The Reading Experience

"I Don't Want to Lose What I Called to Say"

The fiction of Stephen Dixon starkly illustrates the difference between realism as a literary effect and "story" as a structural device, a distinction that is often enough blurred in discussions of conventional storytelling. "Realism" is the attempt to convince readers that the characters and events depicted in a given work are "like life" as most of us experience it, but, as Dixon's stories and novels demonstrate, story or plot conceived as the orderly--or even not so orderly--arrangement of incidents and events for explicitly dramatic purposes need not be present for such an attempt to succeed. Few readers are likely to finish his latest novel, Phone Rings (Melville House Publishing) thinking it does not provide a comprehensive and intensely realistic account of its characters and their circumstances, and of the family relationships the novel chronicles, but many if not most will have concluded that fidelity to the stages in Freytag's Triangle has very little to do with its realism.

Which is not to day that Phone Rings has no story to impart, only that it is one that emerges in the narrative long run, through the accumulation of episodes and interchanges (in this case, as in Dixon's previous novel, Old Friends, interchanges over the telephone), although the episodes themselves retain a kind of narrative autonomy separate from their placement as points on a narrative arc. Ultimately, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but the relationship between the parts is lateral, not linear, the story an aftereffect of Dixon's relentless layering of these episodic elements. (In some Dixon novels, such as, for example, Interstate or Gould, the repetitions, reversals, and transformations he effects through such layering become the story, or at least what makes the story memorable and gives these novels their aesthetically distinctive shape.) One could say that Dixon's commitment to realism precludes imposing "story" when doing so would only be a way of distorting reality by imputing to it more order and more direction than it in fact has.

Dixon's strategy of allowing his fiction to register the mundane and the contingent can seem obsessive, even perverse. In section 7 of Phone Rings, the novel's protagonist, Stu, makes breakfast for his wife. Through a chain of banal actions, Stu accidentally cuts himself with a bread knife. He serves the breakfast and talks with his wife about the fact that he's just cut himself with a bread knife, then, returning to the kitchen and seeing the knife, he wonders what might have happened if the knife had struck his carotid artery. He returns to his wife, who suggests he put a Band-Aid on the cut. The chapter concludes with Stu going back to the kitchen, where he attempts to recreate the situation that led to the accident:

He went back to the kitchen and got the bread knife and opened the refrigerator and wanted to reproduce the way the knife got stuck in the door, but couldn't find a place where it could have got caught. Just somewhere here, in the top shelf of the door, and then before he could do anything about it the knife, buckling under the pressure and something to do with realizing it was stuck and perhaps overcorrecting the situation by pushing the door too far back, sprung out of whatever it was into his neck. Okay, enough; forget about it as you said.

In section 10, "Brother of a neighbor dies. Stu reads about it in the Sun. " Stu wonders whether he should send condolences, starts walking up the hill to the neighbor's house, decides not to after all, and returns home. "I'll just send a condolence card. I'll get it at the drugstore and speak to Peter about his brother sometime after," he says to his wife in the section's closing line.

While these set-pieces are loosely connected to the novel's overarching depiction of Stu's grief over the death of his brother, it certainly cannot be said they advance "plot" in any but the most incremental sort of way--they present us with additional scenes from Stu's life, but do not reduce that life to the bare sum of those scenes. Each provides an equally significant account, however brief or however extended, of Stu's experience (just as the telephone conversations that make up a large portion of the novel's "action" remain self-contained exhanges that allow Stu to invoke past experiences), but Phone Rings, like much of Dixon's fiction, encourages us to consider the portrayal of its characters' experiences as an end-in-itself, not as the prop for a conventional narrative structure artificially imposed on these experiences.

However, if Phone Rings is a novel of character rather than plot, Dixon doesn't always seem at pains to delineate his characters with the expected kind of specificity. Here is a phone exchange between Stu and his brother Dan:

. . ."I'm only calling to tell you something that might interest you that happened today. Of course, also to hear how you are. But that, later, for I don't want to lose what I called to say, unless everything with you's not okay," and Dan said, "No, we're fine. What?" "I was going through my top dresser drawer to throw out all the useless papers and single socks and so on, and came across Dad's old business card," and Dan said "Which one? His dental office or the one he used after he lost his license and sold textiles for what was the company called. . .Lakeside?" and he said "Brookhaven. On Seventh Avenue and 38th." "And a third card. In fact, four," and Stu said "This one was for his 40th Street dental office--his last," and Dan said, "That's what I was getting to. First the Delancey Street offfice, which he had from 1919 till we moved to the West Side in '37, and he set up his practice there. Then Brookhaven, if you're right, and it sounds right--Brookfield or Brookhaven," and he said "Take my word, Haven. . . ..

It is nearly impossible to distinguish between Stu and Dan based on their speech patterns and characteristics alone--and in this novel they are known primarily through their speech. Both exhibit the same tendency to free association and other kinds of roundabout locutions (perhaps influenced by American Jewish speech patterns), to digressive asides and fragmentary utterances. Moreover, many of the other characters in the novel talk like this as well, as if the novel's primary objective is to project a kind of collective voice or to create out of workaday language itself a collective character that is the utlimate focus of Dixon's interest.

This does not mean that the characters in Phone Rings are inadequately rendered or fail to convince as plausibly "real" people. If anything, Dixon's emphasis on the quotidian and the conditional only lends them authenticity--this is the way people actually do talk and act, after all--and his prose style more broadly so insistently restricts itself to the plain narrative essentials, refusing to indulge in figurative embellishments and descriptive decoration (literally sticking to the prosaic) that it might seem these characters are not the creations of writing at all but are merely being caught in the midst of their ongoing, prexisting lives. Thus, chapters begin like this:

His younger daughter comes into the bedroom and says, "Phone call for you." He's working at his work table and says, "Darn, I'm right in the middle of something. That's why I turned the ringer off." "Next time tell us to tell callers you're busy and you'll call back," and he says "Next time I will, thanks," and gets up and picks up the phone receiver and says hello. "Uncle Stu, it's Manny.". . .

This goal of representing life as lived (right down to including details and dialogue most other writers would simply eliminate for efficiency's sake) may also be the motive behind Dixon's often exessively long paragraphs. To adjust his prose to the artificial demands of paragraphing would be a false way of representing the flow of experience, and Dixon's method in effect forces the reader to regard experience in this way--one thing after another. His style--and it is such, a deliberate effort to compose a style that seems without style--does produce a flattening effect, by which actions, thoughts and speech seem to occur on the same discursive plane and receive the same degree of emphasis, but this is more fundamentally the consequence of an approach that seeks to make its treatment of reality as material as possible. We don't get "psychological realism" from Stephen Dixon, at least insofar as that term indicates an effort to plumb the depths of consciousness, to approximate the ineffable. His characters think out loud: "He'd never told Dan this. Thought several times to but then thought better. Made Isaac swear not to tell Dan or Zee about it. 'Oh, on second thought, you can tell her,' after Isaac swore he'd never tell either, 'but not Dan. You do, he won't let me take you anywhere for the next few years. I know him. . . .'"
What originates in Stu's ruminations becomes just another form of exposition.

I find Dixon's strategies fascinating (he ususally manages to extend them just a little bit farther with each book) and his ability to elicit from them compelling and often emotionally affecting fictions impressive indeed. He's one of the few writers to whose work the descriptions "experimental" and "realistic" seem to apply equally, although his inclination to the former is almost always a way of further securing the latter. His relative lack of popularity among even readers of serious literary fiction is both surprising and understandable: Surprising because he's finally such an engrossing and rewarding writer, understandable because his style of realism, shunning as it does the facile resort to "story," calls into question the idea that fiction functions to elucidate life by, figuratively at least, whipping it into shape.

Cavalier Assertions

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, January 17:

Mr. Frey's embellishments of the truth, his cavalier assertion that the "writer of a memoir is retailing a subjective story," his casual attitude about how people remember the past - all stand in shocking contrast to the apprehension of memory as a sacred act that is embodied in Oprah Winfrey's new selection for her book club, announced yesterday: "Night," Elie Wiesel's devastating 1960 account of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

New York Times, January 19:

The publisher and the translator of a new English-language edition of "Night," Elie Wiesel's harrowing account of life in the Nazi death camps, said yesterday that the new edition corrects several small factual errors in the previous translation, including a reference to the author's age when he entered the camps.

Oprah Winfrey's choice of "Night" as the next selection for her television book club on Monday immediately sent the book to the top of national best-seller lists.

But it also revived questions about "Night," one of the first autobiographical accounts of the death camps and a book that changed modern American understanding of the Holocaust. At times over the last 45 years it has been classified as a novel on some high-school reading lists, in some libraries and in bookstores.

Some scholars who have studied Holocaust memoirs have also raised questions about how much of the book can be verified.

Mr. Wiesel and his literary agent, Georges Borchardt, said in interviews this week that the book was factual and that they had never portrayed it as a novel. They said the differences in the new edition are not significant enough to justify the kind of questions raised about Ms. Winfrey's last book club selection, the memoir "A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey

Just a suggestion: "Nonfiction narrative" is inherently a genre in which facts are going to be shaded and embellished in the name of story. In demanding that our "nonfiction" also be "narrative," let's not pretend that it is as well providing us with "the truth." Frey's embellishments may or may not have been warranted, but if we stopped fetishizing "story" as embodying some kind of transcendent value, he may not have resorted to them in the first place.

The Big Picture

Chris Bachelder makes as good a case for Upton Sinclair's The Jungle as I've read in a while:

The Jungle aims to provide an accurate report of the many ways that life in Packingtown crushes people, destroys their power of self-determination, even their humanness. Individual desire, typically the engine of fiction, is eradicated. If Sinclair’s characters seem to lack agency or a certain kind of Rooseveltian pluck, if they seem unresponsive or passionless, well, that’s the point. Readers may long for a tender conversation between Jurgis and Ona as they hold each other on a particularly cold night, but as Sinclair writes, “truly it was hard, in such a life, to keep any sentiment alive.”

Later in his career, Sinclair knew himself well enough as an artist to tell the critic Van Wyck Brooks that “some novelists I know collect their material with a microscope, and I collect mine with a telescope.” E.L. Doctorow once said that contemporary American writers are more technically proficient and far less socially or politically motivated than previous generations of writers (many of whom began as journalists). Readers of contemporary literary fiction have grown accustomed to the novel’s microscopic power to render, often beautifully, the small moments of a character’s life. Conversely, we’ve grown skeptical of the novel’s telescopic function to bring large, distant abstractions into focus. We’re wary of the big picture. And if the accurate depiction or explanation of the world outside our minds is not a part of our conception of Good Literature, we will fail to recognize the power of The Jungle.

The problem with this, however, is that an "accurate depiction" is not the same thing as an "explanation." A realist writer (Flaubert or James, for example) may indeed render an accurate depiction, either of the world inside or outside our minds, without presuming to offer an explanation--an ideological or conceptual grid onto which we are to project the depicted world. More often than not, through the focus on the concrete rather than the abstract, such writers ultimately convey more of the complexity of human experience than its capacity to be reduced to simple explanations. In effect, the more we know, the less we know. (In this sense, the epistemic skepticism Bachelder speaks of in his essay is a consequence of the novel's own "artful" techniques of exploring experience rather than the "sustained attacks on objectivity and truth" by contemporary philosophers.)

Sinclair pretty obviously did want to provide an "explanation." He wanted not merely to portray "the many ways that life in Packingtown crushes people," but to bring the reader, along with The Jungle's protagonist, to an appreciation of socialism as an alternative to the unrestrained capitalism the novel exposes. And, as Baldechar pouts out, Sinclair himself admitted he had failed at this goal: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Still, sickening readers through the power of description is not an insignificant accomplishment. It does show that whatever skills as a writer Sinclair did possess finally overshadowed his more dubious talents as a political theorist.

Although one can acknowledge the "power" of The Jungle and still wonder why it needed to be written as a novel at all (beyond the usual bromides about the way novels offer "identification" and "intimacy"). The accuracy of its depictions could have been achieved just as readily in nonfiction as fiction, their truthfulness perhaps becoming only more consequential as a result. Is "accuracy of depiction" even something that distinguishes fiction as a literary form in the first place?

Born of Blood and Emotion

When I wrote this post, I did not know that Poetry editor Christian Wiman participated in the 2004 conference, “Celebrating Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Poets in Connecticut,” at the University of Connecticut. According to this account at electronic book review, here is what Wiman had to say:

. . .Throughout the entire proceedings, he had sat a bit pushed back from the table, looking sallow and brooding, else intent and reticent. When his turn came to speak, he cleared his throat and slowly, in carefully enunciated syllables, began with this proposition: if Wallace Stevens is influential in 50 years, then the break between American poetry and the world will be complete. Much of the crowd, a bit confused by this comment, leaned in attentively. Was Stevens a great poet? Yes of course. But, was he a companionable poet? No, not at all. In fact - Wiman continued in measured tones - he was almost inhuman, uprooted, impenetrable, unpenetrating, a self-indulgent effete, a hyper-cerebral poet with raw talent blazing but little sense of how to convey something a reader might enter into, something born of blood and emotion and the shared commonalities of lived life. He was a destructive influence on modern poetry. . .Stevens’ poetry has abjured the world, Wiman continued, he lived in a bubble of the mind so that he might not be infected by life. His poetry corrosively and obsessively studied itself and was utterly unconcerned with the specificity of things and with relationships to people. There was coldness or distance that Wiman sensed in Stevens’ poetry and it turned him off, way off, didn’t arrive at the root of him as a reader. The early poems thought in sounds, not in ideas, and throughout Stevens’ career, all he could see were busy associative surfaces with very little depth. . . .

What strikes me most about this passage (acknowledging that it is a paraphrase of Wiman's remarks, not direct quotation), is the dishonesty of allowing that Stevens might be a "great poet," even though his poems have the grave defects Wiman enumerates. Clearly Wiman doesn't believe Stevens is a great poet; how could someone who had "a destructive influence on modern poetry" be great? Wiman has high moral standards for poetry to meet--it mustn't be "inhuman" (that word again),"uprooted," "self-indulgent"--and manifestly Stevens's poetry doesn't measure up. (Although is is important to note that these standards are moral. There's nothing in this diatribe that actually touches on Stevens's facility as a poet, his ability to indeed think "in sounds.")

Although perhaps it is more important for a poet to be "companionable" than to dilly-dally around so much with words and stuff, more important to offer "something born of blood and emotion" (as if Stevens's poems don't contain emotion--has Wiman read "The Death of a Soldier"?) than to write skillful and provocative poems. Presumably Poetry will be publishing poems that manifest the opposite qualities Wiman describes here, and readers can decide for themselves whether they represent an advance in the art of poetry. But if I had to bet on what will be influential 50 years from now, the issues of Poetry editied by Christian Wiman or the poems of Wallace Stevens, my money is decidedly on the latter.

Thanks to John Palatella for alerting me to the ebr article.

Market Discipline

Rather than use its $175 million to help out actually existing poets directly, the Poetry Foundation is instead going to engage in some social work: ". . .the stewards of that large sum believe they can use it to bring poetry 'back into the mainstream of American culture'". This involves "a series of programs designed to jumpstart interest in poetry among nonspecialist readers."

Bizarrely, the goal of these "programs" is intended to build "a readership for poetry large enough to make it possible for more poets to succeed in a commercial marketplace rather than rely on academia to make a living." Why such a roundabout way of giving poets some assistance, unless the real goal is to further debase American poetry by forcing it to be "commerical"? (''More poems should rhyme," says Poetry editor Christian Wiman. "More poems should have meter. More poems should tell stories in accomplished ways. More poems should do the things that people like poems to do.") Unless the real recipient of the foundation's beneficence is capitalism itself, which will now teach even poets a good lesson in the imperatives of market discipline?

We are told that "the foundation's strategy emphasizes rebuilding a general, nonspecialist, and, crucially, nonacademic audience for poetry." The assumption everyone involved in this project seems to share is that at one time poetry did have a "broader readership" that contemporary poets for some reason renounced and that the self-appointed saviors of the Poetry Foundation will now reclaim. But when was this "golden age" that Wiman in particular speaks of? Certainly not in my lifetime. The greatest American poets of the twentieth century are, arguably, Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, both of whom published in Poetry. How much influence did they have on "the mainstream of American culture"? They profoundly influenced those who take literature seriously, but what impact did their work have on "general, nonspecialist" readers? Even now, what would such readers make of "The Idea of Order at Key West" or "Four Quartets"? They would be as incomprehensible to them as the most elusive lines of John Ashbery or the most resolutely nonreferential L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems.

What is a "specialist" reader? Someone who reads poetry? What's a "nonspecialist" reader? Someone who can take it or leave it? Why would poets want to appeal to such a reader?

James Longenbach has it right. People like Christian Wiman and John Barr and Dana Gioia are invested in the notion that poetry is "good for us." It's this "good" they're interested in spreading around along with their money, not poetry itself. Longenbach says further: ''Poets can do without much money. . .and that's a good thing. . . . Poets have much more aesthetic freedom precisely because nobody cares how or what they write. That freedom is priceless." I agree. And American fiction might benefit if more fiction writers took this idea seriously as well.

A Measure Beyond Art

In an essay in the December issue of The New Criterion (unfortunately no longer available at the website except through the purchase of a "token"), Roger Kimball offers a laudatory account of Art in Crisis, written by the Austrian art historian (and Nazi party member) Hans Sedlmayr. “Autonomous man,” according to Sedlymayer, “does not and cannot exist—any more than can autonomous art, architecture, painting and so on. It is of the essence of man that he should be both natural and supernatural … . Man is fully human only in so far as he is a repository of the divine spirit.”

Kimball shares Sedlymayer's contempt for the notion that art might have autonomous value:

One need not, I think, share Sedlmayr’s theological convictions in order to appreciate the power of his strictures about the search for autonomy. “The fact is,” he argues, “that art cannot be assessed by a measure that is purely artistic and nothing else. Indeed, such a purely artistic measure, which ignored the human element, the element which alone gives art its justification, would actually not be an artistic measure at all. It would merely be an aesthetic, and actually the application of purely aesthetic standards is one of the peculiarly inhuman features of the age, for it proclaims by implication the autonomy of the work of art, an autonomy that has no regard to men—the principle of l’art pour l’art.” Art has its own aesthetic canons of legitimacy and achievement; but those canons are themselves nugatory unless grounded in a measure beyond art. That is the ultimate, indispensable, lesson of Art in Crisis.

One hears this sort of thing all the time, and not just from conservatives such as Kimball. Art that is "purely artistic" (itself such a logically dissonant notion--what proportion of art should be something other than artistic? 5%? 50%?--as to make all accounts of art proceeding from this assumption inherently absurd) lacks the "human element," privileges the autonomy of art over "regard to men." Art needs to accomodate itself (or be made to accomodate) some larger, more important conceptual order: if not religion, then politics, history, ethics, or "culture" regarded as a kind of substitute for "theological convictions."

But, since art is made by human beings for the consideration of other human beings, I just find it puzzling what it means to say that some art might be "inhuman." Is the "human element" in art something mystical to be intuited from the work, or is it stirred in like the secret ingredient in the spaghetti sauce? (Of course, in the case of the Nazi Sedylmayer, we can make a pretty good guess about who and what is being identified in his use of the word "inhuman.") What, finally, can be more "human" than to exercise the imagination in such a thoroughgoing and transformative way as to create a poem, painting, or musical composition that seems so self-sufficient that we want call it "autonomous"? What's inhuman about admiring such an effort to the extent of creating a vocabulary to describe its effects? In my opinion, people who opine about the "merely aesthetic," who find aesthetic values "nugatory" unless they are subservient to a higher principle of judgment, manifestly disdain art except as an illustrative aid, a utilitarian convenience.

It has always been relatively clear (at least to me) that Roger Kimball's protestations against the coarsening of art and the study of art have always been hollow, at best a rhetorical expedient in the broader struggle against liberalism, in the "arts" branch of which Kimball has been one of the most prominent combatants. But it is additionally illuminating to find him admitting that aesthetics mean little to him. (Although it is a little surprising that he would explicitly cite the anti-modernist ravings of a fascist art historian to support his position.) The view of art Kimball expresses here is in many ways representative of the long-standing conservative belief that art should serve simply as one of the props of culture (as it also explains the reflexive horror with which many conservative commenators recoil from unconventional or transgressive art), but the essay should also be a useful reminder the next time Kimball--or one of his like-minded colleagues--rails against the latest outrage among artists or literary critics that artistic accomplishment is really the least of his concerns.

Business Decisions

Booksquare takes some exception to the notion that, according to The Sunday Times, "the [book] industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent.":

While our first tendency is to draw comfort from having our worst suspicions confirmed, there is a stronger tendency to explore the idea that while Naipaul and Middleton are fine authors, they do not appeal to every reader. Thus, when it comes to make business decisions (and one must recall that representing or publishing books is indeed a business decision), different criteria are used to judge work. . . .

But this is, of course, the very point of Times article. It does not claim that "the book industry has become incapable of making business decisions" (although one could certainly question the wisdom of many it does make). Obviously, the implication of this experiment (submitting chapters from books by V. S. Naipaul and Stanley Middleton to various publishers, only to have them rejected) is that the overriding imperative in contemporary publishing is to indeed apply "different criteria" than literary merit. Perhaps Naipaul and Middleton "do not appeal to every reader," but that their work manifests "literary talent" seems to me undeniable. The "book industry" and its apologists need to make up their minds: Either "literary talent" no longer matters and publishing any piece of dreck that comes along on the suspicion it might make money is now acceptable practice, or it does matter and the publishing world is doing a dreadful job of serving that talent.