The Reading Experience

Unmoored

I agree with Jonathan Mayhew that for literary study "Mere 'appreciation' seems a little cloying, a little narrow, in prescribing an attitude of silent awe." The experience of literature is grounded in "mere appreciation" (although I would contend that "appreciation" is a much more concentrated and difficult task than its connotation as passive "admiration" usually suggests), but if the study of literature is to go beyond the initial (or even repeated) intensified encounter with the work, it does need to, in a sense, leave the "appreciation" of the work behind. Even a more methodical analysis of the specifically aesthetic elements of a text has to suspend immediate appreciation in order to focus on the particular devices the text incorporates and on the effect these devices create--in other words, on how the text works. "Silent awe" is hardly a useful response when the actual study of literature takes place.

But I can't agree--based on my reading of most scholarly articles published in most "name" academic journals--that for very many academic critics "it is simply taken for granted that there are other questions to be asked aside from 'what makes this poem beautiful?' and that the discipline can't go anywhere being confined to that question. In other words, appreciative admiration is assumed (somewhere in the background) but is not itself the goal." It is true that "there are other questions to be asked" aside from the aesthetic ones, but I don't believe that academic criticism in its current manifestation assumes "appreciative admiration, " foreground or background. Or if it does make such an assumption, it does so only to dismiss aesthetic appreciation as the concern of naive readers who haven't been apprised of the strategies employed by academic critics to transcend the "merely literary" in favor of more "serious" issues of politics and sociology.

And it may be true that the "discipline"--literature as submitted to the protocols and conventions of academic inquiry--can't remain "confined" to the question of aesthetic beauty, but this is a problem not for literature per se but for the subject "literature" as it is defined within the academic curriculum. In a recent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education of M.H. Abrams, Jeffrey Williams comments in passing that "Today the New Criticism, the dominant approach to close reading from the 1940s until the 1960s, seems narrow and constraining." New Criticism was constraining only to the extent that to use it meant to attend entirely to the literary qualities of literature, to withhold biography, history, and politics as subjects tangential to the focused analysis of literary writing. Presumably those more interested in history or politics than in literature would indeed find New Critical close reading "narrow and constraining," although one could ask why such scholars chose literature as their course of study as opposed to, say, history or politics. As Jonathan himself says, "when literary studies forgets the aesthetic, watch out! The discipline becomes unmoored from its reason for being, confused in its aims."

I'd have to say that the discipline of literary study has become more than unmoored and confused. I'm afraid that "the overt hostility to aesthetic questions in certain quarters," as Jonathan puts it, has become the mainstream attitude among academic literary critics. Some writers might still be valued because they can be used to shore up ideological positions, but "literature" as the record and register of literary art is held in contempt, at best the avocation of amateur readers (including bloggers), at worst a fancy instrument of oppression wielded by hyperliterate elites. If the only way works of literature can usefully be brought into the classroom or the pages of academic journals is to examine them for their "social constructions", or to expressly belittle mere aesthetic questions, in my opinion, as I've said here before, the best thing for literature would be to remove it from academic curricula altogether.

Learning How to Write

William Bradley at the blog Incertus takes issue with the recommended "goals" of creative writing instruction for undergraduates as expressed by AWP. The first two goals listed are "An Overview of Literature" and "Expertise in Critical Analysis", while "Understanding of the Elements of a Writer’s Craft" comes in third. Bradley asks:

Does it seem odd to anyone else that "Understanding of the Elements of a Writer's Craft" is listed as the third goal for creative writing instruction? Doesn't it seem like learning how to write should be priority number one? Yes, getting a strong background in literature and honing critical thinking skills are important, but aren't they important in a creative writing class because they help facilitate the goal of students learning how to write?

I do find it odd, but only because I would have thought that by now the AWP would have given in to complaints about requiring literature courses for creative writing degrees and given its approval to craft-driven approaches. This would only be in keeping with the general drift toward "practical" relevance in most undergraduate degree programs, and it's to the AWP's credit that it hasn't yet gone with the flow.

Learning how to write should indeed be the ultimate goal for students in creative writing, but exactly how one would learn this without the widest possible familiarity with literary history and with the basic principles of literary analysis is not at all apparent to me. Students who take "learning how to write" seriously are not learning a set of rules or some generalized standards that simply need to be applied. They are learning how they might eventually write poems that do not just invoke the name of "poetry" as it has been codified into a set of established precepts or write fiction that does not just perform some known variations on the "well-made" story. They can do these things, in my opinion, only when they are relatively familiar with the "tradition" that gives their own work definition and that in turn they hope to revise or modify. (This can certainly be done by any aspiring writer without the mediation of an academic program, although an academic creative writing program should make this encounter with tradition more focused and more organized, or else it really has no useful reason to exist.) And I really don't understand how a "strong background in literature" can "facilitate the goal of students learning how to write" unless it comes first. Otherwise, works of literature are used only for imitation, to illustrate ""pacing" here or "characterization" there.

To approach creative writing instruction with the assumption that "the elements of craft come first" is to reinforce the idea that "writing" can be reduced to a collection of techniques and devices the student must master in order to become a certified writer. Creative Writing programs probably already do reduce the writing of poetry and fiction to a simple "how-to" process, and perhaps for reasons that at one time, at least, were unavoidable. "An Overview of Literature" and "Critical Analysis" (mostly understood as formal analysis and "close reading") were expected to be at the heart of literary study as offered by most English departments, to which was added "creative writing" as a kind of practicum. Over the past twenty-five years, most English departments have more and more withdrawn from this arrangement, offering less and less of an "overview" in order to concentrate on Theory or Cultural Study, and programs in Creative Writing, both at the undergraduate and the graduate level, are going to have to pick up the slack by providing more critical-literary instruction or else their students will have practically no "background in literature" at all.

One of the first things they should do is to insist that there is no "craft" involved in writing poetry and fiction unless this simply means that both forms have a history that provides us with models of how the form was used at some point in the past. Imitating those models might have some initial pedagogical value, but ulimately the best writers will learn how to discard them. Beyond that, craft becomes only the self-applied anasthetic of literature.

NOTE For a broader discussion of this issue, see my essay, entitled "Not Merely Academic: Creative Writing and Literary Study," here.

Responding to Other Scholars

Rohan Maitzen recently gave her colleagues a kind of primer on "academic blogging," and among the responses she received was this:

Finally, another colleague proposed that, overall, the internet is great for connections, comments, and other 'lighter' forms of scholarly interaction (I'm paraphrasing) but not suited for sustained analysis. I think this is true in a way, but more because of how we use the internet than because of any necessary limits on its forms. . .

I also think it's true that few blogs offer the kind of 20-page "sustained analysis" that still stands as the paradigm for academic publishing, but this is, as Rohan says, more a function of how the internet has been used so far than an inherent limitation of the blog post. Much valuable literary criticism is being offered on many blogs, both "literary" and "academic," but most bloggers and readers of blogs still conceive of a blog post as "essay lite," an attempt to engage in some "sustained analysis" without running on to umpteen screens-ful of text. There's nothing wrong with this, but it does reflect an attitude toward screen-reading that continues to consider it ridden with "screen fatigue" and other ills endemic to the act of reading online text. And it tells us nothing about the long-term potential of blogging and other forms of online publishing, especially when print periodicals start to disappear (as they will) and most reviews, essays, and articles are "printed" online.

I've concluded that folks like Rohan's colleague are never going to be converted to online publishing. Their professional identities are too intertwined with the supposed "prestige" of print and of peer review for them to turn to the internet simply because it provides an opportunity to write about literature in interesting and still-unexplored ways. They are too invested in the notion of the lengthy "sustained analysis" (much of which turns out to be rote citation of sources and mindless repetition of academic conventions, anyway) to see, for example, that a "sustained analysis" might unfold over the course of several blog posts, perhaps winding up even longer than a typical scholarly article but without its filler. Or that critical discussions on blogs can really turn into discussions across and between blogs, discussions that actually advance the consideration of writers and texts rather than personal agendas and careers. As Rohan further puts it, "I don't see why [this kind of discourse] should be taken any less seriously by writers or readers than, say, 'responses' to articles that sometimes appear in journals by invitation--which are not, strictly speaking, peer-reviewed in the same way as anonymous submissions. Participation in book events is a form of on-line academic discourse that seems basically equivalent to publishing a book review, with the extra burden of having to respond to other scholars' queries or dissenting views."

Sometimes I thinks it's really this disinclination to entertain "queries or dissenting views" that accounts for the blogophobia among certain critics and scholars that has seemed to be on the rise lately.

Analytic

In his post on "Everything Studies," Joseph Kugelmass suggests that

If the humanities were to re-shape itself in order to accomodate the changing shape of culture, all of the analytical disciplines would combine—Philosophy, Political Science, English, Comparative Literature, History, Sociology, Anthropology, and the rest—while the creative disciplines would remain separate, including Creative Writing, Dance, Theater, Visual Arts, and Musical Composition. Critics and scholars are not always good artists, and vice versa. The grounds for such a merger would be basically ideological. If we accept the idea that our beliefs about the world are essentially constructions, then it makes sense to give the study of those constructions the widest possible scope . . . .

I would be willing to accept this proposal (with one proviso, discussed below), but there are actually a number of assumptions about both art (the "creative disciplines") and about academic study that need to be unpacked from this passage I've quoted.

That the humanities needs to be re-shaped because of the "changing state of culture" signals the extent to which the "humanities" as a marker of a certain kind of academic study has completely lost its original meaning. The "humanities" disciplines were those that resisted the scientific modes of inquiry in favor of a more impressionistic, a more humane (as in "humane learning") approach to certain kinds of human productions and experiences. That these disciplines now focus almost exclusively on a quasi-scientific study of "culture" suggests that "humanities" as an umbrella term ought to just be dropped in favor of the more descriptive "cultural studies," which might indeed include "everything."

"Analytic" is of course a nice term to be used whenever it's necessary to distinguish between mere emotional and instinctual artists and real thinkers--the intellectually rigorous (and properly credentialed) "scholars" who can cut through all the artsy-fartsy rigamarole favored by the "creative" types and let us know what all cultural activites are finally really about. Thus dividing existing disciplines into the "analytic" and the "creative," while potentially liberating for the "creative" endeavors, is also partly a good way to get the academic dilettantes out of the way of the Serious people.

The notion that "our beliefs about the world are essentially constructions" (revised in the next paragraph to "the world is constructed by human beings"), however much it may ultimately be true, is also a neat way to marginalize the "creative disciplines," which are merely engaged in fashioning aesthetic objects and not "the world" (at least not until such objects are interpreted by the analytic disciplines.) The Everything Studies or Cultural Studies or Symbolic Systems Studies scholars are dedicated to understanding "the world," not just the trinkets or the word-games created by artists. Art and literature are useful tools if they can be enlisted in the larger "ideological" project of establishing social constructionism as the dominant worldview (at least among intellectuals), but they surely don't merit consideration as aesthetic constructions in their own right.

Joseph's distibution of "disciplines" to be included as "creative" is tellingly literal: "creative writing" but not English or Comparative Literature; "Visual Arts" but not art history; "Musical Composition" but not music history or analysis. It is certainly the case that "Critics and scholars are not always good artists, and vice versa," but surely the study of artistic forms is enhanced by some appreciation of artistic practice, just as, more importantly, programs focusing on artistic practice benefit from some attention to "analytic" questions. Partitioning the "creative" subjects so thoroughly from criticism and scholarship may seem to remove a source of contention so that both the creative and the analytic disciplines can get on with their "real" work, but I think it would ultimately only make disciplines such as English or Art (to the extent they don't just collapse into the sociology that "Everything Studies" wants to be) even more unappealing to students (who usually pursue these disciplines out of an initial enthusiasm for reading fiction or poetry or for experiencing works of visual art), and would almost certainly further marginalize creative writing or theater or music as "soft" performance-based programs useful mostly for "nurturing" writers and artists.

Thus I would endorse the Kugelmass Proposal (as if it needed my endorsement or not) only if, say, "creative writing" was understood to include not just a series of writing workshops but also a critical component that offered some exposure to literary history (emphasis on "literary" rather than "history") as well as some focus on literary criticism. This ought not to bother the faculty in Everything Studies, since this criticism would be "analytic" of literature as literature, not as another way of registering "the changing state of culture." It might have the happy consequence of returning the term "literary criticism" to its rightful place as the criticism of literature--especially new works of literature--and of transforming the academic criticism that has so misleadingly appropriated the term into something else--"everything criticism," I guess. But since academic critics have long eschewed examining anything so trifling as the merely literary, and are so eager to move on to Everything, I can't see why they would object.

Note: You can read my lengthier proposal for an expanded Department of Creative Writing here (text here).

Open Paths

King Wenclas is not wrong:

Literature can't be taught. All the instructor can do, at most, is leave the student an open path. Then, through reading, the student finds the meaning, his own meaning, for himself.

Rather than classrooms I would have silent reading rooms with widely spaced armchairs, so the student can read-- whatever he wants, but read. Reading is the only way to learn what literature is about.

On the other hand, he's not completely right.

"Literature" can't be taught, unless it's construed as a unified collection of "great works" embodying "the best that has been said and thought." That is, unless it's viewed as Universal Wisdom or essentially as propaganda, to be used to illustrate cultural or national greatness.

Students can be taught to read more efficaciously, however, thus sending them on their "open path" more prepared to find what they're looking for and better able to determine what's worth reading and taking seriously in the first place.

They can be taught to read for style and form, for subtlety and implication, rather than for just "the meaning," whether such meaning is subjectively held or not. This can be done not to satisfy the fancypants vanity of the overeducated instructor but to enhance every individual reader's ability to have a fully satisfying reading experience, an experience that includes but goes beyond extracting "meaning" and allows the reader to reconstruct the aesthetic strategies the author employed in embodying meaning, and in some cases to perceive effects of both manner and meaning of which the author him/herself was not necessarily aware. That some "plegmatic professors" use critical discussions to reinforce their own authority does not make all methods of critical reading and analysis inherently invalid.

However, by and large I agree with the King. Beyond a certain point what readers "get" from literature comes directly from, well, reading. There were times in my otherwise benighted career as a literature instructor when I did indeed think the best thing I could do for my students was to lead them to "silent reading rooms with widely spaced armchairs" where they could burrow deeply into the text at hand. But this is not an MLA-approved pedagogical procedure, and I can't say I miss the days when I would desperately search for an approach to teaching literature that was pedagogically sound and that would justify my taking up space at the front of the classroom.

This essential incompatiblity between the protocols of the classroom and the imperatives of literature--defined as particular works read for their immediate literary value--is probably what most explains the decades-long move in academe away from an emphasis on "literature itself" to an emphasis on literary theory and cultural studies. At best, the literature classroom can only be talk about literature, not the opportunity to experience literature. Students can share their experiences after the fact, but this has limited value as well; it's not a practice around which an entire curriculum of study can be built. Theory and social analysis lend themselves much more easily to classroom pontification, and more readily provide a patina of coherence and intellectual sophistication that focusing on the "merely literary" cannot so easily provide.

The student who would prefer to study literature for its own sake might indeed have to do that "for himself."

Political Thrusts

At least Mark Bauerlein has the honesty to admit that, as an academic conservative, he's not really interested in de-politicizing literary study:

. . .The problem [with anthologies] lies in the sizable portion of the contributions that bear a polemical or political thrust. These pieces don’t pose a new model of interpretation, redefine terms, outline a theory, or sharpen disciplinary methods. Instead, they incorporate political themes into humanistic study, emphasize race/class/gender/sexuality topics, and challenge customary institutions of scholarly practice. When they do broach analytical methods, they do so with larger social and political goals in mind.

The problem isn’t the inclusion of sociopolitical forensic per se. Rather, it is that the selections fall squarely on the left side of the ideological spectrum. They are all more or less radically progressivist. They trade in group identities and dismantle bourgeois norms. They advocate feminist perspectives and race consciousness. They highlight the marginalized, the repressed, the counter-hegemonic. And they eagerly undo disciplinary structures that formed in the first half of the 20th century.

In order to correct this imbalance, to provide more "sociopolitical forensic" from the right side of "the ideological spectrum," Bauerlein proposes adding to such anthologies selections from the likes of Francis Fukuyama, Irving Kristol, and David Horowitz, noted literary scholars all. This will be done in order to "broaden humanistic training and introduce students to the full range of commentary on cultural values and experience," conservative code words for "introduce right-wing propaganda."

The time has long passed when we should have dismissed "conservative" criticism of literary study as just so much me-tooism. The conservative battle cries in the "canon wars" or the "culture wars" or the "battle of the books" or whatever martial metaphor you want to use for the fake conflict over what to include on literature syllabi have never been about restoring the integrity of literature or literary criticism. These conservatives are just as interested in appropriating literature for their own ideological ends as their proclaimed leftist enemies.

Artistic Disciplines

In a post discussing the teaching of "craft" in creative writing classes, K. Silem Mohammad observes that

Writing as an artistic discipline has a pedagogical advantage over music and, to a lesser but still considerable extent, painting: language, its primary medium, is inherently referential. Because of this, it is only natural that the teaching of creative writing should involve a fair amount of attention to content. Content is important to the visual arts too, of course, but painters don't begin with content in the way that poets do; they begin with paint, whereas poets begin with words. Words mean things. . . .

Of course it is true that the medium in which literature is created, language (which is, as far as I can tell, not just its "primary" but its sole medium), is "inherently referential." In poetry and fiction, language is being abstracted from its usual function--to foster discourses of various kinds, to "communicate"--and instead is used as the material out of which an aesthetic construction might be fashioned. Although it might be said that music also abstracts or brackets sound from the cacophany of sounds that surround us or that painting brackets sight, visual detail, from the equally overwhelming spectacle confronting us, certainly language bears a larger burden of reference, of already-established meaning. This is one reason that so many readers and critics of fiction in particular can so often blithely discuss it as if it were unambiguously an opportunity for the writer to "say something," just another way to offer opinions, propositions, and pronouncements. Poetry probably bears less of the freight loaded on by this kind of approach to the reading experience, since it is somewhat more obviously an attempt to bend language into aesthetic shapes, but even poets are often judged more by their themes and visions than by their ability to show us what new kinds of shapes aestheticized language might take.

Which is one reason why I would conclude that creative writing courses should devote almost no attention to "content." I'm all for poets learning about "ethics and politics and science and philosophy," but they should do so by reading ethical philosophers and scientists, not by piggybacking these subjects onto courses on the writing of poetry and fiction. I rarely agree with Joan Houlihan, but I do concur with these comments on KSM's post: "Of course, a study of poetry, of literature, even of language itself, is part of all other human endeavors in the broadest sense, but we don't use the fields of science, politics, philosophy, etc. to study poetry--why would we? So why do you think that we need to use the study of poetry to include these other fields? Of course, all fields of human endeavor necessarily overlap, and poetry--literature in general--is at the intersection of many other fields, has a much wider scope than say, economics, but it's not as if there isn't enough content in the study of poetry itself that we also need to make it carry the weight of all these other human endeavors." In other words, words do indeed "mean things," but the effort to make them, as it were, mean meaningfully is hopelessly redundant and only encourages beginning writers--all writers--to think of themselves as oracles rather than artists.

On the other hand, I can't accept that writing instruction ought to focus narrowly on "craft," either. "Craft," in the context of a creative writing class, too easily reduces itself to the mastery of predigested forms, formulae, and "techniques" that allow one to write poems that are acceptably "poem-like," stories that are likely to strike agents and publishers as following the established conventions that lead to successful publication, but that certainly doesn't encourage the writer with a more iconoclastic attitude to venture into the unknown. This leaves the latter, should he/she journey forth nevertheless, teetering awkwardly on the border between recognition from his/her peers and mentors as admirably daring and the abyss of unpublished risk-taking. Even if "craft" includes the strategies used by previous innovative risk-takers, incorporating those strategies can amount to another kind of conformity to convention. I agree with KSM that "craft" can also mean allowing students to regard it "as something that develops organically from just fooling around with words," but it's finally hard to see why they need to go through MFA programs in order to engage in such fooling-around.

The best kind of creative writing teacher, in my opinion, would both oblige students to read as widely as possible in the history of the form--including generous samplings of current writers and their practices--and show the students how his or her own study of this history shaped his/her understanding of what "craft" is good for. Such instruction would give students a sense of the possibilities that previous poets and fiction writers have exploited and a glimpse into the way another writer's work has seized upon some of those possibilities rather than others, or even attempted to explore other, untried possibilities. It would allow the instructor to emphasize that "craft" goes only so far. At some point it has to be abandoned so real writing, writing that forces its own recognition and establishes its own criteria of judgment, can begin.

What's Already Been Written

The recent very valuable interview with Stephen Dixon in the Baltimore City Paper contains this exchange:

CP: According to a recent National Endowment for the Arts study, "Reading in Risk," [today's students] are worse at reading. They're writing a lot more and reading a lot less.

SD: They're right. They're actually right. When I give stories to undergrads, I'll ask who's read Tolstoy. Nobody's read Tolstoy. Or I mention James Joyce, when we read a story from Dubliners, maybe one or two have read a story in high school. When I first started out, kids were much more serious as readers, and I could actually have literary discussions with them, which I cannot do now. Even the ones who are the most avid writers are not avid readers. They just want to write.

CP: Everyone has a novel inside them, but no one reads anybody else's, then. Is that a problem?

SD: It's a paradox. It hasn't really stopped undergrads from becoming better writers than the readers who were writing before. You would think just the opposite. But then there's a problem. We grew up on Dostoevsky, Conrad, if there was ever a serious name, we read that writer. It also told us what not to write, because if the thing has been taken up already, and you have a history of having read it, you want to go on to something new. So a lot of students are sort of writing what's already been written.

Dixon seems to be suggesting that writing programs are good for raising writing abilities up to a point--the point at which mere "craft" leaves off--but that great writers are produced only through the inspiration of other great writers, and this as much through learning "what not to write" as through imitation. As Dixon says, "if the thing has been taken up already, and you have a history of having read it, you want to go on to something new."

Too much current literary fiction--which certainly is produced in greater bulk than even twenty or thirty years ago, mostly due to the proliferation of writing programs--too obviously bears the influence of being "workshopped." It's competent, tidy, duly serious, but ultimately just another version of "what's already been written." Workshops instill conformity and a respect for the "mastery" of pre-established skills, but if a truly innovative writer emerges from one or another of the MFA programs, it's usually an accident, something that's happened despite the strictures of the workshop or because the writer was gifted to begin with. Conrad or Faulkner would have been laughed out of most "creative writing" programs.

Dixon's own work is a good example of the kind of fiction that would be smacked down in most writing workshops. All those absurd run-on declarative sentences, those characters who sound alike, those circular, stop-start plots! Yikes. Didn't anyone ever teach him what a well-made story is like? Doesn't he know that Hollywood producers would never even pause over such idiosyncratic stuff when scouting out their next "source material"? What's Barnes and Noble going to do with it?

A good argument could be made that if creative writing programs don't produce better readers , they're not worth much. Certainly conventional literary study is no longer focused on perpetuating a culture of reading, on inculcating the reading habit and cultivating a readerly sensibility. If the remaining area of academic study still ostensibly dedicated to literature as literature and to fostering literary talent is now a place where "literary discussions" can't take place because writing has been severed from its roots in reading, the future of "creative writing" is a bleak one indeed.

Missing Buttons

In her review of Claire Tomalin's new biography of Thomas Hardy, Julia Keller proclaims that

Life, alas, can't hold a candle to art. Life is ordinary. Life is boring. Life is a stack of day-old dirty dishes in a crusty sink. Life is a pile of soiled laundry. Life is pettiness and tedium. Life is a blouse with a button missing.

Art, though, can be colorful and unexpected and dynamic, and never more so than when it's contrasted with the dreary predictability of life. Thus the biographers of artists must confront a special challenge: How to calibrate the life with the art. How to make the business of living--paying bills, trimming toenails--measure up to the splendid bounty of creativity: novels, plays, poems, paintings.

One would think that, given the general accuracy of that first paragraph, the proper conclusion to draw might be that biographies, especially biographies of artists and writers, and especially biographies of the junk heap variety (if a scrap of information exists, throw it on), are by and large a waste of time. No "calibrating" of life and art is necessary. The dreary reckoning of the "business of living" is never going to equal in its interest value the "dynamic" experience of works of art and literature, and I finally just don't understand why anyone finds it helpful to supplement the experience of art with investigations into the lives of artists. Why would I want to read about "pettiness and tedium," no matter how much they've been gussied up by the biographer's "insight"?

My own latest attempt to read a biography of a writer whose work I admire, Robert Poltito's Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, predictably enough only met with failure (my own failure to complete it). I knew almost immediately that I probably wouldn't make it through the book when I noticed from the table of contents that only a relatively small portion of it was devoted to Thompson's actual writing life. (His most productive period as a writer, the early/mid 1950s, is given about 60 pages in a 508-page book.) Two-thirds of the book is devoted to Thompson's life before he became a writer, and it is packed with the same kind of eye-glazing detail, about the subject's parents and his parents' parents, about the various places in which he lived, about his adventures as a young man, that fills most such door-stopper biographies. Nothing in the book illuminated Thompson's work, the discussions of which amount to plot summaries and tallies of the money Thompson was paid. If anything, I was left with even less understanding of what Thompson was after in his novels, or how his best ones are as good as they are, than before I read Polito's book.

Keller further asks of a "subject" like Thomas Hardy: ". . .what if the artist was a bit on the drab side? What if he wasn't noisy and rude and randy? What if he simply did his job each day, faithfully and well, with little fuss or fanfare?" It seems to me that these questions answer themselves. If we already know such things about a writer, no biography is needed. What else do we need to know? Exactly how he went about being drab? And even if the writer was "noisy and rude and randy," do we need to know the particulars in order to appreciate the work he managed to produce in his quieter moments? Jim Thompson's life was apparently on the noiser side (although Polito recites the facts of his Communist years, of his drinking and his occasional low-living in such a dry and prosaic manner it's hard to hear it), but learning the known facts about how he lived it still falls far short of the uproariousness of The Killer Inside Me or The Getaway or Pop. 1280. Why do we think the proper way to respond to works of poetry and fiction we have enjoyed is to fixate on the "life" of those who created them?

Life indeed can't hold a candle to art.

Close to Heresy

On the heels of the previous post examining the absurd idea that formalism--close reading, paying primary attention to the formal and stylistic properties of works of art and literature--is a "mechanical" approach that turns art into "something less than human" comes this equally silly commentary by Emily Wilson at Slate:

Historicism, in various new and not-so-new guises, dominates most contemporary academic literature departments. It has become something close to heresy to suggest that any literary work could be studied without close reference to the specific place, time, and culture in which it was produced. Literature does not express timeless truths about human nature—or, at least, you would sound like a simpleton if you said so at an academic conference. Rather, literature articulates the ideas and values of its own time, according to older, Hegelian forms of historicism. Or literature "negotiates" the "power dynamics" of its own time, according to the newer, post-Foucaultian versions. These positions each have something to be said for them: Both respond, in different ways, to the obvious fact that literature is not produced independently of its author and his or her society—as radical forms of literary formalism might suggest. . . .

So formalists believe that a work of literature is produced "independently of its author"? Literally by a machine? By some magic process whereby an author discovers his/her new book fully-formed beneath a moss-covered rock?

Similarly, just how would a writer work "indepentently. . .of his or her society"? All writers are literally expatriates? They float above the world on a billowy cloud of inspiration, gazing heedlessly on their fellow humans down below, who don't seem to realize they might also be "independent" of their time and place?

What radical formalist ever believed such patent nonsense? Of course, names are never given in these sophomoric caricatures of formalism because no literary critic has ever held the position that "literature. . .is produced independently of its author and his or her society." Only someone intent on marginalizing formalism--aesthetic appreciation more generally--could even read such a statement without noting how ludicrous it is. Those of us who prefer to focus on the aesthetics of literature (without which there is no literature) are not so stupid as to think poets and fiction writers free themselves of the assumptions of time and place and produce "timeless truths"; we do think that they produce art, and that art bears scrutiny as art at least as much as (in my opinion more than) it does as a specimen of "the ideas and values of its own time."

Wilson goes on to maintain that "the triumph of historicism is a pity, not least because the dominance of any orthodoxy tends to deaden the critical faculties," but she has clearly accepted the underlying demonization of formalism (it's "inhuman," to accept it "heresy") that has made the domination of historicism in academic criticism possible. To deviate it from it might cede the scholarly territory to those radical formalists and pleasure-seeking aesthetes who still lurk outside the campus walls. Such "simpletons" wouldn't understand "power dynamics" if it was right there in front of them.