Autodidacts

 A friend and I were swapping tales of the minor intellectual humiliations in life that stem from trying to pronounce words that one has previously only ever encountered in print (a topic subconsciously prompted, perhaps, by my having just gotten to the part in Nabokov's Pale Fire in which his narrator/commentator, Charles Kinbote, observes that Baudelaire is a two-syllable name, the middle "e" having no metrical weight, and suddenly feeling like I had to reevaluate my whole life). 

I forwarded my friend a poem I had written on this very subject over a year ago. Noting the dangers of things like the silent "l" in Ralph Vaughan Williams, I observed "These are the things/You can’t get/Just from reading/Unless, that is,/You know/The pronunciation code," referring to the international phonetic alphabet (to which even the most solitary autodidact has recourse in principle). 

My friend had two responses to this vein of half-humorous self-pity. First, he observed, I'm not alone in this. It happens to others, including himself. He cited the perils of "epitome," which can ensnare even the most conversant in spoken English. A young reader may be fully aware of the existence in speech of a word that sounds like "epitom-ie," after all—and yet still fatally blunder when encountering the word in print for the first time, it resembling and having the weight and heft so appropriate to the word we apply to a fat volume. 

(This is, by the way, an instance that appears to echo down the ages—in V.S. Pritchett's memoir A Cab at the Door, he notes his own lifelong vulnerability to "intellectual disaster," and cites as an example this very menace. "For years I thought this book was called the Opitomy Book," he writes, "for I used to think of epitome as a three-syllable word.")

Another example that my friend and I have discussed before is the deadly "misled." Just as with epitome, one may know perfectly well that there is an English word pronounced "miss-led"—and still for all this stumble when encountering the same word in print. For it seems just to sound so very right that there should be another word—pronounced something like "m-aye-zzull'd"—that would convey a similar sense of bamboozlement and crass deception. 

That Anglo-Saxon term, by the way, is an exception. For the most part, all of the greatest dangers in English attend words of Greek origin. And thus these remain the surest ways to distinguish the self-taught reader from among the crowd of university-educated sapients. Indeed, it is precisely the ability to avoid bungling Greek terms that the literary critic I.A. Richards cites as perhaps the only justification for going to college at all. 

As he observes in The Philosophy of Rhetoric: "Even extensive reading [...] will not protect us from the awful dangers of saying [...] Penny-lope or Hermi-one." (That latter having taken on special relevance to generations of readers long after Richards' time, who perhaps made it through entire volumes of the Harry Potter series before a film or audiobook version finally disabused them of how they had been accustomed to mentally pronounce the Muggle-born luminary's name). 

Richards goes on: "I well remember a worthy young autodidact from Manchester bursting in upon me to announce with deep enthusiasm that he had become, in the vacation, 'Desperately keen on Dant and Goath.'" Which reminds me of my own youthful indiscretions, when—as a high school freshman or thereabouts—I thought myself erudite for being familiar with the name of "Johann von Go-eth." I guess pride does indeed goeth before a fall. 

But Richards' example brings me to my friend's second argument: namely, that far from being ashamed of these intellectual catastrophes (four syllables), we should wear them as a badge of honor. Why? Because they show we have not just been the products of the forced tuition of others, but have in fact carved a path for ourselves into the world of letters. We should be proud, not embarrassed, at being autodidacts. 

Of course, it is stretching the definition of that term to breaking point to describe two people with multiple degrees in humanistic disciplines as in any sense "self-taught"—but it derives a kind of spiritual truth from the fact that all the books that every really meant anything to me—with a handful of exceptions—were encountered outside the classroom. 

But is being an autodidact a good thing? In Martin Amis' The Information, the sadistic criminal Steve Cousins describes himself as one (his bookshelf reflecting a bias, fittingly enough, toward the analysis of the roots of violence: we see him in the course of the novel with both Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression and Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power), and this prompts the Oxford-educated Richard Tull to sneer: "Autodidact—that's a tough call. You're always playing catch-up[.]"

Likewise, the "self-taught man" in Sartre's La nausée is a pathetic figure at best, who is spotted early on in the novel toiling his way through the library shelves in outrageously plodding and literal-minded fashion (his method of attack upon the world of letters being, as our narrator eventually discovers, to work his way through the library's entire contents alphabetically, going by the author's last name). 

As these examples subtly indicate—along with Richards' meaning-laden observation that the young man in his example was "from Manchester"—the game of "spot the autodidact" is in large part (especially in a European context) about reaffirming class distinctions. The working-class reader in a free circulating library can obtain—with diligence—most of the same knowledge that one could acquire in a university. But there will always remain holes in their armor when it comes to the sort of lore generally only picked up through learned conversation.

The pronunciation blunders reveal little about how much one has read, that is to say (though to persist in mispronouncing "epitome" or "Baudelaire" perhaps means that one should more closely read one's Pritchett or one's Nabokov—though they come, alas, relatively late in the alphabet); but they reveal a great deal about whether or not one's life has been passed among sophisticates for whom learning is acquired through the medium of the verbal witticism, uttered with impeccable pronunciation.

I am fortunate, however, not to live in Europe, or at an earlier time in history. I live in the postmodern and mechanistic and democratic United States of the twenty-first century, where there is no agreed-upon canon of respectable knowledge, and any humanistic learning—being never demanded or expected in any professional setting, and never yielding the slightest material gain once possessed—is acquired only by those who perversely and idiosyncratically persist in gleaning it for themselves for their own inscrutable reasons. 

The age of the autodidact has come.