Thursday, November 18, 2004
Notes on “I am Charlotte Simmons”
Wolfe immediately creates the perfect girl: brilliant and also beautiful without knowing it. The character has that quality, elusive in the Post-Modern Era, of purity. Not simply a virginal purity, which is there. She is also pure in a Kierkegaardian sense of being dedicated to one thing: the life of the mind. The tragedy of the book is that this type of purity is anathema to the social life in the universities of our day.
From my admittedly whiskey blurred memories, Wolfe nails the College Zeitgeist. We now see College as an Experience not as an education.
Wolfe writes compellingly. The dialogue is realistic. The story moves quickly. And we are talking about a monstrously huge book.
There are hints of Nietzsche throughout. This is fitting. The characters all deal with a crisis created by the clash of their values against a status driven, even uncivilized, morality that pervades their milieu. Nietzsche wrote that the Death of God would lead to the upheaval of the value systems of the past. Quite possibly we are living in the midst of that. But we live without Nietzsche's fantasy of becoming Super-Men.
The book is ultimately great not because of the ideas that so captivate your humble blogger. It is great because we see and feel this young woman slam into the social world of college. Her trials and transformations are heartbreaking. Wolfe forces us to understand the pain of a dumb jock realizing he is just a dumb jock, and of a geek fighting against his emasculated place in the world. The book illuminates the politicized university that acts as the backdrop to this story.
I will stop here without giving away anything more. Buy the book.
From my admittedly whiskey blurred memories, Wolfe nails the College Zeitgeist. We now see College as an Experience not as an education.
Wolfe writes compellingly. The dialogue is realistic. The story moves quickly. And we are talking about a monstrously huge book.
There are hints of Nietzsche throughout. This is fitting. The characters all deal with a crisis created by the clash of their values against a status driven, even uncivilized, morality that pervades their milieu. Nietzsche wrote that the Death of God would lead to the upheaval of the value systems of the past. Quite possibly we are living in the midst of that. But we live without Nietzsche's fantasy of becoming Super-Men.
The book is ultimately great not because of the ideas that so captivate your humble blogger. It is great because we see and feel this young woman slam into the social world of college. Her trials and transformations are heartbreaking. Wolfe forces us to understand the pain of a dumb jock realizing he is just a dumb jock, and of a geek fighting against his emasculated place in the world. The book illuminates the politicized university that acts as the backdrop to this story.
I will stop here without giving away anything more. Buy the book.
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Before I picked up Charlotte Simmons, I re-read Hooking Up as a primer. Glad I did. Nearly every theme covered in Simmons was touched upon in Hooking Up-- most obviously was Edward Wilson's neuro-socio-biology theories. One quick idea touched on in Hooking Up was the idea that after a period of decadence, a culture will undergo a "great relearning." One sees this happen in Simmons and, it goes without saying, in a Wolfian these are the facts, non preachy sort of way. The students whose lives were filled with hedonisim are inexplicably drawn to the virtue of Simmons. Jojo's life is turned around after he rediscovers (or maybe discovers for the first time) the importance of the liberal arts. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting thread.
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