This week, Oxford University Press (OUP) and The Reader announced an exciting new partnership, working together to build a core classics library and to get great literature into the hands of people who need it most, with the Oxford World’s Classics series becoming The Reader’s "house brand" for use in their pioneering Shared Reading initiatives.
The post What do the classics do for you? appeared first on OUPblog.
I have a slight advantage over most people when it comes to looking back over the course of my life to pick one important book and being sure I haven't forgotten to think about any. This is because I'm a huge dork and, after being inspired by an All Things Considered soundbyte in 1999, have been logging every single thing I read--title, author, date, brief comments--into a blue spiral-bound notebook. To make my decision about which book was most important to me, all I would have had to do was flip through.
But in the end, I chose a book that isn't in my notebook because I finished reading it on March 26th, 1999, less than a month before I started keeping the notebook (yes, I remember the date I finished reading it--that should be an argument for its lasting resonance if anything is).
What have I chosen, already?! you're asking. Well, I've committed a sin. I've chosen a very book that every single snobby tall-nosed self-conscious masturbatory pseudo-intellectual tells older men at cocktail parties--particularly their aging bosses who need to be "impressed"--that they loved. I've chosen a book that no one in their right mind actually enjoys reading, but is so effin' pleased with themselves for getting through that they tell everyone they loved it and that it changed their life. And after awhile they begin to think they actually liked it. I might as well have chosen something by James Joyce.
Alas. I have picked THE SOUND AND THE FURY, by William Faulkner. Tragedy of tragedies. I cringe whenever people tell me at a bar, a party, or a job interview that they "love" Faulkner. Pompous cerebral assholes. I know when they say that that they are EXACTLY LIKE ME!--intellectual poseurs. But I can solidly say after a couple hours of flipping through the Book Book that it honestly takes the prize. Here's why--and hopefully not for the reasons you're expecting.
I didn't ever intend to read the book, originally, but it was foisted upon me by the English teacher who changed my life. For the purposes of this blog, let's call her Mrs. Miller. I was in tenth grade at a large rural public school as socially far away from New York City as you can imagine and I was very, very tightly wound about getting into college. Mrs. Miller was in her late seventies at the time, a recovering book editor who had ended up in her second career trapped in a leaking suburban hell and convincing neurotic tenth-graders that they had something to live for besides the SATs. She was--and is--a living legend.
Rumors and horror stories had been passed along down from graduated tenth grader to tenth grader for as many years as anyone could remember. There were often two tests a week, but there was always at least one, on vocabulary and grammar every Friday. And it was hell. Seriously, you can't imagine these tests. The first day of class was a test, in fact, which everyone always failed. My year, it was on Herman Melville's BILLY BUDD, and when the girl next to me got a 76 Mrs. Miller looked positively thwarted. On parent-teacher open house day, she would arrive, every year without hiccup, with a scarlet A pinned to her dress. This was a little cerebral for some of the parents, but most at that point knew we'd suffered through three grueling tests on THE SCARLET LETTER by early October and basically had the book memorized in hopes that we'd avoid the fourth. During our class when we were discussing Hawthorne's use of pathetic fallacy (that is, the literary device that employs weather and other natural indicators to reflect the timbre of the story) a junior named Diego, who had suffered the whole Miller regime and somehow left in one piece, weaseled into our classroom and wrote on the blackboard behind her:
PATHETIC: your grade
FALLACY: thinking you'll ever understand this stuff
We laughed, in our pain.
Another famous Millerism was the spring "Thesis." Everyone spent the entire spring semester working on one piece of American literature and came up with one original thesis on that book, on which they wrote one 20-age paper. No more than 25% of the parenthetical documentation could be taken from the primary source, and no more than 10% from any single secondary source--and yes, she counted. She also spent three weeks following up all of our citations to make sure we hadn't cut any corners. Part of our grade was determined by the index cards on which we were supposed to take our notes--we each turned in at least the required minimum 400 close citations, all color-coded and alphabet catagorized. This was how I learned to index, incidentally.
Even after four pretty darn diligent years at a notoriously intense college, I can still Girl Scout Promise you that this was the single most rigorous piece of academic work I ever did.
In late February, we were to choose our title. We were given a list of acceptable American novels. Deviation from the list was acceptable (with strong argument) but not encouraged. We were to write up 200-word proposals about why we should be allowed to read a particular book on the list. The list was a thinly veiled waterfall from least snooty and erudite to most, and we all saw through that one quickly. We were about to be striated. The last three titles on the list were, in order, AS I LAY DYING, LIGHT IN AUGUST, and THE SOUND & THE FURY.
My arch nemesis, whom for the sake of this blog we shall call Rick O'Malley, the staight A mathlete who printed his vocab homework on cloud-patterned stationary (keep in mind, this was back in the age when most of us didn't even have computers in our houses, never mind printers), went straight for the nuggets with LIGHT IN AUGUST. I saw the knock-down he took about "what would be more appropriate" before he was reassigned A FAREWELL TO ARMS. Oh, SNAP!! My momma didn't raise no fool. I meekly pitched my proposal for THE HOUSE OF MIRTH.
No, nope. That wasn't gonna fly. "Too easy," said Miller. "No laziness from you."
"No laziness," I choked out.
"I think what you WANT to do is THE SOUND AND THE FURY. Isn't that what you want?"
That's right, Rick O'Malley. Straight to the bottom of the list.
The actual reading of the book itself isn't really important. In fact--we're being honest here, and also, I'm anonymous, so you can't even run off and report me to Rick--I didn't get most of the book at all. After reading it twice, cover to cover, and reading more than 30 literary theses on the book, I know all the issues back and forth and inside out. And I LOVE them. But it wouldn't be 100% honest to say that I really enjoyed reading them at the time.
So why was this the book that changed my life? Well, most immediately, because I won Mrs. Miller's respect by doing it. She set me a task, and I rose to it. She annointed me as one of her chosen, wrote my recommendations, grilled me in grammar (she's the reason, for example, that the production manager at my company stopped the production meeting a couple of weeks ago to ask me if I had any idea what the difference between "toward" and "towards" was, and then, after I gave her a 30-second historical usage synopsis, said, "Somehow I just had a feeling you'd know the answer"). She clucked her tongue in disappointment when I confessed I wasn't majoring in English (although she had been a history major herself--"don't repeat my mistakes!" she cried), but then hugged me with relief when it all turned out ok and I veered back toward editorial, the track, I see now, she wanted me on from the beginning.
But is it fair or happy to confess that the book you love most dearly you love because of what it says to someone else about you?
I have yet another confession (but you know how I am with confessions)--I really DO love Faulkner. But it took me years and years to understand how and why. When I finally prised myself away from my "break down every single goshdarn word and understand it!!" approach and let myself sink into impressionistic absorbtion--and yes, that does include plowing through stretched of pages at a time without really taking in what's going on on occasion--I find that I get enough of it to fall in love with the book despite what I've missed. 
But I love his language, and I love what he has to say. I'm certifiably obsessed with his ideas about fictional retelling, although this didn't sink in until I read ABSALOM, ABSALOM! in college, and I have to say that book was even more opaque to me the first time through than TS&TF was. I planned my entire ambitious (and now wisely burned and buried) first novel around what Faulkner taught me about relative truths. But there we go with the overly cerebral again.
So I guess the short story is I love Faulkner mostly because I love what being able to say I've read him means to people at the other end of the conversation, and I hate myself because that's the guiltiest and stupidest reason to love an author. But more deeply and more darkly, I secretly actually do love Faulkner, despite what saying I love him makes people think about me.
I've run my stint as a pseudo-intellectual (funny, I originally typed that as "untellectual") and I got tired and fed up with myself. I don't think I'm a stupid girl, and I'm confident enough in that belief that I'm now comfortable admitting that no, I didn't get the whole novel the first time through. In fact, I still don't get all of it. Yes, the specter of incest throughout haunts me and I still can't decide if I think it actually happened or not, and yes, my solution for reconciling this basic plot misunderstanding is pushing it out of my mind and thinking about some other book. This after ten years.
But you know what? I'm ok with that now. I don't need to fight to be the expert anymore. The impressionism is just fine with me.
So I raise my glass (he was an alcoholic, after all) to Faulkner, who changed my mind and my relationships. Trite as it may be, for Celebrate Reading Month I've got to celebrate you.
By Kirsty OUP-UK
While Rebecca has been quizzing the publishing world of New York, I have been hounding people a little closer to home: the staff of OUP here in Oxford. Here is what we’ve been reading on this side of the Pond in 2007…
Kate Farquhar-Thomson, Head of Publicity
Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Richard Deakin. As an outdoors girl this journey through the woods and forests of both this country and abroad evokes a sense of being at one with nature in all its grandeur. I loved the book and could read it over and over each time discovering something new. (more…)
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