Add in The New Yorker (august 24, 2009, page 32)
Booksbythefoot.com
Dozens of styles for Interior Designers and Book Lovers, starting at $6.99 per linear foot.
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” –Cicero
I have seen the add before. Only today do I think about it differently, because of my initial discussion of books and “American Scholar” in the Emerson seminar yesterday. That is: the lover of books and the problem of books; the danger of becoming the “bookworm” and the bibliomaniac. The Cicero makes me think of how Emerson views the very problem of reading books: that books are not the soul, but the body (at some level, Emerson like all in his culture of copyright, as Katherine Hayles might suggest, is guilty of immaterialzing the book) that houses but potentially limits the soul: the idea, the genius. Every spirit builds itself a house…
And I also think of this line from American Scholar, of course; about what we readers forget (the line that leads up to the bookworm):
Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm.
So what’s being sold here at booksbythefeet? Who is the audience? On the one hand, book lovers, clearly–readers who probably know the line from Cicero, or at least believe it, and would want to enhance, perhaps transplant, the soul of their living rooms. But at the same time, if not on the other hand, notice how surely this same book lover is also the reader without a soul. The appeal, after all, is to create an effect that you have a room of books, create the style of being a reader: interior designers are this audience. One can think of Gatsby’s book shelves and realize that a great American tradition, perhaps, is here invoked. It makes one wonder about, say, The New Yorker: does one read it for love or for style?
I would like to suggest–at least, begin to speculate, and work on this a bit further–that this is where we find ourselves today in literary education (perhaps in the academy overall). Should our focus be on style (and styles)–but suitable for designers? Those who want to create and produce the style of “books” and yes, the appearances of being well read? Or should our focus be on the book lovers–on creating readers who will fill up their future rooms with books, carried with them (we presume) from their studies? Readers who might (like me) subscribe to The New Yorker but not answer the ad.
The latter is, it seems clear, the method of literary education of the last 100 years, certainly since the emergence of the New Critical classroom. The former, I speculate (allowing me the figurative room to borrow ‘interior design’ into the realm of English; though the word style suggests to me that I don’t need to beg too much in that borrowing) is where English seems to have come from (both classical rhetoric and the rhetoric that emerges with the university in the late 19th century), where practical elements in style is the focus. And perhaps this is also where English could go, or is under pressure to go: driven by student interests in more practical applications of writing, more technical. Writing that is professional, rather than rhetorical or literary.
My final speculation, for now, is that Emersonian pedagogy–the Emerson who is interested in the problem of readers and books, and plays a role, though forgotten, in these educational issues (think of James Berlin’s study)–that Emerson can help highlight these two polarities and perhaps offer us a middle ground.
Books by the foot of the familiar?
