However, there are more disturbing implications of this reliance on the internet. I have students (young and older alike) who refuse to part with their phones. Yesterday, an adult student openly checked his Facebook in front of me. When I told him to put his phone away, he protested that he'd finished the exercise. What did people do before smartphones? They'd have looked through the book to review vocabulary or brush up on essay structure. Not this student. He was finished, and he wanted Facebook.
What has been even worse for me than the occasional distracted student has been my tendency to read shorter books because I know they won't take up as much time. I read more than a dozen books over the fall, and while some were light fare (such as Mindy Kaling's entertaining book "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?"), others were legitimate literature, like Graham Greene's "The Human Factor." One thing all the books had in common, however, was that they were comparatively short, i.e., under 350 pages. There's certainly nothing wrong with reading short books, of course. What I do think is a problem, however, is refusing to read longer books because they take up too much time. And this was the trap into which I almost fell. I almost missed reading one of the most incredible books I've ever come across, all because it was 705 pages.
Last year I tried to read Boleslaw Prus's The Doll on my mother's recommendation. I got about 70 pages in and then decided I did not like it enough to lug it back and forth from the MLA conference. This year, when I mentioned to my mom that I was considering trying to do a PhD in Comparative Literature/Slavic Literature, instead of English Literature, she told me I would need to be much better-read in Eastern European literature, and she again recommended The Doll. Dutifully, I picked the book up again. I started back at the beginning, and again found myself uninterested, and, moreover, working very hard to follow the chronology. One day, I decided I would read for an hour more and if I still wasn't interested, I'd give the book up once and for all. I didn't think I was ready for a 700-page commitment.
That day, after another chapter or two of exposition, I suddenly found myself thrust into the middle of Wokulski's tragic preoccupation with the icy Izabela. And I couldn't stop reading.
Boleslaw Prus is considered (by many people better-versed than I) to be the master of Polish realism, and his style has been compared to Balzac's, while his all-encompassing view of Warsaw society in the 1870s is considered as skillful as Tolstoy's in Anna Karenina. High praise for a book that too few readers have heard of. Part of what I find fascinating about Prus's novel is that he presents characters that manage to be interesting without being idealized. While I loved Anna Karenina, I didn't particularly care for Anna Karenina herself. I knew I should admire her for her refusal to be conventional and her desperate unwillingness to give up on love, but I despised her for abandoning her son, and I thought Vronsky seemed hardly likely to inspire such passion. (Lest my facetious tone be misunderstood, I did love the novel, and absolutely consider it one of the four or five greatest works ever written). In The Doll, Wokulski falls in love with the beautiful Izabela without even knowing her. She, in turn, is shallow and selfish. And yet I continually found myself hoping that each of them would somehow have a happy ending. What makes both Wokulski and Izabela--neither of them particularly prototypical protagonists--so fascinating is how painfully a product of their sociohistorical context they are. Wokulski has worked his way up the social ladder by making millions in trade with Russian merchants (and, according to several characters in the book, has betrayed his country by not trying to trade within it), but he never quite becomes a part of the highest circles. In one impassioned speech, he tells the useless Prince: "Mr Starski, who never did anything and got his money Heaven knows where, stood ten storeys higher than I in your estimation. What am I saying? Any foreign vagabond could get into your drawing-rooms, which I had to conquer with fifteen per cent interest on the capital entrusted to me. It is these people, not I who had your respect. Bah! They even had far wider-reaching privileges...Although each of these respected men is worth less than the doorman in my store, for he does something, and at least doesn't infect the community" (624). Izabela may be unkind and selfish, but likewise, she was born into an inescapable ideology, which, in her case, values beautiful women with sizable dowries. Her father's bankruptcy leaves her few choices, as most of her suitors abandon her. Even Wokulski, who is willing to do almost anything for her, falls in love with her at a distance because of her beauty, and then is disappointed to discover the angelic face masks a contemptuous soul. In a conversation with the spirited widow Mrs. Wasowska, Wokulski agrees that women like Izabela "were brought up in a certain sphere of society and in a given epoch, and amidst certain notions. They're like a rash, which isn't a disease, but is a symptom of sickness in society" (634). What makes The Doll even bleaker than Anna Karenina is that in the end, neither of the two principal characters uses suicide as a means of escaping an unjust world. Instead, they remain constrained and unhappy.
Even more wonderful than the tragic story of Wokulski and Izabela, however, is the portrait of Warsaw society as a whole. Each of the minor characters is beautifully detailed, and no character is left without a personality. There is the old clerk, Rzecki, who worships Napoleon (all the Napoleons), and is fascinated with politics, or P, as he surreptitiously refers to the subject in his journal. The Baroness Krzeszowska is the closest thing to a villain the novel has, and she manages to be realistically horrible while also being buffoonish. Her battles with the socialist students who repeatedly drop herring on her head when she pokes it out the window are endlessly riotous, and her persecution of the poor Mrs. Stawksa causes some genuinely anxious moments. The Baron's ridiculous duel with Wokulski and the increasing economic success of Szlangbaum also provide clear pictures of this world in which Wokulski and Izabela find themselves trapped.
After I finished the book, I realized how silly it would have been not to read this book just because it was long. When I was younger, it seemed perfectly normal for a book to spend some time providing background. But nowadays, we all want instant gratification. If a book isn't captivating by the end of the first page, it's not worth our time. No wonder so many young authors find themselves drawn to writing memoirs about drug addiction or outlandish murder stories. They know they have only seconds to get their reader's attention and keep it. After I read the first paragraph of Gillian Flynn's Dark Places, in which she manages to drop the words "blood," "murders," and "dead sisters," I couldn't imagine putting the book down. And it was an entertaining read, all right. But it was no Prus. And yet I almost gave up on this classic, because it took a few chapters to get to the real meat of the story.
Are we destined, eventually, to stop reading the greatest works of literature, all because they're long and slow and meandering? I hope not.
I like "The Doll" (how strange it sounds for me) ver much.
ReplyDeleteThank You for visiting my blog Antonina. You have such a lovely name. I have just read Your blog, I like Your writing.
When I was 15 yeats old I tried to learn English to read all of Jane Austen books, because there were no translations. Persuasion was the last have read. It was no so long ago and I am in Your mother's age, I suppose.
My children live in Kraków and I visitet them very often.
Best wishes to You
"The Doll" is one of my favorite Polish novels. I should re-read it soon. All best.
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