"Orientation" Before Literary Studies

[Extollager]

I'm going to send, in several installments, the podcast script that I've used in several courses. It's intended to get down to some real basics indeed that can help with the reading of pre-20th -century literature. Maybe some Chrons people will find some of it interesting.

“Orientation”

....I’m happy to be your instructor for this course. As we read some great literary works together, I hope you’ll share my enthusiasm for the magic of the written word and the human imagination. It’s been a great pleasure for me, over the years, to meet so many people who do share my love of literature. These fellow readers with me have been students and also members of a Campus-Community Reading Group that I hosted from 2000 to 2010. Members ranged from high school to retirement age. ...People came to the reading group for the pleasure of being part of a company of readers. I hope that literature is, or through this course will become, a great source of pleasure for you.

I’d like to provide some orientation at this time, but I’m not talking about the nuts-and-bolts orientation you need regarding required reading, schedules, assignments, grading, deadlines, and the like. You’ll find those details in the syllabus, and please get in touch with me any time you have questions about things like that. The orientation I’d like you to think about now, though, is a much broader matter. I’m thinking of how people oriented themselves prior to our present way of life. I’d like to offer EIGHT POINTS for your consideration.



The word orientation literally refers to finding your directions.

The sun rises in the east, so, each morning, if you are facing the sun, west is behind you, north is to your left, and south is to your right. This remains true even though the sun rises lower in the south in winter than in the summer.

On a clear night, you may orient yourself by finding the Big Dipper and using the “pointer stars” to locate Polaris, the North Star. The pointer stars are the two outermost stars of the bowl of the dipper. If you draw an imaginary line from the lower to the upper of the two pointer stars and then follow that line further, you will spot the North Star. South is behind you, east is to your right, and west is to your left.

Until recent historical times, most people, I suppose, knew how to do these things, how to estimate the time of day from the sun’s position, etc. However, in the past couple of centuries, and especially in the past few generations, most English-speaking people have moved indoors and withdrawn from immediate experience of world and other people to an experience of the world and of other people that is increasingly mediated. When you speak with someone face to face, the experience is immediate. When you speak with someone by means of closed-circuit TV, the experience is mediated; you are speaking to an electronic representation of him created by activated pixels, sound reconstructors, etc. You are not really seeing him, and you are not truly hearing his voice. Image and sound have been “encoded” and are “decoded.” Along with mediation, another characteristic of the way most of us live now is withdrawal. Artificial lighting, air conditioning, and so on do not so much mediate the world as withdraw from it. A worker may pass nearly her entire day in this withdrawn world, dealing with other people in mediated rather than immediate interactions.

Why am I talking to you about mediation and withdrawal? For one thing, I do so because you may enhance your enjoyment of this course and the works we will read if you become more oriented to the way people used to experience world, others, and books. See if you can reverse today’s trajectory of withdrawal/mediation a little. Use your imagination, and get up and go outside. Here are some activities that I recommend.

 

[Extollager]

1.Get acquainted with the night sky if you can do so safely. At skyandtelescope.com you can find information to help you identify celestial objects by the unaided eye, as well, of course, as tips for use of a telescope. The more light pollution in your sky, the less you will be able to see. It is unfortunately true that we have withdrawn from the stars (in the sense that our towns and cities exude a dull fog of light that hovers between ourselves and them, making them less accessible to our own vision) even while we have developed machines (such as cameras in satellites) that give us remarkable photographs (mediated images!) of them. You might live somewhere from which it is possible to see some of the major constellations. These were familiar sights for poets and peasants.

Here are some lines from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. In it, “patens” means shiny metal tiles. A young man, Lorenzo, speaks to a young woman, Jessica, as they look at the night sky. Do these lines seem to you, at this time, to be rather “flowery”?

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

The night sky is so lovely that it is natural to believe it sings although we do not hear that ineffable music. Shakespeare’s character is talking about the real night sky, the same sky that is above us – if (1) it is not hidden from us by pollution and (2) we get acquainted with it.

In many of our cities, women march against violence with this inspiring banner: Take back the night. By learning some constellations, let’s also “Take back the night… sky.”

 

[Extollager]

2.Day by day, walk, if it is safe to do so. In some places, crime might not be a pressing problem, but there are no sidewalks. However, if you are able to walk appreciable distances, you can get a little bit of a sense of how most people got around till quite recently.

In Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, when Nell and her grandfather flee London, they just walk through and out of the city, and almost all of the people coming and going from the metropolis get around the same way, on foot. You need to read several pages of Chapter 15 to get the full effect, but here are a few passages:

The old man ….pressed his finger on his lip, and drew the child along by narrow courts and winding ways, nor did he seem at ease until they had left it far behind, often casting a backward look towards it….

….they came upon a straggling neighbourhood, where the mean houses parcelled off in rooms, and windows patched with rags and paper, told of the populous poverty that sheltered there. The shops sold goods that only poverty could buy….. At length these streets becoming more straggling yet, dwindled and dwindled away, until there were only small garden patches bordering the road, with many a summer house innocent of paint and built of old timber ….To these succeeded pert cottages, two and two with plots of ground in front, laid out in angular beds with stiff box borders and narrow paths between, where footstep never strayed to make the gravel rough. Then came the public-house, freshly painted in green and white….. with the horse-trough where the waggons stopped; then, fields; and then, some houses, one by one, of goodly size with lawns, some even with a lodge where dwelt a porter and his wife. Then came a turnpike; then fields again with trees and hay-stacks; then, a hill, and on the top of that, the traveller might stop, and—looking back at old Saint Paul's [Cathedral] looming through the smoke,….—might feel at last that he was clear of London.

Near such a spot as this, and in a pleasant field, the old man and his little guide ….sat down to rest.

Wilkie Collins was a friend of Dickens and the author of a fine novel of suspense, The Woman in Whit. In that novel, one of the characters is telling his story. He describes walking back to London from the countryside, one summer night:

….it was nearly midnight when the servant locked the garden-gate behind me. I walked forward a few paces on the shortest way back to London, then stopped and hesitated.

The moon was full and broad in the dark blue starless sky, and the broken ground of the heath looked wild….. The idea of descending any sooner than I could help into the heat and gloom of London repelled me. The prospect of going to bed in my airless chambers, and the prospect of gradual suffocation, seemed, in my present restless frame of mind and body, to be one and the same thing. I determined to stroll home in the purer air by the most roundabout way I could take; to follow the white winding paths across the lonely heath; and to approach London through its most open suburb by striking into the Finchley Road, and so getting back, in the cool of the new morning, by the western side of the Regent's Park.

I wound my way down slowly over the heath, enjoying the divine stillness of the scene….

Can you imagine walking from a city today to another city or town? Where, if anywhere, could you safely do that, without danger of being run over by automobile traffic? Still, just getting out and walking will help you to enter more imaginatively into the literary works that we will read.

 

[Extollager]

3.Read aloud. I thought it was great when I learned, while teaching a class recently, that two of the students enrolled in the course, who were roommates, took turns reading the assigned material to each other. Reading aloud will help you pay more attention to the sound of the words, which is important even with prose, and more so with poetry. If you read to someone, you will, at least to a degree, recreate the experience of many people who enjoyed the literary works we will be reading. Their authors probably expected that these poems and stories would be read aloud between friends or in family circles.

 

[Extollager]

4.Read for sustained stretches of time without wearing earbuds, taking phone calls, and so on. Develop the ability, if you haven’t done so already, to get wrapped up in a literary work. See if you can read for, say, an hour at a time without texting, phoning, and turning on the TV. Give yourself time to grow a reading, often.

[I like to offer an essay on silence that was written by novelist Susan Hill, but I can't seem to find a link to it now.]

 

[Extollager]

5.Mark your books with a fine-point pen. Write notes in the margins. Compile indexes. Create cross-references. For example, when I recently reread Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, I began to notice that Dickens makes a point of specifying where and how his adolescent heroine falls asleep, so I wrote, on pages in which this happens, the page numbers for other pages in which it also happens. I noticed too that the supreme villain of the book often appears suddenly, even startlingly, so I cross-referenced those pages. I discovered that one could say that this alternation between Nell sleeping and Quilp popping up is basic to the book’s structure. That has enhanced my enjoyment of the book. You will find that marking your book helps to make it your own. Readers have been doing that for generations. In fact, there are books that print such marginalia – to use the proper term for such markings – by great writers who were also great readers, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Become a marginalianeuer! I can’t list the neat personal learning outcomes that you may experience as you read actively and mark your books, but believe me, you should do this. Perhaps you can draw and would like to draw a little sketch of one of the characters in the margin. You might even want to write dated “irrelevant” notes in the margins sometimes, that you will like to stumble across years later when you reread a book, or that might amuse a friend, spouse, or even child if she/he borrows the book someday.

Make those copies of classic books your own, and keep them. Put them on a shelf where you will often see them. Keep a log of your reading – author, title, when you began and when you finished a book, whether this was your first or a subsequent reading. I have been doing so for almost 40 years. I didn’t know, when I read my first Dickens novel in August-September 1975, that he would become one of my favorite authors, but it turned out that he gradually did. Become a bookman or bookwoman.

Incidentally, I don’t recommend that you do much highlighting of your books. Why? Look up Lawrence A. Beyer’s essay “The Problem with Highlighters” in Academic Questions 3:3 (1990) or its reprint in Harper’s as “The Highlighter Crisis” in May 1991.

 

[Extollager]

6.Become alert to, and even skeptical of, the “reign of quantity.” People in our time are constantly talking in pseudo-numerical terms. “I’m about 90% sure that my art teacher doesn’t like me.” People didn’t talk like that until very recently!

Notice how often people use numbers to give guesswork, propaganda, the expression of opinion, and advertising an air of “objectivity” or even of “science” that really isn’t justified by their statements.

As you read, notice a different, non-quantitative vocabulary for talking about human experience. Some of these words have become rare because we often do not care to be as precise about the inner dimension as people used to be. People used to get a great deal of enjoyment from conversation. What did it mean when someone used to praise another person as a “genial” conversationalist? As you read, notice such words and learn what theymeant.

The former meaning of some words has been obscured or lost thanks to more recent usages. The word “gay” has become problematic. This is too bad. Take a look sometime at William Butler Yeats’s classic poem “Lapis Lazuli” and you will see what I mean. There is a real loss to language and thought when we carelessly misuse a word that has a priceless specific meaning, when we use such a word to mean something for which we already have words. There is no one word that means exactly what “gay” used to mean – a state of light-heartedness, of manifest lively good cheer. That meaning is now almost lost to use because the current meaning of “gay” has shouldered it aside. Come to think of it, when was the last time you saw someone in a gay (in this sense) mood? What does “magnanimity” mean? Do you know anyone who deserves to be praised for magnanimity? My main point is this, that when we read older literature and know what the words mean, we may gain two worthwhile things: first, we will understand and enjoy the older literature better, and second, we may actually enhance our access to modes of feeling and imagination that are almost lost to us today.

I urge you to become attuned to what words such as heart, soul, fancy (as a psychological quality), etc. meant in former times. You may come to feel that the daily inner lives of people used to be richer than life today usually seems to be for many of us. Learning this might be a first step in recovering something of what being a human can be.

Notice cues for the nonverbal “language of the heart.” For example, notice how older authors refer to people blushing from strong emotions (not just embarrassment). Sometimes it seems that they felt their emotions throughout their whole bodies more than we do – indeed, as if the soul-body relationship was somewhat different from what it tends to be now. Perhaps it was different.

 

[Extollager]

7.Continue your orientation by curbing that habit of our time of being reductive, ironic, superficially funny and “clever.” As a literature teacher, I have been struck by a few students’ reflexive habit of taking something from great literature and doing a trivializing riff on it. I understand that proclivity; in fact, I feel it too. But why are we like that? Are we embarrassed by heartfelt emotion, by romantic love, by maternal warmth in literature, by tragedy, and other great themes, and so we defensively make fun of them?

Instead, orient yourself towards the idea that the human dimension, of thought, feeling, creativity, etc., matters. These values may be “codified” as certain “stock responses” found in literature. For example, poet William Blake describes small, innocent children playing outside on a mild summer day while they are watched by a loving older person. Can we accept and enjoy this picture and the poem about it? Or do we find that we have our guard up at the very idea?

Here is a test case for you. The following poem, by a contemporary of Shakespeare, has long been enjoyed as a tribute to a pretty but modest woman’s good looks.

THERE IS A GARDEN IN HER FACE
by Thomas Campion (1567-1620)

There is a Garden in her face,
Where Roses and white Lillies grow ;
A heau'nly paradice is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits doe flow.
There Cherries grow, which none may buy
Till Cherry ripe themselues doe cry.

Those Cherries fayrely doe enclose
Of Orient Pearle a double row ;
Which when her louely laughter showes,
They look like Rose-buds fill'd with snow.
Yet them nor Peere nor Prince can buy,
Till Cherry ripe themselues doe cry.

Her Eyes like Angels watch them still ;
Her Browes like bended bowes doe stand,
Threatning with piercing frownes to kill
All that attempt with eye or hand
Those sacred Cherries to come nigh,
Till Cherry ripe themselues doe cry.


Are you able to read or hear the poem, without discomfort, as three stanzas of praise for a lady’s beauty? Do you feel the itch to put a modern spin on it – perhaps finding a way to make it funnier and/or sexier? Do people write poems in this spirit any more? If not, might it be all the more worthwhile to enjoy the poem and get a sense of a kind of experience now largely lost to us?

 

[Extollager]

8.In general, reduce your time spent in mediated/withdrawn environments. Don’t hurry off to YouTube to see if there is a movie version of whatever it is that we are reading.

In conclusion, I’d like to welcome you once again to this course. In our time, we are constantly pushed around, pushed to a trivialized, superficially rationalized, consumerized experience not only of education but of life. When you love good books, when you de-colonialize your imagination, you push back. There are actually many people who are pushing back and enjoying classic literature, art, and music.

As I said to a student a few years ago: “You love a good book? Welcome to the underground.”

END

 

[Brian G Turner]

In Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, when Nell and her grandfather flee London, they just walk through and out of the city, and almost all of the people coming and going from the metropolis get around the same way, on foot.

This has made me realise I should read more Dickens. Could be interesting to look more closely at the historical settings, rather than just the story.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

5.Mark your books with a fine-point pen.

I use a 0.5mm mechanical "propelling" pencil, HB softness. Graphite is acid free, non-bleed, non-print through and can be edited if you change your mind. It doesn't fade with time.

3.Read aloud.

I can't do plays or poetry any other way.

Immersion? My difficulty is remembering to stop to eat, drink or sleep!

I don’t recommend that you do much highlighting of your books

I download a lot of older books from Gutenberg. The eInk dedicated eBook readers (Kindle or Kobo) are so much better than an app. I like that I can highlight a part and optionally add as much text as I like. Later I can plug in via USB and import a file to PC for the book, with list of chapter, highlight as context and note, with time and date it was made.

Really I rarely make notes on physical books.

walking from a city today to another city or town?

My son has done this. Our Village is 6km from edge of Limerick City, it's another 3km to the city centre / quays on the Shannon or 10km altogether to the King's Island in the City. A quite safe walk, not steep anywhere. I used to do that sort of walking from Jordanstown to Kilroot past Carrickfergus when I was at College, sometimes near midnight (in mid 1970s).

Thanks for an interesting list.