My academic life is haunted by literary criticism, and that lit crit frequently seems to me to be devoted to denying the existence of joy or pleasure in reading. I realize that this is a terribly unfair statement, and that a great deal of lit crit does, in fact, recognize and even celebrate the pleasure that leaps from the pages when we open books. However, I still have a very difficult time escaping those ghosts, and, as a result, I have been formulating in the back of my mind a series of short essays about that I am calling, in a punning and all-too-clever way, “The Joy of Text.”
Perhaps one of the greatest impediments to the joy of text is the fear of boredom. Too many of us were bored by the forced readings we endured or escaped in high school and college, and we therefore either believe that there is no joy to be found in reading or that any joy we may find exists solely in certain types of glamorous texts. The boredom that certain books elicit comes not from the books themselves, though, but from us. We just might not be ready for them yet.
As I was ruminating on the dilemma of teaching books that might all too easily be dismissed as too boring to endure, I started to see the books that I love to read in the guise of a romantic comedy. Now, follow me here, because this is where I spend a lot of time explaining an overly elaborate parable that contains a valuable lesson that we all already knew anyway at the end.
Our little froth of a film opens with Joe Reader in high school. Since this is a romantic comedy, all of us viewers know that the cardinal rule is “There must be some sort of romantic triangle to complicate things.” The low point of this triangle (which is far from equilateral) is, hmmm, let’s call her Natalie. Natalie Hawthorne. Natalie is a geek. She has braces, she dresses in frumpy, old-fashioned clothes that you know her sad and weird mother bought for her at the thrift store or something, and she wears clunky, unfashionable glasses to boot. We know she is smart (she’s wearing glasses, and in the movies only geniuses wear glasses), but she is also not at all fun. The high point of the triangle is Stephanie, Stephanie King. She’s popular, and we know this because she speaks in the most current teenage slang, or at least the Hollywood screenwriter’s version of current teenage slang, which is to say that it is not so much accurate as prophetic: once the movie becomes popular, Valley Girls from all over (including from the tops of mountains) will be talking like her. She wears trendy clothes, talks on her flashy cell all the time, and drives a cute car–maybe a Mini convertible. A red one.
Natalie is, of course, deeply in love with Joe, but Joe, of course, has eyes only for Stephanie. But we, the viewers, know better. We know, we just know that Natalie and Joe are soulmates. They belong together. But Joe and Stephanie go to the prom together, where both of them get disgustingly drunk, and Joe ends up throwing up on Natalie, who had to go to the prom with her equally geeky cousin, John Austen.
Years pass. Joe returns home, a sadder but wiser man. We learn that he and Stephanie ran off together the day after graduation. They moved to Hollywood, where they both became bigtime movers in the entertainment biz. But Joe got tired of the life. The endless parties, the beautiful starlets hanging on him, begging him to get them a part in his next big picture, the fancy cars, the drugs. It finally got to be too much. And now he is back home.
And there is Natalie. She looks…different. She still wears the glasses, but now they look sorta hip in that almost uncool way that architects’ glasses look. She has her hair pulled back in a severe-looking bun, but a few hairs have pulled loose, and float around her face, framing it and making it look…intriguing. Joe is not sure how to react to her. He knows that he treated her badly back in high school, but that was years ago and he has grown up, hasn’t he? After some hesitation he asks Natalie out to dinner.
They talk. They almost don’t taste the dinner because the conversation is so great. They go to a coffee shop after dinner and keep talking. When they part for the evening, Joe wants to talk more. He calls her the next day and asks to see her again. Just the sound of her voice drives him out of his mind with desire for more conversation. This goes on for days until…
Natalie pulls off her glasses and reaches back to pull the hairclip out. She tosses her glasses and her now-freed hair in that hot-librarian way…and Joe is smitten.
My point is that we need to read things when we are at the right age. When I read Hawthorne for the first time, I hated his work, but then again, I was fifteen, and I was an idiot. Now, though, it’s a different story completely. The crucial difference between books and the people in my romantic comedy is that you do not need to be faithful to books. In other words, Natalie will not care at all if Joe stops off to have a good romp with Stephanie before coming to see her. Natalie, in fact, introduced Joe to her cousin, the one she went to the prom with, and she is happy to hear that Joe and John had a gay old time together. She is already plotting to get Joe together with her sister, the dashing and dangerous, and slightly weird, Hermione.
That’s Hermione Melville.
I loved this! Fantastic! And parabolically spot on. I’m still waiting for Dickens to shake loose his hair and look gorgeous, but you are absolutely right. All books have their time, and sadly the ones they choose for young teenage students are rarely the ones they’d want to read. But don’t you think if they had this concept explained to them, exactly as you describe it above, their interest would be piqued? As for me, I’m off to find my librarian glasses right now (I certainly possess them) in the hope that someone someday will take them off and declare, ‘But Litlove…..!’
This could be a series. You could do Rony and Michelle’s High School Reunion, Thelma and Louise, Mean Girls, and so on with appropriate authors slotted in. Also, the Buffy, Kim Possible, Powerpuff Girls superhero stuff.
When I gave a talk on American literature in Sendai a couple of months ago, one of the people in the audience expressed dissatisfaction with how other media are taking younger generations away from books in Japan. I suggested that they can become “gateways” to books and talked about movies, tv, and blogs (and poetry slams and other things–I’m waiting for video games!) as ways of bringing new audiences to literature. Your post gets at this point perfectly–and I hope “turns people on” to Hawthorne and Melville. Thanks!