Textual Snowflakes

Textual Snowflakes



I decide a book is bad if I get angrier and angrier as I read it. That happens rarely. But if I discover an author cheating, by taking shortcuts, not doing the necessary homework however long it might take, relying on second-hand knowledge, overlooking the other sides of the issue, or experience, then I am ready to explode, and so I know it is a bad book. If I am served up a self-interested snow job these days, it is usually done in the name of a good cause, which makes it harder to criticize.

Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006) is my choice. The book received honorable mentions in nationally prestigious contests, and leading Ameri-canists have given it their endorsements. The gist of its argument, taken from its publisher’s website, is, “Throughout, Dimock contends that American literature is answerable not to the nation-state, but to the human species as a whole, and that it looks dramatically different when removed from a strictly national or English-language context.”

I applaud this goal, yet all of the texts drawn from global contexts “across deep time” are present-ed in English translations. Henry James’s novels and The Epic of Gilgamesh, to give one comic example, get read together. I know—in this case, who cares? But this is true throughout. Knowing a text in its original language and cultural contexts is crucial. If such knowledge is removed, due to the scholar’s inadequacies or the assumed reader’s, the result is readings lacking resonance, depth, weight. Reading then is like looking at a child’s shaken snow globe, with the texts-snowflakes gradually settling down to one common level. All are globally equal now but equally bland and banal.

I’ve been telling students for many years that Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) is one of the best American novels, up until the time Clyde is caught, then it goes into the toilet, more or less. A great book than goes down hill at the end. Recently, I looked at it again, to see if what I have thought for so long is true. AAT is divided into three books; book three is essentially a police procedural, and here Dreiser makes use of what was historic material, since a similar killing had taken place, along with a circus-like trial, a fixture of the era, some twenty years earlier, one that had “inspired” the book. So, part of the problem is that there’s a lot of telling at the end, unlike the showing that had been going on earlier, such as the “murder” scene on the lake. In that way, the first two thirds of AAT is more a product of Dreiser’s imagination, until reality takes over, since the actual murderer did not share Clyde’s fictional background. The character of

Clyde had been pulled out of Dreiser’s own murky inner life. Dreiser has never been accused of being a stylist, so a difference in language is not the ques-tion; it is more a matter of Dreiser letting the public record interfere with his re-imagining. In any case, in the 1951 movie, A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens, Stevens spends hardly any time on