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.

Some thought on Shakespeare, Universalism, and Literary Education . . .

I recently listened to part of a discussion on the CBC concerning the use of Shakespeare text in high school education. Now, for a number of reasons, I don't usually pay attention to such discussions. One of the reasons that I avoid such issues is that I believe that there are so many rationally incoherent ideas peddled by so-called experts on the subject of literature, that I just find it aggravating listening to people propagate these notions, particularly when they are holding themselves up as specialists. I actually believe that with the exception of certain issues such as complex structures of symbolism or technical issues in traditional poetry, one doesn't need specialized knowledge to talk insightfully about literature, though I have met dozens of English teachers and professors who are desperate to maintain their specialist and professional status. Another reason that I avoid such discussions is that despite the fact that there are many ways to talk about and/or understand literature, the vast majority of people promote the idea that there is basically one way and they essentially represent that exclusive methodology. One particularly egregious example of this tendency is the near universal habit of talking about literature in relation to "what the author meant." People hold on to this strategy despite the fact that over sixty years ago, W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe Beardsley successfully undermined the notion of authorial intent as an exclusively meaningful interpretation of a work or text. What they called the "intentional fallacy" continues to be the primary methodology of literary criticism and theory despite the fact that this notion has been undermined not only by Wimsatt and Beardsley but by more than half a century of Continental Philosophy and literary theory which has made it clear that not only can the author's intent be dispensed with if you so choose but there is no objective or authoritative way to understand what literature is, let alone a correct way to talk about it. The quite simple fact is that you can define literature how you choose and, more importantly, you can talk about it and analyze it however you want. One thing I have learned is that if someone tells you that there is one "correct" way to think about and analyze literature, this methodology is most likely hiding an ideological agenda.

In relation to the CBC segment on Shakespeare, I particularly avoid discussions about this subject because of the widespread phenomenon called Bardolatry. Bardolatry is, exactly what it sounds like, the tendency to idealize Shakespeare (aka, the Bard). Its hard to talk about Shakespeare because admiration of him is so deep and widespread that any discourse about him often begins with the assumptions that he is infallible and his status and brilliance cannot be questioned. The most egregious example of Bardolatry I have ever found comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge who once suggested that you couldn't criticize Shakespeare unless you a priori accept that he is the greatest writer ever. Such claims would be amusing if their weren't so bizarre and elitist. I actually have nothing against Shakespeare in the classroom. His work can be a remarkable font of interest and entertainment. But the phenomenon of Bardolatry actually inhibits students' ability to talk about and enjoy Shakespeare's work because in classic top-down teaching strategies, students are not allowed to explore Shakespeare, but rather they are told what to think.

I was particularly struck in the CBC discussion of Shakespeare with the hackneyed claim made by a man who I believe is a high school English teacher that what makes Shakespeare so good is the degree of "universalism" in his stories. This claim is so common and widespread that I can't believe that there is anyone who has been to high school (at least in English) who hasn't heard it at one time or another. It is a belief that I think, though widespread, is basically nonsense. Looking for a cognitive bias that this claim exposes, the closest one I could come up with is the "illusory truth effect." This effect is the tendency to believe something because it is easy to process or because it is so widely believed and repeated that its actual veracity is never brought into question. But here's the thing - it takes a whole linguistic, cultural, and educational structure to even vaguely understand what Shakespeare's works are about, let alone to have any deeper comprehension of the content and meaning. Shakespeare, in fact, fails even the most basic test of what the word universal means let alone any more rigorous notion of universal understanding. Anyone making such claims about Shakespeare's work (or any literary work) is actually a priori assuming a whole structure of indoctrination before Shakespeare's so-called universalism can be understood. When someone is making such a claim about the universalism of a work of art, what they are really saying is that if you can read the original work or the work of a translator (and keep in mind that learning to read is itself a complex sociopolitical act which implies a whole structure of ideological and cultural indoctrination), then you can access a set of universal implications in the work. But, of course, not only are the acts of learning to read and understand the concepts involved ideologically loaded, but any analyzes of the issues talked about after that process of learning takes place will be unable to escape ideological and cultural biases.

A typical counterargument to what I have said here is that this is a misinterpretation of the word "universal" and what is really meant when we talk about Shakespeare's universalism is that the themes found in his work, such as love, jealousy, hate, fear, etc., are universal in nature and that they can be appreciated by anyone. The primary problem with this claim should be fairly obvious, though people seem to miss it all the time. If this were true, then there is nothing more universal about Shakespeare's work than the work of anyone else. Since the work of Harold Robbins or Jackie Collins also deal with all of these themes then we are forced to give the same status to these works as we are to Shakespeare. I am certain that if we taught the novels of Harold Robbins to high school students and we held Robbins in the same high regard as we do Shakespeare, those students would not only have an easier time understanding Robbins (making him, by the normal standard and by definition, more universal) but those students would hold the reputation of Robbins in the same high standard as we now hold Shakespeare. Another problem is this, one might rationally argue that certain human emotions are universal, but that does not mean that they are experienced or understood in the same way. A good, if melancholy, example of this is when we think about love. It is absurd to think, for example, that our highly personalized notions of love and marriage are experienced in the same way as, say, they are by people in an ancient farming society of arranged marriages undertaken largely for familial advantage. Shakespeare's notion of love as portrayed in Romeo and Juliette is, in fact, not only highly stylized and elitist but particularly Eurocentric.

The truth is that anyone who has been initiated into a certain kind of education and knowledge can easily get the impression that Shakespeare's work is uniquely "good" and universal. And though one can make an argument that everyone throughout time has experienced love, hate, jealousy, etc., how we process and understand those emotions and experiences is unique and related to our cultural and class worldviews. This is not to say that you can't read and interpret the works of Shakespeare in a particularly "universalist" way. The real problem is that such interpretive structures are imposed on students as the only coherent and meaningful way to think about Shakespeare or literature in general. Literary education is, at least at the high school level in North America, stuck in a kind of time warp of elitism and close-mindedness. And until we start opening our minds and attitude about what literature is and how we talk about it, students will continue to be alienated by the education system which relies on arbitrary and authoritarian views of education and literature.

"A Confederacy of Dunces," Sam Jordison, and what its all "About."

Sam Jordison of the Guardian recently wrote a brief but interesting article on John Kennedy Toole's remarkable book "A Confederacy of Dunces" and its rejection by the almost legendary editor Robert Gottlieb. I believe Gottlieb was an editor for Simon and Schuster at the time (though Jordison doesn't mention this and I may be misremembering this fact), and though he liked Toole's book and encouraged him, in the end Gottlieb rejected it because it "wasn't really about anything." To most readers today this seems like an irrelevant criticism for a book which not only went on to win a Pulitzer prize but which is one of the most readable and funny books of the 20th century.

Gottlieb was shrewd enough to later admit that his rejection of "A Confederacy of Dunces" was his most "conspicuous failure" as an editor, though he continued to have reservations about the book even after it went on to enjoy the great success that it did - a success that the author was unable to share in since he had committed suicide not long after Gottlieb's final rejection. Though Jordison of the Guardian has mostly unqualified praise for Toole's book, he says that he often hears Gottlieb's criticisms of the novel echoed in contemporary readers. "I've lost count," he tells us, "of the number of times that people have complained that the book doesn't add up to much and that Ignatius J. Reilly doesn't develop as a character." Jordison goes on to assure us that there are "many excellent editors and readers out there who would make the same decisions as Gottlieb."

Jordison's defence of the book is straightforward and timely. He suggests that the book has value on the basis that it is very funny. This is surely true. "A Confederacy of Dunces" is one of the books that stand in my life of reading as notably hysterical, along with Catch 22, Three Men in a Boat, and a number of books by Kurt Vonnegut. But Jordison also mentions that the book is, in fact, about quite a lot. There is a great deal of profundity in Toole's portrayal of the changing values of the 1960s; racism, politics, philosophy are all subjects that Toole deals with in a witting and wise way. I actually think that a good case could be made that "A Confederacy of Dunces" was ultimately rejected not because it was about nothing but because it dealt with the things that it was about in rather raw and provocative ways, ways that probably made Gottlieb uncomfortable and continues to be rather disconcerting to readers today.

And this is the point that I think that Jordison's article, as interesting as it is, misses. The real issue in my mind concerning Gottlieb's rejection of Toole's masterpiece is that it doesn't adhere to certain novelistic standards that were formed largely in the Victorian Era and continue to shape our notion of a "good" novel even today. My argument is this: because the novel as it came to be practiced as an art form grew largely out of the internal landscape of Romanticism and was then injected with a degree of Victoria self-absorption, most successful novels today are stuck in an aesthetic rut. This rut is an image of the novel as a psychological landscape of a character or small group of characters who are expected to psychologically grow (in rather orthodox ways) through the hardship of some social or personal experience. There are, of course, counter examples to this formula, but overall it seems that his has been the MO of the novel as an art form, an art form that I believe is now dying because of the grand social and technological changes facing society. Because of this psychological formula, we have a rather basic Aristotelian view of what a novel should do, how it should proceed in terms of plot and character, and where it should end up to form a proper climax and denouement. "A Confederacy of Dunces" actually fits into this model a great deal more that Gottlieb seemed to think, but it also pushed that boundary in important ways. The main character of the novel Ignatius doesn't grow at all. He doesn't use his hardships as life lessons, but rather as demonstrations and affirmations of all that he thinks is wrong with society in the first place. The other characters in the novel just sort of skirt through life haphazardly the way most of us actually do. There is not much of a lesson or moral in "A Confederacy of Dunces." Rather, it is a more like a French movie than an Anglophone novel, it is a slice of life that gives us a snapshot in time of a twisted degenerate egoist against a backdrop of a racist decaying society which seems to have largely lost its way.

Today we have many writers who have broken the mold of traditional Aristotelian narratives in spectacular ways, not least of who are G.W. Seabald, John Foster Wallace, and Thomas Pynchon. I believe authors like these are, for want of a better expression, the pallbearers of the novel as an art form. The novel grew out of the entertainment needs of the bourgeoise, and society and its entertainment demands are changing in ways that the novel simply is unable to account for. There is no shame in this. Art forms arise and fall as society changes. We no longer mourn the death of the illuminated manuscript as a living art form. We've moved on. Literature will undoubtably survive in new and vital ways. But the demands that society put into an art form, whether it's painting, the novel, or architecture, creates collateral damage. Toole was one of its victims. He wrote a brilliant book that pushed boundaries that many in positions of privilege and authority didn't want pushed, and he eventually committed suicide over it. The important lesson of Toole's book is that when someone says that a work of art isn't "about" anything, its a pretty good bet that it is just "about" the wrong things.

Reading as Aesthetic therapy. . .

For reasons that I am unable to articulate, I stopped painting a couple of months ago. I wish I could explain why, but I don't even understand it myself. Suffice to say that after 35 years for continually working as an artist, I ran out of steam, faith, and inspiration. It has been a significantly depressing and stressful process. In order to deal with it I started writing about life and art. And, of course, reading is always an essential concomitant of writing. Most of my fiction reading for the past twenty years or so has been 19th century and early 20th century work, but I recently started reading contemporary fiction again. After years of reading mostly older fiction, it is quite interesting to read newer books for a while.

The first book I picked up was one that I had read twice before - Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Since it was published in the 1970s, this book has become a kind of modern classic, I think in large because it expressed the immense crisis in the Western psyche that was occurring in the lead up to the 70s. Though it doesn't specifically address these issues in any kind of systematic ways, Motorcycle Maintenance was written against the backdrop of the breakdown of traditional rationality, the linguistic turn in philosophy, the abandonment of so-called meta-theories, and rise of contemporary philosophical pragmatism. I read this book in the 1980s, in the 90s, and now again. Thought parts of it seem dated, an inevitability with any philosophical/fictionary work, it holds up well overall and it is an enjoyable read. Persig really illustrates the way that approaches to rationality were breaking down in someone's everyday consciousness. And of course, because he deals in detail with the question of "quality," a question always central to me as an artists, I find it fascinating.

The next novel I read was David Foster Wallace's last (and posthumously published) book The Pale King. I must admit that, though it is on my list, I have never read Infinite Jest, and I cannot comment on Wallace's work in general. But The Pale King is, I am fairly certain, one of the most boring books I have ever read. Though Wallace's prose style is fluid and interesting in itself to a degree, I just don't know how anyone (particularly an editor) ever thought this could be an interesting book. It is ostensibly a 600 page book about people who work for the IRS, and is precisely as boring as that sounds. It is profoundly difficult to imagine how Wallace could ever have gotten this book published if he hadn't been dead or famous or both. What made the book seem both more tragic and ridiculous is the way the publisher put a little 'guide for reading groups' in the back of the book. In this section you will find sophomoric questions meant to stimulate discussion for reading groups such as "Discuss the different ways in which the characters in The Pale King search for, and perhaps find, happiness." Since corporate publishers have no sense of humour and are notoriously irony-impaired, I am fairly sure these high school-like questions are not meant as a joke. And if they are meant seriously they are absurd, insulting, and belittle not only this book but I suspect Wallace's entire literary project.

Then I read a book I have been meaning to read for years; Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. This is one of those books that people often put on lists of so-called 'post-modern' novels, like Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It is a book in which the narrator is always present and continually addresses the reader, a technique that some people find gimmicky and aggravating. It is essentially a story of a guy who tries to purchase Italo Calvino's latest novel but due to a printing mistake he gets the wrong book, and an incomplete one as well. He goes back and receives the wrong book again, and then the whole novel becomes a story of the reader encountering a series of fragments of different novels that he can never complete. Through the book, the reader is drawn closer to a mysterious and enigmatic woman whom, depending on how you read it, he marries. Calvino is always an entertaining writer and the fragments that he writes are all, in themselves, very compelling. Because Calvino seems like a natural story-teller, you find yourself, like the reader in the novel, wishing you could finish most of the fragments. It is well worth the read for both entertainment value as well as being an interesting literary experiment.

For my next book I went back to North America and read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Foer. The only thing I knew about Foer before I picked up this book was what I had seen in the movie version of his first book Everything is Illuminated. Apparently this book has also been made into a film, and upon reading it I can see why - it is pure Hollywood. This book deeply offends my sensibilities, not because it is poorly written, but because it is gratuitously sentimental. The book revolves around a young boy essentially trying to come to terms with the death of this father in the Twin Towers. This subject matter, in itself, is dangerously evocative and could be made sentimental even by the best, most circumspect author. But in Foer's hands every page drips with saccharin-like sentiment; and it is not just sentiment, but it boarders on melodrama. What I find particularly offensive about it, is that with all this sentimentality the whole book becomes a kind of trickery, like advertising that uses babies or puppies. To me Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a little bit like literary cheating because Foer has taken 9/11, which is a subject that is already very explosive and emotion laden, and then he has infused it with a story of a young boy who has lost his father and is close to a mental breakdown; and he has done all of this without offering any kind of distance or counterpoint whatsoever. It has the makings of the kind of Hollywood film that I most despise, one that intends to pull at the heartstrings (both patriotic and familial) with the aim of selling tickets and little more.

After reading that book I went back to Italy and read Umberto Eco's Novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. This is a story of a mad who has had a stroke and attempts to rebuild a vision of his life by looking through all the books, magazines, and comics in his childhood home. Eco is a very good prose writer (at least his translator makes him so) and I always enjoy his work. Part if the theme here is the issue of the narrator's childhood in fascist Italy where even the comic books and children's' songs were promoting fascist ideology.  If you have an interest in comics and other popular culture from the 30s to the 50s, this book is excellent. But most readers will simply miss most of Eco's references and fail to connect with the narrator. I found this book among my father's things and, though I don't know if he ever had a chance to read it, I am sure the subject matter would have been of great interest to him. I liked it but found some of the long descriptions of various comic books and other popular culture artifacts got a bit tedious after a while.

I am not sure if any of these books will be helpful in my own writing which is very much geared toward sorting about where my conceptual and artistic life will go from here but so far it has been interesting. When you have lost your inspiration, at least the inspiration of others can be stimulating.