Fired from the Literary Canon

Posted on September 5, 2010 in Uncategorized

As book lovers, we are all faced with the same problem: there are just too many good books out there. It’s impossible to get through them all; how are we supposed to narrow them down to an approachable life time’s reading list? On top of all the well meaning recommendations from friends there are those books that we are left feeling obliged to read by society. The classics. Those influential books that make up the loosely defined Western canon. Countless hours of reading time have been wasted on these by people too afraid to admit to themselves that some of these classics are inexplicably dull. The SYP have stepped in to help. Below is a list of books that we recommend you do NOT read.

Lucy Mitchell: What Maisie Knew – Henry James

The book I’d have to throw out of the literary canon is What Maisie Knew, by Henry James. Published in 1897, the story is told from the point of view of Maisie, a young girl who is shuttled between her irresponsible and feckless parents after their divorce. Having whizzed through The Turn of the Screw, which I’d quite enjoyed, I was looking forward to being more comprehensively introduced to James’s work, but, to be honest, I found James’s infamous prose so interminable that I can’t actually remember anything more that happened. Perhaps the fact that I find ‘the Master’ far too hard-going is a sign of my poor literary taste, but reading this book felt like a chore and has put me off James for life!

James Purdue: Hard Times – Charles DIckens

I’d nominate Hard Times by Dickens. He wrote some great stuff; some of his novels are hugely funny, and his descriptive prose is rightly famous. But with Hard Times, he got it wrong. Very wrong. His representative of the Monstrous Rich and Virtuous Poor, who can do no wrong, resembles how you might fondly think of a fit girl while you wank in the shower. It is essentially a (soggy) cardboard cut out that doesn’t tell the whole picture. He turned to this socio-economic criticism in a time of social unrest and industrialisation … mostly to make cash from serial sales, and along the way turned in a novel that contains inspiring binary themes such as ‘Fact versus Fancy’. F. R. Leavis loved it, and thus I rest my case.

Anthony Newman: Anything by Charles Dickens.

Anything by Dickens. Dickens was essentially a hack, with a soap-writer’s talent for obvious characters, endlessly trivial plots, and interminably twee settings. His signposted character names annoy me intensely. His practice of serial publication, while commercially astute and common for the time, destroys any idea that he had an artistic vision for his novels (and surely the canon is all about art). He leant on the old crutch of pathos like a drunk leans on a wall to piss. Today people read him because they like a good cry, want to imagine themselves as a cruel mill-owner or gentle Victorian lady, and think he’s an easy way into the classics. And they’ve seen Oliver Twist and read Hard Times in GCSE English. No thanks.

Beverley Russell: Sunset Song – Lewis Grassic Gibbon
I would like vengeance for the lost hours of my youth spent reading this horrendous book. Regarded as one of the most important Scottish novels of the 20^th century, almost every school kid north of the border was required to read this book in their teenage years. It is, for me, a diatribe about the hard times of a poor wee farmers’ lass and, when handed out by English teachers, you could almost hear their them say, “Ha, this is what it was like in the harsh old days, you spoilt brats don’t even know you’re born.” The supposed heroine, Chris “plain jane” Guthrie, has absolutely no back bone at all. She potters around the depressive landscape looking after her emotionally stunted father who tries to get her to commit incest with him (but poor man he’s disabled so he should have our sympathy, ugh!). Once old man Guthrie bites the dust, she then marries another gloomy farmer who comes back from war and is abusive to her (oh but he loved her really and is eventually killed at war so we should honour him, again UGH!). If the vile characters, crawling narrative and rants about the harsh landscape aren’t enough to make you hate this book there are numerous clumsy metaphors that even the most dense school kid could pick up on. I think it’s high time they gave school children some modern, punchy Scottish literature to read. A bit of Ian Banks wouldn’t go amiss.

Lizzi Jones: Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
Does anybody in the world know whether the eponymous heroine in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa resists the wicked Lovelace and maintains her precious virtue? No, thought not. That’s because nobody in the world has ever gotten to the end of it. At over one million words and 1,536 pages long (despite the Bible-sized font), Clarissa is thought to be the longest novel ever published in the English language. Samuel Johnson, the famous lexicographer, wrote that “if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself”. So I’m guessing you didn’t finish it either Dr Johnson? No, nor me…

Naomi Holt: Ulysses – James Joyce
I read this book from cover for one of my courses at university. I think that any book that has a guide to it, and then a guide to the guide of it, is definitely worthy of being removed from the canon! It is not Joyce that I have a problem with. It is the time constraints of the book itself. It takes a lot of time to read (and to make all the notes you need in the margin) to only cover one day in the lives of several characters in Dublin. And then there is the fact that I spent so long reading it for it only to take a two-hour lecture to cover!

Brian Martin: Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace

Word on the street was that there was a book out there so dazzling, so brilliant and so perceptive that it was going to change the format of the novel itself. ‘Well’, I thought to myself, ‘better get my hands on that.’ I brought it to the till and watched the registrars eyes widen when she saw it approach. “Do you want me to double-bag that?” she said in the same way a timid sidekick would warn a hero before entering a cave.

I’ve flicked through it like a flip book and watched the endless endnotes stream past. I’ve sat with it on the tube scratching my chin in agitation on how to hold it comfortably. I once even brought it on holiday and had to leave tanning lotion and a perfectly good pair of sandals at the airport to avoid excess bagging charges. But no luck. I just can’t start it, let alone finish it.

“Impenetrable!” one critic exclaimed, delighted they had met their match. How many half thumbed copies are out there? God knows. But we can be certain there are thousands of bookcases creaking with it proudly on top – a testament to the owner’s intellect and cultural know-how, yet safe in the knowledge that nobody will challenge that they have read it because no one else has.

Lucia Sandin: On the Road – Jack Kerouac

A grossly overrated and glorified stream of consciousness by an adolescent male who pretentiously imagines himself enlightened by the use of drugs, road trips, jazz and brief encounters with a variety of strange characters. The suggested complexity and original quality of the work is simply little thought out writing which makes you feel as if you’ve been hit by your granddad’s pathetic 1950’s Nash Rambler; painful, but nothing to write home about.

Alex Painter: The Iliad – Homer

I’m a bit of a fraud. With not so much as an English A-level to my name, I’m seriously under-qualified to talk about the literary canon. But, if there were one thing I could take out of it, it would be something like The Iliad. Since I can’t read the original Greek, I’m hardly qualified to talk about this either, and I’m sure plenty is lost in translation. But I think more is lost to the centuries. It’s a great story, but for a work of literature to inspire, I think there has to be some kind of connection to the cultural context for the reader. And I just don’t think there’s any way we can get the whole package. Reading it in book form is surely not how it was originally intended to be experienced, and even if the poem were performed as it would have been at the time, I’m pretty sure it would go over our heads – that’s just not how we enjoy our literature now. So while works such as The Iliad may be of immense value to historians, I don’t necessarily think that the ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ argument applies to literature in the same way that it does to science. I have a feeling that hanging on to the past is more likely to hold us back. So goodbye Homer (‘D’oh!’).

Claire Robertson: Walter Scott – The Tale of Old Mortality

The historical novel. To my ears this phrase is the most thinly veiled euphemism for ‘an incredibly dull read’ I have ever came across. And now, as I take it upon myself to launch an unprecedented attack upon the literary canon with little authority upon the subject, I look no further than he who is credited with discovering the genre – Sir Walter Scott. The book I am going to pick is The Tale of Old Mortality. You would think the fact that this is set in the Scottish Borders where I grew up, would at least rouse some vague excitement on my part. Not a drop. The strongest feeling provoked on my part by this book was one of intense boredom. In theory, it should be much more exciting than it is. It follows the progress of the Covenanters (a group of rebels who wanted to re-establish Presbyterianism in Scotland) and is full of your standard Scottish historical fare – battles, torture etc., all with a love story flung in for good measure. Maybe I am just a worrying product of my generation – unable to get on board with my country’s history unless it is in the form of a Hollywood adaptation with Mel Gibson as a lead character and the basic historical facts unashamedly altered. I just feel Walter Scott could have made a little more effort to snazz up history for entertainment’s sake.