The Reading Experience

Informed Opinions

In her apparent farewell to the litblogosphere, Sandra at Book World asks of the prospect of blogging about Cormac McCarthy's The Road: "Does the world need another opinion on a book that everybody agrees is a masterpiece? What on earth can I add?"

Putting aside whether The Road is a masterpiece or not (I tend to think it isn't, although McCarthy has written other books that might be described in such terms), it is certainly the case that readers, especially McCarthy's readers, might indeed like to read insightful, well-informed commentary about the book, even if other such discussions have already appeared. The question is not whether another "opinion" is needed but whether that opinion is linked to a specific analysis of the book--pointing out specific attributes of form, style, or theme through quotation or extended description--that might reveal to other readers some angle of understanding or interpetation they haven't previously considered. While sometimes it might be interesting to know that a particular reader or critic simply liked or disliked a particular book--if that reader's judgments have in the past been sound--it is ultimately more useful to know how and why such judgments were formed based on an attentive reading of the text.

Recently Kevin Holtsberry posted a review of Mark Sarvas's Harry, Revised on his blog, Collected Miscellany. Kevin begins by asserting "I am not a literary critic," but his review in fact offers a laudable attempt to interrogate his response to the novel and to illustrate specifically why he "liked the book and even found it moving." Referring specifically to a review in the New York Times Book Review that called into question the novel's style, Kevin concedes that the writing "might not be for everyone" but points to compensating qualities that ought not be overlooked: a protagonist with whom many readers will identify, a structure emphasizing flashbacks that ultimately "creates a sense of tension as the reader comes to understand what really led to his wife's tragic death and his seemingly bizarre reaction," and a conclusion that brings "clarity and focus." I don't know if Kevin's review would convince readers of the negative NTYBR review that it was obsessed with style "to the point of excluding everything else" or not, but it certainly does back up its judgment with apt analysis, and potential readers of Harry, Revised would no doubt benefit from keeping Kevin's assessment in mind.

What the litblogosphere promises to offer is the possibility of multiple sources of well-supported reviews and commentary (many more than have been available in print publications, whose numbers are only continuing to decline, anyway), which can only enrich the discussion of current fiction (and poetry) and in turn encourage writers to believe their work is getting serious attention. Those who have criticized the litblogosphere precisely for the abundance of opinions on display have decried the loss of "authority" it thereby produces. But critical authority comes not from having your name in print in some putatively prestigious newspaper or magazine but from the care that has been taken to support an opinion with astute observation. This sort of authority can be claimed just as readily on literary weblogs as in print, and it probably needs to be claimed even more firmly if any kind of literary criticism is going to survive the death of print-based book reviewing.

Middlebrow Mediocrity

Everything that keeps our current literary culture mired in midddlebrow mediocrity is exemplified in Amy Bloom's novel, Away, and its reception by mainstream book reviewers when it was published last fall. The novel itself is not per se a "bad" novel--many worse ones are published and reviewed every season--but it is entirely undistinguished, to the point that my most immediate reaction to it was to wonder why it needed to exist in the first place. Moreover, that book reviewers would so exorbitantly praise such a novel, as in fact most of them did, strongly calls into question the standards being applied by those working in that branch of "literary journalism" represented by newspaper book sections. If Away is considered by "professional" book reviewers to be an exemplary work of serious literary fiction, which my reading of the reviews leads me to think is the case, then as a culture attuned to the possibilities of fiction as literary art, we in a sad state indeed.

In her Los Angeles Times review of the book, Lionel Shriver writes:

Amy Bloom's new novel, "Away," could be called formulaic. Her protagonist, Lillian Leyb, is on a quest of the most classic variety: to be reunited with her young daughter, lost in a Russian pogrom. Yet. . ."Away" testifies to the truism that execution is all. Bloom isn't fighting traditional forms; in some respects her second novel is one more standard American immigration tale. But her execution is exquisite. . . .

Later she adds:

Bloom breaks no new formal ground, yet not a line is trite nor a character stereotypical. Working comfortably within a conventional form, she renews and redeems it. The ultimate test of any writer may be taking on the most traditional of genres -- the love story, the ghost story, the immigration story -- and pouring new wine into old skins. . . .

Shriver's review reeks of the kind of rationalization book reviewers constantly offer when recommending "formulaic" fiction written "comfortably within a conventional form." Such fiction may otherwise seem "standard" in its use of all of the hand-me-down practices of traditional narrative, but it's still full of "finely wrought prose, vivid characters, delectable details," as Shriver puts it a few paragraph later. It may be utterly predictable, reinforcing safe and complacent reading habits by going no farther than to pour some "new wine into old skins," but if its "execution is exquisite," then no more should be asked of it. Who needs fiction that challenges formal expectations, offers an alternative to our hackneyed notions of "finely wrought prose"? Writers who pursue such challenges and alternatives are just "game-playing," anyway, so why not just settle for another feel-good novel and its "soft-smile, along-the-way humor."

Away is in fact just what Shriver initially judges it to be: a tired piece of formula fiction rehashing familiar themes of immigrant stories that cannot be redeemed by its "colorful" characters" or its "soft-smile" humor. In fact, both the characters and the "humor" with which their stories are larded seem only more cloying for the obvious effort being made to use them to inflate an inherently cliched narrative--a mother treks her way across the continent to be reunited with her child--into something less sentimental and more "vivid." Unfortunately, the vividness of the characters is almost entirely a result of their being enlisted in the attempt to justify retelling a "standard" story that otherwise has no real justification. As the novel's protagonist, Lillian, meets up with these characters--a homosexual actor, a black prostitute, an isolated telegraphist in the Yukon, etc.--the narrative becomes only more labored and the characters themselves only more an obvious effort to compensate for the fact the Lillian is essentially a cipher. It's hard finally to care much about her journey, or about the people she meets along the way, since she is so resolutely a blank slate on which these melodramatic adventures are being written--which is not, I don't think, the role for Lillian the author intended.

In her review of the book, Heather McAlpin observes that "Away is a compact epic, an adventure story, a survival tale and an incredible journey wrapped up in a historical novel cloaked in a love story. It evokes E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime in its playful fusion of fiction and fantasy and its exuberant tone. . . . " I don't know if Doctorow could have foreseen the influence Ragtime (as well as his subsequent historical novels) would have on writers following him, but contemporary fiction has indeed become inundated with novels whose primary purpose, or at least so it seems to me, is to "recreate" the past. If Away has any reason for being at all, this is it, to recreate a period of early 20th century American history (with the requisite allowance made for the "local color" as necessary literary device). Since I have frequently indicated my impatience with this sort of historical fiction--in which no other aesthetic purpose beyond evoking an historical event or period can be discerned--I will not dwell on its shortcomings here exept to note that Away is apparently based on historical fact, gleaned from several historical and autobiographical sources Bloom lists in her acknowledgments page, although "reconfigured. . .when it suited the story" (Author's Note). That reviewers would still be welcoming this sort of thing over thirty years after Ragtime, would even extol its virtues in the hyperbolic language used to praise Away, seems to me to indicate an even more impoverished attitude toward fiction's potential to continue to surprise than that illustrated in Amy Bloom's decision to write such a novel.

In what she apparently considers praise for Bloom's writing, Shriver exclaims that Bloom "conjures the kind of specific details that creative-writing teachers are eternally begging their students to generate." However, it is precisely Bloom's "finely wrought" prose, cut to fit the sort of default narrative realism encouraged by creative writing programs (or any other kind of systematic writing instruction) that makes Away seem so perfunctory, so indistinguishable from all the other manufactured works of narrative realism produced--with a few acceptable variations--according to a preconceived model of what a "well-made" novel should be like. That a novel like Away would be widely reviewed and favorably received is probably not surprising, since book reviewers, may of them "creative-writing teachers" themselves, generally seem to accept this model as well. But American fiction is not well-served when book review pages (the few of them that are left) give over so much of their space, and so little critical judgment, to such backward-looking, unimaginative work. Perhaps it is too much to ask that the editors of these pages more often consider art over commerce, the interests of literature over the interests of the status quo, but must they so consistently valorize the mediocre?

The Critical Sphere

Until recently, I was in the habit of posting on Fridays a list of interesting posts from around the blogosphere that I called "Weekend Reading." I mostly stopped assembling this list because blog readership tends to decrease substantially over the weekend, and I was not sure these links were getting noticed much. I am now going to begin posting on Mondays a similar selected list of posts from other blogs, and from online publications more generally, along with perhaps a few comments indicating my interest in the subject under discussion. I hope by doing this to call attention to the kind of critical thinking regularly appearing on blogs that somehow seems never to be cited by those blithely commenting on the litblogsphere without paying much attention to what it actually has to offer.

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Steve Mitchelmore succinctly explains why the continued insistence that biography aids our understanding of an artist's work just misses the point:

"But surely" says Nigel. . ."the 'essence' which makes Shakespeare Shakespeare, Picasso Picasso etc., although obviously important, is something beyond description, or comprehension." Well, yes. But not quite. We comprehend it every time we watch a Shakespeare play, look at painting by Picasso or read novels like Proust's. Everyone can comprehend the essence, just as everyone can frown over the painter's behaviour or gossip about the writer's sexuality. Yet comprehension is also the intoxication of reading. It ends as soon as the encounter is over. From then on, we begin to read backwards, towards the mirage of origin.

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"I don't see how the NBCC helps anything by publishing a list of recommendations that pretty much recommends the authors everyone is already reading," writes Scott Esposito. Neither do I, but it's exactly what we should expect from an organization like the NBCC. By its very nature it gropes toward the lowest common denominator. "The authors everyone is already reading" are inevitably what a group of newspaper book reviewers is going to consider it their job to "recommend," since these are the only authors who get reviewed to begin with.

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Jim H at Wisdom of the West is mostly correct in observing that

If a given novel or story is deemed to be merely the instantiation or embodiment of a philosophical doctrine then it is probably not a fully-realized work. It is hack work; its characters merely counters on a larger gameboard, its themes prefabricated, its "message" inauthentic.

I would disagree only in that I wouldn't necessarily call a "philosophical" novel "hack work." It may well be perfectly sincere and ultimately successful. . .as philosophy. I myself really only object to novels with "ideas" when their authors want to have it both ways: to use fiction as a vehicle for delivering a "message," but also to have their fiction considered first of all as a work of art. By all means write your novel of ideas; just don't tell me that this is a way of making art.

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At One-Way Street, Richard Prouty suggests that although digital technology "has opened a whole new realm of visual experience to photography," photography as an art form is suffering a kind of identity crisis:

If there's a broad trend, it's that digital technologies have allowed photography to assume the monumentality of painting. For instance, the Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen has a series of portraits blown up to the scale of an Ingres or David canvas. Marx once observed that new technologies initially take the form of the technology they replaced, but. . .digital photography seems content to re-enact analogue photography's fascination with painting.

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Jabberwock elegantly captures what separates Akira Kurosawa from other directors of "action" films:

I was wrong to think of “action” in The Seven Samurai purely in terms of the actual battle scenes; Kurosawa’s mastery of shot composition and sweeping camera movements bring a kinetic energy to even the quieter scenes. The film is full of superb setpieces, such as the shot of Kikuchiyo sitting on a rooftop with the samurai banner in his hand, suddenly looking up at the hills and seeing dozens of bandits riding down towards the village. But remarkably, each of these scenes also has a built-in intimacy. Never do you get the sense that the action in this film exists in isolation – it is informed by, and enriched by, what we gradually learn about the characters.

Unnuanced Pleasure

I thoroughly agree with Charles Taylor:

”John Wayne represents more force, more power than anyone else on the screen,” his frequent director Howard Hawks once said. A performer who wields that kind of force, and has a physical presence to match, does not provide nuanced pleasure. But only the crudest reading would reduce the overwhelming force of Wayne’s persona to gung-ho cheerleading for American right and American might. To be true to the contradictions and moral ambiguities of Wayne’s best performances—Stagecoach, Red River, The Searchers, True Grit, El Dorado—you’d have to say he stands not so much for American power as for the American experiment—and thus for the possibility that it could all go wrong.

Although I would subtract True Grit and El Dorado from the list of Wayne's best films and add She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (all films directed by John Ford, about whom the same thing could be said vis-a-vis "contradictions and moral ambiguities" that Taylor says of Wayne), as well as Rio Bravo, which is the focus of Taylor's essay.

The Winds of the World

As someone who would probably be associated with promoting the sort of novel being described here, I nevertheless have to say I find Alan Massie's evocation of the "self-enclosed novel" mostly incomprehensible:

One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. . .By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world.

I really have no idea what it would mean for a work of fiction to make "no reference. . .to anything beyond itself." It would at the least require that such a work be written in an invented language--and thus have no audience beyond the author him/herself--a language that would carry none of the "references" that English carries simply by being a historical language spoken by billions of people. And even if such a thing could be done, the invented language itself would have to make no reference to the "world of fact" its author would nonetheless still inhabit, presumably focusing entirely on an alternative "world of fact" that somehow only the author has ever experienced. This would indeed be quite a feat of self-isolation, and the resulting fiction would be cordoned off both from the actual "world of fact" and everyone inhabiting it, but the notion that some writers do this, or try to do it, is, of course, resolutely absurd.

In suggesting that certain fiction does "not appear to be set in time," Massie must mean that it does not directly refer to either current events as described by journalists or past events as related by historians. There's no other way to understand the bizarre claim that some novels want to deny "that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters." Since all humans live in the world of fact and are subjected to the "winds of the world," and since writers are themselves human, the stories and novels they write bear all the marks of that wind, even if some writers are less concerned with charting it directly than other writers.

Presumably a story like Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon" is the sort of thing Massie has in mind (although he gives no examples at all of the sort of thing he does have in mind). Or a novel such as Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association. "The Balloon" is an obvious fantasy, in which an infinitely expandable hot-air balloon is inflated until it spreads out and covers all of New York City. The story records the way the city's people adapt to and come to understand this "phenomenon": "There was a certain amount of argumentation about the 'meaning' of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena." Massie no doubt objects to the way in which a "self-enclosed" fiction like this casts doubt on "meaning," portrays meaning as something always up for grabs. But who could assert that this story rejects "the world of fact"? It is all about New York City, a "fact" that informs every line and paragraph. It's about New Yorkers, whose residence in the city most assuredly "influence[s] their behaviour" and "affect[s] the course of their lives."

The Universal Baseball Association is about as "self-enclosed" as a novel can get. It takes place completely inside the head of a man playing a game of fantasy baseball. He has created an entire league and invested it with a glorious past. He further invests it with a life-and-death significance that culminates in a horrible accident that tears his world (the baseball world) apart. Ultimately the novel is a kind of meditation on the interplay of fantasy and reality (the "world of fact" represented most obviously by baseball, a very real pastime in whose intricacies millions of people do become entangled), but it does subject its protagonist, however indirectly, to the "winds of the world." Those winds "impinge" on J. Henry Waugh in a particularly destructive way. He wants to be the God of his invented world, but the real world of chance and human imperfection intervenes nevertheless.

Massie essentially uses the distinction he draws between "self-enclosed" and "open" fiction to marginalize the former as "merely literary," while lauding the former for its willingness to "take on" history, "the world of harsh political fact which, working in conjunction with personal qualities, forms or deforms men’s lives." In Massie's view, the open novel "was invented more or less by Walter Scott," whose novels for Massie are exemplars of the kind of fiction that is "open" to the currents of reality. But I think he has it exactly backward. It's fiction like "The Balloon" and UBA that depicts the forces of "contingency" through exercises of the imagination, while writers of historical and "documentary" fiction are stuck with what was and what is. Self-enclosed fiction is actually "open" to any and all kinds of aesthetic innovation, while the "open" novel is closed to all but the most conventional approaches that allow the "world of fact" to predominate.

The important distinction to be made is not between "self-enclosed" and "open" works of fiction. It is between those works whose authors think of fiction as primarily an aesthetic form and those who think of it as a form of commentary on human behavior or the state of the the world, on "the world of harsh political fact" or some such thing. If you want to think of the latter kind of fiction as more "open," more "engaged" with facts and thus more relevant to your concerns as a reader, so be it. Some readers are impatient with art and want their novels to be like sociology only with stories, or like journalism with better stories. But this is no justification for defining a whole other kind of fiction almost out of existence and distorting it beyond recognition in the process.

The Road of Skepticism

In a series of posts about director Frank Tashlin and one of his early films, Son of Paleface, Ray Davis writes of the film's star, Bob Hope:

Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields drift mildly upwards into their personal unreal, tethered by rude tugs of slapstick and abuse. The Marx and Ritz Brothers drive reality squealing like a moneylender from the temple. Approaching sometimes the misanthropic babble of Groucho and sometimes the nightmarish openness of Fields, Hope is the first movie comedian to attain enlightenment by the road of skepticism: an absolute distrust that undercuts narrative drive, filmic convention, and his own part. On the other hand, he's not a delicate instrument; like a cartoon star, you know that if a bomb dropped on Hope, he'd be nervously wise-cracking in Hell next scene.

I agree with Ray entirely. In the great tradition of American slapstick comedy (what I also like to think of as a tradition of "carnivalesque" comedy as described by M.M. Bakhtin), Bob Hope is one of its most important figures, and perhaps the figure most unjustly left out of critical considerations of this tradition. Ray captures his "carnivalesque" qualities precisely: "an absolute distrust" of everything "serious" that informs all of his best films, right down to a distrust of his own role in the film. Not all of the jokes in all of the films work equally well--certainly not as consistently as those in the Marx Brothers films--but as a "movie comedian" his persona is just as acerbic as the other comedians Ray mentions and his best film work just as rewarding. (It must be admitted that he did make more bad films than most of the other great screen comics, especially later in his career, but his early work still holds up.)

Some viewers might object to Hope's films based on a dislike of his conservative political views. But, as with Charlton Heston, such viewers should reconsider the extremely tenuous connection between those views expressed offscreen and Hope's considerable skills as a skeptical comedian.

Charlton Heston

Charlton Heston's political descent into right-wing crankery never really made me think less of his films--at least his better ones--just as Alec Baldwin's liberal activism doesn't make me think more highly of his. (Or, for that matter, make me value Heston's films of the 50s and 60s, when he was himself a Hollywood liberal, more than those he made during and after his political conversion.) Whether actors choose to exploit their celebrity status in order to promote favored political causes is ultimately of little interest to me, although I certainly reserve the right to find their political views obnoxious, as I often did find Heston's.

Unfortunately, Heston was for the most part a rather wooden actor, so it's only in a handful of cases that one has to make the effort to separate the work from the man to begin with. Most of Heston's bad films (and there are many) fail because of poor scripts and/or his own undistinguished performances. Moreover, in some of his better films their success comes at least as much from the compensatory skills of the director (Orson Welles, Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah) or from a fortuitous match between role and Heston's impassivity as an actor (the various spectacles with which he is most closely identified). One remembers that Heston was in these films, but it is not his skills as an actor that make them memorable.

A significant exception to this pattern is Will Penny (1969), a relatively overlooked Western that depends entirey on Heston's sensitive portrayal of the eponymous protagonist, an aging cowboy who suddenly finds himself forming a family with a stranded married woman trying to make her way to California along with her young son. While Heston's previous "strong, silent" characers were laconically heroic, larger-than-life figures, Will Penny, though equally laconic and with his own kind of inner strength, is a modest, in some ways nondescript man mostly concerned just with surviving from season to season. Heston manages to find both the strength and the vulnerability in this man, and although the film creates considerable emotional resonance, it does not sentimentalize Will Penny and his circumstances, primarily because Heston manages to make the character's guilelessness, his essential innocence, seem genuine.

Will Penny probably belongs among the other "revisionist" Westerns of the late 60s/early 70s (The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, Ulzana's Raid), in which the conventionally heroic view of the American West, complete with gunslingers and persevering ranchers, was subjected to vigorous critique. In this case, the West is depicted as a place of hardship for those trying to extract a living from the land, the landscape itself rather bleak and blighted, including by those inhabiting the landscape, such as Quint (played by Donald Pleasance), a lunatic preacher who with his depraved sons stalk Will Penny almost to his death. Will Penny himself seems a revisionist Western hero, an unassuming, instinctively nonviolent character who even when he rides off into the sunset at the end of the film does so less as a gesture of rugged individualism than as a consequence of his own self-understanding--as much as he loves both the woman (played by Joan Hackett) and her son, as much as a settled life might appeal to him, he knows that he is too old and too habituated to his cowboying existence to adapt and that the woman, Catherine, should not be asked to sacrifice her marriage for a life as difficult as that she would share with him.

Heston manages to convey Will Penny's struggle to resolve his own conflicting impulses--to live an ordinary family life and to be honest with himself and the woman he loves--with affecting authenticity. Indeed, his performance is probably all the more convincing because of our association of Charlton Heston with Hollywood-style heroes of great determination if little depth. Will Penny seems to allow Heston to express facets of his talent his other roles forced him to suppress. In the process, Heston's performance in Will Penny helps to de-mythologize both the Western hero in particular and the Hollywood image of masculinity more generally. I don't know for sure what the later NRA President would have thought of this, but his opinion isn't really important, anyway.

At the Expense of the Content

At Costanza Book Club, Pacifist Viking asserts that when watching tv or movies "what sticks in my memory are not necessarily the ideas, but the aesthetic of the work," but when it comes to literature, "I'm not sure how I read different types of writing differently. I'm not sure my mind is operating differently whether I'm reading literature (poetry, drama, or fiction), history, theology, philosophy, criticism, essays, any remotely serious writing: I'm not entirely sure there's a difference in the way I read."

This attitude toward reading is probably not uncommon (everything gets smashed together as "serious writing" and then mined for "ideas"), and the contrast between what PV looks for in visual media and what he looks for in books also betrays a no doubt common assumption about the "aesthetic": it's fine when it means noting "the beautiful image" in works no one would take seriously for their "ideas" to begin with, when pretty pictures and "colorful" characters can substitute for content in otherwise content-less entertainments, but where "serious writing" is concerned it becomes embarassing, "merely" aesthetic. Thus PV's rejection of aestheticism, whereby the "primary" focus becomes "on the aesthetic at the expense of the content."

To me it's telling that when insisting he does nevertheless have respect for the aesthetic qualities of literature, PV appeals to Paradise Lost as an example: "I adore Paradise Lost. I love the content and I love the ideas. But I also love the imagery Milton conjures. I love his poetry. I could spend a long time analyzing and discussing his art in the epic poem. It's a poem beautifully structured and containing many beautiful lines of poetry. It's a poem so rich in both art and content that I rather think it transcends any meaningful separation between the art and the ideas." Paradise Lost certainly is "a poem beautifully structured and containing many beautiful lines of poetry," but it's also a poem in which it's actually quite easy to separate the "art" from the "content," since few people who read the poem now can have much sympathy for its defense of Puritan theology--which is the only "idea" I can find in the poem-- as anything more than a historical curiosity. One loves Paradise Lost precisely because it is such an aesthetically powerful work despite its rather repellent "idea" of Christianity. It's the first work I think of when challenged to provide an example of a work of literature in which art trumps content.

PV doesn't want to let go of the belief that in literature one finds "education and edification." Perhaps this is why he is willing to leave it jumbled up with "history, theology, philosophy, criticism." Literature, like these other forms, is good for you, while the diversions provided by films and tv shows can be acceptably relegated to the "aesthetic." As I read PV's post, it seems to me that he has the most trouble separating prose fiction from the other kinds of "serious writing," perhaps because both poetry and drama exhibit their aesthetic natures somewhat more immediately. Prose fiction is less able to differentiate itself from the discursive methods of these other, non-literary forms; sometimes it imitates those methods directly. But this is no reason to collapse the differences between fiction and "history, theology, philosophy, criticism." Indeed, there's all the more reason to maintain the separation, to allow fiction to explore the possibilities of verbal art in ways that aren't so plainly visible.

The Play of Fancy

In a previous post, I expressed my puzzlement at Peter Brooks's view, articulated in his book Realist Vision, that the 19th century "is the time of industrial, social and political revolution, and one of the defining characteristics of realist writing is I think a willingness to confront these issues. England develops a recognizable 'industrial novel,' one that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict, and France has its 'roman social,' including popular socialist varieties." I wondered why

a defining feature of realism would be the willingness to "confront" issues or to "take on" social problems. If works of fiction are truly "realistic," immersed in the details of life as lived, they will naturally, sooner or later and in one way or another, engage with the issues and the problems of the times. There is no need to take that extra step, to insist that "issues" be confronted, unless the writer's (and the critic's) real interest lies in "taking on" social problems, on using fiction as a tool of social amelioration rather than regarding it as a self-sufficient form of literary art.

As it turns out, maintaining an analysis of realism that emphasizes "taking on" social problems as a defining characteristic requires a skeptical attitude toward the literary art of two of realism's ostensible founding figures, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert. Brooks writes of Dickens's Hard Times, perhaps his own most concentrated portrayal of the social conditions of Victorian England:

By its play on the streets and surfaces of Coketown, the narratorial prose upholds that ideal evoked in the allusion to the Arabian Nights: the play of fancy, of metaphor, of magic and the conterfactual. The narratorial language is constantly saying to Coketown, as to Gradgrind and company, I am not prisoner of your system, I can transform it, soar above it, through the imaginative resources of my prose.

This is Brooks's ultimate judgment on Dickens as a writer who evokes the surfaces of realistic description, at times soars above them, but doesn't really grapple with the "issues" behind them: he writes too much. As Brooks puts it a little later, Dickens engages in "the procedure of turning all issues, facts, conditions, into questions of style." Rather than acknowledging that "Everything in the conditions of Coketown. . .cry out for organization of the workers," Dickens just plays his grandiose language games. He makes "the questions posed by industrialism too much into a trope."

For Brooks, Hard Times is not so much a "taking on" of the harsh realities of 19th century England but a retreat from them into. . .literature. Dickens doesn't attempt the politically-directed representation of these forces but instead the "nonrepresentation of Coketown in favor of something else, a representation of imaginative processes at work, a representation of transformative style at play on the world." It is difficult at times in reading this chapter to remember that Brooks intends such words as criticism. The "representation of imaginative processes at work" that Brooks describes here has always seemed to me one of the glories of Dickens's fiction.

Brooks gestures at granting Dickens his artistic preferences, but it's pretty clear from his discussion of Hard Times that he doesn't value these preferences in the same way he values fiction "that takes on the problems of social misery and class confict," or at least that does so without turning them into tropes. Certainly Brooks doesn't want to admit Dickens's fiction, with its out-of-control "narratorial prose" and its stubborn insistence on imagination, into the club of respectable realism.

With Flaubert, Brooks is less impatient with his style per se but still essentially accuses Flaubert of writing too much--of being preoccuped with writing, in this case of being fixated on structure and on detail ("le most juste"). According to Brooks:

. . .it may be precisely in this disciplining of his imagination to something he loathes that the arduous perfection of Madame Bovary is forged. There is nothing natural about this novel. It is absolutely the most literary of novels, Henry James said--which he did not mean entirely as praise. There is indeed something labored about the novel, its characters, plot, milieux are all contructed with effort. Everything, as Flaubert understands it, depends on the detail.

Flaubert's insistence on detailed description makes Brooks think that Madame Bovary "is the one novel, among all novels, that deserves the label 'realist'," but this conclusion does not leave him sanguine. Flaubert's sort of realism is too insular, too much the excuse for building an elaborate aesthetic construction where "everything depends on the detail." Unfortunately, the detail doesn't add up to a "confrontation" with the world, doesn't even add up to a coherent whole at all:

Rhetorically, I suppose you would call all of those riding crops and cravats and shirt buttons in Balzac's world synecdoches: they are parts that stand for an intelligible whole. In Flaubert's world, however, they seem more like apparent synecdoches, in that often the whole is never given, never quite achieved. While Emma is frequently described, we never quite see her whole. She and her world never quite cohere.

Further: "It is as if the parts of the world really are what is most significant about it--the rest may simply be metaphysics." Flaubert's very approach to realism, then, precludes a fiction that takes on problems other than the problems of representation themselves, beginning with the representation of Emma Bovary: "Emma is surely one of the most memorable 'characters' of the novels we have read, we want to construct her fully as a person, we live with her aspirations, delusions, disappointments. Yet we repeatedly are given to understand that as a living, breathing, character-construction, Emma is a product of language--of her reading, and reveries on her reading, and of the sociolects that define her world." When Brooks claims there is "something labored" about Madame Bovary, he intends it as "le mot juste" in describing Flaubert's relationship with language: "Writing was such a slow and painful process for Flaubert because he had to make something new, strange, and beautiful out of a language in essence commonplace."

"New, strange, and beautiful," it would seem, are finally incommensurate with "realism" as Peter Brooks would have us define it. Despite their importance as writers moving fiction toward a greater realism of representation--the attempt to create the illusion of life as lived by ordinary people--neither Dickens nor Flaubert can finally be embraced as true-blue realists dedicated to confronting the issues of the age. Both of them seem too interested in writing to be reliable social critics, the role Brooks appears to think supercedes all else in the realist's job description. Brooks almost seems to suggest that "art" and "realism" are mutually exclusive terms.

Cousteau of the Heart

Donald Barthelme, from a 1980 interview conducted by Larry McCaffery (included in Not-Knowing: The Essays and the Interiews):

McCaffery: It's very obvious in Snow White--and in nearly all your fiction--that you distrust the impulse to "go beneath the surface" of your characters and events.

Barthelme: If you mean doing psychological studies of some kind, no. I'm not so interested. "Going beneath the surface" has all sorts of positive-sounding associations, as if you were a Cousteau of the heart. I'm not sure there's not just as much to be seen if you remain a student of the surfaces.

See also this.