Happily sunk in Edmund Wilson, I came yesterday to the review, in Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties, of Aldous Huxley's Time Must Have a Stop. As a college freshman, I was assigned to read Time Must Have a Stop, but I can't remember a thing about it. Nor did anything in Wilson's review sound remotely familiar. How can you know your eyes passed over the print on the page of a book with a certain title if, thirty-some years later, you can't name a single character or describe, even vaguely, the plot or theme?
The answer to this question has to do, I think, with a common pedagogical error. (I have an obvious interest in attributing my deficiencies to my teachers.) The course for which I read Huxley was called "Philosophical Ideas in Literature," and it was taught by the Kierkegaard scholar Howard Hong during the January "interim" term at St. Olaf College in 1977. In that one month, we were expected to read The Stranger by Camus, Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevski, Brand and Peer Gynt by Ibsen, Brave New World and Time Must Have a Stop by Huxley, Darkness at Noon by Koestler, and Melville's Moby Dick. The only ones I have any memory of are Stranger, Brothers, and Moby Dick, and I'm reasonably sure it's because I've read these again, at leisure, in the case of Moby Dick several times, over the intervening years.
It is possible that Dr. Hong's pedagogical intent was to force us freshmen to be exposed, however superficially, to these works. One looks for excuses, because it is so obvious that the reading load was, for a month's time, absurd. It would be hard just to turn that many pages in thirty days. It seems reasonable to assume we were supposed to think about what we were reading, but there was no time for that. These professors tend to forget over how long a period of time their own understanding of a certain book develops. In the end, their ambitious syllabi succeed mainly in making thoughtlessness mandatory.
According to Wilson, I didn't miss much with the Huxley, who now that I think of it does seem out of place there with Melville and Dostoevski. Probably he was a particular favorite of Dr. Hong's. I don't think that much of his Kierkegaard, either: he seems to function as a life vest for intellectually vain Protestants who, somewhat sheepish about the Sunday-school version of their faith, might feel obliged to drop it altogether if Kierkegaard had not infused it with some racy desperation. On the other hand, if he'd never written a thing, we probably wouldn't have Therapy, a wonderful comic novel by David Lodge in which the main character conceives an intense interest in Kierkegaard's philosophy and biography.
Speaking of Kierkegaard's biography, it seems to me that of a disturbed person. All the weird business with the girlfriend, Regine Olsen--not a good sign. According to John Updike (who holds Kierkegaard in the highest regard), his sexual experience, unless he died a virgin, was limited to a single visit to a brothel--see Updike's review of "The Seducer's Diary" printed in More Matter. In a New Yorker review of a Kierkegaard biography, Updike mentions the theory, "raised in the far reaches of Kierkegaard studies," that the philosopher suffered from a severely curved penis that made sexual relations impossible. Whatever the source of all the anguish, it seems very likely that Miss Olsen was fortunate to have lived her life at a safe remove.
In a letter to a friend the Russian writer Chekhov remarked, "My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and absolute freedom--freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves." In significant respects Kierkegaard represents the antithesis of the Chekhovian ideal.
Take a look!
http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/523127_4025583771000_1388933441_n.jpg
Posted by: Don | August 25, 2012 at 09:58 PM