What is Poetry? (And should we care?)

 

In his 1821 essay "A Defence of Poetry," Percy Shelley says that "poetry is connate with the origin of man." This is an easy claim with which to sympathize. After all, language seems to have been a central element in human evolution. And language is inherently referential and, therefore always seems to hold the promise of poetry in it. Of course, these issues raise the perennial, seemingly unsolvable problem, of how one defines poetry.  Shelley wanted to defend poetry so he had to, at some level define it. But by telling us that "poetry is connate" with our origins, he is really just telling us that poetry is an unavoidable element of language, we cannot avoid it even if we wanted to. But because of the referential nature of language, the continual metaphorical element on which it seems to operate, it seems almost pointless to attempt to distinguish poetry from any other part of language use. In other words, if language in the many ways that we use it, is continually relying on metaphor, or to say it another way if metaphor is at the heart of language, then it seems to be a purely academic matter to attempt to distinguish between poetry and prose. At a wider level, the problem was defined by Derrida when he reminded us that there is no 'transcendental signified." This is just another way of saying that, while language seems to refer to things in the world, it can only, at best, reach out  toward the world, it cannot provide us with certitude. 

I think, at some level, many people feel the uncertainty of the world (and language's ability to pin it down) instinctively. At a practical level, we hope that, say, a set of written instructions will be clear enough and be a useful aid to performing whatever task we are setting out to perform. But many of our linguistic experiences are fraught with imprecision, and certainly our so-called literary ones. We accept it. In fact we usually relish in it. If we were searching for certitude, we surely wouldn't be reading Henry James or Emily Dickinson. And though many wearisome English teachers might insist to their students that James' Golden Bowl or Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," express certain meanings, such claims are contrary to the nature of literature if not language.  In other words, I think that we read not in a search for certitude, but precisely because life is uncertain. 

But to return to Shelley's Defence of Poetry," I am sure that Shelley would have been comfortable with pushing aside any distinctions concerning poetry and other forms of literature. Shelley was using the term poetry not to indicate a type of literature so much as he was using it as a word for the act of human dreaming. That is why Shelley says that poetry may be defined as "the expression of the Imagination." And in a remarkable foreshadowing of 20th century discourse, Shelley goes on to tell us that "language is virtually metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts, instead of pictures of integral thoughts." 

Dreamers express their dreams, and prophets are only prophets to the degree that they express their visions. And like most poets, Shelley was a dreamer,  and certainly a prophet of sorts. 

 But what does it matter if we dispense with literary distinctions? Other than certain conveniences stemming from taxonomy, there seems to be few, if any reasons to advocate for such distinctions. And there seems to be plenty of reasons to argue against them, the dangers of elitism being amongst the most important. And it is no surprise that Shelley's essay contains the reminder that "the principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in his Republic." If political and social equality is supposed to be of such importance to us, why not apply it here, to literary endeavours? Even when we apply rather nebulous categorical boarders to literature types, we run risks of exclusion and devaluation. I have seen this first hand on many occasions. It is a strange phenomenon to listen to a supposed literary authority struggle to defend syllabus choices based on some abstract and painfully woolly categorical argument that ends up with them inadvertently defending an elitist or sexist, if longstanding, structural convention. And so, interesting work is conveniently marginalized and excluded from the very people who should see it. Such exclusion often targets women or other marginalized voices out of hand, but can also exclude groups of work that don't fit into the standard categories. This is true of, for example, essays or just works that don't fit clearly into regular conventions such as Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Thoreau's Walden,  or Leigh Hunt's The Honey Jar. And for more modern examples just think of most of Andre Breton's work like The Lost Steps, Mad Love, and Nadja. (Incidentally, this is also true of a number of other surrealist authors as well as some of the writers from whom they drew inspiration like the Comte de Lautréamont.)

Anyone who has taken a university English course, and has any sense of natural skepticism or a previous interest in some marginalized literary work, knows with what fervour professors can muster a categorical defence. Few phenomena have done more to alienate people from literary enjoyment or study. 

To return to the subject of Shelley's Defence, it is interesting to me that he wraps it up with the now famous declaration that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," because if it is true, it is remarkable how many impediments are thrown in the way of us garnering the insights of that legislation. 

Here's a thought - next time someone asks you "what is poetry?" step on their foot and when they cry out in pain say, "That! That is poetry."

Can Poetry Save Your Soul?

 There is little doubt that contemporary literature and philosophy can be an alienating exercise in cynicism and apparent detachment. I think most of us have experienced it. I sometimes think of Milan Kundera's book The Unbearable Lightness of Being as the representative post-modern novel, and few books have given me a more overwhelming sense of emptiness. In the opening sequence of that novel, Kundera writes "in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted." Looking around today at the bizarre culture war of the rightwing which is reminiscent of the ethnic purity tropes of the 1930s, Kundera's words, written now nearly forty years ago, are chilling. They are frightening because the permissiveness that Kundera seems to be talking about here is the forgetfulness of history. He makes this remark in the context of taking up a book about Hitler and the way in which, for many, our perverse past is a whitewash, a phantom that never returns. But, of course, Kundera knows, as many of us do, that the past does return, almost as though on a zoetrope loop, and we are compelled to live through what others have lived through before, only with a greater sense of history and, therefore, a greater sense of failure and shame.  

Literature was, once upon a time, one of the great sanctuaries from this sense of failure and shame. And I am not just talking here about novels and poetry - but about the whole gamut of literary work from philosophy to the occasional essay. This is not to imply that literature was, of should be, simply an exercise of escape. Rather, it means it can be a realm not only of honesty and pain, but of aspiration and hope, and that it can satisfy a deep existential need for connection. It can, of course, still be exactly this. But I think its status is now on much shakier ground than it once was. I cannot provide a rigorous statistical argument that proves this cultural shift. Such arguments, when in the midst of the tornado of history, are only reflections of one's sense of what is really going on. Future historians and commentators will make more straightforward arguments with the advantage of distance and evidence. 

Another book that has meant a lot to me is Peter Sloterdijk's 1983 study - Critique of Cynical Reason. In this remarkable book, Sloterdijk traces the rise of modern cynical reason which has gradually reduced everything to a level of pure transactionalism. He adapts the Marxist notion of 'false consciousness' to its modern manifestation - 'enlightened false consciousness,' a state in which people are increasingly aware of the injustice and exploitation of which they are a victim, but they have so little faith that it can change that they just don't bother to do anything about it. 

It is with all of these issues in mind that I find myself continually returning to the great poets of Romanticism and philosophers like Emerson. This is because, despite being part of the cynicism of my age, I, like many people, hunger for a sense of universal connection, but one that doesn't rely on the deep problems of revealed religion. In the face of the isolation of bourgeois individualism and the profound opportunity of a society of transactionalism, it is no surprise that the poems of Shelley and Blake and Dickinson and Whitman, or the essays of Emerson and Thoreau can be a source of genuine edification. 

In his now famous 1838 Divinity College Address, Emerson talks of poets occupying a "holy office" and likens them to priests in their ability to offer revelation, teach, and give. In Emerson's version of transcendentalism, the poet is a kind of priest, only better than most because she is in touch with something more direct. "The true preacher can be known by this," Emerson writes, "that he deals out to the people his life, - life passed through the fire of thought." And what better preacher, therefore, than the poet? Being an advocate for natural rather than revealed religion, Emerson seemed to be much more interested in the revelation of poets than priests. "For the experience of each new age," Emerson tells us in his essay "The Poet, "requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet." And indeed, this idea of poet as revealer of our world and expresser of our experience, is one that I think many of us look for, particularly in an age when the zoetrope loop of dangerous history seems to be circling back to a terrible moment. The waters of art are so deep, Emerson reminds us, "that we hover over them with religious regard." 

One can find this transcendental spirit in a great deal of 19th century poetry. One of my very favorite of Shelley's poems is his 1816 "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." In that poem Shelley tells us that "some unseen Power // Floats tho' unseen among us." And it is this mysterious power to which the sages and poets respond, as well as Shelley himself. "I vowed that I would dedicate my powers," Shelley tells us, "to thee and thine." And indeed this unseen power (we can call it beauty or poetry or aesthetic experience) was, indeed, the thing to which Shelley devoted himself. Shelley tells us that in his childhood he looked for spirits as well as God, but it wasn't until the shadow of this mysterious power fell on him that he "shrieked & clasped" his "hands in extasy." [sic] Though I still struggle with the cynicism of our age, I admire Shelley's experience and faith here. And though this is one of Shelley's more explicit poems concerning this subject, you can find such sentiments throughout his work where he looks to a better world, informed by beauty, where reason and passion are no longer enemies. 

In one of his greatest poems, Queen Mab, Shelley described the world's pain - 

All things are sold: the very light of heaven

Is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, 

The smallest and most despicable things

That lurk in the abysses of the deep, 

All objects of our life, even life itself,

And the poor pittance which the law allow

Of liberty, the fellowship of man, 

Those duties which his heart of human love

Should urge him to perform instinctively, 

Are bought and sold as in a public mart.

But for Shelley, as for Emerson, our secret weapon is poetry, the activity that steps beyond the venal world that Shelley describes in Queen Mab, and looks toward and "indestructible order" beneath. Can we escape the eternal reoccurrence of  violence and hate that Milan Kundera talks about through a poetic accesses to an indestructible order?  I cannot be sure, but I have continued all my adult life in such a pursuit. 

Arminianism and the Opening of Aesthetic Horizons....

 The history of protestant theology is complex and difficult for a non-specialist to effectively conceptualize. Many of the central conflicts of Protestantism were between Calvinism and numerous other views which fundamentally opposed the determinism of the Calvinist view. One such theological movement that was in opposition to Calvinism was Arminianism, a movement based on the teachings of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius. Arminius influenced a great deal of Protestantism, including John Wesley and the rather vague and dynamic movement referred to as Methodism. In America, Arminianism had a significant influence on Unitarianism and the loosely defined, but important movement we know as transcendentalism. 

Arminius

 

Unitarianism split from orthodoxy not just in theological terms but in its whole outlook on human experience. Dissenters in England were pushed into political radicalism both by their exclusion from the political life of the nation (an exclusion that applied to anyone who refused to sign the 39 articles), and by their view that humans were responsible for their own relationship with God and their own views of the world. This was a naturally radical outlook because it relied on a fundamental attitude of equality rather than the hierarchical outlook that grew out of the Church of England and its traditional support of social stratification. In America, where much of the traditional hierarchies had already been torn asunder, Arminianism, through its effect on Unitarianism, was embracing a melioristic world view, a view that pictured humans are improvable, perhaps infinitely so. 

This view is important not only to one's outlook on religion and politics, but also on the arts, because one who is not encumbered by Calvinist inevitability and dour piety, and is at the same time full of the promise of an unbridled human future, is likely to embrace an exploratory attitude towards the arts. Lawrence Buell writes, in his book on literary transcendentalism, that "the main impetus behind the Unitarian departure from Orthodoxy - the shift from a Calvinist view of human nature as depraved to an Arminian view of man as improvable - also helped to produce a climate of opinion more favourable to the arts." 

In America, this expanding attitude arguably led directly to the flowering of transcendentalism in the work of various Unitarians (like Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, and James Clarke) who wrote everything from literary essays to poetry, and to bigger names in American literature like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But it also had a knock-on influence on writers like Nathanial Hawthorn, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. In England, Arminianism and the Methodism that grew from it, undoubtedly inspired much of the radicalism of the 1790s as well as to the growth of English Romanticism. Though the first generation of English Romantics eventually returned, opportunistically, to the fold of the Church of England, the second generation, especially Percy and Mary Shelley, were considerably more philosophically adventurous. 

Emerson 

I think a major aspect of both transcendentalist and Romantic literature was the idea of exploring the possibilities of human experience and potential, which had both been extremely limited in Catholic and Calvinist ideologies. And it was dissenters and those who opposed orthodoxy that were the first to advocate for the literary endeavours that were not simply and straightforwardly edifying.  As late as 1808 the religious magazine the Panopolist condemned nine-hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand novels as "positively seductive and corrupting" at best, and "a contemptibly frivolous...criminal waste of time" at worst. This reflected the view among the orthodox that literature should, at its heart, be morally instructive. But the dissenting generations like the Romantics and the transcendentalists were explorers, and literature often became a map of their travels. And these explorations were not prohibited to some Calvinist, preconceived and limited idea of what people could be. 

The shift in outlook toward the arts during the 19th century in the US (and I think it applies to the late 18th century in England), was described by Willam Charvat as a shift from "the negative principles of religious restraint, " to "the positive principle of moral idealism," This idealism was embodied in much of the work of Emerson or Whitman in the US, and in Blake and Shelley in England.

Mary and Percy Shelley

The rise of Methodism and Unitarianism and their effects on literature is complex subject that could be, and probably is, the subject of a long and interesting book. Thinking about it makes me wonder what kinds of effect the general decline in religious consciousness might be having on our cultural products in contemporary society. I think that Methodism and Unitarianism opened up horizons for aesthetic explorations of the human soul. Are the horizons now so open that we are simply wandering aimlessly with little sense of a goal in mind, like a flâneur in an empty city?  

Jane Eyre and 12th Grade English

 My youngest daughter is in her final semester of high school and is taking grade 12 English. Despite my efforts, she doesn't enjoy reading and isn't into books at all. That's ok, she's from a different generation, a digital generation, and I shouldn't expect her to like all the same things that I do. Books offer all sorts of learning possibilities, but I know that there are other ways to learn. The world is always changing and we have to trust the younger generations to sort things out for themselves. 

I have been helping her with her English work so that she can get through her final semester of school and move on. She has no plans to go to university, but at least if she graduates, her options will remain open. They are reading Jane Eyre in her class, two chapters a week and then answering some questions about the text. Jane Eyre is, of course, a Victorian Novel, and my interests are more centred on the Romantic era.  But I enjoy the Brontë sisters and Jane Eyre is a fine novel. I am a little disappointed, however,  that of all the novels by women from the 18th and 19th centuries, Jane Eyre is the one that these students are compelled to read. However, my disappointment is not a result of the quality of Charlotte Brontë's novel.  Rather, it strikes me as a pity that she is having to read a novel that is so imbued with traditional romantic troupes. Don't get me wrong, there is much to be admired in the character of Jane Eyre, both from the literary and the feminist point of view. Jane is a strong, independent woman who doesn't simply accept the abuse doled out to her. She understands the injustices done to her while still appreciating the positive aspects of her life. And her final triumph is a result of her strength, her integrity, and her unwillingness to simply do what is expected of her as a woman, especially as a woman of minimal means. And perhaps the thing I like best about Jane Eyre is that it is her who is, ultimately, a saviour, and not a man that just comes in to sweep her off her feet and protect her. But as a novel it is the romantic element that sticks with many readers, especially, I think, young readers. 

As fine as Jane Eyre is, there are so many interesting novels by women in the 18th and 19th century. And if young people are going to read only a couple of novels from the past by women, I would really like them to be ones that reject some of the romantic conventions and give the reader a more rounded view. For example, I would love to see them read Mary Wollstonecraft's novel Mary. Though this novel, like most, contains elements of romance, it is not "romantic" in the traditional sense, it is more a novel of the strength of love in friendship than anything else. In that novel, Mary educates herself and only enters into a loveless marriage because of a death-bed promise to her mother. The character then goes on to form a very strong bond with her friend Ann that is really the central relationship of the story. Mary takes Ann to Portugal and nurses her through her consumptive decline and eventual death. Mary also forms an attachment to a man Henry who is also consumptive and she eventually nurses him also as he succumbs to the disease. Mary eventually ends up living unhappily with her husband and the novel ends with the feeling that Mary herself will soon die. 

The great themes of Mary as a novel are concerned with a woman's ability, even in the face of Georgian oppression, to become self-educated and to form strong friendships of equality with both men and women. Though Jane Eyre also takes up some of these same themes, what stands out about Mary is that romance will not come to save the main character, there are no fairy tale endings for Mary, just the realization of the struggles with which we all, particularly women like her, are forced to contend. 

To be honest, there are not that many novels from the 18th and 19th centuries that don't overly trade on traditional romantic tropes. One interesting angle would be to look to the darker novels like those of Charlotte Dacre,  like Zofloya. We can also look to some of  Maria Edgeworth's novels like Belinda and Castle Rackrent as novels by 19th century women that don't rely on typical romantic tropes for their plot. And later in the century the novels of Elizabeth Caskell and George Eliot offer much more complex worlds which, though they contain romantic elements, are not simplistic in their presentation.  

I have never seen any of these novels taught in a high school English class, and I find it unfortunate that they rely on standard fare like Jane Eyre. My daughter is generally repelled by traditional heteronormative love stories and I am sure that the choice of a novel a little out of the mainstream would be much more interesting for her and many young people.  

The Exclusivity of Scholarship. . . .

Though it is difficult to believe today, there was a time when people were ridiculed by the so-called intelligentsia if they were unable to read and write Greek. It seems almost comical to think that the gate-keepers of high culture once used literacy of Greek as a wall to hold back the swinish multitude of average people. On the other hand, I suppose it is as good a standard as any by which to keep people in their place and marginalize their accomplishments or ability. After all, Western intellectuals have had a long history of idolizing Greek culture, as though a militaristic, slave-owning group of people from over two thousand years ago had some special insight into the mysteries of the universe that the rest of us lack. This is not to say that the ancient Greeks, for all their horrible moral failings, aren't due a certain respect for their positive accomplishments, they certainly are. Greek insights into mathematics, natural science, and philosophy are remarkable - particularly given their place in history. If for nothing else, the ancient Greeks deserve an immense amount of credit for their use of reflective reasoning about themselves and their society. (Though it is often forgotten by Westerners that, for example, Confucius and Buddha both predate Socrates by over a hundred years.)

However, it is one thing to give credit where credit is due, and it is an entirely different matter to idealize ancient Greek culture as Western intellectuals seem to have so often done. I actually enjoy, for example, the stories of Greek mythology, Homer, and I even have enjoyed some Greek poetry in my time. And sometimes I wonder if it is not that intellectuals have idealized the Greeks so much as they have used them as a kind of exclusive club to which you had to gain access in order to be considered cultured and important. Traditionally in Europe, only the rich and powerful had any hope of gaining access to an education that would include Greek studies, and only if you were literate in Greek could you hope to be taken seriously by the cultural elite. Greek literacy was often your 'club card' that allowed you to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful and meant that your ideas and opinions could be taken seriously.

Take John Thelwall as a case in point. Thelwall (1764-1834) was an English radical writer, activist, lecturer, and ground-breaking speech therapist. He was a member of the great London Corresponding Society and was famously tied for treason along with Horne Tooke and Thomas Hardy in 1794. Thelwall argued against the monarchy and for a radical expansion of voting rights. He was eloquent, committed, and fearless in his pursuit of justice and equality. And of course, writing in the 1790s, a period of turmoil following the Revolution in France, Thelwall engaged with establishment's premier conservative spokesman, Edmund Burke. One of Thelwall's most famous works was entitled The Rights of Nature in which he addressed Burke's defence of the establishment head on. Because Thelwall tried, to a degree, to emulate Burke's rather grandiose literary style, The Rights of Nature is not an easy book to read and seems rather antiquated today, particularly when read beside, say, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. And, interestingly, it was partly the book's style that drew the attention of some critics (even among reformers) who thought that Thelwall was attempting to speak above his "station." Thelwall tried to invoke Socrates as a symbol of the people's philosopher who addressed regular people and symbolized long-standing principles of egalitarianism and justice. But, unlike Burke, Thelwall couldn't read and write Greek and he was ridiculed for having to rely on translations for his reflections on Socrates. In The Rights of Nature and other works Thelwall makes references to Greek culture that are essentially laughed off because they are not grounded in his own direct reading but are somehow sullied or delegitimized by the fact that they arrive from translations. This, in part, is what critics focused on rather the substance of what Thelwall wrote, and so they portrayed him as an upstart who didn't have the authority to criticize Burke because he hadn't earned his status as a proper scholar.

Of course, Thelwall was also routinely attacked (sometimes physically) for his radical political opinions. But the very fact that his status (or lack of one) as a Greek Scholar could be seen as a legitimate criticism of his thoughts and ideas about politics, is remarkable today. And Thelwall was not the only victim of this kind of bias. Keats, didn't have a classical education and the fact that he wrote classically themed poetry without having read classical works in their original language was seen by many as a perfectly legitimate reason to marginalize his poetical works. There are, of course, still cases wherein you must read works in their original language to be taken seriously. But this is generally only if you are trying to portray yourself as an expert on the works themselves. You would probably wouldn't try, for example, to write a book about Kant's Critique without being able to read German. But it would surely be perfectly acceptable to invoke, say, German Romanticism in relation to the Lake Poets without being literate in German.

But it would serve us well to remember the degree to which people are often marginalized based on their perceived weaknesses in formal education. It is surely no surprise that a white man with almost no education can become president of the United States and be taken seriously by millions of people concerning his thoughts on culture, but a black woman (even with an excellent education) is has to scream and fight to even be heard.

A few thoughts on Grammar. . .

Grammar, as we often think of it, as a set of fairly strict definitions and rules that must be followed if we are to obtain legitimacy as “educated” and “erudite” people, has a fairly short history in the English language. Before about 250 years ago, few people thought of grammar as a distinct set of rules. Rather, syntax was people’s primary concern. That is to say, there were certain conventional ways of speaking and writing that were learned through reading and discourse. And, strangely, the people who first started to talk about and write about English grammar were often Latinists who, having spent a tedious chunk of their lives learning the complexities of Latin grammar began to impose similar ideas onto English. This is why for generations students of English were plied with odd, seemingly arbitrary, rules of grammar. If you are over forty, you were likely told many times in your schooldays that it was a terrible no-no to split an infinitive. And how many old-school English teachers were horrified when they first saw the title sequence to the original Star Trek in which Captain Kirk had the gall to split an infinitive when he said “to boldly go”? The irony, of course, is that the restriction against splitting an infinitive is not a result of the fact that it is frowned on in Latin (or Latin-based languages), but because you can’t actually do it. While in English infinitives are two words (such as “to go”), in Latin (and Romance languages in general) the infinitive is a single word (such as “ire”) so you cannot split the infinitive even if you wanted to. So, just because the early gate-keepers of “proper” English were Latinists and Classicists, generations of English speakers imagined that there was some real reason that they should be restricted from saying “to boldly go.”

Early English grammar primers began to appear in the 18^th century as more and more “middle-class” members of society began to spend years becoming educated. Though I haven’t spent a lot of times attempting to collect these early primers, I have only read about and seen a couple in all my years of book collecting and education. I am sure that before such grammar primers were being properly printed, there were mocked up versions created by private educators, of which there were many in England in the late 18^th century, for their own personal students. I have never seen one of these because I am sure only a handful have survived, but I have read about them in various books about the Georgian Era. I recently got a reminder of how rare technical discourse on grammar was even in the early 19^th century when I was reading a 1809 letter by the legendary political theorist William Godwin in which he was talking about a Grammar Primer written by great essayist William Hazlitt. Godwin writes – “I never saw the parts of speech so well defined (I could almost say at all defined) before.” In other words, Godwin, who was already an accomplished writer and had written one of the most important books in English on political theory, had scarcely even seen the parts of speech defined before. To put it another way, Godwin had never really seen technical grammar, and yet he was a famous and accomplished author.

I have recently thought about this issue a fair amount because of a few rather heated internet discussions. I believe, and there is plenty of academic research to support such a position, that attempting to teach young students grammar doesn’t really make them better writers, and can actually harm their attempts to write. Teaching students grammar not only makes language more antiseptic, but it can make students leery of even trying to write because they become paranoid that they will get something wrong. The best way to make better writers is through a kind of anticipatory socialization process of reading and writing. You don’t need to actually know what a dangling participle is to know not to use one, you simply have to have read a lot. And perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t really matter what a dangling participle is, what matters is that you can use language efficiently and effectively for what, and with whom, you are trying to communicate. Very few people will ever achieve the stylistic competence of, say, Henry James. But then, very few people are trying to communicate the way James was trying to communicate. What matters, nine out of ten times, is simply that writing is straightforward, not confusing, and easy to understand. I am continually amazed when people complain, for example, about young people using a particular word order or syntax, when there is no question about what is being communicated. Of course, when we are accustomed to certain word orders or grammatical structures, certain things can sound strange to our ears. But much of the time basic exchanges of information are what are really at stake, and there is seldom any confusion about that. You can spend a lot of time trying to understand the “correct” usage of “lay” and “lie,” but how often will the “incorrect” usage cause any actual confusion? Are any of us really confused when Eric Clapton told “Sally” to lay down, even though “technically” he should have told her to lie down? And doesn’t it even sound a little odd when we correctly use the “lie” in the past tense, such as if we said “I lay down on my new couch yesterday” ? Most people would think it sounds more correct to say “I laid down on my couch yesterday” even if it is technically incorrect. Of course, if you are writing your PhD thesis, or addressing some professional group of people, you are going to need (for the most part) to conform to their standards or risk rejection. But by the time you go to write a thesis or address a professional body, you have usually already been socialized to such expectations anyway. And most of the time, people are using language with a fairly straightforward goal of being understood in the moment, so lay down or lie down, whichever you prefer, I don’t mind.

Encyclopedic Fiction and Gravity's Rainbow. . . .

I have made some effort (though certainly not an exhaustive one) to read a fair degree of contemporary fiction. However, I don't really read such fiction randomly. I have little interest in many of the popular books, the ones that win the Booker Prize or that local book clubs seem to enjoy. I prefer to read weird books, books that have some quirky or strange element. I like writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and David Foster Wallace.

I particularly find the so-called idea of Encyclopedic Fiction interesting. This was an idea coined by Edward Mendelson in the 1970s and refers to books that attempt to render an exhaustive picture of a cultural milieu. These are books like The Divine Comedy, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, and Gravity's Rainbow. The thing about such books is that they are hard to make sense of; there is so much in them that as readers we are often overwhelmed. Most readers, even ones who consider themselves well read or avid readers, have fairly traditional narrative proclivities. We like stories, and we like them to be well ordered and relatively easy to follow. But encyclopedic books are not just narrative in nature (though they may contain one or a number of fairly well structured narratives at their core). Rather, I think it helps to think of these books as more thematic in nature. Most of us remember high school English classes in which we learned about literature's themes; like "man against nature" or "man against man" etc. But when I say thematic I am not necessarily referring to these basic themes. I simply mean that it is easier to make sense out of one of these difficult books if you read the events they contain as related to a theme rather than simply looking at how they might reflect the narrative.

I know that this might seem like a basic idea but apparently it isn't. I realized this when I read an article I found on-line called "The 50 Best One-Star Amazon Reviews of Gravity's Rainbow." The Reviews contained in this article are all authored by angry readers who couldn't make sense of Thomas Pynchon's novel, and many of whom seem to think that the whole thing was little more than a huge ego exercise on Pynchon's part. Well, I've read Gravity's Rainbow, and though it is a difficult book, it is written so much skill and style that I find it very difficult to believe that it is simply gibberish, or even an ego trip.

The fact is that a book like Gravity's Rainbow could easily appear almost nonsensical. But if you read Gravity's Rainbow through a thematic prism (and there are a number of such prisms you could choose from), you can easily make sense out of it. Someone may say that this approach to reading is disingenuous or overly wilful. However, our readings are almost always our own products in a sense. Whether you are reading a Fairy tale by Grimm or a novel by Henry James, you generally take from it based upon what you bring to it. Our readings are formed by our personal and cultural baggage, and though our reading might be influenced by, say, professional, critical, or educational discourse, it always amazes me the degree to which people formulate their own ideas and readings of even complex material. When presented with a work that seems particularly enigmatic or even nonsensical, it seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable approach to wilfully make sense out of it for ourselves. If a book is hard to make sense out of but not particularly complex or turgid, and especially if it is amusing, like, say, Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, people don't usually seem too bothered by the fact that it doesn't fit into a traditional narrative structure. But a book like Gravity's Rainbow seems to get on many people's nerves, perhaps because they struggle through it and expect a big payoff at the end. But if one looks at the events through some thematic prism such a book can seem considerably less complex and the reading becomes a lot easier. For example, if Gravity's Rainbow is read as an account of 20th Century paranoia in various forms, most of the apparently unconnected events and ideas come into focus. Pirate's relationship with Jessica, the professional efforts to understand Slothrop's apparently supernatural powers, Slothrop's reaction to his racial nightmares, most of the characters' reactions to the War, etc.: all of these are stories about the strange, schizophrenic, paranoid reactions that people have or have had to our twisted and troubled culture. This idea makes Gravity's Rainbow not so much a maze of vaguely connected events but a kind of monologue of our social relations and personal demons. It's not important to me if this is what Pynchon "wanted us to think." Given Pynchon's reclusiveness, we will probably never have any clear ideas about what he thought about his own work anyway. What interests me is whether we can make sense out of a book like Gravity's Rainbow in ways that are interesting an fulfilling.

Instead of difficult, books like Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest are interesting because they pictures not just of individuals, but of important aspects of culture with which we all struggle.