The Literature of the Discontent

I was standing behind a young couple while waiting to order coffee at the local cafe.  It was hard not to eavesdrop since the young man was a loud-talker, but the rationale behind the premise of what he was saying intrigued me (I can only assume it was a well thought-out argument but only caught pieces of it).  He was explaining to his companion that he only stored "classics" in his e-reader and not popular fiction.  "It's not," I was able to catch a full sentence that stuck with me, "like I would keep Harry Potter or vampire series in it."  If anything, his impassioned declaration stayed with me, and I started to look back some years (when I was still teaching) and to remember the argument of some of my colleagues regarding popular versus classical fiction.  I was continually "attacked" over my insistence that classics taught universal themes just as well as, say, Harry Potter or the many genre vampire series of the mid-to-late 2000s.  With regards to Harry Potter, especially, the department was even considering a "Harry Potter Symposium," and the idea of "Potterian Studies" was thrown around with great enthusiasm.  I was the man out in left field, waiting for the "ball" to be hit in my direction so I could drop it as I perpetually have all of my academic life.

It wasn't so much that I was opposed to books like Harry Potter as I was to the idea of jumping on a fad out of sheer popularity.  "Fads," argued Max Shulman in "Love is a Fallacy," "are the very negation of reason."  Now, you may call me an elitist, or a stuck up classicist or worse, a discontented son of a bitch.  Nevertheless, my argument for classics (which, incidentally, I never gave up) was that the universal ideas included in Harry Potter and some of the "friendly" vampire series (that is to say, friendship, loyalty, struggle, suffering, exaltation, love, rancor, reconciliation, etc.) were originally offered in books like "The Scarlet Letter," or "For Whom the Bell Tolls," or "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or "The Grapes of Wrath," or "Moby Dick," or "Sister Carrie," or "The Great Gatsby," or "The Awakening," or "Crime and Punishment" or "The Way of All Flesh," or "The Possessed," or "The Brothers Karamazov" or... you get the point... And what a better way to prepare students for a life of continual learning than the classics.  There's always time, I argued, for "those other books."  It was not to be... students always turned to "Potterian Studies" with unquenchable devotion.  The populist argument is, "well, at least the kids are reading."  That may or may not be a sound premise--what if, for example, the "kids" were in absolute rave about "Mein Kampf"?  Well, "at least the kids are reading," right?

I have great love for contemporary writers, among my top of all time there's always elbow room for Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami and Philip Roth but my love always gravitates toward classic illustrations of timeless themes.  Discontented or not, at least I am still reading, no?

Gatsby turned out all right in the end...

One of my greatest fears and insecurities when teaching the "Survey of Classic American Literature" course is always the persistent worry that students will not appreciate the exquisite languor and perfection of "The Great Gatsby." I insist from the very beginning that we take out time and read slowly. Perhaps it is because the book itself has become a rite of passage of sort, that the expectations are, no pun intended, great. The students of today have little intention of putting up with a book they "dislike from the start." So it is with a heavy burden that I begin introducing this classic of American literature hoping that, as the narrator concludes, the book--as the main character--"turn out all right in the end." This semester it did. I know that I have written on this blog about reading and writing, but it feels I have neglected teaching as a central idea and experience. I am glad to be correcting that lack today.

What I try to emphasize at the start of the instruction period about this great book is how much F. Scott Fitzgerald put into it. The book itself is slightly over 50,000 words. I consider it the great miracle of literature because for a writer to put so much into a book, a transfixing and complicated plot, deeply fleshed characters, and above all the poetic and lyrical language used, is to me the most amazing and outstanding artistry of this book. It was a relief when I started to realize the students' appreciation. Some of them read ahead because they "couldn't wait for the next reading assignment." They singled out entire passages and read them out loud, appreciating the taste as if the words were fine cheese or some other delicacy. In a world that has become too dependent on technology, too fast for people to notice beauty, it is a relief that all (and I mean ALL) of these students enjoyed this book so tremendously. I think one of the passages that moved the students the most, (and I am being partially biased here), is when Nick Carraway, the narrator states:

"It was seven o'clock when we got into the coupe with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand."

Amazingly, students took Nick's relationship with Jordan a bit more serious that I had anticipated. Their break-up (as subtle as it was) had to be pointed out to those incredulous students who didn't want to believe the story was coming to an end, and that whatever relationship Nick and Jordan had in chapter nine needed to be salvaged and carried forward. This and all the other enjoyable memories from these last two weeks will definitely carry me over to the next term. This is teaching the way it should be... free thinking and exploration, drinking the sweet meaning of literature, breathing it like fine dust into our lungs until we are about to explode with enjoyment.

David Mamet, Moleskines and Gatsby

I finished "Writing in Restaurants" by David Mamet. I think that most of the theatrical theorizing was way over my head; I know very little about the stage. The strength of his essays, I believe, was in those essays when he "anecdotized" the subject matter. Some passages did catch my eye, and I ended up underlining several to which I will return. There was one particularly about technique that made sense to me:

"It [writing] is especially stultifying when accompanied, as often happens, by blandishment to the effect that there is no such thing as technique; that there is no need to study; that the only way to learn is through doing; and that, finally, pursuit of good habits of work, that is, technique, and good habits of thought, that is, philosophy, are effete."

I also found Mamet's treatment of Chekov's play "The Cherry Orchard" interesting. It was a lit crit treatment and I found it insightful. All the theorizing about the stage craft now made sense once he applied it to a specific example. He also wrote about the writing life and how it applies to age: "The pressure to continually achieve makes [writing] a young person's game, for it is easily tolerated only by the inspired and naive--by those bursting with the joy of discovery and completely, unselfconsciously generous of that gift." If anything else, it reminded me of those day-long writing marathons at Barnes & Noble bookstores cafe. How little did I think about the process and how easily the words came. But then I got to thinking about it too much and somehow lost the gift. But I still see myself as a contender, and try and write and give it still more thought.

The use of the Moleskine for the composition of this blog entry was a success. It took me nearly 20 minutes to formulate the ideas about Mamet's book and about 5 minutes more for what I am about to write next.

The next book I am reading is "Trimalchio." It is an early version/edition of "The Great Gatsby." There's a million things I could say about "Gatsby," really, but I'll keep it to a minimum since I am going to be writing in length this week as I read the book. This morning I discovered an article by Jonathan Yardley on what makes Gatsby a great novel (just about the greatest novel in the American literature canon). I was enthusiastic about the article until I realized that Mr. Yardley purposely and without discrimination bashed Ernest Hemingway. Now, I am not a lawyer defending Mr. Hemingway, but I think it is easy to bash him practically for all the ills of most Modernist American writers. People blame Hemingway for double-crossing Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, etc. And people who engage in this sort of behavior are concentrating on Hemingway as a social person, not the artist he was. But all the Hemingway bashing aside, the article presents Gatsby as the one marvelous book in American literature; a well-deserved place indeed. More on this as I write about "Trimalchio/Gatsby."