Is literature/intellect sometimes a pose? If so - C or D?

I believe Theodor W. Adorno called it Neu Ansvers...

Yeah, I think genuine interest and a desire to look cool and intellectual are very hard to disentangle. Did you actually read these books you bought when you were 16 or just buy them to look good on your shelves? If the former, I'm surprised you can be so clear that it was stupid. Unless you know how to distinguish these 'two factors'. In which case, what's your secret?

Yes, I read them, with very little sense of what was actually happening! It was wierd, I could write pretty good essays on the literature I read/studied because I read around them and got a good sense of where they all fitted in literary history. But I didn't really understand them as stories, or as ideas, more as cunning props in this 'persona' I constructed. So, I could talk the talk about the 'nineteenth century novel' or whatever, but I couldn't really empathise with characters.

As with most actions by sixteen year old males, I suppose it was a way of talking to girls at the end of the day! (:-)), a way of standing out from the crowd I went to school with... but I suppose some of that questioning of 'why am I doing this?' has stuck, even though now I *think* I have more of a sense of relaxing and enjoying movies and books for their own sakes. Mainstream, or more left-field. High and low culture.

I suppose it depends on what you get out of the books after reading them (assuming, of course, that you bother). I've bought loads of books (Catch 22 and Gravity's Rainbow spring immediately to mind) that I bought out of a mixture of genuine interest and because I thought they'd look impressive on my bookshelf - now I love both of them and have reread each a few times since. If it elicits any kind of response, positive or otherwise, then who cares how you came to the book in the first place?

More often than not, reading is a private thing anyway, something you do behind closed doors - so the act of posing ends the moment you've bought the book, or on the sporadic occasions when someone inspects your bookshelf... in anyone's moronic enough to buy a novel solely for appearance, and never read it, then DUD!

Good you confessed the real reasons behind the action. I suppose it has happened to every creature at 16. Being female, I often did the opposite, i.e.listening to Faith No More (or pretend to) when I'd rather been reading Kant. Intellectual and with XX cromosomes is not a very appealing combination till much later in life, if it ever is.

Perhaps the fact that I'm too old and knackered to bother with looking cool is why I don't really read any more? Though I don't think I was ever too bothered with what books I read - it was always music that was more important. I hope I always knew that I was being a pretentious arse.

Having said that, I read as a job. That makes me confused.

Fashion is the only reason to do anything. Every book I touch is a pose.

Questions like this actually render me gobsmacked. *Ouch*. See? I was only aware of someone's choice in literature being seen as a pose very recently when a friend of mine called me a wanker when he saw I had a copy of "Crime and Punishment" in my bag. As if being working class and literate is something to be ashamed of. Enjoyment is the only criteria I have when choosing a novel, which is why I gave up on Ulysses. I don't care a fig if it transcends the boundaries of the conventional novel, I found it deadly dull.

Yes, of course. This is what I call pretention. I used to be incredibly pretentious when I was between the ages of about 16 and 20. I knew I would never appear beautiful, so I wished to appear intelligent and cultured. This was terribly silly and I grew out of it.

These days- maybe because I was so ridiculously pretentious while younger- I have grown into a large pool of trivial cultural knowledge, and still maintain what I hope is genuine curiosity.

The common parlance implications of the word "pretentious" (ie, overly interested in the intellectual or aesthetic or high culture) is not necessarily a bad thing AT ALL. The dictionary definition of pretention - posing as being more intelligent, cultured or educated than you really are - is a VERY bad thing. That is the difference to me.

I wish I could spell all these words properly. Is it any coincidence that the most pretentious people on this board (former, and positive meaning) are the ones with the poorest spelling?

Are you British, Trevor? My roommate was berated by a British guy she was dating because she was reading Dostoevsky. "Psuedo-intellectual," he called her. Do the British have something against Russian protoexistentialists that I'm not aware of?

Laetitia: oh, it is.

I still do buy books to impress people. It's stupid but you get a good book at the end of it at least.

Josh, I am indeed British and I think you're onto something here.

People in this country are afraid of Dostoevsky. I think it's his name that frightens them - it conjures up images of this incredibly weighty wordsmith whereas his novels are an absolute joy to read. He's the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground.

I also feel there's a pervasive contempt towards the so-called highbrow in working class culture. I still don't understand it and I think it's unlikely to ever disappear completely.

Josh - as far as I know, the British don't have a specific thing against Dostoevsky, it's more likely the altogther more British distrust of anyone trying to 'rise above their station'.

Will, Trevor! Back down the pit with yers!

Right, I never finished 'Ulysses' or 'Crime and Punishment', this latter very much to my mum's despair. I think I'll finish 'U' some time,though.Started 'C&P' at 15 still at only girls' school because some peers were enthralled with it. Moved schools to some poncey grammar populated with cute though luckless Maths-grad to be and never finished it. Josh, I am afraid this sounds like a plea on behalf of single sex schools.

Who 's afraid of Dostoiewsky? The UK? I quite enjoyed other of his books, but they were shorter,true. So, if Dostoiewsky is the equivalent of the Velvet in literary terms, what is left for 'Finnegan's Wake'? Some postrock intrincacy?Tortoise's B-sides?That is scary for my humble self.

(Quivering, the bony, sooty stick-limbed man bends over humbly and doffs his cap at the bejewell-ed princess)

*applause for Will*

I was thinking about this only this morning, because I was reminded of my schooldays by an article in the Metro which said that my old comprehensive has come top of this year's league tables for GCSE results - yes, even above all those fee-paying public schools!

I remember the incredible levels of resentment and contempt me and fellow pupils faced from the pupils of other local schools, simply because of the fact that we went to a successful state comprehensive. This was quite bewildering for a kid of twelve years old, and it's still pretty incomprehensible now.

Us Brits hate success.

Finnegans Wake = Xenakis?

"Will, Trevor! Back down the pit with yers!"

[Bow, scrape] Yes, milady.

Prince Edward agrees with your hating-success theory, you'll be glad to know. So it looks like you can't win either way.

I think it's truer perhaps to say that Britain doesn't offer success automatic respect, or that Britain doesn't have a definition of success people living there agree on.

This lack of respect for success can work both ways - we don't have an unquestioning respect for plutocrats (though our Prime Minister seems to) but it also means that people can get away with the kind of snobbery in the guise of anti-intellectualism Trevor is talking about.

Vis a vis Ulysses - and I'll probably start another thread for this - the publishers of U (Macmillans) have just been banned from releasing a "readers edition" of U - ie with the spelling a grammar cleaned up. Interesting?

I honestly, diligently read every word of Ulysses at 16. I stayed up in my room, the book lit starkly in my dark room by my anglepoise, fuelled until 2am some nights on Dairylea on toast. And you know what? I understood NOTHING past the Gertie MacDowell bit. And still I kept reading. Why? 'Cos I wanted to say that I had read it. Surely this was the action of a madman? To be fair, maybe there was a bit of unwitting 'class war' on my part - I went to a seriously bad school (Caterham - DG will testify to it badness) and maybe, like Trevor, I wanted to confound low expectations comp kids got.

Incidentally, I have read it since because it was on a course I studied, with all the support and notes I needed!

Re-reading this I realise this post should be read with an accompanying violin soundtrack! (or at least the tune to the Hovis advert) But I'm gonna post it anyway!

'I wanted to say I had read it'

And you could not lie blatantly, could you? Ohlala, this Brit honesty! Which is what I did with the Faith no More albums.

Doesn't that have something to do with the editing job going against what seem to have been intentional mispellings and usage oddities? Ulysses edition squabbles are complicated, I can't really follow them.

I often can't tell apart the things I do out of pretension and the things I do out of interest. I am deadly afraid to admit what I do out of pretension, partly because it is an unmasking but partly because then I'll feel like I have to STOP doing it, and I do have enough interest to not want to do that. It's so much easier and less complicated to say "haha, oh, yes, everything I do is fake."

I don't think I do things to LOOK cool and intellectual so much as out of a desperate hope to BECOME cool and intellectual like the people I look up to and want to be worthy of.

I don't know to what extent i'm guilty of literateure as a pose, but i knew a guy who would go through the used bookstores, finding all of the castoff books from advanced lit courses, so that he could fill his shelves with them. He'd leave them on the coffee table as well, putting bookmarks in them at random. Russian authors were favorites. To complete his image of being a writer, there was the central piece of a dusty old typewriter and leafs of blank paper. It worked for him, as he became known as one of the Deep Thinkers in the circles that he travelled.

It was the same guy who copied song lyrics and handed them as his own poetry to impressionable high school sophomores. One of them even figured out the pose, and when she made it to university, carried the same dog-eared copy of Nietzsche around in her folded arms and would plop down in the middle of the crowds to stare blankly at the pages, until it provoked conversation of some sort, like, "Get off my foot." Quite a fashion statement.

I have come to realise (I think I start a lot of posts like this)...that I am no longer keeping up. I have no desire to impress people intellectually (because I can't, he he!). Genuine curiosity = R0x0R!

You know, I think there's something to be said for having literary pretensions of a certain type. If a person decides to read Ulysses or Life: A User's Manual or whatever else not based on interest -- and not for the sake of intellectual oneupsmanship -- but because he/she has a sense that this is what intelligent, highly literate people read, and he/she aspires to be highly literate, well . . . isn't that a positive thing? Looking down on folks for attempting, even the slightest bit falsely, to improve what they perceive as the "level" of their intellectual life seems somehow anti-intellectual -- like telling poor people they shouldn't aspire to make loads of money.

(I realize this implies a belief that highbrow literature is indeed "better" than mid- or low-brow same, which is not necessarily true. But the examples given thus far in this thread do fit that description, I think.)

I pretend to like Buffy and the Power Puff Girls, but actually I read poncy books while they're on.

Oh, and note that the above might not exactly be what we're talking about here, in that it assumes the person actually reads the work and tries to get something out of it and doesn't go around lying about how brilliant it was if he in fact finds it pointless and tedious. I tend to want to give people the benefit of the doubt with this, though, just based on so many people throughout my life assuming I listen to certain types of music "just to be different," as if it's impossible that anyone could honestly enjoy something as relatively straightforward as Sonic Youth. So on some level, I fear being judgemental about these sorts of things.

Point 1 (after NItsuh): As I get older and less defensive about my cultural preferences, I have come to realise (c. James) that I'm getting lazier and my horizons are shrinking some. I don't think this is a good thing. I like living in a plural and relativist culture (it makes life funnier, and god knows this place trades on eclecticism, albeit within limits), but sometimes it really does feel too glib, and too easy. I want to be motivated to make an effort - preferably by being convinced that there'll be something intrinsic to the novel (or whatever) that will justify it, but in its absence I'll take a little bit of intellectual pretention as a catalyst.

Point 2 ('making an effort'): I was thinking about this also re the 'canonical classics you'll never read' thread and following the various debates about Frantzen/Oprah over high vs middlebrow. Is the point about the highbrown and pretentious the need to invest effort? Is difficulty the gatekeeper here? IF so, what gets you through - sweat or effortless insight?

Point 3: How come so few of the difficult/pretentious/highbrow works of art are by women? I know there are plenty of feminist and lit crit answers to this question (plain sexism defines the canon; women's writing fails to embody the qualities privileged in male western discourse; and more recently, that women aren't interested in playing postmodern literary male games), but what do you think?

Point 4 (which uselessly links points 2 and 3): the two most difficult, serious and ultimately most rewarding novels I've read in the last three years were both sf by women. But only a radfem transported from 1975 to my living room would be impressed to see them on my shelves.

No I hate 'literature-as-a-pose', it's SO postpubescent. Grubby! It happened to me too ... before I was 13 I used to just go along the library shelves reading books IN ORDER! So I read some trash sci-fi novel, then Philip K. Dick and I was like, 'wow, what is this weird feeling!!' It happened with Dostoevsky too - I ACCIDENTALLY read 'Crime and Punishment'! I can still remember the strange sensation I felt when I read the first page. I couldn't read it, it was too hard, but I was always returning to the memory of the sudden depth of those first few pages, waiting til I was 'old enough'.

But now I have lost that innocent sense of equality and discovery! There are ranks and hierarchies, and not a blur of words into which a series of great sentences intrude surprisingly and then vanish, without explanation ... it doesn't make it any easier to find good books, either, as most of what's called 'literature' I find trashy ... good things still only happen by surprise!

pretentions about literature are irritating. I read out of general interest not some kind of drive toward self improvement or aggrandisement. I would get references to books from other books, lyrics or anywhere they were mentioned really. So I suppose that might be genuine curiousity. I would not want to appear intellectual, if you do appear "brainy"; people come up to you and say stupid things like 'you're really intelligent' as if that is an adequate topic of conversation in itself. sure a complement is nice now and then, but how do you answer that one? - especially if overt intelligence is not what you are trying to put across. I'd rather be a conversationalist or approachable, or nice than intellectual

Intellectualism was more a 'pose' for me in high school, when I was convinced that by reading a lot I was somehow improving myself, hightening my sensibilites or what have you...Also it gave me a platform from which to look down on the mess of oblivious (but *gasp,* popular) kids whose social lives I envied. I could sit on top of some doric column with Socrates and mock the illiterate masses. Most of what I was reading during high school was classical phil. anyway - I was trying to understand the big questions after all! Now that I'm around people who take an active interest in culture, intellectualism and cultural exploration seems less like a pose/superiority kick and more a hobby (a pretentious one? maybe) I share with friends.

With me, because I'm an arrogant so-and-so I know I'm intelligent, so when I buy books to impress it's more to show that I'm intelligent rather than to pretend to be intelligent - ppl see well-readness as a signifier of smarts (and it doesn't hurt to read a lot) and who am I to naysay? So every now and then a weighty tome hits the shelves and generally gets read (eventually).

Ellie - which books?

Maryann - regarding your 'reading from A to Z' undertaking - there's a character in Sartre's 'Nausea' that does exactly the same thing!

I'm so glad I've had a chance to use that in conversation! ;-)

I'm not 100% convinced it is possible to accidentally read Crime And Punishment. I could turn into a loame-o observational comedian here and do a skit about falling over and accidentally digesting the complete works of Shakespeare - but I just thought I would register my dissent.

C & P is actually quite a good yarn. I was surprised. I was terrified of it. The ending's a bit wierd though. Svidrigailov is one of the most compelling baddies EVER.

Tom - Joanna Russ's _The Female Man_ and Ursula K Le Guin's _Always Coming Home_. THe Russ is a kind of academic feminist 'classic' but I think unloved elsewhere. The LE Guin is a kind of fragmentary utopia with a complex, multiple, self-referential structure (a sort of anthropology of an imaginary people in a future outside History). This is what I mean about the gendered canon thing: it's the kind of writing that I think might be treated as deliciously clever, literary and postmodern (ugh, sorry) but is off that particular map. Both took a second reading to pay off, which is a big deal for me cos I'm not a bit returner.

To whoever was saying that Dostoevsky's a joy to read I say pah! I mean no, it's not Pynchon, but still - all those bloody confusing Russian names. I gave up on The Idiot after a while. I may go back to it one day to look cool and intellectual. Although there reaches a point where one is too old to have not read something already and you have to make it clear that you're re-reading it by having a really old battered copy or something

i read "brothers karamazov" aged 13 because linus in peanuts was reading it (this is TRUE) (it took me MONTHS and impressed ONE PERSON)

Blimey the memories come flooding back. The Le Guin was revered in top role-playing organ White Dwarf which is where I learned the basics of literary and other criticism at the knee of Dave Langford. Mostly he filled up space with comedy savagings of L R%n hubbXorD but occasionally he would fill a column praising stuff like Always Coming Home to the absolute bafflement of his goblin-craving audience no doubt. (Me included - I got it from the library aged 13 but barely opened it).

Nick, I'll match your "pah!" and raise you "fie!".

I still don't get this thing about choice of literature being a pose. Why would anyone want to waste hours and hours of their life in a pursuit they quite obviously don't enjoy in a seriously misguided attempt to appear "cool and intellectual"?

Bizarre.

"The Idiot" was Dostoevsky at his darkest and most twisted. I love the way he compresses all that malice and negative energy and explodes it at the end. It's one of the most powerful endings to a novel evah. Poor Prince Myshkin.

Isn't there a character in catch-22 who 'knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it?'

I wouldn't know. I've got flies in my eyes.

Gah. Question keeps resolving itself into something too monolithic - pretentious or authentic? Need to specify more factors so that the fluid sprawly nature of the issue is visible. Zo: why you buy? why you start reading? why you *carry on*? how does that apply to a particular book? how does that apply to bothering to read literature at all? then: what does it mean to say you 'just like' something? how is that always informed by and subsequently inflected by interatction between yr aesthetic history and cultural gatekeepers and peers and education? In what ways does 'pretentiousness' become normalised through cultural discourse?

I think I am just re-stating Will's original question.

I have never read Dostoyevsky.

Ellie, I've seen Nick's "Pah!", so I'll match your "Gah" and raise you "Bah!".

Maybe the question tends to settle and stagnate due to the fundamental nature of how people communicate on the forum - long unbroken individual utterances that tend to disappear as you travel further down the thread?

I regret not addressing your points about The Western Canon earlier, Ellie: those 'Dead White European Males"

. Does 'intellectual posing' depend on a stable and stagnant Canon, which is implicitly at odds with the sense of questioning and rebellion essential for genuine intellectual development? In order to the 'pose' to be effective, do you show off with the most readily recognisable authors, or, more accurately, those people most readily associated with being 'intellectual' by the masses? The people Daily Mail readers pretend to have heard of? And in an era of lash and backlash - would you be 'posing' to the wrong people? The people in the know - the 'real' intellectual (if there is such a thing - a question worthy of a thread by itself!) might even have attack the books you brandish on the Tube as cliched and irrelevant!

So, on a related point - and perhaps this is a more vital question - is The Western Canon, and its enduring stability, a direct result of this petty-bourgeois intellectual posing on a MASSIVE social scale? Where pseudos pretend to have an in-depth knowlege about Shakespeare, for example? Shakespeare is probably the best example to use: the industry is worth billions - usually people who think buying a Shakespeare tea-towel will magically impart knowledge of the Complete Works. Another reason for using Shakespeare to illustrate my point, even his most politically radical work, his sympathetic treatement of prostitutes, for example, have been hijacked by the media to keep feelings of patriotism and order: Henry V's speeches are often used by the tablioids to help whip up a feeling of unity - Shakespeare often presented fractured societies. Nigel Lawson named Shakespeare as a Tory and a stern disciplinarian after reading Coriolanus, where Coriolanus was really about sexual adventure and masochism (acutally, maybe he was a Tory..;-)) So, Shakespeare (and, by extension, culture?) is hijacked as a 'civilising influence', where 'civilising' means unquestioning bourgeois values

The main manifestation of this, is the use of 'Intellectual posing' for big money. Trivial knowledge = BIG BUSINESS. Knowledge of Shakespeare can get you up to the £125,000 bracket on Millionaire, at least.

How is culture USED? How is our implicit curiosity about the world codified and judged?

sod i forgot to ring WHO WANTS TO BE MILLIONAIRE and register so now i shall certainly not be one for another four months at least

Interesting that we're all (relatively) adept at negotiating the twists and turns and mixed messages of pop tastes and the pop canon but get bogged down more when the subject turns to lit. Lit snobbery/impressiveness doesn't need a fixed canon, it merely needs the idea of canon, the idea of hierarchies, though those hierarchies shift about and you learn to 'play' them depending on audience, just as you do with pop. Impressing via culture requires you to become a kind of Book Jockey.

Shakespeare is indeed an interesting one Will - yr post points up a way in which the BIG NAMES in culture are "used", it becomes not enough to have read Shakespeare you must possess an initiate's understanding of him, hence your use of phrases like "really about", the idea that there are levels of Shakespeare that remain forever inaccessible to the crude readings of the mob (I notice that Shakespeare-as-performance (ultra-fluid) rather than Shakespeare-as- text (can be mastered) doesn't figure in your post).

and anyway Harold Bloom is a complete TOSSER.

I think 'Shakespeare in performance' is every bit as vulnerable to the process I am trying to define as I type: perhaps more so. Going to the theatre in these dark days is increasingly seen as a necessary 'initiation' ritual for a certain element of the population: very few people go regularly. This occurs to the point where the social relevance of the 'ritual' overtakes the perfomance itself. This happens to the point where the play is no longer really the thing.

But then the theatre has always been a place to see and be seen. Even in Shakespeare's Globe there were stalls above the performance itself for the select few to be observed by the people in the forecourt. Performance spaces are also usedIn

Granted, my use of 'really about' was careless but I just wanted to distinguish the various kinds of readings the plays (as both performance and script) are subjected to, as dramatically as possible. Of course, there is no right reading and no Degre Zero de l'ecriture.

When it comes to elitist levels of understanding Shakespeare (I know what it is 'really about' and you don't, nyah nyah) - I was only trying to fight fire with fire: many people will claim Shakespeare (and his/its mammoth importance) for their own ideological ends. I think sexually and ideologically left-of-centre readings are in the minority and should be passionately be put forward, despite claims of 'elitism'. After all, a street performance of Shakespeare is not elitist and it serves as a handy adversary to the theatre-ritual, which is permeated with significance within a late-capitalist social hierarchy.

Missing words in second para:

"performance space is also used in Tolstoy as a forum for the upper classes to chat: No-one ever watches the ballet in Anna Karenina, for instance.'

mark s - I hate to break it to you but just ringing up to be on WWTBAM? is unlikely to get you on the show. Most contestants these days have done their sums and decided it is worth spending about a grand ringing in repeatedly for a reasonable chance of appearing. For someone reasonably intelligent, paying your pound to ring once is prob a better bet than buying a Lottery ticket, but the odds are probably getting worse all the time.

The problem with leftist or queer readings of Shakespeare is that Shakespeare is as you say massively important, the cornerstone of the canon and therefore the culture, and so reflects through no fault of his own whatever is normative in that culture. The tabloids don't need to hijack him, in other words, and nor can he be fully 'reclaimed' by the left - or not without the left's ideas becoming central to the culture, at which point those aspects of Shakespeare which reflect them will become the 'obvious' ones anyway. Alternative readings of Shakespeare remain precisely that - a sideshow, better surely to ignore him and the canon entirely. Elitism has little to do with it - anyway Shakespeare's reduction to soundbites is a lot to do with the archaism of his language, which is a factor any full interpretation of Shakespeare has to deal with no matter what political angle it's coming from.

'better surely to ignore him and the canon entirely.'

But how? And Shakespeare does have genuine, intrinsic worth, surely? We can't deconstruct him until he has as much relevance as, oh I don't know, a car advert?

I 've got to disappear now, but I wonder if the question is: 'can we appreciate Shakespeare, or culture per se without all the accompanying associations and implications of 'bettering oneself?'

― Will, Friday, 23 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)