Diary of a Reader

August 24, 2015

Just finished Echopraxia, easily the closest thing to A Canticle for Leibowitz I've ever read. Saltier. Updated. But it reminded me, for all its salt, of the reasons I used to read. So many years in grad school and teaching the Standard Works of the Church of Literature take a toll on the sensibilities. These past two years—one as a low-level administrator developing spreadsheets and puppeteering committees, and the other teaching the austere and crumbling art of academic writing—have liberated me from the so-called literary novel, and from the pretensions of the academic jet-set.

There's gold in them thar hills, and most of it will never suffer the indignity of pallid classroom light. The downside is that most of it will never grace and challenge the intellects of the very army of apparently critical thinkers it ought to.

On reflection, my best experiences teaching literature have either a) broken free of the constraints of the anthologies and the Harvard syllabus, or b) resulted from falling into the cracks between movements and texts and crusty old questions. What I love about sci-fi is that at its best it eschews constraints, plunges out into varied and often frightening spaces, plucks the common chord if that's what's needed, but as often discomposes, jars, or finds new melodies and harmonies that suit the stuff at hand.

I was thinking about this the other day: instead of worrying over "texts you ought to know," my teaching from now on will say, "this is reading, and this, and this, and maybe something I and others haven't thought of yet is also reading" and "now go read." At the cold heart of my disenchantment with the scholasticizing of literature is a longstanding parallel disenchantment with scholarly criticism, or any criticism that forgets reading and worries over its own survival. To borrow from Watts: the un-augmented roach—who reads to read, who moans and marvels over what he reads—even if he doesn't outlive the priests and sadducees, outLIVES them in his reading because the reading reaches him, changes him, and radiates out from him in untraceable and un-diminishable ways.

Some academic critics, and some popular critics, are just such readers, thank goodness. But not enough of them. Most of us remember what it is to read in fevered and forgotten dreams. We itch and twitch with it now and then. But the demands of publication and the tremendous weight of the critical canon, the dues and don'ts of membership, drag us back under, keelhauled and emptied out. We may speak in hushed and sanctimonious tones of Literature, but that's blasphemy.

The art makes no such demands on us, only the club does.

?

P.S.

I should very much like to teach a course without a reading list, where at most I model dynamic, breathing criticism and then say: "Now go find something that thrills you up and down. Distribute it to the class. But on Monday (or Tuesday, or Whenever), you’ll have to walk us through it, show us where the strings and the loose threads are. Help us admire the weave and weight of the cloth. Make it sing so it thrills us just as much."

Yeah, I'd teach that class.