Dirda on Books – Transcript Michael Dirda Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, October 13, 1999

Michael Dirda The Washington Post

Following is a transcript of the discussion.

Bethesda, MD: I just read your essay about missing your books while you're down in Florida. In this essay, you mourn the uncertain future of the classic books you love, as students of literature increasingly read Toni Morrison, for example, instead of Nabokov.

As I'm sure you could concede, modern authors are just as able to inspire a love, or appreciation, of language as authors of yore...and what is the goal of studying literature, if not to appreciate language? Perhaps to develop one's analytical skills -- fine, modern authors do that, too. To study the human process of interpreting experience and culture? No era's authors have the monopoly on that.

So I'm wondering if you could articulate the danger, as you see it, of young readers never quite getting around to reading the classics you cherish. Aside from sentimental reasons, what exactly is the risk posed to our culture by these books fading away?

Michael Dirda: Hi, welcome to Dirda on books, coming to you from beautiful, sunny Orlando.

Your question seems to suggest that I've taken my stand with the ancients against the moderns. That's hardly the case. Literature must be of its own time and needs constantly to be renewed by fresh voices. I would hardly say that Toni Morrison is a lesser writer than Nabokov, even though I prefer Vlad the Impaler. My actual lament is much simpler: The literature of the past is so wonderful that I would hate for books as interesting as, say, New Grub Street or Aubrey's Brief Lives or Rupert Hard-Davis's Hugh Walpole to be overlooked. I suppose such fine books will always have some readers, but to my mind they should have more. In my experience, many young people only know the literature of their own generation, or a few selected obvious masterworks of the past. I would hope that we could create readers who would never be satisfied with such a narrow range of books. Right now I feel that too many students just read the reserved reading shelf and neglect the rest of the library.

Hilton Head Island, SC: Reading Lolita again after many years. Maybe it's our prurient age, but find it rather boring because we have had our share of notorious maniacs, thanks to TV, etc. Ah, but the prose is still magnifico. What's your take on this one? And which of Nabokov's works do you rate number 1?

Michael Dirda: It's always been the prose that mattered most. Lolita is still my favorite Nabokov--unless it's Pale Fire. I'm also extremely fond of the lectures on literature and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

Cleveland, OH: I'm interested in your thoughts on two writers that I haven't heard you say much about. The first is T.C. Boyle. I thought much of his early work, such as Water Music and World's End, was wonderfully written and quite funny. His more recent novels I have found disappointing as he seems to be straining to write novels with a message. The second is Martin Amis. His novel Money in particular is perhaps one of my favorite contemporary works. It is painfully offensive to just about everyone -and funny-. Again, while I have read and enjoyed his more recent works -particularly London Fields- they too seem to have something missing. What are your thoughts on these two writers and are there any similar writers you could recommend?

Michael Dirda: Have only read a few stories by Boyle, though I remember Water Music as one of those rumbustious word-mad books that I normally relish. Amis I admire a great deal, again mainly for his style and fierce humor. I reviewed his most recent collection of stories and found it a good conspectus of his career. But everyone seems to cavil at something or other in the books following Money. As for writers like these two... You might try Gilbert Sorrentino's devestating satire of the New York literary scene: Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, or his mammoth and very funny, if occasionally long-winded masterpiece, Mulligan Stew. Also, William Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own is both verbally pyrotechnical and very funny. In England you might look into the fiction of Angela Carter (Nights at the Circus, Wise Children) and Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion).

Chevy Chase, MD: Speaking of your students...I've been following your progress through the discussions and your articles. I'm curious as to how your students have recieved your remarks.

Michael Dirda: I walked into class a couple of weeks back to find my online remarks about them being projected onto the screen at the front of the room. Monday a student in honors class quoted Housman to me--I had offered an A to any kid in my writing class who could quote me a line of Housman. They are, for the most part, extremely forebearing of their eccentric professor.

Washington, DC: Michael, I don't read much poetry but I just started reading John Gardner's Jason and Media and it's quite readable. Are there any books explaining epic poetry? And how about some epic poetry recommendations?

Michael Dirda: Epic poetry recommendations! Be still my beating heart. Well, you should start with the classics: Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid; then you might go on to the long medieval epics such as Parzival and Niebelungenlied; in English you could read Troilus and Criseyde (not quite an epic but close enough), The Faerie Queene (which Im' sorry to say I've never read more than a canto of myself), Paradise Lost, Wordsworth's The Prelude. We are currently undergoing a renaissance of interest in the long poem, partly due to the success a decade ago of Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate.

A good readable, if old-fashioned book on the epic is Mark Van Doren's The Noble Voice, which covers a dozen or so poems.

Silver Spring, MD: Mr. Dirda,

No question here, just an expression of endorsement for your feeling that today's generation is missing out on so much by not reading the classics. The classics are called the classics for a reason: their quality has endured the ages. Very similar to movies! So many masterpieces of film are classics, having been produced decades ago. I don't know of many recent movies which, 50 years from now, will even be remembered, let alone considered "classics." Ditto for books!

Michael Dirda: No argument here.

Centreville, VA: Last week someone asked about works for a technical-educated group. I suggest Francis Crick "The Astonishing Hypothesis" --the idea that what we call the soul is a function of the complexity of the human brain. Murray Gell-Mann, "The Quark and the Jaguar", and Roger Penrose "The Emperor's New Mind", about artificial intelligence. As a person with not enough scientific education, I found these really stretched my mind.

Now for my question. I read the first Harry Potter book and quite enjoyed it, as one does a good children's book. However, the Pullman books, the Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife, are a different order of magnitude altogether. I agree with you, these are real literature. The concerns are not just a child's concerns such as a new school, or winning the big game. For instance in the Golden Compass, the comparison between the austere beauty of Jordan College and the feminine prettiness of Mrs. Coulter's apartment. The daemon that takes its permanent form at puberty, and the cruel research involved in separating children from their daemons. In The Subtle Knife, there is a passage where one of the witches meets Lord Asrael. It was clear to the other witches what happened next, and the children never dreamed of it, so there was no need to speak of it. This has a sophistication that goes way over the head of any child I ever met. So my question is, other than the protagonists being children, what makes this a childrens' book?

Thanks, Sue

Michael Dirda: Great recommendations. I'm glad to find someone else who admires the Pullman novels as much as I do. I don't begrudge the Potter books their success, but the Dark Materials sequence is, as you say, of a different order of magnitude.

It has always seemed to me that the great children's books were simply great books marketed for children or, sometimes, adult books that children found enjoyable. In this last category you might include Robinson Crusoe or King Solomon's Mines. But the best children's authors always press hard against the boundaries of thier field: Think of the amazingly touching time travel story Tom's Midnight Garden, the experimental later novels of Alan Garner such as Red Shift, with its sexual content, or Russell Hoban's deeply philosophical The Mouse and His Child or a picture book like Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteris of Harris Burdick. In the case of Pullman, this is a children's book mainly because its heroes are young people and its action is a familiar one of danger and escape. But the poetry of the writing and the religious symbolism make it a subtly disturbing book. Few regular grown-up books are as disorienting. The last volume promises to be about war in heaven. And certainly that witch queen--Serafina Peccala--must be one of the sexiest women in modern literature.

Fairfax, VA: I enjoyed your most recent column on Colette immensely. If one has time to read her only sparingly, what should one not miss?

Michael Dirda: I haven't actually seen the column, so I suspect that the reader's guide sidebar I wrote didn't make it onto the page. The book to start with is Earthly Paradise, compiled by Robert Phelps--a kind of autobiography made up of sections from her memoir-like books. Of the straigt fiction, Gigi is delightful and Cheri deeply moving.

Bethesda, MD: Are you or aren't you anti-modern?? How do you reconcile your statement that you don't 'side with the ancients' with your lack of argument against the statement that no book from the last 50 years will become a classic? Gee, too bad literary brilliance died pre-1949.

Michael Dirda: I have never said that no book from the last 50 years would ever become a classic. Impossible. Tell me where you think I said this. I could name you a dozen classics right now: Blood Meridian, The Recognitions, Catch-22, the short fiction of Steven Millhauser, The Stars My Destination, Annie Proulx's undervalued Accordion Crimes, etc. I can't imagine how you have this impression. I love the literature of the past, but that doesn't mean I don't value the literature of my own time. I'm really shocked by your attribution of these sentiments to me.

Dan from North Noyes Drive: I agree with you wholeheartedly on your comment to the first question. I think Toni Morrison as well as many other more modern writers...write all their books the same and are all extremely maudlin and lack what early 20th centry American literature provided us. I am wondering if there is anyone today that writes similarly or measures up to -in your opinion- Fitzgerald or Steinbeck? Thanks.

Michael Dirda: I would disagree--see previous answer--with any blanket dismissal of modern writers. And I would point to the list of authors and books I mention in the previous message. I'm still really annoyed by that previous question. I spent years pushing "innovative" writing at people--Sorrentino, Perec, Queneau, Calvino, Winterson--and just because I value the classics I'm characterized as some kind of old fart.

Albuquerque, NM: What sort of themes dominate modern futuristic writing -i.e. contemporary HG Wells and George Orwell-? Has anyone incorporated themes involving genetic technology? Do we as a society have a sense that we are several steps into the future already with new communications devices, cloning technology, the ability to create artificial organisms using a simplified genome -Celera Genomics- at our disposal?

Michael Dirda: Sure, lots of people address these issues. Genetic stuff--try Greg Bear's Blood Music; clones and replicants, see the novels of Philip K. Dick, whose obsessive theme is how do we know we are human and what makes us so (try Don Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?); the novels of Bruce Sterling and William Gibson and Neal Stephenson also address all these matters.

Washington, DC: In the blurb that accompanies your chat, the Post describes you as the "Pulitzer Prize winning" critic. What did you win the Pulitzer for and has it made much of a difference in your career?

Michael Dirda: I won it for criticism--for a selection of 10 reviews and essays--in 1993. Winning a Pulitzer helped me do more writing for Book World and less editing.

Washington, DC: During a previous chat or two, people asked for your recommendations of scary books, this being the month for that sort of reading. You didn't mention "Frankenstein" and "Dracula." Why not?

I have read both during the last two Halloweens and can say that in my humble opinion "Frankenstein" is the more interesting and better written book, though it's quite different from what most people probably think, having seen only the movie. It has its scary moments but is a rather sad story, on balance. Still, it's definitely worth reading. Do you agree?

"Dracula," surprisingly, is hardly in his story. When he is, it's most interesting. But I would still recommend "Frankenstein" more. What do you think?

And what of Poe? HE'S the one I'm going to be reading for this Halloween. What stories of his do you think are the best?

Michael Dirda: I figured they were already pretty well known. And, as you say, Frankenstein isn't scarey at all--it's a philosophical novel about human nature. Rather pathetic and wistful really. Dracula does have frightening moments, though.

I like short stories best, and for ghost stories I turn to classic English tales--M.R. James and all the others I mentioned. For Poe I've always thought The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart his most effective scarey tales. Though the end of The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar is hard to forget--and must have inspired a dozen later tales of deliquescent corpses.

Chevy Chase, MD: Hi there. I was wondering what you may have read by Irvine Welsh, and what you think about him in general. I've found his stuff to be extremely real at times, and occasionally quite emotionally wrenching. His writing has a lot of power and beauty, but sometimes you have to do a lot of waiting to get to that point. I found that especially in Marabou Stork Nightmares. Trainspotting was the most wonderfully disturbing book I'd read since Clockwork Orange. The only other thing I've read by Welsh is Ecstasy, which is 3 short stories; he seemed to "try on" a few personas in that one, and eventually came out the best when writing in his usual style.

Michael Dirda: Read a little Welsh when I was editing a review of his last novel, the one about the sadistic cop. I probably should try Trainspotting. Scotland has ben having a real renaissance in the last decade: Alasdair Gray, Magnus Mills, etc.

Mt. Rainier, MD: I think the person accusing you of being 'anti-modern' was guilty of some sloppy reading. The writer from Silver Spring said 'not many' current books or movies will be classics - a quite different thing from 'not any'. Few books survive their own generation, no matter what generation it is, to become classics.

Michael Dirda: Right you are.

Washington, DC: Of Don Delillo's books, which one would you recommend starting out with? I read once a selection from Underworld -the first chapter, later revised- in Harper's; though I liked the selection, I have not been able to get into the book. But, still, I do admire his writing. What do you think of him?

Michael Dirda: I loved Underworld, though it does have its weaknessess--I didn't much care for the mystical ending. You should probably try Libra or White Noise, but if you don't like Underworld you probably won't like these either.

Fairfax, VA: Michael, since you are billed as a critic, what do you think of the excesses of post-modernism, semioticism, deconstructionism, whateveryoucallit-ism? Valid originally, but stuck in a pattern of circular logic?

Michael Dirda: I am sometimes billed as a critic, but I think of myself more as an essayist or literary entertainer. My view of these various isms? In most cases, one or two brilliant minds have been followed by scores of lesser ephebes, disciples who rigidly apply the master's insights. I have no problem with theory being taught in the university--so long as it complements a primary emphasis on original texts. What I worry about is grad students who know their Baudrillard and have never read Baudelaire, who know Derrida but not Diderot, who know Foucault and not Faulkner. Works of art should always be the focus of a literary education. Really, what sane person would prefer to read criticism about Ulysses rather than Ulysses itself? Scholars need to know this secondary bibliography, but the common reader can let it go. Certainly, most of the criticism of our time will be forgotten: Who know reads Lucien Goldmann, once a god? Even truly great critics like Empson are now period pieces. Historically speaking, a critic's main job is being wrong about the important writers of his or her time.

Philadelphia, PA: I recall a line from one of your past columns: only a fool misses the literature of his own time -close, but just a paraphrase-. This could hardly come from one who disdains current literature.

Michael Dirda: Thanks.

Rockville, MD: Another question about your Collette column: near the end you express surprise at "a highly critical reading of the hitherto much admired ... 'Julie de Carneilhan' ... The biographer convincingly demonstrates that the text ... is marred by a more than implicit anti-Semitism." Can you elaborate on this? How and why was it overlooked before. What did Thurman show you that your own reading didn't? It sounds like a remarkable critical achievement.

Jack

Michael Dirda: I didn't realize that Colette wrote the novella during the Occupation. The characterization of the second wife makes clear that she's Jewish; there's a certain nastiness I hadn't really focused on too.

Washington, DC: Nabokov, indeed. I adored Lolita. Now I am on Pale Fire, which is ranking up there with one of the most painfully slow and boring things I've ever picked up. Am I approaching this from the wrong angle? Can you do anything to help?

Michael Dirda: I love puzzles, tricks, funhouse mirrors, collapsing floors, uncanny mimes, and obsessives--Pale Fire is made of all these. What can you be sure of in this novel about the real, the imaginary and the insane?

On that note, alas, we'll have to end this week's chat. I'm sorry I haven't time to get to a lot more very interesting questions. It's been fun. Till next Wednesday at 2, Keep reading!

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