The Reading Experience

Getting to Know You

This article on the adaptation of Russian "literary classics" to tv concludes:

One argument that producers brought forward when defending TV adaptation of classics a few years ago, when the trend had just started, was that teenagers who would have never read a book would at least watch a TV series based on it and get acquainted with literature classics in this way. And that argument seems to be valid. The rationale of those who argue that contemporary TV adaptations of classical novels are vulgar and simplistic may be right to a certain degree. But they are definitely missing one important point: literary classics have become part of pop culture and should be viewed in that way, not like something sacred.

What exactly does it mean to "get acquainted with literature classics" by watching a tv show? Simply to know that they exist? This was for a long time one of the implicit justifications of "exposing" students to great works of literature--make them aware that these books exist so that they might know where the "best" examples of human expression can be found, might be able to follow a conversation in which these illustrious names are mentioned, or might even--gasp!--one day read the books and take them seriously. But I doubt that E.D. Hirsch understood "cultural literacy" quite to mean that "literary classics have become part of pop culture and should be viewed in that way, not like something sacred."

I've tried as earnestly as I can to understand the logic behind the notion that it's good that "teenagers who would have never read a book would at least watch a TV series based on it." This is also a long-standing justification both for making adaptations of "literary classics" and for showing such films and programs to students as either a supplement to or an outright replacement for reading the works in question, but it has never made sense to me. It's based on the assumption that "literary classics" (specifically works of fiction) are stories about characters and that, since these visual media are able to tell stories about characters, if you faithfully tell the stories and present all the characters you've adequately reproduced the book. (Or even if you haven't, it's not a big deal because viewers will still get "acquainted" with it.) While it's true that some "literary classics," especially those written in the 18th and 19th centuries, have stories and characters, surely it isn't the case that they are conveyed to us in the same way from "classic" to "classic." What gets lost in the adaptation is narrative voice, fluctuations in point of view, subtleties in characterization, shades of description. Most importantly, what gets lost is the encounter with language. And this is unavoidably true even in adaptations that are not "vulgar and simplistic."

To believe that adaptations are acceptable substitutes for the works adapted is to believe that the experience of watching a film or television show, even the most intelligent and well-wrought shows, and reading a novel are essentially the same. Or at least the differences are negligible enough that the "essence" of the work is still getting through. It seems to me an implicit devaluation of what is actually the distinguishing feature of fiction--its status a patterned prose, as writing--to maintain that it can be translated into visually realized images without sacrificing its essence. A given adaptation of The Master and Margarita may work on its own, visual, terms. It may even be more successful than another adaptation at capturing something recognizably "Bulgakovian" in the treatment. But it still isn't The Master and Margarita, and viewers of the film who don't become readers of the novel still don't really know what it's all about.

A good television or film adaptation can certainly provide pleasures of its own, but they are the pleasures available in that medium. A good film requires careful attention, just as does a good novel, but the kind of attention being paid is not the kind required by fiction. It can provoke us into immersing ourselves into the mise-en-scene (in a way perhaps analogous to painting but not continuous with it, since the image moves) or force us to keep track of the information conveyed through editing, but this is ultimately the work of the eye and ear keeping pace with appearances. We have to look and listen. Fiction requires a kind of looking, but even our visual registering of word, phrase and sentence, and the way these elements arrange themselves in a "style" distinctive to the author we're reading, is more an internally-oriented mental process than an externally-oriented process of sorting sights and sounds (although a kind of "listening" is also certainly involved, as language manifests itself to our mental "ear"). Our imaginations then have to finish the job the writer has started. We have to mentally transform the words, phrases, and sentences into the "actions" or "thoughts" or "emotions" of the "characters" we agree are being brought to a kind of life. (Films, of course, do this work for us.) And we have to keep straight the way in which the characters and their actions are being presented to us in a particular sort of formal arrangement, an arrangement that is again mostly a phenomenon of our mental engagement with the text. Sometimes--as in some modernist and postmodernist fiction--this formal arrangement overrides our immediate connection to the characters and the actions and has to be processed before we can even comprehend the characters and actions.

I don't say that fiction is superior to film (I have a background in film study and criticism myself), but to the extent it makes the kind of demands on us I have described, it certainly is different in its aesthetic and psychological effects. For a "literary classic" to finally be appreciated, it has to be appreciated as literary. It probably doesn't do any harm to people (as opposed to literature) when they're allowed to be "acquainted" with literature through film, but I can't see that it does them much good, either.

Market Penetration

In his recent disquisition on fiction's loss of audience to television shows about the Mafia, John Freeman opines that "America's most powerful myth-making muse long ago moved in to Hollywood" and that the novel has additionally "been whacked by a number of things," such as the decline of public education and the rise of advertising.

While the spread of a kind of voluntary illiteracy in American culture certainly doesn't help in the effort to perhaps entice a few current nonreaders into becoming readers, I really don't think The Sopranos has likely distracted the attention of many people who might otherwise have been reading novels, certainly not many people who under different circumstances might have spent their time with Nabokov or Beckett. Would it really be a coup for literature if some of those watching The Sopranos were instead reading James Michener or Mario Puzo, in reality the true "myth-making" alternatives to "the screen in its many incarnations"? And if by pointing out the dominance of the "language of advertising" Freeman is criticizing the "book business" for its marketing of trash of all kinds, including that which is sandwiched between covers and called a "book," then I certainly agree with him, although presumably he would be satisfied if such advertising were used to attract readers to real books. Indeed, later in his article Freeman lauds the way such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Ralph Ellison, and Jack Kerouac managed to combine literary ambition with "market penetration."

Freeman is probably correct, however, to cite competition from Hollywood as a detrimental influence on the standing of fiction, but its influence is not of the kind he imagines it to be. If the novel is being marginalized, it is not because too many people are watching HBO; it's because too many novelists are writing novels that are clearly meant to be made into movies. If fiction is being undervalued, by readers and critics alike, it's not because shows like The Sopranos are better, or more accessible, than contemporary novels; it's because fiction writers themselves implicitly concede that film and television are the narrative forms to which they ultimately aspire. If certain movies and the various cable miniseries programs seem livelier than fiction, it's not because fiction no longer "develops characters" on a grand scale, or has abandoned "some of the primary themes of the Great American Novel" or fails to render itself in "a deeply American language," characteristics Freeman believes are positively in evidence in The Sopranos; it's because too few novelists manifest any interest in sounding out the yet undiscovered possibilites of fiction as an alternative to the conventional narrative practices upon which film and tv continue to rely.

It is precisely the desire to achieve "market penetration" (a market that the movie business has not only penetrated but has saturated with its seed) that has caused fiction to become less and significant to the development of American culture.

I began to ponder these issues well before reading Freeman's article. I have long thought that most mainstream "literary fiction" was inspired less by writers' familiarity with literary history and more by the narrative demands of film. This doesn't necessarily mean that most writers want to produce plot-driven thrillers and melodramas or sweet romantic comedies. Indeed, the sensibility exhibited in much contemporary literary fiction is perhaps closer to that informing the "art film," the "independent" movies that can be described as "quirky" or "offbeat" or, simply, "serious." This kind of film has the advantage of combining a degree of artistic credibilty with some plausible prospect of popularity, should the film in question "find its audience," manage to accomplish a measurable act of "market penetration." With many writers, my impression is that their most deeply-held ambition is to see their work adapted into such a film, which would allow them to maintain their artistic cred while also having the work affirmed by those attuned to and sanctioned by our "most powerful myth-making muse."

But I was especially provoked into examining this phenomenon more closely when I recently watched Todd Field's adaptation of Tom Perotta's novel Little Children (screenplay written by Perotta himself.) I found it to be a reasonably pleasant, mildly "quirky" satire of suburbia, one that especially zeroes in on Americans' increasingly fraught attitudes toward parenting, fraught because so many parents have hardly ceased being "little children" themselves. My impression of the novel, based on the reviews and weblog discussions I'd read at the time of its release, was that it was a relatively unquirky literary satire written by someone specializing in the "youth" scene (his previous novels were Joe College and Election, the latter also made into a well-known film.) I decided to read Little Children to see if I had perhaps too quickly discounted him as a writer, although I suspected I would find the novel just another in the very long line of mediocre works of fiction that Hollywood directors and scriptwriters had managed to elevate into better films.

What I found was not just a mediocre work of fiction that managed to be transformed into a watchable film, but a mediocre novel that was mediocre precisely because it was obviously written in order to be so transformed.

If ever a movie could be said to have "filmed the book," the Field/Perotta version of Little Children is it. Very little of the book is left behind in the transference to film. The plot remains virtually undisturbed, much of the dialogue comes from the novel verbatim or with very minor changes, and almost all of the characters introduced in the novel are included in the film (although a couple of them, such as the husband of co-protagonist Sarah, have a diminished role, and the husband's subplot in particular--concerning his obsession with an online porn vixen--is pared back). The novel's scenic narrative structure, by which relatively brief, self-enclosed scenes, alternating primarily between those involving Sarah and those involving Todd, the "Prom King" with whom Sarah begins an extramarital affair, move us forward in a leisurely, episodic fashion is faithfully reproduced in the film. The ending is changed slightly, but not in such a way that the novel's underlying point ("boy, aren't these people pathetic!") is lost. One can easily imagine the screenwriter making his way, page by page, through this novel and converting its prose into scene headings and dialogue.

And yet the film, as an aesthetic experience, is an improvement over the novel. It's not a great film, but as "quirky" independent films go, it holds one's attention and provides the occasional amusing insight into the reverse trajectory (it's all downhill after college) so many Americans have followed in the last few decades. (In this way the film--but not the novel--is reminiscent of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, although Yates's novel is much bleaker, less content with mere amusement.) The novel, on the other hand, is a slog, full of uninspired prose and hackneyed observations. And this difference, in my opinion, is all the difference in the world. The movie spares us Perotta's labored, cliche-ridden, "unobtrusive" writing. It spares us passages like this:

Aaron had discovered his penis. Whenever he had a spare moment--when he was watching TV, say, or listening to a story--his hand would wander southward, and his face would go all soft and dreamy. This new hobby coincided with a sudden leap forward in his potty training that allowed him to wear big boy underpants at home during the day (at night, during naps, and in public he still needed the insurance of a diaper.) Because he often had to sprint to the bathroom at the last possible moment, he preferred not to wear pants over the underwear, and this combination of easy access and an elastic waistband issued a sort of standing invitation that he found impossible to resist.

Almost every sentence here is built out of banal phrasing and worn-out expressions: "had discovered his penis"; "a spare moment"; "soft and dreamy"; "a sudden leap forward," etc. The last sentence in particular is a headlong accumulation of cliches. (I can't decide if the "standing invitation" is meant as a pun--a bad one--or is just lazy writing.) This is supposed to be a "plain style," but its effect is precisely, through its very shoddiness, to draw attention to itself rather than away. I spent more of my time wincing at the woodenness of the prose than following the story, and without "story" a novel like Little Children has nothing. The film rescues the story from the writer, as the director has at least some "style" in cinematic terms. The novelist has none.

One might say that since Perotta himself wrote the screenplay he was able to preserve most of the story another screenwriter might have altered, or that since it is his story he clearly does have some talent as a writer. But these claims only reinforce for me the conclusion that the novel was probably written with the screen version in mind and that the talent Perotta has is precisely a talent for screenwriting. The concepts of "story" and "character" his novel manifests are those prized by moviemakers. Aside from the adultery plot and the supporting cast of "offbeat" characters, Little Children (the novel) has little else to offer, nothing readers who read novels that in one way or another advance the form (even a little bit) would find compelling. I understand that practically everyone in the world has a "screenplay" in the works, and that few of them will ever be produced, but if you're going to write a novel that exists only as a proto-movie, why not just write it up as a script to begin with?

Plot-Wise

David Denby asserts that

The cinema, in which actors appear to be moving in consecutive time through patches of genuine space, has always created a strong expectation of realistic narrative. But here’s the paradox: thanks to the mechanical nature of the recording medium (still photos, or digits, strung together in rapid succession), playing with sequence and representation is almost irresistible. As soon as film was invented, experimental film was invented. Some of the fooling around was just exuberant exploration of a fabulous new toy, but some of it arose from political or philosophical convictions, and was intended to turn us upside down.

In my previous post, I suggested that while fooling around with chronology is more or less identified as the one properly "experimental" mode of fiction writing, few critics and reviewers express much interest in, or tolerance for, other kinds of literary experiment. Here Denby also equates "experimental film" with "playing with sequence." He is discussing a cluster of recent films, such as Babel, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Memento (all of which in turn, claims Denby, are in a lineage that began with Pulp Fiction) that "disorder" time, and he ultimately questions the efficacy of such manipulations.

When himself casting back in time for "classic" precursors to today's fractured narratives, Denby offers Alain Resnais as an example:

Of all the highbrow directors of the late fifties and sixties, Alain Resnais, working with experimental writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, and drawing on ideas developed by those writers in their fictions, played the most extreme (and infuriating) games with time and narrative. In “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” (1959), two lovers, one French, one Japanese, mainly lie in bed trying to retrieve their memories of the war. The movie ceases to move forward in any conventional sense; and the past, it turns out, becomes ungraspable, even irrecoverable, leaving us stranded in an elegant time warp. In Resnais’s “Muriel” (1963), a variety of distancing devices hold at arm’s length an unendurable recollection—a French soldier’s experience of torturing an Algerian girl. At the same time, the present-tense narrative is developed intermittently, and without the usual climaxes and tensions, so that the structure of the story’s emotions, rather than their power, becomes the subject of the film.

That Hiroshima, Mon Amour "ceases to move forward in any conventional sense" and that Muriel's "present tense narrative is developed intermittently, and without the usual climaxes and tensions" does not, it seems to me, make them the inspiration for the jumbled chronologies of current films. Resnais is looking for alternatives to the "power" of narrative; these films want to see if cinema can carry on without "story" in the Hollywood sense, not to find novel ways of presenting story that continue to convey its dramatic force. Films like Babel and Memento (and I actually like the latter film a great deal) do not focus on "the stucture of the story's emotions." They are all "climax and tension," if anything only reinforcing the importance of story: Reassembling the fragments of narrative we are given into a conventional story becomes perhaps our primary prerogative as viewers of such movies. Story remains all.

Part of the problem with Denby's formulation of "the new disorder" is that he opposes it to "realistic narrative." He confuses "realism" with conventional storytelling. Resnais's films are hyperrealistic, even while they do abandon story conventions. Indeed, "experiment" in film is more likely to move toward greater realism than toward ever more frenzied disruptions of narrative line, at least as long mainstream filmmaking continues to be focused on delivering greater and greater narrative punch. Efforts to achieve realism in either mainstream or independent filmmaking are more likely to draw out fresh and innovative approaches to the art of cinema than the admittedly exciting but finally story-bound "scrambling of time frames" that Denby describes. This is not to say that realism is preferable in cinema, just that what Denby calls realism is really just the use of storytelling strategies that don't call attention to themselves.

Denby concludes from the perceived failings of Babel that a return to tried-and-true storytelling techniques might be necessary, that they might lead to "the paradise of a morally complicated but flawlessly told story." I'm all for moral complication, but I don't see that this must be the Holy Grail of filmmaking. I don't see why experimenting with the possibilities of film can't be a sufficient justification for making one, just as similar experiment with literary form has often been for writing a poem or a novel. If Neal Gabler is right and "movies can no longer be the art of the middle," then all the more reason not to single-mindedly pursue the mass audience with more gaudy refinements of "plot." Or mollify them with a "flawlessly told story."

Predictable Nonconformism

David Bordwell on "Indie Guignol":

In an article originally called “Sundance Movies Are Bad for You!” . . .Richard Corliss complains that indie movies have become so predictable that they form a genre in themselves. They focus on relationships, especially those of a dysfunctional family or a fumbling love affair, and treat their principals with a dutiful mix of pathos and humor. Where, he asks, are the more imaginative narrative and stylistic maneuvers fostered by the Coen brothers, Jarmusch, Tarantino, and the like?

That’s only half the story. True, indie films are often pallid comedies and melodramas. But just as often, and sometimes at the same time, they’re desperately sensationalistic. In these the formal conservativism to which Corliss objects is wedded to hot-button content. We call a bland Indie film quirky, but there are others we call dark. They’re Indie Guignol. . .

Very often the predictable nonconformist is just as orthodox as the conformist. Long before the sort of recyclings that Corliss identifies, unconventional moviemaking turned out to have its own conventions–unfulfilling or risky sex, pedophilia, damaged self-images, chancy links among the characters. More surprisingly, the daring indie film often trades on the same clichés that haunt program pictures and prestige items. Sunny small towns harbor nasty secrets, manicured suburbs conceal rot, sex is degrading and only an excuse for power plays, rural folk are racist peckerwoods, corporations grind your soul, siblings vie for parental approval, serving in the military makes you a hairtrigger bully, high school is hell, and so is grade school. Dark visions these films may have, but the landscapes and populations they reveal are pretty familiar. . . .

What the Throngs Believe

Self-Styled Siren on Ace in the Hole, one of Billy Wilder's most underrated films:

When you see Ace in the Hole (and the Siren does hope that is "when"), you will immediately understand why, upon its first release, the movie stiffed colder than Harry Cohn's heart. Austrian-born Billy Wilder always claimed affection for his adopted country, but you would never know it from this very great movie and its portrait of what H.L. Mencken called the species Boobus Americanus. There we are--grasping, foolish, gullible, addicted to lousy food and cheap entertainment, as distractible as a toddler. This film is bitter medicine even in 2007. Send not to know for whom the bile flows--it flows for thee. . .

You can read this movie as an attack on tabloid journalism, which it certainly is, but the press isn't the main target. [Protagonist Charles] Tatum is a heel, but he does have a conscience, albeit one that kicks him only faintly and too late. None of these characters have pretty motives, but worst of all are the crowds of people who arrive to camp out, buy souvenirs and eat junk food while waiting for a man to be rescued or to die. Wilder includes a beautiful long shot of a train pulling into Escadero after years of passing the whistle-stop by. What pangs trouble the passengers as they jump out, so eager to mill outside a possible tomb that they leap before the train stops moving? The same that trouble millions of reality-TV viewers, that is to say, none. The throngs believe they are just indulging their God-given American right to be entertained.

Incontrovertibly Good

Commenting on the idea that readers of Stephen King's books are at least reading, Steve Mitchelmore questions "the assumption that reading is an incontrovertibly good thing." "What this good is exactly is never addressed," he adds. Further:

. . .those who defend novels on such non-literary grounds are more preoccupied with appealing to "a higher platitude of, supposed, superior existence through Literature or Art". . .than those who want simply to explain why writers like Stephen King cannot be compared with certain other great writers; a purely literary explanation. . . .

I certainly agree with Steve in regarding skeptically the notion that reading just anything is, ipso facto, a superior use of one's time. There's nothing inherent in the act of confronting words on a page (or a screen) that makes it a more worthwhile focus of attention than, say, watching movies or tv. (And most people who make the "at least they're reading" argument are presumably hoping to wean people away from the modern visual media.) Some films and television shows are indeed better uses of one's time than most books. I'd surely recommend that anyone looking for an hour's worth of non-trivial entertainment watch House before picking up something at random from the New Fiction section at Border's. And Stephen King's own work helps to illustrate the fallacy of the "just anything" argument as well: Film adaptations of King's fiction such as Brian De Palma's Carrie and David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone are infinitely superior to the novels on which they're based, which in my opinion don't rise above the level of poorly written, sub-gothic trash. (There, I've said it.) These directors made cinematic art out of books that are not merely hack work, but hack work of even dubious "entertainment" value. (I, at least, have never been able to see what readers find entertaining in them.) They made films that used the medium in inventive and challenging ways that totally elude Stephen King in relation to his own medium.

Thus, not only is Stephen King inferior to "certain other great writers," his books can't be compared to the work of certain other accomplished filmmakers, who sometimes are using the same "material." And who would guide younger readers/viewers to run-of-the-mill literary fiction before, say, the films of Robert Altman? There are, in fact, only a handful of contemporary novelists whose books I would have turned to before I would go to see the latest Altman film. If the choice for young people is reading a trashy novel or watching a trashy movie or tv show, perhaps the marginally better option is the novel (if only to stretch their attention spans somewhat), but really I can't see it is any kind of intrinsically "good thing" for them to engage in either of these activities.

I'm not sure that those who take the reading-is-good-for-you position are more highly invested in the idea of a "superior existence through Literature or Art" than those who merely critique on literary grounds the individual works of writers like King, as Steve suggests. They probably are invested in "literacy" as a social ideal--and I don't think illiteracy is an acceptable alternative--and from this perspective they really aren't interested in Literature at all: Any port in a storm will do. They are perhaps still holding on to the model of the "general reader" as a paragon of democracy, but I myself don't think it does democracy much good if we settle for schlock simply because it manifests itself in print between two covers.

A Safe and Useless Place

Frank Wilson thinks that "artistic experiment" is defined by the amount of "trial and error" involved. He takes the scientific "experiment" to be the model for the use of "experimental" as a classificatory term in the discussion of literature. Scott Esposito more or less accepts Wilson's definition, although he has no problem with "art experiments being praised as ends in themselves," something about which Wilson seems skeptical. Scott also suggests that "unlike in science, we can continually come back to and learn new things from successful literary experiments, or simply admire their beauty."

Actually, we can probably do the same with certain especially compelling scientific experiments, but I think both Scott and Frank are mistaken to view "experiment" in literature as essentially analgous to the way the term is understood in science. Scott is correct in asserting that "a lot of trial and error is involved in the writing of most novels," and for that very reason "trial and error" is not really very helpful in capturing what literary critics/scholars have meant by using "experimental fiction" in describing selected works of fiction, especially fiction written since 1945, "experimental." For the most part, critical commentary on postwar experimental fiction (more broadly "postmodern" fiction) has focused on "experiment" as, in Jerome Klinkowitz's words, the "disruption" of a "conservative stability of form" in literary fiction (Literary Disruptions, 1980). Klinkowitz thought this stability had reigned since the 1920s, but it probably goes back farther than that, to the establishment of realism in the mid/late 19th century--experimentalists such as Joyce and Woolf could be said to have also "disrupted" this stability of form (often characterized as the "well-made story"), although their experiments did not disrupt the assumptions of realism itself, were in fact an extension of these assumptions into what is now called "psychological realism." From this perspective, "trial and error" is not so much the guiding principle of experiment (except insofar as it involves finding appropriate methods of disruption) as is the notion that "stability"--to which scientific experiments always return--is itself not a desirable state where the art of fiction is concerned.

It is true that the term "experimental fiction" is a catch-all term of convenience that doesn't necessarily signal anything very specific about what particular writers might be up to in their efforts to, if not "make it new," then "make it different." Thus Klinkowitz prefers "disruption," while other critics have written about "breaking the sequence" or "the art of excess" or "anti-story." In most cases, however, these critics are really interested in what Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs in Breaking the Sequence simply accept as "innovations in form." Friedman and Fuchs also provide a handy description of the elements of "stability" against which most innovative writers are rebelling: "Plot linearity that implies a story's purposeful forward movement; a single, authoritative storyteller; well-motivated characters interacting in recognizable social patterns; the crucial conflict deterring the protagonist from the ultimate goal; the movement to closure. . . ." Perhaps the most succinct statement of the motivations underlying experimental fiction would be the remarks made by John Hawkes, which I've quoted on this blog before: "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained."

A critic who did use the term "experimental fiction" straightforwardly was Robert Scholes in his book Fabulation and Metafiction. In the chapter of that book called "The Nature of Experimental Fiction," he writes: "Forms atrophy and lose touch with the vital ideas of fiction. Originality in fiction, rightly understood, is the successful attempt to find new forms that are capable of tapping once again the sources of fictional vitality." Scholes's book popularized the term "metafiction" as a more specific term describing the tendencies in postwar American fiction that made readers think of them as "experimental": "Metafiction. . .attempts to assault or transcend the laws of fiction--an undertaking which can only be achieved from within fictional form." Writers like Gass, Barth, Coover, and Barthleme were "working in that rarefied air of metafiction, trying to climb beyond Beckett and Borges, toward things than no critic--not even a metacritic, if there were such a thing--can discern."

Eventually that air probably became too "rarefied." Many readers came to associate metafiction--and thus "experimental fiction"--as "game-playing," an obsession with "art" over "life." This perception probably informs Frank Wilson's disdain for experiments "as ends in themselves." (Also his disinclination to think of Joyce as an experimenter--Joyce "knew from the start what he was going to do and how he was going to do it" and would never have stooped to mere "experiment.") It may also explain why Christopher Sorrentino, in a comment on Scott Esposito's post, observes that "while I have met a great many novelists ranging in outlook and approach from Ben Marcus to Jonathan Franzen, not a single one of them to my knowledge has ever described his/her work as 'experimental.'" While the writers associated with the Journal of Experimental Fiction would probably be less skittish about the designation than Marcus or Franzen, it probably is now true that many "experimental" writers (putting aside whether Ben Marcus or Jonathan Franzen are actually very innovative in the first place), are uncomfortable with the word as applied to their work. I'd still accept the explanation given by Raymond Federman, who coined the term "surfiction" as an alternative to "metafiction" in identifying his own brand of experimental fiction:

The kind of fiction I am interested in is that fiction which the leaders of the literary establishment (publishers, editors, agents, and reviewers alike)* brush aside because it does not conform to their notions of what fiction should be; that fiction which supposedly has no value (commercially understood) for the common reader. And the easiest way for these people to brush aside that kind of fiction is to label it, quickly and bluntly, as experimental fiction. Everything that does not fall into the category of successful fiction (commericially that is), or what Jean-Paul Sartre once called "nutritious literature," everything that is found "unreadable for our readers". . .is immediately relegated to the domain of experimentation--a safe and useless place. (Surfiction, 1975)

* Including Frank Wilson?

What Happens Internally

A while back, Stephen Hunter wrote an essay for the Washington Post in which he examined the differences between fiction and Hollywood films taking fiction as "source." At one point he makes this claim:

. . .The primary issue in prose is motive: You have to understand why the people do what they do, or else the whole shebang falls apart as illusion. The minds of the characters have to be consistent to be believable; action has to flow from character. Fiction writing is about what happens internally, even if lots of guns come out and stuff blows up.

I know that a lot of people believe that this difference between the external and the internal is an important distinction to make between fiction and film, and that drawing it usually results in an implicit--or not so implict--valorization of fiction over film. Fiction gives us access to "the mind" of a character in a way film cannot; a corrollary of this is that the internal view is perforce a defining feature of fiction, that those stories and novels (particularly the latter) making a claim to be "serious" must provide it or risk being dismissed as not properly literary.

It is true that often the difference between a given novel and its adaptation to film is the greater focus on "mind" in the former. But this is a difference that is really only palpable when otherwise the novel and the film have much in common, when it was possible to adapt the novel to film to begin with because they both emphasize character, setting, plot in more or less conventional ways. (When finally the guns do come out and stuff does blow up.) In my opinion, the internal/external oppositon is not a very solid peg on which to hang one's hat in promoting fiction's putatively greater sophistication. We all recognize the ultimate tradeoff: immediacy in film vs. "depth" in fiction. But what makes depth the more valuable property? In aesthetic terms, why is it important to provide such depth in the first place? If you're more interested in "empathy" or "motive" than in art, perhaps.

What if you don't really care about "believability"? What if character is something you're not really interested in at all, except insofar as it enables the fiction's aesthetic design? Is such a writer (or reader) not being serious? What if it doesn't matter whether action follows from character? Couldn't character follow from action, if incident and event comprise the engine of aesthetic effect? Couldn't you dispense with action altogether? Couldn't you dispense with character altogether? (Think Beckett's later work.) Some writers want the "whole shebang" of illusion to fall apart. It's precisely a way to divert the reader's attention to some of the other aesthetic possibilities of fiction. Why is this less "serious" than writing the same old character-based story in which we get supposedly "luminous" glimpses into that abstraction called "human consciousness"?

Such fiction as I am describing would indeed be (mostly) unfilmable, at least according to currently reigning ideas about what film properly does as well. But wouldn't this be the whole point? We wouldn't need to have advice about how to approach a film based on a novel. They'd each have their own separate and entirely respectable jobs to do.

The Irreplaceable Conditions of Prose

According to Andrew O'Hagan, "There may be a coming generation who will know the literary classics only from television's adaptation of them, but that knowledge is better than no knowledge at all."

This is wrong. It couldn't be more wrong. What good is it to have "knowledge" of books if they go unread? Would O'Hagan say the same thing about, say, music? Better to have "knowledge" of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, even if one never listens to them? A faint memory of the excerpt that used to be played on William Buckley's Firing Line will do?

O'Hagan continues:

I'm a novelist, so I'm hardly going to argue against the irreplaceable conditions of prose, the pattern and rhythm and truth of good writing. But literature is also about narrative and morality; if it takes a television show to get some of that over to an audience - and possibly to send them to the original source - then there are small grounds for moaning.

I haven't read any of Andrew O'Hagan's books, but if he really believes this, he can't be much of a novelist. Literature without the words is good enough? If television (or film or "graphic novels") can provide "narrative and morality" as well as fiction, which O'Hagan seems to concede here, why bother with fiction in the first place? The other forms are clearly more popular, so if "getting over" some morality to an audience is what you're after, wouldn't it make more sense to use them instead?

In saying all of this, I am not denigrating these other narrative forms. I would simply maintain that tv is tv, film is film, fiction is fiction. Indeed, I have always found television adaptations of "classic" novels to be among the least interesting uses of this form, and much more likely to frighten viewers away from the "original source" than provoke them into reading. The best film adaptations of novels tend to be of those novels less tied to notions of "literature" in the first place, leaving the filmmakers with much more freedom to alter the source in ways that emphasize the strengths of cinema without leaving the novel's fans feeling outraged. If you prefer the visual to "the irreplaceable conditions of prose," fine. But let's not pretend that tv versions of fiction manage to negotiate some blurry terrain between the two modes. It's still just television.

"My stepsons are fairly good readers," writes O'Hagan, "but, recently, they have begun to say that reading is boring":

I find it hard to imagine what they mean, except that when I see them watching stuff on television I see that their eyes are lively. In this situation, are you going to force them upstairs to read Kidnapped, or are will you guide them towards the BBC's recent adaptation of Kidnapped starring Iain Glen as Alan Breck?

I would do neither. I'd let them watch whatever television program they want to watch. I'd suggest to them that Kidnapped is a pretty good book, but I wouldn't force them to read it. If they're going to grow up to be non-readers, I guess I'd just accept it. Maybe I'd try to teach by example by skipping that night's tv lineup altogether and reading a book instead. But watching Iain Glen rather than reading about Alan Breck isn't going to make anyone a Stevenson fan.

Sorrentino on Capra

Thanks to Richard's comment on the previous post, I have discovered an essay by Gilbert Sorrentino on It's a Wonderful Life. Although Sorrentino goes somewhat farther than I would in interpreting the film based on a reading of George Bailey's countenance after returning from Pottersville, this analysis doesn't seem too far removed from my own:

. . .It's a Wonderful Life is a curious example of a work that means precisely the opposite of what it seems to say. Its true message is, in the context of Capra's oeuvre, a surprising one: Money is everything. Although the film is usually read as the pinnacle of the Capraesque ideal of grassroots optimism, I would argue that its subtext calls this optimism into serious question. In effect, the film encapsulates a disgust and anger with modern American life that are barely hidden, and often glaringly foregrounded.

The final scene of the film is ambiguously eerie, and its strangeness is emblematized in George Bailey's near-maniacal grin, one that is equally composed of shame, fear, gratitude, and self-loathing. It is a grin that, once seen, can never be forgotten. Money is everything is what that grin says, what the scene says, and what the film says. In this final moment, the truth of the film strikes at us with metonymic power through the stilted images of celebration and victory and joy. . .

The journey into the Other World of Pottersville may be thought of as George's confrontation with the reality of his thwarted life: this ineffective man is who he really is. George's existence in Bedford Falls has not precluded Pottersville's existence, it merely permits us to see that Bedford Falls and its George are located on another plane. So then, in Pottersville, where George is not, money is all; and in Bedford Falls, where George most definitely is, we have just seen, and will see again, that money is all. The people of both towns, uncanny doubles, show George what really matters, and the final scene, with cash everywhere, is a not-so-subtle allusion to Zasu Pitts's blanket of gold coins in von Stroheim's Greed.

However, I also think this passage goes too far:

George's journey into the Other World is, in truth, his journey into the actual, that is, he sees, at last, and not through the lens of his insufferably self-righteous altruism. His role, far from being that of the redemptive champion (the role that the film is intent on constructing), becomes meaningless. The ramshackle sentimentality implicit in scenes of small-town life reveals itself as sophomoric, and, tellingly, is subverted by the same iconography that is meant to support it. From the moment that George sees, that is, the reality of his life, he will live, he must live as the willing recipient of the money and largesse he has long affected to despise. The film, from the moment George returns to the world of Bedford Falls in laughter and Christmas snow, becomes cold and distant, even though these last few scenes are presented as triumphant and warm: George has escaped from bankruptcy, disgrace, death, and hell. That Capra has disguised his true meaning inside brilliantly manipulated "Capraesque" clichés lifts those cliches to epiphanies. And we see, how clearly we see, the bitter irony of the title.

I do think Capra sees George Bailey as a "redemptive champion." Of course he can't escape the influence of "money and largesse"--he will have to continue living in a capitalist society--but he can put aside the ambition to accumulate money and prestige for their own sake. He can live within the modest and chastened "system" represented by Bedford falls--the good Bedford Falls. Sorrentino's view of Capra depends too much on the notion that what comes across in his films does so to some extent despite Capra's intentions. While to some extent it is of course true that It's a Wonderful Life, like any great work of art, transcends whatever narrow intentions its creator brought to it, but I believe Capra knew what he was doing. He was affirming the decision George Bailey makes to "live again" and to pursue a kind of "altruism" that is achievable. He was rejecting the values represented by Mr. Potter. This may not have entailed calling for the overthrow of capitalism (or a bitter acceptance of its impossibility), but it did entail an explicit repudiation of the idea that "money is everything."