The Reading Experience

Blood Relations

According to Nigel Beale:

Novels that emphasize character seem. . .closer to life, more natural. . . .

So, which characters are truest to life? Those we know best: those who we can most completely relate to, regardless of how fantastical. . .The essential question to ask: is this fictitious entity relevant to me and my life? Does she encounter or answer important questions that I may have about my life? Am I affected by his situation? In short, is there something of this character alive in me? This surely is the measure of ‘lifeness’ and indeed great fiction: the amount of blood the reader and character share. How relevant the thoughts and actions of one are to the other. How applicable fictional situations are to real life ones.

It's hard to imagine a more narcissistic view of the role of fiction--almost literally, it should reflect my own face back to me--and I really have to wonder whether Nigel intends this to be taken altogether seriously. I suppose he might be making a point that in order to enter a fictional world, readers need to be able to envision themselves in that world through a character with whom they can at least minimally identify, but otherwise this is about as reductive an account of the appeal of fiction as I've come across.

Of course, the biggest problem with it is in its underlying assumption that "Novels that emphasize character seem. . .closer to life, more natural." Presuming that "more natural" novels are from Nigel's point of view superior novels (a pretty safe conclusion, I think), one can argue with this assertion in at least two ways . Is it true that character-centered novels are "closer to life"? Is it necessary for novels to be "close to life," in the sense that "fictional situations" be "applicable" to "real life ones"? Nigel opines that novels such as The Brothers Karamazov and The Red and the Black are closer to his life, but why couldn't fiction that emphasizes setting or incident be just as "close to life," especially if "realism" is the preferred goal? (And I'm not so sure either of these two novels actually are character-centered: Karamazov seems to me an excuse for abstract philosophical debate rather than an attempt to create plausible characters, and The Red and the Black is at least as much plot-focused picaresque as a portrait of its ultimately rather two-dimensional protagonist.) Are characters more real than places or activities?

Certainly the origins of the novel do not lie in "situations" that are rendered as closely as possible to those of "real life." Precursors to the novel such as Gulliver's Travels or Gargantua and Pantagruel are plot-heavy phantasmagorias, anything but explorations of character, while most of the earliest actual novels, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, are either explicitly picaresque narratives whose characters never develop beyond their roles in the plots or tales in which what happens is clearly the focal point, not characters "relevant to me and my life." Those readers like Nigel, who recoil from novels "which impose artificial form on formless real life experience," even when such form is simply "plot," have formed a relationship with fiction rooted in late-nineteenth century realism, later developed into "pyschological realism," that might arguably be called character-centered, but such readers assume this sort of fiction essentially brought literary history to a halt and that other kinds of fiction, less dependent on "lifeness" so very narrowly conceived, are simply marginal, trivial, empty flourishes easily ignored. Only character-driven realism is "natural."

This attitude strikes me as ultimately rather contemptuous of "the novel" as a form of literary art, as anything other than an opportunity to project one's own psychological preoccupations onto fictional characters. The order that form imposes is, after all, an aesthetic order without which a work of fiction really has no reason for being. Unless one can turn novels into some sort of religious meditation or "spiritual" quest, which is about all I can make out of the attempt to force fiction to "answer important questions that I may have about my life" and of language like "amount of blood the reader and character share." When the stakes are raised this grandly, "art" can't be anything but a nuisance.

"What This Is Is Jersey"

As found in her new book, The Suburban Swindle, Jackie Corley's stories would seem to be classifiable as a kind of slice-of-life realism, episodes, some quite circumscribed and plotless, that add a little fictional flesh to bare-bones themes of cultural anomie announced in the first paragraphs of the very first such episode, "Blood in Jersey":

What are we? What we are is oiled sadness. Dead garden snakes and dried-up slugs. We're what happens when you're bored and scared too long, when you sit in piles in some dude's basement trying to get the guy's white supremacist brother to shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes. You sit in those hordes and some emo kid takes out a bag of clumpy, dried-up weed and shakes it like he's accomplished something.

What this is is Jersey. This is fear so thick and buried under, you pretend you're not on fire. The boys are brawling on the front lawn and coming back down to the basement with finger-mark welts on their necks and bloody, rubbery scratches on their chests.

But while most of the stories do provide a brief and immediate immersion in the "oiled sadness" of suburban New Jersey youth, the aimlessness and alienation to which we are exposed might seem overly familiar, a little too reminiscent of various movie versions of alienated youth (although I nevertheless do not doubt the accuracy of the portrayal, nor the authenticity of its sources). And if The Suburban Swindle was just another depiction of youthful discontent with suburban life, it would not really be able to make much of a claim on our attention. However, the primary appeal of the book, at least for me, lies not in the details of life as endured in New Jersey but in those of its stylistic and formal features already to be perceived in "Blood in Jersey" and its opening paragraphs.

The pruned-back structure of a story like this (admittedly an especially brief one, although all of the stories, even those of a more conventional length, are similarly committed to an overall narrative minimalism) ultimately brings an increased emphasis on the language with which such a lightly plotted story is presented, on the story as the unfolding of its language. Often in this sort of narratively truncated realism "style" is notably de-emphasized, made as "plain" as possible, but here no attempt is being made to conceal the "writing" that, almost literally, turns out to everything in "Blood in Jersey," not just the vehicle for plot and character development. The first several stories in The Suburban Swindle likewise deflect the reader's initial interest in storytelling and characterization toward their own verbal flourishes, but even the stories that do introduce incident and more fully sketched-out characters still call attention to the prose with which such elements are deployed more that we might expect in conventional realism.

One might say that the "radical exclusion" manifest in these stories goes beyond the implicit narrowing of focus to be found in all short stories and extends to the exclusion of any extraneous plot devices and gestures at character "depth" that inhibit immediacy of expression. Of course, one could also suggest that the sparseness in plot and character only reinforces the essential realism of the stories, since the kinds of lives they portray are themselves likely to be rather short on "plot" and psychologically afflicted in generally similar ways. But whether form most often influences content or content determines form, the result in this collection is a kind of fiction in which the form of expression doesn't merely point us to its subject but is dynamically a part of it in a way that I, for one, find impressive:

The cigarette should burrow through him. It should take his skin to butter and give me a rabbit hole on his skinny, hairless arm. Then I could pull up his shirt sleeve any time I wanted and admire it, that charred empty well. It would always belong to me.

When I try to bring the coal down in the middle of a lazy map of freckles, he flinches again, laughing. His naked torso folds in on itself, as if he's blocking some probing, tickling hand, and he keeps giggling, high and sloppy and loud. He goes down to the floor, drink still buoyed up in the air by an extended right hand. ("Fine Creatures")

I wouldn't say that The Suburban Swindle is a flawless book--sometimes the familiarity of the material does subsume the liveliness of the writing--but it introduces a writer whose approach both to her subject and to the literary presentation it requires certainly makes me curious about what her future work might be like.

Mars Sinking

Marisa Silver's The God of War (Simon and Schuster) is yet another mediocre novel that unaccountably has sent reviewers into raptures of praise, larding it with adjectives such as "beautiful," "stunning," and "exquisite." Such praise for a thoroughly drab, utterly undistinguished work of complacent realism, a novel that reinforces the most retrograde notions of what a "serious" novel should be like, leaves one lamenting not just the persistence of the kind of formulaic "literary fiction" this novel represents, but also the inability of so many critics to evaluate this fiction in other than the most vapid, critically submissive terms.

The God of War is essentially a coming-of-age story, perhaps the most frequently invoked subgenre in the history of fiction. In order to justify yet another novel employing this plot convention, one would hope that its author would at least offer something more distinctive in the way of style or voice, something to enliven an otherwise familiar narrative (as done, for example in The Catcher in the Rye). But, unfortunately, Silver does not provide such aesthetic compensations. Even though she has chosen to let her protagonist tell his own story, the resulting narrative voice is at best bland and perfunctory. The story is told in retrospect, creating a tone of earnest detachment that fails to engage the reader with the narrator's younger self and makes his story read like an indifferent chronicle of the recent past: Here's what it was like in this small part of the world thirty years ago. When the narrator's language isn't just colorless, it strains after effect in badly wrought figures: "Her cheeks were puffy at the bottom as if she were storing two caramels or some other secrets there"; "The air felt exhausted, as if it had finally given up its day work and had flung its spent self across the land."

About the only plausibly original feature of The God of War is its setting on and around California's Salton Sea, a man-made body of water created as an accidental consequence of a water diversion project in the early 20th century. Here, enduring the stench of periodic fish and bird kills, among the detritus of failed efforts to make the area into a resort, and facing what is otherwise an unforgiving desert environment, the adolescent protagonist lives with his mother and his autistic brother. Clearly the elemental bleakness of the setting is meant to reinforce or counterpoint the boy's encounter with the harshness of life, but, considering the indistinct impression we get of the Salton Sea and its environs, the novel could just as well be set in any other struggling, off-the-beaten-track community where young people are forced early to confront adult problems. The peculiarities of the Salton Sea are summoned to provide a kind of exotic backdrop, but since we really learn very little either about it or about the way it has conditioned the lives of those who live near it, it ultimately does not play a very meaningful role in the story. It seems something of a gimmick, a way to differentiate this novel from all the other novels of "local color" competing for attention in the literary maketplace.

The story mostly concerns the narrator's efforts to protect his brother from those whose misperceptions might do him harm, including his own mother, whom the narrator feels never really accepted her autistic son's condition. (In an ironic twist, his younger brother winds up protecting the narrator from danger, although even here the latter finds it necessary to conceal his brother's responsibility for the act of violence involved.) The novel's core situation, single mother barely able to support herself and her two sons, one of whom is severely mentally disabled, provides inherent possibilities for both melodrama and sentimentality, and it doesn't fail to exploit most of them. It especially fails to avoid sentimentality, as almost every time the younger brother figures into a scene the reader's heartstrings get tugged:

. . .He didn't take his mouth from the straw the entire time he sucked, not even to breathe. There was no end to his appetite. He ate whatever food was offered to him even if he had just finished a huge meal. Laurel and I learned to tell him when he was done eating and we were expert at distracting him so that he could tear his mind away from the food and land on a new obsession for a while. More than any other of his traits, this hunger upset me, made me feel unaccountably mournful. It filled me with a great nostalgic sadness for lost things, the way a rich person might feel if he had to live as a pauper, always remembering the fancy cars and clothes of a bygone life. . . .

It is perhaps inevitable that such a character will evoke cheap emotion, but Silver does little to mitigate this effect. Indeed, her decision to include such a character in a novel narrated by a family member almost ensures sentimentality, and the final chapter relating the younger brother's premature death in a group home only lays on the sentiment more thickly, suggesting to me a deliberate strategy to create pathos and evoke pity.

In both its conventionality and its sentimentality, The God of War is representative of a certain kind of "literary fiction" that mainstream reviewers just can't seem to resist. Realistic, mostly humorless, but full of "human emotion," these novels seem to appeal to critics and some readers as adequately "serious" to be elevated above popular potboilers and genre fiction, without violating the presumed need to be "accessible." They shield these critics and readers from more formally and thematically challenging fiction, which can be safely marginalized, and thus ignored. As long as the "literary" in "literary fiction" continues to be associated with novels like The God of War, the word will become only more accurately defined by such other words as "tedium" and "pretense."

The Bizarre Extremes of Human Existence

Citing a recent news item relating bizarre human behavior, Peter Kerry Porter at his blog Read, Write, Now writes:

. . .one looks at this stuff published daily and has to say helplessly that Dickens and O’Connor and Faulkner have nothing on this. Stephen King could do no better in calling up the bizarre extremes of human existence. No wonder contemporary readers have little taste for fiction, and novelists feel compelled to present their fictions as spurious memoir. With a world as it already is beyond all imagining, what role for the writer who wants to imagine what is not.

This is remeniscent of Philip Roth's essay from the early 1960s in which he too lamented the fact that truth is often stranger than fiction:

. . .the American writer. . .has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of Amerian reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.

There is certainly much truth in these observations, and if we conceive of the fiction writer's task as one by which the writer depicts a set of characters and events that transcend ordinary reality in their extremity, evokes a landscape that strikes us as intensely strange yet still faithful to "actuality," then perhaps fiction cannot compete with reality. But is this the writer's task? Should fiction be in competition with reality in a search for the "bizarre extremes of human existence"?

In its way, the notion that fiction should be engaged in such a search only reinforces the underlying idea that realism is the novel's natural mode, that the novel exists to "record" reality, even if it is reality in its most outrageous manifestations. If William Dean Howells believed that the novel provided an opportunity to record the ordinary course of human reality, the 21st century realist may choose to portray that reality through its outliers, its most outlandish displays of human behavior, but the goal, to re-present "reality" as it is lived (by someone), remains the same. Peter qualifies his own conclusions about the difficulty of the writer's job by adding that "Imagination isn’t just an effort to invoke the extreme, but to shape it, to tame it to a tale," but while this begins to consider the art involved in fiction's confrontation with reality ("to shape it"), it finally equates that art with pruning and trimming, with taking the edge off reality (or maybe sharpening it) rather than creating something new--an addition to reality rather than a meticulously groomed version of it.

All fiction begins in reality--where else could it begin?--but why must it end merely in offering a plausible version of "real life"? Is the goal of writing fiction to lure back those readers so obsessed with the superficial appearance of reality that they've turned to memoir? Writers of fiction ought to take the opportunity to transfigure and re-imagine the real rather than just describe it. More than that, they should be seeking out fresh ways of using language to invoke the real, fresh ways of making language itself up to the task of engaging with all levels of "human existence." The writer's job is to "imagine what is not" first of all in imagining what words can do that they haven't yet been made to do.

The Play of Fancy

In a previous post, I expressed my puzzlement at Peter Brooks's view, articulated in his book Realist Vision, that the 19th century "is the time of industrial, social and political revolution, and one of the defining characteristics of realist writing is I think a willingness to confront these issues. England develops a recognizable 'industrial novel,' one that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict, and France has its 'roman social,' including popular socialist varieties." I wondered why

a defining feature of realism would be the willingness to "confront" issues or to "take on" social problems. If works of fiction are truly "realistic," immersed in the details of life as lived, they will naturally, sooner or later and in one way or another, engage with the issues and the problems of the times. There is no need to take that extra step, to insist that "issues" be confronted, unless the writer's (and the critic's) real interest lies in "taking on" social problems, on using fiction as a tool of social amelioration rather than regarding it as a self-sufficient form of literary art.

As it turns out, maintaining an analysis of realism that emphasizes "taking on" social problems as a defining characteristic requires a skeptical attitude toward the literary art of two of realism's ostensible founding figures, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert. Brooks writes of Dickens's Hard Times, perhaps his own most concentrated portrayal of the social conditions of Victorian England:

By its play on the streets and surfaces of Coketown, the narratorial prose upholds that ideal evoked in the allusion to the Arabian Nights: the play of fancy, of metaphor, of magic and the conterfactual. The narratorial language is constantly saying to Coketown, as to Gradgrind and company, I am not prisoner of your system, I can transform it, soar above it, through the imaginative resources of my prose.

This is Brooks's ultimate judgment on Dickens as a writer who evokes the surfaces of realistic description, at times soars above them, but doesn't really grapple with the "issues" behind them: he writes too much. As Brooks puts it a little later, Dickens engages in "the procedure of turning all issues, facts, conditions, into questions of style." Rather than acknowledging that "Everything in the conditions of Coketown. . .cry out for organization of the workers," Dickens just plays his grandiose language games. He makes "the questions posed by industrialism too much into a trope."

For Brooks, Hard Times is not so much a "taking on" of the harsh realities of 19th century England but a retreat from them into. . .literature. Dickens doesn't attempt the politically-directed representation of these forces but instead the "nonrepresentation of Coketown in favor of something else, a representation of imaginative processes at work, a representation of transformative style at play on the world." It is difficult at times in reading this chapter to remember that Brooks intends such words as criticism. The "representation of imaginative processes at work" that Brooks describes here has always seemed to me one of the glories of Dickens's fiction.

Brooks gestures at granting Dickens his artistic preferences, but it's pretty clear from his discussion of Hard Times that he doesn't value these preferences in the same way he values fiction "that takes on the problems of social misery and class confict," or at least that does so without turning them into tropes. Certainly Brooks doesn't want to admit Dickens's fiction, with its out-of-control "narratorial prose" and its stubborn insistence on imagination, into the club of respectable realism.

With Flaubert, Brooks is less impatient with his style per se but still essentially accuses Flaubert of writing too much--of being preoccuped with writing, in this case of being fixated on structure and on detail ("le most juste"). According to Brooks:

. . .it may be precisely in this disciplining of his imagination to something he loathes that the arduous perfection of Madame Bovary is forged. There is nothing natural about this novel. It is absolutely the most literary of novels, Henry James said--which he did not mean entirely as praise. There is indeed something labored about the novel, its characters, plot, milieux are all contructed with effort. Everything, as Flaubert understands it, depends on the detail.

Flaubert's insistence on detailed description makes Brooks think that Madame Bovary "is the one novel, among all novels, that deserves the label 'realist'," but this conclusion does not leave him sanguine. Flaubert's sort of realism is too insular, too much the excuse for building an elaborate aesthetic construction where "everything depends on the detail." Unfortunately, the detail doesn't add up to a "confrontation" with the world, doesn't even add up to a coherent whole at all:

Rhetorically, I suppose you would call all of those riding crops and cravats and shirt buttons in Balzac's world synecdoches: they are parts that stand for an intelligible whole. In Flaubert's world, however, they seem more like apparent synecdoches, in that often the whole is never given, never quite achieved. While Emma is frequently described, we never quite see her whole. She and her world never quite cohere.

Further: "It is as if the parts of the world really are what is most significant about it--the rest may simply be metaphysics." Flaubert's very approach to realism, then, precludes a fiction that takes on problems other than the problems of representation themselves, beginning with the representation of Emma Bovary: "Emma is surely one of the most memorable 'characters' of the novels we have read, we want to construct her fully as a person, we live with her aspirations, delusions, disappointments. Yet we repeatedly are given to understand that as a living, breathing, character-construction, Emma is a product of language--of her reading, and reveries on her reading, and of the sociolects that define her world." When Brooks claims there is "something labored" about Madame Bovary, he intends it as "le mot juste" in describing Flaubert's relationship with language: "Writing was such a slow and painful process for Flaubert because he had to make something new, strange, and beautiful out of a language in essence commonplace."

"New, strange, and beautiful," it would seem, are finally incommensurate with "realism" as Peter Brooks would have us define it. Despite their importance as writers moving fiction toward a greater realism of representation--the attempt to create the illusion of life as lived by ordinary people--neither Dickens nor Flaubert can finally be embraced as true-blue realists dedicated to confronting the issues of the age. Both of them seem too interested in writing to be reliable social critics, the role Brooks appears to think supercedes all else in the realist's job description. Brooks almost seems to suggest that "art" and "realism" are mutually exclusive terms.

No Ideas But In Things

In the first chapter of his 2005 book, Realist Vision, Peter Brooks writes:

With the rise of the realist novel in the nineteenth century, we are into the age of Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle, of Karl Marx and John Ruskin, of Charles Darwin and Hippolyte Taine: that is, an age where history takes on new importance, and learns to be more scientific, and where theories of history come to explain how we got to be how we are, and in particular how we evolved from earlier forms to the present. It is the time of industrial, social and political revolution, and one of the defining characteristics of realist writing is I think a willingness to confront these issues. England develops a recognizable "industrial novel," one that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict, and France has its "roman social," including popular socialist varieties.

To the extent that Brooks wants to link the rise of realist fiction to the rise of science and "theories of history," I can't really see how the former is influenced much by the latter, except specifically in the fiction of naturalist writers such as Emile Zola or, in the United States, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. These writers did indeed try to depict human behavior as it was defined by science--especially Darwinism--and by the forces of history. But these were writers who were deliberately using realism to illustrate a view of human life as determined by such external forces, not exploring the purely literary possibilities of realism as a still relatively new aesthetic strategy. They may have in a sense been portraying "things as they are," but they were doing it from an abstract philosophical perspective, not as an attempt to first of all render life in all of its particularities.

I equally don't understand why a defining feature of realism would be the willingness to "confront" issues or to "take on" social problems. If works of fiction are truly "realistic," immersed in the details of life as lived, they will naturally, sooner or later and in one way or another, engage with the issues and the problems of the times. There is no need to take that extra step, to insist that "issues" be confronted, unless the writer's (and the critic's) real interest lies in "taking on" social problems, on using fiction as a tool of social amelioration rather than regarding it as a self-sufficient form of literary art. To me, a "defining characteristic" of any fiction that can make a claim to be literary art, that can still be taken seriously in the long run, after the "social problems" of the day have been replaced by the next set, is that it not "confront" any issues or problems other than the literary problems immediately at hand.

Brooks's own insistence here that realism must "take on" larger social and cultural questions is actually contradicted, it seems to me, by what he asserts just a few paragraphs later:

You cannot, the realist claims, represent people without taking account of the things that people use and acquire in order to define themselves--their tools, their furniture, their accessories. These things are indeed part of the very definition of "character," of who one is and what one claims to be. The presence of things in these novels also signals their break from the neoclassical stylistic tradition, which tended to see the concrete, the particular, the utilitarian as vulgar, lower class, and to find beauty in the generalized and noble. The need to include and to represent things will consequently imply a visual inspection of the world of phenomena and a detailed report on it--a report often in the form of what we call description. The descriptive is typical--sometimes maddeningly so, of these novels. And the picture of the whole only emerges--if it does--from the accumulation of things.

This seems to me a pretty good account of what the best realist novels do: Draw the reader into a meticulously described world that the reader can accept as like the "real" world (keeping in mind that realistic description in fiction is just another device the writer can use, no more "authentic" than any other, given that what the reader is finally "confronted" with are just words on a page) and allow the reader to "see" the approximated world as fully as possible. If this sort of realism does bear philosophical implications, they are centered around the idea that the real is what is perceived. (Later, the "psychological" realists such as Woolf and Joyce would reject this; their fiction finds the real in how things are perceived, by focusing on the internal processes of consciousness.) But finally the art of realism lies in the way "things" are organized, in the manner and the skill with which the writer entices the reader to take note of the illuminating details.

Such an approach seems wholly at odds with the notion that realist fiction makes the reader aware of historical abstractions and social "issues." (The "generalized" rather than the "concrete.") "Things as they are" in the one seem on a wholly different scale than "things as they are" in the other. We can be made aware in fiction, subtly if implicitly, of historical change or social conflict, but only by acknowleding that the "defining characteristic" of realism is its particular approach to aesthetic representation, not its willingness to "take on" non-literary "problems." I am still reading Brooks's book, and I hope he will demonstrate to me how these two discrepant impulses can be reconciled in an account of literary realism.

Saying This and This Too

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantastic Elements

In her Strange Horizons essay registering her curiosity about the current SF scene after several years' absence from it, Susannah Mandel notes a loosening of the idea that science fiction is "a ghettoized genre form, excluded due to its fantastic elements from the realm of respected, 'artistic' literature, which is dominated by the mode of narrative realism." She further notes that a number of those previously associated with "artistic literature"--including Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, and John Updike--have recently at least dabbled in the "tropes, concepts, or premises historically associated with fantastic fiction" and wonders "How many of these writers have, historically, worked only as realists?"

To me, it isn't so surprising that writers nominally associated with "realism" would occasionally try out the tropes and premises of SF and other categories of genre fiction. Most such realists actually have a lot in common with most genre writers: Both are wedded to story, and both are motivated by an essentially realistic approach to storytelling. Although the stories being told in SF/Fantasy are more expressly "make-believe," they don't thereby get extra credit for being somehow more legitimately make-believe than realism. And even at its most conceptually fantastic in terms of plot and setting, most science fiction (at least in my reading experience) is even more earnestly realistic in presenting its characters and their interactions with their surroundings than most realism. Great efforts are made to present these characters and their actions in minute realistic detail, as if the author is describing a real world that just happens to be strangely transformed from ours.

Richard Larson, in his own response to Mandel's essay, puts it this way: "many of the most prominent mainstream writers are. . .stretching the boundaries of realism to fit their needs within particular stories." These writers are "stretching the boundaries," not abandoning the territory. They are working "within particular stories," using genre "tropes" to create compelling narratives, a conception of the writer's job shared by both realist and fantasist.

Richard suggests further that" People who like Cormac McCarthy and John Updike are not likely to enjoy Dan Simmons or William Gibson, no matter how much people within the genre community say that the books are just so similar" and that this is because these readers will notice in reading The Road or Toward the End of Time a difference in form that will override any similarities in content. While I doubt that either of these novels departs so thoroughly from the conventions of storytelling as to seem that alien to most readers of SF (I think the differences with these two writers are primarily stylistic differences), I do think Richard is pointing out a salient distinction to be made between SF and a certain kind of "literary fiction." It's just that the literary fiction I have in mind has little to do with "realism."

Although Matt Cheney thinks the "form-content distinction" is "more an occasionally-useful illusion than an idea that really fosters good analysis," in this case the distinction is not just useful but absolutely necessary in understanding why the conflict between SF as "a ghettoized genre form" and "artistic literature" as "narrative realism" is largely illusory and certainly not a worthy battle to fight if the stakes include the right to claim the genre as an "alternative" to stuffed-shirt "literary" writing.

To put it succinctly: Why does Mandel, or any partisan of genre fiction, believe the relevant opposition is between realism and not-realism, the latter defined crudely as "fantasy"? Why does she assume that the dominant mode of "artistic" fiction in the 20th and now the 21st century has been and continues to be "realism" in the first place?

If we take the modernists as the founders of "artistic fiction," is it entirely accurate to think of them as realists? To be sure, Proust, Joyce, and Woolf pursued their formal and stylistic innovations partly to achieve what we would now call "psychological realism"--the idea that perception, what goes on inside the human head, is just as vital part of "reality" as what goes on "outside"--and thus Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway could be called works of realism, if not conventionally so. But what about Finnegans Wake? Orlando? What about Kafka or Bulgakov? Is Faulkner best understood as a realist? Is this where his "artistry" lies?

Is it really plausible to claim that the important postwar, postmodern "artistic" fiction is realist? John Hawkes? Nabokov? Donald Barthelme? William Gass, Robert Coover, John Barth? Gilbert Sorrentino?

Among the younger generations of "artistic" writers, which are rightfully called realists? David Foster Wallace? Jonathan Lethem? George Saunders? Granted, a great deal of "literary fiction" of the past 25 or so years has turned away from the formal experimentation and stylistic chutzpah of the postmodernists, and even writers such as Ian McEwan and Richard Powers, whose earlier work could not at all be easily located in the realm of realism, have devolved into something resembling realists, but this sort of retrorealism hardly seems a worthy opponent in the war between reality-bending genre fiction and "artistic literature."

The most distinguished American realist currently still at work, Stephen Dixon, perhaps does stand as a worthy opponent in this conflict. Is Dixon's style of "narrative realism"--which leans heavily on the "realism" at the expense of "narrative"--what those who decry it have in mind? Certainly it eschews fantasy for an obsessive chronicle of the particulars of "real life," but his methods hardly seem representative of the "mode" Susannah Mandel thinks is dominant in current literary fiction. Indeed, one wonders whether Dixon's radical suspension of scene-setting and narrative drama isn't just a little too, well, radical for the genre radicals who think realism is too stodgy. Dixon's fiction illustrates just where the narrative realists and the narrative anti-realists are dancing to the same tune. It's experimental where they are stubbornly traditional: it implicitly posits that fiction has many more unexplored approaches to the depiction of human experience that go beyond the tired storytelling formulas shared by many narrative realists and narrative antirealists alike.

Elemental

Yuri Rytkheu's A Dream in Polar Fog (Archipelago Books) is a very readable novel that also usefully illuminates a corner of the world with which most readers must be entirely unfamiliar. It tells the story of a Canadian sailor who finds himself living with the Chukchi people of northeastern Siberia at about the time of the Russian revolution. Along the way we learn a great deal about the Chukchi way of life and are provided with several adventure-type setpieces that are quite dramatic and entertaining. Rytkheu's prose has been rendered by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse into a clear and immediate English that no doubt reflects Rytkheu's own functionally plain style. I would never think of the novel as a classic of Russian literature, but all in all I'm glad I read it.

Thus I find Neil Pollack's review of the book notably overwrought, probably more indicative of Pollack's notions about what fiction is for than of the place A Dream in Polar Fog might hold in the canon of world literature. "Yuri Rytkheu's A Dream in Polar Fog is a reminder of a time when novels had adventure and mystery," he writes, "before the ubiquity of video made everything on Earth seem familiar, yet also abstract and distant. Its themes are grand, elemental, and simple, comprehensible in the junior high school manner of discussing literature (Man v. Nature, Man v. Himself, and soon), but also tricky and subtle. This is the work of a writer in full command of the novelistic form. It recalls, in both substance and style, the best work of Jack London and Herman Melville, and it is a novel in the grandest sense of the word."

Pollack doesn't elaborate on what he means by "tricky and subtle" (or explain how this is compatible with his follow-up statement that Rytkeu "isn't looking to impress us with his cleverness or with narrative trickery"), other than to repeat in his conclusion that the novel "is both elegant and exciting." It is not necessarily a disparagment of A Dream in Polar Fog to say that its themes are indeed "comprehensible in the junior high school manner of discussing literature," or to conclude that subtlety isn't something a novel like this really needs. Pollack seems to be straining to defend it as also "artistic" at the same time he is elevating "adventure and mystery" to pride of place in our consideration of novels--these are what allow us to call a book like A Dream in Polar Fog "a novel in the grandest sense of the word." He wants to split the difference between Jack London's compelling if not particularly subtle tales of adventure and Melville's more aesthetically intricate metaphysical reveries masquerading as adventure stories.

A Dream in Polar Fog is essentially an ethnographic novel. Whereas the anthropological "information" to be found in London's fiction is generally secondary to the drama of his adventure plots, in A Dream in Polar Fog relaying this information is really the novel's primary objective. In keeping with the strictures of socialist realism (under the authority of which this book was originally written and published), the story of John MacLennan's induction into and embrace of Chukchi society is a vehicle for the portrayal of the Chukchi people as wise and indomitable (although I agree with Pollack that Rythkeu makes an attempt to portray individual Chukchi as motivated by the same human impulses as anyone else) and for providing readers with a detailed portrait of their ways and their way of life. It does succeed in this effort, but I can't see that this warrants declaring that in so doing it "accomplishes everything a novel should." It's defining the form down in the extreme to describe it in terms acceptable even to the Union of Soviet Writers.

Again, I don't mean to belittle Rytkheu's book. Among the officially sanctioned fiction published during the Soviet era, A Dream in Polar Fog is probably less compromised than most by its fidelity to the principles upholding the "truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development." It holds up as a work of literature despite the deformations imposed by the processes controlling its publication--albeit a work of a certain kind, a "simple" story of "simple" people told in a more or less documentary style. By sticking to the descriptive method of fiction-as-ethnography, Rytkheu preserves the integrity of his account of Chukchi culture, and the novel otherwise qualifies as a recognizable piece of adventure fiction. But Neil Pollack seems to think that this particular conception of what novels ought to do is really the definition of the "novelistic form." Presumably, novels at their best are long on narrative, on ethnographic description, on "elemental" themes.

In my view, what this leaves out is the possibility that novels might aspire to be works of art rather than simply rousing narratives. Pollack almost implies that "a novel in the grandest sense of the word" necessarily avoids any artsy-fartsy "trickery," even while he praises A Dream in Polar Fog for its elegance and its "maturity" of approach. I don't know how many readers agree with Neil Pollack that narrative simplicty combined with anthropological detail makes for the "best" kind of novel, but surely such a view at the very least implies that aesthetic values are secondary in our consideration of fiction, that literature is most acceptable when it avoids being too, well, literary.

Labels

I certainly agree with Matt Cheney:

. . .my problem is I don't particularly care what something is labelled, and I especially don't like issuing proclamations that all writers should or should not write in some specific way. What I desire as a reader and a writer has little to do with whether something fits anyone's definition of realist or not, and even less to do with how it fits into a marketing category. As a reader and writer, I find work compelling when it aims to push the possibilities of language and structure, of emotion and character, of ideas and effects. I grow bored with books that are a lot like other books and with stories that don't strive toward being something more than simple entertainment. These qualities can be found in works that fit just about any definition of realist or nonrealist. . . .

Although I'm not sure I would agree that the relevant opposition is between "realism" and "nonrealism" (Matt wants to speak up for the latter among those who would privilege the former) so much as between notions of the "well-made story" or of "craft" and, as Matt puts it, of fiction that pushes "the possibilities of language and structure." Historically, ideas about "the craft of fiction" certainly did arise along with the rise of realism, and even modernist experimentation tended to be along the lines of providing greater verisimilitude, conceived of as psychological depth, internal rather than external realism, rather than a rejection of realism as an ultimate goal. But writers who provide rather too much realism (e.g., Stephen Dixon or Harold Jaffe) without the accompanying comforts of conventional storytelling are as likely to be neglected by mainstream critics and readers of "literary fiction" as the most thoroughgoing fantasist.

It is also true that "realism" as a practice (if not necessarily the term itself) came to prominence as a more or less deliberate rejection of the kind of fiction Hawthorne called "romance" in describing his own work. According to Hawthorne, what we would now call realism "is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience," while romance, althought "it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows, of the picture." Writers from James to Hemingway and beyond foreswore the managing of "atmospherical medium" in order to emphasize fidelity to the "probable" (partly, it must also be said, to bring fiction a perceived respectability that the Romantic dabbling in what Hawthorne also called the "marvellous" did not), and perhaps some of their influence does linger on.

One would think, however, that the work of writers like Beckett, Heller, Pynchon, and Sorrentino (among writers not classified as "genre" writers) would have demonstrated that "nonrealism" (I suppose that at this late date "romance" would sound too antique) is just as serious, just as "literary," as realism, psychological and otherwise. Even the relatively recent appearance of a variety of surrealism in the work of writers such as Aimee Bender and George Saunders finally suggests that "realism" as the attempt to depict "the probable and ordinary course of man's experience" is not really the sine qua non of acceptable literary judgment (although to some extent an indirect appeal to ordinary experience is still manifest in this fiction). As long as such fiction does not unsettle established conventions of craft and decorum too severely (as long as they still recognizably seem "like other books"), it can still be praised for its "imagination" and "invention." But Beckett and Sorrentino wrote books utterly singular in both content (the possibilities of "emotion and character" are strenuously pushed) and form, and it is this refusal to rely on mere formulaic craft, more than their rejection of realism, that keeps them on the margins of respectable opinion.

"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.

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?

Narrative Stuff

In a recent interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Rick Moody says of his new novel, The Diviners, that

Once I knew this novel was going to have a lot to do with TV, I thought the book itself could be structured that way: episodic. . .I really believe an uninterrupted non-continuous narrative is more realistic than American realistic fiction writing.

One appreciates Moody's desire to justify unconventional fiction to readers and book columnists, but his conception of both "realistic fiction writing" and the possible alternative to it is rather fuzzy.

That a novel might be "episodic"--even through mimicking the tv episode--does not mean it can't be "realistic" in the conventional sense of the term. An "episode" is a unit of narrative structure; in a given fiction, this episode could be intensely realistic or utterly fantastic. What Moody is really opposing in his effort to string together "uninterrupted" episodes is what he later calls "that smooth flowing narrative stuff." He wants to disrupt the well-made plot, not subvert realism as the attempt to accurately represent the world via "narrative stuff." In fact, some of the great works of American realism--Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, Winesburg, Ohio--are best described as "episodic" rather that "smooth flowing" in their use of plot. (And the greatest realistic short stories tend to be episodes rather than stories per se--see Chekhov or Joyce or Hemingway.)

Indeed, Moody doesn't really seem to want to abandon realism at all. It's just that his preferred sort of "noncontinuous" narrative is "more realistic" than the traditional kind. One has to conclude from the tenor of his words that Moody believes in the philosophical project of realism--to portray the world "as it is"--but doesn't think conventional story form is any longer adequate in fulfilling it. This was also the assumption behind the original works of "psychological realism" in the early twentieth century. Novels like Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway or The Sound and the Fury had to "go internal" because the techniques devised by the previous generation of realists, mostly focusing on event and external detail, were proving inadequate to the task of depicting what was "really real" about our sense of the world, namely subjective human consciousness. Various kinds of surrealism and absurdism were developed for more or less the same reason: In an increasingly disordered and absurd world, only disorderly and absurdist narrative strategies would suffice to capture it.

These are all perfectly good ways of dealing with the problem of representation--and had the side benefit of extending the formal possibilities of fiction. But I'm not so sure it's such a good idea to continue to defend innovative fiction--if that indeed is what Rick Moody writes--by arguing that ultimately it's more real than realism. In many ways the debate about unconventional narrative structures has already been won. Most readers of serious fiction are willing to accept discontinuous, circular, and unsettled storytelling. It would be more interesting to see an apologia for experimental fiction that rejected accuracy of representation as a goal, that advocated for a fiction true to its own aesthetic logic rather than to a "reality" that will always remain beyond representation in words, however artfully composed. That built a truly alternative fictional world out of them instead, rather than pretending to re-present the already prosaic world we have to live in.

Discomforting

I'm mostly quite sympathetic to Jonathan Lethem's fulminations against the privileging of "realism" over other approaches to the writing of fiction:

. . .Fiction is a gigantic construction, a bauble. A novel is not life. That’s why it’s so pointless that this relentless baiting goes on, where ‘realist’ fiction is pitted against ‘anti-realist’ fiction as though one of the two has made some kind of commitment of integrity to be real, a responsibility the other has abdicated. Listen: every novel is a piece of wrought plastic. Readers may not wish to dwell on this fact, and I feel no necessity that they do, but writers, in order be intelligent about the innate properties of their medium, must come to grips with it. Fiction, like language, is innately artificial and innately fabulous. It’s made of metaphor. . .

Although his next assertion is more difficult to accept:

Language itself is a fantastic element. It’s not possible to plant words in the ground and have seeds grow up and feed on the results. It’s not part of the biological or mechanical world.

I understand the point Lethem is making--language in fiction and poetry is used for verbal creation, not for "reflecting" the "real world" in some unmediated way--but of course language is a part of the biological world. It's an innate capacity of the biological creature called a human being, and human beings use written language--which is an artifically constructed system, if not a "fantasitic element"--to among, other things, write novels. This is as "natural" a human activity as any other. What is required for works of literature to be accepted as the kind of distinctive activity their authors conceive them to be is for everyone involved--readers, critics, writers themselves--to acknowledge that in this particular instance, the exercise of the imagination we call fiction or poetry, language has a license to wander where it will, if necessary unmooring itself completely from the constraints of representing reality in its most familiar forms. This is a pragmatic move, not one demanded by the "innate" qualities of language (either as innately representational or "innately fabulous").

And I really can't agree with this, either, although again I understand Lethem's impatience with the critics he's referring to:

. . .When you encounter the argument that there is a hierarchy where certain kinds of literary operations—which we’ll call ‘realism,’ for want of a handier term, though I’ll insist on the scare quotes—represent the only authentic and esteemed tradition, well, it’s a load of horseshit. When you see or hear that kind of hierarchy being proposed, it’s not a literary-critical operation. It’s a class operation. In that system of allusions, of unspoken castes and quarantines, mimetic fiction is associated with propriety, with the status quo defending itself, anxiously, against incursions from the great and wooly Beyond. When ‘realism’ is esteemed over other kinds of literary methods, you’re no longer in a literary-critical conversation; you’ve entered a displaced conversation about class. About the need for the Brahmin to keep an Untouchable well-marked and in close proximity, in order to confirm his role as Brahmin. . . .

I don't believe that a preference for realism is the expression of a class bias. Perhaps there are times when "mimetic fiction is associated with propriety, with the status quo defending itself," but these are more often occasions for ideological critics and hack journalists to express their own professional anxieties and intellectual limitations than deliberate attempts to shore up class boundaries. It's more often the case that particular critics, even critics who otherwise take literary criticism seriously, simply don't have much use for the notion that reading fiction should provide us with a specifically aesthetic experience (or don't have the ability to experience it that way). Instead, they view it as another way acquiring information, of gaining insight about "social conditions" or "culture" or "Mind," an opportunity to reflect on various and sundry ideas. Such critics disdain experiemental or irrealist fiction (or even just insistently comic fiction) because the farther one gets from realism conventionally defined, the harder it becomes to apply these critical methods.

Lethem is on firmer ground when he suggests that "Once you begin looking at the underlying premise—a blanket attack on the methods that modernism uncovered—the kind of bogus nostalgia for a pure, as opposed to an impure, literature, what you really discover is a discomfort with literature itself." Confining what's acceptably literary to "realism" is an efficient way of dispensing with all those quarrelsome writers who break the rules, who think literary art is necessarily "impure" insofar as its possibilities are still being discovered. It keeps literature stagnant, which is effectively to destroy it.

Flaubert's Children

I have not read Peter Brooks's Realist Vision, the ostensible subject of James Wood's essay "The Blue River of Truth" (The New Republic, August 1, 2005), so I will not comment on its argument until I have. However, Wood introduces many of his own ideas into his discussion of "realism" as prompted by Brooks's book, and I would like to comment on a few of those.

1) Wood begins his essay by quoting two "anti-realist" statements (one by the novelist Rick Moody) and declares them to be "typical of their age." Realism, we are told, is now widely considered "stuffy, correct, unprogressive." It's a little hard to know whether Wood considers this attitude "typical" only of critics and other commentators on contemporary fiction or whether this is a "finely characteristic" belief about realism held by most writers and readers. If he means the latter, he couldn't be more wrong. Judging from the fiction that actually gets published and reviewed, the vast (vast) majority of literary fiction is still safely realistic, even to the extent of focusing on "Mind," the source for Wood of most of fiction's satisfactions. (I have in the past referred to this kind of fiction as "psychological realism," but since Wood has expressed a dislike of the term, I won't use it here. Nevertheless, any honest assessment of the kind of novels showing up on Borders' and Barnes and Noble's fiction shelves would have to conclude that pyschological realism is still the order of the day. That Wood would disregard this fact is not that surprising, since most of these books are thoroughly mediocre and, if anything, illustrate quite persuasively that this mode of realism is indeed, as John Barth once put it, "exhausted.")

2) "The major struggle in American fiction today is over the question of realism," writes Wood. "Anywhere fiction is discussed with partisan heat, a fault line emerges, with 'realists' and traditionalists on one side, and postmodernists and experimentalists on the other." I think this is wrong as well. Postmodernism began to be superseded by various neotraditional practices in the mid-to-late 1970s, although some of the true postmodernists--Barth, Coover, Sorrentino--did continue to produce interesting work on into their literary dotage. And compared to the "experimental" work of these writers--Lost in the Funhouse, Mulligan Stew, etc.--the more adventurous writers who followed them are hardly radical innovators. I think Richard Powers is a great writer, but he's hardly a programmatic metafictionist. T. Coraghessan Boyle has settled into a more or less conventional kind of satire. In my opinion, David Foster Wallace is closer to being a psychological realist--albeit of a somewhat twisted kind--than he is a postmodernist. There are other, less well-known writers who continue to explore the possibilities of self-referentiality or who have revived a form of surrealism, but let's not pretend that they have a very high profile or constitute some kind of "movement" against realism comparable to the postmodernism of the 1960s and 1970s. If there is a "struggle" in current fiction, it is between those who write a conventional kind of character- or plot-driven fiction more or less auditioning to become movies and those who still seek to discover what the possibilities of fiction might be beyond its role as source of film adaptation, what fiction can do better than other narrative or dramatic arts. Realism itself doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this.

3) I agree with Wood that too many people think of realism as a "genre," confusing realism per se with "a certain kind of traditional plot, with predictable beginnings and endings." Moody is quoted as deploring realism's "epiphanies, its rising action, its predictable movement. . . ." But these things are more properly associated with orthodox narrative conventions (embodied in "Freytag's Triangle") than with realism strictly understood. Indeed, one could argue that truly realistic fictions would avoid neat divisions of plot and anything at all "predictable," since "real life" does not unfold like well-made stories. I also agree that the great 19th century realists were actually radicals in their time, overturning as they did the picaresque and romantic modes of storytelling they'd inherited from the first generation of novelists in favor of narratives that focused more on details of setting and on creating plausibly "lifelike" characters. And I certainly agree that "There is no writing without convention," making it most important to "be alive to the moment when a literary convention becomes dead," not to assume that the ultimate goal is to free fiction from convention altogether.

4) Perhaps my biggest problem with James Wood's approach to fiction is embodied in this statement: "There is, one could argue, not just a 'grammar' of narrative convention, but also a grammar of life--those elements without which human activity no longer looks recognizable, and without which fiction no longer seems human." Much of the fiction Wood reviews unfavorably is, in one way or another, ultimately charged with this offense, that it doesn't "seem human." He so conflates a particular aesthetic strategy with the representation of the "human" that the writers of whom he disapproves are more or less declared "inhuman," their work morally grotesque. (This seems to me the upshot of Wood's recent dismissal of Cormac McCarthy, for example.) But this is a wholly unjustified substitution of "human" for "realistic." Since all writers are human beings writing about their own human experiences or those of other human beings, how can any work of fiction be something other than "human" at its core? It may not provide James Wood with a sampling of the human that meets his high moral standards, but to suggest that the dispute between realists and anti-realists is over who gets to be more "human" seems to me supremely unjust, if not simply absurd.

Furthemore, it turns out that what a work of fiction needs to be "recognizable" as human is to conform to W. J. Harvey's "constitutive category":

The four elements of this category are, he suggests, Time, Identity, Causality, and Freedom. I would add Mind, or Consciousness. Any fiction that lacked all five elements would probably have little power to move us. The defense of this broad idea of mimesis should not harden into a narrow aesthetic, for it ought to be large enough to connect Shakespeare's dramatic mimesis, say, with Dickens's novelistic mimesis, or Dostoevsky's melodramatic mimesis with Muriel Spark's satiric mimesis, or Pushkin's poetic mimesis with Platonov's lyrical mimesis.

As far as I can tell, what this means is that fiction needs to be "realistic" enough that it doesn't collapse into the "entirely random and chaotic." (Although in adding "Mind, or Consciousness," Wood again ups the ante. Now it must not only depict "plausible human activity," it must do so with psychological plausibility.) Does Wood really think there are many works of fiction that don't meet this minimal standard? Is experimental fiction merely a descent into chaos? In order to rescue the innovative fiction he apparently likes, Wood broadens his definition of "plausible" even further: "Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Hamsun's Hunger and Beckett's Endgame are not representations of likely or typical human behavior; but they draw their power, in part, from their connection to the human." Well, of course they do. How could they do otherwise? The question is whether in so doing they have done it artfully, and whether the art involved had to be "realistic" in the less sweeping sense of the term. ("Melodramatic mimesis"?)

5) This is perhaps the most provocative thing Wood has to say in his essay: ". . .both sides in this argument are perforce Flaubert's children--Flaubert being at once the greatest realist and the great anti-realist, the realist who dreamed of abolishing the real, the luxurious stylist who longed to write 'a book about nothing, a book with no external attachment.'" Unless Wood deplores Flaubert for his "luxury," for his effort to transcend mere documentary description, one now wonders why he finds fault with the anti-realists. If they too are among Flaubert's children, then they are only attempting to live up to his ideal of the autonomy and integrity of literary art. They just don't think that realism as he understood it is the only way to accomplish this. Wood says further of Henry James that he "found Flaubert's realism exemplary but lacking, because he felt that it did not extend to a subtle moral scrutiny of the self." If Wood agrees with James, then we have arrived at his real complaint against the anti-realists: It's not that they fail to recognize the centrality of "realism" (Wood has already defined the term so broadly as to essentially render it meaningless, anyway), it's that they fail to engage in "moral scrutiny." He objects to this group of Flaubert's offspring not on aesthetic but on moral grounds.

6) In his concluding paragraph, Wood asks us to "imagine a world in which the only possible novel available was, say, Pynchon's Vineland and books like it. It would be a hysterical and falsifying monotony. By contrast, a world in which the only available novel was, say, A House for Mr. Biswas would be a fearfully honest, comic, tragic, compassionate, and above all deeply human place." Now, I happen to like both of these books (Vineland less than either V or Gravity's Rainbow, however). I'm glad we live in a world where both kinds of books are available. It would seem, however, that Wood could be perfectly content in the world occupied only by Naipaul. No variety is necessary because this would be a "deeply human place." (What kind of place would the Pynchon world be? Superficially primatial?) Note as well the way in which this comparison is made in the form of moral judgment. Pynchon is "hysterical" and "falsifying." Naipaul is "honest" and compassionate." James Wood is perfectly entitled to elevate Naipaulian realism and denigrate Pynchonian anti-realism (if that's what he wants to call them--I don't think either term does either writer much justice). I do wish he wouldn't call those of who like the sort of thing a writer like Pynchon does hysterics and liars.

(At the beginning of his essay, Wood speculates that the struggle between realism and anti-realism is especially intense in the United States because of our "anti-intellectualism" and because of "the perceived traditionalism of creative writing programs, long suspected of exerting a gray monopoly over American writing." I think this analysis is also profoundly wrong, but would prefer to put off further discussion of it specifically for a separate, and later, post.)

Psychological Realism

Responding to Lee Siegel's assertion that "Nowadays, often even the most accomplished novels offer characters that are little more than flat, ghostly reflections of characters. The author's voice, or self-consciousness about voice, substitutes mere eccentricity for an imaginative surrender to another life," Maud Newton further describes the way in which she decided to focus her own attention on "books that delve into a character's thoughts and motivations and idiosyncratic take on the world." Both Maud and Siegel are expressing a preference for "psychological realism" (a preference also shared by the literary critic James Wood, among others), an approach to the writing of fiction that perhaps gained its initial impetus in the late work of Henry James, but that probably became most identified with the work of such modernists as Joyce or Woolf.

(I think Siegel is wrong in claiming that 19th century writers "plumbed the depths of the human mind with something on the order of clairvoyance." Before James (or Flaubert, or Chekhov), the reigning narrative model was the picaresque, which surely emphasizes event over reflection, and which generally produces characters that are flat indeed--although not necessarily without color or vibrancy. One could say that writers such as George Eliot or Hawthorne or Melville plumbed the depths of the human soul, but they did not do so using the techniques of pyschological realism as we have come to know them. It was as an addition to the strategies used by 19th century writers that stream of consciousness and what might be called psychological exposition--in which the writer describes what's going on inside a character's mind in the same way he/she might describe landscape or event--came to be identified as "modern" in the first place. And while Siegel blames Freud for the ulimate decline of "character" in fiction, he neglects to mention that the great modernist writers were partly inspired by Freud to try out the possibilities of "plumbing the depths" in the first place.)

I would argue that it is a misperception of most contemporary fiction to claim that it neglects either character or psychological "insight." Siegel identifies "postmodern and experimental novels" as the main culprits in fiction's deliberate turning-away from psychological depth, its refusal to "surrender to another life," but the vast majority of current fiction still focuses resolutely on character, and most of it uses the same strategies pioneered by Joyce and Woolf. Maud thinks that creative writing workshops put too much emphasis on "externalizing" through the "show, don't tell" rule, but most writers are neither minimalists nor postmodernists, and the chances are that if you were to pick out at random a work of literary fiction on your Borders shelf, you would find an entirely recognizable attempt both to establish character as the center of interest and to present the character's thought processes as the primary way of making him/her seem "realistic."

To this extent, Siegel's essay is just another backhanded slap at literary postmodernism (and some further by now superfluous stomping on the grave of Sigmund Freud), and in my opinion not to be taken seriously as a critique of contemporary fiction. However, Maud's concern for the "novel's pyschological possibilities" is not misguided (and to her credit she correctly identifies the temptation to "endless, largely banal psychological reflection" as one of the pitfalls of psychological realism). That the novel has "psychological possibilities" is undeniably true. Indeed, the illusion of psychological depth is something fiction can provide more thoroughly than the other narrative arts, and if you think "imaginative surrender to another life" is finally what fiction is all about, then such illusion is one of the defining features of fiction as a form. But it is an illusion, and in my view if you're going to stories and novels to acquire your understanding of human psychology, you're going to the wrong place. First of all, what gives novelists themselves a superior understanding of the psychological make-up of human beings? Isn't this like expecting them to somehow possess a special wisdom about human life simply because they're novelists? Second, is merely recording in prose what one considers to be the typical operations of thought (which can finally only be done in a kind of shorthand, anyway) really probing human consciousness in anything but the most superficial way?

Better to think of psychological realism as just another strategy a writer might use to give a work of fiction a sense of unity or purpose--another way of getting the words on the page in a way that might compel the reader's attention. This might be done through other means, including the "self-annulling irony, deliberate cartoonishness, montage-like 'cutting'" Lee Siegel disdains. Privileging "psychological realism" over all the other effects a work of fiction might convey, all the other methods of creating an aesthetically convincing work of literary art, ultimately only diminishes fiction as literary art. It perpetuates the idea that fiction is a "window"--whether on external reality or the human psyche--rather than an aesthetic creation made of words. (Perhaps some still consider fiction to be an inferior or inappropriate form for achieving this kind of creation, at least as compared to poetry, but why should those who condescend to the form get to pronounce on its possibilities to begin with?) It reduces fiction to a case study in social science just as much as the insistence that it "reflect" social and political realities. There are plenty of great novels that reveal human motive and the operations of the human mind. But their authors didn't necessarily set out to make such revelations. They set out to write good novels.

Just for Kicks

Although I do not have the same degree of distaste for Neil LaBute's work as a certain other distinguished blogger (I continue to think that In the Company of Men is a very good movie), this week's NYTBR review of his collection of short stories, Seconds of Pleasure, makes it sound pretty dreadful. It's not so much the subject matter--the usual LaButian insights about the casual cruelty of men, and the monstrousness of human nature more generally--but instead the apparent incompetence with which these insights are translated specifically into fiction. (I haven't read the book. Like Mark S. I won't, so obviously my comments here will based on the reviewer's remarks about the book. If someone else reads Seconds of Pleasure and thinks Jennifer Egan's description is off the mark, please let me know.)

According to Egan, "Writing Fiction would seem to offer LaBute a chance to plumb his characters' inner lives more fully, but the opposite proves to be true: being in the head of a LaBute protagonist is like flying in a plane with blackened windows--the rage so many of them feel toward the women who engross them obscures virually eveything else." Further: ". . .the protagonist's inner machinations [in one of the stories] are merely caricaturish. What's lacking here is the subtlety, the intimations of a larger world that gives the best short fiction. . .its insinuating power."

Egan thinks that the "inner lives of Labute's perennial manipulators. . .turn out to be less interesting in these transparent incarnations than when left opaque," as in LaBute's films. This is a convincing enough insight about the kinds of characters in which LaBute is interested, and perhaps if he were to turn his attention to a different sort of character he might produce more compelling works of fiction. But I think it is more likely that LaBute's conception of both character and story are inherently better suited to film, and that his forays into theater and, especially fiction, only reinforce this perception and suggest he ought to stick to making movies. I do not necessarily mean to imply that writing good fiction is harder than writing screenplays, nor that screenwriting is finally inferior to fiction writing; I would say, however, that much mainstream fiction, even much "literary fiction," has been influenced in its formal and narrative assumptions at least as much by movies as by other fiction, and that this influence is not for the better where the future of fiction is concerned.

In a previous post, I observed that what seemed most notable about the rush to adapt certain "chick lit" novels to the screen was that it seemed these novels had been written to achieve such film deals in the first place, that fiction was only the first step in a process that led to the most important accomplishment--having one's story made into a movie, with all of the glamour and the publicity and the talk about grosses that this entails. I didn't exactly suggest that they had been written as if they were actually movies, but that much contemporary fiction--beginning with the popular potboilers, but extending as well to many of the novels that are praised by ostensibly serious reviewers in newspaper book reviews--does indeed leave the impression that it seeks to emulate the storytelling and character-creation conventions of film seems to me, at least, undeniable. Perhaps this comes from the actual influence of film on the authors of such fiction, perhaps unconsciously from the assumption that these conventions are the ones with which even most readers of fiction are now most familiar. At any rate, too many novels I read (or choose not to read, because the reviews make it clear it will be a book of this type) proceed as if what the author really has in mind is the movie version the story at hand merely transcribes into prose; few of them manifest any particular qualities that couldn't also be achieved on screen.

Thus, I would maintain that most fiction labeled "realistic" by critics and readers does not really belong to the tradition of "realism" as it was developed in nineteenth century fiction, but instead merely adopts the elements of conventional narrative as they are exemplified most recognizably in American movies. Such movies perhaps are themselves operating under the assumptions emodied in the traditional "well-crafted" story (at least where plot and character is concerned, both of which must follow certain patterns of "development" it is assumed an audience expects), but again our idea of what such a story is like is almost certainly more influenced now by the movies we see than the books we read. Moreover, realism of the classic variety, as illustrated by such writers as Flaubert, James, and Chekhov, doesn't really bear much resemblance to either mainstream Hollywood narratives or to what is called realism in much current fiction. I always encountered great resistance from students when I would teach any of these writers in intro to lit classes. Most often they would complain that in the assigned fiction "nothing happens," or there's "too much description." Clearly these students have become especially accustomed to a certain kind of story (where the focus is all on what does happen) arising from their movie-watching habits, but I think even more dedicated readers of current fiction might be surprised upon reading, say, Chekhov to find so little emphasis on plot, or even conventional character identification, of the kind films have prompted us to expect.

Two writers who seem to me to illustrate the phenomenon I am discussing would be Tom Wolfe and Richard Price. However much Wolfe wants to imitate Dickens or Thackeray, his books are cinematic, focused on visual detail and dialogue in such a way that whoever attempts a screenplay adaptation of them must find they provide an enormous headstart. Price is a better writer than Wolfe, but he began his career writing novels that, if not exactly movie-like, were readily assimilable to film. This may be why his services as a screenwriter were solicited in the first place. The books he has published since his immersion in Hollywood script-writing certainly seem if anything more cinematic than his early books, as if they began as movie ideas that Price couldn't sell or thought would work better--would provide him with a larger canvas--as novels.

LaBute appears to have been after what is conventionally called "psychological realism." The problem is, judging from the passages Jennifer Egan quotes, he uses it very perfunctorily, with no apparent feel for the possibilities of writing at all. It is as if the thoughts attributed to the characters are merely lines of dialogue LaBute has instead decided to place "inside" the character's heads. What it again seems to betray is the notion that fiction is much like film, only a little bit different, affording the opportunity to make explicit what in LaBute's films is implicit. But what works pretty well in his movies--focusing on his characters' behavior without explaining it, giving it a creepily mysterious quality--can't survive the necessary exposition fiction usually requires, or that LaBute at any rate wants to provide. In this sense, he would definitely be well advised to go back to film, unless he wants to change directions completely and instead explore more fully what fiction might be capable of evoking in him as a writer, as a stylist, rather than as half-hearted exercise one takes up just for kicks.

Literary Realism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Realism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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