Berkeley Book List: Literature

Anne Anlin Cheng, associate professor, English Villette, Charlotte Bronté, reprinted by Modern Library, 1991 The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad, reprinted by Oxford Press, 1998 The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison, reprinted by Penguin USA, 2000 A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee, reprinted by Riverhead Books, 2000 Praise, Robert Hass, Ecco, 1990

Being asked to narrow down my favorite books to a mere handful seems an impossible task, so I have made some special but perhaps idiosyncratic choices. What these books have in common are the ways in which they have altered how I think about the written word.

Charlotte Brontés's Villette must be one of the most haunting and curious confessional novels in the English language. When George Eliot called this novel "preternatural," she might have been trying to capture some of this text’s uncanny quality, the hauntedness of its voice. In the story of Lucy Stone, a sensitive yet indomitable young English woman who ventures off to France without means or family support, love’s plenitude turns out to be eerily similar to love’s impoverishment. To read Villette is to listen to a voice speaking from an empty grave. The other book that reminds me of a like understanding of the profoundness of human loneliness is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which was for me extremely painful to read as a teenager, but as an adult with some life experiences, I was completely mesmerized by the novel’s insights into loss and grief and, in particular, the character of Winnie Verloc who is a peculiar combination of impenetrable surface and psychological privation.

Critic Claudia Tate has written that authors of color often feel obliged to document their communities’ histories of suffering and marginalization, a burden that she calls "the protocol of race". In authors such as Toni Morrison and Chang-rae-Lee, however, we have examples of how fiction might do so much more than document historical injury or offer social plaints, as it were. Instead, both The Bluest Eye and A Gesture Life highlight the power of fiction to engage and re-imagine the realm of material history. A response to Brown v. Board of Education and the still vibrant controversy that it sparked over the question of psychological injury, Morrison’s brilliant first

novel offers us, not merely a testimony of discrimination, but an examination of the etiology of love and hate that finds and is founded by discrimination. An unflinching novel about racism within the African American community, "The Bluest Eye" suggests that discrimination not only perpetuates hate but also troubles the distinctiveness of love itself. Thus discrimination produces a crisis of affective distinction, rendering affective discrimination impossible. As Morrison writes, "... the love of a free man is never safe. There is not love for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love." Love, like freedom, is already itself a compromised ideal. In a similar vein, "A Gesture Life" suggests that the question of love that we like to think of as pure inevitably also evokes a question of ethics. "A Gesture Life" explores assimilation as a double bind between survival and deception, placing the problem of assimilation squarely in the tradition of "passing," a theme that has haunted American literature.

Finally, I end with a collection of poems by Robert Hass: Praise. I highlight this early collection because it was my first introduction to my now colleague’s work and because, when I first read that book as a teenager in Savannah, Georgia, I thought to myself, I don’t know who this man is, but having written a book like this, he would never have to write another line. Of course he went on to write many more gorgeous volumes of poetry, but I will never forget the impact that this book had on me. A person can read and admire many things over the course of time, but once in a rare while, you read something, and it drastically changes your mind about what language or a genre can do. I am speaking of something more than an intellectual insight; it is about having your mind and soul’s tectonic plates shift. "Praise" was one of those books for me. I try to remember those moments in my life. They are compensations against a truth that "Praise" apprehended: "In this life we lead every paradise is lost."

About Anne Anlin Cheng
Anne Anlin Cheng is associate professor of English and American Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Her research interest include psychoanalysis and race and gender. She is the author of "The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief."