Difficult reading

[muckefuck]

Having read Ruth Graham's piece on shaming adults who read YA literature in Slate, I actually find myself sympathetic to some of her arguments--even though I agree with Lauren Davis' counterarguments that good writing can appear in any marketing category and that genre-shaming reinforces the sexist cultural bias of the larger society (i.e. if young women like it, it must be worthless). However I think they both fall into the error of evaluating literature almost solely from a thematic point of view. Graham does make a point about YA narratives being too neat--whether the endings are happy or sad, there's always a clear resolution. Davis asks the question "What unites books like Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why with Stephenie Meyer's Twilight or Scott Westerfeld's Uglies?" and answers, "Very little, aside from the fact that they feature high school age (and often female) protagonists." And I think that's only true if you ignore most questions of style, since by definition they are all written in such a fashion as to be easily digestible by adolescents. And that's not a small thing to have in common, since most literature--genre fiction or otherwise--isn't. A lot of people make the argument that we should just be happy people are still reading anything, regardless of the level of difficulty. It's a decent one as far as it goes, but I would really hate to see us stop there. Obviously shaming isn't the way forward; it seems more likely to put someone off the idea of reading altogether than to prompt them to seek out more challenging material. But I'm glad to see someone make a case for associating adulthood with adult literature.

So what am I reading, you might well ask? I just finished Zamyatin's Мы (We) in Gregory Zilboorg's contemporaneous translation. Aldous Huxley claims not to have read this before writing Brave New World, but Orwell doesn't believe him and neither do I. There's simply too much thematic overlap, from the central conflict between the straitjacket of industrial civilisation and the State of Nature to the role of recreational sex and even the designations of the inhabitants. I enjoyed We more, however.

Probably the most refreshing thing about it was how relatively little time Zamyatin spends describing his world. The novel is short and so are its chapters, which feature much more incident and dialogue than simple exposition. Paradoxically, by not focusing on the details, it defused my tendency to get hung up on inconsistencies and implausibilities and instead pay attention to the psychology of the narrator. As he becomes more disturbed by the destruction of his comforting routine, it gets more difficult to tell what's really happening, which helps keep the fate of him and his society unpredictable until the very end.

But this approach wouldn't succeed without the sparkle of Zamyatin's prose; you forgive him the occasional anachronism on account of the beauty of the resulting metaphor. From the beginning, there's none of the ambivalence of Huxley let alone the grimness of Orwell; the narrator loves the United State and wholeheartedly believe it represents the pinnacle of human endeavour and the best of all possible worlds. He's so thoroughly convinced of the incompatibility of happiness and freedom that he begins to make you doubt a bit your attachment to the latter.

Meanwhile, to help put me to sleep at night, I've been reading Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer, which is as staid and bourgeois a novel as you could hope to find. I'm not sure why I started it--it's mammoth, and I can't quite see it rewarding the effort it will take me to get through 700+ pages of Schachtelsätze and 19th-century diction. But I'm a tenth of the way in and I haven't tired of it yet. I don't plan on taking it along to Florida, however, so I suspect I may decide not to pick it up again when I get back.

In the meantime, I'm tackling Daniel Chacón's newly-published Hotel Juárez: stories, rooms, and loops. A very likeable work, with enough stylistic ingenuity to keep me on my toes. We, however, put me in a dystopian mindset, so I decided it's high time I read The handmaiden's tale--not least of all because a certain kind of contemporary politician seems committed to making it prophetic. If only I could convince a few more of my peers to read that rather than Twilight or Divergent.

Comments

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

FWIW, literature for grown-ups usually had clear and satisfying endings until the beginning of the 20th Century or so. It was also considerably more plot-driven than contemporary literary writing. I think it's an open question whether adults have abandoned literature, or literature has abandoned non-English majors.