Curling Up with a Good Text

...Forster) that he finds at the heart of all original literary works...

...Doesn't anyone who has ever read Great Expectations or seen a performance of Julius Caesar know that...

...There is no sanctuary on the opposite front, where some theoreticians are just as single-mindedly trying to prove that literature's sole concern is with itself, and that it is unconnected to the world outside...

...And his assertion that there is a "necessary, if subordinate, place for literary studies alongside reading" doesn't seem to me to leave enough room for people outside the academy who seek out the wisdom and play of good imaginative writing without wanting to explain, or be told, what makes it good...

...He believes, however, that "the great promise of 20 years ago has turned to bitter ashes, " that the hermetic language, sham erudition and private and political tub-thumping of much current criticism is leading to an "intellectual dead-end...

...The prose can get a bit too specialized as well...

...A discussion of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, Pope's satire on 18th-century English society, is more than a demonstration of the distinction between literary and ordinary writing: Alter's discussion itself becomes a satiric thrust, as it insinuates a comparison between new critics who trendily endorse linguistic leveling and Pope's gaggle of deluded fellow citizens...

...Let the nonacademic reader be warned that while there are riches here for everyone who loves literature, Alter is addressing mainly the beleaguered teacher or student of literature—a more apt title for his book might have been The Pleasures of the Vocation of Reading...

...By quoting Melville's description of Queequeg in a storm ("the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair") Alter manages to return language to the ocean of meaning and, one feels, to pass poetic judgment on one brand of new wave nihilism...

...Well, a few curriculum architects beg to differ...

...Although Alter writes lucidly, and with his usual felicity (reading, he delightfully tells us, is "a prehensile activity of the mind"), he sometimes falls into that highly unfelicitous academic habit of not saying exactly what you mean...

...His sly selection and presentation of the texts he takes as his examples is an engaging feat...

...The odds are that one isn't going to find terms like the "revelatory spatial orientation" of the ballroom scene in The Princess of Clèves, or the "proprioception" of Kitty's body in Anna Karenina, fun reading...

...In the process of examining his concepts—what he also calls "intrinsically literary values"—Alter refutes such "misleading dogmas" by showing how literature is, as he patiently puts it, "different" from othertypes of writing...

...Since this idea is chiefly based on the assumption that "high art" is only considered so because it reflects the values of some ruling class or powerful group, skeptics usually get accused of having a cultural or ideological bias...

...They will have to suffer through Alter's amusing commentary on Stendhal's acid portrait of a provincial bourgeois mayor in The Red and the Black...

...The substance of The Pleasures of Reading is made up of exquisitely close analyses of lines and passages drawn from a wide variety of literary works—from the Bible to Nabokov —encompassing poetry, fiction and drama...

...Accordingly, his purpose "is not merely to question a few of the fundamentally misleading dogmas of the new critical sectarians, but to propose a set of concepts that will point a return to reading...

...To those unfamiliar with this area of turbulence in higher education, the "concepts" Alter presents may seem more like basic truths about the nature of imaginative writing...

...Reviewed by Lee Siegel Robert Alter's fine reply to contemporary literary theory will be welcomed with cheers in some exasperated quarters, as much for its civility as for its common sense...

...But Alter has what can only be called joie de lire, and despite these minor objections those interested in his subject will be swept along into the generous expanse of his enthusiasm...

...W.H...

...It follows, he implies, that this difference consists in the way literature illuminates the unwritten world of people, objects and events...

...Nor does Alter's throwaway description of literature as an "institution" have much appeal...

...Auden once said that a great book reads you...

...The Pleasures of Reading drives home its point, finally, through the rare performance of reading-in-action, the critical enactment of those realms of convergence—Alter's concepts—which are the common ground between reader and writer...

...His general aim is to assert the "high fun" of reading, to outweigh tidy interpretive formulas with the "incalculability of life" (borrowed fromE.M...

...Competing groups hectically make their way along ideological lines toward a reductionist formula, as if determined to prove that the outline of several thousand years of stories, poems and plays had the shape of a double helix...

...Each sect has its own stern masters and methodology, ritualistic jargon and particular adversaries...

...All this is indeed a polemic, but a polemic of a very subtle and gracefully mischievous kind...

...Since the late 1960s, Alter notes, radical—and mostly French—schools of thought like structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction, combined with various strains of neo-Freudianism, neo-Marxism and gender theory, have transformed the study of literature in American universities into an arena of sectarian combat...

...In this maze and haze of theory and countertheory, Alter contends, the deceptively simple act of reading has virtually disappeared...

...But life is not so peaceful in the profession of teaching and studying literature...

...Examining a passage from Moby-Dick in his chapter on style, he shows that literature is frequently a greater subverter of language than abstract theories which have that subversion as their goal —deconstructionists who think language is no more than the flotsam and jetsam of "signifiers" floating randomly in an ocean of referents had better lash themselves tightly to the nearest mast...

...In a spirit of tolerance and critical pluralism that is characteristic of his book, Alter gives the new theories credit where some credit is due...

...arid theoreticians doubtful of literature's connection to the outside world may simply close their eyes...

...Alter does not merely write about books...

...What Alter does with Melville is even better...

...Occasionally, these analyses are a little too close...

...The essential virtue of The Pleasures of Reading is that Robert Alter believes book and person still have something sacred —it is no less than that—to bestow on one another...

...Perhaps not surprisingly in a work that uses words like "fun" and even "intuition" to define the act of reading (Professor Alter may have to attend the next convention of the Modern Language Association with a pair of bodyguards), the author is himself having a good time...

...he scores his points in their language...

...It is a quiet, carefully constructed, fair-minded argument, made by example more than precept, for the fundamental value of reading imaginative literature...

...That, of course, depends on the reader's depth of experience and how well he or she has turned experience into conscious thought...

...He praises the "boldness" of the "new wave" critics, and commends their questioning of Western philosophical and esthetic principles whose authority, in any case, had begun to wane long before this latest onslaught...

...Character," "style," "allusion," "structure," and "perspective"—a chapter is devoted to each—are what distinguish novels from newspapers, poems from advertisements, we are told...

...Critics who believe literature upholds the social and political status quo make similarly easy targets...

...That such an argument needs to be made at all may surprise those who return home evenings with the latest Milan Kundera or Gabriel Garcia Marquez under their arm, or spend their weekends catching up on the Dickens or Jane Austen they have yet to savor...

...He is a critic and scholar possessed by books...

...Contemporary literary theory's most troubling notion holds that the same set of reading skills is sufficient for comprehending all modes of written communication, from comic books to epic poems...

...But here, too, in a chapter devoted to proving that there are correct and incorrect interpretations of literary works, Alter clinches his final argument with alight hand, ending on a wink with a richly suggestive analysis of Pnin, Nabokov's harried and quixotic professor of literature...

...Not until the last chapter—"Multiple Readings and the Bog of Indeterminacy"—do we get a straightforward rebuttal of another critic's work...

...The Pleasures of Reading—In an Ideological Ageis conspicuously given subtitle status—is neither fashionable kvetching nor useless finger-pointing...

...His rallying cry is "experience," the practice of reading books and thinking about them...