Daniel Green
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DANIEL GREEN Introduction Most of the selections that follow originated on my literary blog, The Reading Experience. The blog has been around for quite a while (15 years), so I had a wide range of possibilities available in choosing the pieces I wanted to represent the dominant themes I have pursued there. These are not necessarily the issues I intended to take up when I began The Reading Experience—it was such a new medium I really had no idea where it might lead—but they were the issues I found myself returning to as it became clear it was a medium that offered yet untried possibilities for serious critical discourse somewhere between full-on academic criticism and book coverage as then practiced in most newspapers and magazines. This is the space I tried to fill with The Reading Experience in its early days, and if finally the “litblog” per se did not quite live up to this potential (although it did lead to other, less “bloggy” forms of online literary criticism), my own attempt to seek it out did, I think, leave a varied accumulation of critical writing that nevertheless poses, implicitly and explicitly, a fundamental question: What do we talk about when we talk about literature? My overriding interest in this question probably arose from my life circumstances when starting the blog—in many ways it was a substitute for the academic criticism I wasn’t going to write, since a convergence of factors, some personal, some professional, all unbidden, brought me to a point where I had to give up all hope of a conventional academic career. To some extent this was liberating: the prevailing fashions in academic criticism were not going to bless the kind of aesthetic criticism I wanted to write (not always close readings looking for “beauty,” but critical analysis that assumed a work of literature was first of all an aesthetic creation), so contemplating the nature of literature and the role of criticism in a new medium that promised to bridge a gap between scholarly criticism—at least of the kind I was trained to value—and “literary journalism” in what bloggers liked to call “mainstream media” offered an opportunity to write seriously about literature without deferring to the protocols of either of these modes. Yet, while I also addressed more transitory matters related to publishing or the present literary “scene,” I still seemed to return to the issues I no doubt would also have taken up if I’d remained an academic critic, the issues featured in this book. Certainly there are other topics related to literature and literary criticism that engage my interest, not to mention doing close readings of writers and works in the search for beauty (“aesthetic gratification,” let’s say). But most of those would no doubt eventually circle back to the preoccupations informing the subjects here: the experience of reading works of literature as literature, the centrality of style (and form), the way in which notions of “craft” can impede imagination and experimentation, among concerns that would have us looking “inside” the literary text; among considerations that take us “outside” the text, I would surely have concentrated on writers whose work asks the reader to attend to the dynamics of the text rather than point them to some articulable meaning or representational object beyond it, and would have insisted that literary works themselves are the proper focus of literary study, not the protocols of the academy as enacted in the succession of ever-newer scholarly theories and methods, just as the creation of novels, stories, essays, and poems by current writers is the ultimate goal of a literary culture, not the formation of a social order of writers whose job is to artificially promote that culture. No doubt many—although not all—of these essays lack the sort of rigor associated with academic criticism (some of them are rathe acerbic in tone, especially in the blog’s early days), although by the time I had irreversibly exited the tenure track I had already concluded that much of academic writing required too much adherence to formula, too many mechanical gestures and enforced constraints, to be a mode of writing I could comfortably continue to practice (at least exclusively). Nevertheless, I think they still originate in the imperatives to read more alertly and to understand the literary history without which a particular work is not fully explicable that I learned to value when preparing to become an academic critic and have continued to follow since. My hope in starting the blog was to seek out a critical space in which the formulas of both academic criticism and general-interest book-reviewing would be unnecessary and a more direct but still exacting kind of critical commentary might be possible. Certainly posts attempting this sort of considered analysis were interspersed with more rapidly composed posts addressing more immediate and fleeting literary news (of the kind found on many other literary blogs), but the pieces gathered here offer whatever illustration can be cited as evidence that my hope was realized. INSIDE THE TEXT The Experience of Reading The Reading Class In “Twilight of the Books,” Caleb Crain warns us that There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become 'an increasingly arcane hobby.' I don’t really find myself dismayed by the idea that reading will one day perhaps be confined to a "reading class," primarily because, as far as literature is concerned, it more or less already is. It may be true that "In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months." and that "The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002." That something around 50% of Americans still read poetry or fiction at all doesn't finally seem that bad to me, but this measure is not very rigorous: These are the numbers of people who self-reported reading at least one "work of creative literature," and we can probably safely guess that for many—probably most—only one or two such works per year is probably the more accurate report. Thus, those of us who read works of literature on a regular basis, who don't even necessarily read "for pleasure" but out of a deeply felt need that makes it seem impossible to us that reading might someday disappear, are no doubt even now practicing what seems to non-readers an "arcane hobby." The use of the word" hobby," of course, is meant to disturb us, to shock us out of our complacency about the written word's loss of "the prestige of exclusivity." What kind of world will it be if literacy were to become only a "hobby," as if the ability to read were merely something a few people chose to do in their spare time? (In this future, rather than spend his Saturdays in the basement doing woodwork, Dad might be squirreled away in a damp corner, reading with a flashlight so the kids won't see his shame?) But that reading might one day be the exclusive privilege of those who actually like to do it, that books might be written for those who want to read them rather than for those who don't, doesn't finally seem to me a cause for lament. I feel confident enough that the appeal of "great books" is sufficiently constant that there will always be a fairly sizable group of intrepid people who will want to be able to discover for themselves what they have to offer. But really Crain isn't so much interested in whether literature will survive. Although he begins his essay by citing the NEA report (which alerted us to the decline in interest in "creative literature") and further points out that schoolchildren are especially losing interest in “reading for literary experience,” most of his discussion of literacy vs. "orality" focuses on the superiority of the former in processing information, not on the loss of literature. Indeed, Crain sums up the research of linguist Walter Ong in this way: Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. If anything, the "oral mind-set" is more likely to express itself through a "literary experience," through an account of the world as related through story. Abstract concepts and analysis are the tools of philosophy, not literature, and while I ultimately do not think literature can be reduced to the telling of stories (the "literary" lies elsewhere than in the entanglements of story, although it is just as irreducible to "ideas"), it also does not depend on the reader's ability to "rotate" abstractions and is not strictly commensurate with the "calm and abstract investigations" literacy in Crain's definition makes possible. Crain's reliance on a definition that privileges expository discourse as the object of reading is made only more explicit when he cites "a series of British studies in which people who read transcripts of television newscasts, political programs, advertisements, and science shows recalled more information than those who had watched the shows themselves" or when he concludes that "in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with." I'm certainly not going to dispute that a literate society is preferable to an illiterate one, but few if any of these dangers the new illiteracy poses, at least according to Crain's analysis, threaten to undermine or endanger the literary tradition.