The Celebratory Shelf, and Percy's Paradox

Trust Patrick Kurp to come up with something interesting that I’ve never seen before. Here he introduces Alfred J. Appel Jr.

In The Art of Celebration (1992), the Nabokov scholar Alfred J. Appel Jr. proposes that we devote four or five of our bookshelves exclusively to what he calls “the life-affirming, celebratory works of the twentieth century.” Along with recordings by Louis Armstrong, Ruby Braff and Henry “Red” Allen, and the movies of Astaire-Rogers, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin and Keaton, Appel suggests appropriate books:

“Ulysses should occupy a place of honor on the top, shortest Yes Celebratory Shelf, flush left against the varnished wood. Nabokov, a writer whose works I happen to love, should have seven or so inches to himself there, next to Joyce. Hardcover volumes of the collected poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur will be conspicuous for their handsome, durable spines.”

Appel is not suggesting we judge literature with a Happy Meter: Life-affirming, good; Nay-saying, bad. In fact, he admires Kafka while placing him, rightly, on the “No” shelf, probably next to Beckett.

The “celebratory” shelf is a great idea—I must run home and get the hammer. But “yea” and “nay” is more complicated. Joyce and (even more) Nabokov can be among the chilliest writers in the corpus. On the other hand someone (I think it was Walker Percy, of which see infra) pointed out that Kafka’s first readers fell down on the floor laughing, saying – omigawd, he got us to the life. I believe I have heard the same thing re Chekhov.

"Fell down on the floor laughing"--the point here, I think, is what I dub “Percy’s paradox”—“the man on the train who is alienated, and who then reads a book about a man who is alienated, is no longer alienated.” Percy elaborates:

That's the aesthetic reversal, which I noticed way back. It's a curious thing. I don't think enough attention is paid by psychologists or by semioticists to the curious fact that situations which are experienced directly can be painful (or of not much account, or even of not much meaning), but when they are read about or written about, a kind of reversal takes place--and the reader or the writer takes pleasure in it. The pleasure is a fundamental thing, going back to the origins of speech or consciousness …

[Here’s the link.]