Dear Dean Pleasures,
You are about to begin reading a dissertation called On The Wonder of Mentors Never Met: A Memoir of a Reading Life, by RCP. I want to say right off the bat, “Prepare yourself,” and “I encouraged this.”
Since most dissertations make an “argument” of some sort, you are probably expecting “argument” as you get set to plow through this one. Most dissertations also include an abstract—a little 300-word synopsis of the main argument. But you will not find one in this dissertation, because we both agreed that this little memo to you might serve that function and fit the overall ethos of the project far better than a conventional abstract.
The “argument” in this dissertation is not terribly profound or original. Simply put, reading good books can change one’s life for the better. Books have helped form R, the protagonist of the memoir. He narrates the story of how “book mentors” have shaped his life.[1] A book like this one might even become a mentor to its readers. As R suggests throughout, this book, through the process of his writing it, has become one of his.
As you read, you will want to watch for recurring motifs and ideas. As I understand the project, these ideas recur for a reason: because they are important to the overall impression he hopes to make on the reader. Here are the top ten themes to watch for (in no particular order of importance) as you read this work. Try teasing this much helpful information from traditional abstract.
- Loss. The narrator of this story has lost his very best friend in the world, and this has altered the color of everything. Tragedy weaves its way through this narrative.
- Redemption. Sometimes things come together for good. R believes that the redemptive work of God has woven itself into the very fabric of the universe; he has discovered glimpses of the redemptive in some seemingly strange places, like in books by those who claim they don’t believe in such things.
- Mentoring. R gets by with a little help from his friends, some of which are books, some of which are not. Though this loving tribute is not exhaustive, one would have to be asleep while reading to miss that the central theme of this work is the impact that book mentors and other mentors have had upon his life.
- Reading. It goes without saying that R likes to read. As his advisor, I know that he finds writing about what he has read an enormous chore, and yet through this chore he comes to conclude with some of his book mentors (Lewis, Tolstoy, the Christian mystics) that it is the “fire of suffering which will bring forth the gold of godliness.”[2] We suffer unto wisdom. R does, however, thoroughly enjoy reading and refashioning what he has composed. You will probably get the impression, as I have, that writing this thing was hard work. But, as he told me once in an e-mail, reading his own attempts at early drafts of its parts or of whole chapters or even the first draft of the whole began to give him more and more pleasure, especially as those drafts improved. He said he would much rather read what he has written than actually write it in the first place.
- Rebellion. R has a love/hate relationship with his past. In part, he rebels against it; but in part, he also rebels against those who have rebelled against it, which leads him back to embrace it. He once told me that he woke up to Bob Marley’s “Soul Rebel”[3] virtually every morning while writing this dissertation.
- Mysticism. R has confessed to me that he is a wannabe mystic, and that one of his narrators is a much more adept contemplative than he is. That is the voice you’ll hear when you read the “Letters by a Post-modern Mystic.”
- Sports. R actually is an athlete, though I sense he feels something like regret that he is more athletic than mystical. I suppose we might as well add regret to the list of themes, as well.
- The painfully obvious post-modernist device of the self-conscious or self-reflexive narrative. This work is narrated both in the first person and the third person. Hint: notice the use of italics. Those italicized sections are my favorites, I think, because he is at his most honest and transparent in them.
- The unreliable narrator. Not many dissertations are written using this device, but let’s face it: all narrators are unreliable. It’s not so much that every teller of a tale always intends to be unreliable or misleading, but everyone is. Every sentence ever uttered leaves out a million other sentences needed to qualify the previous sentence’s intended meaning. There just isn’t enough time to clarify everything we mean to say. And so, our narrations end up being unreliable. That doesn’t mean they can’t also be true. But they are not the whole truth.
- Hope. R never sheds his tendency toward optimism. When he expressed some worry to me about his work being so hopeful that it might be dismissed as “hokey,” I asked him where his optimism came from. He told me a story about playing in a college basketball game in which his team was losing 48-19 with about ten minutes left in the first half. And then they came all the way back and won the game. And then he said, “Did we win the game because my teammates and I possessed exceptional levels of hope, or did I come to have an extraordinarily hopeful outlook because we came back and won that game and more than a few others like it?”[4]
I trust this memo does not spoil all the magic of discovering these themes all by yourself as you read. If you are feeling right now like I have done what should be left up to you as the reader, just remember this little proverbial wisdom from Angela Carter which R scribbled on a little sticky note attached to a draft of a chapter he sent me early on in the process. “Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. . . .You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”[5] I agree.
R has described a lot of the “re-writing” he has done in the pages that follow. Now I guess it’s your turn, Dean Pleasures.
You are about to begin re-writing a dissertation called On The Wonder of Mentors Never Met: A Memoir of a Reading Life, by RCP.
Sincerely,
Laura Sommers
[1] More on the topic of narrators below. Judith Barrington says the following about “the narrator” of a memoir. “The narrator is the protagonist of your memoir. It’s a term also used in fiction and poetry, and refers to whoever is telling the story. When thinking about your memoir or discussing it with your writing group (if you have one), you should always refer to the character who is you in the story as ‘the narrator,’ not as ‘I.’ Similarly, your friends or colleagues should refer to the protagonist of your story as ‘the narrator’ and not as ‘you.’ Although you are both the writer of the memoir and the central character in the story, they should be treated as two distinct entities. Thus, a friend could appropriately ask: ‘why did you [the writer] describe the narrator [protagonist] as a mouse on page three?’ (Not: ‘Why did you describe yourself as a mouse on page three’). Separating yourself as writer from yourself as protagonist will help give you the necessary perspective to craft the memoir as a story. It will also decrease the degree to which you feel exposed as others critique your work.” Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth To Art, 2nd ed. (Portland, Oregon: The Eighth Mountain Press, 2002), 25.
[2] Guyon, Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte, Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ (Beaumont, Tex: SeedSowers, 1996), 46.
[3] Bob Marley & The Wailers, “Soul Rebel,” Africa Unite: The Singles Collection, music performed by composers, Tuff Gong/Island Records B0005723-02, 1970, 2005, CD.
[4] This question about causation—did experiences like that one cause him to be hopeful or did the fact that he never gave up hope make it more likely that he would have experiences like that one— alludes to “Scholarly Frame III: Which Came First: How (My) Faith Shapes (My) Reading Shapes (My) Faith.” From time to time in footnotes throughout the project R continues the trend of self-consciously drawing attention to what he is up to. Other times he leaves the fun and magic of discovery to the reader.
