The Reading Experience

Forget Fiction

Lee Siegel recently opined that "fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the nonfiction writers":

You want to read a great story about American politics today, overflowing with sharp character portraits, and keen evocations of American places, and a ripping narrative? Read Mr. Remnick's book on Obama, because you won't find it in American fiction. Looking to immerse yourself in a fascinating tale of contemporary finance? Forget fiction. Pick up Michael Lewis' latest book-not to mention his earlier ones. Yearning for a saga of American money and class? Well, Dreiser is dead, and there sure isn't anyone to take his place, so go out and get T.J. Stiles' The First Tycoon, an epic telling of the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

No doubt if you think fiction ought to be "about American politics today," or provide a "fascinating tale of contemporary finance" or a "saga of American money and class," you might agree with Siegel's claim that contemporary fiction doesn't measure up. On the other hand, Siegel doesn't really establish that in the "Golden Age" of American fiction many writers did these things, either. He rattles off a list of names, but among them--"Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Malamud"--I can't identify one who will be remembered for writing novels about "American politics today" or "contemporary finance." I suppose a couple of them might be said to have written loosely about "money and class," but the best ones weren't directly considering money and class but were writing fiction in which "class" was tangentially involved. (Or if they did write directly about "money and class" --Rabbit is Rich comes to mind--this work was minor at best.) Those of us who cringe at the idea of novels about contemporary finance can only be thankful that neither these writers nor most current writers find it a fit subject for fiction regarded as literary art.

Siegel's displeasure doesn't really seem to be with fiction writers, anyway. He's lamenting that there aren't enough literary critics of the old school around, critics like Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, who focused not on art but on "questions of life and society that a particular novel evoked." Siegel is himself a critic of this sort, and I'm sure if he really put his mind to it he could take almost any work of fiction and, ignoring its aesthetic qualities, belabor these "questions of life and society" to death. I assume that either he no longer wants to do this (diminishing returns) or contemporary fiction really has moved away from the need to "say something" about political and social affairs. I myself come across enough works of fiction that pretty clearly haven't renounced the effort of saying something that I can't really agree there's no longer enough grist for the cultural critic's mill, but if the embrace of nonfiction by people like Lee Siegel means they will henceforth just leave fiction and fiction writers alone, I heartily endorse it.

I am left with a similar feeling about Terry Teachout's recent assertion that "Reading demands a greater investment of time than looking at a complicated painting, and the average reader is not prepared to invest that much time in a book, no matter what critics say about it. I feel the same way. I suppose I could get to the bottom of "Finnegans Wake" if I worked at it—but would it be worth the trouble?" As with Siegel, I think Teachout is both correct and deeply wrong. It is probably true that "the average reader" is not going to devote much time to "difficult" books, but literature-as-art necessarily isn't much interested in the "average reader." Average readers can no longer summon up much patience with Shakespeare, or with Dickens or Melville or Henry James, or most poetry. These writers, as well as Joyce in Finnegans Wake, assumed that most of their readers (or, with Shakespeare, their listeners) would make the effort needed to appreciate their work on its own terms or else leave it alone. I can't see there's anything untoward about this arrangement. That some readers might find the work excessively difficult certainly isn't an argument that writers ought to avoid alienating such readers.

If Terry Teachout thinks Finnegans Wake wouldn't reward his effort, so be it. Many others find its singular kind of difficulty especially rewards the attempt to "get to the bottom of" it (and it would be the attempt that matters, since no one will ever really get to the "bottom"--something that is true of all great literature). Should serious fiction ultimately have to do without Terry Teachout (or Lee Siegel) as audience members, I don't think their absence will be registered that keenly.

Outside the Realm of Poetry

    David Biespiel is convinced that "America’s poets are uniquely qualified to speak openly in the public square among diverse or divisive communities," despite their current "intractable and often disdainful disinterest in participating in the public political arena outside the realm of poetry." Although he assures us he agrees that "a poet must make his way in the world as best fits his vision for himself as an artist," nevertheless his essay is so filled with apocalyptic urgency about the need for poets to reclaim a role in "civic discourse" it clearly implies that those who settle for "quiet rooms of contemplation" are neglecting their responsibilities both to democracy and to poetry.

    Biespiel wants to maintain a distinction between poets writing a deliberately "civic" poetry and using the "gravitas" that comes from being a poet simply to speak out on public affairs, but ultimately he really can't keep his frustration with the "cliquish" and "self-reflexive" nature of contemporary poetry from condemning it outright, not just for its civic derelictions but for its retreat into "art-affirming debates over poetics and styles." In other words, poetry has become satisfied with the "merely literary."

    To an extent, Biespiel's essay seems to me an effort to shame poets into entering public debates by comparing their retreat into insular "coteries" to the larger retreat of Americans generally, who are "self-sorting into homogeneous enclaves," becoming "a collection of increasingly specialized interests":

Like Americans everywhere, America’s poets have turned insular and clustered in communities of aesthetic sameness, communicating only among those with similar literary heroes, beliefs, values, and poetics. Enter any regional poetry scene in any American metropolis or college town, and you will find the same cliquey village mentality with the same stylistic breakdowns.

Surely poets don't want to be like those huddled suburbanites in their gated communities, damaging the public weal in their very tendency to huddle. "Aesthtic sameness" must surely be avoided in poetry as in lawn care. What good is poetry if it gives us only "stylistic breakdowns"?

    Biespiel's call for poet-sages to emerge is predicated on the belief that  "Poets are actually uniquely suited and retain a special cultural gravitas to speak publicly and morally about human aspirations." This seems to be an assumption shared by all those who would have both poets and novelists "engage" with the public sphere, but it's a claim  that cannot be sustained if what Biespiel means is that poets have some special ability not just to speak "publicly and morally about human aspirations" but to speak more intelligently or more persuasively about "human aspirations" than anyone else as part of "civic discourse."

    Certainly the examples Biespiel provides to support his assertion do little to give it credibility: Allen Ginsburg certainly had plenty to "say" in the public realm, but who doesn't think that a good deal of what he said now seems--probably seemed at the time--rather embarrassing in its simple-mindedness? Adrienne Rich may have spoken up from a feminist perspective, but what kind of public impact did it really make, as opposed to the statements of non-poet feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan? Robert Bly is a crank, Dana Gioia a conservative shil, and I'm not sure what Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, or Charles Simic have ever said that has reached anyone other than their devoted readers who already agree with them.

    Biespiel's argument essentially rests on the notion that poets have "the ability. . .to write poems that penetrate differences and discover connection" and partake of poetry's "ancient predisposition for moral persuasion." One could argue that what distinguishes the poet is not primarily his/her ability to "penetrate differences" but to put words together in aesthetically provocative ways and that the connections made are connections between poetry as it has been and poetry as it might be, not between competing "communities," but even if we were to accept Biespiel's amorphous formulation it does not follow that this ability is readily transferable from page to public square. It especially does not follow that whatever "predisposition for moral persuasion" has been attributed to poets over time so naturally manifests itself in modern poets, to most of whom the title "poet" applies in a much more restricted way than it did to Dante or Milton, who did not limit themselves to the lyric mode and who saw fewer differences between poetry and other forms of moral or religious discourse. If most poets now cultivate their own lyrical gardens, it is because that is seen as the appropriate task for the poet, not "moral persuasion."

     Even more dubious is Biespiel's accompanying proposition that "when more poets participate in the public sphere of democratic discourse and even politics, then I’ve little doubt that one consequence will be greater public enthusiasm for the private revelations of our sonnets, odes, and elegies." Exactly why the heretofore unenthusiastic public would suddenly find an interest in sonnets after sampling the poet's political discourse is left unexplored, unless those sonnets turn out to be about "issues" after all--a list of those the "citizen-poet" might take up include "cultural fragmentation, national health care, decrepit infrastructure, threats of terrorism, energy consumption, climate change, nuclear proliferation, warfare, poverty, crime, immigration, and civil rights"--and are not really separable from his/her civic pronouncements. It's hard to know otherwise what would lead people indifferent to poetry to seek it out, so wide is the gap between private and public, at least according to Biespiel in the rest of his analysis. If the sonnets, odes, and elegies are primarily concerned with "memory, private reclamation, and linguistic chop-chop," as Biespiel has it, why would a public yearning for "moral persuasion" bother with it?

I don't want to suggest that poets, or any other writer, or any other citizen, should not enter into "civic discourse." As concerned human beings, of course they should take whatever actions, rhetorical or literal, they think they must. I suppose that the residual esteem still attached to the vocation of "poet" does even give their public words some additional weight, and if particular poets exploit the opportunity given to speak wisely or act courageously on matters of public importance they perform a commendable service. Such a public intervention is only tangentially, even accidentally, related to their work as poets, however, and to laud them for doing it (or condemning them for not) while ignoring the work devalues poetry rather than saving it. It suggests that poetry is mostly good for something else, something other than being itself. Why must the value of poetry be judged by its potential to be a good tune-up for speaking out on more important matters?

    

Self-Protection

A post at OnFiction speculates on a phenomenon in which "readers sometimes struggle against or try to mitigate the effects of reading the fictions in which they are engaged."

Some readers say that they slow their reading before coming to the culminating moment in a tragedy. I wonder if book clubs are another strategy that people use to put some distance between themselves and the fiction they read. We simply do not know what we’re coming upon in the wilderness of some stories. If we have the company of others, though, we may feel emboldened to carry on.

Apparently, some readers need such "self-protective strategies" that "buy time, until the reader can sort out what is happening to her emotionally. . . ." I say "apparently" because this is a reading practice so foreign to my own that I want to think the "struggle" invoked here is being considerably exaggerated. I have never tried to "mitigate the effects" of any fiction I am reading other than to read more carefully. I have never engaged in a "self-protective strategy" in order to "buy time," especially not to "sort out" my emotions. If a particular work of fiction does provoke a strong emotion--which for me actually happens only rarely--I presume that this is the emotion the text was designed to create (otherwise I'm just reading badly) and that my role as reader is to meet the text halfway and pursue that emotion where it's going to lead. That I would try to actively resist the work's effects--emotional, psychological, or formal--seems antithetical to my understanding of what a "reading experience" has to offer.

The explanations that the post's author, Rebecca Wells Jopling, gives for this resistance among some readers seem to me as unconvincing as the phenomenon itself is strange. "It could be," she writers "that these readers know, perhaps not consciously but subconsciously, that the book could change their beliefs, and not always in a predictable way." I can understand a kind of squeamishness about strong emotions--fear, grief, anger--that one doesn't necessarily want to indulge (although in that case you probably shouldn't be reading the kind of fiction you know is going to give rise to such emotions), but that reading a work of fiction might make one squeamish about one's beliefs seems a very large leap, even, as explicated, incoherent. Beliefs about what? Research is cited that supposedly shows that readers are vulnerable to a kind of cognitive incaution and "must engage in effortful processing to disbelieve the information they encounter in literary narratives." "Belief" is thus largely epistemological, or so it would seem, the process of arriving at conclusions based on "information."

But is this "information" about the characters or incidents in a fictional story, or is it "information" of the sort one needs to form firm beliefs about the world outside the text? Since it is implausibe that readers would need to disbelieve their supension of disbelief--we all know going in that our suspension of disbelief is artificial--it must be the second kind of "information" that needs to be combatted. Again, I am hard-pressed to understand this fear of "information," since I don't read novels for information, and wouldn't recognize it if it were presented. Reading fiction is an experience, an aesthetic experience in which at best "information" is woven into the fictional fabric, conditioned by its manifestation in fiction. Novels that attempt to convey information without integrating it in this way are bad novels, and I don't know why a theory of reading would focus on such a flawed conception of what novels do.

The post continues:

Perhaps strong feelings of rejection toward a story and the resulting strategies for distancing oneself arise because readers somehow know that continuing to read may leave them walking around holding beliefs that they do not want to hold, having thoughts that they do not want to have, and re-experiencing images that they do not want to re-experience.

While it is more plausible to me that some readers might while reading, or after reading, a novel be "having thoughts that they do not want to have, and re-experiencing images that they do not want to re-experience" than that they are "walking around holding beliefs that they do not want to hold," it remains unexplained why any serious readers of fiction would be so shocked that what they read might challenge their assumptions or present vivid images. These are among the most historically-recognized functions of literature, and even in popular fiction many readers return to particular  genres precisely because they know that certain kinds of "thoughts" and certain kinds of "images," some of them disturbing, are going to recur. Unless the authors at OnFiction, in their concentration on the psychology of fiction, are confining themselves to the most naive and most unadventurous of readers, it's very difficult to accept that the fear of alien thoughts, images, or beliefs motivates many readers' responses to aesthetically credible novels, or any works of narrative art, for that matter.

The very need to "distance ourselves" in the emotionally immediate way described in this post only really testifies to a flawed, unreflective way of reading fiction. It posits an intensity of involvement with "character" and "event"--the creation of which isn't ultimately very hard for most minimally skilled writers--such that all other considerations, point of view, style, narrative method, simply disappear into irrelevance. A reading attentive to these elements already incorporates an appropriate "distance." A reading of fiction that ignores them is to that extent an impoverished reading.

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Josh Corey detects an "anti-literary" attitude behind much contemporary poetry and fiction:

We have overshot, then, the hermeneutics of suspicion that characterized "theory" in the 1970s to arrive at a poetics of suspicion: only literature that puts the very premises of the literary into question can now summon the aesthetic impact we associate with great literature. This may represent the most complete assimilation by authors of the skeptical stance that diffused itself in the last universally acknowledged great wave of postmodern fiction (Pynchon, Delillo, Coover) and poetry (Ashbery, Ashbery, Ashbery). Now it's not merely literary strategies that are picked apart and turned around through unreliable narrators, disordered chronologies, the blurring of fact and fiction, extreme parataxis, etc. It's the literary itself, the summoning and deployment of aesthetic effects, summarized in the phrase "beautiful language.

On one level, it is quite appropriate for writers to proceed on the assumption it is necessary to employ strategies that put "the very premises of the literary into question." Both poetry and fiction become dessicated and convention-encrusted when established notions of what makes literature "literary" go unchallenged. I would agree with Josh that such a "skeptical stance" is what motivated the greatest of the postmodernists (although his list leaves out perhaps the most thoroughgoingly skeptical of the postmodernists, writers such as Gilbert Sorrentino or Donald Barthelme), but such skepticism was not intended to destroy literature but to enhance it, to open up the possibilities for "aesthetic impact," not to deny the validity of the aesthetic. To the extent that "asethetic effects" can be encapsulated in the formulation "beautiful language," perhaps the postmodernists and their successors (Josh discusses W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolano in particular) were calling literature dependent on it into question, but ultimately they were themselves rebelling against the notion of "beautiful language"--and the usually quiescent formal approaches associated with it--as a defining feature of "literature" in the first place.

On another level, the attempt to "escape" the literary is, of course, doomed to failure. The very attempt to "pick apart" or "turn around" usually results in a new strategy or style that doesn't abandon strategy and style but adds a fresh perspective on both. As Josh writes of Sebald: "Sebald's work first shocked readers with its apparently artless photographs and endless paragraphs, but in recollection the work is nearly limpid, its melancholy polished to a high gleam." Once one commits to writing in one of the literary forms, poetry or fiction or drama, efforts to escape the perceived limitiations of those forms while remaining within the practices of the forms broadly conceived--while continuing to accept the designation "poet," or "novelist"--are going to wind up being not "anti-literary" at all but, if they're successful, the latest additions to our understanding of what "the literary" might encompass. No matter how "useful" you might want your poem or your story to be--which is to say, for it to be more than "merely literary"--its ultimate utility will be to those who are interested in the perpetuation of the literary.

Which is not to say that all poems, novels, or plays conceived by their authors (and perhaps received by critics) as "useful" or "anti-literary" can't be aesthetically accomplished in the way "we associate with great literature." As Josh himself notes, if the attempt to "move beyond" poetry or fiction is what is required for a writer to produce interesting poetry or fiction, then so be it. If Thomas Pynchon needed to imagine he was writing a "critique" of the emergence of the American techno-military empire in order to write Gravity's Rainbow, I'm ok with that, although it's certainly not as such a critique that I appreciate the novel (nor, in the longest run, will future readers, when regarding it as primarily an historical exercise will likely render it unreadable). It's the humor, the narrative ingenuity, above all the language, which certainly isn't "beautiful," that makes it the great "literary" novel that it is. If writers need to think they're starting a revolution against literature--and I don't really suspect Pynchon thought he was doing this--in order to create, well, new works of literature, then viva la revolucion!

The Big Dialogue of Literature

By now, everyone attuned to the literary news is no doubt aware of Horace Engdahl's comments that "Europe still is the center of the literary world" when it comes to the awarding of the Nobel Prize, that "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," and that American writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."

On the one hand, it seems likely that Engdahl's remarks were motivated by a non-literary (and entirely justified) dissatisfaction with American political and military actions over the last eight years, a dissatisfaction widely shared across all of Europe these days. Engdahl assumes, wrongly, that American writers, American "culture" more generally, are somehow complicit with these actions or at least haven't done enough to express their solidarity with European critics of American hubris as embodied by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. To this extent, one might grant Engdahl some forebearance, since his attitude probably reflects a momentary unhappiness with the United States that will surely abate with the passing of the Bush administration.

But on the other hand, Engdahl's comments do reflect some underlying assumptions about both American literature and the role of literature more generally that certainly warrant scrutiny. For one thing, while I suppose it is possible for writers to become "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture" (especially if we take "mass culture" to be something other than "culture" itself, a separate realm driven by the same mindless forces that drive the American government), most depictions of "mass culture" in American ficion tend to be critical of that culture, if not outright satirical. Insofar as Engdahl has read much contemporary American fiction, it would seem he hasn't read it very well. Especially among those writers who might be seriously considered for the Nobel Prize--Roth or Pynchon or Barth--"mass culture" is an object of concern and ridicule, not something these writers seek to reinforce. That Engdahl would think otherwise does call his qualifications for the job of awarding a literary prize--the most esteemed literary prize of them all--into question.

One would have to presume that Europe remains "the center of the literary world" because its writers do not have such an unseemly obsession with their own nations' culture, but of course this hardly seems credible. However, since Engdahl provides no additional englightenment about what it actually means to be the world's literary center an alternative presumption would seem to be that Europe is central because, well, the Nobel committee most often awards the prize to European writers. I admit both a professional and personal bias toward American fiction in my own reading habits, but to the extent Engdahl is claiming the greatest contemporary writers are to be found on the continent of Europe, I must further admit I find the notion thoroughly unsupportable. There are certainly some very fine writers in Great Britain, but most of them are undoubtedly obscure to someone like Horace Engdahl (writers such as Tom McCarthy and Rosalind Belben), and among them are decidedly not the "name" writers Engdahl probably does have in mind--Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. There are also excellent writers in France and the German-speaking countries, and I have recently found myself particularly taken by several Eastern European writers whose work I had not previously read, but again the notion that any of these writers are "greater" than Roth, Pynchon, Coover, or Stephen Dixon seems to me palpably absurd. And that such now deceased postwar American writers as John Hawkes or Stanley Elkin or Gilbert Sorrentino were never even remotely considered for the Nobel Prize only highlights the essential cluelessness of those at the "center" of the European literary world.

The comments that have received the most attention in the print media and on literary blogs are Engdahl's suggestions that American writers are "too insular" and "don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." Most people have interpreted this to be a criticism of American writers for not reading enough translated work, or for focusing on domestic "issues," but I find the claims as worded to be virtually incoherent. Either Engdahl is asserting that not enough American writers are contributing to some ongoing "dialogue" about literature separate from their own writing, or the allegation is that they don't conceive of their writing as a contribution to "the big dialogue of literature." As far as I'm concerned, both notions are equally preposterous. The first requires that we think of world literature as some kind of super seminar in which writers are the invited panelists and collegiality the expected behavior. It seems to subsitute "dialogue" among writers for literary criticism.

Most likely, of course, Engdahl means something like the second. American writers are too "insular" in that they don't offer their work as part of a cross-cultural discourse that Engdahl is defining as "literature." They are too "isolated" to see the value of this discourse. But literature isn't a "dialogue" monitored by self-appointed arbiters who decide what part of the conversation deserves a prize for its insight. It isn't an attempt to "say" anything, except circuitously or by accident. I'm tempted to construe Engdahl's scolding of American writers for their insularity as just another expression of impatience with the "merely literary," with writing that isn't morally or politically useful, but I doubt he really meant to go quite that far. He is simply reiterating a commonly-held, if implicit rather than thought-out, view that literature is more about dialogue and discussion and nicely articulated platitudes. less about art and aesthetic consummation, which indeed often occurs in isolation and, in literature, as a "dialogue" only between the author and his/her text.

One reason that poets are so infrequently awarded the Nobel Prize has to be that it is much harder to value poetry primarily for its relevance to "the big dialogue." Poetry more clearly foregrounds the aesthetic amibitions of literature, and even those who read novels for the "something said" are often willing to concede that this model is overly reductive as applied to poetry (when such readers even admit to reading poetry--many simply confess they don't "get" it). But since the Nobel Prize seems to be decided according to the criterion that a writer "say" things (that, and the implicit requirement that the prestige of the prize be spread around a little--every once in a while a Chinese or Arabic writer--to enlarge the "dialogue"), poetry, or, God forbid, experimental writing, is neverthless going to be left at the door. Such exclusion of writing that in its necessary inwardness doesn't meet the blandly humanitarian standards of the Nobel committee is just one of the reasons why this literary prize, the biggest, is also the most idiotic.

Positive and Ennobling

In discussing "Banned Books Week," David Ulin asks:

The basic message here is one of astonishment: Why would anyone ban books when literature is such a positive and ennobling force? Yet while I agree with that, I also believe that some books truly are dangerous, and to ignore that is simply disingenuous.

He continues:

Yet it's foolish, self-defeating even, to pretend that books are innocuous, that we don't need to concern ourselves with what they say. If that's the case, then it doesn't really matter if we ban them, because we have already stripped them of their power.

Throughout his essay, but especially in these quoted passages, Ulin betrays the sort of sloppy thinking and confusion about the nature of literature so prevalent among the practicioners of "literary journalism" in the mainstream print media. His ultimate point--that even obnoxious books ought to be tolerated--is cogent enough, if something of a bromide. But his enlistment of "literature" in the cause of defending "dangerous" books is hardly credible.

The most immediate flaw in Ulin's thinking is in his casual conflation of "literature" and "books." He invokes "literature" and its "positive and ennobling" associations, only to base his analysis on "books" understood as those works advancing an argument, that make a claim on us through "what they say." Ulin's analysis works only if he first evokes the literary as "ennobling" and then contrasts it with particular (in some cases repellent) books that no one would categorize as "literary" in the first place. It's a move that depends on the reader accepting the blithe but shoddy equation, books = literature, on which Ulin balances his argument.

But works of literature are not identical with "books." A literary work is a verbal composition that exists independently of its medium of transmission. It can be presented on paper, through bytes in cyberpace, or can be stored in a word processing file. (It could also, of course, be recited orally.) It is an act of linguistic imagination that does not coincide with any of these methods of publication (as in "making public") and can exist simultaneously in all of them. A book is a commodified object, an artifact of the printing press, the culturally-sanctioned form of communication assigned to journalists like Ulin for their "coverage." No matter how much they try to smuggle in references to literature in describing their subject, such journalists are always going to prefer books to literature because the former are presumed to have something to "say," provide the reviewer with the opportunity, as Ulin also puts it, "to confront someone else's ideas." Books are what prompt the editor of the New York Times Book Review to convert that publication into a forum for dreary "cultural criticism" and the pedestrian discussion of media-filtered "ideas." Literature is not to be found in its pages, except through the fortuitous conjunction of fiction and news, or an accident of publication date.

I would agree with Ulin that both good books and works of literature ought to "make us uncomfortable," but where the former do this by challenging established ideas about the subject at hand, the latter make us uncomfortable with our own reading practices, with our unsustainable assumptions about the very nature of the "literary." Literature is inherently neither "positive" nor "ennobling," and the "danger" it poses is not to be found in the printed embodiments of "someone else's ideas" but in the reading experience itself, the complacency of which is threatened by works of literature that seek to reconfigure perceptions of the literary. A preoccupation with "ideas" only reinforces such complacency, reducing the more expansive power of literature to the ordinary charge provided by "books."

Contributions

Obooki tells us that

I can’t rightly say that my life has ever been changed by the reading of a novel. . .and more than that, I can’t think of any novel that has changed my thinking about life, the way I conceive the world, this matter of existing. - Which is to say, I guess, that I’ve never looked into novels for philosophy, for meaning; - and which may in turn be why I’m so antipathetic to novels which are largely concerned with “philosophising” or constructing philosophies, or at least the modes of interpretation which favour this approach to them (I certainly can’t think of a novelist who ever contributed anything important to human understanding; and for those about whom it is claimed, often none of it is their own thought at all, but they were themselves strongly influenced by philosophers. . . .

Since I, too, cannot think of any particular novel that "has changed my thinking about life," and since I also don't read novels "for philosophy, for meaning" and am antipathetic to "philosophizing" in novels (as well to the underlying notion that fiction is a medium for "saying something" in the first place), I want to agree with the further claim that no novelist has ever "contributed anything important to human understanding," but finally I really can't.

In the narrow sense of the term "understanding" that Obooki seems to be invoking here--"understanding" as philosophically established knowledge--it is certainly true that fiction has contributed almost nothing to the store of human knowledge. Even those writers whose work is loosely regarded as "philosophical" (Dostoevsky, for example) hardly introduce new ideas but instead reflect on extant "ideas" as embodied through character and incident (or have their characters reflect on them directly). The only original ideas to be found in novels, going back to the first recognizable examples of the form, are ideas about new ways to to exploit the literary potential of the form itself.

It is a common move when defending fiction's putative ability to advance "human understanding" to assert that it allows us to vicariously experience the lives of "other people" or to appreciate societies and cultures different from our own or some other such opportunity to expand our sympathies. Since these claims cannot hold up to critical scrutiny--there are no "people" in works of fiction, only hopelessly circumscribed verbal representations of them, no "culture" except as the faint traces discernible in idiom and other language practices (whick are even fainter in translation)--I will not appeal to the notion of "understanding" underlying them. While of course language and writing are "human" phenomena, it is the linguistic imprint of the "human" we experience in fiction, certainly not actual humans. This version of "human understanding" merely betrays the attempt to convert literature into a form of moral inquiry and instruction.

There is, however, a way in which fiction does produce human understanding, and not just feign or simulate it. According to the account of our experience of art and literature offered by John Dewey (which I have discussed in more detail in previous posts on this blog), our encounter with art can be the most alert and engaged of human experiences. In our free perception of the aesthetic (involving an act of imaginative projection commensurate with that initiated by the artist), we reach a level of pure experience, and a degree of self-awareness of experience as experience, unavailable in most other human endeavors. Via this intensification of experience, one might say that we acquire "human understanding" in the most direct and immediate sense: we more fully understand our own capacities as the creature able to both have an experience and to reflect on the nature of that experience. We realize more distiinctly what it is to be human.

Obooki suggests that at its most satisfying, the reading experience is a state of "induced reverie." This is not entirely inconsistent with Dewey's description of aesthetic experience, but I would use instead the words "sustained attention" to identify the effort involved in the most rewarding experience of art, including the art of fiction. Few other activities call forth our complete attention as thoroughly as works of art and literature potentially do, and the "human understanding" they thus afford ought to be an important enough contribution.

The Winds of the World

As someone who would probably be associated with promoting the sort of novel being described here, I nevertheless have to say I find Alan Massie's evocation of the "self-enclosed novel" mostly incomprehensible:

One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. . .By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world.

I really have no idea what it would mean for a work of fiction to make "no reference. . .to anything beyond itself." It would at the least require that such a work be written in an invented language--and thus have no audience beyond the author him/herself--a language that would carry none of the "references" that English carries simply by being a historical language spoken by billions of people. And even if such a thing could be done, the invented language itself would have to make no reference to the "world of fact" its author would nonetheless still inhabit, presumably focusing entirely on an alternative "world of fact" that somehow only the author has ever experienced. This would indeed be quite a feat of self-isolation, and the resulting fiction would be cordoned off both from the actual "world of fact" and everyone inhabiting it, but the notion that some writers do this, or try to do it, is, of course, resolutely absurd.

In suggesting that certain fiction does "not appear to be set in time," Massie must mean that it does not directly refer to either current events as described by journalists or past events as related by historians. There's no other way to understand the bizarre claim that some novels want to deny "that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters." Since all humans live in the world of fact and are subjected to the "winds of the world," and since writers are themselves human, the stories and novels they write bear all the marks of that wind, even if some writers are less concerned with charting it directly than other writers.

Presumably a story like Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon" is the sort of thing Massie has in mind (although he gives no examples at all of the sort of thing he does have in mind). Or a novel such as Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association. "The Balloon" is an obvious fantasy, in which an infinitely expandable hot-air balloon is inflated until it spreads out and covers all of New York City. The story records the way the city's people adapt to and come to understand this "phenomenon": "There was a certain amount of argumentation about the 'meaning' of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena." Massie no doubt objects to the way in which a "self-enclosed" fiction like this casts doubt on "meaning," portrays meaning as something always up for grabs. But who could assert that this story rejects "the world of fact"? It is all about New York City, a "fact" that informs every line and paragraph. It's about New Yorkers, whose residence in the city most assuredly "influence[s] their behaviour" and "affect[s] the course of their lives."

The Universal Baseball Association is about as "self-enclosed" as a novel can get. It takes place completely inside the head of a man playing a game of fantasy baseball. He has created an entire league and invested it with a glorious past. He further invests it with a life-and-death significance that culminates in a horrible accident that tears his world (the baseball world) apart. Ultimately the novel is a kind of meditation on the interplay of fantasy and reality (the "world of fact" represented most obviously by baseball, a very real pastime in whose intricacies millions of people do become entangled), but it does subject its protagonist, however indirectly, to the "winds of the world." Those winds "impinge" on J. Henry Waugh in a particularly destructive way. He wants to be the God of his invented world, but the real world of chance and human imperfection intervenes nevertheless.

Massie essentially uses the distinction he draws between "self-enclosed" and "open" fiction to marginalize the former as "merely literary," while lauding the former for its willingness to "take on" history, "the world of harsh political fact which, working in conjunction with personal qualities, forms or deforms men’s lives." In Massie's view, the open novel "was invented more or less by Walter Scott," whose novels for Massie are exemplars of the kind of fiction that is "open" to the currents of reality. But I think he has it exactly backward. It's fiction like "The Balloon" and UBA that depicts the forces of "contingency" through exercises of the imagination, while writers of historical and "documentary" fiction are stuck with what was and what is. Self-enclosed fiction is actually "open" to any and all kinds of aesthetic innovation, while the "open" novel is closed to all but the most conventional approaches that allow the "world of fact" to predominate.

The important distinction to be made is not between "self-enclosed" and "open" works of fiction. It is between those works whose authors think of fiction as primarily an aesthetic form and those who think of it as a form of commentary on human behavior or the state of the the world, on "the world of harsh political fact" or some such thing. If you want to think of the latter kind of fiction as more "open," more "engaged" with facts and thus more relevant to your concerns as a reader, so be it. Some readers are impatient with art and want their novels to be like sociology only with stories, or like journalism with better stories. But this is no justification for defining a whole other kind of fiction almost out of existence and distorting it beyond recognition in the process.

At the Expense of the Content

At Costanza Book Club, Pacifist Viking asserts that when watching tv or movies "what sticks in my memory are not necessarily the ideas, but the aesthetic of the work," but when it comes to literature, "I'm not sure how I read different types of writing differently. I'm not sure my mind is operating differently whether I'm reading literature (poetry, drama, or fiction), history, theology, philosophy, criticism, essays, any remotely serious writing: I'm not entirely sure there's a difference in the way I read."

This attitude toward reading is probably not uncommon (everything gets smashed together as "serious writing" and then mined for "ideas"), and the contrast between what PV looks for in visual media and what he looks for in books also betrays a no doubt common assumption about the "aesthetic": it's fine when it means noting "the beautiful image" in works no one would take seriously for their "ideas" to begin with, when pretty pictures and "colorful" characters can substitute for content in otherwise content-less entertainments, but where "serious writing" is concerned it becomes embarassing, "merely" aesthetic. Thus PV's rejection of aestheticism, whereby the "primary" focus becomes "on the aesthetic at the expense of the content."

To me it's telling that when insisting he does nevertheless have respect for the aesthetic qualities of literature, PV appeals to Paradise Lost as an example: "I adore Paradise Lost. I love the content and I love the ideas. But I also love the imagery Milton conjures. I love his poetry. I could spend a long time analyzing and discussing his art in the epic poem. It's a poem beautifully structured and containing many beautiful lines of poetry. It's a poem so rich in both art and content that I rather think it transcends any meaningful separation between the art and the ideas." Paradise Lost certainly is "a poem beautifully structured and containing many beautiful lines of poetry," but it's also a poem in which it's actually quite easy to separate the "art" from the "content," since few people who read the poem now can have much sympathy for its defense of Puritan theology--which is the only "idea" I can find in the poem-- as anything more than a historical curiosity. One loves Paradise Lost precisely because it is such an aesthetically powerful work despite its rather repellent "idea" of Christianity. It's the first work I think of when challenged to provide an example of a work of literature in which art trumps content.

PV doesn't want to let go of the belief that in literature one finds "education and edification." Perhaps this is why he is willing to leave it jumbled up with "history, theology, philosophy, criticism." Literature, like these other forms, is good for you, while the diversions provided by films and tv shows can be acceptably relegated to the "aesthetic." As I read PV's post, it seems to me that he has the most trouble separating prose fiction from the other kinds of "serious writing," perhaps because both poetry and drama exhibit their aesthetic natures somewhat more immediately. Prose fiction is less able to differentiate itself from the discursive methods of these other, non-literary forms; sometimes it imitates those methods directly. But this is no reason to collapse the differences between fiction and "history, theology, philosophy, criticism." Indeed, there's all the more reason to maintain the separation, to allow fiction to explore the possibilities of verbal art in ways that aren't so plainly visible.

Something Fundamental

David Ulin sees similarities between Norman Mailer and Denis Johnson:

Regardless of what you think about Mailer, his death is one more signifier of a literary culture in transition, in which the old guard is disappearing faster than we can figure out who might fill the void. This is why Johnson's prize is so compelling -- because he may be the one American writer of his generation (the generation raised on Vietnam and Woodstock) who consistently writes with that overarching standard of engagement, who's not playing games but going after something fundamental, using literature to get at the essence of who we are.

I have to assume that in Ulin's reference to "playing games" he is taking a swipe at postmodernism, using the same stale cliche those critics who want to valorize the "engagement" of writers like Mailer and Johnson in contrast to the aesthetic affectations of formalists and metafictionists always seem to use. The former don't mince around with "art" but grapple with "the essence of who we are," while the latter are preoccupied with surfaces, with the "merely literary."

It's a tiresome enough exercise, as much as anything else unfair to Mailer and Johnson, who are being judged as philosophers and seers rather than novelists, archaelogists of the soul rather than artists. Surely Mailer's most ponderous and pretentious books are those in which he self-consciously assumed these roles, and it does Johnson no favor to describe his work in terms as trite as those Ulin later uses to capture that "something fundamental" he is putatively "going after":

These are strange books, no doubt about it, built on the notion that reality is a veil behind which we might discover the truer nature of things, if only we could see it for what it is. Occasionally, we are offered glimpses but that just adds to our confusion -- or, worse, puts our most essential selves at risk. "Did you think we were just thinking?" a character asks in "Already Dead." "Thinking forbidden thoughts? Imagining heresies? Pretending to recognize moral systems as instruments of oppression and control?"

What Johnson is saying is that this is not a game but deadly serious, that what's at stake is how we continue in the face of mysteries so large they threaten to overwhelm us -- and ultimately will. The only answer is to continue moving forward, to accept our small graces and benedictions where we can.

The vapidity here is striking: "reality is a veil"; "our most essential selves"; "not a game but deadly serious"; "[t]he only answer is to continue moving forward." What does any of this mean? Why would anyone want to read a body of work that can be reduced to this sort of night-school existentialism? Most importantly, would Denis Johnson be satisfied with such a flavorless characterization of his fiction? I can't imagine that he would. While I would not call Jesus' Son "the most potent work of American fiction in the last 20 years" (among other reasons because it was actually published in 1992), I did enjoy reading this book (as well as Angels and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man), and I can't at all say it was because Johnson had pierced the veil of reality or dug down to our "most essential selves" or because it signalled to me that we should "continue moving forward." In fact, it seemed to me a rather delicate book, working through style, nuance, and indirection rather than a heavy-handed "engagement" or utilitarian view of literature as spiritual guide.

It remains unclear to me why we should hold novelists to an "overarching standard of engagement." Why should I care whether Norman Mailer or Denis Johnson have anything at all to "say"? They're novelists, not soapbox orators, and should be judged by the quality of the literary art they make, not their efforts to discover the really real or stare down the "face of mysteries." I'd rather have writers playing games than aspiring to be sages.

A "Post-" Post

Responding to the notion of a "post-Katrina" fiction discussed in a recent Guardian article, Scott Esposito wonders whether writers aren't being asked to focus a little too much on "current events":

First there was post-9/11 fiction, now there's post-Katrina fiction (and, probably soon, Iraq War II fiction and Bush II fiction). I don't doubt the need for writers to try their hand at making sense of major events, but it strikes me as a little strange to start forming fiction subgenres around disasters and such. It also strikes me as a little troubling the way fiction is being increasingly marketed around events (usually tragedies), as if novels and story collections were some kind of literary op-eds.

I actually do doubt "the need for writers to try their hand at making sense of major events," precisely because the expectation that they will do so inevitably reduces the writing of fiction to a kind of "literary op-ed." Fiction writers are granted the dispensation to "reflect" on the meaning of "major events" and to dramatize their reflections through the use of story (a mode that is in turn granted more immediacy in capturing readers' attention), but ultimately the work produced is judged by what it has to "say" about the event or era in question, by how strikingly it rehashes what we already know.

I have mostly avoided the mother of these "subgenres," the "post-9/11" novel. I well recall the assertions made in the months following 9/11/01 that this event had "changed everything," that writers would have to give up their postmodern game-playing and go back to writing real novels about the real world, blah, blah, blah. I remember hoping that most writers would ignore this critical blather and go on writing whatever kind of fiction suited their fancy. Indeed, I thought that the best response to such sanctimony would be for postmodernists to enage in even more game-playing than ever before. It would seem, however, from such post-9/11 novels as DeLillo's Falling Man and the response to it that such resistance was never very likely.

Recently I gave up my own resistance to the "post-" genre and read Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. (This was after I read Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown, which is a post-9/11 novel only indirectly and might even be said to contain a bit of postmodern game-playing.) I know it's a post-9/11 novel because its story literally takes place during the months following the attacks on the Twin Towers and because all of the reviews of the novel said it was, but although the novel clearly wants mightily to "say something" about this "major event," I honestly can't figure out what this is supposed to be. Ordinarily, I would consider it a mark of a novel's accomplishment that the reader can't exactly pin down its meaning, but in this case the novel in question doesn't open itself up to the possibility of multifarious interpretation. It pretty clearly intends that its parallel between the trauma inflicted on New York City on 9/11 and the trauma of its protagonists' divorce, as well as between the events that ensued in the aftermath of 9/11 (anthrax attacks, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) and the tawdry events leading to the couple's final divorce decree be seen as, somehow, very significant.

But in what way are these parallels significant? Divorce is like terrorism? The blowing up of a marriage is like the blowing up of the Twin Towers? In an unhappy marriage the participants are waging war against each other in the same we waged war against the Taliban? Surely Kalfus doesn't intend for his novel to "mean" things as banal, or as offensive, as these. But what does he intend? Laura Miller suggested in her review that "Kalfus, an endlessly ingenious writer, is not trying to say something about divorce by likening it to the so-called clash of civilizations. Instead, he's showing us that the far-off national conflicts we find so baffling and complicated actually work a lot like a really bad divorce." By this measure, then, the novel is indeed "about" the world wrought by 9/11, and Kalfus is indeed trying to "say something," which is that the war in Iraq can be understood as similar to divorce? He's "not trying to say something about divorce." If someone can tell me what sense this distinction is supposed to make, I would appreciate the explanation.

I was tempted to conclude that what Kalfus was really saying was that, to the extent his protagonists are representative of the America the hijackers thought they were attacking, they had some justification, given how thoroughly detestable "Joyce" and "Marshall" turn out to be. Probably not, but it seems to me as intelligible as any other interpretation one might offer of this really quite dreadful book.

Frances Madeson's Cooperative Village is also a post-9/11 novel, but, despite being published by a start-up press and consequently much less publicized, it has the virtues of being both entertaining and thematically coherent, neither of which can be said of A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. It is a transparently comic novel, pitched somewhere between outright satire and what used to be called "black humor." Although I am more a fan of the latter than the former, the cheerfully absurdist tone of Cooperative Village keeps it from lapsing into facile moralizing.

The novel's black comedy is on display in the opening chapter, as its protagonist, a self described "flameout" in her "previously lucrative career as a professional doormat," discovers a dead body in her co-op's laundry room:

I won't over-dramatize and say I was in shock to find death in the laundry room, even though it's a place I associate more with renewal than dissolution, but it was a little disturbing. Maybe that's why I went ahead and started doing the laundry, which is what I'd come for, knowing that if my hands were busy, my mind would soon follow and clarity would replace confusion. So often I find that if you just put your shoulder to the wheel and start pushing, eventually it'll turn and you'll be on your way to wherever it is you were going, and that's what I did now with Mrs. Plotsky dead on the laundry room floor.

Noticing a smell already emanating from Mrs. Plotsky, Frances decides to take some pre-emptive action:

. . .since I had extra bleach that I didn't absolutely need for Joseph's underwear, and bleach is an excellent odor fighter, I splashed a little on Mrs. Plotsky, thinking it might help. And it did! So then I thought, if a little bleach helps, a lot would probably lick the whole problem altogether.

The machines are front loading, which I generally find very convenient, but now even more so because it would've been too difficult for me to pick the dead-weight of Mrs. Plotsky up off the floor, the dead being as heavy as they are, and I very well might've broken my back trying to load her in the top. But with the ease of front loading, I could unfold her legs into the machine, kind of scoop her tiny little self up, and shove her in. I'm not claiming it was easy, but I pride myself on my physical strength, problem-solving abilities, and a certain can-do attitude that's served me well over the years--well, at least it used to before the, you know, flame-out.

Frances subsequently tries to divest herself of the body, but she finds this not such an easy task when she is told by Mrs. Plotsky's surviving son (who has been sharing a co-op apartment with his mother) that he wants nothing to do with it. Frances winds up hauling the body around on a luggage carrier, before finally managing to have it removed to a crematorium. (And to her credit, Frances later arranges to sit shiva for Mrs. Plotsky.)

In A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, Kalfus also attempts several episodes of what are clearly meant to be black humor, as when husband Marshall rigs himself up in a suicide jacket, only to have wife Joyce try to help him fix it whan it malfunctions due to his incompetent construction. But such scenes are so clearly striving to be "dark" they come off as mostly just foolish. The off-kilter comedy of Cooperative Village is established immediately and creates a consistently off-kilter fictional world.

Frances additionally discovers that her library card has been used by someone else to check out books that come under suspicion via the Patriot Act, and she is informed by the local librarian that she will likely be investigated by the FBI. Here Cooperative Village takes its satirical turn, as eventually Frances goes on the lam, leaving graffiti messages around town announcing her defiance, including one that proclaims, "We Will Not Cooperate."

Thus, "cooperation" becomes the novel's obvious unifying theme. The villagers themselves are not always so cooperative with one another, while an overly intrusive government demands a compulsory cooperation. The thematic convergence is ultimately perhaps a little too neat for my taste, but I'd surely rather have Frances Madeson's more boldly comic treatment of post-9/11 New York than Ken Kalfus's forced, incoherent "serious" account. In its way, Cooperative Village seems truer to the creepy form of insanity we've been experiencing for the past six years.

Interiors

Caleb Crain wonders whether "novels spread human rights and discourage torture." Quoting Lynn Hunt's claim in her book Inventing Human Rights: A History that "novels made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner feelings," Crain glosses Hunt's claim by adding: "As it became easier to imagine the feelings and interior lives of other people, it became harder to justify treating them with cruelty or systematic inequity."

This is a cogent enough observation (although it remains after-the-fact speculation), as long as a caveat is added: Novels, or at least certain kind of novels, can make make it "easier to imagine the feelings and interior lives of other people," but this is a secondary effect of the novel as a form, not its reason for being. It exists to allow writers the opportunity to create aesthetically credible works of literary art in prose, not to champion human solidarity and facilitate good will toward men.

Crain further wonders whether "the recent decline in novel-reading in America hasn't got something to do with the country's new tolerance for torture and lack of concern about human rights." Specifically, he contrasts the attitude toward torture (violence more generally) conveyed by various visual media--advertisements, movies tv--with that encouraged by novels:

. . .Perhaps the brain's limbic system responds to the sight of violence without first checking with the forebrain to find out whether the image is fictional. In other words, a person who see a severed arm, or who sees Kiefer Sutherland shooting a Muslim prisoner, might become frightened, at some level, though perhaps not fully conscious of his fear. His limbic system sees a strong person harming a weak one; his moral faculties, meanwhile, are neutralized by his forebrain's awareness that the sight is fictional; and the limbic system, finding that the forebrain doesn't seem to care one way or the other, decides to side with the strong person. . . .

"Is it really possible," he asks, "to watch the famous torture scene in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs all the way through and remain identified with the torture victim? Not only is the man mutilated and terrorized, but his torturers have all the good lines." Whereas

I can't think of a vividly imagined torture scene in written fiction where the reader sides with the torturer. Maybe this is because the novel's heyday happened to coincide with a faith in human rights, but maybe it has something to do with the cognitive processes involved. In reading, one's forebrain is fully engaged; when it disengages, reading stops. And to every part of you except perhaps your forebrain, reading seems safe. There's nothing about holding a book and turning its pages to alarm one's limbic system. In fact, nothing can be "seen" without first being imagined. . . .

Crain presumably knows more about the physiology of the limbic system than I do, so I'll take his word that the brain responds to images in the way he describes. That an intervening level of "imagining" is involved in reading seems intuitively correct, although I guess I'd like to see some neuroscientific evidence that reading about violence is as different an experience from being confronted with it--or its aesthetic representation--directly in filmed images as Crain thinks it is. As a literary critic, my engrained bias is that reading is a more complex phenomenon than viewing, that literature is in this sense an aesthetically richer form than film or television (although what about painting?), but still. Is it sufficiently more complicated as to make reading novels inherently part of the struggle to establish human rights?

I guess I can't immediately summon up a torture scene in fiction in which "the reader sides with the torturer," either, although much of the behavior depicted in, say, A Clockwork Orange seems just as cruel as outright torture, and I can't say I don't have some empathy for Alex and his droogs as they resist the curtailment of their freedom and, in Alex's case, free will. I may not like feeling such empathy, but most well-fashioned first-person narration produces an almost unavoidable identification with the narrator, an identification that might be repudiated but that still does exist. Bardamu, the protagonist of Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, is in many ways a pretty despicable character without much human fellow-feeling, but it's hard to deny that his narrative is powerful, his narrative voice compelling. We certainly find ourselves admiring him as a fictional creation, if not as a "person" we'd otherwise like to meet. Other novels in which we are invited to inhabit the world evoked by unpleasant or morally dubious characters come to mind as well (Lolita obviously, The Stranger, Naked Lunch), although perhaps Crain would contend that forcing us to sample "the feelings and interior lives" of such characters as these is actually itself a step toward clarifying "human rights" (even if it doesn't necessarily show us that "all people are fundamentally similar.")

It's not entirely clear what period Crain takes to be the "novel's heyday." Since Crain has mostly presented himself as a critic/scholar of 19th century American literature and culture, my immediate assumption is that he has the 19th century novel in mind (perhaps extending into the early 20th.) Thus one might infer that his concern for the decline in novel-reading is also an accompanying lament for the passing of the novel in its realist/character-centered phase (at least characters who are relatively unproblematic in their psychological make-up, who give us desired access to their "inner feelings.") We are no longer in that "heyday," and if we were, if the 19th century novel were still the paradigm current writers followed, presumably it would be attracting more readers and helping to spread human rights more efficaciously. Instead we're left with 24 and Reservoir Dogs.

Perhaps this is unfair to Crain's more fundamental, underlying argument that if more people were reading and fewer people relied on "edgy" television and film for their entertainment we'd live in a safer and more empathetic world. I'd like to think as well that a planet populated by fans of Middlemarch or Portrait of a Lady would be one less inclined to "cruelty or systematic inequity," although I do have my doubts. My biggest problem with Crane's analysis is that it strongly implies that a "novel" is properly that sort of thing that was written back in the "heyday" and that those writers of artistically adventurous prose such as Celine or Nabokov (or John Hawkes or Gilbert Sorrentino or, for that matter, David Foster Wallace) have helped to undermine their own enterprise by writing works of fiction that don't so transparently exteriorize "inner feelings" and thus foster human understanding. It may be that some novels, as Richard Rorty has it, "help us become less cruel," it may even be that a contingent effect of the kind of heyday novel Crain extols was to create a cognitive bond between the reader and the imaginary "people" depicted therein, but reducing cruelty by promoting such a bond takes no more precedence in defining the novel as a literary form than does, say, Nabokov's insistence that great fiction produce a certain aesthetic "tingle" in the reader's spine.

Say What?

In an interesting essay defending politically-engaged fiction, Jeff VanderMeer observes:

. . .Sometimes the reader has a responsibility — and in the case of the political, that responsibility includes not screaming "didactic!" any time a writer raises important issues in his or her work. Readers who care about writing need to recognize that sometimes the entertainment value of a piece must be weighed against the depth of what is being said, that sometimes a story may need a certain slow pace in a section, may need to build, and may even need to, yes, lecture, to achieve its full effect. . . .

While I am indeed the sort of reader who is very quick to scream "didactic!" when fiction begins to deal in "issues," in my opinion the real problem with Jeff's analysis here is the overly reductive way in which he's separated fiction's appeal into its "entertainment value" and "the depth of what is being said." This doesn't leave much room for writers who aren't interested either in "entertainment" for its own sake or in "saying something," much less in using fiction as a podium from which to deliver lectures.

I think the whole idea that what makes fiction "serious" is the extent to which it allows a writer to "say something" is misguided, but the implicit suggestion that making political observations and providing political critique is the most serious use of the fiction writer's time is even more objectionable. Why politics rather than some other sphere of life? Is it really true, as Jeff maintains, that "all people are political in some way, even those who seem apathetic, because politics is about gender, society, and culture"? Isnt' this defining "politics" so broadly as to almost drain it of it meaning? Can't almost any activity ultimately be construed to involve "gender, society and culture"? It seems to me that to say a writer is concerned with such activities is finally to say only that he/she is writing about human beings and the various things they do. And are the most pressing questions we face ones like "How do ruling elites come into being?" or "How do they stay in power"? I don't myself find these questions entirely uninteresting, but are they really the preeminently "serious" kinds of questions a writer of fiction can pursue?

Beyond whatever "content" a work of fiction may have to offer, what about those works in which the writer's serious effort has clearly gone into meeting particular aesthetic goals, into extending the formal or stylistic possibilities of fiction? Is such a writer to be consigned to the category of "entertainer," albeit an entertainer of some sophistication? To be fair, Jeff elsewhere in his essay does affirm that fiction has no obligation to be "relevant," that "The instinctual idea I had as a teen and young adult about Art for Art’s sake, the idea that character and situation are paramount, that some truths transcend politics — that’s all valid." But even here, the assumptions seem to be that the alternative to a focus on content is a focus on "character and situation" and that the writer of fiction is ultimately seeking to embody "truth," even if it isn't necessarily political truth. What of the writer who seeks to discover whether fiction as a form has aesthetic potential beyond rendering character and situation through conventional narrative? Is this not in itself a "serious" undertaking? And what if the "truth" a writer's work reveals is that fiction does have this potential and that the human imagination has yet to find its limits? I guess it could be said that this is a message of some "depth," although such a writer has not attempted to "say" anything. Indeed, the value to be found in such work originates in the effort to avoid saying anything at all.

Sticking to the Words

According to Ellis Sharp:

. . .[Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" is] a campaigning song, set in the real world. If you say that it doesn’t matter what the song is about, or whether it’s true or not, and that it’s just great music, then I think you’ve missed a lot of the point of the song. You aestheticise it. You turn it into an artefact detached from real life. That impulse reminds me very much of the American ‘New Criticism’ of the 1950s. The New Critics wanted to remove literature from life and history and regard writing as exclusively a formal structure – a well-wrought urn, an organic artefact, where all you discussed was language. The New Critics rubbished biography. The writer’s life, the writer’s intentions, were an irrelevance. Out with society and history, just stick to the words! But theory is never innocent, and the New Criticism slotted in nicely with the quietism of the age. If you don’t want to talk about history or society, you threaten nothing.

Heaven forbid that we "aestheticize" an ostensible work of art! Sharp's admonitions here are like saying that the stories in today's newspaper are too much like journalism or that the trouble with physics is that it contains too many darn equations. Reattach them to life! But just as physics no longer exists without the equations, art must be "aesthetic" in order to be itself in the first place. It's the attempt to politicize works of art, to make them illuminate history or act as the servants of biography, that distorts them, not regarding them as artifact--which of course they are, first and foremost. If we don't "aestheticize" art--that is, apprehend it on its own terms as art--we've failed to recognize it at all.

What in the world could it mean to say that in calling a song "great music" you’ve "missed a lot of the point of the song"? That music is something other than musical? That it's more than music? The impulse behind such a claim is understandable--it's a way of saying that something profoundly important has occured in one's experience of "great" art of any kind--but to suggest that the "point" of a song or a poem or a novel lies elsewhere than in its embodiment as a song or poem or novel is to implicitly denigrate the form a particular work has taken: Don't tell me this song is musically satisfying--it's trying to change the world! That novel is pleasant, but it's "merely literary." Implicitly, such assertions tell us that musicians and novelists could be finding better uses for their time than just composing music or writing novels. They could be "campaigning."

Sharp's account of New Criticism is a fairly typical sort of misrepresentation among those who are apparently more interested in "society and history" than in literature. This kind of reductive description has especially been used for quite some time now by academics eager to rid the study of literature of all vestiges of formalism in favor of "cultural critique." But the New Critics never wanted "to remove literature from life and history." It's very hard to see how this could be done in the first place--if it were to be removed from life, where would it go?--but at any rate the New Critics wanted precisely to locate literature in history--its history as literature--and provide it with "life" by identifying those characteristics particular to it, or at least particular to the experience of reading it. It's not as if the "formal structures" with which New Criticism was concerned were already well-known, waiting to be pinned to works of literature in some act of literary preservation. For the New Critics, reading was a dynamic process, a dramatic process, during which judgment needed to be suspended. Formal structures remind us that a poem or story is not like "talk." They have been shaped in such a way that a work's "content" is not that easy to determine. Thus the New Critics' use of such terms as "ambiguity" and "paradox."

Sharp then reprimands Vladimir Nabokov for observing that a particular passage from Dickens's Bleak House is "a lesson in style, not in participative emotion." Sharp continues:

Bleak House is not simply a literary artefact. It powerfully expresses Dickens’s own seething rage and contempt for a supposedly Christian society where children died openly in the London streets. Bleak House projects Dickens’s vision of England as a rotten and corrupt society.

In my view, that Bleak House might express Dickens's "rage and contempt" is not necessarily one of its admirable qualities. Fortunately, what Dickens really did in this novel--perhaps more effectively than any of his other books--was to transcend his rage and contempt and to translate them (if indeed they were feelings he held) into literary art, into a novel that is indeed fully shaped and ingeniously structured. And so what if the novel "projects Dickens’s vision of England as a rotten and corrupt society"? Such visions are a dime a dozen. The only thing that distinguishes Dickens's "vision" is that it served as the impetus for a series of great fictions. Nabokov was right: What makes Dickens still a writer well worth reading are his specifically literary gifts, his ability to create singularly memorable characters, his prodigious prose style.

Returning to his discussion of Dylan, Sharp concludes: "Pop music self-evidently has dimensions that poetry lacks (the human voice, the backing music, the individuality of every performance, its immediate visceral impact) but I don’t see why that should prevent us discussing that aspect which they both share: words." I'll avoid debating the merits of analyzing pop songs as if they were poems (one could view song lyrics as poems of a sort, although comparing them to actual poems is, in my view, unfair to both, since they weren't written to be poems), but suffice it to say that Sharp eliminates almost everything that defines song as a form of music ("the human voice," "the backing music"), further reducing both songwriting and poetry to "[w]hat the two art forms have in common[, which] is a desire to communicate something, usually an experience, through words." Never mind that in Dylan's most creative period in the mid-1960s he focused more on "communicating" an experience through expanded musical means, the lyrics often acting as a kind of hypnotic accompaniment to the music rather than the opposite. In confining the artist's ambitions to "a desire to communicate something," Sharp strips art of its very identity, equating it with any other act of communication and limiting it to what it "is about." Discouraging such an approach to art and literature was what New Criticism, in all of its quietism, was itself finally all about.

Erasing Society

In an essay about the "feud" between the critic Irving Howe and the novelist Ralph Ellison about the role of "protest" in fiction, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington observes:

. . .Whereas Ellison saw a danger in collective generalizations, Howe was attuned to the perils of erasing society. In his autobiography, A Margin of Hope, Howe asks, “Since language has unbreakable ties to possible events in experience, can the meaning or value of a work be apprehended without some resort—be it as subtle and indirect as you wish—to social and moral categories?” The quote is taken from a passage on Howe’s student days, studying the tenets of the New Critics and their aspiration to substitute close analysis of a text for the study of background historical forces. Typically for projects this high-minded, the New Critics failed to see that “the evaluative terms offered by New Criticism—terms like coherence and complexity—were heavily freighted with associations drawn from history, psychology, morality. Is there any evaluative term not so freighted, and must not any attempt to find purely ‘intrinsic’ values wither into sterility?”

Howe's contention that because "language has unbreakable ties to possible events in experience" criticism must attend to "social and moral categories" is an argument that is very frequently made by those who believe that literature transcends mere "art." It is these "unbreakable ties" between language and the reality it represents that make literature different than, say, painting or music. These forms are freer to "be themselves"--to create a closed-off space where aesthetic qualities are allowed a degree of autonomy--than literature because the latter occurs in language and language is the means by which we conduct our everday affairs and through which we make the world meaningful.

In my opinion, however, it is precisely because literature is made from a medium so thorougly tied to modes of conventional discourse and ordinary communication that the creation of genuine art using such a medium should especially be acknowledged and allowed a certain degree of independence from the kind of "social and moral" criticism favored by Irving Howe and his current epigones. Creating literary art is very hard to do, and writers have had to resort to increasingly radical strategies (hence both modernism and postmodernism) to wrest it away from the moral inspectors.

Nothing we do, of course, is entirely beyond the reach of "social and moral categories" if we choose to employ them. But why must we always do so? Why is it necessary to subject that human activity we call "art" to relentless political and cultural analysis even when the artists themselves reject such an analysis as a willful distortion of the purpose of their work? Because we can? Can we not also choose to preserve an aesthetic space for works of literature? Besides, if you really are most interested in sociopolitical or moral interrogation in the first place, why spend your time trying to whip poems and novels into some suitably discursive shape?

Thus, for Howe to say that the kinds of critical terminology associated with New Critical formalism are "heavily freighted with associations drawn from history, psychology, morality" is to say something not very interesting or very useful. That human beings forge their conceptual and critical tools from various sources of human activity is not a very startling revelation. Where else could we get them? No one who ever believed in the efficacy of such terms as "coherence" or "complexity" ever believed they were "instrinsic values" separated from historical forces and derivations. They were just terms that served nicely, right now, to describe the aesthetic goals much of modern literature had set for itself. For me, it is those who cite the historical contingency of everything, as if this were urgent news, who betray a residual longing for absolutes and essences. How awful we don't have them!

Wellington admonishes Ellison for "brandish[ing] a vision of Art with a capital A," for encouraging a fruitless debate that just goes "round and round." But the argument is not circular. The dispute between the view that art is "truth telling" and the view that art is art could be settled if the parties agreed that "Art with a capital A" can exist if we allow it to (that it has its own kind of value if we allow ourselves to find it), but that this doesn't foreclose the possibility that "truth" will emerge for some readers as well (perhaps not so forcefully for others). Those of us who agree with Ellison simply don't want to rush quite so quickly from the immediacy of art to its supplementary implications.

Meaning Something

A while back, Kevin Holtsberry (Collected Miscellany) solticited a response to these questions posed by Betty Smartt Carter:

[I]sn't storytelling all about finding relationships between things? Isn't that why we write and read novels - to prove to ourselves and each other that the world means something?

Carter prefaces these questions by saying of one of the authors she is reviewing that "I like her dry style and her lack of sentiment. She seems less predictably optimistic, less manipulative with our emotions, and therefore more honest than many writers."

Carter actually seems to be suggesting that she found this writer's novel to be more artful than the second one she's reviewing, which "portrays life not as we experience it, but as it looks beyond our experience, in a place where events and people do tie together in mysterious and even sacred ways," but preferred the second because "That transcendent viewpoint trumps even style. . . ."

In a way, Carter performs a useful service by so forthrightly admitting that she would rather have a "transcendent vision" than art--even art that is ultimately more "honest" in the vision it presents--in the novels she reads. No doubt many readers, including readers less disposed to using novels for religious uplift than Carter seems to be, also prefer novels with something to "say," that reassure us that the world does indeed "mean something" and help us find "relationships between things," to those that manifest style or are "less manipulative with our emotions." These are readers who regard fiction as (potentially at least) more than entertainment but who find this something "extra" in a perceived quality of profundity or wisdom.

I'm not going to say that such readers are wrong to value fiction in this way. I object only when it is asserted that these qualities are synonymous with "art," that it is the job of art and literature "to prove to ourselves and each other that the world means something." A work of art can demonstrate to us that we are capable of creating a kind of meaning through the aesthetic order invented by the artist (although this is certainly not the only way of demonstrating this capability--art is not the sole method of "making meaning" available to us), but more often than not this sort of meaning is perceptible to us only because the "world" itself so obviously lacks it, does not "mean something" prior to our efforts to compel it into becoming meaningful. If readers find that a particular novel or other work of art communicates "meaning" of one kind or another, perhaps even profound meaning that transforms the reader's understanding of the world, all well and good. I would simply suggest that as a work of art it has been able to do this precisely because it has "style," avoids sentimentality and predictability, and doesn't manipulate "our emotions" in shabby and shallow ways.

In his own response to Carter's questions, Kevin contends that art "teaches us something about what it means to be human." Perhaps it does, but this can't be art's most immediate goal or we'll have nothing but moralizing and didactic art. Furthermore, so many of our activities (interacting with family and friends, watching the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina) teach us "something about what it means to be human" that this can't be what truly distinguishes the experience of creating and appreciating art from other ways of spending our time. Kevin makes a distinction between "Art" and "art":

. . .Art (with a capital A) can be distinguished from mere craft by rising above itself and its literal structure; by becoming more than the sum of its parts it becomes more than mere "thing." Craft, or art with a lower case "a," can be beautiful, interesting, and require a great deal of skill but it is just what it is (an illustration, a piece of furniture, a photograph, etc.). "Art" on the other hand rises above this level and gets at something deeper.

I understand the point Kevin is making, but, again, I don't think what he is after can be devised through conscious intent, by someone seeking to be an "Artist" rather than an "artist." The "something deeper" is produced by the reader or viewer rather than the writer or artist. The artist sticks to craft and hopes he/she can extend it in such a way that what is created in a sense might "transcend" its status as a well-fashioned "thing." But first of all that is its status, and in my opinion to lose sight of that is to overlook what makes art worthy of our attention to begin with.