Mircea Cartarescu's Solenoid is a work of antirealist fiction whose very departures from verisimilar representation are really strategies for getting closer to reality through the devices available to the literary imagination. In Solenoid, these strategies contribute most of all to an hallucinatory yet undoubtedly truthful portrait of the city of Bucharest, home both to the novel's protagonist and to the author, each in their representations of the city (the protagonist through the journal that is the vehicle of Cartarescu's narrative) seemingly appalled by its degradation during the Ceausescu years but also in a kind of awe at its ancient, dilapidated grandeur. The former is frequently evoked in straightforwardly realistic descriptions of the ruinous state of Bucharest's exterior facades, but the latter is a cumulative impression emerging from the protracted reveries into which the narrator just as often falls.
During these episodes, the narrator recounts events from his own past as well as current experiences, related in obsessive detail, that can quickly veer into distorted dreamscapes. The recounted moments from the past are themselves often dreams, or at least waking visions, that the narrator is transcribing from old journals in which these visions are recorded into a new and all-encompassing journal the completion of which the narrator regards as a kind of culminating act in his own failed career as a writer. (Current happenings are also chronicled in this journal, which serves as the novel's structural conceit, an omnibus memoir of sorts. Among the most prominent of these dream episodes are those that report on spectral visits by mysterious figures who hover around the narrator in the night. They are related as real-life hauntings by apparitions, but they nevertheless reinforce the blurring of the real and the imagined that ultimately characterizes the novel as a whole, although they also more explicitly locate the source of this drift from reality to the perceptions of the narrator himself.
We might then say that the "realism" of a novel like Solenoid is really a version of psychological realism, except that this concept wouldn't really do justice to Cartarescu's full-scale literary rejection of a boundary between what's real and what's imagined. This is apparent as well in the other two books by Cartarescu available in English translations, Nostalgia and Blinding (Book One). These books also freely blend straightforwardly realistic narratives with blatantly surreal and fantastic scenes, both approaches as with Solenoid in the service of experiences that seem autobiographical, although the autobiographical elements are themselves not the center of interest. Cartarescu seems to be using the circumstances of his own like as the means for executing a literary method that is faithful to those circumstances (just as in the depiction of Bucharest) by amplifying their routine qualities into fully fantastic scenes of grotesque fancy.
Of the three books, Solenoid is the most formally integrated. The translated edition of Blinding is only the first part of a trilogy, while Nostalgia may be more a collection of novellas (united by an authorial presence and their setting in Bucharest) with disparate characters and stories. Although Nostalgia achieves it own kind of aesthetic unity-through-disjunction, Solenoid retains the episodic, digressive impulses animating both Nostalgia and Blinding while its unity is made visible rather than merely imminent, the novel's form a function of its point of view but for that reason more immediately present in the reader's perception of its aesthetic order. If Solenoid is less formally open-ended that the two previously translated works (and thus arguably less audacious), it is also less diffuse in its effect.
Solenoid is also more purposefully focused on character development, partly again a function of its use of the protagonist's journal as narrative vehicle, but however much the novel offers a dynamic portrayal of Bucharest, it also gives us a psychologically dense account of the narrator, still temperamentally the career writer he deliberately refused to become after experiencing initial hostility to an apprentice poem he wrote for a writing workshop during his student days. ("I have never recovered from the trauma," he tells us in introducing the incident.) Instead, he is a Romanian teacher at a run-down Bucharest high school, the drudgery of the job also depicted in the novel with an unforgiving realism that ultimately seems almost preternatural in its desolation. If Cartarescu's practice can be called "magical realism," it is a kind of magic that has his characters literally bewitched, forced to live in a kind of benumbed trance. Such conditions force the narrator into the recesses of his own mind, but "during the endless series of evenings when, as my silent room darkens, my mind rises like the moon and glows brighter and brighter" and "I see palaces and hidden worlds on its surface, things never revealed to those running inside the maze."
Although Solenoid is set during the reign of Ceausescu in Romania (as are Nostalgia and Blinding), there are explicitly only fleeting references to the political dispensation in place at the time. Readers innocent of Cold War-era Romanian history (perhaps a sizable enough group) could read Solenoid without fully registering the oppressive reach of the Ceausescu regime, which is nevertheless tacit in the near-ruins of the urban landscape the narrator confronts and the abject resignation palpable in most of the city's residents. The oblique depiction of the specific political circumstances in which the narrator of Solenoid must operate might persuade us to think that Cartarescu intends his novel to be read as a parable of sorts, something akin to Kafka although more firmly embodied in the particularities of place, its politics only nominally suggested, not fully apparent. But Solenoid's narrative structure does not seem allegorical: Cartarescu's narrator is really interested in social and political circumstances only as backdrop to his epic-length self-interrogation.
Solenoid's protagonist is obsessed with his own life not out of narcissism or self-satisfaction but because he finds his own life as grotesque and unaccountable as the city of Bucharest itself. He conceives his journal--the book we are reading--as "a report of my anomalies," which requires the discontinuous, hallucinogenic treatment we encounter in the novel, although the narrator insists he is sticking to the facts of his life, even if these facts are but "vague flashes over the banal surface of the most banal of lives, little fissures, vague discrepancies." One could ask, however, whether the flashes the narrator provides are all that vague, the little fissures he exposes very little. In its juxtaposition of the banal and the incredible, Solenoid casts doubt on our rigid separation of the palpably real and the presumably fantastic, insinuating that each in itself is only a partial measure of the truth, which occupies the permeable border between the two. The narrator directly suggests that our perceptions of reality are inherently limited when he contemplates at length theories of a possible fourth dimension that human beings are unable--yet--to access. Signs of these limitations recur throughout the novel in the hidden spaces and labyrinthine passageways the narrator frequently encounters (including in his own home).
Finally the narrator of Solenoid is more concerned with ultimate questions such as the nature of reality and the meaning behind its surfaces, rather than more temporal cultural and political matters, and he finds a preoccupation with such larger perplexities in a semi-organized group called the Picketists, who hold demonstrations outside places like the morgue. But these are not political protests. Instead the Picketists carry signs that say such things as "Down with Death,"
"Shame on Epilepsy," and "NO to Agony!" At the first rally the narrator attends, the group's ostensible leader demands to know
Why do we live?. . .How can we exist? Who allowed this scandal, this injustice? This horror, this abomination? What monstrous imagination wrapped consciousness in flesh? What sadistic and saturnine spirit permitted consciousness to suffer like this, permitted the spirit to scream in torture? Why did we climb down into this swamp. this jungle, into these flames full of hate and anger?
It is perhaps tempting to think that the ingenuous Picketists are ultimately an object of satire or parody, but in Cartartescu's fictional world it would be more accurate to say that the usual forms of social protest, demands for sublunary justice, are the real expressions of credulity and naivete. The narrator doesn't exactly become a Picketist, but their insistence that the real world of ordinary existence is utterly senseless closely aligns with his own preoccupation with his "anomalous" life and his perception that true meaning is to be found beyond mundane reality.
Still, Solenoid nevertheless often lingers on the details of its protagonist's mundane reality. We frequently return to his far from anomalous vocation as a high school teacher, with its tedious and unsatisfying routines. The narrator is romantically involved with a fellow teacher, Irina, and their trysts are chronicled at various points in the novel. (Later we get the narrator's account of his previous failed marriage, an experience which clearly still puzzles him as another "anomaly.") These trysts are enhanced by a phenomenon whose source gives the novel its title: beneath his "boat-shaped house," he has discovered, is buried a massive solenoid, the electromagnetic effects of which create a force field of some sort that allows him and Irina to literally float above his bed during their episodes of lovemaking. There are other solenoids buried in various places around Bucharest, so that some of the extravagant, surreal goings-on related in Solenoid could be taken as the influence of these amplified solenoids, acting on a metaphorical level as a kind of fanciful conceit. The conceit is able to encompass both the novel's unsparing realism and its detours into the eerie and absurd, allowing it at once to be a visionary work of sustained surrealism and a rigorous exercise in verisimilitude.
This achievement is, of course most immediately attributable to Solenoid's narrator, who is, after all, summoning this blend of veracity and fantasy in organizing and completing his journal. Although the narrator presents himself as a failed writer, and one whose failure was provoked by his work as a poet and not a writer of fiction, the novel nonetheless unavoidably acknowledges its fictional world as artifice, the calculated manifestation of writing. But if Solenoid could be called a large-scale work of metafiction, it is not of the unabashedly self-reflexive kind that is sometimes characterized as "fiction about fiction." Instead, the metafictional elements act as an enabling device making the novel's merging of the representational and the surreal more seamless, not simply an amalgam of realism and fantasy. Ultimately Solenoid--and Cartarescu's fiction in general--makes no significant distinction between the ostensibly factual and the blatantly fictional, but this is more than an exercise in reality-bending: it is an implicit assertion of fiction's truth-telling potential beyond the prescriptions favoring narrative plausibility and literal representation.
At the end of Solenoid, the narrator begins to burn his now-completed manuscript--the last scenes describe an apocalyptic during which the city of Bucharest rises into the sky, revealing a Lovecraftian horror lying beneath--and prepares to seek a new home with Irina and their unborn child where "we will grow old together." This clearly implies a happy ending beyond the nightmarish vision the narrator's writing had evoked, but of course the narrator's action introduces a narrative dilemma: if indeed the manuscript has been destroyed, how then have we been able to read it? We could regard the text's self-immolation as the narrator's sleight-of-hand, a way of providing his story with a narrative closure that resolves his conflicted feelings about writing with an especially emphatic renunciation. Or we could accept the device as the final confirmation of the novel's metafictional presuppositions, an acknowledgement that the narrator and his baroque journal are the author's fabrication, the vehicle for an elaborate counterfactual tale depicting the author's life had he not in fact become a successful writer.
Even so, Solenoid's protagonist certainly does not exhibit diminished skills in his abilities as a writer. Indeed, we could say that the narrator of Solenoid, free of the distractions that might have come with literary success, is able to exercise his poetic gifts in their purest state, untainted by worldly concerns, especially if he knows that what he writes is destined to have no readers. His prose, as translated by Sean Cotter, is characterized by a scrupulous attention to detail, even when the objects of his attention seem unearthly, related in rhythmically propulsive sentences. (One assumes these are qualities of Cartarescu's writing that Cotter has accurately rendered in his translation--at any rate, this English version of the novel is altogether compelling in its style.) However much the narrator of Solenoid wants to affirm the value of life over writing, as the embodiment of Mircea Cartarescu's value as a writer, he is among the most dedicated of writers.
The newest issue (issue 6) of my Substack book review, Unbeaten Paths, is now available. This issue focuses on several books published by Corona/Samizdat Press.
Corona/Samizdat is a (more or less) one-man non-profit literary press founded and operated by the American expatriate writer, Rick Harsch. Physically located in Izola, Slovenia, the press publishes both new unconventional, formally adventurous fiction and out-of-print works by neglected writers--in the press's own formulation, "old works dismissed too early" (website here). This issue is dedicated to recent releases from Corona, although the first review is of a novel by Harsch himself. . . .Continue reading
Although my sampling of the fiction being published by Corona/Samizdat is limited here to the four works I have included, this fourth novel by Lee D. Thompson, Apastoral, would seem to further confirm that Corona is a press interested in publishing work that challenges the formal and stylistic norms dominating most literary fiction (in English, at least), but also engages with cultural and political themes that are very much of current concern (Cactus Boots most insistently, She Sang to Them, She Sang more quietly). None of these novels are straightforwardly, or even primarily, political works (not even Cactus Boots, which is primarily about its own existence), and the political "content" in each is greatly mediated not just by style and unconventional form but by an essentially comic vision, which is explicitly satirical really only in She Sang to Them, She Sang.
The humor in Apastoral might be called satirical, except that it is actually something closer to absurdist, and the novel itself might be identified as a kind of speculative or dystopian fiction, a science fiction novel with laughs. "Kafkaesque" would not be an unwarranted label, if Kafka had as one of his major influences The Three Stooges, and the novel's title suggests it was likely conceived in part as a parody of the pastoral genre. All of these elements are relevant in considering the effect of Thompson's novel, which, far from making it unfocused or incoherent, is in fact what makes the novel compelling: ultimately the impression it leaves is that the writer has taken the basic premise--a method of transferring a human brain to an animal body has been devised and is being used as a form of judicial punishment--and let the premise develop as it will rather than forcing it to act as the vehicle for predetermined meaning.
The novel's first-person narrator, called Bones, is a small-time crook who is the victim of one such surgical procedure, his brain removed and implanted in the body of a sheep. He has been transported to a prison farm whether other criminals have been subject to similar transformations into various animal bodies and shipped out as part of a program called "Constock." (Beginning with one Sylvester Moll, a serial killer of children who was the first person to receive the surgical sentence, his brain placed in a pig.) The novel chronicles Bones's attempts to adjust to his new transmogrified state, alternating with the story of the botched robbery attempt by his hapless gang of criminal cronies that resulted in Bones's trial and conviction. Eventually Bones manages to escape from the farm and makes his way back to the city, where he meets up again with an animal rights activist who had previously tried to help him and who now offers him refuge on a farm she has purchased. There we leave Bones to whatever rustic fate awaits him.
Bones is narrating his story, of course, from his present incarnation as a sheep, which immediately complicates our efforts to interpret the story he tells us. Even before we consider the various visions and dreams he increasingly experiences in his sheep-human state, Bones is inherently an unreliable narrator. His memories of the criminal milieu in which he previously resided, of the events leading up to the robbery-gone-wrong and the subsequent application of "justice" in his case, seem oddly free of the effects of the brain transplant--brains need to be "shrunk" to fit the size of the cranium into which they are being loaded--to which he seems to be subject in the episodes chronicling his new life as a sheep. Putting aside questions about how Bones is able to compose his narrative in the first place, since he is, indeed, a sheep, the very idea of a character like Bones implicitly asking to be taken seriously as the narrator of a credible work of fiction is sufficiently preposterous that we should expect the humor to be more broad farce than purposeful mockery.
Regarding the novel as neither satire nor an absurdist comedy but instead a version of a speculative science fiction narrative might help us in interpreting it as the projection of a future dystopia in which technology has continued to advance but its moral intelligence has continued to decline. But again the novel's comic exaggeration makes it hard to really take its projection into the future seriously as a plausible prediction of what might befall us if present tendencies continue on their course. The depiction of the circumstances attending Bones's apprehension, trial, conviction, and sentencing is a very funny lampoon of the attitudes and procedures already latent in the American justice system, but the fatuity on display among supposedly trained professionals (lawyers, therapists) actually clashes with the notion that technologies might also have advanced to the point that brain transplants are possible. Unless we assume that all of the elements in Thompson's story, from the ditzy lawyer who obtained her law degree after a "six-month intensive" and a one-week apprenticeship, to the animal rights organization, PETABBY, long on ideals and short on competence, to the investment of authority in the penal farm to wolves implanted with the brains of prison guards, have been invoked as devices that further the novel's essential buffoonery.
Which is not to say that Apastoral has nothing to communicate about the practices of incarceration or animal rights, the two "issues" to which it most immediately calls attention. But the carceral state is not a direct target: what seems unjust in Bones's case is not the form of punishment per se, but the process by which that punishment is ultimately declared. Bones is in fact innocent of the crime for which he is convicted, but the incompetence in the system in which he is thrust insures that this can never be discovered and that his fate is foreordained. He is imprisoned in the new body into which he is placed, but his actual physical circumstances are, well, pastoral, however threatening they still are from his new animal perspective. (The novel might be taken as a satire of a certain kind of "humanitarian" prison reform rather than imprisonment itself, a reform that in this case only allows society to mete out punishment without confronting the implications of it at all.) Paradoxically, Bones's "incarceration" might ultimately be a blessing, as it seems likely he will find greater happiness on the farm with his sheep girlfriend, Heather, than he ever would in his former life as a small-time crook. (If the wolves don't come after him.)
Thus Apastoral certainly could lead the reader to reflection on the subjects it treats, even though in my view they are subjects that inspire the novel's humor and invention rather than serve as its center of interest. It shares with the other books under review here this joining of conceptually adventurous, verbally resourceful fiction with politically resonant subjects in a way that inevitably raises the question of what the writer is trying to "say." Gilbert Sorrentino proposed that the appropriate way to think of "content" in a literary work was its realization through "something said"--the literary art itself says what it must, not the artist. Novels like Apastoral are mostly content with the something said, but the focus on politically charged topics does cheat a bit by making it more likely that the "said" is heard.
On one level, W.D. Clarke's She Sang to Them, She Sang is a relatively simple story of a failed real estate deal, the circumstances of its genesis and its aftermath. A young married couple, Katie and Jason, are enticed into a proposed deal in which they will sell their current home and buy the home of the woman proposing the deal--Jo, a local realtor. Jo assigns an employee, Manny to assist in making the deal happen, although the likelihood that it will is dubious from the start. The deal falls through (partly through Manny's ineptitude, but not entirely), and shortly afterwards Manny is arrested on a fraud charge (not connected to his work on this deal), while Jo suffers a stroke, which apparently leaves her permanently incapacitated. Katie and Jason wind up buying Jo's house, after all.
The goals and motives influencing the behavior of each of these characters, are, of course, much more complicated. The novel is set in Orangefield, outside of Toronto, around the time of the '08 financial crisis. Jo's business is in trouble, her personal life's discouraging, and she's on the outs with her now-grown daughter. Manny has mother issues, and isn't exactly flourishing as a real estate agent. Katie is all aswoon over Jason, even though he doesn't really have a very dynamic personality and isn't a take-charge kind of guy, and it seems pretty obvious, to us if not to Katie, that something's going on between him and Susan, their tenant (the "downstairs girl"). The story is related to us in chapters alternating the perspectives of Katie, Jo, and Manny--Jason remains more of a background presence, as does Susan.
Even more complicated is the way in which these characters' perspective is conveyed to us. Very generally the novel's narrative point of view is what Henry James called 3rd-person "central consciousness," although these days it is more likely to be identified as the "free indirect" method--the character is not the narrator but the narration is closely inflected with the character's process of thinking and perceiving. We overhear the character's thoughts so that it is what the character makes of events or how events prompt other modes of reflection that are the objects of narrative interest, not the events themselves. In this novel, Clarke doesn't settle merely for one layer of "thought" but digs even deeper into the substrata of consciousness, at times interrupting its "stream" to follow tributary channels:
But yes, and uh-oh, the Kazans out there were now getting into their frickin' Mercedes, they were
(and ever after this incident he vowed to forswear all drivers of that-now- loathsome brand, no matter how dearly it cost him professionally
--that is to say, commercially---
for this was now a vendetta worthy of his forebears
--e.g. his grandmother Mariyam, his mother's tormentor and the grandchildren's champion, who never forgave a shopkeeper for shortchanging her or for selling her anything less than the choicest cuts of meat, the most unblemished produce, the etc., etc., etc.--)
and his feet were not only betraying him, their owner. those feet were also betraying the girl here, the renter, and betraying what she might possibly think him, Manny capable of!. . . .
This strategy ultimately converts what has traditionally been called a stream of consciousness into something closer to an excavation of consciousness. Clarke would seem to reject the metaphor of "stream" as an overly simplistic conception of the way introspection occurs, and in She Sang to Them, She Sang represents it as something more shifting and disjointed. This may indeed be a more plausible rendering of human thought in fiction than conventional indirect discourse, but the ambition still seems to be to present an essentially realistic depiction of characters thinking. Further, the novel's approach both seems fully to proceed from the assumption that the representation of characters thinking has manifest aesthetic value and reinforces the commonly held belief that the advantage fiction has over other narrative arts is its capacity to probe human thought.
Clarke does this with skill in She Sang to Them, She Sang, as well as with a sufficiently light touch that the effect of its narrative method is to produce a kind of humor--the novel is essentially a comedy, although a highly ironic sort of comedy--that more or less substitutes for the drama of plot. The discrepancies between the characters' ambitions and the fragilities and frustrations as revealed in their internal deliberations are the real subjects of interest in the novel's portrayal of the shadiness of modern real estate speculation. In Katie's case, they reveal a woman whose upbeat innocence is in fact quite sincere but also begets a naïve gullibility that potentially makes the reader feel not sympathy for her vulnerability but something closer to condescension or even contempt. In other words, Clarke creates some compelling characters through his use of a form of "psychological realism," even though the psychological account of what goes on in their minds may or may not be altogether plausible.
However much the method in this novel does attempt to register a greater complexity in the processes of human awareness than is usually portrayed in exercises of free indirect discourse, surely the emergence of thought as enacted in passages such as the one quoted above is not actually the way the conscious mind works. Just making an inventory of my own thought process in ordinary circumstances, I cannot recall any instances in which it unfolded like this. (I don't think my thoughts "unfold" at all.) Of course, W.D. Clarke himself may not believe that his digressive but still rhetorically coherent technique for representing mental activity is actually an accurate reproduction, just a useful illusion that signifies thinking but more importantly acts as a unifying device in his multiperspective narrative that otherwise has no strongly linear story.
If She Sang to Them, She Sang doesn't really give us an "authentic" rendering of the human mind in action, no other literary device would be able to, either--perhaps it's best to regard all such efforts at psychological realism to be a search for the serviceable means of suggesting human thought, but not an end in itself. (I don't think Clarke is presenting it as an end in itself.) As such, Clarke's strategy helps give the novel's satire of the casual corruption induced by capitalism as it intersects with middle class aspiration--which no doubt represents its dominant ambition--a greater continuity and cogency, but also works to keep attention on character, so that the satire does not merely disappear into plot or, by the end of the novel, melodrama. What the novel wants to "say" about the decadence of capitalism, while evident enough, does not overshadow an accompanying comedy of psychological confusion that is perhaps even more telling.
John Guillory's Professing Criticism is in every way an admirable book. It is deeply learned, sharp in its observations, unquestionably sincere in its effort to rehabilitate and reorganize the study of literature, and above all correct: literary study has indeed lost sight of its original, underlying purpose, has become too dispersed in its curricular organization, and has become helplessly caught in the shifting winds of every new and passing critical trend that comes along. It is poorly situated to resist all the demographic and institutional pressures that are destabilizing its intellectual foundations and probably threatening its continued existence as a university-based discipline. It badly needs to be reconceived and reorganized.
Unfortunately, Professing Literature is not likely to have much effect in bringing about such changes in the curriculum and objectives of academic literary study. For one thing, the book itself is short on practical, concrete suggestions for bringing them about. Most of its analysis is historical and diagnostic, providing a general critique of the current status of literature and literary criticism in the academic curriculum, providing lots of clarity about how the "profession" of literary study came into its present form but otherwise remaining content with vague exhortations about what "must" happen if it is to flourish in the future. Guillory doesn't take names or arrest any suspects when it comes to assigning responsibility for the increasingly marginal status of literary study in the university. (Although to some extent it shares this status with the humanities in general, as the recent discourse on the "crisis" in the academic humanities would suggest.) He does speculate that the study of literature might in the near future rend itself in two, one strand branching off into the entirely topical, present-oriented focus on identity politics and social justice, while the other, much smaller, branch might still emphasize the "older" works of British and American literature. But it isn't entirely clear whether Guillory himself favors this bifurcation or whether it's just a concession to the inevitable given current conditions on the ground.
Guillory believes that academic critics in their latest iteration overestimate the efficacy of their politically-motivated scholarship, but while offering courses that seek to "affirm" identity or promote social justice might conceivably be more fruitful in their ultimate political effect than academic scholarship inevitably read by few people (raising consciousness at least among those who take the courses), still it is hard to see how continuing with this utilitarian approach to literature is a very promising option in securing the future of literary study. Certainly courses focusing on these issues could continue to be featured in the college curriculum, but by that time they will have little to do with "literary study" per se, which will have essentially disappeared in favor of cultural therapeutics. And at that point "scholarship" on literature will either be beside the point or a thin disguise for political homiletics. Given Guillory's emphasis on the history of literary study's difficulties in establishing itself as a proper "scholarly" discipline against the skeptical attitude that it belongs in the university in the first place, surely this skepticism would only be heightened in such hyperpoliticized circumstances, its status as a "discipline" only more precarious.
Perhaps literary scholarship (in the older sense of scholarship actually about literature) would persist in the vestigial programs focusing on the older array of canonical literary works. But it seems to me that the gap between the goals of these two approaches would eventually be so wide there would be little reason to associate them as merely separate ways of studying literature. The "study" of literature would surely be more appropriately applied to this second form of inquiry, although it also seems likely that this mode of study would come to be regarded as more or less an adjunct to historical studies, something like Classics, for example, ultimately considered a form of antiquarianism. This sundering of the old and the new might further have an effect on what is taken as "literature" in the new dispensation: since such a premium would be put on the personal and the immediate, memoirs and perhaps poetry would seem to be the more fruitful forms to examine, while fiction could become less central. The reduction of fiction to its ethical and political content is already a trend in literary culture more generally, so perhaps there will be some convergence on the idea that "literature" is a vehicle for direct personal "expression."
The most significant consequence of assigning what we now think of as "literature" to a branch of purely historical study would be, paradoxically, the loss of "literary history" in what is still supposed to be literary study. For the inflection of genres or styles on a new literary work to be registered by readers, those readers need to have some familiarity with such genres and styles as visible historically. That history won't disappear, of course, and readers could choose to avail themselves of it, but if the current resistance to the "coverage" of literary periods in the study of literature remains (likely it will only intensify) and eventually wins out entirely in the topical approach, it won't be part of a literary education per se. Writers themselves would have less motivation to situate their work among the practices of writers of the past: why cultivate such influences when they are mostly irrelevant to the immediate needs of personal testimony and unmediated communication? (Again, this way of thinking about writing seems to me already well-advanced.) Literary history will extend back a few decades, including writers still recent enough that their work still sufficiently encompasses current concerns.
It is possible that nothing like what I am describing here will in fact come to pass. Guillory's speculation about a possible future for literary study may be wholly mistaken (although it is not without a basis in current reality), and my own conjectures may just be a reflection of a disillusioned cynicism (if not a thoroughly retrograde point of view). Surely writers would not fully welcome a cultural environment in which their work is likely to become passé even faster than it does now. Perhaps the conflicts between the ancients and the moderns in literary study will not be entirely irreconcilable. Or at least the ancients won't be banished entirely. Probably the status of both literature and literary study will persist for a while in its presently unsettled condition. The one thing I certainly do not see happening is some sort of "reform" of the currently muddled situation that leaves everyone who has contributed to the creation of the muddle very satisfied. The powers that be in the university hierarchy are likely to close the shutters on academic literary study before that happens.
I feel confident in asserting that no one who ventures to read America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic has ever read a book quite like it. Of course, this could just as easily be said of a uniquely bad book as of a uniquely good one, but in fact this book is much closer to the latter than the former. It could stake a fair claim to being the most self-reflexive novel ever written, but arguably it also evades the charge commonly made against metafiction that it is too preoccupied with "playing games" by enlisting the strategies of metafiction to dramatize ideas that could hardly be more weighty.
Perhaps calling the devices invoked by author Phillip Freedenberg (in collaboration with the illustrator Jeff Walton) simply "strategies" belies how radical they often are: The animating conceit of the novel is that its two protagonists--"Phillip Freedenberg" and "Jeff Walton"--are composing a novel--America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic--into which they themselves retreat as a way of escaping the tyrannical conditions that have overtaken America and find their way to the "unified field" that is a utopia of liberated creativity. This journey is framed as the story of the novel's inspiration, ongoing creation, and ultimate publication with--wait for it--Corona Samizdat Press. "Phillip" writes the novel after he is prompted to order--also wait for it--Rich Harsch's The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas and while he waits for it to arrive. (Slow mail from Slovenia.) Part of the quest for the unified field will find Phillip and Jeff tracking their way through the text--through the sentences, made materially visible--of Eddie Vegas, although first they have to make their way to it after wandering through the words of every other story ever told.
Given this outrageously inverted premise--the novel is literally about itself--it almost seems superfluous to note the other, more recognizable metafictional flourishes, although there are plenty of these. The text of the novel is not merely supplemented by Walton's evocative illustrations but also comes to us in changing fonts and multifarious arrangements, reminiscent of Raymond Federman or Mark Danielewski. Phillip and Jeff frequently confer about the novel as they are creating it, making us hyperaware of the artifice supporting the book we are reading--indeed, the book is artifice all the way down. The narrator (mostly Phillip, although occasionally other characters are allowed to take over to tell us a story) is not at all circumspect in concealing the artifice of the novel's own language, either: much of it is taken up with faux-philosophical and quasi-scientific jargon strung together in chains that seem to make surface sense yet soon enough reveal themselves to be something close to gibberish (often very funny gibberish, however).
But the formal and stylistic antics are related to the novel's "content" in a way that goes beyond simply its unrelieved self-reflexivity. Phillip and Jeff are engaged in an exercise of unfettered imagination as a way of resisting the increasing tyranny of the American government--the novel seems clearly enough to extrapolate from the depredations of the Trump presidency--which has increased its surveillance of American citizens to the point of actually intruding on their cognitive processes to induce a state of blissful narcoticization. A complete "consciousness replacement" is offered so that the burdens of real life might be removed entirely. This is the next step beyond what is already available through the "NeuroFORM Screen Sync 6 face screen," which diverts attention and occupies everyone's time with trivialities so they remain compliant to the wishes of President RALPH and his administration, a conceit which takes the threat to human awareness posed by digital technology to its logical extreme. Phillip and Jeff have been targeted as enemies of the administration through their unauthorized activities with language, and are actively pursued after they begin writing America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots, accused by a government agent of being "antagonistic, subversive agents, conspiring and colluding to perform an illegal word manufacturing program identified as an illegal book writing program."
The "Cult of the Cactus Boots" itself represents both the vehicle for remaining resistance to President RALPH and, once the twin protagonists have completed their quest and been successfully initiated into the cult (along with Rick Harsch), its fulfillment in an alternative state of being in which human beings seek "the enigmatic, eternal creativity." As might be expected, the final arrival at the threshold of the unified field promised through the precepts of the cult is somewhat anticlimactic, the main point being the "creativity" employed in getting there. But while the invention on display in America and the Cactus Boots is indeed manifest, but the iterations and reiterations of the canons of the cactus boots cult eventually become wearing, especially given the novel's considerable length and discursive structure. That the significance of "cactus boots" and "unified field" is mostly rhetorical without much actual substance is not really an obstacle to enjoying the immoderate formal machinations as well as the humor that is derived from them (We might think of these occluded images as verbal MacGuffins in the novel's narrative strategy.) There are times, however, when the humor is drawn out enough that is starts to seem labored.
America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots could be classified as a work practicing the "art of excess" (as elucidated by the critic and literary scholar Tom LeClair in his book of that name), so that the excessiveness of some of its rhetorical turns might seem to be an intrinsic feature of this work. What should be the limits to the excessiveness of an approach deliberately intended to be excessive? At what point does a literary device or verbal performance wear out its welcome, ceasing to be an effective strategy for eliciting laughter or provoking delight and instead becoming a slog, even an excuse for skipping over and ahead? In Cactus Boots, for example, we are offered an initially very funny travesty of the "extreme sports" contest, in the form of "extreme competitive ironing." The goal of the championship match is to iron a series of designated items ("one Peter Pan Blouse," "one Kevin & Howlin Irish Wool Tweed Blazer," etc.), but interposed between the competitor and the successful completion of ironing is a bizarre and byzantine set of limitations and requirements (increasingly byzantine from match to match) the competitor must overcome to be declared champion. At first the preposterous "rules" directing the participants to sing a pair of pop songs while wearing a contraption that houses "eight free-roaming Rabidosa rabida wolf spiders" or begin a competition "positioned standing on top of the center car of the Japan Railway Company SCMaglev magnetic levitation train" are hilariously ludicrous, but during six consecutive recitations of such rules, the humor becomes more difficult to generate.
Does this mean that I would prefer that Freedenberg and Walton had exercised more editorial discretion in settling on the final form of their massive opus? Not necessarily. If a writer is going to embrace excess for its own sake as an aesthetic principle, perhaps better just to go for it. But some readers no doubt will balk not just at this sort of excess, but also the novel's surface discontinuities, its repetitions and its accumulated oddities (for a while Phillip and Jeff carry around a "Rick Harsch homunculus," who is ultimately united with the full-sized Rich Harsch), so that the audience for America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic is likely to be confined to those who (like yours truly (and perhaps most of the readers of this review?)) havean ingrained curiosity about emergent varieties of adventurous fiction. I don't know whether Phillip Freedenberg and Jeff Walton would find that prospect disappointing, but certainly their book is not designed for the preferences of most casual readers.
But finally America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots is not just an outrageously unconventional novel concerned with its own coming-into-being, nor a speculative narrative projecting a future society of total surveillance, although it is both of these things. It also seeks to be a story of spiritual renewal, even of utopian transcendence. Whether it plausibly succeeds in the latter goal might, perhaps, be debated (I think not, although I'm not sure how seriously the effort is intended), but we don't have to accept the message that a commitment to "non-dominant text structures" will give us access to "a new world and a new cosmos" to think that the authors' commitment to this particular non-dominant text has provided us a legitimately new kind of experience through the sheer force of invention. Taken individually, all of the devices employed by Freedenberg and Walton have a precedent in previous works of innovative fiction, but this novel orchestrates their use in an inspired performance of a kind undreamt-of in mainstream literary fiction.
In my previous commentary on Claire Dederer's Monsters, I did not cite the way Dederer, in two later chapters of her book, includes several women as putative "monsters" whose actions might need to be considered when placing value on the work. In one chapter, she makes a curious extended comparison between Valerie Solanis and Sylvia Plath, both of whom are said to be guilty of violence (although Plath's is the violence of her suicide), but the main source of disquiet for Dederer in contemplating questionable behavior by women is in what she characterizes as offenses against motherhood, her two primary examples being Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell.
Lessing is scrutinized for being willing to abandon two of her children (she left them behind with her ex-husband when she moved to London from Africa), while Mitchell is included because she gave up a child for adoption, allegedly to pursue her career. Dederer doesn't exactly propose that this is "monstrous behavior" comparable to the sexual abuse and child molestation of the male artists she surveys, but it is quite clear that she is bothered by the dereliction of duty by these artists, even though she knows the social expectations placed on women in their situation manifest a double standard and that it's society itself that forces women into these painful choices. She knows that committing oneself to one's art necessarily entails making such choices. Still: "When I think of Joni Mitchell, I think of her lost daughter," Dederer writes. "When I think of Doris Lessing, I think of her abandoned children."
Dederer's inclusion of these women artists has the feel of a perfunctory gesture, as if writing a whole book that only examines the problematic behavior of male artists would seem disproportionate. But that in choosing the artists to examine she would select these women who were willing to forsake their children seems telling enough. Surely there are women artists who exemplify truly questionable character more than Lessing and Mitchell. Jean Rhys seems to have been a much more unsavory figure than Doris Lessing would ever be, and in the echelons of bad behavior among women rock stars, Mitchell must rank pretty low. The implication seems to be that deliberately neglecting the duties of motherhood is the most monstrous act a woman might commit, if not directly by Dederer herself then through the apparent assumption that many readers would find motherly neglect a shockingly unnatural thing to do.
Should an artist have greater obligations to family or to her art? Should she have to make this decision? Lessing, after all, didn't really abandon her children to the harsh winds of fate. She left them with their father. Mitchell had the option of putting her daughter up for adoption, through which she by most measures seems to have been give a perfectly comfortable life (and never mind that Mitchell has said she took this action because she was nearly destitute, not to serve her career). Were these results sufficient for us to conclude that these women's decisions to pursue their art are justified, since if they had not made them we might not have Lessing's subsequent fiction or Mitchell's music (or at least only a substantially altered version of them)? Further, is there any truly analogous choice demanded of male artists? We might deplore actions taken by male artists, past and present, that seem disrespectful to family and negligent of family responsibilities, but do we therefore wish that their art had reached us in a similarly diminished form so we can say they acted right?
"Mother" is freighted with so many cultural expectations and entails so many presumed responsibilities that perceived violations of its imperatives are nearly unforgivable. This is of course not the only cultural norm that places an inequitable burden on women, but for women artists none may pose a greater obstacle to full artistic autonomy than this one, as is demonstrated by the very emphasis Dederer gives it in her book. Elsewhere Dederer laments that the concept of artistic "genius" seems to be reserved for certain artists who are/have been granted something like an exemption from blame for their real-life flaws and limitations. Women ought to be given the same opportunities to be geniuses as men, but does Doris Lessing get this chance if her actions as an absent mother are still questioned? Will the assumption that women have a natural attribute (the instinct to "nurture") that simply can't be abrogated always interfere with the appreciation of women's art?
"Artistic autonomy" is valuable, of course, only if you think art itself has a value that makes risking moral disapproval for disregarding expectations of proper conduct worth the risk. You must believe that the art created is at least equal in value to the ethical principle you're violating, even if you agree that the principle is valid. The sort of transgression committed by Lessing and Mitchell surely is not the kind of ethical breach Dederer surveys among the male artists she includes in her book--rape, child abuse, other forms of violence--but to defy cultural norms as they did is an act of courage, unlike the unambiguously contemptible actions imputed to the men. Arguably they regarded the pursuit of artistic expression as just as indispensable to human fulfillment (and not just their own) as the other "natural" impulse they were ostensibly ignoring. Like the other geniuses, their strongest impulse was to the creativity and imagination embodied in their art. Do we think this was more blameworthy because they were women?
Claire Dederer's Monsters might seem to be an attempt to sort out the issues involved in the now resurgent debate about the relationship between an artist's behavior in "real life" and the art he/she creates, between biography and aesthetic achievement, but what turns out to be Dederer's actual subject is implicit in the book's title. She is not interested in the questions that arise when we wonder how the artist's life might clarify the art, but in the bad behavior of notorious artists (in the essay that is the ultimate source of Dederer's book she more specifically identifies "monstrous men" as her ultimate concern) and the dilemma this creates for a "fan" of any such artist. Dederer seeks to write an "autobiography of the audience," with herself and her own fandom as a stand-in.
Dederer gives particular emphasis to the controversies enveloping the careers of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, two filmmakers whose work has been important to her in the past. (Dederer was at one time a film critic.) In each case, she finds that the sexual offenses of which both men have been accused inevitably affect the way she now responds to their films, although in neither case do they entirely overshadow the purely artistic qualities the films still possess. For Dederer, the work of Polanski and Allen does not exactly lose its artistic credibility because of the filmmakers' misdeeds, but it does lose the "love" that Dederer once had for it. While surely the value placed on all of the artistic expressions Claire Dederer discusses in her book (films, visual art, music, literary works) arises also from defensible critical standards, the appeal to "art love" and the priority she gives to our emotional responses to art do indeed evoke the attitude toward art expressed by modern fan culture.
Dederer does venture outside her own personal relationship to art to look directly at fan culture in its response to the transgressions of J,K. Rowling and Michael Jackson (although she is also a fan of the latter). With Rowling, of course, the alleged wrongdoing comes not from abusive actions she has committed but from her exercise of speech--speech that has been judged to be transphobic. Dederer expresses sympathy for those of Rowling's readers whose love of her books have been marred by what they believe is a betrayal of what they took the books to be saying to them, but her analysis of the situation is really quite attenuated. She does not consider whether Rowling's words really are transphobic, whether the Harry Potter books or the films adapted from those books are actually marked by some sort of hostility or prejudice toward transgender people, or why Rowling's later publicly stated opinions are at all relevant to the aesthetic experience of those works. Indeed, the source of disappointment among Rowling's fans seems to be that the Harry Potter books are an inspiration to those who feel shunned or excluded, so that further discussion of these questions could presumably illuminate more fully the valid (or invalid) connections that can be made between an artist's public utterances and that artist's work.
If we are entitled to come to our own interpretation of a work of art without deference to the artist's perspective (his/her "intention"), then it is at the least unclear why the artist's unwelcome views on other matters should be given any additional weight, either. If one's "love" of the artwork must be extended to an unconditional acceptance of everything the artist might do or say, then that love is grounded on a shaky foundation. Dederer throughout the book maintains that responses to art are legitimately emotional, but if love of a particular artwork can't withstand the encounter with extrinsic realities such as the artist's expression of opinion, then emotion itself has prevailed over appreciation of those qualities that make the work artistically compelling. Ultimately the whole approach to art exemplified in Monsters focuses on interpretation, the audience's way of emotionally processing and placing value on the work, rather than the actual experience of an artistic creation, during which, if the experience is genuinely attentive, issues relating to the artist's opinions or behaviors in real life play no role.
Dederer would assert, of course, that these non-artistic factors can't help but intrude on aesthetic experience, especially if the artist is a "monster." This is what makes it a "dilemma." But such an intrusion doesn't just happen, unbidden. We allow it to happen. Even want it to. We are in the middle of a cultural phase in which morality takes priority over aesthetics, so that our esteem for the work must be accompanied by esteem for the life. Not only is the artist's interpretation of the work irrelevant, but the artist must be held accountable to our own interpretation: the "J.K. Rowling" who wrote Harry Potter must not be the sort of person who would make questionable remarks about transgendered people; the "Woody Allen" who created all those nebbishy characters portrayed by Allen himself must in fact be in real life a nebbish who could never be regarded as a sexual predator. It's a curious inversion of the proposition proffered by formalist critics that the artist's life be held separate from the art so that we can perceive the latter clearly. Now we must merge the artist and the art into a seamless whole.
Dederer certainly does question the validity of this separation (citing skeptically the male friends and critics who advised her she must approach Allen's films only for "the aesthetics"), although she does not take the reversal of the biographical fallacy quite so far. For the most part, her book is an attempt to think through the implications of the increased attention to the moral failings of prominent artists, not to erase all distinctions between biography and artistic performance. She is alert to the moral ambiguity in some cases and in others (Polanski) concludes that we must simply live with the tension between great art and compromised artist. The best chapter in the book "The Anti-Monster," in fact challenges the facile moralism that would condemn Vladimir Nabokov simply for writing Lolita, with its truly monstrous protagonist, as if Nabokov is projecting his own attitudes in his portrayal of Humbert Humbert. Dederer's scrupulous analysis persuasively demonstrates that in Lolita Nabokov creates a monstrous character, but this does not mean he does so as an endorsement of Humbert's attitudes and behavior. An attentive reading of Lolita reveals that the story of Lolita is the story of a young girl's devastation, actually not by a monster but by an otherwise unremarkable man (a "run of the mill child abuser") giving in to his worst impulses while concocting elaborate justifications.
Nabokov may indeed have descended into his own inner darkness to conceive a character such as Humbert Humbert, but ultimately all artists must have access to this sort of darkness or their art will be incomplete, naïve about human errancy. By the end of her book, Dederer has concluded that we are all in our way monstrous (she cites her own flawed behavior), in a way perhaps like Humbert Humbert in our capacity to wreck the potential inherent in our youthful selves. She suggests that, just as we can extend a kind of empathetic understanding to loved ones who have transgressed without forgetting the transgression, we should extend the same kind of understanding to favored artists and their faults. I myself don't really think this analogy between "art love" and love of people is altogether convincing--they seem to me completely different things, if the former is even real--but Dederer's solution to the problem that she thinks has become more urgent for her may be the only judicious one to be found.
Dederer's examination of this problem doesn't really try to resolve any properly "philosophical" issues underlying it. She mostly sticks to reflection on the emotional turbulence audiences experience trying to reconcile their attachment to the art object with their disgust at the behavior of the artist. In another recently published book, Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies, Erich Hatala Matthes explicitly does attempt to sort through the concerns about "immoral artists" from a philosophical perspective. Matthes, a moral philosopher who teaches at Wellesley College, is interested both in the moral qualities of art itself and in the implications of immoral behavior by artists, as well as whether "cancellation" is an appropriate response to such behavior. Matthes focuses more or less exclusively on the same recent controversies on which Dederer concentrates, without much if any reference to questions about the moral behavior of artists in the more distant artistic/literary past, or to any previous lines of literary or philosophical inquiry into the relationship between art and artist.
In his consideration of the proposition that an artist's immoral behavior diminishes the aesthetic value of the work, Matthes leans on the examples of r & b musician R. Kelley and Woody Allen, specifically in Manhattan. (To judge by these two books, Allen seems to be ground zero in the discourse about fallen artists, even though the relevant charges against him go back thirty years now.) Matthes's determination that a song by Kelley that seems to celebrate sexual exploitation is confirmed in its immorality by Kelley's history of sexual exploitation seems like an obvious conclusion few would dispute. On the other hand, his further contention that Allen's relationship with Soon-Yi Previn retroactively imports an "aesthetic flaw" into Manhattan because his actions give us "reasons not to respond to the work in the prescribed way " seems to me utterly preposterous. Putting aside whether Allen's conduct with Soon-Yi was in fact immoral (Soon-Yi herself, a college student at the time, has never suggested that it was), the notion that Manhattan
"prescribes" that we accept the film's portrayal of 40-something Isaac's involvement with the 17 year-old Tracy as unproblematic is absurd. The film prescribes nothing. It interjects an element of moral ambiguity into the conventional narrative progression of the romantic comedy, but we are free to resolve that ambiguity according to our own moral sensibility. Plenty of people find the central relationship compelling, while others do balk at its moral ramifications. The film doesn't require either of these responses, and to say that it does is at the very least a myopic interpretation.
Although Matthes thus does believe that we can reject the work of immoral artists both on moral and aesthetic grounds--he makes no claim that all artist immorality leads to the latter, however, nor does he think that continuing to patronize an artist's work necessarily makes one "complicit" with the artist's behavior--he doesn't feel that cancellation of individual artists is the most appropriate action to take. It won't really solve the problem, he argues, and the potential for overreach is too great. Instead, the institutions responsible for producing and curating art works should be held more responsible for creating and enforcing standards of behavior. According to Matthes, such action will minimize the number of egregious cases that now provoke cancellation.
This might seem like a reasonable proposal, but, speaking for myself, I fear such a prospect more than the occasional cancellation of this or that artist. To invest these "institutions" (publishers, museums, other arts organizations) with the ability to police the activities of artists is an invitation to interference with artistic freedom, outright censorship and the establishment of a moral autocracy in the arts. Artists are notoriously unreliable as exemplars of moral propriety. If an artist crosses a line into the clearly forbidden, put him in jail. If he merely acts in way that you deplore, stop being a part of his audience, but don't start imposing rules for correct artist behavior. Someday you could be the one accused of some alleged dereliction and banished into the void.
Corona/Samizdat is a (more or less) one-man non-profit literary press founded and operated by the American expatriate writer, Rick Harsch. Physically located in Izola, Slovenia, the press publishes both new unconventional, formally adventurous fiction and out-of-print works by neglected writers--in the press's own formulation, "old works dismissed too early" (website here). This issue is dedicated to recent releases from Corona, although the first review is of a novel by Harsch himself, which at one point was going to be available on Corona but was subsequently picked up by Zerogram Press, another publisher of nonmainstream fiction (and operated by Jim Gauer, author of Novel Explosives.
Although Corona has existed only since 2020, it has already published a significant number of books, so of course the selection here is just that, a selection. I hope to include reviews of other Corona releases in subsequent issues of Unbeaten Paths.
One Tongue, Many Way
Rick Harsch's The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is a large-scale, digressive novel that is also quite formally meticulous. It could be called a historical saga, and it has some of the more leisurely pace we might expect of such a narrative, although the novel doesn't allow us to settle in for an "immersive" reading, since it doesn't develop through the forward momentum of a linear story. Still, once we grasp that the various characters are part of a unified narrative, being related to us in a disunified manner, the novel still has the appeal of a family saga that reflects the movement of history, although in this case that movement probably can't be called "progress".
But if Eddie Vegas is in part a historical novel, it is of the sort closer to Pynchon's V or Coover's The Public Burning, not a realistic narrative that attempts first of all to invoke "what it was like" at some point in history. to "recreate" history. Instead it defamiliarizes and dislocates the historical, making it sufficiently strange that we might recognize it as essentially alien territory rather than simply reflecting a fixed and already known order. In the work of these writers, history becomes a fictional world that is itself "real," not the attempted facsimile--with a few added flourishes of fancy--of the real world as it was once. Paradoxically, we wind up learning a great deal about history from such fiction--its carefully concealed secrets, not its acknowledged facts--even though achieving accuracy of historical detail is not an essential goal, as it seems to be in much conventional historical fiction,
The novel tells the multigenerational story of the Gravel family--although the original scion of the family is an early 19th century "mountain man" and fur trapper, Hector Robitaille, and the title character is also a Gravel, who has changed his name for reasons the novel eventually gets to. In the novel's initial chapters we meet Eddie Vegas (real name, Tom Gravel) and his son, Donnie. Soon enough, we are returned to the first episode in the family chronicle, Hector's encounter with a bear. It takes a while for the story focused on Donnie, who becomes friendly with a wealthy young man named Drake, to clarify its direction, but the story of Hector being mauled by the bear ("Old Ephraim"), surviving the attack, and crawling his way back to civilization (literally) compels attention on its own, simultaneously a riveting adventure narrative and a hilarious sendup of the American frontier ethos. This sets the tone for the rest of the novel, which often renders scenes of brutality and horror in a manner that is also caustically funny.
As we move back and forth from the exploits of Donnie and Drake to the development of the family line initiated by Hector and a Native American woman after he has recovered from his traumatic odyssey in the woods, both the structural and the thematic connections become more apparent, although the parallels and echoes that emerge are subtle and suggestive rather than insistent (Hector making his way through the wilds of the western American mountains vs. the story of Drake's father traversing the jungles of Vietnam, the father himself, a corrupt security specialist paired with Fitzpacker, the lawless frontier lawman and gold hunter who menaces both Hector and the first Tom Gravel). Card playing and gambling pervade the novel (Donnie and Drake meet during a game of poker), and it seems likely that the deck of cards plays a role in the the arrangement and development of episodes (the author, who makes appearances throughout the novel, dealing the cards). The author's presence, through the third-person narrator attempting to relate this unwieldy narrative, is also palpable in the novel's unconstrained, idiosyncratic language.
Perhaps what holds together the various episodes of the narrative most firmly is the continuity of its setting in the intermountain region of the western United States, especially Nevada but also including parts of California, Oregon, and Idaho. This is the general area in which we find Hector Robitaille at the commencement of the family saga, and the novel concludes with the last Tom Gravel and Donnie fleeing from Las Vegas through Death Valley. Throughout the novel the region is implacably present, the characters attempting to accommodate themselves to its extremes of topography and climate, when they aren't participating in the depletion of its resources. The latter is most directly evoked in the episodes taking place during the Gold Rush, including one depicting the mining of a canyon in Nevada, in which Fitzpacker and the first Tom Gravel have a showdown of sorts. Fitzpacker is surely the precursor to those interests that will later exploit the West for its minerals and other natural assets, the exploitation of nature having an even more horrific culmination in the development of the atomic bomb (with which a later Gravel is involved). The Gravel story's culminating scenes in Las Vegas show us the final tawdry embodiment of the values and attitudes underlying the "settlement" of the West: the casual corruption, the lurking violence, the aimless sprawl.
There are portions of the novel that break away from the predominant regional setting, episodes that introduce us to and track the activities of Donnie and Drake and Donnie's father. (Donnie knows himself as Donnie Garvin, as his father, who is in fact the last Tom Gravel, had changed his named to Garvin after a term spent in prison as a younger man.) Donnie and Drake are initially presented to us as rather aimless young men, but Drake, whose father we learn is the shady owner of Blackguard, a private security company currently involved in the Iraq War, invites Donnie to accompany him on a trip to Belgium, where the two of them more or less continue their aimless ways, but also meet a barkeeper named Setif. They refer to her by the derogatory name "Picasso Tits," but eventually both young men fall in love with Setif. Their idyll in Belgium ends when Drake learns that both of his parents have been assassinated, and he and Donnie fly to Las Vegas (without Setif, who nevertheless joins them later).
Donnie has become estranged from his father, who has managed to establish himself as, of all things, a creative writing professor, married to a celebrity poet whom Tom Garvin/Gravel/Eddie Vegas has come to despise. This situation allows Harsch to interject into the novel some fairly broad academic satire--Tom gets into some trouble, abetted by the wife, for reputed acts of insensitivity toward his students--before Gravel leaves for Las Vegas in search of his son, who he has learned is there with Drake. While The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas might loosely be called satirical, the episodes devoted to the politics and personalities of academe seem more narrowly targeted (no doubt reflecting Harsch's time at the Iowa Writer's Workshop) than the mordantly dark humor of the rest of the novel. Among other thinks, it makes Gravel's wife (named "Languideia") a more cartoonish figure--we see little of her other than through Gravel's unfavorable ruminations about her--than Setif, who turns out to be one of the novel's most self-possessed characters and wisely frees herself from entanglement in Drake and Donnie's increasingly turbid affairs by story's end.
The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas has appeal as a demythologized comedy of American degradation, but ultimately this is a novel that makes its greatest impression through its verbal virtuosity. Harsch is a stylist, although in Eddie Vegas, it is a style based in verbal invention rather than through shapely sentences or figurative decoration. Sometimes it is as if Harsch's sentences can't be contained:
How horrible to report the return of Hector to the likely mortambulatories of the knuckle walker, a re-descent of a man who, upon determining to descend straight to the river he knew was there and would both nourish hum and lead him to westward succor, stepped north at too brisk a pace, gaining a false sense of strength of mine as well as speed, moving from step to stride to lope to leap to running loping leap from mound to rock to mound to rock to root to stone to mound to depression up root over ditch to mound, all in a a dementium of glee as if the river were but a ghostflight off and not perhaps two dozen miles. . . .
If at times the neologisms and runaway syntax threaten to overwhelm sense, the novel's prose has the effect of carrying the reader along on a dynamic current of language for which literal sense is less important than a certain breathless rhythm (although the story gets told, nevertheless). The reader's immersion in language is further sustained by the frequent use of long lists that conspicuously call attention to the artifice of the novel's narration, also further reinforcing its essentially carnivalesque comic vision (reviews refer to these lists as "Rabelaisian," but Gilbert Sorrentino seems to me a more immediate inspiration).
Perhaps we might find a convergence between Harsch's accentuation of language as medium and the historical material with which he is working in Eddie Vegas in the vernacular argot spoken by the frontier characters--"Drop the char erall drop ya raht thar, ya English fartpig mother of devilswine!"--which includes an Indian character who is able to communicate with a white man like Hector Robitaille in a polyglot Native/English/French/Spanish he has ingeniously put together from various encounters with the white interlopers: "Moi no belle sauvage, pero damn real grande. One tongue, many way. Ass felt. Beaverspelt," Such strategies mark The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas as a novel of farcical fantasy and ironic invention that nevertheless speaks something that seems like the truth about America.
It seems fair to say both that book publishers are increasingly employing “sensitivity readers” in the editing process they use and that there is an equally growing backlash against this practice. The motives for its use seem fairly obvious: to avoid giving undue offense—or, in the more currently preferred formulation, to avoid “doing harm”—to any of the various cultural groups whose claims to accurate representation have become more assertive. The reason for the backlash is perhaps equally obvious, at least on the part of writers, some of whom feel that the desire to minimize harm has been pursued with undue zeal, ultimately encroaching on their artistic freedom or their speech rights.
This backlash has recently intensified as well among readers, with a series of high-profile examples of the application of sensitivity reading to the work of “classic” authors such as Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and P.G. Wodehouse. The response to what critics have called the “bowdlerization” of these works has generally been negative, with few commentators seemingly willing to defend such outright revisions of already-existing texts, perhaps because their authors are no longer around to give their consent to them. (Or perhaps the most fervent believers in the eradication of “harm” in literary works haven’t yet fully prepared the case for sanitizing the literary past.) One writer, Imogen West-Knights (who does not seem a zealot), has, however offered a qualified defense of sensitivity reading in the Dahl and Wodehouse controversies, arguing that at least voluntary submission to sensitivity readers can be a responsible act of seeking “accuracy” in a work of fiction.
Even if the writer has no wish to be insensitive to reigning social principles on matters of race, gender, or sexual preference, it remains unclear why the job of prompting the writer to be mindful of these principles is not left to the editor, who presumably wants to safeguard the interests of the writer and the publisher for whom both editor and writer are working. The rise of the sensitivity reader seems to imply a lack of confidence in editors, or perhaps this suggests that ultimately the practice isn’t really about improving the work of writers at all but is a mere cosmetic being applied to keep the publisher’s appearance up. But if the writer and editor working together can’t be relied on to maintain the integrity of the writer’s artistic conception as well as avoid giving gratuitous offense, what’s the point of the editorial process if you then try to cover up supposed imperfections with ersatz words and phrases that only call attention to their mostly feeble artifice?
In another recent article on the controversy, one experienced sensitivity reader says that “Authors and editors can. . .choose to accept her suggestions and implement changes, ignore them, or ask to discuss them further.” One wonders, however, if all readers and publishers are as flexible as this suggests. Surely the pressure on a writer to heed the sensitivity reader must be considerable, and while only a few writers have publicly complained about the process, others have presumably kept quiet for fear of alienating their publisher or causing unwanted controversy. At some point, a well-known and respected writer is going to run afoul of the sensitivity reading machinery and, unafraid of courting controversy, will call it out as the antagonist of artistic expression it can’t avoid becoming, whether explicitly if the writer is forced to submit to the machinery (which will happen, if it hasn’t already), or implicitly through intimidation (which surely has already happened).
Probably the most ominous threat sensitivity reading poses is that we will see continued efforts to deface already published literary works, extending perhaps not just to popular canonical works but to the previous work of still-living writers. No doubt many of these writers would not agree to such retroactive expurgation, but some might, and then the precedent has been set for regarding writers’ work as infinitely malleable—all fiction as fan fiction, except that the purpose is not to imaginatively extend the work beyond the boundaries of the text but to seize control of the text and make it conform to socially accepted standards. Of course this would be the negation of literature as art, the discreet creation of an individual artistic sensibility, but artistic sensibility seems to be regarded as the enemy at the moment by those trying to protect us from its unsupervised expression.
I have no doubt that the bowdlerization exemplified in the Roald Dahl case will be attempted with other writers from the literary past, writers who won’t necessarily exhibit quite the same problematic attitudes seemingly borne by Dahl but whose work will nevertheless be judged questionable (with his unrestrained comic vision, Dickens will be an inevitable target). There will be few writers whose “sensitivity” won’t be found lacking in some way, although there are certainly also writers whose insensitivity can’t be rationalized or ignored. If the preponderance of readers eventually find the racism and sexism of Ian Fleming to be intolerable, his books will no longer be read. But this is the way a writer’s work ought to fall into disfavor: through the collective judgment exercised by actual readers, not a mandate issuing from a process that usurps the authority of that judgment.
The outrage attending the publication of Dahl’s censored work may temporarily dampen the enthusiasm of the book business for outright redactions of published work, but sensitivity reading already seems an entrenched practice, and unless and until the literary moralizers begin to lose their hold on literary culture, it will probably remain in force for current and aspiring writers. Perhaps more writers will rebel and more readers will begin to resent the inherent condescension of the practice. If not, we will have conceded that artistic freedom must not be allowed to exceed the bounds of what the powers that be decide is right and proper.
Readers casually coming upon the title of Michael W. Clune's book, A Defense of Judgment (2021), might understandably assume that it will make a case for the legitimacy of evaluation in literary criticism, the process of weighing the artistic value of a literary work. However, this title proves to be misleading in more than one way: the book has little to say about how a critic might arrive at a valid judgment, and, in the end, the method that Clune advocates and ultimately models for us is not actually judgment at all.
Clune is interested in restoring what he calls judgment to a respectable place in academic literary study, although less as a strategy for the academic critic to use than as a foundation for a revived mission of "academic education" as the justification of literary study as a discipline. Clune wants literature professors to abandon their concession to the irremediable subjectivity of judgment as valuation and freely acknowledge that some literary works (works of art in general) are better than others, more worthy of students' attention. This would entail giving up on the dogmatic insistence on equality as the supreme value of an enlightened profession and admitting that academic expertise exists and should give the views of putative experts some additional weight. Literature professors, according to Clune, should be willing to enlist their expertise in an effort to teach their students how to appreciate the distinctive value of literature,
Clune's critique of the problem academic literary study has created for itself through the demotion of "literature itself" to a secondary status (secondary to theory, historical context, or cultural politics) is astute, and seems to me almost certainly correct. To avow that all responses to works of literature are equally valid is to deny the very basis on which literary study entered the academy in the first place--if the professors in this "field" have no special standing by which their views on it carry extra weight, then what's the purpose of the field and why specialize in it? Notwithstanding all of the appeals to theoretical or cultural knowledge to which literary academics have retreated while dispensing with aesthetic analysis or the explication of ideas (to cite Clune's favored object of study), the floundering around with one new approach after another over the last 40 years of academic literary study has surely left the discipline vulnerable to the kinds of depredations inflicted on it recently--from defunding to elimination of programs to attacks on its supposed left-wing biases--such that its future is now legitimately in question. Taking stock of the purpose of literary study is certainly in order.
The solution to these problems that Clune has in mind, which he illustrates in the second half of the book, might return literary instruction back to literature, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't actually involve judgment in any noticeable way. Clune offers readings of works by Emily Dickinson, Thomas Bernhard, and Gwendolyn Brooks, apparently seeking in all of these cases the literary ideas they disclose--ideas that, we are to infer, can be discovered only through the kind of close scrutiny exemplified by Clune's analysis. The interpretations that emerge from this analysis are interesting and perceptive--Clune's contention that Bernhard's Woodcutters both accepts the "postmodern" critique of art as compromised by social relations and evades it by shedding the "social" altogether is particularly provocative--but they are interpretations. The only form of judgment at work is the initial judgment that this text is worth your attention, and the focus is almost exclusively on ferreting out the theme, the idea that Clune wants to make available to examination. If these readings are to contribute to aesthetic education, they would do so without much reference to the aesthetic as an existing property of literary works.
I am not suggesting that Clune ought to be advocating the use of the classroom as a space in which to pronounce literary judgments. I am perfectly content with interpretation as a classroom method of teaching literature, but at the least Clune's invocation of it makes these concluding chapters seem anticlimactic, the application of what turns out to be a familiar strategy in a book that initially promises a radical reorientation of a discipline desperately in need of occupational resuscitation. If Clune's method was adopted (which doesn't seem that likely), at least it would have the virtue of returning ostensible teachers of literature to literary qualities as the focus of instruction, but I don't see much evidence that today's cadre of literature professors has much interest in such a restoration. However, a reluctance to use the classroom as an opportunity to reinforce a particular judgment of quality in a literary work--lets all gather round and appreciate this text--is not inherently misguided.
Making judgments about quality is of course considered one of the appropriate goals of book reviewing, but even here, judgment is often applied. . .injudiciously. Most reviews offer value judgments, but the majority of them are blandly affirmative, as if the mere act of writing a novel or collecting a set of short stories is in itself a praiseworthy act, the substantive artistic achievement of the work notwithstanding. Many render their judgments, positive or negative, without much reference to the relevant qualities of the work that might validate the judgment, while others spend most of the allotted space summarizing, as if merely telling us what happens or identifying the characters should obviously demonstrate that the critic's verdict is justified. I myself spend a good deal of space in a review--most of it--describing the observable features of the work, but examining the formal order of the work, assessing how it is put together, is not the same thing as summary. It seeks to discover the artistry of the work (or the flaws), not reduce it to its most conventional elements.
If A Defense of Judgment does not finally provide a compelling alternative to current practice in academic literary study, it does help to make clear that the original (and still most coherent) justification for the study of literature in the university was rooted in the assumption that some kinds of imaginative writing were more worthwhile than others, and that by contemplating such works students would indeed acquire profound if intangible knowledge not available elsewhere. They would learn how to recognize great works of verbal art. This justification has been dismissed out of hand as incorrigibly elitist by most of those in the current "profession" of literary study. Given current cultural conditions, in the United States, at least, it is hard to see how that original warrant could ever be revived, even though on its current trajectory, the future of literary academe is most likely one that ushers in its demise.
Grievances against critics often stir up debate about the proper role of arts criticism, and, indeed, a recent complaint by an American actor prompted the British critic and editor Lola Seaton to contemplate this question, focusing mostly on book reviewing. In her New Statesman article, Seaton frames the issue as an inquiry into the relationship between critic and author, but her real subject is the critic's own underlying conception of reviewing itself as a literary form.
Seaton offers the critic Adam Mars-Jones as an especially rigorous exponent of the review as a self-sufficient composition. The goal of a review, according to Mars-Jones, is to address a "potential reader" who is "being guided to pleasure or warned against disappointment" although "a reviewer isn’t paid to be right, just to make a case for or against, and to give pleasure either way." In Seaton's words, criticism "is not an unerring ranking system but a form of personal expression, and a good review is not right (or not only right) but convincing, fresh, entertaining, satisfying, perceptive." In my words: according to this view, a reviewer has autonomy in his/her judgment, separate from any consideration of the author of the work, but also can assert an autonomy separate from any ultimate consideration of the work under review, or any particular critical principles that should be applied to it. If the review is "satisfying" as a piece of writing, it has succeeded in the only requirement this notion of criticism imposes.
Seaton suggests that reserving some consideration for the author might temper the potential abuses of this approach to reviewing, but otherwise seems to accept the Mars-Jones position as an accurate accounting of the goals of criticism. She brings in other critics, such as Elizabeth Hardwick, who seem to agree with the Mars-Jones view (although Hardwick is really more concerned that the critic's autonomy result in “the communication of the delight and importance of books, ideas, culture itself”), and she quotes approvingly James Wolcott's characterization of reviews at their best as the source of "thunder and illumination." Ultimately Seaton does seem to side most with Hardwick, suggesting that the author and the critic should be a "mutually advantageous collaboration," the author and critic "reciprocally at work at shaping taste."
I am myself unsympathetic both to the idea that the critic's job is "shaping taste" and to the underlying assumption that the critic's overriding task is to "guide towards pleasure and to provide it," to act on the one hand as a judge and on the other as a performer. The latter two functions are in conflict with each other, the attempt to combine them often responsible for empty "snark" or overwrought, vacuous praise. But the alternative to a labored liveliness is not to assume the gatekeeper's role, to fancy oneself a high cultural influencer or a guardian of eternal verities. All of these roles are really an attempt to elevate the critic to a position of prominence equivalent to the writer, but I don't see why this is necessary. The writer and the critic have different jobs to do, although they certainly do converge around the literary work the writer has offered. But the writer has indeed offered us something with a claim to being a work of art, a compelling work of nonfiction, or a contribution to some intellectual discipline. At this point, the writer can't really expect to be able to control the responses to the book, and the critic provides (or ought to provide) an especially well-considered response, drawing on that critic's presumed knowledge and experience.
In my view, the critic should be expected not to educate the reader's taste or to engage in rhetorical display but to bring to the literary work his/her fully engaged attention and be able to describe the salient features of the work that careful reading discloses. If the critic's appraisal is to have weight beyond facile judgments that treat works of literature as if they were just another consumer good (albeit of a culturally refined sort), evaluation is actually secondary, even subservient, to the depth of such description. The critic does not owe the author a positive judgment, but does owe both author and reader the application of whatever intelligence and insight that critic can summon in the attempt to more keenly discern the work's fundamental features. A particularly scrupulous exposition of the work's character can itself serve as an implicit assessment of its success or failure, without the addition of a conventional act of judgment at all. To perceive the literary work's formal and stylistic elements clearly is at the same time to recognize its achievement.
Some might regard the kind of critical approach I am advocating as too fussily "academic," but academic criticism has in fact long since abandoned interest in aesthetic evaluation as something that is unavoidably subjective and irredeemably hierarchical. If book reviewing is to be the only remaining source of what was once known as literary criticism, and reviewing is to be regarded more as an exercise in self-expression than a focused contemplation of literature, then for me criticism has essentially ceased to exist. Of course there are critics who defy the current strictures in academic criticism against "formalism," as well as those among reviewers who resist the pressure to act as a judge or a consumer advocate, and offer astute, closely observed literary criticism. It is, however, discouraging that such critics stand out as exceptions to the general practice.
It won't be surprising if I say that I myself identify with these recalcitrant critics who persist in considering the aesthetic standing of the literary work itself to be the object of their attention, not its convenience as a cultural index or as a prompt for the critic's own discursive fancies. I have written the kind of criticism that attempts to explicate what it is like to read a work or an author while also as fully as possible approaching the work on the terms it sets up for itself. This does not entail insisting that all concerns "outside the text" are irrelevant, but it does presume that considering such concerns--cultural, historical, political, biographical--is not the immediate task the critic should perform, as has become the default assumption in most academic criticism, although they inevitably influence the "content" a work of fiction turns to its own purposes through form and style. Reducing a literary work to what it might "say," might "tell us" or "reveal" is not, in my view an act of criticism; no amount of "close reading" devised to arrive at such formulations can make this activity "critical" in any way that is adequate to the allusiveness and indirection inherent in both fiction and poetry that distinguish them from ordinary forms of expository discourse.
Admittedly I have adopted my particular critical strategy in part because I focus so much (not exclusively) on adventurous or experimental fiction, which especially requires, it seems to me, an approach emphasizing description and explication. Although in most cases I do make clear the extent to which I think an "experiment" has succeeded or not, such a judgment is really not very meaningful unless it is accompanied by evidence of careful reading. If I had more interest in covering the contemporary literary scene as a whole (which might possibly have gotten me a larger audience), perhaps I would have developed a style more agreeable to Adam Mars-Jones, but I don't think this would make me a better critic. I might have more book review assignments than I have right now, however.
I have completed a new chapter of my short book, Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction, which appears below. You can also access a pdf version of this chapter here, as well as a web page version here. The previous chapters of the book can be found here:
Sorrentino the Craftsman
Aberration of Starlight
To an extent it is understandable that an inexperienced reader of Gilbert Sorrentino’s fiction might assume that works like Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Mulligan Stew, in rejecting the conventional referentiality of realistic fiction, not only question traditional narrative form but also “craft” as the term has come to be associated with the craft of storytelling in particular. However, while both of these books surely do seem to spotlight their apparent formlessness—Mulligan Stew explicitly announces it in its title—Sorrentino’s ultimate purpose is not to dispense with form in fiction, only the ossified form in which conventional verisimilar narrative was confined. These two books represent his most radical exercises in self-reflexivity, but in undermining the assumptions of narrative transparency in fiction, they substitute structures of language that are just as deliberately crafted as the most “well-made” of conventional stories.
If anything, the disruption in Imaginative Qualities and Mulligan Stew of the presumed aesthetic order of fiction only emphasizes the centrality of both craft and form more emphatically, not because of their absence but because that order is revealed to be nothing but the craftedness of form, that is, not identical with the customary practices of storytelling. This conception of the malleability of fictional form underlies all of Sorrentino’s fiction after Mulligan Stew: each new work seems predicated on the belief that a novel (or, in a few instances, a short story) has no fixed form to the demands of which it must comply, and thus “form” is literally reinvented from work to work. Although readers can certainly disagree about how successful these reinventions turn out to be, that every one of these works is composed with an attention to formal patterns and structures that can only be called rigorous: “craft” may actually evoke a practice that is too routine to adequately describe the care with which Sorrentino assembles his structures.
In no other book, however, does Sorrentino apply the precepts of craft according to something like the conventional understanding of the term as in the immediate follow-up to Mulligan Stew, Aberration of Starlight. While this novel incorporates many of Sorrentino’s signature strategies and devices—lists, questions-and-answers substituting for exposition, a high degree of fragmentation and the inclusion of fashioned documents (in this case mostly letters)—and presents us with overlapping points of view that do not seem to tell a consistent story, the careful reader soon enough can discern that this lack of consistency is actually the ultimate point of the narrative, while the devices are deployed in a very consistent way that binds the discrete versions of the narrative in a tightly wrought structure.
Aberration of Starlight does tell a story, however refracted or contingent on perception, but ultimately it is not really a narrative-driven novel. In fact, it seems more recognizably a novel at all than a work like Mulligan Stew not because it has well-defined characters and shows linear development but because finally it attempts—and succeeds—in evoking, more or less visibly and coherently, a time and a place. (Even more directly and palpably than Steelwork.) While both character and event are subject to distortion and uncertainty, due to the novel’s shifting perspectives, its setting—a summer resort and boardinghouse near the New Jersey shore in the late 1930s—emerges whole and distinct. This is achieved not despite the contingencies of character and the artificial expository devices but through these aesthetic manipulations, through Sorrentino’s formal ingenuity.
The shifts in perspective represent the four residents of the boardinghouse, whose differing perception of essentially the same events over the course of the summer provide the novel with its basic formal structure. Sorrentino does not merely relate his characters’ thinking through conventional psychological realism (“free indirect” narration) but presents the characters both from without (we are introduced to the first character, the boy, Billy, via a carefully described photograph) and through assorted, but ultimately integrated, means, invokes their experience as filtered from within. The expository devices involved are not deployed casually or haphazardly. Indeed, the novel’s structure is strikingly symmetrical: each section is roughly the same length; each contains, in more or less the same order, a brief, objective view of the character, from a neutral narrator’s perspective; an episode rendered in dialogue; a question-and-answer passage; a fantasia of sorts; extended passages devoted to the characters’ memories or direct third-person narration of the character’s current actions.
If the collage-like form we encounter in Aberration of Starlight seems less radical than what we find in Mulligan Stew, it is more strictly applied, although not necessarily more attentively or deliberately. Mulligan Stew may seem like a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends, shards of discourse and interpolated documents, but this is a constructed illusion, the final effect of Sorrentino’s verbal artistry. The greater restriction of formal and rhetorical strategies in Aberration of Starlight perhaps makes the appearance of craft more evident to more casual readers, and in this way the novel could most plausibly be taken not so much as Sorrentino’s effort to rein in his anarchic impulses (which do exist, but are themselves more purposeful than chaotic), but to make some gesture at being more commercially accessible after the relative success and publicity he gained with Mulligan Stew.
That Aberration of Starlight is a blatant stab at commercial appeal is probably belied by the fact that Sorrentino had begun writing it before the publication of Mulligan Stew. (Crystal Vision as well.) And of course it would only be expected that the novel’s publisher (Random House) would attempt to capitalize on Sorrentino’s unexpected recent success through more aggressive marketing and publicity. But Aberration of Starlight does seem, fortuitously timed or not, an effort to reach readers without previous exposure to Sorrentino’s work with a novel employing his alternative methods in a more readily comprehensible way, even in the service of relatively traditional literary goals—the creation of character and setting, the evocation of a fictional world that ultimately seems recognizable as a version of ordinary reality. Readers seeking linear narrative might still balk at the effort, but those amenable to something other than the most conventional sort of plot-driven novel indeed ought to find Aberration of Starlight approachable enough.
Some critics have indeed found the novel rather too approachable, or at least that on the heels of Mulligan Stew it is (or was) a disappointingly restrained exercise, if not exactly conventional in its strategies then venturing to use only the sorts of unorthodox methods Sorrentino had already used in his previous work, methods that, according to one such critic (John Morse) merely suggest the “techniques of modernism” and thus finally “are just as dated as the characters” in the story. Although Aberration of Starlight by no means received uniformly negative reviews, it did not really fulfill hopes that Sorrentino might reach an even wider audience, and the critical response suggested that a significant number of admirers of Mulligan Stew expected Sorrentino not to broaden his appeal by adopting a more conservative manner but to extend the radical formal experiments of Mulligan Stew even more intensively.
Perhaps the critic expressing the greatest disappointment with Aberration of Starlight was Paul West, who in the Washington Post reproved Sorrentino for essentially writing a realist novel, and who further accused him of being “uninventive” and of lacking the “virtuosity” a truly experimental writer should exhibit. Douglas Messerli partially agreed with West’s criticisms, although as an admirer of Sorrentino’s fiction (later a publisher) Messerli ultimately attempts to redeem the novel from “its sense of ironic nostalgia that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren—those doyens of modern narrative theory—might applaud.” (I am myself not convinced that Brooks and Warren would necessarily deplore even Sorrentino’s more audacious narrative experiments, nor that satisfying the exigencies of these critics’ “narrative theory” would be undesirable or inappropriate for a writer like Sorrentino.) “It becomes apparent that what was first perceived as a bittersweet presentation of post-World War II America,” Messerli concludes in his review, “is, in the end, an indictment of the modern novel and the vision inherent in its structures” through Sorrentino’s exaggerations and distortions of these structures even as he seems to be using them.
It is of course only a measure of how thoroughly the formal innovations of Mulligan Stew and Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things had prepared someone like Messerli to anticipate more of the same that he would be almost obliged to find something more radical in Aberration of Starlight that would explain (or explain away) its apparently more modest ambitions. But it seems to me that Messerli (not to mention West) was holding to an overly stringent commitment to literary experimentation of a certain kind—the kind that critics such as Messerli and West would acknowledge—that at best would be difficult for any writer to always satisfy. At worst, such an inherently prescriptive view of the acceptable scope of experimentation in works of literature seems to actually restrict the writer’s creative freedom to pursue fresh approaches to his/her art, even when this effort might seem to be an aesthetic step backward—for the writer such a step might not seem a retrenchment at all but in fact an experiment with an approach that writer has not previously adopted, and therefore quite literally “new.”
None of this is to say that critics were wrong in noting the less emphatic formal daring of Aberration of Starlight, but the relevant question is whether this scaled-back quality should be attributed to a diminished interest in formal innovation (perhaps in favor of exploring more traditional narrative strategies) or is indeed simply an outright commercial gambit, an attempt at channeling Sorrentino’s iconoclastic impulses for a possibly wider audience. (A less charitable view would be to call it “selling out,” a charge Messerli comes close to making even as he attempts to recuperate the novel as a further expression of Sorrentino’s iconoclasm.) It is most likely that for Sorrentino the answer was something closer to the former, since while a larger audience would no doubt be an appealing prospect for any writer, there is little evidence in Sorrentino’s writing career before or after Aberration of Starlight that he would have been willing to seek such an audience on anything but his own challenging terms.
That Sorrentino might have adopted a more recognizable form of “novel” only to undermine it as an “indictment” of that form seems a labored analysis of Aberration of Starlight, mostly because all of Sorrentino’s fiction can be seen as a subversion of the traditional novel as an entrenched literary form, and, relative to many of his other novels (and not just Mulligan Stew), Aberration of Starlight is a “normal” enough novel to indeed seem like an aberration in Sorrentino’s work. Perhaps, however, such an impression is inevitable when the writer wishes to emphasize traditional elements of fiction—character, setting—even if using untraditional means of doing so. (In this way, even Mulligan Stew is surely still describable as a novel, one that ultimately builds a compelling representation of the fictional character Antony Lamont.) Aberration of Starlight emphasizes both character and setting, so the impression that it is recognizably a novel becomes even harder to avoid,
Yet Aberration of Starlight is not just a novel that evokes a time and place through other than conventional methods. Those methods themselves alter our perception of both time and place (as starlight is altered due to the velocity of earth’s orbit): the slippages in memory and attention manifest among the four characters portrayed in the novel attest to the unreliability of both when considering the past, and while the setting itself emerges intact in its historical detail, clearly, for each of the characters it takes on a different aspect. For 10 year-old Billy, the summer resort near Hackettstown is a place where he can temporarily reside in his still innocent hope that the man Tom Thebus, who is keeping company with Billy’s mother this summer, might be the replacement for the absent father for which he clearly longs. For Billy’s mother, Marie, it is an opportunity for love and a late sexual awakening as she responds with increasing favor to Tom’s advances. For Tom, it is the scene of his obviously habitual philandering and self-aggrandizement, although his behavior arguably is less hypocritical than that of Marie’s father, John. For him, the summer vacation is a time when he can fully assert his prerogatives as family patriarch, puritanically controlling his daughter’s life by obstructing her nascent romance (while himself pursuing one of the ladies frequenting the resort after the relatively recent death of his wife).
Each character is given equal time to reveal and act on these attitudes, but that also further fragments the narrative perspective by reinforcing incommensurate versions of the events and interactions the novel recounts. Our view of each character is modified as one rendition succeeds another, and the ultimate juxtaposition of accounts, while it does provide the general contours of a discernible story, does not finally reconcile the four variants of the story so that the ultimate “truth” is made known. Is Tom Thebus a thwarted suitor, or simply a cad? Has Marie been denied the right to determine her own fate, or is she simply naïve? (Or both?) Should John be condemned as a self-righteous autocrat, or has he also to some extent been damaged by a wife who appears to have been even more monstrous? If the reader is asked to, in effect, hold all of these possibilities in suspension, is this a “creative” suspension whereby we arrive at a more complex awareness of reality, or is reality itself something that is always elusive?
Perhaps the answer to each of the last two questions is “yes,” so that Aberration of Starlight is a novel that both offers a kind of realism by other means and subjects “reality” to a skepticism that is associated with postmodernism. Those expressing surprise or disappointment with the supposed conventionality of the novel were likely registering their doubts about the value of the former while overlooking the way the latter complicates the representational gesture. (Messerli chooses to cancel out that gesture.) Judging by the fact that Starlight did not sell out its original print run, it seems accurate to say that whatever effort was indeed involved to make Sorrentino more commercially successful did not really succeed (although sales were not disastrous), so that one could conclude—perhaps Sorrentino did—that readers still found the postmodern features in Aberration of Starlight to be more prominent than the realist novel bracketed within. (Even a muted challenge to readers’ expectations is still a challenge.) Arguably the period in Sorrentino’s career encompassing the release of Mulligan Stew and then the publication of his next few books represents the apogee of Sorrentino’s literary “fame,” but given the reluctance of American readers to countenance difference and difficulty in the fiction they read, that fame was inherently limited unless he was willing to even more fully trim his adventurous sails.
The trajectory of the rest of Sorrentino’s career surely shows how unlikely this was always going to be. Sorrentino was a writer committed to formal invention and alternative orderings of language. To the extent that he would remain first of all a poet, such an orientation seems only proper, but a work like Aberration of Starlight does demonstrate, I would maintain, that Sorrentino is able to realize these aesthetic imperatives just as skillfully in a work of fiction that retains a recognizable structural façade of a novel (a more difficult move to pull off in a novel than it would be through a similar effort in a poem). Sorrentino does this as an exercise in craft, not to nullify the novel, as Messerli would have it, but to reanimate it, to exploit what John Barth called the “used up-ness” of literary form for the writer’s own artful purposes.
Crystal Vision
Crystal Vision resembles a conventional novel less readily than Aberration of Starlight, although it is comparable to a novel such as William Gaddis’s JR (albeit less sweeping in scope), as well as to Sorrentino’s own Steelwork. Indeed, it shares with Steelwork a setting in Bay Ridge and the use of a large cast of characters representative of that neighborhood’s working-class inhabitants during the World War II era. Still, while the neighborhood itself is to some extent a center of attention in Crystal Vision, the focus of this novel is less on setting as a free-standing subject of interest but instead invokes it as an almost mythical place inhabited entirely by voices—not a “real” place at all but one rising from both memory and imagination.
The characters in Crystal Vision do create a vivid enough impression of their Brooklyn community as they interact with each other, but they are also aware that it is actually their own creation, that they are literally bringing the neighborhood to life through their talk. Thus, unlike either Aberration of Starlight or Steelwork, Crystal Vision could not really be called a novel providing realism by other, nontraditional means. (Which is not to say it lacks authenticity, however.) Its subject is the process of its own representation, not the characters and milieu represented. Both character and setting emerge with the kind of particularity and detail that makes them memorable, but that is finally an incidental effect. Their credibility is the kind of credibility that the artistic imagination bestows, the kind that Sorrentino pursues in all of his work rather than creating the illusion that fictional characters “walk off the page” in their fidelity to life.
Although the novel is composed almost entirely of talk (“dialogue” doesn’t really seem to accurately describe what the characters are up to), there are no quotation marks to emphasize the tangible presence of their talk. Stripped of the simulated immediacy induced by quotation, the novel’s scenes seem more like emanations from the past, voices finding themselves disembodied from their actual surroundings (although not really quite aware of this) and able to not just ignore the constraints of time and physical space (able to project themselves into manifestations of both), but to in fact summon characters and locations in the course of speaking about them. (Occasionally it is as if they are standing somewhere above and outside the scene that is the object of their observations.)
The episodes of conversation and repartee are generally brief and self-enclosed, featuring voices that vary from episode to episode, but the scenes are ultimately comprised of a fixed, if extensive, cast of local characters. A few of them establish themselves quickly as distinctive voices—most prominently “the Arab,” who has an opinion about everything and expresses it in his semi-elevated but mostly maladroit English—but inevitably not all of the multiple voices become so individually delineated (although surely they are all singular to Sorrentino). But individuation of character in Crystal Vision is less important than their collective power to bring the neighborhood to life with their assertions and rejoinders, their descriptions of behavior among their friends and acquaintances, their sarcasm, exaggerations, and braggadocio.
“Isabel and Berta? the drummer says” begins one chapter. “Oh God, a couple of honeys.” But this doesn’t just initiate a conversation about the two girls thus identified. It becomes clear the speaker is “seeing” them, although they are in fact not in the drummer’s presence:
Restrict and prescribe them from your mind and its fantasies, the Arab says. They are not for you.
I didn’t say they were. But God, how I hate to see them headed for dopey marriages with cars out on Long Island.
Maybe Teaneck, Irish Billy says. There’s always a chance they’ll go to Jersey.
Indeed, the Arab says. If they marry stout hearts whose noble and yearnful eyes glint and flash forever westward!
Jokes can’t disguise those sour grapes, Arab, Irish Billy says.
But hearken! And hark! The Arab says. What have we here?
Willie Wapner dances and struts about in front of Isabel and Berta. Suddenly he executes a brilliant series of cartwheels and comes to rest directly before them.
What a bore, Berta says.
And a boor as well, Isabel says.
Is that Willie Wapner showing off some of his stuff for the luscious lasses? the Arab says.
It is Willie Wapner, the Drummer says. How he’s grown. The last time I saw him or even thought about him was, I can’t even remember when.
The episode continues on to depict Willie Wapner’s rather abject attempts to gain the attention of Isabel and Berta, with ongoing remarks on the effort by the Drummer, the Arab, and Irish Billy. If at times it almost seems they are watching a film about which the characters provide a running commentary, at other times the characters simply assert they are “looking into the past” or react to a bit of narrative exposition as if actually hearing or reading it themselves. “Perhaps,” a disembodied narrative voices announces about a subsidiary character, “he is searching for a rare species of the Culex mosquito in Brooklyn and duly reported to the Bureau of Diptera Studies,” responding to which “The bureau of what? Big Duck says, shiny black bits of Nibs flying from his mouth.” It is as if Big Duck is attuned to the narrative discourse as it is created, as are all of the characters, whose role in the novel is not merely to act (or not even to act) but in discoursing about the neighborhood to awaken it into life. Perhaps this is ultimately what Sorrentino himself has to say about the gatherings at the candy stores and taverns in a place like Bay Ridge—that the essential reality of life in such places is given substance there, at least in retrospect. And Crystal Vision is, of course, very much a retrospective novel.
The only way to represent this phenomenon is thus to enact it. The characters in Crystal Vision are not designed as “colorful” characters themselves but as conduits for the colorful attributes of the neighborhood—which do indeed include some pretty colorful characters who are talked about rather than being sources of the talk. Perhaps at least in this way Crystal Vision is comparable to Aberration of Starlight and Steelwork as an attempt to evoke both character and place via other than traditionally realistic means, but it is a reality that is subject to contingency and mutation, assembled in multiple versions so that it is the process of assembly that becomes the novel’s focus of attention. Some of Sorrentino’s fiction is more explicitly metafictional than others (generally speaking the most metafictional are the earliest works, with progressively fewer directly self-reflexive gestures thereafter), but almost all of his novels are implicitly metafictional in the way they so palpably employ methods of arrangement and assemblage as an alternative formal strategy.
Crystal Vision employs such a method even more immediately (if not at first altogether noticeably) in its own selection and arrangement of episodes: the scenes in the novel each represent one of the 78 cards in the Tarot deck (both major and minor), giving what might otherwise seem a random assortment of such scenes an underlying formal structure that begins in a semi-Oulipian enactment of restraint that proves less constraining than conventional storytelling in allowing the development of character and situation through metaphorical elaborations that freely break from narrative continuity and surface realism. The reader already familiar with the Tarot deck and its symbology could certainly begin to see the correspondences between that symbology and the characters and situations presented in Crystal Vision quickly enough, but they are often subtle, and a reader could plausibly finish reading the book without really noticing them.
Once alerted to the presence of this formal device, however, the reader’s appreciation of Sorrentino’s skill—which again seems an expression of craft reconstructed—is surely enhanced, although a danger lurks: the temptation to then inspect each episode for its connection to the relevant Tarot card to extract the secret “meaning” of the novel, to reduce Crystal Vision to an exercise in symbol-hunting verifying its fidelity to the Tarot deck instead of simply allowing Sorrentino poetic license to creatively adapt Tarot imagery for his own literary purpose. It seems to me that Louis Mackey, author of the most often cited scholarly consideration of the novel, “Representation and Reflection in Crystal Vision,” unfortunately succumbs to this temptation, preferring to register the correspondences between episodes and cards as a substitute for more comprehensive literary analysis, focusing his attention on the interaction of literature and philosophy in a way that really fails to consider Crystal Vision in the context of Sorrentino’s other fiction, in particular the earlier, more conspicuously metafictional works that even more radically destabilize the boundary between fact and fiction that most interests Mackey.
Like most of Sorrentino’s fiction, Crystal Vision certainly does call attention to its own fictionality, yet this gesture seems less central in and of itself to Sorrentino’s aesthetic goals than it does in, say, Mulligan Stew. Crystal Vision less blatantly challenges readers’ expectations of narrative transparency, even if it does not attempt to disguise its inherent artifice. Crystal Vision is not a crystalline representation of “reality,” but it does develop a surrogate reality that as imaginative projection is a concrete achievement. It does not merely subvert mimetic fidelity (although it does do that); it stands as an aesthetic creation that doesn’t just confuse fact and fiction: by asserting and cultivating its own fictionality, it becomes a new fact in the world, a work of literary art that knows itself as such. Its relevance is first of all to literature, not philosophy.
Arguably the animating purpose of metafiction as it manifested itself in American fiction during the 1960s and 70s was not simply to expose the ultimate artifice of narrative fiction but in doing so to in effect free the writer (and reader) to the possibility of alternate strategies, to expand the range of possibilities for “art” in the art of fiction. Gilbert Sorrentino’s career could be seen as his effort to redeem these possibilities. In a sense, that fiction is an artificial construction (that narrative itself is an artificial construction) is something that is taken for granted in his work as Sorrentino tries out other devices (some more familiar, others entirely invented) that may renounce the claims to untroubled verisimilitude assumed by narrative realism but at the same time attempt to renew the potential for literary art to provoke and delight.
The skill and consistency with which Sorrentino is able to continue fulfilling this aspiration surely must be attributed to both inspiration and craft. If Sorrentino’s work, including Crystal Vision, can plausibly be called “well-made,” it is by affirming the “made.” In Sorrentino’s works of fiction, language is not the storytelling medium but the form-producing medium. In some of Sorrentino’s later novels a story develops, but it is a story that emerges from the application of form, a secondary effect of the writer’s primary commitment to language and linguistic ingenuity. Craft of this kind is not the sort of thing to be learned from following guidelines or enrolling in a creative writing class. It requires that we regard fiction as a practice without fixed forms and approach the literary work as an opportunity to re-create form with each performance. What an aspiring writer can learn from reading Gilbert Sorrentino is that “experimental fiction” is not the opposite of craft, the rejection of “skills,” but is in fact the purest embodiment of craft as artistry.
Sorrentino’s artistry aims not merely for proficiency but for transformation. The first character we encounter in Crystal Vision is a magician who has disguised himself as one of the characters and who returns throughout the novel, both as cloaked character and in his own guise. He is Sorrentino’s surrogate, the emblem of the writer’s role, The writer, like a magician, bends reality, add to it the potential for wonder and surprise. It is an illusion, but at its best is created by the magician-writer’s adept invocation of the tricks of the trade. Sorrentino’s tricks as a writer of fiction are more abundant and more unorthodox that what most writers have to offer, but his facility with them is no less complete
Blue Pastoral
“Craft” in Blue Pastoral manifests itself in Sorrentino’s skills as a parodist. The novel might seem at first to be something like a return to the invoked anarchy of Mulligan Stew, but its apparent formal heterogeneity ultimately reveals a carefully considered purpose. “Pastoral” is not just a loose designation identifying the novel’s atmosphere or setting: Blue Pastoral is a sustained burlesque of the pastoral as literary form and aesthetic ideal. But Sorrentino doesn’t parody any one particular pastoral form or work, instead using the pastoral tradition to create his own hybrid form that transposes the imagery and conventions of pastoral to a very American setting.
The novel follows the peregrinations of Serge Gavotte (known as Blue) and his wife, Helene, as they journey across the United States in pursuit of Serge’s dream of becoming a renowned musician by discovering the “perfect musical phrase.” Instead of playing the traditional shepherd’s pipe, however, Serge fancies himself a pianist, and he and Helene haul his piano with them in a pushcart Serge finds and refurbishes (later it has to be repaired by a pushcart repairman who just happens to show up when it breaks down). Unlike the two immediately preceding novels, in Blue Pastoral there seems to be no effort to invoke realism, either unconventionally or otherwise. Indeed, the characters are deliberate caricatures, the plot an extended farce. This novel is artifice all the way down, but while we are just as aware of its ubiquitous presence as in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things or Mulligan Stew, the artifice of Blue Pastoral includes storytelling as a more central feature of the novel’s aesthetic strategy.
If Blue Pastoral does want to tell us a story, it is obviously not of the “well-made” variety adapted from Gustav Freytag that has come to be regarded as identical with narrative itself. Sorrentino gives his narrative a picaresque structure, but this doesn’t mean it is simply a loose sequence of adventitious events (The picaresque form is not just a depiction of aimless wandering, although the best examples of the form might provide the illusion of such.) The most persistent pastoral motif in American literature (and American culture in general) is the idealization of the American countryside, its “virgin soil” and “untamed spaces,” an impulse that Sorrentino subjects to merciless mockery in tracking Serge Gavotte’s experiences as he treks across the country. (It’s hard not to think of Kerouac’s On the Road as an additional object of Sorrentino’s parody, this time more explicitly than in The Sky Changes.) One could say the center of interest in a picaresque novel has never actually been the resolution of the picaresque tale, or even the ultimate fate of the ostensible protagonist. The journey itself, and the sorts of people who show up and the kinds of behavior they exhibit, is what makes the work compelling, and Blue Pastoral if anything accentuates this quality.
Arguably the picaresque form is inherently a satirical form, at least as it has been practiced by mostly comic writers who use the picaresque hero (or antihero) as an opportunity to expose the protagonist to a range of human folly and to the unavoidable contingency of all human affairs. Yet the comedy this produces is not primarily an expression of mockery but an inevitable effect of the protagonist’s encounters with the world he inhabits. Serge Gavotte is perhaps an even more hapless “hero” than most such characters, so that his own actions are hardly less deserving of ridicule than any of the characters he meets—although his desire to find the perfect musical phrase is not in itself an unworthy pursuit—and thus his is not a perspective from which to register a satirical take of American culture more broadly. At best Serge himself is implicated in the novel’s mockery but finally if Blue Pastoral does inevitably lampoon some recognizable attributes of American culture, it is not in an effort to improve or renovate that culture but to nullify it.
As in most of Sorrentino’s fiction, the comedy he employs in Blue Pastoral is a version of Bakhtin’s “absolute comedy,” which takes nothing seriously, provoking laughter even at its own procedures. Indeed, Blue Pastoral farcically disassembles not just the conventions of the pastoral genre, but the enabling conventions of the novel form in general (even more directly than Mulligan Stew). In deemphasizing plot in favor of the linear succession favored by the picaresque, Sorrentino begins by radically reducing the novel’s narrative structure to its most elemental form, but most of the other expectations we might have of narrative fiction are likewise ostensibly satisfied but ultimately subverted in the comic deflation of the novel’s parody and pastiche. The hero’s journey is neither a rogue’s adventures nor an epic quest but an absurdist exercise in futility. Serge Gavotte as protagonist is mostly a cipher, more acted upon than acting (as when he is cuckolded by Helene), and the Gavottes’ trip across the continent is radically digressive, even by the standards of the picaresque novel (and Sorrentino’s previous novels). Unsurprisingly, Serge does not end his quest with the discovery of the perfect phrase, but instead when he and Helene complete their cross-country journey at the California coastline, they. . .tumble into the Pacific Ocean.
Probably the most conspicuous challenge to novel-writing and -reading strategies in the novel is literally its language. Serge Gavotte’s story is told in a polyglot, mock-heroic, quasi-Elizabethan pastoralese, while its episodes are interspersed with various exercises in verbal invention that draw attention to such scenes as performances of language, routines that appear to suspend Serge’s quest narrative even as they act as the sort of lateral digressions characteristic of the picaresque novel. A politician’s wife (“Lesbia Glubut”) is profiled in a news feature written in the unctuous, sycophantic tone typical of such “journalism,” while her husband, Rep. “Hal” Glubut, gives a cliché-ridden speech defending himself against charges of “moral turpitude” (having sex with sheep). Several chapters clearly enough signal in their titles the sort of discourse we are going to encounter: “Blarney Spalpeen Gives Speech on St. Patrick’s Day,” “Father Donald Debris, S.J., Gives Talk on Sex.” The most prominent display of linguistic japery is ”La Musique et les mauvaises herbes,” a lightly pornographic book Serge brings along on the journey, but which is actually a translation from French—a literal translation of French into English, preserving the French idioms, word order, etc., producing a hilarious mishmash of translation malaprops: “If I could make a sex act on this gorgeous lady for five moments, I will permit my groinal region to have a bad for a week! She is some tootsie!”
Although such passages in Blue Pastoral surely convey a kind of mockery, they register very weakly as satirical, since the humor, although abundant, is ultimately so unsparing that its mockery seems especially caustic. All satire comes as an inherent expression of scorn, but the mockery of a novel like Blue Pastoral does not emerge from an underlying impulse of anger or sorrow; Sorrentino in his comedic routines comes as close to expressing sheer, unalloyed contempt as it is possible for a novelist to come and still justify writing novels. If all a novelist has to offer is repetitive exercises in negation, the novel form has been reduced just as much to a vehicle for “saying something” as any conventional literary novel. But of course Sorrentino explicitly rejects this conception of the writer’s task. The objects of Sorrentino’s ridicule are generally already caricatures of themselves, so in choosing such easy targets he takes advantage of their used-upness to call attention instead to the language game itself: Sorrentino has little interest in figures such as Lesbia Glubut or Father Debris (or even Serge Gavotte) as “characters,” but uses them as material for the verbal treatments that are the true measure of Sorrentino’s intentions as an artist, not the “commentary” we might want to find in his unremitting burlesque.
This may be the most fruitful way to understand Sorrentino’s appropriation of the pastoral form as well. If Blue Pastoral is most immediately a travesty of pastoral motifs and conventions, it does not discredit those conventions themselves but invokes them for the formal and stylistic turns they make possible. Sorrentino’s approach in this novel strongly recalls John Barth’s formulation of the “literature of exhaustion,” as it attempts to create something new out of timeworn practices by conspicuously brandishing these practices so that their very loss of continued relevance can be used to direct the reader’s attention to the adaptation of them for the writer’s own unorthodox purposes. In most of the novels following Blue Pastoral, Sorrentino is more likely to treat the novel form itself as something that is used-up—unlike Barth, who adopted the strategies of “exhaustion” precisely in order to continue writing novels (albeit unconventional ones)—resulting in books still identified as novels but otherwise little resembling conventionally-written novels.
Blue Pastoral hangs on to the vestiges of literary tradition through its incorporation of pastoral elements and a picaresque narrative structure, but they are merely the pretext for Sorrentino’s transfiguration of such conventional devices into the source of verbal vignettes in which language creates its own self-sufficient effects. Through the way Sorrentino links these vignettes in an extended exercise in parody we can identify the craft of this novel, although some readers might think its verbal display to be too self-consciously performative to be regarded as craft. Indeed it might be said that Sorrentino makes language perform, but the goal is to make language visible, not the author staging the performance. Language must be made visible as the focus of aesthetic attention (not “story” or “character” or “theme”) so that an enhanced variety of formal and stylistic possibilities might present themselves to the adventurous writer (and reader). Sorrentino himself would experiment with such possibilities in all of his fiction subsequent to Blue Pastoral.
None of this is to deny that Sorrentino’s work, taken as a whole, expresses a jaundiced view of human nature, as well as the customs and institutions human beings create. But his fiction does not exist first of all as the means for Sorrentino to impart this view. If it does communicate a satirical message (to some readers), it is a wholly contingent sort of communication, a “something said” fortuitously produced by the writer’s full commitment to the aesthetic shaping of language. This commitment, along with Sorrentino’s innate comic vision, surely does give Sorrentino’s novels a pervasively irreverent tone (both toward the novel as a form and toward human affairs in general). But this irreverence works to, in effect, clear the ground for a fresh aesthetic space in which Sorrentino the literary artist can exercise his verbal ingenuity without obeisance to the demands of “subject.”
One could of course say that the subject of most of Sorrentino’s fiction is the nature of fiction itself. Certainly Mulligan Stew is the fullest (and perhaps greatest) realization of this subject in Sorrentino’s career as a writer of fiction, bug after the relative success of Mulligan Stew led Sorrentino to offer modified versions of the subject in an effort to widen his reach among readers, Blue Pastoral marks a return to the more radical exploration of form introduced in the metafictions of both Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Mulligan Stew. The novels after Blue Pastoral will be, if anything, even more resolutely unconventional, as if the fairly tepid sales of Aberration of Starlight and Crystal Vision convinced Sorrentino that gesturing to the literary mainstream was a wasted effort and decided to ignore its requirements altogether.
But this does not mean that Sorrentino would abandon “craft” as redefined in all of the fiction he had written to this point, perhaps most palpably in the three novels succeeding Mulligan Stew. If Blue Pastoral shows Sorrentino to be a skilled parodist able to make from parody a formally intricate and stylistically audacious work of fiction, the work to follow, while it might be called implicitly parodic (of the novel’s formal conventions, of “normal” reading practices), mostly seeks to replace storytelling with the artful arrangement of language as the assumed purpose of fiction. To the reader accustomed to the narrative assumptions controlling most novels, these works likely seem arbitrary, even anarchic, although they are in fact scrupulously composed. Perhaps not all of the “experiments” in form Sorrentino offers in the later novels can be counted as successful, but any failures come from flaws in conception, not lack of discipline.
Beyond what it might tell us about the direction of Gilbert Sorrentino’s career, Blue Pastoral itself stands as one of his most deftly executed works of fiction. In addition to the dexterity of its craft, however, it is also a greatly entertaining novel, an experimental fiction that finds in its stylistic agility and its outrageous humor a self-adequate substitute for the expected diversions of “plot” and “character.” In its own way, Blue Pastoral is a pleasure to read, although these pleasures cannot simply be passively consumed as a “rollicking tale.” Blue Pastoral is a picaresque novel that takes the reader on a journey into the refashioning of its own telling.
Issue 5 of Unbeaten Paths now available.
Under Review:
Emily Hall, The Longcut (Dalkey Archive)
Ansgar Allen, Wretch (Scism Neuronics), The Sick List (Boiler House Press), Plague Theatre (Equus Press)
Mark De Silva, The Logos (Splice/Clash Books)
Perhaps the most formidable obstacle to an unequivocal appreciation of Mark de Silva's The Logos is exasperation with the novel's narrator/protagonist. Actually more than exasperation: the narrator is an unlikeable, often unpleasant fellow. Of course, literature is replete with unlikeable or morally suspect protagonists, and in itself this does not invalidate the aesthetic merits of a work of fiction. But The Logos is a prodigiously lengthy work (over 1,000 pages in the U.K. version published by Splice, 728 pages in the edition now published by Clash Books), and abiding with a character and voice that are often enough obnoxious but also at times simply dull is a fraught exercise for any reader.
That de Silva is deliberately presenting us with an obnoxious narrator would certainly be a plausible enough assumption, although presuming the reader's continuing patience with such a narrator over the course of a narrative of such mammoth size seems an overly sanguine expectation unless the novel offers interest of other kinds that reinforce a more compelling aesthetic vision. But while the narrator of The Logos--a prominent artist whose girlfriend has left him--provides plenty of talk about art, the novel itself is formally and stylistically more or less conventional. de Silva has skillfully created a fully rounded, consistently believable character, and in his role as narrator this character relates a sometimes odd but abundantly detailed narrative, but there really isn't much about either the character or the story that is sufficiently innovative or compelling they would overcome a reader's antipathy to a narrator as insistent on his presence--other characters play their parts in the novel, but always subsidiary to the protagonist and his concerns--as our not-so-humble narrator in this novel. Thus, even if we decide to stay with the narrative despite our discontent with his presence, doubt about its ultimate purpose remains.
The narrator (unnamed throughout the novel) certainly takes his own art very seriously, and is very opinionated about artistic practice and art history, concerning both of which he admittedly seems very well-informed, even learned. Yet his expressions of these opinions, while never less than intelligent, are highly discursive and expository:
Painting, I came to realize, was almost an apology for the nakedness of drawing, a way of glossing over its conceptual blading of the world. It was a way of seeing blindly, so to speak, or passively, without the critical powers of the mind. Photography only heightened this tendency; that's why so many painters have been entranced by the lens, optics, the camera obscura, and the photograph. In contrast, drawing was without doubt an analytical art: the mind's contribution was obvious, and there was no attempt at representing a sensory given--as if such a thing were possible. . .
Drawing, then. began to feel like the intellectual height of the two-dimensional arts, its essence, its philosophy, not some rough-and-ready starting point toward rendering surfaces, as the pervasive notion of the sketch would suggest, but the ultimate product, fully distilled. This is why, for me, photography poses at least a prima facie problem for painting, in its competition for surfaces, whereas it offers no difficulty at all to drawing, properly understood.
These passages are interspersed throughout the narrative, slowing down the already rather slowly developing plot with what is essentially critical commentary--although the narrator's prose style when relating the story he has to tell does not differ drastically from that which he employs when dilating upon art. Perhaps the commentary gives the narrator some credibility in our consideration of his artistic habits, but often they seem like set-pieces that eventually contribute to an increasing weariness with both the narrator's actions and the digressive way he recounts those actions.
These set-pieces seem even more peculiar when considering the novel's narrative perspective. It is a first-person narrative, but the rhetorical situation seems free-floating, detached from any plausible point of origin: never are we told the narrator is actually writing down his account of himself after Claire, his now ex-girlfriend and fellow artist, has departed, or even that he is speaking aloud (on a tape recorder, for example).Thus we encounter this voice from nowhere whose exposition is nevertheless carefully and strategically composed, which accentuates the character's status as the verbal artifact of the author's literary ventriloquism and ultimately makes it harder to dismiss the narrator's more unpleasant qualities as just the flaws of an otherwise "well-rounded" character. The narrator's verbal manner flattens out the fictive discourse to an obsessive, self-involved monologue that almost inevitably comes to seem an exercise in narcissism.
But does the author want us to judge this character a narcissist, or are we to find that the portrait of an artist that emerges from his narration to some degree mandates that we overlook his more prosaic character flaws? After all, artists are infamously opinionated and self-absorbed, known to exploit other people to their own benefit. Indeed, for an artist who specializes in portraiture, as does the narrator of this novel, such exploitation may be unavoidable. But in The Logos, what the protagonist seems most eager to exploit is his own talent, not on projects commensurate with the artistic principles he articulates throughout the novel but on an opaque publicity campaign sponsored by a wealthy capitalist who professes an interest in the narrator's art. For this campaign the narrator is tasked with making a series of drawings of two people selected by the capitalist, a troubled but talented young football player and an actress known so far for her roles in obscure independent films and theater. These drawings are reproduced in a variety of forms and displayed around town, apparently at random but actually according to a strategy devised by the capitalist and his advertising adviser. The project is ultimately judged a success (by the capitalist, but others aren't so sure), and our narrator is well-compensated for his work, but for the reader this whole endeavor remains murky in its purpose and sporadic in its interest.
In his interactions with the football player and the actress (Duke and Daphne), we do learn a great deal about the narrator's attitude toward black people and women--much of it not very laudable. He is not directly racist or sexist, but he clearly harbors views reinforcing the usual kinds of stereotypes (about the dangers posed by black people or the sexual availability of women, for example). Perhaps these views are themselves just a function of the narrator's egoism and his complacency about the world beyond its relevance to his work, but those qualities over the course of a novel so extended become manifestly apparent as well, so that finally the chronicle of the narrator's encounters with Duke and Daphne, his participation in the hybrid art/public relations project more generally, doesn't really reveal the narrator's character defects so much as confirm the alienating effect that his presentation of himself induces from the very beginning.
I remained as uncertain about whether provoking such alienation from his protagonist is one of de Silva's objectives for the novel as when I felt the first stirrings of hostility toward the narrator. If a profound ambivalence about this character is part of de Silva's design, it seems to me aesthetically questionable to prolong the reader's discomfort over the entire course of such a protracted narrative. If instead we are meant to some degree to experience some empathy for the narrator in his attempt to rebound from romantic disappointment, all I can say is that I had a very difficult time mustering it. Perhaps de Silva's intentions don't fully encompass either of these options: the protagonist embodies the artist's quest to be faithful to his vision despite his own limitations and the triviality of the culture he confronts. I am unable to interpret the novel this way myself, but I don't want to discount the possibility I may be misreading it.
The fiction of Ansgar Allen could be called "academic" in an almost literal sense, except that it seems designed to provide an alternative of sorts to academic writing per se--an opportunity to engage with abstract ideas and to contemplate the role of education and the intellect while leaving behind the prescribed forms of expression required by academic writing. This fiction is somewhat reminiscent of the work of Lars Iyer, although while Iyer's novels take the form of quasi-Platonic dialogues in which the characters talk about philosophical ideas, Allen's seem more like parables or fables, in which the narrator-protagonist does directly invoke specific books and ideas but which also themselves embody or dramatize the implications of ideas and ways of thinking.
Allen has published three short novels and a novella since 2020 (a fourth novel is due to be published at the end of 2022). The first, Wretch, is the most purely fabular, and could very loosely be called a post-apocalyptic narrative, although no specifications of time, place, or context are ever given. The narrator relates his experiences as a prisoner of sorts, locked in a small room and instructed to make copies of documents that are slipped to him under the door. The documents seem to be reports submitted by teams of explorers who venture to the outskirts of the "known city" and beyond, investigating what is out there--the "dark regions," although the copyist also at times alters the documents, "providing some measure of clarification, a degree of reordering in order to render what is heard, or what was written, into fresh print." Still, the job takes its toll, as we find the narrator at the beginning of the narrative recovering from a "derangement," an incident in which he destroyed the "machine" with which he carries out the copying: "The full medical report was described, briefly. The machine bore the imprint of chaos, they said. It demanded rehabilitation."
That he now be regarded as an "ordered mind" is obviously of great importance to the narrator, and this imperative seems to reflect an overriding need for order and fear of disorder in the world he inhabits. Whether this outlook accounts for the narrator's situation to begin with is unclear--the narrator finds himself confined as a threat to established order--but the incursions into the unknown regions seem motivated both by a perception the existing order must be extended due to inadequate resources and an absolute terror of what lies beyond the limits of the known. The circumstances described by the narrator (as filtered through the reports he copies) bespeak a society reduced to a kind of subsistence level and attempting to, in effect, start over, but finally nothing about those circumstances can really be certain for the reader, since the narrator's rendition is inherently unreliable. Certainly the entire narrative could be a projection of the narrator's precarious mental state.
Or perhaps the text we are reading is an assemblage of the documents he has copied--if in fact copying is what he actually does. The strength of Wretch partially consists in its open-endedness, its spareness giving the narrative an allegorical structure that might be read in multiple ways, or that may have no emblematic significance at all. Allen's second novel, The Sick List, is less purely metaphorical in its narrative manner, more discursive. Its philosophical ideas are brandished outright, although again whatever specifiable meaning it might all "add up" to is equally indeterminate. Its narrator, a graduate student or instructor at a generic university, tells us of his obsession with the ideas and reading habits of a fellow academic named Gordon. Gordon has a scathing, skeptical attitude toward academe itself, an attitude he has instilled in his acolyte--except that the narrator is never portrayed meeting or actually talking to Gordon. Instead, the narrator closely tracks the books Gordon checks out from the university library, inspecting them for underlines and comments Gordon has made in the margins as well as reading the books carefully himself in order to illuminate the worldview he attributes to Gordon and that the narrator earnestly shares.
In addition to the narrator's chronicle of Gordon's activities and of his own inspection of Gordon's books, he also tells us of a strange condition that overcomes faculty across multiple university campuses. At his own university, two researchers in the education department are discovered sitting in a stupor at their desks. "One had been sitting there from Thursday to the following Monday until she was found. The other had been sitting at her desk from Wednesday to Friday. Both were dehydrated. . .Reports were coming in from other institutions of similar goings on. Sociology departments in neighboring cities seem to have been first affected. . .In the hard sciences it was hardest to detect, since there was very little difference between the slack-jawed behaviour and the usual behaviour that goes by the name of hard science." The primary occupant of "the sick list" is the University itself, which is both the object of Gordon's obloquies ("It is impossible to think at work, in the university, Gordon would say. Its offices are not places of thought") and is now apparently the generator of some literal intellectual malaise.
The author to whom Gordon increasingly turns as the narrative progresses is Thomas Bernhard, whose blunt hostility to the modern world naturally enough would appeal to Gordon, who seems to direct a similar antipathy specifically to academe and its enervation of the intellect. Given the novel's own formal and stylistic resemblance to Bernhard (a single extended paragraph using the same sort of long and discursive sentences), we have to conclude that Ansgar Allen also identifies with the Bernhardian outlook, although perhaps we might say that the author's sympathies with the narrator's allegiance to both Gordon and Bernhard meets its limits at the novel's conclusion, when the narrator literally begins to stalk Gordon in fear that no more wisdom from Gordon's second-hand books will be forthcoming. If the university is sick, the narrator himself joins the sick list with a sickness brought about by a certain kind of analytical learning.
Both Wretch and The Sick List could be called metafictional, since they so directly concern themselves with acts of reading and writing (Wretch could plausibly be taken as an allegorical rendering of the status of the bedraggled modern writer). Plague Theatre continues this strategy, if anything even more conspicuously, as the decoding of text and the process of notation become the story told: an again unnamed narrator (probably an academic, although the university itself does not play a role in the narrative) is given an old, water-logged manuscript that has been discovered during a digging project in the cellar of a hotel (a swimming pool is to be installed). The owner of the property believes it might be valuable (giving the hotel a little extra cachet as an historical site) and asks the narrator "to make some sense of the thing." This proves to be challenging indeed, as the manuscript disintegrates even as the narrator turns its pages, so that he must copy out the manuscript--or what survives of it--by hand.
What emerges is a version of the manuscript, which tells the story of a plague that hit the English coastal city of Scarborough in 1720, but which does not simply present a cleaned-up (so to speak) narrative of those events. In the process of deciphering the manuscript, the narrator expands the text with interpolated reflections on two writers whose work helps illuminate the concept of "plague." The novel begins, in fact with a quotation from Antonin Artaud's "Theatre and the Plague" (later the narrator tells us he decided to do this after beginning to read the manuscript, becoming convinced that the essay was "the key to understanding the manuscript") and, perhaps inescapably, Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year also comes to seem related to the Scarborough plague. Artaud's assertion that plague is finally "a feature of mind, and is passed on by way of the mind" not only provides the events in Scarborough with a larger, more figurative significance, but also affects the interpretation of those events the narrator offers, lending them an air of menace and mystery that perhaps the manuscript's narrative doesn't altogether corroborate.
But this is the advantage of treating what could be an abstract subject--the metaphysical implications of "plague"--through fiction, which doesn't abandon the intellect but operates by a different kind of logic, one of association and particularity. Becoming concrete, the implications of plague are both less grandiose and more disturbing than when grasped only in their intellectual formulation. The narrator regards museums--where the manuscript might otherwise be placed--as an institution where intellect can only be destroyed, something that The Sick List maintains is also true of the university. Yet the protagonists of both The Sick List and Plague Theatre are largely preoccupied with the intellect, which is also shown to be hazardous: at the end of each novel the narrators have been driven toward something like madness. In all of his fiction so far, Allen incorporates ideas by subjecting them to the transformations induced by literary invention, which works to illuminate the hazard.
Observing Herself Observe
How we respond to the unnamed protagonist of Emily Hall's The Longcut is primarily determined by how we adjust ourselves to her first-person narration. From the beginning, it almost seems she is speaking more to herself than to us:
I was always asking myself what my work was, I thought as I walked to the gallery. As an artist I knew I should know what my work was, I thought as I walked, still I did not know what my work was, could not stop asking myself what my work was, it being impossible to think about anything else
The near obsessive-compulsive repetition might suggest that this is meant as a "report" of sorts of the narrator's ongoing thought process (a form of stream-of-consciousness), but she is clearly recording, not merely reporting or signaling disjointedly ("I thought as I walked"), although it does remain unclear exactly how her account is being recorded. The narration seems to exist in some gray zone between and among speaking, thinking, and writing: the narrator seems to be interrogating her own "cognitive space," as she puts it, but this involves perceptions of her physical space as well, both of them often invoked in language that is both insistently detached and often hyper-aware, as if observing herself observe, or thinking about herself thinking.
What she observes and what she thinks about are relentlessly focused on coming to some resolution about "what my work was." This initial conundrum, the protagonist's confusion about what kind of artist she is or will be, is the motivating force driving her actions, as well as the narrative as a whole--the "plot" itself doesn't really move beyond the search for a solution to this conundrum, so what we are left with is the narrator's ultimately very peculiar manner of articulating her dilemma.
The central action of the novel, such as it is, does indeed take place mostly as the protagonist is walking through the streets of a city (unnamed) on her way to meet with an art dealer, although a final episode follows her right after what turns out to be a very consequential meeting indeed. During her walk we are also provided flashbacks to the various circumstances that have led her both to this interview with a "gallerist," who she hopes, of course, will exhibit her work, as well as to her radical uncertainty about the nature of that work, which she also hopes the gallerist will help her overcome. These flashbacks are highly recursive and digressive, which might tempt us to regard them as her "thoughts," but they are thoughts fully-formed and often intricately arranged. They also function as exposition, filling us in--if at times obliquely--on her artistic aspirations, as well as her experiences in a dreary office job she must endure until, presumably, those aspirations are achieved. Here she must expend her energies making sure she has "answered my share of questions and moved them into the 'completed' column," all the while suffering "slant looks" from her boss.
Even when she arrives at the gallery (for a conversation arranged by her friend, "the well-known artist who set up situations"), there are additional lengthy passages in which the narrator meditates on the efficacy of listening to music while making art, on what she has chosen to wear, on a satchel carried by a man on the subway. When she finally begins to speak to the gallerist, she suddenly utters
a torrent of open questions about bodies inhabiting garments or buildings. Most people, it had to be said, finding themselves willingly or unwillingly subject to my torrents, found themselves unprepared, the torrents producing in them --the willing or unwilling listeners--expressions of shock or immediate exhaustion. What if I photographed the expressions of shock or exhaustion, I had asked myself on several occasions. So much for my plan of avoiding blurting, I thought, even as I was torrenting along, evidently not having routed the plan sufficiently thoroughly through my cognitive apparatus.
Perhaps The Longcut itself could be taken as a "torrent" of the narrator's language, except that it is not really a torrent flowing headlong but on its meandering and serpentine way. The torrent isn't really slowed--or at least made less turbulent--until the gallerist actually does suggest to the narrator what her art is (assuming that it is an understanding the protagonist has had all along). But the gallerist's observation that what the protagonist has been showing her has an almost algebraic quality to it ("solving for x") is clearly something that the protagonist has not before considered, and what she seems to conclude is the accuracy of the gallerist's description temporarily disorients her.
After a day of brooding on the implications of this (for her) revelation, she is able to assimilate this new self-knowledge and musters her resolve to act on it, having satisfactorily, it would seem, clarified her artistic purpose, which is to proceed as if the question of purpose is always open, undecided:
to do anything I could to unfind the answer to the question of what my work was, to unaccept the fact of knowing the answer, to unknow, to uncomplete, unaccept, unclose. I would unsolve for x, I would deny there was an x to be solved. I would arrange things to my dissatisfaction in all cases, every case would be the case, I would botch every transition, every border crossing, botching every border between categories or realms, dwelling in the botched transition, the hiccup, the glitch. . . .
This seems like a perfectly good credo upholding a practice of art as radical possibility, but these final flourishes of refortified purpose, so quickly following the protagonist's moment of recognition with the gallerist, at the least seem rushed, so much so as to verge on melodrama. Some such rededication to art lurks beneath the novel's attenuated quest narrative all along, and the terms of the protagonist's pledge to avoid narrowing her scope is conventional enough that it doesn't escape coming off as predictable.
Perhaps to extend the narrator's monologue much farther risks decreased readerly patience with the narrator's eccentric discursive habits, although at a time when the prose of a writer like Thomas Bernhard has become increasingly influential, such a move would not seem particularly extreme. However, even if the protagonist's enlightenment occurred less abruptly, the fulfillment of the narrator's quest for artistic direction as the primary conceit seems inherently slight in a novel that introduces itself as more radically unconventional in its verbal density and formal convolution. However much the protagonist wants to "unaccept" the answer to which her initial question led her, a better answer might have been that it is less important to rhetorically interrogate one's art than it is simply to make it, rendering the question superfluous to begin with.
Still, pursuing the question has certainly prompted Emily Hall to write a novel whose narrator (and her narration) are compelling creations, reservations about plot aside. If finally her way of grappling with the imperatives of art is rather more interesting than any conclusions she reaches about art itself, this should not deflect attention away from this art the author of The Longcut has made.
Taken together, Mark McGurl's three books, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James, (2001), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), and Everything & Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021) read like the author's attempt to perceive the entire "literary field" of the 20th and now 21st centuries in its fully visible totality. If the modern history of literary study in the United States, with the ascension of New Criticism, essentially begins in the close analysis of individual works of literature, the dominant approaches today, in books like McGurl's and the rise of "digital humanities," embrace distance and breadth, not critical rigor but scholarly amplitude, the ability (or at least the attempt) to "see it all."
The notion that to study literature is to contemplate a "literary field" is originally attributable to the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who posited that literary activity constituted a dynamic system in which all of the participants--writers, critics, publishers--occupy a "position" in this system relative to each other, each with their own priorities, to some extent in competition with each other but also to some extent sharing the reigning assumptions, both commercial and literary, of their time and place. From the interactions of these players in the system vying for the rewards and prestige the system avails comes the literary work, and to fully understand the meaning represented by the work we have to locate it in the "field of power" from which it emerged. Literary values are not so much subsumed to commercial values as actually pitted against commercial values so that the capital at stake is not financial but artistic--"cultural capital."
I confess I have never been much able to appreciate a sociological theory of literature such as Bourdieu's. Mostly it just seems to recapitulate the obvious (in suitably academic jargon): writers are subject to the prevailing cultural forces of their era. (How could they not be?) Writing is not produced in a self-enclosed aesthetic zone scrubbed of social influences. (How could it be?) Of course Bourdieu himself as a sociologist was perfectly justified in examining the structural processes of what we so loosely call the "literary world," but his work as taken up by literary scholars has been used to ground literary study in "material" concerns and not just to dismiss the aesthetic value of literature as a hopelessly subjective interest but in general to imply that the aesthetic doesn't really exist apart from its determination by material conditions. In some cases this is accessory to (or excuse for) the politicization of literary study that is now a fait accompli, but ultimately marks the mutation of academic criticism into a sub-branch of sociology, a transformation that can only contribute to the final dissolution of academic literary study as a separate discipline. (Who needs a special focus on literature when it can easily be folded into social analysis more generally?)
McGurl does not dismiss the aesthetic value of literature, although he consistently refers to it as an "elite" preoccupation that has as much to do with status as it does with the actual experience or creation of works of art. The first book, The Novel Art, is ostensibly about the "art novel," which McGurl defines as a literary work intended as an object of art, not commerce, but this very ambition is treated with implicit suspicion, as just another form of accumulation, in this case the accumulation of prestige rather than money. In some ways, McGurl's books in fact favor the latter kind of gain over the former (especially in Everything & Less, where the prevailing tone is one of barely concealed admiration for the scale of Amazon's success, a sort of awestruck wonder at the canniness of Jeff Bezos), which at least has the virtue of being undeceived about its aims, unlike the writers and critics, who don't realize how thoroughly they are implicated in the commercial system they think they are resisting.
This attitude toward the aesthetic claims of both writers and "naïve" literary critics is not really peculiar to Mark McGurl, however. He is just participating in the discourse that current academic criticism has developed for establishing the superiority of the scholarly perspective on literary creation to the credulous assumptions of the creators and most readers. While certainly literary scholars have always been willing to display their learning and their "hermeneutic" skills, the first few contingents of academic critics by and large devoted such skills to elucidative interpretation or textual studies that assumed "new knowledge" (the traditional goal of scholarship) meant knowledge of literature as a self-sufficient object of attention, worthwhile in and of itself as a form of human expression. Gradually literature in academe has become instead the means for the scholar to assert other priorities, a convenient instrument through which to engage in various kinds of social, cultural, political, or theoretical analysis but not worth the scholar's time for mere "appreciation."
There are indications throughout McGurl's three books that he does in fact have appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of literature (or at least fiction, since discussions of poetry are completely absent from all three of the books), but even in The Program Era, in which American fiction as produced through the auspices of academic creative writing are accorded various degrees of praise for such qualities, McGurl's real focus of analysis is the creative writing system itself, which, he maintains, is something we should account for if we are to understand postwar American literature in "genuinely historical materialist terms." In his review of The Program Era, Fredric Jameson praises McGurl's account of this system, but cautions that his classification of the modes of fiction most central to the creative writing Program is somewhat unwieldy and that "unless we somehow identify the aesthetic of production all three classifications share (their ‘autopoiesis’), the system, however useful or satisfying it may be, will risk breaking down into a series of empirical traits and characteristics."
Heaven forbid that literary criticism might retreat to the consideration of "empirical traits and characteristics"! Should it retreat far enough, critics might even find themselves focusing on the palpable traits and characteristics of individual works without regard to the system to which they putatively belong! At its most extreme, such a concession to the integrity of literary value could lead to the mere appreciation of literature, relegating literary scholars to the status of belletristic critics acting as arbiters of taste rather than learned exegetes and theorists rising above such purely subjective judgment. Or perhaps an enhanced respect for the empirical in the consideration of works of literature--the experience of the actual "traits and characteristics" a literary text offers--could begin to persuade academic critics that the interpretive frameworks assembled by most of the succeeding schools of critical thought that have emerged in literary studies over the past 50 years are themselves finally just fabrications, elaborate fictions created by professors not to aid in the interpretation of literature but to supplant it, to substitute the wisdom and insights of scholars for the incorrigibly undisciplined creative imagination.
These frameworks are just as susceptible, in turn, to the same ineluctable forces and unexamined assumptions by which literary scholars contend the expressive autonomy of works of literature is necessarily constrained. McGurl's sociological contemplations reach in Everything & Less perhaps their most intricate elaboration--although The Program Era is complex enough in the web of connections it makes between various postwar literary works and the conditions of creative writing instruction in American universities--and the book as a whole provides us less with an examination of the effect Amazon has had on the writing and distribution of books and more a phantasmagoric excursion through the generic and subgeneric wilderness Amazon has cultivated through its various self-publishing and eBook services. McGurl maintains that in surveying this scene--and no one should exactly envy his no doubt now near-encyclopedic knowledge of the terrain--he is offering the most authentic perspective on the current "literary field," since Amazon has so thoroughly colonized both publishing (through the dominance of the Kindle and through Kindle Direct Publishing) and bookselling. But McGurl as a critic seems as controlled by the prerogatives of capitalism as the fiction he discusses, confining himself to the popular, the commercially successful, the well-publicized. If much of this writing would not be called "mainstream"--either commercially or culturally--nevertheless the measure of its importance is its salience to the marketplace, not its artistic value.
Indeed, most readers whose interest in fiction has its source in the latter are not likely to find much to spark their interest in McGurl's book, aside from its sideshow qualities. It is doubtful that such readers really need to know about Dmitry Rus, author of the Play to Live series of "LitRPG" novels, or the "alpha billionaire" subgenre of romance novels, or that "there is a case to be made for self-published Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica as the quintessential Amazonian genre of literature." While I'm willing to take McGurl's word for it that these ridiculous genres exist (although I'm less willing to concede they are part of "literature") and that the Kindle platform has both made them possible and amplified their popularity, I am dubious that, absent an effort like his to do such a comprehensive survey of Amazon's book-related services, that McGurl's intended audience (people interested in contemporary literature or in book culture more generally) are likely to regard such works as worthy of the attention of serious readers. From this perspective, the elaborate scrutiny of them and their part in Amazon's annexation of the literary field in effect itself assembles these texts and genres into a coherent account that hardly exists outside of it except as the discontinuous artifacts of Amazon's digital machinery.
McGurl contends that as the visionary demiurge who called this machinery into being, Jeff Bezos could be called the author of the novel that is Amazon--or at least that is Amazon's rewriting of the premises of fiction and the reading of fiction in the electronically networked world. But this conceit is again something McGurl himself invokes, as Bezos becomes the protagonist of the novel McGurl implicitly shadows into being through using the conceit. In this novel Bezos (as represented by his company) is the larger than life figure whose mighty deeds produce both emulation and resistance, with the latter finally only resulting in an unwitting version of the former. Finally no one can evade the reach of this figure's influence, and, while the nature of this influence can't necessarily be fully characterized as benign, most of those subject to it are satisfied with the service done.
Thus the title of McGurl's book: Amazon promises to offer us everything, which in the provision of books results in the proliferation of narrative genres and reading platforms, but when some writers and readers seek alternatives to Amazon's maximalist aesthetic, such efforts are inevitably tied to this system that makes them intelligible in the first place--and are still available on Amazon, of course. Needless to say, McGurl's classification of fiction as either maximalist or minimalist (the category under which he places most "literary fiction"), "epic" and "romance," reduces the current "literary field" to simple binaries that don't remotely capture the actual range of practices to be found in contemporary fiction, especially outside the confines of literary fiction as "just another genre" in McGurl's simplistic scheme. But then neither is this classification meant to be adequate to the needs of literary criticism per se, as opposed to those of literary critics assuming the role of "cultural critic" to contemplate not mere works of literature but the cultural circumstances in which they are embedded--an orientation by which the literary works disappear into generalizations and abstractions. "Maximalism" and "minimalism" as terms employed in McGurls's analysis thus tell us nothing at all about literature, only about the ways in which such terms can be obscured beyond any practical critical value they might have.
McGurl's adaptation of the terms really offers little specific insight into the tangible influence of Amazon on publishing and bookselling, either. Readers expecting from Everything & Less an examination of Amazon's business practices, its effects on the economics of publishing (especially as related to smaller publishers), or its transformation of reading practices beyond the expansion of genre certainly won't get it. At best McGurl takes Amazon's status as a provider of "service" at face value, preferring to look more closely at the peculiar kinds of commodities it has produced rather than the process of commodification itself. Although certainly books have long been treated as commodities in the capitalist system, Amazon has surely gone the farthest in discarding any pretense that they are anything but merchandise (even if they are merchandised as autotherapy). McGurl doesn't seem much perturbed about this: if its approach has amassed for Amazon a fortune in sales, it has also supplied the sociologically inclined literary critic with an overflowing source of material suitable for his scrutiny.
For all the sophisticated critical tools and close reading skills--and McGurl certainly does a sort of critical reading that effectively maps onto the texts he examines the interpretive scheme he employs --the results of his far-flung explorations of the literary wilds Amazon has cultivated seem rather unremarkable: American fiction during the time when Amazon has come to dominate publishing would appear to be very. . .Amazonian. Not only is it unsurprising that such might be the case, but we could also grant McGurl this conclusion, yet find it trivial. That works of fiction display the signs of the circumstances in which they are created is finally banal, even tautological. How could it be otherwise? How could an alteration of circumstances as consequential as the rise of Amazon (and of the internet that made it possible) not be registered, directly or indirectly, in the writing that ensues? Everything and Less provides us with a photograph of a literary culture adapting to a cultural development that directly affects its own means of existence, but the implication the book leaves that Amazon's presence has enacted some sort of permanent transformation of writing and publishing is surely subject to doubt. If it certainly appears that literary culture has for now fully assimilated itself to the internet, its currently hybrid print/online status hardly seems immutable, and Amazon itself scarcely seems immune to further technological shifts that would make it less relevant.
McGurl's account of the sort of fiction Amazon is making possible is useful, however, in showing us what the future of fiction might be like should Amazon continue to dominate bookselling and especially the self-publishing market, or rather the future without fiction, since in this future the novel would indeed be dead. No amount of special pleading on behalf of preposterous popular genres will make them worth taking seriously. Relegating aesthetically serious fiction to its own sickly genre will do nothing but ensure that it remains sickly. Writers still interested in the idea of literature will no doubt stubbornly persist in authoring texts that might represent some synthesis of poetry and what we now call fiction, but the processes delineated by McGurl in Everything and Less if they retain their hold will so thoroughly trivialize fiction as a literary form that all claims for the novel as the predominant incarnation of "literature" will seem passingly absurd, although at that point neither will there be literary critics to contemplate its demise.