BOOK REVIEW

Tradition. Seth Lerer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii1135.

Seth Lerer’s contribution to the series of “short polemical monographs”

called the Literary Agenda is prefaced with a threat. “You must not cir-
culate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condi-
tion on any acquirer.” So says the publisher, whose “objective,” also ac-
cording to the copyright page, is “excellence in research, scholarship, and
education.” Such is the imperative of authoritative individualism that Lerer
eloquently contests. His treatise is sincere, enthusiastic, learned, clear, broad,
and humane. Tradition, he proclaims, is “about the individual’s relation to
the group” (2). His opening sally leaves both the presumed New Critical
devotion to “literature itself ” (1) and T. S. Eliot’s close-reading, individual-
ized tradition pinned and wriggling on the wall of history. He quotes Eliot’s
declaration that writers “must inevitably be judged by the standards of the
past. I say judged, not amputated by them.” And then he comments wryly,
“How could anyone read such a sentence in 1917 and not smell the battle-
field?” (6). We live in history, our culture lives in history, and history lives
in our culture. That quick move sets this quick-moving book rolling. De-
spite Oxford University Press, works must circulate, and fortunately their
circulation is alive with “error, mistake, twist, and turn” (7). Today’s “per-
vasive ironic distancing of the self from acts of valuation”—cleverly labeled
“the world of ‘whatever’”—hampers any extended relationship (20). But
history and society are conjoint forms of affiliation, and affiliation is an
affective stance. Hence the question becomes this: “How can we love liter-
ature in an age of blithe indifference?” (21). You may have other questions,
as I do, but Lerer’s enthusiasm is unquestionable, discriminating, and infec-
tious. This is the book of a great teacher—the reviews on RateMyProfessors
.com are, in their word, “awesome”—and whether you finally agree or dis-

Modern Philology, volume 115, number 3. Published online September 25, 2017
For permission to reuse, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu.

E174
 Book Review E175

agree, you will come away from a few hours reading impressed, informed,
and enriched.
“Our acts of loving literature occur even in the weirdest of places” (30).
They figure in two of Dickens’s most lovable naturals, Mr. Dick in David
Copperfield and Joe Gargery in Great Expectations. Both build their imag-
inative life around reading—even if Joe’s consists of a mere two letters,
J-O (47)—as does the young David and, magically, Saleem Sinai, the Dick-
ensian narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. It matters little
what you find, or where: literacy is liberating, even though—or because—
“the literary past must be remade, selectively, by each of us” (47). The fable
that serves as a warning counterexample is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451,
where books represent a salvation that cannot be experienced by the doomed
protagonist—the King James Bible in the novel, and in François Truffaut’s
film version, by miraculous coincidence, David Copperfield.
There are many such miraculous discoveries in Lerer’s book. The next
chapter turns George Orwell’s 1984 virtually inside out, for, as Lerer says
in one of his many aphorisms that this chapter puts into practice, “when-
ever we open up a book, we transform it” (73). Suddenly Orwell’s dys-
topia is revealed as a lesson in the urgency of tradition, with C. S. Lewis
in the foreground and the pastoral ideal of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in
the Willows in the background. This affiliation was news to me, but like
much else in Lerer’s book, it is carefully documented with scholarly pre-
cedent scrupulously acknowledged; the apostle of tradition is as respect-
ful as he should be of his own peers and predecessors.
To be sure, a “search for origins” (82) is also a sign of loss. Those of
us neither as innocent as Mr. Dick nor as poisoned by evil schooling as
Copperfield are the subjects of a “fall into criticism” (83). Our name is
America, portrayed in a chapter—called “This Loved Philology” after a line
of Dickinson—that opens with Leo Spitzer and continues with a cento of
poets encompassing Dickinson, Frost, Williams, Bradstreet, and Gjertrud
Schnackenberg. Lerer’s America “is a land of taste” (96), and his philology
is appropriately less grandiose than Spitzer’s, but equally exact in its un-
derstated way. His falls, however, are cushioned. He quotes his excolleague
Denise Gigante writing about Adam and Eve—“That taste involves plea-
sure is a lesson the Romantics learned from Milton and that we learn from
Romanticism” (83)—not mentioning how our first parents’ fruit proved
“bitter Ashes, which th’ offended taste / With spattering noise rejected” (Par-
adise Lost, 10.566–67).
Finally, Lerer turns to the great tradition. The chapter title is “The
Tears of Odysseus,” but Lerer hardly shares them: he respects the heroic
immediacy of Homer, but inclines by preference toward the secondary
Virgilian line of “resistance to immediate feeling” (113). Here, too, Lerer’s
medievalist roots finally come to fruition, in an appreciation of the variety
E176 MODERN PHILOLOGY

of Chaucerian reception—the dreary “Tale of Melibee” was the fifteenth-

century favorite—whose moral is that literary traditions “bring individuals
into communities” (120). “I’d like to tell you that I wept when I read Ho-
mer,” but Lerer’s modernity is anything but a vale of tears. His peroration
evokes a vision of “an unknown neighbor, rapt in reading, smiling to her-
self, or wiping off a tear” (125). One tear, many smiles. “All children die” is
another of Lerer’s many aphorisms, “for to become a grownup, the child
must move on” (99).
Few are the books whose methods are their morals to this extent. You
cannot fail to be energized by Lerer’s discriminating approach to his af-
fections. You may even be transported by his gusto. And, at the same time,
you may feel, as I do, that he can get carried away. “My 1984” (his chapter
title) may not be yours; perhaps in your more sober moments you won’t
be persuaded that Orwell’s “nightmare version of the dream of reading . . .
differs only in degree from our experience” or that “Winston’s hideaway . . .
is what we want to cherish” (75–76). Certainly, there is a degree of mean-
der to the argument. Lerer’s greatest hits don’t cover all the bases, some of
the zingers sag (“Art is the magnifying glass to life. It makes things larger”
[70]), and a few retreads slip in: among his infallibly polite demurrers (no-
tably to Said and to Moretti), Judith Butler is debited with “copies of cop-
ies” on page 8 and again on page 19, the boundaries between life and lit-
erature are “blurry” on pages vii, 6, and 27, and the same sentence by
Harald Weinrich is quoted on pages xiii and 115. In a lecture these will
pass unnoticed or may even be valued reinforcement; in a short book they
stand out. And they are merely symptoms of the thematic redundancies.
An example is the seventy occurrences of “remember” and its derivatives,
“memory,” and “recollect.” These numbers are dwarfed in turn by Lerer’s
favorite lexeme, the 231 first-person plural pronouns (as counted by Ama-
zon, some of them in quotes and titles). “We” is the vehicle through which
Lerer imagines the human collective. It’s his answer to the publisher’s
thorny “you.”
Readers will vary as to whether they feel included in Lerer’s “we,” co-
opted by it, or excluded. Personally, I’m skeptical whether traditions are
always so hearty and welcoming as Lerer wishes. His vision of children’s
literature, for instance, exudes a pseudo-Victorian innocence. Its nadir is
termed “an idiom of urban disaffection,” a phrase that hardly captures
the brutality of the Lemony Snicket books to which it refers (20). His Chil-
dren’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of
Chicago Press, 2009) basically limits the even more sadistic Hans Christian
Andersen to his autobiography, its Grimms return us to “the childhood of
language and of society themselves” (216)—forget all those evil witches
and carnivorous wolves—and if Freud is lurking in the background (he is
not mentioned in Tradition), it is only because “he returns us to the world
 Book Review E177

of the Grimms and their folk forebears: to the transformation of the sex-
ual life of little girls into figure and fantasy” (Children’s Literature, 232). Yet
not all Dickens’s readers are as adorably childish as Dick and Joe; the
malicious Silas Wegg teaching Boffin to read by pummeling him with
“Eight wollumes” by “Decline-And-Fall-Off-The-Rooshan-Empire” would
seriously darken the picture (Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. An-
drew Lang [New York: Scribner’s, 1905], 64 [chap. 5]). And suppose your
adolescent reading took off from Poe and The Lord of the Flies? To found
community building on tradition presupposes choosing the right tradi-
tion and, I fear, ignoring the impact of others.
Innocuous, yes. Insignificant, no. Lerer’s sermon may suffer from whiffs
of holy smoke. But behind it lies a sermonizer of admirable gifts. While too
much of human reality is left out, you will be hard pressed to find a better
model of attentiveness to the matter at hand, of wide-ranging, meticulously
observed appreciation, of unpedantic collegial dialogue, of lucid address. If
it provokes you, well, debate at this level is worth fostering. And some lemon
balm on our society’s snark might do us all good.
If this book has a devil, it lies in the conception, but certainly not in
the details, which are richly rewarding throughout. Indeed, however you
judge the thesis, and despite the stylistic wrinkles, if you want a model
for composing a fine short book, you would do well to start with this one.
Marshall Brown
University of Washington