The Boston Sunday Globe “Ideas” Section
For those of you who have access to the Globe, today’s “Ideas” section has as its front page article a piece by Jonathan Gottschall suggesting that (1) literary criticism is dying, and (2) the way to revive it is to make it a science.
While I’m not opposed to some decent inquiry into the way literature works, Gottschall’s suggestions were uniformly disappointing.
So I’ll stick my neck out here: The reason modern ‘literary’ literature is losing so much ground to just about everything else is that it so seldom has anything to tell us that we actually want to know. Memoir, by comparison, tells us about actual lives, lived, and struggled through. There is often wisdom in Memoir. There is often only self-indulgence in other literary modes. Detective fiction, for example, is so frequently just indulgent and formulaic. And it is a genre that continues to grow.
So here’s a parallel. People stopped reading the Bible because so much of it was incomprehensible, especially in the Old Testament. The New Testament is a definite improvement because it speaks directly about questions of how to live and what it means (and what the cost of actions might be). We read whatever it is we read because we want to be wiser at the end of it. The possible exception is the back of cereal packages and some newspapers, which we read just to decode before we’re fully awake each day. That’s not reading. That’s eye exercise.
Fine writing, such as we see in literary fiction, is all very well. But it is not a substitute for having something important to say. The Bible in its English version became fine writing because scholars who were artists felt strongly enough about the content that they labored to make it beautiful, to get the right word and cadence. Content FIRST; polish later. If only some modern writers would adhere to that they’d write less but they’d do us all a favor.
Part of my own writing about the Six Archetypes that are present, in a thousand variations, in all literature is because it seems that the concept relays to us the start of some real wisdom. We can read, with this way of thinking in mind, and discover more about what it means to be alive at the highest level.
If literary criticism dared to tread a bolder path, if it could be bold enough to say there is a pay off for reading and thinking - and then spell out what that pay off might be - then we might get somewhere. There are lives out there that truly need change, and they’re expiring in the wilderness for want of direction. Literature used to provide some of that direction….
But like all maps, we sometimes need a little help to decode the symbols.
on May 13th, 2008 at 9:37 am
And memoirists, too, must tread a bolder path in the knowledge that some of what we write shows a reader the solution to a life problem.
In a talk he gave at a local bookstore, Dr. Peter Kramer posited that many forms of psychotherapy (such as Freudian, Jungian, etc.)are “…autobiographical.”
” Psychotherapy, then, is like some forms of memoir. Some one finds a way out and passes it on.”
MLou
on May 13th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Dear Mary Lou,
Absolutely on target - again. as you know I’ve for 22 years been teaching writing about one’s life (a smaller version of memoir) as a therapeutic modality and done so in an unashamedly group-therapy type way. I’m glad to hear the Freudians have finally noticed what the rest of us have been talking about for decades - and have been doing successfully for decades. Freud was a great thinker and theorists, but some of his disciples have been way too narrow in their outlook…. The Jungians have always known this, of course.
With a smile, Allan