The Reading Experience

Brief Encounters

It seems safe to say that more writers have access to more book publishers than at any other time in literary history. While "mainstream" publishing is still dominated by only a few big publishers, copious numbers of independent presses make available the work of writers who in previous eras likely would not have been published. Although some of this increase can be attributed to the concurrent development (at least in the United States) of university creative writing programs and their need for publication credits, surprisingly little of the work to be found through independent presses seems merely perfunctory, without discernible literary merit. Indeed, the existence of these presses has almost certainly made available to readers works of fiction (and poetry as well) that in their departures from the more constrained practices reinforced by most "literary fiction" have expanded the horizon of possibility for more venturesome writers.

Among those departures have been challenges to conventional "development" in fiction, signaled most immediately by a radical shortening of form, specifically in what is called "flash fiction" or "microfiction" but also in works ostensibly called novels that are much shorter than the traditional kind offered by big commercial publishers. Flash fiction, while it still potentially evokes the traditional elements of fiction--plot, setting, character--does so in a way that alters--or should alter--our perception of their purpose in a short story, but it also brings a renewed attention to style, to the writer's arrangement of language, sometimes to the point that a microfiction starts to closely resemble a prose poem. Shorter works (fewer than, say, 50 pages, which would preclude calling it even a novella) that seem structured not as short stories but with the more unhurried development of a novel perhaps also work to foreground language, but such works most obviously complicate assumptions about the formal requirements of novels.

Joshua Rothes' William Atlas (Osmanthus Press) takes the form of a picaresque fable of sorts, a would-be allegory that seems to deliberately frustrate its own pursuit of meaning. The titular character finds himself standing "in a shallow sea--in truth more of a hyper-expansive puddle" that extends "as far as he could see, an uncanny distance" and begins to walk, to a destination unknown except that at the end, he is certain, he will "return home" (wherever that might be). Although there are hints that this might be a journey of self-discovery--the first stage of the trip "taking him directly through himself," we are told--nothing much that happens in William Atlas's effort in "getting from point A to point B" seems to bring much in the way of enlightenment or illumination. There are ominous but elliptical references to "bodies" in his path, but whose they are or why they might be there remain mysterious. William comes upon a hill, ascends it, then descends it to a body of water below. He builds a boat, which then dissolves, as does the narrative itself does when William Atlas again finds himself moving in the muck.

Near the conclusion, the story's narrator makes explicit an analogy that has perhaps been implicit throughout: "William Atlas walks as the writer who commits to her mistakes, who undermines plot with chance meanders that, like the folds of a river, are contingent and changeable, and, to the outside observer, could be absolutely no other way, each oxbow just so." Such a writer is actually "among the more accurate, eschewing arcs for perturbations and eddies." This passage reinforces the metafictional gestures made elsewhere in William Atlas, particularly in relation to descriptions of the environment through which William Atlas traverses, as the narrator discusses the role of the "ecological novelist," thus raising the possibility that the book is a metaphorical rendering of the writer's plight, "trapped in a sub-optimal loop for our stubbornness in recognizing our own limitations."

If we do take the story to be (in part) an allegory of novel writing, it thus seems appropriate that the narrative itself is less than novel-length, even as it evokes the novel as a "system" of representation--the story of William Atlas's journey would threaten to become merely diffuse if extended much longer, considering its ending's implication that the journey indefinitely continues. Still, the story has ambitions beyond the metafictional, often manifested directly in allusions to other writers (Valery, Umberto Eco) or  discursive asides (on the nature of myth, for example). William Atlas's experience climbing hills and trudging through the muck is strongly suggestive of Beckett in its depiction of elemental human circumstances, even as it is related in a discursive mode reminiscent of John Barth. The amalgamation never quite transcends its derivation from each of these previous writers, although William Atlas is certainly not an ordinary work of literary fiction.

 

Christopher Linforth's Directory (Otis Books) is perhaps at first glance a more conventional work, at least in that the form it takes, a collection of stories meant to cohere as a whole, is recognizable enough. Even as a gathering of connected flash fictions it is not unfamiliar, although the connections are through echo, variation, and point of view rather than more direct continuities of character or setting. Loosely similar situations recur, with subtly shifting characters and events, all of them narrated in the first-person plural point view--usually from the perspective of a set of twins or triplicates who relate their often troubled experiences (especially as children, when they are at times on the tormentor's end of bullying behavior, likely the consequence of trauma.)

This extended experiment with the first-person plural is both the most impressive achievement of Directory and its central unifying device (that it succeeds so well at the latter being no small part of its achievement). While the "we" narrator is a kind of unifying character that in a sense acts as the protagonist not just of the individual characters but of the book as a whole, this plural narrator is not strictly speaking a character at all but a literally disembodied voice whose blunt recitations of anecdote-sized exploits animate the stories:

Our misdeeds--let's start with those. We made our old man piss his pants. He limped away, sopped the urine with a kitchen rag and kept his hand over his crotch. He swore at us, said we were no good since our mother left. We laughed. We didn't care. We filched his bottom-shelf vodka and terrorized the neighborhood, rode our dirt bikes up and down the road, burning rubber outside of Mrs. Macomber's house. She watched us from her bedroom window. Her flash of silvery hair a clear sign we had her spooked. . . .

Much of the first half of the book is comprised of episodes like this, relating less than admirable behavior by a trio (in some cases duo) of young boys who are also clearly from unstable families. Thus while the point of view provides a formal (if unorthodox) unity throughout the book, the identity of the narrator(s) fluctuates, as do the particulars of each vignette. Some of them are narratives, but some are more impalpable memories, others more like mini-sagas compressed into 500-word recaps, some indeed approaching prose poetry in their lyricism, such as "Belief," a reverie-like story which begins, "On the day we flee town, we will want the neighborhood to know what happened. We will tell stories about our stepfather to the kind and not-so-kind men on our street, to the cops who size us up to see if we are underage, turning tricks, will turn a trick with them." Escape must remain in the future, but the story concludes with the assurance, "Any day now we will shout."

The second half of Directory contains more thematically varied stories that take exclusive focus away from the narrator, such as "The Temple," chronicling the arrival of a "pastor" who converts a tenement building into a mysterious temple, into which people enter but don't necessarily come back out. Panhandlers go inside but leave "with expressions of fear." "Zia" and "Showtime" are about the "we" narrator's sister, although the brothers lurk at the edges, their adolescent curiosity aroused by her near-exotic appeal. "Layover" focuses on "our shared wife" during a layover in an airport caused by ash from a volcanic eruption, into which the wife disappears at the story's conclusion. If the stories in the first half of the book create a disturbing but essentially realistic version of family dysfunction and adolescent defiance, the second half takes the exercise in first-person plural narration into different kinds of situations, more fanciful and extreme, extending into the narrator's later years. By the book's end, it is more explicitly suggested that this narrator may be a single individual after all, the various episodes perhaps representing multiple embellished iterations of this individual's life.

Although to say that Directory has the unity and focus of a novel would not be entirely misleading, to call it a "novel in stories" would really erase what is distinctive about the book, its use of the story-fragment to both exploit brevity as a self-sufficient narrative strategy and to organize a series of such brief stories so that the result is a work that has structural coherence without strictly conforming to a pre-established form--something independent of both story and novel. Perhaps we could say as well that Rothes in William Atlas has also created a work of fiction with the characteristics of both short story and novel that doesn't comfortably belong in either category. Of the two, Directory seems the work whose departures from the norm most readily suggest future possibilities for writers who might further explore its hybrid form, but certainly neither of these are books one could imagine appearing on the seasonal lists from the risk-averse publishing houses of the mainstream "book business."

                                      

Fierce Politicalness

            You won’t learn a lot about communism from Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, but you will learn a good deal about the emotional and psychological needs that in the first half of the twentieth century brought many people to join the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and that, to judge by the testimony given by those profiled in the book, were satisfied to a remarkable extent by membership in the Party. Gornick’s title might suggest that such people were merely infatuated with the idea of communism, but the often fervent insistence that life in the CPUSA actually was their life offered by most of Gornick’s subjects belies the notion that their commitments were so tenuous. Even those voicing some regrets about their years in the Party—and this would be a majority of them—do not seem to regret having joined the Communist Party in the first place, precisely because it was belonging to it that initially awakened in them a sense of purpose in their lives.

            Gornick herself takes for granted that her readers are familiar enough with both the tenets of Marxism and the history of the CPUSA that any extended exposition of the Marxist program that appealed to very wide range of people who joined the Party—from the down and out working class to bourgeois intellectuals to the children of the upper class—is apparently superfluous. Few of the subjects interviewed themselves reflect much on the intellectual content of either Marxism or socialism more generally (at least in Gornick’s account), so although presumably many current readers come to the book without some foundational knowledge of Marx and Marxism, The Romance of American Communism won’t provide much enlightenment about exactly what the Party members thought were the political and economic structures that would replace the existing structure they so wanted to replace.

            Similarly, one doesn’t really learn that much about the workings of the Party itself, except, of course, indirectly through the various particular experiences offered by Gornick’s subjects. Since Gornick has obviously selected the people that will help her fill out her tripartite organizational scheme—what it was like to join the party, what membership in the Party was like, and how it felt to leave the Party—this sort of oblique look at the Party’s internal operations is inevitable. But while we do get a general sense of the Party’s highly organized community outreach and, through at least one person’s testimony a glimpse at the process by which a member might be accused of apostasy or expelled from the Party (although “process” hardly describes it), given that the interviewees express few reservations about casting their lot with the Communist Party, the depiction of the CPUSA that emerges from The Romance of American Communism is at best incomplete.

            These limitations of the book really only matter because its republication seems clearly enough designed to coincide with the resurgence of interest in socialism, obviously manifested in the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, as well as the increased prominence of the Democratic Socialists of America. The book’s intended audience surely includes those associated with this new movement, who perhaps might find the account of leftist political activism it offers edifying in various ways—including as testimony to the perseverance of idealism even in the face of the greatest adversities. However, The Romance of American Communism is not without its own romantic view of its subjects’ experiences (although not of Communism itself), so the effect on these readers is likely to be less illumination of the historical realities of Communism in America that a reinforcement of an already existing enthusiasm for radical activism (“radical” as such readers now understand the term, at least).

            Despite Gornick’s occasional reminders of the dogmatic intolerance of the Communist Party, and the real damage done to some of its members because of it, the book ostensibly now stands as a testament to the endurance of progressive ideals. Indeed, in the conclusion Gornick explicitly attempts to recuperate American Communism as an indispensable link in the development of radical consciousness: “first had come the visionary socialism of the nineteenth century, then had come the fierce politicalness of the Communists, and now had come the unaffiliated consciousness of contemporary radicalism.” The “radical” consciousness Gornick invokes here is that of 1977, the year of the book’s original publication, which from our current perspective surely doesn’t seem very radical at all. Gornick acknowledges the changed circumstances in her new introduction to the book, commenting that “Today, the idea of socialism is peculiarly alive, especially among young people in the United States, in a way it has not for decades,” but that “peculiarly” would seem to then require some further observation about the implications of her book for a revived socialist movement, but intuiting that is ultimately left to the reader.

            Many of the contemporaneous reviews of The Romance of American Communism were quite hostile, essentially accusing it of whitewashing the CPUSA’s collusion with the Soviet Union and its intolerance of dissent. Perhaps the most prominent critic of the book was Irving Howe, who thought the subject—looking back on the appeal of Communism—might have produced a useful book but that in her execution, Gornick was much too indulgent of her subjects’ nostalgia. “One sometimes has to remind oneself,” he wrote, “that in her evocation of coziness and warmth [Gornick] is writing about the CP in the time of Stalin and not about a summer camp. This is perhaps overly harsh, but Howe adds that “quite apart from the usual risks of alloy and contamination, idealism can in its very purity be a source of moral corruption,” Howe was, of course, one of the foremost of the liberal—in his case, still socialist—anti-Communists, but his comment still resonates beyond the polemical positioning of the cold war.

            The expression of moral certainty does indeed now seem to be widespread among those who call themselves democratic socialists. Since “democratic” socialism would seem to entail some tolerance for uncertainty—if everyone shared the same values and interests, there would be no need for democracy in the first place—that socialists would become better known for the vehemence with which they denounce those perceived as insufficiently progressive than for making alliances that might actually facilitate the enactment of policies they favor seems self-defeating, to say the least. If the goal of democratic socialism is to bring about not just political but also social and economic democracy, working within the constraints of existing political democracy is likely the only available strategy, unless of course it is in fact revolution, the forcible overturning of that democracy for a truly socialist alternative, that is still the implicit goal.

            It is hard to imagine how such a revolution would actually be possible. Certainly if it is to be a violent revolution, the notion that armed socialists will somehow defeat American militarism and gun-toting white nationalists is far-fetched in the extreme. That the very idea such a conflict might plausibly break out seems manifestly absurd only confirms that talk of “revolution,” at least among self-identified democratic socialists, is for rhetorical display only, a reflexive gesture intended to underline the urgency of making change. This means, of course, that any such change will occur only from within the system, however much replacing that system with a more humane and, indeed, democratic one might still be the ultimate goal. Unless the socialist position is fated to remain merely spectatorial, allowing for a maximum expression of outrage and invective but a minimum of practical achievement, something even resembling a socialist future will have to come through participation in democratic politics.

            In Achieving Our Country, his 1998 book warning the contemporary left that its distance from practical politics was likely to help create conditions very much like we face today (he even speculated about the rise of a political figure remarkably like Donald Trump), Richard Rorty advises that “In democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you might have grace doubts.” I’m confident that Rorty would have been much in sympathy with the policy proposals featured in the 2020 Sanders campaign, but his admonition here has surely been rejected by Sanders and most of his supporters, who routinely derided not just other candidates but also many ordinary voters backing those candidates, accusing them of holding merely liberal values that remain in complicity with the neoliberal status quo. Although the primary target of Rorty’s criticism in Achieving Our Country is what he calls the “cultural left,” located largely in academe, this group shares with the current more populist left an ultimate detachment from the political process itself. For the former such detachment is a necessary correlative to the insularity of its academic setting, but for the former it is a paradoxically self-inflicted separation while ostensibly attempting to engage in electoral politics.

            The Romance of American Communism is unlikely to be of much help in reinforcing the need for real political participation, including strategic cooperation with some “about whom you have grave doubts.” Rorty also reminds us that

. . .the Communist Part of the United States was of very little importance to the political life of our country. It marshaled some good picket lines, and it recruited a few good agents for Soviet intelligence. But the most enduring effects of its activities were the careers of men like Martin Dies, Richard Nixon, and Joseph McCarthy.

This may seem a severe judgment, but Rorty is concerned here with the political efficacy of the CP, not the actions of individuals, many of whom Rorty agrees “worked heroically and made very painful sacrifices in the hope of helping our country to achieve its promise.” But Rorty thinks also that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, represented by such anti-Communist intellectuals as Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith, also helped “achieve our country” through enhancing civil rights and social welfare programs and that reverence for the first group while showing contempt for the second is a counterproductive attitude for progressives to take.

            While Rorty wants to pragmatically endorse all efforts to create a “fairer, less cruel” society as worthy of progressive affirmation, this move does blur distinctions that are nevertheless relevant to present circumstances. Those individual CP members, who “worked heroically” for change, are better described as activists engaged not so much in politics as dissent and resistance. The CP itself, however excluded from the existing political process, embodies the bureaucratized, hierarchical logic of organized party politics. The oppressive structure of the CPUSA surely resulted in part from a kind of bureaucratic, hierarchical purity that came from the CP’s enforced separation from democratic politics; overcoming this separation would have inevitably loosened Party discipline and would have compelled negotiation and compromise for any kind of real influence.

            But of course this would have been almost literally impossible: As a party organized around pure ideology, for the CP to make compromises with ordinary political parties and groups would undermine the ideology, which depends on its systemic integrity. (I make a distinction here between Marxism as a source of political, cultural, and economic analysis and communism as the expression of a political program rooted in Marxism.) The radical certitude of communism is thus entirely justified according to its own inherent logic, but it is this certitude, even putting aside the sadism of Lenin or Stalin or the petty authoritarianism of the CPUSA leaders (which no one in the democratic socialist movement excuses) that still threatens to render socialism an ineffective agent of progressive politics, as its performance in the 2020 presidential primaries has already demonstrated. Solidifying a small but enthusiastic segment of the left-of-center electorate accomplishes little if it deliberately alienates the rest of that contingent. Readers of The Romance of American Communism might usefully reflect on how easily idealism congeals into dogma.

Based on Real Life

The description on the back cover of Lee Klein's Neutral Evil))) (Sagging Meniscus) explicitly labels it an "autofiction." Whether the publisher intends by this to directly associate this novel (or perhaps, more accurately, novella) with the mode of fiction most prominently represented by, say, Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgard, or simply to signal that the book loosely originates in autobiographical experience (but in the process capitalizing on the current fascination with autofiction) is not altogether certain, but presumably the author consented to this characterization of his work, so inevitably our response to Neutral Evil ))) will be influenced by what we think this relatively new, (some might say trendy) conception of the relationship between art and life has to offer in reckoning with works of fiction. 

Presumably the term is not just a reformulated label for what used to be called simply autobiographical fiction but is meant to signify a different kind of interaction between the writer's work and life circumstances: rather than merely drawing on personal experiences in creating ostensibly fictional characters, in autofiction the protagonist is identified directly with the author, inviting us, at least, to consider the protagonist's actions to be those the author has performed, the protagonist's words representing the author's unmediated report of those actions. If this seems to erase the difference between memoir and fiction, that seems to be the point, as autofiction is said to expose the extent to which the real is always conditioned by the fictional and the fictional a pathway to the real. As Rebecca Van Laer puts it, "By using the author’s name and some real details while spinning fictional webs, [autofictions] intentionally blur the line between truth and fiction and encourage readers to look at all literature—even what we might usually call nonfiction—as fiction" (Ploughshares, 2018).

Neutral Evil))), however, doesn't seem all that eager to explore this supposed aporia blurring the fictional and the nonfictional. It is a more or less straightforward account of an evening its protagonist (not identified explicitly as Lee Klein, in fact) spends at a concert by the drone metal band, Sunn O))), an evening vouchsafed by the protagonist's wife as she is about to go on a business trip that will leave the protagonist to assume all household duties, including child care. The "action" is largely nonexistent. The protagonist travels to the concert (ingesting some recreational drugs in preparation), waits around for it to begin, and returns home after it is over. Most of the novel is occupied with the narrator's reflections on the current state of the world and of his life, but especially his own interest in music, reflected in his obsession with guitars and guitar equipment. After a fairly lengthy buildup, the attention given to the actual concert once it begins is actually rather attenuated, suggesting that Neutral Evil))) is less interested in the somewhat extreme music that ostensibly attracts the narrator's attention than in the increasing extremity of mind he is experiencing--caused by both political (the election of Donald Trump) and personal uncertainty.

And yet finally this extremity doesn't seem all that extreme. While the narrator's account could certainly be called meandering, it doesn't really deviate that much from the kind of digressiveness that would naturally accompany extended observation and rumination. Indeed, the novel has both a psychological and an experiential realism, related in a transparent and lucid way that, far from prompting us to regard "what we might usually call nonfiction" as fictional, mostly muddies the distinction between fiction and nonfiction by leaving the former almost entirely notional, merely a designation useful in placing the book in the right section of the bookstore. This is not to say that Neutral Evil))) is a flawed piece of writing, merely that it seems content enough with its status as a novel that could just as easily be called a kind of slice-of-life memoir (or even a narrative essay), without really challenging our pre-established assumptions about any of these forms. After reading the book, I am not much compelled to ponder whether its narrator-protagonist is in fact the authorial Lee Klein or a fictional creation, because it doesn't really seem to matter that much.

Perhaps it does matter in considering the book's thematic implications. Neutral Evil))) is surely not just a primer on guitar technology or a guide to the finer points of a particular genre of heavy metal music. We might take it as a meditation on the anxieties of life in the time of Trump, but Sunn O)))'s performance of its rather ominous music is finally depicted cursorily enough that it can't entirely bear the burden of symbolically representing those anxieties. Ultimately, the narrator's chronicle of his autumnal evening out seems a story about growing up, about finally accepting the prerogatives of adulthood and, if not renouncing, beginning to let go of childish things. This narrative mode is of course one of the principal devices of literary fiction (here becoming a delayed coming-of-age story, perhaps), and Neutral Evil))) renders the story mostly without the suffocating, self-distancing irony found in much autofiction. It's a quality of the book that most clearly marks it as fiction, the "auto" merely a means to an end.

 

Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction (Work in Progress)

(All three chapters as single pdf available here.)

Chapter 1: Sorrentino the Poet 

    There is no question that Gilbert Sorrentino considered himself first of all to be a poet. He began his writing career not just writing but also reviewing and publishing poetry, most prominently in the little magazines he edited, Neon and Kulchur. While it now seems almost certain that Sorrentino will be remembered primarily as a writer of fiction, certainly that fiction is sufficiently unconditional in its rejection of the traditional core elements of fiction—plot, character, setting, theme—and so unmistakably focused instead on creating alternative formal arrangements of language that it is considerably more than a fancy to say that essentially Sorrentino remained a poet throughout his whole body of work, whose key aesthetic assumptions are recognizably embodied in the poetry as well as the fiction. (Continue)

Chapter 2: Sorrentino the Realist

    The publication of Sorrentino's first novel after he had established himself as a poet—at least in those quarters of the poetry world whose notice would have meant the most to him—perhaps conveys the impression that writing fiction was a kind of literary second thought. Even while Sorrentino continued to write lyric poetry for the remainder of his life, the succession of novels that followed the publication of The Sky Changes in 1966 certainly did soon enough foster the perception that he had altered his career course to become primarily a novelist. But a proper appreciation of Sorrentino's whole body of work can be gained only be recognizing that the poetry and the fiction are not divergent practices, that the fiction represents Sorrentino's effort to engage with language for the purpose that also motivates the poet: sounding out the artistic possibilities that can be realized through the imaginative arrangement of words. (Continue) 

Chapter 3: Sorrentino the Metafictionist

    Part 1: “Of and For Itself”: Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

    Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things marks a clear turn in Sorrentino’s conception both of the formal requirements of a novel—of fiction in general—and of the specific imperatives implied by his own aesthetic inclinations as a writer. Indeed, while this turn is obvious enough to anyone considering Sorrentino’s career in retrospect, it must have been apparent to Sorrentino, even if he did not begin writing this successor to Steelwork having explicitly determined to make it. Although the move from Sorrentino’s first two novels to Imaginative Qualities could be characterized as the final abandonment of literary realism, the alternative he embraced is even more sweeping. If both The Sky Changes and Steelwork retained a loose allegiance to realism (the latter even more tenuously), neither novel cast its realism in conventional narrative form. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things takes its divergence from conventional form to the point that realism becomes simply extraneous. (Continue)

    Part 2: "Walking Around Inside": Mulligan Stew

    In many ways, the publication of a novel like Mulligan Stew in 1979 should not have seemed especially startling. Not only had it been preceded by Sorrentino's own Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, perhaps the most radical work of postmodern metafiction to have yet appeared, but the entire period in American fiction from the early 1960s to the late 70s was notable for the number of writers employing a kind of iconoclastic, "carnivalesque" comedy--the term used by Bakhtin to describe a spirit of comedic abandon that subjects everything in its purview to parody and mockery. The black humor of Heller and Vonnegut explicitly adopts this attitude, while the equally mordant if less readily categorizable comedy of writers such as Stanley Elkin or Thomas Pynchon participate in this spirit as well. Although not indulging in quite the sort of outrageous self-parody characterizing Mulligan Stew, novels like William Gaddis's JR, Robert Coover's The Public Burning, and John Barth's Letters nevertheless were equally ambitious, comedically extravagant novels published in the mid and late 1970s (Letters the same year as Mulligan Stew). (Continue)

Still to come (tentatively): 4) Sorrentino the Anarchist; 5) Sorrentino the Craftsman; 6) Sorrentino the Oulipian; 7) Sorrentino the Aesthete; 8) Sorrentino the Moralist;  9) Sorrentino the Humorist 

The Temporal Compression of Daydream Experience

A brief synopsis of S.D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid (Coach House Books) certainly makes it sound like a work of science fiction or fantasy, or perhaps a futuristic dystopia: a man given to idleness and daydreaming, recently unemployed and occupied mostly with sleeping, meets a man who claims to be the "Ambassador of the Free Republic of Onirica," literally the land of dreams. This man, Chevauchet, recruits our narrator, after leading him on visits into other people's dreams, to join him in his mission to combat the modern plague of sleeplessness and to restore the value of reverie and dreams. Eventually the narrator begins to recruit people to go underground with him (literally) and symbolically resist society's increasing intolerance of sleep and dreams (they impede productivity, of course) by, well, sleeping. Unsurprisingly, the mission doesn't end well.

However, the reader who would thus expect The Eyelid to conform to the expectations we might have of fantasy fiction would probably be disappointed with this book. It does not render its story in the scenic, episodic way a work of fiction prompted first of all by a commitment to narrative would, as the story that finally gets told is secondary to the essentially expository discourse offered by the narrator, a very learned and allusive discourse incorporating 16th century French philosophy, neoplatonism, modern political theory, and numerous other references to European intellectual history. Most of these disquisitions are summaries of Chevauchet's philosophy of dreaming and its roots in dissident thinkers and emancipatory ideals. "Novel of ideas" is a label that certainly does fit  The Eyelid, although even here its ideas are not the occasional subject of conversation or remain merely metaphorical and emblematic; their explicit exposition by the narrator is the primary focus of much of the novella.

Perhaps the most sustained act of storytelling in The Eyelid occurs when Chevauchet takes the narrator on the journeys into the ongoing dreams of various dreamers, an endeavor in which, the narrator tells us, "Chevauchet made himself my Virgil, a genial cicerone through the circles of Hell and along the terraces of Purgatory, raising my hopes of Paradise." The narrator witnesses "dreams of love," dreams of dread," and other types of night-dreams experienced by the dreamers of Onirica, which, as we come to understand, is really a kind of distillation of dreaming, Chevauchet its keeper. But it is not only the night-dream (over which we have less control)  that Chevauchet seeks to protect but also daydreams and reverie, which can be more fruitful sources of human creativity. 

This series of scenes is relatively brief, however, as the focus switches to the exposition of Chevauchet's theories about the importance of dreaming to human fulfillment and, ultimately, the narrator's act of resistance against a society that eventually tries to eliminate dreaming altogether by simply forbidding it, substituting for it a mind-numbing drug that induces a "beatific state of high-functioning sleeplessness." (The novella is nominally set in Paris, but it is a Paris that has been absorbed into a "Greater America" that has imposed its exploitative ways on much of the world.) This drug, CI, might be a supercharged kind of opioid, but its effects might also reflect our now all-pervasive virtuality: "The masterminds of CI sought by degrees to replace all natural creative imagination with artifice. They claimed it was for the sake of quality control: optimized content and better use of time, what with advances in the temporal compression of daydream experience. In reality, it was to abolish mental activity that was off the grid and went untracked."

In the end, Chevauchet disappears, presumably enfeebled by the cessation of dreaming, leaving the narrator to persevere with his own meager rebellion, but soon enough his clandestine sleep sessions are discovered, and he must flee for his life--unsuccessfully, as it turns out. Thus the novella as a whole does advance a narrative, however interrupted or suspended at times, beginning with the recently unemployed narrator meeting Chevauchet on a park bench and ending with his presumed death. But it finally conveys less the impression of a story told than of a story added to a philosophical rumination on the ebbing of introspection and imagination in the 21st century, a reverie of its own that can be categorized as fiction because the story is quite obviously all made up, while the ruminations filtered through the characters seem just as obviously to reflect the thinking of the author.

Is this necessarily a problem, though? Since the author clearly does not intend to offer a conventional dystopic narrative but to use the conceit of dystopia to directly contemplate the actually existing conditions that might lead us to such a state, we can't really say that the book fails to fulfill its ambitions: It couldn't be called an aesthetic failure if its purpose is not primarily aesthetic to begin with. Finally the fantastic elements in conjunction with the frequent expository passages lead me to regard The Eyelid as an allegory, but an allegory of the pre-modern kind in which the allegorical meaning is not concealed within the symbolic design of the story, to be released through interpretation, but lies plainly on the surface, communicated directly.

An appreciation of this novella thus depends on the reader's acceptance not just of the allegorical mode but of this particular undisguised version of it. For myself, I can say that the book certainly does conceptualize the effects of our current hypercapitalist culture and its brutal work ethic in a way I find illuminating and insightful, although I confess I am also less able to take from it the sort of aesthetic gratification I normally hope to find in works of fiction. Still, when I consider whether the insights Chrostowska provides are more emphatically and memorably expressed in the form she has chosen than might be the case in more straightforward critical discourse, I would have to say they are.

Just Weird

Guillermo Stitch is not the sort of writer who is going to get a lot of mainstream press coverage--the very title of his novel Lake of Urine (Sagging Meniscus Press) seems an immediate thumb to the nose where the mainstream is concerned--but such discussions of his work that can be found (mostly on blogs) use such terms as "bizarro," "new weird," and "absurdist" to characterize his fiction. It is easy enough to see why such terms would suggest themselves as appropriate to a novel like Lake of Urine, but while they might apply up to a point, this novel finally doesn't very comfortably fit into any of these categories.

"Weird" and "bizarre" would each certainly apply to Lake of Urine as simply a general description of the novel's setting and various plot turns (although it can't really be said to have a straightforward plot), yet to the extent each is also more specifically identified with the kind of fiction that such adjectives have come to designate--"bizarro fiction," "the new weird"--the novel falls short of (or exceeds) the definitions given to these modes. While Lake of Urine has its disgusting moments--particularly in regard to the lake in question--it really lacks the full punkish grotesquerie associated with bizarro fiction, and its weirdness doesn't quite take it into the realm of science fiction but is just, well, weird (often rather amiably so).

"Absurdist" doesn't quite capture the quality of the novel's humor, either. Historically speaking, an absurdist novel distorts reality in order to unsettle our notions of the "reality" of the real, or even to sharpen our perception of the real. The comedy in Lake of Urine, however, which follows on directly from its weirdness, serves Stitch in his effort at what is called world-building, even if it is an out of phase and peculiar world. Indeed, this seems to be the primary aesthetic ambition of the novel: to get us to accept its peculiar world as itself "real," at least as far as language and the tools of fiction can work to create this illusion.

As if to underscore the urgency of this task, Lake of Urine offers numerous passages like this, especially at the beginning of chapters:

Two pairs of heavy brocade curtains emit two razor-sharp slits of hard light into the cool, quiet gloom. One of these lines dissects the plum and bamboo motif of the upholstery on a cabriole sofa that sits in the middle of the room--laser-like as it cuts across the floorboards and splits the oriental design from floor to high, curved back.

A reading table is tucked behind the sofa and on it stands a lamp. From the lamp, a gas tube winds upward like a charmed cobra to a ceiling fixture overhead. . . .

The descriptions of the particulars of this world are, as here, almost minutely exact ("the plum and bamboo motif"), not unlike what we might expect to find in a straightforwardly realist novel. In fact, one could say that this is a realist novel, except that the writer's realism presumes a world in which a man wishes to measure the depth of a lake so attaches first a dog and then a woman to the end of his very long rope and plunges them to the bottom (neither return), another woman (the dead one's sister) escapes her home town to the city and almost immediately becomes the CEO of a very large corporation (admittedly she seems at least as competent and well-informed as the other members of the company's board), and, at the novel's conclusion, the dead woman (her name is Urine, hence the novel's title) is herself resurrected from the lake as something like a zombie. The novel's task is to convince us this world makes its own kind of sense, not to suggest that our own reality lacks it.

There are elements of satire in Lake of Urine, but it tends to be of the rather mild and somewhat obvious sort, as in the scenes depicting Norambole (the surviving sister) interacting with her colleagues in the boardroom, an amusing enough send-up of the shallowness and cupidity of corporate values but really more just a part of the comic eccentricity of the characters' behavior in the novel than biting satire of the world outside it. This eccentricity almost necessarily makes most of the characters in the novel two-dimensional, but this does not really affect our ability to accept both them and their world as provisionally convincing fictional creations.

Perhaps the least caricatured character in the book is Emma Wakeling, mother of Urine and Norambole. About half of the novel is in fact narrated by Emma, as she tells, in reverse chronological order, the stories of her eight marriages. (Urine and Norambole were the product of the first.) These chapters are enjoyably outrageous, Emma's pride in being a master at masturbating the men in her life ("He would squeal and cry like a girl while I did it") providing especially hilarious moments. Her manual dexterity aside, Emma is not exactly a man-pleaser; she uses her skills to control them, although this does not prevent her from making some pretty bad choices in husbands. We are also offered scenes from Emma's childhood, which among other things, gives the novel some historical grounding, enhancing the overall exercise in world-building.

Lake of Urine as a whole is enjoyable. Its "bizarre" elements--including the potentially unsavory ones--do not make it a less agreeable work but help it rise above whimsy or "quirk." But, in succeeding at building its off-kilter world, paradoxically by using the strategies of realism, does this novel also enhance our appreciation of the ways in which the evocation of the irreal extends the aesthetic horizon of the novel? Should we be content with the world that is built, or should the way of building hold its own interest, so that such worlds do not come prefabricated? Do these things matter? Perhaps not, not always. Lake of Urine is unlike most other novels, which makes it admirable enough.

On Dodge Rose

My essay on Jack Cox's Dodge Rose (a "cold take" on a less recently published work) is now available at Splice: 

Finally it seems to me that Dodge Rose provokes reflection on two different conceptions of “experimental fiction”. One focuses primarily on the subversion of familiar form for its own sake, without necessarily emphasising the reconfiguration of form anew. The other is also concerned to challenge pre-existing form, but as well is still occupied with creating form, however unwonted. If we simply acknowledge the formal eccentricities of a novel like Dodge Rose but don’t much ask that they transcend mere eccentricity or caprice to achieve some sort of aesthetic continuity, I, for one, would find the work ultimately disappointing. The quirks of Dodge Rose threaten to become just quirks on their way to an unorthodox but ultimately intelligible political critique, unless we recognise its aesthetic effects as being at least as fully realised as its message.

Giving Voice: On the Work of Evan Dara

      (Pdf version)       

            Although the term “postmodern” is still used often enough by critics as a convenient label for certain works of fiction that are considered out of the “mainstream” of current literary fiction, and descriptions of new books ladled with adjectives such as “unconventional,” “original,” or “innovative” are quite common, the era of “experimental” postmodern American fiction—when experimental fiction could be said to have any kind of real cultural salience—was in fact relatively short-lived: 10-15 years, from the mid-1960s to about 1980. This is not to say there were no formally or stylistically adventurous writers of fiction before this period, nor necessarily that no comparably adventurous writers at all have appeared in the years since. But writers willing to jettison all assumptions about the formal properties of novels and attempt building something entirely new in their place have been relatively few and far between in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two of the twenty-first.

            One such writer, however, is Evan Dara. (Or at least the writer presenting his work under that name, since so little is known about him beyond the work—he makes the elusiveness of Thomas Pynchon seem like a craving for celebrity in comparison—we can’t be sure this is other than a pseudonym.) Dara’s first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, was published in 1995, and has been followed by two other novels, The Easy Chain (2007) and Flee (2013), as well as a play, Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins (2018), all of them published by Aurora, a press apparently owned and administered by Dara himself. All three of the novels challenge the expectations of readers accustomed to fiction that observes the post-postmodern consensus that novels need not scrupulously follow entrenched conventions of linear narrative and the kind of expository prose associated with it, but should otherwise still offer readers some recognizable variant of the form historically tied to works of fiction: an invoked world in which created characters engage in observable human activities (even if they might be subject to various departures from strict realism), activities that follow some version of narrative logic. Dara’s novels, especially the first two, instead present us with disembodied voices in place of characters and events that seem to arise arbitrarily and to bleed into each other without warning—or any immediately apparent purpose.

            If nothing else, it is obvious once one begins reading these novels that the author wants to subvert any presumptions we might have that the novel we are reading will bear enough family resemblance to those we have read before that it will be explicable according to the “rules” we believe we have learned about how novels should proceed. Clearly it intends to replace those rules with others applicable only to this work (although any one of Dara’s novels certainly does then provide direction in reading the others), rules that we will have to learn as we read. In this way, Dara’s novels work like all of their predecessors in the lineage of “experimental” fiction, presenting the reader with a heterodox formal arrangement the reader must learn to assimilate by attending closely to the new patterns the work establishes as alternatives to those patterns more conventional fiction has predisposed us to expect. Indeed, in the challenge they pose to the assumption that the conventional patterns define the novel as a form, Dara’s novels are arguably the most radically disruptive books in American fiction since, say, Gilbert Sorrentino in a work like Mulligan Stew (1979).

            The most formally radical of the novels is The Lost Scrapbook. The initial readers of this book might understandably have thought it is in fact essentially formless, although eventually the formal logic of the novel does become more discernible. The first half or so of what is a very long book (a little under 500 pages) seems to consist of a series of disconnected episodes (some longer than others) leaning heavily on interior monologue and introducing “characters” whose relationships to each other are not immediately apparent. Moreover, these self-standing scenes don’t merely succeed each other but at times appear to merge, one dissolving into the other, as if the novel’s discourse represents a radio set whose dial is being tuned, bringing in one station before moving on to another. Ultimately we reach a program to which presumably the search has been dedicated: most of the remaining part of the novel focuses on the plight of Isaura, a town in Missouri on which an ecological catastrophe has been inflicted by a chemical company that has exploited the forbearance of the community for many years (as the narrative reveals).

            This relatively extended narrative focusing on the depredations of the Ozark Chemical Company and their effect on the citizens of Isaura—by no means related in straightforward expository prose but narratively coherent nevertheless—of course inevitably prompts the reader to ponder the structural connections between it and the concatenation of voices and episodes preceding it. In the only contemporaneous review of The Lost Scrapbook (really the only review of Dara’s work to appear in a “major” American publication—the Washington Post—at all), Tom LeClair suggests that all of the prior voices are displaced victims, “literal and figurative,” from the calamity at Isaura. Perhaps this is a fruitful way of considering the structural integrity of The Lost Scrapbook, although too much emphasis on the “literal” connections among the characters and events threatens to impute a more seamless structure to the novel than it actually contains: to an extent, its most radically adventurous quality is the absence of an ultimate integration of its parts, the possibility that a novel might still achieve authentic thematic and aesthetic coherence even when connections are left unmade and conventional unity disregarded, even deliberately undermined.

            This sort of comprehensive fragmentation makes The Lost Scrapbook more audacious than most of the other works over the past twenty-five years received as “experimental, which in comparison still seem more faithful to the norms of current literary culture. (Perhaps books like David Markson’s Readers Block and This is Not a Novel might rival Dara’s novel in its claim to be “something new”—certainly the more flamboyantly experimental novels of a writer such as Mark Danielewski are just gimmicky when judged next to either The Lost Scrapbook or The Easy Chain.) Dara appears to trust the reader’s ability to infer connections and notice implicit patterns of situation and reference, to tolerate the ambiguities and uncertainties in which the novel persists without necessarily expecting the writer to remove them through any contrived devices. The rhetorical irresolution created by the novel’s extreme fragmentation is reinforced within the discrete narrative fragments (and most of them do relate a story or scene) by the emphasis on speech—both in monologue and dialogue—rather than expository prose, which further requires the reader to discern continuity in the various episodes by carefully registering what the voices are talking about absent direct description. Luckily Dara proves himself exceptionally adept at rendering contemporary American speech, making the task enjoyable in itself, and the enactment of this strategy in the rendition of Isaura’s ordeal is especially impressive.

            Unfortunately, this concluding story also works to produce what is ultimately the most significant weakness of The Lost Scrapbook. It is not inaccurate to call this final section of the novel an expose of entities like the Ozark Chemical Company, companies that in carrying out the prescribed mission of American capitalism are in the process of degrading and despoiling the natural environment, apparently without compunction. When we recall the scenes that have come before, we can see that the depiction of the ruin of Isaura is the culmination of a portrayal of America in all its social, cultural, and economic dysfunction—an America in which the atomizing effects of capitalism have spread to all features of ordinary life. In this way, it seems to me, The Lost Scrapbook in effect neutralizes its own formal audacity by making it too easy for the reader to resolve (at least in retrospect) the interpretive dilemma posed by the seemingly dissociated episodes that have brought us to the Isaura narrative, to integrate all of the novel’s parts in what turns out to be an unorthodox but finally structurally harmonious story about the baneful influences of late twentieth century American capitalism, its elevation of profit to preeminent value and disregard for the common good determining the shape of human interaction and inhibiting even our ability to communicate (a motif to which Dara returns in his most recent work). However accurate this vision of the degeneracy of current reality might be (and I for one accept its accuracy), ultimately it comes close to undercutting the novel’s integrity as experimental fiction, arguably converting it to a work of realism by other means.

            Although The Lost Scrapbook is often quite funny, it would not really be appropriate to call it satire. The humor is not of the regenerative kind that implies the offenses portrayed might be ameliorated. It does indeed provoke the more corrosive kind of laughter associated with postmodern writers such as DeLillo, Pynchon, and Gaddis, or even the “black humor” of Vonnegut or Heller. But finally the humor seems part of the larger effort to critique, to “say something” about the dismal state of American culture and the dangers of unchecked capitalism. Dara’s critique is perhaps more vehement than most, and offers no false hope that the conditions imposed by advanced capitalism will be overcome any time soon, but in its substance it hardly differs much from similar critiques increasingly to be found in mainstream literary fiction. What makes The Lost Scrapbook distinctive, of course, is its formal innovation, the quality that presumably has also caused readers to balk at the “difficulty” such a work is presumed to pose. While these readers would find The Lost Scrapbook in fact to be an invigorating reading experience that rewards the effort to meet its challenge, they might also finally be disappointed that the ingenuity the novel exhibits seems to be employed in support of a conventionally polemical purpose.

            Still, if a writer’s commitment to a theme or idea (political or otherwise) inspires a genuinely adventurous approach to form or style—that is, serves the ultimate purpose of experimental fiction to revitalize the form itself—probably we ought to grant that writer his subject. Some might say that the novel’s length does not justify the thematic payoff, but I would contend that such length is required for the formal effect to be adequately felt: if The Lost Scrapbook could be regarded as a version of a picaresque narrative, the journey taken is by the reader in the experience of reading, and as with all picaresque narratives, much of the interest lies in the journey itself, not the destination. However, both Dara’s aesthetic approach and his political critique are more effectively realized in his second novel, The Easy Chain. In some ways it is surprising that this novel did not win Dara a somewhat larger audience and more attention from critics (again only one review, again by LeClair, in Bookforum), since, while it is hardly a conventional narrative, something like a recognizable story “arc” can be perceived behind the multiple registers of talk and shifts of setting. It even has a kind of mystery plot (actually several mysteries), even if those mysteries never quite get resolved.

            Perhaps the most significant departure in The Easy Chain from the strategies employed  in The Lost Scrapbook is that it features a protagonist—albeit one who is present only fleetingly (most directly at the novel’s beginning) and is depicted in a mosaic-like fashion, from a multitude of perspectives, so that we cannot really say we have a very firm grasp on his personal qualities or his motivations. In this novel, Dara takes the method introduced in The Lost Scrapbook, its emphasis on speech and soliloquy, and applies it to the development of the main character. We know Lincoln Selwyn mostly from what others say about him—although we often don’t know who these others are beyond their disembodied voices. The outline, if not all the details, of Lincoln’s story is clear enough: The son of English parents but raised in the Netherlands, Lincoln emigrates to the United States to attend college (the University of Chicago), but instead finds himself, through mechanisms that often remain shrouded from our direct observation, a wildly successful entrepreneur and man about town, steadily accruing admirers and gaining influence. Then, apparently Selwyn disappears. (Later we learn he probably gained much of his success through shady means, although the investigators from whom we get this information are themselves not altogether reliable.) After a break in the narrative (represented in the text by a series of blank pages), we encounter Lincoln back in Holland, where he seems to be trying to fill in lacunae in his own knowledge about his family, including his mother and an aunt who had emigrated to the United States before him and whose whereabouts he has unsuccessfully tried to uncover. Next we discover that Lincoln has returned to the U.S., where at the novel’s conclusion we are shocked to find him preparing to blow up the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and, when the attempt fails, to shoot the private investigator he had tasked with finding the aunt.

            The story, of course, does not come as an uninterrupted linear narrative. Not only are we sometimes not aware of Lincoln’s specific activities, but the interruptions in the story of Lincoln Selwyn are often filled with other, seemingly unrelated stories featuring independent characters, such as the story about a Boulder, Colorado restaurant forced out of business when the rent on their building is arbitrarily raised. As with The Lost Scrapbook, these set-pieces are thematically related to Lincoln’s story: the restaurant’s plight turns into an apocalyptic narrative about the collapse of civilization itself and the reversion of the land to nature. The Easy Chain is ultimately centered around the same concern animating the previous novel, the ravages of advanced capitalism, but Lincoln Selwyn’s life provides a more consistent, and more compelling, unity in the novel’s aesthetic design. Indeed, it seems more fitting to speak about “design” in The Easy Chain than in The Lost Scrapbook (which does not mean the latter is simply chaotic). We see in The Easy Chain similar disruptions of narrative continuity and conventional prose (variations in textual arrangement, graphical effects such as those in the novel’s final section, with its seemingly random divergences in capitalization, punctuation, and spelling), yet here they more readily seem part of the novel’s unified portrayal of Lincoln Selwy, his elusiveness, his contradictory impulses, his lack of a core identity we can easily recognize.

            This does not mean that The Easy Chain abandons experiment for convention or too comfortably courts facile accessibility. Readers not familiar with The Lost Scrapbook are unlikely to think it too conspicuously conforms to expectations of conventional literary fiction. Its achievement consists not simply of the application of “craft,” but from a successful attempt to bring artistic coherence to a work that doesn’t settle for familiar means of character development or rely on a stable point of view. “Experimental” is not synonymous with “anarchic” when applied to formal innovations in fiction, and The Easy Chain adeptly achieves a totality of vision in a way that is perhaps more acutely visible than in The Lost Scrapbook. The balance between invention and design in The Easy Chain is the most finely measured among Dara’s novels.

            If that balance skews somewhat to the former in The Lost Scrapbook, it skews more decidedly to the latter in Dara’s third novel, Flee. Certainly to readers for whom it might be their introduction to Dara (especially because it is the briefest of the three), this novel again would hardly seem a mainstream literary novel, but its more unconventional strategies—which are largely the same ones introduced in the first two novels—are employed to limited enough effect that it is more apparent they are designed to support the novel’s quasi-absurdist story. In Flee it is the story that is emphasized through the novel’s strategies of indirection and omission much as the character of Lincoln Selwyn is evoked in The Easy Chain. However, a story about the gradual abandonment of a good-sized city (most likely based on Burlington, Vermont) after its university shuts down due to it its own malfeasance is inherently improbable and incongruous, and these qualities are only heightened through Dara’s by now signature methods—sudden discontinuities, multiple voices, etc. So compatible are form and content in Flee, in fact, that this novel can indeed be accurately described as satire, allowing Dara’s recurrent focus on capitalist values acting to impede human flourishing to be rendered more distinctly as satirical judgment.

            In its more compact form, Flee demonstrates that Dara’s invocation of multiple voices and perspectives can operate to relate a story that doesn’t flash the usual narrative signals and create characters that are shorn of information beyond the clues offered in their talk—a local couple attempting to profit from the emptying out of their town are tracked throughout the novel and act, if not as protagonists, as narrative anchors, individual representatives of the broader dilemma facing the town whose particular experiences the reader can follow for continuity—but for the first time in Dara’s fiction the strategy seems overly familiar, too derivative of the work of William Gaddis, whose voice- and dialogue-centered novels provide the primary touchstone for Dara’s fiction. Ironically, Flee seems a bit too much like Gaddis’s JR in miniature, even though it is The Easy Chain that is more reminiscent of Gaddis’s novel in its subject and featured protagonist.

            Perhaps it is a realization that this method has become somewhat perfunctory that led Dara to offer as his most recent work not a novel, but a play, the Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins, available as a download on the Aurora website. Here, of course, human speech is the form’s natural medium, and the play is stripped down to just characters and talk, the stage “As bare as you can stand it.” (It has something of the feel of a Greek drama, individual characters set off against a chorus-like group called “the Swirl.”) Mose Eakins is (as described by one of the Swirl) “an American field-risk analyst working for Concord Oil.” He is introduced to us speaking to various co-workers—none of them actually present on stage—in a briskly efficient  but largely supercilious manner. Not long afterward, Mose begins to notice that people are beginning to react strangely in his presence: they seem not to hear what he is saying and instead speak about themselves in ways that strike Mose as wholly inappropriate, as if he is overhearing them reveal their unguarded thoughts. Eventually, Mose is informed he suffers from “imparlance,” a disorder that causes people to “lose the capacity to infuse their words with intelligible significance.” As a side effect, those to whom the sufferer speaks “often give voice to thoughts they usually keep hidden.” Mose’s life steadily deteriorates, and even though he comes to recognize that he himself has participated in the degradation of language, its reduction to utilitarian exchange and self-advancement, his ultimate fate is not a happy one.

            Although Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins focuses on a theme central to much postmodern fiction, the failures of language to “communicate” reliably, that failure is tied to the debasement of language inflicted by society under capitalism, situating the play squarely among the three novels as cultural critique. (There may also be a sly dig at the incomprehension with which the literary establishment has greeted Dara’s novels, as many readers and critics profess that such works lack “the capacity to infuse their words with intelligible significance.”) The novels as well concern themselves, both implicitly and explicitly, with the obstacles language must overcome in order to be intelligible, but they do achieve their own kind of cogency. As does Mose Eakins, suggesting that finally Evan Dara belongs with the original generation of postmodernists in the audacity of his invention but doesn’t really seem to share the postmodernist skepticism about language as a representational medium. In Mose Eakins, he memorably represents the corruption of language by forces that have emptied it of all but the most crudely functional signifying potential, the destruction of literary power it would otherwise possess. Ultimately Dara is a moralist, not an aesthete.

                                                   

On Lance Olsen

My review of Lance Olsen's My Red Heaven, at Heavy Feathers Review:

Regardless of the label we might want to assign it, My Red Heaven fulfills the promise of experimental fiction: it challenges complacent reading habits at the same time it also offers to renew the conceptual resources upon which fiction might draw to engage the reader in new and myriad ways. . .My Red Heaven might be the sort of book that convinces skeptical readers experimental fiction can be compelling reading even if it does not complacently fall back on the most comfortable modes of storytelling.

On Michael Martone

My essay on the fiction of Michael Martone is now available at the Cleveland Review of Books.

Martone’s characters take up the kind of ordinary, recognizable activities—setting up the searchlight displays that announce the new fall Chevrolets have arrived or observing a school carnival, with its obligatory fish ponds and cake walks—that might elicit a knowing smile, not a belly laugh, and does not at all raise the suspicion that the characters in carrying out these activities are being subjected to mockery. Really no other current American writer manages to effect quite such a union of an underlying realism of character and place with an inevitably distorting comic outlook as successfully or distinctively as Michael Martone 

On Krasznahorkai

My review of Laszlo Krasznakorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming at Splice:

    The quartet of novels that now collectively comprise what Krasznahorkai designates as “my one book” certainly do not project a sunny view either of contemporary Hungary or of humankind in general. Baron Wenckheim’s homecoming to a Hungary that has exchanged Communist rule for Viktor Orbán hardly reveals the country to have made ‘progress’ (it largely still resembles the country depicted in Satantango), but it doesn’t seem that Krasznahorkai’s overriding artistic purpose is to specifically provide social or cultural critique — the characters in all of these novels exhibit their fair share of ignorance and venality (although also just fear and confusion), yet surely no more so than the common run of humanity. Krasznahorkai is indeed interested in the more universal corruptions of human behaviour, and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming seems to declare a sentence of metaphysical doom on human existence.

The Old is New Again (Or Not)

Way back in 2005, I wrote a few short reviews for a now defunct publication called Playback St. Louis. I had thought these reviews were forever lost, but have now successfully retrieved them. Because I feel I owe it to posterity (someone's posterity, anyway), I am here posting two of them, a review of Steve Stern's The Angel of Forgetfulness and a combined review of Ronald Sukenick's Last Fall and Rikki Ducornet's The Word "Desire."

                                                 Fuel For Stories

In his first novel since Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Underground (1991), Steve
Stern has produced what is probably his most ambitious work to date. The Angel of
Forgetfulness ranges over two different epochs in American history, several centuries of
Jewish history, and relates three interconnected stories. It attempts a kind of literary
archaeology of Jewish life on the Lower East Side of New York in the early twentieth
century, while also depicting one character’s ultimate rediscovery of the lasting vitality of
Jewish culture. And it seeks to provoke reflection on the way in which storytelling and
imagination can often disarm our merely rational powers. Happily, the novel carries out
every one of these tasks with great skill, making it both an impressive display of literary
artistry and a virtuoso act of storytelling in its own right.

In the years between Harry Kaplan and The Angel of Forgetfulness, Stern
published one collection of novellas, A Plague of Dreamers (1994), and one short story
collection, The Wedding Jester (1994), which, along with the previous story collection
Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (1987), contain some of the finest short fiction by an
American writer to appear in the past twenty years. Stern’s stories are part fable, part
comedy routine (the two come together most explicitly in the title story of The Wedding
Jester), reminiscent to some degree of the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard
Malamud, and Stanley Elkin. His earliest fiction depicted a Jewish enclave in Memphis,
Tennessee called The Pinch, but more recently he has broadened his focus to include
characters and settings beyond the somewhat peculiar (although vividly rendered)
circumstances of an American Jewish community attempting to maintain itself in the
post-Civil War South.

Saul Bozoff, the protagonist of The Angel of Forgetfulness, is a native of
Memphis, but the novel follows him on his journey out of the city of his birth and toward.
. .he doesn’t really know what. The first chapter (a tour de force in and of itself) finds
Saul attending college in New York City, where he meets Aunt Keni, one of the few
surviving residents of what was a thriving Jewish neighborhood. Saul is drawn to Keni
and her stories about the old neighborhood, and she passes on to him a manuscript—The
Angel of Forgetfulness—written by Nathan Hart, Keni’s long-dead lover. The rest of the
novel alternates between Saul’s subsequent experiences on a hippie commune and as an
instructor in a small New England college, a reconstruction of Nathan Hart’s life story as
a recent immigrant and then a writer for the Jewish Daily Forward, and excerpts from the
manuscript itself, which tells the fantastic tale of an angel named Mocky, who prefers life
on earth to a less eventful existence in heaven.

The connections between the three stories remain tantalizingly open for most of
the novel, but they eventually come together in a wholly satisfying way that reveals them
to be much more than simply parallel narratives. And the ingenuity with which Stern
molds his stories one from and into the other is matched by the color and the vigor of his
prose style, which has always been, in tandem with his powers of invention, the great
delight of his fiction. Steve Stern is, finally, a writer able to unite imagination and skill
with language in an almost unbeatable combination.

After he begins composing his Angel of Forgetfulness, we are told of Nathan Hart
that “Experience was the raw material of fiction, and Nathan had had so little of it,
nothing that he believed would translate readily into stories. He had for his fuel only
secondhand stories, though he couldn’t recall ever having read the one he found himself
writing now.” Readers are likely to conclude they’ve never read anything quite like the
stories Steve Stern has to tell, either.

                                                Off The Beaten Path

The American novelist Ronald Sukenick died of a degenerative muscle disease in
2004. His legacy includes not only his numerous works of fiction and criticism but also a
collection of publications and presses that attempt to maintain a place for innovative
writing in contemporary literary culture. Directly, Sukenick founded the Fiction
Collective (now FC2) as a publishing venue for experimental fiction, as well as American
Book Review, which focuses its attention largely on new works of experimental fiction
and poetry and in general works to remind us that the sort of book discussion to be found
in the New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books does not begin to
get at the variety of serious writing to be discovered at smaller presses more dedicated to
literature than to commerce. Indirectly, Sukenick forged an alliance of sorts with the
Center for Book Culture, which publishes the journals Context and the Review of
Contemporary Fiction and helped to subsidize Dalkey Archive Press, which both
publishes new fiction—especially fiction in translation—and preserves an invaluable
backlist of important if unjustly neglected innovative fiction published during the last
century or so.

Together, FC2 and Dalkey Archive probably represent the most concerted and
successful effort in American publishing to present an alternative to mainstream “literary
fiction” that is at least as “literary” without being stylized and “serious” in a
conventionally earnest way. Unorthodox storytelling (as well as imaginative
reconsiderations of storytelling itself) and challenges to the dominance or realism are the
norm at these presses, and both qualities can be found in two of their recent releases, The
Word “Desire” by Rikki Ducornet (actually a reprint by Dalkey Archive of a 1997 book
first published by Henry Holt) and Sukenick’s own final novel, Last Fall (FC2). Both
books will provide readers with something other than familiar reading experiences, and
both will introduce new readers to authors whose other works are well worth seeking out.
(Five of Ducornet’s other books are available at Dalkey Archive, while many of
Sukenick’s previous books—including such seminal experimental fictions as 98.6 and
The Death of the Novel and Other Stories—are also to be found on FC2’s backlist.)

Ducornet writes erotically charged fables and fairy tales to some degree
reminiscent of the fiction of the British writer Angela Carter. As its title suggests, The
Word “Desire” is indeed focused on love and sex, especially on moments of sexual
awakening, of recognition of the irresistible power of desire. In “The Chess Set of Ivory,”
the book’s first story, a young girl is confronted with the fact of her mother’s infidelity
and its effect on her father, a professor teaching in Egypt. In “Roseveine,” a man tells the
story of his childhood infatuation with a mature woman (his mother’s friend) that has, to
say the least, contributed to his apparent insanity. While telling the tale of her own sexual
awakening, the narrator of “The Many Tenses of Wanting” sets forth what might be the
primary theme of the book: “I believe it is so that one’s sexuality is fixed at an early age.
One is impressionable and a visual experience has the impress of a firebrand. I mean one
see something so puissant it sets the mind on fire, an inextinguishable fire that—if it
cools to embers with the passage of hours and days—can be rekindled by a random
word.”

In one of the best stories in The Word “Desire”, “The Foxed Mirror,” a priest
otherwise repulsed by sex (“the thought of a woman’s thighs is terrible”) becomes
sexually obsessed with a male artist. Perhaps the most outrageous stories (which is saying
something) are “Fortune,” narrated by the pet dog of Napoleon’s Josephine, and
“Opium’” about a dying Pope who is suckled by a wet nurse. While plot descriptions
such as these do begin to suggest the extraordinary qualities of Ducornet’s fiction, the
reader will also find her stories replete with vividly rendered scenes, etched by
Ducornet’s incisive prose style, and satisfyingly bizarre plot turns.

Sukenick’s Last Fall shares something of Ducornet’s surrealistic approach,
although in this case the novel’s skewed perspective on specifically contemporary reality
(the novel is set in New York just before and just after the events of 9/11/01, and contains
a very compelling account of the immediate aftermath of the Trade Tower collapses)
might more accurately characterized as what the novelist John Barth called “irrealism.”
The characters and events depicted in Last Fall are located just on the other side of the
line separating the plausible from the implausible (although one might say that 9/11
represents the moment when the unreality of American life can no longer be
exaggerated), but not so far as to make them unrecognizable as a version of the world we
readers must otherwise inhabit. It tells the story of the “Museum of Temporary Art” and
those associated with it, its plot (which is mostly displaced by the ongoing historical
events) centering on an ostensible theft from the museum’s collection. This theft remains
the novel’s unresolved mystery, since a museum of “temporary” art has no collection:

It was a matter of theft, but the problem was that nobody knew what had
been stolen. The museum was banking on my expertise as a professor of postcontemporary art both to identify the stolen work and, if possible, to get it back.
None of this had been made public and, in fact, even the personnel of the
museum were unaware, except for a vague feeling of unease, which was itself part
of the evidence. Because the feeling that something, something important, was
gone was a factor. That is, how else, other that through feeling, were they to know
that something was gone when they didn’t know what it was?

Last Fall is a rather more straightforwardly rendered narrative than most of
Sukenick’s fiction (although it does move from character to character in a way that
requires the reader’s careful attention). It does not much feature the kind of play with
typography and sentence boundaries typical of Sukenick’s other work, and while readers
new to Sukenick might find this beneficial and Last Fall a more accessible introduction
to his brand of experimental fiction, others might prefer his less explicitly allegorical,
more formally challenging work. Nonetheless, the posthumous publication of Ronald
Sukenick’s final novel is a valuable reminder that Sukenick was a figure central to the
flourishing of American postmodern fiction, an important writer whose achievement is
now complete and available for discovery and rediscovery by readers looking for an
alternative to the “mainstream” in American fiction.

 

In his first novel since Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Underground (1991), Steve
Stern has produced what is probably his most ambitious work to date. The Angel of
Forgetfulness ranges over two different epochs in American history, several centuries of
Jewish history, and relates three interconnected stories. It attempts a kind of literary
archaeology of Jewish life on the Lower East Side of New York in the early twentieth
century, while also depicting one character’s ultimate rediscovery of the lasting vitality of
Jewish culture. And it seeks to provoke reflection on the way in which storytelling and
imagination can often disarm our merely rational powers. Happily, the novel carries out
every one of these tasks with great skill, making it both an impressive display of literary
artistry and a virtuoso act of storytelling in its own right.

In the years between Harry Kaplan and The Angel of Forgetfulness, Stern
published one collection of novellas, A Plague of Dreamers (1994), and one short story
collection, The Wedding Jester (1994), which, along with the previous story collection
Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (1987), contain some of the finest short fiction by an
American writer to appear in the past twenty years. Stern’s stories are part fable, part
comedy routine (the two come together most explicitly in the title story of The Wedding
Jester), reminiscent to some degree of the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard
Malamud, and Stanley Elkin. His earliest fiction depicted a Jewish enclave in Memphis,
Tennessee called The Pinch, but more recently he has broadened his focus to include
characters and settings beyond the somewhat peculiar (although vividly rendered)
circumstances of an American Jewish community attempting to maintain itself in the
post-Civil War South.

Saul Bozoff, the protagonist of The Angel of Forgetfulness, is a native of
Memphis, but the novel follows him on his journey out of the city of his birth and toward.
. .he doesn’t really know what. The first chapter (a tour de force in and of itself) finds
Saul attending college in New York City, where he meets Aunt Keni, one of the few
surviving residents of what was a thriving Jewish neighborhood. Saul is drawn to Keni
and her stories about the old neighborhood, and she passes on to him a manuscript—The
Angel of Forgetfulness—written by Nathan Hart, Keni’s long-dead lover. The rest of the
novel alternates between Saul’s subsequent experiences on a hippie commune and as an
instructor in a small New England college, a reconstruction of Nathan Hart’s life story as
a recent immigrant and then a writer for the Jewish Daily Forward, and excerpts from the
manuscript itself, which tells the fantastic tale of an angel named Mocky, who prefers life
on earth to a less eventful existence in heaven.

The connections between the three stories remain tantalizingly open for most of
the novel, but they eventually come together in a wholly satisfying way that reveals them
to be much more than simply parallel narratives. And the ingenuity with which Stern
molds his stories one from and into the other is matched by the color and the vigor of his
prose style, which has always been, in tandem with his powers of invention, the great
delight of his fiction. Steve Stern is, finally, a writer able to unite imagination and skill
with language in an almost unbeatable combination.

After he begins composing his Angel of Forgetfulness, we are told of Nathan Hart
that “Experience was the raw material of fiction, and Nathan had had so little of it,
nothing that he believed would translate readily into stories. He had for his fuel only
secondhand stories, though he couldn’t recall ever having read the one he found himself
writing now.” Readers are likely to conclude they’ve never read anything quite like the
stories Steve Stern has to tell, either.

                                                Off The Beaten Path

The American novelist Ronald Sukenick died of a degenerative muscle disease in
2004. His legacy includes not only his numerous works of fiction and criticism but also a
collection of publications and presses that attempt to maintain a place for innovative
writing in contemporary literary culture. Directly, Sukenick founded the Fiction
Collective (now FC2) as a publishing venue for experimental fiction, as well as American
Book Review, which focuses its attention largely on new works of experimental fiction
and poetry and in general works to remind us that the sort of book discussion to be found
in the New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books does not begin to
get at the variety of serious writing to be discovered at smaller presses more dedicated to
literature than to commerce. Indirectly, Sukenick forged an alliance of sorts with the
Center for Book Culture, which publishes the journals Context and the Review of
Contemporary Fiction and helped to subsidize Dalkey Archive Press, which both
publishes new fiction—especially fiction in translation—and preserves an invaluable
backlist of important if unjustly neglected innovative fiction published during the last
century or so.

Together, FC2 and Dalkey Archive probably represent the most concerted and
successful effort in American publishing to present an alternative to mainstream “literary
fiction” that is at least as “literary” without being stylized and “serious” in a
conventionally earnest way. Unorthodox storytelling (as well as imaginative
reconsiderations of storytelling itself) and challenges to the dominance or realism are the
norm at these presses, and both qualities can be found in two of their recent releases, The
Word “Desire” by Rikki Ducornet (actually a reprint by Dalkey Archive of a 1997 book
first published by Henry Holt) and Sukenick’s own final novel, Last Fall (FC2). Both
books will provide readers with something other than familiar reading experiences, and
both will introduce new readers to authors whose other works are well worth seeking out.
(Five of Ducornet’s other books are available at Dalkey Archive, while many of
Sukenick’s previous books—including such seminal experimental fictions as 98.6 and
The Death of the Novel and Other Stories—are also to be found on FC2’s backlist.)

Ducornet writes erotically charged fables and fairy tales to some degree
reminiscent of the fiction of the British writer Angela Carter. As its title suggests, The
Word “Desire” is indeed focused on love and sex, especially on moments of sexual
awakening, of recognition of the irresistible power of desire. In “The Chess Set of Ivory,”
the book’s first story, a young girl is confronted with the fact of her mother’s infidelity
and its effect on her father, a professor teaching in Egypt. In “Roseveine,” a man tells the
story of his childhood infatuation with a mature woman (his mother’s friend) that has, to
say the least, contributed to his apparent insanity. While telling the tale of her own sexual
awakening, the narrator of “The Many Tenses of Wanting” sets forth what might be the
primary theme of the book: “I believe it is so that one’s sexuality is fixed at an early age.
One is impressionable and a visual experience has the impress of a firebrand. I mean one
see something so puissant it sets the mind on fire, an inextinguishable fire that—if it
cools to embers with the passage of hours and days—can be rekindled by a random
word.”

In one of the best stories in The Word “Desire”, “The Foxed Mirror,” a priest
otherwise repulsed by sex (“the thought of a woman’s thighs is terrible”) becomes
sexually obsessed with a male artist. Perhaps the most outrageous stories (which is saying
something) are “Fortune,” narrated by the pet dog of Napoleon’s Josephine, and
“Opium’” about a dying Pope who is suckled by a wet nurse. While plot descriptions
such as these do begin to suggest the extraordinary qualities of Ducornet’s fiction, the
reader will also find her stories replete with vividly rendered scenes, etched by
Ducornet’s incisive prose style, and satisfyingly bizarre plot turns.

Sukenick’s Last Fall shares something of Ducornet’s surrealistic approach,
although in this case the novel’s skewed perspective on specifically contemporary reality
(the novel is set in New York just before and just after the events of 9/11/01, and contains
a very compelling account of the immediate aftermath of the Trade Tower collapses)
might more accurately characterized as what the novelist John Barth called “irrealism.”
The characters and events depicted in Last Fall are located just on the other side of the
line separating the plausible from the implausible (although one might say that 9/11
represents the moment when the unreality of American life can no longer be
exaggerated), but not so far as to make them unrecognizable as a version of the world we
readers must otherwise inhabit. It tells the story of the “Museum of Temporary Art” and
those associated with it, its plot (which is mostly displaced by the ongoing historical
events) centering on an ostensible theft from the museum’s collection. This theft remains
the novel’s unresolved mystery, since a museum of “temporary” art has no collection:

It was a matter of theft, but the problem was that nobody knew what had
been stolen. The museum was banking on my expertise as a professor of postcontemporary art both to identify the stolen work and, if possible, to get it back.
None of this had been made public and, in fact, even the personnel of the
museum were unaware, except for a vague feeling of unease, which was itself part
of the evidence. Because the feeling that something, something important, was
gone was a factor. That is, how else, other that through feeling, were they to know
that something was gone when they didn’t know what it was?

Last Fall is a rather more straightforwardly rendered narrative than most of
Sukenick’s fiction (although it does move from character to character in a way that
requires the reader’s careful attention). It does not much feature the kind of play with
typography and sentence boundaries typical of Sukenick’s other work, and while readers
new to Sukenick might find this beneficial and Last Fall a more accessible introduction
to his brand of experimental fiction, others might prefer his less explicitly allegorical,
more formally challenging work. Nonetheless, the posthumous publication of Ronald
Sukenick’s final novel is a valuable reminder that Sukenick was a figure central to the
flourishing of American postmodern fiction, an important writer whose achievement is
now complete and available for discovery and rediscovery by readers looking for an
alternative to the “mainstream” in American fiction.

RIP, Stephen Dixon.

From my 2016 review of his Late Stories:

Reviewers of Stephen Dixon’s fiction often take note of the author’s continuing lack of widespread recognition, despite the high esteem for his work expressed by many writers and critics. By now it is no doubt unlikely that Dixon’s work will gain the kind of attention that would in any way equal its genuine achievement — and since Dixon is now 80, and has been forced to publish his most recent books with very small presses, there doesn’t seem much future opportunity for him to capture such attention. Dixon himself has long acknowledged this, telling interviewers — in the few he has given — that he writes for the sheer gratification of it, adhering to his own aesthetic standards and offering his stories and novels to available readers. Those of us who have accepted these offerings all along should ourselves be grateful he perseveres in spite of undeserved neglect and gives us his singular fiction with seemingly undiminished dedication.

On Handke

From my 2014 essay on Peter Handke: 

"For readers familiar with the controversy in which Handke was embroiled when he seemed to defend the government of Serbia as it was committing atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo, [Repetition] might plausibly help to put Handke’s actions, which might otherwise seem inexplicable, in a more comprehensible context. Handke’s attachment is not to Serbia, but to the former Yugoslavia, as a part of which the Slovenes presumably were best able to express their cultural identity — Handke apparently prizes especially the linguistic diversity within cultural commonality that characterized Yugoslavia, especially as a sign of the South Slavs’ refusal to accede to the domination of Austria and Germany as centers of “European” influence. Whether this quasi-romanticized view of Yugoslavia (according to which all of the South Slavs at one time “just got along”) elevates. . .Handke’s rhetorical interventions in the Balkan wars to more principled efforts to preserve the dignity of its people is open to dispute, although that Handke sincerely holds such a view seems less so."

The Absolute Horizon

"Why," asks James Draney at the beginning of his review of Fredric Jameson's latest book, Allegory and Ideology, "does Fredric Jameson’s interpretive method — his insistence that the political interpretation of texts constitutes the 'absolute horizon' of all meaning — still call for defense in today's academic scene?" I'm not sure it does require defense in the current "academic scene": It seems to me that Jameson's notion that political ideology "subsumes everything else in culture" has pretty much won the day. While a few academics periodically question the totalizing influence of this orientation to literary study (everything is politics), those challenges are unlikely to remove it from its position as the authoritative assumption of academic criticism any time soon. (It is itself the pervasive "ideology" among literary scholars against which no effective resistance can really be made.)

However, for those of us who are not obligated to defer to this critical doctrine (no tenure decision looms ahead), the answer to Draney's question actually seems pretty simple: the idea that there is no escape from the conceptual shackles imposed by "late capitalism," no alternative in our approach to reading works of literature to the exactions of "ideology critique," takes all the gratification out of reading, converts it into a dreary exercise in rhetorical self-congratulation for seeing through it all. If this is all we are to get from our engagement with imaginative literature, why bother? I already know what I'm going to find, so spending time with a literary work of any complexity or inventiveness seems pretty stupid.

Many of us, of course, think that the complexity and inventiveness are themselves the payoff, valuable for their own sake. According to Draney, though, to believe this is to succumb to the foolishness that that "there are areas of life and culture that somehow fall outside politics and ideology," something we are not to do with "a straight face." 

But it is possible to find this sort of gratification in reading literature, nevertheless. To do so, we don't have to believe "there is such a thing as an unmediated relationship to art, culture, Being." We can assume that of course no one can encounter a literary text in a state of radical innocence, freed of all previous exposure to the cultural presuppositions our life in the world in which we have been thrown has pressed upon us. How could we be? Why would we want to be? It is possible to find the act of reading works of the literary imagination to be itself an act of resisting the control of all ideologies, even if finally it can never be quite complete.

 

Their Own Approach to Book Criticism

At the Bookseller, Adam Blades, a "lecturer in Publishing," attempts to defend "celebrity tastemakers" (those with "book clubs") by making this claim about actual literary critics:

On the contrary, literary critics have rarely been objective. From Edgar Allen [sic] Poe to Elizabeth Hardwick, all promote their own approach to book criticism, injecting biases and agendas into their work.

On the face of it, these statements are conceptually incoherent. Of course literary critics are not objective, since criticism unavoidably involves interpretation and evaluation, and these are inherently subjective processes. Even that part of criticism requiring description is ultimately a subjective kind of description--this is the way the text works as I experienced it. And of course critics promote their own approach to the act of criticism since "approaches" to criticism are all we have. (Good critics are well aware of this, and do not  pretend their own approach is "objectively" the most appropriate.) In literary criticism, "biases and agendas" are just other words for "critical judgment."

Blades invokes "objectivity" in order to muster the usual attack on expertise or authority in literary criticism--all judgment is subjective, so no one's perspective can be valued above that of anyone else. It's all "mere" opinion. But not all critical opinions are "mere." Some are reached through sustained reflection and achieved through genuine insight. They can be defended because they are anchored in a  reading of the particulars of the work in question that is applied to a consistent overall explication intended to persuade other readers of its credibility. In other words, the critic's subjectivity is indistinguishable from the skill with which his/her "own approach" is exercised.

Such skill is grounded in an ability (perhaps a willingness) to pay careful attention to the "particulars"--the formal and stylistic strategies the work enlists to achieve its effects--and, ideally, a sufficient familiarity with the relevant literary history in which a work of prose or poetry is inevitably situated. The latter is usually the attribute of the professional literary critic that most induces populist resentment: isn't this sort of knowledge just an exercise in pedantry, an opportunity for the elitist critic to insinuate the superiority of his own impeccable taste? While a version of this criticism remains implicit in this writer's allusion to "biases and agendas," Blades instead suggests it is finally only the "flowery prose" to which such a critic resorts that separates the self-proclaimed literary critic from the celebrity book enthusiast.

While it may be true that too many reviewers substitute colorful phrasemaking for critical insight (although sometimes the phrasemaking succinctly embodies the insight, as in, say, the critical writing of William Gass), in my experience as a reader of reviews, the more frequent stylistic trespass is the constant invocation of the empty superlative (stunning! brilliantly original! glorious!), while the most common manifestation of an "agenda" usually involves not the promotion of a preferred critical method but the elevation of the reviewer through tedious reflections on the reviewer's own personal predilections and life circumstances.

Blades also cites a Harvard Business School study that, he says, found that professional reviewers are "less favourable to first-time authors, and rat[e] higher books that have already received media attention." It would appear that critics are harder on debuts than Amazon reviewers, while they are also more favorable to books that other critics have praised. The bandwagon effect is indeed a noticeable phenomenon in current literary culture, and it seems to suggest that whatever standards critics manage to sustain in reviewing debut authors strangely dissipate when considering the latest from established writers. If professional literary criticism does have a credibility problem, it is highlighted here, in this herd mentality and deference to the prerogatives of reputation--a cultivation of celebrity in its own way.

New Review

My review of Albert Rolls's The Demon in the Text can now be found at Review 31.

From Rolls’s perspective on the way the ‘life’ inflects the work in Pynchon’s case, it would seem that Pynchon’s fiction is a near-reversal of TS Eliot’s dictum that a literary work is an ‘escape from personality’. To the extent we can determine the ‘personality’ of Thomas Pynchon, it can only be found in the work, as the writer has deliberately escaped from the kind of public presence that might allow us to deduce a personality at least comparable to that which we might attribute to other writers of his stature. . . .

New Review

My review of Jane Alison's book Meander, Spiral, Explode can now be found at Full Stop.

The kind of formal experiment Alison is eager to encourage is pretty much encapsulated in the book’s title. Meander, spiral, and explosion are forms of spatial movement, although Alison also discusses additional such forms: waves, “wavelets,” fractals. These are all forms that mirror forms of organization in the natural world. One could say that while Alison seeks alternatives to the kind of traditional arc that is described by Freytag in his famous “triangle,” her counter-forms nevertheless reinforce the conventional practice of realism by stressing form as itself a “mirror of nature.”. . .

Liberalism and Literature

(This essay was published a long time ago--as most of the references attest--in a now defunct online journal. Since as far as I can tell its archives no longer exist, I am re-posting the essay here. I mostly still agree with it.)

 

Much has been written about the purported dominance of American universities-particularly in the humanities and the social sciences-by the so-called "academic left." And indeed acceptable scholarship in many disciplines is undeniably influenced in a virtually uncontested way by left-wing and progressive ideas. In the field in which I was trained, English (more specifically, literary study), the current scholarly paradigm is almost exclusively determined by a left-wing critique of culture and the role of literature, as well as other forms of representation and discourse, in shaping and reflecting culture. Certainly few would deny that campus initiatives, student/faculty activism, and the collective weight of political opinion in general all help push the political balance on most college campuses decidedly to the left.

But the most noteworthy consequence of the ascendancy of the academic left is not, from my perspective, that academe is now permeated with leftist politics. Considering a whole constellation of facts about contemporary America-among them its now unchallenged position as supreme economic, cultural, and military power, its exaltation of business and commerce as indicators of status and accomplishment, its thoroughgoing utilitarian approach to education and manifest impatience with the cultivation of intellect and sensibility for their own sakes-it is not at all surprising that those who choose what was once called the "life of the mind" at its universities would feel estranged from the official values that seem to animate the political and commercial life of American society. Whether such people would identify themselves as "liberals," "radicals," "progressives," or just as independent thinkers, surely it is at the least unlikely that as a whole they would incline much toward the established conservative view of the way things ought to be.

As a liberal myself, I find the idea of a university overrun with left-wingers to be a prospect exceeded in its horror and repugnancy only by the idea of its being overrun by right-wingers. (Actually this latter prospect I find more dreadful by a magnitude approaching infinity.) However, the real damage that has been inflicted by the academic left-and I do believe it has inflicted damage-lies in the extent to which it has managed to simplistically politicize academic scholarship, especially scholarship in the humanities. This reductive approach, whereby all subjects are political, either inherently so or made to be so, is detrimental to real politics, which can be safely disregarded in favor of the more tidy rhetorical kind; even more debilitating, however, is the harm done to the ideal of dispassionate, intellectually serious scholarship and criticism.

The discipline of literary study has arguably been the most devastated and disfigured by this kind of politicized scholarship. It is not going too far to say the study of literature as it was envisioned by those who helped bring it into the university curriculum in the first place has been replaced by the inspection of literature for its ideological credentials, by the expropriation of works of literature for political purposes completely dissociated from the qualities that mark them as literary, that distinguish them from other modes of discourse. To deplore this myopic view of the usefulness of literature is not to deny that some poetry and fiction is motivated in part by a desire to represent political ideas or enlivened by a writer's sensitivity to the political forces at work in the world to which he/she must necessarily turn for inspiration. "Political literature" is not in itself a specious category. Nor is it always invalid to subject a literary work to a political reading, especially if the critic acknowledges the motive to do so and, most importantly, does not claim that such a reading cancels out all other critical values a different kind of reading might disclose.

But unfortunately academic critics now all too often do make this claim, at least implicitly. The increasingly uniform acceptance of the new orthodoxy-the cultural studies approach I have described-has in effect discredited criticism that does not set out to interrogate texts for their deep-seated assumptions about gender, race, sexual orientation, or other sources of culturally constructed "difference," their allegiance to the proper progressive attitudes toward these and other issues of concern to the politically enlightened. Adherence to this orthodoxy is to some extent the product of academic careerism, the homogenization of criticism that was almost certainly an inevitable result of the triumph of academic criticism to begin with. In some cases those conforming to the established method do so for entirely cynical reasons, advancing their own interests within the academy while suppressing whatever misgivings they may actually have about the simplistic formula they are obliged to apply, but for others this politicized criticism is undertaken in all sincerity, from a belief in the underlying political ideals they understand it to be expressing. This is the group on the academic left for whom the political imperative is most urgent, a cause so absolute in its demands as to make any other kind of critical work seem a dereliction of duty.

It is this group, as well, whose very presence in the discipline of literary study stands most in need of explanation. In a field dominated for most of the twentieth century by scholars and critics, whether philologists or acolytes of the New Criticism, who were considered advocates of a detached and disinterested approach to the study of literature, how has it happened that at the beginning of the twenty-first it has come to be dominated by such a radically disparate approach, one that encourages those who adopt it to simply become advocates in the most blatantly tendentious sense of the term? Partly it can be explained as a reaction against the disingenuousness of the claims to objectivity and impartiality made by the earlier cohort of historical scholars and New Critics, almost all of whom sought to promote some writers over others, some beliefs about the nature of literature over others, and in many cases to advance agendas separate from the declared goal of encouraging a dispassionate "appreciation" of literature as a whole. It is an overreaction to be sure, and furthermore derives more than a little from the intellectual inconstancy and susceptibility to critical fashion of which literary scholarship has increasingly (and correctly) been accused. But in its very excess, the turn to cultural studies betrays a more significant lack of confidence in the role of the literature professor, as well as, ultimately, in the relevance of literature in a globalized media age that would seem to have little use for its inherent equivocations.

The rise of the academic left during the 1980s and 90s provoked its share of contentious sound and fury-in literary study, the most discordant notes accompanied the so-called "canon war," a momentarily intense conflict that quickly enough turned into a rout-but in retrospect it was accomplished without much serious opposition, aside from those who could easily if often unjustly be caricatured as hidebound reactionaries. In some ways, in fact, the victory of the cultural studies left has about it a certain air of inevitability. The image of the genteel English professor fostering among his students an appreciation of Literature was always only accurate in the blurring: having created Literature as a proper "subject" of academic study, the older generation or two of professors on whom this image was projected were nevertheless unavoidably in the business of using works of literature in a more ambitious enterprise in which poems, novels, and plays themselves served only an intermediary function. One could less charitably describe it as indoctrination, as promoting an underlying and unarticulated agenda, although unlike the current dispensation, under which the indoctrination is blatant and the agenda all but advertised, the earlier paradigm did begin with the assumption that literature has an autonomy and integrity of its own. However, if the present generation of "literary scholars" has effectively abandoned the study of literature in favor of a more expansively conceived program of their own devising, they are in this sense only emulating their predecessors.

But where in the past literature in the academy was most likely to be seen as adjunct to or allied with religion, history, ethical inquiry, or simply a particular scholar/teacher's idiosyncratic brew of such secondary ingredients, today it is almost uniformly politics and political analysis to which the study of literature has become subordinate. Although the various accounts of the radicalizing of the academy in the United States that have been advanced over the last decade and a half are, however implicated in their own ideological bias, mostly accurate to the extent they identify a set of circumstances that further explain the generally leftish tilt of university faculty, in what remains of literary study the subordination of literature to politics is at least as much the consequence of the absence of a true disciplinary identity centered around literature as the exclusive subject of attention. While the prevailing wisdom of the academy clearly privileges the political as the most "serious" focus of one's scholarly attention, in departments of English and Comparative Literature especially the effect has seemed particularly acute because the politicization of criticism and scholarship has completed a process of virtually emptying out these disciplines of the subject with which they were originally invested.

I would like to challenge the apparently widespread assumption that spending one's time contemplating the literary qualities of literature is not only frivolous but that it also disqualifies one from maintaining a parallel if separate interest in politics and political commentary or, more importantly, that an interest in works of literature, and the development of the requisite facility in reading them, add nothing to an analysis of the social conditions that abide in or the political forces that affect the "real world" outside the library carrel or one's attic garret. I would not claim that the particular insights I believe I have gained from the cultivation of such reading habits are necessarily those everyone who takes literature seriously would reach, but neither are they simply the fortuitous results of an otherwise private enthusiasm. If anything, looking at politics from the perspective provided by literature is a more natural and ultimately more fruitful exercise than attempting to impose on literature a constricted and sadly uncongenial vision of politics.

The actual politics of the academic left strike me as a desperate and ineffectual politics: our views have no salience in mainstream American political discourse, no appeal to ordinary citizens, so we will instead expend our time and labor in an artificial environment where what we believe can be articulated but finally dismissed as inherently unworldly, on creating a simulated, ersatz, merely textual politics. My own literary education, on the other hand, has encouraged me to favor a less impatient, more terrestrial liberal politics, a political outlook that welcomes progressive change but recognizes the manifest obstacles to achieving it, that prefers tangible results to free-floating attitude, that refuses to render "politics" itself a meaningless term by finding it everywhere, to reduce all human endeavor and expression to a conception of the political that is impoverished and unavailing. A true literary education (whether acquired through a formally established curriculum or through self-organized effort) is able to do this because learning to read works of literature unencumbered by anxieties about their secondary rhetorical uses can only over time lead one to share the perspective on human affairs that serious literature itself cumulatively provides.

This cumulative perspective emphasizes contingency, mutability, what in the title of Samuel Johnson's famous poem is identified as "the vanity of human wishes." The academic left is frequently attacked for its "relativism," but in this regard they would actually be well situated to appreciate the worldview expressed collectively by serious works of literature. Although conservatives and traditionalists have always liked to speak of the literary canon as a kind of repository of wisdom and eternal verities, no one who really loves literature would make such a claim for it, or would have developed a love for it in the first place, except to say that the greatest works of literature portray the universal uncertainty of human life and the agelessly unresolved conflicts stirred up by human aspirations. The Iliad and The Odyssey may be stories about courage, fortitude, overcoming destructive emotions, but they are even more about the fluidity and inadvertence of experience, our sense of it as random and unstable, ultimately beyond our control and its meaning beyond our reach. Academic leftists with the courage of their allegedly relativist convictions would see such works as the strongest confirmation of their beliefs rather the primary exhibits in their actually quite categorical critical briefs.

By "relativist" in this context I mean something closer to a tragic view, although this way of putting it perhaps seems more appropriate to the fatalism of conservatives than the cautious optimism of liberals. However, a recognition of limits, an acknowledgment of the imperfections inherent in the circumstances of human life-although not necessarily an insistence on equating these imperfections with "sin" or "fate" or "evil"-are the almost unavoidable, if mostly inferred, precepts offered up by literature as a whole, as they also ought to be, I would argue, by liberalism as well. The philosopher of liberalism who presented a vision of it often associated with such a view as this is Isaiah Berlin, and it is notable that in advancing a version of liberalism that takes account of limits and alternative perspectives Berlin frequently examined the work of writers belonging more to the history of literature than philosophy, primarily figures prominent in the Russian and German branches of the Romantic movement. Although many of these writers gave expression to impulses Berlin considered illiberal, he nevertheless read their work with a respect that seemed to come from an underlying appreciation of the complexities and the outright paradoxes that literature especially is apt to expose and to which it is often the most useful guide.

Among current proponents of the liberal tradition, the philosopher Richard Rorty and the literary critic Stanley Fish have also, it seems to me, attempted to remind liberals of the dangers of self-certainty and an inflexible adherence to "principle." Both Rorty and Fish are often counted as belonging in their own ways to the academic left, both loosely classed as postmodernists in their defense of what is finally a genuine epistemological and critical relativism. But here again the "postmodernist" label proves less appropriate as a characterization of the academic left than its common usage would suggest, as both Rorty and Fish are each more thoroughgoing in their relativism, not to mention more intellectually rigorous, than the partisans of cultural studies could ever allow themselves to be. Rorty wants the political left to give up on the idea of the all-encompassing narrative, the final explanation, including the belief that history itself unfolds coherently enough to justify claims of acting in its name. Fish reminds liberals of the hollowness of declarations of value-neutral principles that supposedly can be shared by everyone regardless of their prejudices or their deeply ingrained beliefs.

Neither Rorty nor Fish have been universally rewarded with the good favor of liberals for their efforts, much less the approval of the more radical left, for whom such pragmatism would require reconciling themselves to the inconclusiveness and outright muddle of practical politics, as well as a willingness to consider the consequences of political choices and actions in the broadest possible context. For the literary or academic left in particular it would require taking note of the role literature has played in the formation of the political analyses offered by these two writers. Fish, of course, is a highly regarded literary critic and theorist, perhaps the most distinguished Milton scholar of the second half of the twentieth century, whose ability to "read" the larger cultural text composed so prominently by the ongoing legal and political discourse examined in The Trouble With Principle is clearly derived from his undeniable mastery as a reader of literary texts. Rorty has long given respectful attention to poets and novelists, has even suggested that works of philosophy ought now themselves be read essentially as works of literature, and evokes as the presiding spirits of perhaps his most direct and sustained statement of his political philosophy the American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Far from imposing on literature external political or philosophical conceptions, each of these important American thinkers has in part allowed their understanding of literature to inform and enrich their perception of the ambiguities inherent to politics and philosophy.

One could perhaps say that the political orientation of the academic left also is informed by their understanding of literature, except that unfortunately their understanding of it is hopelessly restrictive. A simplistic and misinformed view of poetry and fiction as instruments for invoking an expressive order-even when (sometimes especially when) ostensibly presenting an appearance of disorder-and a moral clarity most often missing in the ordinary experiences of real life characterizes academic literary study over the past twenty years or so. This is a curious vestige of the era of New Criticism-and a misreading of it-that accepts a caricatured version of the idea of the autonomy of the literary text but only to assist in isolating and emphasizing the political content to which the poem, story, or novel can more usefully be reduced. But this one-dimensional, circumscribed vision of the nature of literature has another, even more telling consequence when considering the recent wholesale politicization of literary study.

From my perspective, the most noteworthy quality of the political ideals motivating both the theory and the practice of the academic left is the apparent transposition of the orderliness assumed to be constitutive of literature to the frustrating irresolution of the conflicts and controversies of actually existing political life. These ideals substitute well-made fictions for the stubbornly open-ended realities of life as it is lived. It might be argued that it is in the nature of ideals to seem beyond what has so far been achievable, or even ever likely to be achieved, and I would largely accept such an argument. But it has been among the least admirable characteristics of the academic/cultural studies left to have converted what might be perfectly admirable as aspirations, as cultural abstractions useful in forwarding one possible kind of analysis, into ideological certainties that discount and disparage any other form of analysis. As we will see, this propensity is not peculiar to the academic left-or even to the "left" or to political ideology in general-but for scholars whose nominal subject is literature, it is a particularly dismaying if not wholly antithetical habit of mind.

For these literary leftists, this habit of mind can be seen at work both in their specific scholarly writings about literature and in the larger political program-sometimes merely tacit, sometimes quite straightforwardly announced-of which such writing are clearly a part. The former generally take two forms: either writers whose perceived political attitudes are deemed acceptable are celebrated for expressing them, or writers with dubious political credentials are subjected to a remorseless kind of scrutiny designed to uncover their political defects. The first enlists the writers in question in a critique to which they may or may not actually be sympathetic; the second manages as well to advance the same critique and to enlist the writers concerned, despite their manifest lack of sympathy, as a result ultimately diminishing all works and writers to the same uniform level of value as tools in a political analysis that often has precious little to do with the values a less dogmatic reader might take from such works-much less the values even the most critically favored of these writers would be willing to endorse.

But it is in the political program that politicized cultural studies scholars believe themselves to be promoting that the most blatant transfiguration of the real into the fictional can be seen. It is not so much that so many of them persist in sustaining the Marxist vision that the 20th century surely proved, at the very least, illusory, but that they thus persist in the full knowledge that their political desires will never be fulfilled in political reality, giving some poignancy, perhaps, to their continued devotion to the fiction that left-wing radicalism has become, but otherwise only reinforcing the sense they inhabit a world of literal make-believe. Or at least one would think so. I am not entirely certain, finally, exactly how to explain the psychological appeal of acceding to this kind of make-believe, nor do I want to engage in a parallel kind of intellectual fabrication by resorting to the explanation provided by the Freudian psychoanalytic story or any other convenient psychologizing fiction. It could be, however, that immersion in the radical worldview provides, like certain kind of popular escapist fiction, an opportunity to leave behind the muddle of ordinary life in exchange for the narrative clarity and enhanced drama stories make available.

Of course, readers of genre fiction or viewers of Hollywood movies know that these fictions have been created for their entertainment and that their pleasures are momentary, time-limited. Belief in the radical fiction, unfortunately, doesn't often show much awareness of its artificial status and far too many of its enthusiasts choose to pretend that keeping up the faith is a sign of their superior principles. Luckily, most settle for the superiority of their beliefs in the abstract-are satisfied with fiction, in other words-and act on them only in the most cursory and ineffective ways. The academic left is an enclave dedicated almost entirely to theory, for most part disdaining genuine political activity, especially if it might only result in the political empowerment of mere liberals. (Although sometimes maintenance of the fiction does exact its price. The 2000 election is an especially consequential example: better to support Nader and help elect Bush than to sully the dream with the likes of Gore.) Furthermore, the excesses of the academic left have been blatant and well publicized enough that any kind of effective political agitation that might conceivably emanate from this quarter would almost certainly be discounted right from the start-unfortunately even if such agitation happened adventitiously to be in behalf of an otherwise worthy liberal cause (such as, for example, adequate funding of higher education, or environmental protection, or universal health care.)

But the predisposition to live within one's own fiction is by no means restricted to cloistered and starry-eyed academics. And while first-hand observation of this tendency in academe has made me particularly aware of it characteristics and its most common effects, I would again maintain that my primary interest in literature-my belief in its capacity to sharpen the mind's apprehension of the shaping patterns at work both in the imaginative creations of poets and novelists and in the imaginary creations many of us attempt to make of the social, political, and cultural arrangements we must unfortunately settle for in lieu of the more vivid if less tangible worlds evoked by the poets-has made me more alert to the many different forms the aestheticizing of mundane reality can take. If academics are not exclusively susceptible to this confusion, certainly neither are those whose political sympathies lie to the left. Conservatives-especially contemporary American conservatives-are if anything even more eager to impose on a recalcitrant and distasteful reality their favored and well-wrought fictions, despite their professed belief in original sin and the imperfectability of human nature.

Early modern conservatism, exemplified by such figures as Edmund Burke and Henry Adams, was indeed skeptical of utopian and radical thinking, preferring the relative security of the already known to the grand designs for the future of the reformers and revolutionaries. This is not an outlook to be lightly dismissed, although it can easily enough harden into a churlish refusal to countenance the possibility of beneficial change. The subsequent history of conservatism, however, has not so much displayed this particular failing as it has seen the conservative frame of mind evolve into a rigid ideology, a "movement" as ready to impose its own version of the way things should be as any left-wing visionary. It is impossible any longer to think of the "conservative"-at least in the United States-as one who simply resists impulsive change; instead, the postwar American conservative comes fully possessed of a complete collection of well-made fictions, chief among them the unequivocal faith in the "free market" (taken over, to be sure, from 19th century liberals), a fiction so powerful in its influence that conservatives have almost managed to conflate it with democracy itself.

Clearly the free market is a notion of potential utility in a number of contexts, but contemporary conservatives have long since abandoned any concern for utility or consequences in favor of an all-encompassing belief system of which the free market has become the central tenet. So all-encompassing has it become that few conservatives bother to notice the way in which it clearly conflicts with, in some cases even undermines, other equally firm beliefs and ideals to which conservatives claim to be committed. The free market necessarily encourages innovation over stasis, relentlessly overturns established methods, practices, and assumptions, ensuring that change becomes the rule, and not even in the more deliberate, managed way-applying what John Dewey referred to as "intelligence"-that liberals prefer. In its cultural effects the free market inherently suggests that all values are ultimately up for grabs, that the most praiseworthy artistic endeavors are those that sell, that those ideas able to attract the greatest number of devotees are the ones best qualified to be regarded as embodying "truth." The free market would seem to be the most immediate agency of "relativism" itself, for many conservatives the central error and besetting curse of our time.

Yet an affirmation of free market doctrine continues to be the sine qua non of conservative politics, uniting all the "wings" of the late 20th century Republican party, which claims conservatism as its political philosophy. One suspects that this valorization of the free market by conservatives can partially be interpreted as a function of post-World War II conservative anti-Communism, in the expression of which free markets became one of those features of American life that clearly distinguished it from life under communism, that made America America, even though previous conservative thinkers-the Southern agrarians, for example-considered capitalism an element of modern culture disruptive of tradition and traditional values. In the effort to counteract the influence of one monstrous fiction, communism, conservatives resorted to the promulgation of another, less monstrous, fiction, and the intensity of their commitment to it has clearly not abated since the demise of the communist threat. If anything, that commitment has seemed to become more inflexible and grandiose, extending to a vision of the whole world subject to the free market dogma (although a sound liberal argument can be made for what is loosely called "globalization," absent the doctrinaire insistence on upholding free market fantasies.)

While the conservatives' desire to hang on to what has become a crucial article of the faith is testimony to their determination that it continue to shape the course of future economic and social arrangements, their embrace of the doctrine in the first place might be further related to the conservative proclivity to idealize the American past, and to measure the present according to a romanticized, fictionalized version of an American that more directly reflects current conservative presumptions. Thus the NRA image of gun-toting colonials and self-reliant frontiersmen; the family values image of the dutiful wife, the bread-earning husband, of America as a sex-free zone, aside from the respectable bearing of children; the strict constructionist image of a Constitution fixed into place once and for all by a group of white founding fathers whose supreme wisdom literally cannot be challenged. Together the various conservative constituencies create a fictionalized story of America and American customs and institutions that guides political consideration rather than the actual appraisal of present conditions that exist, as they say, on the ground. Such an idealization of one's country is no doubt a precondition for the development of nationalism, and the all too frequent conservative assault on the "patriotism" of their political opponents seems to me more a product of their phantasmal nationalism than anything resembling true patriotism.

Nationalism has arguably been the most destructive force in world affairs over the past century, and at the beginning of the twenty-first its baneful influence is only becoming more apparent. As I write, the G.W. Bush administration is being driven by it toward a potentially catastrophic war on Iraq (catastrophic not so much, perhaps, in its immediate prosecution as in its long-term aftermath), ostensibly to build democracy but just as plausibly to enhance the authority of "America" in a new unipolar world. Of course, this action would likely not be taking place except as part of the response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And these attacks, in turn, were prompted by the one force manifestly even more powerful in its capacity to motivate believers than nationalism: religion. Although much effort has been expended in defending "mainstream" Islam from charges that it is an inherently intolerant and fanatical religion, the rise of fundamentalist Islam to a point of unprecedented popularity and prestige in much of the Muslim world nevertheless exemplifies the way in which theistic religion can so easily become radicalized, can become a fiction so compelling to human credulity that any action undertaken to maintain it becomes justified.

The origin of the current variety of unrestrained terrorism in the wellspring of religion is well captured in the title of Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's The Age of Sacred Terror. As Benjamin and Simon persuasively demonstrate, this terrorism is not primarily a reaction of the poverty-stricken or even an expression of the grievances of those oppressed by their own governments and who hold the U.S. responsible for propping up those governments, although these are contributing factors. Instead, it is an act of religious observance, of obedience to the demands the al-Queda and other Islamist terrorists believe their religion necessarily makes on them as believers. And they believe because belief in fundamentalist Islam and its dictates best explains to them the dilemma they face as inhabitants of a seemingly hostile and alien modern world. But when Benjamin and Simon quote bid Laden's assertions that "there is no choice but return to the original spring, to this religion, to God's book. Praise and Glory be to him" or Mohammed Atta's final testimony that "it is Satan who causes fear in his followers. These are the admirers of Western Civilization, who have drunk their love for it and their hallowing of it with the cool water, and were afraid for their weak feeble stomachs," it is very difficult not to think of America's own fundamentalists, the Christian zealots of the "Moral Majority" and "Christian Coalition" who have for at least twenty-five years waged their own version of jihad-mostly political and symbolic, but sometimes literal, as in the terrorist attacks on women's health clinics-against a "Western Civilization" that all but follows Satan.

Both the Islamists and the Christian right derive their inflexible and self-certain doctrines from a blinkered and unimaginative reading of their respective holy books, a phenomenon that from a literary point of view reveals equally the most egregiously mistaken of reading strategies and the inevitable havoc to be wreaked by all designated holy books. Those of us drawn to the literary point of view would like to think that acquiring it would ultimately cure both of these ills, but this very source of perspective also leads to the recognition that they are unlikely to be eliminated quite so easily. An approach to both literature and to life allegedly more open to ambiguity and complexity that allowed itself its own kind of self-certainty would hardly deserve to be called liberal.

It is not unusual to find offered by many colleges and universities courses in the Bible or the Koran "as literature." Such courses seek to help students to read these texts for the literary qualities that might not otherwise be perceptible through the more common historical or devotional readings of them. While I would not deny that such qualities can be found in both holy books, we are, in my view, well beyond the point where either of them could be rehabilitated as works of literature ("mere" literature, some would no doubt say). Such literary features as they may have-their poetry, their arresting images, their narrative force-can never be seen as more than adornments, must always be subservient to the message for which they have been supremely valued by the devout. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that so many of these must compensate for their inability to settle for the potential literary power of such books by invoking it in their fearful struggles against the innocently prosaic, ordinary confusions of real life.

Ultimately the cultural studies/academic left exhibits a similar intolerance of the literary representations of these confusions, preferring to cast literary works that reveal them to be synonymous with human reality itself as politically deficient, to valorize instead the evasion of this reality by what are interpreted at least as strategies better suited to reconstructing the world according to more enlightened precepts. The fundamentalist commitment to illusion of the academic left does not, needless to say, pose the same kind of threat that the zealotry of the religionists represents. The academics threaten only to trivialize and undermine the study of literature, and the humanities more broadly. This is a serious enough danger in the long run, although literature will most likely survive its injuries, nevertheless. Still, among those questioning the removal of literature from literary study, if not actively resisting it, ought to be anyone who believes (as I do) that with its loss liberalism would lose an important potential source of strength.

Suffice it to say that such strength does not come directly from literary works that themselves convey an obviously liberal "message." To insist that liberalism be served by incorporating it in this way into the thematics of literature would be as doctrinaire as the ideologies I have here criticized. Instead the strength of literature, and its potential to strengthen liberalism, lies elsewhere. In "The Poet," Emerson writes that "The poets are thus liberating gods. . .They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward when we arrive at the precise sense of its author." In "stimulating us through its tropes," a great work of literature frees us from previous conceptions and preconceptions that ought always to be challenged. Indeed, it takes away from us our most comforting fictions. Liberals would do well to consider the value of this work.

Inventing Literature

(This essay was published in American Book Review in 2000, but has never been available online.)

In his book In Plato’s Cave, Alvin Kernan describes a career crisis that he no doubt shared with many other literary scholars of his generation:

The canon of great books, authors and their powerful imaginations, the formal
perfection of the literary text, and the belief that literature was a central pillar of
culture—these foundations of Literature were all crumbling. . .Fine poems and
novels were still being written, but somehow they no longer became Literature.

Kernan’s lament for what in an earlier book he called “the death of literature” has been echoed often enough over the last decade (most loudly perhaps in John M. Ellis’s 1997 book Literature Lost), but the elegiac tone of his remarks suggest a resigned rather than a combative attitude toward the passing of the old order of literary study in which men like himself were entrusted with shoring up the “foundations of Literature.” In Plato’s Cave is Kernan’s attempt to account for his career in academe, but ultimately he is willing to cede the ground to those, by now a majority, who no longer share his assumptions about the status of literature and the role of literary study.

Now that the battle between the defenders of capital-l literature and the partisans of the iconoclastic styles of scholarship identified with what has come to be called cultural studies does indeed seem to be over, the outcome decidedly in favor of the latter, what seems most striking about comments like those just quoted is the clearly implicit association, as if it didn’t need to be stated, between literature broadly conceived as verbal works of art—poems and novels—and the academic study and analysis of literature. All of the features Kernan ascribes to “literature,” such as the unique formal elegance of the literary text, are actually the products of academic theories about literature, meant to foster a certain kind of literary criticism and to facilitate classroom instruction. So accustomed are we now to thinking of literature as the subject identified  by that name in the curricula of various university departments, primarily the English department, that it is almost impossible to use the term as a way of describing specific works outside of that context. And this, of course, applies as much to the currently trendy styles of criticism and scholarship as to the old-fashioned kind of literary scholarship practiced by someone like Alvin Kernan. If anything, the champions of cultural studies are even more dependent on the exclusive right claimed by the academy to the brand name Literature—their work would be almost unintelligible without an academic literary establishment to rebel against in the first place, and the new scholarship, at least that which seeks to historicize and politicize our notions of the literary, would itself hardly be sustainable if the idea of capital-l literature were simply to be abandoned.

Even though Alvin Kernan and other like-minded literature professors were largely unable to separate an appreciation of imaginative writing from the disciplinary imperatives of academic literary study, they nevertheless generally spoke of the qualities they most admired in works of literature as qualities that inhered in the works themselves, had clearly always been considered the salient characteristics of great literature, not as creations of the very discourse these professors had adopted for their own professional purposes. It is true that the urgently serious, at times even ponderous, approach to the “canon of great books” and much of the critical lexicon of the mid-century academic literary establishment were filtered through the writings of such poet-critics as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and John Crowe Ransom, but by far the most significant development in the practice of literary criticism in the twentieth century was the investment of authority over literary matters in the figure of the academic critic, from such celebrated members of the order as Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, and Northrop Frye to current critics such as Stanley Fish and Helen Vendler, around whom is still draped some vestige of this authority, however ragged it has become. To the company of so eminent and formidable a group of “scholars” as this, no mere literary journalist or, worse, lowly book reviewer need apply: criticism would no longer be in the hands of the ink-stained wretches, namely writers, but would become almost entirely transformed into the job description of a professional class of literary experts.

As someone who once sought admittance to this class, who still considers it at its best to have embodied an attitude toward literature well worthy of respect and to have  produced a body of scholarly work both present and future readers should continue to find entirely useful, I do not believe that the assumption of such expertise on the part of literature professors was necessarily self-interested or carried out in bad faith. By and large, the institution of literary study as administered from roughly the 1930s to the 1980s was dedicated to admirable goals, even if those goals—broadly speaking, to help provide students with a modicum of a liberal education, more specifically, to advance knowledge about the nature and history of literature and provide instruction to those interested in the formal analysis of literary texts—melded uneasily, if at all, with the overall curriculum of the university, which has always reflected American society’s intensely practical philosophy of education. Like any institution, however, it came to regard its established practices as settled and incontestable (how else to go about studying literature?), and
when doubting Thomases did indeed begin to speak out from within its own ranks, the response from what came to be regarded as the old guard was at first dismissive, later mostly incredulous, and finally simply enraged.

Kernan’s The Death of Literature (1990), comes from the second stage in the academic literary establishment’s response to the new ways of thinking about literature and its place in the academic curriculum. So mystified does he seem in this book by the assault on the literary values that once seemed to need no defense that he really offers none, propounding instead the idea that the era of what he calls “romantic and modernist literature” has simply passed, that literature itself as we have known it for the past 200 years or so has ceased to be relevant. In neither The Death of Literature nor  does Kernan seem able to admit what his analysis and experience clearly show: that Literature is a product of the academic environment in which it has been defined and scrutinized since national literatures became respectable subjects of academic study early in the twentieth century—that professors like himself deserve most of the credit, or the blame, for inventing Literature in the first place.

Thus what drives Alvin Kernan and his generational cohorts crazy is not just that the discipline they helped to build has fallen so easily into the hands of a new breed of scholar who question the integrity of what was built, with furthermore an insufficient appreciation of the ramifications of this development on the part of college administrators or the public at large, but that what may have been their greatest achievement, the  creation of a fascinating cultural artifact out of old books, poems, and play scripts has lost so much of its luster as to be no longer recognizable. Because most of them found their way into the discipline out of a genuine belief in the importance of these texts (In Plato’s Cave succeeds in affirming this impression), their dismay at witnessing a decline in respect for the great books must be taken as sincere, although it is tempting to judge their enmity toward the currently dominant forms of scholarship as largely a case of professional resentment. Their failure to understand their own role in summoning Literature into being at all, however, making it almost inevitable that its exalted status would come to be challenged, is less easy to justify.

A succinct statement of the way capital-l literature was constructed as an essentially academic subject is provided in another book, John M. Ellis’s Literature Lost. Against the “utilitarian” view of education held by many in American society, the professors responded with an alternative, although not incommensurate, view, according to Ellis:

The standard defense of the humanities. . .was that humanistic education
provided all kinds of rewards, but the least important [emphasis mine] was the
enrichment of our leisure through great literature and the arts. The most weighty
arguments were that the humanities enabled us to see ourselves in perspective, to
become more enlightened citizens, and to think more deeply about important
issues in our lives. A society of people educated not just for a vocation but for full
and intelligent participation in a modern democracy would be a far better and
happier society—so ran the argument—and this overriding social usefulness of
humanistic education compensated for its not leading directly to a means of
earning one’s living.

It is hard to imagine that many of the writers who actually left us with what Ellis would accept as “great literature” could have used language like this to describe their own sense of what their work was meant to accomplish. (Especially surprising would be the suggestion that the “enrichment of our leisure” should be at the bottom of our list of expectations of poems, plays, or novels.) Not even Matthew Arnold, perhaps the first great literary critic to postulate the existence of capital-l literature in anything like the terms delineated here by Ellis, could really have envisioned a formal course of literary  study with ambitions quite like these. The extent to which the notion of “great literature” has been transformed into an entire system of interlocking texts is manifestly clear when Ellis further remarks that “[t]he body of enduring literary and philosophical books of the Western tradition is. . .a remarkable set of fascinating struggles with problems and issues. Always prominent is the conflict and competition between the ideas and vision of one writer and those of others, and there is often a high degree of self-criticism.”

John Ellis believes that literature has been “lost” because this system is no longer taken for granted. Unlike Alvin Kernan, who ultimately seems mostly wistful about the dismantling of the system that once sustained him, Ellis is one of those compelled to vent his rage over what has happened. All of the usual suspects—multiculturalists, deconstructionists, feminists, Marxists—are brought forth and denounced for their apostasy, their refusal to acknowledge the supreme authority of Literature, and by the end of the book Ellis has in effect declared that with the overthrow of the traditional Western Literature syllabus, civilization itself is nearing its end. While some of his analyses of current scholarly methods and classroom practices are cogent enough (he is right in claiming that what passes now for literary study in many of the elite colleges and universities is little more than crude political posturing), Ellis is even less able than Kernan to imagine works of literature being read and appreciated outside the academic walls he has helped to put up, much less to think of literature as a still vital activity carried on by living fiction writers, poets, and playwrights. That he finally lays the blame for the perceived affront to the dignity of Literature on affirmative action, both in admissions and faculty hiring, only underscores the impression that for literature professors like John M. Ellis, the “body of enduring literary and philosophical books” properly belongs to a select group of academics teaching a similarly select group of compliant students suitably grateful for the honor.

In arguing that those currently in charge of literary study in American universities have banished, killed, or otherwise discredited literature, however, Kernan, Ellis, and company misleadingly suggest the new literary scholarship no longer accepts the academic concept of capital-l literature and its attendant history. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Literature remains a significant category in scholarly publishing, and most of the books published in this category do little to challenge the legitimacy of the underlying idea—especially not those books that explicitly claim to question the “hegemony” of canonical literature. Take, for example, Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (1998). Radway presents her study of what might be called the book club aesthetic as an alternative to the conventional kind of literary analysis that emphasizes “intricacy, subtlety, and complexity.” Radway’s problem with “serious” literature, especially the more formally complex works of modern literature, is their lack of immediate accessibility:

The books that came to me as high culture never seemed to prompt the particular
shudder, the frisson I associated with the books of my childhood, because they
carried with them not mere promise alone, but also a threat, the threat that
somehow I might fail to understand, might fail to recognize their reputed meaning
and inherent worth. I developed, as a consequence, an aloof, somewhat puzzled
relationship to “Literature” and to the ways of reading required and rewarded in
my graduate seminars.

Radway clearly wants us to believe that the sort of book traditionally offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club (the sort that might excite in its reader the “shudder, the frisson”) deserves the same kind of respect as those books associated with “high culture,” but no one reading A Feeling for Books could conclude that its author advocates giving up either the class of books she learned to regard as Literature or the modes of analysis the study of such books gave rise to in the academy. For one thing, it is only in opposition to high-brow notions of literature that the competing notion of the middlebrow that informs Radway’s account of the Book-of-the-Month Club can even be formulated.

Paradoxically, those who most want to topple literature from its high culture pedestal are obliged to keep it fixed there in order to extol the equal value of popular or non-canonical forms of writing. Further, Radway’s chosen critical method could not be more immersed in the conventions of the academic style. Indeed, the dense and jargon-choked middle section of A Feeling for Books (a laborious examination of her subject’s “ideological position”) seems to presume a reader at least as specialized as any unrepentant formalist, and Radway doesn’t really invalidate qualities such as “intricacy, subtlety, and  complexity” as standards by which to appraise some forms of expression. Instead, she simply elevates what seems a question of taste—a preference for poetry and fiction that are more emotionally direct, that provoke the “shudder, the frisson”—to a level of purported theoretical reflection that itself manifests a formidable degree of complexity.

Despite the inability, or unwillingness, of writers like Janice Radway and John Ellis to inquire into their own deep-seated and mutually unexamined assumptions, it is nevertheless certainly true that literature as an academic subject has been radically transformed in most upper-tier colleges and universities, and its survival in something resembling its orthodox form in some lower-rung schools is not likely to save it from eventual obsolescence. As traditionalists like Kernan and Ellis maintain, literature has lost the respect it once enjoyed from those devoted to its study, and it is not likely to regain that respect any time soon. And, as radicals like Radway would have it, capital-l literature has been promulgated with at best an overly reverent solemnity, at worst a kind of smug elitism that made the appearance of A Feeling for Books and similar rebellious efforts wholly predictable. However, while I could agree with the radicals that the institution of literary study came to be enveloped in an atmosphere of pretension and self-satisfaction, their current occupation of the grounds has hardly been an improvement.

Only if one accepts that literature and the academy are linked in some necessary and unavoidable way will one also feel that Literature’s fall from academic grace is quite the catastrophe the traditionalists make it out to be, however, or that its influence had to be counteracted in the name of other causes one values more highly. Once this link is broken, Literature ceases to be, and the forms of writing that have long been held hostage to it—“fine poems and novels”—would then no longer be subject to any of the agendas academic scholars and critics bring to the discipline-based study of capital-l literature. I am convinced that this would be the best possible outcome of the curricular wars, both for the survival of those older works that once formed the core of the academic canon and for the work of living writers, which has generally either been considered unworthy of attention at all or otherwise made the objects of the most politicized, coarsest forms of analysis. Freed from the pomposities and prejudices of the literature professors, perhaps the books that have been drained of interest to all but those who want to believe in Literature can find the audience they still deserve, and, more importantly, perhaps even  small-l literature might continue to be a meaningful term, especially if it were used to describe a continuum of “literary” activity that, if anything, privileged contemporary writers whose work is able to extend and replenish the genres comprising what can truthfully be called an enduring tradition of imaginative writing.

Cutting the ties that have kept literature bound to the academy could in addition have the salutary effect of reviving literary criticism as part of the potential renewal of an authentic literary culture apart from the enervating influence of the academic critics. While some may question whether the United States has ever had, or ever really could have, a literary culture worthy of the designation, certainly the invention of Literature has proved to be at best a synthetic substitute. One could easily conclude from the lively coverage of the literary scene by web-zines like Salon, from the multitude of other literary e-zines publishing book reviews and critical commentary, as well as original creative work, from the proliferation across the country of book discussion groups, that an interest in small-l literature persists among non-academic readers, that were the remaining superstructure supporting academic Literature to collapse entirely from its own dead weight (there are reasons to believe this is happening—see Robert Scholes’s The Rise and Fall of English), a more finely-tuned, less grandiose kind of literary criticism would soon enough emerge from its ruins. Such criticism might even be practiced by many of the would-be critics who currently regard academe as the only plausible option for anyone who takes literature seriously; professional without being professionalized, this sort of criticism would ideally combine an immediacy of response not often to be found in even the best academic criticism with an ability, developed through simple attentiveness, to contextualize and to read closely, as surely any seriously conceived and executed attempt at literary art deserves.

It is certainly possible, of course, that nothing like what I am describing here will ever come to pass. Capital-l literature will continue, in however debased and beleaguereda form, as the self-claimed domain of academic “experts,” and non-academic criticism will remain a scattershot affair, confined to routine book reviews in the usual periodicals, at best to the websites and journals most committed to the informed discussion of new writing. It is even possible that what we now call literature will simply vanish into the virtual ether of cyberspace, recognized only as an artifact of intellectual history, if at all.

Such a fate seems to me almost inevitable, in fact, if those who retain an interest in the possibilities of literature (small-l) hold on to the assumption that the responsibility for ensuring its survival lies with the academy. The folly of this assumption cannot now be more apparent. Fine poems and novels are still being written, and we can only hope they never become Literature.