no beginning, middle or end - the professor who taught me literary history and literary anti-history

At some point it occurred to me that I might get an English degree.  I began taking survey classes to see what they were like, and because they were fun.  Read Shakespeare, watch Shakespeare, talk about Shakespeare.  All right!

But the life-changers were British Literature I and British Literature II, both taught right out of the Norton anthologies (5th edition), and both taught by the same professor, Chester Sullivan.

Sullivan was an Arkansas novelist and expert on Southern literature.  I have read his two most recent novels, Answered Prayers (1992) and Rattlesnakes in the Rock Chalk (2012); they are so specific to Lawrence, Kansas that I am not sure I could recommend them widely.  Micro-regionalism.  I loved the novels and pray that he does not need twenty years to finish the next one.

Why Sullivan was teaching Brit Lit survey classes I do not know.  Another prof had suddenly quit?  He lost a bet?  Later I took a “Southern Fiction” class from him.  That was a good class, too, but not the revelation of those surveys.

British Literature I was taught chronologically, moving steadily through the Norton anthology, hitting high points (Beowulf, Chaucer, Marlowe, Johnson) with more eccentric choices sprinkled in.  I remember the “Courtier” section of the Hoby translation of Castiglione’s The Ladder of Love to be especially baffling.  But as in Tom Lorenz’s “Innovative Fiction” class, the great question, over and over, was “What is this?”  It was in some sense a traditional “coverage” course that I took at the exact time I was ready for coverage.

I would not have used the term at the time, and chronology is, heaven knows, only one of many organizational principles, but it was in this course where I learned that literature is not just a collection of texts but a field of knowledge.  I have studied it as such ever since.

But it was Brit Lit II that was the real eye-opener.  The Norton anthology again, and for the first couple of weeks, we “covered” the Romantic poets.  I remember, after working through “To a Skylark” line by line, Sullivan saying (imagine a languid Arkansas accent) “I never cared much for Shelley,” and we turned to – I don’t know what – something else, something different, something we had not read in advance.  For the rest of the class, we ransacked the anthology.  In a single class – it was a three-hour night class – we would wander all over the book, jumping across writers and periods, from plays to poems to stories.  Much of this was planned in advance, since my table of contents is full of cryptic markings that I vaguely remember relating to assigned reading.  But often it was not.  “Let’s try page 2,483”:

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings –

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.  (ll. 1-4, Craig Raine, 1979)

Yes, exactly, the Martian is describing my Caxton, my Norton.  I wish I could remember if we, or Sullivan, read the poem aloud or if we all read it silently before diving in.

The class felt free, like we were playing with two hundred years of British literature.  Sullivan approached each text as if he were reading it for the first time, as if he were asking the same questions that we all were.  I now see this as an act.  It worked on me.

It took me a while, and a lot of reading, to synthesize the classes, to combine the literary history approach of the first with the leaps of the second.  Henry Adams, writing about his discovery of fine art, laments that “Once drawn into it, one had small chance of escape, for it had no centre or circumference, no beginning, middle or end, no origin, no object and no conceivable result as education” (Ch. XIV, “Dilettantism”).  Right again, Henry!  I eventually discovered on my own that the same approaches were useful for painting, film, music, everything.  I eventually discovered on my own that the more I knew about the history of a field, the more fun it was to play with it.  Eventually I had the confidence to have my fun in public, here.

Thank you, Chester Sullivan.

Education begins - a note about a professor and class that led me here

As yet he knew nothing.  Education had not begun.  (The Education of Henry Adams, Ch. 4)

Those are the last lines of the chapter titled “Harvard College.”  Henry Adams has just graduated.  No offense meant to Harvard, but I did better than Adams at the University of Kansas.  I have long wanted to write about a couple of professors I had in college who led me to where I am, and now seems to be the time.

Tom Lorenz taught creative writing and was a novelist.  His two books are Guys Like Us, a comedy about amateur softball in Chicago, and Serious Living, which goes somewhere deeper.  They are both excellent.  I do not believe he has published a third.  While finishing the second, he was thinking about the third, wondering if he should try something more, let’s say, innovative; thus, in the spring 1988 semester he taught a freshman honors seminar titled “Innovative Fiction” which changed my life.

Like I knew any of this.  I signed up for a class with an interesting title.

The syllabus (caveat to everything here – “as I remember it”) was: Madame Bovary, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Metamorphosis, The Sound and the Fury, Ficciones, Pale Fire, and Cosmicomics.  I suppose I had read Faulkner before, maybe “Barn Burning,” but nobody else.  I had not heard of several of the authors, or their names had no associations at all.

Later Lorenz told me that he had picked The Sound and the Fury because someone had told him (or he had read?) that it was unteachable.  I cannot imagine a better motive.

My responses to the texts were something like, in order: “I don’t get it,” “wait, what is this?,” “wait, what is this?,” “this is awesome,” “awesome,” “awesome,” “awesome.”  Look, "awesome" was a popular word among young people at the time.

Perhaps because Lorenz was a novelist, we rarely interpreted the book or came up with a “reading,” so much as we asked and answered, again and again, for a book or passage or detail, the “What is this?” question.  “What is this?” can be a hard question, worth a lot of work.  And these are books where the answer to that question is directly tied to style, so much of the discussion was less about meaning than style, or about how style can be made inseparable from meaning.  Why tell the story like this?

Honestly, I had had no idea that the body of work labeled “literature” contained such things as these books.  I could barely believe it.  Why had no one told me before?  Well, never mind, Tom Lorenz told me.

Within a couple of years, I had read much of what was available by all of these writers, including Flaubert, who was upgraded to “awesome.”  These writers led me to all sorts of precursors, disciples, and fellow let’s still call them innovators.  Education had begun.

I was not so interested in older books, not yet.  That’s tomorrow’s professor.

Thank you, Professor Lorenz.

Why not earlier? Why at such cost? - Goethe's Italian study abroad

For all of Goethe’s status, for all of his writing, all of his learning, Italian Journey is a chronicle of firsts.  His first view of the sea, for example, which occurs in Venice:

Now, at last, I have seen the sea with my own eyes and walked upon the beautiful threshing floor of the sand which it leaves behind when it ebbs. (96)

He collects shells and watches, “for hours” the “bizarre and graceful performance of” of the crabs as they try and fail to hunt limpets (100).

Goethe has his first encounter with a Roman ruin, and with a Palladio building, and with any number of other things he had only read about.

I have spent the day looking and looking.  It is the same in art as in life.   The deeper one penetrate, the broader grows the view.  (109)

The trip really is something like Goethe’s college study abroad in Italy, a German major with a minor in art history, except that he is a highly non-traditional student.

How different all this is from our saints, squatting on their stone brackets and piled one above the other in the Gothic style of decoration, or our pillars which look like tobacco pipes, our spiky little towers and our cast-iron flowers.  Thank God, I am done with all that junk for good and all.  (95)

And Goethe has only reached, at this point, Venice!  Italian Journey has a great deal of interest as a pure travel book, especially its middle third covering Naples and Sicily, but the intellectual core of the book is in the fifty pages about Goethe’s first visit to Rome.  Everything about the classical world, Renaissance art, and to some degree living Catholicism creates a tumult.  Every idea is shaken.

Everything in me is suddenly beginning to merge clearly.  Why not earlier?  Why at such a cost?  (173)

Goethe is described a crisis point in his own development, his Bildung.  “I am not here simply to have a good time, but to devote myself to the noble objects about me, to educate myself before I reach forty” (137).  In his own work, the ideas from Italian Journey are most clearly expressed in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-6), where Italy is given enormous symbolic power as the nearly mythical “land of flowering lemon trees,” as Christopher Middleton translates the “Mignon” poem – go to p. 28 of Italian Journey to see Goethe meet Mignon and the harpist in the flesh – the land of fulfilment, aesthetic, intellectual, and sexual.  German readers thus knew about all this twenty years before Italian Journey itself was published; thus we see versions of the idea appear in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir (1815-6), for example.

The Goethean juxtaposition of Italy and the repressed north recurs many times, and not just in German literature.  It is amusing to read E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) in this context, with the heroine finally able to cast off her Victorian chains via the influence of lively Italian murders and violets.  It took longer for Goethe to free himself, and the result was replacing a pursuit of fulfillment with an embrace of renunciation – classicism in place of romanticism, realism in place of idealism, and on like that.  German literature would never be the same.

“It MUST do us good – it's all so hideous” - What Maisie Knew as a novel of education

Is What Maisie Knew a kind of Bildungsroman?  Or is it the reverse, a parody, of the novel of development?  How much development  - meaning of the moral sensibility – should I expect of a nine year-old, especially when literally every person she meets is t best inept and at worst a heartless monster.

At times Maisie looked like a parody of the novel of education, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile turned into farce (and read a certain way, Émile is already pretty funny).  Maisie’s education is not merely neglected by her parents but openly impeded.  Her one relatively present governess, the magnificent Mrs. Wix, is an ignoramus, and thus comes cheap. 

They dealt, the governess and her pupil, in “subjects,” but there were many the governess put off from week to week and that they never got to at all: she only used to say “We'll take that in its proper order.” Her order was a circle as vast as the untravelled globe.  (Ch. 4)

Maisie’s step-parents are better educated than the governess, and less appalling than the actual parents, and thus occasionally make plans to educate Maisie.  For example, Sir Claude, he step-father, plans a course of reading for Maisie and Mrs. Beale, the step-mother:

He had got hold of an awfully good list – “mostly essays, don't you know?”  Mrs. Beale had said; a word always august to Maisie, but henceforth to be softened by hazy, in fact by quite languorous edges. There was at any rate a week in which no less than nine volumes arrived…  (Ch. 17)

Even more ambitiously, Sir Claude suggests a series “of lectures at an institution,” which have the added bonus that the institution is reached via the Underground, a thrill for Maisie.  The walk from the train was  

a pathway literally strewn with “subjects.”  Maisie imagined herself to pluck them as she went, though they thickened in the great grey rooms where the fountain of knowledge, in the form usually of a high voice that she took at first to be angry, plashed in the stillness of rows of faces thrust out like empty jugs.  “It MUST do us good – it's all so hideous,” Mrs. Beale had immediately declared; manifesting a purity of resolution that made these occasions quite the most harmonious of all the many on which the pair had pulled together.  (Ch. 17)

That may be my favorite passage in the novel.  Maisie, the emptiest of jugs, has no understanding of the lectures, but at least she is spending some quality time with her step-mom.

…  they dashed out together in quest of learning as hard as they often dashed back to release Mrs. Beale for other preoccupations…

But the joke is that Mrs. Beale’s interest is selfish.  She hopes that Sir Claude might also show up at the lectures and that the outings will be dates, with Maisie along as the excuse, or disguise.  Maisie’s step-parents are, you know, dating.  Or want to date.  Or something.  That’s the plot of the novel, or the background plot.

In the long end of the novel, almost a third of it Maisie is asked to make a choice that should not be asked of a nine year-old, but nevertheless requires her to balance moral and selfish interests in a way that has some resemblance to what I might see in a Bildungsroman.  Has she salvaged a moral education from the wreckage of her childhood?  To change the title a little, what does Maisie know?

Or, possibly, Maisie is manipulated into thinking she is make a choice etc. etc.  The adults are as always using her as a tool, giving her the illusion of choice for her own purpose.  She still doesn’t know anything.

Or, possibly, Maisie manipulates the adults into giving her the arrangement she wants.  They think they are giving her a choice etc. etc.  She knows far more than anyone realizes, but her knowledge is a form of corruption, and what else could it be given her educators?  I am kind of turning What Maisie Knew into one of those heist films where all of the robbers are triple-crossing each other.

Having read this slippery novel just once, I will not choose among the options.  The first is the most likely.

Underneath all of this, for me, was the sense of horror at witnessing a novel-length act of child abuse.  Someone give that poor little girl an education!

It was not surprising that none of these things was any help - Hesse tells two stories

It was the anti-school angle that attracted me to Hesse’s Unterm Rad aka The Prodigy.  I was curious to bounce it off of the French books that attacked school, like those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jules Vallès, and especially to skeptical German-language fiction like Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless, another book about sensitive boarding school boys that was published just a year after Hesse.  The Prodigy does not otherwise have much in common with Musil, but does resemble Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (1855/ 1879) in a number of curious ways.

Hesse reaches towards the thickly described, distantly narrated fiction of Theodor Fontane and Thomas Mann, but formally he has written a classic 19th century German novella.  I think the most distinctive, irritating feature of the novel, the clumsy, sarcastic, intrusive narrator is his own.

I showed that narrator yesterday, and will just give one more example of how he can stomp on his own scenes.  The apple harvest has come in – it’s cider time!

The many children, however, rich and poor alike, ran about with little mugs, all of them carrying an apple they had bitten into in one hand and a hunk of bread in the other; for as long as anyone could remember there had been a saying – quite groundless – that if you ate bread at the cider harvest you did not get the colic.  (Ch. 6, 121)

You either cringe a little at “quite groundless” or you will get along better with the narrator than I did.  The digression on Swabia in Chapter 3 may still test your patience.  “And so this fruitful province whose politically great traditions stretch back into the past still exerts” okay let’s cut that short.

I don’t want to complain any more.  There is some fine stuff in this book.  There is, just a couple of pages after that Swabian nonsense, a student who is so cheap he secretly uses other students’ soap and towels and takes violin lessons, even though he hates the violin, just because they are free.  There is this doctor:

The pale ex-student strolled round in the open air every day, joyless and weary, avoiding even the few opportunities of social intercourse that were offered.  The doctor prescribed drops, cod-liver oil, eggs and cold shower baths.

It was not surprising that none of these things was any help.  (Ch. 6, 119)

No, not such a surprise.  I am piecing together the comic novel hidden in the actual more gloomy one.  But I what I want to end on is the uncanny part of the novel, which is not just obligatory in the German novella but greatly deepens and possibly even upends the meaning of the novel.

After a promising start, Hans has washed out of the theological college, for reasons discussed yesterday.  Back home, he revisits his childhood, including the fairy tale slum, full of vice and crime, which he loved:

The ‘Falken’ was the one spot where a fairy tale, a miracle, a dreadful horror could happen, where any magic was credible, where it was possible to believe in ghosts and where you could feel the same thrilling shudder that you felt as you read old legends…

The activities of the tanners in the various chambers, the cellar yard and on the floors were weird and peculiar, the vast, yawning rooms were as quiet as they were intriguing, the powerfully built and surly master was shunned and dreaded as an ogre, and Liese went about the remarkable house like a fairy protector and mother to all the children, birds, cats and puppies, brimful of kindness, stories and ballad songs.  (Ch. 5, 116-7)

Hans has at this point taken his exams, gone to college, and washed out.  This strange neighborhood and Hans’s strange relation with it has never been hinted at until this point, as if Hesse had just thought of it, as if he knew that the sternness of the schools was inadequate to the story he was telling, a story which is more fundamentally about the loss of childhood.  The more complex symbolic story, in this episode strongly literalized, dominates and perhaps crushes the more topical protest against teaching boys Greek.

What are brief? What are deep? - Christina Rossetti's nursery rhymes

This week at Wuthering Expectations:  educational literature.  Or literature about education.  Whatever.  I don’t care.

First up, the former, Christina Rossetti’s Sing-song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872).  I read this copy, housed at Indiana University.  I wanted an edition with the original illustrations by pre-Raphaelite painter Arthur Hughes.

Sing-song is not a great book, as a collection of Rossetti poetry or as something of interest to the youngsters of today, but it still has some interest to me.  Sometimes the Rossetti quality seeps through the poems.

Like here, p. 10:

I have no trouble hearing that this is the author of “In the bleak midwinter.”  Aside from the music of the poem, the specificity of the basket and the plant is appealing.  The “tombstone of snow” is almost too symbolically meaningful.

The snowberry bush, and the thrush, too, are part of the educational content of Sing-song.  Poems educate the littl’uns about flowers and birds, colors, sums, months, currency, time, and kindness to animals – again and again, kindness to animals.

I know that the point of the illustration is that the little boy – note his grisly snare in the background –  should leave the mole alone as well as the other critters, but given the mole’s central placement, and given that he is not mentioned in the poem, it is almost as if the poet is urging the mole to leave the worms and bugs alone, even taunting him by calling the beetle “fat.”  At least she omitted “juicy.”  Poor hungry mole.

Another sad example:

Hear what the mournful linnets say:
   “We built our nest compact and warm,
But cruel boys came round our way
   And took our summerhouse by storm.

“They crushed the eggs so neatly laid;
   So now we sit with drooping wing,
And watch the ruin they have made,
   Too late to build, too sad to sing.”  (14)

Poems like this one complement those about dead or dying children, of which there are at least eight.  The poems also have some value for mothers:

Crying, my little one, footsore and weary?
  Fall asleep, pretty one, warm on my shoulder:
I must tramp on through the winter night dreary,
  While the snow falls on me colder and colder.  (19)

Meanwhile the baby sleeps and dreams “of pretty things…  of pleasure.”

Rossetti also includes riddles and nonsense.  My favorite example of the latter, when a bit of nightmarish Carrollian surrealism intrudes:

The riddles can have their own beauty.  This example has obvious rhymes and sentiments, but is pleasingly sonorous:

What are heavy?  sea-sand and sorrow:
What are brief?  to-day and tomorrow:
What are frail?  spring blossoms and youth:
What are deep?  the ocean and truth.  (34)

I am perhaps making the book sound better than it really is.  Most of the poems are trivial, merely cute, no different than in a hundred other similar books.  The Poetry Foundation singles out this one for some reason:

Mix a pancake,
Stir a pancake,
    Pop it in the pan;
Fry the pancake,
Toss the pancake, –
    Catch it if you can.

Not that I am against pancakes – what a terrible thing to even suggest – but I do not think it required the genius of Christina Rossetti to come up with that poem.

Still, I went looking for Rossetti and found her.

John Henry Newman and neighborly, safely antagonistic book blogging

A recent John Henry Newman argument, step by step.  Roger Scruton, in The American Spectator, argues for “a wholly new kind of university” based, somehow, on the principles of The Idea of a University.  Good luck with that!  Miriam Burstein warns Scruton, and me, that Newman’s argument is founded on his Catholic faith, even, at times, when he specifically claims otherwise.  Reader beware.  When Newman defends knowledge for its own sake, one of the “aims” he leaves unspecified is certainly a strengthening or even discovery of Catholic religious principles.  Not sharing those principles myself, I am left dangling.

D. G. Myers asks if anything is then recoverable from Newman for anyone outside of a Catholic university or a similar institution.  His central point, as I understand it, is correct, that the educators and administrators of the modern university do not have a cohesive purpose, not like Newman envisioned, and are often openly antagonistic.  One could defend this state of affairs, but not with Newman’s arguments.

Burstein plucks a single quotation from Newman, almost a single word:

[R]eally, Gentlemen, I am making no outrageous request, when, in the name of a University, I ask religious writers, jurists, economists, physiologists, chemists, geologists, and historians, to go on quietly, and in a neighbourly way, in their own respective lines of speculation, research, and experiment, with full faith in the consistency of that multiform truth, which they share between them.  (“Christianity and Scientific Investigation,” 341, emphasis mine)

I have made an excerpt from Prof. Burstein's excerpt of a marvelously long, twisty sentence.  My slice makes Newman’s idea seem outrageous simply because he denies it is.  Still – quietly, neighborly.  I prefer, as more achievable, a similar metaphor from a bit earlier in the same discourse:

In this point of view, its several professors are like the ministers of various political powers at one court or conference.  They represent their respective sciences, and attend to the private interests of those sciences respectively; and, should dispute arise between those sciences, they are the persons to talk over and arrange it, without risk of extravagant pretensions on any side, of angry collision, or of popular commotion.  A liberal philosophy becomes the habit of minds thus exercised; a breadth and spaciousness of thought, in which lines, seemingly parallel, may converge at leisure, and principles, recognized as incommensurable, may be safely antagonistic. (337)

“Safely antagonistic” – even that, I would not want to take for granted, but it seems possible.  My PhD is from a program based on, known for, its seminar model.  All research of any seriousness was presented at safely antagonistic public seminars.  The professional standards were impeccable.  The audience, every member, typically, had read the paper in advance.  We played havoc with any intended presentation or slide show.  We skipped straight to the good stuff, by which I mean, the weakest arguments and evidence.  We were brutal.  To the extent that I am a competent professional in my field, it’s because of these seminars.

I have wondered if this safe antagonism can be replicated on book blogs.  It seems so difficult.  In the seminar room, every participant knew the rules and the limits of combat.  On the internet, I’m afraid not.  I try to respect the signals bloggers send about how aggressively they want to be challenged, but I’ll bet I misread them a lot, so mostly, I play it safe and try not to be a jerk.  Too big of a jerk.  Perhaps a more explicitly collaborative model makes more sense.

I have imagined digital stickers pasted to the top of the blog – “Have at me” (I’d use that one) or “Play nice” or “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” 

Have at me!  I'll thank you later. Maybe, ha ha, a lot later. It’s for my own good, the furthering of my liberal education. Maybe for your good, too.

Lingering in the vestibule of knowledge - Newman on professional knowledge, with a case study from my own education

Have I ever mentioned that I have an undergraduate English degree?  I do.  Or – one of my undergraduate degrees is an English degree.  I’m a social scientist.  The English degree was pure consumption, knowledge for its own end.  I should not have completed the requirements but rather spent that time studying German or French.  Or I should have finished my math degree.  No,no, the languages.  I took plenty of math.  One of those math classes was perhaps the most important I ever took.

It was Calculus III.  I believe there were about fifteen of us at the beginning.  Seven at the end.  I think I was the only social scientist in that group.  The rest were engineers, scientists, and maybe just one mathematician.  This was the hardest undergraduate class I ever encountered, by far, by so far.  I now know that it was a deliberate screen, driving off the insufficiently serious.

John Henry Newman devotes a chapter of The Idea of a University to “Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill” – knowledge that is by no means for its own end.  By the end of the speech, he has cleverly turned the argument back into a defense of a broad, liberal education, but he understands the necessity of professional training, too.  How should a university engage in professional training?

[I]t is not mere application, however exemplary, which introduces the mind to truth, nor the reading many books, nor the getting up many subjects, nor the witnessing many experiments, nor the attending many lectures.  All this is short of enough; a man may have done it all, yet be lingering in the vestibule of knowledge – he may not realize what his mouth utters; he may not see with his mental eye what confronts him; he may have no grasp of things as they are; or at least he may have no power at all of advancing one step forward of himself… (134-5)

That’s where I and my classmates were, on the vestibule of knowledge, Good At Math but unable to advance a step without assistance.  I’m not sure how he did it – the difficulty of the class was necessary, but not sufficient to the task – but he taught us how to study math.

Six of us marched on to the same professor’s spring class (Differential Equations, I think), where we were joined by a new crop of recruits, all of whom found the course brutally difficult.  Not the veterans, though. We thought it was a breeze.  A powerful, difficult, laborious breeze, yes.  But no big deal.  We had already  learned how to learn about math.  I did not have another class so difficult, in math, or anywhere else, until I went to graduate school, which was a whole ‘nother ball game.

At this time last year, I was actually teaching a math class, to graduate students.  Much of the material was exactly what we covered in that crucial Calculus III class, although I’m not sure that’s relevant.  I was able to teach the class, I realized what my mouth uttered, because of Calculus III, twenty years in the past.  I was able to finish my PhD because of Calculus III.  I don’t want to guess how much of my professional success can be traced to this one course.

Newman argues that even professional training requires “the intellect” to be “disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture.”  He calls this “the business of a University” (135).  That’s what this math professor, a true practitioner of liberal education, did for us.  I don’t remember his name.

Dignified, ridiculous, and endlessly amusing

“So from the study of literature we learn that life is sad, comic, heroic, vicious, dignified, ridiculous, and endlessly amusing – sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once – but never more grotesquely amusing than when a supposedly great thinker comes along to insist that he has discovered and nattily formulated the single key to its understanding.”

So says Joseph Epstein in the article I mentioned yesterday. This statement is obviously wrong, in the sense that by “we” he just means “I, and people like me.” Kazuko Okakura and I suspect William Deresiewicz have learned rather different lessons. But I’m in Epstein’s camp. Careful with those Big Ideas – you might hurt somebody.

Epstein points to Theodore Dreiser as a great writer who was a sponge for bad ideas. Balzac is an example from my own recent reading. These were writers of high intelligence who were suckers for nonsense (“a man who fell for Stalin and Hitler both,” as Epstein describes Dreiser), yet they both wrote novels as great as anyone’s, and the best parts of their books are full of well-observed details about human nature, characters worth knowing, themes that are banal on the surface but rather more meaningful deep down. They are not sugar-coated philosophy or symbolical representations of Big Ideas.

To use Epstein’s examples, who wants to read Proust as a study of Bergson’s ideas about the nature of time, or Thomas Mann as a study of the rise of fascism? If you’re so interested, why not go straight to the source? And in fact almost no one, no non-professional, gives much of this sort of thing a second thought. But Proust’s ideas about how people have different identities in different circumstances, or about snobbery, or jealousy – this is the good stuff, right? To the extent that there is wisdom here, though, one doesn’t simply grasp the principle, incorporate it into one’s life, and move on to the next idea. Or if that is what you do, let me know how that works.

I know that I am often too reluctant to pursue meaning, that I am too quick to turn an author’s ideas into The Author’s Ideas, allowing me to dismiss them. This, by the way, is one of my answers to the test question about my intellectual flaws. Fear of meaning. Let’s drop the subject.

The positive side of all this is that I expect the process by which literature turns facts into ideas to work slowly. That's how it works for me, at least. This is part of my sanguinity about conditions at elite schools. Patience, Professor, patience. You’ve pointed the youngsters in the right direction. Check back in twenty years, or thirty.* Even if they are as resistant as I am, that may be long enough for some ideas to slip through.

* Epstein informs me that Willa Cather refused to allow school editions of her novels. She thought that high school students, at least, were too young for her books. Was she wrong?

Badly conceived, ill-taught, under-confident

Let’s take one more dig at William Deresiewicz, using a couple of lines of his mentioned by nicole of My Life in Books in a comment:

“I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.”

I had omitted this quote because I thought it was encrusting the gilded lily with rubies. The Jane Austen specialist “never learned” that there are smart people who never go to college. I know that formal literary study often de-emphasizes biography, but this is ridiculous. Think of how much he would have learned from a Jane Austen biography, or even an encyclopedia article.*

No college for George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, or Ernest Hemingway. That’s off the top of my head. Isaac Bashevis Singer got as far as dropping out of the Tachkemani Rabbinical Seminary in Warsaw. Then there are the bad students – Theodore Dreiser, Henry James. James did give Harvard Law School a try. A lot of writers fall into this category.

Joseph Epstein, for one. He’s the product of an elite education, with an English degree from the University of Chicago. But in a talk published in the latest issue of The New Criterion (“A Literary Education”), he describes himself as the sort of student that teachers don’t remember. No, not the sort of student – teachers he met later in life never remembered him. He was neither the “good student” who figures out what the teacher wants and gives it to him (that was me), nor was he the passionate student, excited to plunge into the subject, the sort of student he would later, when he was an English professor, especially value (also me, I hope).

Deresiewicz says that the greatest disadvantage of elite education is that it is “profoundly unintellectual,” incapable of inspiring passion for ideas or helping students “ask the big questions.” Let’s see what happened to Joseph Epstein:

“I would say that the most significant course I took at the University of Chicago was a badly conceived one that was, in effect, a history of the development of the novel. This course was ill-taught by an under-confident instructor not yet thirty. The reading equivalent of a marathon, in ten weeks the course went – at the rate of a novel per week – from The Princess of Cleves through Ulysses, with stops along the way for Jane Austen, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Mann, and Proust. What do you suppose a boy of twenty gets out of reading Swann’s Way? My best guess is somewhere between 15 to 20 percent of what Proust put into it.”

This is the class that did it for Epstein, that got him moving. He realized that:

“The endless details set out in novels, the thoughts of imaginary characters, the dramatization of large themes through carefully constructed plots, the portrayals of how the world works, really works – these were among the things that literature, carefully attended to, might one day help me to learn.”

I was the good student, but I had almost exactly the same experience in a freshman English seminar, “Innovative Fiction,” taught by an excellent but decidedly non-innovative novelist at Big State U.** We read Madame Bovary, and nothing penetrated, although I could give the teacher what he wanted. Next was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and something began to rattle around in an empty part of my head. The Sound and the Fury finally did the trick. Borges, Nabokov, and Calvino came next, and I read them with growing enthusiasm. The mental category where I had put fiction was now much too small. Literature, it turned out, contained the world. The more I read then, the more I read now, the bigger that world seems to get.

Joseph Epstein is a superb essayist, first-rate short story writer, elegant raconteur, and fine critic. In his case (elite), and in mine (much less so), the university did what it was supposed to, but not in a way that was specifically predictable.

I don’t want to hang too much on the Deresiewicz piece, which is obviously based on an idiosyncratic reaction to his students and his employer. I am more interested in his reaction to literature and what he thinks it can do, in the classroom or outside of it. His privileged students may not be getting everything out of Emerson that he demands from them. But I don’t see how he is so sure that some version of Joseph Epstein is not sitting in his class, never raising her hand, but slowly realizing that there are some surprising things going on in these books. How else is a liberal education supposed to work?

More on Epstein tomorrow. His talk is available at the website of The New Criterion, but I believe it costs $3 or some such nonsense to read. I understand that libraries often subscribe to magazines.

* I’ve lapsed into open mockery, but I don’t see how “he doesn’t really mean what he’s writing” is a good defense here. Or, here's another try, he learned that there "were" smart people who didn't go to college, but not that there "are" such people.

** If I ever relax my anonymity, I should write an appreciation of this teacher, and a couple of others.

So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values.

There’s this essay, from The American Scholar, that’s been eating at me, and entertaining me. It’s by William Deresiewicz, until very recently an English professor at Yale. Deresiewicz tells us that he finds, or found , it impossible to talk to his plumber. “So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language,” and so on.

That a guy named Deresiewicz can’t talk to a plumber still cracks me up, but even funnier is that this isn’t even the point of the essay. Because it’s not Deresiewicz’s fault that he’s snobbish and anti-social, but rather the fault of his elite education.

That’s precisely what he says. Elite education “makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you”. Yeah, pal, you. “My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class.” This message was “unmistakable.” So if you – is it still you? – went to an Ivy and missed this message, you must have skipped too many classes. And your parents scrimped and saved and sacrificed so much so you could go there. For shame.

Deresiewicz advocates a return to a more humanistic model of education, although he gives few hints as to what that might look like. Based on his weird, gratuitous crack at the Yale economics and computer science departments, it must involve forcing students in the sciences and social sciences to take more humanities classes. Yet he doesn’t seem to think that the literature students are any better.

Come to think of it, he was once one of them, and look how that turned out. One reason – possibly the main reason – I spend so much of my time reading literature is that it introduces me to a range of people that I will never meet, and, given that most of them “lived” in the distant past, never could. Viking poets, Japanese ghosts, Victorian lady travelers. I don’t just meet them, but I see the most intimate details of their lives, even their thoughts. Deresiewicz points to a quotation from Terence as a humanistic ideal: “nothing human is alien to me.” Easier said than done, and probably not quite true for anyone, but this is central to why I study literature, why my “Currently Reading” list is currently entirely about Japan, why I’m tempted to drop everything for classical Sanskrit literature.*

So what happened? I was thinking that maybe Deresiewicz should spend some time with the farmers and carpenters in Adam Bede. JD at What Do I Know?, who pointed me towards this essay, recommends Rabelais, a powerful cure for many ills. But I don’t think they will work here. Deresiewicz is the author of one scholarly book, titled Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. That’s right. He’s a Wordsworth expert! He has read and reread “Michael” and “Resolution and Independence” and they were useless to him. His education was just that damaging. William and Dorothy had no problem talking to that leech gatherer, although come to think of it he was a voluble fellow, and now I realize that the fault may lie with the shy plumber.

In Mansfield Park, a girl from a poor family is taken in by her rich relations. Fanny is abused and ignored, and her snobby cousins sometimes have trouble knowing how to talk to her. A key sequence of the novel is when Fanny returns to her poor family after many years and finds herself horrified by the noise and disorder and bad behavior. In her most virtuous act, Fanny manages to take one of her younger sisters with her when she returns to the rich family. Deresiewicz is an expert on this novel, too.

Some of this may be unfair, but Deresiewicz specifically criticizes his Yale students for failing to recognize the useful lessons contained in literature. For example, they can’t see why Emerson, in his essay on friendship, puts a high value on solitude. Youth, it turns out, is callow. I wonder if Deresiewicz is akin to Okakura here. If one reads that big shelf of books and is still self-absorbed, ambitious, and narrow, then something went wrong, he thinks.

Joseph Epstein has written (I’m paraphrasing) that the only reason to go to an Ivy League school is so you don’t spend the rest of your life blaming your failures on not having gone to an Ivy. His point, or at least the part not about envy and resentment, is really very simple – that a good education is available at lots of schools – and I once thought it was clever and wise. Yet here I find a fellow who actually blames his failures, and those of many others, on having gone to an Ivy. Joe, you let me down.

Tomorrow, I’ll give Epstein a chance to redeem himself.

The essay was published recently in The American Scholar. I’m not convinced that it’s worth reading – the closer I looked at it, and the more I thought about it, the less logical its arguments seemed – but some smart people think otherwise, it does contain a number of points that I have ignored, and it’s pretty short.**

* For good reason – come back later in the week.

** There’s the possibility that this is all some sort of Swiftian provocation, by which I mean, all made up. I’m not so good at recognizing those.