The Usefulness of Novels
Geoff Dyer strikes me as my kind of man–as a writer, I mean, not as what I would define as an archetype of the Man (and by that, I mean the person we look up to in times of distress and need, not the one to whom we pay our taxes and curse when we are in distress and need)– in large part due to the fact that he’s a light and deft writer, and more because what he says rings true with what lies deep in the recesses of my heart:
Hearing that I was ‘working on Lawrence’, an acquaintance lent me a book he thought I might find interesting: A Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, Edited by Peter Widdowson. I glanced at the contents page: old Eagleton was there, of course, together with some other state-of-the-fart theorists: Lydia Blanchard on ‘Lawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality’ (in the section on ‘Gender, Sexuality, Feminism’), Daniel J. Schneider on ‘Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence’ (in the section featuring ‘Post-Structuralist Turns’). I could feel myself getting angry and then I flicked through the introductory essay on ‘Radical Indeterminacy: a post-modern Lawrence’ and became angrier still. How could it have happened? How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it? I should have stopped there, should have avoided looking at any [sic] more, but I didn’t because telling myself to stop always has the effect of urging me on. Instead, I kept looking at this group of wankers huddled in a circle, backs turned to the world so that no one would see them pulling each other off. Oh, it was too much, it was too stupid. I threw the book across the room and I tried to tear it up but it was too resilient. By now I was blazing mad. I thought about getting Widdowson’s phone number and making threatening calls. Then I looked around for the means to destroy this vile, filthy book. In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded in deconstructing it.
I burned it in self-defence. It was the book or me because writing like that kills everything it touches. That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches. Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch (p.100-101).
Four and half years of study of English literature also made me feel this way; I nearly burned my diploma when I received it in the mail (I had resolutely stayed away from commencement, the only university ceremony family can attend other than a disciplinary hearing) in a fit of anger at the uselessness of receiving one that was written entirely in Latin, and thus useless to all those–myself included–who can’t read Latin. At the time, it epitomized the feeling of utter self-loathing and disillusionment I had for having studied literature. Students of literature are asked to study Shakespeare, who Johnson described as having had “small Latin and less Greek,” and the English canon, both which grew out from classical roots, a perversity that astonishes since the overwhelming majority of modern students have no Latin and even less Greek. At a recent job interview, I was asked to bring in this very diploma as evidence of my education; the interviewers looked at it, looked at one another, looked at me, and we all nodded at one another, uselessly, as it was clear no one at the table had any idea of what was written on it other than my name.
John Irving’s Doctor Larch in The Cider House Rules constantly intones about being ‘useful’, a feature that expresses, or rails against, the author’s constant dread of being the opposite of this. While literature is eternal–the good stuff, in any case–there is not one writer dead or alive who has not felt the pull of this vicious undertow, which sometimes drives them to self-conscious despair. Irving has come to terms with his sense of inadequacy by having trained in wrestling his entire life and, in the case of this particular book, by writing for the cause of free-choice and the right to abortion. The theme of being useful is a cornerstone to The Cider House Rules and it is arguably a background theme to all modern literature. (Anecdotally, Doctor Larch also remedies the problem of protagonist protégé Homer Wells’ lack of formal medical education by doctoring a fake diploma, which no one bothers to follow-up on because it is so impressive a document.)
Unfortunately, ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine per cent of all literature students don’t end up becoming John Irving, and they spend several years or more (or, as in my case, four point five years) struggling to understand how studying advanced literacy is going to make them even remotely as useful as their fellow students, in particular those who have wisely chosen to study subjects that at the very least lead them to sources of professional remuneration other than tips. What happens to those brilliant students who stick with their studies of literature and go the academic distance? They usually end up with doctorates in the subject and then, if fortune favours them, teaching the subject to idiot undergraduates; in other words the kind I was, the kind who wrote deliberately vitriolic essays of his professor’s favourite authors and then spent sleepless nights tossing over his mediocre grades.
I recently met a an academic who said that he taught German literature. I was aghast: to think, this man who had been in universities all his life was teaching Rilke. Rilke! Oh, it was too much to bear. You don’t teach Rilke, I wanted to say, you kill Rilke! You turn him to dust and then you go off to conferences where dozens of other academic-morticians gather with the express intention of killing Rilke and turning him to dust. Then, as part of the cover-up, the conference papers are published, the dust is embalmed and before you know it literature is a vast graveyard of dust, a dustyard of graves. I was beside myself with indignation. I wanted to maim and harm this polite, well-meaning academic who, for all I knew, was a brilliant teacher who had turned on generations of students to the Duino Elegies. Still, I thought to myself the following morning when I had calmed down, the general point stands: how can you know anything about literature if all you’ve done is read books? (p. 101)
Ah, the perennial question asked by the undergraduate: are our teachers failed writers? Do they spend their entire lives thinking, could I have written For Whom the Bell Tolls had I ditched my studies and gone, instead, to follow the compass bearing of my brass balls and fought with the guerillas in Guatemala, shot at the contras, and killed some certified badasses in the bush? A few of my professors were American draft dodgers of the Vietnam era, so my hypothesis is unlikely, but the fact remains that there is a tension between the teachers who preach the practice of literary creation but have themselves done little to expand it.
“Now,” then says Dyer, “criticism is an integral part of the literary tradition and academics can sometimes write excellent works of criticism but these are exceptional: the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of books by academics, especially books like that Longman Reader are a crime against literature. If you want to see how literature lives then you turn to writers, and see what they’ve said about each other, either in essays, reviews, in letters or journals–and in the works themselves. ‘The best readings of art are art,’ said George Steiner (an academic!); the great books add up to a tacit ‘syllabus of enacted criticism’. This becomes explicit when poets write a poem about some great work of art–Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’–or about another poet: Auden’s elegy for Yeats, Brodsky’s elegy for Auden, Heaney’s elegy for Brodsky (the cleverly titled ‘Audenesque’). In such instances the distinction between imaginative and critical writings disappears. (p. 101-102)
Such a position also makes the literary author feels somewhat less useless, it might be added. In any case, Dyer is in part correct in his position: leave the work of criticism to the professionals. He also adds that his position is balderdash, “Except that this is nonsense of course. Scholars live their work too” (p. 102). To the heart of the matter, Dyer decries critics, excludes from literary discourse, then lets them back in, all to the point of saying, damn, didn’t D.H. Lawrence write so very well: “That’s why Lawrence is so exciting: he took the imaginative line in all his criticism” (p.103).
Lawrence, to my mind, is among the most tedium-inducing writers I’ve ever read, appealing to those who somehow enjoy seeing life as presented through the anti-rose coloured lens. Certainly Dyer did manage to decrease my prejudice of the writer to that of guarded suspicion, but I still recall attempting to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover one beautiful summer day by the lake and feeling depressed for the effort. After suffering through forty pages of liver-like prose, it was banished back deep into the crevice from whence it came, a space between two battered copies of Daphne Du Maurier.
I am thus both an ignorant and useless critic, unfit to write literature–let alone read it appreciatively–and not even useful enough to make D.H. Lawrence more attractive to a biased audience. So be it: I know my literary position in life and accept it, and I make no apology for being hard on Lawrence based on a partial reading of only one of his works, which is also understood as an overrated novel. I love the writer not, but I do think Dyer did a bang-up job of selling the unsaleable, and sincerely thank him for helping me to exorcize my demons.
