The Reading Experience

Some Other Kind of Structure

According to the Financial Times, a study published in Psychological Science concludes that an encounter with surrealistic art "enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions."

The idea is that when you’re exposed to a meaning threat - something that fundamentally does not make sense - your brain is going to respond by looking for some other kind of structure within your environment.

It would seem that this study indicates that "difficult" art, the kind of art that defies the audiences expectations of coherence--most immediately a coherence between the world depicted in the work and the audience's conception of the "real world"--actually motivates viewers and readers to try and make sense of it by finding alternative "structures." With surrealism this involves, presumably, finding a way to integrate a surrealistic presentation with one's prior conceptions of the way things are: surrealism becomes an alternative vision of the world, one that breaks from the "normal" perceptions most of us share only to portray that world just as truthfully if more obliquely. One rescues representation in surrealist art by acknowledging the challenge to it.

But "difficulty" in art and literature can manifest itself in other ways as well, on a formal and stylistic level that doesn't necessarily, or doesn't directly, result in a patently distorted view of the world. I believe that innovative, adventurous fiction of this kind can provoke the same kind of response in readers as that described in the PS study. In this case, the reader is asked to suspend the "normal" expectations one might have of fiction--which might be brought together through the notion of "transparency," transparency of language, character, event, setting, etc.--and to make new sense of the challenges to literary experience the work's deviations represent. Ideally, the reader is asked to scrutinze his/her assumptions and to conclude that perhaps the innovative device or practice might make its own kind of sense as a variation on established devices and practices. The reader will have "learned" that fiction might come in multiple forms and various styles, that where the art of fiction is concerned there is no normal.

However, the obstacle to enhancing the "cognitive mechanisms" involved in the reading of fiction is not most readers' inability to make this kind of adjustment but their reluctance to give unconventional fiction a chance to engage their attention in the first place. If they don't simply refuse to countenance such fiction at all, they approach it with the kind of desire for "identification" that makes any departure from the comfortable and familiar difficult if not unacceptable. I am not one to recommend a given work of fiction on the grounds that readers might "learn something" from it, but learning how to read more expansively can't be the least timeworthy use one could make of a book.

Self-Protection

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

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

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

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

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

The post continues:

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

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

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

"So Set Against the Notion of Convention That I Should Attack It"

I enjoy reading the novels of Percival Everett, but ultimately they participate in the form "novel" primarily as extensions of the much older mode of satire, which requires no particular form or genre for its more general task of comic deflation. Satire targets behaviors and attitudes that are implicitly marked as so unacceptable or pompous they are deserving of the deflating mockery satire provides. The essentially corrective message of satire--this behavior needs to be eradicated or changed--thus always takes precedence over the purely formal and aesthetic niceties over which some other practitioners of the form at hand often dwell, even when the satirist him/herself might be taking extreme liberties with form and style.

Everett certainly does take liberties with form in his novels, and they are liberties frequently accomplished to hilarious effect. However, these efforts seem mostly directed toward simply dismantling the novel as "form", without much interest in aesthetically reconstituting the text, Everett's text, as at least a temporary alternative to established forms, as a new iteration of form in fiction. The first target of Everett's satire is the writing of fiction itself, which is portrayed implicitly as an enterprise saturated in pretension and moribund assumptions. Although intellectual and academic fraud and pretension in general, as well as the cultural frauds historically perpetuated by white American institutions, are the ultimate objects of satire in most of Everett's fiction, the force of this satire is so intense and thoroughgoing it seems irresitably to extend to the literary/philosophical underpinnings of fiction as an "institution" of intellectual practice.

Glyph (1999) well illustrates both the pleasures and the limitations of Everett's approach. It has a typically outrageous premise: a baby is born with the ability to read and to think (although not to speak) at a near-genuis level. When this is discovered, the baby is abducted from his parents (an artist mother whom the baby rather likes and a clueless literary academic he decidedly doesn't) by a series of academics, scientists, and government goons, all of whom want to harness the infant prodigy to their own personal and professional agendas. Along the way, all of these character types are thoroughly mocked, shown to be concerned only with their own personal and professional aggrandizement. But at the same time the baby, Ralph, is also inclined toward his own kind of self-absorption and intellectual pretension:

. . .My dreams became so transparent that they became devoid of meaning. Jung would have been proud of me. Freud would have gone to sleep during our sessions. My dreams became an exercise in boredom, though I was actually impressed with my imagination and its ability to create so many characters, even if they were stock and repetitive. I thought I knew how it felt to be Louis L'Amour or James Michener or even Dickens.

Ironically, the actuality of my having subverted my dreaming practice made the fact of my dreaming of great interest. I wondered what indeed it meant about me that I was so set against the notion of convention that I should attack it. So, I replaced the dream with the novel, stripping the stories of my dreams of any real meaning, but causing the form of them to mean everything.

Later in the novel, we are presented with "Ralph's Theory of Fictive Space," a long list of propositions that as they accumulate become more and more nonsensical:

B._E) Story is self-determining and therefore conceptually finite, but fictive space has no boundaries and only boundaries.

B._F) The world, story and, by extension, fictive space make up reality.

B._FA) Realities are dependent on fictive space.

B._FB) Fictive space contains, controls, and contributes truth in reality.

B.A) A story cannot be seen at once.

Such passages are very funny, but not only do they make it difficult to muster up much sympathy for Ralph as the novel's protagonist, they work to extend Glyph's mockery to itself as a text, as one struggles to discern how Ralph's various assertions and pronouncements relate to the text we are reading, only to decide that this very struggle is one of the novel's satirical targets.

To some extent, Everett's practice in a work like Glyph is an illustration of M.M. Bakhtin's concept of the "carnivalesque," in which an attitude of "radical skepticism" makes it impossible for anything to be taken seriously. But Bakhtin makes a distinction between carnivalesque comedy and satire--the latter takes nothing seriously except its own, its author's, authority, which is invoked to ridicule that which requires amelioration. My sense of Everett's fiction is that finally it does not fully relinquish that authority, that its attack on literary processes and pretensions seeks to evade comedic reduction where the work of Percival Everett is concerned. That Everett, or the text at hand, at least, depicts the assumptions behind literary representation to be risible does not mean that Everett's text is also risible. The alternative to "causing the form of [novels] to mean everything" is causing Everett's satire of it to "mean" at least something.

The essentially satiric character of Everett's fiction is even more pronounced in his latest novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier. This novel is much less metafictional than Glyph or Erasure, its most outrageous gesture in this direction being the introduction of a characer named "Percival Everett," although this Percival Everett is an Atlanta-based professor teaching a course in the "Philosophy of Nonsense." As such, he is in the line of academic frauds to be found in his namesake's fiction, but he doesn't really act as a focus of satiric attention on literary creation per se. His role instead is as a kind of advisor--whose advice is mostly nonsensical, of course--to the novel's protagonist, Not Sidney Poitier. The novel chronicles Not Sidney's travails as he attempts to find his place in the world after inheriting a fortune from his mother, who made a lucky investment in the Turner Broadcasting System just before it rose to prominence, along with its founder, Ted Turner.

The novel gets most of its laughs, such as they are, from Not Sidney's rather loopy conversations with Ted Turner, as well a series of episodes in which Not Sidney finds himself, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in reality, acting out the scenarios of Sidney Poitier movies such as The Defiant Ones, Buck and the Preacher, and, ultimately, In the Heat of the Night. Unfortunately, as a character Ted Turner falls flat, the satirical intent motivating his portrayal being rather fuzzy at best. The parodies of the Poitier movies come off rather better, although ultimately they seem rather obvious in their satirical ambition to illustrate that the obstacles to civil respect and equality encountered by Sidney Poitier's characters in these "social problem" films are still with us these many years later. And this ambition seems to be the novel's primary motivating force, even if it is leavened with the sort of "nonsense" one expects from both Percival Everett and "Percival Everett."

Everett is certainly no ordinary satirst, but I Am Not Sidney Poitier reveals him as primarily a satirical writer. Its weaknesses, which perhaps result from settling for a more straightforward kind of satire, make one hope for more of the conceptually warped, metafictionally adventurous satire found in novels like Glyph and Erasure. Everett's deformations of form add an element of bracing insolence to satire that in I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a little too earnest.

Kerouac the Writer

When I read On the Road for the first time, I didn't care for it much. I didn't exactly hate it, but I was disappointed by it. I had not at that time developed the suspicion of writers and novels alleged to be "saying something" that I now have, but I do recall being puzzled by the reputation--conveyed to me by fellow graduate students, I must say--this novel had of being a radical statement of postwar restlessness, or disaffected youth, or spiritual exhaltation, or whatever other urgent "content" On the Road was supposed to offer. I couldn't find any statements at all in it, although the characters certainly seemed restless, occasionally expressed disaffection (but not with the government or what could be conveniently labeled "the culture"), and at times appeared to be in a state of exhaltation (frequently drug- or alcohol-induced, but not always). The novels' style, as well, though obviously unconventional, did not at the time fulfill my expectations of what a transgressive style might accomplish.

In short, On the Road seemed rather tame to me, its rebellion more ingenuously earnest than hard-edged, and I read no further Kerouac for many years. Not too long ago, I decided to try reading On the Road again, expecting that I would quickly enough find it the same tepid experience as the first time around, that I would in fact probably stop reading it fairly early on and consign Kerouac permanently to the category of literary disappointments. However, although I can't say I immediately became entranced by it, I did not stop reading it. I did almost immediately judge the novel's protagonist, Sal Paradise, to be a more interesting character than I had previously, when he seemed to be mostly a cipher. Now I saw his restlessness as a genuine craving for experience, not affectation or pretense. At the same time, I found Dean Moriarty a less annoying character than I had the first time around, although I still wouldn't identify his appearances in the novel as necessarily among its highlights. I suspect that the reputation as an "outlaw" text to which I responded impatiently in my initial reading of On the Road, originates in an over-identification with Moriarty, who some readers took to be the novel's most important character. I think Sal Paradise is obviously the main character, and while Moriarty has his role to play in the intensification of Sal Paradise's immersion in experience, he does still too often come off as affected and pretentious, and future critics and scholars would do the novel a service by focusing more on the way his character reinforces the novel's formal and stylistic ambitions and less on his dubious deeds and spurious words of wisdom.

It was precisely the formal and stylistic qualities of On the Road that I eventually found myself appreciating more charitably on this second read. I think I originally experienced On the Road as essentially formless, even though I understood it was very loosely structured as a "picaresqe" narrative ("very loosely" being the characteristic I noticed most). What now seems clearer to me is the strategy by which Kerouac both enlists the picaresque strategy--which is often thought of as a kind of denial of form, although it really isn't--and fractures it even further to convey an impression of "spontaneous" action that the novel merely chronicles. On the Road invokes the journey motif associated with picaresque, but where most classic picaresque narratives present the journey as a serial, unbroken series of episodes that lead directly to journey's end, On the Road fragments the journey, leaves it off only to pick it up again, the episodes united only by the participation of Sal Paradise, who meets up with and then departs from the various characters who contribute to his effort of "going West to see the country," as he puts it in the novel's first paragraph. The novel thus can be taken as an experiment with the picaresque form specifically, but also as an effective application of "form" more generally.

I never really agreed with the criticism that as a stylist Kerouac at best exhibits a "plain" style or that, at worst, in his dependence on the declarative mode his is essentially a style without style. He does frequently employ the declarative mode, but this approach also prompts Kerouac to long, cumulative sentences that invoke a kind of lyricism:

In Newburgh it had stopped raining. I walked down to the river, and I had to ride back to New York in a bus coming back from a weekend in the mountains--chatter-chatter, blah-blah, and me swearing for all the time and the money I'd wasted, and telling myself, I wanted to go west and here I've been all day and into the night going up and down, north and south, like something that can't get started. And I swore I'd be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn't give a damn, just as long as I'd be in Chicago tomorrow.

It's true that Kerouac's prose does not much incorporate traditional figurative language--more of which may be what I was looking for in my initial reading of On The Road--but sentence length and structure are as much a part of "style" as metaphor or simile, and Kerouac's style is not just dedicated to moving the story along. This passage doesn't so much move forward as it does spin in circles once the essential action--getting on the bus--is established. It might seem that Sal Paradise is impatient to get beyond the usual recording of scene--"chatter-chatter, blah-blah"--but Kerouac uses that impatience to motivate Sal's creation of an alternative way of writing that mosty avoids fancy phrasing and obligatory dialogue (although Kerouac's novels have plenty of dialogue--it's just not of the ornamental variety) without sacrificing an attention to language to the exigencies of plot. An examination of a passage such as this one also shows that Kerouac was not oblivious to the effects of pace, rhythm, and variety: the short first sentence of the paragraph sets up the expansive second sentence, which is followed by the still-lengthy but more an afterthought final sentence.

Kerouac famously described his method of composition as "spontaneous prose," designed to mimic the spontaneity of jazz musicians. I take Kerouac to be sincere in his desciption of the aims and nature of this method, and it seems to capture the real achievement of Kerouac's fiction. It is dangerous to impute "development" in Kerouac's work, since the publication dates and the dates of composition of his books are so much at variance. (On the Road was written in the late 40s, while the published follow-up, The Dharma Bums, was written in 1957, after many of the subsequently published novels.) However, it does seem to me that in reading Kerouac's novels in the order of their publication it is in The Subterraneans (published 1958) that we really see a more radical version of spontaneous prose. We can see it as early as the novel's second paragraph:

. . .I was coming down the street with Larry O'Hara old drinking buddy of mine from all the times in San Francisco in my long and nervous and mad careers I've gotten drunk and in fact cadged drinks off friends with such "genial" regularity nobody really cared to notice or announce that I am developing or was developing, in my youth, such bad freeloading habits though of course they did not notice but liked me and as Sam said "Everybody comes to you for your gasoline boy, that's some filling station you got there" or say words to that effect--old Larry O'Hara always nice to me, a crazy Irish young businessman of San Francisco with Balzacian backroom in his bookstore where they'd smoke tea and talk of the old days of the great Basie band or the days of the great Chu Berry--of whom more anon since she got involved with him too as she had to get involved with everyone because of knowing me who am nervous and many leveled and not in the least one-souled--not a piece of my pain has showed yet--or suffering--Angels, bear with me, I'm not even looking at the page but straight ahead into the sadglint of my wallroom and at a Sarah Vaughan Gerry Mulligan KROW show on the desk in the form of a radio, in other words, they were sitting on the fender of the car in front of the Black Mask bar on Montgomery Street, Julien Alexander the Christlike unshaved thin youthful quiet strange almost as you or as Adam might say apocalyptic angel or saint of the subterraneans certainly star (now), and she, Mardou Fox, whose face when I first saw it in Dante's bar around the corner made me think, "By God, I've got to get involved with that little woman" and maybe too because she was Negro. . . .

The free-flowing disregard for sentence boundaries is very pronounced here, but this of course does not mean the passage lacks all structure or does not bear up under analysis. The fused clauses and phrases set up their own kind of rhythm, which can be heard if one reads the passage with care. The first three lines encourage us to read without pausing but the forced pause created by the quotation marks around "genial" allow us to catch our breath before moving on through the next two lines and arriving at the inserted nonrestrictive "in my youth." Since Kerouac otherwise so insistently abandons the comma in such a passage, we must assume that the commas here are quite intentional, a way of creating musical effect, a staccato-like phrase that lead to the different kind of variation provided by the quoted words from "Sam." Similar effects are created in the rest of the passage through the use of dashes, which also introduces digressions that reinforce the analogy with jazz improvisation, and additional inserted commas, parentheses, and quotation.

This stylistic strategy seems to me a genuine contribution to literary stylistics specifically and to American literature more generally. It also makes The Subterrraneans itself an important text both in postwar American fiction and American literature as a whole. Combined with the novel's relative brevity (in my copy, 111 pages), the "bop prosody" of The Subterraneans makes it a work at least as close to poetry as to "fiction" equated in the modern era with "storytelling," in which "style" is often enough just another element of "craft" when it isn't disregarded altogether. The Subterraneans is probably just as revelatory of the "underground" culture of the 1950s as anything else written during the era, but it is less likely to be regarded as a work whose documentary value exceeds its literary merit. On the Road will no doubt continue to be taken as Kerouac's signature work, but I now think The Subterraneans will be more highly regarded by future readers as an innovative work of prose.

The criticism frequently leveled at The Subterraneans, that it offers, through the character of Mardou Fox, a severly limited portrayal both of women and African-Americans will probably linger into the future as well, but while it is true enough that the novel's narrator, Leo Percepied, has a view of women and African-Americans constricted by his background and the era in which he lives, his affair with Mardou is inextricably linked to his desire for experience (a trait he shares with all of Kerouac's protagonists), which in this novel means an affinity with the "subterraneans" of the title and an immediate curiosity about Mardou, who most strongly evokes the "Other" for Percepied. The limitations of Percepied's assumptions about gender or race have to be balanced against his acceptance of a way of life not much in accord with the cultural norms his background and the era would have him affirm. I think most readers are/will be able to strike this balance.

One could argue that Mardou isn't really much developed as a character at all, as neither are any of the other characters in this novel, even, to some extent, Percepied. Our sense of knowing them only incompletely, however, is probably an unavoidable consequence of Kerouac's method in The Subterraneans. It is a novel less concerned with the delineation of character than with it narrator's response to his experience and its delineation in language.

Our Stories

If we take The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House (Tin House Books) to be a representative gathering of critical wisdom from current American writers, what does it ultimately tell us about these writers' understanding of the purpose of fiction, their widely-shared assumptions? 

Unfortunately, in my view it tells us that their understanding of fiction's purposes is very limited indeed, their assumptions about its possibilties, its potential to surprise and to creatively challenge established conventions, very narrow and constricted. Almost none of the essays included in the volume even suggest that fiction ought to be challenging in this way, and some even explicitly express impatience with adventurous, unconventional fiction. Most of the essays--all of them originally delivered at Tin House's Summer Writers Workshop--discuss works of fiction as if they were products to be assembled from blueprints exploiting familiar devices, the writing of fiction as adherence to certain fundamental truths universally acknowledged.

Perhaps this is to be expected in a book presenting "craft essays." A "writers workshop" is centrally focused on "craft" as an element of fiction writing that can be taught (or at least talked about), and as working writers those participating in the workshop presumably do have advice to dispense at the level of craft. Perhaps it is too much to expect that writers themselves would feel comfortable emphasizing "art " over craft, since arguably the best most of them can do is hope that careful attention to craft will ultimately give rise to art. Distinguishing what is successfully artistic, which is a function of the experience of reading fiction, from the mere application of craft is the critic's job, not the writer's.

Perhaps. But in publishing a book like The Writer's Notebook, Tin House is putting its imprimatur on the "craft" approach, and one might presume that those writers who heed the kind of advice dispensed in the book might ultimately be producing the kind of work that could find its way into print in this journal. That this work would be safe, formally "sound" and stylistically "fine," would only conform to the mission of journals like Tin House, which, as far as I can tell, is to a) reinforce the existing structure of academic writing programs and workshops, providing their graduates with a place to publish, and b) associate themselves as much as possible with "quality" writing, which can't be just anything and everything and thus needs to be narrowed down to its embodiment in "craft," the boundaries of which are laid down in The Writer's Notebook.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Tin House or other high-profile literary magazines are actively hostile to adventurous or experimental fiction (sometimes an unconventional story or two can be squeezed into the mix), but the discussions of the nature of fiction and the writing of fiction in The Writer's Notebook assume a form that is relatively fixed, comprising such staple elements as "dialogue," "scene," and "character motivation," a practice that is subject to improvement through increased skill with these tools. Such a conception of fiction as a handy collection of pre-approved devices doesn't much encourage departures from standard practice or questioning of the place of these devices in composing works of fiction. (Why, for example, is "dialogue" to be expected in stories or novels? Shouldn't this be something that might be useful in some circumstances, when contributing to an overall aesthetic effect, rather than a convention all fiction must "get to" at some point?) It shouldn't be surprising that most issues of Tin House don't feature short stories that seem to be the result of such questioning of the short story as a stable, identifiable thing reproducible through the application of "craft."

Thus Tom Grimes informs us that "our stories are amorphous until we discover how time controls them. Every great story contains a 'clock,' an intrinsic timekeeper." "Determine whether or not your story has a 'clock,'" he concludes. "It can be a day, a week, a month, a season, etctera, but the story has to have it." If a story "has to have" a clock, then should one discover one's story doesn't really seem to depend much on timekeeping, on the sort of narrative "development" the passage of time provides, then apparently one doesn't really have a story at all. This seems a reductively literal insistence on "story" as the sine qua non of short fiction, when of course much modern/postmodern fiction has explicitly worked to undermine "story" as the essence of fiction. Not many of Donald Barthelme's stories, for example would be able to pass the "clock" test administered by Grimes. They're much too "amorphous."

Anna Keesey tells us that a "scene" is "fiction's fundamental unit." "Part of what makes fiction writing so difficult," she claims, is that "the writer must decide what's going to happen, to whom, and why, but is simultaneously loaded up with another set of decisons: who'll be telling the story, in what order, with what level of detail and at what speed of revelation." Here again is a recipe for conventionality in fiction, by which "story," ("what's going to happen") takes precedence and all of the other "decisions"--themselves highly conventional and formulaic--are made as ornamental on the primary illusion of narrative immediacy. "We see the action occur; we feel the time pass," as Keesey puts it later in the essay. Keesey acknowledges that writers like Woolf and Proust slow down the unfolding of scene--which Keesey calls "infolding"--but she can't see this as an implicit repudiation of "scene" except in its most perfunctory role as a framing device. She chooses instead to regard it as just an indication that scene "is superbly elastic." Why not just say that in some fiction "scene" is as irrelevant as "clock time"?

Even when otherwise acknoweldging the limitations of one or another conventional approach, as in Keesey's essay or Aimee Bender's essay on "character motivation," the writers can't seem to give up on the assumptions giving rise to the approach. Bender cautions against making "motivation" explicitly clear. Instead, she writes, it's acceptable "not really to know what's going on with your characters and to let the writing be a process of discovering that." This sort of "complexity" is truer to human psychology, after all. But what if "motivation" never becomes clear, or is not even necessary? What if "psychology" itself is irrelevant to a particular's writer's concerns? One gets the sense that this would not be acceptable, since it jettisons one of the underlying assumptions of mainstream literary fiction--it's all about "understanding" character--that supports all of the accompanying assumptions about "craft."

The only two essays in The Writer's Notebook that really do depart from conventional thinking, the only two essays that finally are about the art of fiction, are Lucy Corin's "Material" and D.A. Powell's "(Mis)Adventures in Poetry." Corin specifically abjures the impulse to "find the form to 'suit' your content, your material." Instead, she describes her own practice of regarding words as her "material," from which come other words that finally cohere into form. Her advice to writers: "you should look at the material you produce to find your material." This can include the visual arrangement of the words on the page, and Corin spends much of her essay comparing different kinds of arrangements of "material." The essay undermines much of the other "advice" to be found in The Writer's Notebook and is really the only essay in this book that makes it worth having. Powell posits that in poetry "often it's the inexact, the awful, the mistaken linguistic turn that manages to say the right thing because it unmoors us from our perceived relationship to the subject about which we're trying to write." "The subjects of poetry are always the same," he concludes, "so lend your ear to the language instead." "Dare to say the unsayable in a new way." If only as many fiction writers could find a way to heed this advice as, in my opinion, many poets already do.

Unfortunately, readers of The Writer's Notebook won't get exposed to much discussion of language as the fundamental "unit" of fiction. They'll mostly discover essays that invite the writer to say the same old things, the eminently sayable, in the same old ways, but to think of this as "craft."

The Family Recipe

The ingredients for an "award-worthy Canadian novel."

Transforming Pencil Lead to Gold

I find Ron Rosenbaum's response to his perusal of the Nabokov Original of Laura manuscript pretty creepy.

First there's the general hyperactivity and indecisiveness of his behavior leading up to the revelation that this manuscript existed. He apparently began lobbying Dmitri Nabokov to decide what to do with the manuscript several years ago, but the best he could do in suggesting a course of action was to proclaim "Part of me desperately wants to read Laura. But I have a superstitious dread of violating V.N.'s wishes." Then he wrote a piece describing what he could discern of the manuscript, which surely served to persuade most Nabokov readers they should want to read it, only to eventually conclude the manuscript should probably be destroyed after all. Now he's been given access to the manuscript before its scheduled publication, the encounter with which he smarmily describes as inducing "a numinous aura. . .as if it were a newly discovered Dead Sea Scroll."

The only real reason anyone should want to read this manuscript Rosenbaum dismisses. He tells us that The Original of Laura "might contain a clue or clues, a code, for all we knew, that would offer new perspective on the often cryptic prose of past Nabokov masterpieces," only to declare that this isn't his interest in the book. One doesn't have to think that this manuscript might provide "clues" or "code" to anticipate it might shed some light on Nabokov's work as a whole, might persuade us to read that work just slightly differently, perhaps more aptly. But Rosenbaum is interested in "clues," it's just that they're clues "about the nature of a true object of wonder, mystery and intricacy: the mind of Vladimir Nabokov, perhaps seen for the first time in the process of creation, giving us a glimpse of the alchemy with which he transformed pencil lead to gold."

This is a peculiar approach to the work of fiction writers, as if the writer's brain residue has somehow been left on his words. It expresses more interest in the "process of creation" than the creation itself. I suppose that Rosenbaum is entitled to find the "alchemy" of process a more pertinent subject than actual art (although I myself have never understood this preoccupation with what pyschologically enables the artistic or literary work, rather than the work, the art object), but in this case it seems especially misguided, since Nabokov is a writer of such formal and stylistic distinction and distinctiveness. Why would we be interested in the "mind" of a writer whose language and formal devices on the page--and, indeed, there is nothing else on the page than these things--are so thoroughly the source of his appeal? Rosenbaum professes his overwhelming admiration of Nabokov the writer, but his eagerness to inspect The Original of Laura doesn't seem much motivated by an interest in what Nabokov wrote.

Rosenbaum makes this more or less plain when he suggests that "Encrypted within [Nabokov's] words, encoded indecipherably, ambiguously, is the equivalent of the secret of lightning. Something akin to the secret code of higher human consciousness, the DNA, the genome of genius." I have difficulty believing Nabokov himself would have had much patience with this sort of pomposity. He made fun, in his work, of the notion of "codes" ("Signs and Symbols," Pale Fire) and he was always critical of interpretation that wandered outside the text itself, into biography or psychology or "intention." "Higher human consciousness" was not the subject of Nabokov's books, encrypted or not. The manipulation of language in aesthetically pleasing ways was his concern.

Ultimately Rosenbaum claims to have learned through his encounter with Nabokov's manuscript that, through the evidence of revision, it demonstrates that "even the greatest of geniuses. . .were not superhuman; they live in the same world of error and doubt that the rest of us inhabit. The fact that they think they've made "mistakes" makes their work even more perfect than it would be if they never blotted a line or scratched out a word." This is both staggeringly trite and finally incoherent. The only people who doubt whether great writers "live in the same world of error and doubt that the rest of us inhabit" are those who posit the existence of superhuman genius ("the secret of lightning") in the first place. I'm pretty certain most of us already know that no one is immune from mistake, so why the existence of second thoughts makes a writer's work more "perfect" is perfectly obscure.

But what Rosenbaum seems to have taken away most from his encounter with The Original of Laura is that on page xix of the book's front matter Dmitri Nabokov thanks. . .Ron Rosenbaum. This is probably the creepiest part of Rosenbaum's essay, as he goes all gushy about the role he believes he played in bringing The Original of Laura to light. Despite the fact that he mostly dithered about it and used the occasion largely to draw attention to himself and his own dithering. The whole episode makes me wish Vladimir Nabokov had burned the manuscript himself so we would have been spared the ruminations of Ron Rosenbaum

OCD

I have to agree with Edmond Caldwell:

Austerlitz and 2666 are good books brought to us in a way that sucks the oxygen out of the type of atmosphere in which good books might be much more broadly produced, understood, and enjoyed. . .To come up with Best Books lists in this environment is little more than an exercise in pecking the least maggoty bits from carrion.

But the listing and ranking game goes on – and on and on – as if all sectors of society were afflicted with a kind of mass obsessive-compulsive disorder or species of autism. . . .

Andrew Seal objects:

I am not convinced that [Caldwell's] attempt to move the conversation to a question of who owns the means of literary production does anything more than nudge us toward a severe reification of outsiderness, an anti-brand mandarinism. His approach, in fact, greatly simplifies the whole question of distinction (which he gets to later): it just makes that-which-cannot-be-corporatized into a new fetish object.

This might be a valid objection if the alternative to the kind of list-making employed at The Millions was simply to make another list from which books published by the mainstream corporate publishers were excluded. This would only reproduce wittingly what Millions-type lists do unwittingly, which is to assume that anything remotely useful can be accomplished by making lists and choosing up sides. In the real literary world in which live, the only honest course of action is to refuse to join in on list-making in the first place, which would at the least be an acknowledgement that we can't make such simplified judgments about current or recent work given the pre-chosen samples which mainstream publishing makes available.

 

 

 

Teaching the Book

Miriam Burstein correctly notes that to the literary historian "aesthetic objections are neither here nor there" if a particular text has proven to be influential on subsequent writers. Whether that text might be "overrated" in purely aesthetic--or, for that matter, any other--grounds is irrelevant if an accurate account of genre or period is your concern or if looking at the broad sweep of literary history is of more immediate importance than the aesthetic credibility of a single work.

However, Miriam expresses her concerns about the relevance of "aesthetic objections" in the context of pedagogical practice, of the way in which literature is taught in academic courses: "I still have to teach the book (if it's in my field, anyway)," she writes, "whether or not I want to throw it into the nearest recycling bin." Balancing historical and aesthetic issues is "the great challenge of developing a survey course."

I don't disagree with anything Miriam says here, but what she says does underscore the extent to which the prerogatives of academe, of instruction more broadly, dominate our view of "literary history," perhaps in some cases even shape the way literary history is brought into being in the first place. The purpose for which surely all novelists or poets want their work to be received--to provide aesthetic pleasure, to entertain and provoke--is displaced for the academic critic by the need to chronicle, categorize, and contextualize. Indeed, as Miriam herself concedes, "from the POV of literary history, it's quite possible to 'overrate' a novel's importance (the extent to which it attracted imitators, was genre-changing or -originating, etc.) by pointing to its aesthetic superiority."

As a move made as a reponse to the perceived requirements of a "field," such overrating makes sense. But if the requirements boil down to a novel's capacity to spawn imitators or alter genre conventions, then plenty of aesthetically superior works are going to be excluded from survey courses. Tracking the development of formulas and genre-bending (not breaking) becomes the "subject" of literature courses and scholarship, and, although this approach does not displace actual literature from literary study as directly and thoroughly as does the focus on theory or cultural study, it does still remove the experience of literature--the opportunity to read the most potentially rewarding works of fiction and poetry--from the center of attention. From the perspective of a "literary history" by which such history makes us aware of the most rewarding works it has produced, this makes less sense.

But then the attempt to make literary study a way of invoking this understanding of literary history has already failed, anyway, as William M. Chace's recent article in The American Scholar attests. It probably deserved to fail, since the emphasis on deep reading experience was never really compatible with the accompanying belief held by many older-style literary humanists that, as Chace puts it, "this discipline had certain borders and limitations and that there were essential things to know, to preserve, and to pass on." Either reading great works is a series of singular experiences during which "essential things" are always open to question or it is part of a pre-established curriculum to be preserved and passed on. It is either the opportunity to find and follow one's own reading bliss or it is done within the context of a "field" to be demarcated. Since in each case the latter is much easier to accomplish than the former in an academic setting--to even justify as academic activities--it is unsurprising that determining what are the best books to teach has won out over discovering what are the best books to read.

RIP

A few weeks ago, the literary critic and editor Richard Poirier died, apparently from injuries sustained in a household accident. Since he retired as editor of Raritan in 2001 Poirier's profile in the literary world had naturally diminished, but his passing marks the end of a critical/literary career of great distinction.

Much of the discussion of that career gets focused on his work as Raritan's editor and on his involvement with the Library of America, but it is his literary criticism that will (or should) ultimately be valued most highly. His book A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature is one of the handful of indispensable scholarly studies of American fiction. If you haven't read this book and taken to heart its insights about the way in which American writers have always been preoccupied with the role of style and form in the creation of imaginary worlds (such that it isn't surprising the "postmodern" in fiction is essentially an American phenomenon), you don't really know anything significant about American literature.

The Performing Self, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections, and Poetry and Pragmatism are not far behind in their substantive contributions to an understanding of what is unique about American literature. He wrote in a learned but accessible manner that almost no one in academic criticism any longer bothers to master, and his goal was always to help us become better readers of literature, not to use it to some other, more polemical end or to critically choke it into submission. It is true but also very disheartening to say that literary critics like Richard Poirier likely won't be found in the American academy again.

A Force of Nature

Until now the only Russell Banks novel I had resisted reading was Cloudsplitter--not because of its length (750 pages) but because it belongs to one of my least favorite genres--the historical novel--and because of all Banks's novels it seemed the most committed to simple realism as an aesthetic strategy.

However, Cloudsplitter turned out to be much more interesting than I thought it might be, even if my impression of John Brown, the novel's ostensible protagonist, didn't really change much through reading it. He seemed to me, considered as an historical figure, a pretty one-dimensional character obsessed with religion and what he considered the primary affront to religion in his time, chattel slavery. After reading the novel, he still seems to me a pretty one-dimensional character obsessed with religion, etc. His commtment to the abolition of slavery was all-encompassing, but it amounted to a monomania (certainly the John Brown that emerges from this novel could be described by such a term), and while monomaniacs can be powerful presences in works of fiction--Captain Ahab comes to mind--that power is what makes them memorable, not any complexities of character that might be revealed.

Fortunately, Banks adopts in Cloudsplitter a narrative strategy similar to that which Melville uses in Moby-Dick, a strategy that takes advantage of the overwhelming personality of John Brown to maintain the narrative's dramatic interest but otherwise focuses much of the novel's attention on the charged relationship between Brown and the narrator of Brown's story, his son Owen. As with Ahab and Ishmael, we encounter John Brown through the entranced observations of Owen, and, like Ishmael, Owen is essentially the last man standing (in Ishmael's case, swimming), surviving the raid on Harper's Ferry to, eventually, tell us the tale of what led up to this singular event. Like Moby-Dick, Cloudsplitter filters our perceptions of its main character by presenting us with an account composed by a witness to events, in Owen's case someone with intimate knowledge of the personage involved and himself an important influence on those events, but nevertheless an account the fraught nature of which itself provides at least as much dramatic tension as the actions taken by the character motivating the narrative.

As far as I can tell, not that much is really known about Owen Brown, especially the years he spent after the raid on Harpers Ferry (he died in 1889). This gives Banks the opportunity to in essence create a fictional character to both narrate the novel and play an important role in it, allowing some further latitude in the portrayal of John Brown himself. Banks stays faithful to the known facts about Brown and the public events for which he is known, but of course most of the details about his domestic life (especially that part of it spent in North Elba, New York, the relation of which takes up most of Cloudsplitter) cannot be known, and Banks focuses his view of Brown and his family on and around these domestic episodes or on the trips Owen takes with his father to Boston and to London. These are the sections of the novel in which we most fully get to know both Owen and John Brown, and they are the elements that most fully redeem the book as "fiction." In comparison, the guerilla campaign waged by the Brown clan in Kansas and the attack on Harpers Ferry seem almost tacked-on, the inherent dramatic action of both de-emphasized and deflected, as if the last 200 pages had to be appended in order to certify Cloudsplitter as a proper "historical" novel.

The result, it seems to me, is that Cloudsplitter, despite its taking as its main character a "real" person, is not finally much different from Affliction in its approach to character and narrative. In each instance, the protagonist makes a forceful impression on the reader, but the effect is due to the manner in which the narrator, in each instance a first-person narrator close to the protagonist, renders not just the actions taken by the protagonist but his own anguished efforts to come to terms with those actions and his part in influencing them. While Rolfe Whitehouse has to do more "research" in order to reconstruct the last days of his brother Wade, Owen has to re-engage his own memories in presenting a narrative of his father's life thirty or more years after the experiences related. Both make good-faith efforts to capture these figures as they "really were," but we can only take them, or should only take them, as projections of the narrators' subjective powers of discernment. This does not mean the depiction of such characters is less truthful; it means the truth that does emerge is the truth involved whenever one human being struggles to understand the motives and the acts of another.

In the case of Owen Brown, the truth is that he never really does understand his father, except in the trivial sense that, given John Brown's consistency of thought and belief, he can usually predict what his father might say or do. As Walter Kirn puts it, "To his children, who follow him through frontier America like a band of nomadic Israelites, John Brown is an unmoved mover. His authority is absolute, and sometimes absolutely maddening." John Brown is, for Owen, a force of nature, and, ultimately, there seems little point in doing other than follow him where he will lead (although it is actually Owen who finally convinces his father to begin inflicting violence on those who would oppose him). Kirn suggests that Owen lives in an "existential funk" that arises from the "chronic shame" of never living up to John Brown's ideals, but I'm not sure this is quite right. Owen isn't so much ashamed of his failure to live up to these ideals as he is baffled by his inability to resist the need to act on them despite the fact he doesn't himself fully share them--he doesn't share John Brown's religious convictions at all, in fact. It is Owen's open confession of his bafflement, and his honest account of the way in which it informed his involvement with John Brown's self-declared war on evil, that animates this novel and raises it well above mere documentary-style historical fiction.

In Place of Beauty

Richard Prouty adds to my critique of Roger Scruton:

Scruton is correct in pointing out that the ugly took a qualitatively different form in Modernism, although I disagree with the lesson he draws. For traditional aesthetics, the ugly disrupts the harmony and unity of form; consequently, the ugly may appear, but it has to be subsumed under an overall form to reaffirm the mastery of the artist over his or her material. In Modernism, by contrast, the ugly is no longer something that can be recuperated into formal unity. In the Modernism of Rimbaud, Gottfried Benn, and Beckett the ugly becomes a dynamic principle in place of beauty. The ugly incorporates beauty in the same form-giving processes.

Reading in Time

Jacob Russell wonders why literary criticism approaches literature through spatial metaphors rather than as a temporal process:

There are psalms, at least in Hebrew... where a temporal understanding is essential...that is, a word is used and then repeated in a parallel line in such a way that its given a new definition. Begin the reading (or hearing) of the psalm from the beginning, and you have a revised definition of the key terms... which in turn are revised by the subsequent reading. What we learn along the way changes what we experience. . .

. . .What would it look like... a criticism that read with the discipline of music--reading in time?

Moral Chaos

When reading Roger Scruton, one can always be sure that the ideas and sentiments expressed are being offered with utter sincerity. The extent to which he is willing to defend a view of the world and the place of humans in it that seems not simply conservative but thoroughly antique can be astonishing, but he does defend it, seriously and systematically. As a philosopher, Scruton sticks to the most fundamental questions of social and cultural value, in many instances raising questions long assumed satisfactorily answered and renewing conservative objections to the direction taken by much of modern culture.

Those who might rebut Scruton's case against modern art and popular culture are perhaps tempted to simply dismiss his invocations of such seemingly agreeable concepts as "order" and "beauty" as so much opportunistic cant. This would be a mistake, not merely because Scruton makes his arguments in an intellectually honest way but because the role of order or beauty in art ought not be denied outright. Scruton is not wrong to consider "beauty" a relevant consideration in the assessment of art. He is wrong in his conception of beauty as it manifests itself in works of art.

In a recent essay, "Beauty and Desecration," Scruton asserts that "the sacred task of art. . .is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty." Since the era of modernism, however, deliberate ugliness has usurped the place of beauty and "[a]rt increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes."

Note that is the transgression not of aesthetic standards but of "moral certainties" to which Scruton objects. Scruton rightly notes that in the 20th/21st centuries "expression" has become the underpinning of most movements in and commentary on "new" art, but rather than examine the specifically aesthetic flaws in an approach anchored in "expression," Scruton instead recoils from the moral anarchy unleashed by the modern Romantic rebel: "This emphasis on expression was a legacy of the Romantic movement; but now it was joined by the conviction that the artist is outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it, so that artistic self-expression is at the same time a transgression of ordinary moral norms."

Scruton uses as an example the widespread habit in productions of opera to alter the staging and the dramatic vision to produce a "modernized" version. He cites a particular production of Mozart's The Abduction From the Seraglio set "in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, copulating couples littered the stage, and every opportunity for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. . .The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the scenes of desecration, murder, and narcissistic sex."

Even if we accept that Scruton's description of the staging of this opera is true to its director's intent--and I would guess that many others in the audience that night did not see it in this way--his outrage is directed at its moral implications. It is "an example of something familiar in every aspect of our contemporary culture. It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction." Scruton manages to connect this sort of "re-visioning" in the high arts to the music video, which "is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos."

Scruton cannot appreciate that the operatic production he attended committed an aesthetic offense, not a moral one. I am quite willing to believe that those responsible for it thought it a clever idea to "set the opera in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes," but ultimately this is just an aesthetically vacuous attempt to "update" Mozart, to run roughshod over Mozart's original vision of his opera and establish their own overwhelmingly lame one in its place. It is a practice to be found not only in opera but in theater in general, whereby directors and producers with the aesthetic sensibilities of lizards attempt to keep the great works "relevant." One could, I suppose, call this artistic cluelessness a "moral" problem, but most of what Scruton sees as the unleashing of "moral chaos" is finally just the consequence of the aesthetic incompetence of some those entrused with the job of re-presenting the theatrical art of the past.

I suspect that Scruton does not want to examine the art he despises for its specific aesthetic failings because the very introduction of the "aesthetic" leads for him to the moral decadence he fears. "Beauty" is not to be found in the creations of artists separated from the moral universe to which they must conform:

We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.

In this view, beaty is not even a "creation" of artists. It is a discovery by artists of "harmony," of the "order" that is "already" there "in our perceptions." Artists, such as the great landscape painters, are, if they are to be artists at all, "devoted to moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things."

This harmony and order--a moralized nature--is what Scruton means by the "sacred," the capturing of which is the duty of artists. Modern art is engaged in desecration--the inversion of the sacred. In suggesting that human beings are other than "at home in the world" or that the world itself is not always "fit," modern artists mock and undermine the moral order that art should be celebrating and supporting. It is time, according to Scruton, to recover the sacred, "to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized."

Scruton's is an entirely coherent argument if you accept the underlying world view according to which the role of art is to "affirm" the deep, if not always completely visible, truth in "the scheme of things" that manifests itself in beauty. If you believe, however, that the world at times betrays an order that isn't necessarily beneficent, or that as Scruton puts it in his repugnance at another kind of "truthful" art, a human being can be reduced by life to "a lump of suffering flesh made pitiful, helpless, and disgusting," you might find Scruton's "truth" to be partial indeed. You might, in fact, find it a delusion and the idea that a great artist can't redeem "suffering flesh made pitiful" by an act of imagination (or, as Susan Sontag would have it, "will") anything but an affirmation of life.

Complaining About Your Colleagues and Administrators

From the weblog Wynken de Worde:

. . .when I hosted the early modern Carnivalesque a few months back, and was trolling through the blogosphere looking for posts to include, I began to realize what I had previously been reluctant to conclude: blogs on early modern literature that meet these criteria seem to be few and far between. I came across a bunch of history blogs, and lots of medieval blogs, and oh-so-many blogs about academic life. But where was the blogger writing about teaching Paradise Lost? The excitement of Jacobean revenge tragedies? The struggle to recover early modern women's writing? The costs of the pressure to study Shakespeare over almost all other early modern English writers?. . .

. . .Forget writing about the horrors of your graduate exams or complaining about your colleagues and administrators. Don't write about your research in terms that only other specialists can understand. Push your boundaries beyond pictures of your pets and garden and latest vacation. Tell me about the research and teaching that excites you. Tell me about the latest book that you read. Tell me something that will teach me something new and make me think about something differently. . . .

It seems to me that Sarah Werner's words apply equally to scholars in all academic disciplines. If you have a blog, use it for something constructive. Like advancing the discussion of the literature you're supposedly studying.

Will in the World

At the center of Susan Sontag's discussion of style in "On Style" is her emphasis on the role of "will" in the creation and reception of art: 

Perhaps the best way of clarifying the nature of our experience of works of art, and the relation between art and the rest of human feeling and doing, is to invoke the notion of will. It is a useful notion beacuse will is not just a particular posture of consciousness, energized consciousness. It is also an attitude toward the world, of a subject toward the world.

The complex kind of willing that is embodied, and communicated, in a work of art both abolishes the world and encounters it in an extraordinarily intense and specialized way. This double aspect of the will in art is succinctly expressed by [Raymond] Bayer when he says: "Each work of art gives us the schematized and disengaged memory of a volition." Insofar as it schematized, disengaged, a memory, the willing involved in art sets itself at a distance from the world. . . .

Art must distance itself from the world in order to become visible as art in the first place. It comes into being as a version of the world, as an aesthetic reproduction, and for this to be accomplished as thoroughly as is necessary, both for artist and audience, an act of "will" is required. And this act could be described as "dehumanized," since

in order to appear to us as art, the work must restrict sentimental intervention and emotional participation, which are functions of "closeness." It is the degree and manipulating of this distance, the conventions of distance, which constitute the style of the work.

Although I really don't understand how this effort of aesthetic willing could itself be identified as a work's "style" (more on this below), otherwise the concept of "will" as the imposition of a purely formal status on a text, image, or soundscape seems a cogent enough formulation. Most readers of novels, viewers of paintings or sculpture, and listeners to music want to disregard art's distancing effects and recover a notional "closeness" Sontag duly reminds us is antithetical to the very creation of art.

But again Sontag can't seem to accept the full implications of her position. She must add a codicil:

A work of art is first of all an object, not an imitation; and it is true that all great art is founded on distance, on artificiality, on style, on what Ortega [y Gasset] calls dehumanization. But the notion of distance, (and of dehumanization, as well) is misleading, unless one adds that the movement is not just away from but toward the world. The overcoming or transcending of the world in art is also a way of encountering the world, and of training or educating the will to be in the world. . . .

This encountering of the world is what Sontag calls the "function" of art, which she thus substitutes for "content" in opposition to the art "object." She appears to believe that in so doing she is banishing "content" as a subject of critical discussion, but I can't really see how "function" operates as any less of an obstacle to the appreciation of style--which for Sontag remains the only "substance" of art--as the content it effectively displaces. If previously a work of art could be judged by the moral or social ramifications of its "content," what, under Sontag's formulation of "function, " would prevent it from being judged by how acceptably it performs the task of "educating the will to be in the world"? Art would still be valued at least as much--probably, inevitably, more--for its utilitarian intervention in "the world" as it would as a self-sufficient creation, an act of aesthetic will.

The function of a work of art is to be itself. It doesn't engage in "training" for anything other than subsequent, perhaps more "educated" experiences of art. No doubt some people regard some works of art as having provided them the kind of enhanced re-engagement with the world of "real" experience that Sontag invokes--keeping in mind that works of art themselves belong to the world of experience--but to posit that art has a function that makes it useful to the world for reasons other than being availabe to experience, and this function applies at all times for all people, only gives away to the philistines what Sontag otherwise seems to want to preserve--the integrity of art.

Part of the reason for Sontag's readiness to trade "object" for "function" may lie in the ultimate imprecision of her notion of "style" in art, especially as style is embodied in works of literature: "Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist's will." "If art is the supreme game which the will plays with itself, 'style' consists of the set of rules by which the game is played." "To the extent that a work seems right, just, unimaginable otherwise (without loss or damage), what we are responding to is a quality of its style." "An artist's style is, from a technical point of view, nothing other than the particular idiom in which he deploys the forms of his art." "[E]very style embodies an epistemological decision, an interpretation of how and what we see." Nowhere in "On Style" is there discussion of color or brushstroke, tone or harmonics, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. "Particular idiom" in poetry or fiction is never associated with specific effects of language, with the use of words.

The closest Sontag comes to a real analysis of style is this brief discussion of Gertrude Stein:

The circular repetitive style of Gertrude Stein's Melanctha expresses her interest in the dilution of immediate awareness by memory and anticipation, what she calls "association," which is obscured in language by the system of the tenses. Stein's insistence on the presentness of experience is identical with her decision to keep to the present tense, to choose commonplace short words and repeat groups of them incessantly, to use an extremely loose syntax and abjure most punctuation. Every style is a means of insisting on something .

It would be hard not to notice Stein's "circular repetitve style"--her particular idiom of "commonplace short words" and "extremely loose syntax"--but this sort of focus on style as the deployment of language is relevant to all writers worth our notice, and otherwise "On Style" defines style much more abstractly as "principle of decision," "set of rules," and "epistemological decision." And even here Stein's prose style is summed up as an aspect of will, as the "means of insisting on something," rather than as the enlistment of words in an aesthetically compelling verbal composition. A writer's "style" can be examined for its successes and failures in meeting the latter goal; as an embodiment of "will" it remains, for me at least, rather too mistily metaphysical.

On the other hand, Sontag seems correct to me when she concludes the essay by reminding us that "In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable," that "Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable."

In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . ., of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

I would only add that the "silences" cultivated by great art are "present" because the work makes room for them in a concrete way. They are incorporated into the work as "ineffable" but real. (The New Critics might have called this ineffable quality "ambiguity," something half-said but not fully said.) The specific way in which, through its style, the work of art invokes a fruitful silence is always still worth attention.

The Critical Sphere

Rodney Welch on Updike's Harry Angstrom:

. . .it's the tension, the not-knowingness, the what-do-I-do that makes [Rabbit, Run] so powerful. In a way Harry is like a character in a Bresson film; Updike wants you to meet him just as you would any human being, without being told, up front, how you're supposed to feel, whether you're supposed to like or hate him. One feels no attachment to Harry -- the responses of readers range from dislike to indifference -- but it's hard not to feel deeply involved in his life.

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Scott Esposito on David Foster Wallace's "Good Old Neon":

If you can imagine this accumulation of paradox being built up again and again, and then meta-paradoxes being built on top of these smaller paradoxes, and then doubling back to inject thought into paradoxes discussed pages ago, and plus a little bit of character-defining anecdote and some progression forward in time toward a climactic ending; if you can imagine all that, then you've got a pretty good idea what it feels like to read "Good Old Neon."

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Terry Pitts (Vertigo) on W.G. Sebald as "uncomforable modernist":

. . .As Sebald showed, modernism’s inherent belief in human progress was overtly false.  Only technology progressed, the very technology that made it easier and easier to enslave and murder millions, all the while hiding the truth behind a shimmering veil of lies.  In his conversion from pure academic to prose fiction writer, Sebald was venting his frustration with the limits of traditional scholarship to get at larger truths and, it seems to me, he dedicated himself to the task of trying to find a better way.  What Sebald did then was rather curious.  He borrowed some of the techniques of post-modernism – embedding photographs and the like -  and, in effect, smuggled them back across the border, brought them back through time, and he employed them in what was a very modernist enterprise. . . .

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Ted Burke on postmodernism's alleged skepticism toward "grand narratives":

Do postmodern writers avoid grand narratives? Hardly, as the point of post modern writing was to confront the formerly dominant notion of master narrative and investigate the inconsistencies in the conceits, and to devise alternative ways of telling big stories and conveying big ideas. The doings of Pynchon, DeLillo and Barth seem not to want to destroy the grand narratives as such, but instead to re-tool it, re-build, tweak and switch-and-swap styles, one for the other, in the practice of pastiche and parody, in order to extend the potential of fiction to be able to be able to contain interesting accounts of either Historical processes, or the banality of daily life.

 

Critical Distance

Karen Vanuska's review of Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers is now available at Critical Distance.

If anyone else would like to consider in an extended review any other critical book that examines, either exclusively or in part, American fiction after 1980, please send me a query.

Book Reporting

The "book review" as we now know it is more an artifact of professionalized journalism than it is a form of literary criticism. While critical consideration of "new" books is certainly a worthy task for literary criticism--a case could be made that it is in fact the imperative task of criticism--book reviews of fiction have for decades been primarily a sub-genre of reporting. As Matthew Davis puts it in a recent discussion of Martin Amis's early years as a reviewer, for newspaper editors the book review "could be taken as one of the functions of reporting on all aspects of current affairs." Indeed, the full-length review (1,000 words or more) of single titles is almost entirely a product of the modern newspaper and the few magazines that "covered" books on a regular basis.

Since few book reviews do little more than recount plot and pronounce summary judgment, those that either manage to do more than that, or that manage to expoit the conventions of the book review particularly well, are really the only ones worth considering as contributions to literary criticism. (That these conventions usually make book reviews into a slightly more elevated version of the book report accounts, in my view, for the fact that most of the books reviewed in print publications are conventional, plot-bound novels. Innovative, adventurous fiction often resists plot summary, and thus such fiction is either ignored or regarded with palpable disdain.) Although the insights provided by even the best newspaper book reviews are still filtered through the listless idiom of the book review "craft," sometimes they can actually employ that craft to provide intelligent commentary.

Recently Heller McAlpin reviewed John Updike's My Father's Tears for the Christian Science Monitor. Although restricted to 750 words, her review nevertheless manages to convey both her sense of the value of this posthumous volume and to locate its stories in the broader context of Updike's work in general and of his late work in particular. Although I ultimately think her focusing concept of Updike's fiction as providing an account of "what it is to be an educated, thinking, feeling – and, finally, aging – northeastern American male in the latter half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st" is much too narrow in capturing Updike's accomplishment as a writer--he's much less a conventional realist than many readers and critics seem to think he is--McAlpin's review nonetheless cogently organizes itself around the thesis that, as she puts it later in the review, the "overarching theme of Updike’s last stories is the family diaspora that is a natural but painful passage of man – a dispersal whose final stage is death but whose most effective antidote is memory."

While she may have partly been forced to do so by necessity, McAlpin is still wise to limit her discussion of the individual stories included in My Father's Tears to just four, using them to get at the thematic continuity of the book. Too many reviews of short story collections essentially just list the included stories and offer a synopsis or brief observation, substituting the naming of titles for analysis. McAlpin effectively uses the final story, the first story, the title story, and a fourth story that is representative of others to frame her discussion of the volume's merits and to give the reader an informed sense of how the stories work together. This emphasis on the broad commonalities among the stories potentially helps the reader to fruitfully approach the book far more than a series of plot summaries.

In this review, McAlpin manages to turn the limitations of the newspaper book review--its brevity and its appeal to "consumer service"--into a benefit. She succinctly indicates the nature of the stories to be found in My Father's Tears and just as succinctly links these stories to Updike's previous work. This has the effect of clearing away the detritus surrounding Updike's fiction as it has been received in the final years of his career and bringing readers back to the constant concerns--at least in terms of theme and subject--that have animated Updike's work for fifty years and that are duly updated in what turns out to be his final book.

Unfortunately, in her review of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, McAlpin succumbs to the vices encouraged by most newspaper book reviews. The review begins by stating what appears to be a thesis--that the novel is "an enormously absorbing, nuanced read that steeps us in its character's world - and gradually surprises us with its moral resonance,"  but which turns out to be just an isolated evaluative statement the rest of the review does not illuminate. Instead, it sticks to straightforward plot summary that is meant, presumably, to certify that Brooklyn is "absorbing," etc. but that really just suggests, at least to me, that this is merely a conventional historical novel about "lost innocence." Brooklyn may indeed be "absorbing," "nuanced," and full of "moral resonance," but McAlpin's review does not show us how or why these things are true of the novel. 

That the Toibin review is of a novel while the Updike review considers a collection of stories may partly account for the greater reliance on plot summary in the former (as well might various editorial policies of which we as readers of the review cannot finally be aware), but the temptation to "review" mostly by condensing story and making a few unsupported critical remarks is apparently an inherent feature of journalism-based book reviewing. No one should expect newspaper reviews to evidence rigorous critical thinking, of course--although McAlpin shows in the Updike review she is certainly capable of applying critical insight--but its absence does make it difficult to take seriously the protestations of print reviewers that they are the guardians of literary culture and thus their trade ought not be allowed to disappear.

"Journalism-based reviewing" extends to a publication like the New York Review of Books, which is often cited as a book review that does offer more rigorous criticism. If one were to judge by Michael Dirda's recent review of The Complete Ripley Novels, however, plot summary also seems to be the primary critical method valued by both the reviewer and the editors of NYRB. Dirda makes some attempt to weave in the occasional critical observation ("The hallmark of Patricia Highsmith's work is a calm, hallucinatory intensity built on sentences of unemotional plainness and clarity"), but if anyone is looking to find in his review some critical discernment beyond the usual sort of thing said about Highsmith's fiction (it "probes the fluid nature of identity," is "bleak" and "upsetting"), such is not to be found here. Serial description of the plots of each novel, in chronological order, is.

In my view, this is partly, if not largely, the fault of the Review and its editors. When fiction is discussed in this publication at all--which is rarely more than once or twice an issue--it is often through biographies of writers or omnibus volumes such as The Complete Ripley Novels, and these reviews generally follow the same pattern: rehashing of biographical details combined with superficial observations about the writer's work. The emphasis remains on "reporting" the publication of the book in question, not on providing more penetrating literary criticism.

(When a new work of fiction is reviewed at NYRB, which is even rarer, usually it considers the work of an established writer, seldom is the review allotted as much space as one devoted to nonfiction, and scarcely ever does the review differ significantly from those in other newspaper and magazine book sections. Even Dirda's review is mostly five separate brief reviews piled on top of each other rather than an extended critque.)

Print journalism is fairly quickly being reduced to its core functions of news reporting and analysis, and much of the latter is being siphoned off onto blogs and other websites, especially commentary related to the arts and "culture." Whether the newspaper book review will simply replicate itself online does still remain to be seen, but if it instead fades into literary history, it will be a form of "literary journalism" that won't really be missed.

Jim Thompson in Vermont

If I had never read Jim Thompson, I might think that Dave Zeltserman's Small Crimes (Serpent's Tail) is a neat little book, a provocative narrative of law-enforcement corruption and human depravity with satisfying doses of dark humor and an over-the-top conclusion that almost works.

But I have read Jim Thompson, and thus while reading Small Crimes I could really only register how derivative it is. A first-person narrator relates to us the story of his own dissolution from high school football star to corrupt cop and dual gambling- and drug-addict to ex-con trying to re-establish himself after serving a sentence for disfiguring, and almost killing, the local district attorney. His story includes his relationship with the local crime boss, as well as his former employer, the local sheriff, who if anything is an even bigger criminal than the crime boss himself. The narrator finds himself pursued still by the d.a., who in trying to get the mortally ill boss to implicate the narrator in his criminal operations also threatens to implicate the sheriff, and so the narrator only gets entangled further in the poisonous legacy of his past. That he won't finally escape it seems a pre-established certainty.

In its depiction of ubiquitous criminality and relentlessly sociopathic behavior, Small Crimes is a near-impersonation of such Thompson narratives as The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280. Zeltserman does try to outdo Thompson in a couple of ways, most obviously by transferring the Thompson crime narrative to rural Vermont, where the violence and other crimes perpetrated by most of the novel's characters (including a nurse with whom the narrator briefly becomes involved, who seems to be a serial killer) seems outrageously out of place. Unfortunately, so out of place does it seem that ultimately it comes to be rather cartoonish, a flaw Thompson himself almost always avoided. The second flourish on Thompson guignol is that the narrator appears to be narrating the story from hell, his descent to which occupies the novel's final scene. This actually does seem like a device Jim Thompson might have used, but again I couldn't finally accept it here as anything more than an attempt to compete with the master in the exploitation of extremes.

In most other ways, the novel can't compete with Thompson's books. The narrator has little of the creepy understatement characteristic of Thompson's unhinged narrators. He spends way too much time trying to convince himself, and us, that he's not such a bad guy after all, and it's ultimately hard to have much feeling for him one way or another, not even as someone who deserves some sympathy because he's clearly insane, or who should be feared because he's so inherently evil. Although it isn't a paricularly long novel, it still seems padded out with perfunctory and unnecessary dialogue, while the last one-third or so of the story seems very rushed and full of implausible violence, some of it made more implausible by being reported to us indirectly rather than dramatically portrayed. The constant trouble into which the narrator gets himself seems contrived, which isn't helped by the fact that the setting, against which this action ought to be heightened, is depicted cursorily at best.

I'm less disappointed by the limitations of Small Crimes, however, than I am puzzled by the effort to mimic a writer like Jim Thompson in the first place. There is inspiration and then there is imitation. This novel seems to me clearly the latter, although much crime/detective fiction I read seems largely imitative as well. Most hard-boiled detective fiction imitates Chandler, while most "noir" crime fiction imitates Thompson (or perhaps James M. Cain). This must be why I still read Chandler and Thompson with great pleasure and admirration but find most current crime fiction pallid and secondhand. Both of these writers were creating something new. The kinds of characters, plots, and narrative voices they developed were so compelling they came to define the hard-boiled crime genre, but this has become a mixed blessing, as the genre itself struggles to step out of the shadow of these writers' influence.

In her fawning review of Small Crimes, Maureen Corrigan asserts that "Zeltserman takes up all the familiar tropes of the formula -- femmes fatales, frighteningly dysfunctional families, self-destructive drives and the death grip of the past -- and shows how infinite are the combinations that can still be played on them." That Zeltersman "takes up all the familar tropes" of the genre is certainly true, but the novel demonstrates that the "combinations" available are far from infinite. More importantly, it prompts one to ask why recombining these tropes is a worthwhile activity to begin with.