“Fourscore and seven years ago, our “fathers”—with half the population excluded from the start—“brought forth”—with the dubious, always questionable assumption of “progress”—itself a value judgment about the meaning of history, which opens up the inherently dubious notion of “history” itself—“a “new” “nation”—a double double scare quote, with the claim of “new” at once instantly erasing the presence of all indigenous peoples and affirming the utterly questionable notion that anything can be qualitatively or authentically “new,” which again calls the very notion of “history” into question—and the word “nation” presupposing a commonality that may be nothing more than a kind of conspiracy of consent, a conglomeration of power meant to enrich the few and marginalize almost everyone else—“conceived”—privileging the idea that anything so questionable as a “nation” could be made up, as if out of nothing—“in “Liberty”—

Well, that’s just too much. We’re going to have to stop right here. We can’t even begin to get into “dedicated to the proposition”—we’ll let that pass—that “all”—“all”? Really? “men”—again—“are “created”—by whom? By what? For what purpose? To what end?—“equal.” Yes. Stop right here.

After the seminar

Greil Marcus, an editor of the New Literary History of America, in a piece called “Scare Quotes are the Enemy”

What Marcus’s parody captures about bien-pensant readings  is their dainty horror at the discovery that people in the past did not think like Us. Which is odd in a generation that rabbits on about the Other.  Texts are produced only to be decontaminated. It wasn’t us, cry the critics, we didn’t silence the Other. It was Them.

Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.

Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English, was a declaration at the time that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with the pre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of American undergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of the time was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.

William M. Chace, ‘The Decline of the English Department’ , The American Scholar online

My stress, my experience. All very well for me, because I went on to teach it.  But for all the others, while there’s no evidence that their degrees in English led to blasted lives, the traditional liberal writ had long ceased to run. English Departments at their height – as Chace points out, a height briefly occupied in the middle years of the 20th century -  were preparing students for a world which no longer existed.

A belated cheer for Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi’s book combines memoir with an intimate account of reading for survival in the Mullahs’ Iran.  Nafisi is an academic specialising in fiction. She believes passionately in ‘art as a human complication’ (James’s phrase). Complication as we encounter it in the best Western fiction is always intolerable to the orthodox. Some of us have lived through this conflict – in very comfortable circumstances – in respect to the absolutism of the Left, and later of the women’s movement (Ti-Grace Atkinson’s ‘burn all the books’).

Nafisi describes how, in a class discussion of Daisy Miller, one Islamist declares simply:  Daisy is immoral and ought to be killed. In this milieu, ambiguity and irony become heretical, to suspend judgment immoral, to doubt, a crime.

Nafisi teaches out of commitment to those values and is sacked because of them. Before finally leaving Iran she retreats into private life where she reads to sustain herself, then forms a small group of gifted former students, a cell of freedom.

It’s a humbling experience to read this book. It makes me angry to remember Frederic Jamison’s (representative) claim that there is no space outside ideology.  Stand on Mars and that might be a passable remark. Here there is still a distinction to be made between Popper’s ‘open’ and ‘closed’ societies, here we need to remember how the Left in Iran joined forces with the mullahs to oust the liberals and the liberal Shiite clerics. Here on earth there is a choice to be made between a society in which books, films and TV can provide a ‘human complication’ and a society which tries to derive totalising laws from dumb faith.

The question of the fucked chicken, for example. The Ayatollah approved of chicken-fucking as a sexual outlet for single men. He was then asked whether such a chicken could be eaten.

The best review I’ve found online is Hannes Stein’s for Die Welt (in German). The Anglosphere publisher sees fit to quote Geraldine Brooks on the front cover of the paperback.

Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book.

Open societies have their own problems.

. . . radicals and reformers in mid-19th-century England were to be defined above all as sympathizers with the American Revolution and with the cause of the Union in the Civil War. Dickens was scornful of the first and hostile to the second. His exiguous chapter on slavery in American Notes was lazily annexed word-for-word from a famous abolitionist pamphlet of the day, and employed chiefly to discredit the whole American idea. But when it came to a fight on the question, he was on balance sympathetic to the Confederate states, which he had never visited, and made remarks about Negroes that might have shocked even the pathologically racist Carlyle. I had not understood, before. . . that the full title, American Notes for General Circulation, was a laborious pun on the supposed bankruptcy of the whole “currency” of the United States.

It’s obvious from the non-fiction that Dickens was no kind of systematic thinker. He lived with moral muddles, contradictions and deep-rooted prejudice. That’s there in the work as well (no Flaubertian defences here) and especially in the way his denouements so often depend on the figure of the benign capitalist – the Brothers Cheeryble descending on a machine.  His novels are full of vividly-created characters and types from the growing lower-middle class. This was new. But as I read him, Dickens had no interest in people getting above themselves. American Notes is full of condescension.

Is he then a radical novelist at all? Perhaps so . . .

As to daily news, there is no dearth of that commodity.  This
passenger is reported to have lost fourteen pounds at Vingt-et-un
in the saloon yesterday; and that passenger drinks his bottle of
champagne every day, and how he does it (being only a clerk),
nobody knows.  The head engineer has distinctly said that there
never was such times – meaning weather – and four good hands are
ill, and have given in, dead beat.  Several berths are full of
water, and all the cabins are leaky.  The ship’s cook, secretly
swigging damaged whiskey, has been found drunk; and has been played
upon by the fire-engine until quite sober.  All the stewards have
fallen down-stairs at various dinner-times, and go about with
plasters in various places.  The baker is ill, and so is the
pastry-cook.  A new man, horribly indisposed, has been required to
fill the place of the latter officer; and has been propped and
jammed up with empty casks in a little house upon deck, and
commanded to roll out pie-crust, which he protests (being highly
bilious) it is death to him to look at.  News!  A dozen murders on
shore would lack the interest of these slight incidents at sea.

Dickens, making a rough passage to America in 1842. The propped-up pastry cook I’m sure was so, almost as if they were expecting the writer whose books are full of such stretchers. I’m enjoying American Notes partly for these bits, for the sudden flash of that wild imagination.

But mostly, Dickens here is the journalist and Victorian ‘improver’, and too well informed about how much at home needed improving to patronise the New World.  In Boston, he diligently tours prisons, asylums and orphanages. In an institution for the blind he comes across Laura Bridgman, blind, deaf and dumb, who was taught to read and write by the extraordinary Dr Robert Howe.  She was, says Wikipedia,’ the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education in the English language’. Dickens gives us Howe’s own touching description of their work.

It’s not all blue-book, however. When he goes to hear a famous preacher address a congregation of sailors the novelist wakes up and begins to take notes.

‘Who are these – who are they – who are these fellows? where do
they come from?  Where are they going to? – Come from!  What’s the
answer?’ – leaning out of the pulpit, and pointing downward with
his right hand:  ‘From below!’ – starting back again, and looking
at the sailors before him:  ‘From below, my brethren.  From under
the hatches of sin, battened down above you by the evil one.
That’s where you came from!’ – a walk up and down the pulpit:  ‘and
where are you going’ – stopping abruptly:  ‘where are you going?
Aloft!’ – very softly, and pointing upward:  ‘Aloft!’ – louder:
‘aloft!’ – louder still:  ‘That’s where you are going – with a fair
wind, – all taut and trim, steering direct for Heaven in its glory,
where there are no storms or foul weather, and where the wicked
cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’

Did he take notes? Perhaps the years of Hansard reporting refined an already wonderful memory. Writing does that.

The book is not short of time’s ironies:

In all the public establishments of America, the utmost courtesy
prevails.  Most of our Departments are susceptible of considerable
improvement in this respect, but the Custom-house above all others
would do well to take example from the United States.

So far I’m enjoying this a lot more than the last book-length account I read by a visitor to the US. This was Bernard-Henri Lévy’s American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. I read it as it came out in The Atlantic with disbelief (that someone had paid big money for this crap) and envy (of the expense account). It was fatal to the book even to think about Toqueville, let alone to re-open Democracy in America. Garrison Keillor’s review in the NYT seemed to me dead-on, substance as well as tone – the patroniser patronised into the ground. But intellectuals in America lined up to piss on Keillor. Their burden was that the NYT had given this Important Book to a middlebrow writer.  The newly-Americanised Christopher Hitchens called him ‘a vulgar jerk’.  OK. My book on America will be called The US: 400 Years of the Cultural Cringe.

It is a universal law that people give a bad account of themselves when they speak. They cannot find the words for what they truly feel. At a loss, they say what someone else has said, or what they think they should say, and end up parodying what is in their hearts.

Hence the need for literature.

As with what they speak, so with what they hear. Which is why you will find so many intelligent people prepared to listen to and read material that is beneath them. It is as though aesthetically and linguistically we lag behind our own natures. Thus we see adults who have thought long and felt deeply squandering themselves on Harry Potter.

Hence the need to teach literature.

Seems the French regard the good ol’ shiny wrapper round a paperback as a bit daring, to judge from a piece in Le Figaro. Can this one really be an example of what worries them? (It’s the 2009 winner, Trois femmes puissantes by Marie Ndiaye.)

Are they “behind” us with other forms of in-yer-face promotion?

(Click on the pic.)

Which reminded me of Auden’s ‘Under Which Lyre’, a rhyming address to Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard 1946.

Encamped upon the college plain
Raw veterans already train
As freshman forces;
Instructors with sarcastic tongue
Shepherd the battle-weary young
Through basic courses.

Among bewildering appliances
For mastering the arts and sciences
They stroll or run,
And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter
Are shot to pieces by the shorter
Poems of Donne.

The review quotes a passage which will no doubt go straight into the Beckett primers.

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

As Banville says, this is the kind of pronouncement that has enthralled critics of modernism and it’s gravy for the deconstructionists.

? yet reading again this famous manifesto from the party of the Nothing, one is driven to ask, however timidly, the simple question: why? Why are grammar and style irrelevant, and what is it they are irrelevant to? Why is language “best used where it is most efficiently abused”? Why should we contribute to the disrepute of language as the next best thing to dismissing it altogether?

One day, I hope, someone will be able to trace the full variety of motives for the twentieth century’s attacks on the organised and ordered word and the various goals of the attackers.

Oh, Banville gave me an idea for the next Wordability competition. Sharpen your keyboards.

Leighton, 'Study'

For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read.

“At a time of immense cultural pessimism, the NEA is pleased to announce some important good news. Literary reading has risen in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter century,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “This dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working. Cultural decline is not inevitable.”

Maybe not. But any statistician will tell you to wait for the next survey, and maybe the one after that: it may be a dead cat bounce. Still, it’s way better than more decline. Pity about poetry and drama – still sinking.

The full report can be downloaded here, and in the same place you can find a six page summary of the Reading at Risk report which started the heartburn.