Victor Hugo, hélas!

In a poll of French literary figures, Andre Gide responded to the question, "Who is the greatest French poet?" with "Victor Hugo, alas!"

I can barely imagine a more interesting answer. More on this later.

Favorite Books

I have a more substantial post coming up, but I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I have been re-reading a few favorites in school.

1. The Iliad
2. The Odyssey
3. Oedipus Rex
4. Hamlet
5. Paradise Lost
6. The Inferno
7. Moby-Dick
8. Swann's Way
9. Middlemarch
10. David Copperfield
11. War and Peace
12. Madame Bovary
13. Tristram Shandy
14. Emma
15. 100 Years of Solitude
16. Great Expectations
17. Macbeth
18. Portrait of a Lady
19. Absalom, Absalom!
20. The Great Gatsby
21. Beowulf
22. Charterhouse of Parma
23. The Trial
24. Crime and Punishment
25. King Lear
26. The Red and the Black
27. The Good Soldier
28. Pride and Prejudice
29. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
30. The Brothers Karamazov
31. Wings of the Dove
32. Love in the Time of Cholera
33. The Castle
34. Antigone
35. Borges' Collected Fictions
36. The Guermantes Way
37. Persuasion
38. Cities of the Plain
39. Jude the Obscure
40. Wuthering Heights
41. Sound and the Fury
42. Tropic of Cancer
43. In a Budding Grove
44. Richard III
45. Heart of Darkness
46. Things Fall Apart
47. Man and Superman
48. The Old Man and the Sea
49. Lolita
50. Tess of the D'urbervilles
51. Bleak House
52. Huckleberry Finn
53. Grapes of Wrath
54. The Fall
55. Nightwood
56. Henry V
57. The Stranger
58. Our Mutual Friend
59. Dubliners
60. Lord Jim
61. Le Morte D'Arthur
62. Julius Caesar
63. The Pickwick Papers
64. Dead Souls
65. Pere Goriot
66. Animal Farm
67. Disgrace
68. Of Mice and Men
69. Naked Lunch
70. Vanity Fair
71. Siddhartha
72. Austerlitz
73. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
74. The Count of Monte Cristo
75. For Whom the Bell Tolls
76. The Scarlet Letter
77. L'Assomoir
78. The Song of Roland
79. Notes from the Underground
80. Fifth Business
81. Romeo and Juliet
82. Tom Sawyer
83. The Maltese Falcon
84. 1984
85. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
86. The Secret Agent
87. Elective Affinities
    
88. Sense and Sensibility
89. The Moonstone
90. Catch 22
91. Barchester Towers
92. The Monk
    
93. All Quiet on the Western Front
94. Edwin Mullhouse
95. The Long Goodbye
96. Mrs. Dalloway
97. Washington Square
    
98. Mansfield Park
99. New Grub Street
100. The Sun Also Rises

"How to Read"

Nick Hornby recently wrote this article called "How to Read." It's a quick read, but it's basic points are these:

• Reading is for pleasure. Therefore, people should read what gives them pleasure, instead of racking their brains trying to slog through "important" books or supposed "classics" that they don't enjoy. Life is short.

Oh, well, there would be more bullet-points, but actually Hornby's argument stops there, more or less. Within the piece is, covertly, a theory of the novel: transparency into a world and its characters, whom the reader is made to care about. So, Hornby's champion is Dickens, rather than Henry James. Oh, fuck, let's just name opaque novelists with unlikeable characters: James, Flaubert, Conrad, Faulkner, Madox Ford, Woolf...

So, predictably, behind this argument for practical "simplicity" is an exclusion, a prohibition on difficulty which is reproduced in the argument: read for pleasure. Supposedly, difficulty is not pleasurable. Anyone who has ever, uh...done anything will tell you otherwise. The JOY of finishing a difficult novel is not to be underrated, and not merely in the sense of relief.

My argument, if you know me, is extremely predictable: in music, I refuse to believe that the bottom, root pleasure of music is the "pure pop song," which all the variations, experimentations, and genres we wade through are just complications and disguises for 3-minute pop gems. Similarly, I reject the idea that "plot" or "caring about characters" is the BASE LINE of literary enjoyment. If I agreed with that, Hornby would be right. Pleasure would be, ultimately, the same thing for everyone, only in more and less sophisticated versions. Literature would be like alcohol: some people might prefer chardonnay, others Pabst Blue Ribbon, but the root pleasure (getting drunk) would be the same, even if some aficionados veered into wine snobbery and pretended it were otherwise.

The best example for me will be Nabokov (and therefore, covertly, Proust, you see): Nabokov's novels are written in exactly the prose that Hornby deplores: "Prose that draws attention to itself." Moreover, the plot and characters of Nabokov novels cannot be said to be their main selling points. Further still, Nabokov is not a novelist you can just pick up and go. He is difficult, allusive, and benefits greatly from the reader knowing a great many conventions and references and maneuvers that will be played with, undermined, and exploited by Nabokov. It is an aesthetic enjoyment, rather than a mimetic one. And this pleasure is like the pleasure of exercising, of building muscles or generally improving at something.

Hornby's discussion is facile because the ability to take readerly pleasure changes over time, and not just with the seasons, but with one's readings, and in response to difficulty and challenges. Anyone who has read Roland Barthes' Pleasure of the Text will have noticed that this "pleasure" is far from uniform to every text (reading Zola versus Robbe-Grillet is Barthes' great example), and is a pleasure honed over a lifetime of difficult and introspective reading.

Hornby is arguing for a path of least resistance. Enjoy! (says the superego). I hope my rebuttal is clear: no one is born being a "certain kind of reader," as Hornby's article repeatedly implies; if someone enjoys Tolstoy, it is not because they are simply that kind of person, but because they have probably suffered and been bored and had to look things up, and wondered about putting it down---and that could all happen just reading War and Peace. On the other hand, there is no greater pleasure than reading War and Peace. It's fucking good. I would say, not despite, but *because* the novel is not unmitigatedly "pleasurable," determines its greatness. The Novel, Lukacs reminds us, is the aestheticization of its own problematic. And, so, the greatest novels tend to be, well...problematic.

As for Hornby's specious conflation of entertainment novels with difficult ones (I imagine Nostromo), it is no wonder that he "begs" us to put down novels that are "making us weep with the effort of reading them." By defining books as purely ENTERTAINMENT, Hornby essentially has made his entire argument. Why, indeed, struggle to entertain yourself? But it's so stupid, because even in classic fiction, the most "entertaining" novels (Mathew Lewis' The Monk), which make no demands on the reader, are ultimately forgettable. And I should stop here before I go into a long thing about Freud and cathexis and circuits of pleasure, but let's just say that if you believe Hornsby, you cannot also believe that crossword puzzles are fun. After all, they can be frustrating.