Literary Studies: Planets or Bookcases?

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. – T. S. Eliot, "Gerontion"

When I was a kid I devoured the Swedish comic book adventures of Bamse – the strongest and kindest bear in the world whose superhero fix was not Kryptonite but bee’s honey prepared by his granny. His sidekick Skalman, an anthropomorphic turtle sporting a yellow hat, was my first hero. He was a bundle of endearing contradictions: an Enlightenment spirit and Aspie, a ridiculously vain socialist, and the Taylorist inventor of an alarm clock telling him exactly when to eat and nap. 

A true Renaissance turtle, he would often lecture his friends on subjects as diverse as Rembrandt’s later self-portraits, why we pay taxes (“to help each other”), Christian zeal vis-à-vis the gang rape and murder (though not necessarily in that order) of the pagan philosopher Hypatia in 5^th century Alexandria, and the difference between astronomy and astrology. The gravitational pull from Jupiter, he explained in a passionate debunking of pseudo-science, is about the same as that of a book at a distance of a few inches from you. “You do not become who you are,” (at this point his salivary glands were working overtime) “because of the constellation of the planets at the time of your birth; their influence is as negligible as that of a bookcase in the room.” 

Here I am afraid I have to part ways with my childhood hero. How could he – the most erudite turtle to walk the earth (at least on two legs); someone who spent his summer days under the foliage of an oak reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – how could he so underestimate the pull of books? While I do thank my lucky stars for being born in a house full of them, this, I reckon, is more of a metaphorical gesture. My gravitating towards them was on the other hand something real. On a heap next to my wicker-work armchair, misfits, schlemiels and beautiful losers sprung to life and mingled: the homeless albino moose who lost his happy stomping grounds to deforestation and had to drown his sorrows in apple wine while babysitting, bumped into Fiver running away from the destruction of his warren. And they were horrified to hear Sybil’s tale of woe – that 60s cause célèbre who (if we are to believe the psychoanalyst who cashed in on her story) developed severe disassociation syndrome after being sexually abused by her mother from the day she was born.

I think I might need to pull a Holden Caulfield now, lest you think this is turning into a rather bizarre Bildungsroman. No, I am only trying to make a point about the current status of literary studies; bear with me. Fast-forward some years and I find myself leafing through the books my dad bought (but probably never read) from a bargain box at a seaside second-hand bookstore during our summer vacation in Berwick-upon-Tweed. The green cover caught my attention. It looked somber. The guy looked even more somber in a consumptive kind of way:

I should like to lie still

As if I was dead; but feeling

Her hand go stealing

Over my face and head, until

This ache was shed.

I caught myself misreading the last line and tried again. But every time ‘shed’ turned to ‘shared’. Of course I was the speaker, and of course I had someone specific in mind. I hardly remember her name now, but who can forget the Sturm & Drang of adolescence? The more I read the stanza the more I realized that there is (there must be!) a dramatic irony at play here. The speaker is as deluded as any teenage lover, thinking that the beloved is more than a figment of his or her imagination. But every first lover is a Pygmalion. We carve gods or goddesses out of our dreams, and lose our marbles in the process. If the speaker and girl ever met, all that could come out of the tryst would be a shared pain – the realization that the relationship is impossible. While both I and the speaker were blissfully unaware of this, the poem somehow knew. Or maybe we knew but were metaphorically sticking our fingers in the ears with the infuriating “nanananananana” of a toddler? 

I thought of holographic images that change when you tilt them, and reread the lines for the umpteenth time. This was amazing! It was also a sobering experience. Not only did I realize that my consuming desire was far from unique, but a commonplace, something every pimply man and woman had experienced since… well, I didn’t know, but I would eventually work my way backwards via the “joly wo” and “lusty sorwe” of Chaucer’s Troilus to Catullus’s "odi et amo" and Sappho’s amorous blackout. “A single word even,” Shelley writes in his Defence of Poetry, might be “the spark of inextinguishable thought” and that little unassuming “shed” in the D. H. Lawrence poem did it for me. To live is to suffer cognitive dissonance. And behind the tantalizing ambiguities and oxymora of poetic language lies the realization that this is quite all right. We are not alone.

Articles in literary studies don’t come with disclaimers. If a medical research team is funded by Evil Pharma, on the other hand, that is a conflict of interest (between the disinterested nature of science and the not-so-hidden interests of said company) and must be stated as such when they publish. The medical community will consequently exercise caution when interpreting the findings (perhaps to the effect that Thalidomide is a great cure for bipedalism). I thought I’d break the ice by issuing the following disclaimer: I am not a disinterested critic. My writings have everything to do with me and my childhood reading. The ne'er-do-wells mingling in front of my wicker-work armchair taught me how to make connections. Tenuous? Yup. Idiosyncratic? Guilty as charged. But the realization that, not bound by the covers, literary characters can travel through time and space was earth-shattering. They taught me the beauty of the underdog, from Lawrence Ferlinghetti's canine trotter to the mutt in Paul Auster's Timbuktu. They taught me that Everyman and Everywoman are [expletive] geniuses. And much later I would not laugh at Leopold Bloom when he thought that I.N.R.I was short for "Iron Nails Rushed In" or went looking for the back orifices of the Greek goddesses in the Dublin Public Library, but with him! And every time Homer Simpson surprises me I form my lips into a Molly Bloomian YES! But more specifically, my writings on poetry have everything to do with that green Penguin volume I found in my parents’ bookcase when I was sixteen. Everything. The poets I relate to and write about have all had similar experiences; they are all interested in cognitive dissonance and the awesomeness of a language that can convey these states of mind. When Lord Byron was accused of mixing gravity and levity in Don Juan (a poem that features the seasick protagonist entreating his absent lover in the following couplet: “Beloved Julia, here me still beseeching! / Here he grew inarticulate with retching.”) he sent the following letter to his publisher to answer the critic:

who objects to the quick succession of fun and gravity, as if in that case the gravity did not (in intention, at least) heighten the fun. His metaphor is, that 'we are never scorched and drenched at the same time'. Blessings on his experience! Ask him these questions about 'scorching and drenching'. Did he never play at Cricket, or walk a mile in hot weather? Did he never spill a dish of tea over his testicles in handing the cup to his charmer, to the great shame of his nankeen breeches? Did he never swim in the sea at Noonday with the Sun in his eyes and on his head, which all the foam of Ocean could not cool? Did he never draw his foot out of a tub of too hot water, damning his eyes and his valet's? Did he never inject for a Gonorrhea? or make water through an ulcerated Urethra? Was he ever in a Turkish bath, that marble paradise of sherbet and Sodomy? Was he ever in a cauldron of boiling oil, like St John? or in the sulphureous waves of hell? (where he ought to be for his 'scorching and drenching at the same time'). Did he never tumble into a river or lake, fishing, and sit in his wet cloathes in the boat, or on the bank, afterwards 'scorched and drenched', like a true sportsman? 'Oh for breath to utter!' - but make him my compliments; he is a clever fellow for all that - a very clever fellow. (Byron’s Letters and Journals VI:207)

In response to another Don Juan critic he asked rhetorically: “it may be profligate – but is it not life, is it not the thing?” It is. We are scorched and drenched all the time, if not physically so at least metaphorically. If I had not found that D. H. Lawrence poem, however, I might have been as clueless as Byron’s contemporary critic or as modern critics of M. H. Abrams’ ilk, who are deeply uncomfortable with the way Byron “speaks with an ironic counter-voice and deliberately opens a satirical perspective on the vatic stance of his Romantic contemporaries.” (Natural Supernaturalism 13) This is the end of the disclaimer, but there is more to be said. Like the madcap 17^th century librarian Robert Burton, I “confusedly tumbled over divers authors” and turned into the reader, critic and armchair poet that I am today. The gravitational pull from the planets in the solar system did not make me who I am, but (pace Skalman) my parents’ bookcase certainly did.

The planets and the bookcase represent two conceptual views on how to interpret art and literature. According to the planetary notion, a work of literature has less to do with the volition of the author than with the constellation of external forces exerting their pull on the work. These are not necessarily planets, but are commonly referred to as the literary epoch during which the work was written (the assumption is that all works from the same period have family resemblances or share cultural determinants in the form of a certain epistemological or ontological outlook) or as in orthodox Marxism and its more attenuated developments, the material base of society or its ethos. Often sociological, ethnographic and demographic categories are thrown into the mix. The planetary approach is highly useful, but sometimes inadequate. Saying that works of art are in no way determined by material exigency would be laughable. The bookcase in our living room would most likely not have been as well stocked if we were not middle class, and if I grew up in a non-European or non-Western country, its contents would have been different. But beyond this I fail to see how my haphazard readings and trans-generational friendships could be explained by any planetary categories. 

The bookcase approach, on the other hand, emphasizes serendipity, anachronistic affinities, and the Siren song of books heard in dusty attics, seldom-visited library shelves and in the nooks and crannies of used bookstores. It is concerned not with the planetary configurations at the moment of writing or reading but with the hidden paths (textual and psychological) that lead, to quote Harold Bloom, from poem to poem. It can be seen as an attempt to reduce what Richard Rorty saw as the perennial tension between writer and philosopher/critic, between "an effort to achieve self-creation by the recognition of contingency and an effort to achieve universality by the transcendence of contingency." Are the frequent allusions to Middlemarch in Virginial Woolf’s Jacob’s Room indicative of modernism’s ironic reconfigurations of Victorian literature or due to the fact that Woolf quite liked Eliot’s novel? Wary of endowing planets or epochs with agency we bookcase supporters would probably opt for the latter. That is not to say that the approaches are mutually exclusive; they are in fact mutually illuminating. Let us not forget that Skalman claimed that the books in the bookcase exerted the same pull as the biggest planet in the solar system. But it is far from negligible.