Leavis declares the great English novelists as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad at the beginning of this selection. By the end of the selection, he has amended the list to include D.H. Lawrence also. According to Leavis, these writers “not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but…they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.” By defining the great English novelists, Leavis intends to define the great English tradition.

Throughout the selection, Leavis dismisses a panoply of significant British authors:

• Henry Fielding: his subject matter and interests are too limited.
• Samuel Richardson: his subject matter is also limited and his works demand too much of the reader’s time.
• George Moore: he is too concerned with style. (And he wasn’t English, but the difference between British and English seems to have escaped Leavis.)
• “The Trollopes” (Frances and Anthony, I assume): they could not understand and appreciate Austen.
• James Joyce: his work lacks an organic form. (Also not English.)
• Charlotte Brontë: “she couldn’t see why any value should be attached to Jane Austen.”
• Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights seems like “a kind of sport” to Leavis and she only inspired a “minor tradition.”

In the selection I read, Leavis only discusses Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence’s merits that contribute to their inclusion.

• Jane Austen: she is the rare kind of author whose work defines tradition retroactively. By reading Austen and discerning her influences, one can deduce the important novelists of the tradition who came before her.
• George Eliot: she appreciated Austen. From Austen she borrowed a sense of irony related to morality. (I don’t quite understand Leavis’ point, probably because I haven’t read much Eliot, but anyway….)
• D.H. Lawrence: he wrote novels that “demanded no unfamiliar effort of approach” and did not settle into one writing style once it gained success.

From what I can discern from this selection, Leavis believes that Austen is the center of the English tradition and appreciation and indebtedness to her work serves to include or to exclude novelists from the tradition. As one can see, three authors—Charlotte Brontë and the Trollopes—were dismissed due to lack of appreciation of Austen and Eliot seems to have been included because of her indebtedness to Austen.

Leavis is suggesting a deductive (oh, I hope I remembered the distinction between deductive and inductive so that I don’t look like an idiot) process of determining greatness—one approaches a text with a set of standards and the work’s adherence to those standards ascertains its greatness. The greatness is not found within the work.

Why this obsession with greatness? As I said, Leavis believes that defining great novelists will define tradition. But will a text’s lack of greatness make it any less a part of the English tradition? Even novelists that Leavis does not consider great—like Fielding, Richardson, and Fanny Burney—he admits influenced Austen. Thus, aren’t they part of the English tradition? Despite their lack of greatness, they helped mold the center of the English tradition, according to Leavis.

Can someone explain this sentence to me:

The writer [George Eliot] whose intellectual weight and moral earnestness strike some critics as her handicap certainly saw in Jane Austen something more than an ideal contemporary of Lytton Strachey.

Wuh? That sentence makes it sound like Strachey and Austen were contemporaries, but Strachey was born 63 years after Austen died. Eliot died the year that Strachey was born and I doubt that on her deathbed Eliot laid hands on Baby Lytton and proclaimed, “Ah! This boy will grow up to be a writer whom undergrad students will learn of when researching Virginia Woolf! This boy, he reminds me of Jane!” and then croaked. The footnote indicated at the end of that sentence talks about some guy named Peacock—the only Peacock I’m aware of is Thomas Love Peacock, but I would assume he would be classified as a Romantic and not a Victorian….I’m just bloody confused.

Mr. Leavis needed to learn something called parallelism. A critic of his distinction should not have lists of authors in his texts that look like this: “Trollope, Charlotte Yonge, Mrs. Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Charles and Henry Kingsley, Marryat, Shorthouse.” For god’s sack, man, either first and last name, last name only, or title and last name! Don’t use all three options in the same damn sentence! I could make an exception if you had mentioned some of these authors previously by first and last name and on following references called them by only the last name. But you, Frankie, hadn’t mentioned the last-namers previously. And you call Jane Austen “Jane Austen” every damn time you mention her. You refer to George Eliot as “George Eliot” and T.S. Eliot as “Mr. Eliot,” and while I believe you intend the title to imply derision at T.S., good, old George, whom you actually admire, appears to be slighted. And please don’t just start talking about “Richardson” as if everyone should know about whom you are speaking before you mention Clarissa, okay? Some of us, especially those of us who have been reading a lot of women’s lit of late, might think, “Richardson? Dorothy Richardson?” which really isn’t that stupid of an assumption because she was British too. Yeah, yeah, yeah….you’re thinking, “I’m dead! Get over it!” Well, sucks to your assmar, Frankie!

Ahem. Anyway….

In this essay, James Baldwin explores the complexities of both race relationships and familial relationships. Concerning his relationship with his father, Baldwin admits toward the beginning of the essay: “We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride.” This admission sets the tone for the rest of the essay, an idea of both opposition and similarity in this relationship.

Baldwin seemed to spend most of his childhood struggling against his father. His father wanted him to preach like he had while Baldwin wanted to write. He grew up in Harlem where he was in the majority and, against his father’s advice, easily befriended white people. When he moved to New Jersey, he encountered an environment much less friendly to Blacks. He became the minority in a segregated town. The poor treatment he received in New Jersey created a bitterness in Baldwin that matched the bitterness that his father had. His father’s bitterness had become his. He also does not act unlike the paranoid schizophrenic that his father was when he displayed some of his father’s violence at yet another restaurant’s refusal to serve him because he was Black.

In the first few sentences of the essay, Baldwin notes that his sister was born on the same day that his father died and that his father was buried on Baldwin’s birthday. Both of these events suggest a rebirth of sorts and, in a way, the essay ends in a rebirth. At the time of his father’s death, Baldwin has finally come to understand him and realize their similarities. Baldwin’s father has, in effect, been reborn in him.

I don’t believe I’ve ever read a doctor’s account of a surgery. I was surprised that Selzer is so sympathetic to the patient’s position. I would expect a doctor to be comfortable with his tools, but Selzer is as wary of the scalpel as the anesthetized patient on the table. Unlike H.G. Wells’ Dr. Moreau, Selzer fears the power of the knife and the submission that it effects.

Selzer explores the different roles that a doctor can play: “I must confess that the priestliness of my profession has ever been impressed on me”; “And if the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like the verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul”; “But mostly you are a traveler in in a dangerous country, advancing into the moist and jungly cleft your hands have made.”

That last description intrigues me the most; it fits with Selzer’s wariness of the scalpel. Not only does the doctor fear his tool, but the body that he meant to heal. When our bodies fail us, they can feel foreign, treacherous. We expect doctors to make sense of the treachery, reclaim our bodies for us. But Selzer seems to fear our insides as much as we do.

There really isn’t much to say about this collection of critical essays other than I recommend it. I realize that one must be of a certain ilk to enjoy reading a book about a man reading books, but Hornby’s ordinary (in the best sense possible), conversational voice makes these essays very accessible. He offers intelligent critiques of the books he reads, but Hornby remains cognizant, as he does in his novels, that he is writing to his readers and not above them.

In these essays, Hornby is speaking for everyone who struggles with books, in that you have a library somewhere full of books you’ve been meaning to read, books you know you’ll never read, and yet you spend hundreds of dollars a year buying more books that you know you’ll never read but you keep meaning to. He’ll expound on the brilliance of Charles Dickens and spend a month happily reading David Copperfield, but he’ll also abandon a novel for a soccer game. Hornby tackles some fundamental questions: why books? why do we read? why do people write them? what’s the bloody point?

If you are unaware that the title of the collection is a reference, well, it is. The Polyphonic Spree is a very large group of musicians who dress in colorful robes and play hard-to-classify music. Chamber pop would probably be the closest genre I can think of. Elizabeth tells me that it’s an “ambient orchestral experience.” I tell you this so that, in case you go out and read Mr. Hornby’s essays, you will be able to appreciate the humor of his Spree references. See? I take care of you.

Probably the aspect of the English language that bothers me the most is the fact that one word is used for both singular and plural second person. This lack of distinction has spawned several irritating alternative expressions for the plural “you,” “y’all” being the one that particularly frosts my cookies. “You guys” seems to be phrase that irks Alice Walker.

Even though I have heard many arguments against using “guys” as a neutral term for both men and women, I’ve never heard the argument articulated quite as beautifully as Walker does in this essay. The etymology that Walker provides of the word “guy” as both a noun and a verb is
interesting:

It would seem from the dictionary that the verb “guy” is another word for “guide,” or “control”: bearing a very real resemblance to “husband.” It means “to steady, stay, or direct by means of a guy, from the French guying.” The noun means “a boy or man; fellow; chap.” It means “a person whose appearance or dress is odd.” Again, as a verb, “guy” can mean “to tease; to ridicule.” And this last is how I feel it [sic] when the word is used by men referring to women, and by women referring to themselves. I see in its use some women’s obsequious need to be accepted at any cost, even at the cost of erasing their own femaleness, and that of other women. Isn’t it at least ironic that after so many years of struggle for women’s liberation, women should end up calling themselves this?

I understand her position and I’m with Walker until she makes this statement: “I don’t respect ‘guys’ enough to obliterate the woman that I see by calling her by their name.” I think she just means “guys” that fit her definition of “guy,” i.e. controlling, etc., but she sounds a little dismissive of the male sex as a whole. I’m sure there are one or two worthwhile chaps out there.

So, is “guys” preferable to “girls”? Okay, yes, “guys” erases women’s femaleness, but it doesn’t sound as condescending. Though, I suppose, Walker would disagree with that.

“A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman” seems to be Mukherjee’s manifesto of sorts, in that in this essay she states the goal of her writing:

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.

She strives to give an inner life to those normally overlooked—“call them Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese”—“[her] duty is to give voice to continents, but also to redefine the nature of American and what makes an American.”

Mukherjee also states that she considers herself an “American writer, in the American mainstream, trying to expand it,” despite the fact that she was born in India, married and lived in Canada before finally moving to America in 1983. According to Nina Baym, Mukherjee’s interest in using her writing to define “American” and “the American Experience” places her firmly within the American literature tradition. Baym notes in her critical essay “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors” that oftentimes texts that detail the immigrant or minority experience are excluded from the canon because they do not describe the true “American” experience. Mukherjee specifically wants to challenge this notion.

I found this statement interesting: “Wherever I travel in the (very) Old World, I find “Americans” in the making, whether or not they ever make it to these shores.” What makes a person, who has never seen the United States, an American in the making? Mukherjee continues, “I see them as dreamers and conquerors, not afraid of transforming themselves, not afraid of abandoning some of their principles along the way,” and then mentions her main character from Jasmine, who fits that description. But why these characteristics? And why does Mukherjee define them as specifically American?

I thought that I would never read another piece of literature written by Sherman Alexie after the disaster that was FYE and Smoke Signals (Sorry, Kim), but I’m glad that I surprised myself and read this essay because it’s quite good. My favorite sentence:

The Lewis and Clark expedition was exactly the kind of multicultural, trigenerational, bigendered, animal-friendly, government-supported, partly French-Canadian project that should rightly be celebrated by liberals and castigated by conservatives.

Alexie surprised me with how fair he is toward white people and white culture. But his viewpoint with which I am more familiar surfaced as well. Alexie sees white and Indian cultures as at odds with each other and, therefore, he describes himself as a contradiction because he is the son of a half-white/half-Indian woman. He lists other contradictions of American culture:

This country somehow gave birth to Maria Tallchief and Ted Bundy, to Geronimo and Joe McCarthy, to Nathan Bedford Forest and Toni Morrison, to the Declaration of Independence and Executive Order No. 1066, to Cesar Chavez and Richard Nixon, to theme parks and national parks, to smallpox and the vaccine for smallpox.

The final paragraph of this essay is a grudging acceptance of the contradictions of this country and the acknowledgement that he himself is a contradiction.

Alexie’s expectation and seeming desire for a more homogeneous culture surprises me. Not that I want more Ted Bundys to appear just because I’m bored of everyone acting too sane, but different people and opinions are what gives cultures depth and richness. Alexie sees the dualities of the culture but does not seem to recognize the degrees of moderation which can be embodied.

I tried to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, it being a best seller and all, a couple years ago. I think I only made it to page 50 when slogging through the abstruseness became too tiring. But I really enjoyed this essay.

Ostensibly the essay begins with attempting to simplify writing dialogue, assigning punctuation to silences, changes in intonation, and other elements of conversation. Foer’s task becomes more intricate when he begins assigning punctuation to represent meaning. By the end of the essay, the punctuation has made reading the dialogue more complex than simple. But one realizes how complicated human communication is. Amidst his classification of punctuation, Foer uses more conventionally written pieces of prose (explaining the “Heart Disease” portion of the title) that effectively convey the emotions his punctuation intends to express. However, the final conversation between Foer and his father is very compelling with Foer’s shorthand. And probably the conversation is more compelling and less melodramatic than it would be in a more traditional prose form. Foer’s punctuation fits well into Western ideals of minimalism and subtlety in art.

Death is the antagonist. Not a particularly novel concept, but such is the case in this essay:

But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.

The legs agitated themselves once more. I looked as if for the enemy against which he struggled. I looked out of doors. What had happened there? Presumably it was midday, and work in the fields had stopped. Stillness and quiet had replaced the previous animation. The birds had taken themselves off to feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular. Somehow it was opposed to the little hay-coloured moth. It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death.

Death is “the enemy,” it is “indifferent, impersonal…[and] Somehow it was opposed to the little hay-coloured moth.” But death opposes not only the little moth but everyone and everything, of which Woolf grudgingly admits acceptance at the end of the passage. And by the end of the essay, and the end of the little moth’s struggle, Woolf seems to admire the insect:

The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.

The moth “decently and uncomplainingly” seems to state its acceptance of its vulnerability to death’s power. Perhaps just as the moth struggles against death, so does Woolf struggle with her, indeed, all life’s vulnerability to death with this essay.

“Strange” seems to be an important word in this essay. Life is strange, death is strange, the moth is strange…. The peculiarities seem to fascinate Woolf.

Woolf’s writing in this case does not reflect her usual stream-of-consciousness style, but her use of what she refers to as “the woman’s sentence” in A Room of One’s Own is in full force.

In this piece, Baym criticizes literary theorists for excluding female authors from the canon. Because of the United States’ split from Britain, the earliest American literary critics had no criteria by which to judge American literature—relying on British standards would have been traitorous. Thus, critics had to judge literature based on its “Americanness.” Literature of America should reflect the experience of America and, thus, the ultimate subject of the work must be America as a nation. This definition has two consequences, according to Baym: 1) stories about universal experiences are excluded and 2) detailed portrayals of some aspect of American life are also excluded.

Eventually “the essential quality of America comes to reside in its unsettled wilderness and the opportunities that such a wilderness offers to the individual as the medium on which he may inscribe, unhindered, his own destiny and his own nature.” This concept of Americanness is the ultimate perpetrator of the exclusion of women from the canon. Within novels that explore this “unsettled wilderness” women are often portrayed as the enemy. Women are the socializing forces that prevent the (male) main character from exploring this wilderness and creating his own destiny. While the evil encroaching force of society is feminized, the wilderness is feminized as well, but as compliant and supportive rather than destructive (as society is portrayed).

Essentially, Baym claims that critics have defined Americanness to represent the male psyche.

I found Baym’s argument mildly interesting, but a little too essentialist for my taste. There was too much of “men write this way and women would never do that.” Until the very last paragraph of her article, she seems to ignore the fact that male writers who have contradicted the “Americanness” concept as defined by literary critics and are also often excluded from the canon.

How do the American women usually included in the canon—Anne Bradstreet, Sarah Kemble Knight, and Emily Dickinson—clear the hurdles which this narrowly defined concept of Americanness has erected?