How To Enjoy Reading: Fact vs. Fiction,
I'm taking a bit of an unexpected detour this month. As I near my two year anniversary with Suite101, I had planned to return full circle and review a book by A. S. Byatt, whose first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, was the topic of my first column. The Biographer's Tale is Byatt's most recent novel. I have long been a Byatt fan and hence feel blasphemous for admitting this, but The Biographer's Tale bored and exasperated me.
Byatt begins humorously enough by poking fun at the academy. An English graduate student tired of pursuing ideas looks instead to pursue things. In his quest for facts, Phineas Nanson decides to write the biography of a biographer (to find facts about a fact finder). He seeks to accumulate personal data that will bring to life Scholes Destry-Scholes, biographer of Sir Elmer Bole. Nanson's frustrating journey yields sundry tidbits and tidbits only, teasing facts that shed little light on the mysterious biographer. Byatt spends an enormous amount of energy and page space detailing the tedious and disconnected notes Nanson finds that Destry-Scholes has scribbled on cards. The reader becomes as annoyed as the ur-biographer Nanson. The point is, I believe, how can one person truly know another? And, in the course of writing (or trying to write) about the elusive Destry-Scholes, Nanson learns more about himself and the fictions he creates. (The reader, too, may drift off and create fictions as eyes glaze over after encountering the endless notecards.) Along the way, Nanson meets some wonderfully eccentric characters just begging for a story worthy of their oddities. The Biographer's Tale, alas, is not that story.
I set down the novel and thought about reading in general. What do we look for in and from a novel? So, I blew the dust off another book that has been waiting patiently to be opened, Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why. Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at NYU, is of the very academy Byatt satirizes, but like Byatt, he does not shy away from ridiculing various schools of thought (or lack of thought) that have furthered careers rather than insights into literature. The first principle about reading that Bloom asserts he borrows from Dr. Johnson: "Clear your mind of cant." Bloom extends Johnson's dictum to encompass the cant of the twenty-first century:
Since the universities have empowered such covens as 'gender and sexuality' and 'multiculturalism,' Johnson's admonition thus becomes 'Clear your mind of academic cant.' A university culture where the appreciation of Victorian women's underwear replaces the appreciation of Charles Dickens and Robert Browning sounds like the outrageousness of a new Nathanael West, but is merely the norm.
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