To believe in the power of art to create or change politics (for the better) is no small thing. Such belief requires an implicit optimism that the despair and risks of the political moment (of now or any time) has difficulty supporting. Cynicism is a logical, rational response to the political moment of Trump, or in the case of Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time : Stalin. The personal danger of resisting the cynical impulse by creating art is the question of the novel. Continue reading
Tag Archives: reading
Infinite Jest: Why Reading this Book Makes You a Hero
I started reading David Foster Wallace’s epic Infinite Jest at the cottage. I set myself an (overly) ambitious target of 100 pages a day. Ambitious because it took me an hour to read 15 pages. And I could only reasonably avoid my family and read on the dock for seven hours of the day. Because reading Infinite Jest is an exercise in focus, absorption and dedication. Like the ‘entertainment’ that so bewitches characters that they cannot look away (choosing death by starvation or dehydration rather than stopping the consumption of the entertainment) the novel asks for (demands?) complete attention if the reader is to make sense of the overlapping plot lines, constantly shifting points of view, temporal and geographic locations, narrative styles and relationships among characters. Continue reading
Filed under American literature, Fiction, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner, Reader Request
Bone and Bread: Eating Disorders & Making Use of Life in Fiction
*caveat – I do quite a bit of thinking out loud in this post and don’t arrive anywhere elegant*
Out for dinner recently the table got to discussing the merits of fiction and nonfiction. I was (surprise) defending fiction for its imaginative invitation to empathy; my companion argued all fiction was telling the same story and that nonfiction did far better to educate. Our two friends weighed in on both sides. We started talking about Annabel by Kathleen Winter and the misrepresentation of intersexed people and their experiences. I suggested, naively, ‘but surely the character is meant to be a metaphor,’ to which my companion noted that surely individual lives ought not be used for literary purpose. The conversation moved elsewhere. I haven’t stopped thinking about the question.
It’s certainly a question I’ve considered in memoir and biography: what are the ethics of using the living in stories and in fiction? Of course in the case of Annabel, or the broader question we were discussing, it’s not a particular or ‘true’ individual being used for literary purpose, so much as an identity being used. In the case of Saleema Nawaz’s Bone and Bread it’s not an identity, but an illness: anorexia.
The novel follows two orphaned sisters Sadhana and Beena as they grow up in Montreal. Sadhana’s experience with an eating disorder shapes the sisters’ relationship as much as their loss of parents. Except the part I’m trying to figure out is the eating disorder functions both as a plot and character device, but also with thematic intent: what are we starving ourselves of when we live alone? (how) does art demand the diminishment of the self? how do we respond to circumstances beyond our control? The illness is misrepresented, even as it ‘gets right’ some aspects of the disease. But does it matter what it gets right (or not) about the real life illness? It’s not meant to be an educational, nonfiction exploration of the experience of an eating disorder; it’s meant to be an exploration of sibling love, control, secrecy and the limits of care. And it uses an eating disorder as a means to explore those questions. Perhaps the better question isn’t whether such representation and use should be allowed, but questions about how effectively and to what end.
As someone who experienced an eating disorder do I get to weigh in (ha) on these questions differently? (probably not) We should question how identities and experiences are being represented in fiction. These are not neutral activities; these representations shape how we understand and interact with others and our world. Where I think I come down is that the responsibility isn’t on the novel to get it right, so much as it is on us as readers to get the reading right. We need to read attuned to the fabrication, manipulation and use that character, plot and setting are being put. We need to be prompted to read a description of an eating disordered behaviour and ask ourselves (or others! or research!) whether such a behaviour might be ‘true,’ and if so, what does that mean to us? and if not, what does that mean to us (and the novel)?
There are many, many terrible novels that are terrible because they get so much of representing life, people and their experiences so incredibly wrong. Bone and Bread is not one of these novels. (I suppose I should actually comment on this book!). [The novel has strong and evocative description, a Can Lit insistence on its importance and Literary Merit (and this insistence has paid off: it is a contender for Canada Reads 2016!), a compelling family-drama plot. Its characters are a bit shallow and surprising in their actions. The Can Lit insistence is grating for the first forty page until you accept what’s happening to you and move on. Or perhaps the author relaxes and eases up on the similes (questions for another day).]
So yeah. I haven’t cracked this one. The novel I’ve figured out. Not so much these questions of the liberty afforded in fiction, the responsibility of readers and the literary consequences of misusing that freedom to invent, misrepresent or attempt to capture accurately. Good thing I have a book club tomorrow with my former students to figure this one out. Or you could tell me. Let me know your thoughts (as always).
Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction
Reading while teaching; Teaching what you read
If you do an image search for ‘teaching’ and ‘reading’ (as I just did), you get lots of pictures of the quote “If you can read this, thank a teacher.” So you modify your search terms (because who wants a treacle quote to being their blog post) to “teaching english university” and you get pictures of lecture halls and students with their hands raised. Because that’s what teaching looks like (on Google at least): a classroom with a teacher, students and some kind of learning going on (hopefully). What you don’t find when you do an image search is a picture of the teacher (me) buried in articles, reference books and webpages frantically preparing for a class. And not reading other things. And making my book club read a book I’ve already read so that I don’t have to read something new. And placing books on hold at the library for the winter break when I’ve promised myself a reward of reading all the things I’ve wanted to be reading, but haven’t had the time to (or more properly the reading energy – more on that to come).
In my more desperate moments I convince myself I haven’t read anything since September. Untrue! I’ve reread the novels assigned for the course (The Book of Negroes, Indian Horse and In the Skin of a Lion) and read dozens of texts surrounding these novels (and I read a collection of essays on motherhood *The M Word* before bed, but I didn’t blog about it because essays and I just didn’t). Surely this preparatory work ‘counts’ as reading?
Why then, when I’m teaching what I read, does it not feel like reading? It’s not quite that it feels like work (though it *is* work), it’s more that it feels like their are two tracks of running simultaneously: the reader and the teacher. The reader-me is paying attention to formal elements, to the experience of reading, to making connections. The teacher-me is paying attention to passages that might be included in a lecture or on an exam, to anticipating questions from students, to imagining how to present complex ideas in ways that will be engaging and enriching. It takes energy – “reading energy” – to read on these two tracks.
I probably sound like I’m complaining; I’m not complaining. Much of the time it’s exciting to be doing this work. To plan lessons that will invite students to analyze and to support their enthusiasm for reading (and they are brilliantly engaged and lively students). Some of the time it’s exhausting and frustrating. All of the time it’s a privilege: to be in the classroom, to work with the students, to have the opportunity to teach.
The real effect though is to limit my reading energy for books outside of what I’m teaching. Is it that I’m getting older and just don’t have the same energy? Because in my PhD I read for ‘work’ and then I read for ‘not-work.’ I did the 100 book challenge in the year I wrote my dissertation! So what is it about *teaching* what I read that, for me, makes it so much harder to eek out the time/energy to read-for-me?
As I consider whether to teach again next semester (or ever again!), I place high on my pro/con list the loss of reading-for-me. To help me decide, my analytic-minded partner, S., generated a spreadsheet ranking different pro’s and con’s. When asked how much it mattered to me whether I had energy to read other things, I ranked it the highest as a con for teaching. I miss one-track reading.
So I’ve started reading something just for me. I’m reading Elena Ferrante’s *My Brilliant Friend* with S. (the other S. – my brilliant friend, S.). I’m hoping that in what remains of the semester I can find a pace that lets me read this way. And if I can’t? What do I do? Blog-readers-who-are-also-teachers: what do you do? How do you create the space for different ways of reading? Teach me your ways.
Literary Vice 
