportunity to read up on Islam’s complicated relationship with art. Because of the commandment to “not make unto thee any graven image, or likeness of anything,” figurative painting is forbidden. Furthermore, those miniaturists who do paint strive to perceive and depict the world as Allah sees it—and thus, the injunction against perspective (A fly 2 inches away from the viewer, depicted as larger than a minaret 200 yards away, would be deeply insulting). The difference between the Venetian approach to art and the Turkish approach is summed up as “They paint what they see, whereas we paint what we look at” (emphasis mine).

In the same vein, blindness is the ultimate state of grace for a painter—only then will he draw from a kind of platonic ideal, rather than be influenced by the world as he sees it. The goal of a Turkish miniaturist is to paint the meaning, rather than the thing. Style is a conceit and a sin. The Eastern aesthetic opposes the Western cult of personality: “Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity…What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.” The artist is not the creator, but merely the conduit or servant of a perfect, objective perspective.

The miniaturists of My Name is Red radiate the same passion and clarity of purpose that Pamuk brings to his own writing. One of the miniaturists exclaims: “God must’ve wanted the art of illumination to be ecstasy so He could demonstrate how the world itself is ecstasy to those who truly see.” This sense of ecstasy is one that appears again and again in Pamuk’s writing; by separating the function of seeing from authorial judgment, he is able to revel, to truly marvel at his characters, Istanbul, and the world. All in all, the novel displays truly brilliant ideas on art, artistry, and representation. I was struck by the passage in which the miniaturist Olive explains:

“To see is to know without remembering…It is impossible, at one and the same time, to look at the horse and at the page upon which the horse’s image appears. First, the illustrator looks at the horse, then he quickly transfers whatever rests in his mind to the page. In the interim, even if only a wink in time, what the artist represents on the page is not the horse he sees, but the memory of the horse he has seen.”

Therein lies a manifesto’s worth of ideas about seeing, representation, and the freedoms and limitations of an artist—ideas I’d love to bring to any roundtable. But even as Pamuk questions the very philosophy of art, he, too, is limited by his medium.

This is, after all, a novel. And no dizzying heights of rhetoric can make up for the fact that the novel plods along. The story disappears under anecdotes, vignettes, and parables. The characters—most often, the female ones, slaves to pettiness, hysteria, and manipulation—are more symbolic than real. (Take, for example, the miniaturists, who announce themselves in scare quotes—My name is “Butterfly,” My name is “Stork”—they are almost self-consciously archetypes rather than characters). It’s unfortunate that I’ve never seen a fully developed female character in Pamuk’s fiction. Only in his memoirs does a single woman come alive, and it’s his daughter.

Perhaps My Name is Red is intended to be more of a vehicle for thoughts on Turkish art than a full-fledged novel, but if that’s the case, then I highly resent the back copy for promising me a “fiendishly devious mystery [and] a beguiling love story.” Not like I was in it for the narrative goods, but after reading Snow, I was expecting as much driving narrative as political philosophy.

If you’re going to follow my lead, be aware of what you’re getting yourself into: this murder mystery comes with a heaping side of Symposium.

Russia!

This picture elicits both sadness and a desire to dive into that pile of books a la Scrooge McDuck.

I was in the middle of slogging through several book reviews for work, mining each one for quotes, when I came across this Paper Cuts article on the seven most over-used and abused words in book reviews. It’s so spot-on—you’d be surprised by how few books haven’t been called “compelling” or “lyrical.”

My favorite part of this article are the comments, where readers make their own book review jargon nominations. The best comment:

IT’S SO TRUE.

LOOOOOOOL.

Colson Whitehead, author of The Intuitionist and Apex Hides the Hurt, addresses contemporary literature’s most pressing issue: writing in Brooklyn.

In interviews, I get asked a lot, “What’s it like to write in Brooklyn?” I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan, but there aren’t as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. What do they expect me to say? “Instead of ink, I write in mustard from Nathan’s Famous, a Brooklyn institution since 1916.”

Highly recommended.

Arthur Krystal, in his round-up of aphorism collections in the February issue of Harper’s, reminds us of the commonplace book:

Robert Darnton also tells us that “early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts.” This segmented rather than sequential mode of reading, which prevailed until people started consuming novels, “compelled its practitioners to read actively…to impose their own pattern on their reading matter…Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities.”

Kind of sounds to me like lit blogging! I can’t speak for my blogging peers (ha), but I know that ever since I’ve started writing here, I’ve been a far more active and engaged reader. I’ve learned read to respond rather than to merely absorb. I’m sure there are a good number of bloggers out there doing exactly this, but it’d be interesting to start a private (or maybe semi-private with a handful of contributers) commonplace blog where we post excerpts and comment on any patterns or connections that emerge. Just a thought. Admittedly a dorky thought.