Catcher in the Rye, How to Read, Arsy-versy, Pope Francis, AI Cheating, Austen and abolition, Diaries in the 1560s, Conrad, highcounterculture, handwriting, memorising poetry, Graves vs Milton, Lewis

The irregular review of reviews, vol. VIII

I wouldn’t date a man reading Catcher in the Rye

The worst part of this article is the headline and the best part is the final paragraph, which made me want to read Conjugal Love, by Alberto Moravia. While I share some of the author’s worries about the decline of reading, it seems to me that at some point, literary people are going to have to decide if they want to spread the good news and encourage people to read great literature (all of it, any of it, and yes, that includes Catcher—a good book to read at all ages!) or whether they merely want to join in with the status-grabbing culture they pretend to despise, and complain a bit to garner themselves some attention. I keep saying that the philistine supremacy is real—well, it is often most real among the people who profess to dislike it. What is more philistine, to read a trash book or to spend your time being a snob on Twitter about a young woman on TikTok? This piece is yet another example of modern literary culture ironising the social(-media)-merry-go-round in order to make it acceptable that the author is a very willing and active participant in the whole thing.

There are two basic conclusions to be drawn from what this author observes among her friends: first, having status accrue to reading is fine and to be encouraged (we want reading to be high status and yes that involves some cafe posing! the first step towards being serious is aspiring to be serious which involves being unserious and pretending to be serious—seriously); second, you can either improve that status to encourage more people in to the garden of literature, or you can act as a gatekeeper to preserve a sense of exclusivity to yourself. The choices many literary people are making seem to belong more to the first category that the second.

I don’t doubt that some unpleasant men can be identified by their reading habits (nor that women should be attentive to such “red flags”), but it’s not a “ruse” that people follow trends and read what other people are reading. It’s normal behaviour. What we need to do is to set an example of reading what we think is valuable, to make use of this inherent characteristic of human behaviour rather than quibble and moralise about it while doing the exact same thing ourselves. Having scorned those people who pretend to read feminist works in order to attract women online, the author then quotes her friend saying this: “I always assume that the worst men I know read Kerouac. With the exception of Allen Ginsberg, the Beat generation is so overrated.”

Are these people supposed to know the Beats are overrated without reading them? What’s wrong with a man reading literary fiction (at a time when many men don’t)? How comfortable would we be to have a man write in the Times about the books that makes him assume a women to be “the worst”? Mostly what this does is to nudge the status spiral of literature down rather than up.

Sally Rooney is very good at skewering this kind of not-as-self-aware-as-it-seems culture and I look forward to her next novel being both popular among readers and a popular target of scorn among self-consciously literary readers.

Anyone who is enjoying Catcher at the moment, by the way, is well advised to read Franny and Zooey next, followed by The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen for a view from a similar period (though in Britain) of what it is like to be a teenage girl.

What and How to Read

Janan Ganesh wrote in the FT that “To read well is to ignore the now. This is true of no other art form, because no other art form is so time-intensive.” He does have a point of course—, but the idea that we should ignore modern books made me chuckle a little, because while Ganesh writes like a highbrow what he said brought to mind Virginia Woolf’s satire of middlebrow consumption habits:

Queen Anne furniture (faked, but none the less expensive); first editions of dead writers, always the worst; pictures, or reproductions from pictures, by dead painters; houses in what is called “the Georgian style” — but never anything new, never a picture by a living painter, or a chair by a living carpenter, or books by living writers, for to buy living art requires living taste.

I will be reading the new Alan Hollinghurst, Sally Rooney, and Susannah Clarke novels this summer/autumn. And I just finished James, which is superb. Maybe C.S. Lewis’s old motto is closer to the truth: “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” That’s not exactly how I read, but it might be closer to what most people will accept as a “rule”… And imagine if, following Ganesh’s rule, you had missed out on reading George Eliot or Seamus Heaney! Serious readers must always aim to have a living taste, which requires reading both the old and the new.

Arsy-versy Argy-bargy

This is just excellent. About the genius of Chaucer. (Note the Bloom reference further down. The Anxiety of Influence really has become one of those ideas that creeps in everywhere.) As one would hope in an essay about Chaucer, this piece contains lots of high-minded scholarly information, a very pleasant writing style, and phrases like, “Pope’s tendency to slip emetics into Grub Street rivals’ drinks”. I also learned this interesting fact: Chaucer is “the third most-quoted author in the Oxford English Dictionary, after Shakespeare and Walter Scott.”

For a writer to be all things to all men, he must know a bit about things, and a lot about men—not to mention a lot about language and literature. Had Chaucer not been born into a mercantile environment and had the opportunity to mingle with Italians by the Thames, he may have struggled with Italian, and had he not spent so much time around nobility, he may not have learned French. His narratives are mostly borrowed from Latin and Romance-language sources (including Boccaccio’s Decameron, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun). His forms and genres almost all derive from French minstrel romances and fabliaux (bawdy medieval stories), and, more granularly, from the verse structures of poets such as Guillaume de Machaut, from whom Chaucer stole the seven-line form now known as “rime royal” or the “Chaucerian stanza.” And he may never have thought about writing in English had he not observed how Dante elevated Florence’s vernacular in his Commedia (1321), a technique Chaucer noticed while in Tuscany for diplomatic work. Based on all of this, some critics, such as Marion Turner, have argued that it is impossible to cut off Chaucer and his legacies from European contexts. Very little in his work is sui generis. He invented in the Latin sense of invenire—to find and discover. “Had he lived in a different time and place,” the scholar Jeremy J. Smith suggests, “he would have ‘invented’ different things.” His work was more conflation than divine afflatus.

Pope Francis argues for the value of reading literature

Does a bloody good job too.

AI cheating

One way to deal with the fact that AI makes it hard to assign traditional literature essays to students (though historically cheating has been at about 50%!) is to use close reading to compare literature with AI generated writing. What a good idea!

Robbins said the University of Utah has adopted a similar approach. She showed me the syllabus from a college writing course in which students use AI to learn “what makes writing captivating.” In addition to reading and writing about AI as a social issue, they read literary works and then try to get ChatGPT to generate work in corresponding forms and genres. Then they compare the AI-generated works with the human-authored ones to suss out the differences.

Personally, I hope to see the return of memorisation. Knowing the text used to be a core part of studying literature and one thing AI cannot do is be your own memory. Requiring students to turn up and either on paper or orally demonstrate extensive knowledge of the texts, which is then used as a basis for discussion sounds very old school, but maybe the wheel is about to turn. Asking questions of ChatGPT4o like “Write about seriousness in the work of Jonathan Swift or Daniel Defoe or both. Give quotations to support your answer” yields reasonably thin answers, so it shouldn’t be too hard to start identifying which students really do know the material, especially in exam conditions. (More good exam questions here, including: “Could computers ever write poems as well as humans do?”)

Austen and abolition

New research by the always-worthwhile Austen scholar Devoney Looser shows that three of Jane Austen’s six brothers were public abolitionists. This is an article outlining the findings, written by Looser herself.

Taken together, these discoveries about the abolitionist activism of three of Jane Austen’s six brothers add weight to the theory that by the end of her life, cut short by illness at age 41, the novelist may herself have been on the road to becoming a passionate, active and public supporter of abolition.

Diaries in the 1560s

People mocked Harold Bloom for saying Shakespeare invented the human. What he meant was that Shakespeare discovered the human in literature; he discovered self-consciousness. And guess what? The first people to keep personal diaries, that is, to write down self-reflective thoughts in private, seem to have lived in rural England in the 1560s. Exactly when and where Shakespeare was born. There is so much about Elizabethan England that makes Bloom’s thesis seem sensible to me, and this is the latest brick in the wall.

What was Conrad up to?

Reading New Yorker articles can be frustrating because of the way the page jumps around as it loads (and the subscription offer that butts in) but this piece about Conrad by Leo Robson is worth your attention, maybe especially if you don’t know any Conrad. The piece is a few years old, but it was the centenary of Conrad’s death recently.

What saves Conrad’s work from coldness and nihilism is his embrace of an alternative ideal. If irony exists to suggest that there’s more to things than meets the eye, Conrad further insists that, when we pay close enough attention, the “more” can be endless. He doesn’t reject what Marlow calls “the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation” in favor of nothing; he rejects them in favor of “something,” “some saving truth,” “some exorcism against the ghost of doubt”—an intimation of a deeper order, one not easily reduced to words. Authentic, self-aware emotion—feeling that doesn’t call itself “theory” or “wisdom”—becomes a kind of standard-bearer, with “impressions” or “sensations” the nearest you get to solid proof. Marlow may be just another partial observer, another myopic pair of eyes, but he knows what he is, so we trust his sincerity about the “glamour” he found in the East, or the depth of his engagement with Jim’s fate:

He swayed me. I own to it, I own up. The occasion was obscure, insignificant—what you will: a lost youngster, one in a million . . . an incident as completely devoid of importance as the flooding of an ant-heap, and yet the mystery of his attitude got hold of me as though he had been an individual in the forefront of his kind, as if the obscure truth involved were momentous enough to affect mankind’s conception of itself.

High culture as counter culture

Alice Gribbin sent me this after my recent piece about elites and high culture. Not only is a superb review of the main ideas of high and low culture in the last hundred and fifty years, but it ends with this lovely sentence.

If high culture must go into opposition in twenty-first-century America, at least it should exercise a privilege that is unavailable to a clerisy, but has always accrued to countercultures—the enjoyment of a certain stylish defiance.

I prefer to think of myself as part of a counterculture than as a reactionary, which is what I do so often feel like. As Kirsch says, “the most unsettling thing about high culture is that it is not a means to an end but an end in itself.”

Handwritten notes

This meta study suggests that you get better results when making notes by hand rather than typing. But the effect size isn’t very large, so the effects aren’t that impressive. I do a lot on paper, but because I think it helps you think differently, rather than because of any retentive power.

Memorizing poetry

First rate stuff. I enjoyed every sentence.

Graves vs Milton

Robert Graves’ 1957 polemical close reading of Milton is full of fine common sense. “A poem is legitimately judged by the standards of craftsmanship implied in the form used.” And, “Poetry (need I say?) is more than musically arranged. It is sense; good sense; penetrating often heartrending sense.”

Lewis in Oxford

Good review of the new bio, which I have not read. I enjoyed this particularly.

He was required to write an official account of his term, and did so as a five-act drama in blank verse entitled “The Tragi-Comicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald”. It survives in the college archives, as does a large corpus of his letters and book drafts written in his neatly slanted handwriting (the illustrations in this book are a pleasure to peruse).