Have you ever scrolled through the user reviews on Amazon and noticed that no matter how overwhelmingly positive the general trend is, there’s always one jerk who gives a vitriolic one-star review? Even where the book in question is a classic, an acknowledged masterpiece, you can usually find one of these guys, denouncing an adornment of human accomplishment with poorly-spelled scorn, expressing only regret that Amazon does not allow for no-star reviews. What’s this guy’s problem? Is he just being contrary for the sake of it? Or is his review an honest one? Perhaps, uncowed by critical consensus, he is reading the book with fresh eyes, and shouting out to Amazon customers that the emperor has no clothes. Let’s face it, there are plenty of classics that have left me cold, and probably plenty of others that I might never have read had I not known of their exalted status. Maybe Ulysses is a bit too showy. Maybe War and Peace does go on a bit. What follows is a fresh approach to the literary canon, The Great Works of Western Literature as reviewed by That Asshole From Amazon.
War And Peace – Leo Tolstoy
“Too Long yet still can be interesting”
“Consider carefully before you take this on…,”
The author of the second review shown here gave five stars for “Sensational Knitted Socks???.
Ulysses – James Joyce
“New Rule: nobody needs to read James Joyce. He was not a good writer. He was all show-off and gimmick. There is no substance to his writing. It is a waste of time. It is pompous. It is boring. Accept reality people.”
This man, if his star rating is to be trusted, thinks that “I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie??? by Pamela Des Barres is four times better than Ulysses. I haven’t read the former, so I can’t say with certainty that he’s right. He loves his Rock & Roll, this guy. I am beginning to notice that a dislike of canonical literature often goes hand in hand with a passion for heavy rock.
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
“SO boring!”
Like many negative notices of classics, this review is from a school kid, and therefore not representative for several reasons. Firstly, books that one is ordered to read for school are rarely as enjoyable as those read by choice. Secondly, not everyone is the bookish type, and some people might just be bored by all books. They are not representative readers, as they wouldn’t be reading at all were it not enforced. What I am interested in here is the person who is actually interested in books, the guy who actually went to the trouble of buying the book, reading it all the way to the finish, and then posting a negative review.
The author of the below review is a classic example of the kind of critic I’m after. Not only is she not a school-kid, she’s something of an Austen scholar, including in her review some recently unearthed biographical material previously unknown even to Austen experts
“Pride and Prejudice: a book for the bored,
Basically, the whole book is about an 18th century girl whining about her upper middle class life. Of course, at the end, she gets exactly what she wants and everyone lives happily ever after. There is credit to be given to Jane Austen, since she wrote the book in an American household in the early 1800s, with no support from any of her family. She had to hide her writing under knitting or sewing whenever someone approached. She then had a friend publish the books she wrote, without telling her husband. Considering all that, the story really isn’t that bad, but in general, if you were looking for a book by Jane Austen, Emma would be a better read. If you want a predictable love story, “Pride and Prejudice” is a good book for you.”
No, she’s not joking.
The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien
A speciality type of bad Amazon review is the “I think I’m at the wrong meeting??? review, as where a reader denounces that the volume he paid good money for is written in English, and contains very little about tractors and their history. This would never appear on amazon.co.uk, where the more easily embarrassed buyer would rather die than admit what this critic so casually tells us in his final sentence:
“Too Weird for Words
Obviously, from all the reviews, this book appeals to many people. I am not one of them. Perhaps it’s because I don’t care for science fiction. I found the writing stilted, the footnotes distracting to the point I stopped bothering with them, the story boring, and the ending (covered in the introduction) to be a Twilight Zone cliche. If, like me, you want to read the book because it has some connection to bicycles and cycling you will be disapppointed.”
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
This is perhaps the most vitriolic review I have yet come across. This guy actually seems angry with someone (Amazon? Dickens? School?) for making him read the book.
“how dare you call this a literary masterpiece. this is swill. i can’t believe i wasted the time, effort, and money on this book.”
Ouch! His other reviews reveal that he has read two other books, both by Stephen King, and loved them both. But in general, he’s more into Rammstein, thus providing further evidence for the heavy rock/book-hater thesis.
But perhaps I am being unfair. All these reviews come from Amazon in the states. The readers may prove more receptive to classic works of American literature. It is to these that I next turn, and I am immediately rewarded.
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
“Now I See Why Ernest Hemingway Killed Himself,
This is a terrible book. Never read it for the following reasons:
1. It is BORING. All the characters do in the novel is get drunk and have sex. If I wanted to read a book filled with nothing but that, I’d pick up my copy of “I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell” by Tucker Max, thank you.
2. The love scenes are amorous and unrealistic. At one point in the book, Brett tells Jake that love is “hell on earth”.
3. This book, along with almost all of Hemingway’s books, is about himself. If Hemingway was an interesting person that would be all right but he’s not. He should have just taken all of his novels and made them into one big autobiography. It would have saved many high school students like myself who have are assigned his crap in English a lot of misery.
4. He is not that great of a writer. His style is short, simple, with not a lot of difficult vocabulary. Because of his style, his characters are two-dimensional and dull.
This supposed masterpiece helped establish Ernest Hemingway as the most overhyped writer of the 20th century. If there is anything rewarding about this novel, it is that you can finish it real fast and get this self-indulgent drivel over with.”
What an awesome review! I couldn’t agree more. This guy has a future in the New York Review of Books.
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott FitzGerald
“Uninspired
It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops.
You would do better reading the Iliad.”
This man takes an interesting tack. Where most panning of classics is done for populist reasons, our critic here takes the elitist approach. His disapproval of “the doings of fops” is a wrong-headed but all too common confusion of the moral worth of characters with the artistic worth of the work. Still, the Iliad reference suggests a fairly high-brow sensibility. I click on his “see all my reviews” link, eagerly awaiting a treasury of classics. His only other review, a rave, is of the soundtrack to the Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai.
Finally, I get to the core of things. A psychological profile of the Amazon Asshole is helpfully provided by the author of the following.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
“Huck Finn – The True Cure for Insomnia.
This book really sucked ass”
I take a look at his other reviews. Apart from the rather depressing fact that only rarely has he seen, listened to or read anything meriting more than two stars (action movie The Rock and, of course, some heavy metal records being the only things he’s ever actually enjoyed), what’s most apparent is that this guy is more than just an unimpressed reader. His slating of Huck Finn rather is symptomatic of a more general hatred of all classic American Literature. To Kill A Mockingbird, Charlotte’s Web, Melville’s Billy Budd, Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Thoreau’s Walden and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible all get the one star treatment, The Crucible tellingly described thus “Like most classics, it sucks???. Wow, this guy really hated school, didn’t he? All these years he’s resented having to read this crap, perhaps nursing a sense of inferiority that he didn’t “get??? the books in question. Now, with the coming of the internet and it’s democratizing of opinion, his view is as good as that of any university scholar. Now his miserable times in English class can be reworked with a revisionist sheen. It was the books’ fault, not his. Take that Twain, you smart-ass! And that, four-eyes Miller! Essentially, this is a form of sublimated schoolyard bullying, and comes from the same resentful, frustrated origin. If the Amazon Asshole could find a way to steal Herman Melville’s lunch money while dissing his books, have no doubt that he would do it.
26 Comments
I think that in our fast paced MTV driven interweb linked world people just don’t have the time to appreciate a good book anymore – the time taken to interpret the themes and ponder the philosophical subtext (except for Hemmingway which is all beer, birds, big fish and fighting).
Also, I suspect that for many of the books hailed in ‘conventional wisdom’ as being classics their fate would have been different had we had cheap toilet paper available during the early Industrial Revolution. A copy of Tolstoy in the privy kept many a family through a winter – but you had to read carefully as there was no going back after the rip-and-wipe.
I actually think some of those reviews are quite good – just because a book is considered a classic doesn’t mean it should be immune from criticism.
I really don’t like Joyce at all and think the review is spot on – pretentious twaddle that serves only to mark out those who are foolish enough to read it as being a cultural elite. Also, I mostly agree about Hemmingway – a self-obsessed braggart and a bore.
On the other hand, Tolstoy is my favourite writer of all time by a mile, I think Dickens and Twain are both great and Austen and Fitzgerald are worth a read. Flann O’Brien I don’t know enough about to say for sure, but I’m prejudiced against him due to the fact that people who like him also seem to like Joyce.
Hilarious stuff.
“If, like me, you want to read the book because it has some connection to bicycles and cycling you will be disapppointed.”
This is the same problem the person who reviewed “The Story of O” had.
“If, like me, you want to read the book because it has some connection to Sesame Street and the Number 6 you will be disapppointed.”
A number of questions arise – why is only Tucker Max allowed to write civilisation’s one book about getting drunk and having sex and what committee makes the final decision?
What does The Illiad have to say about America that Gatsby doesn’t? (ok, quite a lot)
I just note by the way that the soundtrack for the Last Samurai was appalling – I remember commenting on how mindbogglingly inappropriate the use of music was throughout the film, which was a massive missed opportunity anyway.
I’m really disappointed by Chekov’s commentary on Joyce and Flann the Man. One of my pet hates is when someone uses the word pretentious to refer to something they failed to see the point of rather than in its proper sense.
It’s pretentious to dismiss Joyce as twaddle designed only to promote a sense of self-satisfaction among a bunch of snobs. It’s pretentious because it pretends to understand Joyce’s work, references and achievements and to dismiss them summarily as worthless when in fact the opposite is the case.
That one wasn’t prepared to make the effort required to read it properly might be closer to the truth.
Joyce was not a pretentious writer – he was fully immersed in and conversant with the classical and modern cultures which he mined for the structure of his novels and philosophical musings on the human condition.
He deeply cared about art and language and their limitations, which just makes comments like Chekov’s even more ironic than they already are.
I recommend Chekov read Kiberd’s introduction to the Penguin student edition of Ulysses. I think you’ll come away, if not wishing to read the book – perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of prose – then at least ashamed of the snobby, vulgar dismissal of this man’s work above.
It’s not like he did it for the money and the chicks.
“It’s pretentious to dismiss Joyce as twaddle designed only to promote a sense of self-satisfaction among a bunch of snobs. It’s pretentious because it pretends to understand Joyce’s work, references and achievements and to dismiss them summarily as worthless when in fact the opposite is the case.”
And it’s presumptuous to assume that I haven’t read it and understood it. I have, I just don’t like it at all – hell I’ve even read Finnegan’s Wake for my sins. I wouldn’t come to the conclusion if I hadn’t thought about it a good bit either.
I am also fairly familiar with the various classical and neo-classical structures, themes and so on that he mined and can spot most of the allusions and references – I just think that it makes for a really crap read – the only pleasure to be had out of it is the pleasure of recognising those references and the way that he weaves them into the narrative. I think that for a novel to be a really great read, it needs to be approachable to somebody who isn’t familiar with the various sources that it has mined and I think that’s clearly not the case with Joyce. By all means adopt classical themes and structures, but only adopt them if they serve the purpose of adding to the narrative, not for their own sake.
I agree, however, that it was a formidable intellectual achievement, but I still think it’s a crap book and I just don’t have any time at all for Joyce’s musings on the human condition – he was a tortured, introspective type, who grappled with his inner demons and self-doubt endlessly – just not a mind that interests me at all I’m afraid.
I am also not advocating any type of inverse snobbery towards difficult work – most of what is considered to be classics, I really like. I could rave for hours about Tolstoy, Hugo or Zola, none of which are particularly easy, I just don’t think that Joyce belongs in the same league as them, not even close.
Finally, I think there are just two very different types of mind when it comes to this stuff. Some people dig Joyce, others can’t stand him – and never the twain shall meet. For example, there’s a poster on indymedia who writes sub-Joycean streams of consciousness type stuff. It genuinely flabbergasts me that everybody else can’t see that it’s obvious tripe, but apparently some people love it.
“I could rave for hours about Tolstoy, Hugo or Zola, none of which are particularly easy”.
Now that is pretentious!
It’s not crap. That’s the point. You just don’t like it. Don’t you think it’s incredibly conceited to confuse your subjective reaction to a work of art with its objective merits?
As Alvy Singer says to the guy in the movie line – aren’t you ashamed to pontificate like that?
great piece and it reminds me of many arts reviews I read along similar lines – “I really wanted to see this kind of play but as I’m forced to be here I’ll tell you why this play isn’t as good as the one I thought I was coming to see” kinds of reviews..not dissimilar at all
It’s not crap. That’s the point. You just don’t like it. Don’t you think it’s incredibly conceited to confuse your subjective reaction to a work of art with its objective merits?
It’s art. It’s purely subjective.
“As Alvy Singer says to the guy in the movie line – aren’t you ashamed to pontificate like that?”
It’s just my opinion, I’m not claiming that it should be objective truth or anything; just my own opinion, posted in a comment on a blog, with no pretensions to be any more valid than any other opinion.
Perhaps we have a philosophical disagreement as to the nature of art. I don’t think there is any objective measure of quality in art – if I like it I think it’s good, if I don’t I think it’s crap. I then try to understand why I had that reaction to it, a reflection which sometimes changes my opinion. Having formed an opinion, I express that opinion – with a willingness to be persuaded if somebody presents an angle of interest that I hadn’t thought of before, which provokes a new insight. My comments here are part of that – I’m interested in why people like Joyce.
“Now that is pretentious!”
In fairness, I was only trying to defend myself against accusations of anti-intellectualism. I am far from being an authority on either author, but I like them.
“I don’t think there is any objective measure of quality in art – if I like it I think it’s good, if I don’t I think it’s crap.”
This statement is completely illogical. The statements “it is good” or “it is crap” are statements of objective merit – to be consistent with your claims of subjectivity, you can only state “If I like it, I think I like it,if I don’t I think I don’t.”
So, I don’t think your position is credible and I bet you think the Da Vinci Code is total rubbish.
The notion that some works of art represent no greater or less a creative achievement than all others except as they appeal on a person by person basis is self-evidently ludicrous and makes no more sense than to say that one engineering achievement is no better or worse than another except on the basis that one person here and another there develops an affection for it or not. Or for saying that one set of moral and political values (like storming across the world fighting energy wars) is no better than another (trying to live in near pantheistic harmony with nature in a village up a hill in the south west of Ireland).
I don’t think even a complete utilitarian positivist would buy into your worldview.
The question of whether any of it amounts to a hill of beans in the greater scheme of things is different to the one of whether some people are more talented, creative and insightful than others.
A long running debate this one. It’s a bit like trying to answer the question of what is delicious. There’s a general consensus on the topic, but plenty of outliers too. We all have a gut feeling that certain things are better than others, but it’s not easy to say exactly where that judgment comes from. Plenty of books tick all the boxes regarding plotting, characterisation, prose quality etc, and yet leave the reader cold. Others are cheap sensationalism that by way of sheer zest (Dracula for example) claim a place in the pantheon. The worthy likes of Banville, Tobin, etc will not, I suspect, outlast the century.
Or, to move the topic to popular music, I think that Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division is terrible. I want to be clear about this: I don’t just dislike it, I actually think it’s bad music. And yet people will tell meit’s a masterpiece. On the other hand, I see genuine genius (not just the pop-ironic kind) in Ignition (Remix) by R. Kelly. Am I wrong? Many will tell me that I am, but I know I’m not. The only solution is as follows: Great literature is whatever I, Fergal Crehan, say is great. Any disputes to be solved by way of arm wrestling.
Finally, here’s a warning of the perils of relying on consensus in art:
http://www.diacenter.org/km/
If we love books we each have to read the classics anew, bringing to them our personal social experience, which may be totally different from the times when the classics were written. Brave man Chekov, for reading Finnegan’s Wake all through – I gave up after five pages. I never read Ulysses, but enjoyed Portrait of the Artist, and some of the stories in Dubliners. War and Peace is too darn long, but Tolstoy knows how to describe a society and has some insightful digressions about history. I read Anna Karenin twice and found it a finely paced novel. Levin the proto narodnik is a wonderful foil to the supercilious aristocratic attitudes of the others. At Swim two Birds is probably Miles’s best comic novel, but as an intro to his unique Irish style I recommend The Best of Miles, which includes the inimitable humour of his Irish Times pieces like the Chapman and Keats series. Dickens could write with a surfeit of long latinate words and winding subclauses, so you have to pick and choose with his enormous output. I’d be careful about using the word pretentious. Better look up dictionary definitions. LoL
By the way
“makes no more sense than to say that one engineering achievement is no better or worse than another except on the basis that one person here and another there develops an affection for it or not”
A faulty analogy. A work of engineering is judged according to utilitatarian standards as well as aesthetic ones. A bridge has a physical job to do, a book does not. A judgment is far easier to make on whether a bridge has succeeded or failed than on the success or failure of a novel.
This is terrible. It’s the fall of Rome.
The engineering analogy is not faulty, rather your interpretation is too literal. Functions are not limited to physical ones and the best (which term I use objectively) works of art are ones which marry form and function together and in which one reflects the other – and this is where Ulysses stands out.
And the fact that a judgment is easier to make on whether or not a bridge has succeeded or failed is not the same as saying it is not possible to tell whether a novel has succeeded or failed.
Such a statement has nothing to do with the debate here.
I contend that the utility of a bridge is founded on the same basis as the utility of the novel – they may have different functions but they are both in the service of society. The utilitarian argument goes to that question and bears not a whit on art itself. Indeed in the utilitarian universe the objective value of art is indeed calculable by reference to utils of satisfaction on the part of the greatest number.
The utilitarian philosopher would approach this question by saying that because there is no moral basis for society (true) a bridge or a book are equally whimsical and equally serious. The alternative is to sit around in caves. Again no moral distinction between doing that or creating civilisations, the centrepieces of which tend to be cultural achievements as housed in museums and imbued with totemistic powers to represent and move and explain.
My girlfriend just completed a project for her M Ed in UCD which was designed to explore the best way to engage children with the experience of reading, the objective utility of which is to prepare them to move into society and to enhance their ability to think. So, the fact that it was a project where she chose a book and then carefully followed and measured the level of response, participation and engagement from all the girls in her class by way of questionaires and observation and activities related to the novel and designed to guage response must constitute what Chekov might recognise as a valuable “distributed critical analysis” and as an objective measure of success as people are capable of making.
I think a number of quotes are illuminating about the objective function of literature.
“Stories provide the possibility of educating the feelings and can offer their readers potential growth points for the development of a more subtle awareness of human behaviour”
“Stories do not help us to live better; they help us to understand living better. What we choose to do about that understanding is another story.”
“Caroline Daly (1998) stresses the vital importance of reading as a social interaction, reminding us that ‘through reading we are able to interpret, comprehend and respond critically to the ideas of others”
Whether or not a novel is capable of helping to educate people is certainly one measure of its success as a work of art – and it does need to succeed as art to work on this level. And what’s good for little girls in first year is not necessarily a bad thing for an adult reader to remember.
Garreth is correct to say that the reading experience is unique to every person (I liked this, but not that), but that is not to say that in reading we are not all trying to achieve the same general goal.
“The only solution is as follows: Great literature is whatever I, Fergal Crehan, say is great”
This is a terrible solution (however tongue in cheek). It buys into the consumer culture of dumbing everything down and is reflective of recent (publicity seeking) demands by Ireland’s chick lit practitioners that the critics take them as seriously as they do literature.
It’s no longer enough for the rich to simply have more material success than everyone else, they now demand that the purely economic success be recognised as a cultural achievement. If the way to do that is to devalue genuine cultural effort with its concomitant effects on the young and the ability of society to resist growing corporate hegemony, inequality, frustration and dissatisfaction. Well hey, that’s not their problem, they’re rich.
I like Ignition (Remix) as much as the next man because it’s infectiously entertaining, hot n’ fresh out the kitchen as it is. It may even be art, but it’s not Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
I also note that by appealing to the judgment of posterity re Banville, Toibin et al Fergal is simply elongating the period of objective determination rather than undermining the notion of it.
I like both those authors and while Toibin may be especially contemporary in his concerns, I don’t think it diminishes him as a genuine artist. And he’s not finished writing yet.
I’d loads of other things to say, but I’ve forgotten them while bashing out the above.
Suffice it to say, gents. You’re objectively wrong and you’re destroying civilisation.
Just to clarify on the dumbing down – if you didn’t “get” something that’s an acknowledged great work, it’s awful that our consumer society like a devil on our shoulders has encouraged us to blame the work rather than our own shortcomings as critics.
The fact that this sort of thinking has infected intelligent, educated and socially conscious people like the commenters here should give us all pause.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves”.
So if you don’t like Ulysses, you should take that as a challenge and ask, well why is this so good, and how can I learn to appreciate it.
Surely you don’t think that you can get to your late 20s and not have any self-improvement left to do?
I also think Chekov had a mild panic attack at being criticised and became very defensive. My comments were nothing personal. Just business.
I think it’s obvious that I have little truck with those who would claim that no objective judgment can be made on the quality of works of literature – my point in writing this piece was partly to poke fun at such a view. Nor do I think it’s acceptable to automatically blame the book when a lack of comprehension on the reader’s part might be the more likely culprit.
But it remains the case that definitions of what makes a great work differ. There are entire critical schools that disagree as to whether certain works are art at all, let alone great art. Of course you feel that a definition of what constitutes greatness is possible – so do I. But we might have different definitions, or different ideas of what works accord to that definition. It’s clear to me from experience that it is almost impossible to convince another person of the greatness of a work of art if they aren’t open to that idea in the first place. I am not arrogant enough to think that the reason for this is that every peson I ever agrued with was less discerning as I. Art is not an entirely cerebral business. Even where a work ticks all the boxes, it might not even approach greatness. This is why I avoid novels described by critics as “brilliantly achieved” or “suberbly crafted”.
Finally, whilst I offer no argument against your assertion that I am destroying civilisation, this is because of my work on the development of a death ray machine, and not because of my critical views.
Fergal,
That Death Ray Machine has been sitting in the Tuppenceworth shed, blocking the lawn mower for months now. Please sort it out.
S
“Just to clarify on the dumbing down – if you didn’t “get??? something that’s an acknowledged great work, it’s awful that our consumer society like a devil on our shoulders has encouraged us to blame the work rather than our own shortcomings as critics.”
But how do we decide what is an “acknowledged great work”? If the individual opinion of the reader is not an acceptable criterion on which to form a value judgement, then how on earth does something get acknowledged as great in the first place?
I’m generally suspicious of deferring to expert opinion. I listen to it, by all means, but I think everybody is potentially smart enough to form their own opinion. I also don’t have a tremendous amount of respect for academics in the liberal arts. Their fields tend to be seriously polluted by ideological imperatives and, lacking any empirical measures, they have little defence against wooly self-serving thinking.
There’s also the fact that what is considered to be an ‘acknowledged’ great work changes over time, artists come in and out of fashion, get rediscovered, or only discovered hundreds of years after their deaths.
Funnily enough, the last 50 pages or so of Joyce’s portrait of the artist are concerned with this very debate – the nature of aesthetics and whether there is some inate and objective quality within a work of art which goes beyond the subjective. Joyce comes down (at great and tedious length) on Copernicus’ side – another reason why I don’t like him I suppose.
“So if you don’t like Ulysses, you should take that as a challenge and ask, well why is this so good, and how can I learn to appreciate it.”
I think people should have more faith in their own intelligence. If you don’t like a work of art that others like, you should ask yourself why others like it and perhaps you will see something that you missed, but I really don’t think it’s a good idea to start from the assumption that you are definitely wrong and that whoever disagrees with you is automatically right.
“I also think Chekov had a mild panic attack at being criticised and became very defensive. My comments were nothing personal. Just business.”
Hmmm. I don’t think so. I’m pretty used to being criticised on the internet. I was just surprised by the virulence of your response and suspected that I hadn’t made my point clearly enough, so I wanted to make it clear what exactly I was saying. At that stage I was as yet unaware of my mission to destroy civilization, which certainly explains your trenchent defence.
As it happens there is a political current, known as primitivism, which aims to destroy civilization and one of the things that they are opposed to is ‘symbolic thought’. It’s main proponent is John Zerzan, a Portland based failed academic. I was always of the opinion that he was a complete idiot and that his writings were stupidity squared. But, perhaps he’s infected my thinking and I’m surreptitiously promulgating his agenda. Gadzooks, the horror!
Mr Zerzan’s work is available at primitivism.com. Apparently he’s also trying to destroy irony and self-awareness.
That Fergal had little truck with those claiming no objective judgments were possible was obvious – hence my use of the term tongue in cheek to describe his later inconsistent “solution”.
As for my “virulent” response, I think it should have been obvious that I too was being fairly tongue in cheek in pointing out that Chekov was out to destory civilisation.
My global point, completely sustained, was that his language was completely at odds with his claims of subjectivity. I just think people should be more careful about what other people will understand about their beliefs from what they say.
That Chekov wasn’t pointed to his position on Joyce being simply reactionary.
Joyce is difficult and dense and can’t be read quickly, whereas other writers with similar things to say – the Russians perhaps – are the opposite.
I just think it’s better to rationalise one’s cultural input and to get more from less.
And I think the more politically engaged and appalled at what the modern world has in store for us, the less able you are to do that.
I recognise that as a failing though and am slightly disconcerted to see it presented as a virtue here.
Good taste exists – tentatively, at least; didn’t Hume and Kant sort this out years ago?
Are there objective standards for judging a ‘classic’ poem, play or novel? Can we accept the idea of certain literary works being ‘generally acknowledged’ as ‘great’? Such questions came to the fore in the USA during the so-called culture wars brought on during the 1970s onwards when ethnic and feminist groups asserted that the DWM or dead white male tradition had prevailed in American literary education and served to occlude the historical contribution to American and world culture of oppressed groups denied their rightful place under the sun. People like Harold Bloom fought back against this denigration of the “100 Great Books to read” tradition in high school curricula. His book The Western Canon was his elegantly written attempt to posit an accumulated corpus of literary works in many languages that amount to a ‘body’ of essential reading. Whether you agree or disagree with his views, the appendix of writers and works he puts at the end is a fine guide for any youngish person setting out to become well read in world literature, and for older readers who feel that there are gaps in their reading. A lot of academic literary theory has been written in opaque prose at variance from the good writing it theorises about. There has been a succession of ideologically motivated literary criticism in the academy – marxist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, poststructuralist, practical criticism, deconstructionism etc. etc. Much of this distracts the student reader from the enjoyment of reading, and reading a lot. Writers have gone in and out of fashion as social circumstances changed. Whatever the passing fashions, each of us coming to a book for the first time has to engage attentively with the text and – this is the perennial subjectivity of reading – make the work something significant to each of us individually, with wider human resonance.
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That Austrian scholar should do some research before her reviews, as Jane Austen was not married, she received a proposal but turned it down because she didn’t love the man (I think).
Aoife,
Well spotted- I was too mesmerised (cf. Mr. Mesmer) by the animal magnetism of the suggestion that Jane Austen was an American writer to have spotted that.
Simon- and I was so busy noticing the marriage mistake that I missed the ‘American household’ one! Christ. Even if this scholar (presumably that’s a joke) didn’t have the mistakes in her review, I would still think she was an idiot, as her whole opinion on Pride and Prejudice and Austen is just stupid.