The Violence and Giddiness of Literature.

It is one of those moments that comes to us sometimes. We are in the midst of something meaningful––or something important, or, oftentimes, something that contains the quintessence of a particular time in our lives––and we are aware of its importance. We are aware that what we are feeling somehow expresses an ordinarily quiet notion: that slippery abstraction of living, of experience, of time.           

Maybe it’s just me.           

Being a fiction writer has its disadvantages. One of which is this constant desire to summarize and qualify. I can’t experience anything meaningful without attempting, mentally or verbally, to express that meaning. In fact, two close friends of mine (you know who you are) were discussing me once––I was told this later––and they both commented (lamented may be a more appropriate verb here) about how I could never simply let a moment pass, how I couldn’t just let life happen, how I had to talk about everything all the time.          

Well, as a response to this, I said that since fiction is my passion, it makes complete sense that hyper-loquacity has become my tendency. Think about it: there isn't a single moment of silence in a novel or short story. Every moment is linguistic. Even moments of silence, in fiction, are described with words. So, for me, something isn’t as meaningful––nay, may not contain any meaning at all––unless it can be articulated in prose. Doesn't make me any less annoying to my friends; it just explains why I do it.

So, the pregnant moment I’m having walking down an English street may be the result more of my odd eccentricities than of any actual, objective significance.

Apologies if this is so. But – I have to keep reminding myself – it is indeed my blog.

* * *

Oxford still maintains the tutorial system it started with hundreds (yes, hundreds) of years ago. Recently, this system has come under fire, as it is not exactly financially tenable. There is simply not enough money (even for an absurdly well-funded University with as many well-connected alumni) to continue a one professor/one student ratio. In other words, Oxford may have to become more like a regular university sometime in the near future. 

Until then, I’m lucky to have been able to experience the tutor system. It is encouragingly independent. You are assigned reading (a lot of reading) and given an essay prompt, which are ordinarily vague and open-ended, sometimes frustratingly so. The purpose of this is to inspire the student to grapple with the topic instead of arguing one point tirelessly throughout the piece. The most prevalent criticism I’ve received for my essays has been a (relative) lack of counterpoints.

Anyway, it’s Friday and today I have my tutorial on James Joyce’s Ulysses. My tutor, a unanimously well-liked man named Edward Clarke, asked me to meet him at his flat. So my friend Shana walks me there, as it is kind of confusing to find. The walk there is pretty, but I don’t notice too much of the wonderful nuances until afterwards.

The tutorial is exactly what I had envisioned when I thought of my time in Oxford. Edward Clarke is an admirable man: charming, extremely erudite and personable. He seems to be interested in engaging with the texts, in culling from them something new, something excited, whatever the avenues it takes to get there. He's also, it should be mentioned, very handsome.

We discuss the opening sections of the novel, which, with one notable exception, are not nearly as esoteric as I had anticipated. He says that that’s a universal assumption aimed at Ulysses, that it’s some sort of literary trick, that it is only interested in proving its cleverness and its author’s education. He says that there is real value in it, though, that it contains some urgent truths about humanity that aren’t obscured from so-called “regular” people, and that it’s the greatest novel of the twentieth century.

He has me read my essay out loud (which I'm also pleased about). I wrote an explication of the opening paragraph of the novel. Our dynamic is fun and intellectual, a combination my younger self would simply gush over. You see, I view this Oxford experience as another in a long, long line of tests to myself. When I was in high school and I was a fledgling intellectual (which means, essentially, an arrogant asshole), I always wondered whether or not I was a fraud, whether I actually enjoyed academic pursuits or if I merely wanted to be perceived as someone who did. I had always visualized this test as a sheet of paper with a line drawn vertically down the center: on one side there was a check for every time I couldn’t finish a novel because it was too challenging or gave up on a story or turned in a lazily written essay or didn’t know about history or didn’t care to know about history or, in general, every time I felt the pang of mental exhaustion that seemed disproportionate to its cause.

So, as I’ve gotten older, when I find myself enjoying––or, more aptly, feeling completely propelled by––a scholarly occasion, I remember that old feeling of presumed fraudulence and I make an imaginary mark under the side of the argument that has the checks for every time I pushed through intellectual difficulty or overcame a struggle in fiction or impressed a professor with an insight or a turn of phrase or, in general, every time I realized that this measurement I set for myself when I was younger is utterly irrelevant and that life isn’t about proving the validity of the claim of yourself, that, instead, it’s simply about doing, motivations notwithstanding.

I leave the tutorial elated. I think to myself, I’m at Oxford. I’m really doing this. I just spent an hour discussing, in depth, a novel that always seemed beyond my scope with a man of whose literary acuity I would be lucky to achieve a portion.

I walk down his street, which now strikes me as markedly English and profoundly beautiful. The houses stand tightly next to each other, with nothing between them save an inch of paint. It is a sight an English person would find banal, but to me it speaks volumes about my progression in life. I wonder down that street with a renewed sense of conviction that what I'm doing is important. I've spent a lot of time in my life regretting missed opportunities and hypothesizing about alternative lives, but here on Edward Clarke's street, I do not think about anything else but what I am doing.

It’s funny: most of my time thus far has been spent in relative quiet, reading and writing. In about a month, I’ve written over 15,000 words of essays, blogs and fiction. I’ve read four Shakespeare plays, two novels and a portion of Ulysses. It has not been some conventionally exciting time, but it has been supremely fulfilling. I find myself (a phrase Cecily Miller will appreciate) thinking of this passage in The Biographer’s Tale by A.S. Byatt, one of the novels I’m reading for one of my tutorials:

“There are a very few human truths and infinite variations on them. I was about to write that there are very few truths about the world, but the truth about that is that we don’t know what we are not biologically fitted to know, it may be full of all sorts of shining and tearing things, geometries, chemistries, physics we have no access to and never can have. Reading and writing extend––not infinitely, but violently, but giddily––the variations we can perceive on the truths we thus discover.”

Violently. Giddily. Yes, that about says it.

It was a wonderful moment.