Seriously, Jane

Abstract

Seriously, Jane Toon Staes (bio) Sansei and Sensibility Karen Tei Yamashita Coffee House Press https://coffeehousepress.org/products/sansei-and-sensibility 232 Pages; Print, $16.95 Writing about "serious" literature reminds me of Matthew Arnold, that eminent Victorian, part-time poet and full-time educator, whose literary criticism inspired the F. R. Leavises and Harold Blooms of this world. In "The Study of Poetry" (1880), perhaps his most famous essay, Arnold concerned himself with setting the high standards by which we are to judge what counts as "classic" literature—the poetry that could stand alongside Homer's or Dante Alighieri's. Style and content mattered to Arnold, of course, and so did "superiority of diction and movement," but the two criteria that truly separated the best from the rest were these: "a higher truth and a higher seriousness." Arnold never went into much detail about what passes for truth or seriousness in literature, but no matter: here we might have a yardstick to measure which texts belong to the canon, a benchmark proposed by a prominent scholar who would shape the tastes of English and American critics for years to come. It stood to reason that, within the space of the same essay, Arnold coursed through the history "of our English poetry" with his own criteria in mind. William Shakespeare or John Milton? Yes, please. Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, or Alexander Pope? Brilliant poets, sure, and influential to boot, but not serious enough. "The Study of Poetry" stands as a testament to the importance of scholarship among the Victorians, who touted the Western canon as part of a well-rounded education—much as Leavis, Bloom, and other defenders of the Great Tradition would do later. It also speaks to how vague or even frustrating scholars can get when they want to prescribe what makes "serious" literature function. "Literature is an act of invention," another highpowered writer-turned-scholar, Vladimir Nabokov, would counter, "a great writer is always a great enchanter." But for functionalists, literature seems not just an act of artistic imagination—it's a vehicle that adheres to one, often ill-defined, moral standard. Of course there is nothing wrong with the assumption, say, that poetry or prose can serve as an abstract space in which we come to terms with the complexities of life. They can, and as empirical research on children's literature and theory-of-mind skills suggests, for instance, they often do. But the reading brain is much wider than the classics alone, and rankings of literary models (authors, styles, genres) on the basis of their "seriousness" rarely boil down to more than personal opinions about how literature should behave. When John Gardner or Gore Vidal railed against the "Po-Mo" writers of the sixties and seventies, they simply measured them against the values of the Victorians. Even today, the influence of Arnold and his band of serious readers lingers. How different are "truth" and "high seriousness," really, from more recent buzzwords applied to serious literature? "Relatability" comes to mind. "Sincerity." More questions inevitably follow. Relatable, for whom? Sincere, compared to what? How would the literature of alienation score on the relatability scale? Hasn't irony taught us much about the difference between appearance and reality? Here, too, we might turn to Nabokov—or to Nabokov's own poet, Pale Fire's John Shade, in conversation with his exegete, Charles Kinbote: "when I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool." Jane Austen doesn't appear on Arnold's list of classics, but she is, of course, as classic as they come. (Arnold was always a bit belated as a critic, not having noticed that by his day, some fifty years after Austen's, the novel had already caught up with the poem in terms of literary cachet.) Here we have one writer whose innovative tricks with narration and perspective have kept literature professors occupied for long. Perhaps, for too long. (I once overheard an established narrative theorist propose a twenty year ban on studies of Austen's use of free indirect discourse. Austen might have appreciated his irony.) At...