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We had to read a lot of Eng Lit at our University for two whole years and were expected to wade through 17 books, most of them not available in the market or library. But since ours was not English (Main) but English (Subsidiary) we escaped reading Literary Criticism and I was happy for it. We had ample leisure and read quite a few novels on the side from Sherlock Holmes to Somerset Maugham for pleasure.
I chanced to get a copy of Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' at the age of 19 and was so charmed by it that I read it back-to-back twice over before returning it.
There was just one other book that I read like that, and that was Mark Twain's Huck which I read twice over at the ripe age of 65.
I loved both.
AND THIS is what Mark Twain says about my first love!:
- quoted in Remembered Yesterdays, Robert Underwood Johnson
To me his prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 18 January 1909
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 13 September 1898"
My English got enriched by a new word the other day. Apparently there is an Indian writer whose work is hailed:
Paleolithic Regressive Fiction
...Posted by Ishani
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We had to read a lot of Eng Lit at our University for two whole years and were expected to wade through 17 books, most of them not available in the market or library. But since ours was not English (Main) but English (Subsidiary) we escaped reading Literary Criticism and I was happy for it. We had ample leisure and read quite a few novels on the side from Sherlock Holmes to Somerset Maugham for pleasure.
I chanced to get a copy of Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' at the age of 19 and was so charmed by it that I read it back-to-back twice over before returning it.
There was just one other book that I read like that, and that was Mark Twain's Huck which I read twice over at the ripe age of 65.
I loved both.
AND THIS is what Mark Twain says about my first love!:
"Jane Austen? Why I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.
- quoted in Remembered Yesterdays, Robert Underwood Johnson
To me his prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 18 January 1909
I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 13 September 1898"
Oh, well! Mark Twain had a British contemporary by name Benjamin Disraeli who started as an author and ended up as a Prime Minister of Victorian Britain. He says he read 'Pride and Prejudice' all of 17 (seventeen) times.
So, what do I make of Lit Crit?
It is zilch...
We had to read Keats and Shelley in the 1950s. Our teachers who were most 'progressive' at that time told us that these literary heroes were on an almost equal footing as romantic poets and so questions may come in the exam on either in equal number.
By the time I reached KGP, I was told that Keats is a real pearl while Shelley is fake...
While I was at my University, I happened to read most of Sharatchandra novels in horrible Telugu translation, Tagore novels in good English, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa dialogues (RKP) in delicious Telugu, and Vivekananda's seven volumes in fair English.
Liked all of them.
When I reached Bengal and tried talking about these with my Bengali friends (to impress them), they said no adult reads Sharatbabu any more. RKP is a taboo (in fact under the Marxist Regime and The Statesman's patronage, RKP-bashing was a favorite pastime). Vivekananda is 'oh ok' because he went to Chicago.
But Tagore was God! If anyone at the dining table said even a single word against Tagore, there would be a riot. When the joker Khuswant wrote something against Tagore he was taken too seriously even for himself and a fatwalike thing was issued against him.
Looks like things have changed with the change of regime. Perhaps Didi is too busy finding funds to pay salaries to party workers. For, when an aging celebrity called Girish Karnad recently said (among other silly things) that Tagore was a second-rate playwright, he was not skinned and set on fire in the newspapers that I read. This 'rating and ranking' I thought was a Bengali hobby, but dispirited Southees also are taking it up it looks.
When Harold Ross rejected an artist's drawings for New Yorker, he was accosted by him:
"You publish that Thurber's fifth rate drawings but reject mine!"
"You mean third rate?"
Sick Lit
Post-modern Transgressive Fiction
So, I know now where my writing stands:
Paleolithic Regressive Fiction
...Posted by Ishani
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