Have you ever just...tried remembering stuff?
On not re-reading, not performing effort, and on getting in touch with Moliere
Hello friends. When I started writing about literature, I decided that I wasn’t going to be fake—I wouldn’t pretend to read things I haven’t, or to understand things I don’t. I think when you’re at the higher end of the cultural sphere there is a strong temptation to perform your own effort. Like, once I was at workshop, and one of the fellows was telling me she does 45 or 50 drafts of each story (this was in the context of her giving me some very condescending advice about my own story). And I said, “Why? What changes between the 45th and the 46th?” And she was like, “I work on every sentence until it is perfect, etc, etc.” All nonsense of course. If Faulkner can write As I Lay Dying in six weeks, why are you doing 45 drafts of a short story?
Now I have no doubt that she does occasionally do that number of drafts, but it’s all in service of managing her own insecurities about whether or not she is truly a genius. People trick themselves into thinking that if they’ve worked hard enough, the result will be a diamond.
When it comes to writing about literature, the effort is research and re-reading. How much of the secondary literature have you read? How deep into the author’s ouevre have you delved? Etc. Etc. This is certainly worth doing if you’re a scholar, but it also imposes certain limits on what you can write about. Some books don’t need to be, and in fact shouldn’t be, read multiple times. Nobody is going to read all of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writings just to write an essay about her—-that would be unbearably boring. And yet she is unquestionably someone who is worth writing about! The same is true for Sinclair Lewis—are you really going to read all the novels he wrote before Main Street and after Dodsworth? No, of course not.
The point is, sometimes you need to make the effort and sometimes you don’t. Like if you’re writing about Flaubert you could come off like a real jackass if you’ve only read realist fictions like Sentimental Education and Madame Bovary and haven’t perused Salammbo or Bouvard and Pecuchet (a hyperrealist novel and a metaphysical fable, respectively).
When it comes to writing about the Great Books, there’s a lot of natural limits. I remember reading A Great Idea At The Time, a history of the Great Books, and realizing that this list of books was created by a committee: no member of the committee had actually read all the books! To me that felt tremendously freeing: you don’t have to read all the books in order to write about the Great Books as a whole.
Similarly, when I write about a book, sometimes it’s a book I’ve read multiple times, like Proust’s novel, but other times I’ve only read it once. A lot of my Great Books reading was a long time ago, early in my journey: I read most of the great works of Dostoevsky in 2010, almost fourteen years ago. I don’t remember them particularly well: the one I retain best is Crime and Punishment, which I believe I read six years later, in 2016. Some of these books I will certainly reread, like Paradise Lost, and other books I probably never will: Am I really going to read The Idiot again?
It’s like with the lady doing 45 drafts—the point isn’t to create an unassailable empire of effort—it’s to do whatever work you can do, are capable of doing, have time to do, and need to do. When it comes to the Great Books and this blog, I had to forgive myself a long time ago for sometimes not reading closely or not retaining everything I read.
That being said, I do have a very good memory. All the time I meet people who say, “I can never remember people's names.” And I’m always tempted to say, “Have you ever considered just…trying?” Because I also used to have a bad memory for names, until eventually I just began trying harder. Now when I meet someone I try to fix their name in my memory. I went through a period when I would make notes, but I eventually realized that the notes were an excuse to forget. Writing down their name felt like remembering, but it wasn’t the same as actually trying to remember. I am also very good at retaining trivial details of peoples’ lives. One of my favorite anecdotes is about the time my wife told me about her friend’s trip to Taiwan.
I said, “Oh did she see her parents?”
Rachel said, “Excuse me, X isn’t Taiwanese, they’re Japanese!”
I said, “Yesss….but doesn’t her dad work in Taiwan?”
Rachel had forgotten. She’s been friends with this person for twenty years. I remembered. Similarly, when I am reading a book, I just try to remember what is going on. I try to remember the names of the characters, the plot, the main arguments, etc. Just like if I am confused in a book, I make an effort to try to understand what is happening.
I’ve finally moved on from Iceland.
Before I started on Iceland I got really into Moliere, but I realized that he originally wrote in verse, and most of the translations I was reading were in prose. I went looking for good verse translations and found this box set translated by Richard Wilbur. It is shockingly good! He translates in iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets, and he claims to be accurate on a sentence level, though my French is terrible so I can’t really say one way or another.
The style is extremely different from Shakespeare, without that flowery Petrarchan language that’s settled all over Shakespeare like dandruff. The work is earthier, the plots a little more coherent, and there is more of a unified outlook—a sense of scoffing at mankind’s foibles. Moliere definitely comes across as a moralist. But there’s a very human element in his plays as well. Take, for instance, Tartuffe, about a father who gets rooked by a priest who pretends to be very holy—the father isn’t a bad guy. He’s not even a fool. He’s just someone who believes himself to be in the presence of true holiness. And the children and wife who the father disowns aren’t grotesques either, they’re not particularly bad or particularly noble. The daughter just wants to marry her man (instead of being forced to marry Tartuffe) and the son wants to do the typical things of a man of his class. I am really into it.
When reading a play like this, you’re reading a comedy. It’s supposed to make you laugh. You don’t necessarily read it through a psychological lens, for its insights into human nature, or through a mimetic lens, looking for insights into the workings of the real world. In read early-modern and pre-modern works, there’s a sense of distance, particularly for a modern person, but I am not convinced that the contemporary reader or viewer didn’t also experience distance. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Don Quixote, but no reader can avoid being shocked by how brutal it is. People are constantly beating up Quixote: he loses teeth, collects bruises, and is just horribly tormented. It does seem like the sort of fiction that would come out of a world that had slavery, bear-baiting, conquistadores, and the like. Today we read DQ, and we see some nobility in the main character, but I’m not convinced he was particularly noble to contemporary readers. I do not think that they respected fools in quite the way we do. If anything, I think contemporary readers had a grudging respect for the out-and-out rogue and hypocrite, the man like the main character in Lazarillo de Tormes, who ends up in a variety of professions before, I believe, finding a secure spot as a corrupt priest.
One doesn’t want to judge pre-modern and early-modern literature by standards that it wasn’t holding itself to—to say that Don Quixote doesn’t respect its own protagonist is to miss the point. And the complexity of a Great Book is that we can see that contemporary audiences weren’t that alien. They could perceive that element of nobility in Quixote, but it didn’t necessarily predominate in their understanding of the character. The book is complex enough that it can be many things for many people.
The answer of course is, “What about the book that isn’t that complex? What about the book that is just exactly what the people of its time wanted and needed?” An example, perhaps, might by Seneca’s blood-thirsty plays, like Thyestes, which were apparently big spectacles, well-suited to early Imperial Rome.1 It’s hard to say! We can only be ourselves, and we can only judge things by how much we enjoy them. I tend to believe that nuance, complexity, and the ability to get at some kind of deeper or unspoken truth is something that writers have strived for in all times and places, and that it’s precisely by getting at that truth that we enable any form of cross-cultural or cross-generational communication in the first place.
But Moliere isn’t that alien to us. Much less so than Shakespeare! You could imagine his stuff as a Hollywood musical, to be honest, full of hijinx and capers. Maybe that’s a function of reading it in translation, I’m not sure, but French literature has always struck me as more practical, less flowery, and less given to satirical exaggeration than English literature—the latter, often verges on melodrama and absurdity, as in the novels of Samuel Richardson (which I do enjoy, especially Pamela) and some of plays of Shakespeare (I’m thinking, for instance, of Merchant of Venice, which is too serious to be funny, and too funny to be tragic).
Addenda:
Recently I was having a politely heated discussion with a friend about Masha Gessen’s statement that Gaza was a ghetto, and it was being liquidated. My friend said, “But that’s true.” I said, the Warsaw ghetto was liquidated over the course of about ten weeks, in the Aktion Warsau: 250,000 people were shipped to Treblinka and most were killed immediately. There are only 60 survivors of the 800,000 people were sent, in total, to the camp. So, you know, that’s pretty different from Gaza. But the situation in Gaza also seems quite bad.
Seneca was such a fascinating figure: a Stoic philosopher who produced spectacles for the masses, served as Emperor Nero’s prime minister (essentially), and used his position to build the largest fortune in the Empire.
This was an interesting note, thank you.