I am about mid-way through Possession now and am still holding on–though I’ll admit that I’ve started to skip over the excepted pieces of poetry and critical essays. The story part is still very interesting. It’s not a very exciting read, I’ll admit, but it’s a very different kind of love story.
One of the things I’m enjoying the most about this book is that it is also a critique of modern literary scholarship. Last time I mentioned the absurdity of what scholars write about and read into their subjects. This time I want to comment on something that one of the characters said. The character, Fergus Wolff–a scumbucket with a better vocabulary–wondered angrily about the point of what they do. He reads “dead letters by dead people” (my paraphrase). Truth to tell, the vast majority of people couldn’t care less about literary scholarship. So why do literary scholars write? Sure some write to stay in academia (for whatever reason), but there has to be a deeper reason to stay in a profession that is poorly paid and highly competitive.
I think it’s because literary criticism is, in part, a search for meaning and, maybe, truth. When I was an undergraduate working on a literature degree, I started to think of novels and plays and poems as petri dishes, where the author would throw characters and setting and situations together just to see what would happen. (I always thought this was especially true of Shakespeare.) I saw literature as a safe way to do human behavioral experimentation and the psychology of the text was what interested me the most.
My favorite works to write about were any of the variations of the Faust myth: Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Shelley’s Frankenstein, etc. What drew me to those works was the moral and ethical dilemmas that the characters wrestled with. Maybe it’s because I am a dropout from Christianity and have had to find my own moral compass, but watching those characters and thinking deeply about their motivations had profound meaning for me.
I don’t know if it’s true for every scholar, that they find a story that speaks to them and that they can listen to and think about for years, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most literary critics continually return to the same author or the same work over and over again.
I totally skipped the poetry, but now that I've done my MA in essentially literary criticism, I wonder if I should give this book another go. I'm not staying with literary criticism as a career (I think), but I think the drive to be a critic is part and parcel with the drive that makes us read and write about reading. There is some search for meaning here. For me, it's too personal to make a career. I want my working life to *be* meaningful and to share and connect with more than the 25 people who might read my book on Girlhood and Literature (one of the topics I fleetingly considered for a dissertation).
Watching the movie first really helped. This book was dense.