Vive la difference

On top of all my other various reading endeavors, for research and for pleasure, I’ve been enjoying two very different books lately. One, my “bathroom read” (don’t judge) is Klara and the Sun, the newest novel from recent Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro. The other, my audiobook du jour, is Charles Portis’ The Dog of the South. The two novels make for an interesting pairing (not to mention trio, with my read of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time still ongoing) because they go together like milk and pickle juice.

Ishiguro, who wrote what I consider to be one of the few novels (Remains of the Day) that can be described, on a technical level, as flawless, writes in simple, controlled language about characters who, on the whole, can be described as buttoned down. Remains of the Day focuses on a tight lipped butler serving near the end of the British empire, and with Klara and the Sun he’s now written two books which feature not quite human protagonists, with all the mechanistic style that implies. His writing never feels monotonous, because he turns his simplicity in surprising directions; his book The Unconsoled might be the only successful homage to Kafka ever written. But, again, control is the optimal word here: his sentences are tight, his sense of overall narrative completely reigned in — an almost clockwork author.

Contrast Ishiguro with Portis, a practitioner of “Southern literature” best known for True Grit, his Western with an uncanny use of old timey dialog. There’s a wildness to Portis’ writing, both at the sentence level and the architectonic level, that’s tremendous fun to grapple with. Ray Midge, the bewildered protagonist of The Dog of the South, must travel that direction down from Arkansas to “British Honduras” to retrieve his runaway wife (and his car), and at every turn he encounters absurd characters and events that make him exclaim, repeatedly, “Why, I couldn’t believe it!” Portis has more than a dash of the raconteur about him, spinning out improbability after improbability. Conversations take turns that blindside the reader, and even within a single sentence you are liable to wind up by the end quite far from where you started. Portis loves “bullshitters” as characters (he’s a bit of one himself), and he’s happy to follow them as they careen wildly off the beaten path. [Side note here, but this is one reason The Dog of the South makes for a great audiobook, especially in the hands of a capable narrator like David Aaron Baker: it’s feels like a tall tale being told on your grandpa’s porch]

Reading these two books simultaneously has driven home for me the deep pleasures involved in consistently reading different types and styles of writing. My life would be less rich if I had decided, at age 20, that I only liked the Ishiguro school of stripped down, clean writing, and had no time for the Portisy detours and delays. The reverse would be equally true. Literature isn’t ever only one thing, for one purpose or with one ideal. It is multifarious, variegated, as Gerard Manley Hopkins would say, brinded. One of the deep pleasures of hosting a podcast with two other people whose taste overlap my own, but only imperfectly, is that I have had a chance to read and discuss works that stretch me, sometimes to the limit. Karl’s pick Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton, with its dense mathematical references and chewy syntax, is not a book I would seek out on my own, but I’m glad I read it. Others might feel the same way about Friedrich’s choice of The Warden, with its windy Victorian sentences, or even my wildcard selection of Euripides’ The Bacchae, perhaps the strangest of all Greek tragedies.

It would be a strawman, I think, to argue that there are tons of people out there that think you should only read one school of writers, though occasionally you’ll see passed around lists of commandments for writing provided by successful authors that do suggest a particular style, usually the Hemingwayesque stripped down aesthetic (for what it’s worth, the people I follow on Twitter, where these things circulate, usually roundly condemn these narrow edicts). But I do think that more subtle pressures exist that nudge us toward a sort of conformity in our reading habits.

One of these pressures is, simply put, chronological snobbery. We, raised in our current moment, favor the lean style that comes at us from all angles, both from the propulsive prose of airport thrillers that, judging by bestseller lists, are the sorts of books most read by the American populace, and, in a different key, from the ruling potentates of contemporary “literary” fiction, that MFA house style learned so well by the bandana’d bros of the world. Not that this writing comes carbon copied, of course. There are differences between authors, but these are like the different tasting notes of wines grown in the same region with the same grape varietals: shades, not worlds, of difference.

Put another way: people could stand to read more Victorian literature (and no, I’m not just saying that because Season 2 of The Readers Karamazov builds around George Eliot’s Middlemarch). Even though the idea of writing a Victorian novel in the present day seems absurd, there’s still plenty to learn from reading in that style. And of course it’s worth noting that that blanket term hardly captures the sheer variety on display. What hath Dickens’ London to do with Hardy’s Wessex? By reading deeply in other time periods, from ancient epic to medieval mystery play, we gain a sense of uses and goals of literature other than those we are accustomed to. One tiring tendency that does crop up on Twitter in endless waves: a person insisting that you stop reading X white, male author (usually David Foster Wallace) and instead read Diverse Authors (TM). While reading diverse authors is in fact a good, the authors these firebrands want you to read are usually drawn from the same small pool of contemporary writers. No one’s suggesting you go out and read Frederick Douglas’ autobiography — and more’s the pity.

Another related subtle pressure comes from the world of Internet writing in which we so enthusiastically immerse ourselves. There’s a deadening sameness to this Internet prose, a mix of hectoring earnestness with blank irony, that threatens to anesthetize us as readers to the sheer variety of language. Whatever you think of Freddie deBoer (if you think of him at all), he’s been very good on this aesthetic point of late: there’s too much sameness in the vast morass of online content aimed at the vaguely educated, upwardly mobile “intellectual” set of American life. The same sets of rhetorical moves, the same bland “humor.” Call it the Marvelfication of discourse, if you like: just as with the endless supply of Avengers films, we’ve been trained to expect the same set of stimuli, with the same conditioned responses.

What does it take to break out from this deadening prison? It takes, in part, an openness to real difference, a recognition that the styles of writing we personally favor do not comprise the sum total of quality literature. It takes a boldness in risking reading something we don’t like, that we are put off by, in order to expand our tastes.

Maybe, in world where getting another person to read any book can leave one feeling like Hercules confronted with the Augean stables, it feels like “small beer,” as Auden would say, to try to convince those who already read to read more widely. But I think it’s a worthwhile task, not least of all because, hey, you’re already reading, so maybe you’re amenable to reading more. And, as of this writing, the people with the most power to shape our culture from the top down still pay at least lip service to the power of reading, but they also tend to prescribe and proscribe from a very narrow reading list. I’m not generally one to subscribe to theories about literature making us better people — in fact I detest particularly the idea that it can make us more “empathetic,” a word tied inextricably to particular contemporary ideologies regarding what literature is and should be — but I do think there is value, even if only the value of aesthetic and intellectual stimulation, in trying different things. If more people read, say, the prose of St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, we might have clearer thinkers, readers, and writers on our hands, because his prose can help us think through and correct our own lack of clarity and precision. And if more people read (actually read) Don Quixote, we’d have a richer, more expansive sense of the surprise on which humor hinges. And that would be, at the very least, not nothing.