I heard Howard Jacobson speak recently on Ulysses as the greatest Jewish novel of the 20th century. Ulysses shows us, Jacobson convincingly argued, ‘the healing power of creative exile into oneself…the dignity of the average damaged person.’ Leopold Bloom’s relationship with Molly is the relationship between the Jews and God: it goes on mostly in Bloom’s head while Molly herself is mostly upstairs and unavailable; it is built on the expectation of discomfort, and it is revolves on the deeply held belief that ‘it requires great potency to deserve great punishment’. His insightful, impassioned analysis of Bloom invoked how a complex character in literature may offer the reader insight into human psyche: one’s own pains and triumphs as reflected in another. So I was disappointed to read his rather simplistic rant against readers and reading groups in the Guardian this weekend.
I agree- emphatically- with his disgust at the limited response of readers who say, “I don’t like this book because I don’t sympathise with the main character.” Liking or sympathising with a character is not the point; understanding our own response, recognizing when a character has discomforted or engaged us gets the reader much further down the road to critical and engaged reading. But I disagree with his generalization that it is destruction of art to use reading to find ourselves–in fact, the discomfort or challenge offered by an authentic portrayal of human experience does help the reader ‘find themselves’–perhaps clarifying our own values in contrast, reflecting back to us our own narrow thinking, helping us expand our perspective by locating ourselves on a spectrum of human consciousness. This is certainly not the only purpose of a great read–and it would be solipsistic to limit the power of reading to simply understanding the self. But Jacobson’s cranky rejection of reading groups as ‘lacking the strong stomach’ necessary to understand and respond to difficult or unsympathetic characters reflects his own limited perspective. My experience with readers in the Salons demonstrates a variety of readers who, with courage and curiosity, explore the difficult aspects of human nature as reflected in the characters we study. My weekend reading partner also pointed out the great irony in a writer who is disgusted by readers who seek to find themselves in books as he is publishing a book about himself as a writer. Hmmmm…
This article titled “Howard Jacobson attacks the dearth of ‘good readers'” was written by Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer, for theguardian.com on Friday 24th August 2012 17.25 UTCThe novel is in danger, according to Howard Jacobson, the Man Booker prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. But, he said, the fault lies not with novelists, but with the lack of good readers.
Describing his experience of appearing at reading groups – “sometimes they are lovely, sometimes they aren’t, and sometimes they are just staggeringly rude” – Jacobson said that he felt a sense of “heartbreak” when he heard readers say, “I don’t like this book because I don’t sympathise with the main character.”
He added: “The language of sympathy and identity and what we call political correctness is killing the way we read.
“That’s like the end of civilisation. That is the end. In that little sentence is a misunderstanding so profound about the nature of art, education and why we are reading, that it makes you despair. Who ever told anyone that they read a book in order to find themselves?”
Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Jacobson said that the reader needed a “strong stomach” and ought to be able to withstand the “expression of an ugly point of view” in a book. There was, he added, great danger in the “politically correct” pressure that urged “you can’t write about women like that, you can’t write about men like that, you’ve got to be careful what you say about gays, you’ve got to be careful what you say about Jews… But you have to be able to say of the novel that it has free rein – it can go anywhere.”
His latest book, Zoo Time, is a comic novel about what he called the “multiplying degradations” of being a writer. When he began it, immediately after finishing The Finkler Question, he was convinced the novel that went on to win the Booker would be a disaster.
Being a novelist, he said, is “the nicest way of spending your life but it’s full of indignities. These indignities were swarming after I’d finished The Finkler Question. I also felt that no one was going to read it: the subject matter was inimical to the taste of the times. I was over, I thought. So I thought, ‘I’ll go out in a blaze, I’ll write one more novel that makes fun of myself: make fun of my dreams, make fun of my fantasies.'”
He added: “The signs were very, very bad for The Finkler Question. If ever I were not going to win the Man Booker prize, this was the time. I so wasn’t going to win the Man Booker prize that it actually can’t be that I won the Man Booker prize.”
Zoo Time, then, is about the failure of the novelist and the ruination of the publishing industry. It begins with its hero, a novelist called Guy Ableman, being arrested, after addressing a reading group in Chipping Norton, for shoplifting one of his own novels from the local Oxfam. In the second chapter, Ableman’s publisher shoots himself.
He put aside the draft of Zoo Time when he won the Booker, thinking, “How do you go on writing a book about literary failure when that happens? I put it away thinking that will be the final joke against me: great novel ruined by Booker prize.”
After a matter of months, though, he was prompted to take it up in “a state of retrospective despondency… It all came back to me, if possible even sharper than before, the misery of my life before winning the Man Booker prize.”
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