Why Literature Matters<\/em><\/a>). What they are qualified to do, he says, is to bestow honor, \u201cbecause meaningful praise has to come from those who know the excellences of things\u201d (xiii).<\/p>\nArbery\u2019s book is a beautifully written, entertaining book that bestows honor on the excellences of literature, and also bestows opprobrium where it\u2019s deserved. He doesn\u2019t have much use for Tom Wolfe\u2019s pyrotechnics, for instance. Where Arbery excels, though, is in close reading of texts. He doesn\u2019t denounce Wolfe. He shows where he is sloppily unliterary, and unconvincing.<\/p>\n
He quotes this from Wolfe\u2019s A Man in Full<\/em>: Charlie Crocker has just heard a reference to Michel Foucault, and we go inside his head to follow his thought processes: \u201cWho? thought Charlie. Michelle Fookoe? He looked at Serena, who was turned about in her chair drinking in every word as if it were ambrosia\u201d (quoted, p. 8). Arbery writes, \u201cInsecure, Charlie plausibly glances at his wife to see whether she . . . knows the name he does not recognize. But the phonetic rendering of \u2018Foucault\u2019 . . . unfortunately does not bode well for the urbane simile. This description of Serena . . \u00a0. requires Charlie to make the ironic comparison of Myrer\u2019s critical jargon to ambrosia, which means that he has to know the classical qualities of ambrosia, including its capacity to immortalize those who are allowed to partake of it. Is there something either in Charlie\u2019s down-home background or in his acquired tastes to make classical allusions spontaneous? . . . Not at all: his favorite work of art is an N.C. Wyeth illustration of the wounded Jim Bowie fighting off Mexicans with his big Bowie knife\u201d (8). Wolfe, he adds, doesn\u2019t want to create a plausible character but to \u201csatirize the Types,\u201d and that leads to \u201cexamples of indifferent art on every page\u201d (8\u20139).<\/p>\nHe doesn\u2019t think that Wolfe can defend himself by claiming to render life as it is today. To do that, a novel has to succeed as literature: \u201cA novel that does not succeed at being literature cannot fruitfully address the actual condition of the world. Why? Because it has not addressed, with sufficient awareness or care, its own actual condition as a made thing. There is no reason to trust it as wisdom, and its inflated contemporaneity will eventually hit a low pressure trough and drop into the waters\u201d (19).<\/p>\n
A<\/span>rbery describes his own epiphany about literature, when he heard a college teacher explain how Shakespeare deliberately, artfully varied the stresses and jammed up words in Sonnet 73: \u201cWhat impressed me was the teacher\u2019s point that the poem leads its reader to expect an unstressed syllable at the beginning of the fourth line, but instead Shakespeare uses a stressed one. I suddenly felt <\/em>the word \u2018bare,\u2019 how it cuts across an established expectation, the way a good tennis player catches his opponent leaning the wrong way, or a pitcher throws only fastballs, then \u00a0gets the batter to swing at a change-up.\u201d<\/p>\nHe became suddenly aware how \u201cShakespeare could write three lines of more or less iambic pentameter about getting old, that he could be deliberately indecisive about those leaves and get the word \u2018hang,\u2019 after all those changing-his-mind commas, to hang there, that he could emphasize \u2018cold\u2019 with the rhyme, and that he could suddenly, at the beginning of the fourth line, write on purpose, \u2018Bare, ruin\u2019d choirs, where\u2019\u2014a glutinous sound clump, a gobbet of near-rhymes full of r\u2019s that have to be laboriously pulled apart\u201d and then end the line with a phrase as \u201cclear and airy\u201d as \u201cwhere late the sweet birds sang\u201d (xvii-xviii).<\/p>\n
Arbery doesn\u2019t explain why literature matters. He shows.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Glenn C. Arbery is a literature professor, and he knows his limits.\u00a0Literature professors can\u2019t bestow importance on great literature, writes Arbery (Why Literature Matters). What they are qualified to do, he says, is to bestow honor, \u201cbecause meaningful praise has to come from those who know the excellences of things\u201d (xiii). Arbery\u2019s book is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1098,578,1321],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","category-shakespeare","category-tom-wolfe"],"yoast_head":"\n
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