Sam put it that, in the good-books spectrum, there’s popular writing (Red Dragon, The Time Traveler’s Wife) (“easy”)– shading into Great Literature (Nightwood, Ulysses, Omensetter’s Luck) (“hard”)– shading into the very best books– where we’re back to “easy,” the old thrill of insight, malediction, passion, curiosity, and dumb human acquaintance.
Sam and I were on top of the Volunteer Park water tower. How many “very bests”? Just Moby-Dick, he told me, Shakespeare, Don Quixote, some Russian books I forget, and The Canterbury Tales.
So now I’m reading the Canterbury Tales.
Great isn’t dignified, only familiar– a work reflecting back clearly what one alone senses confusedly. Like: one pilgrim, the Summoner (“lecherous as a sparwe” with a “fyr-reed cherubynnes face”), gets so drunk he’ll only speak Latin. Another, the Miller, tells a tale about a student tricking an old husband into hanging a bathtub from his roof to wait for God’s second flood, so the student and the carpenter’s weasel-figured young wife have a “bisynesse of myrthe and of solas” below; the tale ends with a hot brand to the ass and a punchline about a kissing a “nether ye.”
Great is dignified, actually, too. The Knight, reticent but “swowning” at his own story, relates the dead prince Arcite’s funeral pyre, and his young wife’s weeping, by relating what his account will not tell– from the felling of the trees to the ceremonial casting-in.
Ne how the beestes and the briddes alle
Fledden for fere, whan the wode was falle;
Ne how the ground agast was of the light,
That was nat wont to seen the sonne bright;
Ne how the fyr was couched first with stree,
And thanne with drye stokkes cloven a thre,
And thanne with grene wode and spicerye,
And thanne with clooth of gold and with perrye,
And gerlandes hangynge with ful many a flour,
The mirre, th’encens, with al so greet odour;
Ne how Arcite lay among al this,
Ne what richesse aboute his body is,
Ne how that Emelye, as was the gyse,
Putte in the fyr of funeral servyse;
Ne how she swowned whan men made the fyr,
Ne what she spak, ne what was hir desir;
Ne what jeweles men in the fyre caste,
Whan that the fyr was greet and brente faste;
Ne how somme caste hir sheeld, and somme hir spere,
And of hire vestimentz whiche that they were,
And coppes fulle of wyn, and milk, and blood,
Into the fyr, that brente as it were wood…
–His negations themselves a stern, teary kind of denial. Do I read (or rent movies) for surprised familiarity? For more life though I’m alive already?
Toward the blog of the wonderful Mark Fisher: Is anyone else tired of the dichotomy we’re taught exists between stupid-democratic and intelligent-elitist? “Neoliberal ‘choice’ traps you in yourself,” Fisher writes, “allowing you to select amongst minimally different versions of what you have already chosen; paternalism wagers on a different ‘you’, a you that does not yet exist.”
After the MFA’s rarefied smart-set pleasures, I want art whose humanism simply excites me, work that’s a gift I love so much (another Fisher formulation) because, though I recognize it, I wouldn’t have thought of it myself. O’Hara: “After all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.”
(Readers in Massachusetts, come visit me this weekend: I’ll be tabling for Thermos at UMass Amherst’s Juniper Literary Arts Festival.)
(And no, this whole post is not an implicit dismissal of Nightwood.)