On Beauty and Being Fair

If the first part of this essay had its redeeming features, the second managed to enrage me.

So why is it that we no longer talk about beauty? It is, Scarry tells us, because we wrongly believe beauty to contribute to social injustice in two main ways:

1. Our focus on beauty distracts us from other things, namely from the fight against social injustice.

2. Our focus on beauty harms the beautiful things we're focused on by objectifying them.

On Beauty and Being Wrong

A thing I hate with some degree of passion: when beautiful individual sentences or paragraphs are ruined by their context, that is to say, when the whole of a text prevents me from admiringly quoting its parts. This is the case with Elaine Scarry’s essay, On Beauty and Being Just, which I've been reading in an attempt to sort out my feelings about a Zadie Smith book that borrows half of this essay's title and, I'm afraid, some of its ideas. For what is more quotable than:

What is the felt experience of cognition at the moment one stands in the presence of a beautiful boy or flower or bird? It seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication. Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.

or

This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet suddenly cuts through a certain patch of sky.

? 

What About Philosophy?

Let's kick off July with a discussion.

I'm curious about the concept of well-readness and what it covers. Amanda of Dead White Guys & Book Riot had a post exploring this concept a while back. The takeaway seemed to be that you should read widely and thoughtfully to qualify as well-read. The conversation was recently rekindled by Jeff O'Neal's list of 100 books that will take you "from zero to well-read" and the debates over his post neatly illustrated how difficult it is to define and apply labels like "well-read." So far, so good. I admit that I'm not very invested in this debate as concerns literature, but I was wondering whether it should include only literature. 

Quint Buchholz, Book Scales

I sort of get why the sciences are not mentioned here. It's not only about the two cultures divide, about the way in which the humanistic and scientific worlds are constantly portrayed as apart and incompatible, and the ideal of the cultivated or well-educated mind is more often associated with the humanistic side (think of how not knowing who Shakespeare is carries a greater intellectual stigma than not knowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics). When it comes to sciences, there's also the fact that it is not very productive to read the original works as opposed to studying their main ideas from a textbook (I mean, good luck with reading Newton's Principia if that's what you want to do with your life, but still...). So the sciences are not easily-included in the well-read conversation.

But if the goal of being well-read is to be able "to think and converse about the human experience intelligently," shouldn't philosophy qualify? Not as an afterthought ("of course, non-fiction is important too"), but as an essential part of the canon. After all, much of the world (and literature) we know now would simply not exist without philosophy. Whether you want to have an idea of the history of human thought, or to understand a piece of literature in context (sometimes to understand a piece of literature at all), you need to have some knowledge of philosophy. And this is not to talk about the tools and frameworks literary theory borrows from philosophy. 

This raises the question of how far we should go, though. How much and what philosophy should you read to qualify as well-read? Most people would probably agree that Plato's Dialogues are indispensable (or, more accurately, a selection of them is). So is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, but it's long and dense, so should you read it if you don't have a special interest in philosophy? Most people would probably agree that you should have some knowledge of Sartre and Existentialism if you want to understand the 20th century in literature. Fair enough, but what about other strands of philosophy? Should you be familiar with Carnap or Quine?

So what do you think? Would you include philosophy in the endless stream of stuff you have to cover to be "well-read"? Do any particular works or criteria for selecting them come to mind?

The Double Standard of Aging by Susan Sontag

I'm sorry to have missed out on February. Life got really busy, which is a shame, because I was (and am) very excited about both social justice and French literature. I suppose we'll just have to continue to discuss these subjects throughout March, since we got nowhere near completing our readings or exhausting our thoughts.

The one thing I read was a very interesting essay by Susan Sontag: The Double Standard of Aging. I was pretty familiar with the argument through cultural osmosis, but I had never read anything by Sontag.

The essay discusses the double standard in how society perceives and treats aging in women and men respectively. Sontag's conclusion is that there is a far higher pressure applied on women with respect to age, which leads to higher psychological costs for them. Old age is something no one is very happy about (from a social capital point of view, nevermind the biological aspects), since it involves a diminishing of one's sexual attractiveness, but in men these negative aspects are somewhat compensated by an increase in the respect they get, from being perceived as wiser or more interesting. For women, being older is being less attractive: there is no achievement that can compensate for wrinkles. 

Proust on Reading as Friendship

Friendship, friendship in respect of individuals, is no doubt a frivolous thing, and reading is a form of friendship. But at least it is a sincere form, and the fact that it is directed at someone who is dead, who is not there, lends something disinterested, almost moving to it. It is a form of friendship freed moreover from all that makes other forms ugly. 

                                                                                --Marcel Proust, On Reading

On Reading is a charming little essay that Proust wrote as an introduction to his translation of John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. It is remarkable in that it sets out to cut reading down to size, but still manages to make it look so damn appealing in the process. To sum up his argument: no, books are not your intellectual life, they are at most the nudge that sets that life in motion. They are not the end of the road, they are perhaps not a part of the road at all, but only your desire to walk it. Reading doesn't give you the truth; it gives you the impulse to figure out the truth for itself. It's not a substitute for thinking and, seeing how it's really just a means to an end, one shouldn't fetishize it. I happen to agree with all of this, but, at the same time, I admit one is hard pressed not to slip into "reading is the best thing since sliced bread" mode, when faced with paragraphs like the one I quoted above. Luckily, that paragraph is wrong.

Canon B

We have been thinking about the Canon, the Great Western Canon, quite a lot lately.

Part of it comes with our Classics Club member cards. Being a Classics Clubber seems to involve thinking about the classics - about what makes a classic classic, about our relationship with these books and why they still have the power to affect us - quite a lot. We know we're not alone in this because we've read a handful of very insightful posts on this topic lately, all from fellow Classics Clubbers. And this is the part that makes us grateful that we have the classics, that, no matter their faults, they still have something good and beautiful to give.

Part of it is the discomforting realization that our map has a lot of uncharted territories in it. Like a medieval map, it is full of "Here be dragons," "Here be lions," "Here be writers we never heard of." We had this feeling reading Martina's excellent post about Polish literature. We have it every time we read a book that seems to have slipped through the cracks of the Western Canon. We even have it reading less known works from famous authors. It's like a feeling of vertigo. It's not that we had missed something - we will never read all the famous works, anyway - it's that no one told us there was something to miss. And this is the part that makes us crave more than the Western Canon, that makes us want to discover new books and new authors.

And, finally, part of it comes from an occasional desire to throw away maps altogether. There was this paragraph recently on Electric Literature's tumblr that made us nod in approval. It's from Michael Cunningham recommending a neglected classic:

I’m urging you to experience something like what I did, in consenting to read an obscure novel, an experience that involved not only the discovery of the novel itself but the attendant realization that the world is host to such novels—call them the “invisible classics.” Call them “Canon B.” It makes for a richer, more fabulous sense of what might be out there, beyond the titles one read (or pretended to have read) in college.

We read this and we thought to ask you: do you know any invisible classics? Do you know any works that should receive more attention than they do? Any works that are from foreign literature and receive little or no attention in Canon A? It doesn't have to be that they are completely neglected (an academic out there is surely writing articles about them as you speak), but that you feel they are not popular enough. I myself wish that more people read Boris Vian and more people read James' The Ambassadors (which, admittedly, doesn't lack for critical acclaim).

So please share your favorite invisible classics with us. We're taking notes and building A Hitchhiker's Guide to Canon B (also known as a to-read list). 

Reading and Lingering

When I was little, I was a binge reader. If I found a book I liked, I'd read everything of its sort I could find. That's why I spent a few months at age seven reading a 50-book collection of folktales. That's why I read something like 20 Jules Verne books the following year. The faux-science bored me to tears, but I pushed through. This tendency persisted into my teenage years. Every time I liked a book, I would go on to read more and more titles from that author. It was not always the best decision either. If someone could give me back the time high school Claudia spent reading that 5th and 6th Kundera novel, I'd invest it in...I don't know, but it would be something a lot less repetitive.

With all of these books - not just the tales, the Jules Verne, the Kundera, but most of what I've read in my life - I rarely, if ever, felt the need to reread. Like most fast readers, I would occasionally worry that I'm not reading well, that there is a proper way to read, which includes deep thinking about every sentence and naturally takes forever. But if there was, I simply didn't have it in me. I did think about what I read while I read it, but my thoughts were as fast-flowing as my reading and only a few of them lingered after the reading. Sometimes after finishing a book that had been thought provoking, I'd feel guilty for wanting to read another book immediately, so I imposed to myself a "mourning" period, in which to Really Think about the book I had just read. The longest time I mourned a book by thinking about it was probably a full day, most of which was comprised of watching TV. There was no turning me into a more grounded reader.

The last couple of years something changed. I now read fewer books, significantly fewer books, but spend a lot of time thinking about them and returning to them. It feels weird and it's, I'm afraid, not terribly fit for blogging. I'm pulled between reading new things and lingering almost obsessively over the stuff I already read. I still have things to say about Daniel Deronda. I haven't yet properly reviewed Ulysses, but I spent a lot of time thinking about it this summer and, more recently, circling an unfinished post about it. The other day, I discovered a quote I remembered liking in Wolf Hall was historically inaccurate. I feel like writing analyses of Eminent Victorians. And so on, the list grows.

I'm still trying to come to terms with this new way of reading. My reading speed is the same, it's just the lingering on a book after I'm done with it that's new. And since grass is always greener on the other side, especially after you jumped the fence, I wish I could go back to being a fast, untroubled reader.

Why am I telling you all this? As a partial excuse for the lack of blogging lately, but mostly as a warning that I might continue to talk about the same set of books for a long, long time. I have hopes that the Literary Others reading event will add some new books to my lingering pile next month. But if not, Ulysses, here I come!

Why Do We Talk about Books?

I just had an Aha! moment. You know when you read a book that you really like and you call your best friend to say, "I just have to tell you about this book"? And how when you do tell them about the book, you're usually not satisfied with the result? It doesn't feel like you covered everything. You might have recounted it to them in excruciating detail, you might have described your reaction to every single paragraph, but something's still missing and you end up just saying, "It's so good. You just have to read it to see what I'm talking about." I do this all the time and never really questioned it. But now I stumbled across a passage that explains wonderfully why we feel the need to do this, but also why we always fail and have to send our friends to experience the book on their own:

This entanglement of the reader is, of course, vital to any kind of text, but in the literary text we have the strange situation that the reader cannot know what his participation actually entails. We know that we share in certain experiences, but we do not know what happens to us in the course of this process. This is why, when we have been particularly impressed by a book, we feel the need to talk about it; we do not want to get away from it by talking about it - we simply want to understand more clearly what it is in which we have been entangled. We have undergone an experience, and now we want to know consciously what we have experienced.

You will need a little background here. This is from Wolfgang Iser, whose stuff I'm slowly read at the moment (and it's a much pleasanter activity than I thought it would be). He's trying to describe what happens when you read a piece of good literature and he arrives at the conclusion that you get entangled with it. What does this mean? Well, a successful literary text will first draw you in under the guise of the familiar. You think you have an idea of what's going on in it, of where things are going. (If you don't have any idea at all, engagement with the text might be too difficult for you to even bother. See most readers and Finnegans Wake.) You inevitably form some expectations, some preconceptions based on your background, culture, previous experience etc. And then a good text challenges those expectations. In one way or another, things just don't go exactly as you anticipated. And this happens again and again in the course of your reading, as you form new expectations based on the new stuff the text throws at you. (Which is very good, because if this didn't happen, you'd have a yawn-fest on your hands.)

So what happens when you read a good book is that your preconceptions are continually overtaken, and, as you let go of them, you start to experience the text itself. The book becomes your present. You don't just read it, you become entangled with it and changed by it. That is the magic of good literature and it does make sense that you would want to understand it by capturing it in words. It makes sense you would want to share it. But it also makes sense that you'd fail at this task. You can't really capture the sense of living in the present of a book. If you're very good, you can give someone a wonderful representation of what it was like to experience a book, you can explain what elements in the book allowed for this experience, but you can't give them the experience itself. That's why you end up sending them to the book instead.

But another interesting corollary of this is that you can't really have access to that experience either. You can remember what it was like to read a text, but you can't read it again and have the same experience. Just the fact that you now know how it ends will change the way you read it, will change your preconceptions and expectations. (The text can still surprise you, though.) So I guess that, if we accept all this, no man (or woman) ever reads the same book twice.

Ode to Books Discovered by Chance

The books I love the most are the ones I discovered by chance. It is a realization I had revisiting Possession, where every page reminds me of the first time I read it, of my wonder and admiration then. It was a book I bought on impulse. I was somewhat familiar with Byatt: I had read two of her shorter novels and had conflicted feelings about them. Surprisingly enough, I hadn't heard anything about Possession. I bought it because it was on sale and it had a cute cover. It sat on my shelf for two years. And then one day I read it and was touched beyond expectation.

This is a story that repeats itself over and over again in my list of favorite books. I picked up The Ambassadors because it was dirt cheap. I had never heard of it and I was not in love with Henry James. I received Absalom, Absalom from my mother, who uh, bought it because it was on sale. I hadn't read anything by Faulkner and my mother doesn't have the greatest taste in books, so it's a wonder I even opened it. I found T.S. Eliot by buying a book for someone and reading the first poem in it because I was bored. I bought The House of Mirth in Germany because a. visiting foreign countries makes me buy books and b. it had a beautiful cover. I bought The Handmaid's Tale in Scotland in a '3 for the price of 2' deal together with Never Let Me Go and Beloved. (Without a doubt, the best spent £20 in my life.)  I picked up Middlemarch at the library because it was there. The name George Eliot didn't tell me much beyond "classic author," "woman with male pseudonym" and "not George Sand."