Book Review: The Things That Matter / Morning, Noon & Night

Existentialist autobiographies from Sartre's Pourquoi Ecrire? to Hazel Barnes's The Story I Tell Myself have recognized the importance of story and storytelling as a starting place for being. The urge to create a meaningful narrative from the events of a life, to understand and to learn, is one of the reasons people come to psychotherapy. Existential psychotherapy seeks to help people tell their stories whilst recognizing that there are many stories and that those stories change as we change. In the same way, when we read a novel or a work of literature we are choosing one reading out of many. Mendelson and Weinstein, American academics in the subject of literature, have written books which help us to see the possibilities contained in some of those novels and works of literature and how they illuminate our understanding of life.

Psychoanalysts have long used literature to back up their insights or to illustrate their theories:

...reading what used to be called Literature is probably a better preparation for the practice of psychoanalysis than reading anything else (political history would be a close second)

(Phillips, p xiv)

Psychotherapists of many persuasions also use literature for illustration and explanation:

One of the functions of literature is that it offers itself to us as another vehicle of self recognition.

(Haynes, p 214)

For Sartre the acts of writing and of reading were inextricably entwined – the writer needs the reader for the text to come into being; writer and reader co-create meaning, although of course the reader is free to interpret the text in his or her own way. This makes the act of writing and reading, like the practice of existential psychotherapy, a collaborative venture requiring the willing participation of two parties or 'agents'.

Although Sartre's title 'Pourquoi Ecrire?' is a worthy question, the question we are asking here is 'Pourquoi Lire?' In fact we may ask why, in the age of the internet, read books at all? Or even more precisely, we may ask, as Italo Calvino (a novelist as existential as Camus) once did: 'Pourquoi lire les classiques?' Why should we read the classics?

In their books, Professors Mendelson and Weinstein give us compelling arguments for why we should read literature, why the classics are still worthy of our time and attention, and what might be gained from them if we do. Mendelson in particular makes the case for novels written in a particular period, the 19th and 20th centuries, the golden age of novel writing and the rise of the female author. Weinstein looks at a variety of literary texts and authors from Shakespeare to the present. All these works are shown to be of significance for us today and worth our investment.

The Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton points out that:

All literary works, in other words, are 'rewritten' if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them: indeed here is no reading of a work which is not also a 're-writing'. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair.

(Eagleton, p 11)

But this unstable affair is one which offers us choices to make and unmake ourselves over and over again, a Sartrean self-making and re-making. Fictional beings and events can become as real as our own memories (and our own memories in some sense become fictions when compared to the event itself). In her autobiography The Story I Tell Myself the American existentialist scholar Hazel Barnes said:

They are part of my lived experience…Once I have deciphered the printed words, their content resides in the right side of my brain. The world of a novel which I am currently reading is part of the texture of my day.

(Barnes, p 315)

Weinstein says:

literature shows us who we are; it never stops doing this

(Weinstein, p xiv)

In his recent memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, about being stalked by one of his former creative writing students, writer James Lasdun offers this answer to our question 'Why read?':

If you read naively, as I mostly do, to make sense of your life, rather than for more sophisticated aesthetic or scholarly reasons, then certain writers inevitably become your own Fluchthelfers, helping you over your own wall, whether to escape your reality or, as I prefer to see it, to find your way into it.

(Lasdun, p 96)

(A Fluchthelfer was someone who, in the former East Germany, helped others escape over the wall.)

Simply, psychotherapists and authors can agree that we read to make sense of our lives and our experience, and that literature can provide us with guides and support as we live.

Mendelson & Weinstein, it could be said, have written books filled with Fluchthelfers. As professors of literature they have devoted lifetimes to this study and both these books show this breadth of knowledge and reading. Whereas Mendelson contains his discussion to just seven books, Weinstein ranges widely through the global cannon of literature, across time, geography and genre. Professors of literature it seems, can relate literature to life as therapists do, or perhaps as readers do. Weinstein and Mendelson have both written works out of a love of literature and life and they have written about love. They show us how life and literature work symbiotically to inform us about what it is to be human. In the course of their books we learn little about the facts of the authors' own stories, identifying these as ostensibly works of criticism, but criticism which intends to illuminate both life and literature. Exceptionally, Weinstein, towards the end of his book ruminated on his own advancing years and is half apologetic to be writing about his personal journey. Certainly, both books are written with a personal authorial voice. Auden scholar Mendelson says:

In most cases, the less that critics say about themselves the better will be their criticism, but criticism is always more memorable, more convincing, more valid, when the critic's voice is and sounds like the personal voice of someone who has learned from unique personal experiences

(Mendelson, pxxii)

His book is, he says;

Written for all readers, of any age, who are still deciding how to live their lives

(ibid., p xiii)

Weinstein's book on the other hand has a greater scope, and aim, the author is a man who is reviewing his life and his career. In fact he says:

This (very likely valedictory) book also constitutes something of a conclusion to my career. The ground I cover……represents a roll call of the works of literature I've dealt with over a lifetime, but I now understand that they illuminate my own lifetime.

(Weinstein, p xiv)

The book is a love letter to a life of literature by a man who understands he is moving to the final stages:

I now feel the awful weight of Freud's words on King Lear: 'making friends with the necessity of dying.' There is little that is strictly literary in all this.

(ibid, p xiv)

But it is as impossible for the authors to remain 'blank screens' as it is for a therapist – they give themselves away with their choices of words, their tone of utterance, their use of pronouns. Weinstein is given to opening chapters with expansive statements:

Falling in love is the glorious, liminal experience that so many of us place at the center of growing up.

(Weinstein, p111)

Mendelson writes with a more restrained tone, perhaps more academic; we might discern a slightly cynical take on life, an ironic view of human nature, as opposed to Weinstein's more all-embracing bonhomie. The former is an Auden scholar so perhaps this is only to be expected. Mendelson's chapter on love begins:

Mrs Dalloway is a book about the kind of love that everyone wants but that no grown-up person seriously expects to give or to get.

(Mendelson, p 160)

But on to the books named in the books reviewed. List-making seems to be a human compulsion as fundamental as story-making and so the question which is demanded is: What seven novels would you choose in order to illuminate your life or life's stages?

[Reader - before looking at Mendelson's list – make your own.]

Now here are some clues:

The chosen 'seven classic novels' are all written by women. Mendelson first displays a predilection for 19th century classics but then an almost obsessive interest in Virginia Woolf.

The life stages as they occur are birth, childhood, growth, marriage, love, parenthood, the future – the publication dates of the chosen ones also follow this order chronologically:

From a 21-year-old novelist (who arguably would know little about life's stages yet seems wise beyond her years) to a writer who took her own life two years after the publication of Between The Acts, the last one in the sequence.

[Reader – how many were on your list?]

There is some agreement between the professors; three of Mendelson's five authors, four of his seven books, are discussed by Weinstein. For example, both Brontë novels are discussed in Love sections (Falling in Love and Love Gone Wrong), and To The Lighthouse in Enduring Love. Not to include George Eliot seems a strange omission by Weinstein. Mendelson says:

Middlemarch is, I believe, the greatest English novel, even though, when I think in terms of George Eliot's whole career instead of this single book, she does not seem to me as great a novelist as Charles Dickens or Virginia Woolf.

(p116)

However, he does not find a single work of Dickens worthy of inclusion in this exploration whereas Great Expectations and four other works of Dickens are given much consideration by Weinstein. Both authors would claim with utter conviction that works written over a century ago transcend the limits of their time and place and speak to us today, that they enrich our lives and understanding. It does not seem that there is disagreement over which works are worthy of our attention, it is rather that on this occasion the two authors are making different selections for their own purposes.

Weinstein's much larger work (450 pages compared to 250) divides and divides again. There are two main sections, Growing Up and Growing Old; the titles of the sub-sections contain references and puns. Love is the abiding and uniting theme of this book, the experience of all kinds of love and the experience of the lack of love. This is the work of a man reviewing his own life after all.

For me the temptation is always to write about the books rather than plunging straight into the primary texts themselves. After all, each Victorian novel requires substantial commitment of time, attention and concentration, so perhaps that is why an intelligent and educated guide is useful to help us choose the direction which would be most useful for us at our individual place in time. I would argue that Mendelson and Weinstein remind us of texts that we may have known and nodded at, may have read and forgotten or may never have known at all. They can help us think about re-reading as well as first reading – why that? why now? Weinstein explicitly reminds us that our reading is contingent on our own experience and our own life stage, as is his own. These professors also remind us why their chosen texts are worthy of our attention and help us to read with intention. I will certainly return to Virginia Woolf with renewed enthusiasm, perhaps I shall find what I missed all those years ago. Weinstein and Mendelson do what good professors of English do – they help us to know ourselves by making texts open to our experience and guiding us to be open to what they have to tell us. I shall certainly look at both these books from time to time to remind myself what to read and why I should.

References

Barnes, H. (1998). The Story I Tell Myself: A Venture in Existentialist Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Eagleton, T. (1996). Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Haynes, J. (2007). Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am? The Journal

Kate Thompson