thereadingexperience

So Much Noise

Roxanne Gay recently agonized over the profusion of literary magazines available to too few readers:

One of the primary challenges with getting people to buy magazines is that there are too many. It’s not that magazines aren’t doing great work or that editors aren’t marketing their product well or that they haven’t found the right price point or whatever magical solution we’re all desperately searching for. People want to read the exciting work in Magazines A, B, C, D, E, F, and G through Z but it’s not financially feasible to subscribe to all those magazines and there’s so much noise that it’s hard to find a way of saying that Magazine P is worth buying over Magazine V. . . .

The same problem exists with books, something that the closing of Borders only reinforces:

People milled about the store like buzzards feasting on a carrion and hey, I was there too, looking for bargains. . .As I looked around the store, even in it’s diminished capacity,  I thought, “This is too much.” How could anyone possibly know what to read in that store swollen with books, too many of them mediocre? How could any reading experience be meaningful amidst so many choices?

I certainly agree that "too many" of the books available in most bookstores--even the beloved "independent" stores-- are "mediocre," but I have to say I also think too many, probably even a majority, of the fiction published in literary magazines (A-Z) is mediocre as well. If there is a source of the feeling there are too many magazines publishing more fiction than anyone could possibly read, it is here, in the stuffing of literary magazines with stories few will read because they aren't really worth reading, are most likely being published because the authors need the credits to keep their creative writing teaching jobs, just as most of the magazines exist in the first place to bestow such credits.

I realize this is a harsh assessment, but it seems to me that anyone truly interested in addressing the oversupply problem Roxanne Gay has honestly described needs first of all to acknowledge my assessment isn't completely inaccurate. There is sometimes "exciting work" to be found in many literary magazines--and not just the most well-known--but the real problem is being able to keep track of that exciting work in the midst of so much that is just perfunctory. Literary magazines have historically played an important role in maintaining the vitality of American fiction and poetry, and they need to continue playing that role. However, for that to happen their mission must first of all be to provide a place for the publication of potentially significant additions to literature, not of routine, indifferent work by instructors wanting tenure or aspiring "authors" whose fondest wish is to "be published" rather than to write interesting poetry and fiction.

Gay wonders whether the underlying problem is that "everyone wants to be an editor." Starting up a new magazine and publishing worthy writers seems a noble calling, never mind the difficulties of actually getting your magazine into the hands (or on the screens) of actual readers, and so there is a lot of starting-up and not enough following-through.

Another magazine where the editors don’t know how they’re going to fund each print issue? Are these magazines, multiplying exponentially, really going to offer something we’ve never seen before? Is becoming an editor really that important?

I would suggest instead that editors and would-be editors are making a mistake by not including more literary criticism among the contents of their journals. A few magazines run a few book reviews in a given issue, but these reviews tend to be relatively brief, short on analysis and long on boosterism. It is understandable that reviewers in such a context would want to reinforce a sense of literary community, but finally that is precisely the biggest problem: Literary magazines may be the only remaining site of what could be called a common literary culture, and one wants to encourage and cultivate that culture, but not at the expense of a frank estimation of practices and achievements. The current situation, in which academics no longer engage in "mere" evaluation and appraisal, and in which newspaper and magazine reviewing is becoming more and more cursory when it isn't simply disappearing, in my opinion no longer makes it acceptable for literary magazines to blunt a necessary critical edge.

It seems to me that literary culture is just as likely to wither away through the neglect of impartial, substantive criticism as it is through the oversupply (or undersupply) of literary magazines per se. Without it, literary works just get folded into the "entertainment culture," and since poetry and serious fiction cannot hope to compete with most of the other choices offered by this culture, it is permanently marginalized, without even the lingering respect conferred by tradition. Without conscientious criticism, which goes beyond making superficial judgments of value and attempts to explain, describe, interpret, works of literature disappear into the undifferentiated mass at which Roxanne Gay despairs.

Why couldn't literary magazines include such criticism as part of their effort to maintain a literary culture? Surely one or two substantial book reviews and/or an essay on a contemporary writer or work wouldn't deprive many deserving stories or poems of their space. Such criticism might even make that space seem more valuable. Perhaps an especially intrepid editor might invite a critical examination of one or more of the "creative" contributions in the present, or a past, issue. Beyond helping readers make specific decisions about what to read and appropriate discriminations in what they have read, critical contributions like this might help readers understand why what they read is important, why continuing to publish and read literary magazines is important. They might help to reduce the noise.

 

Empathy Will Be Received

To an extent, it's a little surprising that Elisabeth Sheffield's Fort Da (FC2) has not received more attention. It is, after all, in part a fairly sensational story about what we now call a "sexual predator," in this case a reversal of Lolita in which the "offender" is a female scientist who becomes obsessed with an adolescent boy. Although to be sure the story is told (by the woman) in an unorthodox way, the narrative is explicit enough, and the representation of motive and psychology seems true enough, it would seem the novel might have caused a little bit of controversy, although the very fact the narrative is related through unorthodox means that to some extent distance us from the events portrayed and mute the potentially scandalous elements suggests that Sheffield certainly did not seek to court controversy.

What Sheffield seems to be after is a truthful account of the narrator's affliction (if that's what it is) and of her manner of coping with it. The narrator straightforwardly acknowledges her desire for Aslan, the adolescent boy, and painstakingly chronicles the events of their meeting, their eventually consummated relationship, and her final efforts to track him down when she is separated from him. But she is not quite able to tell us this story from a conventional first-person point of view, as if she can't finally bring herself to associate these events and her part in them with the "normal" self she still wants to preserve, as if she just can't acknowledge her own agency. Thus she adopts a cumbersomely "scientific" style emphasizing passive voice constructions. Addressing her "report" to her high school English teacher, Mrs, Wall, the narrator affirms 

A true story that will faithfully present yours truly, without distortion or bias. To this end, a detached style has been adopted, one that will hopefully facilitate accurate reportage. The intent of this style is to step outside Rosemarie Ramee in order to more accurately observe her (and not, Strunk and White forbid, to annoy you with passive verb forms, which it is well remembered were a source of contention in high school). Yes, and maybe if the observations are presented with great care, with the greatest possible degree of honesty and precision, in the end empathy will be received.

Readers will have to decide for themselves whether to send RR (as she frequently hereafter identifies herself) "empathy," but her tortured attempts to remain objective, attempts she maintains throughout the narrative with gradually diminishing success, are really both the aesthetic and the emotional focus of the novel.

Aesthetically the style seems an apt analogue of the narrator's state of mind--she can tell the story, but only if she is in a sense able to withdraw her own participation and attempt to view the events with a kind of clinical detachment. Paradoxically, this forced detachment only makes the reader more aware of RR's obsession in the effort to cloak it, and her emotional turmoil becomes only more visible. This does have a discomfiting effect on the reader: there is a fascination to witnessing the machinations to which RR is driven in order to tell the tale, while we also recognize her strategy is in effect an attempt to minimize her offense. At the same time, it is not at all clear that Aslan resists RRs advances, or that he has been harmed by them, although of course the long-term harm cannot be predicted and we cannot finally trust that RR's account is anything but self-serving. She indicates that she is addressing her "confession" to Mrs. Wall because of the latter's reputation for leading an unconventional lifestyle, suggesting she does hope her audience might extend her some sympathy.

If Fort Da could be said to be "experimental" (FC2 is one of the most prominent publishers of experimental fiction), it would have to be in this tonal discontinuity--how far can the reader extend his/her sympathy to such a character presenting herself in such a narrative voice relating a story about what today approaches being as taboo a subject as we have? While the "report" form is interesting enough, it is finally just another variation on the epistolary or diary forms first explored in novels like Pamela or Robinson Crusoe as the immediate context and justification for first-person narrative. The narrative itself is essentially linear, and though the narrator's language occasionally makes it necessary for the reader to check his/her bearings, it unfolds interrupted only by the by now rather familiar use of footnotes (although given the text's formal status as scientific "report," the footnotes don't seem out of place).

If RR, like Humbert Humbert, believes her desire for Aslan, like Humbert's for his "nymphet," is a genuine expression of love, she seems less comfortable than HH with this form of love. Although both Fort Da and Lolita could both be said to be comic novels, the comedy of Lolita is darker,arising from the audacity of HH's behavior. The humor of Fort Da arises from RR's own confusions and limited self-knowledge. This makes Fort Da a consistently compelling read--to call it entertaining would seem impertinent--but whether it has something to "say" about, for example, the nature of female desire vs male desire, or about the origins of sexual behavior in psychological trauma (RR herself appears to believe she may be reacting to the early death of her brother) is perhaps for the reader to determine, depending on whether one considers it important that a novel treading on sensitive ground should redeem itself by making a "serious" point about the subject. In my opinion, the greatness of Lolita consists, in part, in its refusal to countenance communicating such a point. By raising "issues" related to pedophilia, Fort Da suggests it wants to address those issues and thus doesn't really show quite the aesthetic courage we find in Nabokov's novel.

 

Join Google+

If any readers of this blog would like to join Google+ (where I have an account), just click this.

On Gass

Big Other just posted a "birthday" tribute to William Gass that included an essay by me on Gass the critic. I am reposting that piece here.

Looked at Importantly

William Gass has often been praised as an essayist (perhaps more often than as a fiction writer), but for the most part Gass's essays are more appropriately regarded as literary criticism. As a critic, however, Gass is generally not concerned with making and justifying judgments about the superior and inferior in works of literature (although judgment is always implicit) but with carefully, and, in his singular, luminous style, insightfully explicating those features of the texts and authors he admires that will help other readers share his admiration. At other times his essays are essentially exercises in aesthetics, although the aesthetic explorations are always grounded in specific practices or specific writers. Few literary critics are able to combine deep erudition, critical discernment, and a keen aesthetic sensibility as does Gass, and few offer readers such an opportunity to enlarge their own understanding of and sensitivity to expressions of literary art.

To a degree, Gass's criticism seems an extension of his work as a fiction writer, a critical elaboration of the assumptions underlying it and the methods animating it. But Gass's critical impulses are too generous and his focus too thoroughly on the dynamics of literary creation in general for his essays to be taken as a collective apology for his own style-centered, formally audacious fiction--although certainly it does provide critical support for that sort of aesthetically challenging writing, both in fiction and in poetry. Moreover, it is also the case that in Gass's reading, "aesthetically challenging" is more or less identical with the "aesthetic" per se, so that in describing and delighting in the writers who are the subjects of many of the essays, and in contemplating the devices and strategies available to the literary artist, Gass has been engaged in a lifelong project of alerting us to the presence of aesthetic beauty, however "difficult" or unconventional. He is one of those critics, in fact, who has endeavored to keep the very notion of aesthetic beauty alive at a time when it is often viewed with skepticism as "snobbery" or "elitism."

 Gass is not a snob, although he may be an elitist, but only in the sense, as he puts it in "The Test of Time," that he belongs to the "unorganized few. . .who sincerely love the arts." He--and those of us who would like to be there with him--does not declare allegiance to this group because the arts make us better people or superior people or more refined people but because what they provide is good in itself: "There are those for whom reading, for example, can be an act of love, and lead to a revelation, not of truth, moral or otherwise, but of lucidity, order, rightness of relation, the experience of a world fully felt and furnished." If great works of art and literature "teach" us anything, they teach us "immersion." For Gass, "they teach me that the trivial is as important as the important when looked at importantly."

"The arts" in their individual forms thus are worthy of attention when they can be "looked at importantly" through an immersion in their well-wrought particulars. In "The Test of Time," Gass focuses on two writers, seemingly very different kinds of writers, but who both nevertheless enlarge our perceptions through their renderings with words. In Walden, Thoreau perpetually brings the pond and his experiences there to life:

. . .we, as readers, are not brought to Walden Pond in some poetic time machine. We experience Walden as it passed through Thoreau's head, his whole heart there for us to pass through, too, his wide bright eyes the better to see with, the patient putting together of his prose to appreciate. Of the pond, the trees, the pain, the poet may retain--the poet may retain-through the indelibilities of his medium--moments which, in reality, went as swiftly as a whistle away; but he will also give them what was never there in the first place: much afterthought, correction, suggestion, verbal movement, emotion, meaning, music. . . .

Hopkins would seem to be the more obviously suited to Gass's aesthetic ideal rooted in detail and sensuous sound, and indeed he is valued for these qualities, even as they failed to satisfy Hopkins himself: In poetically brooding over whether there is a way "to keep back beauty. . .from vanishing away," Hopkins, writes Gass, "said it was 'yonder," in effect, up high in the air, as 'high as that,' when all the while he knew where it was: it was there under his forming fingers; it was in his writing, where the real god, the god he could not avow--dared not worship--worked, wrote, writing his rhetorical regrets, putting his question so perfectly the proof was in the putting." In Hopkins's poetry

They, those things, the terrible sonnets, every one, were composed, brought by Hopkins into being, not when he was down in the dumps, not while he was Hopkins, but when he was a Poet, truly on top of the world, the muse his mother; and the poems supplant their cause, are sturdier than trees, and will strip the teeth of any saw that tries to down them.

Both Thoreau and Hopkins in their own ways contest the passing of time by summoning, through the strength of their writing, a kind of eternal present,  invoking the "rule that reads: never enter time, and you will never be required to exit." Gass assures us that

It was lovely to be on Walden Pond at midnight, fluting the fish, but lovelier and more lasting in the verbal than in the fishing lines. It is painful to lose faith even for a moment or see a row of crudely hewn trunks where your favorite rustic scene once was, but mutilation's sorrow is inspiring in the reading, although we realize the poem does not soften the blows felt by the trees.

"The Test of Time," first given as a Woodrow Wilson Lecture, is perhaps a kind of summary statement of Gass's aesthetic philosophy, but it is very much the philosophy that informs Gass's criticism taken as a whole. He is among those few critics who have persisted in defending the aesthetic integrity of literature in an era when literary criticism has increasingly come to regard the aesthetic as an embarrassing frill or an outright impediment to the enlistment of literature in various ideological agendas or in a program of social or moral improvement. Although Gass is a very different kind of critic than Harold Bloom, who is more interested in the psychoanalytic origins of works of literature than in their immediate aesthetic effects, Gass nevertheless shares with Bloom, if not a belief in "literature as a way of life," as Bloom puts it in his most recent book, then certainly a commitment to it as a supreme human achievement and experience. And while Gass perhaps does not quite pursue "an erotics of art," as Susan Sontag once called for, his appreciation of both prose and poetry usually emphasizes the pleasure of attentive reading receptive to the sensual qualities of language and the dynamism of the imagination at its most engaged.

Perhaps Gass occupies as a critic a space somewhere between the aesthetic purity of Sontag's notion and the explorations in poetic genealogy performed by Bloom. He doesn't assume that works of literary art will be harmed by efforts to "interpret," as long as such interpretation does justice to the aesthetic integrity of literary art, but his own efforts are focused more on the tangible properties of texts than are Bloom's considerations of the deeper sources of literary creation.

Although Gass's essays are ultimately too voluminous, varied, and too occupied with identifying the value of other works and writers to be regarded as a critical justification of his own fiction, they nevertheless do help us to gain perspective on Gass's fiction, in which he too asks readers to "immerse" themselves in description and detail as revealed through the rhythms of his prose and the vigor of his language. Combining an intensity of style and a preoccupation with form, his fiction always impresses on the reader's attention its arrangements and figurations of language, as Gass's own effort to refuse to "enter Time." In this way the essays perhaps form a mutually reinforcing complement to the fiction, the one adeptly practicing what the others eloquently preach

Tangibility of the Word, Part II

Continued from a previous post.

In a way Silliman makes the task of reading a poem like "Blue" easier by framing it as a narrative, although obliquely so:

The Marchioness went out at five o'clock. The sky was blue yet tinged with pink over the white spires which broke up the east horizon. The smell of the afternoon's brief shower was still evident and small pools of clear water collected in the tilt of the gutters, leaves and tiny curling scraps of paper drifting in the miniature tides which nonetheless caught and reflected the swollen sun, giving the boulevard its jeweled expression.

The first line is an allusion to Paul Valery's asservation that he could never write novels because he would be compelled to write sentences like this one. The rest of the paragraph humorously completes the first paragraph of Valery's unwritten novel, while also establishing "Blue" as a narrative of sorts without explicitly identifying it as a first-person narrative related by the speaker. In effect, this first paragraph invites us to consider the poem unified through a loose narrative structure (completed by the final paragraph, in which the Marchioness arrives at her destination), and thus perhaps the poem can be read as an account of a walk through the Lower East Side, as Silliman's note informs us, but we should not expect it to tell us its story through hypotaxis or outright signs of narrative development.

In fact we are free to make connections among sentences in a way that arguably enhances the narrative beyond literal events and perceptions:

If challenged, its first response is to spit. This took place at the museum. Wires slope from the pole to the house, where they gather, entering a narrow pipe along its side. This conveys motion. I am writing in shadows. Don't you worry about accessibility too?

The first line of this paragraph is perhaps a direct reference to a cat or some other animal encountered on the walk, perhaps just a general reference to such an animal. "This" tempts us to link back to the spitting animal, but of course such an encounter would not take place in a museum. Or would it? Line three seems to bring us back to the walk, a sentence of pure description, but the setting of course contrasts greatly with the (memory of?) the museum, although the contrast may be exactly what Silliman is after. (Still, what the poet is after in a poem like this both can't really be determined and is probably irrelevant--if making  "purpose" clear was a priority, the "new sentence" approach would be self-defeating, to say the least.) "This conveys motion" might in this instance actually refer to the wires, but our previous encounter with the demonstrative pronoun suggests caution in making the connection. The last two lines apparently bring us out of the immediate scene of the walk into the scene of the composition of the poem (something Silliman does frequently in many of his poems). What are "the shadows" in which the poet writes? Literally the shadows forming the environment in which the poet was writing this line? (Probably.) The figurative shadows cast by the environment of the Lower East Side as the poet composes his poem? (Possibly as well.) To whom is the question in the final line asked? Another poet? Silliman, by another poet? The reader? All three are plausible, and a different layer of connotation is added depending on which auditor you choose and what answer to the posed question they give.

While the kinds of sequential paragraphs featured in "Blue" or the following poem, "Carbon," are more or less the central device of Silliman's poetics, there is variety of form in The Alphabet. "Demo" is essentially a sequence of single sentences (or combinations of clauses punctuated as a sentence), "Force" seems structured as a medium-length verse poem (although with an occasional paragraph embedded therein), but the lines unfold in recognizable new sentences, part of "Jones" is composed in what seem like quatrains, "Ketjak2: Caravan of Affect" is one 84-page paragraph, etc. "Non" employs stanzas of various lengths, "Quindecagon" is a series of 15-line stanzas the final words of each of which are repeated throughout the poem (in different orders, end of first line in one stanza going to the bottom in the next), somewhat in the mode of a sestina, while Silliman himself calls "VOG" a "collection of "ordinary" poems."

In other words, the reader will find a great deal of manipulation of form in The Alphabet, even if the result is "form" of a type not really found before. As also revealed in the Notes, form in many of the poems is derived from Oulipo-like restraints, especially mathematical, as in "Lit," in which "every section is predicated on the number 12," or in Silliman's use of the Fibonacci series, which structured Silliman's previous "Tjanting" and which in The Alphabet appears in modified version in "Ink," "Lit," and "Oz." However much Silliman at some level was motivated as a poet by political beliefs about the commodification of language, his poems are a formalist's delight, at least if formalism is defined as an interest in the malleability of form, and the extent to which Silliman's work, as exemplified in The Alphabet, attracts future readers unschooled in the origins of Language Poetry will greatly depend, it seems to me, on the interest its considerable formal achievements continues to provoke and ultimately to satisfy.

Although the formal experiments of Silliman's poetry are their most conspicuous aesthetic attribute, they also offer other, more immediate rewards. While many of the sentences are ordinary declaratives and descriptions, some are quite striking in themselves: "A shift not in light, but to light, as day's first illumination floods the room so that colors exist, however muted. . .Mockingbird gargles a whole new song." If most of Silliman's paragraphs and stanzas work through disjunction and discontinuity, sometimes they have an evocative if obscure cohesion of their own:

Before dawn, a kitchen light casts its full glare out over the snow. Sense of panic in a dream. In the bank, a large woman hands me my money stapled together in an envelope. I'm pulling my children through the streets on a sled, waiting for the street lights to come on. I wave and realize I'm alone in my bed, then see her asleep wrapped in some blankets on the floor. "Brittany," he shouts when I ask him what breed his dogs are. More snow begins to fall. ("VOG")

Perhaps the most consistent pleasure the poems in The Alphabet provide is their humor, in particular Silliman's inveterate punning:

When in the course of cumin events. . .The unbearable whiteness of being. . .Thirteen ways of scratching at a blackboard. . .Note to the typesetter: you can't always get what you font. . .Rhyme and punishment. . . .

That each of these puns is taken from a poem, "Under," that contains some of the most obvious "political" discourse in The Alphabet (much of it is composed during and is a running commentary on the first Iraq war), and that they to a significant degree undercut the seriousness of this commentary, indicates to me Silliman's ultimate allegiance after all is to poetry, and to the verbal play that is its most fundamental characteristic, not to external political goals. Even if the "tangibility of the word" to be found in such puns, as well as other kinds of wordplay found in, for example,"Lit," does call attention to the "transparency" of ordinary discourse, that is because poetry (good poetry) always call attention to the inadequacies of ordinary discourse.

However imposing The Alphabet might at first seem to the casual reader, it is accessible given time and the alternative reading strategies I have mentioned. It could even be read sequentially, provided the reader can be tolerant of inevitable obscurities and confusions, which are best left for later when the alternative strategies don't apply. Eventually the poems teach the determined reader how to read them. Speaking for myself, I found the later poems much more satisfying for the effort, although I now recognize my appreciation of the earlier ones was incomplete. All the more reason to read them again.

Read as a single essay.

.pdf 

Elsewhere

A brief piece (by me) on Donald Barthelme's "Me and Miss Mandible."

Tangibility of the Word

The sheer bulk of Ron Silliman's The Alphabet, as well as its apparently arbitrary structural principle, could initially leave the impression it deliberately defies reading. The same could be said of the larger project, the "life work" in progress and of which The Alphabet is a part, that promises when complete to be gargantuan in size and scope. And to a significant extent Silliman does want readers to be intimidated before a work like The Alphabet, uncertain enough about how to proceed to abandon preconceptions about both books and poetry and willing to learn how to read differently.

I think readers who are so willing will ultimately find their fortitude and patience is rewarded, but one of the first lessons to be learned is that The Alphabet can't really be read discreetly as a book, a process we usually consider as self-enclosed and sequential, a task to be completed before moving on to the next book. Indeed, I found it better to read the poems separately, over a few days or even a few weeks (some of the poems are a few pages long, but most are 20 pages long or more, and one, "VOG" is over 100), and then perhaps putting the book aside for a while. Such a reading strategy acknowledges the occasional and highly fragmented nature of these poems, and even more time could be allowed to some of the poems--"Skies," for example, in which each section of the poem corresponds to the calendar day on which it was written over the course of a year. To really experience the full effect of the poem, we might duplicate the process, reading a section a day for a year.

Certainly the poet doesn't quite expect we will approach such a poem in this way, but The Alphabet in its very excess persistently challenges us to ask just why a poem shouldn't be read like that, or be written like this, or why a book can't be held together, to the extent that it is, by the fact that each of its poems corresponds to a letter of the alphabet, presented in, well, alphabetical order. Those already long familiar with Silliman's work, both through his poetry and his critical writing, will of course not find it surprising that this book poses these questions, although now that the individual poems included have finally been gathered to form the book, the latter does provide a new setting for and potentially a new experience of the poems. The challenge will be most acute for readers encountering Silliman's poetry for the first time or who have had only a casual acquaintance with it, but arguably The Alphabet could provide the most enlightening reading experience for precisely such readers.

Silliman's most significant contribution to the aesthetics of poetry, however, is to be found not at the global level of the book, but at the most fundamental level of the poem's existence as "verse." While the equation of "poetry" and "verse" was questioned prior to Silliman in the development of "prose poetry," Silliman has further undermined the association of "verse," whether free or metrical, with poetry as such in his focus on the "sentence" as the fundamental unit of poetry. While on the one hand Silliman substitute sentences for "lines" in his poems, the "sentence" is reconceived so that it no longer fulfills the function it is assigned in ordinary discourse. This allows it to remain an aesthetically plausible basis for "poetry," but it also forces the reader to read sentences in a new way, the failure to do so causing probably the most serious impediment to engaging with Silliman's work, finding it instead "difficult" or unsatisfying.

Silliman wants us to consider his sentences not as instances of "hypotaxis," the discursive process in which elements of the sentence, and sentences themselves, maintain a subordinate relationship as parts of a developing thought, the connected parts of a larger rhetorical whole, but as self-sufficient "parataxis," by which the sentence stands autonomously as a unit of sense, connected to previous and following sentences only by the thinnest, implicit "and." It is essentially Silliman's poetry, or perhaps most importantly, his critical writing about it and the work of other like-minded poets, that gave rise to the concept of "Language Poetry" to designate the practice among American poets of using parataxis to minimize connections among images and statements and calling attention to those images and statements, the sentences, as language, free of the obligation to cohere into transparent "meaning."

Silliman's initial formulation of the hypotaxis/parataxis distinction as applied to poetry was essentially part of a Marxist critique, by which poetry demonstrates that hypotaxis is a kind of capitalist conspiracy. "What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development," he writes in "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World," is "an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive, and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of 'realism,' the illusion of reality in capitalist thought." Since it seems to me that when language passes into any stage of development--through the development of "society" and "culture," however rudimentary--the "tangibility of the word" will be sacrificed for expository and descriptive power, to emphasize the culpability of capitalism is only to affirm you especially don't like its kind of anaesthesia.The argument that poetry is fundamentally an effort to counter the anesthesia of language in general is certainly credible enough, but Silliman's version simply subsumes poetry to a larger ideological project, however much it purports to "unmask" ideology.

Ultimately, however, much of what Silliman has to say in essays like "The New Sentence" can stand, lightened of its Marxist baggage, as a perfectly coherent defense of a "poetics" anchored in parataxis and organized around sentences and paragraphs replacing, for the most part, lines and stanzas. As I wrote in a prior post, "The New Sentence" in particular is "first of all a relatively straightforward and learned history of ideas about the sentence in both linguistics and literary criticism that demonstrates the potential of the sentence as an autonomous unit of language has not really been appreciated." Although Silliman makes exaggerated claims for both the revolutionary potential of the new sentence and the unprecedented nature of its appeal to language over sense, the kind of poetry Silliman's explication of it makes possible seems entirely plausible.

The Alphabet certainly confirms the plausibility of such a poetry, but in doing so it also illustrates that an artistic practice inspired by a non-artistic agenda can hold up as an artistic practice, especially over such an enormous canvas, only if it is aesthetically justified quite apart from whatever other motives brought it into being. The Alphabet does withstand aesthetic judgment, in my opinion--indeed, any reader could read any or all of this book with no knowledge of Silliman's ideological commitments and be able to appreciate his poems (or not) solely for their contribution to the "art" of poetry. It is admittedly not art of the musical, imagistic, or strongly figurative variety associated with what Silliman labels the "school of quietude" in poetry, but whatever long-term value The Alphabet will prove to have can only come not just from its status as part of Silliman's challenge to school of quietude poetics but as a successful collection of poems manifesting an alternative poetics that is no less aesthetically compelling.

That the first poem in the book, "Albany," is quite brief, a single arranged paragraph of hypotactic sentences, gives an uninitiated reader the opportunity to get an immediate purchase on Silliman's aesthetic strategy, an opportunity Silliman enhanced by the previous publication of Under Albany, in which he gives an account of the circumstances behind (under) the composition of the poem, line by line. Through Under Albany the reader can get a sense of what the poet believed himself to be doing and of how the poem emerges from actual experience after all, however much it might seem at first to be just a series of disconnected declarations. While this may seem an overly onerous way to begin a book, such a reading strategy not only makes it more likely the reader will continue with the other poems but begins to indicate the way in which reading The Alphabet will not be like the experience of reading a conventional book.

For readers who still find the dissociated density of "Albany" intimidating, moving on more quickly to the second poem, "Blue," might be productive. Still a reasonably short poem, "Blue" is structured as a series of short paragraphs which manifest Silliman's "new sentence" poetics but perhaps in more approachable portions:

Rust designs that old truck door. The number of objects is limited. Some leaves on the fern are more yellow. Sooner or later you will have to get up to change the record. That buzz is the dryer.

If we turn to the brief notes for each of the poems that Silliman provides at the back of The Alphabet, we learn that "Blue" was "occasioned by a long walk through the Lower East Side." From this paragraph we get one sentence, the first, that must surely be a detail from this walk, but the other sentences seem to have little, or at least very obscure, relationship to this initial detail. At least one, the last, seems to be in deliberate contrast to the details of the walk, as if a moment from the poet's own more comfortable life intrudes on the immediate, tawdry scene. Otherwise, the sentences might seem randomly arranged into a "paragraph" the exists mainly to store these seemingly discrete sentences.

Such a paragraph can stand as a model of what Silliman has in mind in the use of parataxis. The construction of the paragraphs, as well as the unfolding of the paragraphs as a "poem," provoke us to meld these sentences into an ongoing discourse or chain of images, but the relationship among them is not as a progression but as a simple juxtaposition. Thus at first such a poem as "Blue" frustrates our desire to make it yield sense or meaning, yet the reader who again spends some time with it might find it actually yields more meaning when the possibilities of a paratactic juxtaposition gradually reveal themselves. That the sentences considered as a forward-directed chain do not willingly release their meaning does not preclude us from finding meanings by reading them in a different way.

TO BE CONTINUED

Requirements

Richard Eder begins a recent review in the Boston Globe by telling us that

Great novels written in the first person require one of two conditions. In “Moby Dick,” Ishmael is essentially a window, though tinted with metaphysical light.

The other option requires becoming a guide of sorts. To play an active part, to become a participant with one hand while clutching our elbow with the other, it is necessary for character and voice to possess an autonomous savor and thrust. . .Huck Finn triumphs because he is, in himself and beyond what he relates, a figure of such winning crag and sheen.

There are not just "two conditions" that first-person narratives must fulfill. First-person narratives can come in all kinds of flavors and can create whatever conditions they want.

First-person narratives are not "required" to do anything, and it is not "necessary" for "character and voice" to possess any particular qualities. Writers are allowed (or should be allowed) to create whatever kind of character and whatever kind of voice suits their aesthetic purpose. The reader (or reviewer) might not be sympathetic to that purpose, but this does not sanction the reviewer to devise a set of aesthetic rules that conform to his taste and that the book under review is obliged to observe.

Eder might have said that he prefers first-person narrators that are like Ishmael in Moby-Dick or that are like Huck Finn. He might have then said that the particular book under review does not create a narrator similar to those in these two books, and therefore he didn't care for this book. That's a pretty restrictive demand to make of a work of fiction, but at least we would know that this reviewer makes such a demand and could judge his review accordingly.

Eder might also simply have said that indeed he didn't like the narrative voice in this novel and therefore didn't care for the book. He didn't need to issue an edict about the use of first-person narrative in order to convey that opinion.

 

 

The Value of the Business

In an essay at The New Yorker, Louis Menand recounts an episode from early in his career as a professor in which a student asked him, "Why did we have to buy this book?" Continuing in the student's mercantile language, Menand avers that the student was "asking me to justify the return on investment in a college education. I just had never been called upon to think about this before. It wasn’t part of my training. We took the value of the business we were in for granted."

Menand proposes three possible answers to the student's question. The first simply asserts that "you’re in college, and these are the kinds of books that people in college read." The second assures the student “You’re reading these books because they teach you things about the world and yourself that, if you do not learn them in college, you are unlikely to learn anywhere else.” The most baldly utilitarian response has it that "advanced economies demand specialized knowledge and skills, and, since high school is aimed at the general learner, college is where people can be taught what they need in order to enter a vocation."

The third answer is the one now implicitly given by the school as part of the state apparatus, and Menand expresses the usual dismay at the pass to which we have come when this is the primary justification for reading books in college (although he does also acknowledge that the situation isn't likely to change). However, I can't see that the other two answers are any better. The first would be true if this were 1935 and all college students were undergraduates at Yale, but it hardly describes the situation in 2011. The second, which is Menand's own preferred answer, spells out perhaps the underlying justification for answer one, but if college students are no longer interested in learning "things about the world and yourself" in return for their "investment" in college (which in my experience they indeed are not, to the extent they ever were), this answer is no more compelling than the first.

The problem with all three answers, ultimately, is that they tie the value of reading a book (I'm assuming Menand has in mind primarily works of literature, since he's an English professor) to its potential value to the institution of college, to the school (most charitably, to the goals of "education"). In my opinion, a better answer would be something like this: "You should read that book because it's a significant book of its kind, one that anyone studying _____ needs to read." In my opinion, a literature professor's first allegiance is to literature, or to the period/genre/national literature the course covers, and as long as the college where the professor is employed requires or encourages its students to take courses in literature, this answer should suffice. All questions concerning the place of literature in a college curriculum need to be answered by administrators or campus committees, not by the individual professor otherwise just doing his/her job.

Perhaps the time has come to reconsider the literature requirement, however. Most of the justifications that need to be made of reading assignments occur in courses in which the majority of students would not be there if taking such a course were not a degree requirement in "general education." Although generally speaking I think it a good idea for as many people as possible to read as many worthwhile books as possible, I'm pretty sure that materializing this broad aspiration into specific college course requirements has not worked out that well. It has especially not worked out well for literature. Courses in "Introduction to Literature" or "American Literature, Beginnings to the Present" are hopelessly incapable of fulfilling the aspiration, at best providing some students with some "information" about the subject they might later be able to recall, at worst making most students resentful of being compelled to take the course and less likely to follow up on the assigned reading with voluntary reading of their own. Given the career and personal goals of most of the students who take such courses, there really isn't a good answer for them to the question posed by Menand's student. Frankly, I don't see why these students should have to buy the books to take this sort of course, and I don't really want to teach them.

Students who take literature courses voluntarily, or choose to major in English, Comparative Literature, etc., are implicitly agreeing to accept the instructor's judgment about what books are appropriate for them to read. They would have cause for complaint only if it were determined the instructor's judgment is demonstrably faulty or if the instructor is a demonstrably bad teacher of the subject. An instructor (not just in literature) should be asked to know his/her subject well and to present it with integrity. He/she should not be asked to justify the entire project of higher education as it currently stands.

Of course, a great deal of instruction in "literature," particularly in the bigger universities and more pretigious liberal arts colleges (as opposed to, say, community colleges and many "regional" universities) is no longer instruction in literature. Literature is instead used to indeed "teach you things about the world" through cultural studies or to improve "thinking" through critical theory. Perhaps this development over the past twenty-five years or so has managed to keep what are still labeled as literature courses in the curriculum, but soon enough the question "why did we have to buy this book?" will be a question about some theorist's magnum opus, not Melville. At that point, the utilitarian answer may actually be the most truthful one.

Very Different from Themselves

In the previous post I suggested that too often reviews written by novelists or poets are taken as "an opportunity to disparage an approach to fiction or poetry that isn't the reviewer's." A good example of this would be a recent New York Times review by Michael Cunningham of Rikki Ducornet's Netsuke. After faintly praising Ducornet's novel, Cunningham instructs us that

By delving into a character’s motives, a writer fulfills one of fiction’s most powerful potentials — the ability to draw the reader into a character, including the most repellent of them. Fiction can show readers what it’s like to be someone very different from themselves, even if that drawing-in is discomfiting.

Ducornet, unfortunately, "has erred too much on the side of discretion":

The pure malice of Ducornet’s  [protagonist] is not alleviated by her reluctance to show us much by way of the injuries he’s inflicting on his patients. Ducornet treats the analyst’s patients as offhandedly as does the analyst himself. The book’s atmosphere of arid heartlessness begins to produce a parched feeling in the reader.

Cunningham's review betrays a lack of sympathy with the aesthetic goals of Ducornet's novel, goals that clearly clash with his own--"to draw the reader into a character"--and this unwillingness to accept a kind of fiction different from that which he writes is reinforced in the review by an unwillingness to understand what Ducornet's goals may be. He engages in no reflection on what Ducornet might be up to rather than psychological realism, and he considers Netsuke in total isolation from the rest of Ducornet''s by now rather ample body of work. If Cunningham has read any of Ducornet's previous fiction, his review seems rather determined to avoid any reference to it.

Readers familiar with Rikki Ducornet's fiction know that it does not attempt "to draw the reader into a character" in the manner--adopted, no doubt, from Virginia Woolf--that Michael Cunningham himself favors. This is not because she has no interest in character, but because in her fiction character is just one element that works to help give it its distinctive signature. Ducornet is not a realist, psychological or otherwise, but a fabulator, and were she to focus on drawing the reader inside the characters in the mode of Woolf or Faulkner she would either be undermining the very mode in which she has long worked, or be turning herself into a different kind of writer. Still, to say that Ducornet to some extent subordinates character to plot, setting, symbol and imagery, or, especially, style, is not to say that her fiction shows no concern for the "motives" of its characters. Indeed, long-time readers of Ducornet's work must be taken aback by Cunningham's suggestion that Netsuke exhibits insufficient attention to motive, since Ducornet's fiction so relentlessly chronicles what it represents as the motive force behind all human behavior: the unavoidable power of "desire."

In Ducornet's story, "The Word, 'Desire'", the protagonist, who is still experiencing the intense, intoxicating effects of new love, comes to appreciate this power when she notices her lover looking with obvious desire at another woman. She imagines herself into the perspective of both the lover, gazing, and the other woman, being gazed at, and finds herself concluding: "How far the word 'desire' goes! How it tugs us along! How it worries us, daggers us. How it lights our path." Ducornet's fables are fables of the manifestation and the consequences of desire, how it "tugs us along" and both "daggers us" and "lights our path." Her characters are driven by desire, experiencing both ecstasy and pain, come to a healthy acknowledgment of it, disastrously deny it. Desire in such works as The Stain, The Jade Cabinet, and Gazelle leads the characters to both become more human, and, in some cases, descend into the monstrous. Ducornet isn't really interested in showing readers "someone very different from themselves" because this fundamental human motivation is one to which we are all equally subject.

Thus the claim that a novel like Netsuke fails to explore "motives" arises both from a weak reading of the book and sheer ignorance, either literal or willed, of Rikki Ducornet's work as a whole. Cunningham asserts that the psychiatrist protagonist acts out of "pure malice" in seducing his patients, that he "systematically and without guilt soul-­murders" them. While it is not necessarily surprising that a reader might cringe with horror at the actions of a character like this protagonist (readers have expressed similar distaste for some of the actions and events depicted in her other novels), one might expect Cunningham to examine his response, to more fully appraise the text and more carefully measure his response against what the novel actually conveys to us about the protagonist. Because this character as subject to the inescapable influence of desire as any of Ducornet's other characters. He is not motivated out of "pure malice"--he may be malicious, but the malice isn't pure, uninflected by deeper impulses that are themselves neither benevolent nor malevolent but simply are what they are.

"My clients are thwarted, famished, and lonely," the protagonist tells us. "Inevitably, sooner or later, I seize upon and penetrate the one who has wanted this from me from the first instant. Or has taken time but has come around to wanting it." The narrator both believes what he is doing is of benefit to his clients--it's what they want as an assuagement of their pain--and knows he is exploiting them. He knows also he is exploiting his wife, Akiko, an accomplished and compassionate woman he both loves and despises. In betraying his wife with his clients, the narrator is acting on desires his marriage can't fulfill--that he doesn't want it to fulfill. Cunningham is correct to say that Netsuke is "a story about a man trying to bring his own house down" (although this isn't all the story is about), but this very insight implies he isn't simply acing out of malice. His accomplishments as husband and professional are being overrun by elemental impulses for which those accomplishments are an inhibition and a nuisance. In Ducornet's fiction, carnal desires must and should be expressed, but that doesn't mean the consequences will aways be "healthy."

Ducornet admittedly makes it difficult for us to grant the psychotherapist his portion of a shared humanity by making him the narrator of his own story. Novels narrated in the first person by morally compromised characters, such as Lolita, Thomas Berger's Killing Time, John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges, or, more recently, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones can charm us into a kind of moral complicity in which we come to regard our identification with the narrator with some horror, but can also lead us to recoil at too obvious violations of ethical norms and decorum. We can both lull ourselves into overemphasizing the narrator's "human" qualities, and allow our disgust to overlook them. Judging from Michael Cunningham's response, Netsuke can provoke the latter reaction. A first-person narrator is always unreliable to some degree, but some writers especially exploit the capacity for first-person narration to create ambiguity and instability. Rikki Ducornet is this kind of writer. Whenever she uses a first-person narrator, as readers we need to be prepared for, and willing to accept, the resulting ambiguities.

 Netsuke, like many of Ducornet's novels, is relatively brief, which also no doubt adds to the possibility it will be misread in the manner exemplified by Michael Cunningham. We don't "get to know" the character as we do in longer works, especially those devoted to the kind of psychological realism in which "getting to know" is largely the point. Ducornet's kind of fabulation, which can draw on the elements of the fable or fairy tale without incorporating the movement toward narrative closure ("the moral of the story"), works best both through brevity and a deliberate avoidance of psychological "depth," at least through explicit strategies of point of view or style. Anything longer could mar the delicacy of what she is after, and "delving into a character's motives" would only undermine its subtlety.

Perhaps writers who take a much different approach to their own work will be unsympathetic to Ducornet's methods, but they ought to consider that bias before agreeing to review her work.

(June 13, 2011)

The Kind of Work That You Like to Do

In a recent profile of Stanley Fish, Fish is quoted as having said, "Literary interpretation, like virtue, is its own reward. I do it because I like the way I feel when I'm doing it." He further amplifies:

You do this kind of work simply because it's the kind of work that you like to do, and the moment you think you're doing it to make either people or the world better, you've made a huge mistake. There's no justification whatsoever for what we do except the pleasure of doing it and the possibility of introducing others to that pleasure. That's it!

There is, of course, a paradox at work in Fish's formulation: To provide yourself and others with a positive pleasure is, however slightly, to "make. .  .people or the world better." Since the pleasure that "interpretation" provides comes from the invigoration of one's mental faculties, it might be said that literary interpretation--literary criticism more generally--performs an especially useful service. But Fish is cautioning against the hubris of believing that literary criticism will perform any service beyond this modest one of engaging the mind in a productive activity.

This view is no doubt uncongenial to both those academic critics who want their work to be an "intervention" in culture that transcends the "merely literary" and to those traditionalists who think that literature itself can make us better, a goal to which the scholar or critic should help lead us. In my view, the "justification" for criticism and interpretation indeed cannot be found outside of the activity itself, although it is certainly true that any particular act of interpretation can prove useful or enlightening for others. And to the extent that the critic intends his/her analysis to be enlightening, this sort of utility could be said to "justify" critical analysis as well. Such analysis might even be narrowly and tendentiously focused, an attempt to "use" the subject text for partisan purposes that go beyond simply understanding or appreciating the text. But criticism has then become something other than literary criticism. "Interpretation" as Fish would define it becomes instead the means to some other end, an end deemed more important than simply coming to terms with the text itself.

Fish is perhaps the most well-known literary critic associated with philosophical pragmatism, as descended from John Dewey through Richard Rorty. His version of reader-response theory, in which meaning can only arise "in the reader," is a clear descendant of Dewey's notion of "art as experience." Since the highest pragmatic value is generally considered to be that of utility--an action or belief is justified if it produces an efficacious result--one might think that when applied to literary criticism whatever "use" might be made of a literary text is perfectly acceptable if it works to some desired end, but while of course finally  any reader can make "use" of any text in any way he/she wants, this does not mean that all such readings contribute to the integrity of literary criticism understood as a practice or a discipline possessing definitional coherence. Indeed, if any reading can be appropriately considered "literary criticism," then the term has no meaning at all, no object that is its proper concern. Fish is implicitly insisting that the proper concern of criticism is the free play of "interpretation" unconstrained by agendas other than the imperative to carry it out intelligently and attentively. Interpretation of texts that do not themselves communicate meaning fully or directly is what literary critics do, and the most appropriate affirmation of its value comes from the critic who is able to convey "the pleasure of doing it" to responsive readers.

There are, alas, too few critics of this kind around. In my opinion, this is only partly because critics themselves cling too firmly to various non-literary and non-critical agendas. Those in charge of the most widespread source of literary commentary, book review sections of magazines and newspapers, seem seldom to assign works of fiction or poetry to capable, disinterested (as in "impartial") literary critics in the first place. In fact, a significant majority of reviews of novels and poetry collections seem to be written by other novelists and poets, a practice that is apparently founded on the assumption that novelists and poets are in the best position to assess other work in their chosen forms. This is a mistaken assumption.

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom observes that "when a potential poet first discovers (or is discovered by) the dialectic of influence, first discovers poetry as being both external and internal to himself, he begins a process that will end only when he has no more poetry within him, long after he has the power (or desire) to discover it outside himself again." Bloom is acknowledging that while the poet--the fiction writer as well--is initially inspired to write by the discovery of previous writing "external" to his/her own need for expression, eventually he/she finds it difficult to still "discover" poetry in other writers because his/her own work now so thoroughly defines what poetry should be. This is especially true of the best poets and novelists, which all the more makes it a good idea to view even the most accomplished of such writers with suspicion when they turn to reviewing. We will probably acquire more understanding of the reviewer and the reviewer's perspective on his/her own work than we will get a trustworthy account of the book ostensibly under review.

There are, of course, always exceptions. Some writers are also such penetrating critics that one wants to read them even if it is likely the critic's analysis will reveal more about the critic's assumptions than about the subject of the analysis. William H. Gass would be one such writer, but as much as I value Gass's criticism, I would also acknowledge that it is at least as valuable as an adjunct to his fiction, helping to explain the nature of its departures from convention, or as part of a philosophy of literature that works in tandem with the fiction. Certainly Gass engages in this critical work because it his work he "likes to do" (or at least this is the impression his criticism leaves with me), but as much as Gass lends credibility to experimental fiction through his essays and reviews, ultimately such fiction is well-served as well by critics able to more comprehensively assess its failures as well as its successes.

The kind of work novelists and poets most like to do, presumably, is writing novels and poems. They might also like writing reviews perfectly well, but this is inevitably a secondary sort of gratification, and in most cases not something done for "its own reward." My impression of the reviewing done by these writers considered collectively is that all too often it is either an opportunity to disparage an approach to fiction or poetry that isn't the reviewer's or to praise one's colleagues, perhaps in the hope that such generosity might be reciprocated when the reviewer's own book appears. The first approach is an especially good way to dismiss unconventional fiction that might pose a threat to established practice, while the second helps to build "community," to elevate the status of current writing more generally.

Ultimately none of these motives do current writing much good, however, if it is to be considered as potentially part of "literature," if "literary" is to be a term that designates more than a lifestyle choice. Judging a work according to principles the work has rejected is hardly criticism in the first place, and seeks to encourage a conformity of method that would really only drain literature of its vitality. "Community" is a pleasant notion that might help to blunt the edges of literary rivalries, but finally it has nothing to do with writing worthy poems and novels. Praising fellow members of one's community for anything other than creating worthwhile literary art is just a free form of publicity and reduces literature to just another act of social networking. New books need critics willing to regard them as efforts to be taken seriously as literature, to survive in the long run, not just their notices in the weekend's review pages. They need critics who regard criticism as the act of considering books in this way, and who want to engage in it because it's a good thing to do.

June 6, 2011

Turning Pages

Sven Birkerts has been developing a critique of "electronic media" for quite a long time, publishing The Gutenberg Elegies in 1994, well before the rise of blogs, stand-alone news sites, and critical webzines, so his cyber skepticism is not to be dismissed as simply more defensive posturing by an endangered gatekeeper. I have myself taken issue with some of Birkerts's more uninformed outbursts, but his concern for "unhurried" reading is usually expressed in an equally unhurried analysis of the act of reading (specifically reading fiction), not as the high dudgeon of a book critic protesting his imminent loss of status.

This is especially true of a recent essay by Bikerts in The American Scholar, "Reading in a Digital Age." The essay is framed as yet another inquiry into the way the digital information "environment" is making serious reading harder to accomplish, but ultimately it is really a candid inquiry into his own reading habits and an attempt to generalize from his conclusions to a theory of sorts both about reading and about the nature of fiction. Much of this theory seems to me perceptive, and generally correct, but parts of it as well seem an overly roundabout way of describing our experience of fiction that would benefit from a consideration of John Dewey's own "experiential-phenomenological" analysis in Art as Experience. There is overlap between the accounts offered by Dewey and Birkerts, but finally Dewey's comes closer to doing full justice to the role of "imagination" in reading, both writer's and reader's.

Birkerts associates imagination with the mental state of "contemplation," which he in turn contrasts with "analytic thought." Contemplation is "intransitive and experiential in its nature, is for itself"; analytic thought "is transitive, is goal directed. . .a means, its increments mainly building blocks toward some synthesis or explanation." Contemplation is, or should be, the preferred mode of reading fiction, by which "enhancement" and "deepening," end-states in themselves, are achieved. But Birkerts finds this "deepening" moving in just one direction: the purpose of fiction "is less to communicate themes or major recognitions and more to engage the mind, the sensibility, in a process that in its full realization bears upon our living as an ignition to inwardness, which has no larger end, which is the end itself."

Birkerts's insistence that the reading of fiction leads to experience and not "explanation" is wholly appropriate and does seem to coincide with Dewey's contention that art is an "enhancement" of experience. However, while Dewey might accept "sensibility" as the name for the human receptivity to art, he would not characterize our response to art and literature as primarily an opportunity "to enage the mind," especially if this means a retreat into an "inwardness" that is itself the ultimately desired state, cut off from the projected space occupied by the work instigating the experience in the first place. A Deweyan representation of the reading experience (the experience of art in general) would balance the inwardness Birkerts evokes with an outwardness that also seeks satisfaction in the perception of form and style. If "contemplation" involves the heightened awareness both of the palpable qualities of the created work and of our own awareness of those qualities, then the term might accurately capture the nature of aesthetic experience, but I think Birkerts privileges the activity of "mind."

When Birkerts writes that fiction provides "an arena of liberation. . .where mind and imagination can freely combine," he is not describing an interaction between the reader's "sensibility" and the the work as an act of imagination but is positing "mind" and "imagination" as faculties exercised by the reader. When a little later he allows that "I tend to view the author as on a continuum with his characters, their extension," it seems to me he is explicitly discounting the artistic shaping that is finally the role of "author." In merging the author and his characters, Birkerts is putting most value on fiction's ability to induce "empathy," which in his case means the opportunity to connect with another "mind": "It is the proximity to and belief in the other consciousness that matters, more than its source and location." It is presumably this proximity to the "other" as evoked in fiction that constitutes "imagination" for Bikerts, not the unencumbered immersion in aesthetic experience as a whole.

On the other hand, I do identify with Birkerts's account of the "residue" his reading experiences leave:

. . .the details of plot fall away first, and so rapidly that in a few months’ time I will only have the most general précis left. I will find myself getting nervous in party conversations if the book is mentioned, my sensible worry being that if I can’t remember what happened in a novel, how it ended, can I say in good conscience that I have read it? Indeed, if I invoke plot memory as my stricture, then I have to confess that I’ve read almost nothing at all, never mind these decades of turning pages.

What does remain is "A distinct tonal memory, a conviction of having been inside an author’s own language world, and along with that some hard-to-pinpoint understanding of his or her psyche." "Tonal memory" seems to me a good way of characterizing the lingering impression a strong work of fiction leaves, although it is a memory the work has indeed impressed upon the memory rather than the sort of mechanical effort of "recall" the recounting of plot entails. For myself, not only do I usually have trouble retrieving specific episodes from novels I have read more than a few months in the past, I often enough lose all but a general sense of the voice or behavior of the characters, in the case of minor characters sometimes forgetting their existence altogether. Yet I continue to feel a tangible connection to the "language world" I have encountered, which to me is the surest sign my experience of the text was worthwhile.

The storage model of reading thus threatens to reduce the reading experience to the acquisition of "information," which Birkerts rightly resists. But I would take Birkerts's invocation of the "language world" as the ulimate source of value in fiction even farther. Reading a work of literature should always imply the possibility, even the desirability, of re-reading. Suspension in the language-world rather than the collection of facts about the work is much more likely to encourage later re-reading, both because one wants to abide there again and because the work in its particulars hasn't already been thoroughly assimilated and duly packed away. I can read it again and still have a worthwhile literary experience. (Presumably Birkerts might think that re-reading would give him further insight into the author's "psyche" as well; I cannot accept this particular element of his theory of reading, as I cannot see how the created language-world that is the text could possibly reveal anything about the actual author's mental states, except through free-floating speculation irrelevant to the text itself, nor why I should care even if it could.)

Birkerts concludes by encapsulating his claim about "deep reading":

Serious literary work has levels. The engaged reader takes in not only the narrative premise and the craft of its realization, but also the resonance—that which the author creates, deliberately, through her use of language. It is the secondary power of good writing, often the ulterior motive of the writing. The two levels operate on a lag, with the resonance accumulating behind the sense, building a linguistic density that is the verbal equivalent of an aftertaste, or the “finish.” The reader who reads without directed concentration, who skims, or even just steps hurriedly across the surface, is missing much of the real point of the work; he is gobbling his foie gras.

While there are still assumptions here that seem to me unwarranted--why must the core element of fiction be its "narrative premise," which would only re-introduce "plot" as a barrier between the reader and the "language world"--ultimately this is a credible description of what is involved in serious reading. Unfortunatey, Birkerts seems motivated to offer this description mostly in order to bolster his conviction that this kind of reading is endangered by the transition to screen-reading. I am unconvinced, to say the least. If Birkerts were suggesting that deep reading is succumbing to the general human inclination to give in to distraction, to settle for what's easiest, he would perhaps be on firmer ground, although this weakness has always plagued us and can hardly have been induced by the presence of computers. But he clearly enough wants to insist there is something inherent in cyberspace and e-books that make them inimical to "serious literary work" and the reading it requires.

A generation or two from now, serious readers--and they will still be around--will look back at Birkerts's claims and find them deeply puzzling. They will find the notion that literary texts published on pieces of glued-together paper are somehow metaphysically superior to those published electronically difficult to comprehend. I find it hard to comprehend the idea now. I can understand continuing to find the printed book more convenient, or more comforting, but to maintain that serious, sustained reading can take place only when enabled by print-on-paper just isn't plausible. Birkerts is a trustworthy literary critic and a reliable authority on the pleasures of reading, but as a seer into the future of literature he will surely prove inadequate.

Rabbit's Run

Although I have read Rabbit, Run at least four times, I have read the other Rabbit books by John Updike only once. While I thought Rabbit is Rich was worth reading, the other two were tepid and lackluster, period pieces at best that existed to show Rabbit Angstrom as a "representative" American of his time and place and to document American culture at the turn of each decade from 1960 to 1990. Rabbit is Rich shared these characteristics as well, although in this book Updike was able to mirror Rabbit's own predicament in Rabbit, Run in the situation in which Rabbit's son, Nelson, finds himself, which gives it a structural and thematic association with the first novel that allows it to be a plausible continuation of that novel rather than just another installment in a loosely-jointed chronicle of the life of a guy in Pennsylvania.

To a limited extent, Rabbit, Run itself is a "documentary" novel that gives us a portrait of small-town life (we sometimes forget that the Rabbit novels are set not in Brewer, the modestly sized city the characters often enough visit, but in Mt. Judge, which really doesn't take on the attributes of suburbia until later in the series) circa 1960. But much of its documentary value is retrospective, illuminated by the additional light cast by the subsequent novels in the series. It has a role in this series due only to the fact that Updike chose to write another novel featuring Rabbit Angstrom ten years later, its social realism partly an artifact of the later creation and our perception of "the Rabbit books" as a unified set. Further, I don't think that documentary realism was really Updike's primary ambition in Rabbit, Run, although it was and is a secondary effect of his anchoring of the story in a fictionalized version of his hometown and of his commitment to specificity and detail.

I recently re-read both Rabbit, Run and Rabbit is Rich, and my perception that Rabbit, Run is a qualitatively different kind of novel was only reinforced. Of the four books, it is by far the slimmest, and its relative brevity and more concentrated focus reflects its different purpose: it is more nearly pure narrative, almost allegorical, a fable about disillusion edging into desperation. Its present-tense narration gives it an immediacy that still seems immediate, while the same strategy in the other, more bloated novels seems increasingly perfunctory (although perhaps this impression is heightened because the present-tense strategy itself eventually came to seem somewhat unexceptional--an outcome made possible by Updike's prominent use of the strategy in Rabbit, Run). Rabbit, Run is a novel centered on its protagonist's existential crisis, the dramatization of which is its dominant concern.

Rabbit is Rich is, like its now forty-something protagonist, much less frenetic, more leisurely paced than Rabbit Run but also somewhat more expansive in the account it provides both of Rabbit's domestic life (now that he's settled into one) and of Brewer and Mt. Judge, the latter of which has now truly become an upwardly mobile suburb that provides Rabbit and his wife the comforts they enjoy due to the circumstances indicated in the novel's title. Rabbit has outgrown his existential crisis, although his son Nelson is depicted as just entering into his. Rabbit is Rich lacks the intensity and the structural economy of Rabbit is Rich, making it a less urgent, more diffuse reading experience, but it also offers a breadth of detail and observation not to be found so much in the first novel.

Both Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich seem clearly enough designed to transform the approach taken in Rabbit, Run into a strategy by which the story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom becomes not just the story of an isolated American trying to figure out what he wants but a story about the social development of America in the second half of the twentieth century. Rabbit, Run takes on "social" implications if we regard it as the story of a high school athlete confronting the world after stardom and finding ordinary life unsatisfying, but neither the American preoccupation with athletic success nor the effects of fame and glory could really be said to be the focus of the novel's attention. And while very little reference is made to current events or objects of popular culture in Rabbit, Run, Rabbit is Rich is saturated with such references, the chronicle of a few months in the life of the Angstrom family unfolding within the cultural currents of such developments as the ongoing energy crisis and the taking of the hostages in Iran. This "embedding" of narrative in social context does provide some parallel to the circumstances of Rabbit's life--he seems himself to be experiencing an energy crisis of sorts--but for the most part it seems designed to add to the novel some "texture" that Rabbit, Run doesn't need.

I think that this strategy in Rabbit is Rich mostly works--it's still a pretty good book that manages to make Harry Angstrom a more sympathetic figure than he is in either Rabbit, Run or Rabbit Redux but doesn't sentimentalize him in the process. Given that Updike portrays Harry in this novel as someone who has become comfortable with his place in the world--certainly much more comfortable than in the previous two novels--it is probably necessary for him to provide a fuller portrait of that larger world as well. Nelson, who comes off as at least as obnoxious as Rabbit himself was in the first novel, introduces some of the tension that animated Rabbit, Run through his own discomfort with the world in which he has been placed and through his increasingly brittle relationship with his father. (That Rabbit is impatient with his son, to the point it seems he really doesn't like him, perhaps suggests that Rabbit perceives Nelson as a little too close to the immature young man he once was.) But, although I can imagine wanting to read Rabbit, Run a fifth time some years hence, I don't think I'll ever want to pick up Rabbit is Rich again. It has reminded me of the era in which it is set, but in the future if I want to be so reminded, I'll consult history books.

Signature Elements

In an essay on Flannery O'Connor for Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, David E. Anderson writes:

Revisiting O’Connor after five decades, it still remains difficult to find that Catholic sensibility she and many of her admiring critics insist permeates her work, and other shortcomings—in particular the almost complete absence of attention to race and the civil rights movement that was convulsing her beloved South as she wrote some of her most powerful works—become increasingly apparent with distance. It can even be argued that the signature elements of her style—character as grotesque, gratuitous violence as the bearer of meaning—no longer shock, no longer convince.

Anderson is principally concerned in this essay with the question of whether O'Connor's work is adequately and recognizably Catholic for current readers, and about that subject I have no opinion. The way in which O'Connor's work embodies a particular interpretation of Catholic doctrine has always seemed to me the least interesting subject of inquiry into her fiction, and, as Anderson does correctly note, most non-scholarly readers remain unaware that it even is a subject relevant to the fiction, so fully is that fiction otherwise focused on its depiction of its Southern mileu, grotesque characters, and perversely melodramatic events.

I am interested in the issues Anderson raises in the passage I've quoted, mostly because his comments are so misguided and misleading. Anderson identifies as a flaw in O'Connor's fiction "the almost complete absence of attention to race and the civil rights movement." It has always seemed bizarre to me that an "absence of attention" to this or that condition or phenomenon in a writer's work could be considered a "shortcoming," as if every writer is under the necessary burden to address every fact of life that confronted the writer in his/her time and place. O'Connor had no obligation to portray race relations or to confront issues of civil rights. Her subject lay elsewhere, in the lives of white Southerners and the effects of class and religion. If it is true that O'Connor's work is anchored in the belief that the world around her was "mired in nihilism," that view could not plausibly be embodied in stories centered on the lives of Southern blacks. They were themselves neither nihilists nor the victims of nihilism in the theological/philosophical terms with which O'Connor was concerned. They were the victims of bigotry, and this is a more mundane human evil that doesn't really get to the spiritual corruptions O'Connor was at pains to disclose. A writer should be judged by what her work does attempt, not by what it doesn't.

Anderson's most nonsensical assertion, however, is that the distinctive features of O'Connor's "style" are to be found in "character as grotesque, gratuitous violence as the bearer of meaning." This shows such a thorough misunderstanding of what "style" in fiction refers to that it really cancels out everything else Anderson has to say about Flannery O'Connor as a literary artist. It may be true that the narrative use of "violence as the bearer of meaning" no longer shocks, although I never thought the violence in O'Connor's fiction was exactly shocking in the first place--the violence at the conclusion of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is so prolonged and so interspersed with absurd dialogue ("absurd" as in "darkly comic") that the effect is more operatic than startling. And I, for one, find her characters just as grotesque the second or third time around as I did the first time I encountered them. "Style," however, encompasses not the writer's narrative strategy or character creation but her "signature" use of words, her language, her way with phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. This element of O'Connor's fiction has not eroded with time at all but is still just as compelling as ever.

Here's one of the first paragraphs in the story "Greenleaf":

She had been conscious in her sleep of a steady rhythmic chewing as if something were eating one wall of the house. She had been aware that whatever it was had been eating as long as she had had the place and had eaten everything from the beginning of her fence line up to the house and now was eating the house and calmly with the same steady rhythm would continue through the house, eating up her and the boys and then on, eating everything but the Greenleafs, on and on, eating everything until nothing was left but the Greenleafs on a little island all their own in the middle of what had been her place. When the munching reached her elbow, she jumped up and found herself, fully awake, standing in the middle of her room. She identifed the sound at once: a cow was tearing at the shrubbery under her window. Mr. Greenleaf had left the lane gate open and she didn't doubt that the entire herd was on her lawn. She turned on the dim pink table lamp and then went to the window and slit the blind. The bull, gaunt and long-legged, was standing about four feet from her, chewing calmly like an uncouth country suitor.

Surely this passage is just as cadenced, just as precise and as evocatively creepy as it was when O'Connor wrote it. Far from being no longer convincing, O'Connor's style survives all the blather about theology and "Christian realism" and cathartic violence that only takes us away from the words on the page, where O'Connor's real literary legacy is to be found.

Anderson's flip, and deeply misinformed, dismissal of O'Connor's style bothers me not just as it applies to Flannery O'Connor's style in particular but as an illustration of a broader ignorance about what we talk about when we talk about literary style. "Style" operates in much literary discussion as an all-purpose substitute for narrative method or point of view, "technique" or "tone," characterization or particular types of dialogue. I understand that readers don't always want to be bothered with the niceties of literary criticism, but a great deal of ordinary discourse about literature seems designed to distract us from a writer's actual words, where "style" is indeed substance.

The Inner Needs of Writers

There is much in Ron Silliman's recent post on the process of historical change in poetry with which I agree, and in fact I would extend most of what he says to include the history of all literary forms. Among his most salient points are that "the history of poetry is the history of change in poetry," that the critics of innovation in literary practice are themselves writers and critics likely to be swept away by the historical currents that favor innovation and are thus mostly engaging in "tantrums" over their own unavoidable fate, and that the "new" and the fashionable are not synonymous terms in our appreciation of the innovative in poetry (or fiction.).

Literature certainly is more the history of its own evolving forms than it is an assemblage of "great works," although I would substitue for "change" John Dewey's notion of "growth" as the inevitable outcome of artistic traditions that manage to extend themselves over time--"growth" not as simplistic "progress" but as the expansion of available approaches to the form, an increase of insight into the variety of its possibilities. Indeed, even if we were to consider literary history as the accumulation of great works, in most cases these works are great precisely because they represent some new direction taken by the form employed. Surely English drama was not the same after Shakespeare finished stretching its boundaries, nor was English narrative poetry (narrative poetry in general) after Paradise Lost. Although we now think of the realistic novel as the epitome of convention in fiction, there was of course a time when it was on the cutting edge of change and writers like Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Henry James were writing what was for the time experimental fiction.

Thus I am less willing than Ron to dismiss the "well-wrought urn" as a metaphor for aesthetic accomplishment in works of literature. A poem or novel may indeed be "well-wrought" without conforming to pre-established models. Perhaps the passage of time does allow us to see more clearly the craftedness of some works of art that at first seemed simply model-breaking, but ultimately I see no conflict between innovation in poetry or fiction and the skillful construction of individual poems, plays, short stories, or novels.

On the other hand, Ron is certainly correct in characterizing most of the critical resistance to change in literary forms as a kind of lashing-out against writing implicitly recognized as destined to be remembered precisely because it exposes most of the otherwise critically favored writers of the moment as aesthetically tame and unadventurous, tied to the critical nostrums of the day (which, especially with fiction, are typically not only aesthetically conservative, but often not really focused on aesthetic achievement at all but on what the writer allegedly has to "say" about prominent "issues"). American experimental fiction of the post-World War II era has been especially subjected to these "tantrums"--if anything they have only increased in intensity--concerted efforts to marginalize this fiction by accusing it of lacking seriousness of purpose, of indulging in games and jokes rather than sticking to straightforward storytelling, of striving after effects that turn out to be "merely literary." In my opinion, however, it will be the work of writers like John Hawkes, Robert Coover, and Gilbert Sorrentino that will be recognized as the indispensable fiction of this period, not that of the more celebrated but less formally audacious writers such as Bellow or Styron or Vidal.

Eventually almost all postwar writers whose work departs significantly from convention have come to be labeled "postmodernist," a term that has definable meaning but that also has been used as an aid in this lashing-out, a way to further disparage such writers both by lumping them together indiscriminately and by identifying their work as just another participant in literary fashion. Ron Silliman points out that a distinction can be made between fashion in the arts and the truly new:

Each art form has its own dynamic around issues such as form and change. For example, one could argue that the visual arts world, at least in New York & London, has become self-trivializing by thrusting change into warp drive because of the market needs of the gallery system. There, capital demands newness at a pace that hardly ever lets a shift in the paradigm marinate awhile. I seriously wonder if any innovation in that world since the Pop artists let in the found imagery of the mid-century commercial landscape has ever had a chance to settle in. That settling process seems to be an important part of the run-up in helping to generate the power of reaction, to motivate whatever comes next. The problem with the visual arts scene today is that innovation is constant, but always unmotivated.

Poetry has the advantage of not being corrupted by too much cash in the system. That ensures that change can occur at a pace that has more to do with the inner needs of writers as they confront their lives. . . .

The New York art world has become so dependent on "the latest thing" that aesthetic change becomes "unmotivated" except by the need for individual artists to enter the system that confers purpose on their work. And although fiction is probably more tied to the cash nexus than poetry, most serious literary fiction is much less so, and the degree of change and resistance to change, while perhaps somewhat less pure than in discussions of poetry, is largely determined by honest beliefs about the direction fiction ought to take.

In this context, to regard experimental fiction as "fashion" is essentially to believe there can be no "shift[s] in the paradigm" in the development of fiction, that the experimental must always represent an irritating deviation from the accepted unitary model of how fiction should be written. It forecloses the possibiltiy that the established paradigm might "shift" if something genuinely new were to appear and transform our assumptions about the nature of the novel and/or the short story. Even if it is allowed that the occasional genius comes along to produce work that stands out from the mainstream, such work is considered a singular achievement, a momentary departure from the otherwise settled paradigm granted only to the genius. The exceptional, extraordinary talent thus helps to preserve the status quo since no one else can be expected to rise to his/her level.

In reality, the "postmodern" period in American fiction came close to establishing a new paradigm insofar as it seemed to validate the experimental impulse behing modernism, its own even more radical experiments extending the reach of literary experiment beyond modernism and implicitly suggesting it can always be extended farther still. But ultimately experimental fiction can provide a paradigm only if it is one that rejects the creation of paradigms except in the loosest possible sense of the term--the model fiction writers should follow is the absence of a model. However desirable such a model might be in the cause of aesthetic freedom, it isn't likely to offer much stability to literary culture, and thus it was almost inevitable that some sort of reaction against the postmodern would set in to restore good critical order. The past thirty years or so has not seen a shift in paradigm but a reinforcement of conventional practices, a widespread return to narrative business as usual.

Such an embrace of convention--of the assumption that the art of fiction = storytelling, that the writer's job is to create characters who can be regarded as if they were persons, persons with "minds," etc.--can't really be said to be a part of the kind of dialectical process Ron Silliman describes. Postmodernism in fiction didn't "settle in" and then become the impetus for a new a refreshed practice but was considered a temporary aberration until writers could be brought back to producing "normal" fiction. Experimental writers have not disappeared altogether, but those sometimes still called "experiemental"--Lethem, Saunders, Wallace--are surely much less resolutely so, much more restrained, than Hawkes and Coover, et. al. Normal fiction is precisely what is taught to aspiring writers in most creative writing programs.

Literary change will continue to occur, of course, but in fiction it won't come in paradigm shifts but through the persistence of individual writers impatient with normal fiction. These fiction writers will be motivated by the need to preserve the integrity of their own work and by the desire to ensure that fiction has a purpose beyond providing the "book business" with a commerical product designed to be another entertainment option. Their work will continue to demonstrate that the aesthetics of fiction are manifested more in the continued reinvention of the form than in the successful reinscription of the existing form.

Saying This and This Too

If Stephen Dixon's work shows that it is possible to register in fiction the unfolding immediacy of experience without resorting to facile "psychological realism," Kent Haruf's Plainsong demonstrates that fiction can effect a perfectly plausible and convincing rendering of ordinary experience without "getting inside" the heads of its characters at all.

Almost any passage from the novel would do as illustration, since Haruf's approach is remarkably consistent throughout. This is the final paragraph of the first chapter, which is centered on Tom Guthrie, one of the novel's alternating protagonists:

Downstairs, passing through the house, Guthrie could hear the two boys talking in the kitchen, their voices clear, high-pitched, animated again. He stopped for a minute to listen. Something to do with school. Some boy saying this and this too and another one, the boy, saying it wasn't any of that either, because he knew better, on the gravel playground out back of school. He went outside across the porch and across the drvie toward the pickup. A faded red Dodge with a deep dent in the left rear fender. The weather was clear, the day was bright and still early and the air felt fresh and sharp, and Guthrie had a brief feeling of uplift and hopefulness. He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it and stood for a moment looking at the silver poplar tree. Then he got into the pickup and cranked it and drove out of the drive onto Railroad Street and headed up the five or six blocks toward Main. Behind him the pickup lifted a powdery plume from the road and the suspended dust shone like bright flecks of gold in the sun.

The point of view here is not quite omniscient, since the third-person narration does cleave to Guthrie's limited perspective ("Something to do with," "Some boy saying this and this too"--incomplete information because it is incomplete or unclear to Guthrie), at least until the final sentence, when it leaves Guthrie's vantage point to report on the dust left in his wake. But never does it presume to burrow itself beneath Guthrie's conscious awareness, to take us along as well and oblige us to look back out on the world from the subjective set of perceptions roiling around in his mind. Indeed, most of this paragraph consists of a straightforward, externally-based narration of events: "He stopped for a moment to listen"; "He went out across the porch"; "Then he got into the pickup." We're not invited to share Tom's "brief feeling of uplift and hopefulness," not clued in further to the nature of this feeling; we're simply told that he had it.

The rest of the novel proceeds in this way. The things that Tom Guthrie, his children Ike and Bobby, the pregnant teen Victoria Roubideaux, and others do are related to us, but we do not experience these things through them. They just happen, and the characters deal with what happens to them in the best way they can. By the time we've finished reading Plainsong, we can't really say we "know" its characters in the way we're encouraged to do so in most narratives steeped in psychological realism. These novels pretend to tell us what's essential about their characters, what literally characterizes them at the "deep" level. They're rung through the rhetorical ringer; very little mystery is left. As a result, in the end, they're boring. The characters in Plainsong to an extent remain enigmatic, and they're more convincing as a result.

I didn't really expect to like Plainsong. I thought it would be just another exercise in "local color" a la Richard Russo. But Haruf isn't anything like Russo, at least not in this book. His characters seem authentic because they're presented to us with a stark simplicity we assume must be honest. There's no laboring after "vivid" details and colorful tics, no quaint, picturesque descriptions. It's an intensely realistic novel, but after a now decades-long era in which most "literary fiction" has filtered reality through flimsy psychologizing, workshop-derived wrappings of formula, and a gaudy camouflage of superficial surrealism, it's rather nice to encounter it again.

Market Penetration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Past the End of the Year

Cynthia Ozick makes at least one very important point in her essay, "Literary Entrails," in the April, 2007 Harper's Magazine:

. . .in searching for the key to the Problem of the Contemporary Novel (or Novelist), there are cupboards where it is useless to look. And there are reasons that do not apply: writers vying for the highest rung of literary prestige; potential readers distracted by the multiplicity of storytelling machines. Feuds and jealousies are hardly pertinent [e.g., Ben Marcus vs. Jonathan Franzen], and the notorious decline of reading, while incontrovertible, may have less to do with the admittedly shaky situation of literary fiction than many believe. The real trouble lies not in what is happening but in what is not happening.

What is not happening is literary criticism.

Unfortunately, Ozick isn't very precise in explaining what she means by "literary criticism," beyond conjuring up a critic possessing "a powerfully persuasive, and pervasive, intuition for how [novels] are connected, what they portend in the aggregate, how they comprise and color an era." Even more unfortunately, she doesn't bother to bring poetry within the purview of criticism, which might have forced her to identify those elements of the critic's task that take criticism beyond taxonomy ("how novels are connected"), which is an important but by no means sufficient activity, and beyond noting what an era's fiction "portends," how it "colors" its time and place, which seems to me to be the job of sociologists and historians, not literary critics engaged in what I take to be their most indispensable work: reading individual novels (and poems) carefully and insightfully, giving other readers a sense of what a particularly dedicated reader experienced while attending closely to the text. The most efffective critics also bring a familiarity with literary history to bear on the text at hand, but simply pointing out "connections" and keeping track of the "aggregate" won't really do.

Ozick invokes James Wood, apparently now almost everyone's default setting for the category "critic," as an exemplar of the kind of criticism she presumably has in mind, but she quotes some of his more pompous, oracular pronouncements--"Belief is a mere appendix to magic, its unused organ. This is a moral problem" [referring to the work of Toni Morrison]--rather than any specific instance of critical analysis that might help us actually read the text more efficaciously, as opposed to admiring the critic's cute phrase-making or joining in on his moral sanctimony. Wood does frequently enough mix in plausible analysis with his moralizing, but it would seem that Ozick prefers his rhetorical posturing to his usable criticism.

Nevertheless, Ozick is right to distinguish between "literary criticism" and most book reviews and between literary criticism and academic criticism. While some book reviewers are also skillful critics (Sven Birkerts, Louis Menand, Daniel Mendelsohn) able to use the book review form to more precisely critical ends, Ozick is right to maintain that the judgments of book reviewers, even reviewers who are themselves writers, are too often "capricious," too often constrained by the formulaic structure of the book review. She is also accurate in her description of "advanced" academic criticism as limited by its "confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multi-syllabic pidgin," reducing literature to dogma. (One can only hope that she is correct in predicting such criticism is "destined to vanish like the fog [it evokes].") The success of academic criticism in appopriating "criticism" to itself, however much it has devolved into an insular discourse that long ago left any real interest in literature far behind, has created a situation in which the brief newspaper/magazine review has to suffice as "literary criticism." Ozick justifiably calls for the development of "a broad infrastructure, through a critical mass of critics," for the more amply developed kind of criticism she at least gestures toward in this essay.

This perceived need for a renewal of criticism is where I myself began when creating this blog. To some extent, I have become only more aware of how the absence of such criticism, less deadline-driven and publishing-centered, has created a situation like the one Scott Esposito describes:

Enough with the mad rush of literature where we barely have time to contemplate spring's hot titles before summer assaults us with its books. Why not linger over those spring books (and the winter ones as well), think about them a little longer, say something about them that will last past the end of the year?. . . .

Such a "mad rush" of superficial discussion can only result in a brand of reviewing that emphasizes the trendy and ephemeral, that elevates the "book business" and its trivialities over the long-term consideration of books that more people ought to read, of books that might even stand the test of time and still be read a generation from now, not just next year. One thing Ozick overlooks in her discussion of the current state of criticism is exactly where good literary criticism might appear. (One place to look would be Scott's own online critical journal, The Quarterly Conversation.) Certainly newspapers and magazines are not suddenly going to publish more of it. The current effort by the NBCC to "save" the book section at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is not likely to succeed,and if it did wouldn't make much of a difference--I can't remember the last time I read the AJC's book reviews with any seriousness. Literary quarterlies might usefully devote more of their space to criticism, but that really hasn't been happening very much, either.

In starting this blog (and joining up with other literary blogs in implicitly attempting to create a "broad infrastructure" of serious literary discussion), I was making a judgment that the blog post could come to approximate (in a perhaps more condensed form) if not replace the critical essay--the available forums for which have long been dwindling in number--as the vehicle for "literary criticism." Not only could an individual post attempt critical readings of various kinds and lengths, but that post could be linked to other posts (both of one's own, and of others considering the same subjects) in a kind of chain of critical discussion. I still believe that literary blogs can perform this function (especially since numerous other bloggers have since appeared taking what seems to be the same approach), although Cynthia Ozick either hasn't considered this option or shares the same blinkered attitude to online discourse expressed by Michael Dirda, Keith Gessen, etc. Her one mention of blogs is dismissive, as she refers to "blogging and emailing and text-messaging" as among the distractions the younger generations have succumbed to. I assume she's one of the print fetishists who can't imagine serious literary debate occuring online.

But I can't share either her snobbery or her conviction that, whether serious criticism survives or not, "novels will be written, whatever the conditions that roil around them." I think the existence of literary criticism is a necessary condition of the survival of both fiction and poetry. Without thoughtful discussion of what's being done by interesting writers, as well as continued discussion of what's been done in the past, "novels" as a form of "literature" will descend into further irrelevance. With no one to argue over what makes writing "literary" in the first place, or why such a concept even matters, novels will at best be only the first step in developing the script for the possible movie so many novels already want to be. Unless folks like Cynthia Ozick think rigorous print-based criticism is going to make a miraculous comeback in newspapers and magazines whose editors suddenly come to their senses and seek to safeguard the literary tradition, she ought to contemplate the possibility that "pixels" can form words and paragraphs and essays just as readily as ink.

Audacities

Since Philip Roth has lately been publishing new work at a rapid rate, and since nothing immediately suggests this pace will slacken, it is probably not wise to make generalizations about what may be the "late" stage of his career. He may yet produce much more new fiction, perhaps returning to longer novels, perhaps with yet another "major" novel of the sort The Plot Against America was widely regarded to be. Still, the short novels Roth has now given the collective designation "Nemeses: Short Novels," which includes Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis, at the least seem to have been written expressly as a series of short novels that invite reflection both on the possible connections and correspondences among them and on their status as works of, perhaps, Roth's later years as a writer.

The relative brevity of these books has struck many reviewers as including a shift in tone, even for some a loss of the energy and audacity we associate with "classic" Roth. It is certainly the case that these four short novels are absent the irreverence and comedic iconoclasm of works like Portnoy's Complaint (itself not a particularly long book) and Sabbath's Theater. On the other hand, they don't really lack the confrontational attitude toward existence to be found in Roth's previous fiction, their protagonists' ability to live comfortably in their own behavior, their fundamental assertions of self. The unnamed protagonist of Everyman, Marcus Messner of Indignation, Simon Axler of The Humbling, and Bucky Cantor of Nemesis all resist the external constraints they perceive to be pressing on them, just as do Alexander Portnoy, Mickey Sabbath, or David Kepesh. But these characters find themselves struggling more directly and immediately with mortality itself, and thus quite possibly the shorter form and less comedically pointed approach of the "Nemeses" books is entirely deliberate, Roth's effort to characterize this struggle in a more appropriately sober tone.

Indeed, perhaps the more appropriate collective title for the four books might have been the title of the third, since the process of aging and/or the prospect of impending death are portrayed in all of them as a kind of "humbling," although in The Humbling itself, Simon Axler is also humbled more specifically by his failing powers as an actor and by his sexual misadventure with a woman even more self-centered than he is. "Everyman" is humbled by his helplessness at the mercy of his failing body, while Bucky Cantor is humbled even more cruelly by the random actions of nature, struck down at an early age by polio. Marcus Messner is notable for his refusal to be humbled by the authority figure who has that goal in mind, but ultimately he also is subject to the subsequent humbling of an early death.

It is tempting to conclude that these four novels reflect Roth's own growing sense of being humbled by increasing age and infirmity, and of death as the final nemesis, but of course this could just as easily be an instance of the biographical fallacy, the assumption that a writer's work is a direct translation from episodes in his/her life, or in Roth's case, at least that his most recent books are more concerned with such ultimate questions than any of his earlier ones. Then again, Roth's fiction is notorious for suggesting parallels with his life, for presumably drawing on his own experience in ways that perhaps most radically blurs the boundaries between life and literature among all postwar American writers. One could say that much of Roth's work makes discerning the former in the latter a mostly hopeless task, but also perhaps trying to separate the two beside the point.

While none of the Nemeses books explores these boundaries as deliberately as Operation Shylock, The Facts, or even the Zuckerman books, they all do share the preoccupation with the historical Newark of Roth's childhood and continue to model characters and events on Roth's family members, particularly his father, and his own experiences as a boy and younger man. Everyman, which seems to me the weakest of these four books, is a rather conventional "autobiographical novel" that draws on the circumstances of Roth's life, in this case especially his medical history and, loosely, his relationship with his brother, but is otherwise unremarkable in the way it fictionalizes it's author's experiences without insisting on the connections. The Humbling would seem to be the least autobiographical work of this quartet, although again the portrait of an aging artist unhappy with his fading powers might be taken as a kind of self-examination, and the protagonist's vexed relationship with the femme fatale could easily enough be seen as a send-up of Roth's own image as both a writer and a man troubled by a dubious history with women. In this way The Humbling, not obviously based on the writer's life, is actually a more resonant example of Roth's aesthetic appropriation of "real life" than the more directly autobiographical Everyman, which attempts to invest its fairly routine story with additional significance simply through associating the protagonist with the allegorical figure named in the title

Indignation is, in my opinion, the most resonant  of these four novels, the one most likely to stand among Roth's best books, especially as a shorter work that could serve future readers as an introduction to Roth. It both inhabits the autobiographical gray area and provocatively exploits this strategy by focusing on a protagonist who apparently has much in common with the young Philip Roth but then representing the protagonist as the posthumous narrator of his story. This is explained (barely) by projecting Private Marcus Messner's account as the final activity of his dying brain upon his mortal wound as a soldier in the Korean War, not long after the events narrated as Indignation, but the ultimate chapter relating this occurrence raises more questions than it answers: How did the narrator of this chapter gain access to Pvt. Messner's fading brainwaves? If this narrator is assumed to be Philip Roth, does this make Indignation finally a metafiction, the story of Roth telling us the story of the Roth stand-in Messner, only further obscuring the divide between the experiences on which the novel might be based and the fiction Roth has made of them?

As Jonathan Rosen points out, Indignation is  "one of Roth's counter-life books, where the author seems to be confronting what might have happened had things gone just a little differently for him." And Marcus Messner has much in common with other Roth characters--not just Neil Klugman of Goodbye, Columbus, Gabe Wallach of Letting Go, or Alexander Portnoy, but also Nathan Zuckerman in the original Zuckerman novellas and Mickey Sabbath, characters who, if not always expressing "indignation" per se, certainly maintain a healthy (or unhealthy) degree of skepticism and impertinence. While such characters don't always necessarily prosper in the wake of their audacities, they persevere, a chance denied to Marcus Messner due to his premature death. To the extent we must inevitably regard all of these characters as variations on Roth's own self-image, we might thus call Indignation a kind of autobiographical fantasy, a version of the egoist narrative in which the protagonist does not survive his impudence.

Nemesis differs from Indignation in that the impudence of its protagonist is both learned and earned. Bucky Cantor is not naturally egocentric or defiant. He is in fact an idealist who wants only to do good and believes that this attitude will be rewarded. When he is cruelly disabused of this notion and not only contracts polio but is convinced he has been the carrier of the virus that has killed many of his students, Bucky himself turns virulently against the God he believes has burdened him with both a broken body and a broken spirit. Although Bucky is seemingly justified in his rage--the novel depicts his undoing as an almost malicious act of fate--he allows this rage to destroy whatever chance he still has left to lead a meaningful life. When at the end of the novel its narrator tells a much older Bucky, "Don't be against yourself. There's enough cruelty in the world as it is. Don't make things worse by scapegoating yourself," we must surely conclude that Roth himself partly endorses this sentiment, but it's hard not to conclude as well that he shares Bucky's disabused view of God's creation as a randomly brutal place. God would indeed be a sadist had he in fact created such a place, and this is what Bucky still seems to believe, but one could just as easily conclude that Bucky's problem is that he does still believe in that God, with whom he is in perpetual battle, when his experience simply confirms that the world can be random and brutal.

The narrator's encounter with Bucky Cantor is part of a final chapter in which we learn that the narrator of Nemesis has been all along one of Bucky's former students. Although we have been given one brief hint earlier in the text that this might be the case (and this is reinforced by the fact that Bucky is often referred to as "Mr. Cantor"), it is possible that many readers will assume that the novel is narrated by a third-person narrator, perhaps  similar to those narrating Everyman and The Humbling. Those readers have to some degree been tricked by another subtle manipulation of point of view, which should prompt such readers to reexamine their response to what has come before. Is Nemesis another autobiographical excursion after all, in this case with the Philip Roth stand-in as the narrator rather than the protagonist? How confident can we be of the account provided through this "as told to" strategy? Are we simultaneously to find the narrative of Bucky Cantor moving and Bucky himself pitiable and to agree with the narrator that Bucky overreacted?

These are questions readers will have to answer for themselves. Both Indignation and Nemesis belong to that by now long line of Roth's fictions that in experimenting with the permeability of "facts" and fiction and in constantly challenging readers' expectations, not always in an immediately obvious way, pose questions without final answers, including questions about the very "realism" on which they otherwise seem to depend.

 

May 23, 2011

Absorbing the Information

I recently tried for a second time to read William Gibson's Neuromancer, which I have long been told is perhaps the most important contemporary science fiction novel, and for the second time I failed--although this time I did make it to page 85, which is about 50 pages farther than I got the first time.

I was defeated mostly by passages such as the following:

At midnight, synched with the chip behind Molly's eye, the link man in Jersey had given his command. "Mainline." Nine moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure sect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent, Blue Nine, into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.

I suppose that this sort of infodumping is part of the admission price in most science fiction, but I confess I have a hard time slogging my way through it, an even harder time actually caring about the "information" once it's been dumped on me. I know that I am eventually supposed to understand what a "link man" is, who the "moderns" are, what the "Sprawl" is, and why "MAX EMERG" is a code being used. That the "Sense/Net Pyramid" is a highly significant sort of thing will become clear. But since the presentation of these things in the pedestrian prose of this paragraph has left me indifferent, I also know I'm not going to be able to muster up much interest when they make their inevitable returns. A passage like this doesn't so much incite my imagination as it does beat it into submission.

Perhaps this kind of interlude would be tolerable if it were just an occasional hazard, but unfortunately in Neuromancer such piling-on of exotic details just keeps on coming. And perhaps I would be more willing to accept that as a necessary part of the "world-building" of science fiction if I could take some interest in the novel's plot and characters, or find some other aesthetic attraction to offset the tedium of the endless exposition, but alas the characters are made of the thinnest of cardboard (limited almost exclusively to their function as devices to advance the story), the "plot" seems just a retread of the Hollywood thriller with its international cartels and conspiracies as objects of intrigue, and the writing itself never rises much beyond the perfunctory--move the characters through their melodramatic paces, offer up the "vision" supposedly invoked by the unfamiliar terms, occasionally pause to feature some snappy dialogue. Finally it seems that the unfamiliar terms and their world-building are primarily what the novel exists to provide, as if the accumulation of the nomenclature in itself is some kind of aesthetic accomplishment.

Maybe I'm asking of science fiction such as Neuromancer something it isn't intended to provide. Maybe "art" is not what draws most of its audience to the genre, and thus I should just leave it to those who do appreciate what it wants to do. I'd still like to think, however, that science fiction can have aesthetic interest that isn't overridden by the need to "say something" about the future (and implicitly about the present), turning fiction almost entirely into a form of cultural criticism.

Illusions of Substance

Charles Baxter's stories, as collected in Gryphon, seem to me to epitomize an approach to fiction writing that has become the trademark approach in the era of the Creative Writing program and its "workshop" method of instruction. Whether Baxter has simply become the most consistent enabler of this approach, or might even be a model to which other aspiring Creative Writers turn for inspiration, Gryphon is a virtual sourcebook of the workshop method, and might ultimately be interesting for later readers and critics who want to understand the nature and appeal of this method--although, in my opinion, they will prove interesting for very little else.

The stories included in this volume are not exactly bad, but they certainly are dull. Consistently and surpassingly dull. First and foremost they are dull because they are so formulaic. It is true that Baxter's stories do not emphasize "plot" in the most traditional, drama-building sense of the term, but for this they substitute a more meandering, "slice of life" technique that nevertheless almost always leads to a moment of revelation, understated in the "quiet" manner favored by workshop realism (presumably a legacy of minimalism, but now more a mannerism than an intentional strategy), but a gathering-point of plot nonetheless. In a Baxter story things happen, and they are always pointing to a resolution of the underlying tensions the story has introduced. This sort of slackened plotting so predominates the stories in Gryphon that it quickly comes to seem just a pallid variation on conventional plot devices and settles into bland routine.

Baxter's characters are similarly repetitive, and ultimately seem alternative versions of the same character, however much the superficial circumstances change. Most often, they seem to be just drifting along in their lives (so the "drift" in the plotting, of course, is even more directly mimetic); sometimes they are merely eccentric outsiders, other times outright losers; often they are disappointed with their lives (whether they admit it or not), and even those characters who seem mostly content with their lot have experiences that bring out latent conflict. These characters are subject to the revelatory moment or episode, usually a realization on the character's part about the state of his/her life, to which the stories are leading. Usually the revelation adds up to the fact that the character is, well, drifting, disappointed, conflicted, etc.

Both Baxter's habitual mode of plotting and characterization could no doubt be called "quirky," or at least this is the overall "feel" of the stories. The characters are off-centered enough and the narratives just nonlinear enough that they can pass for unconventional, but "quirky" has become its own kind of storytelling mode, almost a genre of its own, in both fiction and certain "independent" films. It seems to designate a sufficiently unorthodox approach to suggest such works are to some degree original and innovative, but these "quirky" films and fictions are actually a flight from originality and innovation, a retreat into formal timidity and aesthetic sameness. They pretend to be daring in their choice of character, subject, or milieu, while reinforcing all the unadventurous expectations of narrative transparency that ensure readers won't be alienated by a work that is unduly "difficult." Charles Baxter's stories could be the lodestar of this style of "quirk."

Much of this quirkiness is also, ultimately, sentimental. The characters and their travails inevitably provoke, or are meant to provoke, protective feelings on their behalf, feelings of sorrow or pity for their limitations or of satisfaction at their occasional triumphs. Baxter's stories share in this sentimentality. The first two stories in Gryphon, featuring elderly characters with dementia, lay it on pretty thick, but while not all of the stories are quite so explicit in their heart-tugging, most of them most of them do ask the reader  to indulge in emotions that are essentially sentimental. "Surprised by Joy" is an especially egregious example, a story about a couple whose daughter has died. The wife finally seems to manage to find "closure," but the husband still has not, and the story ends with the husband exclaiming "I don't want to be all right" while the wife looks at the beautiful mountains in reawakened joy. "Shelter" concerns a man who takes a sudden interest in helping the down-and-out and brings one young homeless man home with him, bemusing his wife but upsetting his son. In "Flood Show," a man almost drowns trying to cross a flooded river to reunite with his ex-wife, to whom he then confesses, "I couldn't help it. I never got over it." All of these stories take ostensibly strange turns to get to their sentimental conclusions ("Shelter" ends as the protagonist asks his wife to "shelter me" and embraces her), but they are finally just a diversion from the hackneyed tropes and cloying emotions in which the stories habitually traffic.

Often enough the stories attempt to cloak their sentimentality with portentous conclusions. In "Harmony of the World," a failed musician turned music journalist takes on a side job playing accompaniment for a singer whose lack of talent he can't finally keep himself from declaring. The protagonist, who is also the narrator, concludes by reflecting on the fate of souls in Dante's limbo, where they suffer "grief without torment." The narrator observes, "These sighs are rather like the sounds one hears drifting from front porches in small towns on soft summer nights." The bathos of this is overwhelming. The story does nothing to convince us that life in "small towns" rises to this level of grandiosity. (The analogy actually makes it seem rather banal and sordid.) It does convince us that the narrator is wallowing in his own self-pity. In "The Disappointed," a Swedish engineer visits America on business, perhaps to stay on in Detroit as a consultant. Not surprisingly, Detroit provides a virtual reverse image to the protagonist's antiseptic native Sweden, and at the end of the story he is mugged. Leaving the hospital, he "steps[s] out onto the front sidewalk, and to the air, which smelled as it always had, of powerful combustible materials and their traces, fire and ash." One hardly knows what this sentence is supposed to signify. It clearly wants to mean something. The "smelled as it always had" seems to add some pseudo-allegorical implication, but at best we are left with a story of ordinary, even obvious, disillusion elevated into faux-apocalyptic imagery.

This kind of fake profundity embodied in the story's concluding image or gesture is unfortunately yet another characteristic of the workshop story Baxter shares, to the ubiquity of which he has no doubt contributed. Such a device is just "indeterminate" enough to seem appropriately "literary," while managing to simulate a moment of insight that is sufficiently arresting to convince some readers the story must be consequential. In all of the devices that Baxter uses, he works to manufacture this illusion of substance, both formal and thematic. Since I have not found a single negative print review of Gryphon, I have to conclude he is apparently succeeding.

What Translation Is

Translator Daniel Hahn expresses irritation at the way his work is sometimes regarded:

So what makes me crazy is when the reviewer praises something that I did and gives the impression that I’m not there. By all means compliment the author on the tightness of the plotting, on the deftness of the characterization, and ignore me—they’re supported by my work, of course, but marginally. But a reviewer who thinks he can praise the rhythm, the texture, the beauty of the prose, the warmth and wit of the voice, without acknowledging who’s responsible—as though those things in an author’s original simply reappear automatically after the mechanics of translation have been applied to a text—that’s a reviewer who simply has no understanding of what translation is. There’s a reason the copyright in my translations belongs to me and not the original author. The plot and the ideas and the themes aren’t mine, but the words are, all of them, and the way they all fit together, too.

It seems to me that almost all reviews of translated fiction make the error Hahn is lamenting. They don't stick to what can be discerned of the "plotting" and other structural devices, but move on to make comments about the quality of the prose or the "tone" of voice, without acknowledging that the prose giving rise to the voice has literally been composed by the translator, not the author putatively under review. No doubt some translators do a better job of others at getting us as close as possible to the prose style of the author, but finally the words will be, indeed, the translator's. Too many reviewers make too many facile judgments of translations in which the translation itself drops out, the focus being on features of the author's text the reviewer simply hasn't actually experienced unless that reviewer has read the text in the author's untranslated original.

This is the tragedy of translation: Many of us will read some great books only in their translated versions, and thus we won't finally really know fully what makes them great. It's also possible we might read some rather mediocre books that have actually been made better by their translations.Given the cachet translated fiction seems to have acquired among some readers (its very lack of widespread availability, its lack of attention from the major newspaper book reviews perhaps allowing the devotee of translated fiction to feel one of the enlightened few), I think it likely some translated books of this latter kind are getting more attention than they deserve--under the prevailing circumstances, any new translated work deserves notice. Making authors and their work available through translation is an entirely worthy service, but understanding their limits are also important. We shouldn't make claims about the underlying work--on which the translation is a variation and therefore a new work--we can't possibly validate without in fact reading it.

Absorbing the Information

I recently tried for a second time to read William Gibson's Neuromancer, which I have long been told is perhaps the most important contemporary science fiction novel, and for the second time I failed--although this time I did make it to page 85, which is about 50 pages farther than I got the first time.

I was defeated mostly by passages such as the following:

At midnight, synched with the chip behind Molly's eye, the link man in Jersey had given his command. "Mainline." Nine moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure sect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent, Blue Nine, into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.

I suppose that this sort of infodumping is part of the admission price in most science fiction, but I confess I have a hard time slogging my way through it, an even harder time actually caring about the "information" once it's been dumped on me. I know that I am eventually supposed to understand what a "link man" is, who the "moderns" are, what the "Sprawl" is, and why "MAX EMERG" is a code being used. That the "Sense/Net Pyramid" is a highly significant sort of thing will become clear. But since the presentation of these things in the pedestrian prose of this paragraph has left me indifferent, I also know I'm not going to be able to muster up much interest when they make their inevitable returns. A passage like this doesn't so much incite my imagination as it does beat it into submission.

Perhaps this kind of interlude would be tolerable if it were just an occasional hazard, but unfortunately in Neuromancer such piling-on of exotic details just keeps on coming. And perhaps I would be more willing to accept that as a necessary part of the "world-building" of science fiction if I could take some interest in the novel's plot and characters, or find some other aesthetic attraction to offset the tedium of the endless exposition, but alas the characters are made of the thinnest of cardboard (limited almost exclusively to their function as devices to advance the story), the "plot" seems just a retread of the Hollywood thriller with its international cartels and conspiracies as objects of intrigue, and the writing itself never rises much beyond the perfunctory--move the characters through their melodramatic paces, offer up the "vision" supposedly invoked by the unfamiliar terms, occasionally pause to feature some snappy dialogue. Finally it seems that the unfamiliar terms and their world-building are primarily what the novel exists to provide, as if the accumulation of the nomenclature in itself is some kind of aesthetic accomplishment.

Maybe I'm asking of science fiction such as Neuromancer something it isn't intended to provide. Maybe "art" is not what draws most of its audience to the genre, and thus I should just leave it to those who do appreciate what it wants to do. I'd still like to think, however, that science fiction can have aesthetic interest that isn't overridden by the need to "say something" about the future (and implicitly about the present), turning fiction almost entirely into a form of cultural criticism.

Altman and the Filmgoing Experience

Although I have boundless admiration for the work of Robert Altman in general, I've never much cared for M*A*S*H, unfortunately the film of his most popular among casual viewers. Its humor seems pretty sophomoric to me (especially in comparison with a truly great work of "black humor" set in wartime such as Heller's Catch-22) and what it has to "say" about war--it's really bad, and thus invites compensating "bad" behavior--seems rather trite. Every time I rewatch it--this time as part of a career survey of Altman's films I am hereby initiating--I think perhaps I'll finally get it, will understand why everyone else likes it so, but I never do. (I actually like the tv show much better, especially the first couple of seasons.)

But at least this time around I was able to see those things in it that are of a piece with Altman's later and better work, even how directing this film might have inspired him to further pursue its strategies, with greater success, in the later films. It may not be one of his best movies, but it probably will still turn out to be one of his most important.

M*A*S*H is, of course, an "inversion" of the war film, just as McCabe and Mrs Miller inverts the Western, The Long Goodbye the detective film/film noir, Thieves Like Us the gangster film, etc. Rather than focus on scenes of battle and heroism, it depicts the results of battles--carnage--and the decidedly nonheroic behavoir of its protagonists (except when they're in the operating room trying to undo the damage inflicted by war heroism). Rather than extolling the scene of war as one in which traditionally "masculine" virtues are revealed at their best, in which boys become men, M*A*S*H shows men acting like boys. This is presented as the most authentic response to the stupidity of war. And rather than portray war with the solemnity that might seem its due, the film offers outrageous humor, humor that exceeds in its acidity all those previous war comedies that tried to find the "lighter" side of war.

The subsequent exploded genre films will continue this strategy, reversing our expectations of the genre in question, upending assumptions about gender, in general mocking the conventional practices that pretend to represent American life and attitudes in the movies. That M*A*S*H did it first and in 1970 perhaps partly explains why this movie became popular--such questioning of inherited beliefs and conventions was surely reaching a receptive audience at that time.

M*A*S*H also shows Altman developing (or refining) what will become his signature methods and techniques, an approach that here and afterward can be identified as his distinctive (and, for American cinema, innovative) fillmmaking style. Most discussion of Altman's style focuses on his use of long takes and overlapping dialogue--both are on display in M*A*S*H, although the latter somewhat less so--but to me what stands out most in Altman's use of such techniques, including his restless camera, is the way in which it works to substantially underdramatize his films' narratives. This can be seen in M*A*S*H, and also in That Cold Day in the Park, Altman's most immediately previous film, released in 1969. Both films are deliberately and episodically developed, although That Cold Day in the Park is ultimately more linear in its narrative strategy that M*A*S*H, which is literally presented as a collection of episodes. That Cold Day in the Park, in fact, could almost be called a thriller of sorts, although the story is told in such a matter-of-fact, understated way that one is almost caught offguard when it eventually makes its way into Pyscho/Peeping Tom territory. Sandy Dennis's underplayed performance as the psycho (again a reversal of our expectations of such a character), whose diffidence and adherence to class norms mask her mounting frustration and despair, anticipates all the similarly underplayed, ad hoc performances Altman managed to elicit in his subsequent films from all of his actors (occasionally at some cost, if Altman's reported conflicts with Donald Sutherland and Warren Beatty are to be credited).

Altman's style and his unhurried, off-the-cuff mode of storytelling have the effect of almost de-familiarizing the filmgoing experience. We don't expect movies, or at least American movies, to proceed in this way. Where's the melodramatic conflict, the overwrought gestures, the clearly signalled plot twists? Altman's films force our awareness of them as films, or at least enforce our recognition of the formulas employed in most other films, formulas Altman either attacks or ignores. And this happens even though the techniques Altman does employ are otherwise unobtrusive, more authentically realistic as aesthetic choices than most of those used to create "realism" in American cinema. The ultimate effect of Altman's approach to filmmaking, it seems to me, is to more fully immerse us into the filmgoing experience, make us more aware of viewing films as an experience, very much in the spirit of John Dewey's notion of "integrating the parts" I discussed in the previous post. Very few other American filmmakers encourage us to ponder the nature of aesthetic experience in its cinematic form in quite the way Robert Altman does.

In my opinion, That Cold Day in the Park actually performs this task in a more satisfying way than M*A*S*H. It is, I think, one of Altman's more underrated films, even while M*A*S*H is one of his most overrated. Its exploration of the conflict between classes and between "liberated youth" and the repressed older generation might seem to fix the film to the 60s era it to some extent does seek to render, but its very lack of affect and its unostentatious surface (the youth with whom Sandy Dennis's character becomes obsessed is not a blustering radical but for much of the film simply remains silent) lure us in and prevent it from being an obvious period piece. In some ways, M*A*S*H, with its willed anarchy and its scarcely hidden analogies to Vietnam, seems more dated. Neither film really shows Robert Altman to be the great film artist he will demonstrate himself to be in just a few years hence, but That Cold Day in the Park, at least, does announce he has the promise to become one.

Fictionalized

William Skidelsky is entirely justified in objecting to the ever-increasing number of films and novels offering "fictionalised portraits" of historical figures and events, although I can't agree with his analysis of the origins of this phenomenon, at least where literary fiction is concerned. I share his impatience with this new genre's exploitation of readers' fascination with the "true story" (producing in the process mostly a type of extended narrative gossip), but I think there is--or was--a more radical impulse animating the precursors to this genre, one that has been transformed into the tedious "fact-based storytelling" Skidelsky describes.

Because of the ubiquity of this kind of narrative today, it is now more difficult to appreciate just how unsettling E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime seemed at the time of its publication in 1975. Not exactly a historical novel--it seemed designed to question the very utility of historical "fact" in our consideration of the past--it nevertheless presented a vivid if subjective rendition of the ragtime era by juxtaposing purely fictional characters with actual historical figures who are in turn treated as if they were fictional characters. Considerable liberty is taken with the historical record, and the result is a novel that not only fictionalizes history but suggests that, as far as the novelist is concerned, history might just as well be fiction. Whereas much of the self-reflexive, "postmodern" fiction of the time called attention to the artifice of fiction-making in order to reinforce the separation of fiction and reality, Ragtime seemed to propose that, for the literary imagination, the two realms are really quite permeable.

Unfortunately, the legacy of Ragtimehas been the simplistic notion that the fiction writer might go back in time and pick out a "real person" to use as a character in a "fiction" that is mostly true to the facts, although some embellishment might be allowed where less is known and the reader is given access to "thoughts" of the character that of course can't be verified. (Doctorow has written such fiction himself.) In other words, what seemed innovative in Doctorow's novel has now become just another way of writing novels of conventional "psychological realism," a phenomenon that perhaps reaches its apogee in Colm Toibin's The Master, a study in psychological realism of one of the pioneers of psychological realism, a novel that seems clever in its conception but is otherwise, at least to me, essentially unreadable. It is neither a tribute to Henry James, whose originality in the representation of psychological states Toibin can't touch, nor a contribution to "knowledge" about James, beyond reinforcing the assumption that he was homosexual, an assumption that has never been credibly substantiated. I myself don't understand why the novel needed to be written at all.

But it is telling that this novel and many of the other fact-based novels (such as Jay Parini's recent about Herman Melville) are about writers. This feature of the genre also, it seems to me, is a latter-day development of a phenomenon linked to the experimental writing of the 1960s and 70s. One of the ways in which postmodern American fiction "called attention to the artifice of fiction-making" was by focusing on writers in the act of writing (think Barth especially). The point of this gesture, however, was not to make a conventional "character" out of such a figure (although in some cases this could happen) but to make all elements of fiction, including character, transparent as artifice. To the extent that writers and writing became a "subject," it was as part of an aesthetic reordering of fiction by which all of the "elements" were exposed as contingent, all secondary to language itself regarded as essentially a poetic rather than narrative medium.

Needless to say, this sort of inquiry into the nature of fiction as literary art has been replaced in the "fictionalized portrait" genre by inquiries into the same old practices advancing plot, setting, and character "depth" the postmodernists and metafictionists were questioning. The ironic self-regard introduced by the metafictionists has been replaced by actual self-regard for the vocation of writing by writers substituting "fact-based storytelling" for imagination. Nonfiction biographies have now mostly superseded literary criticism as the primary form of discourse about writers' work, and threaten to supersede the work as well. The last thing we need is for fiction to exacerbate this problem by simulating biographies.

Mediation

Tom Lutz asserts that Harold Bloom (along with Francine Prose) believes the current generation of politicized literary scholars (what Bloom terms the "school of resentment") "are all looking at something besides the text itself, by which they mean a book that is read without theory, without reference to other values, and without mediation of any kind."

Lutz associates this view that we should return to "the text" with New Criticism, but nowhere in his essay does he reveal (if he knows) that Bloom was actually hostile to New Criticism. He considered its approach so limiting and so dismissive (in the practice of most of the New Critics, at least) of the Romantic poets, whose work Bloom so loves, that he deliberately designed his own theory of poetic influence as a corrective, if not an outright rejection, of New Critical biases. Lutz goes on to associate both Bloom and New Criticism with such disparate figures as Mortimer Adler, E.D. Hirsch, and John Sutherland, simply because they appear to endorse the idea that learning to appreciate the "text itself" is an important part of literary education.

In a move apparently intended to show that Bloom doesn't practice what he preaches (or doesn't understand the foundation of his own practice), Lutz cites H. L. Mencken's witless attacks on "The New Criticism" (as delineated by J. E. Springarn in 1911), which putatively show that academic criticism is inherently theoretical, "criticism of criticism of criticism." But again, since Bloom is/was not a New Critic, it's hard to see how this undermines Bloom's own approach to the "text itself." The New Critics did indeed have a "theory" of the literary text as something dynamic and inherently dramatic (and reading as the experience of the text's dynamism), but it is not Bloom's, however much he might accept the underlying emphasis on the integrity of the literary text, free of the demands made on it by those with their own personal and political investments.

But of course Bloom does have a theory. No one who remembers the scholarly debates of the 1970s and 1980s could think otherwise, as Bloom played a major role in these debates precisely as a theorist of literature, a proponent of the Freudian notion of the "anxiety of influence." Far from being considered a conventional formalist, someone who believed a text should be read "without mediation of any kind," Bloom was taken as a radical, even a postmodernist, a critic who was taking literary study away from its proper focus on the "text itself" into very a-textual speculations about the role of poetic influence and its rather violent Freudian implications. Anyone who's read and taken seriously books such as The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, and Agon would know that the accusation Bloom is some kind of retrograde enemy of "theory" is ridiculous on its face.

Thus, at least as far as Bloom is concerned, Lutz's invocation of his name as one of those who demands a book be read "without theory, without reference to other values, and without mediation of any kind" is simply incorrect. This is not a matter of interpretation. Some investigation of Bloom's work, even of secondary explications of that work (a simple Google search, perhaps) would immediately reveal that Lutz's account is a caricature of the role Bloom has come to play in current literary discourse (the aging curmudgeon) but has nothing to do with what he's actually written. Even a book such as How to Read and Why, a deliberate simplification of Bloom's ideas about the value of literature, reveals that he does not hold the naive view of reading Lutz attributes to him.

Unfortunately, the caricature of Bloom is widely accepted. Just recently Sandra at Bookworld (otherwise a nice, thoughful litblog) opined that she had contracted "Bloom Syndrome," a "condition in which the sufferer is unable to read any work of literature unless it is deemed Significant by Harold Bloom and which often results in the reader losing the will to live/read, crushed under the weight of canonical imperatives." To the sin of thinking that the "text itself" is what literature is all about (and in Bloom's case looking to account for the text by emphasizing the writer's confrontation with his predecessors, an emphasis that highlights the continuity-through-conflict of literature) is added the annoying belief that the literary tradition is meaningful and worthwhile, that "some books are better than others." It's telling that in our culture someone who becomes associated with beliefs such as these is lampooned as a pathetic fogey who apparently thinks those old books are important or something.

Lyrical Commentary

In some ways, the critical response to John Updike's recent work seems to me similar to that accorded to Harold Bloom's, even though Updike is a novelist and Bloom a critic. Most of it is rankly opportunistic, as if it is now clearly time, given these writers' advancing age, for Our Best Critics to prepare us for their impending deaths and certain subsequent neglect, at least if these critics' own level-headed standards are to be applied. Most of it is directed at the authors rather than the work, as if the reviewers have stored up their animus against both writers' misguided if inexplicably successful ways and are now able to let them have it. And most of it is pretty stupid.

Terrorist is certainly not one of Updike's best novels. Literary posterity will probably regard it as an interesting but failed experiment, taking Updike away from his usual themes and mileu, although not completely: its exploration of religious belief is consistent with much of his previous fiction, and the town of New Prospect, New Jersey could easily enough be a depiction of Brewer, Pennsylvania in its own decayed postindustrial latter days. But it certainly does not deserve the kind of critical censure it often enough did receive upon its publication. (Amitav Ghosh: "the end result is that Updike is unable to cut his brown characters loose from texts, scriptures and ideologies. As for his belief that elaborate descriptions of skin color are a form of insight, it is not wholly without merit, for it does serve to occasionally enliven the prose"; Floyd Skloot: "the novel is almost wholly without credibility"; Jonathan Shainin: the novel is full of "consummately pretty descriptions of everything under the sun"; Michiko Kakutani: "the ensuing developments in this maladroit novel prove to be every bit as dubious as Ahmad is as a recognizable human being."

To some extent, Christopher Hitchens's ravings can be dismissed as just further proof of what an incompetent literary critic he is. (For more on this, go here.) One combs through his review looking for substantive support for his assertion that "Updike has produced one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon" but finds little beyond dissatisfaction with the author's pop culture references and impatience with his "grueling homework." Updike's portrayal of a religiously-obsessed Muslim clearly does not satisfy Hitchens, but then, given Hitchens's own record of misjudgment of the influence of religion in Iraq, one would hardly want a protagonist who does fit his image of what a true believer might be like. If I had to choose between John Updike and Christopher Hitchens for "insight" into or "imaginative sympathy" with a young man caught up in the struggle between religious belief and the physical/material temptatations of secular American society, I wouldn't have to weigh the alternatives for very long.

James Wood, on the other hand, doesn't have the excuse of being a generally inept critic, certainly not if his hyperelevated reputation for "intelligence" and "close reading" is to be taken seriously. And, indeed, Wood's familiarity with modern fiction (especially English and European fiction) can't be impugned, and, unlike Hitchens, he does take care to cite text and offer support for his judgments (which are in turn literary judgments rather than political arguments or expressions of dyspepsia). Yet Wood's negative review of Terrorist essentially rests on the conclusion that Updike isn't Dostoevsky or Conrad and that, surprise! surprise!, he isn't a psychological realist. These seem to me to be charges Updike would pretty readily confess to, and they only seem like damning criticism because Wood, as is his wont, advances his own preference for psychological realism, for realistic fiction that gives us an account of Mind, to the front of the line where proper literary strategies are concerned. Only psychological realism is a proper literary strategy, according to Wood, and writing that doesn't conform to his prejudice gets labeled "hysterical" or worse. Wood's reviews would be much easier to take if he began every one of them with a disclaimer: I have a particular hobbyhorse I like to ride when reviewing fiction, and in this case I have chosen a writer who allows me to ride it like the wind!

Wood tells us that the fatal flaw in Terrorist is that it shows Updike's failure "at the essential task of free indirect style." Updike "will begin a paragraph in his character's voice, and then, apparently losing any capacity for the necessary ventriloquism, decide utterly to write over his character." Updike's protagonist, Ahmad, "has no personality, no quiddity as an eighteen-year-old American, so he is Updike's serf, ready for whatever the writer chooses to do with him. In Updikeland, this means lyrical authorial commentary." In other words: Updike does not give over his prose to the task of probing his character's consciousness; he does not present us with a psychologlical portrait that subsumes either style or form to fiction's putative capacity to delve within, to make characters "real" to us by inviting us into their minds.

Updike's "lyrical authorial commentary" in Terrorist is not much altered from what we find in much of his other fiction, so Wood's complaint can't really be about this novel alone. This is Wood attempting a takedown of Updike based on a perceived flaw in one particular book, in which Updike has taken a risk by treating a subject not immediately and recognizably Updikean, however much he is able to render it with his usual precisely observed style. It allows Wood to make the same kind of criticism that has always been made of Updike, but to dress it up in fancier crittalk ("free indirect style"): Updike is too besotted with language. He writes too much.

It is true that Updike does not use the free indirect style. It is true that he "writes over" his characters. Although his third-person narratives (and most of his fiction does use third-person narration) do center on particular characters and their responses to events, Updike does not "inhabit" them in a way that would erase his own stylistic tracks. As I said in a previous post, Updike's writing draws on his characters' "mental storehouse of memories and images, but does not dwell in [their] immediate awareness. It creates writing out of that storehouse." Updike does not prove himself inadequate at psychological realism. He doesn't attempt it. Wood's criticism is thus entirely irrelevant and his review utterly useless.

Both Hitchens's and Wood's reviews seem to me of a piece with Leon Wieseltier's condemnation of Updike for "aestheticizing" the ruined World Trade Center in his depiction of the scene that appeared shortly after the events of 9/11/01. Updike merely applied his considerable powers of visual description to the task of evoking the disaster and was denounced as some kind of moral leper. It isn't surprising that Hitchens and Woods, themselves both moral critics suspicious of the merely aesthetic, would join in on the faultfinding once Updike dared to write a whole novel steeped in associations with the events of that day.

Telling Your Story

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

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

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

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

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

The Grifters starts out pretty well, too:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elfriede Jelinek

The novels of Elfreide Jelinek seem to me a conspicuous illustration of the limits of translation. Reviewers and critics favorable to her work tend to be familiar with it in its German versions, while those unfavorable tend to judge it based solely on the English translations available. While the former generally caution against forming conclusions about Jelinek's practices as a writer without considering the effect of her prose style as encountered in German, the latter generally ignore this advice, or at least proceed as if criticism of a writer known for having an unorthodox style and for creating special linguistic effects need not finally be constrained by these facts. Since I do not read German, I of course cannot myself attest to the specific qualities of Jelinek's prose that ought not be overlooked, but that is precisely the point: I feel that I must defer ultimate judgment of Jelinek's fiction because in a very real sense I cannot actually read it. I am left with those elements of her novels that I can discern and appraise, and to that extent I am much more well-disposed to them than her many detractors.

The most serious accusation made against her, at least for me, is that her work is a narrowly focused social critique of her native Austria, and a particularly "shrill" one at that. That her novels portray postwar Austria in an unflattering way can't be denied. To a degree it is indeed focused on specifically Austrian cultural failings--its attempt to whitewash its role in the Nazi era, its effort to crassly forge a national identity through emphasizing its tourist appeal and its musical heritage--but in other ways it isn't a "provincial" critique at all. The social and gender relations portrayed in Jelinek's novels are, or should be, perfectly recognizable to most Western readers. Coarse commercialism and patriarchal assumptions are hardly confined to Austria, and if the depiction of these forces in the novels is indeed unsparing, it's hard to argue it's inaccurate.

A closely-related complaint, or at least so it seems to me, is that Jelinek's fiction is short on "character." Joel Agee frets that "none of her specimens are alive. To be alive—or to seem so—a person must exhibit at least the appearance of autonomy, and none of Jelinek’s characters have enough consciousness to surprise themselves or the reader in the least." Of course, what we find in a Jelinek character is not "a person" to begin with. It is precisely a character, and providing a character with "consciousness" (or at least the illusion of such) is only one expedient with which a writer might proceed in creating a compelling work of fiction--and it remains just as much a piece of artifice as any other literary device. Jelinek herself comments on this in her essay/monologue "I Want to be Shallow":

I don't want theatre. Perhaps I just want to exhibit activities which one can perform as a presentation of something, but without any higher meaning. The actors should say something that nobody ever says, for this is not life. They should show work. They should say what's going on, but nobody should ever be able to say of them that something quite different is going on inside of them, something that one can read only indirectly on their faces or their bodies. . . .

Jelinek is here referring literally to theater, but it doesn't seem an inappropriate leap to conclude that she has a similar disinclination to dwell on what "is going on inside of" the characters in her fiction, apart from what can be included as "a presentation of something," a "presentation" rather than a "representation." Readers are of course free to prefer characters whose creators are attempting to represent the "higher meaning" of consciousness, but it isn't finally a valid criticism to dismiss a writer for not effectively carrying out an aesthetic strategy it is not her intention to use in the first place.

I'm pretty sure that what most readers would find most distinctive and ultimately memorable about Jelinek's novels (with the possible exception of The Piano Teacher, which arguably contains her most fully developed characters and is more conventionally narrated) is less their themes or their character creation but instead the unorthodox way in which the themes and characters are presented. That language itself will be perhaps the primary focus of interest in, say, Lust, is implicitly announced in its first few sentences: "Curtains veil the woman in her house from the rest. Who also have their homes. Their holes. The poor creatures. Their hideaways, abideaways, their fixed abodes. Where their friendly faces abide." The wordplay continues throughout the novel, most notably in the form of puns:

The banks offer shoulder bags in an attempt to win the custom of the very young. Even this riff-raff, the mere proteges of parents, want accounts of their own; there's no accounting for it. In a year or so the money will be looking good: it'll be a car, for death on the roads, or a furnished apartment, for death in your own four walls. Always assuming that--like the Direktor's son--you are a child under fourteen, guiltless, single, alive, but already singled out for a life among the clientele, the future consumer guild that will tax their hearts with the wish--consume their souls with the desire--to have some guilt-edged value added. . . .

Jelinek's narrator remains well outside her characters' "thoughts," at best externalizing them in her own declarations, otherwise observing, commenting, indulging in these linguistic games. To the extent a story and characters emerge from the narrator's discourse it is almost despite that discourse rather than because it is focused on telling a story. To me, the reward of reading Jelinek's fiction is in untangling the story from the circuitous narration, without severing the story from the free play of that narration.

And yet I still finally feel that I can't fully appreciate what Jelinek is trying to do with language and narration because I can't read her actual language, German. It is no slight to her translators to say the equivalents they have found to her punning and other linguistic twists may not be as satisfying, or as true to her talents, as what we would find in the German texts. This lack of true acquaintance with Jelinek's writing allows some critics to go on about her toneless social criticism or her purported "nihilism," but the genuine nature of her achievement ultimately eludes such assessments (as it does my own).

Expressions

According to Zadie Smith, in a Guardian essay by now showered with much praise for its "honesty:

. . .writers do have a different kind of knowledge than either professors or critics. Occasionally it's worth listening to. The insight of the practitioner is, for better or worse, unique. It's what you find in the criticism of Virginia Woolf, of Iris Murdoch, of Roland Barthes. What unites those very different critics is the confidence with which they made the connection between personality and prose. To be clear: theirs was neither strictly biographical criticism nor prescriptively moral criticism, and nothing they wrote was reducible to the childish formulations "only good men write good books" or "one must know a man's life to understand his work". But neither did they think of a writer's personality as an irrelevance. They understood style precisely as an expression of personality, in its widest sense. A writer's personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don't think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer's way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions.

Wow. Style is "an expression of personality" It's also a mark of the writer's "manner of being in the world." It's also "a personal necessity. . .the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness." It's also "a writer's way of telling the truth." It's also "the refinement of a consciousness." And it's also the "education of the emotions."

That's an awful lot of weight to heap on words and sentences and paragraphs, especially in fiction, which, except in the hands of narcissists and pseudo-philosophers, is not a medium for the "expression" of anything, but the attempt to convince your readers that words on a page evoke a "world," and to make something aesthetically pleasing out of prose. If you can do this, then all of the handwringing about "human consciousness" and "telling the truth" and educating emotions is just so much pomp and circumstance.

Frankly, I really don't know what any of the declarations made in the above-quoted passage are even supposed to mean. How the hell am I to know anything about the writer's "personality" from reading his novel? I don't care about his personality in the first place; I want to know what he can do with words. He can take his "personality" to his therapist. "A writer's personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner." Is this like "grace under pressure"? The writer goes around perfecting his "manner" and then transfers his concocted "lifestyle" to the printed page? Is anybody still buying this moonshine?

There's no way that fiction can embody the writer's personality. Personality is itself a fiction that we use to make overgeneralizations about ourselves and other people. At best, a work of fiction might create what seems to be a personality "behind" the work, but this doesn't happen with all fiction (and Eliot was right in suggesting that good writers try to avoid it, anyway) and to equate that personality with the "real" personality of the writer is only a mark of bad reading. Neither of these personalites exist in the first place.

I suppose style could be "the expression of a particular human consciousness" if the writer's "consciousness" was itself the subject being explored. That is, if the writer was writing some kind of psychological memoir rather than fiction. But I don't see how consciousness in this pretentious way of speaking about it is even at issue in the writing of fiction, and I certainly don't see how style has anything to do with getting it expressed. A good writer's style does exhibit certain continuities and characteristics over time, but is this an effect of "consciousness"? Isn't it just a function of that writer's particular way of living with language? (Perhaps in alluding to the expression of "consciousness," Smith is actually referring to the creation of consciousness in fictional characters, the pursuit of "psychological realism," but this is not how I read the passage in question.)

Similarly, style as a way of "telling the truth" might be plausible if by this we mean that the writer has found the right style--the right words and sentences and paragraphs--to evoke the fictional world he/she is after. If it means "telling the truth" about the characters and events portrayed in the fiction. If it means telling the truth in some more metaphysical sense, telling the truth about The Way Things Really Are, to me such pronouncements are just cant.

And I have to say that Smith really launches herself into outer space when she concludes that style has something to do with "the refinement of a consciousness" rather than refinement of "words on a page." "Style" in art and literature is a material characteristic, an identifiable, distinctive arrangement and rearrangement of the elements of the medium, whether that be language, paint, musical sound, etc. It is not some ineffable, mystical quality, a "personal necessity," something these people have but those do not. Literary style is the means by which accomplished writers manipulate language for aesthetic effect. You can educate your emotions all you'd like, but if you haven't created something aesthetically pleasing with your words, you haven't succeeded as a writer of fiction.

In her own response to Smith's essay, Jenny Davidson carries the argument to its unfortunate conclusion: "I find in particular as a reader that my doubts about a particular writer's style (his/her sentences, say) can rarely be expressed in strictly aesthetic terms, it always shades into questions of character--it is good to see Zadie Smith saying that so clearly here." Here we return to what I've previously described as "style as moral failure." The inevitable consequence of associating a writer's "sentences" with "questions of character" (with the "expression" of character) is to confuse a response to writing as a response to the writer. A failure of art becomes a moral defect. Conversely, an artistic success becomes a vindication of "character," the experience of art reduced to the degree of one's sympathy with the artist, however much a figment of the imagination he/she turns out to be. Compared to these "refinements of consciousness" the writer makes available, all discussion of the skill with which he/she organizes "words on a page" is, of course, "merely literary."

What Usually Follows

According to Matt Ridley,

There is a growing conviction within neuroscience that one of the human mind's chief preoccupations is prediction. Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computing who is now a full-time neuroscientist, argued in his 2004 book "On Intelligence" that the mind does this by detecting a familiar pattern in its input, then anticipating from past experience what usually follows. The more unexpected something is, the more conscious we are of it.

Although this research concerns immediate disruptions of pattern (sudden surprises or anomalies), and therefore I would not suggest an extrapolation to more deliberative situations is necessarily scientifically sound, the human brain's response to changes in "familiar pattern" as described here by Ridley does make me wonder if something like this phenomenon helps explain many readers' resistance to experimental or innovative fiction.

Through their own habitual reading experiences and/or the critical discourse and pedagogical practices associated with fiction, most readers believe "novel" or "short story" name identifiable forms with discernible features. Stories generally put more emphasis on plot, novels allow more development of character, both establish a setting within which the plot and characters are delineated, etc. Some stories or novels might be allowed to deviate to a limited extent from the underlying standard, as long as they can still be recognized as the sort of thing a novel or story is supposed to be.

An experimental fiction introduces the "unexpected." It makes the reader conscious the implicit paradigm is being violated. One might hope at this point that the reader would exploit this intensified consciousness of difference to give the new a chance, to let the work be what it will be. Some readers no doubt do this, perhaps assuming the work eventually can be accommodated to the paradigm after all. Most probably don't, either giving up when it continues to be "difficult" or finishing it but pronouncing it "boring" or "pointless" or "a slog."

That readers might be confused or uncertain when confronted with an aberrant work of fiction is understandable. What is disappointing is that these readers can't summon up more curiosity about the challenging or the unusual, using it to expand their appreciation of the possibilities of fiction rather than shut them down in favor of the already familiar. It's my belief that fiction as a literary art depends upon challenges to convention or it becomes just a somewhat more respectable alternative to watching tv. Perhaps many readers are comfortable with this role for fiction, preferring not to burden it with the expectation it be "literature." Perhaps it is just a fact of our brain's wiring that we favor the customary and find its transgression disturbing. In this way we are all inescapably conservative.

Many innovations in fictional form or style--although not all--eventually become more accepted, more established as among the devices readers of fiction might encounter in stories and novels. Many writers initially judged too difficult or too adventurous gradually seem less so, although often enough the greatest of such writers, Joyce or Beckett or Faulkner, still can give uninitiated readers fits. By that time, of course, their innovations have themselves become conventions, which can be as overworked as any other, consolidated into "familiar pattern." It may be that this is the best adventurous writers can hope for: long-lasting influence, but at best late recognition of their accomplishments.

From the Inside

The editors of n + 1 tell us that

The novel is unexcelled at one thing only: the creation of interiority, or inwardness. How does life look and sound from the inside, where no public observes it and not even a friend listens in? No better instrument than prose fiction was ever developed for answering this question.

Lots of people who think they know what they're talking about and that they are paying "the novel" some kind of tribute like to say this. They apparently believe it. But if we're meant to take such a statement literally, it's actually unmitigated nonsense, utterly absurd.

No novel has ever given us a depiction of how "life look[s] and sound[s] from the inside." Never has one recorded "interiority, or inwardness." Many instruments--neuroscience, for instance--have given us better insight into what it's like inside the human mind, among other reasons because no novel has ever given us such insight at all.

Some novels have attempted to convey, insofar as words in a literary context can convey, an impression of what interiority is like, at least as it is plainly different from our usual presentation of ourselves in exteriority. Such attempts are a metaphor for inwardness, but the notion that somehow they are truly presenting us with a verbal picture of inwardness is just inane, a failure to appreciate the ultimate fact that literature is inescapably metaphorical, a system of deploying tropes for their own sake. Some of these novels, particularly the early modernist novels of psychological realism, do a pretty good job of creating the illusion we are following a character's stream of thought, witnessing events from the "inside," but surely we don't believe this is more than an illusion. Do our mental processes really consist of sentence fragments or an unpunctuated "flow"of words, two of the more common methods of invoking the illusion? Is the "free indirect" narrative strategy, by which the narrator is somehow peering into a character's consciousness and extracting the appropriate words from this flow really an approximation of Mind? Please.

If you want to say that these strategies are the means available to writers to approximate "inwardness" when that seems like an appropriate aesthetic choice, fine. But it's not always the appropriate choice, and it certainly is not the case that fiction exists primarily to reveal inwardness. Those who insist otherwise are voicing the reductive claim heard throughout the history of fiction as a literary genre that the aim of fiction is "realism," except in this case it is a realism of the inside rather than a realism of the outside. To this extent, literary history, at least as regarded by the likes of the editors of n +1, has never really gotten beyond the most conservative incorporation of the innovations of writers like Woolf, Joyce, and James, whose turn to psychological realism was a break with the surface realism of Flaubert, Chekhov, and William Dead Howells but did not thus depart from the broader goals of realism--to present a verbal simulacrum of reality. Other implications of the formal and stylistic adventurousness of these writers that might be explored are ignored in this version of the development of fiction.

The claim that "The novel is unexcelled at one thing only" comes as a comparison to other narrative forms, namely film, television, and journalism. This seems to me a valid comparison only if you take fiction as just another narrative form in competition with these other, more popular, sources of narrative so that which does what best becomes a consideration in the struggle for audience. I agree that fiction can't compete with film and television for immediacy of image, and that documentary realism is best left to journalists, but otherwise the one thing the novel--fiction more generally--is "unexcelled" at is in exploiting its medium--language--for whatever narrative purpose. In this way it is in competition with no other medium, and the "creation of interiority" is merely one effect it might produce from its invocation of words--an effect that is, in my opinion, becoming only more shopworn and perfunctory with every novel that again appeals to it.

Learning From Modernism

I agree with Jonathan Mayhew that

The New Critics developed theories sympathetic to some aspects of literary modernism, but they condescended to Pound, Williams, and Cummings, tolerated Moore, ignored H.D., did a poor job with Stevens, failed to welcome O'Hara and Creeley, Duncan and Ginsberg--the poets who learned from modernism. Modernism, for the New Critics, didn't include European surrealism or the Latin American offspring of the avant-garde.

My own approach to literature and literary criticism is strongly informed by the example of New Criticism, although substituting for the New Critics' tendency to treat the text as object an emphasis on aesthetic experience, inspired by John Dewey's Art as Experience. The New Critics' insistence that the proper focus of literary study was on literature, not politics or sociology, that reading requires paying close attention to the organization of language, and that whatever "meaning" a text conveys is necessarily conditioned by its formal organization have always seemed to me not just convincing but finally so manifestly obvious I can't really accept the judgment implicitly rendered by the practice of academic criticism that the underlying assumptions of New Criticism are inextricably tied to a historical phase of literary criticism that was appropriately superseded by the new assumptions of subsequent phases. The basic principles illustrated in a book such as Cleanth Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn are still valid, although the notion of "well-wrought" is more useful than the objectification inherent in the metaphor of "urn."

But it is true that while it could be argued that New Criticism emerged from the theory and practice of modernism, many writers who were either certified modernists or who were influenced by the innovations of modernism did not find favor with most New Critics. The innovations of Eliot and Faulkner were more congenial to the conservative formalism (and ultimately more conservative cultural outlook) of the major--mostly Southern--New Critics than William Carlos Williams or E.E. Cummings. One imagines that those of these critics who survived through the 1960s and 1970s found postmodernism pretty distasteful, although luckily they chose not to pronounce on it much, and surely Language poetry was/would have been anathema to them. I would conclude that in general most "avant-garde" writing seemed to the New Critics a repudiation of form, or at least a failure to regard it with the care they found in the greatest poetry, Modernist and traditional. So if in some ways New Criticism was a product of the increasing self-consciousness about form to be found in modernist poetry and fiction (and especially a further refinement of the early essays of T.S. Eliot), by no means was all experiment in form, or every writer who emphasized form, sanctioned by New Critics.

This was more than short-sightedness on these critics' part. It exemplifies a real blindness to some of the important implications of their own critical principles. In my view, a formalist approach to literature ought to value most of all those texts that do experiment with form, those writers who seem to foreground formal experiment for its own sake. Only such experiments keep literary form from ossifying into an empty formalism and reading from degenerating into a formulaic exercise. Not all of these experiments will be successful; probably only rarely will an experimental work truly reward the kind of alert, dynamic reading the New Critics at their best both championed and exemplified, but then only rarely does any work of fiction or poetry so reward our attention. Experiments in form keep "form" as a defining characteristic of literary art alive as a subject of critical commentary and as an object of readers' consideration. No doubt the New Critics' religious and cultural commitments kept them from fully appreciating the value of uninhibited experiment in literature, as it seemed to them implicitly subversive of the final order they valued more highly.

As stated most directly by T.S. Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," the New Critics could accept the challenge to order presented by the "truly new" work of literature, but they conceived of the new as both changing and adapting itself to the established order (of literary history, at least). I agree with them that the new in literature works in this way, but see no reason to think the principle doesn't ultimately work with even the most radical departures from convention. Until such time as innovations in poetry and prose literally cross boundaries and create something that can no longer be classified as either, or until writing itself no longer attracts new talent, "avant-garde" works will continue to offer up fresh responses to the demands of form, which will in turn ultimately be assimilated into the tradition, however different that tradition will be after such efforts have been registered. I would say that the formal audacity of Eliot's own work (as opposed to its expression of alienation from modern culture, which has indeed become its own kind of cliche) has yet to be altogether assimilated, and will continue to play a role in inspiring new avant-gardes.

Newness

In an essay in the December 2010 Writer's Chronicle ("Poetry and Memorability"), Mark Irwin assures us that

Certainly, then, originality is part of the memorable. A work of art should be new, fresh, but not merely for the sake of the newness, where much art loses its magic. The original must rise naturally out of its subject and the artist's vision.

Proponents of "content" over form in art say stuff like this all the time. It's a way of paying lip service to formal ingenuity, "newness," while at the same time implicitly declaring it nonexistent, at least in real art. It's the subject, stupid, the way the artist's "vision" catches up to "fresh" subject matter, that is new. Any poem or wok of art that fails to carry out the dictate that "the original must rise naturally out of its subject" can be safely dismissed as not really art at all, as something that is merely new, hollow at the core.

Irwin cites as something truly new Duchamp's painting Nude Descending the Stairs, which he allows is original because it introduces the notion that "the beauty of the machine becomes that of the body, something earlier resisted in the Industrial Revolution." But surely the scandal this work created when it first appeared had much less to do with its suggestion there might be beauty in machines but was instead focused on its aesthetic challenge. No one had seen anything like it before. It seemed to be subverting received notions of aesthetic beauty, and if we now recognize the painting has its own kind of beauty, that's because the "newness" of this work helped us to perceive aesthetic beauty differently, more amply. You can say that Duchamp's unique vision was able to make a connection between "the beauty of the machine" and the human body, and that this was a "new" way of regarding machines, but its expression in the work of art, the aesthetic qualities of the work, is what makes the painting new. I would argue that the vision of beauty the painting has ultimately encouraged arises from its formal orginality, not the other way around.

Ultimately, those like Irwin who contend that form is just a phenomenon of subject are reinforcing the view that works of art and literature are acts of "saying something." Aesthetic form is simply the consequence of the inconvenient fact that these are indirect ways of "saying," and too much "newness" of form, or an overemphasis on form, only obscures the clarity of what is said. Oddly, such people do seem to think that what is said might be "new." But those works of art, especially works of literature, determined to say something usually just belabor the obvious or offer up platitudes ("marriage is difficult"; "consumerism is bad"). Art is worth our attention when it takes a "subject" and makes it aesthetically compelling. At that point the subject becomes irrelevant.

The Grip of Sense

The anthology clearly plays a more central role in the dissemination and consideration of poetry than it does with fiction. The appearance of a new anthology, whether surveying the "state of poetry" as a whole or identifying a particular group or movement within current poetic practices, usually provokes much discussion, as critics and poets themselves debate the validity of the principle of selection or point out glaring omissions and outrageous choices made by the editor. For poets and readers of poetry, something seems to be at stake in the publication of an anthology that doesn't seem to be similarly true of fiction and its readers.

Perhaps what is at stake is literally the access to readers for poetry. In a culture that at best expresses a collective ignorance of poetry (even among readers of serious fiction) and at worst an active disdain for it, an anthology might be an opportunity to gather a few additional readers who would be willing to sample the work of the poets represented, even if they likely would not read individual books by those poets or seek out the magazines or journals in which their poems more regularly appear. No doubt some prominent anthologies (especially those published by relatively large and well-known publishers, such as Norton) do stir up a few such readers, but it is my impression that the bulk of the audience for most anthologies is among poets and the small critical establishment that still exists in English departments and the preeminent poetry journals. Thus, the work of the anthology surely extends beyond occasionally reminding readers who don't really like poetry, or who can sometimes tolerate it in measured doses, that it still exists.

What may motivate both the creation of poetry anthologies and their subsequent reception is suggested to me by Ron Silliman's discussion of 2009's Norton anthology American Hybrid (edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John):

[American Hybrid] is an attempt at a comprehensive anthology of “Third Way” poetics by poets representing both of the major traditions that feed into the hybridization process. This fact alone ensures the book’s historic importance, not only for the effort at codifying what hybrid poetics might actually be, but also because one of these two traditions has been historically shy about announcing its collective identity in the form of movements, wings, tendencies, whatever you might wish to call the collective formation of like-thinking writers.

The last significant instance of a Quietist movement, as such, was New Formalism, which was a lot like the Old Formalism, only younger, rising up about 20 years ago after the Iowists & Leaping Poets had taken the quietist mode of free verse lyric & confessional monolog about as far as they could go. Not unlike the New Coast / Apex of the M uprising at the same time amongst post-avant poetics, New Formalism saw itself as a corrective, a return to core values of a literary tradition that had been abandoned by their elders in a postmodern time. . . .

The forthright acknowledgement here of factionalism in contemporary poetry is a little startling. The numerous movements identified--old and new formalists, lowists and Leaping Poets, not to mention Silliman's signature dichotomy of "Quietists" and "post-avants"--seem to take precedence over the poets and poems they might encompass, while American Hybrid has primarily "historic importance," its apparent role the "effort at codifying" and each movement ultimately notable for its "collective formation of like-thinking writers." Silliman probably thinks he is merely providing some historical context for the appearance of this new attempt at categorization (which ironically is based on the blurring of categories), but even attempts to question categorization in poetry wind up offering even more categories, as in this proposal for an anthology of "Populist Poetry" and all of its attendant subcategories.

Both the publication of American Hybrid and the discourse responding to it and to the philosophy of anthology-making suggest to me that anthologies present an opportunity for labeling that many poets find not only helpful but necessary. I can think of two ways in which it might be necessary, at least as contemporary poets see it: to help them make sense of the proliferation of poets and poems in the United States (abetted by internet publication), if not the proliferation of audiences for these poems, and to provide handy guides to contemporary poetry for use in poetry and poetry writing courses in colleges and universities. I would not discount the importance of the latter, since the very survival of poetry might become even more dependent on its continuing to claim a place in academic curricula. Perhaps some poets want to locate their own work in relation to whatever trends or movements an anthology identifies; perhaps some hope to align themselves with these trends and movements. It does seem safe to suggest, however, that anthologies do not merely gather together a few poems by poets deemed notable simply for the quality of their work. "Quality" is now reckoned as so relative to the "school" to which the work belongs that overarching judgments just can't be made--although often enough it seems that simply belonging to the school is itself, at least for its adherents, a sufficient guarantee of quality.

American Hybrid is most immediately an attempt to blur boundaries between schools (or what are perceived to be schools) by suggesting the Quietists have become more like the post-avants and the post-avants more like the Quietists.This move allows the editor to blunt sharp edges and implicitly to attribute quality more generously across party lines. Unfortunately, the sharp edges are sometimes what gives a poem its appeal, and their general absence in this anthology lends these poems a sense of sameness, mitigated only to the extent that some of the poems are kinda accessible but mostly difficult while others are kinda difficult but mostly accessible. Since I assume most of the poems were chosen because they helped to position the poet somewhere on this continuum, almost all of the selections do less to establish that the poem in question is an important poem and more to demonstrate this poet deserves to be designated as one of those employing the "American hybrid" mode. The reader gets no help in determining whether or why the poem might be a particularly good example of this mode and thus might survive its categorization to be regarded by future readers as an important poem.

If the ultimate purpose of this anthology is to establish that increasing numbers of poets are prepared to incorporate such elements of "experimental" poetry as "non-linearity, juxtaposition, rupture, fragmentation, immanence, multiple perspective, open form, and resistance to closure," as the editors enumerate them in their introduction, while not necessarily claiming the title "experimental poet," it probaby succeeds. Perhaps younger poets, especially, are receptive to the new hybridity and only the most hardcore older Quietists, such as Billy Collins or Dana Gioia, really continue to uphold the traditional values of lyricism, coherence, and clarity. If a few readers were to take from American Hybrid the impression that poetry doesn't need to resolve itself into assimilable "meaning" it would have provided a service to the future of poetry. Still, a too often undifferentiated mass of poems exhibiting "resistance to closure" doesn't do very much service to the individual poets involved.

Part of the problem is that the editors' introductions to each of the poets are, in my opinion, almost universally horrible. The very definition of perfunctory, usually a mere paragraph or two, they only reinforce the perception that these poets are significant mainly for the way in which they can be made to illustrate the anthology's thesis. The outlines of the poet's career are presented, preceded by a paragraph allegedly describing the poet's work but phrased in the most vacuous boilerplate imaginable: "emotionally charged vocabulary"; "tracks the subtle movement of consciousness against the backdrop of a culturally shifting and spiritually depleted world"; "rapturous and dense, yet paradoxically precise and incisive"; "the intensity and density of his images pick up, and as soon as the grip of sense starts to slip, sound steps in, often with tremendous momentum, to keep the whole thing aloft." These introductions substitute promotional spiels for criticism, and if the editors weren't really up to the task of providing insightful commentary on the included poets, perhaps they should have called on other poets, critics or scholars who are. I eventually stopped reading them because they were so obnoxious; many of these poets, particularly those whose names I did not recognize, would have been better served without any introduction at all than with these vapid declarations.

If something that could be called hybridization is indeed an important development in current poetry, a development that could help determine the future course American poetry takes, more was needed to delineate the precise features of this hybridization, to separate out the truly significant examples and to explain why this process is occurring than is offered by American Hybrid. It does acquaint us with a potentially new variety of poetry and with some names to associate with it (although the appearance of so many older poets--Ashbery, Graham--who have never previously been considered "hybrid" suggests it might not be so new), but ultimately does very little to establish it is more than a vague trend. If "American hybrid" is just another label to pin on some otherwise amorphous group of poets in order to keep track of everybody, or just a convenient marketing device to get more textbooks in the classroom, then its appearance signifies little, either about the current state of American poetry or about the poetic practice associated with the "hybrid."