A distrust of pleaure; being suspicious of suspicious reading.

I have felt that many of the articles we have have read in this course have been very demanding of us.  That every critic is chastising us for taking pleasure in reading. Or at least, that's the impression I get from browsing the bolgs.  A common response has been of relief; that uncritical reading is sometimes championed as useful, allowed and non-shameful. It is a sentiment I think is mainly a response to Michael Warner; his 'solipsistic distanciation' and 'reading through a text' which betray a fear that closeness with a text is all consuming.  However I do not think that a close alingment with the text equals uncritical reading and I disagree with it being presented as such.

Rita Felski takes up this very point in 'After Suspicion'.  She is interested in many things, aesthetics being one of them.  Conjuring up the aesthetic value of art implicates culture and ethics, both which inform the affect and interpretation of literary work.  Why should critical reading fail to take account of these elements, when, as Felski suggests, we must converse with texts across a 'chasm of historical or cultural difference'?  The 'modality of recognition' must come back to the individual.  If we do justice to the 'singularity and strangeness' of the text itself then we must also do so the reader and critic.  The idea of the 'upper case' Critic denies a nuance of understanding which otherwise might be attributed to a text.

I use the NSW high school curriculum as an example.  Though it was not the procedure when I went to school, others in my English classes tell of the way they studied King Lear in Advanced English.  They were tested on their understanding of feminist, post-colonial and Marxist readings of the play; Mark Edmundson would have a fit and presumably he writes his article in response to such learning techniques.  It is shoehorning of a most explicit kind.  Felski tells us that we need not to be suspicious of the text as it does all the work of suspicion for us, however we do need to be suspicious of the way we read it and the type of criticism we apply.  Being told how to understand a text, being subjected to an instance that there is only one way to read a text deserves a critical analysis.  Though I understand that teaching students about different types of theory is valid and useful, suggesting that models of theory are self evident in a text is not.  King Lear does not fit as neatly into critical theories as the school system would have us believe.  Last year in the Shakespeare unit at university we focused on the presence of animals in the plays; the Ovidian context, the dehumanisation, the similes and metaphors of humans into animals and the implications this had.  Or one could take Wuthering Heights another school/university novel.  Yes you could read it with the curriculum's preordained theories with mind; on the other hand our lecturer told us that she understands the work along side Freud's essays on The Uncanny and Narcissism.  She also told us that we would probably understand the text very differently, for us it would have nothing to do with Freudian thought.

In an essay on migrant and Aboriginal assimilation in Australia Anna Haebich notes that 'fundamental values' would be shaped by the nation's core Anglo-Celtic institutions and when I read it I wondered if we could expect it to be anything else.  I'm not advocating a cultural hegemony which functions to exclude certain groups, merely wondering how history could have shaped culture differently.  Imagining how to comprehend a  cultural phenomena which does not exist.  In many ways this is what Felski warns us against; judging a a text by characteristic it does not posses or produce.  Forcing meaning where the individual finds none.  And for Felski it is always about the individual.  She invites us, not to look through a text like it is a thing, but hold it at arm's length and allow it to keep us company.  
 



    

The Value of the Secret History

Nietzsche seems to be a reoccurring theme in this bolg which is quite funny, for although I own copies of his work and like to make reference to him and often think of him as I read things, I'm doing a bit of a Bayard as far as he is concerned.  This really reflects the concerns of this blog; access and right to knowledge, understanding and value, investment in what one is told one should know.  The Secret History begins with a quote from Nietzsche about the classics, their foreignness for young people and suggestion that perhaps they will always remain so.  Donna Tartt writes a novel where students strive to become familiar with ancient Greek and their failure in comprehension plays out like a Greek tragedy.  Nietzsche asserts that the origins of philology are troubled because there is no way of knowing if one should ever be suited to understanding the Greeks and Romans and it is with this sentiment that Tartt explores the issue of the canonical.
   
In their articles both Barbara Herrnstein Smith and John Guillory discuss the issue of curriculum producing the canon (which is not surprising, Guillory spends so much time quoting Herrstien Smith I felt like I had deja vu).  This brings to mind Cassonova's world of letters where every text is in competition with each other, for other mediums effect the popularity and reading of books like weekend paper book reviews and a certain talk show host's book club.  But I digress.  Tartt has an extreme version of canon formation for one teacher prescribes every text and then these books are used to teach everything from history to art and philosophy.  So limited is the range of educational resources and focus Richard notes that of his classmates only he and Bunny are aware of the moon landing.  It is ignorance of an astonishing kind.  All of the students in the Greek class principally have Julian as their only teacher.  Julian chooses not only the style and content of the classes but, because of his ability to intoxicate the students, controls how they think as well. Richard believes that Henry killed himself to prove the 'high cold principles' Julian had taught them to use, but I think Henry did it because he realised - once Julian reacted to hearing to the murders - that he had perhaps not understood Julian at all.


Knowledge is certainly power;but in The Secret History it is also the bringer of destruction.  The very thing which undoes the Greek class is the study of Greek itself.  The Greek and its literature is the only signifier of cultural values in the novel and these lead to and justify murder in a most succinct way.  How can we value their knowledge when it transforms into explicit violence, sublime or otherwise?  We could assume as Henry does that it was a misunderstanding of the classics which leads to the tragedy of the novel but I think what Tartt is suggesting that it is a lack of perspective which caused it, just as Henry and the others increasingly see murder as the only way to deal with Bunny.  


We can read this as a warning about too strict adherence of the canon which is prescribed by only a few people and almost never challenged.  Julian's canon is too tight to be allowed to breath and point by which the poison enters the air; it is a toxic mix for the class members.  In the  end Richard chooses his own literature to study.  They are still tragedies, but better reflect the humanity and error in 'sin unpunished and innocence destroyed'.  Ancient Greek taught Richard the beauty was terror, beauty was harsh.  Only when he searches a wider canon can he understand 'the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.'