The Reading Experience

Seeing Through It

John Freeman begins his review of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End by asserting that

A thousand years from now, if future generations turn to contemporary fiction as a window into the past, they will wind up with a rather skewed portrait of America. People, they might surmise, spent very little time in cars, resolved many disputes with violence, almost never slept with their spouse, and, in spite of pulling in regular incomes, never, ever went to work.

Which is precisely why future generations should not read fiction "as a window into the past." And why we should not be reading fiction of the past as a "window" onto the "reality" of the life therein evoked. Only bad writers, writers who think of fiction as a more "dramatic" way of recording history or who imagine themselves as "saying something" about The Way We Live Now, take themselves to be providing a "window" for future readers.

Good fiction is inherently a "skewed portrait," skewed by the writer's particular vision of experience and by that writer's singular way of transforming experience into language and molding both language and experience into aesthetic form. In subject or theme, most good fiction either depicts human situations in extremis, focusing on characters and events that may illustrate more or less universal human predicaments embodied in an exemplary instance but that do not exist primarily to "represent" a specific time (Catch-22, The Tunnel, Sabbath's Theater), or does indeed center on "ordinary" experiences but emphasizes their status as experiences for the characters undergoing them, not their value as emblematic events "capturing" a moment in time. The characters in Stephen Dixon's fiction, for example, do plenty of driving (Interstate is constructed around the act of driving) and are often shown at work (especially in his earlier fiction--Garbage, for example), but I don't think "future generations" will want to see these characters as anything other than the specific creations of Stephen Dixon.

The "window" afforded by the best fiction is always clouded, distorted, self-reflective. For these very reasons, it continues to fascinate. Fiction that pretends to offer a clear view onto the events of the day will never reach those "future generations" except as a moldy sample excavated by some social historian. Thus if Then We Came to the End is intended as a more transparent portal onto Our Times, I probably won't be reading it. Although judging from Freeman's description of the book, I think I already have read it, when, windowless, it was called Something Happened, by Joseph Heller.

The Specific Aspects of the Trouble

Brock Clarke does an effective job of undermining the assumptions about "realism" embraced by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Rachel Donadio:

. . .as Wolfe makes clear, a writer needs to be big and strong because a real writer is more warrior than artist: “At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.” According to Wolfe, once we have mounted our steeds, we should turn to journalists for our riding lessons: “The answer is not to leave the rude beast, the material, also known as the life around us, to the journalists, but to do what journalists do, or are supposed to do, which is to wrestle the beast and bring it to terms.” Or, if there aren’t any journalists on hand, we (meaning literary novelists—that is what I mean, and that is what Wolfe means as well) should look to writers of popular fiction, who “have one enormous advantage over their more literary confreres. They are not only willing to wrestle the beast; they actually love the battle.”

The hilarity here is high (one imagines Wolfe in his famous white suit wrestling and defeating a beast—any beast will do—and one feels sorry for the poor beast, too, who no doubt entered the wrestling match thinking he was about to do battle with a mere writer of literary fiction and not Tom Wolfe), but to be fair, the metaphors of the hunt, the battle, are merely goofy and shouldn’t concern us overmuch, except that we’re still using them, and we’re also still repeating Wolfe’s dire warning from seventeen years ago: “If fiction writers do not start facing the obvious, the literary history of the second half of the twentieth century will record that journalists not only took over the richness of American life as their domain, but also seized the high ground of literature itself.”

The question of whether or not journalists have “seized the high ground of literature itself” aside, that verb—“seized”—is a significant one, in part because Donadio uses a similar verb in her essay. Her essay’s first sentence, for instance, aligns itself with V. S. Naipaul in claiming that “nonfiction is better suited than fiction to capture the complexities of today’s world” (emphasis mine). Later in the essay, Donadio repeats that “To date, no work of fiction has perfectly captured our historical moment” (emphasis mine). What we’re meant to learn through Donadio’s use of capture is that literature at its best doesn’t evoke its subjects, or create them, or transform them, or render them, or distort them, or reinvent them, but rather captures them, as though they were enemy soldiers or Wolfe’s beast. This is not so—in fact, the idea that fiction can or should “capture our historical moment” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what fiction can do to and with the world, and what the world does to it. But it is a useful misunderstanding, and we should be grateful for it, and for Donadio’s use of the word capture, too, because if, as both Donadio and Wolfe claim, one of nonfiction’s unique capacities is to capture our historical moment (I have doubts that this is so, but so many nonfiction writers insist upon it that I’m just going to go ahead and agree with them), then Donadio’s use of capture lets us know precisely how far afield the tools and goals of nonfiction have led some novelists, and it also lets us see how important fiction is to our world and our imperfect understanding of it, even (especially) if fiction is never able to capture anything. Nor should we expect it to; nor should we want it to, except insofar as we’d like to live in a world simple enough to be captured.

Clarke correctly maintains that the call for writers to "capture" their times is really a plea for simplicity, for easy answers and for a brand of fiction that differs from nonfiction only in that novelists are able to use their "imaginations" to make up stuff in a way forbidden to journalists. This attitude toward the role of fiction results in the kind of cartoonish simplicity to be found in Wolfe's own novels, but this is just one method of, in Donadio's words, "illuminating today’s world most vividly," which is presumably what journalists like Donadio want to get from the fiction they deign to read.

Which makes it all the more mystifying to me that Clarke goes on to asset that "Wolfe believes in width (as when he casts his wide net and hauls in the names of New York’s neighborhoods and nationalities), but a novel is a novel not because it spreads wide, but because it goes deep, just as a novel is a novel not because it captures our troubled times, but because it illuminates and imagines the specific aspects of the trouble."

I just can't see that there's that much difference between capturing "troubled times" and imagining "the specific aspects of the trouble." I'm not even sure what the latter means. Unfortunately, Clarke's subsequent discussion of Heidi Julavits's The Effect of Living Backwards doesn't do much to clarify. Julavits "creates a stylized, surreal, but not unrecognizable version of our own world, a world which evokes our own world’s confusions and contradictions without attempting to be a replica of our world." This is fine, but if the author's ultimate goal is still to provide "a vantage point from which we can look at our moment," as Clarke puts it later, what does it matter if the novel otherwise pretends to be a "replica" or is instead "stylized" and "surreal"? Ultimately, in both cases it is the "trouble" that is being brought to the reading's attention, not the novel's own formal and stylistic features, nor even the specifically aesthetic implications of the fictional world being evoked. The focus is on the sociological, not the literary.

And then there's that familiar assertion that what distinguishes fiction as a form is that it "goes deep." At the risk of repeating myself too often on this subject (see this post, or this one), I will again say that, while it is true that some novels have explored human consciousness in very interesting ways, and that fiction generally provides an opportunity for this sort of exploration more readily than film or narrative nonfiction, this approach is one among many available to fiction writers and in no way defines fiction as a literary genre. It's an approach that long ago ossified into convention, and most literary fiction that continues to adopt it, and most critics who defend it, strike me as, frankly, just plain boring. Furthermore, I don't understand at all what relevance "going deep" has to Clarke's broader argument. Apparently, The Effect of Living Backwards is a first-person narrative, so it's ability to even go deep at all is inherently limited--to the narrator's understanding of her own mental processes. We are restricted to the narrator's point of view, which necessarily does introduce a degree of subjectivity ("uncertainty," as Clarke would have it) that we as readers must accept, but a) this kind of narrative uncertainty is a far cry from "going deep" in the stream-of-consciousness mode, and b) providing us with a "vantage point" on the confusions of post-9/11 American society still doesn't seem to me qualitatively different from attempting to render our "historical moment" in more straightforwardly objective ways. The ends are the same: to depict the times in which we live.

Clarke essentially admits as much himself in his conclusion. "Wolfe," he writes, "argues. . .that 'The future of the fiction novel would be in highly detailed realism based on reporting.' By this, Wolfe means that fiction best approaches its big subjects directly, head-on, which—to use Wolfe’s rhetoric—is the only effective, honorable way of wrestling the beast." On the other hand, "Julavits shows [that] we might better take on such massive subjects intelligently, indirectly, in ways that might not exactly comfort us but are surprising, irreverent, provocative, entertaining, and edifying." "Direct" vs. "indirect." This is a difference in tactics, not in strategy. Presumably both Tom Wolfe and Heidi Julavits (as well as Brock Clarke) agree that summoning up an era ought to be one of the novelist's objectives, it's just that Julavits's novel has more subtly "represented our era in its difficulty, in its absurdity and tragedy." Julavits has shown "that fiction doesn’t have to capture an era to engage with it."

Again, this seems to me a distinction without a difference. If your ultimate purpose as a writer is to "engage" with the sociopolitical conditions of your time, you would indeed be better off sticking to nonfiction. Or at least not claiming that in being more "indirect," you've thereby seized upon what "literature at its best" is all about.

Remembering Things You'd Forgotten

I read Mary Gaitskill's Veronica hoping to have confirmed the judgment that she is "one of the most transgressive American writers working today," as one review put it. I should have known better. Words like "transgressive" and "subversive" are used so promiscuously to describe any fiction that threatens to "critique" reigning norms, just as "innovative" is used reflexively to describe any work that doesn't obediently proceed in the narrative direction prescribed by Freytag's Triangle, that normally I just disregard their invocation as so much boilerplate. Having read in a number of places, however, that Gaitskill was a truly transgressive and unconventional writer, I decided to see what Veronica had to offer.

No doubt I should not take out on Gaitskill my impatience with such critical inflation, but I don't think she's done much to discourage the idea she's a "daring" writer. As it turns out, the attempted transgressions in this novel are entirely transgressions of sexual morality or propriety. In the milieu in which its characters move--the fashion industry, AIDS-frightened New York City in the 1980s--there's lots of sex, much of it exploitative and unhealthy. Apparently we're to be taken aback by passages such as this one:

. . . Alain looked up and smiled. "Do you like [the haircut]?" I asked. He stood and said of course he liked it, it had been his idea. Then he jumped on me.

I say "jumped" because he was quick, but he wasn't rough. He was strong and excessive, like certain sweet tastes--like grocery pie. But he was also precise. It was so good that when it was over, I felt torn open. Being torn open felt like love to me; I thought it must have felt the same to him. I knew he had a girlfriend and that he lived with her. But I was still shocked when he kissed me and sent me home. . . .

Frankly, the idea that the fashion world is full of sexual predators and encourages a sadomasochistic attitude toward sex doesn't come as much of a shock to me. If you really want a disturbing portrayal of the way in which women are inculcated into a kind of reflexive sadomasochism, read Elfriede Jelinek, whose fiction truly transgresses modern myths about sex and romantic love without relying on the superficial adornments of the sociological "expose." Ultimately, all of the characters in Veronica (maybe especially the title character, who is not the novel's protagonist but whose fate is a sort of cautionary supplement to the protagonist's story) seem to have been assigned their roles in a kind of retrospective account of the hedonistic 1980s, but none of them rise above the highly schematic requirements of these roles. They're types, duly chosen to represent various attitudes and excesses of the era:

I wanted something to happen, but I didn't know what. I didn't have the ambition to be an important person or a star. My ambition was to live like music. I didn't think of it that way, but that's what I wanted; it seemed like that's what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around like they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next--songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph, each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked down the street or rode the bus.

In his review of the novel, Benjamin Strong writes that "If Veronica has a weakness, it's that it sometimes feels more like a document of the last decade than the current one." Frankly, I'd have just as much trouble with a novel that seems to be a "document" of the current moment as with one that "documents" a previous epoch, but Strong does make a relevant point: Veronica, published in 2005, already seems dated, an evocation of a period and of characters that come off as mere historical curiosities. Francine Prose also describes Veronica as essentially a period piece--"Gaitskill may be, among contemporary authors, the one best-suited to capture, on the page, a period when the marriage of sex and death was such an extraordinarily close one"--but claims to have found reading the book unsettling, "like biting into a nightmare-inducing, virally loaded madeleine. Halfway through, you may find yourself remembering things you'd forgotten about a moment in time when half your friends were dying young, and when you feared that anyone who had ever had sex (including, of course, yourself) was doomed to a premature and hideous demise."

It's telling that for Prose what is "nightmarish" about reading Veronica involves "remembering things you'd forgotten about a moment in time. . . ." What the novel offers is an opportunity to "remember," to recollect from a perspective of relative safety a "moment in time," even if the memories are full of doom and foreboding. But the memories themselves, the effect of being transported back to this time when one realized sex and death could be so nearly aligned, are what is "nightmare-inducing" about the book. Neither its prose, its formal ingenuity, nor even its specific imagery is responsible for its allegedly profound impact. Its status as "document," as a reminder of how traumatic the "AIDS era" was for those who lived through it, remains its primary virtue.

Gaitskill is not a bad writer, but her occasional stylistic flourishes ("her eyes gave off the cold glow of an eel whipping through water") cannot bring its first-person narrator Alison to life as anything other than a stock figure (the unlucky victim of her times) or compensate for the ulitmately bland and unengaging memoir-like structure Gaitskill employs as a way of narrating Alison's life and times. Prose claims that Veronica places no. . .strain on our memory. It creates an atmosphere, provokes a response, and suffuses us with an emotion that we can easily, all too easily, summon up." She means this as a compliment and apparently believes this makes the novel "unconventional," since we are not requried to revisit the narrative, "searching for some forgotten plot turn, some event or aspect of character." I don't myself find this strategy very unconventional; if anything, it's just a way of reinforcing the cheap appeal to established iconographic images, our cultural memory of the 80s. At best, it's the kind of "newness" that, as I argued in the previous post, is more interested in the sociopolitical than the literary.

I managed to finish Veronica, but if I hadn't decided it might serve as the subject of a post discussing the use of fiction for "captur[ing], on the page, a period," I probably would not have made it through the second half of the novel, which seems especially rote and uninspired. Once I understood Veronica was mostly an excuse for summoning up its chosen "period," I expected it to unfold in a more or less predictable fashion (pun intended). It did.

Complexities and Paradoxes

Arthur I. Blaustein obviously believes in the socially redeeming effects of fiction:

. . .Now more than ever, we need moral fiction as a healthy antidote to the Bush administration, which has elevated lying and deceit to an art form. Novels offer genuine hope for learning how to handle our daily personal problems—and those political issues of our communities and our country—in a moral and humane way. They can help us to understand the relationship between our inner lives and the outer world, and the balance between thinking, feeling, and acting. They awaken us to the complexities and paradoxes of human life, and to the absurd presumptuousness of moral absolutism. They can give us awareness of place, time, and condition—about ourselves and about others. As our great Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner said, the best literature is far more true than any journalism.

I know that Blaustein believes he is valorizing fiction by describing its ethical utility in such terms, but in my opinion he is advocating that we read fiction for all the wrong reasons. Far from elevating fiction to some kind of privileged place as an object of our regard, Blaustein's encomium to "moral fiction" really subsumes it to the prerogatives of good citizenship and reduces it to its potential value as instruction and therapy. When Faulkner said that literature is more "true" than journalism, he certainly did not mean that it was instead a way to deliver "metaphoric news," as Blaustein puts it later in his essay; he meant that it grappled with those "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself" that surely transcend our concern with the lying and deceit of the Bush administration.

Indeed, Blaustein trivializes those problems Faulkner identifies by diminishing them to our "daily personal problems" and by implying that fiction aims to teach us how to resolve "those political issues of our communities and our country." The writer, said Faulkner, must leave "no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed." Otherwise, "His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands."

I really don't know what it means to say that novels "can help us to understand the relationship between our inner lives and the outer world." Are out "inner lives" not part of the "world"? If not, where are they? And if in teaching us about "the balance between thinking, feeling, and acting," Blaustein is suggesting that, used properly, novels will encourage us to do more of the last-named, presumably in the name of the "outer world," I can only say that if you need novels to tell you that living in the world is important, that we must balance "thinking, feeling, and acting," you're not likely to take their lessons to heart, either. Not to mention understand why most writers take up fiction in the first place, which is precisely to avoid delivering lessons.

It is certainly the case that fiction "awaken[s] us to the complexities and paradoxes of human life, and to the absurd presumptuousness of moral absolutism." This is the one point on which I wholeheartedly agree with Arthur Blaustein. But it's hard to accept that he really believes this when most of his essay concentrates on the way in which reading fiction can simplify our current conundrums, can uncover for us the essence of our mass-marketed and politically corrupt social world and perhaps return us to the time when "the imaginations of young people have been fired by characters that function as role models." And it's equally hard to take Blaustein's own lessons to heart when most of his essay is as morally absolutist as this: "How has it come to pass that our founding fathers gave us a land of political and economic opportunity, and we have become a nation of political and economic opportunists? As we have come to worship the idols of power, money, and success, we have neglected the core political principles of justice, equality, community, and democracy." Or this: "This McNews approach has undercut our moral values and civic traditions. We have sought simplistic answers to complex problems without even beginning to comprehend the consequences of our loss."

(I don't necessarily disagree with these statements, but they're not conclusions one reaches from reading novels. They're moral declarations.)

Blaustein would like to see more people forming reading groups in order to share the socially constructive messages of fiction. Here are the questions he thinks such people should ask of the novels they read:

What do you think is the central theme?
What are the underlying themes?
Did the author raise any emotional conflicts you may have had… or resolve any?
Did the author challenge any political, economic, social, or cultural beliefs that you may have held with regard to race, sex, gender, class, or ethnicity?

Conspicuously absent is any question inquiring about those features of a novel that make it a compelling work of art. They're questions about "themes," emotions, and beliefs. Of course, I wouldn't want to prevent anyone from joining a reading group organized around such questions, but finally I can't quite see why in order to discuss them it would be necessary to read novels. Couldn't everyone get together and talk about certain pre-determined themes (perhaps even ones extracted from this or that novel by someone who'd once read it), specified "emotional conflicts," and selected "political, economic, social, or cultural beliefs"? If you're going to target novels because they might be useful as curatives or for raising consciousness, why not just dispense the cure or proceed with enlightening insights and save time?

The time actually spent with a work of fiction is the most valuable part of the reading experience. It is, in fact, everything. The "reading group experience" is something else altogether. Innocuous enough, undoubtedly, and maybe even helpful in the therapeutic sense, but ultimately a poor substitute for sustained engagement with a novel or short story at its deepest formal and linguistic levels or with works of fiction that aren't obviously congenial to "moral" readings. You'd think that Blaustein might at least acknowledge this.

Changing Moods

Reviewing Ann Beattie's Follies, Donna Rifkind asserts that "once the pioneers of a directionless generation," Beattie's characters "are now at best supporting players in a drama whose mood has changed. The trademark passivity of Beattie's characters has given way to a new generation's urgency, passion, religious and political conviction, determination and certitude. Serving as a generation's voice has its limits: One day the action moves on."

This is the literature-as-fashion view of fiction. According to this view, a writer reflects the "drama" ongoing in the social theater the writer is presumably attending. This drama is judged to be particularly intense when the writer is young and can be claimed as an especially astute critic of the theatrical trappings considered most illustrative of the advanced trends of the day. Once these trends have been exchanged for a new set, as inevitably they will be, the writer formerly thought to provide keen "insights" into the way we live now is dismissed as thoroughly retro. This has clearly happened to Beattie, at least as far as Donna Rifkind is concerned. "One day the action moves on."

Rifkind can't be urging Beattie to adjust her focus, to start chronicling "a new generation's urgency" et al, since if she did she would surely be accused of horning in on the new generation's territory, her fiction judged to be hopelessly unconvincing. Beattie does anomie, not "determination and certitude." She is instead announcing both to Ann Beattie and to the readers of the Washington Post Book World that Beattie's work is now passe, not worth the attention of readers hoping to keep their fingers fastened to the social pulse. And clearly it is the sociological information that can be gleaned from fiction that interests Rifkind, since elsewhere in her review she allows that Beattie's style "remains distinctive and surprisingly fresh." Her characters, alas, just aren't with it: Where they "used to seem thoroughly familiar and fashionable, both they and the bland world they inhabited have now been kicked to the curb." How awful to be middle-aged and to be stuck writing about such "supporting players."

I myself have never been that enamored of Ann Beattie's fiction. But my problem has always been precisely with its literary qualities, which Rifkind accepts as not yet "out of style." I find Beattie's writing itself to be bland and mostly unengaging. I don't object to the plotlessness of her stories, or even the repetitivenes of her themes and situations. I just think her affectless prose style strains too much to mimic the impassivity of her characters and becomes merely numbing. And I thought this about her work when I first read it in the 1970s, when Beattie could still be called "a generation's voice." What continues to bother me about her fiction is that her "method" remains dull and unimaginative, not that she writes about the same sorts of characters she's always depicted, as they now struggle through middle age. Why would such characters necessarily be less interesting than younger characters and their own ephemeral "trademarks"?

I don't believe Ann Beattie ever claimed to be "a generation's voice." This was a label slapped onto her by critics who, like Donna Rifkind, thought of fiction-writing as a generational contest in which the new always triumphs over the old, simply because it is new. Beattie is now being held responsible for an insipid practice among reviewers she herself never endorsed. This is no way to perpetuate a literary tradition, one in which past or aging writers still have something to offer and are not disparaged simply because "the action moves on" among the literary trendsetters. Rifkind's review not only fails to assess Beattie's book by any kind of legitimate literary criteria, but it assumes that readers, both young and old, are as shallow in their judgments as the reviewer seems to be.

Keenly Observed

According to Morris Dickstein,

To understand the changes that shook the modern world, my students and colleagues have returned in recent years to long-neglected writers in the American realist tradition, including William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. For readers like me who grew up in the second half of the 20th century on the unsettling innovations of modernism, and who were attuned to its atmosphere of crisis and disillusionment, the firm social compass of these earlier writers has come as a surprise.

Dreiser, Crane, Wharton, and Cather are "long-neglected"? As far as I can tell, the latter two especially have become increasingly popular, both among academics and ordinary readers, over the past two decades. This must be just another anti-modernist rhetorical gesture--surprisingly, from someone who has in the past written insightfully about both modernism and postmodernism. (See his Gates of Eden, actually one of the very best books about American fiction in the 1960s.)

I can't really see that the "unsettling innovations of modernism" provide a very clear opposition to the "firm social compass" of the writers Dickstein lists. The modernists didn't lack a social compass, did they? Joyce? Faulkner? They simply weren't as interested in "social fiction" as Dreiser or Lewis. Their "innovations" were directed elsewhere--to the depiction of consciousness, the fragmentation of form, etc.

Dickstein continues:

Like Henry James before them, they saw themselves less as lonely romantic outposts of individual sensibility than as keen observers of society. They described the rough transition from the small town to the city, from rural life to industrial society, from a more homogeneous but racially divided population to a nation of immigrants. They recorded dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns. Novels like Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" and Wharton's "House of Mirth" showed how fiction paradoxically could serve fact and provide a more concrete sense of the real world than any other form of writing.

Were these writers really as immodest as to consider themselves "keen" observers? Isn't it only literary critics who want to confine such writers to their putative powers of observation in the first place? Did Crane or Dreiser or Wharton believe this was their primary talent as writers? Was mere "observation" all they had to offer?

The rest of Dickstein's paragraph actually does no service to any of these writers. It makes them sound like journalists or historians, but not like novelists that anybody would voluntarily read. If you want information about "the rough transition from the small town to the city" and "dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns," why not go straight to the historians? Why bother with novelists? Just for a little dramatic illustration? Is this any reason why readers interested in literature rather than history or sociology would now turn to these writers? And exactly why do we need a "concrete sense of the real world" from our writers? Don't our own eyes put us in contact with this world every day? Besides, what other world could novelists be writing about? Where else would their subjects come from?

Dickstein concludes:

This is how most readers have always read novels, not simply for escape, and certainly not mainly for art, but to get a better grasp of the world around them and the world inside them. Now that the overload of theory, like a mental fog, has begun to lift, perhaps professional readers will catch up with them.

How does Dickstein know "how most readers have always read novels"? Exactly how would he have gleaned this information? Professor Dickstein wouldn't be generalizing from his own reading habits, would he? Or those of other "professional readers"? I've known many more people who say they indeed read novels for "escape" rather than something as earnest as "a better grasp of the world around them." For that matter, if this latter were indeed the reason why most readers turn to fiction, would Lewis, Howells, et. al. be as "neglected" as Dickstein contends? Wouldn't they be the most beloved writers in the American canon?

How disdainful is that "certainly not mainly for art." Disdainful of those readers who do seek out "art," disdainful of the possibilities of fiction as art, implicitly disdainful of "most readers," who apparently couldn't appreciate it even if it were present. Unfortunately for Dickstein, it's precisely the lack of "art" in the work of writers like Howells and Lewis (and sometimes in Dreiser and Cather) that accounts for whatever "neglect" they have suffered. No matter how thoroughly the postmodern fog lifts, they're not going to be rediscovered as anything other than than the dreary documentarians they were.

Critiquing American Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Link provided by Sarah Weinman.)

Relevancy Redux

TEV asks (in a comment below) whether a distinction can be made between the relevant and the merely "topical" in literature. I do acknowledge the difference, and would even admit that sometimes even "topical" fiction can transcend its topicality to be relevant both to contemporaneous and to subsequent readers--The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps. Clearly Steinbeck's novel engaged its readers on a level much deeper than the merely topical, and to some extent continues to do so--except when it is considered primarily as reflective of "social history," the death chamber of literature.

But Steinbeck did not, at least in my view, achieve this feat by striving to be "relevant" first and foremost. Instead, he effectively carried out his relatively simple idea--a family of Okies on the road--to its logical culmination. The story he tells proceeds at least as much as a skillful working out of this literary idea as anything else, and thus it is still able to provide some readers with a satisfying reading experience. If it didn't, it would now be worthwhile only as social history. That it also engages with larger political and historical issues is, in literary terms, a bonus. (That is, if getting your politics from literature is a motive for reading it.)

Stone's Dog Soldiers does not rise to the literary occasion in this sense. It is, at least to this reader, almost purely an attempt to "comment" on the Vietnam War and its effect on American culture. It doesn't have the same mythic resonance as a novel like The Grapes of Wrath and doesn't provide many other readerly pleasures, as I tried to point out in my initial post. And when it's all said and done, who really cares about the "commentary," no matter how relevant, supplied by a novelist? We ought to turn to novels and poems because their authors know how to create good ones, not because they have extra-literary "ideas." (Although some writers undeniably do.)

The Price of Relevancy

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

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

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

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

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

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