Sad Revelations

According to n+1:

By the mid-’60s something crippling was happening to fiction, still quite hard to explain: articulate writers blamed the sheer craziness of American life (Roth) or the “exhaustion” of forms (Barth). There was the pressure of criticism, which could lead even a dyed-in-the-wool critic like Sontag to declare herself “Against Interpretation”; others pointed to academic writing programs and the group therapy of the workshop. In short order, 1968 arrived, and the chaotic Seventies, an era which received—in place of Germinal or Sentimental Education or The Posessed, or even The Grapes of Wrath!—Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and William Gaddis’s JR. One was a symbolico-enyclopedic epic unembarrassed beside Joyce, the other (in a mode stolen from the minor English modernist Henry Green, alternating dead-to-rights dialogue with brief descriptive passages of hallucinated brilliance, and elevated by Gaddis to demented majesty) a novel concerning nothing less than American capitalism. But in retrospect these books appear marginal where the “Great American Novel” was supposed to be central, heroic sighs of depletion instead of inaugural hymns.

Actually, the 1960s was one of the greatest periods in the history of American fiction. Here's just a partial list of the great books produced by American writers in that decade:

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Last Exit to Brooklyn. Hugh Selby Jr.
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, William Gass
The Universal Baseball Association and Pricksongs and Descants, Robert Coover
Eustace Chisolm and the Works, James Purdy
A Bad Man, Stanley Elkin
Come Back, Dr. Caligari and City Life, Donald Barthelme
V, Thomas Pynchon
The Freelance Pallbearers, Ishmael Reed
The Sot-Weed Factor and Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Second Skin and The Blood Oranges, John Hawkes
When She Was Good and Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
Little Big Man, Thomas Berger
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey

In fact, the 60s were surpassed in the quality of fiction published perhaps only by the 70s, during which we were offered, besides Gravity's Rainbow and JR, such books as Something Happened, The Franchiser, The Public Burning, Mulligan Stew, 98.6, Sula, Mumbo Jumbo, End Zone, The Tenant, and The Oranging of America, as well as the first books by such writers as Raymond Carver, Mary Robison, Ann Beattie, and T.C. Boyle. Books like these could only be considered "marginal" when your model of the "central" indeed includes novels like Germinal and The Grapes of Wrath. I have nothing against The Grapes of Wrath, except that every time I try to re-read it I am struck by how much it remains the kind of fiction that seems "exhausted," increasingly a relic of its era and important more to social history than to literature. Most of the books I have listed, however, reveal something fresh each time I read them, probably because they didn't set out to be "inaugural hymns." And thank God they didn't.

Our anonymous n+1 author continues:

Terry Eagleton once pointed out that the French theorists preserved the modernist tradition in literature when fiction writers did not. Verbose, allusive, experimental, but always to a purpose—declaring that certain thoughts could only be had in certain kinds of words—yes, that was theory. But the more significant thing is that theory took over the thinking function of fiction as well as the stylistic: it treated social theory in the way the novel always had, more for liberatory power than strict fidelity to scholarship, and offered wild suspicion as the route to personal enlightenment. It did the novelistic job of a whole period: it produced the works, at once literary and intellectual, that came to terms with the immediate aftermath of the Sixties.

I will repeat something I have said before in previous posts: I am not anti-theory. I used it in my doctoral dissertation, and I continue to find the work of many theorists both worthwhile and instructive. However: Terry Eagleton doesn't know what he's talking about. Fiction writers did indeed preserve the "modernist tradition." It's called postmodernism. If anything, "theorists" like Eagleton stole the term "postmodern" as a description of culture from writers like Barth, Coover, and Gass, who were way ahead of most of critical theory (with the possible exception of Derrida) in exploring such things as the slipperiness of language and the problem of signification. And anon reveals his/her true assumptions about the nature of fiction in asserting that "the more significant thing is that theory took over the thinking function of fiction." Theory couldn't have taken over the "the thinking function of fiction" because fiction doesn't have a thinking function. Only the most tediously polemical works of fiction pretend to be thinking, and in most cases even they are only rehearsing banalities and platitudes. Fiction might make its reader think, but only if it has first of all succeeded in its primary goal of transforming language into verbal art.

Between the lines of this essay seems to be a suspicion (fear?) that an era of theory is ending and an era of literature might be returning. One can only hope that this is so. I will gladly trade in a "diagnosis of society" (in my opinion, a formulation that finally only oversimplifies and distorts what theory is really about) for the "sad revelations" of even the itsiest-bitsiest fiction, anyday.

Rake's Progress critiques this essay as well, from a different angle.

Comments

[Jimmy Beck]

Amen. I think you're dead on re: The Grapes of Wrath. It and Uncle Tom's Cabin are the archetypes of the heavy-handed, clunky treatises that kill off burgeoning writers (and readers) with the same brutal efficiency that calculus, physics and organic chemistry weed out would-be doctors.

[Jonathan]

I guess Terry Eagleton has never heard of Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman, or Georges Perec. This is also a good time for poetry. Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara.

If by thinking function you mean the presentation of absract ideas, I agree. However, the whole idea of metafiction in the postmodernists means that fiction itself is the literary theory of its day. The N+1 guy gets it backwards. Fiction takes over the function of theory. The theory of the period is just a mostly failed literary genre. Barthes as novelist manqué, etc...

[R. A. Rubin]

Funny, I liked Roths early books, Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, but gad, have you read some of his Zuckerman books? Horrible! Pretenous! Gasp, POMO at its worst.

My advice: kill the theory and the prose poems and write a book with a plot and interesting characters that grab the reader ala, er, Charles Dickens!

[Rake]

Charles Dickens is to literary conversations what Rocky Marciano is to boxing conversations.

[Michael Blowhard]

Why is everyone overlooking non-literary fiction? I'll give odds that much of the crime writing from that decade will outlast much of the lit writing you cite. Oh, wait: people aren't going to be reading novels in 50 years anyway ...

[Jonathan]

"Non-literary" fiction? There's no such thing.

[John]

"Between the lines of this essay seems to be a suspicion (fear?) that an era of theory is ending and an era of literature might be returning."

Well, the essay is certainly concerned with this moment (today), yes, although to frame it in such rather grossly simplistic terms is to suggest you haven't really read the essay for much other than familiar mill grist. Do you deny the accuracy of this description? A new era of literature, perhaps, but to suggest it will be "without theory" in some sense is simply naive if not irresponsible. In fact the piece is much more subtle and substantial than you infer. One can only encourage others (with some hospitality, perhaps!) to read it for themselves in its entirety.

In fact you end up agreeing with its description quite a bit (or is that "diagnosis"?) For many unavoidable historical and geopolitical reasons, 'literature' has been responding to a "sick" society for some time now. Perhaps it always has, in a way, but certainly since the 60s a lot has changed and, frankly, the New Critics have not aged all that well. Maybe this is why so much energy is spent lambasting "theory" as if it were all "prescription" entirely unconcerned with description (hardly the case–consider for example the raging debate over how to read Bakhtin) instead of defining/performing what you mean by "literature as literature." Where is the positive vision? And who, exactly, besides everyone's favorite punching bagwagon Terry Eagleton, embodies this purely "diagnostic" mode? Might it be the many banal forms of late capitalism as it seeks to accomodate and assimilate the very critiques grown out of the sixties (and largely in France)? In short, one senses that the vitriol reserved for Terry Eagleton, however sloppy he may be, is profoundly misplaced. Well I've rambled on soiling your blogomecca long enough. But those who wish to reduce "theory" to a "failed genre" are simple naive if not dangerously nostalgic.

[Dan Green]

I never said that theory was a failed genre. I said that the n+1 piece falsely substitutes theory for fiction.

The best of the New Criticism has actually aged quite well. You should read some of it.

When I hear talk of "late capitalism" in relation to literature and literary study, I mostly just run away.

[Josh]

I'm curious, Dan, as to whether any women were writing the kind of fiction you admire in the Sixties. They only start appearing in your account of the Seventies. Do you, for example, like Molinaro? Emshwiller? Expensive People? I mean this as a question about your aesthetic, not some kind of "Ha, an omission!" accusation.

[Sabra]

I am curious from the theory end of things how much y'all (lit crits) believe that writers actually study and use theory in writing fiction. Are most writers, especially those cranked out of MFA programs, cognizant of theory when they put pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard?

My experience as a writer, which destines me to greatness or obscurity, is the complete ignorance of modern literary fiction. If I try to read most of it, I get pissed off with its heavy-handed conventions. Indeed, when I began my novel at the end of 2002 I hadn't read any American Lit since college, eight years beforehand. Instead, I synthesized a great number of things I have seen and read in my life rather effortlessly and produced a book that isn't really like what's out there in "literary fiction" today. Good or bad? I don't know. However, I really question the writers that are into staying on top of theory, it seems assbackwards.

Theory is meant to see and interpret the trends of literature, no? Not define what literature should be, that kills both, in my opinion.

[bky]

Sabra -- if you haven't read either, how do you know?

[Sabra]

Know what?

[bky]

"Theory is meant to see and interpret the trends of literature, no? Not define what literature should be, that kills both, in my opinion."

Sabra -- if you haven't read either [literature or theory], how do you know [that they kill each other]?

[Chris]

If I can try to read between Sabra's lines, it seems to me that she's saying that some literary theory elucidates what writers of literature know intuitively. Of course, (1) some literary theory does not perform this function, and (2) theory itself is literature, some of it quite beautiful. I don't know how hiding from it could help in the writing of fiction, though I agree with Sabra's implicit point that fiction writers do not need theory in order to write, or write well, or write relevantly. However, as I think I've quoted Curtis White quoting Henry Staten here before, "the writers and poets of the present who will matter in the future will come to terms with theory."

Maybe Sabra could tell us what she means by "modern literary fiction." I can't tell if she's referring to the conventions of, say, Richard Ford, or the conventions of, say, Harry Mathews.

[Sabra]

bky is making assumptions. I read extensively in college and for some time afterwards what wasn't included in my undergraduate English classes. Theory was discussed in my ug English lit classes. I am familiar with both up to about 2000, though postmodernism has always not only not interested me, but gone over my head.

When I started writing my novel, because of not only personal things (I had three children in 15 months and at the time the youngest was six months old) but professional (I couldn't, at the time, read and write concurrently), I didn't read anything. I wrote.

Then this year, I had solidified and had enough faith and confidence in the direction of my work to pick up my "contemporaries" and by contemporaries I mean literary fiction Gen X writers. I wasn't real happy with what was out there. They all seemed to be trying too hard or what everyone calls overworkshopped.

I feel that Gen X should (and some of us are breaking away), leave behind Pomo. As I began to finish my novel, I saw its place in more context. What I was able to synthesize simply by writing a story I would read and enjoy and be consumed by, has prompted me to become interested in theory and lit crit. This is because I think my novel may be quintessentially Gen X- social drama wrapped in Gen X constructs.

Thus, I now have my own "theory" about the movement of literature, at least the Southern novel, because I wrote a novel and sat back and said, "Damn!" I may end up being full of shit, but with the degree of disgust that so many have toward modern literature, it's definitely time for something new. Maybe it'll be my stuff and other new writing.

[Dan Green]

I thought very hard about the question of women writers from the 60s. I think finally it is the case that women writers (American) started coming into their own in the 70. I don't care for Oates. I've not read the other two writers mentioned (in Josh's comment). Titles?

Sabra: Actually, writers have been leaving behind "Pomo" for 30 years. Minimalist neorealism was the preferred mode in the 80s and 90s.Perhaps this is something else you didn't find out from your undergraduate lit classes.

[ben]

great post. although there are many (bloom, eagleton, others) who decry "pomo" lit, or at least the literature written in the area often defined as postmodernism, i find that there is a lot of great writing that was produced beginning with the 60s and continuing through at least the 80s. too often the tone of those who don't like the direction that literature has taken make moral arguments, as does the writer at n+1 about the way this or that form should be, rather than acknowledging the way writing evolves. people were of course appalled by ts eliot's lines and themes when "the waste land" was first published, but only 30 years later it was considered institutional and something to be rejected.

just a few titles i would like to add to your list: 1960s: major works by vonnegut, philip k dick, ursula leguin; 1970s: delillo's first novels (if hardly his best), joseph mcelroy, kathy acker's first works, delany's dhalgren, thomas disch's 334 and camp concentration.

if this list is a bit heavy on science fiction it is only because your own lists are already quite good in terms of more mainstream lit and also because it was in the period of the late 60s through mid 70s that sf really came into its own as a viable form of experimental literature and social critique. again, nice post.

[John]

"The best of the New Criticism has actually aged quite well. You should read some of it."

Oh? Who do you recommend?

[Sabra]

I have expanded my above sentiments on my blog concerning this issue. Though I fully realize my novel isn't currently available for anyone other than my family and friends to read, I do elaborate on the elements and execution of it on my blog entry.

Thus, I invite the limited interpretation of its context and my "theory" to all you lit crits. If it has a place, fill me in. If it doesn't, what of the potential of a movement in which it does?

thebleckingblog.blogspot.com

[david milofsky]

Can't remember women writers of the Sixties, how about Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick, plus of course the Oates of them (winner of NBA in 68, I think)? But as long as we're talking 60s writers, it's striking to me how no one has referenced the writers of the so-called Jewish renaissance, including Bernard Malamud, Bellow, Mailer and those mentioned above. Of course Roth and Elkin are Jewish as well, but all were in their prime in the 60s, which was actually a very exciting time for fiction.

[Dan Green]

John: Start with The Well-Wrought Urn.

David: Most of O'Connor's important work was published in the 50s, wasn't it? And I don't think Paley published anything (in book form) in the 60s.

Actually, I did reference Malamud's The Tenant. I greatly admire his work, although in my view the 60s books (A New Life, The Fixer) aren't among his best--although I do think A New Life is underrated.

[david milofsky]

Dan,
I'm not in a position to check right now, but didn't O'Connor publish the wonderful Everything that Rises Must Converge in the 60s? I believe she did. And the stories in Paley's The Little Disturbances of Man were all published in the 60s, I think, though you may be right about book publication. Also, Joanne Greenberg, whose I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a classic. I'm actually with you on Malamud's The Fixer (though it won the Pulitzer and NBA), but how about Idiots First? This is a great thread, though. Very interesting responses.

[david milofsky]

Dan,

Just checked above. I was a year off on Paley, who published Little Disturbances in '59 but O'Connor, who died in '64, published three books in the 60s: The Violent Bear it Away, a novel in 1960; Everything that Rises...in 1965; and her wonderful book of essays, Mystery and Manners, in '69.

[John]

"When I hear talk of "late capitalism" in relation to literature and literary study, I mostly just run away."

Where...to the Arctic Circle?

Just kidding of course.