Beowulf on the Beach

One of the most common assumptions people make about my choice of career is that I am as well-read as my job description implies, and because of that, I have a reason to be - even an obligation to be - snooty about my reading choices, and make equally snooty declarations regarding any literary work I come across. These people look at me and titter, and say that I must have read the Russian novelists and enjoyed them, or that I must find Joyce and Woolf exceedingly enlightening reads.

But I do not like a classic simply because it is a classic, and as a professor I'm supposed to like them. As a matter of fact, there are certain classics that I hate with a passion. Finnegans Wake is my favorite example. A lot of people assume that I must love it, because I teach literature, but in truth, I absolutely abhor the thing. My relationship with James Joyce and his work is ambivalent at best, and my stand on Ulysses (the only long work of his that I was able to tolerate enough to read to the end) is a bit wobbly. But I hate Finnegans Wake, and personally believe that Joyce was either trying to be an absolute prick, or had drunk a little too much whiskey or absinthe (or both!) while writing it. The same can be said of The Catcher in the Rye, which I hated when I was made to read it in high school, and though my dislike has faded somewhat, I still wouldn't say that I like it because it's a classic.

On the other hand, there are also quite a few classics that I do enjoy. Homer's epics are absolute gems, and I love reading them. The same goes for Shakespeare's work, though I am more of a fan of his comedies than his tragedies. Pride and Prejudice is all right, but I think Jane Eyre is superior (and I have thought this way since I was sixteen, when they were required reading - and at the time, I couldn't stand Pride and Prejudice). Lady Chatterley's Lover is a heartbreaker, in more ways than one, and the same might be said of Don Quixote. And there are so many other classics besides: the swashbuckling adventures of Alexandre Dumas; the intricate logic-puzzles of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the twisted dreamland logic of Lewis Carroll. And this is just the Western side of things: I have not yet gotten into the delicate meditative beauty of the Genji Monogatari, for instance, or the aching longing for home in Bienvenido Santos's works (as best exemplified in the short story “The Day the Dancers Came”).

Unfortunately, not a lot of people (nor a lot of my students) share the same enthusiasm as I do about the classics - or about reading in general. I feel this points to a fundamentally incorrect handling of the teaching of literature, particularly at the grade-school level: reading must be taught not only because it is an essential skill, but also because it is one of the greatest pleasures one will ever know.

This, I think, is the core mission of Jack Murnighan's Beowulf on the Beach. He seeks to promote reading in general, but reading of the classics in particular, as a pleasurable endeavor, something that the reader does because he or she thinks it is a worthwhile effort, and not because he or she is required to read. Murnighan selects fifty classic texts from the Western canon (no surprise, since he is speaking primarily to an American audience), and then proceeds to offer a combination of cheat sheet and enticement, telling them the naughty bits and which chunks to skip, all in an effort to get the reader to at least try his recommendations.

In a way, the book reads like a collection of reviews, since what Murnighan does is what any book review tries to accomplish: point out the best bits, point out the worst bits, and then explain why or why not the book is a worthwhile read. And, like all reviews, Murnighan's opinions are really rather personal. At the end of the book he explains how difficult it was to narrow down a list of fifty books for this particular project, and in that explanation he also adds that the true factor that determined whether or not he used a book for his project was whether or not he liked it.

This, I think, certainly goes a long way towards explaining why Murnighan chooses the books he does. Note that he includes Joyce, but recommends Ulysses and not Finnegans Wake, even though higher authorities (other professors and literary connoisseurs) generally declare Finnegans Wake to be superior to Ulysses. But Murnighan openly thumbs his nose at this opinion, and makes no bones about why, precisely, he thinks Ulysses is better than Finnegans Wake. In this, at least, I agree with him: just because “authorities” declare a work to be superior to another, does not automatically mean that the “better” work is a “better read.”

It also helps to keep in mind the personal nature of the selections, as well as the opinions regarding them and the audience for whom the book was intended. A lot of the statements Murnighan makes throughout the book will undoubtedly grate on many readers, particularly the way he distinguishes between “manly” literature and “girly” literature, something which is particularly prevalent in the early part of the book, but which is present all throughout. There is a rather “douchebag” feel to Murnighan's writing, something which will undoubtedly put off more than a few readers. But then, one must remember that he is probably writing for an audience that appreciates such an approach - or perhaps, Murnighan himself believes it is the best approach, and so uses that instead of many other possible ways he could approach the subject at hand. This is certainly a good way of explaining why he dedicates a section of each entry solely to the “naughty bits” of a chosen book (though he also has another book solely about the naughty bits in books), and it also explains why he includes a section about what to skip in a particular work. While some people might disagree with this section entirely, I find that it can be useful when getting through some works like Homer's epics, where entire chunks of the epic are nothing more than lists and so have very little to contribute to the storyline itself. The reader may disagree with Murnighan about what (or what not) to skip in a book, but it must be admitted that there are very few classics (particularly early ones) that do not have chunks one can conveniently bypass without doing damage to one's understanding of the story - unless, of course, one is utterly enamored with the novel in question. That certainly seems to be the case with Murnighan and One Hundred Years of Solitude.

But for all that his writing makes him sound like a godawful douchebag, I will say quite a bit of it is humorous and very easy to read. There were quite a few times when I found myself laughing out loud over some line or idea, and it certainly helps in lightening up the ostensibly “serious” reads that Murnighan is trying to promote. While the jokes do grate on the nerves on occasion, there is a lot more there that is genuinely funny without being mildly offensive.

On the whole, Beowulf on the Beach is not entirely a bad read: it is rather entertaining, and really does try, in its own way (which may or may not be pleasing to the reader), to get the reader to try the classics Murnighan writes about. And although this is not a book about pedagogy, it does point out what is fundamentally wrong with the way literature is often taught in grade school and high school, and offers an alternate method of teaching it: get them to love it first by showing them what they can love about it, and all the rest will follow.