Bringing you a new and strange post on the poor forsaken unread novel and that the university curriculum isn't the best way to save it, as inspired by two recent experiences.
Firstly reading the truly brilliant One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde and now already you've confused because you could never label Fforde's books as unread- you can tell people read them because when they are first released they come out in jumbo size with an expensive price tag and if you haven't read them and you are a fan of things book like, I recommend you join the rest of us and read them. The thing about this novel that got me thinking is the way it talks about unread or unreadable books. Now it is the fifth in a series so I won't plot spoil at you, just to say go and visit a few second hand book stores or garage sales and you'll notice that there are literally millions of books out there that no-one is reading and that no-one has read for quite a while, and just think what if the world inside books was real and interactive what would happen to them.
Secondly was me once again doing a self deprecating and deferring explanation of my PhD thesis. That's right people of the blog world (those who don't actually know me in reality which I think is probably very few, if any, of you), I'm an Arts PhD student...you know those slightly awkward creatures who cling to walls at social gatherings occasionally latching onto an innocent bystander in order to talk a plethora of isms at them and explain why people should be interested in talking about social paradigms in order to justify the government letting them study for free. Worse than that, I'm an English lit PhD student which in most people minds translates as a person without the gumption or talent to be a writer. The reason that gets me thinking of unread books is that I'm writing my thesis on one.
During my honours year, I wrote my thesis on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda which not many people have read and I tried endless to explain to many people why they should read it. I mean if you are judging a book by its opening line - the first chapter epilogue opens with "Men can do nothing without the make-believe of beginning" which is just brilliant (OK it's no "A single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife" but I think it is better than "Miss Dalloway bought herself flowers"). Even with very good BBC miniseries of it made a few years before I started honours, people usually stared at me blankly and told me that either Middlemarch was brilliant but it was enough Eliot for them or that someone had thought forced them to read Silas Marner and they were never touching Eliot again or, sadly more often than either of the above, they said that 19th century lit wasn't their thing and they had no idea who this Eliot guy was anyway. So many hours wasted explaining to people the brilliance of book and also that George Eliot was a WOMAN, that when I started my PhD and found myself researching a book even fewer people have read I gave up and stopped trying to convince people to read. When people ask what my thesis is on, I say "Oh it's on Mary Shelley but not Frankenstein" and half the time they don't even follow with by asking which of her other novels it is on (needless to say most of them don't think she wrote anything but Frankenstein so it's all confusing from the outset). Those who do ask the follow-up question are told that The Last Man is one of those books not many people would be interested in and that it isn't shocking that no-one has read it. I'm starting to think I've been a bit mean to The Last Man (which don't get me wrong, I personally do love). It too has a good opening- "I am the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with its shoreless ocean and trackless oceans, appears only as an inconsiderable speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental power, far outweighed countries of larger extent and more numerous population"- and it, like Frankenstein, is an interesting study of the human condition. You sold on it yet? Maybe not, maybe it will die an unread death or maybe it will be put on a uni curriculum and English lit undergrads of the future will be whinging about it. Then again it isn't bad enough of some uni curricula.
And that is the problem with a book that is largely unread by the general public, the decent ones often die a quiet death but the bad ones might be controversial and that might get them put on a uni curriculum . High school curriculum novels somehow maintain their dignity- lots of people love To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye despite having studied them in high school. Uni novels don't fare as well especially as they are often on a course to illustrate a point and not for their quality. This means I have suffered through many a terrible novel, many of which I hated so much after a chapter that I put them down and left them there. This was the case with Silas Marner- one of the most boring books out there and I'm yet to find someone who liked it- and D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent- I had Sons & Lovers forced upon me in high school and while I know some (especially male) academics think Lawrence was profoundly talented, but to my mind his misogynistic, deary prose makes me wish he was alive so I could beat him about the head with a large shovel. That said I couldn't drop them all. Luckily people in most parts of the world can avoid the works of Richard Harland who was one of my lecturers, but I'm sure that some others were forced to read Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness which is put on curricula for being an early depiction of lesbianism and a banned book. It is truly dreadful and being banned is not a reason for now being read (listen up also those who would read Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover for this reason). There is this brilliant story about it wherein Virginia Woolf visited Radclyffe Hall and said she and her Bloomsbury chums would protest the banning of the novel because censorship was wrong and Hall responded that if they were going to protest the banning, it should be on its literary merits not as part of large protesting of censorship, and Woolf replied in that case we cannot protest. I often thought that my lecturers were doing the same thing a friend of mine did with The da Vinci Code. He hated the book but instead of telling everyone how bad it was, he ranted on and on about its brilliance. After I read it, I was like what the deal, that book sucked beyond the telling of it. He laughed and said yes isn't it painful, I just felt others should share my pain. I think a few too many lecturers out there were forced to read a bit too much D.H. Lawrence and personally I'm also plotting my pay it forward revenge. Or maybe I should be more positive and start new traditions with better books that no-one reads and resurrect the brilliance that is rotting in garage sales.
No comments:
Post a Comment