Texts and Attitudes, Part 4

Literature, Philology and Rhetoric

As I have said before, my reading over the years changed from individual, almost random texts to more complicated patterns.  Rather than choosing books by chance from the racks in bookshops or trawling through the boxes in second-hand stores, I started to look for specific titles and authors.  Every time I read something I liked, I tried to find more books by the same writer or searched out similar topics or time periods. 

I studied dedications, acknowledgments, prefaces, epilogues, footnotes and the puffery on book jackets, seeking to find out the milieu in which these authors worked and their books came into being.  Always one things leads to another. Often the very best of texts requires that you plough through the popular, the second rate and the best-forgotten.  Then you hear the resonance, understand the implied questions, see through the mists of time to what was the everyday out of which the  unusual, the unique and the superb arose. 

Sometimes, when I was setting up the syllabus for literature courses, I moved away from chronological presentation altogether, though I was usually stuck in the paradigm of periods—Sixteenth-Century,  Eighteenth-Century, Modern Literature—and tried to set up the clusters mentioned in an earlier part of this essay.  Where possible, I would want students to read—and for me to teach—books that answered one another (such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela being responded to by Henry Fielding’s Shamela and then Richardson trying to answer that satire with The Second Part of Pamela and Fielding publishing a retort in Joseph Andrews , and then with graduate students throw in several Anti-Pamelas from the same period).  In addition, I could show how different authors went over the same grounds, occupied the narrative-space and recreated the characters of each other (for instance, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (in all three of its parts), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels).

This is the way I taught Biblical and Classical Literature in Translation for nigh on to forty years. Not as random texts, not as individual books arranged in some formal chronological sequence. Not even as separate entities such as Ancient Greek, Classical Roman, Hebrew Bible and New testament: but interwoven as aspects of a relatively large and at the same time intertextual East Mediterranean civilization.  Some years the various books, clusters and woven tapestries of material were chosen on the basis of key ideas (such as creations of the world, nations, cities and peoples), other years by dominant images (such as mountains, gardens and watercourses), and then sometimes by generic categories (such as romance or love stories, epic or wars and warriors, prophecy or preachers and teachers).  One of the great problems is that year by year, as I grew to know, understand and ponder more deeply the questions within these texts, the students came for the first time, less and less prepared to read such ancient, archaic and classical materials; so that it took more and more time to prepare them for deep reading, contextual comparisons, and intellectual discussions.  Thus the chosen books, books became chosen passages, the range of materials more restricted, and the time spent on close-reading and explication de texte extended, almost to the exclusion of analysis and interpretation.  This, however, was not only the case with that course, which also climbed up from a first to a second and finally a third year level—and in the end I contemplated making it a graduate seminar—but with other syllabuses for medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment Literatures.  On the eve of my retirement I had to concede, at least to myself, that the way of reading I had shaped over the years, was no longer (if ever) possible for students.  Every course at every level had to be taught as though it were an introduction in regard to knowledge and skills required. 

Yes, there are skills that need to be honed, as there is knowledge to be learned and digested. The skills involve mastery of foreign languages (ancient and modern), grammar, philology, and what used to be called philosophy (the art of thinking clearly, coherently and systematically, as well as the history of institutionalized ideas and religions) and rhetoric (the art of using language effectively and logically).  The knowledge includes history, geography and a great deal of biology—so as to be able to recognize persons, places, events and ideas.  I would add the studies of iconography and iconology.

Even now, well into my seventies, when I start new projects of research for myself, I have to think in terms of being at once the experienced guide as teacher and the inadequately prepared beginning student.  I know more than anyone each time I start these plunges into virtually new fields that what must be done necessitates a vast programme of reading of basic and background texts and that it will take more years than I can optimistically depend on to get myself ready to do the kind of analyses and interpretations proper to such an investigation.  

Sometimes to humble myself more than anyone should treat a gentleman of my age I confess that, not only are there long lists of authors and texts I have not yet read, but whole shelves of books in the library I never heard of, and even more of archival materials not edited, transcribed or heard of, only some of it lurking in the vast and ever-expanding resources possible to access on the internet.  Reading, as I envisage it, therefore is an ideal, a wonderful dream to tantalize the scholar, but ultimately impossible. Except for a very few highly trained geniuses, those lucky enough to be born amongst the right institutions, and endowed with degrees of chutzpa beyond my imaginings.  And except for those who have had the self-discipline to specialize ever more narrowly throughout their lifetimes.