Ghostwriting No. 9: Two Ways of Reading Books

We have a literary criticism section. It has very recent things and very old things - the latest from Duke University Press and Matthew Arnold - in the same bookcase. As with many disciplines, we select books for this section based not only on what is currently of interest but also which texts shaped this field of study. Aristotle, William Morris, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida: they are all important in the history of how scholars read.

I have to admit, as a point of bias, that I'm a formalist by nature and a reader response critic by training, so the section probably has a slight slant based on my tastes. A slant, not a selection principle; the biology section has a selection principle; I do not consider creationism to be a science, as a matter of definition, so there isn't any in my biology section. I don't disinclude postcolonial critics from my literary criticism section, because they are, definitionally, literary critics. I don't always agree with them, but there they are.

But I do have a larger-scale bias that does affect my recommendation principles not only for criticism, but for everything. It's time I admitted to that, too.

Two categories into which I divide fiction, critical theory, memoir, and several other genres of written work are oneirophilic and omphalophilic. I have an extremely heavy bias toward the former, and since I recommend books based on what I know, most of the books I recommend have qualities appealing to the oneirophile.

The oneirophile likes the structure and the aesthetic, the narrative and the well-reasoned, but most of all, the Idea of Things and the Possibility. The oneirophile dislikes tragedy without catharsis, narrative without protagonism, theory that examines and postulates but offers more deconstruction than appreciation. The oneirophile likes complex symbolism and, while finding influences on literature interesting, does not believe that evidence from any related critical schools can explain away the goodness of a book as merely and unfortunately particular to a privileged class, unless it is quite clearly the author's intention to exhibit and promote an ugly belief (such as that a certain minority lacks intelligence or moral judgment, or that a crime such as rape or enslavement is justifiable). The oneirophile cannot tolerate an act of art designed to create ugliness; ugliness in art, selon the oneirophile, should exist only to give us a reason to love what changes during the book or what one leaves the book prepared to hope.

The omphalophile likes beautifully written tragedy, catharsis or no; beautifully written relations of experience, with or without change on the narrator's or main character's part; and critical theories that explain an author's slant or bias or class influences or cultural history and the effect of these things on the author's writing, with or without love for the story or its author. Omphalophiles also tend to prefer description to evocation, example to archetype, and conscious deconstruction of a form over conscious use (or playful misuse) of a form. For some reason, a statistically significant percentage of omphalophiles I know also like the beautifully rendered ugly subject.

I, an oneirophile, can make myself appreciate the quality of the rendering, but I'd rather be watching britcoms on public television than trying to appreciate an aesthetically interesting treatment of an unpleasant or unhopeful subject. For this reason, I adore Calvino, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Winterson; Cather, L. M. Montgomery, C. S. Lewis, Morrison; David Mitchell, Kawabata, Woolf, and the late Saramago. I've read Madame Bovary and The Awakening and Death of a Salesman and Angela's Ashes, and it's not that I don't understand why they are important and well made; it's just that after a long day of answering sales calls and cleaning up oopses and fielding the criticism and feast/famine ledger lines one naturally gets in any retail business, I don't want to read about ennui, degradation, attrition of hope, unmendable sorrow. I certainly don't want to read about any of those things from authors with less skill than Flaubert, Chopin, or Arthur Miller.

Oh, here I am talking about my personal opinions again. As with all my personal opinions, I invite differing ones gladly. I like to know what other people think.

But don't try to make me like the latest unresolveably hopeless, urban-decayed, ruthlessly 'honest' bestseller. I may be curious, but I will never be other than an oneirophile. I don't refuse to see ugliness in the world and I don't refuse to respect art that captures ugliness - I just know that even with my strong genes and the best of medicine, I won't live past a hundred and twenty, which means I don't have enough time to admire the hopes and laughters and beauties of the world that, if well presented, contain within them the despairs and cruelties against which we compare them and perhaps even from which ashes we resurrect them. Especially if they're presented in Justice-like sestinas (the kind with deliberately clever end-word twisting), novels that are also good yarns, stories that are also puzzles, or imagery-rich, playfully crafted poetry. Because I'm an oneirophile, which, if you didn't know, comes from the Greek roots for 'lover of dreams.'