Craving literary sustenance
Never have I craved meat as I do this week. When I talk about the German Expressionist movement, what I really crave is the meat of orange pastel on thick paper. I searched for Faulkner in the library one day, finding only “Faulkner and Feminism,” “Faulkner the Novelist,” “Faulkner and Postmodernism” and “Critical Essays on William Faulkner,” when all I wanted was to dig into Faulkner’s work itself.
Modern day critics are taking their meat and chewing on it a little too long. I think sometimes they forget to chew at all. They take one look at a work and leave their steaks behind in favor of abstracted ruminations, thus siring texts that have nothing to do with the original. It’s enough to drive an honest vegetarian like me into lusting after flesh. Who needs to read about Faulkner’s writing before she really tastes it? Does meat make the public a little too queasy? Will we all become cultural vegetarians?
What is meat? If Faulkner is bear flesh, Robert Frost is pheasant, Robert Rauschenberg sweet and sour pork, Andy Warhol spam and Salinger peppercorn jerky; Laura Esquirel is the quail in rose petal sauce she writes about in “Like Water for Chocolate” and poet Billy Collins is rosemary turkey, simple, warm and a little melancholy. Meat is essence and weight, work that so engulfs viewers and readers that it cannot be taken but as a whole. I was so engulfed when I read “Catcher in the Rye” that even the words that came out of my mouth were foul and short like Holden Caulfield’s.
For American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, meat is monument: structures like the Coliseum and the Pantheon, of such proportion and history to oblige reverent gaze from the casual onlooker. Through mechanical reproduction tools like photos, we attempt to claim ownership of what is essentially singular and thus rob ourselves of its meat (then, of course, we submit it to the image contest at the Study Abroad office). “Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable,” Holmes writes. “We will hunt all curious, beautiful grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.” His “we” are the people who are satisfied with mere postcards of the Eiffel Tower and leave string quartet concerts regurgitating the words of the critics instead of really listening. Listen. Look. Read, for God’s sake, and don’t forget to create stuff, too.
I don’t doubt that a good critic can illuminate audiences and even shape discourse that colors the reception of the greatest artistic works. But critiques are pieces of the whole, mere carbohydrates that must be paired with proper doses of artistic and literary protein. Nobody should be satisfied with the mere shell of whatever he’s studying. Postmodernists tell us we can borrow and re-interpret to no end, and it’s true. But we academics will never survive on chewed-up old words or postcard hides of famous paintings. I don’t want to be a hide hunter. I want to make art and read real Faulkner. Let there be meat!
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