The Reading Experience (Alternate)

Statement of Purpose

When I first began thinking about creating my own weblog, I thought I wanted to add another "literary weblog" to those so usefully surveyed by the Literary Saloon, the best of which include, in my reading, the Bookslut blog, Maud Newton, Golden Rule Jones, and the Saloon itself. But I eventually concluded I did not want just to provide yet more links to the daily literary news, perhaps with my own biting comments. Instead, I would like to test the proposition that the internet, in the form of the so-called "blogosphere," can provide a forum for a new kind of literary criticism, more compacted and concise, perhaps, than conventional print lit/crit, but serious criticism nonetheless.

Literary criticism is greatly in need of revitalization, as mainstream publications confine their coverage mostly to gossip and the book business, their book reviews becoming more and more perfunctory when not being eliminated altogether, while the academy, once entrusted with the job of engaging with works of literature, has mostly abandoned it altogether in favor of "cultural studies" and other forms of political posturing. I would hope, in fact, that this blog could work as a kind of bridge between the blogs and other general interest literary publications and what was once called "literary study"--which in my mind is simply the willingness to take works of literature seriously.

I would like, then, to provide consideration not just of individual works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, etc. but also important developments in the literary world more generally, issues being debated in the literary press, as well issues related to the craft of writing. I will do so on a regular if not always daily basis, the idea being not to keep abreast of the literary version of breaking news but to pause and consider these broader issues, as well as the overall direction being taken in today's literary world.

Those looking for the latest and newest in the morning's papers might thus be disappointed with this blog. I hope, however, that I can substitute for the breadth of coverage found in the other literary weblogs (which I myself read almost every day) a little more in the way of critical depth, although I also hope readers find my comments to be lively as well as engaged.

Taking Up the Slack

The most recent issue of The Antioch Review (Winter 2004) is devoted entirely to poetry and, more importantly, the criticism of poetry. Included are lengthy and insighful discussions of Eavan Boland, Charles Simic, and Frank Bidart, among others. Although at an earlier phase of recent literary history these essays might have been considered "academic," they are, relatively speaking, free of jargon and external agendas. This is an especially important point to make, because what is now called "academic criticism" is all but unreadable and concerned with everything but works of literature. Although poetry criticism is actually in less dire straits than the criticism of fiction in most academic journals, nevertheless we have come very far down a very dark road since the days when New Criticism and other approaches emphasizing "literature itself" were the coin of the academic realm. Not that I necessarily wish to see the return of New Criticism or some new variant--I have written critically of the limitations and flaws of the original proponents of the New Criticism. But what has been lost in the abandonment of this kind of formalism is any serious attention to the intrinsic value of reading works of literature as opposed to all other "texts." This is too high a price to pay. Mainstream literary journalism has by no means taken up the critical slack, and one of the few ways by which serious and sustained literary criticism might by saved is for literary magazines like The Antioch Review to print engaged criticism alongside the creative writing most such publications now emphasize. To this end, The Antioch Review should be commended for its efforts in this issue, and other journals should be encouraged to emulate them.

Addendum: See also the Pleiades Book Review, a new online service of the Pleiades literary magazine.

Book People

The literary blogs have been seized with incredulity over the news that the New York Times Book Review, once it has hired a new editor, will, according to its editor and its cultural editor, be moving away from "literary fiction" (including especially "first novels") in favor of more coverage of popular fiction and "urgent and journalistic" nonfiction. As well they should be . The coverage of literary fiction in the Book Review as it now exists is plainly inadequate, and the kind of nonfiction the aforementioned editors seem to have in mind is in great measure not worth reading in the first place.

Yet it certainly should not be surprising that the general disdain for serious reading of worthwhile books that has long characterized American culture would eventually infect even The New York Times. The people running the place are journalists. By and large mainstream journalists (and by this designation I truly intend to exclude large numbers of perfectly good writers whose work might be characterized as a form of journalism) wouldn't know a good book from the latest political press release, and no doubt find the very idea of "literary fiction" alien and frightening, given their own crude sensibilities. A number of years ago I taught at a University known for training such journalists. My experience when teaching these students (an impression reinforced by the comments of my fellow instructors) was that they were among the weakest students on campus, many of them astonishingly ignorant and particularly inept in the use of the language. I doubt that many of my students now work at The New York Times, but the difference is one of degree and not kind. That so-and-so is an editor of a major newspaper I don't find very impressive.

These editors and journalists are, in fact, more akin to the "movie people" extolled in two recent postings at 2 Blowhards. What especially unites them, at least to judge it by the kinds of comments made by Bill Keller and Steven Erlanger, is that really neither they nor the movie people have much use for books at all in the final analyis, and certainly not for reading. In the 2 Blowhards screed, Michael (or Friedrich, or whoever the hell he is) admits as much in his insistence that books have value for purposes other than reading! (As well in his belief that literary fiction ought to be no more than 50 pages long.) Keller's stated preference for books that act as "a launching pad for discussion" betrays a similar attitude toward books as, in this case, an excuse for Hardball-type tv gasbaggery rather than as carefully composed "texts" intended to be read and considered in an equally careful way.

At best, what Keller and Erlanger seem to have in mind, aside from reviewing more airport books, is to convert the Times Book Review into something closer to The New York Review of Books, where indeed most of the review space is taken up with books of "urgency' or which deal with issues of "current interest." Unfortunately, the NYRB is even less interested in fiction or poetry than the new Book Review is likely to be. At best one or two reviews of fiction by well-known writers appear per issue, and the intent of the editors is clearly to keep abreast of political and social developments rather than provide a forum for literary criticism. And the new Book Review will surely be less adept at this than the NYRB.

Perhaps the best strategy for those of us dismayed by this change in the Times Book Review's emphasis is not to deluge Keller or Erlanger with e-mails of protest, as was suggested at The Return of the Reluctant, but instead to bide our time. I suspect that these people, who are relatively new to their jobs, don't really understand the nature of the audience that does read the New York Times Book Review. I think the majority of this audience are indeed "book people" who won't appreciate the new approach and who will stop reading the thing. Ad revenues from publishers could fall off as well. It may be that this readership is finally less interested in "urgency" and more interested in the 800 words (or more) dedicated to what's left of serious fiction--and truly serious nonfiction, for that matter.

The Price of Relevancy

In his comment on my Statement of Purpose below, Mark of The Elegant Variation asks about the continued "relevancy" of literature, an issue he takes up further in an exchange with Splinters. Here he explicitly wonders about the novel's ability to "shake up society" as it has arguably done in the past. These are perfectly good questions at a time when one could wonder about the future not just of specific literary forms but of written language itself, and I would like to address them in an indirect way by examining one novel in particular.

It was fortuitous that TEV raised the issue while I was reading Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers (1974). Although I have read other of Stone's books, this was the first time I had read this novel, the one that essentially put Stone on the literary map to begin with. I have had a mixed reaction to his other books: I liked A Flag for Sunrise and Outerbridge Reach, disliked both Children of Light and Damascus Gate so much I couldn't finish either. I was able to complete Dog Soldiers, but not without some undesired labor.

The novel narrates a heroin smuggling effort gone disastrously awry, but the story itself is fairly obviously the vehicle for an expose of sorts of the state of American society in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In other words, it is an explicit attempt to be "relevant," to use fiction as a way of critiquing culture. And it is precisely this approach that makes the novel difficult to read now as a work of literature rather than as just a cultural artifact from the period. I would argue that in striving to be relevant, Stone actually created a work destined to seem irrelevant.

The novel does enact an interesting switch in character identification. One expects the smuggler, John Converse, to be the story's protagonist, but ultimately this role is given to the man acting as courier, Ray Hicks, who bears the brunt of the danger and the decadence that has overtaken American society--at least the slice of society the novel portrays, the drug scene, the counterculture--and whose plight seems most compelling. Converse turns out to be a very bland character, as does his wife, who runs off with Hicks only to become hooked on the dope they're trying to sell. Hicks and the wife are pursued by a trio of perfunctorily portrayed crooked cops, and wind up in the desert domain of an equally stereotypical countercultural guru gone to seed. The problem, then, is that all of the characters are assigned a particular role to play in the social picture Stone wants to paint, and, especially now, this makes the novel a less than inspired performance in purely literary terms. Even Hicks comes to seem just the sacrificial lamb the novel needs to make its cultural drama complete.

Further, because the novel's message must take precedence over its methods--otherwise the cultural analysis is blunted--it is presented through highly conventional, or at least very familiar, means. Stone uses a stripped-down version of the "scenic method," in which the narrative voice simply moves the characters around, sets the scenes, occasionally provides some further description. A premium is placed on dialogue, which is deliberately "pungent" and "gritty," an attempt to capture the countercultural patter of the time. One might have accepted this technique readily enough seventy-five years ago, but by now it all seems, at least to this reader, more an effort to duplicate the effects of film, to compete with movies by using the narrative conventions film has assimilated to itself. There are very few episodes in the book, in fact, that could not be transferred directly to film (a movie was made of the book, retitled Who'll Stop the Rain), and frankly the same thing is true of the other Stone novels I have read. He uses this narrative method skillfully enough, but I don't think that novels can become more "relevant" by doing the sorts of things that movies can arguably do better.

If one test of "literature" is that it stands up over time--even a relatively short amount of time--I for one don't believe a novel like Dog Soldiers can accomplish the task. Not that current events and the cultural climate in which one lives should play no role in literary fiction. It is hardly possible to ignore either of these. But I have always found the effort to simply "capture" these events and this climate in fiction beside the point and anyway doomed to make such fiction seem dated in the long run. (This is why Jonathan Franzen's lament over the demise of "social fiction" left me cold.) Better to focus on those things only fiction can do--or unquestionably does better--and to struggle to make the form "relevant" by creating a readership for it based on its strengths rather than the pretense it can compete with movies and the other popular arts.

Reclaiming Literature

I do not intend for this weblog to become obsessed with the academy or an excuse for my recurrent attacks on academic criticism, although since I am trained as an academic critic and continue to monitor such criticism, I probably will occasionally comment on developments in this corner of what we might still want to call the literary world. The current posting is occasioned by 3 articles/essays that have appeared recently that do provide an opportunity to assess current attitudes toward literature in the academy.

The January 27 issue of the Christian Science Monitor contains an article, "Theory in Chaos," that purports to reveal that literary theory no longer has the appeal among academic critics it had a decade ago. While this may be true (pure theory has been out of fashion even longer than that), it does not follow that the academy is returning to the study of "literature itself." Certain political orientations (feminism, Marxism) unquestionably still obtain, but these approaches are themselves now put in the service of what is generically called "cultural studies," which increasingly dominates most up-to-speed English departments. Cultural studies approaches literature as just another form of expression (just another kind of "text") to be examined for its cultural and political implications. In other words, literary study in these departments is becoming merely a branch of sociology. The "traditionalists" referred to in the article are no closer to regaining control of the study of literature than they were in the salad days of high theory.

In the January 16 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Peter Brooks reviews Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe. Even more than the title itself, Graff's subtitle says it all: "How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind." I actually have great respect for Gerald Graff, who has been willing to consider the state of higher education, and the place of literature more broadly, with honesty and in plain language. However, even though Graff at least implicitly concedes that the study of literature no longer plays a significant role in the academic curriculum, he doesn't show much concern for it once this has been granted. Instead, his commitment is still to the academy--or to the "life of the mind" more broadly--and he continues to look for ways to reconfigure the curriculum so that English professors, at least, continue to have a role to play. As Brooks points out, Graff now focuses on the teaching of English composition as a way to maintain some integrity in the English curriculum. (Previously he had emphasized the possibility of accenting the "conflicts" among different approaches to literature, but that has not worked out so well.)

In ths same issue of the TLS, Patrick Wormald, a Cambridge don, has an essay, "The Proper Study," that rehearses all of the familiar arguments for retaining the Humanities as a core part of the academic curriculum. Wormald's arguments are all cogent enough, but by now such a brief on behalf of the "elevating" and "humanizing" benefits of the study of the humanities, in this case specifically history, sounds like mere boilerplate. It is precisely this insistence that we get our history and our literature from attending "the university," in fact, that has bleached both endeavors of all visible color. Both Graff and Wormald take for granted that the life of the mind, an interest in history, a love of literature, are all synonymous with occupying a place, as student or as teacher, in the academy. Why should this be so? Inevitably, as has happened with literature, the priorities of academe take precedence over the substance of the "subjects" being taught, so that something like the current mess that is literary study becomes more or less inevitable.

Somehow or other, literature needs to be rescued from those in the academy who have almost tortured it to death. One reason I have become interested in the weblog phenomenon is that it might potentially become part of such an effort, along with the appearance of literary web journals and other literary sites that seek alternative ways of publishing creative and critical work (and perhaps with a move by mainstream literary magazines to revive general interest literary criticism). Literature--embodied in its writers and its readers--has nothing to lose but its soul.

Reviewing Literature

I would not want my previous posting to leave the impression I think the current dehydrated state of literary criticism is due entirely to the failings of academe. Mainstream "literary journalism" is at least as culpable as the academy in its inattention to what is actually being written by contemporary poets and fiction writers. Few and far between are the general interest publications that feature any extended analysis of contemporary literature, and those that do usually have an underlying ideological agenda to advance in the guise of literary criticism (The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, The New Criterion.) This is partly what makes the current turmoil at the New York Times Book Review so frustrating, since it is one of the few publications to examine poetry and literary fiction without such obvious biases.

Still, criticism of fiction from a political point of view would arguably be preferable to none at all, as long as not only explicitly "political" fiction was chosen for review. At The Nation, for example, one can comb through issue after issue and find almost no reviews of current fiction. Granted, The Nation is a political magazine, but I can recall a time when this magazine did review fiction, even though one knew such reviews would be filtered through the "progressive" political lens. At its online site (current issue February 16), vaguely "literary" reviews are offered of Terry Eagleton's After Theory and Colin McCabe's Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, but neither could be said to concern literature (or in the latter case film) in any meaningful way. The Eagleton review identifies Eagleton's discipline as "literary study," but goes on to discuss politics and cultural theory as if this is of course what a literary scholar studies. The Godard review (by David Thomson, otherwise an excellent film critic), by its nature discusses Godard's "life" (and his politics), although Thomson does attempt a little discussion of Godard's work, as if taking whatever small opportunity being assigned a biography affords him.

Something like this obtains as well at National Review Online, the conservative counterpoint to The Nation, where in fact no books are discussed at all, only politics. Again I seem to remember that this magazine at one time did attempt to engage with current works of literature, although perhaps I am merely waxing nostalgic for my student days when I pored over all new publications for their coverage of literary news. I myself don't agree with the relentlessly political attitude toward culture to be found in both of these publications, but as more broadly "journals of opinion" such magazines could be asked to consider fiction and poetry as aspects of culture more expansively conceived. Couldn't they?

Relevancy Redux

TEV asks (in a comment below) whether a distinction can be made between the relevant and the merely "topical" in literature. I do acknowledge the difference, and would even admit that sometimes even "topical" fiction can transcend its topicality to be relevant both to contemporaneous and to subsequent readers--The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps. Clearly Steinbeck's novel engaged its readers on a level much deeper than the merely topical, and to some extent continues to do so--except when it is considered primarily as reflective of "social history," the death chamber of literature.

But Steinbeck did not, at least in my view, achieve this feat by striving to be "relevant" first and foremost. Instead, he effectively carried out his relatively simple idea--a family of Okies on the road--to its logical culmination. The story he tells proceeds at least as much as a skillful working out of this literary idea as anything else, and thus it is still able to provide some readers with a satisfying reading experience. If it didn't, it would now be worthwhile only as social history. That it also engages with larger political and historical issues is, in literary terms, a bonus. (That is, if getting your politics from literature is a motive for reading it.)

Stone's Dog Soldiers does not rise to the literary occasion in this sense. It is, at least to this reader, almost purely an attempt to "comment" on the Vietnam War and its effect on American culture. It doesn't have the same mythic resonance as a novel like The Grapes of Wrath and doesn't provide many other readerly pleasures, as I tried to point out in my initial post. And when it's all said and done, who really cares about the "commentary," no matter how relevant, supplied by a novelist? We ought to turn to novels and poems because their authors know how to create good ones, not because they have extra-literary "ideas." (Although some writers undeniably do.)

Life's the Thing

I read few memoirs and biographies, perhaps as a reaction against the trendy popularity of both forms over the past 10-15 years, but more significantly because of my sense of the ultimate limitations of the conventional sort of "life writing" represented by memoir and biography as they now exist. I can't really remember the last memoir I was able to read all the way through, and I generally read biographies only of literary and historical figures in whom I already have an interest and even then only after I have become familiar with the writer or thinker's work and have read most of the important commentary on that work.

In a January 11 column posted at Triangle.com , the online site of The News and Observer (link originally found at Arts & Letters Daily), J. Peder Zane criticizes the contemporary memoir for its superficiality and misunderstanding of the possibilities of the memoir. According to Zane, current memoirists

want the best of both worlds: fiction's flexibility and nonfiction's oomph. Their efforts do not represent
a moral failure because they think they are pushing the envelope, not breaking the rules. Instead, they signify a failure of the imagination, a lack of the talent or courage required to make their own
lives -- their real lives -- compelling.

This is an insightful comment, and I would take it further. It is not only fiction's "flexibility" memoirists seem to be after, but the form and feel of fiction, at least in its conventional, pre-modern/postmodern manifestation. The specific memoir Zane discusses, for example, Susan Shapiro's Five Men Who Broke My Heart, does indeed seem inspired by an idea--the narrator finds five old boyfriends in an attempt to "find out what went wrong"--that could have been transformed into a novel if the author had more trust in and commitment to the literary imagination. That Shapiro further chose to alter the "facts" in her treatment of the subject nevertheless only reinforces the sense that she wanted the narrative economy of fiction but thought that "real life" was preferable to made-up stories. Memoirists seem to occupy a half-world of actual experience only partially submitted to narrative transformation.

If memoirs could be said to now substitute for traditional 1st-person confessional fiction, biographies seem to satisfy the need for the kind of 3rd-person omniscience associated with much 19th century fiction. Many current biographies even replicate the density and the heft of the Victorian "triple-decker." If the memoir provides the intimacy of the 1st-person narrative, perhaps the biography provides a corresponding need for some perspective and dispassionate reflection. In my experience, however, this sort of biography produces (with some exceptions) mostly tedium. A relatively recent biography of Emily Dickinson, for example, which I went to out of the preexisting interest mentioned above, barely got me past the first few pages, which clearly indicated the book was going to go into exhaustive detail about the Dickinson family, in the style of a historical novel, when I was looking for useful information about Dickinson and her work.

Maybe this sort of clutching onto the conventions of realistic narrative should only be expected when serious literary fiction has in many ways abandoned those conventions. (Even minimalism and contemporary neorealism seem blanched and attenuated in comparison to the novels of Hardy or Dickens or Steinbeck.) Memoir and biography keep them alive for some readers, readers who apparently still want them alive. I think it just as plausible, however, to consider the real "failure of imagination" to be among those who retreat from the challenges of imaginative fiction, especially in its more innovative forms, for the established safety of the familiar and the traditional. Certainly the memoir especially should not be taken as a "literary" form simply because it imitates literary forms of the past. Perhaps the more challenging styles of contemporary fiction will inevitably attract a smaller audience (although this need not be the case), but I can't think of it as a service to literature to settle for the tried and true merely because it's more popular.

Wrong Right Thinking

Roddy Doyle thinks James Joyce is overrated. Terry Teachout thinks the same of Virginia Woolf. Doyle's comments can be taken as the know-nothing envy of a mediocre writer in the shadows of another writer of infinitely greater accomplishment. Teachout, however, joins the ranks of other conservative authors and commentators who have recently been expressing their disdain for "modern" art and literature--going back several years to Jacques Barzun and including in the last year or so Paul Johnson and Charles Murray.

I have always considered this conservative scorn for modern art rather peculiar. (I should make it clear that I am myself not a political conservative. Most conservatives would no doubt find many of my political, as opposed to aesthetic, views considerably to the left.) To take literature specifically, a number of great modern writers--Yeats, Eliot, Wyndam Lewis--have themselves been conservatives (certainly not left-wing radicals, although one such radical, John Dos Possos, later became a political conservative in a very prominent way), while others--Joyce, Faulkner, Proust--were at worst apolitical. Indeed, the literary darling of the modern right, Evelyn Waugh, wrote novels that were in no way aesthetically conservative. Moreover, it is precisely the traditional and the representational forms of art (the sort of art these conservatives would prefer, one has to assume) that have most been exploited for left-wing political purposes over the course of the twentieth century--the "proletarian" writers of the thirties, "socialist realism," etc.

To take this point even further, the disdain Dale Peck has now famously declared for writers like Joyce and Faulkner stems from the fact that these writers are not political, not "engaged" sufficiently, but instead players of literary games. One would think that conservatives would value an approach to literature that keeps the emphasis on its literary qualities, on its capacity to reinvigorate the aesthetic impulse, to exemplify imaginative "human accomplishment," to use Murray's phrase. In my mind a truly conservative approach to art would seek to preserve the Western tradition of artistic skill and innovation to which writers like Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf decidedly belong.

Perhaps conservative critics are still reacting to the attempt made in the 1950s and the 1960s to unite radical politics and modernism. This attempt failed, however, if the contempt for high art to be found among left wing academic critics is any measure. These conservatives excoriate such left-wing academic literary critics for their excesses--their politicization of literature that drains it of its aesthetic value. If we take Teachout, Murray, and Johnson as representative of "conservative" criticism of the arts, however, one suspects their real complaint about left-wing political dominance in the academy is that it's not a right-wing dominance. Their views are equally blinkered by politics.

Postmodern Beckett

Two interesting posts at the weblog acdouglas.com--interesting in large part because in tandem the one seems to contradict the other. The first, an "archive of the day" post from 2003, discusses a televison production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It speaks in glowing terms of the play and of Beckett, an appraisal of this writer with which I agree (although I would also say I think Happy Days is just as good). In essence it discusses Godot as if it were, perforce, a classic.

The second, an account of Douglas's attempt to write a piece of "literary fiction," is interesting enough in and of itself--I particularly like his description of the amount of work that was involved--but what struck me most strongly was this apparently offhand comment: "I loathe -- heartily loathe -- the studied conceits of PoMo fiction, and just as heartily adore the antediluvian form of the omniscient, intrusive, third-person narrator, and a story with beginning, middle, and end, that last preferably with a wrenching twist."

In light of Douglas's admiration of Beckett, one does wonder what he would make of Beckett's own fiction, the work for which, in my opinion, Beckett will be most enduringly remembered even beyond his groundbreaking drama. This fiction, even his earlier work such as More Pricks Than Kicks or Murphy, is characterized by nothing if not its "studied conceits," to the point that Beckett's late work becomes almost nothing but such conceits. Perhaps Douglas likes Beckett's plays but not his fiction (although I must say I find the same sensibility informing both) and at any rate he is thoroughly entitled to his preference for the kind of old-fashioned (as in 19th century) fiction he describes.

But in the final analysis, can we even have literature--presuming we consider fiction to be a form of literature--without "studied conceits" at its core? Does poetry exist without them? Why should fiction not use them as well? Isn't any writing that resists this sort of imaginative transformation something other than "creative" writing, something other than literature? Maybe the postmodernists Douglas loathes take it all too far, forget their putative obligation to "entertain." This is something different, however, from creating carefully considered "conceits" in the first place. And if entertainment is the issue, Beckett himself probably fails this test, perhaps, for many people, in Godot itself.

Somehow the term "postmodern" as applied to contemporary literature has, I think, become conflated with the worldview or "philosophy" of academic postmodernism,--although perhaps not for Douglas, who may understand the distinction perfectly well. But postmodern fiction is not postmodern because it is "leftist," or "relativistic," or "self-reflexive" or any of the other bad things (some of them bad indeed) academic postmodernism has been called. The original postmodern writers--and the term predates its adoption by acdemic scholarship--simply believed themselves to be continuing the challenges to conventional, formulaic thinking about literature begun by the modernists. Loathing them for it seems an overreaction, to say the least.

Preceding Essence

A review of Bernard Henri-Levy's Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century (unfortunately featured at Arts & Letters Daily) that couldn't be more wrong about Sartre.

The reviewer, Brian C. Anderson, offers up this thesis: "What Sartre actually offers us is a paradigmatic example of the leftist mind, in all its dodgy enthusiasms." Putting aside for the moment that Anderson's own account of Sartre's career belies this statement, Sartre was not "paradigmatic" of anything except his own thinking and writing. He's become a handy tool to use in bashing left-of-center thinkers, writers, and ideas (even just poor tepid liberalism), and this to a significant extent through his own mistakes: his later Marxist and Maoist phase was indeed "dodgy," his actions and statements frequently obnoxious and just plain stupid.

But his fiction up to the 1950s, as well as at least Being and Nothingness among his philosophical works, remain essential reading. Even Anderson admits to the value of this work, although his praise is grudging enough. (He is wrong to say that the fiction and drama of this earlier period should be read as "a description not of a permanent truth of man’s fate but of the predicament of a certain kind of modern man." These works precisely describe a "permanent truth of man's fate.") No one who reads Nausea shorn of the preexisting animus expressed by Anderson could say it does not remain a readable and affecting novel.

Moreover, the idea that Sartre's misguided politics were somehow an intrinsic feature of his philosophy is simply incorrect. There's nothing inherently leftist, much less Marxist, about existentialism. If there was, such concerted efforts to hold up Camus as a cold-warrior alternative to Sartre as have been made would not be possible. Nausea and Being and Nothingness were not the products of the "leftist mind." The review's biographical sketch of Sartre itself shows that his leftism was something Sartre came to embrace, not something latent in the earlier books. One could argue that Sartre willfully distorted these early ideas in order to justify his politics, but this was a weakness in the man, not in the ideas.

Anderson doesn't really bother to seriously critique Sartre's work, anyway. He contents himself with ad hominem attacks against both Sartre and Henri-Levy, along with a heavy barrage of adjectival bombast--"nihilistic,""nasty,""relativistic," "atheist." I'd be willing to bet that, despite the attempt by those like this reviewer to bury Sartre, his work will still be read well into the future and he will be considered an original thinker and important writer--both in philosophy and in literature. Perhaps Henri-Levy's biography will help to hasten this process, although one suspects that the possibility it might do so is one reason this review has appeared.

One of the things the review also points up is the inadequacy of using biographies of writers as a way of assessing that writer's body of work. Inevitably the focus of such reviews returns to the limitations and foibles of the man or woman in question, and the work becomes a way of exemplifying these "character" traits. Sartre may have been, at various times, maybe even most of the time, an unpleasant man, but this says nothing about the abiding merits of his best books.

The Idiocy of Synopsis

The New Critics sometimes appealed to what they called the "heresy of paraphrase." As defined by Hugh Holman in A Handbook to Literature, this meant that " a work of art means what it means in the terms in which it delivers that meaning, so that paraphrase, summary, abridgement, expansion, or translation is bound to miss the point, usually by understating the complexity and misconstruing the uniqueness of the original statement." Pretty clearly, the word "synopsis" could be added to this list.

As usual, the New Critics needlessy phrased this idea in religious language, but the underlying principle is sound enough. And it was this New Critical dictum I immediately recalled when reading Robert McCrum's "The Curse of the Synopsis" in Sundays Guardian/Observer.

As I compose this post, both the Literary Saloon and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind have already commented on this article, but while in both cases their comments are completely well-taken, I don't think they go nearly far enough in capturing the sheer idiocy of judging the quality of a given book--at least when it comes to fiction--on a "synopsis." Perhaps this practice works well enough for some works of non-fiction--those in which information and "content" clearly overshadow all other considerations--but only the most reductive, simplistic approach to fiction or creative nonfiction could settle for synopsis.

Put simply, what does a novel have to do with synopsis, or synopsis with a novel? A synopsis is usually a plot synopsis, and such an account of a work of fiction doesn't come close to describing what the reader will actually experience in reading the work, and with modern/contemporary fiction it's a total disaster. Even most forms of neorealism don't put much emphasis on plot--writers having sensibly concluded there's no point in competing with movies for the slam-bang scenario--and what would be the point of laboriously describing in a synopsis the details of character and setting that the reader simply has to encounter in the finished work?

Think of the great novels that would necessarily seem silly in synopisis: Catch-22? Gravitys Rainbow? JR? Even Rabbit, Run or The Assistant? All of these books have to be experienced in their unfolding on the page for their qualities of language, form, tone, the intangible elements creating a good novel's distinctive voice. If a novel's essential attributes can be presented in a synopsis, why not just save time and go with the synopsis?

Perhaps--perhaps--some genre fiction in which plot is clearly king could be adequately previewed in a synopsis. But even here, can we be certain that a really good genre novel is going to get published because of what is known about it through a synopsis? Do all the movies made recently from Philip K. Dick's novels (a film version being a kind of synopsis) really capture what Dick's fans love about his books?

Most likely publishing through synopsis is just a way of making the job easier for editors and publishers, allowing them to perpetuate the blockbuster syndrome. In my view, most editors and publishers at the "major" houses don't know what they're doing anyway--certainly they know little about literature--and the "curse of the synopsis" is actually a curse on literature itself.

On Reserve

Literary criticism is in a sorry state these days. Discussion of books and writing has been superseded by gossip about writers (Elias Canetti/Iris Murdoch) and even about critics (Naomi Wolf/Harold Bloom), the most talked-about critic has become so because he indulges in hysterical and ad hominem attacks on writers who don't write books like his own (Dale Peck), not a single book nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of "criticism" is actually a work of literary criticism. Literary webloggers have so far focused their attention on what passes for literary "news" (a useful enough service nevertheless), book reviews of fiction are gradually being abandoned, academic critics concern themselves with literature at all only to the extent of instructing their students to despise it.

There was a time when well-read and skilled critics wrote books intended to enlighten interested readers--all interested readers--about the nature and possibilities of literature, in effect to show them how to read fiction, poetry, and serious drama more profitably. Very little of this is done anymore. Most literary journalists don't seem to know how to read profitably themselves (there are exceptions, always exceptions), most academic critics simply aren't interested in it. I am thus providing here a list of the kinds of books I have in mind, books that are still eminently readable and that would educate anyone who picked them up about literary forms, style, history, predominant themes, etc.

Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American
Literature
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition
Eric Auerbach, Mimesis
Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn
William Empson, 7 Types of Ambiguity
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden
Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970

These are not the "top ten," certainly not the only ten, merely ten. Many others could be added. I have not included books on individual authors, of which there are scores of good ones. Again, I would have included books of equal merit of more recent vintage, but there really aren't any, at least not books that are designed to demonstrate to readers and potential readers the rewards of serious literature.

Actually such books would greatly benefit all would-be writers as well. They would learn how to build on the accomplishments of the past, how to think clearly about the requirements of literary form, as well as when to alter and rebel against the practices of the past. Many writers who went through college, possibly graduate school, when these books were routinely assigned would undoubtedly testify to this. It is a great failing of the literary academy, and the literary culture more generally, that so few people now seem to recognize the value of this critical heritage.

William Gaddis

Where I live the mail is very slow, and I've just now received the February 20 issue of the Times Literary Supplement. Not that the belatedness of this post matters that much, since the item in question, "Famously Obscure," an omnibus review of William Gaddis by Stephen Burn, was not available on the TLS website, anyway.

The review is a very good introduction to Gaddis's work for those unfamiliar with it or who have shied away from it. (Burn is also the author of a book on David Foster Wallace.) Gaddis is perhaps the poster boy for "difficult" and "experimental" fiction (most likely a "Wanted" poster), but as Burn points out, "Gaddis's gift for capturing the clipped patterns of American speech is unparalleled among contemporary writers, and although his novels are undeniably complex, his eruditon is mixed with his characteristically dark humor."

Gaddis is precisely the sort of writer whose books require reading, slow and deliberate, not the kind of scanning (looking for the elements that might make the novel in hand a really nifty movie) that unfortunately much current fiction practically encourages. His books may even seem confusing, at least at first, but staying with them really pays off. They are not merely formally complex, but their complexity serves their material, which is ultimately the sheer babble and noise of American culture.

Although The Recognitions is perhaps the most impressive debut novel in postwar American fiction, I would start by reading JR, published in 1975. As Burn says of it, "the atmosphere of the novel may be anarchic, but the narrative is clear and the book is extremely readable." At least after you've caught on to Gaddis's method of revealing everything--everything--through dialogue. But in addition to its formal challenges, JR is the most incisive and at the same time most savage dissection of the American commercial/financial culture you'll likely ever read. In my opinion it's one of the greatest American novels ever written.

The review's title refers to Gaddis's penchant for staying out of the limelight. However, it is somehow telling that discussions of Gaddis's fiction must usually work in some mention of this idiosyncrasy, as if even in avoiding publicity Gaddis manages to elicit commentary in which publicity takes center stage, so to speak.

There's a very thorough Gaddis website, overseen by the perhaps foremost Gaddis scholar Steven Moore, at www.williamgaddis.org. Several books on Gaddis have been published, among the ones I own being Carnival of Repetition, by John Johnson, and The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis, by Gregory Comnes. The chapters on Gaddis in Tom LeClair's The Art of Excess and Susan Strehle's Fiction in the Quantum Universe are also very good. The jargon factor in all four of these books is not that pronounced, but it would probably be most useful to read them after reading at least JR and The Recognitions.

Ladies Only?

When is "chick lit" actually chick lit? That is, when is it more, or less, than "a lucrative niche in an otherwise struggling fiction industry"? Is it a legitimate "genre" of contemporary literature? Is it an inherently derogatory term? If a book concerns a single and/or educated and/or young-ish woman "worrying about" her status, her love life, her family, does it automatically qualify as belonging to the genre? Can the "lit" part be completely spelled out into "literature"?

These questions occur to me as I finish reading When the Messenger is Hot, a debut collection of stories by Elizabeth Crane. Many of the reviews of the book referenced "chick lit" (at least one referring specifically to Bridget Jones, presumably the Ur-text of chick lit), and the stories, most of them revolving around the kind of urban woman mentioned above, certainly seem directed to readers who would find fiction about unmarried heterosexual women and their travails immediately appealing.

But ultimately the stories do also seem--or at least their cumulative effect seems--more substantive than the term "chick lit" appears designed to allow for. At the same time, their almost obsessive concern with dating and sex, lifestyle and love, makes one hesitate to think of them as "literary" in the fully amplified sense of that word.

Most of the stories are tinged with a melancholy and frustration that certainly elevates them above the Candace Bushnell-level of "women's writing." The best story in the book, "Privacy and Coffee," about a woman who in essence avoids committing suicide by "falling up" to a secluded part of a friend's apartment house rather than "jumping down" from it, is tonally right-on in capturing the protagonist's subdued despair. The second best story, "Something Shiny," is a mordantly funny tale of, literally, a loss of identity.

Formally and stylistically the book displays some imagination and skill as well. Crane is not afraid to break out of the mold of the well-made story, experimenting in many of the stories with structure and character-creation, venturing sometimes, with varying degrees of success, into fantasia and reverie. Crane's style, generally consistent across all the stories, is also unconventional in a pleasingly unwieldy kind of way. (In a profile published in New City Chicago, Crane intimates she wanted to emulate David Foster Wallace, but her style reminds me somewhat of the decidedly non-chick writer Stephen Dixon.)

And yet, my enduring impression is that When the Messenger is Hot to some degree expends the writer's talents and insights on overly flimsy material. Even the recurring motifs of death and grief (in most cases for the protagonist's mother) ultimately lead less to reflection on these unavoidable occurences than to assertions of the characters' sorrow in dealing with them--as if they're just one more obstacle in the way of these characters finding "fulfillment" in a rather hackneyed and familiar way. It would finally be unfair to label Elizabeth Crane a writer of "chick lit," but fans of the genre would still probably find her book more than faintly recognizable.

Politics and the Novel

There's an interesting interview with Scottish writers Alasdair Gray and James Kelman in the newest issue of the journal Contemporary Literature--interesting in large part for the way in which the interviewer (described as "a research assistant in the departments of literary theory and English literature at the Catholic University of Brussels, and a Ph.D candidate at the Catholic University of Leuven") keeps pressing the two writers to identify their work as essentially political writing, an invitation both writers consistently reject.

Before discussing further the particulars of the interview, a few words about Contemporary Literature. Like almost all "academic journals," CL does not make its issues available online. Archived articles from such journals sometimes make their way into cyber print, but even then getting access to them is frequently so difficult that indeed only the scholar squirrels among us would be tempted to try. Not that these journals, including Contemporary Literature, print that much of interest to ordinary readers--they're not even intended for "specialists" anymore, since all academic literary scholars are now taught to specialize in the same mind-numbing chants of formula and cliche--but occasionally a useful interview or interesting book review still does appear. It would be in everyone's interest for this material to be more available online.

(It is particularly ironic that CL has become as preoccupied with the politicized platitudes of academic criticism as any other journal, since it and other journals focused on contemporary literature were once viewed with condescension in the academy, contemporary literature itself not being worth any serious person's attention. Unfortunately, Contemporary Literature has now situated itself securely in the mainstream of useless scholarship.)

The interview with Gray and Kelman clearly enough has been included not because both are accomplished writers of worthwhile books (as they are, in my view Gray especially so), but because as members of an oppressed nationality they can perhaps plausibly be examined under the aegis of "colonial" or "postcolonial" studies. Certainly the political situation obtaining in Scotland plays an inevitable role in their fiction, but both Kelman and Gray try to make it clear that this situation is not uppermost in their minds when they're writing their books. Says Kelman, "It's important to get out of the way a possible misunderstanding. . .My politics is really irrelevant to my work; there's no place for it. If you are committed to a certain political thing anyway, I believe also that you can relax as a writer, even if you feel that events are so oppressing in the world that there's no time to sit back and write stories and you have to be political or something." Gray says much the same: "I became a writer who wanted to draw attention to myself by being an entertainer, by pleasing people. I became a writer for the same reason I became a reader: I read to be entertained, to be shifted into a rather different world from that which I occupied, or to get a view of the world I occupied that made me feel free of it."

Yet the interviewer keeps pressing them to admit to the centrality of politics, as if he can't believe Kelman and Gray would say such things. It all speaks multiple volumes about the mindset among "literary" academics, who have almost come around, one is pushed to say, to the condescending view of the frivolity of trying to seriously study "contemporary literature" once expressed by the snootier of the tweedy academics convinced it was better to stay with the tried and the true, to stay burrowed in the past. Current academics are less inclined to live in the past, but they certainly occupy their own kind of burrow.

Non-Career Advice

I've been seeing a number of articles like this one, purporting to give young writers advice about a writing "career" and the realities of the "book business." Undoubtedly this particular essay, from Bookninja, contains some nuggets of good advice, but I would like to propose some counter-advice. I don't suspect many would-be writers--especially those seeking a "career"--would take it, but it's worth expressing it, anyway.

The best writers don't have "careers." If they do, it's usually an accident, a byproduct of the happenstance of actually writing a good book, even an important book, and miraculously acquiring readers, in some cases enough readers to make it financially feasible to do nothing but write more books. Such writers certainly aspire to write well, to produce worthy fiction and poetry on a more or less long-term basis, but if they had simply set out to have writing careers, they almost certainly would not have written the important books in the first place. Third- and fourth-rate writers settle for careers.

The "book business" is something to avoid. What has the book business ever done for American literature (or Canadian literature, as the case may be)? Earlier incarnations of the book business (now the "industry") overlooked Hawthorne, neglected Melville, probably helped to kill E.A. Poe, sneered at Mark Twain, ran Henry James off to Europe, couldn't at first have cared less about Faulkner. Even now some of the best American writers--Gaddis, Gilbert Sorrentino, James Purdy, John Hawkes, numerous others--have been and still are cast aside by the "industry," obliged to supplement their "careers" through teaching, or advertising, or not at all and forced to just scrape by. Most of these writers thought the "book business" their enemy.

Of course one could say that all of these writers might have avoided their fates had they simply shaped up and written proper books of the sort the book "audience" wants to read--and thus provided themselves with "careers"--but of course that is just the point, isn' it? They wanted to go their own way and write the books they thought could be written, not the books that needed to be written to support the "book business." They paid the price for it, and perhaps that is how it should be. (I doubt any of them ultimately thought it too high a price, all things considered.) Some of them (Twain, at least) even wound up finding themselves "popular," if not necessarily for the right reasons.

So one could set out as a "bright young thing" to be "successfully published," and one could accomplish this goal. One could have a long and happy "career." But if you think the "book business" will respect you for your talent and originality, assuming you have them, you might come to be bitterly disillusioned. Perhaps this will happen, however, in time for you to write a really good book.

Meanwhile. . .

An excellent account of a special 92nd St. Y Hawthorne celebration/reading at beatrice.

A brief but very good discussion of Emily Dickinson at the weblog Reading & Writing.

At a website with which I was until now unfamiliar, a "call for more political poetry."

Although in several previous posts I have complained about the politicization of both literature and literary criticism, I can't say I really object to the kind of "policital" poetry Michael Silverstein describes here. In general, I don't really have a problem with either "political poetry" or "political fiction," as long as everyone involved understands that such writing is essentially what ought to be called "occasional" writing--composed in response to a particular event or some other immediate provocation--and that this kind of writing does not come close to exhausting the possibilities of either poetry or fiction.

Some great political poems have indeed been written--Yeats's poem on the Easter uprising, Cummings's "i sing of olaf," even The Waste Land. All three of these poems in fact have transcended the "political" circumstances in which they were written and continue to work powerfully on their readers because they express emotions and ideas that could be called "universal" even if political; in effect they tap into feelings that could superficially be considered political but that really have their roots in the deeper responses we have to ongoing events that make them seem important to us. They get at the "conditions of possibility" of a political response. (The same thing is true of great political fiction, such as Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, or Robert Coover's The Public Burning.)

Of course, none of the poems I've named would have been printed on the Op-Ed page, either.

I do think Silverstein is confused when he writes, "On the poets' side, we need a lot less of the postmodern, endlessly introspective, culture for the cognoscenti, self-consciously unstructured work. . . ." "Postmodern" and "endlessly introspective" are not the same thing--not by a long shot; few poets have much use for the "cognoscenti," and very little contemporary poetry is "self-consciously unstructured." Much of it is actually quite intricately structured, which is one reason why some people do complain that it's "postmodern."

On Charles Dickens

Steve Mitchelmore at In Writing bravely confesses to all of the "great" writers he hasn't read. The first one he mentions is Charles Dickens.

I suspect Steve isn't alone, if not in having read no Dickens then certainly in having read very little of his work. This is no doubt in large part, at least in the U.S., to the horrible way Dickens has been "taught" in American high schools. (The extent to which literature is actually taught at all in high schools, or even whether it ought to be, are entirely separate questions to be left for another day.) By and large, the Dickens novel most frequently thrust into the hands of high school students is A Tale of Two Cities, inarguably his least representative work, and arguably his weakest. It is used in this way, in fact, because it generally contains fewer of those characteristics that make Dickens Dickens: his picaresque abandon, his outsized characters, his exuberant and fluent style, above all his humor. In my opinion, no writer in any language is funnier than Charles Dickens.

Here's a passage that illustrates many of the features I've just mentioned. It's from Dombey and Son and introduces "Miss Tox":

The lady thus specially presented was a long lean figure, wearing such a faded air that she seemed not to have been made in what linen-drapers call "fast colours" originally, and to have, by little and little, washed out. But for this she might have been described as the very pink of general propitiation and politeness. From a long habit of listening admirably to everything that was said in her presence, and looking at the speakers as if she were mentally engaged in taking off impressions of their images upon her soul, never to part with the same but with life, her head had quite settled on one side. Her hands had contracted a spasmodic habit of raising themselves of their own accord as an involuntary admiration. Her eyes were libale to a similar affection. She had the softest voice that ever was heard; and her nose, stupendously aquiline, had a little knob in the very centre or keystone of the bridge, whence it tended downwards towards her face, as in an invincible determination never to turn up at anything.

Miss Tox is a relatively minor character in the novel, but she's as absolutely vivid a character as many a protagonist in novels by lesser writers. And Dicken's novels are full of such characters, all of them at once both distinctive and colorful as well as fully recognizable as "types" that must have been instantly recognizable to readers in Victorian England--creating this sort of characterization itself being one of Dickens's great gifts, perhaps unrivaled by any other novelist. The humor of this passage is also typically "Dickensian": observant, tolerant of eccentricities, and devastating all at the same time. His comedy can sometimes be "gentle," but it is frequently also quite caustic, even dark. Here is the first paragraph of Dombey and Son: "Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new." This seems a homey enough scene, except that, as it turns out, Dombey's ultimate actions toward Son are indeed such (if unintentional) to "toast him brown." (And the fireside vignette is taking place at the same time Dombey's wife is dying after giving birth to Son.)

The ultimate effect of both the comedy and the characters in Dickens's novels is to convey a world that is utterly real and also completely removed from the "real world": a Dickens-world that no one could mistake for another writer's creation, or for that matter the usually banal world we all inhabit. This does not mean Dickens is for "escapist" readers. Few novelists have ever been as engaged with the social and cultural and economic conditions of his/her time as Dickens. Dombey and Son depicts the horrendous consequences of the mercantile mindset in a way that should make us ashamed to have sentimentalized A Christmas Carol as much as we have done. There's no more scorching indictment of "the law" as Bleak House. (Perhaps Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own.) Hard Times portrays the ill effects of utilitarianism with compact (for Dickens) precision. But his novels are first and foremost fully realized aesthetic creations in which the comedy and the satire and the characterization and the social commentary are all inextricably joined.

Which is not to say there are no flaws in Dickens's fiction. If we've sentimentalized Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim, there's truth in the charge they're latently--maybe more than latently--sentimental figures to begin with. Florence Dombey is the Tiny Tim of Dombey and Son, and here's a description of her: "Florence was little more than a child in years--not yet fourteen--and the loneliness and gloom of such an hour in the great house where Death had lately made its own tremendous devastation might have set an older fancy brooding on great terrors. But her innocent imagination was too full of one theme to admit them. Nothing wandered in her thoughts but love--a wandering love, indeed, and cast away--but turning always to her father." This at a point in the novel when Florence's father could not be less deserving of her love. There's no getting around the fact that Dickens's novels are to some degree enfeebled by the too-frequent appearance of characters and scenes like this. Luckily, his best books are relatively free of them, and such characters as Florence Dombey do have a role to play in the overall moral dynamics at work in his fiction. (One of the consequences of assigning them this role, however, is that with these characters we are deprived of the great comic flourishes of which Dickens is otherwise such a master.) Furthermore, the great strengths of his work, the strengths I have tried here to indicate, however sketchily, vastly compensate for the emotional flaccidity the sentimental moments occasionally introduce.

In short, if there is an impression that Charles Dickens is old-fashioned, stodgy, associated with a now superseded approach to writing fiction, that assumption is totally wrong. Readers and writers can still learn much about what fiction is capable of achieving by reading him.

Nor should his immense popularity, both during his lifetime and subsequently, be held against him. It is merely one of the few examples of the public actually being right.

For the uninitiated--perhaps even Steve?--there are several ways of beginning with Dickens. Of the earlier, more loosely structured books, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby would be good choices. If you'd prefer to start with something briefer and more concentrated, Hard Times is the choice. If you want to go straight to the masterworks, these would be Bleak House and Great Expectations. (Dombey and Son falls just short of these books, as does Our Mutual Friend.) Although David Copperfield is perhaps Dickens's most popular book, it is also a great novel as well.

For a much longer appreciation of Dickens, see Edmund Wilson's "Dickens: The Two Scrooges" in The Wound and the Bow. If I can't persuade you to read Dickens, perhaps Wilson can.

Freedom to Roam

Over the weekend I watched Woody Allen's Anything Else on DVD. (I believe I am correct to say it is his most recently released film.) To sum up the experience quickly, it was very painful.

As the author of a "scholarly" essay on Allen, as well as other such essays on film comedy more generally, I feel like I do have some modest authority to speak on this subject (as well as to occasionally change the focus of this blog from literature to film), and to judge that Anything Else is a complete dud, perhaps the most disheartening failure of Allen's career. (Interiors was bad, but for other and to some extent understandable reasons.) This may be the first time Allen sets out to be funny in the manner of his earlier films--at least the "romantic" comedies Annie Hall and Manhattan--and just isn't.

The jokes are generally tired and derivative (with a few exceptions, as when the protagonist's girlfriend tells him (in essence) she can no longer stand to have sex with him, but that of course it has nothing to do with him), but that is really the consequence of the film's lack of authenticity more generally. The film's main characters are young--even younger than Allen and his own co-stars in their "younger" days in the 70s--and Allen seems to have no clue what to do with them other than rehearse the old routines in what is only a superficially similar mileu.

How much more interesting it would be to see Allen attempt to portray--comically, of course--characters of his own age (60s) dealing with the kinds of problems they still confront, rather than, as he does in this film, trying to keep up with the kids. There aren't that many precedents for either slapstick or romantic comedies about older folks, but one would think that someone as unconcerned about Hollywood and its conventions and as bold a filmmaker as he once was, at least, would be willing to tackle such a subject. Allen's comedic talents and joke-making facility in this context might produce something "edgy" indeed.

Of course, that Allen has chosen in Anything Else to make a conventional romantic comedy focusing on younger people--unmarried people--may just be an obvious sign of the kind of audience to which filmmakers must appeal. It's certainly possible that a film of the sort I've described would fail miserably at the box office (although it probably couldn't fail more miserably than Anything Else apparently did), since the audience for even the "mature" subjects that do get screen treatment now is assuredly small and perhaps getting smaller. However, if a filmmaker as free to do as he pleases as Allen has generally been can't break out of the constraints of the "youth market," who can?

In this way writers of fiction still have an advantage over filmmakers. In some ways their biggest obstacle lies in the opposite direction: actually cultivating a youthful audience for fiction. Still, literary fiction generally depicts the full range of available experience, from childhood to old age, if anything is able to explore the less familiar if not deliberately ignored circumstances of the various kinds of "marginal" people movies don't always like to examine. (And if they do, frequently they're movies based on novels.) Perhaps novelists and short story writers ought not to aspire to the kind of popularity movies enjoy, if it would mean giving up this freedom to roam through the whole open territory of human experience.

Realism

In a previous post I referred to a discussion in the weblog s1ngularities:criticism in which John Updike was quoted as saying that in the U.S. "realism is kind of our thing." The quote was in reference to Donald Barthleme and his supposed decline in influence, but I've looked up the Salon interview in question (it's actually quite an old one, going back to the pubication of In the Beauty of the Lilies) and Updike had actually mentioned both Barthelme and John Barth, remarking, in full, that "There are fads in critical fashion, but a writer at his peril strays too far from realism. Especially in this country, where realism is kind of our thing. Writing that gives you the real texture of how things look and how people acted. At least there's something there beyond your self and your own wits to cling to, a certain selflessness amid the terrible egoism of a writer."

Updike doesn't necessarily speak contemptuously of either Barthleme or Barth, and if they were "out of fashion" in 1996, they are indeed even more so now. However, Updike's assertion that "realism is kind of our thing" is simply wrong. It can't stand up to an analysis of American literary history in any way.

I'm not sure that Updike's own fiction validates a statement like this one, in fact. Certainly his work represents an effort to give "the real texture of how things look and how people acted," but a number of his books defy the label "realism" in any meaningful sense of the term: The Centaur, The Coup, The Witches of Eastwick, Brazil, S, most recently Toward the End of Time. Furthermore, Updike's sinuous prose style is probably not what most people have in mind when they think of "realistic" storytelling.

Much of the most important American fiction fits more comfortably into the the category of "romance" than realism. (The term goes back to the medieval narrative form, and doesn't have any connection to the modern "romance novel.") Hawthorne famously set out the terms in which the romance is to be understood in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables: "When a writer calls his work a Romance. . .he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material"; this "latitude" allows him to present the "truth" of human experience "under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation" and to "manage his atmospherical medulm as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture."

Going back to the beginnings of American fiction, "romance" would thus encompass the work of Charles Brockden Brown (often identified as the first important American novelist), Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, much of Twain, the later Henry James, Faulkner, Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Malamud, much of the later Roth, and, in my opinion, almost all of the writers called "postmodern." Of the "great" American writers, only Crane, the earlier James, Edith Wharton, Dreiser, Steinbeck and Hemingway could plausibly be called "realists." (And there are those who think the latter would more aptly be called a "symbolist" rather than a realist.) Currently the followers of Raymond Carver or Richard Yates might fit the description.

Perhaps it's just that the term "realism" gets tossed around much too lightly, used to signal other assumptions about what fiction ought to do: tell dramatic stories, create sympathetic characters, depict current social conditions, reflect "life" as most readers would recognize it. If so, I can't believe Updike actually thinks that this kind of "realism" is either fiction's "proper" mode or that most readers actually do prefer fiction that really, truly, tells the "truth" about human existence or the common lot of most people in our beloved U.S. of A. In my somewhat jaded opinion, most readers still want "escapist" literature--to the extent they want literature at all--that nevertheless doesn't stray too far from ordinary experience. American "literary" writers have really never provided them with this, so the test of how many people are reading a given writer at a certain time is wholly irrelevant.

Having said all this, I like much realist fiction perfectly well. Flaubert is a great writer, as is Chekhov, as is James, as is, in a much different way, Thomas Hardy. If the complaint is that current writers don't write like these folks, well, few writers could. If it's that writers like Bartheleme or Barth don't write conventional narratives with "real" people and identifiable "themes," then it's really a complaint that serious fiction doesn't remain static and hidebound. This is not Updike's complaint, but it's one I hear often enough.

For a much fuller treatment of the romance tradition I've sketched out here, see Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition, one of the books I listed in a previous post ("On Reserve") as among the ten critical works with which all serious readers should be familiar. That such books have fallen into obscurity is itself perhaps one of the reasons many people misunderstand what the history of American literature actually shows us--and thus what many contemporary writers are actually up to.

The Limitations of Clarity

In Sunday's NY Times Book Review, Brooke Allen reviews a new biography of Somerset Maugham, on behalf of whose faded reputation some critical labor has been expended lately, mostly, in my view, as part of a larger effort to identify certain unthreatening modern writers as possible alternatives to the modernists. (See also this review of the same biography in the February New Criterion.)

After mostly avoiding an assessment of Maugham's fiction (and a voluminous body of work it is), Allen finally concedes that "What characterizes a great writer, perhaps [note the perhaps], is what is left out--what must be read between the lines--and on this level Maugham falls short." I have myself read Of Human Bondage and a few of the "South Sea" stories, which I had been advised were his best work. Allen's judgment here seems right to me. There is no "between the lines" at all in these fictions, and very little style. If these were the author's best efforts, I concluded, there seemed little point in reading more.

The most interesting part of Allen's review, however, is this bit of quasi-praise: "But Maugham's strengths, it must be remembered, were very considerable. As William Plomer once felt it necessary to remind highbrow readers, 'To be a man of the world, to be acquainted with all sorts of different people, to be tolerant, to be curious, to have a capacity for enjoyment, to be the master of a clear and unaffected prose style--these are advantages.' "

These are perhaps advantages in the attempt to lead a worthwhile life, but they are advantages of no kind in creating works of literature. They are, in fact, except for the imperative "to be curious," wholly irrelevant to the enterprise of writing fiction.

Surely we can all agree that being a "man of the world" and "to be acquainted with all sorts of different people" are in no way necessary qualifications for the job of fiction writer, and can often enough get in the way of doing the job (as they seem to have in Maugham's case). If they were, how to account for Faulkner, for Sherwood Anderson, the Bronte sisters, Thomas Hardy?

Being tolerant is of course nice, but in my reading of literary biographies, most great writers are anything but, aside from the tolerance they show in their work for the human frailties we all share.

It is certainly an advantage for the writer to be curious, although one might think that this curiosity would extend as well to the possibilities of literary form, rather than the persistent incuriousity about it to be found in the work of a writer like Maugham. And as to the "capacity for enjoyment," Samuel Beckett, for one, appears to have had very little talent for this, yet he turned out to be perhaps the greatest writer of the twentieth century.

This leaves us with the mastery "of a clear and unaffected prose style." I confess that the demand for this particular quality among certain kinds of readers and critics has always seemed inexplicable to me. For one thing, how many great writers of fiction can actually boast of such a style? Hemingway's style is "clear," but certainly not "unaffected." Dreiser's style is unaffected, but not at all clear. (Personally, I wouldn't want them to be otherwise.) I am hard pressed to think of a great British writer of fiction whose style could be described thus. Maybe Austen. But Dickens? Hardy? Lawrence? Conrad? For another, why would a fiction writer want such a style? It is a great advantage if you're sending a telegram, but why would a writer seeking to use the resources of language to explore human motivation and psychology, our frequently mysterious behavior and actions, be interested in such a style? Does Shakespeare have it?

If Allen's list of Maugham's attributes is the best that can be said of him, then he will assuredly continue to fall into obscurity. For that matter, all such attempts to rescue "clear" and "unaffected" writers (such attempts have been made on behalf of writers like James Gould Cozzens and J. P. Marquand, among others) will always fail. In the long run, their "advantages" are just not the sorts of things readers interested in what can be accomplished in fiction are looking for. Perhaps it would have been interesting to meet the likes of Somerset Maugham (if indeed he was the kind of man Allen describes), but his fiction, in almost all ways unremarkable, is another matter entirely.

Politics and the Blogosphere

I have tried to keep explicitly political commentary and analysis out of this blog--except to point out the political uses to which literature is so often put these days--and while political bias almost always seeps out of any kind of "cultural" commentary eventually, I believe I have mostly succeeded. This underlying intention was one of the reasons I called The Reading Experience a "literary literary weblog" in the first place. (As well as a way of signalling I would probably not focus much on "pop culture" or personal confession).

I of course have my political views, and they are strongly held views, but it did and does seem to me that there are plenty of other blogs purveying political opinions and analysis, many of them expressing political views close to mine but otherwise better informed than I could be. Further, there are lots--lots--of purportedly "cultural" blogs that also offer up plenty of political rhetoric, but few, at least in my reading, that simply examine art, literature, and culture as if they were pursuits with value separate from ongoing political discourse. Perhaps there would be room for at least one that proceeded according to that assumption.

It has occurred to me to voice all of this explicitly as I have lately been doing a kind of wide-ranging sweep of the "blogosphere" to get a sense of what's actually being done in as many of its quarters as I could find. I have especially been looking for other blogs that appear to focus on the arts and culture at least to some significant extent. I will not name names, but I would like to give a report of sorts about what I have been finding.

If anything, my sense that in the current cultural climate "politics is everything" in discussions of art and literature has been reinforced. In fact, the dismaying impression I get from much blog commentary is that, at least implicitly, politics is more important than art and literature. (I am for now putting aside the self-styled literary weblogs, the usual suspects listed by the Complete Review on its "Links to Literary Weblogs" page, although even here political postings often enough interrupt the flow of more purely literary news.)

This is especially true of weblogs that identify themselves as "conservative," or that ally themselves with other conservative commentators. I had expected--honestly had hoped--that I might find in such blogs an impatience with politicized arts criticism similar to my own. I thought that perhaps the honest desire to "conserve" artistic and literary accomplishment both from the past and in the present would manifest itself in conservative culture blogs through non-ideological analysis of the work of noteworthy artists, writers, or composers. I haven't found much of this at all. Most of these blogs seem to me relentlessy ideological. (It should go without saying that there are exceptions. I am necessarily making generalizations that individual examples will bely.) There seems to be an assumption that almost all modern art and literature is part of the broader liberal conspiracy against mainstream America, and certainly that almost all attempts at what used to be called "higher criticism" are the work of pointy-heads.

Yet in a broader sense these blogs want to lay claim to high culture as part of their domain. It's just that from this perspective it's not the actual achievement in works of art that's important. "Appreciation" of it is just another way for conservative bloggers to distinguish themselves from the barbarian liberals trying to bring down Western Civilization, at times a tool with which to bash these liberals on the noggin.

(The extent to which many such conservatives in fact avoid real engagement with serious art and literature was really brought home to me when I ran across this rather astonishing admission in a conservative blog: "I suppose the truth is that I don't like literature very much. I admire it. I realise that it matters, and I want to at least experience the occasional literary masterpiece, just to know how that feels. But the process of ploughing through hundreds of pages of prose while trying nevertheless to keep in mind exactly who all these people are and what they have all been doing is beyond me.")

"Liberals" themselves unwittingly conspire in this process. For the most part admitted liberal bloggers simply ignore art and literature. This is their way of acknowledging that only politics is worth a serious person's attention. When they do take up such topics it's almost always a way to substantiate their own political claims and assumptions. The fact of the matter is, however, there are few if any defenses of the arts from a liberal perspective, leaving the field wide open for the kind of expropriation of culture by the political right I have discussed.

But then I'm not sure I'd want that there be such. The literary weblogs are ultimately by far the most reliably non-biased web-based sources of debate on current art and literature, although again their political allegiances do come through at times, and those allegiances are frequently and fairly obviously "liberal." (Mine are too.) Speaking just for myself, however, my fondest hope for these weblogs might be that they offer a genuinely credible alternative both to the bad-faith usurpations of the right and the apathy and irresponsibility of the left. This might in itself be seen as an assertion of "political" principle, but it would be one in opposition to the real corruption of both politics and literature my tour of the blogosphere revealed to me.

Serious Fiction, R.I.P.

Unhappily, I am inclined to agree with the Literary Saloon's rather gloomy preliminary assessment of NY Times Book Review editor-select Sam Tanenhaus based on this profile. The Saloon has also picked out the quote that should cause the most alarm:

And while he has no plans to abandon fiction -- contrary to the fears of many in the publishing world -- his enthusiasms seem to lie more in nonfiction. "We’re living in really an exemplary age of nonfiction narrative, and to some extent nonfiction has taken over some of the earlier attributes of the novel, which is story-telling," he said. "Nonfiction writers have inherited the classic technique of fiction. That’s what I tried to do in my biography, I tried to write it as if it were a novel."

I have in a previous post expatiated on my views of memoir and most biograpy ("nonfiction narrative"), so I'll try not to repeat myself too extensively. However, there is much to disagree with in Mr. Tanenhaus's statement. First of all, it is an entirely open question whether we do in fact live in "an exemplary age of nonfiction narrative." We live in age where much of it is being done, but this may prove to be all that can be said for it. In fact, most of the nonfiction narrative I sample is characterized primarily by formula, simplistic imitation of "the classic technique of fiction," and, unfortunately, much tedium.

Second , Tanenhaus correctly states that a certain kind of nonfiction has appropriated "earlier attributes" of fiction, but he then pronounces these attributes to be indeed the classic qualities of fiction. What Tanenhaus is identifying as "classic" has not been the norm in serious fiction for about 150 years. One could say that the kind of "traditional" storytelling Tanenhaus almost certainly has in mind dominated serious fiction for only its first 75-100 years. If we take Tanenhaus's own biography of Whittaker Chambers as an exemplum of what he's describing, he probably is thinking of something like the Victorian "triple-decker." I like these books a lot, but it can't seriously be proposed that the narrative conventions of Victorian England are the appropriate standards for twenty-first century America. To this extent, Tanenhaus is advancing a model that is retrogressive indeed.

Having said that, I'm not even sure Tanenhaus's Chambers biography works in the way he implies here. It tells the story of Chambers's life all right (this is still the very definition of "biography"), but it doesn't settle for mere "nonfiction narrative." There's plenty of analysis, social, political, even literary, as well as a good deal of psychological probing of the mindsets of both Chambers and Alger Hiss. In my opinion, it doesn' read like a "novel" of the period at all.

Finally, Tanenhaus's glorification of all things nonfiction is fairly obviously a way of belittling the practices of current novelists, who no longer--not even the remaining "realists"--respect the "classic technique of fiction." Probably behind this is the belief that contemporary writers of fiction are too artsy for their own good and don't understand that fiction writers ought to do their duty to the great sociopolital "conversation" that journalists like Bill Keller--and regrettably even Sam Tanenhaus--take for serious discourse. (There's almost no mention of poetry in this profile. It's probably a goner.) To judge by the quality of such conversation in the current configuration of the NYTBR (as well as other book reviews), it's all going to be pretty insipid.

In a comment I posted at another blog on the announcement of Tanenhaus's ascension to the Book Review throne, I said that since Tanenhaus was himself a good writer, I was "mildly optimistic" about his administration of the New York Times Book Review. I still think he's a good writer, but I can't say I'm now very optimistic, mildly or otherwise. As the Saloon puts it, this early declaration of the new editor's reigning assumptions "doesn't sound good at all."

Postscript (March 20): Agni editor Sven Birkerts examines this whole mess here. I've just discovered this piece. Everyone should read it.

The Poet-Critic

T.S. Eliot once wrote that in his view "Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author in composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism; and. . .that some creative writers are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior." (Eliot means not that such writers should be judged superior because they manifest this critical faculty, but that it is the possession of this faculty that has made them "superior" in the first place.)

Eliot is himself perhaps the most distinguished example, in the twentieth century at least, of the "poet-critic," the "creative" writer who also feels the need to write literary criticism, as if the creative act of writing poetry is not quite finished unless it is accompanied by some critical analysis that goes beyond the kind he ascribes here to the writer performing such analysis on his own work. (It should be said that Eliot has been accused, with some justification, of writing criticism that ultimately works to confirm the kind of poetry he wrote, even when ostensibly writing about other poets. This does not make his criticism less valuable to us now, however.) There have been many such poet-critics, especially in British literature: Dryden, Johnson, Pope, Coleridge, later Eliot, Empson, Auden, and others. In American literature such "poet-critics" have often enough been novelists: Henry James, Ralph Ellison, Mary McCarthy, among living writers Norman Mailer, Gilbert Sorrentino, John Updike, very recently writers like Jonatham Lethem and Michael Chabon.

Some think that "creative writers" ought to refrain from writing criticism, especially in the form of reviewing their colleagues and potential competitors. However, Eliots's statement explains why poet-critics ought to be encouraged to engage in literary criticism: they know best of all what is really required of poetry and fiction for it to be aesthetically and intellectually credible, "crafted" in all the best senses of the term. In fact, in today's literary climate, where few literary critics who both respect literature and wish to write about it in generally accessible terms are actually to be found (or have a forum in which to do it), the criticism of practicing writers might be the most important available source of sound critical judgment.

In my lifetime, the most distinguished "poet-critic" has been, in my view, William H. Gass. Although he has published at least two works of fiction, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and The Tunnel, that stand up to the work of any of his contemporaries, he has also produced half a dozen collections of critical essays that will surely endure as among the best criticism to appear in the second half of the twentieth century. The day his "Collected Essays" appears will be a notable one in American literary history.

Although he is a fiction writer and not a poet, his criticism may in fact be the best example to be found of criticism as poetry. In this he exemplifies Eliot's claim that the critical and the creative are, in the best writers, inextricable. This is the beginning of the first essay in Gass's first critical book:

So much of philosophy is fiction. Dreams, doubts, fears, ambitions, ecstasies. . .if philosophy were a stream, they would stock it like fishes. Although fiction, in the manner of its making, is pure philosophy, no novelist has created a more dashing hero than the handsome Absolute, or conceived more dramatic extractions--the soul's escape from the body, for instance, or the will's from cause. And how thin and unlaced the forms of Finnegans Wake are beside any of the Critiques, how sunlit Joyce's darkness, how few his parallels, how loose his correspondences. With what emotion do we watch the flight of the Alone to the Alone, or discover that "der Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist," or read that in a state of nature the life of man is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' . . .

Novelist and philsopher are both obsessed with language, and make themselves up out of concepts. Both, in a way, create worlds. Worlds? But the worlds of the novelist, I hear you say, do not exist. Indeed. As for that--they exist more often than the philosophers'. Then, too--how seldom does it seem to matter. Who honestly cares? They are divine games. Both play at gods as others play at bowls; for there is frequently more reality in fairy tales than in these magical constructions of the mind, works equally of thought and energy and will, which rise up into sense and feeling, as to life, acts of pure abstraction, passes logical, and intuitions both securely empty and as fitted for passage as time.

Few writers of criticism are able to combine such a compelling and frankly "superior" prose with correspondingly apposite critical insights as does William Gass. To this extent, I would not hold him up as a model. Gass's example, as well as Eliot's, does illustrate, however, that the "poet" and the "critic" can coexist comfortably. More importantly, poets and novelists might learn from them to less reluctantly admit that the creative work to some extent requires the "frightful toil" of the critical. At the same time, critics, perhaps especially critics who are not themselves "creative" writers, ought more often to acknowledge that this toil is only compounded in the labor performed by poets and novelists. It is not a simple matter of unsightly "expression" being confronted with the "handsome Absolute" of critical judgment.

Too Much Writing

The Association of Writing Programs (AWP) puts out a review/journal called The Writer's Chronicle (sadly, not available online), similar in many ways to Poets and Writers. As does Poets and Writers, Writer's Chronicle always steers pretty close to the mainstream, dispensing "advice" and "analysis" that seldom strays from the conventional and currently accepted.

Rarely, however, has WC printed an essay as vapid and uninformed as "Translating Ideas: What Scientists Can Teach Fiction Writers About Metaphor," written by Debra Fitzgerald and featured in the new issue of the journal (March/April 2004). The essence of her argument in favor of "scientific" uses of metaphor can perhaps be gleaned from this analysis rather late in the essay. First she quotes a passage from Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn:

The cat walked in from the main room and stood on my outstretched thighs and began kneading them with its front paws, half-retracted claws engaging the material to make a pocka-pocka-pocka sound. . .The cat was black and white with a Hitler moustache, and when it finally noticed I had a face it squeezed its eyes at me. . .The big Nazi cat went on raking up thread-loops from my trousers, seemingly intent on single-handedly reinventing Velcro. . .its uneven cackling purr. [Ellipses inserted by Fitzgerald.]

Fitzgerald's critique:

There is a clearly defined object here--the cat--but there are three different images attached to it. The big Nazi cat with the Hitler moustache and cackling purr intent on reinventing Velcro conjures up simultaneous images of an ethnic cleanser, a witch, and, I don't know, an inventor. While these images are fun and evocative, they are a dead-end. They do not heighten our understanding of the idea of this cat. It's a passage full of nonfunctional, decorative metaphors, a good example of writing that is all style, no substance.

This reading of the passage is so ham-handed that I can't entirely be sure I know what it's getting at, but the point seems to be that Lethem (it would be more accurate to say Lionel Essrog, the narrator), is not sufficiently concerned with giving us a clearly "functional" description of the cat, one that gives us an "idea" of the cat. (Why that would be necessary is not explained.) It's apparently not enough that Lethem would use the cat as an opportunity to create a word-portrait, a verbal construction, one that might go beyond the merely "functional" to help us see the "clearly defined object" in a less clearly defined, but perhaps more insightful way. Or, more importantly, that he would use this scene and Essrog's perception of the cat to help us more fully understand Essrog's own, I don't know, peculiar relationship to the world (keeping in mind his own Tourette's-induced verbal habits.)

I once taught a course in contemporary American fiction in which during our discussion of John Updike's Rabbit Run a student bitterly complained about Updike's generous (my word) prose style. In another class I had recently heard a similar complaint about Madame Bovary. (All that description.) I was led to say to the Updike-fatigued student--perhaps more harshly than I should have--that I found it strange to be accusing a writer of engaging in "too much writing." (The rest of the class did find it amusing.)

I have to say that I think this is what Debra Fitzgerald's argument boils down too. Too many writers doing too much damn writing. Too much style, and not enough substance. This is not the occasion for going into a lengthy disquisition about the interaction of style and substance, about the way in which style creates its own substance, etc., etc. Suffice it to say that Fitzgerald wants writers to follow scientists in providing strictly functional metaphors that help to explain and instruct, and that I think this couldn't be a more unfortunate and almost willfully obtuse understanding of what serious fiction--literature--ought to be about. Certainly there are plenty of writers who take the merely "decorative" as the index of good writing, but Lethem isn't one of them, and neither is Updike.

(And frankly I often find the use of these "functional" metaphors by scientists and science writers to be annoying and implicitly condescending, a way of dumbing down science for the rest of us yokels.)

What finally disturbs me the most about "Translating Ideas" is precisely that it is published by Writer's Chronicle and at least implicitly has its imprimatur. I can't be certain about the editors' intentions in publishing the essay, but I have to assume they at least in part found it compelling and worth passing along to its readers. And since a very large part of its readership consists of student and aspiring writers, that this is the advice they get from an influential "professional" organization to me borders on scandalous. If the powers that be in Creative Writing programs hope to turn out writers who follow this advice, Heaven help us. Literature has already been shown the door in departments of literary study; is writing to be expelled from Creative Writing?

Reviewing the Review

I have come to hold what I assume is a somewhat heretical opinion about The New York Review of Books: I don't really like it very much.

I don't presume that the following exposition of my reasons for holding this opinion should necessarily convince anyone with the opposite opinion to suddenly change it; I would just like to explain why I think the limitations of NYRB are symptomatic of problems with American "intellectual" culture itself, especially in terms of the way in which this culture now approaches not just literature but the role of books and writing more generally. I would not claim that the problems I have with NYRB in this context are problems everyone else ought to find as pressing.

The April 4 issue is also the "Spring Books" issue, so it seems an appropriate choice with which to illustrate my concerns. Presumably it represents the editors' own conclusions about what books should be considered important among those available in the spring "season," as well as an indication of the current preoccupations of the "intellectual" class itself. It certainly does not offer a representative survey of the kinds of books that are indeed available to interested readers during this season, but it never has pretended to do that. On the other hand, one is perhaps entitled to ask in the midst of what seem to be significant editorial changes at the New York Times Book Review, which historically has seen its mission as offering such a survey, whether a book review with the reputation of the NYRB ought to be expected, to some degree and in all good faith, to take up the critical slack the New York Times appears to be leaving. It has a smaller audience, to be sure, but the audience it does have is precisely the audience most concerned about these changes. (Everyone must be aware of them by now, so I won't rehash the details.) And, as I recall, The New York Review of Books was actually created in the first place to compensate for the temporary loss of the New York Times Book Review during a newspaper strike.

I would have referred to the attitudes of the "literary" class as revealed in the pages of NYRB, except there isn't much that's literary about it anymore. Maybe there never was, at least if this measured by the amount of coverage actually afforded to works of literature. The New York Review has always ranged well beyond literature and literary issues, but I remember first becoming a regular reader back in the 1970s because it was a reliable source of discussion about serious fiction and poetry, although it's possible my memory distorts. (However, a glance at the acknowledgements pages of William Gass's Fiction and the Figures of Life (1971), as well as The World Within the World (1976), reveals that many of the essays included were first published in The New York Review of Books, almost all of them reviews of Gass's fellow writers and other essays on decidedly literary matters.) To judge by the contents of the Spring Books issue, most readers must now come to NYRB because of an interest in history, cultural commentary, "learned" scholarship in non-literary disciplines, and politics (especially politics.)

Of all the works of fiction published this spring season, is it really the case that the only one worth reviewing in the Spring Books issue was Jim Crace's Genesis? (And is it merely my own misperception, or does NYRB not give more attention to British fiction than American fiction? They seem to have a real case of Anglophilia.) In almost every issue of NYRB, in fact, no more than two reviews of fiction are included, and frequently there's only one. The Literary Saloon is keeping a running tab of the nonfiction-to-fiction ratio at the New York Times Book Review, but the proportion of fiction reviews in relation to nonfiction reviews is consistently even lower at The New York Review--I'd guess less than ten percent.

This issue does include reviews of other "literary" books. There's a review of two biographical studies of Mark Twain and an omnibus review of Shakespeare. In the Twain piece the reviewer, Larry McMurtry (a frequent contributor to NYRB, which is itself a whole other problem), writes that "Twain is one of those authors who is, invariably, more interesting to read than to read about." So why are we reading about him? The Shakespeare review, by James Fenton, is an interesting enough discussion of the viewing Skakespeare vs. reading him debate, but it trods well-worn ground. How about some discussion of the merits of reading some contemporary writers, particularly since they have a hard enough getting read in the first place?

A literary scholar, Stephen Greenblatt, reviews Walter Laqueur's Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Maturbation. Perhaps I'm alone in finding these "cultural histories" of various and sundry topics increasingly tiresome, but I sure do, and Greenblatt's essay does nothing to convince me I should read Laqueur's book, aside from the prurience of the topic. Greenblatt's a perfectly good writer (itself a minor miracle among current academic critics), but his review points up another feature of New York Review reviews that I no longer can manage to tolerate: many times these reviews are not reviews at all, merely excuses for the reviewer to sustitute his own expertise and wisdom about the subject of the book for an actual critical evaluation of the book itself. A number of years ago I read a dismissive description of NYRB as the "New York Review of Themselves." At the time I thought it was just knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, but now I'm not so sure.

Something like this problem occurs in Garry Wills"s "God in the Hands of Angry Sinners," which begins with some very interesting observations about The Passion of the Christ but then veers off into a lengthy discussion of the Legion of Christ, a radical Catholic group that is obviously of great interest to Will, but the analysis of which I frankly couldn't finish. Wills, like McMurtry, is an NYRB perennial, and although I admire many of Wills's own books, some new and fresh perspective from younger reviewers would really do The New York Review of Books a lot of good.

Finally there's the obsession with ongoing politics. I mostly share the political views that get expressed in NYRB, and thus I should perhaps welcome this forum for their dissemination, but I don't. It crowds out less tendentious and more thorough discussion of other kinds of nonfiction, as well as of fiction and poetry. Part of the Spring Books issue is taken up with a continuing discussion of Michael Massing's dead-on accurate dissection of the news media's coverage of the Iraq invasion. The subjects of Massing's criticism have yet to adequately respond to it, but why was his essay even published in The New York Review of Books? Why wasn't it published somewhere not only more appropriate for the subject, but where it might have gotten even more attention and had even greater impact? I'm glad I read the essay, but not at the expense of some worthy books that might have gotten the space.

I've gone on entirely long enough. To sum up: some good essay-reviews gets published in The New York Review of Books, and some worthy books get reviewed. But not nearly enough good writing--as opposed to just "books" in the perfunctory sense of containing pages with covers around them--is highlighted, and not nearly enough coverage of subjects that might help to foster a real literary culture is provided. It's become too much a "review" of the predictable and familiar by the smug and established. It's the very antithesis of "lively." I find it increasingly dull and ponderous, and I speak as someone who ardently wishes it were otherwise, that it was in fact the essential publication it could be (and perhaps once was.) One of my greatest fears is that the New York Times Book Review will merely become a more "popular," but also more superficial, version of what has become of NYRB.

Probably I have been dull and ponderous myself. To that extent you can ignore me.

Not Really About Shakespeare

In the March issue of First Things, R.V. Young, an English professor at North Carolina State University, seeks to praise Shakespeare, and not to bury him. Here is the first paragraph of his essay:

More than any other writer, Shakespeare embodies the distinctive principles of Western Civilization. Men and women of the West are drawn to Shakespeare because his plays and poems continue to express their aspirations, to articulate their concerns, and to confront the tensions and contradictions in the Western vision itself. He is admired not as an uncritical encomiast of his own culture and society, but rather as an exemplum of the spirit—both critical and conservative—that is among the West’s most enduring legacies to the world. It is, therefore, no surprise that academic literary critics, who owe their very existence to Shakespeare and other great writers, have cast doubt upon Shakespeare’s exalted position at exactly the moment in history when the societies of the West have become most anxious about their own integrity and probity.

Now, I think Shakespeare is indeed the greatest writer in the English language (and I have read all of the plays). I also think the passage just quoted is garbage.

When I come upon essays like this one, ostensibly defending Shakespeare from all of his many supposed detractors, I also come as close as I ever do to feeling sympathy for the academic critics who have rejected "bardolatry" and used Shakespeare as one more opportunity to "depreciate the merely literary" (Sven Birkerts) and politicize literary study to advance their own agendas. These critics assume (wrongly, in lots of cases), that this sort of Western-Civ rah-rah was really the goal of academic literary study all along and have understandably enough recoiled from it.

But of course to uniformly boo and hiss at "the West" is no better than to always celebrate its wonders, and my sympathy is short-lived.

What I really seem to hear when reading passages like the one above is the sound of Shakespeare himself frantic to free himself from the grave if only to seek out the likes of Professor Young and throttle him. Shakespeare of course had no interest in the "distinctive principles of Western Civilization" (wouldn't have known what they were), did not in the least express something called the "Western vision," was certainly no "encomiast of his culture and society" (far from it), and sought to exemplify nothing but the possibilities of the forms in which he wrote and whatever personal "vision" of human existence he had managed to acquire. (And fortunately he did possess a vision that has seemed to express the aspirations and concerns of many of the rest of us--the one point on which I agree with Professor Young.)

But in Professor Young's "vision" Shakespeare's plays and poems disappear in favor of an "encomium" on behalf of Western Civilization, Shakespeare becomes a Great Figure to admire and exalt (but not to read), an opportunity for the Professor himself to posture and declaim. And Shakespeare is not the only writer to fall victim to this sort of reactionary praise ("reactionary" in the literal sense of the term, as it is a reaction to the perceived loss of prestige among the "great" Western writers). Sadly, writers from Milton and Swift to Emerson and Twain are accorded this dubious defense, their obvious enough human limitations in terms of racial attitudes or class solidarity not simply acknowledged or explained but erased. Young, for example, struggles mightily in his essay to demonstrate there's really nothing at all wrong with Shakespeare's depictions of Shylock and Othello, that in fact he really portrays Jews and "Moors" as stand-up guys. I would agree that there's great amibivalence in the portrayal of these characters, and that the plays in which they appear ought not to be merely dismissed, but there's no point in denying that some of the ambivalence is unattractive, to say the least.

Sometimes people come to have questions about even great writers not because they despise Western Civilization but because every new generation of readers has to be convinced anew that the work of these writers actually stands up to present scrutiny. (The sort of indoctrination Professor Young seems implicitly to favor never works.) "Criticism" of the kind this First Things essay represents doesn't help to resolve such questions because it ultimately discourages serious reading in the first place. An acquiescent and unequivocal esteem will do. It might still be presumed that previous generations of academic critics all essentially engaged in this kind of empty rhetorical gesturing, but most of them did not. "Close reading" was an approach to literature that precisely encouraged readers to take literature seriously, but, at its best, it attempted to show these readers a more resourceful way to do this.

Ordinarily, First Things has a relatively limited audience, one that is presumably already receptive to the message R.V. Young has come to bring them. But the essay was featured at Arts & Letters Daily, so it might have reached others who could be tempted to believe it. The more broadly such misguided and unhelpful messages manage to get purveyed, the more important it becomes to intercept them.

The Critic as Hanging Judge

It would seem that a significant number of people whose opinions I otherwise respect, including not a few literary webloggers, have great admiration for the British literary critic James Wood. (Or at least they profess to admire him--one could wonder whether some of those who have extolled his critical virtues aren't trying to stave off some of the critical barbs he might at some point hurl in their direction.) I would like to say I share the high opinion of Wood so many others have expressed, since in some ways he does continue a tradition of informed, wide-ranging literary criticism not tied to the careerist norms of the academy that desperately needs to be revived. But I just can't. Ultimately his reviews and essay-reviews are detrimental not just to the cause of literary criticism but to the continued appreciation of the possibilities of literature itself.

Last year in a review of Wood's novel The Book Against God, Wyatt Mason made some telling points against Wood as a critic, some of them similar to those I will make here, so I would recommend reading Mason's essay for an even more extensive discussion of the topic. However, I am going to use Wood's most recent review, of John Le Carre's Absolute Friends in The New Republic, to illustrate my particular problems with Wood's criticism. I should say that I am neither a fan nor a detractor of Le Carre. I have read a few of his books and found them entertaining enough. I would not be among those Wood takes after for elevating Le Carre above his merits to the status of "literary" writer. Perhaps thus I am even better able to see the limitations of Wood's approach to both criticism and literature than if he were attacking a writer I greatly esteem.

I will also say that I do not question Wood's intelligence, his preparation to be a critic, or his motives. I think he believes his approach to literature is the correct approach. (And unlike Dale Peck, Wood's harsh judgments are usually backed up with reasons, even reasons that have something to do with the book at hand.) I simply think that this approach exemplifies what's finally wrong with the kind of literary criticism he attempts to perpetuate.

It would indeed be easy to maintain that Wood sees literature as a kind of religion-substitute, a charge Wood has himself acknowledged and to an extent accepted. But it's not so much questions of religious belief or "philosophy" more generally that Wood wants to find addressed in works of "serious" fiction. It's that he wants to take literature seriously in the same way the devoted take their religion. Just as they often believe their religious tradition gets things right in a particular way, Wood wants to believe there's one true path to writing a serious novel, one which makes all other paths not just more full of obstacles but actual roads to perdition. Wood's attacks on writers like Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon can be seen as motivated by this larger belief.

In the case of Le Carre, his first sin is to have written genre fiction. Although Wood tries not to condemn the whole enterprise outright in this review, it's clear enough he has no use for it. We can't even say that in reading Le Carre we learn anything about spying because, Wood declares, "much of Le Carre's detail was entirely invented, including the terminology, and there were old intelligence hands who complained that his picture of the service, while intended as an anti-James Bond demystification, was itself a species of romance." Not only is Le Carre a genre writer, then, but he writes. . .fiction.

Next Wood goes after LeCarre's reputed "political complexity" (which of course Wood thinks is anything but):

. . .In fact, instead of analyzing the political complexities of the Cold War, Le Carre's books narrate the functional complexities of the political complexities; that is, they show us, mainly, that the two espionage systems often worked in matching ways. This insight then locks the mazy plots in place, essentially closing the door on further analysis: the two-sided mirror dazzles further curiosity. And so the form of the books tends toward a self-cancelling amnesty, each side a little shabbier at the end of the story than it was at the start.

I sure hope I am not alone in finding this passage mostly gibberish. To be fair, it has probably come out this way because Wood is trying to hide, as he does through most of the review, what he really finds objectionable about Le Carre: he doesn't like the man's politics, especially the "anti-American" turn his politics has seemed to take of late.

We are told that Le Carre "can write very well," even in this latest book, which Wood clearly despises. However, after quoting a passage of ostensibly good writing, and even explaining why some might find it good, Wood eventually concludes that Le Carre's "prose announces, in effect: 'here is what the world looks like according to the conventions of realism.' It is a civilized style, but nonetheless a slickness unto death." Apparently even what Le Carre actually does well he doesn't do well at all. (Or, he writes well very badly.)

Which brings us to the real nub of the issue, the failing of Le Carre's that is most debilitating, the overriding purpose novels must embody that Le Carre doesn't understand. In his essay, Wyatt Mason observes that ""How somebody felt about something' is precisely what Wood wants from a novel; reaching into character is what he expects. Consciousness is the ultimate freedom, and its honest representation in fiction is what draws us into sympathy with the created, not with its creator. This is the hallmark of the work of those authors. . .for whom Wood has the greatest regard." Of Le Carre Wood says: [His] character portraits are not themselves complex, merely complex relative to the rolled thinness of most characters in contemporary thrillers." Le Carre's characters, like those of Hemingway and Graham Greene, "are, paradoxically, alert but always blocking the ratiocinative consequences of their alertness. Such characters are not minds but just voyeurs of their own obscurities."

Frankly this is just a very pompous way of saying that Le Carre--and by extension almost all of the writers who come up short in Wood's estimation--does not employ the technique of "psychological realism," the revelation of consciousness that seems to be for Wood the most important legacy of the modernist fiction writers. To this extent Wood is stuck in the early twentieth century, taking what was indeed at the time an innovation in the presentation of character and a step beyond the realism of earlier writers as the final word about what novels ought properly to do. Clearly it fulfills his own needs as a reader of fiction, filling in whatever void was left when he abandoned religion, but to write this out as a prescription for what novels must be like for everyone else seems hardly tenable, just as other, differing prescriptions (for "plot," for "clarity," even for "originality") shrinkwrap fiction into easily storable commodities but don't allow for the flexibility of the form.

Wood is sometimes compared to the academic critic F.R. Leavis, and indeed Wood's prose does have some of the smug lecture hall certainty and harsh evaluative tone of Leavis at his worst. But there's very little in Wood's writing that conveys an enjoyment of literature (sometimes a failure of Leavis's as well), even of those literary artists he appears to admire. Furthermore, Wood's own criticism is very seldom enjoyable--it creates the tense atmosphere suitable to a hanging judge. (Note how seldom he reviews writers he actually does admire--and certainly very few current writers, unless they're to be sent to the gallows--preferring the already indicted malefactors.)

Wood also shares something with the "moral critics" such as the poet-critic Yvor Winters or Lionel Trilling (or even Irving Howe.) With all of them, literature is a rather sour and sober affair, the critic its grave taskmaster. I will take Wood's word for it that Absolute Friends is spoiled by the inserted political rhetoric he describes, as fiction usually is by such propagandizing. But one can't help but feel that by the end of the review Wood has converted what should be an aesthetic flaw into a flaw of the author's own character ("this humanly implausible and ideologically enraged novel"--enraged at George W. Bush). If Le Carre is not exactly judged to be a bad man, he is judged to be a "bad writer" solely because he has ideas different than James Wood's, ideas about the world and about fiction. To this extent, Wood shows himself to be a remarkably intolerant critic, just as "ideological" in his way as Le Carre is accused of being.

If this is the remaining legacy of the "great tradition" of British literary criticism (or American, for that matter), better that we should refuse it.

Eliminating Scam

The current issue of Poets & Writers prints a very pointed query from a reader:

I just tabulated the cost for entry fees listed online from the May/June 2003 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. If I submitted work to every contest, it would cost me $727 in entry fees alone. Then there is the cost of round trip postage, the cost of duplication, the cost of envelopes, the cost of paper, the cost of computer printer cartridges, and the cost of waiting for the never-to-happen response that one might expect from such an immense fiscal contribution to the publishers. Is the issue of entry fees something that P&W accepts without question?

The editor provides a very evasive answer that essentially indicates P&W does indeed accept this practice without question. Since Poets & Writers is a publication that really exists to serve the interests of publishers and writing programs, not poets and writers, this answer is not surprising.

What is most evasive about Therese Eiben's response is that it fails to address the ethical issues raised by the very existence of these "contests." While no individual literary magazine or journal is necessarily attempting to dupe gullible potential entrants (although editors surely can't be so naive as to think there are no such gullible entrants, who from the start have no chance of winning), collectively this whole enterprise is nonetheless a colossal scam.

The popularity of these contests has risen to such an extent that probably a majority of existing literary magazines sponsors one. It is pretty clearly a way to raise a little cash for an endeavor that doesn't otherwise produce much. That literary magazines, which exist on the margins of the publishing "industry" but nevertheless often provide first publications for writers who go on to have considerable success in this industry, would have to resort to such devices is to an extent understandable, and ought to be occasion for shame among those in the "industry" (if they were capable of it), and for bitter disappointment among those who think American culture as a whole actually values serious writers and writing. Some worthy writers no doubt win these contests, but other worthy writers just as surely don't, and a culture that took literature seriously wouldn't require its aspiring writers to undergo such a humiliating (as well as expensive) dance of subjection.

But the editors and patrons of literary magazines still might feel some compunction about staging these contests. There probably are some writers who spend, if not the thousands of dollars tabulated by the letter writer, a great deal of money they really can't afford to spend just to get themselves published. (The cost of simply submitting manuscripts can easily run into the hundreds of dollars.) Does everyone have to stage a contest? Does anyone? Couldn't some of this money be more profitably spent publishing more issues and thus more writers? Couldn't the publishing "industry" help defray the cost of printing the little magazines? Couldn't the universities housing many of these magazines be more generous?

And couldn't Poets & Writers be honest and admit it's all ethically dubious? Or would this go too far in the direction of actually caring about poets and writers?

Perhaps the proliferation of online literary magazines will help to alleviate this problem. Perhaps the less onerous costs of publishing poetry and fiction in this form will make the scandal of these contests moot. In the meantime, my advice would be to not enter any such contest, even if you think you can win. Refuse to be scammed.

Let's Review

It's always good when a reviewer voluntarily reveals his/her biases or preconceptions. In last Sunday's Boston Globe, Caroline Leavitt says this of Mark Dunn's Ibid: A Life--A Novel in Footnotes:

The writing's playful and witty, and there's a good bit of inventive silliness to the tale. Young Jonathan misinterprets a wink as a sign that a young girl likes him, when actually it's a spasm. There's a wry running joke that all the loves of Jonathan's life are killed in freak Boston accidents, including the Great Molasses Flood. It's all sometimes dazzling fun, but the truth is, I wasn't lost in the book the way I wanted to be. I was always aware of the writer's sprightly mind at work here, when what I wanted was the feeling that his characters were real, that they might knock on my door any second and ask for a cup of tea

Ms. Leavitt is of course entitled to her preferences, but, really, what is a reader to do with this? The reviewer refers to what seem like good qualities in the novel, but then in effect dismisses them. What if you are a reader who actually would enjoy a novel that's "witty," "inventive," has good jokes, is "dazzling fun," and reveals "the writer's sprightly mind at work"? Should you then disregard the reviewer's judgment that the novel lacks "real" characters and conclude this book is probably rather promising, despite the reviewer's ultimate "thumbs down"?

And what of this?:

What do we want from our books? Of course it depends on the reader, but personally, I think that new shouldn't just be novelty. Heart should override mind. And always, always, the characters -- be they investment lawyer or circus attraction -- should let us into their souls.

Disregarding the illogic of the claim that the new shouldn't be novel, isn't it just patently untrue that all good novels "always, always" feature characters whose "souls" we enter? Can't some good novels emphasize plot instead? Shouldn't some novelists be allowed to be "witty" and "inventive," qualities in some cases that might override the creation of character in the first place? Aren't novels that are primarily comic almost necessarily limited in their capacity to create "soulful" characters? (Such characters are by the requirements of comedy inherently two-dimensional.)

My problem is really not so much with Caroline Leavitt, who may like or dislike whatever she wants. But why does the Boston Globe print such a review? Of course reviews are matters of opinion (sometimes), and various opinions ought to be expressed. But the statements made in a review like this are enormously sweeping, to the point that they finally make the review almost impossible to use in any serious way to decide whether to read Ibid or not. If we don't share the reviewer's assumptions, are we likely to actually enjoy this novel? If we do share them, will we dislike it because it's too inventive and "fun"? The review fails in its presumably assigned task of informing readers about the book under review.

Or is this indeed the task of a book review? If lit blogs hope to devote more space to reviewing books rather than just linking to print reviews (as some have recently intimated they want to do), perhaps some rethinking of both the purpose and the form of the book review is in order. Is a book review primarily informative or evaluative? If the former, then the greatest hazard is that it will become a kind of book report, a record of the fact that you read and can summarize the assigned book. If a review should be primarily evaluative, then the danger is that, given the space usually alloted to book reviews, you'll wind up with something like Caroline Leavitt's review--all unsupported assertion with little effort to justify the underlying assumptions.

To indulge in my own very sweeping statement, my general impression of book reviewing in most print publications, both newspapers and magazines, is that it includes too little description of what the works reviewed actually do, what they are (aside from simple plot summaries), and too much glib evaluation. Partly this is a result of the limited and shrinking space being given to the consideration of books and writing at all. Partly it is the consequence of too often assigning reviews to reviewers who seemingly have little acquaintance with or, frankly, much interest in literature in the first place. It's probably also a consequence of the general American propensity to have an opinion without feeling much need to support it.

Blogs can be relativey free of such constraints. (Although others, such as screen fatigue, do come into play.) I don't mean to suggest that reviews of books or poems or plays or films should be free of evaluation, by any means. But literary weblogs could in effect show more respect than is often shown in the mainstream press for the variety of work being published by both small and large presses, in print and online, through devoting a little more time to describing what seem to be the goals and ambitions of the writers so published, not just expressing unexamined opinions. (At the same time, some indulgence in pointed commentary, if not snark, can be "dazzling fun" and the right to do this ought to be preserved.)

This kind of descriptive analysis could be done in numerous ways and with the kind of rhetorical freedom the blog form allows. Long, rambling essays are not really what I have in mind--although sometimes these can be useful, too. Devising methods of discussing books and literature that take them seriously in an at least implicit way would be limited only by the imagination of the blogger. In a recent post James Tata writes that blogs (or at least his blog) should not seek to be "a space for definitive judgements that better belong in print somewhere." I like James Tata's blog very much, but here I think he's wrong. Why should "definitive judgments" be reserved for print? As often as not, the definitive judgment turns out to be of the sort exemplified in Caroline Leavitt's review--larely because "judgment" is understood in simplistic like it/don't like it terms. What are most print publications doing for books and serious writing now that justifies leaving to them the job of literary arbiter?

The book review is itself a literary form that is too important to be left to the whims of newspaper and magazine editors. Its potential needs to be rediscovered.

Attention Please

Notwithstanding this rather hysterical response to it, the Camille Paglia essay recently featured at Arts & Letters Daily is really very good. It's in the more scholarly mode of Sexual Personae, and is well worth reading. Here are her main points:

Decade by decade since the 1960s, popular culture, with its stunning commercial success, has gained strength until it now no longer is the brash alternative to organized religion or an effete literary establishment: it is the culture for American students, who outside urban centers have little exposure to the fine arts...

Interest in and patience with long, complex books and poems have alarmingly diminished not only among college students but college faculty in the U.S. It is difficult to imagine American students today, even at elite universities, gathering impromptu at midnight for a passionate discussion of big, challenging literary works like Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. . .

Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space. The new generation, raised on TV and the personal computer but deprived of a solid primary education, has become unmoored from the mother ship of culture. . . The ironically self-referential or overtly politicized and jargon-ridden paradigms of higher education, far from helping the young to cope or develop, have worsened their vertigo and free fall. Today's students require not subversion of rationalist assumptions—the childhood legacy of intellectuals born in Europe between the two World Wars—but the most basic introduction to structure and chronology. Without that, they are riding the tail of a comet in a media starscape of explosive but evanescent images. . . .

Since Paglia herself has been among the most vocal champions of "popular culture" among academics and intellectuals, the essay can almost be read as a kind of apology for her own excesses in encouraging us to "become unmoored from the mother ship of culture," or at least as an expression of second thoughts about her own possible collusion with the powers that be in the academy in "subverting" literature and the fine arts.

Anyone who has tried to teach literature to either high school or college students over the past 15 years knows, however, that she is correct in her description of these students' capacity to read not just long books but any works of literature that require careful attention. It is also true that the prevailing models of literary study actively encourage this corruption of reading by dismissing, both implicitly and explicitly, what gets called "elite" culture as the encoded propaganda of the Oppressor. Students are assured that they don't need to take art and literature seriously because it will only hurt their feelings, or worse. (This is itself an inherently patronizing approach, since it assumes that only the tenured among us need to consider such works in the first place in order to determine they are indeed bad for us.)

I don't think computers have much to do with this state of affairs, although television certainly does. Computers--the internet more generally--requires the active agency of its users, and there's nothing wrong with sampling some of what art and literature have to offer for the first time in cyberspace rather than in a museum or classroom. Television, on the other hand, is entirely passive and does promote the kind of impatience with anything that can't be reduced to its demands that Paglia discusses.

Paglia then goes on to describe the way she tries to introduce her own students to visual art, and although her approach seems reasonable enough, others more competent to assess it would have to do so. I'm also not sure that this kind of remedial, catch-up work will in the long run be very effective. It may be too late. My impression of much of the current discourse on art, music, and literature, even among professed enthusiasts, is that all of these arts have gotten too "difficult," too "cerebral," too far away from what "common people" like. In discussions of literature, much of this criticism seems to take writers to task for not writing books that could easily be made into movies and tv shows. If the experience of reading a novel is ultimately judged by whether it seems like watching television sitcoms, then there's no reason to read (or write) novels at all.

In the response to which I linked above, Paglia's analysis is labeled "cultural conservatism." It is only conservative if we stick to the core meaning of the term--to "conserve." Given that presently in American culture there's not much left of either the ability or the desire to experience any works of art in a substantive way, conserving it is now probably beside the point. Bringing art and literature back into the lives of people of any age--or at least the knowledge of how to do that for themselves--would actually be a fairly radical act. It's the partisans of the current media culture and the mavens of academic criticism who have become the "cultural conservatives."

Originality

In the April 2 issue of TLS, Michael Marr conducts an extended analysis of the similarities between Nabokov's Lolita and the recently re-discovered 1916 short story of the same name by the German author Heinz von Lichberg (a pen name). This has become something of a mini-scandal, according to which, at least implicitly, Nabokov appropriated the early work as the basis of his own novel. If Nabokov has not exactly been accused of plagiarism, he has been charged with some kind of dishonesty.

I frankly don't understand why anyone would care about this supposed controversy, even if the worst were assumed and we concluded Nabokov just stole Lichberg's idea outright.

Who would deny that literary history is in many ways a grand procession of such theft, Nabokov's just the latest in a long line of literary larceny? Did Homer "invent" the Iliad and the Odyssey? Are the Greek tragedies to be judged by the "originality" of their plots? (Aristophanes is another story.) We all know Shakespeare pilfered his own plots (and many of his characters) from preexisting sources. Do we consider him less accomplished as a writer because of it? Did Milton "steal" Paradise Lost from the Bible?

It's hard to think of many writers who could be judged primarily on the evidence of originality in story, theme, or character, at least before the 19th century. As many scholars have established, "originality" is itself a concept that arises from the "individualism" of the Romantic movement of that century, although not all of the Romantic writers could be measured by it. Of the Romantic poets, Blake seems the most wholly original, Shelley perhaps the least; in my opinion, however, Shelley is a better writer. (It seems more appropriate to judge Blake as some kind of "visionary" rather than as a writer per se.) As F.O. Matthiessen points out in American Renaissance, Melville's Moby Dick is a rewriting of King Lear, Pierre of Hamlet.

It is really only with the rise of the novel as the predominant literary form that originality becomes a criterion by which it seems appropriate to assess a work of literature--or through the use of which one might say something useful about a particular work. Yet here again we all know that what seems original at first glance often enough isn't and that writers are frequently quite willing to foreground the sources of their inspiration. (And even when they're not, there's always Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence"--and if you actually bother to read Bloom, you discover that his analysis is overwhelmingly compelling.) Ulysses is a rewriting of the Odyssey; the Biblical echoes in Faulkner are deafening; some readers might think Henry James stole from himself and wrote the same few stories over and over again.

If we take the postmodern notion of "intertextuality" seriously (I actually do), we really only come back to T.S. Eliot's claim that "what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves. . . ." Eliot doesn't really mean that nothing new is ever seen under the sun, but that what he called the "really new" has a unseverable link to that which came before--at least as long as the artist is perpetuating an artistic form that emerged from the past.

The "literary" occurs entirely in the presentation of the work of literature, in its manipulation of form, in the details of character, in the manifestation of a distinctive style. Surely no one believes that in a comparison of the "original" story to Nabokov's novel the former would be judged superior simply because Lichberg's thought up a similar story and the same name. (And no one who has read the first "Lolita" has suggested this.) If Nabokov had appended an acknowledgment of Lichberg's story, would anyone now care?

Marr does a pretty good job of demonstrating why the similarities between "Lolita" and Lolita really don't much matter, but he comes up short of admitting that Nabokov did essentially steal from Lichberg. I'm willing to stipulate he might have. He might have read the story, judged it to be aesthetically inferior but also to be based on an interesting idea, one he (Nabokov) might come back to. In my opinion, Nabokov wrote some of the most exquisitely shaped and almost perfect prose in the history of the novel in English. (And he was Russian.) If, among other things, he had to steal from Heinz von Lichberg in order to give us this prose style, good for us!

High Culture?

I'm going to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Kevin Holtsberry at Collected Miscellany, who apparently agrees with Anne Applebaum's recent observation (Washington Post) of a "divide" between "high culture" and "low culture," one that has allegedly been growing larger of late. In identifying the possible cause of this divide, Kevin proposes that

Without falling into a blind nostalgia about the past, it is safe to say that middle and even lower class citizens looked to high society and art for inspiration. Those with the means and the leisure time attempted to set a standard for taste and class. Sure this didn't always reflect a true meritocracy and it had its share of problems, but there was a sense of responsibility and a sense of standards. The iconoclasm and egalitarianism of the counter-culture sought to destroy this system. Its inspiration was relativistic and anti-hierarchy. Rules and standards; culture and custom; traditions and mores; these were all oppressive tools the powerful used against the weak. They must be thrown off to achieve freedom.

Everything that's wrong with Kevin's argument is contained in that first sentence. In order: 1) He has fallen not into "blind nostalgia" about the past, but utter fantasy. There's never been--never--such a thing as "high culture" in America, or there has been only in "relativistic" terms: some things might be "higher" than others, but when everything's hugging the ground in the first place, the distance isn't very great. This is not to say there haven't been serious artists, writers, thinkers--there are plenty of them around, even now--but that no one in the rest of the culture ever considered such people, or their work, as particularly important or worthy of recognition. Such figures in American intellectual and cultural history have always worked in isolation and took whatever audience they could find. Later on some of these figures have been "canonized" as great American writers or artists, but this is merely a form of nationalism, and doesn't have much to do with "culture" in the way Kevin wants to use the word. The prevailing American attitude toward "high culture" has always been that it's one of those attributes of "old Europe" that America can do without

Thus, 2) It isn't at all "safe to say that middle and even lower class citizens looked to high society and art for inspiration." Most citizens of these classes have been mostly unaware that such a thing as high art exists, or if they were so aware they had long been instructed to view it as suspicious, a conspiracy against "normal" Americans. Even now, from both the right and the left, high art is assailed as "elitist" or "nihilistic" or just plain sissified. At one time the universities did make a little room for the study of serious art and literature, but, perhaps inevitably, they too succumbed to the general disdain for such stuff long embedded in American culture. Conservatives have taken what's left of this legacy and now use it as a weapon in the culture wars. I'm sorry to say that Kevin seems to have adopted this strategy as well.

3) Surely we can all agree that "high society" and "art" are not the same thing. Perhaps in old Europe the two have been and to some extent still are on speaking terms, but "high society" in America" is "high" because that's where the wealth is, and the only place art has here is as an entry in one's investment portfolio. If by "high society" we mean the fashionable crowd, then art is for this group if anything even less important. It's a bauble, a frill, the latest and the newest, a way to get into the papers. (Getting into the papers is the real core value of American culture.)

Art and literature are the products of hard work and seriousness of purpose, and what's produced frequently enough outrages the denizens of high society and the standard-setters of culture (a large portion of the latter are just baffled by it). However, perhaps this is all to the good. If art and literature in the United States were ever accepted into something called "high culture," this would probably be an indication that they've entered into their death throes.

The Literary Saloon also questions the validity of the high/low distinction, but for reasons somewhat different than the ones I've given.

Caution!

Ron Silliman, a stalwart champion of what he calls "post-avant" writing, nevertheless has problems with what he calls in an equally colorful way "retro-avant-gardism," particularly the sort of poetry "that tends to employ new technology in order to generate post-rational texts, ranging from tossing dice to the latest in flash technology. I often feel that such writing is too in love with techné & not with the text, sort of an avant-gardism at all costs strategy. . . ." To put it another way, this kind of writing takes the "experimental" writer's concern with technique and reduces it to an expression of technology. This kind of approach, Silliman suggests, "is best practiced in moderation, for what it can teach about the limits of meaning & intention, not as the central project of anyone’s work."

I am and have long been myself a partisan of "experimental" or "innovative" fiction (choose your adjective), but, like Silliman, have always been less enamored of work that literally "exceeds the page," that takes the search for new forms of literary expression over the borders of literature itself into new media altogether. ("Multi-media," this endeavor was once called.) It is for this reason that I have never really been able to see the point of "hypertext" fiction--except, perhaps, as Silliman has it, as a way of instructing oneself about the "limits" of literary experiment, something that can be brought back to "the text" as a refreshment of purpose.

Even when a writer I greatly admire, Robert Coover, became rather a champion of hypertext, I just couldn't bring myself to take the thing seriously as literature because clearly enough it was no longer literature but something else, a new form of expression entirely, with it own separate, newly developing conventions and ambitions. I had no problem with the idea that this new form might coalesce into a new artistic mode of its own, in the same way cinema had done this, eventually, but since works of literature are aesthetic constructions of language, the spatial and visual qualities added by hypertext just seemed a different kind of practice. (After his initial experiments in hypertext, Coover himself came back with two of his best print fictions, Ghost Town and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, so perhaps the kind of reinvigoration I mentioned did occur in his case.)

Perhaps this is the bedrock of tradition that still underlies my more overt enthusiasms for experimental fiction. Once you abandon that tradition completely, you're no longer experimenting with the forms that interested you in the first place. There's not even anything left to challenge. John Barth once wrote that he was "of the temper that chooses to rebel along traditional lines." He preferred "the kind of art. . .that requires expertise and artistry as well as bright aesthetic ideas and/or inspiration." This Barthian kind of experimental fiction in turn could invoke a number of oxymoronic descriptions: "conservative radical"; "cautious iconoclast"; "pragamatic revolutionary." (I especially like the last one.) But in some ways it's only in the contradictions between these terms that actual experiment with literary form can take place. Or at least that's a way of thinking about it.

Confessions of an Aesthete

The latest burst of debate about the relationship between politics and art is wending its way around the literary blogosphere. (Perhaps the locus of the current debate is this post by Mark Sarvas--itself a well-expressed bit of reflection.) This is of course a highly charged subject, one that frequently applies a heavy jolt to those who touch it, since it quickly gets to the core assumptions many readers bring to the act of reading works of literature. Better in most cases not to question these assumptions too strongly, rather than risk embroiling literature in the very dispute over politics that I, for one, always want to avoid in the first place.

In the present round of commentary, however, one claim in particular requires some response. Scribbling Woman makes the following assertion:

. . .all writing — all human endeavour — is political in one way or another. It could not be anything but, as we are all political creatures who exist in the world. The absolute disdain for politics of the aesthete is in itself a political choice. Of course, to a large extent when we are talking about artistic products, given our culture's continuing Romantic hangover, the inherent politics are not always overt or even conscious. But that does not mean that they are not there.

My criticism is not directed primarily at the author of this passage. Unfortunately, she repeats what has become a mantra chanted incessantly by many current academic critics, an invocation of "politics" so all-encompassing as to make any disagreement with it almost literally impossible (anything you say is "political") and so final in its judgment as to safely keep anyone who wishes to study literature rather than its political exploitation decidedly in his/her marginal place.

I'm perfectly willing to accept the label of "aesthete," although I know it's meant to be a term of horrible abuse. Speaking as one of these aberrant creatures, I will state categorically that my expectation that art will be "aesthetic" has no political content at all. None. It's not a disdain for politics, just a recognition that politics and aesthetics aren't the same thing. I have political views about politics and aesthetic views about art. You can mix the two if you wish, but don't tell me that in refusing to do so I'm doing it anyway. And I don't have any political views that are covert or unconscious. They're all out in the open (in the appropriate forum), and I happen to feel strongly about them. The assertion that they must be unconscious is just Freudianism smuggled into politics.

This totalizing view of the scope of the political is itself finally just a choice, a preference for politics over art, a way of maintaining that politics is the most important subject with which a serious person ought to occupy him/herself. It's a view that's now pandemic in the academy. If we are all "political creatures who exist in the world," are we not also "sociological creatures," "historical creatures," "cultural creatures," "economic creatures"? Such abstractions are so cosmically extended as to be meaningless. And to say that politics is everything, of course, is ultimately to say that politics is nothing in particular. If by saying everyone is "political" we mean everyone has his/her interests all well and good, but this is not the way "political" is used in the argument that all art is political art.

Frequently various "thinkers" are here invoked as authorities who have supposedly "established" that politics pervades everything (Marx or Baudrillard or Althusser or whomever). I've read these writers too, and to the extent they say that art is always political they don't know what they're talking about. They trivialize art and politics alike, and collapsing the distinction between the two is actually a way of avoiding thinking. (Although it's often the uninformed distortions of these thinkers that are really to blame.) No matter how many such thinkers are piled atop one another, the belief that "all writing is political in one way or another" is just a way of justifying one's own preference for politics and polemics over literature. I understand why some people prefer these things (although most can't seem to understand why I don't), but simply repeating the formula that all writing is political doesn't make it so.

There's nothing "Romantic" about my status as as aesthete. I think in fact that it's quite pragmatic. There's art and there's politics. "Political art" does exist, but it's not all art. Sometimes when we read works of literature we have an "aesthetic" experience, sometimes we can limit this experience to whatever political implications we can squeeze out of it. I think this latter is a very impoverished concept of reading, but I would. To say finally that all human endeavor is political (including the effort to create art) would be a pretty sad commentary on human potential, if it were true.

Middling Intelligibility

In a previous post, I discussed some of the current conventions of book reviewing, concluding in part that "book reviewing in most print publications, both newspapers and magazines, . . .includes too little description of what the works reviewed actually do, what they are (aside from simple plot summaries), and too much glib evaluation." This judgment applies exponentially to Emily Barton's review of Gary Lutz's I Looked Alive (Black Square Editions), printed in the Spring issue of Bookforum.

I must first say that I was mostly unfamiliar with Lutz's work until reading this new book, but having done so my own judgment of the book couldn't be in starker contrast to Emily Barton's. I liked it a lot. While Barton claims the stories make for "rather anhedonic reading," I found them on the contrary to be even rather moving on the whole, in addition to being structurally and stylistically challenging (the latter description being meant as a compliment.) It's the kind of book that requires patience in the beginning, but eventually becomes more compelling as you read it. But "experimental" fiction is often like that.

Even if I didn't like these stories so much, however, I would still have great problems with Emily Barton's review. It's reasonably short, so I will point out the lowlights in order, as they manifest themselves to the reader's notice. Although the review masquerades as a "description" of I Looked Alive, what passes for description is transparently a way of conveying to the reader that Lutz simply doesn't write fiction the way it ought to be written, according to the reviewer's assumptions, not as it should be done at all.

Barton immediately informs us that Lutz's fiction "is difficult to read (to some the mark of experimentalism, to others shoddy craftsmanship). . ." The opposition between "experimentalism" and "craftsmanship" is patently obvious, of course, and we know before reading the rest of the review that we ought to avoid Lutz because he isn't a "craftsman." A craftsman doesn't write something that's "difficult to read." Never mind that this amounts to a wholesale rejection of the idea of experimental fiction in the first place, but it's a hopelessly reductive concept of what defines "craftsmanship" as well. If anything, experimental writers tend to be even more craftsmanlike in their approach, since what constitutes the "craft" of writing fiction is uppermost in their minds to begin with. Too many "well-made" stories or novels are not products of craft at all, but simple repetitions of formula.

Then there's "the fault of the narrative voice itself, which may make nominal switches from first to third person but sounds relentlessly the same from piece to piece." One of the blurbs printed on the book's back cover (from Sven Birkerts) suggests that "the overall effect of a Lutz piece is not unlike what we experience reading a John Ashberry poem." This actually seems right to me. The structure and execution of Lutz's stories have at least as much in common with poetry as with fiction. Do we criticize poets because the "voice" in their poems "sounds relentlessly the same from piece to piece"?

This problem, from Barton's persective, is presumably related to the next: ""Lutz never provides the one, salient fact that would imbue a character with vigorous life, or even make him memorable." This is a very familiar lament of reviewers whose most basic assumption is that fiction will present us with "memorable" characters. In addition to being "craftsmen," fiction writers are also expected to be portrait painters in prose. Apparently this is the only thing that makes some readers interested in fiction in the first place, but of course the very notion of "experimental" fiction suggests that these ingrained expectations of what fiction is supposed to do are going to be challenged. If the writer isn't attempting to create memorable characters, it hardly seems a valid criticism to say that after all he doesn't do this. (Nevertheless, in my reading of these stories, several of the characters do stand out, and as a collective whole the characters in I Looked Alive are memorable indeed.)

If Lutz can't deliver up memorable characters, how about his ability to tell a story? "[It's} hard to know, moment by moment, what a Lutz story is even about," Barton observes. Putting aside the fact that this largely isn't true, that it's perfectly easy to see what a given story is "about" as long as you at least temporarily abandon the assumption that a story must proceed "moment by moment," this criticism really takes us to Barton's core complaint about this book, which is further captured in this declaration: "Experimental fiction typically forgoes the comforts of storytelling in order to reveal the world in a new light. Sadly, Lutz reveals little." Thus Emily Barton would be willing to overlook the lack of storytelling, if the book would only conform in this other way to the conventions of realistic fiction, revealing the world through fiction's "light." But in fact experimental fiction doesn't first "reveal the world" in a new way. It attempts to reveal the possibilities of fiction in a new way. If it also gets us to look at the world differently, fine, but Barton puts her critical cart before the literary horse.

Perhaps the most damaging of Barton's criticisms, if it was true, is that Lutz "can't even write prose of middling intelligibility," fails to "maintain a crystalline clarity." Certainly Lutz could write prose of "middling intelligibility" if he wanted to, but he doesn't. He's deliberately confronting the standard of "crystalline clarity," asking why literary experiment can't include experiment with conventional uses of language. In the book's very first paragraph we are told by the narrator that "I had not come through in either of the kids. They took their mother's bunching of features, and were breeze-shaken things, and did not cut too far into life." This is not immediately "informative" in a "crystalline" way, but if you pause (and pause you must, throughout most of this book) and consider it, it makes perfect sense as a description of the way this man might see his children. It's just a "new" way of expressing features we are accustomed to seeing signalled in more familiar phrases.

One could decide that Lutz has failed in his experiments with language or character, that they don't accomplish what he seems to have set out to do, but it hardly seems useful to criticize him for even trying them out in the first place, which is what Emily Barton's review finally amounts to. Bookforum is in general an excellent publication, usually receptive to experimental writing. How disappointing that in this instance it is a forum for a reviewer so thoroughy uncomprehending of what experimental fiction is all about to begin with.

Stanley Elkin

I want to join with Rake's Progress (a blog that just keeps getting better, by the way), in recommending the latest issue of Harper's. In addition to Lance Esplund's excellent piece of art criticism (quoted in my previous post), there's a provocative essay by Richard N. Rosenfeld proposing that the U.S. Senate be abolished. But most of all I want to echo RP as well in calling attention to William Gass's essay on Stanley Elkin.

Gass provides a very good introduction both to The Living End, his essay's immediate subject, and to the nature of Elkin's work in general. He concludes with some reflection on the ultimate decline of his friend's health (the two were colleagues for many years at Washington University in St. Louis) that paradoxically explains a great deal about the overpowering energy and vitality of Elkin's fiction.

Although Elkin has been dead for less than a decade, it's my sense that already his work does need this kind of introduction for readers who did not follow his career while it was still ongoing. Elkin has many passionate admirers, but ultimately they probably comprise only a coterie. This is not enough for a writer as prodigious in his gifts as Elkin, whose books are of the kind that can make the act of reading a transcendent experience.

It's hard for me to avoid such superlatives when discussing Elkin's work. He's probably the postwar American writer I most admire, a writer who indeed shows us how prose can become poetry. But he's also damn entertaining. Probably no other writer (with the possible exception of Dickens) makes me laugh out loud so often (and so loudly) as Stanley Elkin. When trying to get across what Elkin has to offer, it's probably best just to quote him.

This is from The Franchiser, perhaps Elkin's greatest novel--although The Living End might indeed be a good book for those unacquainted with Elkin to pick up first. Here Ben Flesh, literally a "franchiser," is trying to explain why he'll need to shut down one of his businesses (an H & R Block office):

"Finish your case load. Take twice your commission. Triple. We're closing shop, we're going out of business, everything must go."

"But--"

"I told Evelyn Wood the same. What, you think you're a special case? I told Evelyn Wood, I told her, 'Eve, there's trouble in Canada, in the forest. The weather's bad, the stands of trees are lying down. There's no wood in the woods, Wood. The pulp business is mushy. Where's the pulp to come from for the speed readers to read? They're reading so fast now they're reading us out of business. Publishing's in hot water. Magazines are folding, newspapers. (What, you never heard of folded newspapers?) If we want to keep up with the times we have to slow down, go back to the old ways. We have to teach them to move their lips.'"

Critical of Scholarship

The recent discussion of "academic blogging" at Crooked Timber prompts me to some further examination of the difference between literary "scholarship" and "literary criticism." To the extent that whatever becomes of "academic blogging" about literature proves to be continous with the current practice of the former, this distinction will remain relevant to those whose interest lies primarily in literature rather than the assumptions of academic scholarship, if likely not to the academic scholars themselves.

Perhaps a brief account of my own experience as an "academic critic" would be useful here. When I began to pursue a career as a "scholar," my assumption was that literary scholarship and literary criticism were just two different but complementary activities undertaken within the shared space of literary study. There were those who were truly scholars in the traditional sense--text editors, literary historians, etc.--and those who although they called themselves "scholars" were really literary critics concerned with the explication/critical analysis of works of literature as a whole. Eventually I came to understand that the very act of calling oneself a scholar was increasingly a way of actually distancing oneself from mere "criticism," especially criticism of a formalist or aesthetic variety.

Those who helped to install literature as a respectable subject of academic study--and this did not happen until at the earliest the 1920s and 1930s, and probably not completely until after World War II--were not innocent themselves of elevating the "academic" and the "scholarly" over the merely literary. Critical method was almost always more important than a mere "appreciation" of literature. I hate to quote myself, but I have written a "scholarly" essay on this subject (College English, January 2001) in which I maintain that "in the battle over the English curriculum between the partisans of cultural studies and the partisans of literary study the latter are in no position to charge that cultural studies relegates literature to a supporting role secondary to the promulgation of a particular critical method. The notion that as a discipline English has ever been, or even could be, essentially a preservation society dedicated to the inherent virtues of literature is mostly unsupportable." Even New Criticism, the critical approach most dedicated to these "inherent virtues" wound up advocating the values of the academy more than the values of literary criticism itself.

However, the earlier proponents of academic criticism were more focused in their efforts on the inherent value of works of literature--on the "literary" as that could be determined. This kind of criticism has been entirely rejected by the present generation of academic critics as "soft," politically incorrect, outmoded, as thorougly beneath them as "scholars." Academic scholars have a great need to feel superior to the mass of unenlightened and uncredentialed readers--I will foreswear the temptation to speculate on why this is the case--and increasingly academic literary scholars found it necessary to consider themselves superior even to the writers and the literary texts they ostensibly study. For this reason it is possible that scholars could never be persuaded to turn their attention back to the good faith study of works of literature for what they have to offer, and thus academic blogging is not likely to be very interesting to anyone other than academics--and many of them will lose patience with it as well, as battles over critical turf just get transferred to a different arena.

Literary criticism, on the other hand, to the extent it remains such, must apply itself to the sorting out of the claims that various works of literature have on our attention as readers. In short, it must help keep the possibility of reading literature in intelligent but also appreciative ways alive. The academy at present is only helping to kill this possibility. And to the extent that "literary scholarship" actually subsumed the very idea of literary criticism to itself--for a very long time criticism has really only been practiced by those with ties to the academy--it will be necessary, at the very least, for those still within the academy who nevertheless want to study literature to renounce the models of cutural study and critical theory now ascendant as the acceptable methods of what is misleadingly still called "literary study." If some of these folks were to see blogs as a way of returning to real literary criticism, this kind of blogging might actually succeed.

Some of the literary critics I greatly esteem--Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Marjorie Perloff, Helen Vendler, Henry Louis Gates--do have ties to the academy, are in most ways "academics." Many of them are also derided as old-fashioned or too eager to engage in merely "popular" criticism by the guardians of the currently established "advanced" practices of academic criticism. My own field of scholarly study, postwar or "contemporary" American literature, has been ruined by these practices, except for the few "scholars" who continue to consider the great writers who have demonstrably emerged from this period and to monitor the developments initiated by current writers. There really aren't many who do this sort of thing without falling prey to the formulas and vapid pronouncements that characterize academic criticism in general. In many ways, unfortunately, it could be said that it was the scholars of contemporary literature who introduced these approaches to literature in the first place.

Literary webloggers would be well-advised to run away from the products of present literary scholarship as if from a plague. If academic bloggers deprecate the lit blogs as lacking substance or rigor (and it must be said that the original post at Crooked Timber did not do this--itself a promising sign), lit bloggers should take this as the snobbishness and unearned elitism that it is. The academy is increasingly proving itself to be the funeral home of literature--one presided over by the academic critic-embalmers themselves. A revived literary criticism, perhaps aided if not spearheaded by literary weblogs, might not be able to rescue all that has been consigned to the tender graces of these critics, but surely something can be saved.

There Are Books, And Then There Are Books

The April 25 issue of The Boston Globe includes in its "Ideas" section an article by Edward Tenner entitled "Rebound." It offers a fairly useful accounting of where the "book industry" now stands in terms both of sales and of its encounter with the technologies of the electronic age. It seems to bring good news about the ability of books to withstand the challenge of these technologies, but there are also plenty of reasons, as the article itself reveals, to wonder what the future of serious writing, as opposed to the fate of "the book" as itself a technological device, will really look like.

The good news is that "books have multiplied partly because they have become less and less important as information storage technologies. As our dependence on them has shrunk, their number and variety has increased, and their status has been if anything enhanced by the attention that the Web has showered on them through online bookselling and discussion groups."

Here I think Tenner makes a very important point. To the extent that we rely less on books simply for "information storage," we might actually see them as even more valuable as the means by which writers (artists, thinkers, real journalists--in other words, creative and serious people) explore the possibilities of books as that form that allows for certain kinds of literary work to be carried out. "Books" might come to be seen as the only medium in which this kind of work can be done. (Whether such books continue to be printed on paper in the currently conventional way seems to me a separate, and frankly not very interesting, issue.)

Teller is surely also correct in pointing out that "the Web" has paradoxically enough elevated the status of books by making them more available and enlivening the discussion of books of all kinds. Those of us who maintain lit blogs might want to call Mr. Teller's attention to the contributions this form is making to the consideration of books and writing, but his larger point is cogent enough. And he is right as well in observing that "books [continue to] survive because technology has made it much easier to write and publish them."

But here the picture starts to seem somewhat cloudier. That more books can be produced doesn't mean they should be. Throughout the last decade, Teller asserts, "More and more people came to believe they could publish and flourish. According to a recent survey, 81 percent of Americans would like to write a book. Some of them are aspiring authors of serious fiction and nonfiction, who have never had an easy road and who now exist in greater numbers than ever, thanks in part to the proliferation of academic writing programs."

Now we all know that if 4 out 5 adult Americans published books, in the vast majority of cases their only readers would be close family members and perhaps the next-door neighbor. (If the author promised to reciprocate.) And it seems overwhelmingly likely that the book most such people really want to write is an autobiography or memoir--some kind of "life story." If the number of "life stories" being published continues to increase, this will only lead, in my view, to the ultimate cheapening of the value and integrity of books as the kind of distinctive medium I described above. And should the "proliferation of academic writing programs" continue without some fundamental change in the goals of such programs, they too will finally help to hasten the decline of genuine "creative writing."

All of which leads us to the truly bad news in Tenner's article:

Were the doomsayers needlessly gloomy? Not entirely. There does seem to be less zest for reading among today's college students than there was in the 1960s and early `70s. In the American meritocracy, general culture ranks far behind job-related learning. In Europe and the United States, demand has not kept up with the expansion of new pages, leading to sagging unit sales. . . .

So the increase in the number of books published doesn't really matter that much after all. What good does it do if no one really wants to read them or, more distressinlgy, knows how to read them, anyway? "Job-related learning" can certainly be done without books. The "zest for reading" is only becoming less zesty given the way literature and writing is currently being taught in most colleges and universities. If anything the oversupply of books can only make these problems worse, since even if you wanted to keep up on your reading, who can do so with so much coming over the transom?

I would like to suggest that the healthiest development in American publishing would be not publishing more books but publishing many fewer. This might result in feeding the American appetite for trash, but the loss of enthusiasm for reading is ultimately going to include the "commercial" authors as well. (It might hit them the hardest of all.) Most best-sellers are written to be movies in the first place, and I think that eventually they'll just be movies. In the meantime "the book" might be preserved as a space for serious writing, a mode of "communication" that might find the right audience for its method of communication. If the Book survives as something with a smaller but more dedicated audience, so be it. At least it survives. And might flourish.

Very Funny

In a previous post I explained why I have less admiration for the literary critic James Wood than conventional literary wisdom suggests I ought to have. I don't want to rehearse the argument I made there in discussing his introduction to The Irresponsible Self: Humour and the Novel (available at the Guardian website), although I would like to suggest that the views Wood presents here only reinforce my belief that his very understanding of what "literature" is all about--in his case, literally what it's good for--finally just gets in the way of a broader understanding of what works of literature more generously conceived are actually capable of accomplishing.

This is essentially the burden of Wood's analysis of "humor":

In literature, there are novels. . .in which a mild tragi-comedy arises naturally out of context and situation, novels which are softly witty but which may never elicit an actual laugh; and there are also "comic novels", which correspond to the man who comes up to you and says, "have you heard the one about...?", novels obviously very busy at the business of being comic. Tristram Shandy, for instance, is in multifarious ways a marvellous book, but it is written in a tone of such constant high-pitched zaniness, such deliberate "liveliness", that one finds oneself screaming at it to calm down a bit. The "hysterical realism" of such contemporary writers as Pynchon and Rushdie is the modern version of Sterne's perpetual excitements and digressions.

I don't doubt the applicability of Wood's distinction between "mild tragi-comedy"--what he will go on to identify as "humor" more properly understood--and the "comic" as illustrated in Sterne or Pynchon. I do question the soundness of Wood's implicit judgment that the kind of humor he describes is to be preferred, is in some way more "literary" than the "hysterical" comedy of writers descending from Sterne. That he would use this term, as well as the equally condescending "zany" in referring to this latter comedy makes his valuation of it clear enough, but later he also remarks that "Evelyn Waugh, alas, still represents the great image of English comedy in the 20th century, rather than his subtler and gentler contemporary, Henry Green." That humor deserves to be taken more seriously because it is "subtler and gentler" is the obvious conclusion Wood hopes his readers will draw from his essay.

This "humor" Wood is after he more precisely calls a "comedy of forgiveness," and he uses explicitly religious language rather freely in defining this brand of humor. That James Wood likes to see such humor in the books he reads is fine by me, but readers ought also to know that it is not per se the style of comedy practiced by the "better" writers and that a good argument can be made that the "hysterical comedy" he deprecates is more suitable to a view of literature that demands of "serious writing" that it be more than "gentle," that it in some ways be unforgiving, deliberately withholding reassurance or consolation.

The best definition of this unforgiving kind of comedy, in my opinion, was offered by the Russian critic M.M. Bakhtin, who wrote that "laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it." Elsewhere Bakhtin writes that this kind of comedy embodies an attitude of "radical skepticism" against all forms of "straightforward seriousness." Paradoxically, then, comedy is itself most serious when it casts doubt on what is otherwise considered to be serious. Nothing escapes the maw of this sort of "radical" comedy, including the pretensions of those engaging in it, and thus it goes beyond what Wood calls the comedy of "correction."

This kind of comedy can be seen in many of the great twentieth-century writers--Joyce, Beckett, Ionesco, such American writers as Barth, Heller, and Stanley Elkin. (To avoid charges of pretentiousness myself, I would also say it can be seen in the films of the Marx Brothers and the sketch comedy of Monty Python.) It can be "zany" or not (Beckett is zany in Waiting for Godot, not in How It Is or The Unnameable, but the effect is the same). But in its refusal to take anything seriously it performs at least as useful a service as does that humor preaching "forgiveness" that Wood celebrates. It asks us to question everything, to be willing to laugh at everything, ultimately to resist the temptation to settle for easy consolation. Wood essentially dismisses this kind of modern writing when he describes "the modern novel's unreliability or irresponsibility, a state in which the reader may not always know why a character does something or may not know how to 'read' a passage, and feels that in order to find these things out, he must try to merge with the characters in their uncertainty." Since our common plight is precisely to live in such uncertainty, what's wrong with this?

In the final analysis my disgreement with Wood is undoubtedly an issue of taste. I don't mean to disparage those who prefer Green to Waugh or Austen to Dickens. I respect many of the authors who employ "humor" of the sort Wood identifies, although I often get the sense Wood doesn't respect those writers whose comedy is "hysterical." But in Wood's own "typology" of humor, the "gentle" comedy he likes seems unavoidably sentimental to me. And in my reading, at least, I have found that the greatest literature avoids sentimentality with the most radical kind of skepticism.

A Musical Interlude

Not long ago I participated in a lively comments discussion at another weblog wherein I defended "modern" art music. (I actually enjoy modern music, not just admire it in a detached sort of way.) The majority opinion among those commenting seemed to be that modern music isn't music at all, just noise, and that only pre-twentieth century music, or modern music hearkening back to it, could even be called musical. This is an argument easily transferable to literature, since modern literature too is senseless, too difficult, and only pre-modern fiction and poetry are real, "normal" works of literature.

The April 23 issue of the Times Literary Supplement offers a version of this debate, as David Pitt, a philosopher at Cal State-Long Beach, reviews two books by the music critic Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding, and Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Kivy is the anti-modernist, arguing, in Pitt's words, that "the emotions we ascribe to music are properties of the music, not the listener." Music doesn't evoke an emotional response, it embodies emotion in its very nature. Thus, any music that doesn't manifest a recognizable emotion (by implication at least, all of "dissonant" modernist music) couldn't be music.

This is a fairly transparent way of rejecting experimental music--just as many others reject experimental fiction or poetry because it's also "dissonant"--and Pitt does a good job of diagnosing its flaws. In responding to Kivy's claim that "when we characterize music as yearning, or angry, joyous or melancholy, we. . . are not saying. . .that the music makes us yearn, or be angry, joyous, or melancholy, but that it is those things," Pitt quite rightly points out that "Taken literally,. . .this would be absurd. A piece of music is not a sentient being, and cannot itself be in an emotional state." But arguments about music of the sort Kivy advances are intended to be taken literally, since if we settle for the listener's experience of various emotions (or anything else you'd care to call them), an irretrievable element of subjectivity is being granted, the kind of subjectivity that makes "modern" atonal music possible in the first place. It's all in the ear of the listener.

What really interests me most about Pitt's account of Kivy's books, however, is the additional discussion of what Kivy calls the "problem" of opera. According to Pitt:

. . .at one point Kivy claims that the crux of the problem of opera (and all music with text) is that music is essentially a repetitive art form, while literature is not. Musical form is determined by musical repetition, whereas literature (especially narrative fiction) is ongoing, unidirectional, and non-cyclical. There is thus a deep incommensurability between them, and, hence, the problem of opera is insoluble.

Kivy must have "narrative fiction" in mind (although the real analogy would seem to be with drama), since poetry is of course full of repetition. Nevertheless, Pitt convincingly observes that the "repetition" involved in music "does not have to be literal" since "[in] the freely atonal piano pieces of Berg and Webern, for example, coherence and structure are achieved without literal repetition of whole sections. These works. . .have structure and coherence, though the musical relations that determine them are rarely on the surface of the music and almost never involve literal repetition."

Pitt also questions Kivy's assertion about literature, but not nearly as strenuously as he could. To what extent is it true that literature, even granting the narrowing of the term to fiction, is "ongoing, unidirectional, and non-cyclical"? Surely everyone can think of reputable works of literature that are either discontinuous, omnidirectional, or entirely cyclical, if not all three at the same time. Finnegans Wake? To the Lighthouse? Naked Lunch? V? Of course, these are all experimental, dissonant books, and the point of describing literature in the way Kivy appears to be doing it (at least according to Pitt) could well be to exclude such books from the category of "literature," just as Berg and Webern are excluded from the category of "music."

Moreover, why couldn't "repetition" be as valid a structuring device in fiction as it is in music? Pitt observes that "[c]ompletely non-repetitive music would be incoherent. If no musical event in a work bore any relation whatever of similarity or sameness to any other event, the work would not make any sense." He further observes that the same thing must be true of fiction. I would only add that to the extent any work of literature is literally a composed and arranged text of written language, it is quite like music.

Really the terms "ongoing, unidirectional, and non-cyclical" are a way of reducing literature to the element of "story." Literature, or at least fiction, is story. Which brings me to my real subject, although I will leave it with a series of questions, questions I pose in all sincerity, even if the reader probably knows how I would answer them. Must fiction's core identity ultimately be understood in terms of story, however much other elements are also emphasized? In an era when the need for story seems to be quite well met by films and television, should fiction writers also be pigeonholed as storytellers? Couldn't they simply be considered "writers," some of whom tell stories to meet particular artistic goals, others of whom essentially discard narrative, taking fiction closer to the model of lyric poetry--without quite crossing the line? Couldn't fiction do without "story" altogether?

Teaching Literature

Terry Eagleton now appears to find the state of literary study to be as dreadful as he claims the late Edward Said found it to be. Given that both Eagleton and Said played major roles in bringing academic criticism to the dire straits in which it now has trouble maneuvering, it is on the one hand difficult to have much sympathy with Eagleton's own current displeasure. However, one might on the other hand see the later frustration of both Eagleton and Said as a welcome sign they had come to see their own contributions to the politicization of literary study to be a terrible mistake.

Yet, that Eagleton finally doesn't really get it is revealed to me, at least, in this seemingly innocuous comment about Said: "Said's concern was justice, not identity. He was more interested in emancipating the dispossessed than in celebrating the body or floating the signifier. As a major architect of modern cultural theory, he was profoundly out of sympathy with most of its cerebral convolutions, which he correctly saw as for the most part a symptom of political displacement and despair."

This is all well and good and, for that matter, I believe that Said (Eagleton as well) was indeed concerned with justice and with "emancipating the dispossessed." But why in the world would either of these men have thought that a good way of achieving these ends was to become literature professors in British and American universities? To the extent that both of them (Said more than Eagleton) actually took their concerns into the real world and acted on them in properly political ways, I admire them. To the extent they used their sinecures in academe to pollute literary study with political dogmatism, I find their actions pernicious in the extreme.

In championing Said's "humanism," Eagleton asserts that "What he is after. . .is what one might call a reconstructed or self-critical humanism--one that retains its belief in human value and in the great artistic works that embody it, but which has shed the elitism and exclusivism with which literary humanism is currently bound up. We would still read Dante and Proust, but we would also extend the very meaning of humanism in order to 'excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility.'" What I myself finally don't get about this project is why reading Dante and Proust would ultimately have anything to do with the desire to "excavate the silences," etc. What it does suggest is that it really is impossible to "teach" literature as an academic subject without in the end resorting to literature as a secondary means to "teach" something else entirely, whether it be humanism, postmodernism, gender studies, or all the other possible "approaches" one could take to not reading literature.

I would really not even have commented on Eagleton's brief essay-review if I hadn't also at about the same time read two very thoughtful and intelligent posts on academic weblogs dealing with the very subject of what's wrong with academic literary study. Erin O'Connor, who maintains the weblog Critical Mass, recently discussed her reasons for leaving her tenured position for a job teaching at an independent high school. Her reasons are all most honorable, and she should be commended for her decision. But this was the passage in her post that struck me as most revealing: "[Others who have made the same decision say] they are able to do the sort of intensive, personalized teaching they dreamed of doing as college teachers, but could not do in a higher ed setting; all say they feel more intellectually alive than they did in academe; and all say, too, that they have a much greater sense of purpose and of professional satisfaction than they did in academe. They are palpably happy, and the differences they are making in kids' lives are real and meaningful."

Even those academic scholars who don't have an allegiance to a particular agenda probably feel as O'Connor does about what their job is really all about. It's about making a difference in "kids' lives," about (ideally) "intensive, personalized teaching." I certainly wouldn't say I have an objection to any of this, but for O'Connor teaching literature is first about the teaching, not about the literature.

In an equally sensible reply to O'Connor, Tim Burke, in attempting to formulate solutions to the problems from which O'Connor is fleeing, writes that "Graduate pedagogy needs to shift its emphases dramatically to meaningfully prepare candidates for the actual jobs they ought to be doing as professors, to getting doctoral students into the classroom earlier and more effectively, to learning how to communicate with multiple publics, to thinking more widely about disciplines and research."

Again, this proposal is all about making academe a more congenial place for the teacher, and again I don't object to it per se, but I do note that neither in O'Connor's nor Burke's post, nor in Eagleton's essay, is there much consideration of the role literature itself plays in literary study. This disjunction seems to be so commonplace, so much taken for granted by "literary" academics, that it makes the academy seem an even more disembodied, insular place than it actually is. (And it truly is disembodied and insular.)

I don't have a proposal of my own for changing the situation. The prerogatives of academic life are always going to take precedence over a mere interest in or concern with the intricacies of literature. Teaching literature is not the same thing as writing it or even reading it. It may even not require that the teacher actually like or respect it. All of which suggests, perhaps, that literature would be better off if the teachers stayed away from it. At the moment, it certainly isn't benefiting from their ministrations.

Disillusioned

I rarely disagree with the Literary Saloon, but in this case I think I do. I am, in fact, somewhat startled that the Saloon would so readily concede to the assumptions of the "book-buying world," the very assumptions it normally dissects quite trenchantly, but that it appears to accept in this post.

I'm as little "in the know" about publishing practices as the Saloon confesses itself to be, except that I do know what mainstream publishing actually makes available to readers, and what it does offer, what it pines to offer even more reliably, is for the most part utter, 100% pure, laboratory-tested garbage. Agents play their duly-appointed part in this farcical process, although the agent subjected to the Saloon's criticism in this current post seems somewhat more conscientious about his own contribution to the "book industry," which is why I find the post rather curious.

This agent, Andrew Wylie, is particularly ridiculed for saying of Grace Metalious, the author of Peyton Place, that " Her name is now barely known. She wrote a book called Peyton Place, which is badly written, out of style, out of date, out of print, valueless. Her publisher has disappeared. The publishers of Calvino, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner abide. Who made the better investment?" The Saloon takes Wylie to task for the misstated "facts" here, noting that the book is still in print, her name still known, at least as the author of this book, etc. It even provides Amazon ranking numbers to show that Peyton Place still outsells Faulkner's The Town and Calvino's The Baron in the Trees (both from roughly the same era).

We'll put aside the fact that less than fifty years have passed since the publication of PP, not nearly enough time to measure success in the literary "long term." We'll also just mention that sales of Peyton Place have long been propped up by the existence of the movie adapted from it (and its sequel), as well as the television show. Finally, we'll not dwell either on the fact that no other book by Metalious will ever again be read by anyone, while the body of work by both Faulkner and Calvino (especially Faulkner) surely reaches greatly more readers than Peyton Place, and in the true long term will only outdistance Metalious by even greater numbers.

What surprises me most about the Literary Saloon's ruminations on this subject, however, is this disturbing claim: "Yes, we like Calvino's The Baron in the Trees better than Peyton Place, and think it's far superior, but even we would recommend a publisher publish (or re-publish) the Metalious-title before they tackle the Calvino. There's no contest: printing Peyton Place was -- and probably still is -- like printing money."

So even the Literary Saloon accepts the proposition that finally book publishing is all about the opportunity to "print money"? Perhaps this only ratifies the judgment that I am completely out of sync with the publishing times, am so marginal in my view about this that I can be safely disregarded, but frankly the last thing I would ever do is advice someone to publish the likes of Peyton Place, especially if Calvino could get published instead. To favor Metalious over Calvino is so alien to me I can't understand why serious people could even consider it, her potential as cash flow notwithstanding. It is tantamount to admitting that finally publishing books is just a species of commerce, and that literature only gets in the way.

I am by no means an ideological anti-capitalist. Capitalism is good for many things, but some endeavors ought not be cut to fit capitalism's trim. Health care is one of these. In my opinion book publishing is another. I understand that books like Peyton Place keep the "book industry" afloat, but that in itself is a profoundly sad commentary, and eventually this practice isn't going to work anymore. When the ability to read is finally so coarsened that even Peyton Place is too much for the "general" reader, the "book industry" will of course collapse. Book publishers might instead (but won't) concentrate now, before it's too late, on cultivating those readers who still take books and reading seriously. These are the readers who will continue to read Falukner and Calvino in the long run, and eventually might be the only readers left for new fiction at all. If Andrew Wylie wants to try and cater to these readers, please let him.

Bellowing

I dislike the fiction of Saul Bellow. I offer no apologies or excuses for this. I simply do. I've written an essay expanding upon my reasons for disesteeming Bellow's work (Northwest Review, Vol. 41, No. 1), so I won't recapitulate those reasons here. I bring the subject up now only becasue of J.M. Coetzee's review of Bellow's first three novels, now republished by the Library of America, in the New York Review of Books.

Coetzee's review begins as if it will be just another of the hagiographic treatments Bellow has received over the last several years--"Among American novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century, Saul Bellow stands out as one of the giants, perhaps the giant"--but his appraisal of these three books is rather more tepid. He prefers The Victim, and I guess I would agree with that assessment although I myself find it only mildly interesting, yet even here Coetzee concludes that Bellow "has not made Leventhal [the protagonist] enough of an intellectual heavyweight to dispute adequately with [the antagonist] Allbee (and with Dostoevsky behind him) the universality of the Christian model of the call to repentance."

Coetzee is correct to find Dostevsky "behind" The Victim, as well as most of Bellow's other novels. Bellow takes from Dostevsky a conception of the fiction of "ideas," and if anything makes those ideas even less interesting and more intrusive than they are in Dostevsky's novels. There's lots of anguish and philosophizing and gesturing after profundity in Bellow, and mostly (not completey) I find it all very tiresome. Other readers, of course, are free to disagree. (Obvioulsy most other readers do.)

The most revealing part of Coetzee's review, however, is his distinctly unenthusiastic estimation of The Adventures of Augie March. This is his ultimate judgment of the book:

Once it becomes clear that its hero is to lead a charmed life, Augie March begins to pay for its lack of dramatic structure and indeed of intellectual organization. The book becomes steadily less engaging as it proceeds. The scene-by-scene method of composition, each scene beginning with a tour de force of vivid word painting, begins to seem mechanical. The many pages devoted to Augie's adventures in Mexico, occupied in a harebrained scheme to train an eagle to catch iguanas, add up to precious little, despite the resources of writing lavished on them. And Augie's principal wartime escapade, torpedoed, trapped with a mad scientist in a lifeboat off the African coast, is simply comic-book stuff.

What Coetzee doesn't come right out and say is that Augie March is basically unreadable. I labored through it many years ago, but more recently I tried to re-read it and made it only halfway through. Coetzee thinks its the unearned "exuberance" of the style that bogs the novel down, but I think it's just badly written and terribly paced. The Adventures of Augie March in many ways marks the beginning of the cult of Bellow, and if now a writer as well-respected as Coetzee is willing to say it's not so good, the future of Bellow's reputation could prove to be in some doubt.

Coetzee thinks that Herzog is Bellow's most successful book (at least it's what he implies), and I would also agree with this judgment. Herzog is the sole Bellow novel that I, at any rate, would call a superior work of fiction--although even here the book is marred by Bellow's typically unpleasant portrayal of women. Form and subject mesh together seamlessly, and Bellow's style (which again I mostly find annoying) conveys both in an aesthetically satisfying way. It's finally the only Bellow novel I would gladly recommend to others as a book worth reading.

After Herzog, in my view only parts of Mr. Sammler's Planet, most of Humboldt's Gift, and a few short stories are any good at all. Everything else represents a calamitous falling-off in quality. Has anybody tried to read The Dean's December? Don't bother. At best these books represent a chronicle of Bellow's personal peeves and petty squabbles. They provide a distinctly disagreeable reading experience.

The only reference in Coetzee's review to Bellow's "greatness" is in that first sentence I've quoted. I'd like to think that even this statement is Coetzee's way of describing the current state of Bellow's reputation, but not necessarily his work as a whole. If a few of Bellow's books were to survive as minor novels I wouldn't be saddened, as long as in the long run Bellow's fiction doesn't overshadow the work of his much more accomplished colleagues, including his fellow American Jewish writers Malamud and Roth. That one hundred years from now Bellow would be seen as the "giant" post-World War II American novelist is inconceivable to me. But perhaps I'm just missing something.

James Wood Responds

In fairness to James Wood, who has come in for a fair amount of criticism on this weblog, I reprint here an e-mail message he just recently sent to me. The subject is his Guardian essay on comedy in fiction.

Dear Mr Green,

You are of course entitled to whatever opinions you want about me. But you shouldn't graze on edited texts (the Guardian ran the introduction to my new book at half the length) and then invert my meaning. When I write that in the modern novel 'the reader is not to be overly helped by the author. We must find out for ourselves how much we know of a character, and we may find that what we know is that we do not know enough', and when I go on to write that 'this alternative picture comes closest to my notion of the modern novel's unreliability or irresponsibility, a state in which the reader may not always know why a character does something or may not know how to "read" a passage,' I am PRAISING precisely the uncertainty or 'irresponsibility' of this kind of comedy. The Guardian piece -- even in its edited form -- makes very clear that I promote THIS kind of comedy as distinctively modern, as the great creation of the modern novel. I distinguish this comedy from the kind of satire (the comedy of correction) which trades in KNOWABLE typologies (the miser, the hypocrite, the fool, etc). Yet you write that I 'dismiss' this comedy of irresponsibility of uncertainty. The opposite of the truth. You seem to be unaware that my forthcoming book is called 'The Irresponsible Self" -- this is a self I approve of! And though you accuse me of using religious language, the kind of modern comedy I praise is the comedy that I explicitly distinguish as SECULAR comedy (to distinguish it from the the more religious comedy of 'correction.)I know that bloggers do everything at breakneck speed -- the hermeneutics of multi-tasking -- but you should read people a bit less rapidly, and -- hey, what a notion! -- think before you write. No amount of Bakhtin will save the careless reader. Oh, and Green's Loving is a far greater book than, say, Brideshead Revisited, but no one reads Green.

best wishes
James Wood

To the extent I misrepresented Mr. Wood's views by relying on the Guardian's truncated version of his essay, I apologize. However, I do not think I missrepresented his relative dismissal of the "hysterical realism" (the kind of comedy Bakhtin describes) of Sterne, Pynchon, and Rushdie. Their kind of comedy is not what Mr. Wood has in mind in speaking of the "comedy of forgiveness." And I agree that Brideshead Revisited is not one of Waugh's best books. Readers should seek out instead A Handful of Dust or Vile Bodies. I don't agree that no one reads Henry Green.

F.O. Matthiessen

A while back, I offered a list of older works of literary criticism that I think are increasingly neglected but still have a great deal of value. I considered putting F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance on this list, but I had not read the book in quite a long time, and it was besides somewhat more narrowly focused on a particular period in American literary history--roughly the mid-nineteenth century--than I thought was appropriate for a list of "general" criticism.

I have now re-read the book (itself an act of supreme patience, since it contains over 650 densely-packed pages), and I would have to say I still would not include it on a list of critical books that non-academic readers might want to check out--at least not at first--but for reasons that have nothing to do with its quality. It is in fact, a book of great erudition and discernment, and is probably more responsible for the very concept of the "American Renaissance," and thus for the multitude of survey courses on this period that followed in the wake of the book's publication (1941) for at least the next fifty years than any other single work of literary criticism or scholarship. It may even be said to have provided the model for this kind of "periodization" in academic literary study in the first place.

Furthemore, the book clearly has played a large role in the way its five chosen writers--Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman--are understood by subsequent readers interested in the period. I think Matthiessen undervalues Emerson, overvalues Thoreau, and exaggerates the degree to which Hawthorne was simply trying to provide a more sober view of human nature than was implied in the transcendental assumptions of Emerson and Thoreau. However, I also think the chapters in American Renaissance on Melville and Whitman are just about the best things I've ever read about those two writers. At any rate, the overall picture that emerges from this book of the literary goals and accomplishments of each writer is probably the starting-point from which different pictures might ultimately be portrayed.

But ultimately its impressive learning and lengthy explications are, paradoxically perhaps, the very reasons I probably would not recommend the book to readers without an existing interest in these writers and this period or who would rather read the writers themselves than such an extended work of critical commentary. Matthiessen's approach is essentially historical (in the "undertheorized" way of scholars from this generation more interested in literary history than in "subverting" this history), although Matthiessen also states that his primary interest lies "with what these books were as works of art, with evaluating their fusions of form and content." In essence, he wants to understand what these writers thought they were doing, how each of them in turn influenced what the others were trying to do, to let them as much as possible speak for themselves through judicious analysis of selected texts and passages, ultimately to help readers understand why these were and are writers worth reading and taking seriously. What a concept!

However, this has become in so many ways such an alien concept that many readers of American Renaissance might think it quaint, even a little bizarre. Why would someone so obviously spend so much time reading Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman so thoroughly, so clearly attempt to think through the implications of why and what they wrote, so patiently take the reader through their essays, fictions, and poems and invite this reader to think further about it all him/herself? Where's the attitude, the jargon, the theoretical superstructure, the knowing superiority to the writers being examined? Matthiessen barely mentions Whitman's homosexuality (or Melville's suspected same-sex orientation), isn't much interested in gender (although is plenty interested in class), only touches on these writers' attitudes toward race, doesn't seem concerned to pivot his analysis in an appropriately progressive political direction, actually thinks the writers he discusses ought to be read on their own terms. In some cases, these omissions are indeed problematic (the omission of race particularly), but more to the point, the book's overall focus on those qualities in these writers that make them important writers in and of themselves just isn't done any more.

And American Renaissance is admittedly somewhat digressive, moving ahead or backward from one writer to the other seemingly in midstream, breaking off for a discussion of the painter Thomas Eakins before returning to the homologies between Eakins and Whitman, etc. Its very breadth of knowledge can be intimidating if not irritating--it isn't always clear why we need to know quite so much just to appreciate Hawthorne's stories or Leaves of Grass--and its footnotes frequently insert what just seems superfluous information. It's a book for readers of its five chosen writers who are already convinced of their centrality--at least it is for readers now--and who would like to know more about why they wrote what they wrote when they wrote it.

Which is finally why it probably wouldn't be of interest to those who wouldn't already describe themselves as readers of this sort. Anyone who really wants to know what the "American Renaissance" was all about and what these five writers contributed to it couldn't really claim to have this knowledge without reading F.O. Matthiessen, but I fear there aren't many people around anymore who want to know these things. Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe books like Matthiessen's were written according to a "scholarly" model that is ultimately inappropriate for the appreciation of literature. I sometimes think this myself. But I'm glad to have read American Renaissance (twice), and my subsequent readings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman will be richer and more informed because I did.

Politics Before Literature

Artforum alerts us to this bit of aesthetic wisdom from the editor of The American Spectator: "Outrage at obscene photos would be a little easier to take from liberal senators if they didn't have a history of financing them. Had Robert Mapplethorpe snapped the photos at Abu Ghraib, the Senate might have given him a government grant. Jesse Helms would certainly be surprised at the moral horror on display these days in the Senate. In 1989, he asked his fellow senators to stop funding degrading photography coming out of the National Endowment for the Arts. They refused. . . Who knows, perhaps the photos from Abu Ghraib will reappear as modern art at one of the museums the senators have patronized over the years. . .The Abu Ghraib scandal did not happen in a cultural vacuum. It is a reflection of the libertine pop culture the American left has long tried to impose on a military culture it considers too 'rigid'. . . ." And Rush Limbaugh apparently added: "You can see these pictures on American websites where they win awards. These kinds of pictures with these kinds of acts depicted. They win awards. They are considered progressive, they are considered enlightened. . . ."

All of this would be just too stupid for further comment, if it didn't conveniently reveal the utter bankruptcy of what has become the "conservative" philosophy of art. (Not among all conservatives, for sure. And the far left has its own problems in coming to terms with art as well.) On the one hand, when these conservatives look at the Mappelthorpe photographs, or any other kind of iconoclastic art, all they can see is a posed rearrangement of the "real"--the depravity and the obscenity of it all, whatever aesthetic effects the artist intended to create notwithstanding. On the other hand, when viewing the Abu Ghraib photos, all they can see is the posed rearrangement, the depravity and obscenity of what really happened notwithstanding. Apparently only when a photograph is an actual record of "degrading" acts can they manage to call attention to what they can then identify as the "art" in photography, "libertine" though it may be. Art becomes reality and reality art, each act of critical appraisal, of course, determined by the political ideolgy it ultimately is meant to buttress.

A less obvious, if no less telling, strategy for insinuating a conservative critique of the arts--in this case literature specifically--can be seen in Max Watman's omnibus review of recent fiction in The New Criterion. Watman makes no explicit political judgments about the fiction he reviews, relying instead on this initial remark in the form of a thesis:

I recently saw a man wearing a t-shirt that said “I bring nothing to the table.” These t-shirts should be handed out at the orientation session of every MFA program in the country. Not as a rebuke, but as celebration and encouragement. It is not always a new angle, or a new approach, or a new gimmick that your book needs. Don’t add something just for the sake of adding. That’s destructive. How about bringing nothing to the table? How about thinking inside the damn box every once in a while?

If this were simply an exhortation to take the form of fiction seriously, to avoid extraneous tricks or "gimmicks," I might agree with Watman. But I fear it's not. It's just another attack on attempts to experiment with fiction ("new angle," "new approach"), but in this case it's also an attempt literally to banish conceptual thinking from the writing of fiction. "Thinking inside the damn box" can only mean not thinking at all.

In the rest of the review, this translates to the criticism that The Confessions of Max Tivoli is too clever, The Dew Breaker too "exotic," Little Children too jokey. The current release Watman approves of most unambiguously is Stuart Dybek's I Sailed With Magellan. Presumably this is the book in which Watman finds the least "on the table." (I don't mean to criticize Dybek, rather the way in which Watman is using Dybek's book for the larger purposes of his review.) This is Watman's conclusion:

Dybek knows the rhythm of his streets and his voices. He can put them to use. His fiction is subtle, strikingly original, and brilliant. He never pushes too hard for effect, and he never lets you down.

These are elusive stories. One is not entirely sure what to think. These days, where authorial intention and opinion are so easy to spot, where writers hang little flags on the characters they use to make points, it is refreshing to see a writer so involved in the art. He is carefully, subtly putting together human emotions, not to make a point, not to disapprove or champion, not to comment, but to illustrate.

I haven't read Dybek's book, so those who have will have to decide whether these superlatives are deserved. (I'm perfectly willing to believe they are.) And if Watman means to discourage the use of fiction for polemical and political purposes, I'm with him. But I confess I don't really know what that last sentence means. How does one "subtly put together human emotions"? Doesn't a writer put together words? More importantly, what's the difference between putting these words together "to make a point" and doing so "to illustrate?" Something has to be illustrated, and it can't be just human emotions. A story full of emotions without shaping or intention or, indeed, hanging flags on the characters, is just emotional, not necessarily artistic. Subtlety is good, but it's not inherently superior in an aesthetic sense to other effects an author might want to create. Like any other strategy, it's the means to an end.

I must say I also find it somewhat strange that critics with conservative political leanings would embrace an approach to fiction (loosely, "urban realism") that has traditionally been used most often indeed to "make points," and in fact has been associated with left-leaning writers. (I've read other reviews in conservative publications where realism has been embraced in this way as well.) Have these critics come so strongly to detest the unconventional approaches associated with modernism/postmodernism that any fiction that seems content with traditional realism gets their support? As long it's not "degrading" or "obscene"?

Reading and Writing

I have previously written here about the "poet-critic," the creative writer of poetry or fiction who also takes literary criticism seriously enough to attempt it as well. As I said in that post, in some ways poets and fiction writers are in the best position to discuss what goes into the creation of works of literature in the first place, and a willingness among creative writers to also write serious literary criticism (including book reviews, but going beyond them as well) could only be welcome. (Even if it's Dale Peck.)

However, there has also undeniably always been an uneasy relationship between creative writing and literary criticism, sometimes verging on hostility, and I don't just mean the "snarkiness," as it's now called, that some creative writers justifiably resent vis-a-vis some book reviewers. At one extreme are poets and fiction writers (and some readers) who find criticism an unwanted imposition on works of creative writing, something that only impedes the direct appreciation of poetry or fiction on the part of their ideal readers. In some cases these writers (I've known a few) almost regard criticism as an affront to the practice of their art.

At the other extreme are critics who at least implicitly regard works of literature to be incomplete, untested, until criticism has been able to appropriately classify, dissect, and evaluate them. With some critics (I've known a few of these, as well), especially of the academic variety, works of literature are finally only "cases," grist for the critical and scholarly mills. Academic criticism ultimately became so suffused with this attitude toward literature that now there's barely any pretense to an interest in literature itself. It's finally just a convenient starting-point for advancing other agendas.

Most readers probably are, of course, somewhere between these two extremes in their attitudes toward the proper relationship between literature and literary criticism. Most would likely welcome constructive critical consideration of poetry and fiction, as long as such criticism seemed to acknowledge that ultimately it is the means to greater understanding and appreciation of literature, both in regard to individual books and poems and to a broader perspective about the nature and goals of literature. In my opinion, writers and critics, as well as those who simply consider themselves interested readers, ultimately spring from the same source: a rapt, transforming act of reading. The critic emerges from this experience saying "I want to know how this thing (poem, story, novel) works"; the writer emerges saying "I want to do something like that." What the critic and writer subsequently go on to pursue is divergent from this initial experience, but ideally both can be traced back to the common source.

Perhaps the very abandonment of real literary criticism by academic critics represents an opportunity to rediscover this common source. I've noticed lately that many literary weblogs are indeed trying out more ambitious ways of engaging with current books and writing--longer reviews, shorter but pithier reviews, well-conducted interviews with authors (Robert Birnbaum obviously, but Mark Sarvas's interview with Andrew Sean Greer could also serve as a model of the form), extended commentary of various sorts--but reattaching criticism to literature needn't take place only in blogs. Other kinds of online or print forums in which writing and the engaged appraisal and appreciation of writing were both encouraged would be most apropos. Certainly criticism can't exist at all without a flourishing literary culture of poets and fiction writers. But in the long run I'm not sure that serious poetry and fiction can themselves survive--at least in a wholly healthy form--without interested readers willing to convert their interest into intelligent criticism.

Style as Moral Failure

The Mumpsimus points me to an essay on Angela Carter in which Carter is quoted as saying "I've got nothing against realism. . .[b]ut there is realism and realism. I mean, the questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality. I would like, I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS, but I, I haven't. I've done other things. I mean, I'm an arty person, ok, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose - so fucking what?"

The defensiveness with which Carter speaks here is well-justified. Not only was she accused of being un-British in her choice of subjects and her prose style, but writers like Carter, who willingly employ an "overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose" are frequently treated not like they are in some way bad writers but are actually bad people. I am frequently amazed at the vehemence with which some reviewers and readers react against stories or novels that are unconventional or stylistically "excessive." The authors of such works are regarded as deviant, hostile to "ordinary" readers, just plain contemptuous of good order in matters of storytelling and style. (Even a writer as conventional as John Updike is sometimes attacked for these sins.) And woe indeed to the writer who, like Carter, combines an extra-realistic approach and a "purple" prose.

An essay in the current issue of Raritan (Spring 2004) reprises these once-infamous remarks by Philip Roth:

. . .I set myself the goal of becoming the writer some Jewish critics had been telling me I was all along: irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious. . .A quotation from Melville began to intrigue me, from a letter he had sent to Hawthorne upon completing Moby Dick. . ."I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as a lamb." Now I knew that no matter hard I tried I could never really hope to be wicked; but perhaps if I worked long and hard and diligently, I could be frivolous.

And indeed from Portnoy's Complaint on, Roth produced numerous books that were "frivolous" in comparison to his earlier work, that went beyond the bounds of decorum in structure and good taste in style, that were "excessive" in many, many ways, but . . .so fucking what? They are also books that will continue to stand as among the best American novels written in the latter part of the twentieth century. They are all clearly the consequence of "hard and long and diligent" work, and in their very excesses and frivolity are as serious as anything written by more obviously earnest writers of the time, including Roth's colleague Saul Bellow.

Yet there are still readers who can only see the frivolity--that is the comedy, as savage as it can sometimes become--and the excesses--Roth's frequently freewheeling style--and who regard books like Sabbath's Theater and Operation Shylock as fundamentally not serious, as irresponsible treatments of subjects that ought to be treated in a grim and sober way. They welcomed, on the other hand, American Pastoral, because it seemed closer to this more earnest approach. (I like American Pastoral as well, but not for this reason.) I think Roth would probably agree with Carter in every particular of her statement, and both of these writers could serve as models of the sort of writer willing to endure the charges that their writing is an example of moral failure, as long as they were ultimately seen, rightly, as aesthetic triumphs.

Whenever I hear or read someone urging writers to be "clear," to "communicate," to avoid "trickery," I can only take it as an exhortation to be good. Not to offend official sensibilities or imply that many readers are too timid in their willingness to take risks. In the name of literary decency not to engage in "too much writing." Perhaps in the long run these stylistic gatekeepers can be persuaded that literary form and style have nothing to do with morality, but most of them probably don't really much like literature, anyway, if "literature" is more than just an opportunity to assert your own virtue.