The only Great Book that is a must-read
The author is wondering if it’s a good idea to write more "takes". The author has experimented recently with taking topics generated by the "discourse" (i.e. the hive-mind of very-online literary people) and turning out essays that might titillate her audience. These essays are, she thinks, good and honest, and she is not ashamed of them.
She is certainly open to the idea of developing more "Great Books" inflected takes. But she is troubled by the idea of subjectivity: is she delivering takes on her own behalf? Or on behalf of the Great Books themselves? If the author is the one who is making the comment, then it feels like she's setting herself up as a tin-pot expert, saying "Because I've read Plato, my opinions about student protests are now of superior value and worth reading". This feels rhetorically insecure: the author doesn’t have original opinions in sufficient quantity to actuate this position, and the result would be a readership left thinking “Wow, what’s the point of reading Tale of Genji if you end up sounding like every other liberal?”
The second possibility is that she is writing her takes on behalf of truth, beauty, tradition, and culture itself. The implication being that because the author has read so many old books, that she is now in possession of some private, secret knowledge about how mankind was meant to live, before it was perverted by the cell-phone and equal rights for women, and the author is writing blog posts to dispense this wisdom to others.
This is a genuinely attractive prospect. If the author truly was communing with "the Voice of the Past" then she would be ecstatic about sharing that knowledge. Unfortunately (in the author’s opinion) the past is too cacophonous. There is no throughline—everything one Great Book advocates, another denigrates. Moreover, even if the author could, as an intellectual exercise, construct some kind of case that the world of yesterday was different / better than the world of today, the fact is that on on a brutish, experiential level, the author has simply never heard "the voice of the past" and doesn’t relate to the Great Books on this level, and it would be dishonest to pretend that she has. Thus, the author is left as simply "person who has read books and has opinions". She is well-read, perhaps even wise, but not a sage. She has no special font of wisdom, no revelation to impart.
So why does the author write in the third person? The author is totally allowed to eschew writing "takes" but surely not all first-person criticism is a "take". There are many kinds of first-person posts that do not constitute a "take". There is, for instance, the essay: an honest and searching attempt, by an individual mind, to get to the bottom of some question that strikes the mind as being important. And yet, although this is unfair, the author can't help thinking that an essay is just a take without any discourse to piggy-back on. The nice thing about discourse is that it provides an occasion: why are you writing about this now? Well, it's because this is what we're talking about today!
But if you set out on your leaky raft all by yourself, the natural question becomes, "Why? Do you really expect to find something out here that nobody else has?"
And yes, the rhetoric is that it's all about trying—it's in the attempt to answer the big questions that we, somehow, answer the big questions, but without really answering them...or something? No! The author rebels against this line of reasoning. It's absurd, it's silly. If you set out to answer a question, then at the end you must answer it. And if your answer is not novel, then you've merely crafted a take. Moreover, there's no need to write an essay unless it's in search of something. But the author is not looking for anything: the author has picked her side. She is a centrist liberal, an atheist, a humanist—she is slowly turning into her favorite MFA professor, a woman who loved Gibbon and Proust and Chekhov and Henry James and felt no compunctions about dissing whatever was contemporary or au courant. The author has her social role—the essay form has no answers for her.
So what is left for the author besides the production of “takes”? As the author gets older, she finds herself more and more in love with high culture. She genuinely enjoys Henry James. She genuinely likes classical music, art films, etc. The author could certainly become an educator of some sort--could slot herself into the Dead Poets Society mold. As a youth, the author felt that it was a bit cringe to talk about books in ecstatic terms, but now that she's older, the author sees that in the beginning there was ecstasy. That much of the art she loved (Sophocles and The Mahabharata comes to mind) was born out of intense religious feelings. That people related to this art not just in some anemic, abstract way—it wasn't only entertainment—it had some sacramental function. Oddly enough, one of the author's most emotional reading experiences was the Gospels. Reading the Gospels last summer, the author was brought to tears by the story of the unclean woman (continuously bleeding from her vagina) who was afraid to ask Jesus for a cure (because she was so impure) so would only follow behind him and touch his cloak. He turned and asked who had touched him, and when he figured out it was her, he healed her. The author has written a half-dozen times about this story since reading it, and she thinks about it relatively often. The author became interested in Christianity a few years ago, after reading a number of slave narratives. In one of them, the life of Harriet Jacobs,1 the writer has a chapter on religion in the South, and the author was struck by Jacobs’ confidence in her own religiosity. The author thought, how strange that this woman doesn’t renounce the religion of her captors. In fact, far from it—she asks for more religion. She writes:
They send the Bible to heathen abroad,and neglect the heathen at home. I am glad that missionaries go out to the dark corners of the earth; but I ask them not to overlook the dark corners at home. Talk to American slaveholders as you talk to savages in Africa. Tell them it is wrong to traffic in men. Tell them it is sinful to sell their own children, and atrocious to violate their own daughters. Tell them that all men are brethren, and that man has no right to shut out the light of knowledge from his brother. Tell them they are answerable to God for sealing up the Fountain of Life from souls that are thirsting for it.
For the first time, the author understood the immense power of the plain meaning of the Gospel story. Yes, it is possible for powerful people to think that Jesus is on their side, but the plain meaning of the Gospel is so clear ("the meek will inherit the earth")—that it is impossible to hide the fact that Christ really belongs to women, to the poor, and to the enslaved. The plain meaning of the Gospel story is so powerful that it has the power to inspire even the author, who does not believe that Christ was truly divine and who, honestly, kind of detests Christianity.
The author wants their blog posts to be as powerful, as consoling, as the Gospel. Obviously this is both insane and impossible. But the Gospel is not a mere 'take'. The Gospel is perhaps the closest the author can get to a form of literature that is not mere words, not mere games. Because the Gospel is still alive in a way that other Great Books are not. The author might read The Iliad and feel the pathos of this great civilization brought low by fate, but The Iliad is only a story. It didn't really happen. We cannot pray to Athena and ask her for aid (or well, we can, but she won't answer). The Christian God is different. He still exists. That is why, the author thinks, the slave Harriet Jacobs was so drawn to the Gospel—this is your God, the white man's God, but he is really speaking to me. This is the God that you worship, but I am the one to whom he chooses to speak. It's that throughline that gives the gospels their power, the triad formed by a master and a slave that worship the same God. The text's power comes from this essential contradiction: a) it is a text that on its plain meaning indicates that the oppressed, weak, and enslaved are superior to those above them; and b) it is a text that has been embraced by some of the most powerful members of our society. If powerful people disregarded the Gospel, it would be a mere document, the same as The Iliad. But they don't! They embrace it! They invest it with their power. This means that even if you're an atheist (like the author), you get a kind of holy, sacramental feeling when you read the gospel. This is a text that is more than a text. This is a text that has some sort of meaning.
It's easy to imagine a version of the Gospels that is less clear in its viewpoints. The Gospels are certainly not a liberal document. Jesus doesn't say to the adulterous woman "You didn’t deserve to be punished". He says "Go forth and sin no more". The Gospels enjoin an extremely strict, harsh, judgemental morality. It is a morality so strict that nobody can escape, nobody can be pure. It's a morality so replete with sins that it's possible for every person to think "Oh, I'm a sinner, but I'm not as bad as those other people." But, mostly, the Gospels are powerful because their core message is both simple and yet unbelievable: "The first shall become last." The Gospels repeatedly state that the absolute lowest and worst—women, slaves, unclean people, the demon-possessed, tax collectors, etc—will, in the afterlife, be raised above their superiors. It's a simple, compelling, and kinda mind-boggling idea. How can that be true? The reader deeply, deeply wants it to be true, but there is simply no way to make it work out logically. There is no real reason why the least should become greatest.
The author finds it deeply distasteful to say that the experience of reading the Gospels constitutes a "true artistic experience". And here is why: if the Gospels are true, then they constitute a promise. Earthly suffering is transient; you are ennobled by your suffering, and you will be raised high after death. But if they are not true, then they are just words. And yet...to read those words, even as words, is deeply meaningful.
The author does not believe in Christ's divinity, but the author is also deeply certain that if Christ is real, then Samuel Alito is going to hell. The author in fact wants Christianity to be true, precisely because she is so convinced that so many of Christianity's biggest proponents are, under their own belief system, doomed to hellfire. The author thinks sometimes of Paul's Letter to the Romans, where the Christians are asking him, so, uhh, what about the Jews? They don’t believe in Jesus. Does that mean they’re going to hell? And Paul is like...guys, of course not. There is no fucking way. God isn't going to praise the fruit and condemn the tree.
Similarly, because the author is abject and sinful and genderqueer, she feels, very deeply, that God (if he exists) will not condemn her. Those who reign on Earth will not reign in Heaven, and vice versa.
Anyway, these thoughts, these worries, these metaphysical speculations—these for the author have increasingly come to be the main business of literature. It's not that the author doesn't care for beauty or personality, it's only that these things feel a bit played out. For fifty years, millions of readers have poured through the languages of the world like a horde of locusts, gobbling up any hint of story, and now all that's left are the bare, indigestible bits. The author wants now to retreat, to stand atop the landscape from on high and to point out whatever is left. And, yeah, when all is said and done, even though it's cringe as fuck, Christianity is one of rocks that has endured.
Afterword
In writing my anecdotes / tales, I’ve come to realize that they only work when there’s distance between the narrator and the protagonist. I’m still not totally sure why: I think it’s because the tale is stripped-down to bare events, but when you’re immured within a close point of view and psychological realism, the number of possible event is just so few that the story becomes boring. In a tale, you need narrative distance so you have freedom to shake the snow-globe and change the rules, either by switching up genre, introducing new characters, going off on a tangent, or otherwise complicating the ‘rules’ of the story.
Lately I’ve been trying to write criticism that’s equally bare and stripped-down to essentials. I really don’t think anyone wants to read even a thousand or two thousand words of my thoughts on the prose of Henry James, especially when those thoughts are the same as everyone else’s (it’s really abstract and heavy, but it kinda works?). And yet the alternative—providing “takes” on the latest discourse—seems too unambitious. But in trying to write my stripped-down criticism I realized that I was experiencing the same problem: I needed distance. Hence my third-person narration above. The voice in the above piece is very heavily inspired by David Markson—I read his five major works about ten years ago, but I’ve been revisiting them recently (This volume is lying next to me as I type). Still trying to work out this voice, but I stand by these thoughts—the Bible really is the one essential read for any American who’s interested in literature. The Old Testament has the more interesting stories, but the Gospels is the more powerful (and idiosyncratic) reading experience. There is nothing else in all of world literature that is so profoundly democratic.
The AmazonClassics audiobook, narrated by Adenrele Ojo, is one of the best-narrated audiobooks I’ve listened to.
I remember staring up at a statue of John the Baptist in a cathedral once, and he had a scowl on his face, and he was pointing fiercely at the Jesus statue across the way, like, "What are you staring at? Don't look at me! Look at him!" And I thought a long time about the idea of a statue that didn't want you to look at it but to look somewhere else.
Girard's whole schtick is that all desire is mimetic. The only things we want are what we see other people want. We learn how to want through watching others' wanting. This is also how we learn art and how things like jokes work, what's "funny." (Something-something-Wittgenstein too)
I'm just a rando, but it seems like what you're doing with Great Books is a kind of pointing. Don't look at me--look at this! And it's also a kind of indirect teaching of love. "Look at me here. Pay attention. See how I love this? See how to love this? This is how it goes. This is how one does it." And maybe you have to use tricks (like connecting things to current events) to keep the reader's interest, but ultimately (my sense is) you want the reader to read the book you are talking about. And, as a reader, when you write about Henry James or Proust, it increases the likelihood I'm going to read it. (And when I do read it, increases the odds I will enjoy it.) But, at minimum, it increases my desire for the the thing you're desiring. And even when I've read it before, it brings that love back.
I agree that the Old Testament feels more like literature, while the New Testament is more like, well, a witness. It's a pointing. That's Paul's whole MO--trying to point away from himself, even while he's trying to assert authority. "Watch me. This is how you do it."
All that to say, I think you should keep writing about your experiences reading Great Books because it is, in fact, doing something.
I've been on a weird reading kick for the last week--a long, dense history of Byzantium and Peter Heather's new history of Christianity, which is the deepest dive into the early institutional history of Christianity that I've taken in my life. And the thing is that on one hand the debates, if we can call them that considering the violence and intensity of them, within Christianity of the 3rd-5th centuries, is only barely scriptural and almost not at all exegetical. The Gospel is sitting right in front of them, the paint only just drying on it, and they're not really reading it because their debate about the nature of Christ and God is philosophical and shaped in many ways more by non-textual, received bodies of philosophical thought that had been circulating in antiquity for some time. Their debate is also temporal--it's about command over institutions, resources, political authority; it's as much about Alexandria v. Rome v. Constantinople v. Antioch v. Athens as it is "let's read the Sermon on the Mount again".
What's I wonder now is that I'm not sure the New Testament and the Gospels in particular mattered as a great book in the sense of something to read and savor and think about for its literary qualities, for its expressiveness, for the depth of its thought, until Protestantism or at least until humanism--until there was an open-endedness in the thought that reading it as a book could produce not just doctrine but interpretation and inspiration. I'm sure there are exceptions in medieval thought that I don't know about and it might be that the thinness of my knowledge of the early Church is also leading me astray on this point as well.