The Reading Experience

The Real World of Reading

In an essay lamenting V.S. Naipaul's personal failings, Joseph Bottum conludes that Naipaul's documented bad behavior is "a grand literary joke on all his readers, for we gave Naipaul our admiration, and he turns out to have been someone we wouldn't have touched with a barge pole." He continues:

Perhaps, in some abstract sense, a novel is an independent thing, with the person who wrote it utterly beside the point. But in the real world of reading, when we know certain facts about a writer, we read them into the story and find them buried there. Books are responsible for their authors; in a kind of child labor, they carry their fathers on their backs. And the works of V.S. Naipaul are now so weighted down they feel like blocks of lead.

Shame not on V.S. Naipaul but on Joseph Bottum for having given Naipaul his "admiration" based on such a weak connection to the work that revelations of flaws in the author's life could break it so easily. For all of his despair that "we can no longer read A Bend in the River or A House for Mr. Biswas in the way we used to," Bottum's attachment to these books must have been superficial indeed if biographical details, even those sanctioned by Naipaul himself, could now loom so large that alone they alter his judgment of books he once enjoyed.

I myself have never read "certain facts" into novels or stories and found them "buried there." Perhaps because I do not care about these "certain facts" in the first place I haven't really looked very hard, but finally I just don't understand why anyone would want to read fiction in this way, would not actively fight the temptation to do so, would allow such facts to so readily overwhelm the reading experience. Perhaps I just don't understand the mechanism by which the act of reading becomes an act of composing a competing fiction about the author, so that subsequent information that doesn't comport with this fiction somehow distorts the actual fiction, the text, the arrangement of words that is finally the only tangible manifestation of the "real" writer we encounter. Interest in the writer as other than this ultimate arranger--at least as we're reading the work--seems to me so misplaced as to make the act of reading superfluous. Google the author's name instead and see what you find.

What Bottum describes here is not "the real world of reading" at all. It's a substitute for reading, a cop-out. The "abstract sense" of fiction as "an independent thing"--this is the only sense in which reading fiction really makes sense. Fiction, like all art, exists in a created imaginative space, an alternative world that, no matter how much it must be built out of the elements of "real life," takes us out of that life and allows our capacity for experience to be refreshed. To the extent that we insist the details of the real world, our own or the author's, be imported back into this space, we cut off the possibility of such fresh experience. If we bizarrely contend that "Books are responsible for their authors," we convert books into the accessories of literary personality cults. (And are disappointed when the personalities turn rancid.) Why not accept that some people have the skill and vision to create compelling works of literary art, the power of which is unaffected by facts about the author's personal behavior, whether those facts be flattering or incriminating.

Bending Over Backwards

According to Lionel Shriver:

Literature is not very popular these days, to put it mildly. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly half of Americans do not read books at all, and those who do average a mere six a year. You'd think literary writers would be bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves to readers -- to make their work maximally accessible, straightforward and inviting. But no.

But why in the world would anyone think that writers should be "bending over backwards" to appeal to people who have no interest in reading? What bizarre conception of literature would have it intended primarily for nonreaders? The mangled logic of this view, which perversely seems to be widely shared by many who do read, seems to me so far removed from any plausible assessment of the place of "literature" in our culture as to be pretty close to insane. That "literature is not very popular" at a time when the most potent measure of popularity is American Idol ought to be seen as a sign it still offers some hope of resistance to the values of commerical culutre. Most of all it should be seen precisely as an opportunity to experiment with aesthetic strategies that challenge audiences rather than giving in to the inexorable pressure to "dumb down."

Since when have serious writers sought to be "maximally accessible, straightforward and inviting" above all? Until the 19th century, "Literature" (or what was then simply considered "poetry") could only appeal to that minority of the population who literally could read, and most writers wanted to be "maximally accessible" not to contemporaneous audiences so much as to posterity, where the final verdict on literary greatness would be rendered. It's doubtful that Spenser or Milton thought that this audience would consist of readers for whom they needed to slavishly "ingratiate" themselves in advance. Some like to point out that Shakespeare in his time appealed to a relatively popular audience, but who could carefully examine Shakespeare's texts and conclude other than that the "accessibility" of his language comes not from any attempt to be more "straightforward" but from an assumption that his audience had sufficient listening skills to invite themselves into his imaginative world?

"Literature" of course is itself a concept that develops during the 19th century and after as an umbrella term that attempts to gather "poetry" together again with its now renegade forms, fiction and drama, precisely in order to make them available to the newly literate middle class as "good for" such readers. However, even this dilution of literary value--by which literature becomes valuable not in and for itself but as a tool of education and emergent nationalism--assumed that the appreciation of works of literature was something to aspire to, that "great books" required an elevation of taste and skill, although "common readers" could indeed reach this higher level.We now appear to have reached the point where literature can be relevant only if it turns itself into just another "inviting" mass entertainment.

The larger point of Shriver's essay, about the use of quotation marks, is just puerile: "By putting the onus on the reader to determine which lines are spoken and which not, the quoteless fad feeds the widespread conviction that popular fiction is fun while literature is arduous." Forget that the "quoteless fad" has been around since at least James Joyce and William Gaddis. Forget that not just quotation marks but dialogue itself are optional in fiction--who said that novels should record speech in this way at all? Heaven forbid that any "onus" be put on the reader to recognize that fiction isn't just a prosy version of a tv drama, with some written-out bits to supplement the talking. If Lionel Shriver's version of "literature" is what it takes to move the average books read per year from six to seven, writers ought to preserve their backs and refrain from bending over too frequently.

Blood Relations

According to Nigel Beale:

Novels that emphasize character seem. . .closer to life, more natural. . . .

So, which characters are truest to life? Those we know best: those who we can most completely relate to, regardless of how fantastical. . .The essential question to ask: is this fictitious entity relevant to me and my life? Does she encounter or answer important questions that I may have about my life? Am I affected by his situation? In short, is there something of this character alive in me? This surely is the measure of ‘lifeness’ and indeed great fiction: the amount of blood the reader and character share. How relevant the thoughts and actions of one are to the other. How applicable fictional situations are to real life ones.

It's hard to imagine a more narcissistic view of the role of fiction--almost literally, it should reflect my own face back to me--and I really have to wonder whether Nigel intends this to be taken altogether seriously. I suppose he might be making a point that in order to enter a fictional world, readers need to be able to envision themselves in that world through a character with whom they can at least minimally identify, but otherwise this is about as reductive an account of the appeal of fiction as I've come across.

Of course, the biggest problem with it is in its underlying assumption that "Novels that emphasize character seem. . .closer to life, more natural." Presuming that "more natural" novels are from Nigel's point of view superior novels (a pretty safe conclusion, I think), one can argue with this assertion in at least two ways . Is it true that character-centered novels are "closer to life"? Is it necessary for novels to be "close to life," in the sense that "fictional situations" be "applicable" to "real life ones"? Nigel opines that novels such as The Brothers Karamazov and The Red and the Black are closer to his life, but why couldn't fiction that emphasizes setting or incident be just as "close to life," especially if "realism" is the preferred goal? (And I'm not so sure either of these two novels actually are character-centered: Karamazov seems to me an excuse for abstract philosophical debate rather than an attempt to create plausible characters, and The Red and the Black is at least as much plot-focused picaresque as a portrait of its ultimately rather two-dimensional protagonist.) Are characters more real than places or activities?

Certainly the origins of the novel do not lie in "situations" that are rendered as closely as possible to those of "real life." Precursors to the novel such as Gulliver's Travels or Gargantua and Pantagruel are plot-heavy phantasmagorias, anything but explorations of character, while most of the earliest actual novels, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, are either explicitly picaresque narratives whose characters never develop beyond their roles in the plots or tales in which what happens is clearly the focal point, not characters "relevant to me and my life." Those readers like Nigel, who recoil from novels "which impose artificial form on formless real life experience," even when such form is simply "plot," have formed a relationship with fiction rooted in late-nineteenth century realism, later developed into "pyschological realism," that might arguably be called character-centered, but such readers assume this sort of fiction essentially brought literary history to a halt and that other kinds of fiction, less dependent on "lifeness" so very narrowly conceived, are simply marginal, trivial, empty flourishes easily ignored. Only character-driven realism is "natural."

This attitude strikes me as ultimately rather contemptuous of "the novel" as a form of literary art, as anything other than an opportunity to project one's own psychological preoccupations onto fictional characters. The order that form imposes is, after all, an aesthetic order without which a work of fiction really has no reason for being. Unless one can turn novels into some sort of religious meditation or "spiritual" quest, which is about all I can make out of the attempt to force fiction to "answer important questions that I may have about my life" and of language like "amount of blood the reader and character share." When the stakes are raised this grandly, "art" can't be anything but a nuisance.

The Pedagogical Habit

In a recent post, Rohan Maitzen suggests that responsible criticism (she has academic criticism in mind, but the point would seem to apply to generalist criticism as well) should concentrate not on "comparative measures of ‘worth’" but on "seeking out the measures that fit the particular case." She continues:

One of the key features of this approach is working with a text on its own terms--trying to understand how to read it so that it best fulfills its own potential. This means not holding it up to a particular, preconceived standard of excellence ("good novels do this“), whether that standard is formal or ideological. Now, depending on the occasion, there may be a second phase in which you move back from internally-generated norms and question them against external ideas; often, in teaching, this kind of questioning arises just from moving to the next book on the syllabus and discovering that its norms differ widely from--and thus, implicitly or explicitly, challenge--the ones we’ve just left behind (reading North and South right after Hard Times, or Jane Eyre soon after Pride and Prejudice, for instance, will certainly have this effect). But it’s difficult to see either a method or a reason for evaluating, say, Pride and Prejudice, as better or worse than Jane Eyre. It’s only if you have a set notion of what makes good fiction in general that you could fault either one for not measuring up.

Rohan seems to assume that because in my posts both here and at my own blog I defend the view that "philosophizing, politics, or social commentary are unimportant (even undesirable) in the novel, or at least far less significant than aesthetic effects" (really more the latter than the former) I would not accept the approach to literary criticism she is describing. But in fact I wholeheartedly endorse Rohan's critical pragmatism; indeed, this kind of pragmatism is at the very core of my philosophy of criticism, along with John Dewey's insistence that it is the aesthetic experience of literature that is the immediate object of critical appreciation, an experience that can be satisfied in a multitude of ways. I do not agree with Ronan McDonald and others that "if [literary criticsm] is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative" Even if I acknowledged that criticims needs "to reach a wide public" (which I emphatically do not), I could, I think, make a plausible argument that this "wide pubic" would be better served by a descriptive mode of criticism that seeks to carefully elucidate the manifest qualities of a given text than by an evaluative act that in effect disclaims the reader's own powers of judgment by rendering them unnecessary.

I would also agree that it isn't the case "that reading a novel on its own terms should always be the end point of criticism," although I do maintain--this is really what my allegiance to "aestheticism" finally amounts to--it is a indispensable and necessary beginning point. And I also assume that the act of writing a novel is inescapably an aesthetic endeavor. There would be no point, except in the crudest forms of propaganda, to write fiction in the first place if the primary goal was not to produce a work that succeeds most immediately as art. Since novels and short stories inherently equivocate, unavoidably qualify and make ambiguous anything that might be straightforwardly "said," anyone who wants to "comment" on social life or engage in philosophical speculation would be well advised to do so more directly than fiction allows.

Which is why I can't agree with Rohan that approaching "a novel in which philosophizing, politics, or social commentary are extremely important" is simply a matter of adjusting critical focus away from aesthetic considerations and toward the "something said," judging it by the non-aesthetic criteria it seems to propose for itself. At this point, the pragmatic impulse threatens to become an all-purpose excuse for whatever aesthetic lapses are deemed irrelevant to the larger goal of "philosophizing, politics," etc. It comes close to allowing that some novels don't need to offer "aesthetic effects" at all, if this means interfering with the "philosophizing, politics, or social commentary" with which they are principally concerned. Even if you emphasize "how the form and artistic strategies of the novel serve those [ulterior] purposes," as Rohan suggests, this is a pretty tepid measure of the work's literary value. If the primary requirement is not that the work engage us through "form and artistic strategies" above all, its ulterior purposes aside, it is hard for me to understand why fiction should be distinguished from other modes of discourse in the first place, why it should be included with poetry as part of "literature" at all.

Rohan says she's "wondering about the relationship between what I’m calling the 'pedagogical' habit of trying to find the best reading tools, the right measures, for any given example, and other critical strategies or purposes." I believe that by now the "pedagogical habit" has subsumed all other "critical strategies or purposes," to the extent that the need to adapt literature to the academic curriculum has become the overriding consideration in academic criticism. Periodization makes it necessary to find a "place" for texts "in which the form and aesthetics are far less impressive" than others and to accentuate "the contingency of different standards." The rise of theory made it necessary to situate the text in the framework of external schemes that supposedly broaden the context in which literary works can be studied. While it is true that a literary criticism not bound to academe might still give attention to "philosophizing," et.al., it is hard to imagine that such criticism would so willingly apologize for aesthetically inferior work as academic criticism in its current guise is forced to do. It's possible that literary criticism might one day free itself from the pedagogical imperatives with which the academy has burdened it. When that happens, "artistic merit" might not be as dispensable as many academic critics want to find it.

The Existing Public Sphere

In a post criticizing science fiction blogs for allowing "the SF blogosphere [to] become a venue for crassly commercial interests far more concerned with selling things than encouraging intelligent discussion," Jonathan McCalmont notes my own previous post distinguishing between "liblogs" and "critblogs" and suggests such a distinction is "more about retreating from the existing public sphere than it is about changing it."

I think he's probably right, although I would describe the effort to establish the category of "critblog" more as a separation of blog-centered critical writing from the necessarily ephemeral "daily digest" style of blogging than a full-on retreat from the "public sphere." Nevertheless, I share McCalmont's dismay that many litblogs have simply accomodated themselves to the "public sphere" of superficial literary discourse rather than continuing in the attempt to provide an alternative to that discourse. This is even more discouraging for "mainstream" literary fiction and criticism, since it gives in not merely to the commercialization McCalmont decries in the SF community but also to the unexamined assumptions and shallow thinking that make journalism-based commentary on "literary fiction" so crippling to begin with.

McCalmont correctly notes that

whenever commercial interests enter into a public space, they change the focus of discussion from what is good or interesting, to what is worth buying. We can see this effect in the fondness of the SF blogosphere for book covers, give-aways, recycled press releases and interviews that are far more interested in what an author has to sell than in the subtleties of their writing or world-view. By contrast, actual substantial reviews are few and far between (especially outside of specialised review sites) and when they do appear they are seldom discussed, seldom linked to and seldom responded to.

I don't know that I would say most mainstream litblogs are "far more interested in what an author has to sell than in the subtleties of their writing or world-view", but there is a distressing number of "give-aways, recycled press releases," and perfunctory interviews in the literary blogosphere as a whole, and "substantial reviews," sustained critical reflection in general, certainly are all too often "seldom discussed" in comment threads. Too much space is given over to perpetuating the "book business" status quo, reinforcing middlebrow standards and enabling market-driven reviewing practices rather than challenging and critiquing them.

Yet I do think it's ultimately pointless to expend too much energy directed at "changing" the literary public sphere, either generally ("literary journalism") or literally (the public blogo-sphere). Capitalism will continue to trump literary worth among the big publishers, gossip and book business fandom will continue to dominate high-profile literary discussion. Many litblogs will be swept up (have been swept up) into the publicity machine. Trying to halt all of this is as futile as the effort to make fiction palatable to nonreaders, which is finally what motivates the existing public sphere in publishing and book reviewing in the first place.

Even so, the blog remains a useful publishing tool, and the blogosphere a valuable publishing medium. Just as it was always possible--although harder to do for financial reasons--to maintain a space for worthwhile literary criticism in print among all the reams of wasted paper that constitute the majority of what appears in print form, it is entirely possible to stake out a segment of cyberspace for nontrivial criticism, notwithstanding the possibility that what was the literary blogosphere will drift into irrelevance. The audience for such criticism might be targeted and modest in size, but such has always been the case for any literary criticism that takes itself, and the work it considers, seriously.

RIP

John Leonard, one of the best generalist literary critics in the post-WWII era. He was both a perceptive analyst of fiction and a distinctive stylist.