I was recently holding forth on this topic to a friend, describing how Lewis chose to interpret interpersonal hardships — unfair or delusional scolding from Mrs. Moore, the felt obligation to respond to hundreds of letters from readers, and so on — as trials imposed on him by a God who demanded complete submission to his will. After a pause, my friend asked, “But isn’t that the same as almost everyone’s relationship to God? It’s about bowing as low as you can before an incomprehensible power.”
His observation stopped me in my tracks. Surely not every believer is a closet sadomasochist? On the other hand, perhaps sadomasochism is not as exotic as it’s made out to be. Perhaps its devotees are merely people whose affinity for a particular dynamic takes a sexual rather than spiritual form? It only seems outrageously transgressive because we don’t recognize its meaning as theater and ritual. The church where I fidgeted through countless Sunday Masses as a girl had an unsettlingly lifelike crucifix hanging over the altar. Whenever I got bored enough to study it, I saw the tortured body of a man, swooning in agony, blood dripping from his brow, hands, feet, and side. What would someone with no prior knowledge of Christianity conclude upon walking into that god’s temple?
Religions have been known to demand great suffering from their adherents, ordeals ranging from fasting and other forms of self- denial to self-flagellation and hair shirts to outright martyrdom. Remove the overt sexuality and the paraphernalia from a sadomasochistic scene, and the emotional center of helplessness and dependency isn’t so very different from the intense bond between parent and child or between a god and his worshipper. Perhaps all of these are facets of something universal that I, too, can recognize. It’s the desire to be carried away by something greater than ourselves — a love affair, a group, a movement, a nation, a faith. Or even a book.
Chapter Fifteen
The Other Way In
During my freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley, I took a course called Rhetoric 1A. I sat in a small classroom with about twenty other undergraduates clutching beat-up copies of Albert Camus’s The Fall and listened to a stout, cranky young man in a grubby T-shirt and a Yankees cap explain to us that we needed to learn a whole new way of reading. In high school, teachers were satisfied if we could point out that The Fall contains several scenes involving water or metaphors of water, which symbolized oblivion. But when we tentatively offered this sort of observation, the stout young man would sigh, and say, “OK, but what is it doing there?” At times, our obtuseness reduced him to simply repeating that same question over and over.
Even today, I’m sometimes not entirely sure that I know what he meant by this question. Most often, I think that he was telling us to look at the components of Camus’s fiction and ask ourselves what strategy lay behind each choice the author made. The green light at the end of the pier in The Great Gatsby, for example, doesn’t just stand for the doomed hopes and fantasies of the title character; it also marks Fitzgerald’s novel as the kind of story that works through romantic symbols. A satirical novel written about a character like Jay Gatsby would never use such a motif, not when its intention would be to cast the bootlegger as a poseur and his dreams as ludicrous or deluded. The swoony, aching, soft-focus quality of the green light would be incompatible with the funny, often cruel specificity of satire.
But perhaps that’s not what the stout young man was trying (and largely failing) to communicate to me and my fellow undergraduates. One day in Rhetoric 1a, feeling especially exasperated by the impasse, I asked him if he meant, “What the heck is that doing there?” — the sort of question you’d ask if you tripped over a garden rake in the corridor of a high-rise office building. I was being flippant, and he was not amused, but lately my interpretation seems more pertinent than not. It’s a question worth asking, not just about the water imagery in The Fall, but also about The Fall itself. Why is this book here — in my hands, opened before my eyes? Why was it written to begin with and why was it printed, bound, and sold? Why am I reading it? Why read?
This is an immaterial question for most academic critics. However iconoclastic their approach to great books (or to the very idea of great books), however intently they seek to “interrogate” or “dismantle” the ideologies that imbue those books, for the English professor, books themselves are always a given, as the salt mine is for the salt miner. The common or recreational reader, on the other hand, has different questions flitting at the periphery of her mind: Why read this book? Why read any books at all?
A satisfactory answer is apparently hard to come by. Many, many people don’t even bother to read; movies and television are easier and usually more fun, and athletics or spending time with friends and family are more healthful. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts published a report, “Reading at Risk,” indicating that less than half of adult Americans read literature in their leisure time. (Since the survey defined “literature” as “any novels, short stories, plays or poetry,” leaving out memoirs, histories, and other forms of literary nonfiction — such as this book — we’ll have to assume the percentage is on the low side.) The results, the report maintained, “show the declining importance of literature to our populace.”
If these ex-readers wanted it, they could find plenty of intellectual justification for their abandonment of books at the average university English department. Not long after I entered college, academic thinking underwent a series of transformations. The traditional, reverential study of canonical literature that prevailed in Lewis’s day, and the revolution-mongering of the 1960s and 1970s that supplanted it, gave way to poststructuralist and postmodern theory. Books that past generations regarded as eternal monuments of genius were dragged into the courts of theory and indicted for their ideological inadequacies. Their authors’ personal lives and political beliefs served as evidence against them. Racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia lurked everywhere, often in disguises that required expert decoding. If you wanted to explain why the world proved so resistant to the utopian designs of a fading radicalism — and that’s exactly what many academics, having seen such dreams die, wanted to do — you could point to the poisonous bias embedded in even the most celebrated pillars of our culture.
For academics, seeing literature’s former gods brought low doesn’t constitute much of a dilemma — the salt miner keeps going to the mine every day whether or not he likes salt; that’s his job. The common reader has different prerogatives. In a few unhappy cases, however, both readers are forced to exist side by side in the same person. In his academic satire, The Handmaid of Desire, the novelist John L’Heureux, who teaches creative writing at Stanford University, describes an English department under siege by a young firebrand professor who wants to turn it into a department of Theory and Discourse. But the firebrand has a secret stashed in a locked cabinet — a copy of Jane Austen’s Emma. His professional reputation depends on hiding this forbidden passion from his colleagues; his own discipline, his livelihood, is dedicated to proving that the pleasures of old-fashioned novels are invidious, regressive, illusory.