Dear Simon,
What is life, in fact, but a
(dis?)organised digression? In answer to
your question, I’m reading/recently read Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005)
– a novel with a title that makes it sound like it’s an essay,
right? As you probs know, the book is based on my literary boyfriend’s best
work Howards End (1910), and it was, frankly, a joyful read. Both that novel, and its antecedent, feel like
the perfect anodyne for these divisive times where two very different worlds
are forced (imperfectly and with difficulty) to connect. Smith has moved the
action, broadly, to a campus of a US university in which the two contrasting
worlds are headed (ish) by the liberal professor Howard Belsey, and on the other
side a cultural conservative critic Monty Belsey (a kind of Clarence
Thomas/Roger Scruton figure).
It, alongside your current predilection for
non-fiction, made me think of a long distant time (maybe three years ago, alas
when I was young, alas) in the run up to my MA when I was (do you detect
here the tell-tale shimmer of a flashback?: there I am, rifling through various
tomes on the third floor of the Warwick University Library, comparing the
classmarks on the spines to those scrawled on a scrap of paper) thinking
about the possibility of what seemed (in my view at that time) to have fallen
away in the academy: a liberal criticism in the tradition of
Arnold, Mill, Trilling, of Forster himself (I imagine it would have drawn on
figures like Dewey, Rorty, Nussbaum also). I was interested in a criticism that didn’t
clatter and clank with jargon (though wasn’t anti-intellectual), was deeply
felt and thought, that was aware of the beautiful, and of a public beyond
simply others working in literature departments, and the promotion of reading
more generally. It would have the joyful
enthusiasm of Marshall Berman’s work. It
would have been imaginative (I have almost always preferred the writing of
novelists on other novelists). It would
definitely have been mindful of the penultimate sentence of the introduction to
Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950): ‘The job of criticism
would seem to be then, to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination
of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and
difficulty.’
Now, don’t ask me what all that looks like in
practice. My life digressed into other things, or that was a digression from
those other things, and I returned unto those things. All I write about this is tentative as a) it
was wrested and rescued through the flicker and shimmer of a flashback heat
haze, b) my past self, as much as my current self, was a moron, c)
tentativeness is a good disguise for vagueness.
Yourz vaguely,
James
P.S.
Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation is
great.
P.P.S.
What does keeping a reading diary strictly involve?
Or what is your approach to it?
No comments:
Post a Comment