The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner, and: The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood (review)

Lerner and Wood have in common that they are not so much readers of literature as human beings living their lives in the company of literature. Each is less concerned with the object of his reading—a literary work—than with being or becoming the right kind of subject to understand and interact with it. In making this distinction, I am thinking of a subtle point that Jonathan Lear makes in his book Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony (2003), where he notes that psychoanalytic training endows the trainee with "the capacity (or set of capacities) to be a psychoanalyst" but not with the qualities required to help any particular patient ("for to be a psychoanalyst is ever to be in the process of becoming a psychoanalyst"). The analyst must incessantly investigate "what it is for me" to become a person who can "see" my current analysand fittingly.

What is most interesting, when regarding Lerner's treatment of poetry and Wood's engagement with fiction, is the way in which the two writers position themselves—their lives—in relation to literature. For Lerner, the question of how to live with poetry is set against the realization that his hatred of poetry, as much as his skepticism of the ideals associated with it, actually defines him. For Wood, the question of how to live with fiction is enmeshed with the question of what literature has done with him, as much as he with it, when he was a religious boy, then a curious teenager, and now a self-exiled adult. In the case of both these writers, how to live with literature is shown to be less a subjective choice than the discovery of a unique point of view allowing access to a work or works of literature. Each writer sought to become and then became the right subject for dealing with the textual objects that preoccupied him and, in the process, became the right subject to produce a textual object that no one but he could have written. I wonder, then, why teachers of graduate proseminars in university departments of literature focus the training of young critics on the study of critical works that could have been written by many people other than their authors.