Another opportunity to talk crap about Faulkner.

Dear bloggy blogwater with blog bodies inside,

For most of my academic life, I thought Virginia Woolf was an idiot. She was just one of those modern authors that alleged intellectuals pretended to like so they can feel smarter than the rest of us. You see, I like old things. Antiques. History. Distinguished British actors. There’s a reason why I chose Medieval and Renaissance literature as my focus in undergrad. Well, a reason besides the bawdy morality plays. But, to my dismay, in my final year at the University of Michigan, I was subjected to a required class on what I thought would be the most heinous of literary subcategories: the modern novel.

In hindsight, all I can say is this. Inside every modern novel, is a little bit of nerd love. No, seriously. I anagrammed it out.

Speaking of nerd love, back to senior year. I’m not kidding when I say I loathed modern literature. I blindly despised anything written after, say, the first automobile was constructed. And don’t even get me started on this so called hippie beatnik poetry nonsense. Anyone can do drugs and then spew non-rhyming couplets onto their typewriter. Real writers are crazy enough on their own without drugs. I had no choice in the matter though. The class was “Required.” I dutifully gathered up my copies of “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man,” and D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” from the campus bookstore, swallowing the bile in my throat, and headed over to Angell Hall for the first day of class.

Oh, literature, what a remarkable and clever minx you are! You see, the modern novel knew my secret weakness: Handsome men who know how to read. Perhaps it was my professor’s dashing good looks that began to turn my opinion. He was pretty much the John Hamm of the literary world. I am more inclined to believe, though, that it was because he was just so flipping excited about the modern era of writing, that you sort of felt like a jerk if you didn’t think so too. I can remember one class where he was reading us a passages from “Portrait of an Artist” and using this hilarious falsetto voice whenever he read the dialogue of a female character. Now that is passion for one’s job.

So I read Joyce, and Ford Maddox Ford and even a little T.S. Eliot, and choked down the cyclical, stream-of-conscious refuse that is Faulkner, and I actually began to appreciate the way they used their prose to reflect the chaotic, war-torn world they were living in. I loved T.S. Eliot, and grew to admire the unending complexity of Joyce’s work. What surprised me the most, however, was when I read Virginia Woolf’s essays. I rarely read books about writing, because I feel that writing is a craft you either possess or you don’t. It’s like having an opposable thumb. What I do like is when classic authors discuss the process or idea of writing, simply from a personal or observational perspective.

In one particular essay, titled “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf talks about the novel as being in a state of crisis, citing the differences in writing styles of her generation (the modern movement) versus those who had come before. Needless to say, she was criticizing the generation that came before. Look at you, Virginia Woolf! Talking smack with the best of them! Turns out she’s a far more relatable lady than I ever thought. Now, the article delves into levels of discussion a little too heavy for a blog with Steinho in the title, so I’ll leave it up to you to decide to peruse or not to peruse. Regardless, I learned my lesson in the end. Don’t judge a whole period of writing based off of one jerk face named William Faulkner. Also, hot professors can get you to read just about anything.