Great Books Archives - Page 24 of 26

The Problem of Not Being Dickens

Tom Jones is a novel.

Of that there is no doubt.

Depending on how you define “novel,” it may be the first “novel.”

Probably not, though. For no particular reason, I define “novel” more broadly, so Robinson Crusoe get the honor.

The novel (Tom Jones, not Robinson Crusoe) is divided into 18 books, and the first chapter in each book is an address from the Author to the Reader in which all sorts of asides and digressions and commentary are supplied.

So, in discussing Tom Jones, it is perfectly appropriate to begin with a digression having nothing to do with the actual substance of the story at hand.

Sadly, in order to truly be true to the spirit of Tom Jones, the digression at the outset must be both a) amusing and b) followed by an interesting tale. The sadness arises from the fact that the digression here fulfills neither of those two characteristics. But, I digress.

What would happen if you crossed David Copperfield with Tristram Shandy? You would get Tom Jones, well except that Tom Jones predates both of those other two books so you would have to add in some sort of time travel to make this all work out.

I enjoyed reading Tom Jones. I can certainly see why professors specializing in 18^th century novels are quite fond of it—compared to the other novels from that time period, this one is easily among the best.

But, the 18^th century was not a good time period for novels.

How does to compare to Dickens? Honestly, it isn’t that close. Tom Jones has the scope of a Dickens novel. It has all the characters and odd coincidences of a Dickens novel. But, it does not have quite the charm of Dickens.

Don’t get me wrong; there is charm here. But, the difference is easily seen when thinking about the characters. Dickens is littered with memorable charters.

Tom Jones? Well, there is the perfect heroine Sophia; but she is only memorable from the worship bestowed upon her by the author (not by Tom, though he worships her too—she is memorable because the author keeps telling us how amazing the author thinks she is—she isn’t even memorable in and of herself—it is really the heroine worship which is memorable.)

Mr. Western, Sophia’s father, is amusing. But nobody else in the novel really rises to something interesting. The story is good, the characters are nice, it is surely a Good Novel, and probably a Great Book. But, it is no Dickens.

Which leads to an interesting problem.

Is it a fault to not be Dickens?

Surely not. And surely, we would never say that only Dickens should be read. There are lots of great novels written by people who were not named Charles.

But, in this case, the connection is just too strong. Everything Fielding has done, Dickens has done better. That doesn’t make Tom Jones a bad novel at all. I would even recommend it if I wasn’t immediately afflicted with the thought that really, instead of Tom Jones, you will probably enjoy one of Dickens’ novels more.

A Little Dose of Optimism

I don’t often read books which make me feel full of youthful optimism.

Obviously, I have a sardonic and mordant streak (Ok, “streak” may be a bit understated), but I am generally quite upbeat and think the future isn’t all that bad.

I can’t remember the last time I felt that bubbly, optimistic, really the world isn’t all that bad, attitude. After all, the world really is that bad, but we might as well smile as the ship is sinking.

Sure the world is decaying and getting worse all the time, but in the juvescence of the year came Christ the tiger and all that. (Yes, he devours us, but even still…)

Yet, here I am reading a book, thinking the whole time: “Oh, please Philip, it isn’t that bad. Seriously, now. Must you be so bleak and glum and dismal?”

That’s what Philip Larkin does to me…he is so unrelentingly depressing that he makes me feel like a giddy optimist. How in the world is he is such a popular poet?

The general spirit of the age is that if things go just right, if the right people are elected or the forces of evil can be stopped, then we can remake the world in our own image and everything will be all warm and cuddly and cheerful. Are there really enough pessimists who buy poetry to explain Larkin’s popularity?

Maybe I spend too much time with Americans. Maybe the British are really all dour and sad—come to think of it, maybe they have every reason to be glum—the weather’s bad and all they have to look forward to is King Charles.

After reading a review of Larkin, I bought a copy of Collected Poems. Well, one of the volumes entitled Collected Poems.

The same editor, Anthony Thwaite, has put together two different collections of Larkin and cleverly gave them both the same title. So, this is the one that has Larkin’s original books republished instead of putting all the poems in chronological order.

(Can I just say that Thwaite belongs in the Hall of Shame for this. How could he not notice that the two collections had the same title? Was he trying to confuse? Where were the editors in all this?)

I’ve read The North Ship, The Less Deceived, and The Whitsun Weddings. (He has one other book, which I still have not yet read: High Windows. One can only take so much dark sky before wanting a little sun in one’s poetry reading.)

The North Ship really isn’t worth reading. If he hadn’t published anything after that, we wouldn’t be talking about Larkin today.

The other two were good, quite good. But, bleak—did I mention that already?

Consider the poem “Next, Please.” I like this poem a lot, so it makes a useful means of seeing how Larkin works.

It starts:

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.

The poem then tells how we stand on a bluff waiting for a ship to drop off the good things in life. It concludes:

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break

And after reading that, my first reaction is, Oh Please, Philip. It isn’t that bad.

Surely every now and then a ship drops off at least a small bit of cargo to brighten our days. Surely we get a trinket every now and then, don’t we?

And, therein lies the brilliance of Larkin and the tedium of Larkin. Poem after poem with the same tone and the same message. All is pointless and lost.

You are a toad, merely going to your dull job and learning to enjoy your dull, pathetic life (“Toads” and “Toads Revisited”). Your memories of good times are just that, memories—there is nothing to them and everything you remember as making you happy is gone, long gone (“I Remember, I Remember”). Seeing a dead body loaded into an ambulance is really just a picture of the emptiness of our lives (“Ambulances”).

So, what can we conclude about Larkin?

Technically, he is very good. He has a consistent message and relates it well. He is worth reading. Well worth reading.

But, it clearly takes a different temperament than I have in order to deeply enjoy reading him. Once can admire his work, one can even enjoy it. But only in small doses.

The Secret of Wisdom

Charmides by Plato

The subject of this dialogue is a Greek word (which I cannot read (it’s all Greek to me)), which, according to Benjamin Jowett, translator of Plato par excellence, can be translated as Temperance, Moderation, Modesty, Discretion or Wisdom.

In this dialogue, Socrates has a merry time (doesn’t he always?) asking people to define the term, and then watching as all the attempts at definition end up circular or absurd.

Obviously the people to whom Socrates is talking never played Dungeons and Dragons. If they had, then they would have never attempted to define “Wisdom.”

When I was a lad and enamored of the game, I never did understand “Wisdom.” For those not in The Know—in that most intricate game, every character is defined by scores on 6 attributes: strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma.

Five of those are easy to define; wisdom is not. I never did figure out what wisdom was.

Clerics have to have a lot of it, but they don’t have to be intelligent. Magicians have to be intelligent, but don’t have to be wise.

So, wisdom is that thing which people to whom you might go to for advice have. And a person who has wisdom will be the sort of person of whom others ask advice. So, wisdom is what wise people have. Which is circular. And I realized this when I was 12.

Thus by the time I hit my teenage years, I would have never played Socrates’ game in this dialogue.

Now, however, I want to play it.

It seems to me now that I do know what wisdom is. But, I still can’t come up with a decent definition of it. My dear friend, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, gives this as the connotation of “wise”: “suggests great understanding of people and of situations and unusual discernment and judgment in dealing with them.” That sounds good.

But, then I ask: how does one know if one has discerned and judged correctly? Who can evaluate wisdom? And the answer is obvious: wisdom is the ability to discern wisdom. And suddenly I am playing both Socrates and Charmides in my own mind.

I flip the question a bit. Suppose I wanted to become more wise. What would I do?

If I spent more time reading books, I could become more knowledgeable, but knowledge is not the same as wisdom.

If I practice giving advice, that does not make me more wise unless I have the ability to discern whether my advice is wise or not, and I would have to be wise to know this.

Solomon had to pray for wisdom, was given more wisdom than anyone in the land, and then went out and made some really stupid decisions.

Socrates was declared to be the wisest man alive by the Oracle at Delphi, but concluded that the only thing that made him wise was that he knew he wasn’t wise.

So here we have a desirable characteristic, something to which it seems everyone should aspire to acquire. But, we can’t define it or figure out a way to acquire it. Puzzling to say the least.

Does the World Fit You?

John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the books I recommend to people the most often.

This book is funny, very funny. And thought-provoking.

It is interesting, well written, and has some of the most memorable characters you’ll ever meet.

The main character, Ignatius J Reilly is a modern day Falstaff. Take Shakespeare’s character, put him amongst the working (or non-working as the case may be) classes of New Orleans in the 1960s and you would have this book. Brilliantly done.

The cast of supporting characters are also worthy of Henry IV. No small feat, that.

It’s a sprawling book, with, I suppose, something akin to a plot line, but really a series of minor plot lines weaving in and out.

Uniting the plots is Ignatius’ attempts to navigate a world in which he doesn’t quite belong.

A slothful holder of a Master’s degree in English, holed up in a room in his mother’s house, we see Ignatius simultaneously trying to write the grand philosophical work to end all philosophical works—he runs out of steam every time he gets a paragraph or two of random musings down on paper—and looking for a job to help pay the bills so his mother doesn’t lose the house in which he resides.

Reilly is unsuitable for work—in exactly the same way the Falstaff would have been unsuitable for a desk job.

Reilly is larger than work. He is larger than life. There is simply a vast Too Muchness about him.

You would not want to know Ignatius J Reilly. You would think he was an Absolute Loser because, well, he is one.

He Dreams Big, can’t muster the energy for even the most mundane tasks, and yet, despite being everything you would not want your kid to become, it is hard not to secretly, very secretly (you wouldn’t want anyone to hear you think this), admire him a bit because he just doesn’t care that the world does not fit him.

He chalks his misfortunes up to Fortuna, and…well, I was going to say moves through life, but “moves” conveys a bit more purpose than Ignatius is wont to display.

Throughout the book, the other characters serve as a foil for the problems of Reilly—we watch others struggling or giving up the struggle to fit into the world, none of them terribly successful. As Reilly muses toward the end of the novel:

Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen. Everywhere there lurked pitfalls like Abelman [a customer of the factory in which Reilly briefly worked], the insipid Crusaders for Moorish Dignity, the Mancuso cretin [a policeman], Dorian Greene [a rather campy homosexual], newspaper reporters, strip-teasers, birds, photography, juvenile delinquents, Nazi pornographers. And especially Myrna Minkoff [a wannabe 60s radical]. The consumer products. And especially Myrna Minkoff [yes, he repeats that sentence—Myrna is a real problem for Ignatius].

It is interesting to think at the end of a novel like this: how much do I try to fit into the world? How much of what I do is a deliberate attempt to shape my life so that I seem at home here?

What would be different if I simply woke up every morning, firmly convinced, that the world should fit me, that world should modify itself so that it was at home with me?

Imagine that you really believed that, that you really did wander through life unaware that there was something odd about your attitude toward the world. You are totally unaware that it was singularly odd that you actually didn’t understand why you should adapt yourself to the world.

It’s a strange thought experiment.

From there, one gets to wondering why the world is the way it is. There is a logical progression from Faulkner to Toole.

And yet…is the world really all that bad? Is fitting into a world of work and polite social interactions really all that bad? Are we really living lives of quiet desperation (OK, that’s a Northerner’s line, but even still, it fits)?

I’m not so sure. I like my computer and my iPhone and the easy ability to buy books. I like microwave ovens and cordless drills. And is modern industrial life really such a high price to pay for the marvel of being able to read news about the Raiders on the internet while living on the East Coast?

But, Ignatius J Reilly just sits there and I can’t help wondering why I admire him so much.

My Daemon Made Me Do It

She Has Funny Cars.

Some books are nearly impossible to review.

I started listening to Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealist Pillow to help me write this review.

That should tell you what is to come.

It should probably also make you stop reading.

Your mind’s guaranteed/ It’s all you’ll ever need/ So what do you want from Me?

Let’s pretend I just said something deep.

If you read a book written by a drug-addled 1960’s wannabe poet (I’m looking at you Jackie Kerouac), you probably shouldn’t complain about what you find.

But, if you read a book written in 1925 by a German guy and you realize that it is like a novel from the fevered brain of a drug addict in the 1960s and if you wanted to read a novel like that you would have picked one to read but you didn’t pick one to read because you picked a 1925 German book, then can you complain?

Don’t You Want Somebody to Love?

I spilled my coffee. That probably isn’t relevant. But maybe it is a Sign. You’ll never know. Because I won’t tell you. Because I don’t know. I had a dream about coffee. It had milk in it and I hated it so I took out the milk and then I liked it. I didn’t really have that dream. I just made up that dream. But, I did really spill my coffee.

The life of a repo man is always intense.

Repo man should drink more coffee.

Oh, the book. When I spilled my coffee, some got on my book. That probably also isn’t relevant. You just never know.

If you met yourself, would your recognize yourself? What if you just met your Real Self? Is your Real Self more or less You than the You that you think is You?

To be any more than all I am would be a lie.

Wait. What?

So, getting back to that Real You. Would you even recognize that Real You?

Let’s call that Real You your Daemon. Then, let’s spell it Demian. Then let’s write a whole book that may or may not be about Demian and Demian’s mother and some bird.

The Bird Fights Its Way Out of the Egg

I dreamed about that bird. Well, no, I didn’t. Somebody else did. Well, no, somebody else didn’t. A character in a book dreamed about that bird. Well, no, a character in the book didn’t. Characters in books can’t dream. They aren’t real. So, nobody dreamed about that bird. But, the bird is real and the egg is real. So let’s all go worship Abraxas.

A transparent dream beneath an occasional sigh

Most of the time I just let it go by. But not this time. This time I…what? Don’t let it go by?

I saw you. If that sounds creepy, it is. Life is like that. I just made that up for fun. I didn’t see you. My daemon saw you.

I once thought I should read a lot of Herman Hesse. I didn’t know what I was doing. I should have stocked up on LSD first. I think Herman Hesse was meant to be read while taking LSD.

I have never had LSD, so I don’t really know if that is True. But, I have read books about people who took LSD. And I have listened to the Beatles. Does that count?

LSD didn’t exist when Herman Hesse wrote Demian. I looked it up. On Wikipedia. So, it must be true. Herman Hesse must have travelled through time to the 1960’s, met Timothy Leary, written Demian, traveled back through time to 1925 and published his book. He must have done that in a dream. Time travel isn’t possible. My future self told my present self that it is not possible to travel through time. In a dream. Because Time Travel isn’t real. But dreams are Real.

Dreams are more real than Reality. So, why do we call it Reality? We need to stop that.

Demian’s mother doesn’t really exist.

D.C.B.A.-25

Is there any point to exploring a Jungian mindscape? If Jung was right, then what is the reason to explore the minds of others? Am I more liberated when I see that Emil Sinclair is insane? Or am I more liberated when I think that Emil Sinclair isn’t insane, when I think he is more sane than the Sane because the insanity is the Reality and the Reality is the insanity?

Am I more knowledgeable when I realize that Demian’s mother is real and that she is Emil’s mother and my mother and your mother and nobody’s mother and the bird and the egg?

Is my life richer and fuller when I stop trying to live my life in these walls which surround me and I run in circles on the lawn screaming “I am running around in circles” with no other intention than to run in circles on the lawn screaming “I am running around in circles” because the lawn is a stage and my life is an act until that moment when I realize that the lawn is the grass and the grass is out of the seed and is reaching to the sky which is filled with invisible birds screeching that they are flying around the lawn in circles and I am merely the egg and My Real Self is the Bird and You and I and Her are One and we are Four? Tell me how do you Feel?

I am running in circles on the lawn. I am dreaming that I am typing in my office.

Some books are nearly impossible to review.

If you enjoyed reading this, then I have a book to recommend to you.

The College Carnival

Whenever a school year winds down, nostalgia creeps in.  There is a sameness to the rhythm of college.

While the individuals change, the nature of the average student doesn’t change much.

Indeed, it hasn’t changed much since at least 1920.  That was the year F. Scott Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise.

This novel is one of those inter-war expressions of the hopelessness of the modern age. And after a century of unbelievable change, I was shocked at how much Amory Blaine would fit right in at a college like Mount Holyoke.

Nearly a century after Fitzgerald’s book was published, college students are still chasing after the same things with the same hopes and fears and the same ennui nagging at the fringes of consciousness.

Amory ends the novel with the declaration: “I know myself, but that is all.” In that phrase is captured all of the angst and problems of the 21^st century undergraduate college.

Amory, of course, does not understand himself at all. He just thinks he does. But he does know that he knows nothing beyond himself, nothing greater than himself. His whole life is reduced to the Self:

“I am selfish,” he thought.
“This is not a quality that will change when I ‘see human suffering’ or ‘lose my parents’ or ‘help others.’
“This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.
“It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.
“There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend — all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness.”

That is, of course exactly what the modern college teaches students. Live for the Greater Good because then you will fully express yourself. Study hard because then you will be able to do great things and feel self-fulfillment.

What about all those classes and things those professors make you learn? Knowledge is dead. As Eliot put it in 1934:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

What does the modern college student learn? We talk about teaching “critical thinking” and “life skills,” but never wisdom.

So, what is the modern college? It’s just like the frenzy of social activity described by Fitzgerald in a subchapter entitled “Carnival.” It’s also just like the Carnival (“Karn Evil 9, First Impression, Pt. 2”) Emerson, Lake and Palmer described in 1973.

It doesn’t have to be like that, of course. But, the fact that the college Fitzgerald describes and the college my students attend are more alike than it is comfortable to admit, must give one reason to pause in hoping for a dramatic change in the culture of higher education.