OF A GOLDEN AGE

in steve’s section of 258, we read heart of darkness last week. i’d never read it, which is apparently some kind of travesty among high-school english courses. people remarked in class that they’d read it two, three, four times for other teachers and professors.

i found myself glad i didn’t read it before, though. steve introduced a reading that was a drastic departure, both in depth and in overall attitude toward the text, than any reading i’d heard of in high school or otherwise.

and this made me think, again, about how glad i am for all the levels on which you can read most books. in order to talk about books with any genuine zeal or to find commonalities among different people’s taste in books, you have to dig much deeper than the superficial “it’s a story about a man taking a trip” kinds of descriptions.

in diane’s class this morning we made a list of the potential genre categories for everything is illuminated, which of course ranged from postmodern to epistolary to successful first novels. diane asked what kinds of books we might say are similar to this one, and the answers varied wildly, as did people’s sentence-long descriptions of “what the book is about.”

a concept that came up in discussions for both heart of darkness and everything is illuminated was light. we asked ourselves if anything WAS illuminated at the end of the latter, and someone sharply pointed out that illumination does not necessarily imply clarity, just light. it made me start to think of the book as headlights in a dense fog — in this case, the less light you can manage with, the better.

on the other hand, heart of darkness arguably moves in the reverse. what could be a reasonable gray area — that is, the relationship between british “conquerors” and the african people they subsume — is transformed by the europeans into an ultrapolarized black-and-white situation. in this case, illuminating the white means making the “darkness” even more strikingly black by comparison.

illumination does not imply clarity.

no responses