Living the texts; Herrnstein Smith's sonnet-obsession and Tartt's Dionysian madness

“[…] Julian answered the door exactly as he had the first time, by opening it only a crack and looking through it warily, as if there were something wonderful in his office that needed guarding, something that he was careful not everyone should see.” (Tartt, The Secret History, p27)

The precious something Julian guards is what draws Richard Papen into the dark story which unfolds; the allure of the Classics is not, for Richard, a matter of intellectual or scholarly pursuit, but a personal fascination with the members of the Greek class;  “I envied them, and found them attractive […] Studied or not, I wanted to be like them.” (pp32-3)

For my final post, I would like to read the personal immersion in the Classics of the characters in The Secret History against the ideas about experience hindering our assessment of literature presented by Herrstein Smith in “Contingencies of Value”.

The most interesting character of the novel for me was Julian. There was so much mystery and fascination surrounding him, building throughout the novel – then what? A thoroughly anti-climactic response; he simply disappears, leaving his students terribly alone and disillusioned. I think Julian represents something important when it comes to critical and uncritical reading. Julian in many ways is constituted by his students’ thoughts of him; his aura of wonder and otherworldliness is a romanticisation by those he affected, which Richard finally acknowledges at the end; that he has a tendency to ‘reinvent’ Julian because Julian himself was “constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort.” (p576) I believe that the character of Julian can be read, at least in this case, as representing the nature of a personal connection with literary subjects. Like a beloved novel allows room for our own personal fantasies and imaginations, the Greek class projects their own ideas of their divine teacher onto Julian, and he becomes to each of them something personal and individual.

Julian and his Classical teachings represent to Henry and the others what Shakespeare’s sonnets mean to Herrnstein-Smith; she claims she will fail to “evaluate” them because she is too close to them, her personal life is too imbued with their presence and content.

I cannot evaluate Shakespeare’s sonnets partly because I know them too well. […] Experience not only deepens us but also batters, scars, individualises, and specialises us: experience is a provincialism of its own, separating us from our fellow creatures […]. (Herrnstein-Smith, p5)

Julian’s Greek students also have the trouble of being far too close to their academic pursuits to view him in a critical light. Their study of Greek goes beyond the classroom and into the very essence of their beings; Richard notes, before he joins them, that “they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world” (p32). The Dionysian madness Henry, Francis, Camilla and Charles achieve is the ultimate, pure literary experience, completely detached from oneself, with all the prejudices, scepticisms and critical faculties gone, and only a complete and utter immersion in the text. An impossible fantasy for any real reader, but a hyperbolic picture of the impersonality Smith claims she lacks, and hence is unable to give her experiences of the sonnets as an authoritative one. While Smith writes that in reading certain sonnets, “I have lived the poem”, her “living” the literary is dependent on her personal, external experiences, while in Henry’s Bacchic freedom personal being and all the world are one, as “the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self” (p187). But Smith is immersed enough in the sonnets for all the poetic technicalities that fill high-school poetry classes – “form, style, logic, figurative language” – disappear. She “can’t see them anymore”, as they have “been absorbed and reabsorbed into the art of the whole and my experience of it”. So perhaps this personal, emotional connection to the texts, which allow the essence of the poetry take over, is the closest we can really get to the Dionysian ecstasy Tartt’s characters experience.

At the end of the novel, Richard says of Julian that “I loved him […] for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be” (p576). Like the sentiments of Shakespeare’s sonnets allow Smith to live them in light of her own life, the personal connections to works of literature allow us to experience them in relation to life outside academic pursuit; whether this is a hindrance to critical objective or not, we are probably richer for it.

Leuschner and Friday's seminar

Firstly, I'll say that I was surprised, amused, but not at all offended by Fiona's criticism of Wordsworth Classics. Being an owner of a few of those, I pulled one off my bookshelf in an attempt to decipher the faults and flaws of my $10 paperback edition of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Having never before encountered the topic of editions discussed in Friday's seminar, I can't say I found anything wrong with the text itself; there are line numbers, and the acts and scenes seem in accordance with the Oxford Shakespeare edition. [I mention the line numbers because the old anthology of Shakespeare I used to read from had no page numbers, let alone line numbers.] The superiority of the Oxford Shakespeare edition is in the notes and introduction; having a personal preference for footnotes as opposed to endnotes, the Oxford edition offers an abundance of informative and relevant footnotes, whereas the Wordsworth Classics edition offers endnotes at only a basic level, most of which give information which a dose of common sense could probably tell you. But if I had never been to yesterday's seminar in which we discussed the quality and effort put into different editions, I daresay I wouldn't have ever paid attention to such details and, if needing the text, would have simply grabbed the closest copy, or even decided on the slimmer Wordsworth edition, half the thickness of the Oxford Shakespeare. I suppose my point is that perhaps there are others like me, who may have recently had their eyes opened to the wide, complicated world of editions; as opposed to my ingenuous state before, when seeing a shelf of neatly arranged paperbacks with matching fonts, colours and aligned spines in a bookstore was enough assurance of an edition's authority and trustworthiness.




Onto the topic of this week's readings, Eric Leuschner offers a cultural history and critique on the obsession over a book’s external glamour:

"While the publishers and advertising touted the physical characteristics, emphasizing the external nature, little was said about the internal, that is, the work itself. It is as if the internal, or the content, is assumed to be worthy of the apparatus."

The concept of a text being ‘unworthy’ of its external pomp is an interesting one. I think we’d often regard the text itself (to be Romantic, the very essence of the text, not just the words printed on paper) as easily transcending its mortal coil of paper, thread, glue and ink. But to think the other way around, that perhaps the text doesn’t deserve its elaborate housing, makes the question of literary value or presence less philosophical and more a question of literary capital and commodity.

Leuschner tracks the commodity of books within the so-called “leisure class” (by which I assume he means non-academic readers) to the point in which they become luxury household furnishings; deluxe editions, he says, quoting a1930 article of Academy, are “a necessary furniture of the house – not of the mind”.

The detail Leuschner uses to describe these lavish deluxe editions – gilt edges, silk paper, engravings and ornate bindings – makes me wonder whether our modern taste in book-exteriors are a reaction against all this. I’m thinking specifically of Popular Penguins; those uniform, orange, $10 paperbacks; “Popular Penguins at a Perfect Price”. Gratifyingly simple, modest, appealingly clean cut and unadorned. Perhaps in 1900 “the abundant cheap editions of “classic” novels is a problem […] because of the attendant deterioration in the physical nature of the book”, but now it seems the Popular Penguins express a ‘back-to-basics’ campaign of books, when all texts are equal and the uniformity of those bold orange covers allow the text within to speak for itself.

Foucault's "What is an Author?"

Foucault begins his lecture entitled “What is an Author?” by stating outright that he has no intention whatsoever of answering his posed question: “Far from offering a solution”, he writes, “I will attempt to indicate some of the difficulties related to these questions”.


Foucault’s treatise addresses the issue of “authorship”, a reaction against Barthes’ and Derrida’s theses on the same subject. He immediately demonstrates his argument that authorship is a classification or description, rather than a pronoun, when he casually alludes to Nietzsche; “God and man died a common death”. An immediately recognizable reworking of Nietzsche’s widely-quoted statement, “God is dead” [The Gay Science, 1882], Foucault equates our lost concept of an author with the “death” of Christianity and its values. Moreover, he introduces “author function” – that is, what fuels our insistent interest in the “author” and the subsequent assumptions we make about a text based on its ‘author’ – in referencing the iconic quote and iconic author. “Nietzsche”, just like “Plato”, “Descartes”, or indeed “Foucault”, are not just names, but descriptions of a text’s validity and significance. We attribute an immediate sense of authority and gravitas to their words, a point Foucault conveys acutely.

He then discusses the differences of “author function” between the arts and sciences, and highlights an inevitable truth in comparing the spheres of learning; while scientific writings can have a valid claim to “truth”, or the objective nature of the world, the arts can have no such black-and-while objectivity, and thus ‘authorship’ [which – and this article prompted me to look into it – shares the same etymological root as ‘authority’] will always attract more focus.


It was difficult not to notice Foucault’s bias towards “thinkers” such as himself like Freud and Marx, as opposed to novelists. Comparing Marx and Freud with nineteenth-century writer Ann Radcliffe seems rather unjust. Pitting Radcliffe and her Gothic-Romance novels against the likes of Freud and Marx is hardly a fair contrast, but the example illustrates his attitudes regarding the difference between the author of a literary, fictional text with founders of a discipline/discourse. Radcliffe’s novels influence the genre of nineteenth century Gothic fiction, “various characteristic signs, figures, relationships, and structures that could be integrated into other books”. While the novelist’s function as an author goes beyond her written work (i.e. by developing a certain genre), the “initiators of discursive practices” (and Foucault uses Freud as a paradigmatic example and the subsequent field of psychoanalysis) create a space in which new, different ideas can be introduced, rather than writers following a particular convention; they establish “endless possibility of discourse”. Foucault’s point is convincing and compelling, but I still think its success relies on the examples he chooses. Substituting, say, Ovid, or Shakespeare, or the great Romantic poets for Ann Radcliffe, Foucault would have a more difficult time arguing that writers of literature have not completely revolutionised not only the way we write, but the way we think, and shaped our collective social psyche, just as much as Marx or Freud, with influences which extend far beyond their genres.

All in all, Foucault hopes for a time when our romanticised and overrated focus on “the author” can give way to more insightful questions about literature and discourse. Foucault’s paper is certainly a sophisticated argument, taking the reader through the way we use the most basic language (pronouns and names) and thereby exemplifying how an author is something quite different and abstract. But it may make one wonder whether the benefits of anonymity he preaches are perhaps making a virtue out of necessity. Some of our most canonical “authors” have their authorship or identity in doubt, such as Shakespeare and Homer. While their influences are incontestable, we may never know the truth of their texts’ much debated “authorship”. For such cases, perhaps it would be best to, pragmatically, turn to Foucault’s solution.

And as for his final question, “What matter who’s speaking?” Well, what should we think of this controversial thesis if it weren‘t Foucault’s name atop the page? Being against the idea doesn’t save Foucault from the inevitable fate of authorship.

On Edmondson’s “Against Reading”

Part of the ingenuity of Mark Edmondson’s “Against Reading” is the way he opens; I’ll admit I gave an inward groan seeing the names of Marx, Foucault, Derrida –thinkers whose names are practically unavoidable in the sphere of the arts nowadays. But this is, I think, Edmondson’s very intention. We see the iconic names of these intellectual giants in a sentence which denounces the whole exercise of “reading” works of literary art. He takes the legacy of Western thought, embodied in the names of these thinkers, and turns it on its head with his bold statement: “I wish that’d we declare a moratorium on readings”.


The body of Edmondson’s essay is rich with literary references and examples. His own personal story of enlightenment in reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X enforces his view on literature; a “second chance” for the “socialisation” which is a necessary step on the journey to adulthood, and an encouragement to "befriend the text" in place of academic "readings". Edmondson’s essay writing itself is carefully stylised. He uses Latin etymology (“educare” = “to lead out of”), casual references to Plato whilst discussing pedagogy – in doing so Edmondson creates not just an argument but an overall sense of the richness, colour and history of the literary and pedagogical tradition. His choices of examples are also carefully picked to create the greatest possible contrast between ‘academic’ scrutiny and the intrinsic joy of literature. William Blake, the English Romantic poet, represents literary purity and joy, and is contrasted with Marx, “assumed to be a superior figure”. His quip of “there are in fact any number of Marxist readings of Blake out there; I know of no Blakean readings of Marx” is, I think, with tongue-in-cheek, but he certainly raises a well-thought idea that not only does a “Marxist reading” detract from Blake, but from Marx as well. Neither of their works are able to be seen in their own light, for their own merit. In this sense, Edmondson presentation of his argument is sophisticated and well thought out.

My main qualm with Edmondson’s thesis is his conclusion about the field of literary criticism. Edmondson presents a highly idealised, romanticized and uplifting picture of books and their merit. The books written by academics today, he criticises, “are composed as performances”. Unlike the texts that professors teach, the texts they write are “could not conceivably be meant to provide spiritual or intellectual nourishment”. He includes himself in this category: “our books are written not from love but from need”. Edmondson critiques the sense of audience modern academics ‘perform’ for. But it’s inconceivable to say that the greatest works of literature – those indeed which have inspired generations to come – are highly conscious of their audience and how their art will be received. If we think back to the very beginnings of poetry, the Ancient oral tradition, the travelling bard was entirely dependent on pleasing his audience; the epics of Homer or Virgil is extremely self-reflexive. Later on, the Renaissance writers worked under the patronage of aristocrats, or for theatre companies. The most canonical of texts had this same awareness of audience – Edmondson’s ideal of writing as a free expression of one’s soul is a product of the Romantic period, and however charming and seductive it may be, we can’t forget that it is a relatively new ideology, which leads back to figures like Marx and Foucault, who remind us that social and cultural ideas are forever changing. This leads me, at least, to wonder whether it is really possible (however desirable) to “give readings a rest” as Edmondson wishes after all.

The Secret History

This is just a test post, never blogged before. But for something to say, I've finished reading Donna Tartt's The Secret History and absolutely loved it. Such a contrast in both style and matter to Henry James. A haunting and highly intelligent story, especially it's dealing with lost languages and the mysticism of the ancient world. Am now very inspired to learn Ancient Greek.