The Companionship of the Long Distance Critic

This has become, by now, older than old news, and its position on the mighty Most E-Mailed List at the Times has of course been overtaken and overtaken again. Regardless, a promise is a promise, and here are: my polled, wildly unscientific, rhapsodic observations on the New York Times essay entitled, “It’s Not You, It’s Your Books.”

This essay begins with an anecdote, and then zooms out with the claim “We’ve all been there.” Where we’ve all been, supposedly, is the chilling moment when one realizes that his or her putative inamorato/a has atrocious taste in literature. This seems, though, to be something of a straw man. Virtually no one asked in my wildly unscientific poll had “been there”, and even the people in the Times piece seemed largely to think that shared literary taste wasn’t such a big deal. Love could often conquer all. Even people who seemed to think that books played a role in determining compatibility, such as the psychiatrist Anna Fels quoted in the piece, thought they did so mainly as a Rorschach test, as an index of what sort of person we are dealing with (viz., people who read Proust for fun are just different from people who read James Patterson for fun, or who don’t read at all).

What I thought was interesting about the article (apart from the Jessa Crispin quote, which was, I thought, by far the bright spot) was that everyone seemed to be in accord that there are fundamental persons leading bright romantic lives here, and that those fundamental persons would be cheapened somehow if their books they were to be judged. It is as if approving someone’s love of Richard Powers is similar to approving someone’s perfect hairline, or shying away from an Ayn Rand fan is like denying the possibility of the Ayn Rand fan’s inner beauty. The delicate self is somewhere, like an ear of corn, ensconced in a husk of tastes which we are to overlook. What is meant to be important, I suppose, is the corn.

And so it is. Notice that the only people toward whom those interviewed in the article tend to deny their sympathy to are the ones that are either totally helpless (the ones who liked Ayn Rand or Marley and Me) or the ones who try too hard to telegraph whatever it is that they’ve been reading. Here’s Northrop Frye:

“The original experience [of literature] is like the direct vision of color, or the direct sensation of heat or cold, that physics ‘explains’ in what, from the point of view of the experience itself, is a quite irrelevant way.” (Anatomy of Criticism, 27)

What we object to in this discussion is the idea that literature has been press-ganged into some advertising function, and we are as loath to be such advertisers as we are to be caught doing it ourselves. The original experience is to be left alone, such that talking about books is either left off or achieves the attitude less of shared experience than of work. The Old Crow was wise enough to clue me into this work attitude given to some literary discussion; the Shadow Correspondent informs me that while books must remain essentially private, inviolate, movies can take their place as shared cultural currency for romantics. (The Crow also points out that shared film tastes are important for tactical, if not strategic reasons).

I believe, then, that the reason people do not want to have their literary tastes used as a Rorschach test, by which others may judge their sensitivity or seriousness or whatever, is that they want to hold onto their own idiosyncratic readings as the way in which they assess their own selves. To make the preceding corn metaphor ridiculous, it is as the corn is happy to present its husk however it wishes, but needs literature to maintain its own understanding, of itself, as its own ear of corn. We ask that our commitments to literature be judged superficially (and receive those who do not do so as showboaters) when we fear the reckoning that we would have to give ourselves of those commitments. Or, I do anyway. Literature itself, and dealing with literature itself, is a lonely business, just as looking at vibrant flowers or sunsets, or feeling pleasant in front of a fire is an essentially lonely business. Deep down, what-it-is-like-to-read is an epiphenomenon, one available only to the person experiencing it, and shared only with the book itself.

This idiosyncratic power of literature seems to explain also the common reaction that people have of just hoping that their potential romantic quarry has read at all; it is as far as you can go toward shared literary experience to insist that someone has been in similar conditions (ie, read a book for fun). A person can’t know whether someone else has been alone with a book in the same way as they have, so the best they can do is to hope that that other person also knows how to be alone properly. As the Times notes, this can lead to infelicitous pairings; they cite the (alleged) possibility of one half of a couple identifying with Gilbert Osmond and one half with Isabel Archer which, I mean, have you read Portrait of a Lady? Someone who identifies with Gilbert Osmond is going to have bigger troubles than his taste in early James.

Criticism, incidentally, can speak for itself in a way in which literature cannot. That will be the object of my next wildly unscientific survey. Can your relationship survive competing commitments to Paul de Man and William Empson? Find out next time, on unpacking my library.