How to Read Literature Like a Professor (29 page)

Sir Thomas Malory,
Le Morte Darthur
(late fifteenth century). Very old language, but writers and filmmakers continue to borrow from him. A great story.

Iris Murdoch,
A Severed Head
(1961),
The Unicorn
(1963),
The Sea, the Sea
(1978),
The Green Knight
(1992). Murdoch’s novels follow familiar literary patterns, as the title of
The Green Knight
would suggest. Her imagination is symbolic, her logic ruthlessly rational (she was a trained philosopher, after all).

Vladimir Nabokov,
Lolita
(1958). Yes, that one. No, it isn’t a porn novel. But it is about things we might wish didn’t exist, and it does have one of literature’s creepier main characters. Who thinks he’s normal.

Tim O’Brien,
Going After Cacciato
(1978),
The Things They Carried
(1990). Besides being perhaps the two finest novels to come out of the Vietnam War, O’Brien’s books give us lots of fodder for thought. A road trip of some eight thousand statute miles, to Paris no less, site of the peace talks. A beautiful native guide leading our white hero west.
Alice in Wonderland
parallels.
Hemingway parallels. Symbolic implications enough to keep you busy for a month at your in-laws’.

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Mystery of the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), “The Raven” (1845), “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846). Poe gives us one of the first really free plays of the subconscious in fiction. His stories (and poems, for that matter) have the logic of our nightmares, the terror of thoughts we can’t suppress or control, half a century and more before Sigmund Freud. He also gives us the first real detective story (“Rue Morgue”), becoming the model for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and all who came after.

Thomas Pynchon,
The Crying of Lot 49
(1965). My students sometimes struggle with this short novel, but they’re usually too serious. If you go into it knowing it’s cartoonish and very much from the sixties, you’ll have a great time.

Theodore Roethke, “In Praise of Prairie” (1941),
The Far Field
(1964).

William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Take your pick. Here’s mine:
Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, King Lear, Henry V, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, A Winter’s Tale, As You Like It, Twelfth Night
. And then there are the sonnets. Read all of them you can. Hey, they’re only fourteen lines long. I particularly like sonnet 73, but there are lots of wonderful sonnets in there.

Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein
(1818). The monster isn’t simply monstrous. He says something about his creator and about the society in which Victor Frankenstein lives.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
(late fourteenth century). Not for beginners, I think. At least it wasn’t for me when I was a beginner. Still, I learned to really enjoy young Gawain and his adventure. You might, too.

Sophocles,
Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
(fifth
century
B.C
.). These plays constitute a trilogy dealing with a doomed family. The first (which is the first really great detective story in Western literature) is about blindness and vision, the second about traveling on the road and the place where all roads end, and the third a meditation on power, loyalty to the state, and personal morality. These plays, now over twenty-four hundred years old, never go out of style.

Sir Edmund Spenser,
The Faerie Queen
(1596). Spenser may take some work and a fair bit of patience. But you’ll come to love the Redcrosse Knight.

Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886),
The Master of Ballantrae
(1889). Stevenson does fascinating things with the possibilities of the divided self (the one with a good and an evil side), which was a subject of fascination in the nineteenth century.

Bram Stoker,
Dracula
(1897). What, you need a reason?

Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill” (1946). A beautiful evocation of childhood/summer/life and everything that lives and dies.

Mark Twain,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1885). Poor Huck has come under attack in recent decades, and yes, it does have that racist word in it (not surprising in a work depicting a racist society), but
Huck Finn
also has more sheer humanity than any three books I can think of. And it’s one of the great road/buddy stories of all time, even if the road is soggy.

Anne Tyler,
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
(1982). Tyler has a number of wonderful novels, including
The Accidental Tourist
(1985), but this one really works for my money.

John Updike, “A&P” (1962). I don’t really use his story when I create my quest to the grocery, but his is a great little story.

Derek Walcott,
Omeros
(1990). The exploits of a Caribbean fishing community, paralleling events from Homer’s two great epics. Fascinating stuff.

Fay Weldon,
The Hearts and Lives of Men
(1988). A delightful
novel, comic and sad and magical, with just the right lightness of touch.

Virginia Woolf,
Mrs. Dalloway
(1925),
To the Lighthouse
(1927). Explorations of consciousness, family dynamics, and modern life in luminous, subtle prose.

William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1892), “Easter 1916” (1916), “The Wild Swans at Coole” (1917). Or any of a hundred others. A medievalist professor of mine once said that he believed Yeats was the greatest poet in the English language. If we could only have one, he’d be my choice.

Fairy Tales We Can’t Live Without

“Sleeping Beauty,” “Snow White,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Rapunzel,” “Rumpelstiltskin.” See also later uses of these tales in Angela Carter and Robert Coover.

Movies to Read

Citizen Kane
(1941). I’m not sure this is a film to watch, but you sure can read it.

The Gold Rush
(1925),
Modern Times
(1936). Charlie Chaplin is the greatest film comedian ever. Accept no substitutes. His little tramp is a great invention.

Notorious
(1946),
North by Northwest
(1959),
Psycho
(1960). Somebody’s always copying Hitchcock. Meet the original.

O Brother, Where Art Thou
? (2000) Not only a reworking of
The Odyssey
but an excellent road/buddy film with a great American sound track.

Pale Rider
(1985). Clint Eastwood’s fullest treatment of his mythic avenging-angel hero.

Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981),
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(1984),
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
(1989). Great quest stories. You know when you’re searching for the Lost
Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail that you’re dealing with quests. Take away Indy’s leather jacket, fedora, and whip and give him chain mail, helmet, and lance and see if he doesn’t look considerably like Sir Gawain.

Shane
(1953). Without which, no
Pale Rider
.

Stagecoach
(1939). Its handling of Native Americans doesn’t wear well, but this is a great story of sin and redemption and second chances. And chase scenes.

Star Wars
(1977),
The Empire Strikes Back
(1981),
Return of the Jedi
(1983). George Lucas is a great student of Joseph Campbell’s theories of the hero (in, among other works,
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
), and the trilogy does a great job of showing us types of heroes and villains. If you know the Arthurian legends, so much the better. Personally I don’t care if you learn anything about all that from the films or not; they’re so much fun you deserve to see them. Repeatedly.

Tom Jones
(1963). The Tony Richardson film starring Albert Finney—accept no substitutes. This has the one and only eating scene I’ve ever seen that can make me blush. The film, and Henry Fielding’s eighteenth-century novel, have much to recommend them beyond that one scene. The story of the Rake’s Progress—the growth and development of the bad boy—is a classic, and this one is very funny.

Secondary Sources

There are a great many books that will help you become a better reader and interpreter of literature. These suggestions are brief, arbitrary, and highly incomplete.

M. H. Abrams,
A Glossary of Literary Terms
(1957). As the name suggests, this is not a book to read but one to refer to. Abrams covers hundreds of literary terms, movements, and concepts, and the book has been a standard for decades.

John Ciardi,
How Does a Poem Mean?
(1961). Since it first appeared, Ciardi’s book has taught tens of thousands of us how to think about the special way poems convey what they have to say. As a poet himself and a translator of Dante, he knew something about the subject.

E. M. Forster,
Aspects of the Novel
. Although it was published in 1927, this book remains a great discussion of the novel and its constituent elements by one of its outstanding practitioners.

Northrop Frye,
Anatomy of Criticism
(1957). You’ve been getting watered-down Frye throughout this book. You might find the original interesting. Frye is one of the first critics to conceive of literature as a single, organically related whole, with an overarching framework by which we can understand it. Even when you don’t agree with him, he’s a fascinating, humane thinker.

William H. Gass,
Fiction and the Figures of Life
(1970). Another primarily theoretical work, this book discusses how we work on fiction and how it works on us. Gass introduces the term “metafiction” here.

David Lodge,
The Art of Fiction
(1992). Lodge, an important postmodern British novelist and critic, wrote the essays in this collection in a newspaper column. They’re fascinating, brief, easy to comprehend, and filled with really fine illustrative examples.

Robert Pinsky,
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry
(2000). The former American poet laureate can make you want to fall in love with poetry even if you didn’t know you wanted to. He also provides valuable insights into understanding poetry.

Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
. Another important reference book. If you want to know something about poetry, look in here.

Master Class

If you want to put together the total reading experience, here you go. These works will give you a chance to use all your newfound skills and come up with inventive and insightful ways of seeing them. Once you learn what these four novels can teach you, you won’t need more advice. There’s nothing exclusive to these four, by the way. Any of perhaps a hundred novels, long poems, and plays could let you apply the whole panoply of newly acquired skills. I just happen to love these.

Charles Dickens,
Great Expectations
(1861). Life, death, love, hate, dashed hopes, revenge, bitterness, redemption, suffering, graveyards, fens, scary lawyers, criminals, crazy old women, cadaverous wedding cakes. This book has everything except spontaneous human combustion (that’s in
Bleak House
—really). Now, how can you not read it?

James Joyce,
Ulysses
(1922). Don’t get me started. First, the obvious:
Ulysses
is not for beginners. When you feel you’ve become a graduate reader, go there. My undergraduates get through it, but they struggle, even with a good deal of help. Hey, it’s difficult. On the other hand, I feel, as do a lot of folks, that it’s the most rewarding read there is.

Gabriel García Márquez,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1970). This novel should have a label: “Warning: Symbolism spoken here.” One character survives both the firing squad and a suicide attempt, and he fathers forty-seven sons by forty-seven women, all the sons bearing his name and all killed by his enemies on a single night. Do you think that means something?

Toni Morrison,
Song of Solomon
(1977). I’ve said so much throughout this book, there’s really nothing left, except read it.

I
T IS IMPOSSIBLE
to thank individually all the students who have had a hand in creating this book, and yet it couldn’t have come into being without them. Their constant prompting, doubting, questioning, answering, suggesting, and responding drove me to figure out most of the ideas and observations that have gone into these essays. Their patience with my wacky notions is often astonishing, their willingness to try on difficult ideas and perplexing works gratifying. For every routine comment or piercing query, every bright idea or dull-eyed stare, every wisecrack of theirs or groan at one of mine, every laugh or snarl, every statement praising or dismissing a literary work, I am profoundly grateful. They never let me rest or become complacent. Several students in particular have had a
hand in the development of this book, and I wish to single them out for special thanks. Monica Mann’s smart-aleck comment pointed out to me that I have quite a number of little aphorisms about literature, although even then it took several years for me to see the possibilities in the “Quotations of Chairman Tom,” as she called them. Mary Ann Halboth has listened to and commented on much of what became the material of this study, often pushing my ideas well beyond my initial conceptions. Kelly Tobeler and Diane Saylor agreed to be guinea pigs for certain experiments and offered insightful, amazing interpretations of the Katherine Mansfield story; their contributions made my final chapter immeasurably better.

I am deeply indebted to numerous colleagues for their assistance, insight, encouragement, and patience. I especially wish to thank Professors Frederic Svoboda, Stephen Bernstein, Mary Jo Kietzman, and Jan Furman, who read drafts, provided ideas and information, listened to my complaints and obsessions, and offered support and wisdom. Their intelligence, good humor, and generosity have made my efforts lighter and the product greatly improved. To have such brilliant and dedicated colleagues is a genuine gift. They make me sound much smarter than I am. The errors, however, are purely my own.

To my agent, Faith Hamlin, and her assistant, Kate Darling, and to my editor at HarperCollins, Nikola Scott, many thanks for their belief in the work, as well as for all their many constructive criticisms and suggestions.

As ever, I wish to thank my family for their support, patience, and love. My sons Robert and Nathan read chapters, contributed interpretations, and gave me firsthand insights into the student mind. My wife, Brenda, took care of worldly and mundane tasks and made it possible for me to lose myself
in the writing. To all three I offer my immense gratitude and love.

And finally I wish to thank my muse. After all these years of reading and writing, I still don’t understand where inspiration comes from, but I am profoundly grateful that it keeps coming.