Having read about 50 or more books in 2016, I’d like to give a few highlights of what I believed to be for me a great year of reading, where I discovered and cherished some truly classic works of literature that have entered my imagination for possibly forever.
2016 was for me the year of Hawthorne and Melville, the year of the epic, and the year of Milton…
Where I truly discovered Hawthorne and Melville:
Near the beginning of 2016, I was moved by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great masterpiece The Scarlet Letter. I’d been meaning to read this novel for some time, having read and loved some of Hawthorne’s stories. I read it all - even the “Custom-House” preface (which is good, btw; don’t skip it) - and, needless to say, I was moved. I was moved by Hester Prynne’s endurance and her complex personality textures - how she had a fierce, Oriental sexual energy; how she became a stronger person by persecutions; how she began to stifle her energy; how the scarlet letter’s purpose changed; how she became a matron of courage and consolation to others in the end; how she made the central symbol - the scarlet A - her own. It’s as D. H. Lawrence said; it’s one of the most perfect American novels.
Chillingworth for me forms a semi-Miltonic, semi-Shakespearean villain, a betrayed man, a man whose only ease is found in destruction. Even at the end, he tries to hold onto Dimmesdale, and in the end, when Dimmesdale dies, he dies too. He wants to destroy, and he’s done it for so long that he has become destruction, and when he has nothing to destroy, he dies.
I was also moved by the levels of ambiguity and allegory, as well as the hidden subtext about reading and misreading. Hawthorne’s attitude about reading signs seems to be one of skepticism that also mixes with reverence. He acknowledges the symbolical, yet departs from the excessive allegorizing of the Puritan moral order that he criticizes and satirizes.
I also loved the prose style. It’s thorny, complex, yet, like the novel’s subtext, is full of ambiguity, resonance, depth, and its own subtlety.
My big book for last year was Brothers Karamazov. 2016’s big book was Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I read it all - even the whaling sections. It picked up in the end, and I loved the dark, comic subtext that clashed and counterpointed with the poignant “American Shakespeare” tragedy aspect. It’s written in a rich, epic, high, poetic style that carries many registers - Shakespearean/Miltonic, colloquial, biblical, expository, extravagant, melancholy. The climax of the three-day chase is elegantly constructed, and the last moments are some of the fiercest that I’ve read in literature. It took me several months to read it - interspersing it with my periods of boredom, my time at college, and other events - but I was glad I stuck with it. It really deserves its reputation. I need to reread it, even as I seek for other big and great books to edify and delight myself.
The year of the epic poem
My first epic poem was John Milton’s masterpiece Paradise Lost. It’s truly brilliant stuff. I was moved by the vistas, by the lush landscape of Paradise, by the epic scale, by Satan, by the depiction of heaven and hell, and the final conclusion that mixed tragedy with a profound redemptive hope. I also happened to take kindly to Milton’s very refreshing freedom in depicting sexuality. Book IV has some of the finest poetry on the issue of sex, and Milton’s erotic imagination encapsulates both the horrific side of sex - the Sin-Death allegory and Adam and Eve’s infernal lovemaking after the Fall - and the innocent side of sex. I loved the gorgeous blank verse, the sentences, the elevated diction, the words themselves. It fits, and it’s so perfectly constructed.
The Iliad and The Odyssey, in the Fagles translations, were a treat. I ended up preferring The Iliad, but both are truly fantastic. And I’d say, The Odyssey is more than just those adventures that we all know, though those adventures are important. Odysseus’ scar, Priam’s and Achilles’ reconciliation, Achilles’ shield, Achilles vs. Hector, Achilles’ speech in Book 9, Odysseus’ slaughtering of the suitors, Odysseus and the Cyclops, Odysseus and the underworld - all these are part of the fabric from which the West’s literature is built. If anything, beyond the delight I got from the poems themselves, I invested some quality time with the foundations of Western literature.
The Aeneid was also moving. Not as exciting as Homer or Milton, but with a power of its own. I loved its melancholy tone, the Aeneas-Dido love story, the first-person storytelling of Aeneas in Books II and III, the fierce rage of the epic’s central figure other than Aeneas (Juno), the darkness that in some ways exceeds Homer and Milton and looks forward to Dante (no wonder Dante picked Virgil rather than Homer to be his guide through Hell), the sense of futility, the moral emphasis that exceeds Homer’s pragmatism, and more. Books 7-12, long thought to be half-hearted compared to the first half of The Aeneid, has its virtues, especially for fans of The Iliad. Even in its depiction of war, Virgil’s unique style fits the sadness behind it. Robert Fitzgerald was right to note in his Paris Review interview how The Aeneid’s second half really has a compelling Aeneas, that the story itself is far more readable than we give it credit for. Reading it in Sarah Ruden’s translation for Yale University Press, I loved Ruden’s translation of Virgil’s subtle, chaste, yet richly poetic verse (which I have yet to read in its original Latin), which brought out the melancholy, two-edged sword aspect of the poem. Even as the Trojans defeat the Latins and form Italy, they lose their Trojan identity - and Juno, hater of the Trojans and avatar of wrath, has the last word on that. It’s sad when you think about it. And even as it glorifies empire, it also looks with deep sadness at what’s lost in the formation of empire. It looks forward to the Christian epic and bridged the gap between pagan and Christian for so many, including Dante. Yet it has its own sad power. Even as I prefer Homer and Milton in the end, I would say that Virgil excels over both of them in his sadness.
So Virgil or Homer? I’d say Homer, but Virgil deserves a shining silver prize, no less splendid than Homer’s gold.
In addition, I'm proud to have discovered and started on Dante and Spenser. The Divine Comedy, so far, is truly great. I, in the year of 2017, am currently on Purgatory; but Inferno gave me a taste of Dante's great art, which involves literary reference, complex Christian theology, and that overriding theme of love which strangely shows even in Inferno. And Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene is no easy work, but it's fantastic stuff. The verse, while complex, has a poetic richness and beauty capable to its luxuriant subject matter and stately pace; the allegory works well, and it's quite skilled and capable of being sustained for the length of the poem; and the epic similes are pretty well-handled.
Speaking of which, the epic simile has become one of my favorite literary devices, in addition to the Shakespearean metaphors and similes that I love so much.
Year of Milton
Like with many of my favorite authors, I started Milton by reading his shorter work - “Comus,” his shorter poems, and “Lycidas” - before I dived into Paradise Lost. I will not jump into much about that, as I already spoke about it. But I was so moved by it that it replaced Blood Meridian as my favorite book of all time. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes are also masterworks, but of different kinds - Paradise Regained as a chaste brief epic and Samson Agonistes as a Greek tragedy with Hebrew subject matter written in thoroughly experimental English verse.
I like the mash-up aspect of Milton - how he takes the classical world and the Bible and sets them together to create a special music. One of my favorite things about Paradise Lost is how it uses its classical allusion freely while not departing and corrupting the Hebraic and Christian spirit of the poetic matter. Imagining the biblical Paradise in terms of classical myth is a bold thing to do, and Milton pulls it off. As Barbara Lewalski shows in her book Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, everything about Milton’s great poem is an educative, exciting, delightful, and artful manipulation of classical and biblical and Christian literary forms and models to make a poem that fulfills the two-handed engine of Horace’s poetic goal - teaching and delight. Even the “Christian” parts - Michael’s prophecy, Milton’s God, Milton’s Messiah - all owe to this effective mashup of biblical and classical reference, to not only Genesis and Exodus and the New Testament but even to Homer and Hesiod and Ovid and Virgil. That’s years of experience and learning jam-packed into Paradise Lost, perhaps the greatest epic after Homer and after Dante’s Commedia.
Much has been written about the thematics of the poetry, so I won’t say much except that I was thoroughly moved by it. As a Christian, I like how the thematic complexity of Adam and Eve’s story both relates to my own beliefs and yet has a resonance of its own beyond Christian orthodoxy. Strangely, the angel Michael’s prophecy in Books 11 and 12, far from diminishing the poem’s power, contributes to it in that distinctive way.
Milton’s Satan is a truly heroic (false heroic) character, and while he is muted in Paradise Regained, he still has some of the rhetorical interest he once had in the greater poem. The intellectual aspect of Paradise Regained, as well as the striking perfection of its construction, provides moments of interest. I happen to find it underrated compared to Paradise Lost, and I find myself with Wordsworth and De Quincey among the admirers, as well as Miltonic scholar Gordon Teskey.
One of the things I learned about Milton in this year was his experimentalist nature as an author. He’s really the classic experimental author. He experiments with literary forms and almost transforms them with his Christian vision. He writes epic, tragedy, masque, lyric, ode, and so much. The mashup of his matter is relevant to how Milton experiments with the form. I like that about Milton.
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