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Tradition . Seth Lerer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii+135.

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/694800

1545-6951

Marshall Brown,

Irish and British Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewTradition. Seth Lerer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii+135.Marshall BrownMarshall BrownUniversity of Washington Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSeth Lerer’s contribution to the series of “short polemical monographs” called the Literary Agenda is prefaced with a threat. “You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.” So says the publisher, whose “objective,” also according to the copyright page, is “excellence in research, scholarship, and education.” Such is the imperative of authoritative individualism that Lerer eloquently contests. His treatise is sincere, enthusiastic, learned, clear, broad, and humane. Tradition, he proclaims, is “about the individual’s relation to the group” (2). His opening sally leaves both the presumed New Critical devotion to “literature itself” (1) and T. S. Eliot’s close-reading, individualized tradition pinned and wriggling on the wall of history. He quotes Eliot’s declaration that writers “must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated by them.” And then he comments wryly, “How could anyone read such a sentence in 1917 and not smell the battlefield?” (6). We live in history, our culture lives in history, and history lives in our culture. That quick move sets this quick-moving book rolling. Despite Oxford University Press, works must circulate, and fortunately their circulation is alive with “error, mistake, twist, and turn” (7). Today’s “pervasive ironic distancing of the self from acts of valuation”—cleverly labeled “the world of ‘whatever’”—hampers any extended relationship (20). But history and society are conjoint forms of affiliation, and affiliation is an affective stance. Hence the question becomes this: “How can we love literature in an age of blithe indifference?” (21). You may have other questions, as I do, but Lerer’s enthusiasm is unquestionable, discriminating, and infectious. This is the book of a great teacher—the reviews on RateMyProfessors.com are, in their word, “awesome”—and whether you finally agree or disagree, you will come away from a few hours reading impressed, informed, and enriched.“Our acts of loving literature occur even in the weirdest of places” (30). They figure in two of Dickens’s most lovable naturals, Mr. Dick in David Copperfield and Joe Gargery in Great Expectations. Both build their imaginative life around reading—even if Joe’s consists of a mere two letters, J-O (47)—as does the young David and, magically, Saleem Sinai, the Dickensian narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. It matters little what you find, or where: literacy is liberating, even though—or because—“the literary past must be remade, selectively, by each of us” (47). The fable that serves as a warning counterexample is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where books represent a salvation that cannot be experienced by the doomed protagonist—the King James Bible in the novel, and in François Truffaut’s film version, by miraculous coincidence, David Copperfield.There are many such miraculous discoveries in Lerer’s book. The next chapter turns George Orwell’s 1984 virtually inside out, for, as Lerer says in one of his many aphorisms that this chapter puts into practice, “whenever we open up a book, we transform it” (73). Suddenly Orwell’s dystopia is revealed as a lesson in the urgency of tradition, with C. S. Lewis in the foreground and the pastoral ideal of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows in the background. This affiliation was news to me, but like much else in Lerer’s book, it is carefully documented with scholarly precedent scrupulously acknowledged; the apostle of tradition is as respectful as he should be of his own peers and predecessors.To be sure, a “search for origins” (82) is also a sign of loss. Those of us neither as innocent as Mr. Dick nor as poisoned by evil schooling as Copperfield are the subjects of a “fall into criticism” (83). Our name is America, portrayed in a chapter—called “This Loved Philology” after a line of Dickinson—that opens with Leo Spitzer and continues with a cento of poets encompassing Dickinson, Frost, Williams, Bradstreet, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Lerer’s America “is a land of taste” (96), and his philology is appropriately less grandiose than Spitzer’s, but equally exact in its understated way. His falls, however, are cushioned. He quotes his excolleague Denise Gigante writing about Adam and Eve—“That taste involves pleasure is a lesson the Romantics learned from Milton and that we learn from Romanticism” (83)—not mentioning how our first parents’ fruit proved “bitter Ashes, which th’ offended taste / With spattering noise rejected” (Paradise Lost, 10.566–67).Finally, Lerer turns to the great tradition. The chapter title is “The Tears of Odysseus,” but Lerer hardly shares them: he respects the heroic immediacy of Homer, but inclines by preference toward the secondary Virgilian line of “resistance to immediate feeling” (113). Here, too, Lerer’s medievalist roots finally come to fruition, in an appreciation of the variety of Chaucerian reception—the dreary “Tale of Melibee” was the fifteenth-century favorite—whose moral is that literary traditions “bring individuals into communities” (120). “I’d like to tell you that I wept when I read Homer,” but Lerer’s modernity is anything but a vale of tears. His peroration evokes a vision of “an unknown neighbor, rapt in reading, smiling to herself, or wiping off a tear” (125). One tear, many smiles. “All children die” is another of Lerer’s many aphorisms, “for to become a grownup, the child must move on” (99).Few are the books whose methods are their morals to this extent. You cannot fail to be energized by Lerer’s discriminating approach to his affections. You may even be transported by his gusto. And, at the same time, you may feel, as I do, that he can get carried away. “My 1984” (his chapter title) may not be yours; perhaps in your more sober moments you won’t be persuaded that Orwell’s “nightmare version of the dream of reading … differs only in degree from our experience” or that “Winston’s hideaway … is what we want to cherish” (75–76). Certainly, there is a degree of meander to the argument. Lerer’s greatest hits don’t cover all the bases, some of the zingers sag (“Art is the magnifying glass to life. It makes things larger” [70]), and a few retreads slip in: among his infallibly polite demurrers (notably to Said and to Moretti), Judith Butler is debited with “copies of copies” on page 8 and again on page 19, the boundaries between life and literature are “blurry” on pages vii, 6, and 27, and the same sentence by Harald Weinrich is quoted on pages xiii and 115. In a lecture these will pass unnoticed or may even be valued reinforcement; in a short book they stand out. And they are merely symptoms of the thematic redundancies. An example is the seventy occurrences of “remember” and its derivatives, “memory,” and “recollect.” These numbers are dwarfed in turn by Lerer’s favorite lexeme, the 231 first-person plural pronouns (as counted by Amazon, some of them in quotes and titles). “We” is the vehicle through which Lerer imagines the human collective. It’s his answer to the publisher’s thorny “you.”Readers will vary as to whether they feel included in Lerer’s “we,” coopted by it, or excluded. Personally, I’m skeptical whether traditions are always so hearty and welcoming as Lerer wishes. His vision of children’s literature, for instance, exudes a pseudo-Victorian innocence. Its nadir is termed “an idiom of urban disaffection,” a phrase that hardly captures the brutality of the Lemony Snicket books to which it refers (20). His Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press, 2009) basically limits the even more sadistic Hans Christian Andersen to his autobiography, its Grimms return us to “the childhood of language and of society themselves” (216)—forget all those evil witches and carnivorous wolves—and if Freud is lurking in the background (he is not mentioned in Tradition), it is only because “he returns us to the world of the Grimms and their folk forebears: to the transformation of the sexual life of little girls into figure and fantasy” (Children’s Literature, 232). Yet not all Dickens’s readers are as adorably childish as Dick and Joe; the malicious Silas Wegg teaching Boffin to read by pummeling him with “Eight wollumes” by “Decline-And-Fall-Off-The-Rooshan-Empire” would seriously darken the picture (Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Andrew Lang [New York: Scribner’s, 1905], 64 [chap. 5]). And suppose your adolescent reading took off from Poe and The Lord of the Flies? To found community building on tradition presupposes choosing the right tradition and, I fear, ignoring the impact of others.Innocuous, yes. Insignificant, no. Lerer’s sermon may suffer from whiffs of holy smoke. But behind it lies a sermonizer of admirable gifts. While too much of human reality is left out, you will be hard pressed to find a better model of attentiveness to the matter at hand, of wide-ranging, meticulously observed appreciation, of unpedantic collegial dialogue, of lucid address. If it provokes you, well, debate at this level is worth fostering. And some lemon balm on our society’s snark might do us all good.If this book has a devil, it lies in the conception, but certainly not in the details, which are richly rewarding throughout. Indeed, however you judge the thesis, and despite the stylistic wrinkles, if you want a model for composing a fine short book, you would do well to start with this one. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 115, Number 3February 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/694800HistoryPublished online September 25, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.