Prior to his most recent novel, The Devil is a Southpaw (2025), Brandon Hobson’s fiction has been most notable for its portrayal of struggling young men, often Native American, and of the dynamics of Native American family life, as well as for its use of Native American folklore and cultural practices. None of these features are emphasized to the exclusion of other themes that might arise in any depiction of struggling and alienated American youth, as if dramatizing the particular problems of Native Americans was the overriding goal, although some reviews of Where the Dead Sit Talking and The Removed in particular did present them as “social problem” novels of a sort. It is perhaps inevitable that a writer of Hobson’s background (he is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee nation) would have his work characterized as a vehicle of cultural identification—which it partially is, of course—but even Where the Dead Sit Talking and The Removed, the novels that brought the writer to critical prominence and established him as a Native American “voice,” show that Hobson does have an accompanying interest in the effects of point of view, and a willingness to depart from the underlying realism that he does also work to convey in these novels.

This more adventurous ambition is even more apparent in The Devil is a Southpaw. Again the emphasis is on youthful males, in this case two adolescent boys named Milton Muleborn and Matthew Echota. As in the two previous novels featuring teenage protagonists, Milton and Matthew are detached from family, although they are not orphaned but through much of the novel are present to us as inmates in a juvenile detention center. Their misdeeds are left pretty nebulous (mostly drugs and general disobedience), and none of the offenders to whom we are introduced seem especially prone to violence—indeed, the violence perpetrated or threatened inside the detention center comes from the “drill sergeants,” the guards who add to the inmates’ misery through their callous and contemptuous attitude. What makes both Milton and Matthew feel most estranged from the community values of their rural Oklahoma town is their attachment to art, to creativity in general, which the drill sergeants urge them to abandon in favor of more sensible, manly pursuits.

The most immediate manifestation of the protagonist’s artistic inclination is that the story of Milton and Matthew in the Tophet County Juvenile Correctional Facility is actually presented to us as “a novel by Milton Muleborn,” written after the putative events occurred (Part I). Parts II and III of The Devil is a Southpaw offer us the perspective of the “real” Matthew Echota and Milton Muleborn. But if Milton is the author of the interpolated novel entitled The Devil is a Southpaw, Milton Muleborn is also, of course, a fictional character in Brandon Hobson’s novel of the same name, and our view of the character is illuminated just as much through his imaginative projection of his earlier experiences as through the more straightforwardly confessional representation we find in Part III—Milton’s commentary on his novel and on the course of his life more generally. Ultimately, however, I don’t think that the portrayals of Milton Muleborn or Matthew Echota are in themselves meant to be the novel’s primary concern. Milton is rather the agent of its formal and stylistic devices, which are more numerous and more adventurous than in Hobson’s previous novels. Matthew Echota, for example, while he leaves an impression as a prodigy of sorts, really serves as an object of fascination for Milton, someone he both admires and resents for his seemingly effortless facility with art and, ultimately, success as an artist. This fascination, in turn, motivates much of what Milton does in The Devil is a Southpaw, both as character and creator.

Milton is driven to write The Devil is a Southpaw, in fact, as a way of ordering his own ambivalent feelings about the influence his memories of Matthew have had on subsequent, rather disordered, life:

Behold my innocence: my entire life has been a longing to be close to Matthew Echota, but it was a longing not uncommon among people who have lived indigent, lonely lives as adults, who have failed to maintain employment, regular health screenings and good finances. Matthew, being an idee fixee, is my worst characteristic, it’s true, it is absolutely the worst, not my mental health diagnosis or my intelligence or poverty, despite what anyone else says or believes.

Although Milton refers to his novel as a “memoir,” the portrait of Matthew Echota it presents is one conjured by Milton’s imagination. “I created a fictional version of Matthew Echota in my own specific way,” Milton tells us in Part III, which perhaps allows Milton to think of the work as a memoir—it is finally all about Milton and his attempt to counteract Matthew’s influence, not just by altering the facts about the real Matthew Echota, making him a more vulnerable and diminutive figure, as well as also depicting his death at the end of the story, but also by asserting his artistic authority in the act of transforming Matthew into his own artistic creation.

It could be said either that Milton succeeds in remaking Matthew Echota as well as his own unsettled youth into an artistic vision of sorts or that he overdoes it, mistaking exaggeration and indulgence for genuine aesthetic expression. The prose in his novel is often overcooked, deliberately extending itself in meandering compound-complex sentences and invoking an artificially enhanced vocabulary (as if writing with a thesaurus nearby). The narrator writes of Matthew’s effect on the inmates of the correctional facility:

We knew early on that he possessed what we wanted, even if his mother put his glasses on him first thing in the morning or read him Anacreontic verse while she trained him in adages written in modern English as they relaxed in the sultriness of low clouds on warm afternoons, or when she sat with him upstairs at the public library longer than any son had ever dreamed of on the face of the Earth, training him with the apodictic determination of a mother whose love for her son was inexhaustible, a fierce and immortal influence, an irresolvable love none of the rest of us had received or could even comprehend. . . .

The plot of Milton’s novel is similarly diverted from its apparent purpose: what is initially a combination prison memoir and realistic expose of youth incarceration is interrupted by scenes registering how the inmates’ isolation makes them susceptible to dreamlike visions and ghostly presences, the narrative sometimes erupting into outright surrealism, as when the facility is bombarded by a plague of frogs, an episode that perhaps most directly represents Milton’s resort to imaginative embellishment. The culmination of such embellishment is in his novel’s final sections, in which the inmates stage an escape that sends them into a phantasmagoric dreamscape populated by Matthew’s disappeared sister Nora, the doppelgangers of Salvador Dali and Frida Kahlo, and which appears to the boys “like the dream world we had read about in books, a place of haunted mansions with the ghosts of murdered lovers, sick horses, and headless knights, with the bones of the dead scattered around. . . .” The novel ends with Matthew and Milton about to be re-apprehended and taken back to the correctional facility. Their retreat into art isn’t finally going to cancel out reality, which will assert its prerogatives.

Parts II and III of The Devil is a Southpaw (Brandon Hobson’s novel) would seem to be the implicit recognition of this uncomfortable truth. Part II offers an ostensible interview with the older Matthew Echota (conducted by “Sanbo Hornbond”). The interview is brief, and doesn’t really provide a vivid account of the older Matthew beyond establishing that he holds a respectable position in the art world and has overcome whatever obstacles he encountered in his younger days—although both his experience in a “corrupt juvenile detention center” and his connection to Matthew are confirmed: Matthew offers an explanation for his incarceration (one not mentioned in Milton’s novel), and he arrives at the interview with the manuscript of The Devil is a Southpaw (presumably sent to him by Milton). The effect of this ostensible update of Matthew’s life is to give us a view of him outside of MIlton’s interested perspective, sandwiched between the literally fictional portrayal of the younger Matthew and Milton’s later reflections, supposedly more anchored in the actual truth (about himself, at least). But of course there is nothing to bely the possibility that this Matthew, and the purported interview, are also Milton’s creation, although Part II most immediately reminds us that both Matthew and Milton are the creation of the author of the novel appropriating the title of Milton’s novel—Brandon Hobson.

It is not misleading to call Hobson’s novel a metafiction, even though it shares with his previous realistic novels the concern for the struggles of youth (if anything made more dramatic here by introducing his characters as literal prisoners in a correctional facility) and the depiction of the lives of rural Oklahomans (with somewhat less emphasis specifically on the circumstances facing Native Americans). While the reference to Sanbo Hornbond—an anagram for Brandon Hobson, of course—as the interviewer in Part II is an amusing reminder that the characters in The Devil is a Southpaw are a product of the writer’s imagination, it does not exactly undermine the representational illusion on which the novel still depends. Nevertheless, the novel as a whole does show a greater interest in the formal possibilities of fiction as an object of the writer’s interest, and Hobson clearly intends to make the reader aware of the effects of form on our perception of the story he is telling.

The Removed used a fragmented, shifting point of view as its overall organizing principle, but in The Devil is a Southpaw, we are obliged to be aware of the way point of view always conditions our access to narrative “content,” and to that extent it is inherently unreliable. However, to say that a fictional account is unreliable is not to say that no meaning or truth can be found in it: its meaning requires that we consider not merely what is represented but also its source in possibly hidden motives, and its truth requires that we defer interpretation until we can sufficiently register the formal order of the work as a whole. This is actually true of all works of fiction, but a novel like The Devil is a Southpaw makes the necessity of these recursive moves especially explicit, so that in this sense it becomes a novel about reading a novel, albeit not to the point that it is no longer about the characters and experiences it portrays. Perhaps the most admirable achievement of The Devil is a Southpaw is in the balancing of its more adventurous strategies with its still compelling depiction of lost youth and their often bleak environment.

The novel is more adventurous as well in its use of style as a device that works directly to help characterize its protagonist, a device that prompts the reader to realize that Milton Muleborn is being a little more pretentious than is good for our judgement of him. While Milton’s language in Part III, in which he revisits his youthful experiences apart from their role in his novel, is somewhat more subdued, he remains a rather extravagant stylist, although less through reaching for the fancy and unfamiliar word and mostly through a penchant for rambling sentences. However, such a style may finally serve to remind us that Milton is a writer, by aspiration if not by trade, and The Devil is a Southpaw is a novel about the importance of art and creativity to outcast young people such as Milton and Matthew. Matthew’s fanciful excursions into reverie and sheer fantasy similarly might be judged as the overly ambitious flourishes of a budding young writer, although they also further allow Hobson to add more unconventional elements to the aesthetic framework of his novel, which is reinforced by the periodic placement of drawings, presumably by Milton, throughout the text.

These more varied devices, not previously so much in evidence in Hobson’s fiction, could be explicated as themselves the complement to the fundamental realism continuing to motivate Hobson’s work. The Devil is a Southpaw is not merely the testimony to the mistreatment of adolescent boys in a modern juvenile “correctional” institution (although it is that), but it is also the story of two young inmates’ attempts to cope with their circumstances by affirming the ability of imagination to transcend those circumstances. This doesn’t quite succeed entirely, at least for Milton Muleborn, but that is one of the realities that The Devil is a Southpaw portrays At the same time, the portrayal itself, through its reflection of the boy’s commitment to the idea in the novel’s own imaginative order, is ample compensation for the reader.

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(This is the introduction, as it were, to a short book I will shortly make available entitled Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction. As explained in the prologue, the book is an attempt both to introduce Sorrentino’s work to readers less familiar with it and to re-introduce a body of experimental fiction to those who might have forgotten how consistently committed to the continuous renewal of literary art it was.)

 

This book is not a biographical study of Gilbert Sorrentino’s life and work. Although it became more evident to me while trying to write about Sorrentino’s whole career as both a poet and a writer of fiction that understanding a writer’s intentions can be relevant to a well-grounded interpretation of a literary work (as long as they are not regarded as the final authority), and that the writers’ attested experiences can be useful to the critic if they are used to judge how experience has been aesthetically transformed, I have no background as a biographer, and it is Sorrentino’s work that needs renewed attention, not his life circumstances. Still, the dearth of biographical information about Sorrentino beyond the most cursory is a significant hurdle for a critic to clear, and a proper biography to mitigate error and certify facts would certainly be welcome.

But neither is this book an exercise in academic criticism—certainly not as currently practiced in what’s left of literary study in the academy, and not really even as it existed prior to the advent of theory and its subsequent metamorphosis into various versions of cultural studies. My focus is on explication of text, but my readings of Sorrentino’s works are close readings only in the sense that they give unqualified attention to the formal and stylistic qualities of those works. They don’t necessarily provide exhaustive analysis that attempts to take the measure of a literary work’s aesthetic dynamics in the way some New Critics set out to do. There is attention to context, related both to Sorrentino’s work as a whole and to literary practices in general, as well as some citations to external sources when such sources can lead to a further appreciation of the text at hand.

Readers will probably notice, however, that “context” of the kind academic criticism presently emphasizes the most is largely missing here. I do not dwell on the historical, sociological, and political implications of Sorrentino’s fiction, nor do I attempt to subordinate that fiction to its utility as historical analysis or cultural diagnosis. Readers expecting that sort of emphasis will surely be disappointed with my approach, and this examination of Gilbert Sorrrentino’s writing is probably not going to be their sort of thing. What is most “old-fashioned” about my approach is probably its underlying assumption that “literary criticism” names a mode of critical writing that seeks to account for the literary effects of literature, which it does not view as secondary to the critic’s real concerns beyond it. Literary criticism exists to help us understand how a literary work achieves its own integrity, not to direct our attention elsewhere, to something else the critic finds more important (these day, that would usually be politics). We should read Gilbert Sorrentino’s books because they offer us a distinctively rewarding reading experience that expands our appreciation of the possibilities of literary form, not because they instruct us about history or might lead to our moral and political improvement.

While the tone of this study is prevailingly analytical, the analysis is “technical” only if you believe that any attempt to disturb the surface purity of the literary text with any critical concepts (perhaps including the characterization of what we are reading as “text”) is an undesirable imposition on the pristine act of reading. The terminology I use should be immediately familiar to anyone who takes literature seriously to begin with (or at least its denotation clear from the context of its use) and is always employed to explicate and clarify Sorrentino’s strategies. Since Sorrentino is a writer who habitually invokes unconventional strategies, any critical effort to comprehensively cover all of Sorrentino’s published work will necessarily venture interpretations requiring extended explication. And that is indeed what is offered here: sustained exposition of a body of work that systematically defies established precepts about the nature of prose fiction accepted in mainstream literary culture. If the reader finishes this short book believing that Sorrentino’s project as a writer has been coherently elucidated and that the aesthetic achievement of individual works of his has been cogently described, I would consider my effort a success.

If the scope of that effort does not encompass the biographical particulars of Sorrentino’s career as a writer, a thorough reckoning with what he wrote (and to a more limited extent what he said about what he wrote at various times) certainly does leave a vivid enough impression of a writer with very strong opinions and an unequivocal commitment to his understanding of the demands of art. Absent more widely available biographical information about Sorrentino’s personal and professional life outside the writing of his books, only idle speculation would have that these  somewhat cantankerous traits carried over to his interactions with people, although based on stray reports from scattered sources it seems likely that he was willing to accept the consequences of being faithful to his vision (losing friends over his portrayal of them, for example). He was certainly willing to bear the consequences of his intransigence in adhering to the principles of aesthetic experimentation that motivated his work as a fiction writer and that resulted in a kind of hand-to-mouth existence in the publishing world, often circulating his manuscripts among numerous publishers before finally securing one willing to take a chance on his latest offbeat offering.

For those of us who think that the urge to trace the features of a writer’s work to their source in the writer’s life us too often indulged in strained interpretations and ought to be resisted, perhaps we know enough about Gilbert Sorrentino to judge the work efficaciously: born to an Italian father and Irish mother in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (where he befriended fellow writer Hubert Selby, Jr.) a stint in the Army while attending Brooklyn College, where he returned after his discharge and founded the literary magazine, Neon, although did not finish his college degree. After beginning to publish his own poetry, he became associated with the journal, Kulchur, which focused on literary criticism and in which Sorrentino published many of his own critical reviews and essays (later collected in Something Said (1984). At this time he also began writing his first novel, The Sky Changes (1966). (He wrote an earlier, more conventional novel—described by Sorrentino as “very, very long”—that was never published, presumably consigned to oblivion.) After The Sky Changes was published, Sorrentino wrote his second novel, Steelwork.

In the second half of the 1960s, Sorrentino worked as an editor at Grove Press, which he left in 1970 after completing Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (published in 1971). (Among the books he worked on as editor were Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, as well as The Autobiography of Malcolm X.) During the 1970s he seems to have subsisted mainly on fellowships and occasional teaching jobs. (Unfortunately, his early novels didn’t sell so well). In 1979, the publication of Mulligan Stew seemed to finally promise a degree of commercial success, but, unfortunately, while this novel did establish Sorrentino’s reputation as an important experimental writer (and remains his best-known and best-selling book), that promise wouldn’t be fulfilled, as Sorrentino couldn’t really adapt his talent to the kind of conventional thinking that writing a “successful” novel would entail. Thus, the most consequential development affecting the course of his subsequent career was the offer to join the creative writing faculty at Stanford University in 1982, an appointment that ended only with Sorrentino’s retirement in 1999. This job may have restricted his ability to pursue writing full-time, but it also allowed him to write the sort of fiction he wanted to write without concern for publishers’ disapproval or financial uncertainty.

This condensed biography shows that Sorrentino was more or less able to live an outwardly literary life, despite being from a working-class neighborhood in Depression-era Brooklyn. But the “literary” assumptions accompanying Sorrentino’s career were always heterodox and antipathetic to the prevailing consensus about acceptable literary practice; in his reviews he was often openly hostile toward the writers who he believed profited from this consensus. Perhaps what we can most readily take from surveying Sorrentino’s life as a writer is that his primary commitment was to the integrity of literature itself—to its reclamation as a vibrant art that doesn’t just repeat the inherited formulas and lifeless gestures that dominated a literary culture characterized more by the pretense to seriousness than to its actual pursuit.           

A superficial reading of Sorrentino’s work might suggest that he is essentially an iconoclast, a writer who overturns existing literary forms simply for the sake of doing so. Although there is truth to the claim that Sorrentino’s fiction is iconoclastic, his approach is not to flagrantly ignore the demands of form, or to reject outright the influence of literary history. Sorrentino wishes to replace traditional narrative structure as the default formal principle of fiction with new forms invented or adapted for the work at hand. In this way, he actually pays more attention to form than most novelists, either conventional or “transgressive.” Similarly, Sorrentino does not dismiss the literary past, although the writers he invokes may not always be the most obviously canonized. That Sorrentino takes preceding literary achievements seriously is made explicit in his criticism, but it is equally clear in much of his fiction that his writing originates in a far-ranging familiarity with the forms and tropes supplied by literature itself and by particular writers he admired (even if Sorrentino’s use of them often tended to parody and burlesque). Sorrentino was “alt lit” only in that he offered alternative strategies beyond simple storytelling, not because he disdained the appeal to aesthetic order altogether.

Sorrentino’s iconoclasm is perhaps more apparent in the “content” of his work, not just in his lampooning of bohemian attitudes or academic pretension or middle-class sexual mores but in his radical skepticism about human nature and the crass sensibilities that dominate American culture. Sorrentino is an iconoclast most clearly in his criticism, which on the one hand champions writers Sorrentino believes are undervalued, but on the other also unleashes some uninhibited attacks on those he thinks are not just overrated but degrade the artistic standards of literature. These strong opinions, which can seem peevishly dismissive, along with his portrayals of unredeemed human degradation, no doubt for some readers conveyed the impression Sorrentino’s work was even more formidable than his unfamiliar formal strategies already suggested it must be.

But idol-smashing was not in itself the primary goal motivating Sorrentino’s work. It is the necessary initial gesture implicit in his larger project of reorienting the aesthetic expectations  of readers who assume that narrative form is the only form that might give shape to a work of fiction. To rebuild the formal structures of fiction, the old structures must first be razed, but Gilbert Sorrentino’s fiction is ultimately more about what can replace the structure that was leveled than the mere act of subverting existing arrangements. It doesn’t go too far to say that Sorrentino would like us to take delight in the formal variations he offers in each of his novels. In this sense, Sorrentino’s fiction has an affirmative purpose, but it is an affirmation of the capacity of art—specifically literary art—to renew itself through the exercise of imagination.

This was certainly what most captivated me when I began reading Sorrentino’s fiction. I found Sorrentino after I had already discovered other postmodern innovators such as John Barth and Robert Coover, but encountering Mulligan Stew made me think I had come upon a writer who upped the metafictional ante over even Barth and Coover and had dazzling comedic skills that encompassed satire but went beyond the merely satirical to create a kind of absolute comedy that takes nothing seriously, including itself. (Later, upon reading M.M. Bakhtin, I found the critical perspective that would accurately describe this kind of comedy as “carnivalesque.”) While none of Sorrentino’s post-Mulligan Stew novels quite attempted to replicate its audacious structural complexity, nor to repeat its outrageous devices in the same encyclopedic way (although the latent comic attitude would always remain), Sorrentino’s subsequent work continued consistently to challenge literary convention, each new release promising its own sort of originality and surprise.         

What I also discovered is that most mainstream reviewers did not really know how to account for Sorrentino’s literary project. Most seemed to expect that a Sorrentino novel would violate the established norms with which they were familiar, but, while critics would usually acknowledge Sorrentino’s writing skills in general, the typical response to the formal provocations encountered in his work was that he was engaged in “playing games,” that he seemed disdainful of the imperative to be accessible to ordinary readers. Although there were certainly critics who appreciated Sorrentino’s adventurous ambitions, very little effort was made in the prevailing outlets of literary journalism to ponder his alternative literary strategies more deeply or to consider seriously the notion that the norms observed by most writers of fiction might be deficient and in need of revision. Sorrentino was left to assume the reputation of an incorrigibly eccentric writer little interested in appealing to the general reader, and his later novels, although in some ways indeed more accessible to the average reader, were not really much reviewed in the most popular mainstream publications at all.,

Sorrentino had his champions, and he did rather better among academic critics, at least in depth of analysis, if not in the amount of attention paid to his work in comparison to other writers perceived as “postmodern.” Indeed, only one book by an academic critic, Louis Mackey’s Fact, Fiction, and Representation, has been devoted entirely to Sorrentino’s work (and it examines only Crystal Vision and the three novels comprising the Pack of Lies trilogy). William McPheron’s Gilbert Sorrentino: A Descriptive Bibliography usefully lists critical essays written about Sorrentino (as well as reviews of Sorrentino’s books), but this book was published in 1993 and has not been updated to cover all of Sorrentino’s career. Many of the critical considerations by academic critics are more interested in using Sorrentino’s work to exemplify broader philosophical issues that his inveterate self-reflexivity and breaking of form (especially in Mulligan Stew) tangentially raise, or in placing Sorrentino’s fiction in a taxonomy of postmodernism, so that neither the full range of Sorrentino’s aesthetic strategies nor the distinct progression of his work as a whole are as well-appreciated as they should be for a writer of Sorrentino’s accomplishments.

My current effort here, then, is to contribute in some small way to advancing this more complete view of Sorrentino’s career as a writer. It isn’t as expansive as a critical biography might be, or as detailed in its close readings as a more focused analysis of an individual work can be, but it attempts both to survey all of Sorrentino’s published writing from his beginnings as mostly a poet through to his final, posthumous, novel, The Abyss of Human Illusion, and to consider the various aesthetic objectives informing Sorrentino’s approach to the creation of literary art. Although Sorrentino is most often described as an “experimental” writer (and this is the category in which I myself initially placed him), the longer view of Sorrentino’s body of work reveals that his aesthetic purposes are in fact multifarious, if ultimately all unified in an effort to discover the still unrealized potential of fiction as a form of verbal art. Sorrentino is indeed an experimental writer, but that word in itself does not describe the specific strategies, accentuated to different degrees in different works, by which he effects his distinctive manner of experiment.

Thus this book is organized more or less chronologically (some slippage with the final books), but also according to an analysis of these multifarious purposes as they are manifested in particular works. I have identified what I believe are the separable but ultimately integrated aesthetic modes that are prominent in Sorrentino’s practice, each of which is more predominant in some of the novels but are also present in many of the others. This allows the opportunity to emphasize the panoply of strategies Sorrentino employs, while acknowledging his underlying commitment to formal innovation and the self-sufficiency of literary language. These commitments are what unites all of Sorrentino’s fiction and mark it as among the most distinctive in postwar American literature, but they do not determine the specific narrative devices—or whether narrative is even present—that Sorrentino chooses to use, or preclude the possibility that an individual work might pursue specific kinds of effects that Sorrentino’s formal designs also make possible, as I hope my discussions of each of Sorrentino’s published novels will show.

Some of Sorrentino’s works, of course, have been more widely discussed than others, and while I give ample attention to books such as Mulligan Stew and Crystal Vision, I also try to give extended consideration to all of his books, in some cases more extended than is generally available through extant critical commentary on Sorrentino, especially the later ones (after the Pack of Lies novels). While Mulligan Stew will no doubt remain the Sorrentino novel most likely to find its way onto reading lists dedicated to postmodern fiction, and his early work up through Crystal Vision will likely attract most new readers, familiarity with the shape of his whole career can only enhance appreciation of Sorrentino’s strategies in those novels, as well as perhaps encourage interest in the lesser-known titles (some of which are out of print). The subtitle of this book promises an “introduction” to Sorrentino’s work, but it is really more accurately an attempt to re-introduce a writer whose work arguably most purely embodies the practice of “experimental fiction” in postwar American writing.

 

Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction

Daniel Green

Contents

Prologue

Sorrentino the Poet

Sorrentino the Realist

          The Sky Changes

          Steelwork

Sorrentino the Metafictionist

          Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

          Mulligan Stew

Sorrentino the Craftsman

          Aberration of Starlight

          Crystal Vision

          Blue Pastoral

Sorrentino the Anarchist

          Pack of Lies trilogy

                    Odd Number

                    Misterioso

                    Rose Theatre

Sorrentino the Formalist 

          Under the Shadow

          A Strange Commonplace

          The Abyss of Human Illusion

Sorrentino the Comedian

          Gold Fools

          Lunar Follies

Sorrentino the Local Colorist

          Red the Fiend

          Little Casino

Epilogue

          Splendide-Hotel

(This is the final chapter of my upcoming book, Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction. I do not currently have a publisher, so, tentatively, it will be available as a free ebook or pdf. More info to come.)

Splendide-Hotel

In the early to mid-stages in Sorrentino’s career as a writer of fiction, Splendide-Hotel seemed something of an outlier among his books (so much so that some critics hesitated to identify it as a work of fiction at all). But in the last phase of his career, when he was publishing a series of short novels organized through the collage method featuring a sequence of connected vignettes, it became possible to see Splendide-Hotel as the precursor to this approach, It, too, dispenses with narrative and the development of characters in favor of self-contained prose compositions that seem disconnected but that ultimately realize their own form of unity-in-division.         

The unity in Splendide-Hotel is manifested both structurally and thematically. The book contains 26 sections, each of them corresponding to a letter in the alphabet, and the theme that those entries each help to elaborate is indicated in the book’s title, which is taken from a line in Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations: “And Hotel Splendid was built in the chaos of ice and the polar night.” Sorrentino takes Rimbaud’s image and metaphorically erects a more fully materialized site—in “S” we get a fully detailed description of the hotel:

. . .the dark-wood paneling and lemon-colored wallpaper of many of its suites, the huge crystal chandeliers of the Golden Age Room, the oiled mahogany and oak furnishings of the Men’s Saloon—all assure the guest that he is in one of the very last of the truly regal hotels Although lacking such amenities as a swimming pool and a gymnasium, the Splendide is equipped with almost anything else a guest may desire. . . .

Sorrentino has made his Splendide-Hotel “real,” but its reality is the reality created by the artist’s imagination, the residency for which the Splendide is built. As the narrator says of a painter known for painting pictures of waiters: “they are totally unlike any waiters that anyone will ever see. And yet—and yet surely they must be the waiters employed by the Splendide. By an act of the imagination, the artist has driven through the apparent niceties of restaurant dining to reveal the bewildered rage and madness therein.” The waiters’ “irrational behavior and broken spirits do exist: in the imagination, purified against all change in the Splendide.” This notion is central to Sorrentino’s conception of the essence of literary creation and affords an appropriate rejoinder to those critics who claimed that Sorrentino paid insufficient attention to “reality”—the writer’s verbal creations are real, “willed into existence by an act of the imagination.

Sorrentino arrived at this view of the act of creation through his extensive reading of William Carlos Williams (both the poetry and the fiction), and Williams along with Rimbaud might be seen as the de facto protagonists of Splendide-Hotel, each of them at different points invoked as “the poet.” The attention given to poets and poetry in Splendide-Hotel on the surface at least might leave the impression that it belongs to poetry (and the criticism of poetry) than to fiction—an impression that is reinforced in the Dalkey Archive edition of the book by the Afterword provided by the poet (and Sorrentino friend) Robert Creeley. Some critics have even referred to Splendide-Hotel as itself a collection of prose poems rather than a work of fiction, and while we might consider the book to be, in part, a meditation of sorts on the implications of poetic language, and there are numerous passages confirming Sorrentino’s own skills with language (such as “Y,” in which the narrator associates “love” with the color yellow), Sorrentino’s subsequent books, and especially the late works, would show that the structure and style of Splendide-Hotel continues to  inform his efforts to create alternative formal patternings in works of fiction.

 Reading Splendide-Hotel reminds us, however, that Sorrentino indeed was first of all a poet, and that all of his fiction proceeds through formal assumptions that reveal a poet’s awareness of form more than the narrative instincts of a traditional novelist. (As a poet, Sorrentino is inclined toward formalist-inspired lyric poems rather than shapeless “free verse.”) In neither his poetry or his fiction does Sorrentino conventionally “wax poetic” through the kind of lyrical figuration that often passes as “literary” writing. Love is not “like” yellow, it is inhabited by it, embodied in the arrangement of images:

. . .It may be, though, that in flailing about, the notion that yellow is love’s color appealed to my sense of design. I think of the pale sun that occasionally shines above the massive hotel: I think of Amarillo: I think of the color of the walls in that tavern where the men still sit, drinking red beer. The peeling paint of those walls, a kind of dull mustard-yellow, is close to the color I envision. Nothing spectacularly brilliant will do, The color is somehow perversely pleasing in apposition to that which it surrounds.

But is this “I” Gilbert Sorrentino the poet, author of Splendide-Hotel, or is it an invented narrative persona, masquerading as the author and tempting us to assume he speaks for the author? On the one hand, this narrator performs the tasks a narrator conventionally undertakes, introducing characters, setting up a situation, at times even telling a brief story, but on the other he freely acknowledges that this is a role he plays, that he is, fact, making things up. In “P,” he tells us that a “painter whom I have invented has recently painted a picture which, after some deliberation, he has decided to call P. It is not a good painting, but I find myself strangely drawn to it.” This picture reminds the narrator of an old photograph that includes his grandparents in a composition much like that of the painting. “What is strange, of course, is how this painter should have come upon his subject, notwithstanding his butchery of it.” This does not seem strange to any reader who did simply pass over the narrator’s declaration that the painter is invented: the painter came upon his subject because the author/narrator contrived the situation in which the mysterious coincidence supposedly occurred.

Mysteries in fiction are always contrived, as are plots, settings, and the idea of character development, and Sorrentino’s fiction, at least after Steelwork, makes no pretense to concealing its own contrivances. Along with perhaps John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino may arguably be the most purposefully self-reflexive writers in postwar American fiction. Any serious consideration of the phenomenon of metafiction as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s would have to give a exprominent place to Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Mulligan Stew, and Splendide-Hotel continues the practice established in Imaginative Qualities of directly acknowledging the presence of the author (or at least that authorial persona) engaged in bringing the work we are reading into being. (Mulligan Stew relies less directly on this kind of direct discursive gesture in calling attention to its own blatant artifice.) Even though it returns us to Sorrentino’s antecedent interest in poetry, Splendide-Hotel now serves not just as an aesthetic progenitor to some of Sorrentino’s later work, but as one of the paradigmatic examples of the rule-breaking strategy that arguably became the challenge to conventional assumptions about the nature of form in fiction most closely identified with the earliest “postmodern” writers.

 If Splendide-Hotel is often enough overlooked, lurking between Imaginative Qualities and Mulligan Stew in the confirmation of Sorrentino’s gifts as a writer of experimental fiction and immediately followed by a last resurgence of activity as a poet (three volumes in 1976, 77, and 78), it nevertheless affords a reader of Sorrentino’s work a worthwhile reminder that it all arises from the poet’s enhance awareness of language—the alphabetical structure of Splendide-Hotel directs us to the very source of language, and Sorrentino’s fiction never really lets us stray far from it. There are no Sorrentino novels that invite us to look past the words on the page, as the shaper of form, and contemplate instead the illusionistic space occupied by “real people” caught up in the story being told about them. Sorrentino is more interested in the total effect his verbal arrangements might have on the attentive reader than in conjuring such an illusion.

Sorrentino certainly paid a price for maintaining this aesthetic throughout his career. After the semi-success of Mulligan Stew, Sorrentino conceivably could have enlisted his genuine comedic skills in further “rollicking” comic novels or postmodern Menippean satires, or transmuted his Bay Ridge past into more straightforwardly autobiographical narratives rendering the old neighborhood—books that might have sustained or even increased the commercial value of his fiction. He did not do that, of course, the partial feint toward commercial appeal of Aberration of Starlight notwithstanding, if anything further reducing the commercial viability of his novels with every new release. Perhaps there were those who thought Sorrentino thus showed at the least some impatience with conventional reading habits (if not outright contempt for them), but his disdain for mainstream literary culture was more often directed neither at readers nor critics, but at publishers whose notions of quality in books were pretentiously middlebrow and unshakably commercial.

Sorrentino’s list of rejections from such publications was prodigious. Luckily, all of the works Sorrentino wanted to publish did find homes with one or another of the myriad independent presses that help to get adventurous fiction into print. (Dalkey Archive being among the most prominent of these.) That Gilbert Sorrentino persisted in writing his own inimitable versions of formally adventurous fiction right up to his final, fatal illness finally suggests he did believe there was and will be an audience for this work, however much the American “book business” wants to ignore it.

I have now managed to transport the contents of The Reading Experience from Typepad to Word Press. However, as in some episodes of Star Trek in which the transporter malfunctions, the blog has rematerialized in a somewhat scrambled form: I have not been able to reproduce the features of the Typepad version exactly, and thus have altered the blog’s organizing principle accordingly. Most of the posts I wanted to preserve (there were many with stale links or ephemeral content that I discarded) and the reviews (numerous of which first appeared in other venues) and longer essays have been arranged on pages to which I have linked on the sidebars. These pages present the posts that seem to me to still have resonance and/or relevance, or that I just want to preserve.

I must say I do not find Word Press to be nearly as intuitive and user-friendly as Typepad. (I sampled the AI Editor, but, like all other iterations of AI I have experienced, it is a disaster–AI is quite literally destroying civilization).Typepad made formatting and posting simple and easy, while Word Press seems to make them as cumbersome and confusing as possible–so cumbersome that I am now not at all sure when, or even if, I will continue posting on this blog. Perhaps I will get used to the needlessly byzantine processes here, but it could be that, at least for me, the era of blogging is finally over. Alas: Why is it we can never have nice things?

Wayne Booth’s scholarly apologia on behalf of “ethical criticism” in his 1988 book, The Company We Keep (still the most well-known defense of such criticism written by a modern academic critic), is not a plea for the upholding of “morality” in literature—or so, at least, does Booth want to assure us:

The word “ethical” may mistakenly suggest a project concentrating on quite limited moral standards: of honesty, perhaps, or of decency or tolerance. I am interest in a much broader topic, the entire range of effects on the “character” or the “person” or the “self.” “Moral” judgments are only a small part of it.

Indeed, Booth believes that ethical criticism rigorously and conscientiously carried out is the best way to ward off the censors. By taking seriously the notion that works of literature have actual, palpable effects on readers’ perception of themselves and of the real world they inhabit outside the text, critics will avoid being “trapped” inside unacknowledged critical pieties that only ensure that the battle against censorship will be lost.

However, if “moral judgment” is only a small part of ethical criticism, it is nevertheless still a part. And it does not seem altogether impudent to ask: What really is the point of ethical criticism, define it however broadly you want, if the ultimate objective is not to arrive at a moral judgment? This judgment might be restricted to the individual reader, with no attempt to persuade others to share it, but the impulse to communicate one’s disapproval of a literary work’s moral assumptions or applications is surely a strong one in many people, especially among certain kinds of censorious literary critics. Although it is not Booth’s goal to assist such critics in turning their private moral judgments into socially enforced censorship, the very notion of “ethical” criticism seems to me inherently censorious: The Company We Keep is full of moral judgments about particular works that Booth has come to esteem or disesteem (often having changed his mind from the former to the latter), and while his discussions of these works are often elaborate but never less than thoughtful, I don’t see how they can avoid having an effect that is at least a kind of unofficial condemnation, censuring rather than censoring. Booth may not have directly wanted to discourage us from reading Rabelais because of the moral imperfection of Gargantua and Pantagruel (sexism), but this is inescapably its secondary effect.

Of course, critics discourage readers from taking up a literary work whey they accuse it of aesthetic imperfections as well, but in this case it is being judged by the standard appropriate to them: works of fiction and poetry solicit judgment as literary art, and to assess them as more or less successful is the chief function of criticism (certainly of book reviews). Aesthetic judgment need not be the only or final goal of criticism, but ethical criticism is not merely the analysis of literature in its historical, political, or cultural context. It purports to render a conclusion about the quality of literary work, in effect competing with aesthetic judgment as an arbiter of literary value. However, it is difficult to understand how ethical or moral concerns are, in fact, properly regarded as “literary” values at all. To emphasize the ethical qualities of a work of literature is to be preoccupied with ethics (in the form of morality or a branch of philosophy), not with literature per se,  and criticism becomes merely the vehicle for abstract thinking about “values” in general.

It could fairly be said that many of the “great works” assigned to the literary canon were given that status because they were perceived to be the source of ethical and moral wisdom, or because they dramatized compelling ethical dilemmas. Indeed, works of literature written before the modern era may have been regarded by their audiences as at least partly a prompt for ethical reflection. I would argue, however, that to the extent these works continue to resonate for modern readers they do so as a result of their continuing aesthetic power, not mainly for their moral messages (often religious), which in many cases no longer attracts our attention (I, for one, have this reaction to Paradise Lost.) But, even granting that works of the more or less distant past were presumed to convey moral lessons, fiction (the dominant object of Booth’s ethical scrutiny) steadily developed into a literary form that increasingly discounted moral content in favor of aesthetic complexity (especially in the 20^th century). Booth himself implicitly acknowledges this through his various efforts (most famously in The Rhetoric of Fiction but also in The Rhetoric of Irony, as well as The Company We Keep) to demonstrate that the putative “autonomy” of the text in modern fiction and criticism—polysemous and ironic all the way down—is an illusion, critical dogma, a misreading of the way fiction actually works, Rhetoric is unavoidable and no narrative can be completely ironic. A text that can’t be interpreted can’t be read; “meaning” may vary among different readers, but that doesn’t mean it is nonexistent.

Both The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Rhetoric of Irony are impressive feats of close reading that in effect try to use the kind of close reading advocated by the New Critics against the New Critics’ intentions to seal off the literary text from intrusions of extra-literary kinds of of analysis (political, biographical, etc.) and thus pry open the text for readings that do indeed question its autonomy. In both books, Booth applies a careful analysis to the texts and practices he considers, and both of them still provide insights into how fiction, and the devices used in fiction, work on readers. The Rhetoric of Fiction remains a book with which serious students of fiction (including writers themselves) should still be familiar. I myself read the book as a neophyte graduate student, who found it an inspiring introduction to serious literary scholarship that revealed to me how sustained thinking about works of literature, done by a critic of Booth’s intelligence and keenness of perception, can enliven out reading of these works, not bury it in jargon and abstraction.

Yet these books ultimately cleared the way for Booth’s transformation in The Company We Keep of the insights he offered there into a manifesto of sorts that magnifies those insights well beyond merely questioning the aestheticism of modern criticism and produces instead a critical program  unambiguously elevating “meaning” above aesthetics. Literary criticism itself is essentially reduced to inspection of a literary work for its ethical correctness, its success or failure made contingent on such inspection. In this way, The Company We Keep has in retrospect become the harbinger of the profound shift of scholarly perspective that has occurred over the past 50 years, by which the academic study of literature has all but banished the aesthetic orientation against which Booth makes his case in favor of a broadly ethical approach (although ultimately the emphasis in current academic criticism is usually specifically political). Most academic critics do not now “read” literary texts as works of art but instead for their meaning, either explicit or latent, the latter of which providing what is now seen as literary analysis.

If The Company We Keep can be identified as a herald of this change in disciplinary mission—from the attempt to construe what is in the text to moving as directly as possible to what is outside it—Booth himself as a critic is still able to maneuver adeptly inside the text. His aim is no to use the literary work to prompt ethical inquiry tangential to literary value but to judge literary value by taking the work’s ethical implications seriously. The Company We Keep includes four extended close readings (as well as other, briefer readings throughout the book) that amply illustrate Booth’s skills in explication and interpretation. His analysis of Rabelais reluctantly concludes that Rabelais’s great work (a term Booth continues to use) is inextricably tainted by its sexism. He defends Jane Austen against the charge that her novels reinforce gender stereotypes in 18^th century England, showing how Austen’s portrayals of male-female interactions already contain an implicit critique of those stereotypes, while his in-depth consideration of Huckleberry Finn comes to more ambivalent conclusions about the alleged racism of Twain’s book, although Booth asserts he does still admire the novel.

The most impressive of these readings is Booth’s account of his reconsideration of the work of D.H. Lawrence (originally delivered as a keynote address to the D. H. Lawrence Society). Booth previously had a, at best, mixed reaction to Lawrence’s novels (liking Sons and Lovers, intensely disliking Lady Chatterley’s Lover), generally finding the “implied author” in them problematic. When he is persuaded to reread Lawrence, he comes to admire his fiction for its capacity to inhabit the various points of view of its characters:

Lawrence was experimenting radically with what it means to lose his own distinctive voice in the voices of his characters, especially in their inner voices. In his practice, all rules about point of view are abrogated: the borderlines between author’s voice and character’s voice are deliberately blurred, and only the criticism of whole tale will offer any sort of clarity to the reader seeking to sort out opinions.

Lawrence in effect gives over his narratives to the perspectives of his characters so that nothing any of them think or say can be attributed to Lawrence’s implied author (or Lawrence himself). Booth considers this a sort of ethical generosity on Lawrence’s part, but Booth’s analysis of how Lawrence employs point of view is also a virtuoso act of literary criticism, ethical or otherwise. His analysis does not necessarily make me more appreciative of Lawrence’s ethical stance, but it does make me better informed about how his fiction works.

The impression left by both The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep is that Booth is a critic whose first commitment is to the integrity of literature and to its illumination by criticism, but who also believes that an important measure of that integrity is a literary work’s ethical effects. But not only should the effects produced by the work be acceptable (at worst, benign, at best, virtuous.), but the reader should find its authorial presence reflected in what Booth designates in The Rhetoric of Fiction the “implied author.” Booth is the originator of this term, and his entire ethical project is essentially dependent on it for the trope that lies behind the book’s title: the reader finds (or should find) the implied author to be a “friend,” worthy of our continued attention. Booth goes into great detail about how our relationship with the implied author might approximate the qualities we value in real friendships, so it is a metaphor he takes very seriously—so seriously that he almost regards this implied author (which is itself ultimately a metaphor) as if, ideally, he/she becomes the equivalent of an actual human friend.

This is asking the metaphor to carry a great deal of rhetorical weight—too much, in my opinion. Like so much of Booth’s literary analysis, his postulate of the implied author is ultimately a reaction against the more extreme manifestations in modern criticism of formalist assertions of the independence of the literary work from the author of the work, assertions that isolate the work itself, and just the work, as the object of critical attention. We can speak only about the emergent features of the text itself, not about what the author intended, or what the author believes, or the author’s biographical circumstances. The literary text doesn’t itself “say” anything, doesn’t pronounce its meaning, but leaves the reader to determine how the text might be meaningful in the experience of reading it. Booth finds this an incomplete account of how a literary narrative actually works on us, and a misunderstanding of how most people read, and thus the implied author, who does in fact invoke rhetorical strategies to accomplish a particular effect, and whose overall presence in the reader’s perception of the way those strategies coherently interact prompts Booth to think of this presence as “company.”

If by “implied author” Booth means something like “a narrative presence fashioned by the (real) author or the sum total of the effects the work seems to produce,” then I wouldn’t really have any reservations about using the term as a way of speaking about how we experience a literary text. But Booth wants it to signify something more palpable, more closely associated with the author, even though he maintains there is a distinction between them. Ultimately, however, this seems to be a distinction without a difference: when Booth claims that Rabelais is no longer as worthy of reader’s esteem as he once might have been because of his demeaning portrayals of women, he does not mean we should direct our disapproval at the “implied” Rabelais, the writer’s stand-in, but should regard Rabelais the long-canonic historical figure who wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel less charitably (since, after all, the feelings of the “real” Rabelais hardly now seem the proper object of our concern). And simply to think less highly of that book surely doesn’t spare Rabelais as author his comeuppance. The same verdict would be passed down on, say, Dickens if here were in the dock for his perceived infractions. It is not the implied author who would serve the sentence of posterity’s disdain, but Charles Dickens as we who read him now know him (as he exists now only in our reading and discussing him).

Thus Booth’s attempt to keep work and writer separate in his ethical judgments seems just as much an artificial construct as any of those contrived by the modern critics whose overly refined ideas and theories about the interpretation of literature Booth has attempted to discredit. To find a particular work ethically unfit doesn’t necessarily entail an ethical indictment of the writer (the flesh-and-blood person who wrote the book), but it does inevitably taint that writer’s work as a whole: if the Mark Twain who wrote Huckleberry Finn, which literary history as come to designate his greatest work, authored a book that is inescapably racist, what chance that his other books happily avoid this offense? Our estimation of the literary work produced by “Mark Twain,” the name itself now the only living presence of the author available to us, can only be lowered. However much Booth would like his method of ethical criticism to remain a text-based practice and not an ad hominem stricture against the person who wrote the text, the latter is in fact the ultimate effect because it is, among the preponderance of actual readers, the only effect it can have.

The present contingent of academic critics in their efforts to make literary works serve as the vehicles for their own version of ethical criticism, have focused less directly on the moral effects of narratives, concerned instead to find in literary works those elements that affirm (or fail to affirm) a broadly progressive social or political perspective. Perhaps the most consequential difference between ethical criticism as presented in The Company We Keep and the current practice in academic criticism is that Booth’s approach is centered on the interaction between the text and an individual reader, on the reader’s “appreciation” of the work, while academic critics now concern themselves with the appreciation, not of the literary work itself, or even the reader’s possible responses to the work, but of the “issues” at stake in the representations offered in, mostly, fiction (academic critics have more or less lost the ability to interpret poetry, since it doesn’t lend itself as well to analysis that rejects aesthetics), although of their memoir/creative nonfiction sometimes also fills the bill. Booth wasn’t really attempting to inquire into ethical questions outside of their salience to particular works of literature. Today, academic critics focus above all on what is “outside.”

Yet, in suggesting in The Company We Keep that “pure” literary analysis is an illusion, that the literary critic must supplement any kind of formal analysis with a consideration of the work’s ethical ramifications, Booth would return academic literary criticism to the assessment of “content.” Since the usurpation of New Criticism as the paradigm method of academic criticism by, first of all, literary theory, content has increasingly become king. The critic uses the literary narrative to get a glimpse of material historical conditions. The critic seeks to understand the influence of culture by isolating its representations in the symbolic space of literature (along with other forms of symbolic expression). The critic interprets a literary narrative and its depictions of characters in such a way that it reinforces enlightened political values related to race, gender and sexual orientation, etc. Seldon do writers’ aesthetic achievements play a role in these efforts, although at times an underappreciated writer from an underrepresented group does receive critical treatment in order to bring that writer greater recognition in general (usually because of the way this writer reinforces those political values).

Whether Wayne Booth would find these approaches to criticism consistent with his intentions in The Company We Keep seems to me questionable, but these broad changes of approach were already underway when it was published and accelerated in the remaining decade and a half of his life. I can myself recall, at around the time this book was published and I had just completed a graduate education of the kind that may have consisted of the last vestige of the traditional literary curriculum that Booth still took for granted, that in talking to several other instructors in a cohort of us who had taken temporary jobs at a midwestern University (the move to contingent employment in academe was also already underway), many, if not most, of them obviously had different assumptions than me about what “professing literature” should be about. To them, New Criticism was a hopelessly outdated and misbegotten enterprise, enamored of “verbal icons” rather than being engaged with important new ideas or making criticism and scholarship socially relevant.

I thus began my prospective career as a literature professor already feeling old. I was not myself necessarily wedded to New Criticism as the critical method I intended to pursue, but as academic criticism became only more oriented away form an interest in literature to an interest in what other agendas it can be made to serve, I found myself increasingly defensive about the formalist approach exemplified by the New Critics (but not only by the New Critics), even though I could agree that the New Critical insistence on such terms as “autonomy” and “ambiguity” could readily enough slide into dogmatism and that the proscription against sundry “fallacies” threatened to make the method excessively methodical, a matter of following interpretive rules. That an approach that had as its goal to clarify how  a literary text works might be applied too zealously in following its rules does not, however, mean that the fundamental principle animating the approach is invalid. Formalism is arguably the mode of criticism that most completely centers the work of literature itself as the object of critical interest, and while it is certainly true that this need not be the only purpose the literary text might serve for the scholar or critic, to essentially deny it any acceptable place in academic literary study seems a profound overreaction to its alleged limitations.

It almost certainly was part of Booth’s intentions in The Company We Keep to dislodge formalism from its putatively privileged place in postwar academic criticism (although its displacement was happening even as the book was published, but just as surely he did not question the existence of the “art” in the art of fiction—what throughout The Company We Keeps he calls the “power” of literary narrative at its most accomplished, a power for which formalism at its best tries to account. Unfortunately, current academic criticism has not only banished critical formalism from its ranks of acceptable practice, but it has come to deny that literary art has any power that doesn’t derive from its capacity to reveal the material circumstances in which it was produced and thus to raise political awareness of those conditions. It does not attempt to reckon with the aesthetic practice of those writers who are implicitly acknowledged as literary artists, but assumes that the ultimate value of their work lies in raising political awareness of particular issues. Notwithstanding the significance of The Company We Keep as the portent of a major shift in direction in academic literary study, Booth as a critic would still probably seem to most readers encountering his work for the first time to be a pretty old-fashioned, literature-centric literary critic.

My own response to The Company We Keep has changed in the time since it was published. While even then I did not agree with Booth’s insistence on the urgency of ethical criticism, the book seemed to offer a perspective worth taking seriously for a formalist-inclined critic like me, exposing for reappraisal some of the inadequately thought-through assumptions about the distinction between form and content. But when content has so thoroughly overwhelmed formal analysis, and when the only writing about literature by academic critics that has a chance to be published must address narrowly-focused political topics that properly belong to disciplines and interests other than literature, my patience for a criticism that calls for foregrounding ethics has mostly been exhausted. When criticism in what was my field, postwar American fiction (which as “contemporary literature” had to claw its way into the curriculum in the first place) has been so emptied of concern for the integrity of literary writing as a distinctive practice, and when any consideration of an individual writer’s work concentrates on its ultimate social utility as political intervention (as a glance at the latest offerings at the major university presses will demonstrate), it is only reasonable to conclude that academic literary study has all but disappeared in any form its original proponents would recognize. Accuracy in advertising would require  it be renamed to better reflect its revised mission, housed in departments of cultural analysis, activist studies, or whatever other name more correctly describes what academic critics are really up to.

If Wayne Booth could not have envisioned such a development, from my own perspective it seems entirely predictable that a conception of literary study proposing we focus on what’s good for us in the books we read would inevitably lead to the sort of single-mindedly reformist criticism we are getting. Literature itself isn’t really necessary for that kind of exercise, except as a pretext for introducing the subject at hand and reinforcing the critic’s rhetorical purpose, so it is neither surprising that literature has disappeared in the academic discipline that supposedly studies it, nor will it be an irreparable loss to those of us who do value literature if the current implosion of the humanities in academe finally reaches full collapse. I have little confidence that recent efforts to return attention to literature itself (by resuscitating “judgment” or “close reading” or “pleasure”) will meet with much success, so the question will be what do we who still care do in the midst of the rubble.

I do not unequivocally reject the consideration of ethical questions in reading or interpreting works of literature. Readers value what they read in different ways, and a work that provokes ethical reflection in addition to its aesthetic appeal is no violation of the integrity of art—that integrity depends on the work possessing aesthetic appeal in the first place, not avoiding any relevance to real-world concerns. (Deliberately saying nothing would be just as preoccupied with advancing a message as the effort to “say something” in fiction). But the “ethical” critic almost unavoidably must subordinate the aesthetic to the ethical: How can we admire the art when we believe its effects to be harmful? This question has led to a pervasive mistrust of art and artists, not only in literary criticism but in cultural discourse in general. Artists must be and do good rather than make good art.

According to Elif Shafak, fiction "encourages empathy, oneness, pluralism, wisdom and understanding, especially in these awfully fractured times."

I think of all the fiction I have read and ask myself how often what I have read made me think I was accomplishing one of these goals.

Never have I actually experienced empathy, because empathy is something you feel for actual people, and there are no people in fiction at all, only words. Sometimes a work encourages me to share an illusion that people are present, but I am also unable to experience empathy with an illusion.  A work of fiction, at least a work of realistic fiction, attempts to create a representation of human experience, but even if I agree to feel empathy for a particular representation of such experience, I would only be deceiving myself if I pretended that some real act of empathy for real people has occurred.

I am not exactly sure what "oneness" is supposed to mean–I presume some sense of solidarity with my fellow humans–but again it would be extremely weird to think that in reading a work of fiction and its various representations I am experiencing oneness with anyone or anything. Reading fiction is in fact a private, isolating experience, and I am perfectly happy with that isolation if it allows me to intimately connect with a work of art. (So much for "pluralism" as well.)

It is possible that my many years of reading fiction has produced wisdom in me, but this would be wisdom about how to read fiction with more satisfaction and pleasure. If I am supposed to be an example of how fiction has made someone a "wise" person outside of this special context, God help us all.

I assume wisdom is associated with "understanding." Here I can't say that reading fiction has helped me to understand it better, because each work of fiction actually makes different demands on my ability to comprehend what I am reading. If it doesn't do this, if it's easy to understand, that's because it's just a repeat of other works I have read, and this is isn't helpful to me at all. (In fact, I have probably stopped reading it, anyway.) What I can say about the best fiction I have read over what is now many, many (many) years, is that these works have helped me to understand that we will never understand why human beings are as they are and do what they do. (Now that I think of it, if this is actually wisdom, maybe I am wise, after all.)

Maybe I am just a bad person. I know that many other smart and well-meaning people believe that fiction exists to accomplish all of these virtuous tasks (and I guess have made them virtuous), but they all seem to me to transform fiction into bathos and hokum. For some reason, I have a deep-seated aversion to hokum.