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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15 |
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Jay Elias | You can take it with you
"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II
2002-12-20- 4:30 p.m.
The Shrug Of Eternity
“To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one’s own conscience is to abandon mankind.”
You want to know something that has been bothering me? In the preview for The Two Towers that I keep seeing on TV, the tagline is Bernard Hill (playing Theoden) saying grimly towards the camera, “So it begins.” And the line is really well delivered, and placing it there at the end of the preview gets all those excitement juices going so you want to go see the movie. But, the thing is, it isn’t at all how it begins. It is the second film in the trilogy. I think perhaps he meant, “So it middles.”
The above quote is from the novel Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler. I started thinking about it after it showed up as number eight on a list of the one hundred greatest modern novels that the incomparable Weetabix wrote an entry about. I was pleased to see it on the list but shocked that it was so high; I had discovered the book when it was assigned in a political history class I took in college, and had never heard of it in regards to literature.
Darkness At Noon is a wonderful book. It is the sort of film that seems bound to be made into a prestigious Oscar-nominated film some day; only 216 pages, and all a wonderfully dramatic and historically important examination into the Stalinist purges. In many ways it is a shock that it hasn’t become a film yet, seeing as it has been around since 1941. The best explanation for this is that the principle character, while “politically unsuitable” for the regime of Stalin, is in fact an unrepentant communist whose capitulation is due as much to the unforgiving logic of his own Marxist beliefs as by the interrogation tactics of the KGB. And there is a lot of prejudice in Hollywood against making films where Russian communists are the heroes, so we end up with nearly fifty films about D-Day and only one Hollywood picture about the more momentous battle of Stalingrad. And no one watches Alexander Nevsky anymore, but film students all dissect Triumph of the Will in class. But I shouldn’t get myself started in on that.
Despite its place in the top ten of the Random House modern novels list, I don’t really think anyone reads Darkness At Noon anymore, if indeed they ever did. If English teachers want their students to read a book about communism (and I’m not sure if they do, now that half the Warsaw Pact are members of NATO), they teach Animal Farm, which while an inferior novel has both the lazy charm of a campy metaphor and the advantage of an animated film for the less reading-inclined students to ease the burden on the professor. And Koestler isn’t a major figure of the literary scene like Hemingway, Camus, or Tolstoy, so no one teaches it as a means of getting kids acquainted with anyone important’s oeuvre. And more and more novels like this are getting pushed to the side, both by reduced reading lists in public schools (The remarkable Jessi has informed me that in the district where she teaches, students will now be reading only one novel a year by order of the Superintendent – I, meanwhile, remember often having up to fifty pages of reading for English a night at my public high school) and by both excellent and inferior works chosen for reasons of multiculturalism instead of for literary merit.
I’m getting sidetracked again, but I never understood why the solution when people felt that novels by minorities were underrepresented in school curriculums the obvious solution was not simply “have the kids read more books”. There are, of course, numerous amazing and important novels written by minorities and people of color. I would hope that all people find it important to read Virginia Woolf, August Wilson, James Baldwin, Mary Shelley, Alexandre Dumas, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde and Yukio Mishima. To name a few, many of who were on most public school syllabi long before reading lists had quotas. One thing I do find somewhat disturbing is how much the books are chosen for the social sensation they created when published then for any literary merit. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Chester Himes’ If He Hollers Let Him Go are books written about similar situations in the same place and time, and one is a great novel and one is not, and it is definitely the wrong one on high school reading lists, not to mention the one that kids are much less likely to enjoy. What I find more disturbing is the haphazard manner in which books that were previously essentials are deemed useless; I hate to imagine what Jane Austen would think of the dismissal of Victor Hugo from the canon.
I can only tell you that Darkness At Noon is both an excellent read and excellent reading. I’d like to tell you that I think you should go out and get a copy and read it, but this whole exercise is something I’m starting to have my doubts about. I mean, frankly, why should you read Darkness At Noon? If you were interested in the Stalinist purges, you could read a history book or just watch some special on the History Channel and learn a lot more about it. If you are interested in a good book, there are many others that are also very good, and are a lot more likely to give you something to talk about with the pretty girl in the cute retro-fifties glasses at the bar. And what I am beginning to realize is that being well read is a virtue that isn’t worth a material damn in modern society.
Let’s face facts: it truly is the information age, and part of what that means is that none of us need to have any information at all stored away in our heads. To whatever extent society previously felt that understanding of Goethe or Joyce or Sun-Tzu was useful, today, we place greater merit on the skills to find a pertinent quote than we do the foreknowledge of it. Even in political commentary, we have left George Will alongside the road and hopped into Ann Coulter’s convertible. And you don’t need to know much of anything to be Ann Coulter, or James Carville either.
I could try and fight this, I know, and perhaps I should. There is a part of me that truly believes that these things, that literature itself has great value because it is the history of human ideas, and that only by understanding and appreciating ideas themselves can we hope to have great ideas of our own someday. But I don’t live in a world that cares. I live in a world where Jonathan Frazen is reviled because he spent five years of his life crafting The Corrections, and when it came right down to it, he’d prefer people looked at it as literature instead of Oprah Winfrey-ed pop. I live in a world that would reward me more if I read a handbook on Linux networking than if I read the entire collected works of John Stuart Mill. And I better start getting comfortable living in that world. After all, my apartment is there.
Copyright © 2001, 2002 - EoZ
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Older
Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02
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