Pseudo-scholars

The pseudo-scholar. A class of, that apparently 'includes professors who have written large books on the novel as well as all the people who read superficially', to whom E. M. Forster addressed his Clark lectures, somewhat sarcastically, with irony. For they were not true readers; they did not as a true reader would enter into a struggle with the writer. Though the struggle begun will, of course, be one-sided, the writer having done and closed the subject. The reader discourses with a creation independent of its author and can expect no authorial responses, except those from reviewers and critics and teachers and professors should it have become a required text. And even if the latter should be the case and the text is read under some duress, the struggle is still the reader's own, so that he or she will have to make their own judgements and reach their own conclusions, and determine, for instance, why they may be troubled or exercised.
A struggle is also, it's worth pointing out, not determined by length. A slim volume, of say seventy to one hundred pages, can be as equally thought-provoking or maddening as one of such size and weight it makes a good doorstop. The slimmest are not, as is frequently assumed, the simplest, nor the fattest, the more complex. It's very often, in my experience, the reverse, perhaps due to language or style or the psychology of the protagonist, or the historical circumstances covered. The slim can pack a punch, whilst the fat's punches are evenly spaced in-between more slow-paced action, usually ending on a damp note, as too many words by this time had been spent; the reader's struggle having ended some pages ago, past caring, though on they read to the bitter end.
Size, then, (the number of pages or words), can determine the novel's energy, and how too the reader's struggle will be charged. A quick read and the ground on which the reader-writer relationship is built may prove less firm, less secure than the cosy one formed with a confiding narrative made of many words. One may exhaust with its nervous tension, the other may only have moments of it, interspersed with moments of stillness, peace. One's protagonist-narrator may make the reader uncomfortable with his actions, the other less uneasy and more complicit. The writer either indifferent to the reader, or the reader, and their perception, made to feel involved in the story.
Pseudo-scholars know only a little or nothing of these struggles, for they read not to challenge themselves, but because they are told, led, as it were by bestselling lists and the choices of their contemporaries, and so cannot engage with a novel in quite the same way as a true reader or a real scholar.
'The word [genius]', to quote Forster, 'exempts him [the pseudo-scholar] from discovering its meaning.' A genius writes literature; all novelists therefore are geniuses, a class apart from the rest of us, even if the novel, born of the genius' hand and itself declared genius, has not been digested or even partially consumed. The pseudo-scholar, as said before, would rather go around proclaiming their uninformed opinions than sit down alone and read. For, I imagine, if we take the same French critic's definition of the novel as Forster does in his introductory lecture anything above 50,000 words would be too much. A pseudo-scholar would prefer in that instance to place their hands upon it as one might do a Bible and hope some, if not all, of what it contains is transferred to their brain. Perhaps some have tried this?

Picture credit: Scholars at a Lecture, William Hogarth (source: WikiArt).

See Aspects of the Novel by E.M Forster.

Adapted from journal entries, August 2021.