TRE Prime

The Price of Relevancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postmodern Beckett

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

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

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

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

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

Politics and the Novel

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

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

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

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

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

Non-Career Advice

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

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

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

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

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

On Charles Dickens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom to Roam

Over the weekend I watched Woody Allen's Anything Else on DVD. To sum up the experience quickly, it was very painful.

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

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

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

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

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

Realism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Limitations of Clarity

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

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

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

These are perhaps advantages in the attempt to lead a worthwhile life, but they are advantages of little worth in creating works of literature. They are, in fact, except for the imperative "to be curious," wholly irrelevant to the enterprise of writing fiction.

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

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

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

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

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

Science and Literature

In what must have been a deliberate move, Arts & Letters Daily linked both to this article and to this essay on the same day. In the first, Edward Rothstein speaks approvingly of "Being Human," an "anthology" released by the Bush administration's bioethics council in its ongoing effort to stave off stem-cell research. It appears to be top-heavy with literary examinations of the folly of too much science. (Among the writers Rothstein mentions are Hawthorne, George Eliot, Whitman, and Jonathan Swift.)

The second, otherwise an interesting and insightful essay by Paul A. Cantor on the attitudes toward science of the 19th century Romantic writers, comes to a conclusion the bioethics panel would no doubt endorse: that these writers offer "a sobering sense of the dangers of a scientific wisdom completely severed from poetic wisdom." In other words, "pure" science needs to leave well enough alone.

I want to discuss not the merits of stem-cell research but rather the appeal to literature as a way of conducting the debate over this kind of science. Since Rothstein prominently mentions Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," and since this story is another version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which Cantor uses as a primary example, I'll use the story as the vehicle for my own perspective on the subject.

"The Birthmark" could certainly be seen as a cautionary tale about human overreaching, which is undoubtedly a large part of what Hawthorne had in mind. But of course works of literature can be used to illuminate any subject under the sun. 1984 has been claimed as a story justifying every conceivable political point of view and as illustrating mutually incompatible themes. (This is not a weakness of the book, rather one of its strengths.) It is hard to imagine that Hawthorne would have objected to all of the real scientific advances that have in fact been made since his time (almost all of them increasing human happiness and decreasing the suffering he depicts so often in his work) as "overreaching." He merely wished to point out one possible consequence of the rise of the scientific attitude. I think he would in fact have been appalled to know that his work was being used not just to slow down scientific research on a sensitive subject, but to stop it all together. Cantor speaks of "the chief point of contact between Romantic poetry [Hawthorne was himself a Romantic] and modern science" as being that "both are creative forces and put a premium on bringing new things into the world." Hawthorne was a conservative, but not a reactionary.

More to the point, the use of Hawthorne's story as a strategic thrust in the culture wars ought to be parried by an analysis of the relevance of literature in this context. Cantor writes that "The basic lesson Frankenstein can teach us is this: science can tell us how to do something, but it cannot tell us whether we should do it." On the other hand, neither can literature. Literature poses questions, but rarely does it provide the anwers. The slipperiness of literature and its interpretation arguably makes it a poor choice as a polemical weapon at all. Only ethics can ultimately resolve the conundrums posed by stem-cell research, and again since works of literature can be claimed as exempla in any and all ethical systems, simply to say that Hawthorne (or Whitman or Tolstoy or Mary Shelley) warned us against the dangers of scientific excess (if he did) doesn't get us very far.

I write as someone who believes intensely in the value and the ultimate "relevance" of literature. I even think that Hawthorne's story is well worth reading for the insight it might provide the individual reader on the delicate balance between "scientific wisdom" and "poetic wisdom." But I also believe that the greatest obstacle to an understanding of literature's relevance is its misuse by various interested parties in advancing extra-literary agendas. It's real value--aesthetic and experiential--gets obscured in discursive rhetoric. Reading Hawthorne or Mary Shelley won't tell us much about stem-cell research. Reading them scrupulously, however, might tell us something about how seriously to entertain a document such as "Being Human."

Too Much Writing

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

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

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

Fitzgerald's critique:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Really About Shakespeare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's Review

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

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

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

And what of this?:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caution!

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

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

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

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

Confessions of an Aesthete

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Middling Intelligibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical of Scholarship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Musical Interlude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teaching Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disillusioned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bellowing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F.O. Matthiessen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Thing After Another

In the May/Summer issue of The Writer's Chronicle, Alice Mattison offers an interesting essay defending the use of coincidence in fiction. Subtitled "An Essay Against Craft," the essay commends the use of coincidence as a way of taking risk, which Mattison feels is discouraged in a literary world dominated by the workshop "rules" implicitly taught in creative writing programs. Writes Mattison: "I don't think directions or rules are available, just terms. . .that undeniably simplify discussions of writing and literature." Such simplification is at times useful, but "the problem arises when we begin to draw conclusions from succesful choices, assuming that what works once will work in every instance."

A few paragraphs after the statements just quoted, Mattison is discussing a Charles Baxter essay in which "Baxter glances at the sort [of stories] that were rejected as old-fashioned by the authors who first made stories turn on insight. He characterizes the stories that Henry James and James Joyce rejected as those with 'plot structures tending to require a set of coincidences or connivances of circumstance.'" Mattison comments: "It hadn't occured to me, before I read Baxter's sentence, that coincidence defines the type of story in which it appears. I hadn't noticed that such stories. . .were helpless without coincidence."

Although Baxter and Mattison don't use the word, what they are both describing is the influence on early novels in English of the "picaresque" narrative. The picaresque story--derived from the term identifying the protagonist of such stories, the "picaro"--was introduced by Spanish writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and is essentially a journey narrative in which the picaro, usually a rogueish character, embarks on a journey in which, literally, one thing happens after another. There's not really a sense of progression in the picaresque narrative, just a series of episodes, and usually the protagonist remains more or less unchanged, undergoing no transformation or "epiphany." The most famous picaresque novel is undoubtedly Don Quixote, in which Cervantes alters the form by making his protagonist a deluded but not antisocial or rascally character.

The early British novelists of the 18th century were greatly influenced by the picaresque narrative, especially such writers as Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. Fielding's Tom Jones is probably the most famous of these British picaresque novels. It adopts the journey conceit, the episodic structure, and adds an element of explicit comedy that exceeds even the kind of doleful humor to be found in Don Quixote. (Tom Jones remains a tremendously readable book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know what the picaresque form can accomplish.) Charles Dickens was in turn profoundly influenced by Smollett and Fielding, and his novels represent a further fashioning of the picaresque into a narrative technique of great flexibility and latent aesthetic potential.

But this was indeed the "old-fashioned" kind of storytelling that came to be rejected by later writers more concerned about the "craft" of fiction. Perhaps the first writer to really move away from the picaresque was Flaubert, and he may be the writer most responsible for converting fiction into a more gracefully "shaped" kind of storytelling, and therefore a form that could be taken seriously as a mode of literary art. (I greatly admire Flaubert, and nothing I say here is meant to denigrate his achievement in any way.) Mattison identifies James and Joyce as the writers who came to "shape" their stories around the occurence of an "epiphany," but it was really Flaubert who showed James and Joyce that such an aesthetically intricate effect could be brought off in fiction.

Since Flaubert, the notion of "story" in fiction is thus usually associated either specifically with the kind of dramatic narrative leading to revelation or epiphany pioneered by James and Joyce or more generally with the kind of carefully structured narrative encapsulated in "Freytag's triangle": exposition, rising action, climax, denoument, etc. Most genre fiction probably uses the latter, most "literary" fiction the former. Most best-selling potboilers are likely to use the Freytag-derived narrative filtered through Hollywood melodrama. In this context, the picaresque story almost doesn't seem like a story at all, since it doesn't arrange itself in some shaped pattern, but is instead just a series of incidents strung together.

I go over all this not to offer some kind of lesson in literary history but ultimately to suggest, with Mattison but more broadly than her advocacy of "coincidence" goes, that the picaresque ought to remain a viable option and can provide an alternative to the workshop-reinforced domination of the revalatory narrative. To some extent the picaresque style was revived by postwar American writers such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, but in my opinion it still contains much untapped potential. It can free the writer from the tyranny of story--the creation of narrative tension by which too many stories and novels are reductively judged--but at the same time allows for the depiction of external events, provides an aesthetically justified motive for abjuring the directive to probe the psychological depths, and perhaps most of all makes available all kind of other effects--satire, subplots, a larger cast of characters--that the craft-like story discourages. Of course, this is not the 18th century, and writers now would be using the picaresque form in a much more self-conscious way, but that in itself would likely give such fictions a "shape" that would rescue them from mere formlessness. (Although attempting a truly "formless" novel might be an interesting experiment in itself.)

I am not suggesting that the picaresque narrative is superior to the more conventionally shaped narrative most novels employ. The possibilities in "shaping" the latter kind of narrative have by no means been exhausted, although most published novels don't seem much interested in exploring these possibilities. A renewed interest in the picaresque might, however, help demonstrate that there is more than one way to tell a story, multiple ways to "shape" a work of fiction, without sacrificing readibility or even fiction's "entertainment" value. (Both Don Quixote and Tom Jones are nothing if not entertaining.) And in the final analyis using such a narrative strategy wouldn't really involve abandoning "craft"; ideally it would further demonstrate that craft is just as much involved in the breaking of convention as in its repetition.

Updike

I am making my way through John Updike's The Early Stories. The book has been patiently waiting its turn on my To Read book carousel, its very heft causing me to turn right by it several times in favor of something smaller, something less demanding of my fully engaged attention. Reading a writer like Updike, a writer for whom language is more than a transparent covering on the "reality" it evokes, always requires one's willing attention, or there's no point in reading him at all. To make your way through 103 stories and 828 pages of Updike, however, makes one hesitate before finally summoning the commitment to go ahead with it.

I have read many of these stories before, but Updike has re-arranged them in the way in which he presumably now wants them to be read, the arrangement that will convey most felicitously what they have to offer us. The fresh connections this arrangement makes between the stories, whether written as early as 1953 or as late as 1975, must surely also make them, if not more meaningful, at least meaningful in a different way than when they are read in isolation, or even in their original published context. Thus I do intend to read the book as it is presented to us, from first story to last.

However, I also intend to pause after reading each section or two (there are eight sections, each containing 10-15 stories) and discuss the stories assigned to these sections, perhaps as much for my own benefit in thinking through my response to Updike's writing as for the opportunity to share my responses in a blog post. Those not interested in Updike's fiction--and there are perfectly good reasons why one might not have had a positive response to Updike, on which more later--can of course simply skip these posts. However, I do hope that others wishing to know more about this writer, or to check his/her own responses with mine, might find something of value in this discussion and the ones to follow.

The first section of the book is dedicated to the "Olinger stories," written between 1954 and 1961 and clearly based on Updike's own youth in Shillington, Pennsylvania. I have never really thought of Updike as an autobiographical writer per se. Although much of his fiction is clearly anchored by his own experiences first in Pennysylvania and ultimately in Massachusetts, many of his books are not autobiographical at all, taking as their subjects characters completely unlike John Updike--The Coup, Roger's Version, The Witches of Eastwick, In the Beauty of the Lilies, the Bech books. Even Rabbit Angstrom is obviously not an autobiographical character, however much some of his responses to his situation and his experiences might have come from Updike's familiarity with his mileu and his background.

The Olinger stories, however, are relentlessly autobiographical, so much so that when taken together their value as literary art, as fictional creations with full aesthetic integrity, is somewhat less than I expected it to be. One thing that even this initial section of The Early Stories begins to demonstrate is the price to be paid by a writer determined to survive simply as a writer, to have a "career" in fiction writing and not to either martyr himself in his poverty or take up a supporting career as professor or editor. The consequence is that some of the work is written as work, stories written to pay the bills or keep one's presence up but not necessarily because they were otherwise stories that just had to be written. Several of the stories in this section seem to me to be of this kind, written to first establish Updike's presence and then to help the writer earn his keep. There's nothing morally objectionable about this, but stories like the first one, "You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You," a coming-of-age vignette similar to Joyce's "Araby," but much less accomplished, or "In Football Season," an equally slight reminiscence of high school football games, are perhaps interesting enough to read in charting the development of John Updike's career but surely won't stand the test of time as short stories.

As a whole, these stories revolve around the same set of characters, given different names in some of the stories, but clearly the same nevertheless: a young man with a tendency to brood and to speculate about what his life will be like, as well as with some latent talent as a writer or artist, his parents, the mother somewhat frustrated with her lot but also capable of enjoying life, a father stuck in a low-paying job as high school teacher and given to a fair amount of brooding of his own, which he hides in a facade of cheerfulness, sometimes one or more elderly grandparents, the boy's real connection to the past, the history of the community in which he lives. This is all clearly enough a version of John Updike's own family and their travails, of his own trajectory from small-town boy to aspiring writer. But the effort seems so intensely focused on recreating these circumstances and tracing that trajectory that one finishes these stories thinking more about John Updike's life and his desire to portray it in fiction than about the achievements of the stories in literary terms.

Probably the best-known story among the group of Olinger stories is "Pigeon Featherss," the title story of Updike's second collection, published in 1962. This is also a coming-of-age story (Updike seems fond of this conceit), in which the Updike character, in this case named David Kern, is seized with a kind of premature existential crisis. "Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. . . ." No doubt this is as well one of the earliest stories in which religious faith becomes a foregrounded theme, a theme that has led many critics to label Updike in part a "religious" writer. David's crisis is resolved in the story's conclusion, when, after ridding the family's barn of a group of pesty pigeons, David looks at one of the dead pigeons and "lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a contolled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him." David buries the pigeons, and as he finishes "crusty coverings were lifted from him" and "he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever." One wants to think there is some irony in this, that it is not being suggested that the slaughter of "these worthless birds" (pigeon as Christ figure?) is not necessary to save David's soul, but I, for one, have to conclude that this revelation is meant to be taken precisely as such, the pleasing lyricism of the passage notwithstanding.

In my opinion, the two best stories in this section are "The Persistence of Desire" and "The Happiest I've Been." In the former, the Updike stand-in, here called "Clyde Behn," returns to Olinger after a number of years and meets a former girlfriend. There is clearly unfinished business between the two of them, although they both understand why their relationship had to end. The ex-girlfriend, it seems, is willing to betray her husband for a sexual encounter with Clyde and leaves Clyde with a note: "The glimpse, through the skin of paper, of Janet's old self quickened and sweetened his desire more than touching her had. He had tucked the note back into his shirt pocket and its stiffness there made a shield for his heart. In this armor he stepped into the familiar street. The maples, macadam, shadows, houses, cars were to his violated eyes as brilliant as a scene remembered: he became a child again in this town, where life was a distant adventure, a rumor, an always imminent joy." The tone of regret and sorrow for things passed that runs through all of these stories is perhaps most effectively sounded here, an effect Updike achieves entirely through the aptness of phrasing and the rythmic ease of his language. "The Happiest I've Been" is an equally quiet story in which the narrator ("John") is a college sophomore about to drive back to school with a local friend. Before leaving they stop off at a party where the narrator meets up with some old acquaintances and eventually winds up sitting in a kitchen with a girl he doesn't know well but with whom he has a tender moment nevertheless: "She drew my arm around her shoulders and folded my hand around her bare forearm, to warm it. The back of my thumb fitted against the curve of one breast. Her head went into the hollow where my arm and chest joined; she was terribly small, measured against your own body. Perhaps she weighed a hundred pounds." This is all that happens, but it makes the narrator "happy" that she "had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me," as does his friend, Neil, as the narrator later drives away from Olinger. (We have also learned that "after we arrived in Chicago I never saw him again either.")

The wistful quality that many of these stories seem to be after comes through most affectingly in these two stories because they're understated, don't try as hard as does even the staged epiphany in "Pigeon Feathers." The remaining Olinger stories perform variations on the themes of these two stories, to greater or lesser effect, but ultimately work, at best, to sketch out the overall portrayal of Olinger and its influence on David/Clyde/John Updike. In my view "The Persistence of Desire," "The Happiest I've Been," and perhaps "Pigeon Feathers" are the works that will continue to attract readers among this grouping of stories. (Also in my view, the essay-like "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island" and "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car" just don't work at all.)

Throughout all of these stories, however, Updike's impressive prose style is in evidence, although it is here perhaps somewhat less florid, but also somewhat less assured, than it will later become. In addition to the passages I have already quoted, this paragraph, the opening paragraph of "In Football Season," shows Updike the pure stylist at his best:

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold on the dark slop of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

Some readers find Updike's style excessive, too intoxicated with the description of things, but I find it irresistable, the style of a writer trying to discover in all good faith what words can really say.

In many ways, the real culmination of the Olinger stories is Updike's novel The Centaur (1963). Perhaps because it was Updike's immediate follow-up novel to Rabbit, Run, in my opinion it really did not then and to some extent still has not received the credit it is due. Containing essentially the same cast of characters, this novel really completes the portrayal of Olinger and its place in Updike's fiction, and is the most compelling portrait as well of Updike's father (or at least of his fictional transformation.) The novel additionally shows Updike beginning to depart from strict conventional realism, as it alternates the story of the father and the son with a depiction of the father as literally a centaur, the mythological creature who is half man and half graceful beast. It really is a completely successful novel, and it is to be hoped that in the future it acquires the many readers it deserves.

Updike Redux

The second set of stories in John Updike's The Early Stories is a more miscellaneous grouping, united only very loosely through their characters' shared circumstance of being ""Out in the World," as this section's title has it. Whereas the first section, "Olinger Stories," is worth reading as a whole because of its portrayal of Olinger (a fictionalized version of Updike's home town), the second can probably be read selectively, focusing on the better stories and skipping over the less substantial. I will try to identify what seem to me to be the better stories, and perhaps suggest how these stories might be read within the context of Updike's then developing career as a writer.

The characters in this group of stories, most of them still recognizably some transformed version of Updike himself (or at least of Updike and his experiences taken as representative of certain kind of postwar American, an aspirant to the educated middle class), are "out in the world" as students, as recent college graduates, as husbands starting families, or in some way getting an idea (in at least one case, not getting it) of what the world "out there" is really like. Like the Olinger stories, these stories were all written between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s, and if one were to judge by these first two sections of The Early Stories, it would seem that Updike set out to be a writer who would chronicle the coming-of-age and the subsequent experiences of that generation of Americans who were born before World War II but came to maturity and adulthood in the immediate postwar period. In Updike's case this also entails chronicling the journey from small-town America and its assumptions to those of the more "wordly" suburbs and cities.

Some of the stories are slight and, in my opinion, readers could safely pass on them: "The Kid's Whistling,""Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow," A Trillion Feet of Gas," Dear Alexandros, and "At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie" would fit into this category. "The Lucid Eye in Silver Town" and "His Finest Hour" are worth reading, but are ultimately fairly recognizable kinds of maturation stories (the latter confronting its married protagonists with the reality of domestic violence just next door) that, after promising beginnings, more or less disappoint by the end. One group of stories--"Dentistry and Doubt," "A Madman," "Still Life," and "Home"--portray their student protagonist's visit to and return from England, but only the last, which concerns this character's return and the beginnings of his readjustment to "home" and career, could really be classified as among Updike's more compelling stories.

This leaves "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth," "The Christian Roommates,""The Doctor's Wife," and "Ace in the Hole" as the cream of this crop. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" depicts an episode between a young male schoolteacher (still somewhat earnest and unsuspecting) and what he assumes to be a female student with a crush on him. (She is caught conspicuously passing a note that expresses her love for him.) It turns out, however, that this girl has been buttering up all of her teachers, and it is the protagonist who indeed winds up crushed. After discovering her strategem, "Mr. Prosser took his coat from the locker and shrugged it on. He placed his hat upon his head. He fitted his rubbers over his shoes, pinching his fingers painfully, and lifted his umbrella off the hook. He thought of opening it right there in the vacant hall, as a kind of joke on himself and decided not to. The girl had been almost crying; he was sure of that." (This latter is a repetition of the same thought he had had upon confronting the girl with the note) Many of Updike's stories end with these epiphanic moments of truth, but this is a story in which that moment is particularly affecting.

"The Christian Roommates" is finally less effective as a story, but is remarkable for the current of barely concealed homoeroticism that runs through it. Otherwise a more or less conventional story of "the college experience," it presents probably the most naive and sheltered character in this group of stories, Orson Ziegler, who "came straight to Harvard from the small South Dakota town where his father was the doctor," confronted with his assigned roommate, "Hub" Palamountain, an unconventional fellow of a sort Orson certainly has never before encountered. Orson comes to hate Hub, but the hate clearly enough hides a simultaneous attraction. It all comes to a climax, so to speak, when Hub steals a parking meter and brings it into their room. Orson is scandalized and the two of them finally have it out: "Orson came up behind him and got him around the neck with one arm. Hub's body stiffened. . . Orson experienced sensations of being lifted, of flying, and of lying on the floor. . .He scrambled to his feet and went for Hub again, rigid with anger and yet, in his heart, happily relaxed. . .Hub's body was tough and quick and satisfying to grip. . .Orson felt a blow as his coccyx hit the wood; yet even through the pain he perceived, gazing into the heart of this forced marriage, that Hub was being as gentle with him as he could be. . .He renewed the attack and again enjoyed the tense defensive skill that made Hub's body a kind of warp in space through which his own body, after a blissful instant of contention, was converted to the supine position. . . ." By today's wised-up standards, this scene has a barely suppressed hilarity about it, but Updike's language is clear enough to conclude he knew what he was doing.

"The Doctor's Wife" in a sense takes us farthest "out in the world," to an out-of-the-way Caribbean island where a young American family is vacationing. The doctor and his wife are permanently resident caucasians, and the story impressively enough depicts some of the racial tensions being felt during the early 60's. (As, in its way, does "The Christian Roommates.") The doctor's wife has come to have the attitude of the white colonialist toward the black inhabitants of the island ("Unnatural, childish ingratitude. You just don't know how unnatural these people are"), and at the end of the story she tells the American husband that the locals think his own wife's "good tan" means she is "part Negro." The husband is left brooding on his own reaction to this: "She [his wife] would have wanted him to say something like yes, her great-grandfather picked cotton in Alabama, in America these things are taken for granted, we have no problem. But he saw, like something living glimpsed in a liquid volume, that his imaginary scenarios depended upon, could only live within, a vast unconscious white pride; he and the doctor's wife were in this together."

The most noteworthy story among the "Out in the World" group may be "Ace in the Hole," and not just because it is clearly a precursor to Rabbit, Run. It is an interesting and accomplished story in its own right, perhaps the most successful of those stories (so far) in which Updike tries to move beyond his own experiences and create a protagonist who is not merely a fictional persona. Like Rabbit Angstrom, Ace is a former high school basketball hero no longer in the spotlight. But unlike Rabbit, Ace Anderson seems only obliquely aware that his glory has irretrievably faded, and although he clearly is just drifting through his life as depicted in the story, he can't quite let go of the happy-go-lucky attitude of his basketball days. The story ends with a confrontation between Ace and his wife (Eve) that doesn't bode well for the future, reinforcing the uneasiness Ace has been feeling of late: "He wasn't hungry; his stomach was tight. It used to be like that when he walked to the gymnasium alone in the dark before a game. . .But once he was inside, the locker room would be bright and hot, and the other guys would be there, laughing and towel-slapping, and the tight feeling would leave. Now there were whole days when it didn't leave."

What Ace Anderson lacks is Rabbit's self-awareness that his life has become tragic in an archetypally American way. Having made it to the top so early (and under such unavoidably consticted circumstances), Rabbit isn't likely to have another chance, and his horror at this prospect is what gives Rabbit, Run its sense of urgency and inescapable failure. Ace is less astute than Rabbit, and it's unlikely that as written his character could have developed the alertness to his situation that made it possible for Rabbit to be the center of a full-length novel. But the very qualities that distinguish Ace from Rabbit still illuminate for us the realities of American life Updike seems to be exploring in both "Ace in the Hole" and Rabbit, Run. In the one case a growing sense of quiet desperation that will probably remain muted, in the other a prolonged outcry against the conditions that create that desperation in the first place.

Marital Matters

Probably it will be John Updike's "domestic fiction" for which he will be best remembered and perhaps on the basis of which he will be judged as a writer. And indeed "The Married Life," the third section of The Early Stories, provides the most provocative and most consistently accomplished set of stories in this book so far. Of the fourteen stories in this section, probably only "The Crow in the Woods" and "Wife-Wooing" fail to reward a careful reading.

Which is not to say these stories are unequivocally agreeable, without their disturbing qualities. The portrayal of marriage that emerges probably has at least as many shadows as warm light, although that is ultimately what makes them seem more honest than not and gives them the dramatic tension they need to succeed as short stories. The underlying assumptions about gender roles can at times seem questionable--again the majority of the stories were written in the 1950s and early 1960s--as can some of the attitudes toward unfolding political and cultural changes that are at times expressed or at least implicitly suggested. However, many of these problematic features can be interpreted as inherent in the circumstances and the mindsets of the characters themselves, whose assumptions and actions are precisely the focus of Updike's depiction of marriage in postwar America.

Most of the stories in "The Married Life" are in the form of vignettes or isolated episodes, episodes that nevertheless reveal much about the characters and their moments of heightened awareness of the pain and toil involved in married life. It is a form that Updike handles well (and that he had perfected long before it was taken up by the minimalists and neorealists of the 1970s and 1980s), seems perfectly suited to the disclosure of small insights Updike seems to be after, and that also allows him to exercise his stylistic gifts in a way that can transform the stories into something like lyrical set-pieces. (Readers will of course have greater or lesser tolerance for fiction of this kind.) Even the slighter stories have these kinds of lyrical moments, as in the conclusion to "The Crow in the Woods": "Something happened. Outdoors a huge black bird came flapping with a crow's laborious wingbeat. It banked and, tilted to fit its feet, fell toward the woods. His heart melted with alarm for the crow, with such recklessness assaulting an inviolable surface, seeking so blindly a niche for its strenuous bulk where there was no depth. It could not enter. Its black shape shattering like an instant of flak, the crow plopped into a high branch and sent snow showering from a sector of lace. Its wings spread and settled. The vision destroyed, his heart overflowed. . . ."

Perhaps the very best story of this type in the group at hand is "Unstuck." The story can be easily summarized: A married man wakes up to find that a heavy snowfall has occured overnight. He goes outside to dig his car out from under a snow bank that has hemmed it in. Unable to do so, he enlists his wife to help him. They succeed. The story begins by telling us of the husband and wife that "They had made love last night and again she had failed to have her climax." Later: "She wanted to make a holiday of it. And she wanted, he thought, to bury the aftertaste of last night." In the story's conclusion, the wife has navigated the car out of its snowbank: "[The car's] driver, silhouetted with her nose tipped up, looked much too frail to have managed so big a thing. . .Mark shouted 'Great!' and leaped over the shattered ridge, brandishing the shovel. . .He walked to his car and opened the door and got in beside his wife. The heater had come on; the interior was warm. He repeated, 'You were great.' He was still panting. She rosily smiled and said, 'So were you.'" The not-so-subtle humor of the sexual suggestions here are nicely balanced, at least in my reading of the story, by the authentic generosity of the wife's words, making the story itself the most generous vision of the rewards of marriage in this section of the book.

This generosity toward her husband is shared by Joan Maple, wife of Richard, the two of whom are featured in a series of stories from the 1960s and 1970s chronicling the break-up of their marriage. Five of these stories are featured in "Married Life": "Snowing in Greenwich Village," which introduces the couple, and the four concluding stories in this section, "Giving Blood," "Twin Beds in Rome," "Marching Through Boston," and "Nakedness." Taken individually, these are not necessarily the best stories in part III of The Early Stories, but collectively they are probably the most significant of these fictions when considering the development of Updike's career as a whole. They clearly serve a dual purpose: to give an account of the difficulties of marriage in America, but also to register the social cultural changes in postwar life that contributed to these difficulties.

It is a good thing for Richard and Joan Maple's marriage that Joan exhibits some generosity of spirit, some forebearance and acceptance, since Richard Maple doesn't himself possess many such characteristics. The stories, although told in the third-person, are deflected through Richard's central consciousness, and while this technique almost always creates some initial bond between character and reader, it isn't long before this bond is frayed and Richard comes to seem a frightened and insecure man with some very unpleasant habits and assumptions. He's inclined to be patronizing toward his wife, mostly because he's the man and she's the woman, but he also comes to be envious of her, almost afraid. Joan takes the social changes of the 1960s in stride, attempting to accomodate herself to them, but Richard does so with great reluctance, sometimes out of jealousy that Joan's increased activism is taking her away from him, and frequently lashing out because of it. His racial attitudes and his contempt for "liberals" like his wife come to seem unsavory indeed. Some readers might be inclined to think that Richard's attitudes are given too much prominence, suggesting they might be shared by the author himself, but Updike elsewhere, particularly in the Rabbit books, has demonstrated his ability to explore the mindset of characters whose views he himself does not share, and the portrait of Richard Maples that emerges from these stories finally comes off, to this reader, at least, as an honest attempt to present such a character from the inside, so to speak, to depict Richard Maples the middle-class American male of this period as authentically as possible.

"Snowing in Greenwich Village" shows Richard already, early in the marriage, not entirely comfortable in the role of young husband, as in this story he escorts a dinner guest back home, going up to her apartment and at story's end obviously tempted to take things further. "Giving Blood" begins "The Maples had been married nine years, which is almost too long," and shows the marriage to be indeed quite fragile. "Twin Beds in Rome" begins this way: "The Maples had talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, had the final effect of knitting them together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy." The couple's vacation in Rome perhaps momentarily revivifies the marriage, but Richard's bad faith (in a noxious alliance with his genuine love for his wife) is sufficient to guarantee that this reprieve won't last long. "Marching Through Boston" and "Nakedness" most directly chronicle the Maple marriage in conflict with social change, in the former case the civil rights movement and in the latter the sexual revolution. "Marching Through Boston" casts Richard in an especially ugly light, as his latent bigotry is exposed quite explicitly, although some of his vilest words are clearly enough spoken in his own protest against the changes taking place in his relationship with his wife. (The story literally narrates Richard's participation with Joan in a civil rights march in Boston. It only drives them farther apart.)

What these Maple stories most memorably offer is a representation in fiction of the way in which the neuronal threads constituting the male psyche, perhaps reinforced by that patriarchal cultural climate of the 1950s, began to unravel during the 1960s and 1070s. This unsettling of gender roles and perspectives is further reflected in such stories as "Sunday Teasing" and "Should Wizard Hit Mommy?" (A parallel kind of turmoil in racial perspectives can be seen in the story "A Gift from the City," perhaps the most direct confrontation with these kinds of changes.) The male characters in these stories are not completely aware of the way in which their assumptions are being overturned, and perhaps Updike himself could not have entirely recognized the long-term consequences of those social forces causing the marital tension he was attempting to depict in these stories. Perhaps all of this makes the fiction collected in "Married Life" at least as interesting for sociological as for aesthetic reasons. But in all of the ways I have indicated, most of the stories as well show Updike's talent for writing poetically insightful short fiction coming to be confirmed, the WASP-y, middle-class focus on marital matters notwithstanding.

The Middle of the Journey

The two middle sections in John Updike's The Early Stories, "Family Life" and "The Two Iseults" offer a grab-bag assortment of stories united by the shared subjects of family and/or marriage, the latter increasingly portrayed as a locus of dissatisfaction and betrayal, of real but fleeting pleasures and of dashed hopes. There are two more Maple stories, "Eros Rampant" and "Sublimating," which cast these themes in the starkest relief, but most of the other stories as well work, to the extent they do work, to sketch a collective image of midcentury family life in suburban America.

Perhaps the most representative stories in this middle part of the book are two that serve as bookends of a sort for the two sections, "The Day of the Dying Rabbit" and "I Will not let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me." The first simply depicts a family vacation in a "five-room shack" to which the family retreats every summer, this one ultimately memorable for the incident named in the title (the family cat brings in a baby rabbit that finally can't be saved), but it in turn only serves to fix in place this particular vacation as a kind of emblem of the quiet joys of family life. The father and narrator, a photographer, wonders aloud: "What was it in the next twenty-four hours that slowly flooded me, that makes me want to get the day on some kind of film?" He answers his own question at the end of the story, as the narrator and his son are paddling their way across a pond back to the shack, about to strike land: "The days since have been merely happy days. This day was singular in its, let's say tone, its silver-bromide clarity. Between the cat's generous intentions and my son's lovingly calm warning, the dying rabbit sank like film in the developing pan, and preserved us all." The story works because it is fully dramatized (unlike some other other stories in these sections) and because it works out its structural metaphor (story as photo) with a satisfying aesthetic logic, allowing the story to avoid sentimentality. The dying rabbit introduces an element of tragedy into the "happy days" of family life, but, like the day itself, the rabbit's very suffering gets preserved as a kind of testimonial to all of life's realities.

"I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me" is an equally simple but amply realized story that focuses on a farewell party being held for a couple about to move from their Connecticut suburb to Texas. In this awkward transition period, "The familiar lulling noises--car horn and dog bark, the late commuter train's slither and the main drag's murmur--had become irritants, the town had unravelled into tugging threads of love. Departure rehearses death." At the party, the husband dances with a woman the story clearly intimates is a former adulterous lover, her stony indifference to him now both a painful reminder of what they once meant to each other and a telling sign (to readers) of the malaise into which the husband and wife have fallen and from which they are fleeing. The story's closing dialogue captures this fatigue quite nicely:

Safely on the road, Lou asked, "Did Maggie kiss you goodbye?"
"No. She was quite unfriendly."
"Why shouldn't she be?"
"No reason. She should be. She should be awful and she was." He was going to agree, agree, all the way to Texas.
"She kissed me, Lou said.
"When?"
"When you were in the bathroom."
"Where did she kiss you?"
"I was standing in the foyer waiting for you to get done admiring yourself or whatever you were doing. She swooped out of the living room."
"I mean where on you?"
"On the mouth."
"Warmly?"
"Very. I didn't know how to respond. I'd never been kissed like that, by another woman."
"Did you respond?"
"Well, a little. It happened so quickly."
He must not appear too interested, or even to gloat. "Well," Tom said, "she may have been drunk."
"Or else very tired," said Lou, "like the rest of us."

Unfortunately, many of the other stories in these two sections are very slight and expose some of Updike's weaknesses as a writer. Too often he relies on lyricism to raise his subjects to a level of profundity they just can't reach on their own, as in "The Morning," literally a story about mornings: "At moments his dull attention caught, like a slack sail idly filling, a breath, from this multifaced horizon, of the hope that set in motion and sustained so many industrialized efforts, so much commercial traffic, such ingenious cross-fertilization of profit, such energetic devotion to the metamorphosis of minerals, the transport of goods. . . ." The same lyricism that breathes life into Updike's characters and their situations in his best stories here just goes blowing off into nowhere.

And too many of the stories are really just excuses for rather cloying reflections on the various aspects of family life. Among these would be "The Family Meadow" (you can guess its subject), "Plumbing," "The Orphaned Swimming Pool," "Son," "Daughter, Last Glimpses of," "Solitaire," and "Leaves." Other stories--"How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time," The Music School," "Museums and Women," "Four Sides of One Story"--are "experiments" in chronology or perspective or presentation as alternatives to scenic or episodic realism, but in my view they only suggest that Updike is much more skilled at this kind of realism. One understands why a writer like Updike would attempt such experiments--for a little variety, if nothing else--but most of these stories seem to me, at least, more a consequence of the need to keep churning out short stories than a real interest in literary experimentation.

It must also be said that in some of Udike's fiction the overall characterization of women can be unpleasant, bordering on the misogynistic. In "The Stare," a woman initially defined by her "blunt and elusive" demeanor is further described in this way: "In the months that unfolded from this, it had been his pleasure to see her stare relax. Her body gathered softness under his; late one night, after yet another party, his wife, lying beside him in the pre-dawn darkness of her ignorance, had remarked with the cool, fair appraisal of a rival woman, how beautiful she--she, the other--had become, and he had felt, half dreaming in the warm bed he had betrayed, justified. Her laugh no longer flashed out so hungrily and her eyes, brimming with the secret he and she had made, deepened and seemed to rejoin the girlishness that had lingered in the other features of her face. Seeing her across a room standing swathed in the beauty he had given her, he felt a creator's, a father's pride." The masculine vainglory here is pretty unattractive, and although the exposure of such male conceit seems built into Updike's project as a writer, there are times when one wonders whether some authorial condescension isn't seeping through, nevertheless.

Tarboxian Flavors

I had anticipated that section six of John Updike's The Early Stories might be one of the highlights of the book. Called "Tarbox Tales," it gathers together fourteen stories set in the fictional town of Tarbox, Massachusetts (although in several of the stories the town's name is never mentioned.) However, I have to say that as a whole the stories did not live up to expectations. Readers looking for a supplementary depiction of the suburban town that also serves as the setting for Updike's novel Couples (1968) are likely to be disappointed as well.

The first four stories in this section--"The Indian," "The Hillies," "The Tarbox Police," "The Corner"--do provide some extra coloring beyond what one would find in Couples, but these "tales" are really sketches more than they are fully dramatized short stories, and as much as anything they seem to be the vehicles for Updike's musings on the changes being wrought on a town like Tarbox during the "turbulent" late 1960s and early 1970s. Several of the other stories--"Lifeguard," "The Deacon," "The Carol Sing," "Believers"--are better examples of Updike's treatment of religion and religious belief than they are of "Tarbox Tales," stories about middle-class suburban life. I am probably not the best judge of Updike's "religious" fiction, since in the main I find it obvious and heavy-handed right from the start, even though I know that scholarly articles and books have been written about the centrality to his work of Updike's own Karl Barth-derived religious beliefs. I actually much prefer the stories about suburban malaise and serial adultery. "Lifeguard" is probably the best of this group, as it also introduces the preoccupation with sins of the flesh to be found in many of Updike's novels.

There are two Maple stories in this section, "The Taste of Metal" and "Your Lover Just Called," although it isn't clear to me why these are included as Tarbox Tales while the others are not. They are in fact two of the better stories about this ultimately doomed marriage, as they focus on the relational dynamics and sexual restlessness of the Maple marriage rather than linking the couple's problems in a too facile way to the social transformations going on around them as perhaps some of the other Maple stories do.

For most readers, then--and for me--the most significant story in "Tarbox Tales" is probably "A & P." Easily Updike's most anthologized story, its first-person narrative tells the deceptively simple story of the protagonist's coming of age as he, a checkout boy in the grocery store named in the title, watches the reaction of the Tarbox residents ("the sheep") to the appearance of a sexually uninhibited, scantily clad young lady in the store one day. The story's conclusion, relating the immediate aftermath of the narrator's resignation after he has taken the girl's side (for reasons beyond the obvious one) against his employer, is justly famous: "I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the second slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me from here on in." And we understand that the narrator, Sammy, is correct: the world will be hard on him. The story is not just an account of adolescent rebellion but indeed a meditation on the unavoidable turning-points in life. The present-tense narration still seems powerful in its immediacy, even though the use of the present tense among current neorealist writers has become something of a commonplace. (Updike should probably be held accountable for this phenomenon only to the extent that he really was a pioneer of the technique, here and in Rabbit, Run.)

(The last selection in "Tarbox Tales," the brief poem-story "Eclipse," although it is not narrated in the present tense, also dramatizes a turning-point in its protagonist's life. The narrator comes to his own kind of realization during an eclipse, which Updike handles in a subtle and satisfying way. I would identify this story, along with "A &P," as the two really indispensable stories in this section of the book.)

Those wishing to experience Updike's portrayal of Tarbox, the otherwise rather nondescript New England town going through its own kind of turmoil during the 1960s, will thus probably have to turn to Couples. Although I wouldn't necessarily rank it at the very top among Updike's novels, I have now read this novel twice, and each time I thought it provocative and convincing, despite the critics who scorned it at the time of its publication. It's interesting partly as a period piece, but it also shows (along with a few of the stories in "Tarbox Tales") John Updike discovering what, in my opinion, is still his most interesting and most enduring subject.

Updike Reconsidered

In contrast to the two previous sections of the book, there are in the final two sections of John Updike's The Early Stories, "Far Out" and "The Single Life," many very good short stories, perhaps a couple of great ones. It is a pity, however, that these stories are reserved for the concluding pages, as some readers may have already given up on reading the whole book because of the lesser work to be found in its middle sections and will miss out on some of Updike's more satisfying work in the short story form.

"The Astronomer" is one of Updike's better explicitly "religious" stories, relating, in an efficiently compressed way, a brief episode dramatizing the not-so-disaparate-after-all views of the scientist and the theologian. "The Witnesses" and "A Constellation of Events" present the adultery story in which Updike so frequently specializes from perspectives different than the usual, the latter focusing on the woman's point of view for a change. "Ethiopia" and "I am Dying, Egypt, Dying" are stories of Americans visiting Africa, and are worth reading for the insight they provide into the American response to its "natives." "The Bulgarian Poetess" is the first of the Henry Bech stories, but, although a perfectly good story, it probably doesn't really belong in this collection. "Separating" and "Gesturing" more or less bring the saga of the unsuccessful Maple marriage to its conclusion.

"Transaction" is the longish but suprisingly compelling story of an evening's encounter between a "man of forty" and a prostitute. It proves to be an unexpectedly profound experience for the man of forty, as "Always, until now, [sex] had been too much, bigger than all systems, an empyrean as absolute as those first boyish orgasms, when his hand would make his soul pass through a bliss as dense as an ingot of gold. Now, at last, in the prime of life, he saw through it, into the spaces between the stars." "Problems" is one of Updike's most successful formal experiments, a brief story of, again, adultery, told entirely in the form of a mathematics test.

In my view, the two best stories in the final sections, both perhaps among Updike's very best, are "The Hermit" and "Killing." The first very quietly tells the story of a man who, in the gradual dissatisfaction he has come to feel for his life, finds an old shack in a deserted track of woods and withdraws into solitude. As much as he wants to escape from the troubles and frustrations of the world he's left behind, however, the story depicts the ultimate impossibility of doing so. Updike establishes a kind of empathy with this character (authorial empathy) that I, at least, found rather surprising. "Killing" relates the story of a daughter coming to terms with the death of her invalid father, which she herself has had to oversee, and it does so very effectively indeed.

My final judgment of this book is that, although it contains numerous very good stories, stories on which Updike's ultimate reputation will certainly in part be assessed, as a book it is not a very satisfactory presentation of Updike's skills. Far too many of the stories are throw-aways (the second half of "Far Out," for example, consists of a series of overly cute exercises in whimsy that are, frankly, not worth the bother), and the order Updike has given them doesn't particularly do them credit or force us to consider him as a writer of short fiction in any new and more illuminating light. It is a book that probably ought to exist (as a convenience for scholars and critics, perhaps), but is not something that even Updike's fans need to read with any great urgency. Updike's talents as a writer of stories will be much better served when a "Selected Stories" ulimately appears, one that would include probably only a third to a half of the stories to be found in The Early Stories, 1953 -1975.

If anything, the casual reader is likely to find the book frustrating if not counterproductive as a way of sampling Updike's shorter fiction. I myself still think that Updike has a lot to offer as a stylist, and even occasionally as a writer willing to stretch the limits of form in fiction (although this he does more satisfactorily in the novels, novels such as The Centaur or The Coup, Roger's Version or Brazil). There's no doubt, however, that he can also belabor certain subjects beyond their aesthetic usefulness, and that a long career spent actually earning a living as a writer of fiction has resulted in a fair number of short stories that seem motivated primarily by the need to keep churning them out. This latter problem, on the other hand, is one most writers would gladly welcome if it meant being able to also produce fiction of higher quality and care through the literary livelihood thus provided. John Updike is certainly in the final analysis a writer who has produced such fiction, even if one does have to pick and choose when surveying his very large body of work.

Heavy Burdens

I do not read the Wall Street Journal and know nothing about Eric Gibson, the features editor of its "Leisure and Arts" section. My comments are restricted to this article (May 28) about the recent fire in a London warehouse that destroyed a large collection of contemporary art. Neither do I know anything about the specific art works for which Gibson expresses his particular scorn (the usual kind of philistine skepticism), although I will say it's an especially cheap device to pick out just two of over one hundred works and implicitly hold them to be representative of the whole.

What's really objectionable about this article is the attitude it betrays toward not just contemporary art but toward the nature of art in general, an attitude, I'm afraid, shared by all too many self-appointed arbiters of contemporary art (and literature) given all too much space in "mainstream" newspapers and magazines. (In this case I am able to say that it is an attitude most academic critics have abandoned, although in many cases an equally extreme and unthinking attitude in the other direction has been adopted instead.) This view of art is pretty much encapsulated in this statement: "It's not that I think incinerating art is a good thing. It's just that the work of these artists--as of all contemporary artists--is too new and untested to have acquired the cultural heft that makes it seem an indispensable part of one's existence. I regret the fire happened, but I can't quite see it as a body blow to civilization."

The key words here are "cultural heft" and "civilization." According to the definition of "art" apparently being used by Gibson, art is about "culture," and a work of art becomes a part of culture by acquiring "heft." It would indeed seem that a work of art doesn't necessarily reveal this heft upon initial examination since new art is too "untested" to have it. It's a weight that, presumably, subsequent critcs load onto it. (Now you know why all those "great works" of art and literature you were exposed to in school seemed so heavy on the spirit.) Related to this is the art work's relationship to "civilization." Civilization, one has to conclude, is that ponderous institution wherein all of that great mass of art can be stored, and such lightweight fare as was being kept in that flimsy warehouse burned through lack of time to bulk up.

A little later in the article Gibson also pronounces on the role of critics: "Criticism used to be about detachment, discernment and making rigorous judgments about artistic quality. Critics used to refrain from applying the word 'masterpiece" to any work less than a few hundred years old." Putting aside for now the questionable assumptions behind the description of what criticism "used to be," there seems an elemental lapse in logic here. How can criticism be about "making rigorous judgments about artisitic quality" if you have to wait around several hundred years to say anything at all?

Art is not for culture or for civilization. Art and literature are for the enjoyment and edification of people, individual people, artists, writers, viewers, and readers who live now and can't really hold off until someone three centuries from now says its okay to call it art. "Civilization" may not have suffered from the London fire, but it's quite likely that potential viewers of this art have suffered a loss, the loss of a possible experience of some worthy art that can't be replaced by going to a museum to look once again at certified "masterpieces." Not to mention the loss felt by the artists themselves, which is real enough despite the "perspective" Gibson appeals to at the end of his article.

Nor is true that criticism has always been about "detachment, discernment and making rigorous judgments about artistic quality." Detachment and discernment (the latter predicated on the former) were indeed qualities valued by certain kinds of modern critics, but they were mostly attempting to show how works of art and literature that seemed alien and unconventional (not unlike the works Mr. Gibson disparages) could be judged artistically accomplished if you regarded them in the appropriate ways. Actually very few of these critics were known for "rigorous judgments" about inferior art, as the consideration of such works added nothing to their broader goal of enlarging our understanding of what "art" could be. Only certain newpaper-based critics interpret the requirements of their job in this way.

We'd all be much better off if critics in Eric Gibson's position, able to discuss art with a relatively wide audience, would forget about culture and civilization and making rigorous judgments about quality and stick to describing and explaining the works of art they actually encounter. Consigning it all to the "bonfire of the vanities" only makes them look silly.

Sclerotic and Irrelevant

In the Times Literary Supplement, Peter Brooks (author of Reading for the Plot) recently wrote of the conquest of academic literary study by "theory" that "the coming of theory actually rescued the study of literature at a time when it was threatened with sclerosis and irrelevance. In particular, it brought students back to literary studies with a sense that there was something exciting going on."

There are several things wrong with this contention, although I do not myself believe that "theory" of the kind Brooks discusses (he is reviewing a book centered mostly on figures like Foucault and Derrida, the "poststructuralists") was itself necessarily a bad thing for literary study. Much of Derrida's work, for example, is perfectly compatible with the kind of "old-fashioned" literary study focused on the close reading of literature for what it as literature has to offer us, and he could not have been happy when the notion of "deconstruction" eventually became, among some alleged "followers," essentially a synonym for trashing the place.

But I do have problems with idea that the study of literature needed to be "rescued," and I do not believe that the coming of theory "brought students back," since they hadn't gone anywhere in the first place and since every account I have read about the level of student interest in English or comparative literature or Romance Languages suggests that enrollment in such departments has only declined since the advent of theory. If Brooks has the graduate study of literature in mind, then bringing students into a field where finding a job upon completing one's study, no matter how "exciting" it may have been, has now become difficult approaching impossible performs a service for no one.

More to the point: literary study may or may not have become "sclerotic" pre-theory, but so what? If this means that literature professors were just teaching students how to approach works of literature--defined sclerotically as poetry, fiction, and drama--so they might read them more profitably, and were trying to point them to the kinds of novels or poems that might be worth their attention, then they were doing their jobs as efficiently as it could be done. Unless you think that studying literature in this way just isn't peppy and glowing enough and requires a dose of "excitement" in order to show it off in meetings with the Dean. But this is just another step in the process of making "literature itself" secondary to other more suitably "advanced" methods of academic inquiry, methods that have now become themselves the subjects of academic literary study, leaving literature far behind.

This yoking of literature to other purposes and other causes is equally typical of more traditional humanists who wouldn't otherwise countenance notions about the "subversive" quality of critical inquiry. In a recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 4, 2004), Vartan Gregorian pleads for a return of liberal arts instruction to higher education. In many ways, this essay is just the usual blather one would expect from a certain kind of college president, pitched at such a high level of generality that he really never even bothers to define what he means by "liberal arts." It's pretty clear nevertheless that included in Gregorian's liberal arts curriculum would be the study of literature, perhaps even as its centerpiece. But what Gregorian wants is "to integrate learning and provide balance," to "help our students acquire their own identity," to "provide a context for technical training" so students may "understand the general nature and structure of our society, the role of the university, or the importance of values." All worthy goals, I suppose, and if you wanted to include works of literature in an ethics class, or a psychology class, or a political science class, this might be a perfectly sound strategy. But if you set up whole departments devoted to literary study, and then charge them with helping to "understand the general nature and structure of our society," you're using extremely indirect means to arrive at results better pursued in other ways. And you're implicitly demeaning what literature might really do for individual readers quite apart from your social engineering scheme--although perhaps that's really the point.

Probably what bothers me most about Peter Brooks's claims about theory is the appeal to the potential "irrelevance" of literary study without it. I'm not even sure Brooks himself means to suggest that literature ought to be "relevant," given that immediately following the passage I've quoted he goes on to say that theory "was something that might in the long run turn out to be unsubstantiable, and perhaps unusable--but then most literary undergraduates aren't planning to build a career on how they have read either Milton or Foucault." Thus Brooks acknowledges that the study of literature is indeed irrelevant in the context in which universities generally function. A few students are in college or graduate school just to learn, literally to become "learned," less ignorant, but everyone will acknowledge they're a vast minority. Even fewer would like to become more skilled readers of literature. But this is really the only authentic consituency literary study has. Everything else is just defensiveness and empty rhetoric. Literature can't be relevant to civic responsibility and reform agendas except in defying them.

To be defiantly irrelevant. How subversive is that?

Dissecting Literature

Over at The Weblog, Adam Robinson wonders about the value of literary criticism. Although acknowledging that inferior works of literature can sometimes provoke instructive criticism, he's not so sure what criticism can actually say about great literature:

Literary criticism stretches the distance between life and art to a near breaking point. Scratch that--it completely severs any connection between our life and the beauty we can find in it. It contrives terms and categories that are natural to our instincts but not to our existence. For instance, when we apply the force of love between Romeo and Juliet to our own lives, when we derive our definition from their relationship, we've made love into something concrete, definable, and weird. Now we feel funny about having a crush, and we hope no one makes fun of our emotions or plagues our houses behind our backs.

This is nicely put, and, up to a point, I agree with it. Sometimes it is better to say of a book, play, or poem that has moved you or has enhanced your appreciation of what literature is capable of doing simply that it has moved you, enhanced your appreciation, etc. In other words, sometimes you just want to savor the reading experience. However, it is just as true to say that often criticism appropriately "stretches the distance between life and art to a near breaking point." Life isn't art, and it's probably Romeo and Juliet, not criticism of it, that encourages us to unfavorably compare our experiences of love to those of its protagonists. Criticism, at its best, would warn of us of the dangers of doing this: It's only a play, and look what happened to Romeo and Juliet, anyway.

Ultimately I think Adam's post carries some unexamined assumptions about "criticism." I do think criticism can perform a useful function on behalf of great, or even just good, works of literature, as long as we recognize that these assumptions are not inherent to literary criticism as it has been practiced by great critics or to criticism as it might be more efficaciously practiced in the future.

The first assumption is that literary criticism is essentially academic criticism, the kind of thing done by those belonging to a "profession" and according to the standards of that profession's "discipline." A literary critic is someone who works for a university and observes the conventions of what has become (or what once was) literary study. This is the kind of criticism engaged in, as Adam puts it elsewhere in his post, "vivisecting Ulysses. . .to try and make a relevant point." It is certainly true that for the better part of the last half-century literary criticism has essentially been subsumed to the prerogatives of the academy (for reasons that seemed good ones at the time), but must it remain there? The "advanced" forms of academic criticism at the moment--cultural studies, critical theory in its most politicized version--have almost nothing to do with literature, so this would be an especially good time to reclaim literature on behalf of a literary criticism that rejects both the conversion of criticism into sociology and the practice of "vivisection."

The second assumption is that criticism is primarily evaluative. Whereas Adam finds that it is with the lesser books, "those that you laugh at because they're so bad" that he "can find a compelling essay" to write, he is hard put to write about the books he loves because, by my reading of his remarks, he would simply want to describe them, better yet, just tell other people to read them. But a form of literary criticism could be developed to do both of these things. Describing a work of literature and what seem to be its aesthetic ambitions is not as straightforward as it might seem, and many good books and poems have suffered from the inability of critics and reviewers to fairly and accurately give readers an account of what reading them might be like. And criticism that ultimately convinces readers to give a particular book a try, but perhaps also provides perspective or information that makes reading it more rewarding, would be in my opinion criticism that redeems the very potential of literary criticism.

Unfortunately, there's very little criticism to be found these days that doesn't proceed according to at least one of these assumptions. Academic criticism has, to be sure, performed vivisection on a body of work that was still living, although now is indeed nearly dead. "General interest" criticism, even as practiced by intelligent and informed critics who don't accept the first assumption, is almost entirely evaluative, usually in ways that limit readers' ability to comprehend the range of possibilities available to writers of fiction and poetry and that foreground the critic's own superior sensibilities--not just superior to those of the larger mob of readers but to the writers whose work is being evaluated. Valuable criticism of worthwhile and accomplished works of literature could be written, but it would first of all have to arise from the conviction that literature itself is valuable, and would in addition have to be open to the myriad ways in which works of literature are and can be created.

Not in this Lifetime

I greatly admire Helen Vendler. She is perhaps the greatest living close reader of poetry, especially modern poetry, in the United States. She is also passionately committed to the task of explicating the value of poetry, of literature in general, to as wide an audience as possible, as her recent Jefferson lecture, "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar," makes abundantly clear. Cynics are advised to not go near this lecture: not only will they immediately encounter a student of literature utterly convinced of its centrality to human life, but they may wind up convinced of this centrality themselves if they read the lecture through to the end.

But it is precisely Vendler's sincerity and her eloquent communication of her own passion for poetry that ultimately, for me at least, make reading this lecture a rather sad experience. She's right about almost everything she says in trying to argue for making art and literature the curricular centerpiece in the study of the "Humanities" in American universities, but given how thoroughly the study of literature (art more broadly) has been rejected in this country, by administrators, politicians, students, parents, employers, and most pathetically, by literature professors themselves, the context in which her words are offered make this lecture sound more like a funeral oration than an inspirational address, an elegy for what might have been than a proposal for curricular reform. It's almost as if she hasn't noticed that the academic and business elites in America ooze contempt for art and literature, or, more to the point, that literary academics long ago stopped pretending they had any real regard for what is supposed to be the subject of their scholarly study.

Vendler is certainly correct in saying that "When it became useful in educational circles in the United States to group various university disciplines under the name 'The Humanities,' it seems to have been tacitly decided that philosophy and history would be cast as the core of this grouping. . .Philosophy, conceived of as embodying truth, and history, conceived of as a factual record of the past, were proposed as the principal embodiments of Western culture, and given pride of place in general education programs." Americans' demand for "facts" and "hard" knowledge, their disdain for the fluff that is fiction or poetry or painting or music, were reflected even in that realm of academic study that was--grudgingly--ceded to "humanists." She is also justified in claiming that "Confidence in a reliable factual record, not to speak of faith in a reliable philosophical synthesis, has undergone considerable erosion. Historical and philosophical assertions issue, it seems, from particular vantage points, and are no less contestable than the assertions of other disciplines." Finally, she makes as compelling a case that serious engagement with the arts is good for you as anyone is likely to make.

But her answer to her own posed question, "If the arts are so satisfactory an embodiment of human experience, why do we need studies commenting on them?", is not so compelling, at least if she means by this, "Why study the arts in college?" Or, "Why create an academic caste of professional 'scholars' to comment on art as a 'discipline?'" I unhesitatingly agree that "reminders of art's presence are constantly necessary," but is the best way to do this to relegate the study of art to universities, where the most concrete result has been the very maginalization, the trivialization, of art and literature? Vendler's second reason for installing the arts in the curriculum of universities, that "such studies establish in human beings a sense of cultural patrimony" is, in my opinion the weakest argument that can be made on behalf of the academic study of art or music or literature, since it threatens to reduce them to a form of nationalist propaganda--or a reaction against such perceived propaganda, which is largely what has indeed happened to literary study in particular. But Vendler doesn't finally seem to believe very strongly in this argument herself.

The real weight of Vendler's defense of "the products of aesthetic endeavor" falls on her contention that studying works of art and literature "helps us to live our lives," and that scholars are best situated to show us how this can be true. The weight of this argument, in turn, rests on her reading of three poems by Wallace Stevens, poems in which Stevens does indeed speak of the indispensability of art--specifically poetry--and of the scholar's role in reminding us of this. I have no intention of disputing Vendler's reading of these poems. I couldn't plausibly do it even if I wanted to. But I do think she overgeneralizes Stevens's reference to the "scholar, separately dwelling," who "Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,/Which, as a man feeling everything, were his" to mean the academic scholar of the sort we find in American universities. As Harold Bloom points out in Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, the scholar of "Somnambulisma" is likely an allusion to Emerson's "American Scholar," who is not exactly the tweedy gentleman available for office hours we all know and love. If Vendler means in her discussion of this poem that it is desirable if not necessary that some people devote themselves to perpetuating the legacy of still vital poets and artists from the past, reminding us of the "pervasive being" Stevens identifies in his poem, I would have no quarrel with her. But I have a hard time believing there are many such scholars around any more, the very denotation of the word "scholar" now understood as it is to designate exactly the gentleman/woman in the office.

Bloom additionally points out that "Large Red Man Reading," the second poem Vendler discusses, as well contains allusions to Emerson, who also saw the poet's job as writing the "poem of life," was also concerned with the "vatic" power of the poet, but again it is difficult to imagine that either Emerson or Stevens conceived of this "earthly giant of vital being" (Vendler's words) as a "scholar" of the modern kind. Is it part of the job description of the scholar nowadays that he hold his students in rapt attention as he teaches them that "the experiences of life can be reconstituted and made available as beauty and solace, to help us live our lives"? If such scholars as Vendler seems to evoke here ever existed, they surely no longer stride through the halls of the general classroom building, if only because such activity as Vendler wants to describe through her explication of this poem will certainly not get you tenure. The "Large Red Man Reading" helps us pay attention to what we otherwise wouldn't notice; the modern scholar only notices what is otherwise not worth our attention.

Although clearly what Helen Vendler values most in art and literature is the stimulation and pleasure they afford in their own right, in order to duly place them at the center of humanities education, she is ultimately forced to appeal to other services they might perform ("training in subtlety of response," enhancing "scientific training" through the "direct mediation. . .of feeling, vicarious experience, and interpersonal imagination"), as is any proposal to include art in an academic curriculum. She is also led to adopt very dubious--and somewhat naive--theories about how training in the arts is to be accomplished: "Once the appetite for an art has been awakened by pleasure, the nursery rhyme and the cartoon lead by degrees to Stevens and Eakins. A curriculum relying on the ocean, the bird, and the scholar, on the red man and his blue tabulae, would produce a love of the arts and humanities that we have not yet succeeded in generating in the population at large." I am not aware of any evidence that the aesthetic domino effect--from the nursery rhyme ultimately to Wallace Stevens--actually ever happens with other than those students who were always going to get to Stevens or Eakins anyway. And if "the population at large" were going to be led to a love of the arts, we would already have witnessed the appearance of this heaven-on-earth, since much of the justification for teaching the arts and humanities to captive student audiences during the last seventy-five years was based on some such theory. Everyone should read Helen Vendler's poetry criticism, as it indeed can lead individual readers to an appreciation of what makes poetry worth reading. Her Jefferson lecture, however, mistakenly assumes that this kind of concrete experience of literary art can be universalized into a system of academic intruction, still mistaken no matter how well-intentioned the effort might be. Or how nice it would be if it could actually work.

Communication Skills

In one of the most recently published diatribes against unconventional literature (this time poetry), Joan Houlihan declares that

Like all other forms of writing, poetry is a communication. The evidence is in its release from the poet's brain onto a medium designed to be read. The fact that it was written down, made readable, makes it a communication even if its only reader turns out to be its creator at a later time. Furthermore, whatever one feels about the role of the reader, or author-as-reader, there's no dispute that there is a role—a poem without a reader is not a poem, but just an artifact of the imagination.

This is so profoundly wrong in so many ways that I have been unable to resist examining the passage for its more egregiously mistaken assumptions.

Neither poetry nor fiction is "a communication" in the way Houlihan clearly intends the term to be understood here. Poets and novelists do not "communicate" information or messages or ideas or propositions or wisdom or anything else by writing poetry or fiction. If these forms of writing are to be considered methods of communication, they are very poor ones indeed, since in most acccomplished poems or novels the best that can be said is that their messages or "points" are communicated in a very roundabout way, a strategy that would seem merely self-defeating if the goal of writing them is to satisfy readers looking for the points being made or the message communicated. Most of the great works of literature would surely by now have been judged failures by the communication test: if the value of those works from the past we still read were to be found in their clearly signalled meanings, their unambiguosly announced "themes," we probably would not still be reading them. Why bother? Just take the message and run.

That poetry is written down, "designed to be read," doesn't in itself demonstrate it's to be taken as communication, although most of us do admittedly have a harder time separating the medium in which the literary arts are created from the artistic effects of which that medium might be capable than we do with painting or sculpture or music. Since we do use language to communicate, we assume all language must be used for that purpose--or that all uses of language can't escape its origins in communication or discourse. We are much more willing to grant that music, say, (the scores of which are also "written down") is something other than communication, in most cases, in fact, would resist the idea that behind the music we like is primarily an effort to communicate ideas or messages. But why is it not possible simply to grant that when poets or novelists set to work they are using language for some purposes that can't be reduced to "communication?" A poem or novel is an artificial construction of words. You may not like what has been constructed in a specific instance, but it hardly seems useful to say that it didn't communicate with you.

All of this is just confirmed if we further consider Houlihan's own contention that a poem communicates "even if its only reader turns out to be its creator at a later time." This seems frankly bizarre. If a poet at some future date "reads" a poem she has written, is she really "communicating" with herself? Would this poet even be aware of what's being communicated? Wouldn't she be looking at the poem's formal qualities, the aptness of its word choice, etc.? Why couldn't other readers look primarily to such things as well? Did Emily Dickinson consider herself finally a failure because the vast majority of her poems didn't "communicate" with anyone? Might she have been satisfied simply that she had created hundreds of well-made poems?

Even more bizarre, at least to me, is the claim that "a poem without a reader is not a poem, but just an artifact of the imagination." I will agree that ultimately most writers want readers, but what's wrong with those readers considering a given work as "an artifact of the imagination"? Isn't this the very way to define all works of art? Perhaps the problem Houlihan sees here is not that poems are products of the human imagination, but that they might be regarded as "artifacts," something that has been made by "artificial" means. Presumably poetry ought to be "natural," indeed an effort at communication. This distinction is probably at the heart of most complaints against works of art and literature that go too far in their brazen use of artifice or that are pronounced "obscure." But anyone taking up the writing of poetry and fiction is committed to an endeavor that is inescapably artificial. Poetry is an inherently unnatural disruption of our ordinary sense of what language is for (just ask all those freshmen struggling through intro to lit), but if you really resent writers playing this kind of game with words (game-playing, however, being just as integral to human nature as the need to communicate), you probably shouldn't be reading (or writing) poetry in the first place.

I looked for evidence in Houlihan's essay that I was myself misreading her message, misconstruing her point, but was only reinforced in my analysis by her conclusion, in which she writes of "poets who betray what talent they may have for the approbation of peers, who engage in the worst self-delusion: that they have something to say that can only be said in a poem." Once again we are dealing with the assumption that literature is a forum for "saying something," even if it is something "that can only be said in a poem." I've never been clear exactly what things "can only be said in a poem." If you can reformulate the poem into what it "says," then obviously you have said it in another way. If you can't put what it says into words, then just as obviously it's not saying anything. The only other alternative is that a poem just is what it is, in most ways precisely avoiding saying anything in particular. If what we have in such a piece of writing is a failure to communicate, this failure is the poem's greatest success.

Mass Appeal

Many others have by now commented on Charles McGrath's New York Times piece, "Not Funnies," a long-ish history/survey of "graphic novels." I don't myself have anything to say about graphic novels, since I don't read them. I have enough "prose novels" to keep up with as it is.

I do have problems, however, with McGrath's set-up for his discussion of the subject:

You can't pinpoint it exactly, but there was a moment when people more or less stopped reading poetry and turned instead to novels, which just a few generations earlier had been considered entertainment suitable only for idle ladies of uncertain morals. The change had surely taken hold by the heyday of Dickens and Tennyson, which was the last time a poet and a novelist went head to head on the best-seller list. Someday the novel, too, will go into decline -- if it hasn't already -- and will become, like poetry, a genre treasured and created by just a relative few. This won't happen in our lifetime, but it's not too soon to wonder what the next new thing, the new literary form, might be.

It might be comic books. Seriously. Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal. . . .

There was not a moment when "people" switched from reading poetry to reading fiction. As you will discover by reading Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel, both novel-reading and -writing were themselves a consequence of the rise of mass literacy in the 18th and 19th centuries. In effect, they coincided with the rise of the modern middle class. Before this time, few people indeed read even poetry, because few people could read. There was never a time when "people" read poetry in the way McGrath wants to imply in his initial sentence.

To say that at first novels "had been considered entertainment suitable only for idle ladies of uncertain morals" is a vast overstatement, if not simply stupid. The former editor of the New York Times Book Review should know better. It is true that most novels were not taken seriously as literature for a time after the form appeared on the cultural scene, but by the mid-19th century, with the arrival of Flaubert, of Dickens, and of Hawthorne, this was clearly no longer the case. I don't mean to insist on trivial points of literary history, but it's really not so trivial: McGrath's suggestion is that literary history, reading more generally, is a story of changing fashions, and this attitude only reinforces the notion that fiction or poetry not conforming to the latest trends and practices can be safely ignored if not discarded. This attitude performs no service for graphic novels themselves in the long run: eventually they too will be obsolete, cast aside in favor of the next big thing.

In the United States, at least, novels were not read or written by "ladies of uncertain morals." Hawthorne did famously scorn the "mass of scribbling women" whose novels were overshadowing his own. His problem with these novels, however, was precisely that they were written with great moralistic fervor but, in his opinion, little art. His books indeed were already appreciated by "just a relative few." Furthermore, it's really difficult to maintain that serious fiction now is "treasured and created" by more than this small circle of interested parties. Hawthorne surely wanted more readers than he was getting when he made his remark, but it's hard to believe he really wanted some version of what at the time would have been considered a mass audience. That audience would have been impatient with Hawthorne's "difficulty" and seriousness of artistic purpose (just as generations of high school students were taught--unwittingly--to feel such impatience when forced to read The Scarlet Letter), and he would have been better off to settle for those "few" who wanted to read his books on their own terms. Contemporary writers would be better off to cultivate this audience as well.

The clear implication of McGrath's words is that novels (even graphic novels) ought to acquire a mass following, should seek to be "an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal," else they can't be considered important, culturally "relevant." This is a common enough view, shared by many literary journalists and cultural commentators. I can't help but think that in forcing the graphic novel into the categories of the "accessible" and the "vernacular," McGrath is distorting what the creators of these "comic books" are really up to. (The longer they're around, in fact, the less accessible and less vernacular they're likely to get, since anyone who takes the form seriously as art is going to explore the possibilities of the form beyond its audience share or usefulness to cultural critics.) It's just a way of perpetuating the myth of the high/low divide in American culture, whereby the low or the popular triumph over the elite and the effete. If literary fiction ultimately "declines" to the point of being truly of interest only to the few, so be it. It will have found its audience among those who understand its purpose and potential. These will be readers who neither have pretensions to superior taste nor want to jump on the bandwagon of fashionable appeal. They will just be readers.

A Show About Nothing

In many ways, "In the Penthouse of the Ivory Tower," Gideon Lewis-Kraus's essay in the July issue of The Believer, is just the latest rehearsal of what is by now a very tired journalistic routine: Go to the MLA convention and report on how absurd and silly most English professors are. (I've been reading versions of this exercise since at least 1985.) In this case, the author is able to cover the convention at somewhat greater length than usual, and he seems somewhat more interested and informed than most garden-variety journalists who have performed the routine in the past. He even tries to dredge up a little sympathy for the out-of-touch professors, although by the end of the piece this effort has mostly come to naught. However, the final verdict is expected enough: "So as much as I want to grab the panelists by their modish lapels and shake them and demand to know exactly what the hell they're talking about, it is not my right to do so, for I am not there by invitation, I am not a member of their community, and I have no right to expect that their words should mean anything to me. I still think their tortured, overwrought sentences are for the most part patently absurd. . . ."

It's not that I don't think that most sentences read aloud at MLA conventions--I've attended many--are "for the most part patently absurd." They are indeed. It's just that, like most of his predecessors in the laugh-at-the-professors genre, Lewis-Kraus doesn't really seem to comprehend just why they're so absurd, so overinflated, so utterly irrelevant. He thinks it's just a failure to speak in fathomable language, an unthinking capitulation to the professionalization of academic discourse. He thinks English professors are finally too insular. But that is not the problem, that is not it at all. English professors no longer have a subject. They are literally speaking and writing about nothing.

Almost immediately upon listening to the first group of speakers at the 2003 convention, Lewis-Kraus is struck by the degree to which these people are asking, implicitly and explicitly, what it is that an English professor is supposed to be doing: "what is an English professor for?" It wasn't that long ago that such a question had a relatively straighforward answer. English professors taught literature, helped to keep the tradition of serious literary writing alive, introduced students and others to this tradition through the classroom and what was called "scholarship" about literature. In the very broadest sense, English professors were the caretakers in charge of maintaining some historical perspective on the language itself, studying literature as the greatest expression of the possibilities of this language. No professor of English today could claim these endeavors as the justification for English as an academic discipline. English professors have now dedicated themselves to the task of "interrogating" the literary tradition, as if it were an intellectual infection whose toxic elements have to be identified. And the only interest in the language most of them show is in injecting it as often as possible with rhetorical formaldehyde.

Lewis-Kraus writes of the papers he hears delivered at one session that they "are so bizarre and freakish and sodden with jargon as to make them utterly incomprehensible." I don't doubt that this was the case, but unfortunately he is unable to give us much in the way of quoted illustration of this kind of discourse. However, in looking at the most recent issue of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (a publication to which I still subscribe and have myself contributed), one quickly comes upon a passage like this, from an essay on Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations: "Across the various epistemic systems of encyclopedic information, diachronic narrative processes self-organize reactions and catalyze reciprocal, feedback relations across the textual network. The structure of the system evolves as the product of co-evolution between system and environment, involving a multidirectional collection of linear and nonlinear processes." This is incomprensible enough, even, as far as I can tell, meaningless, but it's not really the jargon that makes it so. For comparison, here is the beginning of the second paragraph of Eric Auerbach's Mimesis, one of the greatest works of literary criticism ever written. He is describing a scene in the Odyssey:

All this is scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion. The two women express their feelings in copious direct discourse. Feelings though they are, with only a slight admixture of the most general considerations upon human destiny, the syntactical connection between part and part is perfectly clear, no contour is blurred.

Later in the same paragraph:

The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to one another, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; like the separate phenomena themselves, their relationships--their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations--are brought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.

I'm pretty certain that most students, as well as most other readers unpracticed in literary criticism, would find the Mimesis passages almost as incomprehensible as the previously quoted passage about "epistemic systems" or as the scholarly papers Lewis-Kraus sat through. The difference is not that one uses jargon and the other doesn't. (Keeping in mind that Mimesis is a translation.) Both use jargon of one kind or another. Any kind of considered literary criticism is almost by necessity going to be caught using language that offends general-interest sensibilities. The real difference is that Auerbach is attempting to explicate the text in front of him, to help the reader "see" more fully what is really going on in the scene from the Odyssey. He has to use terms ("direct discourse") one wouldn' think of while reading the scene for the first time. The discussion of The Gold Bug Variations, on the other hand, has itself translated the novel into something else, an excuse to use abstraction and scientific-sounding argot and to discuss a subject the critic has invented. It has nothing to do with the novel it otherwise pretends to analyze.

Which is why Lewis-Kraus is on firmer ground when he comments that the kind of "scholarship" to which he is being exposed exhibits "a truly virtuosic incomprehensibility that makes sense only as a kind of poetic performance." It's not even that these scholars are communicating only with one another. They're not trying to communicate. It's all self-display and an allegiance to external agendas of the scholar's own choosing, agendas themselves important only to the extent that the professor in question can give it his/her own scholarly spin. (For a more extensive discussion of this, go here.)

In a response to Lewis-Kraus's essay, Sharleen Mondal makes a valiant effort to defend the contemporary literary scholar: "Literary scholars already hold themselves to a very strict standard when it comes to the validity of arguments--we are supposed to contextualize everything to the nth degree, historicize our analyses, enter the academic conversation, offer 'evidence' through the use of quotations and page references, are supposed to be clear about what we are contributing to existing work on the topic, show which theorists we are using to construct the basis for our argument, etc. If a reader is willing to do what it takes to become acquainted with all these processes, then I am perfectly happy to consider criticism. But my sense is that the reason why our work is often inaccessible to people outside our field is that most people. . .simply aren't interested--the immediate and personal experience of reading is enough."

Mondal is living in another academic age. None of the things she describes are any longer important, except when a "senior scholar" wants to have an excuse for denying a junior colleague tenure. (Even in using the word "colleague," I can hardly manage to suppress a sneer at the idea that English departments are any longer involved in any kind of collective enterprise.) All of them presuppose an existing interest in literature and in advocating on behalf of literature, but the literary academy as a whole can no longer summon up such interest. Lewis-Kraus's essay makes this patently obvious. There's scarcely a mention of literature in it except as "what you teach to your students" for the professors on hand at the convention. The fact of the matter is that not even most English professors care much about the "work" being done by those who have inherited the space inside the ivy-covered halls. Charles Bertsch, a professor who accompanies Lewis-Kraus to the convention, practically admits he has more interest in PAC-10 basektball. Literature is passe, and it's hard to muster up much enthusiasm for a fragmented curriculum that mostly rewards self-obsession.

In my opinion, it's this self-obsession that Lewis-Kraus mistakes "for a faint tremor of heroism in the air" as he sums up his experience of the MLA convention.

Ronald Sukenick

I believe I first became aware of Ronald Sukenick when, as an undergraduate, I began to cultivate an interest in experimental fiction and came across a book called Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, edited by Raymond Federman (author of Double or Nothing and a writer with whom Sukenick would himself long be associated). Published in 1975, this was one of several "academic" books from this period that were being produced as a result of the successful introduction of contemporary fiction as a legitimate subject of academic study. Most of these books were indeed about postwar experimental fiction, the sort that would later become categorized as "postmodern."

Sukenick was a contributor to Surfiction, through an essay entitled "The New Tradition in Fiction." Thus I initially thought of Sukenick as a literary critic of sorts, an advocate of the experimental and the innovative in fiction. Yet it is significant that this essay speaks of a "new tradition." Sukenick saw experimental fiction as merely the latest phase in a literary history, at least where the novel is concerned, itself characterized by continual experiment. The essay begins: "Obviously there's no progress in art. Progress toward what? The avant-garde is a convenient propaganda device, but when it wins the war everything is avant-garde, which leaves us just about where we were before. The only thing that's sure is that we move, and as we move we leave things behind--the way we felt yesterday, the way we talked about it. Form is your footprints in the sand when you look back." "The first thing that must be said about the new tradition of the novel," he writes a few paragraphs later," is that it's not modern." The new fiction, in Sukenick's view, could trace its roots at least as far back as Cervantes and Rabelais. And it should be pointed out that Sukenick's first book was not fiction but a study of the poetry of Wallace Stevens, where he found inspiration for the kind of writing he himself would later do in fiction.

This sort of what might be called traditionalist iconoclasm, by which the very act of rebellion against past or established practices is done in the name of preserving the continuity of past and present, was greatly inspiring to me, as I loved both the great literature of the past I was then studying and the current fiction I was also reading, the latter otherwise so often dismissed by professors specializing in the older periods. I also found it in such writers as John Barth, Robert Coover, and Gilbert Sorrentino, who were writing what some people wanted to call anti-literature, but in my view were doing it because they too loved literature and did not want to see it become ossified in particular forms and assumptions. Anybody who really pays attention to what writers like Sukenick actually did in their own practice of fiction, and to what they actually said about that practice, knows that all talk about how postmodern literature is anti-literary or contemptuous of the past or is engaged in irresponsible game-playing is just plain nonsense. These writers knew more about their great predecessors in literary history and about how contemporary literature could contribute to this ongoing tradition than all of their detractors put together could ever hope to know.

Although I ran across this piece only recently (courtesy of the Literary Saloon), I was gratified to learn that Sukenick also held this view, one which I myself have come to hold, although I arrived at it separately from my interest in Sukenick's work:

Innovative fiction is not inherently better than any other kind of fiction. It’s a genre like any other, and like any other there are mediocre examples as well as a few brilliant ones.

I personally am enamored of the traditional Canon but not interested in repeating it. . . .

Too many critics of the innovative and the postmodern in contemporary fiction think that those of us who defend such writing do so because we think it is the only legitimate way to go about writing fiction, that more conventional or recognizable styles and forms have no value. This is not true at all, at least not in my case. I simply feel that it is a legitimate "genre," one that has the added benefit of provoking us into thinking about other alternative ways of fulfilling the possibilities of fiction as a literary mode. And, with Sukenick, I think there's merit in not wanting to merely repeat what's already been accomplished.

Sukenick's own fiction was characterized by the critic Jerzy Kutnik (The Novel as Perfomance, 1986) in this way: "As a result of its abstractness and opacity, the kind of novel Sukenick has in mind is neither a mirror nor a window, and not a lamp illuminating some other reality, either. As such, it resists interpretation in terms other than its own and directs our attention to its own reality as both an imaginative and a concrete structure. The technological aspect of the novel, its objecthood, is for Sukenick as important as the imaginative aspect, for it plays a crucial role in making the transaction between the author and the reader possible. A novel is most immediately apprehended as a book. . . ." Sukenick himself adds to this in the Surfiction essay: "A writer may wish to convey an illusion, an imitation of reality, or he may wish to create a concrete structure among the other concrete structures of the world, although one which, like a piece of music, may alter our perceptions of the rest."

In practice, this means unorthodox uses of syntax and punctuation, of paragraphing, of typography, all done to emphasize the "technological" qualities of the book as book, of fiction as print. These experiments with "inscription" are perhaps at first perplexing, even frustrating, but one comes to understand what Sukenick is up to, and his books are in their own way both aesthetically coherent and even, ultimately, enjoyable to read. His first novel, UP (1968) is less experimental in this way, and might be a good place for those unfamiliar with Sukenick to start reading his work. However, I believe that his best book is 98.6 (1975), which also is somewhat less freewheeling in its typographical idiosyncracies but is nevertheless thorougly representative of Sukenick's achievement as a writer. It's a metafiction which also manages to present a compelling portrayal of the America of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Also worth seeking out are Death of the Novel and Other Stories (if you can find it), Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues, The Endless Short Story, and Mosaic Man, the latter also perhaps one of Sukenick's more accessible books.

Literary Realism

I have some problems with Scott McLemee's recent article on "literary realism" in the July 30 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. While I would agree with the article's contention that, given the sociological and political approach exemplified by the realist writers McLemee discusses, it is surpising that academic critics do not give more attention to these writers, the reason that it is surprising is that the approach taken by most of these critics is itself emphatically sociological and political. On the other hand, it is not suprising that critics interested in the specifically literary and aethetic accomplishments of fiction would shy away from such writers as Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and James T. Farrell. Their work has little aesthetic appeal in the first place, although, to be fair to them, these writers really did not take up the writing of fiction for its aesthetic potential, anyway.

I'm not quite clear why McLemee chose to focus on these particular writers if the object is to bring some attention to "realism" as a literary mode. The realists in American fiction are writers like James, Twain, Crane, and Edith Wharton, or the "colorists" such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather. Lewis, Sinclair, Farrell, and Theodore Dreiser are really "naturalists," a further development of realism to be sure, but one that is inherently programmatic, that is to say, it is an approach that deliberately uses fiction to illustrate larger ideas about, in this case, the biological determinants of human nature and the clash of the biological and the social. Most of the naturalists would be more accurately called commentators or polemicists rather than artists. Again, since the overwhelming trend in academic criticism is to view literature as, at best, an opportunity for polemics and social analysis, it is perhaps correct to say that these naturalist writers are unduly neglected, but if literary study was still mostly about literature these writers would quite rightly get little atttention.

I think we should preserve a distinction between the kind of social realism discussed in Scott McLemee's article and "literary realism" more concretely understood. If analysis of social conditions is what you want from fiction, then probably social realism is where you should go. Realism as an aesthetic strategy, however, requires that both writers and readers first of all put aside the consideration of social conditions and political debates. Well-conceived and -crafted literary realism might finally lead the reader to reflect on the state of society or on political ideas, but this would be a secondary effect, a consequence of the fact that the writer has taken a particular aesthetic strategy--to create an illusion of "real life" sufficiently compelling that the reader is willing to put aside the knowledge that it's constructed, finally just words on a page--and allowed it to discover the integrity of its own internal logic, to go where it will. If social analysis is what the writer wants to provide instead, then that's what we'll get. But it won't be something that could plausibly be called literary art. And no argument is going to convince me, at any rate, that writers like Sinclair and Farrell (or for that matter Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer) are anything but polemicists and would-be social philosophers.

As it happens, at least one of the writers to whom McLemee refers, Dreiser, managed to produce work that can be regarded as literary art, even though it's clear enough in reading his books that he had the ambition to be a social philosopher as well. But Dreiser is a good example of a writer whose instincts for fiction to some extent subverted his more schematic intentions. (Flannery O'Connor is another example.) Although Dreiser was surely not subtle, his narratives have a power that comes much less from any insights he may have had into the grinding away of the social machinery than from the impression his novels create that they have proceeded from their original arresting images--a young girl from the provinces on her way to start a new life in the city, a family of itinerant Christian proselytizers plying their trade on the streets--to dramatize the possiblities inherent in those images with great amplitude and discernment, the narrative unfolding in what finally seems the only way it could have developed. Both Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy seem "real" in that they are faithful to the particulars their subjects already--naturally--seem to possess, their worlds and their characters built up out of accumulated details that give them credibility as fictions, no matter how readily we are tempted to interpret them as vehicles for the author's social commentary.

Something like this has to be true of any realist fiction that makes a claim on us as fiction rather than an excuse for dubious political or cultural analysis--and the latter would have to be dubious because making up stories is first of all not a very efficient way of engaging in such analysis and because there's nothing inherent in the act of writing fiction that gives the writer any particular wisdom to convey about politics or social arrangements. Again, an artfully composed work of realist fiction might provoke in readers some reflection on these topics, but it would be the result of the work's success in literary terms, its capacity to stand up to subsequent readings because of its aesthetic interest. Otherwise it is inevitable that "realist" works such as The Jungle or Babbitt or Studs Lonigan are ultimately going to be of concern mostly to the kinds of historians who, as McLemee laments, "treat realist fiction strictly for its documentary value" and who, in the words of one scholar McLemee quotes, "[l]ike strip miners,. . .rampage through texts, interested in only the most obvious social references." Unless it can be shown that books like these work first of all as skillfully shaped and convincing examples of literary art (and I admit I don't think this can be shown), they will in the future attract few readers other than these kinds of historians.

If you want to see a good illustration of the kind of distinction I have in mind, compare the stories of Chekhov with those of his contemporary Maxim Gorky. Chekhov's fiction reveals a great deal about the state of Russian society in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, but we still read these stories because they're splendid examples of the artistic possibilities of a certain kind of realism. Gorky's stories will perhaps tell you something about a Russian radical's attempt to change this society through fiction, but only if you're able to actually read them as something other than propaganda--that is, if you're even able to read them at all.

One final issue. In his conclusion, McLemee discusses a current scholar's attempt to show that "a careful reading of the American writers reveals a stronger influence that issued from an incongruous source: the deep current of literary romance, exemplified in American literature by the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne." He claims further that "The genre of romance -- with its strong tendency toward symbolism and its eruptions of the fantastic and the supernatural -- seems like an improbable influence on, say, Frank Norris." But the very first book to propose the Romance as the dominant strand of American fiction, Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), included a chapter on "Norris and Naturalism." Writes Chase: ". . .the youthful father of naturalism was in dead earnest in describing his works as romances. . .And in the brief years of his growing maturity. . .he wrote books that departed from realism by becoming in a unified act of the imagination at once romances and naturalistic novels." And of Dreiser Chase writes "[He] performed the considerable service of adapting the colorful poetry of Norris to the more exacting tasks imposed upon the social novelist--very much as James assimilated Hawthorne's imagination of romance into novels."

David Foster Wallace

Reviewers of David Foster Wallace's books are often moved to speak of his intelligence, his mastery of information, his capacious knowledge of many different subjects and sub-subjects. Some are even prompted to use the word "genius" in describing their perception of Wallace as a finally very cerebral writer. John Freeman in the Denver Post, while avoiding the g-word, nevertheless concludes his own intelligent review of Oblivion with a faily representative judgment of Wallace's writing: "The real joy of reading these stories, then, is not having Wallace ferry us from point A to point B, but in watching his reptilian intelligence slither and snake across the page, flicker out its forked tongue and nab yet another linguistic fly off the wall."

I would not want to deny that Wallace is an especially intelligent writer, nor that his fiction displays a great deal of acquired knowledge, sheer information. But to describe Wallace's fiction in these terms doesn't quite capture what he really seems to be attempting in much of his most interesting work. In some ways to categorize Wallace as cerebral or to dwell on his intelligence (which many reviewers and readers seem to find intimidating) is to assign him a convenient and even ultimately condescending label--the brainy writer--and to overlook his actual, if somewhat off-centered, achievement as a writer of fiction.

In my view, Wallace's real subject is language, but not just language as the medium in which writers create stories, not just style, and not exactly the "failures of language," as Freeman has it, although ultimately language can only fail to communicate fully or to cohere into an entirely satisfactory aesthetic rendering of the world. What Wallace's stories try to do is to inhabit the consciousness of the characters they feature, but this can only be done by inhabiting the language-world of these characters, a world itself evoked by the very language they habitually use in confronting it and only through which can they perceive it to be comprehensible at all. His stories are composed of the stream of words by which his characters construct a manageable account of the reality they negotiate--although in most cases these characters do not literally speak in their own voice, tell their own stories.

Thus the beginning of "The Depressed Person," the best story in Wallace's previous collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men:

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.

Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utterness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain's context, its--as it were--shape and texture. The depressed person's parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played. . . .

This is, of course, the sort of language, used to create a distinctive discourse of jargon words, filler phrases, and practiced rhetorical moves, by which we might expect a "depressed person" to negotiate the therapeutic world she lives in. Going back to Wallace's very first collection of stories, Girl With Curious Hair, something similar is being done with characters like the Account Representative and the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production in "Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR":

There were between these last two executives to leave the Building the sorts of similarities enjoyed by parallel lines. Each man, leaving, balanced his weight against that of a heavily slender briefcase. Monograms and company logos flanked handles of leathered metal, which each man held. Each man, on his separate empty floor, moved down white-lit halls over whispering and mealy and monochromatic carpet toward elevators that each sat open-mouthed and mute in its shaft along one of the large Building's two accessible sides. . .

Particularly the divorced Account Representative, who remarked, silently, alone, as his elevator dropped toward the Executive Garage, that, at a certain unnoticed by never unheeded point in every corporate evening he worked, it became Time to Leave; that this point in the overtime night was a fulcrum on which things basic and unseen tilted, very slightly--a pivot in hours unaware--and that, in the period between this point and the fresh-suited working dawn, the very issue of the Building's ownership would become, quietly, in their absence, truly an issue, hung in air, unsettled.

The Account Representative hung in air, dropping on his elevator's wire. This again-single junior executive was spare, lithe, had about him an air of exteme economy, was young for an executive (almost literally a junior executive), was most at ease with those he countenanced at a distance of several feet, and had a professional manner, with respect to the accounts he represented for the firm, describable along a continuum from smoothly capable to cold. His elevator descended with a compact hum that was usually hard to hear.

Again, these characters and their actions are being described through the kind of no-nonsense, robotic language that would mirror the perceptions of characters who can be adequately identified as "Account Representative" and "Vice President of Overseas Production." Thus, readers of Wallace's fiction ought to be thoroughly prepared for the first story in his new book Oblivion, "Mister Squishy":

In an unconventional move, some of this quote unquote Full-Access background information re ingredients, production innovations, and even demotargeting was being relayed to the Focus Group by the facilitator, who used a Dry Erase marker to sketch a diagram of Mister Squishy's snack cake production sequence and the complete adjustments required by Felonies! at select points along the automated line. . . .

The Focus Group facilitator, trained by the requirements of what seemed to have turned out to be his profession to behave as though he were interacting in a lively and spontaneous way while actually remaining inwardly detached and almost clinically observant, possessed also a natural eye for behavioral details that could often reveal tiny gems of statistical relevance amid the rough law surfeit of random fact. Sometimes little things made a difference. The facilitator's name was Terry Schmidt and he was 34 years old, a Virgo. Eleven of the Focus Group's fourteen men wore wristwatches, of which roughly one-third were expensive and/or foreign.

The story is a kind of inventory of the observations and memories that roll through Terry Schmidt's mind as he "facilitates" his Focus Group, captured entirely in this kind of advertising/marketing-speak. What unites all of the passages I have quoted is that they reveal the extent to which we all inhabit such language-worlds, ways of thinking that determine our interactions with the "outside" world, except that, caught as we are in these linguistic and syntactical webs, there really is no outside. And what each of these slightly different webs have in common is that they blanch our words of most of their vigor, leaving only edgeless, etiolated husks. If there are overriding themes in Wallace's fiction, this portrayal of an exhausted language has to be one of them.

Ultimately, this does not seem to me a particularly "postmodern" technique, although Wallace is of course tagged with that label and does acknowledge the previous generation of posmodernists as inspiration. It is more an attempt to capture the Way Things Are, in other words a modified version of realism. (Although there is an undeniable accompanying emphasis on monitoring the way things are, as well.) The "stream of consciousness" method used by many of the most prominent modernist writers was itself a modification of realism, an attempt to get at what is most immediately "real" in human experience, consciousness itself. What Wallace is doing seems to me a further development of this kind of psychological realism, although he finds himself writing in an era when even human mental processes can't really be trusted as authentic, determined as they are by culture, by genetics, by forces beyond conscious human control. Wallace might be most usefully considered as a realist writer caught in a postmodern age in which "old-fashioned" realism has been discredited.

How then to tell stories when the language you must use is so thoroughly inflected by artificial discourses, however authentically you manage to portray the inauthentic? Of course, you really can't, except by simultaneously noting the way in which what you're doing is telling a story. Again Wallace could be said to be a writer of "metafiction," perhaps the original brand of postmodern fiction, but that his fiction is so often fiction about fiction-making is really a function of the essentially realist strategy I have described: since the artificial discourses permeating postmodern culture are themelves used to construct stories about the world, an unavoidable subject of Wallace"s fiction is going to be the ways in which these stories work. Thus in Oblivion, almost all the stories are in part about the fashioning of stories, two of them, "Another Pioneer" and "Good Old Neon" quite explicitly.

One could certainly have greater or lesser enthusiasm for an approach to fiction like the one employed by David Foster Wallace. I have considerable enthusiasm for it, but it does make for especially hit-or-miss results. In my view, in Oblivion "Another Pioneer," Incarnations of Burned Children," "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," and "The Suffering Channel" are mostly misses, either because they don't add up to anything in particular or because they go on far too long in carrying out fairly obvious or simply uninteresting ideas. However, if Wallace's stories are to be assessed fairly, it has to be done by judging how well or how provocatively he accomplishes the aesthetic tasks they seem to be pursuing, how much he makes us believe that the kind of fiction he wants to write has produced genuinely engaging and artful works of fiction.

"Mr. Squishy" pays off its initial premise simply as a bravura performance that does make us believe in the portrayal of its protagonist's own feelings of being trapped inside a worldview he really no longer believes in. One even comes to have some sympathy for his plight, as it becomes ever clearer that he has gone as far in his chosen "profession" as he's likely to get, having accomplished little of value. "The Soul is Not a Smithy" succeeds in finding a fresh angle on a somewhat familiar story of sociopathic frustration turned deadly. (The story is narrated by a daydreamy student who tells us, ultimately, what happened on the day his substitute teacher ran amok.) The title story turns out to be a rather affecting account of a couple dealing with their own peculiar version of empty nest syndrome, although even here the story could be read as at least as much about the narrator's attempt to understand through recounting them his own ongoing experiences as best he can--or, as it turns out, perhaps his wife's attempt?

In my opinion, the best story in the book, perhaps one of the best things Wallace has yet written, is "Good Old Neon." In some ways the story brings together many of the concerns of the book as a whole (the existence of unexplained, and unexplainable, suffering, our fear of "oblivion" even as we rush headlong toward it), but ultimately it will stand alone as a compelling and provocative piece of fiction that successfully uses the presuppositions of metafiction to both create a worthy addition to the canon of such works but also to transcend the narrowly schematic uses to which those presuppositions are often put. At its core, "Good Old Neon" is indeed a story about a story, although we don't know that until its conclusion. We do then discover, however, that "Good Old Neon" has been an impersonation by "David Wallace" of one of the latter's high school classmates who died in a "fiery single-car accident he'd read about in 1991," an attempt by the fictionalized author of Oblivion to "imagine what all must have happened to lead up to" that crash, why someone "David Wallace had back then imagined as happy and unreflective and wholly unhaunted by voices telling him that there was something deeply wrong with him that wasn't wrong with anybody else and that he had to spend all his time and energy trying to figure out what to do and say in order to impersonate an even marginally normal or acceptable U.S. male" would drive into a bridge abutment.

It is a wholly convincing impersonation, and emotionally charged in a way we perhaps don't expect from David Foster Wallace. And it is precisely in the act of "baring the device"--the story self-reflexively disclosing that it is indeed a story--that "Good Old Neon" produces its greatest emotional effect. For in addition to the genuine human feeling for the distress of its imagined protagonist the story encourages in us, even more compelling is the revelation that it was some such feeling on its author's part that led "David Wallace" to write the story in the first place. Although Wallace has of course enjoyed his share of critical acclaim and a surprisingly wide readership for a body of work that presents its own share of "difficult" reading, he has also provoked some hostility among those put off by the surface mannerisms of his work. In not a few of the reviews of Oblivion can be detected a demand of sorts for more heart and less brainpower. But displays of emotion in themselves do not gain a writer much aside from cheap effects. It's the way emotion (or ideas or insights or anything else) gets embodied in felicitous forms and resourceful language that matters. Wallace's fiction contains plenty of emotion, it's just that he's a writer who's also always interested in the nature of the container.

Metafiction

At a time when the idea of self-reflexive art has become commonplace, if not itself a kind of established convention, it may be useful to reconsider the original appearance in contemporary literature of what came to be called "metafiction." Not only was this strain of American fiction--taken up by several different writers, in slightly different ways--probably the first of all of the contemporary arts (including the popular arts) to explore the possibilities of self-reflexivity, but arguably it was this approach to fiction that initially provoked the coinage of the term "postmodern" to describe it. Since both "metafiction" and "postmodern" have by now clearly become terms of abuse as much as descriptive labels, perhaps reexamining what the writers associated with the use of metafiction believed themselves to be up to might clarify what is still valuable about their work, as well as what the literary strategy involved still has to offer current and future writers of fiction.

As I wrote my own doctoral dissertation on the "rise of metafiction," I do feel I have a familiarity with the subject that is sufficiently informed that my comments amount to more than just superficial impressions or an unexamined enthusiasm. At the same time, I am not in this relatively brief post attempting a full-blown crtical analysis of metafiction. I hope merely to suggest that granting the original metafictionists some integirty in their literary goals and methods can only remind us why many serious, accomplished writers found various self-reflexive techniques to be, collectively, an aesthetically satisfying way both to follow up on the exploration of fiction's possibilities undertaken by the modernists and to create a then-contemporary mode of fiction that would in its own way capture the tenor of the times in which it was written. Perhaps this in turn would illuminate the further possibilities of metafiction--if any--current writers might find in it as fiction itself continues to define its place among other visual/narrative arts that feature "story" as their ostensible center of interest.

In my view, the foundational works of American metafiction are John Barth's story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association (1968), as well as Coover's collection Pricksongs and Descants (1969). These books of course themselves show the influence of various precursors in the work of, among others, Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov, but finally they are the books that brought together most explicitly those characteristics of all previous fiction that work against simply producing transparent realism, that point the reader away from the unfolding narrative and toward the artificial devices by which all literary narratives are constructed and embellished. In so doing, Barth and Coover created a kind of "self-conscious" fiction that would decidedly--and perhaps irretrievably--alter perceptions of the role of convention in fiction.

In Barth's fiction, these conventions were challenged directly, in stories that blatantly reveal themselves to be fabrications, that examine self-reflexively the process and the tools of storytelling, that delight in all the contrivances and tricks that are involved in storytelling even as they acknowledge that such contrivances are always involved. Coover's fiction indulges in these sorts of diversions as well, although his work is perhaps more likely to explore the ways in which fiction and fiction-making incorporate, perhaps inevitably, elements of ritual and myth, as in UBA or "The Magic Poker," and to explode the conventions of realism and traditional narrative from within, to produce a kind of kaleidoscopic surrealism, as in "The Babysitter," rather than the comic anatomies of storytelling to be found in Lost in the Funhouse. (Although Barth is certainly interested as well in the mythic/ritual origins of storytelling.) But even as both Barth and Coover were seemingly set on demolishing the established conventions of narrative fiction, both also clearly revelled in storytelling and in finding new ways for stories to be "relevant" in a period of upheaval and radical change, as the 1960s clearly was.

Thus, metafiction was simultaneously an attempt to clear the ground of the remaining inherited presuppositions about the "craft" of fiction and to make possible a more unrestricted viw of what actually constitutes literary craft, to open up the ground for new practices that might expand fiction's potential range, that might even lead to a renewal of storytelling in new forms and styles. Most importantly, Barth and Coover went about this without sacrificing fiction's "entertainment" quotient. (In my opinion, at least.) The Universal Baseball Association is an engrossing read (even if you don't like baseball), "The Babysitter" an intensely compelling story despite the fact that what's "reallly going on" is impossible to determine. A story like Barth's "Menelaiad" is great fun to read, as long as you're willing to go along with its almost literally infinite regress of story-within-story. Other readers might not find them as entertaining as I do, perhaps, but that the authors meant them to be entertaining in their own way seems to me indisputable.

A list of subsequent metafiction of equal value and accomplishment would have to include William Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (1971), Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) and Mulligan Stew (1979), as well as some of the work of Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman. These writers continued to ask questions not just about the conventions of fiction but about the very medium of writing, about the established usages of language itself. Gass and Sukenick play games with typography, Sorrentino adds to metafiction his outrageous humor and inveterate experimentation, Federman uses metafiction (or what he called "surfiction") to question the "reality" of reality. Taken together, they remain the literary touchstones of American metafiction. Their books may occasionally go out of print, but they will always be rediscovered because they still seem innovative despite the passage of time and the borrowing of their innovations by later writers.

By the 1980s a backlash of sorts had set in, both among other writers, who increasingly went for minimalist neorealism, and among critics, who increasingly called such fiction "self-indulgent" rather than "self-reflexive." Nevertheless, all of the metafictionists continued to write some very good books, and younger writers emerged who were clearly influenced by their earlier work. There are metafictional elements in the work of Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace, of Steve Stern and Steven Millhauser. A good deal even of Philip Roth's later work would clearly not have been the same without the prior efforts of the metafictionists. Other writers, from Michael Chabon to Ian McEwan and David Mitchell, would not necessarily be called metafictionists, but their books show a preoccupation with writing and with forms of storytelling that can be traced back to the related but different kind of preoccupation to be found in Lost in the Funhouse and The Universal Baseball Association.

However, the real promise of metafiction has not yet really been fulfilled. Its true legacy is to be found in the way it calls writers' (and readers') attention to the attributes of fiction as art, potentially making all of us more immediately aware of the limitless ways in which works of fiction can be shaped into artful verbal creations. Too often self-reflexive devices and strategies are still used simply as gimmicks, empty gestures, strategems employed by those wishing to appear clever and knowing. Not enough effort has been made to redeem the still latent possibilities of fiction when approached as an aesthetically malleable form waiting to be adapted to various imaginative purposes. (For an example of how one of the founding metafictionists is still able to do this, read Robert Coover's most recent novel, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre.) The unmitigated commercialism and careerism of the publishing "industry" as it now exists is not going to make this sort of effort more likely in the near future, nor will the disciplinary imperatives of academic creative writing, which mostly makes for the homogenization of product. But anyone who might like to strike out on a different path anyway, to understand how fiction might be freed of its encrusted layers of formula and routine, could do worse than to read (or re-read) the books and writers I have mentioned.

Postmodernism

In a comment on my recent post about "metafiction," Nick Kerkhoff (whose relatively new blog can be found here) wonders about the precise relationship between metafiction and postmodernism:

Meta-fiction does not seem to require a social understanding, for the self-reference is inherent to the story (am I right about that?). Whereas postmodernism can only be understood in the context of the social climate. (If I could make an analogy to painting: any human in the world should possess the prerequisites to understand a Pollack (if they let themselves), and even though it's illusionary, most people who have seen a regular drawing before, should be able to understand the meta-tricks of MC Escher, but only a person immersed in our culture could understand the point of a enlarged Warhol soupcan (otherwise they'd be appreciating merely the original Campbell Soup-employed artist)).

In the post I had stated that metafiction was really the original movement in the contemporary arts to be called "postmodern." In fact, arguably the first substantive use of the term was by the literary critic Irving Howe in 1959 to describe a kind of postwar fiction that was, in Howe's view, clearly departing in its assumptions and methods from prewar modernism. (Howe and his fellow New York Critics always felt that this rupture was a mortal one, as most of them had first become prominent literary critics through their championing of high modernism.) Only later--in the 1970s and even 1980s--did "postmodernism" become the label for a broader cultural tendency that theorists of all kinds found convenient in their analyses of, variously, consumer capitalism, identity politics, and historical change, or for engaging in a certain kind of highly abstract "philosophical" debate. Postmodernism in literature, or in the arts more generally, in turn became merely illustrative examples that one could handily appeal to as embodiments of one's favored theory.

It is, I think, this version of postmodernism that Nick has in mind when he says that "postmodernism can only be understood in the context of the social climate." Warhol's paintings, in this view, can be called postmodern because they "say" things to us about consumerism, about the fetishizing of objects or the artistic tastes of "elites," etc. One would indeed need to be "immersed in our culture" to get all this, but it is, of course, a central tenet of postmodernism-as-cultural-analysis that everyone is inescapably immersed in it, so the problem of interpretation is not acute.

Nick also asks "if metafiction could be labeled a piece, a subset, in the overall postmodern impulse." Indeed it could be, as long as we restricted our use of the term to mean the kind of literary postmodernism Howe was talking about and that later was applied to Barth and Coover, Barthelme and Pynchon. All of these writers were in one way or another responding to the challenge laid down by the high modernists, and in most cases they were trying to experiment further with the innovative techniques associated with modernism, not to overturn or abandon them. If "postmodern" can no longer be reclaimed from the school of cultural analysis I have described, however, I would rather discard it altogether, since I don't think metafiction, or experimental fiction more broadly, has much to do with that kind of politically-motivated criticism. Although it is certainly true that such fiction potentially has much to say about such things as the slipperiness of our notions of "identity" or the way in which stories are often used to give order to a chaotic reality in ways that are often more dangerous than the underlying chaos.

I prefer to think of metafiction as indeed existing outside the immediate requirements of "social understanding." That is, reading it, like reading any worthwhile fiction, is first of all a literary experience, not an experience in social criticism or cultural recognition. While there are some things about the "postmodern" critique of culture with which I agree, one of its most baneful conseqeunces is the way in which it has swept up what was postmodern fiction into its smothering arms and blocked our view of what this fiction is really like. It has little to do with Marx, or with Boudrillard, or with Jameson, or with any other so-called postmodern theorist. It has much more to do with Joyce, or Woolf, or Beckett. Or, for that matter, Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding.

Merely Literary

Not long ago I read a weblog post in which the blogger extolled the virtues of a recent critical book by declaring that it examined the fiction of a well-known postwar writer in ways that went beyond the "merely literary"--specifically that it examined the sociopolitical significance of that fiction. Just a few days later I came across the same phrase in a slightly different context; this time what was at stake in a particular writing strategy easily transcended the "merely literary."

Versions of this idea--that worthwhile or important writing must of course be characterized by qualities that elevate it above mere literary value--are to be found everywhere in discussions of books and writing in American publications (Leon Wieseltier's non-review of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint in the NYTBR, for example, can be explained as Wieseltier's refusal to waste his time assessing the "merely literary" features of that book), but seldom is it stated as baldly as in these two instances. And it is quite likely that neither writer really thought that in speaking of literary value in this way they were necessarily denigrating literature or the literary--it's just that everyone understands there are more important tasks to fulfill in the act of writing, even in the act of writing fiction or poetry, than just to do it well or with some originality. Don't they?

Most often it is politics that is considered more important than the "merely literary," some kind of engagement with the "real world" that demonstrates the writer's concern for the problems of injustice or income distribution or international instability. Even writers as universally acclaimed as, say, Philip Roth are frequently judged by these standards. Roth's best novel in the last decade and a half was easily Sabbath's Theater, but much more attention was given to his later trilogy, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, since they were more obviously about consequential subjects like politics and cultural history. Sabbath's Theater, a ferociously comic novel about--about what, an oversexed puppeteer?--was "merely literary." (Although not very decorously so.)

But it doesn't have to be attention to politics per se that justifies our taking a writer or book seriously. We just have to feel that the writer is reaching beyond the pages of a book to grapple with "issues," is "saying something" about the world, conveying ideas or stirring up emotions. As Ruth Franklin put it last year in a review in the NYTBR (I jotted this down in a little notebook because it seemed such a forthright statement of this point of view), "literature's most necessary task [is in] communicating the writer's thoughts about the world we live in." Presumably anything else a fiction writer or poet might be concerned with, such things as exploring the stylistic possibilities of language, formal invention, even just telling a story in a skillful way or making us laugh, is "merely literary." (Although why insist on calling that which does meet Franklin's criterion "literature"?)

And why would we as readers be interested in a writer's "thoughts about the world we live in" in the first place? Is there something about being a novelist or poet (or memoirist or essayist) that makes one's "thoughts" more significant than anyone else's? I hardly think so. And I don't really think most such writers want to be burdened with the role of "thinking" in this sense, anyway. They probably want to write well enough and in such a way as to attract a certain kind of reader, a reader who doesn't dismiss the "merely literary."

The September 10 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education contains this little item:

Storytelling has helped make human beings "a nicer species," says Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, in a converstation [in the summer issue of Seeds] with Rebecca Goldstein, a visiting professor of philosophy at Trinity College and the author of several works of fiction, including The Mind-Body Problem. They discuss a variety of topics related to how science and art are grappling with "substantive questions.". . .

. . .Exposure to a wider range of stories has helped people empathize with groups they might otherwise have considered "subhuman," [Mr. Pinker] suggests. "Fiction can be a kind of moral technology."

Ms. Goldstein agrees that storytelling serves a moral purpose. "To be in the throes of a story, to have one's emotions provoked by another's story is not quite ethics, but it's kind of the shadowlife of ethics," she writes. "Storytelling is something that can awaken attentiveness, engagement, and empathy to a life that isn't one's own. And to be attentive, engaged, emphathetic. That is moral."

What an all-encompassing justification for writing and reading fiction. It makes us a "nicer species"! I'm not going to argue that fiction has no moral content, that it cannot provoke a kind of moral reflection in some readers. This is, in fact, a nice side effect of some works of literature. But can literature only be justified because it might lead to this kind of reflection? Must we reduce fiction to "a kind of moral technology"? Otherwise it is "merely literary"? (I'm actually a little surprised to see Rebecca Goldstein indulging in this kind of analysis. Some of her books strike me as nicely "literary" indeed, and they need not embody some "shadowlife of ethics" to be worth reading. As for storytelling as "something that can awaken attentiveness, engagement, and empathy to a life that isn't one's own": What would Goldstein make of Mickey Sabbath?)

I, for one, am quite content with the "merely literary." In fact, if I read a description of a particular book that emphasizes its political implications, its effectiveness in "communicating the writer's thoughts," the way in which it in effect functions as "moral technology," I'm probably going to run away from that book like a child fleeing an ogreish schoolmarm. The book and its author may want to do me good, but whatever benefits there are to be derived from it are going to be overshadowed by the pain involved. (Perhaps, however, I will come back to it later, after learning that the schoolmarm was the reviewer or critic, who really didn't know what she was talking about.) I may be among a dwindling number of readers who think that the "literary" has "substance" in and of itself, that the good it can do on a purely experiential level is reward enough. But to those who think that reading novels and stories and poems can be a worthy endeavor only if they point us to larger questions about politics or ethics, I can only ask: Why not just go talk about politics or discourse on morality or think big thoughts and leave literature alone? The rest of us will settle for our meager pleasures.

Gilbert Sorrentino

Often enough a good way to get a quick introduction to an author’s work is to start with one or another collection of that writer’s short fiction. Frequently the short stories will provide a helpful if preliminary sense of the writer’s preoccupations, strategies, preferred subjects, stylistic tendencies, etc. If this writer is also a novelist, one can then decide whether to devote the greater time and commitment needed to tackle the longer works. Unfortunately, this does not really prove to be the case with Gilbert Sorrentino. Although Sorrentino is in my opinion among the most accomplished (and will, I believe, in the long run be among the most influential) post-WWII American novelists, The Moon and Its Flight, a more or less omnibus collection of his short fiction, does not present Sorrentino either at his best or his most representative.

The book does manage to hang together thematically as a portrait of American life in the twenty or so years following on the end of the second world war, or at least of a certain segment of American society characterized by its aspirations to a pseudo-bohemian way of life vaguely associated with art or writing or the academy. The portrait that emerges of this class of intellectual pretenders is a decidedly sour one, their lives notable mostly for their casual betrayals, petty spite, their lassitude and spiritual drift. Indeed, the overall view of human endeavor that seems to pervade The Moon in Its Flight is overwhelmingly pessimistic, even misanthropic. The narrator of “Decades” writes: “The fashionably grubby artistic circles in New York are filled with people like me, people who are kind enough to lie about one’s chances in the unmentioned certitude that one will lie to them about theirs. Indeed, if everyone told the truth, for just one day, in all these bars and lofts, at all these parties and openings, almost all of downtown Manhattan would disappear in a terrifying flash of hatred, revulsion, and self-loathing.” The narrator of “In Loveland” remarks on his own writing ambitions that “The desire to add some more stupid clutter to the clutter of the vacuous world is virtually unquenchable.”

Of course, one ought to hesitate in associating the comments of these first-person narrators with Sorrentino himself, but the world-weariness and sense of futility these characters express are reinforced in many of the other stories as well. The impression conveyed in such retrospective stories as the title story, “Facts and Their Manifestations,” “Life and Letters,” “Gorgias,” and “Things That Have Stopped Moving” is of failure, lost opportunities, not just regret for squandered lives but a feeling that such lives were always doomed to be squandered. This is one of the ways in which The Moon in Its Flight seems a departure from most of Sorrentino’s other work, which is marked, even when treating similarly disturbing material, by a sense of creative playfulness and an all-encompassing kind of comedy that is missing from most of these stories. But perhaps they are simply the flip-side of such comedy, the more sober depictions of the stupidity and folly that also fuels the comic novels.

Not all of the stories depart from the mode of all-out experimentation one expects from Sorrentino’s novels, however. “A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles,” written entirely in interrogative sentences, is the obvious precursor to the later Gold Fools (and, it must be said, the technique works better in the shorter form); of “Times Without Numbers” we are told in a concluding note that “the story comprises 177 sentences, 59 of which are taken from 59 separate works by 59 different authors. The remaining 118 sentences are from one of my own earlier stories.” “The Sea, Caught in Roses” seems to be built on some principle of repetition or accretion, taking the initial image named in the title and working it through a series of emendations and authorial comments. Or it may just be a spoof of romantic imagery and “picturesque” subjects.

Although most of the stories are metafictional in various fairly minimal ways—Sorrentino always reminds us that such stories have been subject to imaginative re-creation, are at least “twice-told” even when they seem to be sliced from life—few of them are as outrageously and systematically self-reflexive as his better-known novels. “Sample Writing Sample” is a story about making up stories, while several others are directly about writers, and examine the consequences and ramifications of what they’ve written. “It’s Time to Call It a Day” is a fairly thinly-disguised attack on the banalities of conventional fiction as well as current publishing practices, but a rather entertaining attack (and implicit statement of Sorrentino’s own principles) nevertheless:

This latest novel, created to satisfy the desires of an audience, as Clifford’s editor had characterized it, “too hip to actually read a lot,” educated, so to say, and busy, so, so busy, was, he hoped, the very thing to interest those readers among the favored “target group” who had progressed from slop-and-ramshackle best-sellers to the sort of fiction admired by professional reviewers—well-written, with fully developed character, a nicely turned plot, and something important to say. It was, that is to say, designed for a particular kind of success, a “literary” success, and one that was, God knows, long deserved. So Clifford thought in righteous irritation. His first three novels should have been better received than they were—as he often complained to his wife. She thought of him as “neglected,” not, as he was, ignored. The books had been painstakingly constructed, modern in their “sensibility,” whatever he meant by that, accessible and possessed of accessible, contemporary motifs, dialogue, and sex scenes. They were, to be blunt, absolute failures, and each got a handful of mostly snide, semi-literate reviews, featuring the self-satisfaction of the ignorant. These were, of course, the usual, but Clifford was astonished by their blithe savagery.

(Although not astonished enough that he would want to stop trying to please them.)

The two concluding stories in this volume, “In Loveland” and “Things That Have Stopped Moving,” in some ways sum up both the strategies and the themes of The Moon in Its Flight. “In Loveland” begins, “I have attempted to tell this story many times over the past years, the past decades, for that matter. I’ve not been able to bring it off, for I’ve never been able to invent—inhabit, perhaps—the proper narrational attitude. I begin to invent plausible situations that soon enough falsify everything, or unlikely situations that, just as soon, parody everything. I have even, at times, tried to tell the undecorated truth. . .” and goes on to tell a story of marital failure and self-disgust similar to a few of the earlier stories, but it is more amply told, with some compelling details. It concludes with these reflections, which add in a satisfying way to the story’s dramatic resonance and aesthetic implications: “Reality, or, if you will, that which we constrain ourselves to believe is, beyond all philosophies, also that which we make of what happened. Unexpected connections do, of course, sometimes make for unexpected forms. For instance, I see that this story is, essentially, about a set of disappearances. I had not intended that to be its burden, although any further attempt to say what I meant to say is out of the question.”

“Things That Have Stopped Moving” at first seems a retelling of the earlier story “Decades” (Ben and Clara Stern are the principals in the latter story, Ben and Clara Stein in the former), but manages to leaven its narrator’s account of the empty and adulterous sexual encounters between himself and Clara with some rather heart-felt reminiscences of his parents. It, too, comes with a metafictional conclusion:

This story is dotted with flaws and contradictions and riddled with inconsistencies, some of which even the inattentive reader will discover. Some of these gaffes may well be considered felicities of uncertainty and indeterminacy: such is prose. The tale also, it will have been clear, occasionally flaunts its triumphs, small though they may be. I am afraid that the final word about the gluey, tortuous, somehow glamorously perverse relationship that Ben and Clara and I constructed and sent shuffling into the world hasn’t been arrived at, but perhaps the unspeakable has had created some sad analogue of itself, if such is possible. Something has been spoken of, surely, but I can’t determine what or where it is.

Both of these stories seem to me to be successful demonstrations of the way in which self-reflexivity can actually contribute to the emotional impact of a work of fiction, while continuing to draw the reader’s attention to the artificial devices by which, unavoidably, aesthetically cogent fiction must be created.

Still, I do not think that, for readers mostly unfamiliar with Sorrentino’s work, The Moon in Its Flight would be a good place to start. It is a book that fans of Sorrentino’s fiction will want to read, but it is more interesting as a minor side attraction amid the greater pleasures of Sorrentino’s carnivalesque novels. Curious readers would be better off to start with Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, a provocative but also compelling work of metafiction, perhaps then going on to what is in my view Sorrentino’s masterwork, the sui generis Mulligan Stew. Those interested in Sorrentino’s fictional depictions of Brooklyn (in which several of the stories in The Moon in Its Flight are set) might also try Crystal Vision. My most substantial reservation about recommending The Moon in Its Flight is that unwary readers might take some of the more tepid and unfocused stories in this book as representative of Gilbert Sorrentino’s achievements as a writer of fiction and might pass on the more important novels. If they did so, they would be missing out on the opportunity to read one of the most invigorating and audacious bodies of work in 20th century American fiction.

Collective Formations

In an article ostensibly about art forgery, Denis Dutton (philosophy professor and Editor of Arts & Letters Daily) concludes with these words:

Establishing nominal authenticity serves purposes more important than maintaining the market value of an art object: it enables us to understand the practice and history of art as an intelligible history of the expression of values, beliefs, and ideas, both for artists and their audiences — and herein lies its link to expressive authenticity. Works of art, besides often being formally attractive to us, are manifestations of both individual and collective values, in virtually every conceivable relative weighting and combination. Clifford Geertz remarks that “to study an art-form is to explore a sensibility,” and that “such a sensibility is essentially a collective formation” whose foundations “are as wide as social existence and as deep” (Geertz 1983). Geertz is only partially right to claim that the sensibility expressed in an art object is in every case essentially social: even close-knit tribal cultures produce idiosyncratic artists who pursue unexpectedly personal visions within a socially determined aesthetic language. Still, his broader description of works of art, tribal or European, is generally apt, along with its corollary is that the study of art is largely a matter of marking and tracing relationships and influences.

This explains why aesthetic theories that hold that works of art are just aesthetically appealing objects — to be enjoyed without regard to any notion of their origins — are unsatisfactory. If works of art appealed only to our formal or decorative aesthetic sense, there would indeed be little point in establishing their human contexts by tracing their development, or even in distinguishing them from similarly appealing natural objects — flowers or seashells. But works of art of all societies express and embody both cultural beliefs general to a people and personal character and feeling specific to an individual. Moreover, this fact accounts for a large part, though not all, of our interest in works of art. . . .

Despite his mild caveats about "idiosyncratic artists" and "personal character and feeling," Dutton is expressing a view of art held these days by a number of philosophers, scientists, and social scientists, especially those who consider themselves "Darwinians", that art is mostly the product of biological impulses hard-wired into the brain, impulses that prompt us to create works of art for primarily ritualistic and "collective" reasons. (Some of these scientists simply stop at asserting that art is the byproduct of certain biological operations that appeal to our preferences for "symmetry" or that allow us to feel satisfaction at task-fulfillment, etc., leaving it to the evolutionary psychologists or the anthropologists like Geertz to speculate about how art evolved as a social adaptation.) It is a view that is astonishingly hostile to "aesthetic theories that hold that works of art are just aesthetically appealing objects" (the "just" is oh so telling), and is, in many of its manifestations, especially hostile to artists or critics who deviate from the biological/cultural dicta announced by those such as Dutton and presume to create or champion works of art that don't follow the time and gene-honored customs they've explicated for us.

And, in my opinion, it's all poppycock. The initial move is to proclaim, in some formulation similar to Dutton's, that art proceeds from "both individual and collective values," but to both slight the importance of mere "individual" values (they're all traceable to the genes, anyway) and to skirt around the problem of defining "values" at all. Art is determinedly influenced by society and culture and that's that. To give more attention to "just" aesthetic concerns would be to "endorse precisely the concept of the eighteenth-century curiosity cabinet, in which Assyrian shards, tropical seashells, a piece of Olmec jade, geodes, netsuke, an Attic oil lamp, bird of paradise feathers, and a Maori patu might lay side by side in indifferent splendour." In other words, all of these pretty things are trivial in comparison to what art can tell us about culture, and aesthetic analysis is irrelevant to the more important task of "marking and tracing relationships and influences."

Besides being an overwhelmingly tedious conception of what art and the study of art can be, this approach is, as far as I can tell, simply wrong in terms of what artists and writers, at least in the "Western" tradition, have actually done. Perhaps ur-artists in their "ancestral environments" performed the function assigned to them by Dutton and Geertz, but could someone name for me any great artists in the modern world who did not "pursue unexpectedly personal visions," who instead regarded their art as a wonderful opportunity to embody various cultural beliefs? Who thinks Milton wanted merely to be part of a great "collective formation," no matter how devout his religious or political beliefs, or that Paradise Lost, one of the greatest "embodiments" of "values, beliefs, and ideas" in all of literature, is not first and foremost, is not primarily, a great "personal vision"? Who reads or views Shakespeare to experience his plays' "socially determined aesthetic language"? How absurd.

To say that an artist or writer works in a context that has been established by his/her experience of his/her society's practices or assumptions is at best trivial, at worst simply tautological. What other experience is he/she going to have? Her work expresses salient social or cultural presuppositions or "refects" her society's various realities and their ideological foundations. So what ? Is this all it does? Is this the most important thing it does? It was to do these things that she became an artist? A writer who comes to his work, inevitably, with all of the "individual values" he has acquired over time produces a poem or a novel behind which can be seen his. . . individual values? This is very silly.

Beware all "thinkers" who come bearing news they've discovered how to explain art (or most human activities, for that matter) by appealing to our "human contexts." It's the first clue that these thinkers likely don't know very much about art, probably don't even much like it. This is a corollary to my suggestion in an earlier post to avoid those who presume to direct us to what is beyond the "merely literary" in works of literature. In this case, we are informed by those of whom we are assured they know all about those "human contexts" that of course art is not worth the attention of serious people if all we are doing is noticing that which is "merely art."

James Wood

It is a very peculiar definition of "comedy" in literature that values such comedy for the way in which it manages to restrain itself from actually producing laughter, and that identifies as among the greatest comic writers in modern fiction the likes of J.F. Powers, Henry Green, and V.S. Pritchett. But this is indeed the view of comedy that emerges from James Wood's The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel.

I have nothing against the work of Powers, Green, and Pritchett (or, for that matter, many of the other writers Wood discusses in his book), but they are not the writers anyone surveying the landscape of 20th century Western fiction with any real concern for historical development or descriptive accuracy could plausibly select as exemplars of "comic fiction" as it has been practiced over the course of that century. They are instead exemplars only of Wood's particular, and particularly parched and narrow, preference for a kind of fiction "in which a mild tragicomedy arises naturally out of context and situation, novels which are softly witty. . . ." (Note the words "mild" and "softly"; they are the kinds of words Wood resorts to repeatedly--along with "gentle," which must be used a dozen times or more--in his descriptions of the "comic fiction" he most admires.

Again, Wood has every right to prefer this sort of fiction, indeed, to write essays extolling the virtues of those writers who provide it and belittling those who don't, but to elevate this preference to a critical principle of universal salience is something else. Although, one has to simply accept that Wood's critical principle is both incontestable and universally applicable, since Wood doesn't really carry through his notion of "the irresponsible self" and the gentle comedy accompanying it in any kind of sustained argument. Once he has set out his case for what he calls the "comedy of forgiveness" in the Introduction, in many of the ensuing essays he at best merely assumes the reader will remember the previous discussion and apply it for him/herself to the subject at hand. Certainly Wood does not engage in much of the kind of close analysis an argument as sweeping as that which he wants to make about both comedy and modern fiction would require. Frequently there is no further discussion of comedy of any kind in the essays collected in this book, and there are some essays included on writers--Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Joseph Roth--whose work hardly has any relation to comedy--certainly not as "humor"--at all. One essay is not about fiction at all, but is merely a review of V.S. Naipaul's Letters Between a Father and a Son.

Of course, it might be objected that these essays were written for publication separately, in various magazines and book reviews, and expecting them to cohere more systematically when collected in a book would be unfair. But what justification is there for them to be reprinted as a book if no real effort is made to make them readable as a book?

Although Wood ostensibly disparages the category of "religious comedy" (which he associates with satire), his own explanation of the secular "comedy of forgiveness" seems to me essentially religious in its expectations of fiction:

The comedy of what I want to call "irresponsibility" or unreliability is a kind of subset of the comedy of forgiveness; and although it has its roots in Shakespearean comedy (especially soliloquy), it seems to me the wonderful creation of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel. This comedy, or tragicomedy, of the modern novel replaces the knowable with the unknowable, transparency with unreliability, and this is surely in direct proportion to the growth of characters' fictive inner lives. The novelistic idea that we have bottomless interiors which may only be partially disclosed to us must create a new form of comedy, based on the management of our incomprehension rather than on the victory of our complete knowledge. . . .

This is a notion of "comedy" that ignores what is comedic in comedy in favor of the revelations of character, a spiritual communion with "fictive inner lives." Wood further muddies, rather than clarifies, the conceptual waters by opposing this comedy of forgiveness against the "comedy of correction"--satire--as if all other manifestations of the comic in literature were perforce satirical, only versions of what is to be found in Moliere or Swift. Such a reduction of the possibilities of comedy is not just an oversimplification; it completely ignores a vast body of comic fiction that is neither primarily satirical nor "tragicomic" in the "mild" and "gentle" mode Wood celebrates.

Mikhail Bahktin described this kind of comedy as embodying an attitude of "radical skepticism" that excludes as just another form of "seriousness" both conventional satire, which does indeed, as Wood maintains, seek to eradicate vices and flaws, and the "comedy of forgiveness," which is a thin veneer indeed on a form of fiction that otherwise could not be more "straightforwardly serious" in its intent. (Sentimentally serious might be a better way to describe it.) It is the kind of comedy to be found in Joyce rather than Henry Green, Beckett rather than V.S. Pritchett, Nathanael West rather than J.F. Powers. It is the comedy of Catch-22, of Gravity's Rainbow, of Mulligan Stew, and of the fiction of Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and Stanley Elkin. If a book were to be written that was truly about "laughter and the novel"--not about "mild tragicomedy"--these would be the books and the writers that would have to be examined.

The closest Wood comes to assessing this brand of fiction is his back-of-the-hand dismissal of what he calls "hysterical realism." Wood identifies Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, and Thomas Pynchon as the chief hysterics in question, but one suspects he would accuse many of these other writes I have mentioned of being unduly hysterical as well. He never really defines "hysterical realism" at any great length or with any great analytical precision, but the following passage comes pretty close to capturing the essence of the idea: ". . .there are also 'comic novels,' novels which correspond to the man who comes up to you and says, 'Have you heard the one about. . .?' novels obviously very busy at the business of being comic. Tristram Shandy, for instance, is in multifarious ways a marvelous book, but it is written in a tone of such constant high-pitched zaniness, of such deliberate 'liveliness," that one finds oneself screaming at it to calm down a bit."

There are indeed comic novels that embody the sort of laughter associated with jokes and comic routines. (Catch-22 is one of these, as is Portnoy's Complaint and most of Elkin's novels), and many more that are broadly funny in a fashion James Wood no doubt finds excessively "lively." Frankly, I am surprised to find that Wood admires Cervantes, since Don Quixote is quite a "zany" book (or so it seems to me), as are most of the many novels influenced by Don Quixote throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Furthermore, few of these kinds of comic novels could convincingly be labeled "hysterical realism" because almost none of them are realistic in any credible sense of the term. In fact, comedy is almost by definition not realistic, depending as it does on a deliberate distortion of reality, even to the point of completely reversing its normal assumptions. To the extent works of fiction seek first of all to be "realistic," whatever comedy they might also contain is almost certainly going to be incidental, the sort of "mild" and "gentle" amusement Wood clearly enough enjoys.

(The one writer Wood discusses to whose work the term "hysterical realism" seems appropriate is Tom Wolfe, whose novels Wood accurately judges to be shallow and really not very funny. It is one of the few essays in The Irresponsible Self with which I unreservedly agree--one of the others is the essay entitled "Shakespeare and the Pathos of Rambling.")

Finally, both "hysterical realism" and the book's occasional analyses of comedy more generally seem really to be devices Wood has adopted in his essays to make a more compelling case for the kind of fiction he manifestly most esteems: loosely, the sort of late 19th/early 20th century fiction that added to the realism that had come to be valued by writers like Flaubert and Tolstoy and George Eliot a further "psychological realism" that located the real truth about human reality in the disclosures of consciousness. Much of this fiction remains vital and important, and many of the strategies developed by writers like James and Woolf and Henry Green continued to be adapted by later writers in different and interesting ways. But the pure form of pyschological realism Wood continually returns to--"a state in which the reader may or may not know why a character does something, or may not know how to read a passage, and feels that in order to find these things out he must try to merge with characters in their uncertainty"--is not a method that most subsequent 20th century writers continued to practice as if it had been determined to be the "correct" way to write novels and stories. (Neither it nor "mild tragicomedy" have been been greatly favored in, especially, American fiction, which by and large Wood doesn't emphasize much at all in The Irresponsible Self; in most of his critical writing Wood appears to be particularly dismissive of post-60s American fiction, which has most consistently sought alternatives to the approach Wood seeks to privilege.)

It doesn't bother me in the least that James Wood approves of psychological realism and the creation of the "irresponsible self" more than any other technique a writer of fiction might choose to employ. To each his own where taste in fiction is concerned. However, Wood's overriding critical precept, that things were done much better back when, that the way things were done then is the only right way, performs no service (no useful service, at least) for the cause of contemporary fiction whatsoever.

Joseph McElroy

Joseph McElroy is usually grouped among those postwar American experimental writers--most often he is compared to Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo--known for stretching the limits of both form and acceptable content in fiction. Such a conclusion is understandable, given McElroy's seemingly elusive and disjointed prose and his use of various scientific and technological tropes, but it is not really one that can stand up to an analysis of McElroy's actual strategies and assumptions--or at least I have always thought so. In fact, reading McElroy's most recent novel, Actress in the House, has only reinforced my judgment that McElroy is in many ways a conventional, even derivative, writer engaged in the effort to use the novel as a means of projecting human consciousness through a fairly obvious method of "psychological realism."

McElroy has long been championed by a certain kind of academic critic who sees contemporary ficition as an opportunity to indulge in abstruse talk about technology and communications theory, about suitably abstract and "scholarly" issues of cultural concern, about everything except what it's like to read McElroy's work, of what its aesthetic accomplishents might be. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this would be the chapter on McElroy in Tom LeClair's The Art of Excess (still a valuable book, nevertheless), which contains passages like this: "The formulating or mastering capabilities of systems are, for McElroy, closedly tied to a 'massed variety of information.' More consistently than any other writer in the systext, McElroy has registered the systems pardigm's contemporaneous scale of information. . .Systems-influenced, information-dense, variously excessive, McElroy's novels are themselves 'collaborative networks,' distinctive and distinguished models of our postindustrial world. Like the other systems novelists, McElroy uses his fictive networks to defamiliarize common experience while pressing the reader to whole-seeing. . . ."

As it happens, the electronic book review is currently running a series of scholarly essays on McElroy. These essays are admirably sweeping in their survey of McElroy's career, but unfortunately they are mostly characterized by observations like these (by Tim Keane):

For over four decades, McElroy's innumerable characters, his voracious novels, and his grammatical and linguistic explorations, not to mention his willful readers, have adhered to the letter of Rilke's famous dictum that we should live out the questions. His novels are not full of events any more orderly than actuality. Nor are they contained by time. Rather, in book after book, his writings are dramatic investigations of noesis - that abstract but evocative concept rooted in Platonic idealism and redefined by philosophers (through Phenomenology) as those ineluctable acts of consciousness that constitute reality. . .

A writer necessarily concerned with the mental acuities and cognitive refinements that constitute the life-work of his characters and their worlds is essentially a poet of emotional intensity and tangible intimacies. For all the comparisons made between Joseph McElroy and half a dozen other brainy American novelists of the Information Age, not one of them comes close to achieving so consistently the emotional truthfulness and the zealous humanism of McElroy's work.

This is the groundwork for essays that go on to discuss such topics as "noesis," "coordinate equality," de-automatization," and describe McElroy's style as the process by which "the reader follows the lines and blind leads of a syntax that defines patterns recursively and as a matter of palimpsestual depth. Focus on the interlacing of cause and effect because they correspond in a strange bilaterally fearless symmetry: causes create effects, which in turn effectively create causes." Taken together (with exceptions, one of them being Charles Molesworth's discussion of The Letter Left to Me), they are, unfortunately, a very pompous and self-involved way of saying what should be apparent to anyone attempting to read McElroy: His books narrate whatever stories they have to tell by focusing on his character's ongoing mental processes, in a rather straightforward "stream of consciousness" style strongly reminiscent of Joyce and Woolf.

Here is the first paragraph of Actress in the House: "A shock, that's all it was, in the darkened house. The girl struck by her partner very hard. It had staggered her, it was over the line, you wondered how she was standing. Her partner had clapped her one to the side of her face with the full flat of his hand, and it had swung her right around toward the audience, almost knocked her off the stage, and she was hurt. The man in the eighth row from his angle hadn't seen it coming, but neither had she seen it you could almost believe, the actress herself. Something wrong up there. He was stunned and amazed, he was honestly thrilled, not stunned at all." After the initial external identification of "the man in the eighth row," the remainder of the novel unfolds through this man's "central consciousness" as he (a lawyer named Daley) proceeds to have a sexual affair with this very actress being slapped. Along the way we learn various things about Daley's past, through Daley about the actress's past, etc., and the narrative ends after the first week of their acquaintance.

To the extent the novel is "difficult"--and it can indeed be frustrating--it is the consequence of its thoroughgoing dedication to the stream of consciousness method. Everything is oblique and discontinuous. Explanations are sometimes delayed for pages and pages, sometimes never materializing at all. McElroy is frequently called "uncompromising" in his use of this method, but in this case the uncompromising merely becomes tedious. (Although frankly this is the response I've had to other McElroy novels as well.) Nothing very special ever happens, and the characters never become interesting except as "ordinary people" in the most dramatically unpromising sense of the words.

I don't think the problem is so much that McElroy is a bad writer but that in the final analysis the stream of consciousness techique, in my opinion, is an extremely limited approach to writing fiction except in short doses or when "compromised" by mixing it with other strategies. (Which, for example, Joyce does in several episodes of Ulysses). We do, by the conclusion of Actress in the House, come to feel we've been exposed very intimately to Daley's preoccupations and habits of thought, but this in itself doesn't get us very far. It proves to be a clinical exercise in psychological speculation--Here is Man Thinking--but not much of an artistic endeavor.

I have in previous posts complained that too many book reviewers engage in free-floating evaluation rather giving an accurate account of what a given writer is trying to accomplish. In the ebr essays I have mentioned, the opposite and abiding flaw of much academic criticism, especially about contemporary literature, can be seen. There's a great deal of very elaborate description of Joseph McElroy's purported intentions as a writer of fiction, but not much in the way of an assessment of that fiction, which conveniently leaves out a very important point to be made about it, especially Actress in the House: It's really pretty boring.

A Prized Local Specimen

Near the beginning of this New York Times Magazine "profile" of Alice Munro, we are told that "she is famously private, someone who needs to be coaxed into giving interviews and finds book touring an ordeal." She ought to have continued to insist on her privacy and turned down this opportunity to meet with Daphne Merkin as well.

Is there some reason why Merkin, who calls Munro "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," also had to tell us that she has "relatively unlined skin," that one finds an "undercurrent of quiet amusement emanating from her gray-green eyes"? Why Munro needed to be quoted as saying that ''I was bulimic for a while before the word existed. I thought I was the only person who discovered it. Most women I knew got a heavy maternal figure. I was determined not to, as part of maintaining my identity.'"? Why we need to know that Daphne Merkin feels "A witty, sometimes brutally observant self, held in check by the need to pass herself off as conventionally and graciously female" while talking to her?

In what way does it help us understand Alice Munro's fiction to know that, where her eldest daughter is concerned, Munro confesses ''She wasn't the utter joy of my life she might have been. I was emotionally more open to the second''? That in high school "I was nice looking, but they left me alone. I would have been so unhappy if I had married one of the boys I went to high school with"? That "Having married at 30 after carving out an independent existence for herself as a schoolteacher, her mother seems always to have yearned for more psychologically and financially luxuriant vistas"?

Is this all a way of cutting the writer down to size, reminding us that, as accomplished a writer as she might be, nevertheless as a human being she's had the same problems as the rest of us, has been as clueless about how to live as we all are? Didn't we already know this? Don't we always know that a given writer has had her share of problems and disappointments, that after searching around for "more clues to the psychological whereabouts" of this writer we're only going to find the same old familiar things? What makes us think that a writer's life must have special interest, or at least that we can't understand her work unless we know for sure her life hasn't? Is this a way of avoiding the task of reading the work in the first place, of finding some external and easy solution to the problem of paying attention to the work itself, taking it on its own terms and settling for the incomplete understanding we'll surely end with?

Must we treat even serious writers of fiction or poetry as if they were celebrities to be interviewed and examined for the quality of their clothing? I have never understood the idea that novels or poems, or even a writer's entire body of work, can't be assessed without knowing something further about the personal circumstances behind them. Nor why biographies of writers have become such a cottage industry. With a few exceptions, most such biographies I have read are essentially excuses for spreading gossip or engaging in ludicrous psychological speculation. Even when the speculation might even illuminate some aspect of the writer's troubled life, rarely does it help us come to terms with the work. Nothing in Daphne Merkin's article helps me understand Alice Munro's fiction more clearly, or, since I have not in the past actually found her fiction all that engaging, why I should it give it another chance. Shouldn't either or both of these goals be more important than that she has "coiffed silvery gray hair," in contrast to "the slightly unkempt curls of her early photos"?

Critiquing American Society

Although Michael Collins describes his ambitions perhaps somewhat more boldly than most, these remarks illustrate a common enough view of the ultimate purpose of fiction:

"After I was shortlisted for the Booker, I learned that no one reads literary fiction any more". . ."That's because the action--the novel's crises--are all in a character's head, not in on-page action. So I got to thinking about using crime to critique American society, perhaps a dismemberment murder mystery to echo the dismantling of the U.S. middle class."

Never mind the distinction between "literary fiction" and genre fiction. As far as I can tell, Collins himself has never written the kind of literary fiction he describes, but clearly he thinks of his work as serious nevertheless; even if he did prefer fiction in which the "action" is "all in a character's head," this doesn't preclude the larger goal of critiquing society. Indeed, writers of literary fiction are more likely to think in such terms than those who work in the genres, where in many cases--especially science fiction or detective/crime fiction--some sort of implict examination of "society" is built into the very nature of the genre, almost hard to avoid.

Those listening to Collins make this remark did not seem to object to the idea that writers might want to "critique society," merely to Collins's further theories about "the peculiar suitability" of the United States to this kind of crime fiction: "Europeans, he said, tend to visit only coastal America, and have no idea of the bizarre religious beliefs and brooding violence exhibited by the mad inhabitants of the territory between New York City and San Francisco." What the author of this Macleans article calls "Collins' naked ambition and political paranoia" apparently did not appeal to this audience, but they surely would not have taken exception to a writer's claim to be "critiquing" society, since the notion that this is what fiction does, at some fundamental level, is very widespread.

This kind of social commentary, if not exactly political propoganda, is certainly "political" in that it values social or cultural change as the potentially most salutary benefit of writing and reading fiction. Like satire, it seeks "correction" of the flaws and mistaken beliefs it portrays. Such a conception of literature's relevance to its readers views political change and the consideration of essentially political issues to be the most important, if not the only, way for literature to be serious in the first place. Aesthetic achievement is not dismissed altogether, but it becomes at best a trick used by the skillful writer to draw the reader's attention to those sociopolitical concerns that are really what have motivated the writer to begin with.

How many works of literature from the past have survived because what they provide is deemed to be social commentary, offering insight into the cultural mechanisms and assumptions of a particular time and place? Hardly any. It is sometimes said that, for example, Dickens gives us this kind of window onto the social landscape of his time, but to the extent this is true--and it is partly true--it is a consequence of Dickens's much broader aesthetic ambition to build a whole fictional world, related to the concrete realities of Victorian England, but thoroughly transformed, out of the socially determined materials he had to work with. (And he had no other materials; he lived in Victorian England and not somewhere else.) Works of literature, especially fiction, can always be used by the cultural historian as the source from which to dredge up "information." But a novel or poem or play that can only be used as such a source has already been judged no longer worth reading.

As I mentioned earlier, it hardly seems necessary to insist that a genre like crime fiction should seek to "critique" society. Given the various conventions of the genre--the focus on law enforcement (or on the attempt more broadly to redress lawless acts), the inherent need to "investigate" a particular social mileu, the search for an explanation, to the extent it can be found, for what motivates people to violate social and cultural norms--a critique of sorts will almost always arise from a crime or detective novel. The hard part for a crime novelist (at least it seems to me) is to find suitable ways of making this intrinsic kind of commentary aesthetically satisfying as the subject of a work of fiction. Literary novelists have on the one hand an easier job--they don't have to fulfill these generic expectations (at least not these particular ones) and ought to be less constrained in the attempt to find aesthetically satisfying forms--and an even harder one--to find such forms absent the inherent interest-value these embedded conventions additionally provide. Perhaps this makes it all the more tempting simply to fall back on "commentary" as fiction's ultimate justification.

It is not, I hope, simply contrarian to suggest, on the eve of a very important American election, that politics is not the most important, certainly not the only important, endeavor with which a serious-minded person might want to occupy him/herself. Nor is it necessary that he/she engage in social commentary in order to be discharging the duties supposedly assigned to the writer of fiction. If this were the case, it would be much easier, and ultimately more useful, to forego fiction altogether and write political speeches or make documentary films. (There seems to be more money in the latter as well.) It may or may not be true that "no one reads literary fiction any more," although I myself think such a claim is asinine. There are, in sheer numbers, way more readers of serious fiction than there "used to be," given the vast increases in population just over the past half-century. Probably the percentage of serious readers within these populations isn't significantly lower, either. Even if fewer people do want to read "literary fiction," it's precisely because it has increasingly become reduced to an attempt to "critique American society," through the combined efforts of certain so-called literary journalists, by academics, and by the editors of prominent book reviews.

Given a choice between such lugubrious stuff--at least in the way it is presented--and more artfully done "entertainment," some readers have understandably gone for the latter. (One wonders how popular Michael Collins will be among such readers.) As well: If I have to choose between the social critic and the artist, my vote goes to the artist.

Character

In a recent post at s1ngularity, Trent Walters objects to the paucity of compelling characters in the horror fiction he's been reading for review. He then goes on to speculate about how "character" in fiction is created.

There are two obvious extremes of characterization (obvious because of their extremity) that help writers to quickly sketch a vividly realized character. One is the crazy or really weird character common to the literary story. Writers do this often to get noticed by a literary magazine, to do something that hasn't been seen. The other is the object or affectation of the character's that distinguishes this character from the others. He's the thin man, the fat man, the girl with the bone through her nose, the three-legged dog, the boy who stutters.

But neither rendering has much to do with character except that they both quickly sketch what a character appears to be, but appearances don't capture the reality of a character. Actions characterize the character (or, in the case of Hamlet, inaction, which is still an act). . . .

It may be true that in some fiction--perhaps in horror fiction more than most, although I have my doubts about this--character emerges mostly from "action," but I would propose that in the very best fiction, genre or otherwise, character is actually just an illusion created by the use of language in a particular way--by a writer's style, although the illusion thus created may be more or less a conscious act, may in fact be simply an artifact of the stylistic choices the writer has made to begin with. This may seem a preposterous notion, way too "postmodern" to be taken seriously, so I will further illustrate with examples of writers who couldn't be considered postmodern by anyone.

It is sometimes said that among the first "realistic" characters in works of fiction are those to be found in the novels of Jane Austen. They seem quite firmly rooted to the soil of real life, restrained in their actions and words in comparison to most of the fiction of the 18th century, where realism tends to be sacrificed in favor of color and dynamism. But isn't this a consequence of Austen's style, which is itself quite understated and restrained? To the extent a character like Elizabeth Bennet seems to us a very levelheaded and quietly witty woman, isn't this because Jane Austen is a very calm and quietly witty writer? What else do we need to know about Jane and Elizabeth Bennet beyond what we learn from this brief exchange early on in Pride and Prejudice about Mr. Bingley: "He is just what a young man ought to be," said [Jane], "sensible, good-humored, lively; and I never saw such happy manners!--so much ease, with such perfect good breeding!" "He is also handsome," replied Elizabeth, which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete." How much of the effect on our perception of character comes from the revelations of "speech" in the ordinary sense, and how much from the fact Jane Austen is a master at composing very sly and exquisitely worded dialogue?

Likewise, Dickens's characters are usually described as outsized and vigorous (and they are), but how often do we pause to consider how outsized and vigorous Dicken's own style actually is? Don't his characters come across to us in the way they do because of that style? Even the minor characters in Dickens are always vivid, partly because of Dickens's strategy of picking out one or two habits or features and exaggerating them, but also simply through Dicken's forceful and distinctive way of writing, as in this brief account of "Mr. Fang," from Oliver Twist:

Mr. Fang was a lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, middle-sized man, with no great quality of hair, and what he had, growing on the back and sides of his head. His face was stern, and much flushed. If he were really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good for him, he might have brought an action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages.

It could be said that the effect of a passage such as this comes more from what is ususually called "voice" rather than style per se, but what else is voice in writing but the concrete effect created on the printed page by an appropriate arrangement of words and sentences and paragraphs? Dickens's style, garrulous but pointed, seemingly ingenuous but actually quite caustic at times ("brought an action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages" seems a delicate way to put it, but is really very cutting), might be called "theatrical," but so might all of his characters, their theatricality a reflection of the language used to create them.

Similarly, the characters in Henry James's fiction, which most readers find quite convincing even when the fictions themselves are judged to be somewhat short on dramatic action, share the obsessed and ratiocinative qualties of James's style. When James Joyce or Virginia Woolf create character through the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, the characters that emerge, Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Dalloway, aren't compelling because of the "content" of their thinking or even because we're given a glimpse into the way they think, but because of the manipulations of language and expected novelistic discourse that each author performs. Literally, it's the strange way in which the words--broken up, rearranged, discontinuous--are put down on the page. "Character" in Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway can't be separated from these puposeful arrangements of words.

To use an example from genre fiction: How much more do we ever really learn about Chandler's Philip Marlowe than we do from the very first paragraph of The Big Sleep, as Marlowe stands before the Sternwood house?:

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Everything we associate with Marlowe is here, manifested in this brief but punchy paragraph: his powers of observation, his self-deprecating, wiseass attitude, accomplished through a demotic yet also eloquent style. And in this case it is specifically a writing style, as Marlowe is the narrator of his own adventures, which ultimately makes it impossible for us to separate Marlowe the writer from Marlowe the "character." The "action" in which Marlowe always becomes embroiled is fun to read, perhaps even keeps us reading, but for me such action adds little to my perception of him as a character, which is also always being reinforced by the way in which he describes this action to us.

First-person narration makes it most apparent that it is style--voice, if you wish--that evokes character, not action, certainly not the quirks or affectations that some writers try to use to force characters into being "vivid," to return to Trent's comments quoted above. Not only is the narrator's own character what we discern through his/her style, but all the other characters about whom such a narrator might speak clearly enough are what they are because of the way this narrator speaks about them. But good writers approach third-person narration in the same way they would a first-person narrator. It is itself a character, a voice, with his/her/its own distinctive way of summoning a fictive world through writing. Perhaps at his point you have to say that character and style are indivisible, but this is where "the reality of a character" has to start.

There are some writers for whom style supersedes character, for whom the "authorial" character is the main character, and their fiction doesn't suffer in the least from it. Stanley Elkin is such a writer. His characters are believable enough, vivid certainly, but their vividness comes not from any externally imposed "features," fastened onto the characters like artificial limbs. It comes from Elkin's inimitable and inexhaustibly inventive style. Here is a third-person account of Ben Flesh, protagonist of The Franchiser:

Forbes would not have heard of him. Fortune wouldn't. There would be no color photographs of him, sharp as holograph, in high-backed executive leathers, his hand a fist on wide mahogany plateaus of desk, his collar white as an admiral's against his dark, timeless suits. There would be no tall columns of beautifully justified print apposite full-page ads for spanking new business machines with their queer space-age vintages, their coded analogues to the minting of postage, say, or money--the TermiNet 1200, the Reliant 700, Canon's L-1610, the NCR 399--numbers like licence plates on federal limousines or the markings on aircraft.

Though he actually used some of this stuff. G.E. had an anwer for his costly data volume traffic; Kodak had found a practical alternative to his paper filing. He had discussed his microform housing needs with Ring King Visibles. He had come into the clean, bright world of Kalvar. A special card turned even a telephone booth into a WATS line. Still, Fortune would do no profile. Signature, the Diners Club magazine, had never shown an interest; TWA's Ambassador hadn't. There was no color portrait of him next to the mail-order double knits and shoes.

(It's worth noting how Elkin here describes Flesh by what he's not; all the clutter of detail only produces a stereotype that Ben Flesh mercifully avoids.)

Here's a first-person narrator, from The Bailbondsman:

So I'm Alexander Main, the Phoenician Bailbondsman, other men's difficulties my heritage. Alexander Main the Ba'albondsman, doing his duty by the generations and loving it, thriving on the idea of freedom which is my money in the bank, which is my element as the sand was my ancestors'.

So give the Phoenician your murderer, your rapist, your petty thief yearning to breathe free. Give him your stickup guy and embezzler, your juvenile delinquent and car robber. Give him you subversives and menslaughterers. I like dealing with the public.

Pretty clearly both Ben Flesh and Alexander Main are really Stanley Elkin. Or "Stanley Elkin," the manufactured authorial presence. In many ways, all of Elkin's characters seem just like all the others, are versions of this most important character, the writer. No one who loves Stanley Elkin's work, as I do, could want it any other way. Who needs characters when you can be carried along by writing like this?

SF/Fantasy

Polyphony 4 makes it clear enough that a spirit of experimentation exists among those writers who have chosen to work within the uber-genre of science fiction/fantasy, much more so, if this anthology is at all representative, than among those who still aspire to the putative respectability of "literary fiction." The latter category encompasses a small subset of writers who are in effect granted a license to call themselves "experimental," but the degree to which these writers are truly willing to reconsider the ultimate purposes and unexamined proprieties of fiction is really quite limited. And while occasionally this or that ostensibly unconventional approach manages to create a modest stir or even for a time to catch on as the latest in literary fashion, my impression after monitoring the wandering course innovative fiction has followed over the past twenty years or so is that only a few experimental writers are able or willing to stick to that course very firmly in the face of both complete commerical irrelevance and a general lack of informed critical attention.

SF/Fantasy of all the genres presumably offers through its fundamental enabling conventions the most explicit alternative to mainstream literary fiction, which, even at its most experimental, mostly aims, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, to capture present circumstances, things as they are, or at least as they can be seen to represent abiding concerns in human existence more generally. Science fiction deliberately foregoes a direct engagement with the world literary fiction confronts more squarely, preferring instead imaginative extrapolations from existing conditions in that world; fantastic fiction ignores the restraints of realism in coming to terms with that world altogether. But the stories in Polyphony 4 don't just exemplify the alternative strategies embodied in their genres. They manifest an obvious effort to question inherited assumptions about storytelling, the basic principles of fiction-making.

And yet my most immediate response to this anthology was disappointment, even boredom. While the ambitions motivating most of these stories are entirely admirable, the realization of these worthy ambitions is not often equal to the potential for "making it new" the anthology itself represents. Too frequently the stories seem to settle for, at worst, an indulgence in superficial whimsy, at best, a cultivation of the bizarre in situation and event that, at least as I read them, can't bear the weight they're asked to bear when left to provide the primary source of dramatic interest. Somtimes, the piling-up of bizarre details and frankly silly conceits simply substitutes for any further attempt to additionally develop the work into something more aesthetically compelling, as in "Ataxia, the Wooden Continent":

ATAXIA: A floating continent, entirely composed of wood. Populated by various races of arboids, celluloids, and laminates. Ruled by the priest cult of the Great Lectern at Shellac-Veneer. This magnifcent city surrounds the sacred lectern's base. The cupolas and minarets of Shellac-Veneer rise from the Plain of Lath, Ataxia's central plateau. The Lectern's high priest administers the Holy Ataxic Empire from the Shrine of the Thrones of Nails. Defended by armies of Drillers under the command of the Walking Barn Roof. . .Major Cities: Shellac-Veneer, Cambium, Silo, and Wharftown. Main rivers: The Timber, the Pellet, and the Tanbark. Chief imports: screws, bolts, and brackets. Chief exports: Shovelers and toothpick hay.

Moreover, the editors have not made it easier to appreciate the worthwhile stories that are included in Polyphony 4 by arranging it so that the most tiresomely whimsical and/or hackneyed stories are the ones at the front of the book (the very best story, in fact, is literally saved until last), thus only increasing the possibility that a casual or curious reader will give up on the anthology and conclude that sf/fantasy may not reward further sampling. By my count, the first really good story doesn't come along until page 169 ("The Storyteller's Story"), althought at least four of the following eight stories ("Memree," "Baby Love," "Hart and Boot," and "Bagging the Peak") are also quite good. Of the remaining 100 pages, readers might disagree about the quality of such stories as "The Journal of Philip Schuyler," and "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" (historical fantasies of a sort), while "Tales from the City of Seams, and "Three Days in a Border Town" are two of the best stories to be found in Polyphony 4, almost (not quite) redeeming the tedium one must unfortunately endure through the largest part of this anthology.

Perhaps the most significant contributing factor to the general lassitude Polyphony 4 induces is that, with exceptions, the writing itself in most of these stories is really quite lackluster, not at all commensurate with the colorful concepts from which the stories seem to emerge. The very first paragraph of the very first story sets the tone for the mostly flat and stale style of writing one encounters in too many of the stories:

Emelia's home is in a city where only children are allowed to draw graffiti on the crumbling walls. The old bricks and stones are covered in crude pictographs and stick figures, smoking chimney houses and bicycles with four wheels and two seats. Chalk is a penny a piece, any color to be had. A little old lady with gnarled fingers and crooked eyes sells the sticks out of cigar boxes on street corners, even in the rain.

The open-eyed wonderment conveyed by this passage cannot, for me, mitigate the otherwise bland prose and the cloying and cliched effect it produces. Overall, the most lasting impression the writing in many of these stories left with me is the sense that all too often their authors were so enamored of the "idea" being pursued they couldn't really bother with composing satisfying prose to go along with it. In the most extreme cases, I could only conclude that the sensibilty informing the stories was finally more cinematic than literary, more concerned with narrative immediacy than with the opportunity to do something interesting with words, at least where style is concerned.

Nevertheless, if I were to point interested readers to stories in Polyphony 4 that would reward the effort to locate a copy of the anthology, regardless of one's interest in genre, there would be two: Michael Bishop's "Baby Love" and Jeff VanderMeer's "Three Days in a Border Town." I would be hard put to classify the former story as science fiction or fantasy at all: It tells in a more or less straightforwardly realistic but effectively understated way the story of a man who loses his wife in an auto accident and must care for his infant daughter by himself. It is an engaging story that concludes in a quiet but really very emotionally crushing way. "Three Days in a Border Town" is to some extent a fairly familiar tale of the postapocalypse, but its central conceit is executed very effectively (it is thematically integrated in a manner that succeeds in purely literary terms and is not merely clever or fanciful) and the writing is evocative and assured: "When you come out of the desert into the border town, you feel like a wisp of smoke rising into the cloudless sky. You're two eyes and a dry tongue. But you can't burn up; you've already passed through flame on your way to ash. Even the sweat between your breasts is ethereal, otherwordly. Not all the blue in the sky could moisten you." If VanderMeer's story is a good example of what current sf/fantasy is capable of achieving, I would definitely like to read more.

Lost in the Funhouse

Ray Davis (Pseudopodium) suggests that, while such books as Nabokov's Pale Fire and Cortazar's Hopscotch can be appropriately labeled "experimental" fictions, the fiction of John Barth is instead only a "generic" member of a category that has come to be identified as "experimental fiction." Barth's work, presumably, simply makes a number of familiar moves that have been accepted as "experimental" in this generic sense.

I would agree that such a category exists, and that those writers who could be consigned to it do indeed mostly reprise certain recognizable techniques or repeat what have become by now fairly well-worn tropes. But I can't see how Barth belongs to this category. Many if not most of the techniques in question (techniques of self-reflexivity, self-reflexively applied) were actually introduced by Barth in the first place, and the idea that conventional fiction had become "exhausted" in its ability to keep serious fiction afloat--and that a new kind of fiction able to confront this fact head-on was needed--was Barth's idea.

Certainly Barth had his own precursors. In "The Literature of Exhaustion," he cites Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett as the kind of technically adventurous writers whose company he would like to join, and, even further, praises Borges for his recogniton that no writer is truly original--such a writer would be unreadable, would make it so difficult for us to find our literary footing that the effort wouldn't finally be worth the trouble--but in effect is merely commenting on what's already been done. ("Pierre Menard," for example.) Thus Barth acknowledges that all literary writing is, in this broadest sense, generic writing. Moreover, Barth also confesses that he himself is a writer who "chooses to rebel along traditional lines," perhaps only inviting the charge that he's really not very innovative after all, merely imitative of his own favorite innovators--who themselves aren't really innovative, either, etc., etc.

But I really don't see how anyone could read Barth's early work, from The Floating Opera to, say Chimera, and conclude that Barth is not engaged in a fairly earnest kind of literary experimentation. If any of these books seem deriviative at all, they would be the first two, The Floating Opera and End of the Road, which are not only fairly conventional narratives (with a few modernist flourishes) but also embody "existentialist" themes of a kind rather popular in the 1950s/early 1960s. On the other hand, The Sot-Weed Factor clearly shows Barth looking for inspiration elsewhere than modernism, specifically 18th century picaresque narratives. The picaresque had not been entirely abandoned, of course (The Grapes of Wrath), but I think Barth can genuinely be credited with refocusing attention on the picaresque specifically as an alternative to both modernist introspection and the well-crafted realistic story. This may not be sui generis experimentation, but it seems to me that in the context of the time it is undeniably a literary experiment.

Giles Goat-Boy is an even more thoroughgoing effort to reconfigure the mid-century American novel, and to explore more fully the potential of "archetypes" (a la Borges) and of what Robert Scholes called "fabulation." . Although I myself find it less compelling than The Sot-Weed Factor (it's an example of the "art of excess" that's finally just too excessive), again I find it hard to believe that many readers could attempt this novel without finding it quite a singular work of fiction, at least within the context of postwar American literature. Forty years later it can try one's patience, but this is because Barth was trying to do too much, not because he was just working over a formula inherited from his literary forebearers.

But it is Lost in the Funhouse in which Barth most purposefully engages in literary experiment. So singlemindedly does he do so, in fact, that readers who encounter this book now, shorn of the context in which it was both so controversial and so influential, might think it dated, a relic of an era in which experiment in fiction could be so noteworthy. (They would be mistaken to judge it so, however, as it is an example of the sort of fiction that, in Barth's own words, is still "au courant" but also "manage[s] nonetheless to speak eloquently and memorably to our human hearts and conditions, as the greatest artists have always done.") Here readers will find: a story in the form of a cutout Mobius strip; a story narrated by a spermatazoon on its journey of fertilization; a story in which the narrator (the author's recorded voice) pleads with the author himself (standing by) to put it out of its misery; a story narrating its own coming-into-being; a story about speaking in tongues in which each of six brief speeches is "metrically identical" to the Lord's Prayer; a story that takes the notion of story-within-story to its hilarious limits; and stories such as "Life-Story" and "Lost in the Funhouse" itself, perhaps the prototypical and most influential metafictions in postmodern American literature.

Again, perhaps reading such stories after close to forty years of "experimental" fiction by other writers coming to terms with the implications for the future of fiction these very stories themselves brought into the open makes it easier to see how their innovations are to some extent coterminous with the practices of other forward-looking writers throughout literary history, might even by this point seem overused. But that in 1968 Lost in the Funhouse was unlike anything else being done by Barth's contemporaries (with perhaps the exception of his like-minded colleague Robert Coover) seems to me indisputable.

Barth is perhaps legitmately vulnerable in his later work to the charge of repeating himself, of abandoning the kind of focused experimentation to be found in Lost in the Funhouse in favor of a more lighthearted self-reflexivity drawing on Barth's own life and probably more interested in depicting his native Chesapeake Bay region than in advancing the cause of innovative fiction. Books like Letters, The Tidewater Tales, and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor have their pleasures (I find the latter to be a particularly affecting novel), but certainly Barth's reputation as an important American writer could not really rest on them, however much they add to a critical consideration of Barth's work as a whole. And I do believe Barth will ultimately be judged an important postwar writer, largely because of the accomplishment of a book like Lost in the Funhouse, which, however much it absorbs the influence of writers such as Borges and Nabokov, also transforms that influence into a frequently outrageous kind of comic fiction that discloses the many ways in which storyelling can trip over its own narrative feet, but in the process demonstrates that fiction still has plenty of innate if unexploited resources from which it might continue to draw.