The Morphology of Literary Genius

I was recently reminded of the biological truism of embryonic parallelism "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" when I encountered this statement in an annotated bibliography:

"The comedies of Plautus, written near the beginning of Latin literature, are full of lively humanity.  His comic animation and chaotic plots stand in sharp contrast to Terence's quieter, more polished and sensitive comedies of manners."

This distinction seems to be visible likewise in the English comedic tradition, with the sequence from Shakespeare through Ben Jonson to Restoration comedy mirroring Plautus, while Terence is emulated by Addison ("The Rivals", "The School for Scandal") through Goldsmith ("She Stoops to Conquer") to Wilde ("Lady Windemere's Fan", "An Ideal Husband").

I am less able to say whether the sequence remains true to type in French comedy.  Moliere certainly provides adequate exempla of the first mode, but I am insufficiently well-studied to know first-hand whether Voltaire and his contemporaries produced comedy of the other, as they are largely forgotten, at least in translation for readers of English.

Still, it would be interesting to investigate whether this process from farce to sophistication is universal:  does Aristophanes to Menander prove the rule or stand as a counter-example?  Does Chekhov have a farcical predecessor in Russian theatre?  And do American comedies of mid-century conform to either mode?

This all seems to echo the historical morphologies of scholars like Pitirim Sorokin et. al., who attempted to see patterns, even inevitable sequences, in aesthetic or historical development (most famously by Toynbee in his masterful A Study of History, quod vide).

Twenty-Four Hours to Go

Less than a day before I start and I have yet to definitely settle on my first book in each category.  The candidates in Fiction are Sir Walter Scott's Waverley; A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole; The Metamorphoses of Ovid; The Lady of the Lake by Scott; and the Thirteen by Balzac.  I can't seem to find my copy of Louis Auchincloss' The Rector of Justin, so that one will have to wait a month or two.  It's imperative that my first novel not be a mistake, so that I get off on the right foot.

Fewer possibilities in Non-Fiction:  Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, begun many times but never managed to get past the first couple of chapters; Roman Literature by Michael Grant; The Classical Greeks, again by Grant; Berkeley's dangerous Principles of Human Knowledge; and John Hale's weighty The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, which seems to have the inside track.

Any guidance on which of these to essay first will be greatly appreciated.

Faulkner's Imagination Lubricant: Boon or Hindrance?

Okay, so I went to a friend's 80th birthday party tonight in Old Preston Hollow, the mind-bogglingly rich neighborhood where former president George W. Bush has recently acquired some square footage.  Not sure whether the Frida Kahlo's and the Diego Rivera's gracing the walls were authentic, but the rest of the vast urban estate bore an unmistakable frisson of silent connoisseurship, impeccable taste, and invincible wealth.

Whenever I manage to wangle an invite to these enclaves of the hyper-fortunate, I find an excuse to wander the grounds, armed with a flute of champagne or a tumbler of single-malt, until I locate the library.  Just as some in the publishing world can derive hidden data about the sexual orientation of the guy who did the index (Kurt Vonnegut--Cat's Cradle), I learn a lot about my hosts from a few minutes studying the books on the walls.

Here, for example in addition to a plenitude of ordinary volumes:  Jude the Obscure in a Barnes and Noble hardcover, with the erudite maroon binding; Faulkner's Nobel-nominated late picaresque novel The Reivers; Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris in the original French; three plays by the martyred Spanish genius Federico Garcia Lorca;  Rand's Atlas Shrugged, but only in a cheap mass-market paperback (rather than enshrined in hardcover like a cultist of objectivism might display).

More indicative, everything on the shelves willy-nilly, without a hint of organization, except the volumes having to do with Mexican art, sculpture, and belles-lettres, here collected by subject.  Thus are the passions of a house revealed.

There are three reasons to keep books, and three only:  the lowest is to impress passers-by with your erudition and taste; like Jay Gatsby, you have the books without ever bothering to slice the pages open.  The median is stacks of good books organized only very generally, obviously in mid-read, a project in process of transferring ideas from barbaric ignorance to the bare beginnings of knowledge; such is my own working library au moment.  The third and highest is the library of an advanced mind, where the books have attained their places in precisely the same order as they occupy in the intellect of their owner, a sort of hard-copy for the overstuffed cerebrum, in which it is not necessary to remember the opening words of Cicero's First Oration Against Catiline, in the original Latin, because you know precisely where that volume sits (between Caesar's Gallic War and Suetonius, perhaps; Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is on another shelf entirely).

The Viewless Wings of Poesy

Okay, so what about works of literature that are NOT novels?  Do they count?  Should they count?  After all, my most recent outing with Shakespeare (King Richard II) took two and one-half hours, about the same length of time I would expect to spend watching an actual production.  And some of the short novels I've counted during my previous training period (Stephen Crane's Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, to name just one example) took less than that amount of time to read.

So, do plays count?

And I have to say no.  After all, I don't want to read 25 plays and 25 novels, which would be relatively easy to do, and shift the onus of difficulty over onto the non-fiction works.  The novels have to remain challenging in order to forestall doomed attempts at (Good God!) Spengler.

But poetry is a different matter.  Does Homer count?  Of course, even if in verse.  The Divine Comedy would count as three.  Paradise Lost but probably not Paradise Regained.  Idylls of the King.  John Brown's Body.  Orlando Furioso.  But not "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", "Pippa Passes", and other works of similar brevity.  ("Atalanta in Calydon" falls into a grey area, if only for Swinburne's tortured diction . . .)

So long poems, of book length, published and studied separately, count.  Plays do not (Well, maybe "Mourning Becomes Electra".  Good God!)

The Grandeur That Was Greece, the Glory That Was Rome

Which brings us to a major fact about this project:  I don't tend to read anything that's absolutely current.  With 25 centuries of important books to savor in a brief lifetime of seventy or eighty years, I'm not addicted to New York Times best-sellers or the latest fads of scholarship (Someone please assure me that Jacques Derrida is no longer in fashion.)

Glancing through a pile of books on international relations that I hope to include on The List, I see copyright dates of 1994 for Henry Kissinger, 1996 for Samuel P. Huntington, and 2002 for Philip Bobbitt.  Okay that last one is cutting it a bit close, but maybe it will seem more distant in time by next summer.  (I certainly anticipate feeling much older.)  So if you're reading this blog with hopes of getting a review of a current book, you're out of luck.

In fiction, I think twenty years or so will be the cut-off, or even further back if A Confederacy of Dunces fails to make it.  But I intend to vary The List of novels by both by era and country of origin:  not more than two novels from the same century and country in a row, and the 50 novels displaying a wide diversity of provenance when taken as a whole.  The same diversity will manifest itself among the works of scholarship through a diversity of subject matter rather than era or country of origin.

After all, the ultimate object of this project is to plug the woeful gaps in my apparently dreadful education.  (More on that to come.)

And in the Arena of Non-Fiction . . .

For works of non-fiction, the selection criteria are inevitably trickier, inasmuch as I can scarcely be equally expert in every field of study.  How then to determine which books are worth reading?  here, I will defer to the opinions of a previous generation, and attempt to read only those books which remain among the most seminal in their field despite being a quarter century old or more.

Take Joseph A. Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.  Weighing in at 425 pp. plus index, this is, by practically any yardstick, an astonishingly dull book.  But John Grisham has written relatively few works of economic theory and, before the collapse of Soviet-style communism, this book was highly regarded and much read by the intellectual element of the post-war generation.  Mine is a 3rd edition, meaning somebody liked it.  My bookmark, stalled hopelessly at page 39, is indicative that Schumpeter's style is--how shall I express it--somewhat lacking in sparkle?  But it's published by Harper Torchbooks, an imprimatur which in the 1960's was carried around a lot on campuses from Dartmouth to UVA, and possibly even farther south.

The names in the back of the book are a veritable laundry list of forgotten thinkers once regarded as being of the first water:  Jacob Bronowski, Jacques Barzun, Crane Brinton, Arthur O. Lovejoy, C. P. Snow, Alfred North Whitehead, Joseph Campbell, Carl Gustav Jung, Heinrich Zimmer, Karl Barth, Martin Buber, Rudolph Bultmann, Jacob Burckhardt, Frederick Copleston, Johan Huizinga, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Paul Tillich, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, Soren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud.

Okay, some big names there.

So that should be the level I strive for.  Whether the books are of more recent date, or vintage Victorian scholarship, the determining factor should be this:  is this a book which would have been a staple of required reading for coursework at Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, back then even if not necessarily now?

What Should Count as an Important Book?

Okay, I've poured myself a very watery scotch, a veritable Easter Island of liquor in a lonesome South Pacific of ice and H2O, and I'm going to tackle one of the ontological questions of this project, namely, which books count?

Obviously, in literature, the classics by novelists who are household names:  Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac, Mann, Joyce, Proust, et.al.  (Is Balzac a household name in the United States?  One hopes, one hopes.)  But also less celebrated works that have a certain permanence:  The Rector of Justin, La-Bas, The Sleepwalkers, Il Gattopardo, The Master and Margarita, for example.  I can't expect myself to take on War and Peace or Die Zauberberg every outing.

So, famous authors; authors who should be famous, were the world less crass; and one-offs like, well, Lampedusa's The Leopard comes to mind again.  (I guess I'll be trying to actually finish that one.)

Here I have a confession to make:  like many lovers of books, I've attempted probably three times as many books as I've actually finished.  Swann's Way I've started at least six times; Crime and Punishment three or four; Little Dorritt definitely twice; The Talisman, Ivanhoe, War and Peace, practically every novel by James Joyce.  I'm great at starting books; not so terrific about actually seeing them to a conclusion.

But everything this year started from the beginning except for the books I happen to be in the middle of right now.  My work schedule being what it is, I don't expect I'll finish any of those until the counting starts, but I'll consider them legitimate, given my previous track record (see above).  I'll need all the help I can get once I run out of the Shorter Novels of John Steinbeck.

Crossing the Rubicon

After seeing a movie this past weekend in which a woman cooks her way through every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year's time, I have been intrigued by the possibility of using this rather moribund blog to set myself a deadline and monitor my progress.  Specifically, for the past year I have been trying to read more of the Great Books and their lesser kindred, the significant and important works of literature and non-fiction.

In the last half of 2008, I set myself the goal of reading 50 important novels in 6 months:  I scored 28.  In 2009, it was 50 important novels along with 50 important works of non-fiction:  in the first 8 months, I've only scored 12 novels and 6 non-fiction works.

So how to bring my reading and research to the next level:  two books a week, week in, week out?  Setting myself a deadline and writing about it seems like a program that will achieve the elusive ideal of working as part of a crew rather than as an individual, even if the other seven guys in the shell are somewhere out in the aether of the internet; even if no one reads my reactions to the books I select, the possibility that someone might is motivation to keep to the schedule.

Of course, nobody is going to find David Hume as fascinating as Julia Child's coq au chambertin, or Stendahl as intriguing as  boeuf bourgignon, other than myself, I suppose.  But the American side of the web may surprise me; people are always telling me that I should give my countrymen a bit more credit.

I've chosen September 1st as my start date.  It seems a good day to commence ambitious projects with potentially dire consequences.