Even more on covers

While curiosity is natural, and reverence is healthy, there are times when an author’s familiarity with the literary universe obstructs and clutters her creativity. We like a narrator to be literate, cognisant, and even referential, but we don’t like a story that’s simply a tissue of references, or one that gets stuck in the cobwebs of the literary attic. It feels too second-hand, and too clever by half. Iris Murdoch says somewhere (I can’t find it now), the most obstructive thing for a new writer is literary tradition. This can mean that the greatness of the tradition stops a new writer before he’s begun, or it can mean that the great tradition so entangles and tongue-ties his story that he ends by adding nothing to the tradition he so admires. An overly referential story falls short because it’s written in a kind of shorthand, full of gestures to points already made, images already bodied forth, full of obeisance rather than bold strides. And it cuts to that old dichotomy between artist and critic: both know how a novel is written, but only one can write it.

More on covers

This article's discussion of Colm Toibin's book about Henry James, The Master, led me to further pondering of the copyright issue. There are subtleties here, and beyond the question of whether literary borrowing is good or bad is the question of why we do it. What's the compulsion to go back instead of on? In revisiting scenes of literary greatness, what do we expect to find? Or, more probably, to leave? It's a compulsion I feel too, though I've never acted on it. (And in James' case, reverence would humble my ambition.)

I think it starts with simple curiosity. What became of the younger sister? Who might have lived in the house next door? What happened to him in those three years at sea? That curiosity is strongest where the novel's world is strongest, where the author's creation is real and robust, and carries a resonance of its own. We want to explore the empty rooms that exist by implication, the darknesses left by the limits of an author's fiat lux.

 I think such curiosity and the creativity it inspires show a healthy respect for the power of good writing. “Imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown,” and “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” Theseus, the king in Midsummer Night's Dream, knows well the power of poets to call things convincingly into being, to name and locate them so thoroughly that they have an existence outside the work which first embodied them.

At a deeper level, I think it proves my theory that art is singular: all art is part of humanity's collected works. I'm not talking about T.S. Eliot's “tradition,” or about a canon of great works, but about the inescapable connection between all works of art, whether they acknowledge it or not.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Today a poem that has been haunting this blog for several weeks in one way or another. It’s final lines are some of the most quoted among the American oeuvre, and it is truly a thing of elegance. However (and I'm indebted to Richard Strier here), a closer reading of the whole poem suggests the lines are often misquoted, or at least misunderstood.  Like Homer Simpson, we ‘fastforward’ the poem and wind up at its conclusion before we’ve understood its intent. 

The roads diverge, but the traveller says they were ‘just as fair...really about the same, / And both that morning equally lay’ untrodden. He chooses one, and leaves the other for another day, knowing he will not come back, because ‘way leads on to way.’ Already there is duplicity, or at least inconsistency, in his thoughts. Next comes deliberate blurring, as his choice between equals becomes a romantic tale told ages hence, and with a sigh. Time and distance soften and warp his view of the choice he made. The ‘difference’ at last is not coloured in - it could be either good or bad; his sigh could be sweet or sad.

The poem is often read as a statement of bold individualism, the romance of Whitman or Thoreau. Yet it seems to be more about the tricks of memory and the narrative impulses of the mind. About how telling gives shape and purpose to a life of indifferent alternatives, of myriad minor choices, in which way leads on to way, and you can see the way you came only when you look back.  Better known by its last lines, the poem is actually called ‘The Road Not Taken.’

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Judging covers

Yesterday's Book Show opened with an interesting conversation about copyright - literally the right to make copies - and the execution of literary estates, about which I've posted before. There's a court case at the moment between Christopher Tolkein, the executor of JRR's estate, and the writer of a book with the unpropitious title Mirkwood: A novel about JRR Tolkein. The issue seems to be reputational: not so much that the character of Tolkein is somehow copyrighted (how can it be?) but that the author, Hillard, is reaping where he has not sown by using, and probably abusing, Tolkein's literary reputation to advance his own. The case raises interesting questions about rights versus freedoms. Do we protect the legal rights of creators at the expense of creativity? If we relax the borders of the literary universe, do we create the conditions for a loss of creativity? Something like this loss can be seen in the film industry, where intertextuality has become naked looting, imagination plays on a narrow loop, and writers peddle endless reruns like rats in wheels. Should we then judge a case not by whether a writer has made use of another writer, but by whether she has made good use of him? Who will be the judge? 

Friday’s poetry seminar

Last Friday was my final encounter with Richard Strier - a three-hour seminar on a single Herbert poem, “Love,” which I've posted before.  I thought three hours seemed like a lot for one short poem, but the Professor said he could easily have spent a week on it.

We spent the first hour on the poem's form - the rhyme scheme (ABABCC), line lengths (10,6,10,6,10,6 x 3), metre (mostly alternating iambic pentameter, trimeter), and syntax (a move from longer to shorter phrases, from softer to harder punctuation). I confess this left me a bit cold - or perhaps I should say it found me cold; I'm never one to dive into group discussion before it's properly warmed up, and I felt terribly rusty on the technical stuff; my grasp of all those Greek terms (trochees, iambs, dactyls) has always been tenuous. I think form is tremendously important, but to plunge into it before any work on the meaning or tone of the poem felt premature, putting the cart before the horse.  How can we know what's significant about the form, I thought, until we know what the poem's about? Perhaps it showed a lack of intellectual courage on my part.

Then we moved on to meaning. Word by word and line by line, we went deeply into the poem's emotional, social, theological, and intellectual world. We felt the courtesy and hospitality of the poem's atmosphere. We found it odd in the beginning that the speaker would “draw back,” from Love's welcome. We noted an increasing urgency and assertion in his resistance to Love's lovely invitations, his insistence on his unworthiness to the point, in the final stanza, of demanding to be sent to hell, rather than be Loved. A sort of paraphrase of what Milton's Satan says: better to reign in hell than be served in heaven. In the end, Love insists: you must sit down and taste my meat. And in the end, the speaker sits, submits, allows himself to be served, to eat, to be satisfied, to no longer be “ungrateful” but to be the willing object of grace.

In some ways a complex and prolonged analysis sits uneasily with a poem of such breathtaking simplicity. But the beauty of such poetry is that however much you break it open, it is never broken. Relentless interrogation will not weary or stale it, and there is no limit to the number of times or ways to encounter it. Like grace, it is new every morning. Like love, it always bids us welcome.