The Reading Experience

Moral Chaos

When reading Roger Scruton, one can always be sure that the ideas and sentiments expressed are being offered with utter sincerity. The extent to which he is willing to defend a view of the world and the place of humans in it that seems not simply conservative but thoroughly antique can be astonishing, but he does defend it, seriously and systematically. As a philosopher, Scruton sticks to the most fundamental questions of social and cultural value, in many instances raising questions long assumed satisfactorily answered and renewing conservative objections to the direction taken by much of modern culture.

Those who might rebut Scruton's case against modern art and popular culture are perhaps tempted to simply dismiss his invocations of such seemingly agreeable concepts as "order" and "beauty" as so much opportunistic cant. This would be a mistake, not merely because Scruton makes his arguments in an intellectually honest way but because the role of order or beauty in art ought not be denied outright. Scruton is not wrong to consider "beauty" a relevant consideration in the assessment of art. He is wrong in his conception of beauty as it manifests itself in works of art.

In a recent essay, "Beauty and Desecration," Scruton asserts that "the sacred task of art. . .is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty." Since the era of modernism, however, deliberate ugliness has usurped the place of beauty and "[a]rt increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes."

Note that is the transgression not of aesthetic standards but of "moral certainties" to which Scruton objects. Scruton rightly notes that in the 20th/21st centuries "expression" has become the underpinning of most movements in and commentary on "new" art, but rather than examine the specifically aesthetic flaws in an approach anchored in "expression," Scruton instead recoils from the moral anarchy unleashed by the modern Romantic rebel: "This emphasis on expression was a legacy of the Romantic movement; but now it was joined by the conviction that the artist is outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it, so that artistic self-expression is at the same time a transgression of ordinary moral norms."

Scruton uses as an example the widespread habit in productions of opera to alter the staging and the dramatic vision to produce a "modernized" version. He cites a particular production of Mozart's The Abduction From the Seraglio set "in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, copulating couples littered the stage, and every opportunity for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. . .The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the scenes of desecration, murder, and narcissistic sex."

Even if we accept that Scruton's description of the staging of this opera is true to its director's intent--and I would guess that many others in the audience that night did not see it in this way--his outrage is directed at its moral implications. It is "an example of something familiar in every aspect of our contemporary culture. It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction." Scruton manages to connect this sort of "re-visioning" in the high arts to the music video, which "is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos."

Scruton cannot appreciate that the operatic production he attended committed an aesthetic offense, not a moral one. I am quite willing to believe that those responsible for it thought it a clever idea to "set the opera in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes," but ultimately this is just an aesthetically vacuous attempt to "update" Mozart, to run roughshod over Mozart's original vision of his opera and establish their own overwhelmingly lame one in its place. It is a practice to be found not only in opera but in theater in general, whereby directors and producers with the aesthetic sensibilities of lizards attempt to keep the great works "relevant." One could, I suppose, call this artistic cluelessness a "moral" problem, but most of what Scruton sees as the unleashing of "moral chaos" is finally just the consequence of the aesthetic incompetence of some those entrused with the job of re-presenting the theatrical art of the past.

I suspect that Scruton does not want to examine the art he despises for its specific aesthetic failings because the very introduction of the "aesthetic" leads for him to the moral decadence he fears. "Beauty" is not to be found in the creations of artists separated from the moral universe to which they must conform:

We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.

In this view, beaty is not even a "creation" of artists. It is a discovery by artists of "harmony," of the "order" that is "already" there "in our perceptions." Artists, such as the great landscape painters, are, if they are to be artists at all, "devoted to moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things."

This harmony and order--a moralized nature--is what Scruton means by the "sacred," the capturing of which is the duty of artists. Modern art is engaged in desecration--the inversion of the sacred. In suggesting that human beings are other than "at home in the world" or that the world itself is not always "fit," modern artists mock and undermine the moral order that art should be celebrating and supporting. It is time, according to Scruton, to recover the sacred, "to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized."

Scruton's is an entirely coherent argument if you accept the underlying world view according to which the role of art is to "affirm" the deep, if not always completely visible, truth in "the scheme of things" that manifests itself in beauty. If you believe, however, that the world at times betrays an order that isn't necessarily beneficent, or that as Scruton puts it in his repugnance at another kind of "truthful" art, a human being can be reduced by life to "a lump of suffering flesh made pitiful, helpless, and disgusting," you might find Scruton's "truth" to be partial indeed. You might, in fact, find it a delusion and the idea that a great artist can't redeem "suffering flesh made pitiful" by an act of imagination (or, as Susan Sontag would have it, "will") anything but an affirmation of life.

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Josh Corey detects an "anti-literary" attitude behind much contemporary poetry and fiction:

We have overshot, then, the hermeneutics of suspicion that characterized "theory" in the 1970s to arrive at a poetics of suspicion: only literature that puts the very premises of the literary into question can now summon the aesthetic impact we associate with great literature. This may represent the most complete assimilation by authors of the skeptical stance that diffused itself in the last universally acknowledged great wave of postmodern fiction (Pynchon, Delillo, Coover) and poetry (Ashbery, Ashbery, Ashbery). Now it's not merely literary strategies that are picked apart and turned around through unreliable narrators, disordered chronologies, the blurring of fact and fiction, extreme parataxis, etc. It's the literary itself, the summoning and deployment of aesthetic effects, summarized in the phrase "beautiful language.

On one level, it is quite appropriate for writers to proceed on the assumption it is necessary to employ strategies that put "the very premises of the literary into question." Both poetry and fiction become dessicated and convention-encrusted when established notions of what makes literature "literary" go unchallenged. I would agree with Josh that such a "skeptical stance" is what motivated the greatest of the postmodernists (although his list leaves out perhaps the most thoroughgoingly skeptical of the postmodernists, writers such as Gilbert Sorrentino or Donald Barthelme), but such skepticism was not intended to destroy literature but to enhance it, to open up the possibilities for "aesthetic impact," not to deny the validity of the aesthetic. To the extent that "asethetic effects" can be encapsulated in the formulation "beautiful language," perhaps the postmodernists and their successors (Josh discusses W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolano in particular) were calling literature dependent on it into question, but ultimately they were themselves rebelling against the notion of "beautiful language"--and the usually quiescent formal approaches associated with it--as a defining feature of "literature" in the first place.

On another level, the attempt to "escape" the literary is, of course, doomed to failure. The very attempt to "pick apart" or "turn around" usually results in a new strategy or style that doesn't abandon strategy and style but adds a fresh perspective on both. As Josh writes of Sebald: "Sebald's work first shocked readers with its apparently artless photographs and endless paragraphs, but in recollection the work is nearly limpid, its melancholy polished to a high gleam." Once one commits to writing in one of the literary forms, poetry or fiction or drama, efforts to escape the perceived limitiations of those forms while remaining within the practices of the forms broadly conceived--while continuing to accept the designation "poet," or "novelist"--are going to wind up being not "anti-literary" at all but, if they're successful, the latest additions to our understanding of what "the literary" might encompass. No matter how "useful" you might want your poem or your story to be--which is to say, for it to be more than "merely literary"--its ultimate utility will be to those who are interested in the perpetuation of the literary.

Which is not to say that all poems, novels, or plays conceived by their authors (and perhaps received by critics) as "useful" or "anti-literary" can't be aesthetically accomplished in the way "we associate with great literature." As Josh himself notes, if the attempt to "move beyond" poetry or fiction is what is required for a writer to produce interesting poetry or fiction, then so be it. If Thomas Pynchon needed to imagine he was writing a "critique" of the emergence of the American techno-military empire in order to write Gravity's Rainbow, I'm ok with that, although it's certainly not as such a critique that I appreciate the novel (nor, in the longest run, will future readers, when regarding it as primarily an historical exercise will likely render it unreadable). It's the humor, the narrative ingenuity, above all the language, which certainly isn't "beautiful," that makes it the great "literary" novel that it is. If writers need to think they're starting a revolution against literature--and I don't really suspect Pynchon thought he was doing this--in order to create, well, new works of literature, then viva la revolucion!

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.

The Big Dialogue of Literature

By now, everyone attuned to the literary news is no doubt aware of Horace Engdahl's comments that "Europe still is the center of the literary world" when it comes to the awarding of the Nobel Prize, that "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," and that American writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."

On the one hand, it seems likely that Engdahl's remarks were motivated by a non-literary (and entirely justified) dissatisfaction with American political and military actions over the last eight years, a dissatisfaction widely shared across all of Europe these days. Engdahl assumes, wrongly, that American writers, American "culture" more generally, are somehow complicit with these actions or at least haven't done enough to express their solidarity with European critics of American hubris as embodied by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. To this extent, one might grant Engdahl some forebearance, since his attitude probably reflects a momentary unhappiness with the United States that will surely abate with the passing of the Bush administration.

But on the other hand, Engdahl's comments do reflect some underlying assumptions about both American literature and the role of literature more generally that certainly warrant scrutiny. For one thing, while I suppose it is possible for writers to become "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture" (especially if we take "mass culture" to be something other than "culture" itself, a separate realm driven by the same mindless forces that drive the American government), most depictions of "mass culture" in American ficion tend to be critical of that culture, if not outright satirical. Insofar as Engdahl has read much contemporary American fiction, it would seem he hasn't read it very well. Especially among those writers who might be seriously considered for the Nobel Prize--Roth or Pynchon or Barth--"mass culture" is an object of concern and ridicule, not something these writers seek to reinforce. That Engdahl would think otherwise does call his qualifications for the job of awarding a literary prize--the most esteemed literary prize of them all--into question.

One would have to presume that Europe remains "the center of the literary world" because its writers do not have such an unseemly obsession with their own nations' culture, but of course this hardly seems credible. However, since Engdahl provides no additional englightenment about what it actually means to be the world's literary center an alternative presumption would seem to be that Europe is central because, well, the Nobel committee most often awards the prize to European writers. I admit both a professional and personal bias toward American fiction in my own reading habits, but to the extent Engdahl is claiming the greatest contemporary writers are to be found on the continent of Europe, I must further admit I find the notion thoroughly unsupportable. There are certainly some very fine writers in Great Britain, but most of them are undoubtedly obscure to someone like Horace Engdahl (writers such as Tom McCarthy and Rosalind Belben), and among them are decidedly not the "name" writers Engdahl probably does have in mind--Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. There are also excellent writers in France and the German-speaking countries, and I have recently found myself particularly taken by several Eastern European writers whose work I had not previously read, but again the notion that any of these writers are "greater" than Roth, Pynchon, Coover, or Stephen Dixon seems to me palpably absurd. And that such now deceased postwar American writers as John Hawkes or Stanley Elkin or Gilbert Sorrentino were never even remotely considered for the Nobel Prize only highlights the essential cluelessness of those at the "center" of the European literary world.

The comments that have received the most attention in the print media and on literary blogs are Engdahl's suggestions that American writers are "too insular" and "don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." Most people have interpreted this to be a criticism of American writers for not reading enough translated work, or for focusing on domestic "issues," but I find the claims as worded to be virtually incoherent. Either Engdahl is asserting that not enough American writers are contributing to some ongoing "dialogue" about literature separate from their own writing, or the allegation is that they don't conceive of their writing as a contribution to "the big dialogue of literature." As far as I'm concerned, both notions are equally preposterous. The first requires that we think of world literature as some kind of super seminar in which writers are the invited panelists and collegiality the expected behavior. It seems to subsitute "dialogue" among writers for literary criticism.

Most likely, of course, Engdahl means something like the second. American writers are too "insular" in that they don't offer their work as part of a cross-cultural discourse that Engdahl is defining as "literature." They are too "isolated" to see the value of this discourse. But literature isn't a "dialogue" monitored by self-appointed arbiters who decide what part of the conversation deserves a prize for its insight. It isn't an attempt to "say" anything, except circuitously or by accident. I'm tempted to construe Engdahl's scolding of American writers for their insularity as just another expression of impatience with the "merely literary," with writing that isn't morally or politically useful, but I doubt he really meant to go quite that far. He is simply reiterating a commonly-held, if implicit rather than thought-out, view that literature is more about dialogue and discussion and nicely articulated platitudes. less about art and aesthetic consummation, which indeed often occurs in isolation and, in literature, as a "dialogue" only between the author and his/her text.

One reason that poets are so infrequently awarded the Nobel Prize has to be that it is much harder to value poetry primarily for its relevance to "the big dialogue." Poetry more clearly foregrounds the aesthetic amibitions of literature, and even those who read novels for the "something said" are often willing to concede that this model is overly reductive as applied to poetry (when such readers even admit to reading poetry--many simply confess they don't "get" it). But since the Nobel Prize seems to be decided according to the criterion that a writer "say" things (that, and the implicit requirement that the prestige of the prize be spread around a little--every once in a while a Chinese or Arabic writer--to enlarge the "dialogue"), poetry, or, God forbid, experimental writing, is neverthless going to be left at the door. Such exclusion of writing that in its necessary inwardness doesn't meet the blandly humanitarian standards of the Nobel committee is just one of the reasons why this literary prize, the biggest, is also the most idiotic.

The Realm of Elegance and Grace

Steven Millhauser is correct to defend the short story as a form of "radical exclusion" that works through "austerity" but that can also through this very austerity "body forth the whole world." However, in making his case that the short story mostly settles for "a grain of sand" and leaves the rest of the observed world as the subject of novels, I think Millhauser is exaggerating the differences between the two forms, in a way that actually does an injustice to the novel.

According to Millhauser,

Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The novel is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.

The most immediate overstatement here is in the association of novels with the "large" and the "exhaustive." This characterization clearly enough describes historically the practice of certain writers--Dickens, Dreiser--but not others--Hawthorne, Emily Bronte, certain novels--Moby-Dick, The Mill on the Floss--but not others--The Red Badge of Courage, The Trial. It also more accurately encompasses the Anglo-European novel than the American novel, which has always edged closer to what is generally called "romance" than to the "novel" and its inexhaustible realism. The romance, although not necessarily always "small," is nevertheless "selective," content, as Hawthorne put it, to "manage [its] atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture." Romance doesn't seek to "devour" the world but to transform a discrete portion of it into a version of the writer's own imagining.

This "tendency" in American fiction persists among contemporary writers, especially those commonly identified as "postmodern." Thus even meganovels such as Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest, as "large" as they undeniably are, do not threaten to become "unwieldy, clumsy, crude." In both structure and style they bear the hallmarks of writers more interested in "hidden powers" than "things in plain view," intimate the possibility of "revelation," even if such revelation is perpetually deferred. Their "ponderous mass" belies an intensity of effect traceable in manner to Charles Brockden Brown, to Hawthorne and Melville, not to Richardson or Trollope, nor even Tolstoy. In American fiction, at least, the opposition between the hulking, indecorous novel and the delicate short story just doesn't very cogently apply.

A very good example of fiction to which this opposition decidedly does not apply can be found in the novels of Steven Millhauser himself. Edwin Mullhous, Portrait of a Romantic, and Martin Dressler require somewhat more room for their stories of obsession to be fully developed, but they are hardly recognizable as the sort of graceless beast Millhauser describes in his essay. They might be said to breathe a little more expansively, but they are otherwise as stylish and fully-shaped as any of Millhuaser's short stories (which themselves do have the kind of "completeness" Millhauser attributes to the short story.) Moreover, Millhauser has worked extensively in the novella, a form that at the very least straddles the divide between short story and novel, and as employed by Millhauser really only further undermines his own hard distinction between the two. Millhauser's novellas, collected in such books as Little Kingdoms and The King in the Tree, are just as elegant and selective as his stories (as anyone else's stories, for that matter), but they certainly do not shrink from assertions of "power," which in Millhauser's case results from the effort to encapsulate the world through fable and a twisted kind of allegory.

I think that ultimately all fiction involves a degree of "Faustian" striving, and that no fiction accomplishes "perfection." Fiction can never sufficiently "attain its desire" such that no further variations on a theme can be achieved, no additional aesthetic avenues of approach explored. And while it is possible to identify a strategy of "radical exclusion" that often does allow us to differentiate between story and novel, there is no reason why this strategy can't be practiced in those longer prose narratives we can't categorize as "short" stories and by tradition call novels. Millhauser's novels and novellas do this, as do, in different ways, the novels of Nicholson Baker, for example.If a novel has to conquer "territory" for it to be classified as a real novel, then I suppose Millhauser's taxonomy makes sense, but I don't see why this needs to be a defining feature of the novel in the first place.

The Minds of Characters

The contributors to the blog OnFiction profess to be doing "research on the psychology of fiction." If we take this to encompass broadly the increasing popularity of "cognitive theory" and neuroscience in the analysis of literature and our response to literature, "psychology of fiction" attempts to describe our reaction to fictional characters as if those characters were real people with minds, who, as a recent post at OnFiction has it, provoke us to "wonder what they are up to." In this view of the reading experience, "we readers imagine ourselves into the minds of characters as we run the simulation which is the literary story." So do writers, which accounts for the reported instances of characters "exhibiting apparently autonomous agency" during the composing process.

As a reader, I have never "imagined myself into the minds of characters" while running "the simulation which is the literary story." Neither can I really believe that anyone else has done this. In the first place, in most fiction that to any significant degree asks us to consider the mental life of its characters, we are not encouraged to imagine ourselves "into" their minds. Their mental life is presented to us explicitly, often in the narrative mode called the "free indirect" method, sometimes directly through a stream of consciousness, or near stream of consciousness, point of view. We don't have to "wonder what they are up to" because the author/narrator makes it perfectly plain what they are up to. Perhaps it is the case that in some first-person narratives we are invited to read between, or behind, the lines the narrator literally offers us, resulting in a perception of the narrator's state of mind to which even he/she has little access, but I don't think this relatively special circumstance is what the "psychology of fiction" generally emphasizes.

Second, in what way does "the simulation which is the literary story" differ or depart from the literary story itself? Are we being told that the "literary story" exists as a way for us to imagine the characters in other situations, situations the story doesn't relate? That the story is merely an excuse for us to wonder abstractly about the characters in all of their "autonomy"? Or is it that the "simulation" we "run" is just the story itself and that when we "imagine ourselves into the minds of characters" we are simply envisaging what it would be like to be these characters involved in this story? If "character" is so overridingly important in a work of fiction that we are led to detach it from all other elements of the work and regard the characters as real people we might ask over for drinks, then why bother with the other elements of the story? The author could just send us a character sketch of his protagonist, whom we could then imagine in any circumstance we'd like. And while I do believe some readers project themselves into the situations in which fictional characters are portrayed, this has more to do with the operations of the readers' minds than those allegedly at work in the characters' minds. Such readers are more engaged with the story in which the characters appear than with the characters themselves, certainly more than they're connected to the "minds" of those characters.

Similarly, I'm sure that some writers do experience their characters exhibiting "autonomy," taking the narrative in directions the author didn't anticipate, but I doubt that very often this is a result of the author dwelling in the characters' "minds." In my own on-and-off career as a fiction writer, I have had characters wander off the plotted path, but never because I could read in their minds that they thought it best to do so. Either the character's voice seemed to provoke a change in plan, or the story itself prompted a change in character, or the character just didn't seem in general to be the sort of character who would do that rather than this. Realizing that a narrative needs to be readjusted because one's preconceptions about a character's role in it have been altered is an aesthetically sound decision, but it has very little to do with remaining alert to the "psychology of fiction."

If anything, a fixation on "character," even more reductively on the "inner life" of a character, only makes our response to the whole work of fiction more impoverished. The very best fiction, like the very best art in general, widens our perspective on the possibilities of the form as a form. It helps us enhance our experience of fiction by remaining alert to all of the artistic choices the writer has made. In John Dewey's words, "The artist selected, simplified, clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest. The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest." Isolating character as the most essential element in works of fiction potentially circumscribes our response to them, blinkers our awareness of the other aesthetic "operations" at work in the text. It inherently declares fiction to be this sort of thing--a way of meeting up with imaginary characters--rather than all the other things it might be. It renders stories and novels into case studies for psychologists rather than complex works of art.

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.

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.

A Normative Conclusion

In his recent post on his Think Again blog about the misappropriation of deconstruction by American academics, Stanley Fish writes:

. . .No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown — can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one.

Among literary scholars, there are many who regard works of literature as a kind of social construction. In this view, a given work cannot be granted a special status as "art" separated from history or culture, since it is permeated with both. For literary study in its historicist and cultural studies incarnations, literature gives us access to the historical/cultural forces that worked through the writer to author the work, the exposure of which forces is the most important work of academic criticism. Literary art as an autonomous accomplishment that deserves consideration in its own right is not just shunted aside, but is dismissed outright as a delusion.

Behind this rejection of the "literary" as anything other than a window on culture and beyond that mostly an imposition by overweening writers claiming an exalted power they don't ultimately possesses is an attitude that might indeed be described as "normative conclusion" as Fish uses the term. Writers are inevitably responding to the social conditions of their time; they can't escape the historical contingencies that inform their assumptions about the world; their works might help us understand how culturally-bound beliefs get circulated around and through all culturally-inscribed modes of expression, but they certainly can't be considered as distinctive aesthetic objects produced by the play of human imagination. The notion that a work of literature might, in its encounter with particular readers, transcend the conditions, contingencies, and cultural presuppositions of its creation, at least for the moment of the reader's experience, just can't be countenanced. No text can escape the confines of its social construction.

Thus all literary works are "just" social constructions. And this conclusion has become the basis of the most widely-practiced forms of academic criticism, whereby poems and stories and novels (particularly the latter) are scrutinized for their socially-constructed representations, as if they were being punished for being found complicit with all the evils with which "culture" can be charged. But, as Fish points out, a specific work can be criticized for advancing a particular socially constructed vision that might be found objectionable (which in most cases means it has failed at being art in the first place), but it can hardly be criticized for being a social construction to one degree or another. Writers are human beings, not members of some alien species, so they cannot finally escape their circumstances as human beings, their being alive at a certain time, in a certain place, with all the attendant assumptions and perspectives that time and place embody.

Thus, to say that a work of literature is inescapably a social construction is precisely to say nothing. Of course it is. How could it be otherwise? That it can also be a work of art, "art" being defined not as something insulated from history and culture, outside of time and place, but as we human beings in all our socially constructed atttitudes and expectations choose to define it as we go along, seems to me not only possible but indispensable. Sometimes writers manage to raise themselves to an awareness of the social constructedness of aesthetic conventions and conventional discourse and compel their readers to rise to such an awareness as well. Sometimes they even work toward the dissolution of certain especially noxious social constructions. They don't always succeed in these efforts to confront social constructions, because they can't. We remain blind to some of them, especially if they're constructions of which we approve or which otherwise help us get our work done. But this is no reason to hold all of literature responsible for this unavoidable human failing.

Easier to Talk About

In Exit Ghost, Philip Roth includes a letter putatively written by "Amy Bellette" but, as it turns out, mostly written by her lover, E.I. Lonoff, the perfectionist writer whose portrayal in The Ghost Writer initiated Roth's series of Zuckerman novels. Bellette/Lonoff write:

Hemingway's early stories are set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so your cultural journalist goes to the Upper Peninsula and finds out the names of the locals who are said to have been models for the characters in the early stories. Surprise of surprises, they or their descendants feel badly served by Ernest Hemingway. These feelings, unwarranted or childish or downright imaginary as they may be, are taken more seriously than the fiction because they're easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than the fiction.

I was reminded of this passage when reading Brian Boyd's "The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature," not because Boyd himself really finds external issues easier "to talk about than the fiction," certainly not because Boyd values such issues more than "the fiction," but because even in his attempt to retrieve the "art of literature" as the central subject of literary criticism he seemingly can't help but underscore the value of fiction as the gateway to something else.

Boyd correctly observes that

For the last few decades. . .scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

In order to demonstrate that to ignore the "imaginative accomplishment of a work" is to totally misunderstand the claims that art makes on us, Boyd further correctly observes that "For both artists and audiences, art’s capacity to ensnare attention is crucial" and concludes from this that "attention—engagement in the activity—matters before meaning."

Yet if we normally engage in art simply because it can command our attention, meaning, in academic contexts, elbows its way to the fore, because the propositional nature of meaning makes it so much easier to expound, circulate, regurgitate, or challenge than the fluid dynamics of attention.

Boyd devotes the largest part of his essay to an analysis of the play with "patterns" in Nabokov's Lolita that shows, for Boyd, that "A writer can capture our attention before, in some cases long before, we reach what academic critics would accept as the 'meaning' or 'meanings' of works. The high density of multiple patterns holds our attention and elicits our response—especially through patterns of biological importance, like those surrounding character and event, which arouse attention and emotion and feed powerful, dedicated, evolved information-processing subroutines in the mind."

Boyd's reading of Lolita is impeccable, and I couldn't agree more with his essential insight that attention precedes meaning and that the implications of this for our "appreciation" of literature are profound. Indeed, up to this point Boyd's account of the nature of art and the reception of art is entirely consistent with that given in John Dewey's Art as Experience, a book that stands as the foundation of my own philosophy of art and the claims of which I have tried to integrate with a more purely literary interest in formalist aesthetics (substituting for New Critical notions such as "organic unity" Dewey's emphasis on the unity of experience). Dewey similarly underscores the value of attentiveness and the process by which the reader or the viewer comes to be aware of patterns.

But in my opinion Boyd more or less gives back what he has taken away from those preoccupied with "meaning" in literature, with extracting from literature an analysis that services an extra- or even anti-literary agenda, when he declares that "The pleasure art’s intense play with patterns affords compels our engagement again and again and helps shape our capacity to create and process pattern more swiftly. Perhaps it even helps explain the so-called Flynn effect, the fact—and it seems to be one—that IQs have risen with each of the last few generations. . . ." Dewey would never have "justified" the experience of art by invoking this capacity to "process pattern more swiftly." Dewey's account emphasizes art's capacity to enlarge experience, to make us more appreciative of experience, not its utilitarian potential to speed up our recognition of patterns. Indeed, such speeding-up probably cuts off the full experience of art as Dewey describes it. Art may or may not contribute to a "Flynn effect," but that it might do so is hardly the most important reason to attend to art's patterns in the first place. The attention we pay to art is its own compensation.

Thus I also don't see why Boyd needs to appeal to "science" as a way of invoking the immediacy of art. The Darwinian/biological analysis of art itself brings along its own anti-art baggage, and finally the appeal to Science as the all-encompassing context in which art is to be understood is no more helpful to art than the appeal to History or to Culture. That "works of art should provide ideal controlled replicable experiments for the study of both rapid and gradual pattern recognition in the mind" or that "Literature and other arts have helped extend our command of information patterns" seem to me conclusions that are just as extra-literary in their attempts to use art and literature for that "something else" as the idea that works of art and literature disclose cultural symptoms or that they capture the elusive forces of history. (Or that they reveal the flaws of their creators.) Finally they also seem topics that might be more convenient to talk about than the fiction.

Ultimately the problem may be that Boyd's brief is not so much on behalf of a more profitable way of reading literature as it is an attempt to reintroduce "literature as an art" back into the university curriculum. But "the fluid dynamics of attention," however much they do govern our response to works of art or literature when we are freely encountering them, are not really "replicable" in the college classroom unless you want to spend most of it simply reading a novel, poem, or story and directing your students to be very dynamic in their attention. Teaching literature because it brings out many of the imperatives of human evolution doesn't seem any more faithful to the "imaginative accomplishments" of literature than any of the other methods of literary study that have been tried. It may be that the "indulgent inclinations" really do need to be indulged outside the classroom and elsewhere than in scholarly journals.

A Nicer Chap

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has read a biography of V.S. Naipaul and decided she "certainly will not buy another book by this egomaniac." She proclaims:

The man and the writer are not as easily separated as critics would have us believe. Writers don't have to be saints but they do have to have empathy and live as civilised beings within the rules that apply to us all. What would we do if we found Richard Branson beat his mistress and drove his wife to death? Or if the BBC's director general spoke of his addiction to paid sex? Artists are part of our world and must be judged as others are. They cannot claim immunity from decency.

As a matter of fact, the man and the writer are quite easily separated. Step one would be to avoid reading biographies of writers. This would leave you with only the work (about which harsh things might certainly be said, but they wouldn't be inspired by an animus against the man founded on moral disapproval rather than an estimation of the writing founded on literary judgment) and spare you the emotional energy required to work up a good lathering of moral outrage. It would encourage you to regard "criticism" as an act of engaged reading of fiction or poetry rather than the dissemination of gossip. Indeed, if we would all forswear the reading of most literary biographies, such gossip would not become a part of our literary discourse in the first place and the whole question of "separating" the writer and the work would never come up.

If step one proves too difficult, step two might be to acknowledge that writers should indeed "live as civilised beings within the rules that apply to us all," but to further acknoweldge that this is a statement about personal conduct, about the way we interact with other humans in a social context, not about writing novels. What exactly are the rules of fiction-writing that "apply to us all," other than that those who do write novels should do so in an interesting or compelling way? If the writer has not fulfilled that obligation, then refusing to read any more of that writer's work would be an appropriate response, but such a refusal based on violation of rules of behavior (a malfeasance to which many. many writers would have to plead guilty) is just an easy way of avoiding the harder work of considering works of literature on their own terms as works of invention and imagination. It's a way of avoiding literature, which too often doesn't allow us to indulge in our moral certainties.

"Artists are part of our world and must be judged as others are. They cannot claim immunity from decency." Only writers and artists who themselves refuse to separate their lives from their work would stupidly "claim immunity from decency." They take their freedom to flaunt rules of decorum and challenge established conventions (formal and othewise) in their work to mean they have similar freedom in their real lives. This is mostly childishness, which is, I suppose, morally culpable, although again I can't see that it should affect our estimation of whatever genuine insights and aesthetic achievements arise from their iconoclasm as artists. It doesn't seem to me that Naipaul's moral failings can be placed in this category of deliberate indecency, anyway. His is a more garden-variety exhibition of human weakness, and as such will no doubt continue to be noted (probably ad nauseam, by those who don't want to be bothered by mere literature), but ultimately his reputation as a writer will still be determined by the appeal of this work, not by the noxiousness of his behavior, even if the charges apparently leveled at him in this biography are true, which I myself don't accept simply because the biographer claims they are.

As Steve Mitchelmore points out in his own discussion of Alibhai-Brown's condemnation of Naipaul, she "recalls wistfully the days she read and loved Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas. As she doesn't say, we can only guess why she loved his work at that time. Was he a nicer chap?" Ailbhai-Brown's own response to Naipaul's artistry in Biswas shows that it is not only possible but preferable to separate the writer from the work. She might have remained blissfully unaware of Naipaul's personal derelictions, or dismissed them the irrelevancies they are, and retained her fondness for his earlier work. Instead she now has to concoct a narrative in which since Biswas Naipaul's books "have got increasingly bigoted and nasty; he was moved more by hate than love, and an ugliness repeatedly broke through his beautifully written prose." How in the world does Alibhai-Brown know that Naipaul was "moved more by hate than love"? She has to cling to some such notion in order to preserve her conviction that Naipaul the man emerges in all his nastiness in the work, but it's a pretty impoverished view of literature that suggests it can be so easily be dismissed through this two-bit piece of psychologizing.

Pyschological Occurences

In The Logical Structure of the World, Rudolph Carnap attempts to show how a "constructional system" can be built the purpose of which is "to order the objects of all sciences into a system according to their reducibility to one another." Among these "objects" are what Carnap calls "cultural objects" (which include works of art) and "pyschological objects." The former, Carnap maintains, are reducible (for the purposes of this system) to the latter:

The awareness of the aesthetic content of a work of art, for example a marble statue, is indeed not identical with the recognition of the sensible characteristics of the piece of marble, its shape, size, color, and material. But this awareness is not something outside of the perception, since for it no content other than the content of the perception is given; more precisely: this awareness is uniquely determined through what is perceived by the senses. Thus, there exists a unique functional relation between the physical properties of the piece of marble and the aesthetic content of the work of art which is represented in this piece of marble.

To put it another way, the aesthetic experience includes an awareness of the piece of marble in all of its physical attributes, or of a page of text with its words printed in a particular style on paper of a particular color and weight, but it only begins there. "Aesthetic content" requires another step to be fulfilled:

. . .if a physical object is to be formed or transformed in such a way that it becomes a document, a bearer of expression for the cultural object, then this requires an act of creation or transformation on the part of one or several individuals, and thus psychological occurences in which the cultural object comes alive; these psychological occurences are the manifestations of the cultural object.

Although he uses the word "experience" rather than "psychological occurences," and although he is more rooted to the "physical object" than is Carnap in what seems an essentially phenomenological analyis of the experience of art, John Dewey in Art as Experience offers a philosophy of art and the reception of art that at least has a family resemblance to what Carnap is suggesting here. Both Dewey and Carnap avoid attributing metaphysical status to the "beauty" of art (a beauty that is intrinsic to the work) by locating the aesthetic in our apprehension of the work. As Carnap puts it, for the work to become a "bearer of expression," there must be "an act of creation or transformation on the part of one or several individuals." Similarly, Dewey would maintain that these "several individuals" include both artist and audience, as the work is not really complete until the viewer/listener/reader is able to "recreate" it in perception: "Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art. The artist selected, simplified, clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest. The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest."

Thus aesthetic judgment is unavoidably subjective, requiring the "transformation" Carnap describes, a process that will be bound to the "point of view and interest" of the "beholder," as Dewey has it. Still, the "sensible characteristics" of the work remain what they are, and aesthetic judgment cannot simply be cut loose from the work's sensible properties. Indeed, the more fully one experiences art according to Dewey's account of the process, the more, and the more intensely, those sensible properties will be felt.

It seems to me that both Carnap and Dewey remind us that, although the aesthetic is consummated in the "psychological occurences" experienced by readers or viewers, the sensible charactertistics of works of art and literature cannot be denied or dismissed. Thus, in reading fiction, we should not forget that neither people nor "things" are the subjects of perception. Words are. If, for example, we are reading a realist novel, we are not experiencing "the world" faithfully reproduced at all. We are not even, finally, experiencing a world of the author's creation, whether it's a world meant to be taken as a version of the real world or one the author has imaginatively brought into being. We are experiencing writing, which, through the psychological processes Carnap and Dewey invoke, is "transformed" into a world of characters and their stories. Ultimately a sufficient accumulation of responses by readers in turn transforms the work into a "cultural object." In our haste to describe that realist novel as a convincing "picture" of reality or as something "that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict," we should not forget that it's neither. As an object of aesthetic experience, it's just writing, skillfully arranged for your act of recreation.

No Ideas But In Things

In the first chapter of his 2005 book, Realist Vision, Peter Brooks writes:

With the rise of the realist novel in the nineteenth century, we are into the age of Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle, of Karl Marx and John Ruskin, of Charles Darwin and Hippolyte Taine: that is, an age where history takes on new importance, and learns to be more scientific, and where theories of history come to explain how we got to be how we are, and in particular how we evolved from earlier forms to the present. It 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.

To the extent that Brooks wants to link the rise of realist fiction to the rise of science and "theories of history," I can't really see how the former is influenced much by the latter, except specifically in the fiction of naturalist writers such as Emile Zola or, in the United States, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. These writers did indeed try to depict human behavior as it was defined by science--especially Darwinism--and by the forces of history. But these were writers who were deliberately using realism to illustrate a view of human life as determined by such external forces, not exploring the purely literary possibilities of realism as a still relatively new aesthetic strategy. They may have in a sense been portraying "things as they are," but they were doing it from an abstract philosophical perspective, not as an attempt to first of all render life in all of its particularities.

I equally don't understand 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. To me, a "defining characteristic" of any fiction that can make a claim to be literary art, that can still be taken seriously in the long run, after the "social problems" of the day have been replaced by the next set, is that it not "confront" any issues or problems other than the literary problems immediately at hand.

Brooks's own insistence here that realism must "take on" larger social and cultural questions is actually contradicted, it seems to me, by what he asserts just a few paragraphs later:

You cannot, the realist claims, represent people without taking account of the things that people use and acquire in order to define themselves--their tools, their furniture, their accessories. These things are indeed part of the very definition of "character," of who one is and what one claims to be. The presence of things in these novels also signals their break from the neoclassical stylistic tradition, which tended to see the concrete, the particular, the utilitarian as vulgar, lower class, and to find beauty in the generalized and noble. The need to include and to represent things will consequently imply a visual inspection of the world of phenomena and a detailed report on it--a report often in the form of what we call description. The descriptive is typical--sometimes maddeningly so, of these novels. And the picture of the whole only emerges--if it does--from the accumulation of things.

This seems to me a pretty good account of what the best realist novels do: Draw the reader into a meticulously described world that the reader can accept as like the "real" world (keeping in mind that realistic description in fiction is just another device the writer can use, no more "authentic" than any other, given that what the reader is finally "confronted" with are just words on a page) and allow the reader to "see" the approximated world as fully as possible. If this sort of realism does bear philosophical implications, they are centered around the idea that the real is what is perceived. (Later, the "psychological" realists such as Woolf and Joyce would reject this; their fiction finds the real in how things are perceived, by focusing on the internal processes of consciousness.) But finally the art of realism lies in the way "things" are organized, in the manner and the skill with which the writer entices the reader to take note of the illuminating details.

Such an approach seems wholly at odds with the notion that realist fiction makes the reader aware of historical abstractions and social "issues." (The "generalized" rather than the "concrete.") "Things as they are" in the one seem on a wholly different scale than "things as they are" in the other. We can be made aware in fiction, subtly if implicitly, of historical change or social conflict, but only by acknowleding that the "defining characteristic" of realism is its particular approach to aesthetic representation, not its willingness to "take on" non-literary "problems." I am still reading Brooks's book, and I hope he will demonstrate to me how these two discrepant impulses can be reconciled in an account of literary realism.

Publish or Perish

The emerging controversy over the fate of Vladimir Nabokov's final, unfinished manuscript raises issues similar to those discussed in the preceding post. In that post I suggested that the publication of the "original" versions of some of Raymond Carver's stories will serve only to diminish readers' estimation of Carver's fiction. I further argued that even if Carver's editor in effect co-wrote the stories, it would be better for those original efforts to remain unpublished. What ultimately matters is the quality of the work, and, since I believe the impure versions of the stories (those edited by Gordon Lish) are superior, they are the versions that should be available to future readers.

In the Nabokov case, a manuscript the author felt should not be available will either be destroyed or be published against the author's wishes. Whereas Carver agreed to the publication of the impure versions of his work (thus effectively claiming them as his own), here the author wanted the impure version of his work-in-progress (impure because not completed) to be withheld from publication. If we are finally able to read The Original of Laura, we would be reading something the author had not yet claimed as his own (worthy of being attributed to "Vladimir Nabokov" on the cover), something that, to Nabokov's way of thinking, did not yet constitute a text that could be read at all in any meaningful sense. It was the finished work that Nabokov would share with his audience; the work done on the way to that finished form should not concern them.

In discussing the issues involved in this controversy, Ron Rosenbaum asks, "Does the lust for aesthetic beauty always allow us to rationalize trampling on the artist's grave?" But the unfinished manuscript could not have "aesthetic beauty" as Nabokov would have defined the term. Aesthetic beauty emerges from the work as it is fully shaped, exhausting its creator's artistic resources. The completed work might fail to have aesthetic beauty, but only the completed work manifests the aesthetic beauty the artist/author attempted to bring about. Nabokov wanted The Original of Laura destroyed because it coud not provide the aesthetic satisfaction he wanted his fiction to provoke above all else. (The "tingle" in the spine he himself most valued when reading works of literature.)

There are of course notable challenges to the purity of effect Nabokov demanded. Kafka wanted his incomplete work (including The Trial) similarly dispatched to oblivion, and most of us are surely glad that Max Brod, his executor, did not follow his instructions. Few would deny that even in their truncated or unpolished form Kafka's novels provide a distinctive aesthetic experience. Perhaps The Original of Laura would also redeem itself in its fragmentary state, although from Rosenbaum's description of it (through Dmitri Nabokov), it doesn't seem that it will. Still, Nabokov is such a beguiling writer it is certainly possible that this 30-page manuscript has a sufficiently realized appeal that it would be a loss to literature--or at least to Nabokov's body of work--if it were to be destroyed.

Nabokov would never have gotten himself into a situation like that Raymond Carver faced when deciding which version of his stories to make public, since it is inconceivable that he would have allowed an editor to interfere with his work in the way Gordon Lish apparently did in editing Carver. But the two cases are related in the way they foreground important questions: Who has the authority to decide when or whether a text should be officially sanctioned under a deceased author's name--the author, through his or her explicit instructions or tacit acquiescence, or his/her "executors," those in possession of the text in question? How do we assess unpublished works in the larger context of an author's known work? Most importantly: At what point does a text have sufficient aesthetic integrity that we are justified reading it as a text, and not just a draft still on its way to its artistic consummation?

Something Fundamental

David Ulin sees similarities between Norman Mailer and Denis Johnson:

Regardless of what you think about Mailer, his death is one more signifier of a literary culture in transition, in which the old guard is disappearing faster than we can figure out who might fill the void. This is why Johnson's prize is so compelling -- because he may be the one American writer of his generation (the generation raised on Vietnam and Woodstock) who consistently writes with that overarching standard of engagement, who's not playing games but going after something fundamental, using literature to get at the essence of who we are.

I have to assume that in Ulin's reference to "playing games" he is taking a swipe at postmodernism, using the same stale cliche those critics who want to valorize the "engagement" of writers like Mailer and Johnson in contrast to the aesthetic affectations of formalists and metafictionists always seem to use. The former don't mince around with "art" but grapple with "the essence of who we are," while the latter are preoccupied with surfaces, with the "merely literary."

It's a tiresome enough exercise, as much as anything else unfair to Mailer and Johnson, who are being judged as philosophers and seers rather than novelists, archaelogists of the soul rather than artists. Surely Mailer's most ponderous and pretentious books are those in which he self-consciously assumed these roles, and it does Johnson no favor to describe his work in terms as trite as those Ulin later uses to capture that "something fundamental" he is putatively "going after":

These are strange books, no doubt about it, built on the notion that reality is a veil behind which we might discover the truer nature of things, if only we could see it for what it is. Occasionally, we are offered glimpses but that just adds to our confusion -- or, worse, puts our most essential selves at risk. "Did you think we were just thinking?" a character asks in "Already Dead." "Thinking forbidden thoughts? Imagining heresies? Pretending to recognize moral systems as instruments of oppression and control?"

What Johnson is saying is that this is not a game but deadly serious, that what's at stake is how we continue in the face of mysteries so large they threaten to overwhelm us -- and ultimately will. The only answer is to continue moving forward, to accept our small graces and benedictions where we can.

The vapidity here is striking: "reality is a veil"; "our most essential selves"; "not a game but deadly serious"; "[t]he only answer is to continue moving forward." What does any of this mean? Why would anyone want to read a body of work that can be reduced to this sort of night-school existentialism? Most importantly, would Denis Johnson be satisfied with such a flavorless characterization of his fiction? I can't imagine that he would. While I would not call Jesus' Son "the most potent work of American fiction in the last 20 years" (among other reasons because it was actually published in 1992), I did enjoy reading this book (as well as Angels and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man), and I can't at all say it was because Johnson had pierced the veil of reality or dug down to our "most essential selves" or because it signalled to me that we should "continue moving forward." In fact, it seemed to me a rather delicate book, working through style, nuance, and indirection rather than a heavy-handed "engagement" or utilitarian view of literature as spiritual guide.

It remains unclear to me why we should hold novelists to an "overarching standard of engagement." Why should I care whether Norman Mailer or Denis Johnson have anything at all to "say"? They're novelists, not soapbox orators, and should be judged by the quality of the literary art they make, not their efforts to discover the really real or stare down the "face of mysteries." I'd rather have writers playing games than aspiring to be sages.

A Flattened Landscape

Stephen T. Asma observes that

My relativist undergraduates feel empowered by a leveling theory that puts their favorite rock band on equal footing with Bach and Mozart; but watch how quickly a qualitative hierarchy races back when, in the interests of consistency, you suggest that their favorite band must be no better than the Backstreet Boys (or that their favorite bohemian film is no better than, only different from, Police Academy 5). The old dichotomies between elite and popular, and high and low, may indeed be vexed by unjustifiable privileges, but without a new language of merit for the arts, the postmodernists are forced to live in a flattened landscape where Barry Manilow and Beethoven are equals. In principle, the postmodernists are happy to do so, because anything else would be hegemonic propaganda. In practice, however, their hearts are as autocratic as yours and mine (and they frequently elevate their own favorites with praise of "keepin' it real").

Aesthetic judgment always comes into play, just as much among those who decry the impermissably snobbish judgments of "elitist" critics as among the snobs themselves. Even if we do reject the high/low distinction when it assumes some kind of metaphysical difference between forms ("literary fiction" vs. "genre fiction"), we still inevitably conclude that some works are better than others. Criticism exists to make these conclusions honest, to force us to give our reasons for believing that, say, Philip K. Dick's fiction is more challenging and provocative than, say, that of Ray Bradbury. Or that Dick's work is not as accomplished as Vladimir Nabokov's. Not because the latter is "literary," but because it can be shown that Nabokov is a better writer, conceptually, stylisitically, formally. And such a thing can be shown.

Unfortunately, "aesthetic judgment" gets associated with people like Roger Scruton, who tells us that art falls into two categories, "the uplifting and the demeaning," and who equates "works of art as objects of judgment" with "expressions of the moral life." This is the view of art that insists we attend to art because it's good for us, that some works are morally elevating and others degrading. "Taste" is supposedly involved, but all this really means is that some of us are morally perceptive and others not. "Hence," writers Scruton:

. . .in the democratic culture, aesthetic judgment begins to be experienced as an affliction. It imposes an unsustainable burden, something that we must live up to, a world of ideals and aspirations that is in sharp conflict with the tawdriness and imperfection of our own improvised lives.

Our failure to make aesthetic distinctions is not an aesthetic failure, it's a moral one. We don't share the "ideals and aspirations" that people like Scruton posit as the proper ones.

It's no wonder that so many "relativist undergraduates" reject this sort of moral scolding. But it's not an imposition of aesthetic standards; it's the renunciation of them.

Mindful

Matt Cheney quotes approvingly from this blog post by John Harrison. Some of what John says I wholeheartedly endorse:

Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research. As a reader I’m not interested in a “fully worked out” world. I’m not interested in “self consistency”. I don’t care what kind of underpants Iberian troops wore in 1812, or if I do I can find out about it for myself. I don’t want the facts about the Silk Road or the collapse of the Greenland Colony, sugared up & presented in three-volumes as an imaginary world. I don’t want to be talked through your enthusiasm for costume. I don’t want be talked through anything.

A good deal of my own frustration in reading science fiction comes precisely from a similar impatience with the "exhaustive" treatment of a "fully-worked out world" in which an obsessive focus on picayune detail is substituted for imagination. In such works, "realism" and "fantasy" seem separated by the thinnest line of mere plausibility. In one case the story might have "really" happened, in the other we know it couldn't, but the texture of the "worlds" created and the method of storytelling employed are essentially identical.

I have more trouble with this:

When I read fantasy, I read for the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know. I want the taste of the writer’s mind, I want to feel I’m walking about in the edges of the individual personality.

Not because I necessarily disagree with either of these sentences taken alone. Each advances a perfectly coherent expectation of a particular kind of writing. But the two statements aren't really coherent with one another.

I myself like fiction that emphasizes "the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know." I also like some realistic fiction that "defamiliarizes the world I know." In each case, however, I'm focused on the aesthetic particulars of the text in question, the strategies it uses in its "world-creation." I'm focused on the text: what it does, what it's like, how its aesthetic qualities are manifested.

I frankly don't really know what it means to get a "taste of the writer's mind" in a work of fiction. The writer's mind belongs to the writer, not the work. Maybe if I'm reading a memoir or other work of nonfiction I might want to think that, figuratively speaking at least, I'm "walking about in the edges of the individual personality," but for me "personality" has nothing to do with my experience of the words on the page in a novel or short story. Looked at long enough with a determination to find "personality" in a work of literature, perhaps the work will offer up such, but in my view this would ulimately be just as much an artifact of the text as any other material feature readers find there. The personality found, in, say, Samuel Beckett's work is not the personality of the actual Beckett but that which a close reading of the texts reveals is a consistent characteristic--when read in a certain way--of the "Beckett text."

If this is really all John Harrison himself is suggesting in his reference to "personality" and "the writer's mind," then we're not really substantively disagreeing. These are terms that denote a "sensibility" that seems to pervade an author's work and that provide it with a kind of unity of effect. One might also refer to this as a certain kind of "intelligence" that sets the work apart from other works in which the guiding principle does seem to be an "exhaustiveness" of presentation, a fabricated authenticity that comes from dissociated details rather than a more adventurous literary imagination.

Still, I've never really understood the common enough tendency to speak of literary texts as if they were emanations of "mind" to whose wavelength we might want to tune in. I've never really understood why we should want to have access to these wavelengths in the first place. Are writers' minds more special than everyone else's? More awe-inspiring? I'm interested in what writers as literary artists create, not in what we can perceive of their disembodied "minds."

Fantastic Elements

In her Strange Horizons essay registering her curiosity about the current SF scene after several years' absence from it, Susannah Mandel notes a loosening of the idea that science fiction is "a ghettoized genre form, excluded due to its fantastic elements from the realm of respected, 'artistic' literature, which is dominated by the mode of narrative realism." She further notes that a number of those previously associated with "artistic literature"--including Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, and John Updike--have recently at least dabbled in the "tropes, concepts, or premises historically associated with fantastic fiction" and wonders "How many of these writers have, historically, worked only as realists?"

To me, it isn't so surprising that writers nominally associated with "realism" would occasionally try out the tropes and premises of SF and other categories of genre fiction. Most such realists actually have a lot in common with most genre writers: Both are wedded to story, and both are motivated by an essentially realistic approach to storytelling. Although the stories being told in SF/Fantasy are more expressly "make-believe," they don't thereby get extra credit for being somehow more legitimately make-believe than realism. And even at its most conceptually fantastic in terms of plot and setting, most science fiction (at least in my reading experience) is even more earnestly realistic in presenting its characters and their interactions with their surroundings than most realism. Great efforts are made to present these characters and their actions in minute realistic detail, as if the author is describing a real world that just happens to be strangely transformed from ours.

Richard Larson, in his own response to Mandel's essay, puts it this way: "many of the most prominent mainstream writers are. . .stretching the boundaries of realism to fit their needs within particular stories." These writers are "stretching the boundaries," not abandoning the territory. They are working "within particular stories," using genre "tropes" to create compelling narratives, a conception of the writer's job shared by both realist and fantasist.

Richard suggests further that" People who like Cormac McCarthy and John Updike are not likely to enjoy Dan Simmons or William Gibson, no matter how much people within the genre community say that the books are just so similar" and that this is because these readers will notice in reading The Road or Toward the End of Time a difference in form that will override any similarities in content. While I doubt that either of these novels departs so thoroughly from the conventions of storytelling as to seem that alien to most readers of SF (I think the differences with these two writers are primarily stylistic differences), I do think Richard is pointing out a salient distinction to be made between SF and a certain kind of "literary fiction." It's just that the literary fiction I have in mind has little to do with "realism."

Although Matt Cheney thinks the "form-content distinction" is "more an occasionally-useful illusion than an idea that really fosters good analysis," in this case the distinction is not just useful but absolutely necessary in understanding why the conflict between SF as "a ghettoized genre form" and "artistic literature" as "narrative realism" is largely illusory and certainly not a worthy battle to fight if the stakes include the right to claim the genre as an "alternative" to stuffed-shirt "literary" writing.

To put it succinctly: Why does Mandel, or any partisan of genre fiction, believe the relevant opposition is between realism and not-realism, the latter defined crudely as "fantasy"? Why does she assume that the dominant mode of "artistic" fiction in the 20th and now the 21st century has been and continues to be "realism" in the first place?

If we take the modernists as the founders of "artistic fiction," is it entirely accurate to think of them as realists? To be sure, Proust, Joyce, and Woolf pursued their formal and stylistic innovations partly to achieve what we would now call "psychological realism"--the idea that perception, what goes on inside the human head, is just as vital part of "reality" as what goes on "outside"--and thus Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway could be called works of realism, if not conventionally so. But what about Finnegans Wake? Orlando? What about Kafka or Bulgakov? Is Faulkner best understood as a realist? Is this where his "artistry" lies?

Is it really plausible to claim that the important postwar, postmodern "artistic" fiction is realist? John Hawkes? Nabokov? Donald Barthelme? William Gass, Robert Coover, John Barth? Gilbert Sorrentino?

Among the younger generations of "artistic" writers, which are rightfully called realists? David Foster Wallace? Jonathan Lethem? George Saunders? Granted, a great deal of "literary fiction" of the past 25 or so years has turned away from the formal experimentation and stylistic chutzpah of the postmodernists, and even writers such as Ian McEwan and Richard Powers, whose earlier work could not at all be easily located in the realm of realism, have devolved into something resembling realists, but this sort of retrorealism hardly seems a worthy opponent in the war between reality-bending genre fiction and "artistic literature."

The most distinguished American realist currently still at work, Stephen Dixon, perhaps does stand as a worthy opponent in this conflict. Is Dixon's style of "narrative realism"--which leans heavily on the "realism" at the expense of "narrative"--what those who decry it have in mind? Certainly it eschews fantasy for an obsessive chronicle of the particulars of "real life," but his methods hardly seem representative of the "mode" Susannah Mandel thinks is dominant in current literary fiction. Indeed, one wonders whether Dixon's radical suspension of scene-setting and narrative drama isn't just a little too, well, radical for the genre radicals who think realism is too stodgy. Dixon's fiction illustrates just where the narrative realists and the narrative anti-realists are dancing to the same tune. It's experimental where they are stubbornly traditional: it implicitly posits that fiction has many more unexplored approaches to the depiction of human experience that go beyond the tired storytelling formulas shared by many narrative realists and narrative antirealists alike.

Goodness and Functionality

In this essay called "Our Creed and Our Character," Terry Teachout notes:

No less deeply rooted in the national religious past, one might add, is our distrust of art for art’s sake. Over much of the country’s history, many artists, like most of their countrymen, have favored an art that exists not autonomously but in the service of some cause whose goodness or functionality justifies its existence. In the 19th century, that cause was usually religious; nowadays, it is far more often political. But in both cases, it is hard to escape the conclusion that something in the American national character is inimical to the uncomplicated enjoyment of beauty. We prefer our art to be earnest, and that preference is another survival of American Puritanism.

One might expect Teachout, who has been known in his own criticism to take pleasure in beauty, to point out the way in which this Puritan distrust of the aesthetic and accompanying demand for "functionality" distorts and marginalizes American art (not so much among artists as among critics and audiences), but instead he seems to accept David Gelernter's mawkish notion that there is such a thing as "Americanism," essentially religious in nature, of which American art is, or should be, an expression. "Secular-minded historians who fail to acknowledge this fact—and like-minded aesthetes who believe only in the gospel of art for art’s sake," writes Teachout, "are incapable of seeing either America or its earnest, achieving, incurably idealistic, and wildly gifted people as they really are."

So those of us who are "secular-minded" or who do profess "an uncomplicated enjoyment of beauty," or both, are not real Americans, are irreparably distant from Americans "as they really are"? Only those who accept "Americanism" in all its anhedonic glory need apply for citizenship, a precondition for which is knowledge of Gelernter's "sacralized reading of American history"? Only paintings of kittens or poems about Thomas Edison can really capture "earnest, achieving, incurably idealistic America," an endorsement of which is the true test of art?

Teachout almost says as much when he asserts that "one learns surprisingly little about American religiosity from modern American art," as if this does indeed disqualify it from being considered art, disqualifies it from even being accepted as truly "American," since "religiosity" defines us. "Though some of our major novelists, most notably Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, have been preoccupied with religious matters," he continues, "it is far more common for American writers either to ignore religion altogether or to portray it as a destructive feature of American life. Similarly, few of our major composers have produced religious compositions of any significance—there is no American counterpart to Verdi’s Requiem or to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s G Minor Mass—and even fewer of our major painters have made use of Judeo-Christian iconography except as a kind of cultural local color."

Is Terry Teachout proposing "earnestness" (understood mostly as an expression of "religiosity") as the primary standard for judging works of art? Is indifference to religion among artists a crippling flaw? I realize that this is a view very commonly advanced by certain "conservative" cultural commentators, but I always thought Teachout managed to avoid such a narrow, agenda-driven (indeed, thoroughgoingly "political") approach to art in most of his better criticism. I'm disappointed to find him vouching for it here.

UPDATE Terry Teachout responds.

Unmoored

Readers of this blog probably know that I have criticized the politicization of literary study on grounds that superficially resemble those laid out in this essay (actually the first in what is advertised as an ongoing series by its author, James Matthew Wilson) at Contemporary Poetry Review. It is true that, as Wilson has it, "the hunting for 'ideology' in every 'text' [has] become so conventional and ubiquitous that most professors can no longer imagine what 'criticism' would be if it were not that."

However, I do not, could never, share this grandiose, ethereal view that since

the philosophical foundations that recognize beauty as a transcendental property of being, alongside goodness and truth, have become unmoored, the critic who believes in these things and makes judgments according to them, must also perform the task of explaining and justifying their re-foundation. . .The literary critic must also be, at least, a metaphysician, but not just any metaphysics will do. The long theological-metaphysical tradition that begins with the ancient Greeks and careens smoothly on through history until the modern philosophers shipwrecked it, must be restored authoritatively. Only in that tradition, where beauty is an attribute of being, can literary criticism flourish.

I accept that people like Wilson (spiritual snobs, they might called) probably do believe in their own bombast, but still. Why does beauty have to be "a transcendental property" to be recognizable or worthwhile? Can't a poem or work of art just be "beautiful" according to specified aesthetic principles without being "refounded" in a philosophy of goodness and truth? Why should the literary critic have to "explain" or "justify" philosophy of any kind, much less one that is "theological-metaphysical"? Shouldn't that be done (if it has to be done at all) by, well, a philosopher?

Elsewhere in the essay, Wilson praises New Criticism because "it recognized poetry as poetry rather than something else," but in his effort to find a "refoundation," he's only echoing, from a "conservative" perspective, the same call for poetry to be "something else," something other than poetry, in this case theology and metaphysics. It's oh-so typical of the reactionary critics who oppose "theory" for wrecking Western civilization that they want to replace it with the old "theory" (transcendental metaphysics) they imagine was once its true foundation.

As far as I can tell, the rest of the essay is just the same Poetry Foundation-endorsed argument that poetry lost its way when it stopped rhyming.

Of Limited and Personal Interest

John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? is a very strange book. It's first half seeks to demonstrate that art doesn't really exist and that, if it does, it doesn't do anyone any good. The second half essentially ignores the case that Carey has just made and asserts that art does indeed exist after all and does some people quite a lot of good.

The first half is actually the more interesting and lively part of the book. Here he surveys all the various efforts made to define art and finds them wanting, concluding that "Anything can be a work of art. What makes it a work of art is that someone thinks of it as a work of art." The relativist in me wants to concede that ultimately this is true: no Platonic definition of art that thoroughly delineates those properties inherent to art and that marks it off from all those other phenomena that are "not art" exists. We wouldn't want one even if we could get it. Rogue artists who confabulate our notions of what art is and isn't are always going to come along, and we should be grateful for them, even encourage them. "Art" is, finally, whatever succeeding generations of human beings determine it to be.

On the other hand, when we all put on our logical thinking caps, we know that if "anything" is art, nothing is. There are just "things" that provide us with enjoyment, pleasure, instruction, or whatever we want to call whatever it is we get from these things. One could plausibly enough adopt this view (the pragmatist in me thinks it wouldn't ultimaty matter because it wouldn't really affect our sense of the value of what it is we do "get" from these things), but Carey himself finally doesn't want to go this far. He wants to retain the word "art," even if it does it does reduce art objects to those "things" someone, somewhere, thinks to call art. (Later in the book Carey tries to raise "art" back up to a more dignified status by stressing its utilitarian applications, but for it to have such applications it surely does have to exist in the first place, or those using it won't exactly know what they're applying.)

Thus Carey is able to argue further that "art" as it is celebrated by its snootier adherents doesn't have the morally elevating qualities they want to claim for it. No plausible evidence exists that art makes us better people. Most of the rhetoric used to pronounce on its spiritual qualites Carey incisively, and rightly, points out is so much bluster and metaphysical cant. If we can't provide specific scientific descriptions of the effect art actually does have on us (and Carey maintains that we can't) then better to remain silent than to make grandiose assertions about its "spiritual authenticity" or its ability to evoke "a peculiar emotion" that is "independent of time and place," as Clive Bell had it. And not only is the "religion of art" rhetorically bankrupt but it in fact "makes people worse, because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic."

Curiously, then, Carey winds up not so much rejecting the ethical function of high art but affirming its ethical dimension: Too much attention to the wonders of art and too much discussion of those wonders only work to make us bad people. That art turns out to be morally enervating rather than elevating doesn't make it any less "moral" in its implications.

Carey's inability to rid himself of the very assumptions he wants to decry runs throughout the chapter charging arts enthusiasts with turning it into religion. Such enthusiasts apparently are wrong not so much in thinking that art might have beneficial effects but in failing to spread those effects around widely enough: "Turning art into religion often carries with it the assumption that there is a higher morality of art, distinct from conventional morality." The religion of art "devalues, by comparison with itself, ordinary life and ordinary people." Furthermore, it is the focus on the appreciation of, rather than participation in, the arts, that keeps it floating above the outstretched arms of those "ordinary people" who might after all be made into better people if they were to experience the joy of art for themselves. As evidenced by various studies Carey cites, feelings of powerlessness might be alleviated (resulting in a decrease of violence), self-esteem might be raised, and an epidemic of depression might be halted. Thus, "Another thing we should do is to switch the aim of research in the arts to finding out not what critics think about this or that artwork--which is necessarily of limited and personal interest--but how art has affected and changed other people's lives."

Notwithstanding that Carey's contentions in this chapter essentially contradict everything he's said before--art can't be "anything" or there would be nothing specific to apply in the kinds of arts programs whose beneficent effects he lauds, and there would be no reason to enlist the arts at all in such programs if they can't change lives--they don't even count for much in Carey''s own ultimate valuation of "art" in the second section of the book, "The Case for Literature." It turns out that Carey's brief on behalf of participatory art was only a kind of gesture toward a quasi-Deweyan program of "making art," good for bashing the swells and the necessarily limited efforts of critics, perhaps, but not really a serious defense of an alternative to Art. Literature, it would seem, actually is art, and its primary effects are to be located in the secondary act of reading. (I agree that they are, but in the context of Carey's overall argument about the subjectivity of standards, it nevertheless brings the critic back into prominence, as the reader who proves to be especially attentive.)

Carey titles his first chapter on the subject "Literature and Critical Intelligence," but his initial argument seems to place "critical intelligence" in literature rather than the reader: "The first claim I would make is that, unlike the other arts, [literature] can criticize itself." It "shows itself more powerful and self-aware than any other art." Perhaps this is true, but if so, it very nearly belies Carey's larger point that art--even the premier art of literature--doesn't have any particular, objective value. (Yes, Carey assures us that his valuation is indeed his unavoidably subjective own, but still. Carey's very attempt to offer concrete reasons for literature's superiority seems to assume at least an objective method of assessing its superiority.) "More powerful" suggests that works of literature do have some experiential qualities that can be measured. Furthermore, Carey believes that literature "is the only art capable of reasoning" and that "only literature can moralize." (He seems to be using "moralize" in a sense that makes it a good thing, something like a "critique" of human behavior.) Swift and Johnson are presented as authors whose works illustrate these capacities.

Carey appears to have adopted some variation on the otherwise presumably "elitist" French-theoretical idea that language, not writers, create texts, since it is "literature" that reasons and moralizes. If he means instead to say that individual authors such as Swift are moralists, this is just another way of describing their particular interests. It says nothing about literature as "art" per se. According to the terms of Carey's discussion, it is literature that moralizes, literature that reasons.

I confess I find this idea absurd in the extreme, essentially insane. Carey is hearing voices speak through literary texts that no critic or reader with a decent respect for fiction or poetry as distinctive modes of discourse would hear in such an unmediated way. Moreover, Carey himself apparently doesn't really accept these formulations. The final chapter of What Good Are the Arts? tries to make a case for literature based on the its characteristic "indistinctness."

All written texts require interpretation and are, to that extent, indistinct. But with Shakespeare something new happened. An enormous influx of figurative writing transformed his language--an epidemic of metaphor and simile that spread through all its tissues. . . So when writing is dense with metaphor and simile. . .the imagination has to keep fitting things together that rational thought would keep apart. It has, that is, to keep ingeniously fabricating distinctness--or whatever approximation to distinctness it decides to settle for--out of indistinctness. . . .

As it happens, I thoroughly agree with all of this. "Indistinctness" is a perfectly good name for that evasive quality in works of literature that sets them apart from straightforwardly discursive forms of writing, that in the most intensive way requires we really read the text before us. But I don't see how at the same time we are grappling with the "indistinctness" of literature we can also comfortably accede to its "reasoning"--after all, "the imagination has to keep fitting things together that rational thought would keep apart"--or its "moralizing." Either literature "says something" about morality or politics or ideas in the kind of readily accessible way Carey's discussion of it implies, or it is "indistinct" and thus all of its putative messages are unavoidably ambiguous when they're not just hopelessly garbled.

Carey wants to have it both ways: it is because literature can "communicate" more effectively and it can also remain "indistinct" in the manner common to all the arts that it is ultimately the most valuable of the arts. Perhaps this is just the consequence of the fact that literature emerges from language as its medium and that language is inevitably burdened with "meaning" (although it is also the consequence of a failure to consistently distinguish between the use of language for meaning and the use of language for aesthetic effect), but it nevertheless results in the most crippling contradiction in a book full of contradictions. Literature can't both produce an indistinctness that every reader makes distinct in his/her own way (or leaves it indistinct) and make moral and rational claims that are presumably universal in their appeal.

As far as I can tell, Carey seems to have written this book in order to upbraid the likes of Geoffrey Hartman, who, according to Carey, believes "the experience he gets from high art is better than that others get from the mass media." Since there is no way of establishing that high-art lovers do obtain a "better" experience therefrom, or even of establishing what "better" might mean, all defenses of high art are simply expressions of elitism dressed up in patronizing rhetoric.

But what if the experience of art does contribute to human improvement? Not because art's moralizing or "spiritual" qualities directly lead to social change or self-actualization, but because close consideration of art enhances our ability to have fulfilling experiences? Because complex works of art encourage us to pay attention in a way that does not direct it into pre-existing channels or entirely cut off the very possibility of sustained, fully-engrossed attention by settling for the superficial or the sanctimonious. Even if there is no way of measuring the quality of experiences of this sort vs. the quality of the "anything" someone might want art to be, who really thinks that anything will do? Near the end of the book, Carey offers a sop to art-lovers: "That the arts are enjoyable to those who enjoy them is a fact that it may seem I have not emphasized enough in this book. If I have not done so, it is partly because it is obvious, and partly because being enjoyable does not distinguish the arts from a vast range of other human activities." But what if it's why the arts are enjoyable "to those who enjoy them" that's important? Not because it confers some special honor on their declared tastes but because the enjoyment comes from having one's powers of apprehension challenged?

And why can't the objects of this particular kind of enjoyment be called "art" by those who care about it? Why does John Carey want them to stop calling it that, unless they also stipulate that "anything" can be art if claiming otherwise makes the "inartistic" feel bad? It's finally only Carey who seems to believe that "art" must have a metaphysically-fastened, all-encompassing definition, or else there's nothing.

Interiors

Caleb Crain wonders whether "novels spread human rights and discourage torture." Quoting Lynn Hunt's claim in her book Inventing Human Rights: A History that "novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings," Crain glosses Hunt's claim by adding: "As it became easier to imagine the feelings and interior lives of other people, it became harder to justify treating them with cruelty or systematic inequity."

This is a cogent enough observation (although it remains after-the-fact speculation), as long as a caveat is added: Novels, or at least certain kind of novels, can make make it "easier to imagine the feelings and interior lives of other people," but this is a secondary effect of the novel as a form, not its reason for being. It exists to allow writers the opportunity to create aesthetically credible works of literary art in prose, not to champion human solidarity and facilitate good will toward men.

Crain further wonders whether "the recent decline in novel-reading in America hasn't got something to do with the country's new tolerance for torture and lack of concern about human rights." Specifically, he contrasts the attitude toward torture (violence more generally) conveyed by various visual media--advertisements, movies tv--with that encouraged by novels:

. . .Perhaps the brain's limbic system responds to the sight of violence without first checking with the forebrain to find out whether the image is fictional. In other words, a person who see a severed arm, or who sees Kiefer Sutherland shooting a Muslim prisoner, might become frightened, at some level, though perhaps not fully conscious of his fear. His limbic system sees a strong person harming a weak one; his moral faculties, meanwhile, are neutralized by his forebrain's awareness that the sight is fictional; and the limbic system, finding that the forebrain doesn't seem to care one way or the other, decides to side with the strong person. . . .

"Is it really possible," he asks, "to watch the famous torture scene in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs all the way through and remain identified with the torture victim? Not only is the man mutilated and terrorized, but his torturers have all the good lines." Whereas

I can't think of a vividly imagined torture scene in written fiction where the reader sides with the torturer. Maybe this is because the novel's heyday happened to coincide with a faith in human rights, but maybe it has something to do with the cognitive processes involved. In reading, one's forebrain is fully engaged; when it disengages, reading stops. And to every part of you except perhaps your forebrain, reading seems safe. There's nothing about holding a book and turning its pages to alarm one's limbic system. In fact, nothing can be "seen" without first being imagined. . . .

Crain presumably knows more about the physiology of the limbic system than I do, so I'll take his word that the brain responds to images in the way he describes. That an intervening level of "imagining" is involved in reading seems intuitively correct, although I guess I'd like to see some neuroscientific evidence that reading about violence is as different an experience from being confronted with it--or its aesthetic representation--directly in filmed images as Crain thinks it is. As a literary critic, my engrained bias is that reading is a more complex phenomenon than viewing, that literature is in this sense an aesthetically richer form than film or television (although what about painting?), but still. Is it sufficiently more complicated as to make reading novels inherently part of the struggle to establish human rights?

I guess I can't immediately summon up a torture scene in fiction in which "the reader sides with the torturer," either, although much of the behavior depicted in, say, A Clockwork Orange seems just as cruel as outright torture, and I can't say I don't have some empathy for Alex and his droogs as they resist the curtailment of their freedom and, in Alex's case, free will. I may not like feeling such empathy, but most well-fashioned first-person narration produces an almost unavoidable identification with the narrator, an identification that might be repudiated but that still does exist. Bardamu, the protagonist of Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, is in many ways a pretty despicable character without much human fellow-feeling, but it's hard to deny that his narrative is powerful, his narrative voice compelling. We certainly find ourselves admiring him as a fictional creation, if not as a "person" we'd otherwise like to meet. Other novels in which we are invited to inhabit the world evoked by unpleasant or morally dubious characters come to mind as well (Lolita obviously, The Stranger, Naked Lunch), although perhaps Crain would contend that forcing us to sample "the feelings and interior lives" of such characters as these is actually itself a step toward clarifying "human rights" (even if it doesn't necessarily show us that "all people are fundamentally similar.")

It's not entirely clear what period Crain takes to be the "novel's heyday." Since Crain has mostly presented himself as a critic/scholar of 19th century American literature and culture, my immediate assumption is that he has the 19th century novel in mind (perhaps extending into the early 20th.) Thus one might infer that his concern for the decline in novel-reading is also an accompanying lament for the passing of the novel in its realist/character-centered phase (at least characters who are relatively unproblematic in their psychological make-up, who give us desired access to their "inner feelings.") We are no longer in that "heyday," and if we were, if the 19th century novel were still the paradigm current writers followed, presumably it would be attracting more readers and helping to spread human rights more efficaciously. Instead we're left with 24 and Reservoir Dogs.

Perhaps this is unfair to Crain's more fundamental, underlying argument that if more people were reading and fewer people relied on "edgy" television and film for their entertainment we'd live in a safer and more empathetic world. I'd like to think as well that a planet populated by fans of Middlemarch or Portrait of a Lady would be one less inclined to "cruelty or systematic inequity," although I do have my doubts. My biggest problem with Crane's analysis is that it strongly implies that a "novel" is properly that sort of thing that was written back in the "heyday" and that those writers of artistically adventurous prose such as Celine or Nabokov (or John Hawkes or Gilbert Sorrentino or, for that matter, David Foster Wallace) have helped to undermine their own enterprise by writing works of fiction that don't so transparently exteriorize "inner feelings" and thus foster human understanding. It may be that some novels, as Richard Rorty has it, "help us become less cruel," it may even be that a contingent effect of the kind of heyday novel Crain extols was to create a cognitive bond between the reader and the imaginary "people" depicted therein, but reducing cruelty by promoting such a bond takes no more precedence in defining the novel as a literary form than does, say, Nabokov's insistence that great fiction produce a certain aesthetic "tingle" in the reader's spine.

Seeing Through It

John Freeman begins his review of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End by asserting that

A thousand years from now, if future generations turn to contemporary fiction as a window into the past, they will wind up with a rather skewed portrait of America. People, they might surmise, spent very little time in cars, resolved many disputes with violence, almost never slept with their spouse, and, in spite of pulling in regular incomes, never, ever went to work.

Which is precisely why future generations should not read fiction "as a window into the past." And why we should not be reading fiction of the past as a "window" onto the "reality" of the life therein evoked. Only bad writers, writers who think of fiction as a more "dramatic" way of recording history or who imagine themselves as "saying something" about The Way We Live Now, take themselves to be providing a "window" for future readers.

Good fiction is inherently a "skewed portrait," skewed by the writer's particular vision of experience and by that writer's singular way of transforming experience into language and molding both language and experience into aesthetic form. In subject or theme, most good fiction either depicts human situations in extremis, focusing on characters and events that may illustrate more or less universal human predicaments embodied in an exemplary instance but that do not exist primarily to "represent" a specific time (Catch-22, The Tunnel, Sabbath's Theater), or does indeed center on "ordinary" experiences but emphasizes their status as experiences for the characters undergoing them, not their value as emblematic events "capturing" a moment in time. The characters in Stephen Dixon's fiction, for example, do plenty of driving (Interstate is constructed around the act of driving) and are often shown at work (especially in his earlier fiction--Garbage, for example), but I don't think "future generations" will want to see these characters as anything other than the specific creations of Stephen Dixon.

The "window" afforded by the best fiction is always clouded, distorted, self-reflective. For these very reasons, it continues to fascinate. Fiction that pretends to offer a clear view onto the events of the day will never reach those "future generations" except as a moldy sample excavated by some social historian. Thus if Then We Came to the End is intended as a more transparent portal onto Our Times, I probably won't be reading it. Although judging from Freeman's description of the book, I think I already have read it, when, windowless, it was called Something Happened, by Joseph Heller.

Telling Your Story

I've just re-read Jim Thompson's The Grifters, and the farther into it I got, the more apparent it became to me that Thompson's novels provide an especially useful illustration of the differences between third- and first-person narration in fiction. I still enjoyed The Grifters, which is narrated in the third person, but reading it a second time made me more aware of its limitations, as well as the virtues of the first-person narratives to be found in novels such as The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280, and After Dark, My Sweet.

Here are a few paragraphs near the beginning of After Dark, My Sweet. The story is being told by "Kid" Collins, the novel's protagonist, and he has stopped in at a roadhouse for a glass of beer:

The bartender slopped a beer down in front of me. He scooped up the change I'd laid on the counter, sat down on the stool again, and picked up a newspaper. I said something about it was sure a hot day. He grunted without looking up. I said it was a nice pleasant little place he had there and that he certainly knew how to keep his beer cold. He grunted again.

I looked down at my beer, feeling the short hairs rising on the back of my neck. I guessed--I knew--that I should never have come in here. I should never go in any place where people might not be nice and polite to me. That's all they have to do, you know. Just be as nice to me as I am to them. . . .

We then learn that Kid Collins has spent some time in "institutions" (eventually that he has just escaped from one), but we really don't need that information to know that something's not quite right with the Kid. His very need to elicit a response from the bartender and those short hairs rising tell us what we need to know. And we wouldn't know it in the same way if the Kid himself wasn't telling us. The novel immediately plunges us into the world of Kid Collins as he is able to articulate it, and most of its melodramatic punch comes from being jolted by the Kid's direct verbal flourishes. (And he is, it turns out, an ex-boxer.)

The Grifters starts out pretty well, too:

As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony. A hard blow in the guts can do that to a man, and Dillon had gotten a hard one. Now with a fist, which would have been bad enough, but from the butt-end of a heavy club.

Somehow, he got back to his car and managed to slide into the seat. But that was all he could manage. He moaned as the change in posture cramped his stomach muscles; then, with a strangled gasp, he leaned out the window.

Several cars passed as he spewed vomit into the street, their occupants grinning, frowning sympathetically, or averting their eyes in disgust. . . .

This also steeps us immediately into the world as experienced by Roy Dillon, but in The Grifters he shares our narrative attention with his mother Lilly and his girlfriend, Moira Langry, and so the story involving the three of them will have to be told by a third-person narrator who has access to their thoughts and emotions but filters them through his own more distanced narrative voice. It's not quite full-blown "pyschological realism," but Thompson nevertheless can achieve his signature hard-boiled, scary/depraved effects only by fishing around in the characters' minds for their perceptions of and reactions to the inevitably untoward situations they encounter. The verbally-constructed "voice" of a character like Kid Collins is lost, and we have to pick our way through such vague verbiage as "incredible agony" and be satisfied that just "somehow" Roy Dillon returned to his car.

Thus, while the novel commences with a typical Thompsonesque bang, it's not long before we get a little bogged down in passages like this:

. . .He had looked around extensively and carefully before choosing Los Angeles as a permanent base of operations, and his capital was now reduced to less than a thousand dollars.

That was a lot of money, of course. Unlike the big-con operator, whose elaborate scene-setting may involve as much as a hundred thousand dollars, the short-con grifter can run on peanuts. But Roy Dillon, while remaining loyal to the short con, was abandoning the normal scheme of things.

At twenty-one, he was weary of the hit-and-get. He knew that the constant "getting"--jumpring from one town to another before the heat got too hot--could absorb most of the hits, even of a thrifty man. So that he might work as hard and often as he safely could, and still wind up with the wolf nipping at the seat of his threadbare pants. . . .

In my view, we're being given way too much "information" in a passage like this, information that is perhaps important for us to have but that would be less intrusive if it were parceled out gradually by a first-person narrator or if it was at least provided to us dramatically--through showing rather than telling. It would be better, for example, if we saw Roy Dillon "abandoning the normal scheme of things" rather than being told this was the case through an awkward inventory of the contents of Roy's mind. A secondary effect of this third-person technique is the fuzzy, flabby language: "He had looked around extensively"; "can run on peanuts"; "the wolf nipping at the seat of his threadbare pants". Not only does such writing lean heavily on cliche--which again might be more tolerable if it were issuing from a first-person narrator--but it helps to make passages like this themselves seem like just so much perfunctory "scene-setting."

Perhaps this is why I actually prefer the Stephen Frears movie made from The Grifters to the novel, something I would not say of the film adapted from After Dark, My Sweet. Frears's film is able to dispense with the third-person narrator and focus on the characters and their overlapping stories in a direct, unmediated way. We get Thompson's lowlife plot without his narrator's sometimes laborious attempts to move it along. It is also probably why I think Thompson's best novels are those related to us by his sublimely scuzzy first-person narrators. It's impossible to reproduce these novels on screen because their narrators are so inseparably a part of their appeal. Such is undoubtedly true of most well-devised first-person narrators, which is one reason I believe this method of storytelling is almost always more promising as a way of creating distinctive, aesthetically pleasing works of fiction than the kind of close-in third-person narration that has in most literary fiction become more or less the only available alternative (and that is probably often used precisely because it does lend itself more easily to screen adaptation.)

Talking About Issues

"Why doesn't 'culture' include 'poetry'?," asks Jonathan Mayhew, while explaining his own practice of sending academic articles on poetry to journals of cultural study, where "they will be seen by people who wouldn't normally read an article on 'poetry.'"

Noting that cultural studies focuses mostly on novels, and that "people who are (otherwise) quite well-read often confess their near total ignorance of poetry," Jonathan further asks:

When did the novel get to be so important?. . .Is it [simply] a matter of the fact that more people read novels? Or is it because novels talk about the "issues" people want to talk about, and therefore can integrated seamlessly into a certain vision of cultural studies?

Jonathan's answers to his own question are surely part of the explanation of why, where "cultural study" is concerned, the novel has gotten "to be so important," but I would add that another reason this brand of inquiry goes on "in near total ignorance of poetry" is that encountering a poem requires an initial acknowledgment of and response to the constructedness of literary works, the formal and ultimately wholly artificial quality that makes them literary to begin with and that renders poetry less than congenial to the bull-in-a-chinashop approach to "content" favored by cultural studies. In other words, poetry requires some literary sensibility on the part of the reader, and that is the one thing that has been bred out of literary "scholars" in the cultural studies camp. That is why they so readily "confess" their ignorance of (that is, contempt for) a kind of writing so "merely literary."

I would love to see fiction develop in a direction that also makes it less nutritious fodder for the "issues" people (or continue to develop in that direction--I think much of postwar experimental fiction has indeed moved fiction closer to poetry already.) A kind of fiction that foregrounds language, form, the vicissitudes of "structure," and the very processes of meaning-making and "expression" and that de-emphasizes "character" and "theme" and, indeed, "issues" would be just the thing for separating those who value literature precisely because it is merely literary (that is, verbal art) from those who glom onto it because it seems a convenient means to more conventionally "serious" ends (that is, the study of almost everything except literature itself). I'd like to see fiction become less "important," less "seamless" in its utility to cultural studies and more utterly, blessedly frivolous.

Separate But Unequal

In an essay for Strange Horizons defending what are frequently called "airport books" ("mysteries and thrillers"), Matt Cheney asserts that

I am as grateful to the writers of engrossing, easy-to-read books as I am to writers such as Tolstoy and Faulkner, Kafka and Beckett because though the latter have given me some of the most powerful reading experiences of my life, the former have done something just as useful—they have made otherwise dull and uncomfortable hours pass more quickly, less painfully. I would be a fool to declare one or the other superior. . . .

I can't quite see that it would be foolish to hold that Faulkner and Beckett are superior writers as compared to Thomas Harris or Donald Westlake. They are superior. I believe this could be demonstrated relatively easily in a close comparative analysis of books by these writers (although please be assured I will not undertake such an analysis in this post). Not only are Faulkner and Beckett leagues beyond the likes of Harris and Westlake in their ability to bend language to their own aesthetic purposes, but they are also willing to take risks in both language and form that most pop writers are unwilling, perhaps unable, to take. Faulkner and Beckett show us how prose can be molded and manipulated into works of verbal art. Harris and Westlake at best show us how prose can still at times be used unself-consciously to tell stories that momentarily divert. To make this distinction is not to declare the latter kind of writing despicable; it does affirm that such a distinction is not meaningless, simply a function of some kind of metaphysical elitism.

Matt himself implicitly affirms this in the passage I've quoted. Tolstoy et al. have given him "some of the most powerful reading experiences of my life," while the airport books "have made otherwise dull and uncomfortable hours pass more quickly." Presumably in those "powerful reading experiences," merely passing time has become irrelevant. These kinds of experiences often seem to arrest time, make its passing beside the point. They redeem the time lost in reading them. Mysteries and thrillers take the time, help us ignore our surroundings when we otherwise find them unworthy of the time we must spend there. This perhaps does make them "useful books," as Matt puts it in his title, but again it seems to me that the "use" being made of them qualitatively differs from the more "powerful" use to which Kafka can be put. One might say that the airport books ultimately blunt experience (admittedly at a time when it perhaps needs to be blunted), while reading Kafka and Beckett help expand it.

I am not suggesting that Matt is wrong to find "easily engrossing books" the most "useful" in the situations he describes. An airplane is surely not the ideal setting for a profound reading experience of great literature. But I am finally puzzled why he so readily equates "easily engrossing" with "powerful" in elevating the airport books to equal status with great literature. I don't deny that "each has its place and value" when I say that the value of the latter is of a different order and to that extent "superior." Great works of literature sometimes fail to entertain in the conventional understanding of the term. So be it. Their ultimate value lies elsewhere. Popular fiction usually fails to satisfy as other than momentary distraction. So be that as well. This is what it aims to provide. These are separate domains of value, but they're not equal.

A Convenient Facade

In a review of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream, Dave Itzkoff asserts that Scalzi might prove himself worthy of comparison with an SF icon such as Robert Heinlien "if he uses [his future] work to articulate a firm position on the political issues that will inevitably define his historical moment, take a stance that considerate readers might potentially disagree with, and even risk the possibility that a half-century later, some petulant, know-nothing critic will dismiss his ideas as dangerous and obsolete".

I haven't read The Android's Dream, but if it does not "take a stance" on issues defining our "historical moment," for me that is in its favor and only makes me more likely to give it a try.

Itzkoff's take on science fiction in general (or at least that branch he calls "military sci-fi") leads me to think I might not clearly understand the ambitions of science fiction, at least among its more serious-minded authors and critics. Although I have only relatively recently begun to sample noteworthy science fiction novels and writers (that is, I am most assuredly a johnny-come-lately), I have done so under the assumption it is a genre that seeks to provide an alternative to "realism" and other conventionally "literary" practices, not just by evoking speculative worlds and looking to the future rather than the past or present but also by creating alternative forms and experimenting with the established elements of fiction (plot, setting, point of view, etc.). That SF is inherently a kind of experimental fiction is a proposition I have been convinced to take seriously by some of the more intelligent critical discussion of the genre, both on SF litblogs and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find this proposition very persuasively confirmed. The novels I have attempted, by among others Philip K. Dick, China Mieville, and Samuel Delaney, while they certainly do engage the imagination well beyond what is offered in most humdrum literary realism, do not seem to me especially preoccupied with formal experiment or stylistic innovation. (Which is not to deny that the latter two, at any rate, do write well.) Traditional plotting prevails, setting is described in the kind of minute detail a Flaubert-inspired realist would almost certainly admire, and point of view (at least in the particular novels I have read) remains transparent and undisturbed. They are, finally, resolutely traditional novels, if anything overloaded with conventional storytelling, marked as "other" only by their deliberately exotic subjects.

And now Dave Itzkoff tells me that SF writers ought to emphasize "stance" and "ideas" in a way that makes even these exotic subjects just a convenient facade behind which to hide the writer's ultimate intent to "articulate a firm position." Indeed, writing science fiction, it turns out, is just another way of conveying a "philosophy": In one of Scalzi's other books, the characters read Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which "they collectively decide 'had some good action scenes but required too much unpacking of philosophical ideas.'" "Heinlein may have cultivated a philosophy that now seems distasteful bordering on appalling," says Itzkoff, "but it is unfair to criticize him for simply having a philosophy. At a time when endless war is not just a nightmarish fictional scenario but a real and looming possibility, there is still a position less commendable than having dangerous ideas, and that is having no position at all."

Perhaps having "no position at all" on real war isn't very "commendable," but declining to take positions in fiction, even if war is the ostensible subject, brings no moral opprobrium at all. In purely literary terms, refusing to "take a position" by sticking to, well, literature, and leaving the moral or political discourse to other, more suitable forums is as much of a "stance" most fiction writers ought to feel comfortable assuming. If John Scalzi thinks his job is to write engaging works of fiction rather than "cultivate a philosophy" by indirection, it's all to his credit. But is Itzkoff's own position, that the work of the science fiction writer can be reduced to the attempt to stake out a position on this or that, really shared by most writers and readers who lay claim to this genre? Is it the literary "philosophy" of SF?

I have every intention of carrying on with my survey of science fiction, both current and classic. The next writer whose work I've decided to assay is Stanislaw Lem. Perhaps here I will find at least as much art as philosophy, an equal effort to explore the possibilities of fiction as a literary form as to "say something." I continue to expect (hope) that eventually I will find that science fiction truly can be a genre that expands these possibilities, that in my initial forays into SF I just didn't get it because of my own limitations or presuppositions. That critics like Dave Itzkoff themselves underestimate SF's potential to escape the tedious restrictions of polemics and "message."

UPDATE In a response to this post, Niall Harrison at Torque Control suggests I am "under the unfortunate impression that Dave Itzkoff knows what he’s talking about." This may be right. I don't know much about Itzkoff, and I should certainly be wary of taking reviews that appear in the New York Times Book Review as representative or authoritative about anything. Otherwise, Niall says that my attempt to find SF that does "something formally new not found in other kinds of fiction" is probably "doomed to fail" because "sf stories won’t often look like experiments, because the point is the subject." I'm not sure I know exactly what he means by that last statement, but at first glance it doesn't seem that far removed from Itzkoff's "taking a stance" except that the "point" to be made is inherent in the act of imagining alternative worlds.

The Content and Form of American Fiction-Writing

It may be true that, as Michael Blowhard contends, Gold Medal Books, publisher of pulp/noir fiction in the 1950s, "had a greater impact on the content and form [of] American fiction-writing than any other postwar book publisher," although he doesn't really provide much support for this claim beyond citing a few films that were adapted from Gold Medal books, as well as various filmmakers who obviously enough have been influenced by the noir style. To say that "pulp fiction" has influenced storytelling in the movies, or even that some otherwise "serious" writers (Lethem, Chabon) have paid homage to it in their work, is one thing, but to assert it has "had a greater impact on the content and form" of postwar fiction than anything else is quite another. I'm willing to entertain this idea, but I'd really like to have a somewhat more specific idea of what "content and form" means in this context. Does MB really mean to say that Gold Medal-style fiction has so overwhelmingly influenced both the subjects chosen by postwar writers (is this what he means by "content," or is it a looser reference to what might be called "atmosphere" or "ideas"?) and the "form" these writers adopt? What writers does he have in mind? How does their work show this influence?

Perhaps MB clarifies his point just a bit in the sentence following the one I've quoted: "Gold Medal novels were intended as reliable, disposable entertainments: fast, short, and full of action. Noir-ish intrigue, westerns, and adventure tales were the general rule; sensationalism and sleaze were encouraged." It would seem that MB is trying to expand the definition of "American fiction-writing" by insisting we include the practice of those writers aiming for a popular audience. Postwar fiction includes the Mickey Spillanes and the John D. McDonalds as well as "Capote, Cheever, Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Pynchon," et al. Surely there is some justice in this contention, especially if the measure applied is sales or total books in print or name recognition rather than aesthetic accomplishment as determined by sensible literary standards. (And I would even concede that some of the pulp writers MB identifies--Jim Thompson and Richard Matheson, for example--have some claim to aesthetic accomplishment as well.) Undoubtedly most of the fiction published in the postwar era was meant to provide "entertainment" ("disposable" or not), and no one has ever gone broke overestimating the American taste for "sensationalism and sleaze." If Michael Blowhard thinks pulp fiction should be respected for its capacity to satisfy popular tastes, I'm not going to quarrel with him.

Yet underlying MB's paean to the pulps is a palpable resentment against those in certain "stuffy" literary quarters who just won't grant such fiction its due. And its hard not to conclude that this resentment lies not just against readers and critics who disdain "entertainment" but against those who won't admit such fiction is also just as artistic as "literary fiction," perhaps more so, since it has after all influenced Godard and Truffaut and Tarantino, who must know art when they see it. It has good-old fashioned masculine "raw energy," a better criterion for judging narrative art than that applied by those now in control of American publishing, which has become "feminized and corporate." It gives the people what they want (and makes money too!), and people who won't settle for its "gritty fun" are just "prisses."

As always in populist screeds such as this, the primary target of ire is the "canon-maker-wannabes" in universities. The professors have told an "official story of postwar American fiction [that] recoiled entirely from the Gold Medal writers." They've withheld their markers of "respectable culture." Putting aside the fact that writers who valorized "sensationalism and sleaze" probably were never looking for the approval of "respectable culture," MB really ought to take a closer look at what academic critics are actually up to these days. Contemporary literature has been a substantial part of the literary ccurriculum for only about 30 years, and "scholars" of contemporary literature have long since abandoned a gatekeeping role, anyway. Breaking the canon--in this case before it was even clearly established--is much more popular than making it. And as MB himself admits, "Many colleges now offer a course or three in the history of hardboiled and/or detective fiction." Indeed, it is much more likely for students to find "a course or three" in not just detective fiction but genre fiction of all kinds than a course designed to teach "canonical" postwar writers in the solemn manner MB describes. Genre fiction is much more amenable to the kinds of historical and sociological analyses literary academics now undertake than "merely literary" works by Roth or Pynchon.

MB imagines a critical-literary establishment that disdains popular and pulp fiction. (It's hard for me to believe that much of this establishment resides in "the New York City trade publishing biz." As far as I can tell, popularity now means everything to this "biz.") When Gold Medal Books was founded in 1949, it probably could be said that "respectable" literary opinion" was appalled. But it seems to me that genres like detective fiction and SF, "noir" fiction in general, has been embraced by many if not most readers and critics whose most immediate preference is simply for challenging and aesthetically credible work. It is just as likely that accomplished writers are going to emerge from these genres as from "literary fiction," a designation that has now become just another marketing category. A lot of dull, formulaic genre fiction gets published these days, but the same thing is also decidedly true of literary fiction.

It is also true, at least in my opinion, that most of the Gold Medal fiction was indeed "reliable, disposable entertainment." The serious writers (and also filmmakers such as David Lynch) who were subsequently "inspired" by this fiction have not settled for the disposable and the sensationalized. They have in some ways transcended the original limitations of the pulp fiction form by filtering the conventions and images of this fiction through a more developed aesthetic sensibility. They write better than Mickey Spillane. To make a case for these pathbreaking pulp fictions as art seems to me on a par with the attempts by creationists to make "intelligent design" acceptable as "science." (They want the approval of scientists, whose domain they otherwise reject.) You can believe in intelligent design if you like, but it isn't science. Have all the fun you want with fiction that is "fast, short, and full of action," but, in most cases, it isn't art.

Reading a Different Book

In the previous post, I quoted John Dewey's dictum that a great work of art "has esthetic standing only as the work becomes an experience for a human being." This implies, even assumes, that a work of art or literature might alter its "esthetic standing" on each re-viewing or re-reading. If experience is the measure, a work might prove to be several different works over time and reacquaintance. This seems to be borne out by Dr. Crazy's experience re-reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse:

The experience is bizarre for so many reasons. It's bizarre when I hit upon a passage that stood out to me in the past and I can remember what I thought about it (and wrote about it) but where now my interpretation is slightly different, and so I find myself transcribing notes from memory and then adding nuances to those semi-remembered ideas. It's bizarre when I hit upon a passage or image that is so clearly crucial to me now but to which I didn't give a second thought on previous readings - as if I'm reading a different book, at some points. It's also bizarre to read this in preparation to teach it - this is a book that I read as a student, and on which I wrote as a student, and coming to it from this vantage point seems foreign. I find myself anticipating student responses - trying to connect the text to other texts we're covering this semester - and so I can't get lost in the book in the way that I remember getting lost in it as a student. Finally, it's bizarre that I don't find the book at all difficult, which was one of the key attractions of it for me when I first read it. I wanted to figure out the puzzle with which I felt it presented me. Now, I no longer feel like it's a puzzle. Now, it just makes sense.

. . .so on this reading, I am in love with this book again, but I'm in love with a different book from the one that I first fell in love with, if that makes any sense.

Makes perfect sense.