It is fundamentally incorrect to contrast bourgeois culture and bourgeois art with proletarian culture and proletarian art. The latter will never exist, because the proletarian regime is temporary and transient. The historic significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consist in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture which is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.
- Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution
Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called “wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.”
Dr. Aragon: Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or… hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy… precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.
- from Woody Allen’s Sleeper
During my first year of teaching, I had the occasion to involve my 8th graders in a contest called something like “The Language Arts Olympics.” I can’t really remember its name, but essentially it was an exercise in vocabulary, sentence structure, and literary elements. Before the kids got started, I thought I had a pretty good idea who would do well. I had a group of students, mostly boys, who were very vocal and very willing to discuss the stuff we read in class. Of course they would be the group to excel in the contest. After I finished grading and looking at the results, I found that a small group of girls, who never said “boo” in my class discussions, blew the doors off. Being a novice teacher, I just could not figure out what made these girls do so well. They had average IQs, and their grades, while not poor, were not stellar either. Finally, I went to their English teacher from the year before and asked her, “What gives?” Being a veteran teacher, she looked at the names and laughed. The girls were insatiable consumers of romance novels going through several a week for years.
I couldn’t believe it. Romance novels are crap. How could anyone develop the vocabulary and command of text that these girls demonstrated by reading crap? And if they read so much, why were their grades not higher? It took me a few years, but I came to see that reading was not in and of itself an indicator of anything. I also learned that my approval did not make a book appealing or appropriate for all of my students.
Because we enact linear lives, the telling of narrative stories is the basis for human communication and understanding. They are endemic to how we exist in our physical and perceptual worlds. Storytelling may modulate with the latest political swing or technological innovation, but its importance to the human experience will remain as long as we are a species of individuals in need of a collective experience. In The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, Mikita Brottman makes the argument that in the novel form, the hearing of stories to the extreme can be a solitary experience that isolates the reader from the social nature of the activity.
Brottman is trying to make a subtle argument and is not out to end reading or to impugn the good name of literacy. Rather, she makes an argument for their importance by rightly attacking the elitist nature of Literature and the Canon as well as their tendency to create an abnormal disconnect between the world as it is and the world as it is perceived. (For those of you who believe that either of those worlds contradicts the existence of the other, just stop reading now and hit your browser’s home button. Thank you.)
Brottman begins by warning against the dangers of reading as an addiction. While I take her point, and have always been a believer in the Middle Path, too much moderation can quickly kill a buzz. In light of what some of my high school students are into, reading is low on my list of dangers. Our literary muckraker moves on to warn against the “high” caused by the freebasing of E. A. Poe, namely, too much reading can sever one’s connection with the pleasures of a more “real” world. At a young age, books were an escape from “reality” and caused her to lock herself in her attic and walk around “whispering” lines from Macbeth. Oh, the horror!
Brottman’s problem is that she makes her case using only herself and favorite authors as evidence. I teach students with learning disabilities. By and large they are a group of non-readers. Guess what? They get wrapped up in football, video games, cars, girls, boys, girls and boys…
… and some wear black and walk around whispering lyrics from Cannibal Corpse. While Brottman quotes some great stuff, and makes some insightful connections, she misses the fact that its not the books, its youth. Books are only one of the things that will “cast a spell” on young people, and they may be one of the best things.
Solitary Vice does move on to make some very weighty and well-argued points regarding the danger of applying class distinction to literature. This idea of privilege or rank leads to trouble for humans in many areas. As I write this, my wife is sitting next to me watching the last part of BBC Planet Earth series, which deals with the future of our impact on the little blue marble. One of the reasons we destroy our environment is the modern human inclination to ignore the physical realities of living inside a very finite sliver of the universe capable of supporting life. Our problems began not when we began seeing ourselves as lord and vassal or proletariat and bourgeoisie, but when we saw ourselves as outside the natural system. In his novel, Ishmael, Daniel Quinn argues that the way out is creating a new narrative for the human race to enact.
(Quick side note: Those few who read this infrequent page on an understandably infrequent basis, will know that my ass is all over this postmodern shit! I am so glad I read this book during an election year!)
Her argument against Joseph Gold, who identifies the human capacity for narrative as a “survival tool”, continues her subtle thinking. She does not disagree with the premise, just the fodder. She suggests that the world of pulp fiction will do the same job as “LITERATURE” (or Big Lit if you’re on K Street.) Brottman sings with the ring of truth on this point as long as she is discussing micro-narrative like “personal loyalty, social conflict, or human crises” Of course, Quinn is speaking of universal narratives, specifically the narrative of how we have come to be at war with our environment.
My favorite moment in the book came when Brottman discusses the true power of great Literature, skillfully acknowledging that such a thing exists after spending many pages knocking it down. That is the correct order, I think. She references a letter from Kafka in which he says, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us.” My mind immediately yelled, “Gooseberries!” referring to the Chekhov story of the same name that boasts this passage:
“Every happy man should have some one with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him — illness, poverty, loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like an aspen-tree in the wind — and everything is all right.”
Two paragraphs later Brottman references the Chekhov story and she and I had the moment (or I alone had it, if you believe her earlier chapters) of collective experience that can be provided by the written word. As I discussed with one of my 11th graders yesterday, H. P. Lovecraft (ironically given the adolescent Brottman’s reading list) is able to reach through time to speak to us.
Ok, brass tacks time. Solitary Vice is a very interesting book that wanders its way through reading and books and their impact on the individual if taken too far. Brottman is an engaging and wickedly well-read narrator, and in addition to appreciating Gooseberries, if those are her legs on the book’s cover (sexist remark coming) I’d be interested in meeting her for a drink. (Punitive moment for sexist remark to come after wife reads blog.) Because I spend my day among older teenagers with a host of learning difficulties including Asperger’s Syndrome and autism, I was particularly interested in one of Brottman’s details that helps me sum up Solitary Vice. She begins one chapter describing Temple Grandin, who is not a house of Jewish worship, but an autistic designer of farming equipment. She describes visual-spatial thinkers as better at understanding the whole rather than noticing the details. I find that Professor Brottman is at her best when focused on the trees without worrying about the forest.
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