An alternative title to Joshua's Landy's zippy work of critical theory might be: "how to read difficult books"; or (even more honestly) "why bother with difficult books at all?" The latter is a question that perhaps does not get asked often enough, or answered satisfactorily ever. Is it proper to struggle through novels without enjoyment, with furrowed brow and aching eyes, overwhelmed by "the boredom that pours in waves from the chirping pages" (as John Updike once said of Tristram Shandy, when he managed to get no further than page 428)?
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Everyone has their own example of novels dutifully, painfully or uncomprehendingly battled (and I will second Updike's Shandy and raise him a Moby-Dick). Landy, a Stanford French professor, asks the same question specifically in regard to the "notoriously difficult works of fiction" of Samuel Beckett: "why do we, some of us at least, willingly put ourselves through them?"
His answer, when shorn of its sometimes uncomfortably scratchy fleece of critical theory, is simple: complicated literature (like green vegetables) is good for you. Landy believes that certain texts provide training for our minds, by actively working on the reader to expand their mental capacity: "each work, in other words, contains within itself a manual for reading, a set of implicit instructions on how it may best be used."
His examples come from "five countries, and two and a half millennia": Plato's Gorgias and Symposium, Mark's gospel, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a sonnet by Mallarmé, and the novel trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable by Beckett. With a nod to JL Austin, Landy dubs these works "formative fictions", because they form and shape the reader by incorporating lessons about reading itself.
Before we get to the evidence, we receive a breathless summary of various other literary theories that seek to explain the purpose of fiction. Landy is fond of lists and numbers, and posits "13 ways of looking at fiction", which include three main schools of thought: the "exemplary" (novels as morals; read Clarissa and become a better person); the "affective" (freeing our emotions; see Kafka's wonderful observation that "a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us"); and the "cognitive". Landy spends most time on the "cognitive", subdividing it – I think – into four other sections, but basically categorising it as the view that novels are "directly educational".
Landy's own theory, of fiction as a thought-trainer, comes close to this notion, but he exerts himself considerably to condemn those "meaning-mongers" who insist that fictions provide the key to straightforward verities. He is also dismissive of those of us who only want to dwell on the enjoyment of being told a story, or what he calls "the glorious uselessness of fiction, its ostensible inability to yield anything beyond pleasure". Vladimir Nabokov, who was among other things a literature professor, would disagree, as he celebrated the "tell-tale tingle between the shoulder blades" as a legitimate (indeed crucial) critical response. One never gets the sense of Landy's shoulder blades giving so much as a twitch.
But Landy is not simply a po-faced purveyor of arcane theories. His responses to the texts are personal, lively and – in parts – spectacularly acute. He is at his best as a close reader when he is examining Mark's gospel, or discussing "the cosmic magnitude" of Mallarmé's "ses purs ongles" sonnet.
The reading of Mark focuses on the Parable of the Sower (in which the metaphor of sowing seeds is used to explain why religious messages do not always flourish: some fall on fertile ground, some on rocky etc). Landy seeks to explain why Jesus actually admits – in a famously disputed passage – that he does not want to convert everybody who listens to him: "for those outside, everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven".
This is gripping stuff, for believer and atheist alike. Why would Jesus, of all people, not want sinners to be forgiven? Landy's answer is that the understanding of metaphorical language is essential to faith itself: if one cannot move from the visible to the symbolic, then one can never comprehend God. Jesus uses non-inclusive language because he only wants those with the capacity for genuine belief to follow him. As Landy triumphantly concludes: "the Sower is a meta-parable, a parable about parables, a parable that only indirectly concerns the kingdom of God, being focused, rather, on the ability to handle figurative language".
When we read the parable, then, it is the very experience of reading that is crucial. That is why it is used to support Landy's theory about the self-consciousness of fiction. Elsewhere, we are readily convinced that Chaucer is parodying didacticism in "The Nun's Priest's Tale" and Plato is undermining Socrates by giving him weak arguments so that the reader will learn about the perils of flawed thinking. The quondam impenetrable poetry of Mallarmé is characterised wonderfully as "training in the two skills that make life bearable: generating fictions, and persuading ourselves that they are true".
Landy tells a splendid story about the death of the abbé Joseph-Antoine Boullan, who people suspected had been killed by the "occult thunderbolts" of the French Rosicrucians. As the theory spread, Joris-Karl Huysmans contributed to a newspaper with his own recollections of being the subject of a similar attack, unimprovably concluding: "the proof is that my cat, who for his part is hardly likely to be a hallucinatory, is gripped by spasms in the same way as me".
It is not clear what this has to do with formative fictions, or anything else. Actually, the tale of Huysmans's spasming cat should be a reminder to Joshua Landy that some stories are worth telling simply for themselves. Glorious uselessness is something to be cherished. But if we persist in reading complicated books for something more than their plot, Landy has at least given us a series of thoughtful and persuasive reasons for doing so.