At this late stage in his career, John Barth is probably in a kind of no-win situation. Those who identify him as a first-generation postmodernist, and have probably never had much admiration for postmodern fiction, anyway, will see every new work as an example of postmodernism's obsolescence. Thus Gregory Leon Miller proclaims that in Barth's most recent book, The Development, "Emotional moments – mortality is a major theme of the book – are undercut by narrative games that have become cliche, as narrators reveal themselves to be someone other than we were led to believe, and then someone else altogether. . .The tedium of these gestures strongly suggests that it is such postmodern fiction itself – at least in its purest, initially conceived form – that has run its course."

On the other hand, those who do consider themselves admirers of Barth's work are more likely to find a book like The Development, which undeniably is more accessible to the non pomo-inclined, disappointingly ordinary. Thus Christopher Sorrentino concludes that "Barth once talked about embracing 'another order of risk,' in which one would test one’s ability to hold an audience with narrative complexity. Here, though, we have stories about community that, while not without their appeal, are as bland as the homespun Americana of Garrison Keillor."

Although I am more inclined to agree with Sorrentino in his judgment that The Development is "a modest addition to [Barth's] oeuvre," I can't quite agree that the portrayal of the gated community on Maryland's Eastern Shore that is the focus of the nine stories comprising The Development bears comparison to Keillor-type sentimentality. Indeed, to the extent that Miller's criticism has validity–and only here does it have validity–it is true that Barth's fiction rarely lingers over "emotional moments" without resorting to distancing effects such as verbal irony or authorial self-reflexivity. While it might seem "conventional" for John Barth to write a sequence of stories about elderly couples trying to cope with the fact that the horizon line of their lives has come much closer, I don't think either the subject or the setting is inherently "hokum."

Indeed, the most emotionally unsettling moment in The Development occurs at the conclusion of "Toga Party," in which the story's husband and wife protagonists decide to gas themselves in their garage rather than continue on their life's "crappy last lap," as the husband puts it. The story is unsettling precisely because there really has been no emotional preparation for this almost spontaneous decision and because it is carried out with little emotional display:

. . .Already they could smell exhaust fumes. "I love you, Dick."

"I love you. And okay, so we're dumping on the kids, leaving them to take the hit and clean up the mess. So what?"

"They'll never forgive us. But you're right. So what?"

"We'll each be presumed to have survived the other, as the saying goes, and neither of us'll be around to know it."

The car engine quietly idled on.

"Shouldn't we at least leave them a note, send them an e-mail, something?"

"So go do that if you want to. Me, I'm staying put."

He heard her exhale. "Me, too, I guess." Then inhale, deeply.

It is true that this event has emotional resonance throughout the rest of the book–other characters refer to it, its possibility as the final act for these characters as well can't be dismissed–but I don't see how it can be taken as "a virtual Hallmark card for suicide." That people like the Fentons might indeed resort to this kind of clear-eyed suicide in the midst of modern "retirement" only seems to me an equally clear-eyed indictment of the very middle-class lifestyle to which almost all of the characters in the book have readily acceded, to one degree or another. There is a repressed but still palpable disappointment with the outcome of American "success" permeating The Development, not an affirmation of it.

Some of the characters are more resistant to the illusions of the American Way than others. At the end of "Progressive Dinner," about the annual Heron Bay Estates social, we are left with Peter Simpson, an associate dean at the local college:

From the porch Chuck Becker adds loudly, "God bless us all! And God Bless America!"

Several voices murmur "Amen." Looking up and away with a sigh of mild annoyance, Peter Simpson happens at just that moment to see a meteor streak left to right across the moonless, brightly constellated eastern sky.

So what? he asks himself.

So nothing.

Most of the characters are presented as financially comfortable and as having accomplished career success, but many of them don't seem to regard their careers as achieving anything very important. Some are outright failures, as for example George Newett, a creative writing professor at the same local college, who confesses to having published little and who settles for "trying to help others do better" than he did, although "as of this writing no Stratford alum has managed that not-so-difficult achievement." None of them are held up as especially insightful, morally or intellectually. They may indeed be "bland," but this seems to me at least the natural outcome of their author's vision of Heron Bay Esates,the small but representative world John Barth wants to invoke.

Given the extent to which in The Development Barth has trimmed back what Gregory Leon Miller calls the "meta-fictional [sic] flourishes" for which Barth has become, at least to critics like Miller, infamous, it is rather astonishing that Miller would insist on charging it with "excessive self-reflexivity." There are a couple of stories–in particular, "The Bard Award" and "Rebeginnings"–that feature Barth's trademark dual emphasis on telling the story and on relating the story of the storytelling, which makes some of his most notoriously postmodern novels and stories more like narrative puzzles than narratives per se. But for the most part, the stories in The Development are surprisingly straightforward suburban slices-of-life joined together to create a surprisingly earnest work of late-life realism. One suspects that for readers like Miller, Barth could never be less than "excessive" unless he were to stop writing altogether or start being an utterly different kind of writer than the one he's always been.

One "self-reflexive" feature of the book that even Miller does not bring forward for censure, and that might be considered an addition of "narrative complexity," can be found in its title. "The Development," it seems to me, does not refer merely to the housing development itself, nor to the "development" of the characters' lives so far, but to "the development" as one of the elements of narrative. Most of the stories (except, of course, for "Toga Party") consist mostly of "development," most of them beginning in no particularly urgent situation and trailing off before the "tale" could be said to have reached its dramatic apex. "The End," which ostensibly tells the story of HBE's destruction by tornado doesn't actually narrate that catastrophe and registers the deaths of two of the community's members in just a couple of sentences. But this seems to me to reinforce the book's portrayal of the characters' "last lap." As Paul Lafarge puts it in his review of The Development, "The open-endedness of these stories is not mere trickiness. The tired reporters and washed-up teachers of creative writing in Heron Bay Estates are, like Barth himself, close enough to the end of their lives that the autobiographer's paradox is more than a theoretical worry. How do you tell the conclusion of your own story?. . .there is perhaps no better way to face the certainty that your own consciousness will cease, than with a defiant colon, so:"

Barth employs such a strategy of inconclusiveness, it seems to me, with particular skill in this book, so much so that its more subtle effects are apparently lost on his harsher critics who see only the more obvious "meta-fictional" touches.

I do not at all understand what David Rieff thought could be the justification for his book, Swimming in a Sea of Death, about the death of his mother, Susan Sontag. It contributes nothing to our understanding of Sontag's work as critic or novelist, and even as a chronicle of Sontag's harrowing death it seldom seems more than tacky and sensational. Sontag herself isn't even given much of a role to play beyond that of victim and object of Rieff's endless rationalizations about his own behavior during Sontag's struggle with the blood cancer that finally killed her. Besides leaving us with an unpleasant depiction of Sontag in her last months, the book is difficult to admire simply for its repititious, turgid prose, which constantly circles around Sontag's illness, always seeking to extenuate Rieff's response to it.

The portrait of Susan Sontag that does emerge is of a woman utterly unhinged by the prospect of her own death. She is unable to summon any degree of composure or self-possession, and is unwilling, at least in Rieff's account, to acknowledge the reality of her situation. She comes off as cowering, irrational, selfish. Perhaps this is an accurate portrayal of Susan Sontag in her confrontation with death, but I am reluctant to accept it as such, since so much of Swimming in a Sea of Death keeps returning to the effects of this confrontation on David Rieff, on his own struggle with how to mitigate his mother's inappropriate responses. This narrated struggle seems to me both narcissistic and futile, since ultimately he doesn't really do much of anything, preferring to passively acquiesce to Sontag's illusions. If it was the case that Sontag was unable to face the truth about her condition, I am not going to take this book as evidence.

The implicit damage that Swimming in a Sea of Death does to Susan Sontag's legacy as writer and critic will be registered primarily by the degree to which its "revelations" about Sontag's difficult death will come to dominate future discussions of her work. These revelations will be trotted out again and again as some sort of clue to "vision," dominated by her fear of death and her own puzzling sense of immunity to it as that vision must surely have been. The image of Susan Sontag as, in Sven Birkerts's words, "an isolated, deluded figure, terrified of death and filled more with regret than any satisfaction at her achievements" will linger. The biographical will triumph over the exegetic, as it always done in our gossip-obsessed excuse for a literary culture, and even though Sontag's work, especially the criticism, is focused on the sheer pleasure of life as represented by our encounter with art, the terror of mortality rendered in David Reiff's book will overshadow continuing encounters with Sontag's essays and books. How lamentable that this process will have been initiated by her own son.

The lure of the biographical can also be seen at work in Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Sontag's journals. (Although the primary culprit in encouraging biographical readings is again Rieff, who made the decision to publish the journals in the first place.) Although I agree with much of Mendelsohn's commentary on Sontag's writing per se–that her criticism is much more important than her fiction, that her taste in fiction became much narrower and more conservative in her later years, in particular that she had a large and debilitating blind spot where American fiction was concerned–I cannot countenance the basic split in Sontag's sensibility that Mendelsohn finds by focusing on her personality, on her supposedly conflicted sexuality.

"Here again you feel the presence of an underlying conflict: Sontag the natural analyst against Sontag the struggling sensualist," Mendelsohn tells us. He would have us believe that her reticence to speak about her sexuality somehow indicates a "hidden emotional life," that she was essentially asexual. (I don't really know how otherwise to interpret his gloss on Sontag's sexual life: "So the sex is not that good. That leaves the ambition.") From the fact that Sontag apparently didn't use her journals as an opportunity to emote, Mendelsohn concludes that "the outsized cultural avidity, the literary ambition to which these pages bear witness, seems eventually to have occluded the more tender feelings." How does Mendelsohn really know the degree of Sontag's sexual desires or the extent of her "tender feelings"? Should we be making any judgments about Sontag's emotional life based on the selections from these journals? (If she preferred to use them as a way of recording "the cognitive and the analytical" in her experiences, does this make her emotionally enfeebled?) Above all: Should we be using stray comments in a writer's journal and speculations about her sexual nature as the basis of a theory about the disposition of the work?

Mendelsohn thinks that despite her call in Against Interpretation for an "erotics of art" to displace what Sontag calls in that essay the attempt by literary critics "to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else" through interpretation, she was finally herself an intepreter:

Again and again, the essays themselves give the lie to her agenda of devaluing interpretation: even as she appears to swoon over "the untranslatable, sensuous immediacy" of, say, Last Year in Marienbad, you can't help noticing that there is not a single sensuous surface that she does not try to translate into something abstract and rarefied, that is not subject to the flashing scalpel of her critical intellect.

There is truth to this assertion (especially that Sontag's "critical intellect" could wield a "flashing scalpel"), but it exaggerates the role that "sensuous surface" plays–or should have played–in Sontag's criticism. "Sensuous surface" is where criticism begins, in the actual experience of the work of art, but it does not limit the critic's attention. Indeed, in "Against Interpretation," Sontag is more interested in redeeming "form" than "surface" per se, but this is the subject for another post. The most immediate flaw in Mendelsohn's analysis is still the effort to appeal to Sontag's personal lack of "sensuous" feelings in describing the attributes of her criticism.

In the conclusion to his essay, Mendelsohn tells us that Sontag has now herself become the "text" that must be interpreted. "Infinitely interpretable, she has at last ended up on the inside of a book." I don't know if this is some sort of backdoor justification for his own focus on Sontag's personal quirks or is just a cute way of referring to the journals as Sontag's private–now public–"text." But I fear it does signal the direction much subsequent discussion of Susan Sontag's career will take.

One might at first assume that David Denby's short book, Snark, is the latest in the line of anti-Internet polemics, such as Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur or Lee Siegel's Against the Machine, but it really isn't. It's a critique of media discourse more generally, and Denby focuses some of his most withering criticism on such "mainstream" journalists as Joe Queenan and Maureen Dowd. The closest he gets to targeting Internet practices per se is his citation of such gossip-centered sites as Gawker and Wonkette, both of which almost all serious readers can agree are worthy of contempt.

Denby does, however, repeat the mantra by now chanted regularly by print journalism at large that bloggers and other anarchic inhabitants of cyberspace threaten "authority," that "agreed-upon facts and a central narrative" will disappear into the "many niches and bat caves from which highly colored points of view will fly wildly like confused vectors, and in that situation no one will be right, no one will be wrong, and everything will be a matter of opinion." (Denby and his fellow fetishists of "authority" must have an easily provoked fear that "facts," what's "right" and what's "wrong," are pretty unstable concepts to believe that a motley collection of folks publishing their thoughts from basements in Terre Haute or Sioux City could eviscerate them so readily.) More plausibly, he asserts that the Internet has helped to proliferate an alreadly existing tendency:

It turns out that in the wake of the Internet revolution, snark as a style has outgrown its original limited function. The Internet has allowed it to metastasize as a pop writing form. A snarky insult, embedded in a story or a post, quickly gets traffic; it gets linked to other blogs; and soon it has spread like a sneezy cold through the vast kindergarten of the Web.

The metaphorical association of Internet and disease, as well as the assignment of bloggers to their playrooms, certainly betrays a low opinion of online writing habits, but there's probably no point in denying that snark as a rhetorical strategy has gotten more widely dispersed through its use on the Internet, even in particular through its adoption by some bloggers. Here, however, a little care ought to be taken in distinguishing between honest snark–biting words that contain an element of truth and cut through the tangles of false decorum–and what Denby calls "low snark" the latter of which finally degenerates into "bilious, snarling, resentful, other-annihilating rage." The former can ultimately become wearying if such snark is the *only* mode of commentary offered up by the blogger, but the latter doesn't even rise to the level of "snark" in the first place. It's simply biliousness.

I'm not sure I've ever really run across much of this "low snark" on the blogs I read. Like many critics of the blogosphere, Denby seems particularly fixated on the comment threads that develop from many blog posts, where "low snark" perhaps does occasionally slip in. He seems to think that attracting as many comments as possible is the point of most blog posts and assumes most readers of blogs make their way dutifully through the subsequent threads, but in my experience this doesn't usually happen. Blogs that attract a modest number of considered comments (I like to think this is one such blog) can spark worthwhile give-and-take, but posts that result in hundreds of comments, as on most of the prominent political blogs, for example, are just too unwieldy, and I, for one, don't bother with the comments. Denby really gives few examples of bloggers who indulge in "low snark," and it's pretty hard to take seriously as informed criticsm an analysis that takes the occasional loud-mouth comment as reason for alarm.

Denby doesn't discuss literary snark per se all that much, so it's hard to know whether he thinks the discussion of books online is as endangered by snark as a cultural style as political debate or personal interactions conducted on social networking sites. I assume he isn't really aware of the hundreds of blogs devoted to the serious consideration of literature, as well as philosophy, history, and film and the other arts (surely he must be generally aware of his own online competition as found in film blogs) and that, far from "ruining our conversation" where literature and art are concerned, are perhaps in the process of renewing it. These blogs aren't necessarily always free from what I've called honest snark, and to this extent they might prompt him to reconsider his blanket assertion that "contemporary snark is postaesthetic. . .produced by people living in the media who know, by the time they are twelve, the mechanics of hype, spin, and big money. Everything that isn't part of the entertainment business cyle seems lifeless and unreal to them." Certainly this description aptly fits many "people living in the media" (including some bloggers), but the sort of snark occasionally to be found in otherwise seriously-intended blog posts is often squarely aesthetic in its attempt to focus attention on issues that aren't "part of the entertainment business cycle." Snarky comment about books clearly intended to find their place in this cyle, or about "criticism" that merely observes its movements, is actually an attempt to identify the Entertainment State itself as "lifeless and unreal."

Denby does devote a couple of paragraphs to the well-known efforts of Heidi Julavits, editor of The Believer, to distinguish between snark and honest critical judgment, wherein, as Denby puts it, "Julavits found it hard to separate justified cruelty in criticism from mere critical showing off." By now one can say that the entire run of issues of The Believer has mostly been an attempt to banish "critical showing off" from its book reviews, which has, in my opinion, resulted in a style of criticism that is uniformly bland and mostly useless. The latest issue I have read (January 09) contains six reviews of 5-7 paragraphs, each of which consists almost entirely of plot summary or cursory description with a few dashes of empty praise. The usual sappy cover accurately enough signals the sort of inflated cheer that characterizes most of The Believer's content. (It is altogether revealing that far and away the best piece in the January issue, Gary Lutz's essay on the art of the sentence, was not commissioned by The Believer but is a lecture reprinted in the magazine.) If what is required to remove snark from critical discourse is the prominence of a publication like The Believer, I'd prefer bile and resentment–or at least more appreciation of "justified cruelty," the systematic exclusion of which only renders literary criticism toothless.

This, more or less, is the thesis of Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation:

Yes, young Americans are energetic, ambitious, enterprising, and good, but their talents and interests and money thrust them not into books and ideas and history and civics, but into a whole other realm and other consciousness. A different social life and a different mental life have formed among them. Technology has bred it, but the result doesn't tally with the fulsome descriptions of digital empowerment, global awareness, and virtual communities. Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them.

It is tempting to say that the condition Bauerlein describes, here and in the book as a whole, has always obtained, that the majority of American youths have always found their interest in "the social scene around them" rather than in "books and ideas and history and civics." Indeed, to judge by the majority of adults who were themselves once "young Americans," this would seem to be the case since they, too, as far as I can tell, have little interest in the "stores of civilization," little knowledge of the wider world beyond their own "social scene" as it is to be found in their neighborhoods, their communities, or perhaps on network television. American democracy has produced many admirable things, but one of them is not a widely informed and curious populace motivated by a love of learning for its own sake–however much the image of the bookish youth of the tenement or farm, of the self-educated immigrant, might still linger.

But Bauerlein acknowledges that the intellectual life has never exactly beckoned to most Americans, and that the current wired generation is neither smarter not dumber than its predecessors in terms of native intelligence. The difference is precisely the one produced by that "digital empowerment" and its "virtual communities" created by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., and even by those websites ostensibly devoted to providing real information and knowledge. The bad habits and immature attitudes to which those in their teens and twenties are prone–the belief that the past has little to offer them, the preference for the swift and flashy over the slow and cumulative, the elevation of "social life" over the academic–have been exacerbated by widespread access to the internet, which encourages them to live in the hyper present and has coarsened their reading skills.

And Bauerlein has studies and statistics to back up his claims that the Internet encourages superficial learning and that its predicted capacity to enlarge students' access to knowledge and sharpen their academic skills hasn't manifested itself:

This is the paradox of the Dumbest Generation. For the young American, life has never been so yielding, goods so plentiful, schooling so accessible, diversion so easy, and liberties so copious. The material gains are clear, and each year the traits of worldliness and autonomy seem to trickle down into ever-younger age groups. But it's a shallow advent. As the survey research shows, knowledge and skills haven't kept pace, and the intellectual habits that complement them are slipping. The advantages of twenty-first century teen life keep expanding, the eighties and nineties economy and the digital revolution providing quick and effortless contact with information, wares, amusements, and friends. The mind should profit alongside the youthful ego, the thirst for knowledge satisfied as much as the craving for fun and status. But the enlightenment hasn't happened.

The "survey research" Bauerlein cites actually does show–or Bauerlein makes it show–that the vaunted benefits of "computers in the classroom" appear to have been greatly exaggerated. One study concludes that most high school students have poor research skills online, are unable to use the Internet effectively to find relevant sources of information. Another concludes that federal subsidies for internet access in the schools produced "no immediate impact on measured student outcomes." In general, the middle section of the book, a chapter called "Online Learning and Non-Learning" makes for sober reading and ultimately a compelling case for the view that, at the least, we should be skeptical of claims for the "revolutionary" potential of computers as a pedagogical tool. This doesn't prove that use of computers and access to the Internet is actively bad for students, and it is possible that future revisions to the way "connectivity" is integrated into the classroom will produce better results, but Bauerlein's survey of its current results certainly doesn't make one sanguine about the prospects.

If Bauerlein had stopped at establishing that young people are not making good use of online resources, and that some of the practices on the web are actively encouraging their worse habits, impeding their ability to take advantage of the information that undeniably is available online, I would say he had written a valuable book. And while I would still ultimately conclude that it is a valuable book, The Dumbest Generation in its second half unfortunately descends into an ill-disguised temper tantrum against la trahison des clercs, altered by Bauerlein to "the betrayal of the mentors" but making it no less clear that those who should be counterbalancing the enthusiasms of the "masses" now are actively adopting those enthusiasms as their own. Bauerlein joins in on the now four-decades long war against the "sixties" that conservatives continue to wage, dredging up Richard Poirier's 1968 essay "The War Against the Young" and Charles Reich's The Greening of America as putative sources of the closing of the young American mind. He writes of the former that "Poirier's essay marks a signal case of the generational romance, the transformation of youth from budding egos into attuned sensibilities. . .an approach that may have respected the students but yielded a terrible outcome," while Reich "interpreted youth lifestyle as a serious expression with deep political, social, and moral content, however flippant and ant-intellectual it appeared, and while his books comes off today like little more than a dated artifact in a time capsule, shorn of the radical, Bacchic 1960s rhetoric, the outlook he promotes carries on."

While I would agree that The Greening of America seems today a "dated artifact," I find it hard to see how at the same time a book describing the efforts of a generation attempting to save the world from itself, to transform it utterly, could still account for a generation wholly at ease with the circumscribed world it inhabits. Bauerlein probably intends some version of the argument that "les clercs," specifically those associated with American universities, are themselves, directly and indirectly, the products of the sixties and are now in positions of intellectual authority, from which they continue to promote anarchy and People Power. They have denigrated the value of tradition and thus "the guideposts are now unmanned, and the pushback of mentors has dwindled to the sober objections of a faithful few who don't mind sounding unfashionable and insensitive." But, the sanctimoniousess of the invocation of the "faithful few" aside, the time when "the stern shadow of moral and cultural canons at home and in class" intimidated students isn't coming back, mostly because the assumptions about "tradition" underlying them were untenable in a culture where the concept of "democracy" is now so entwined with the unfettered practices of a capitalism that privileges change in its own right, and that is finally more responsible for the growth of digital technology than any professors, intellectuals, or education theorists. Conservatives will have to come up with a better explanation of why American youth are becoming dumber than the bogeyman of the '60s radical.

To his credit, Bauerlein does not entirely fall back on static notions of "tradition" in defending its value. He looks favorably on "culture wars" in the form of "direct and open ideological combat" that makes sectarian groups "face the arguments and strategies of outsiders." What is being lost in the cyberspheric fog, in this view, is an intellectual tradition grounded in "great books" but that uses their ideas to formulate new ideas and provide answers for current questions. While I don't think that this tradition is being lost at all–and do think that blogs and internet publications in general might actually come to enhance this tradition–Bauerlein thinks it needs to be dispersed more widely among those not self-motivated to join it: "A healthy society needs a pipeline of intellectuals, and not just the famous ones. An abiding atmosphere of reflection and forensic should touch many more that the gifted and politically disposed students. Democracy thrives on a knowledgeable citizenry, not just an elite team of thinkers and theorists, and the broader knowledge extends among the populace the more intellectuals it will train."

Frankly, this seems to me a utopian fantasy, just as attached to a sentimentalized vision of the way things could be as The Greening of America. Teens and twenty-somethings are resisting "an abiding atmosphere of reflection and forensic" because they find it boring, as do most older people as well. The alternatives to "reflection and forensic" are only going to become gaudier and more widely available. No amount of "mentoring" on the part of intellectuals browbeaten into doing their "duty" is going to compete with them. Perhaps theoretically "Democracy thrives on a knowledgeable citizenry," but in practice American democracy has thrived only as licensed consumerism, and I see very little evidence that this will change any time soon. Certainly Mark Bauerlein, if he does claim allegiance to conservatism in its current configuration, can offer few real solutions to the problem he accurately diagnoses, since conservatism has embraced capitalism as its own. It's unthinkable that, given a choice between allowing capitalism its sovereignty and encouraging more intellectualism among young people, most conservatives would choose the latter.

An equally serious problem with Bauerlein's argument, at least for me, is the way in which he largely equates "reading" with acquiring "knowledge" as usable information. Although he occasionally puts in a word for the value of reading imaginative literature, by and large he focuses on the utility of reading in forming both individual character and a "knowledgeable citizenry." There's little in the book about reading as a good in and of itself, as the cumulative sharpening of sensibility, as, specifically where literature is concerned, a respite from the ceaseless acquisition of "information." Given that Bauerlein has elsewhere expressed a belief in "the positive and independent value of literary experience and literary tradition," it's rather disappointing that he doesn't find a place in his book for elucidating the "independent value" of fiction and poetry, apart from their place in the "great ideas" approach to education.

Ultimately, however, I have to say that The Dumbest Generation did make me think through the implications of our ongoing transition from print to screen more critically and more thoroughly. I still think that critical-intellectual discourse can be conducted online, and that, used the right way, the Internet can encourage serious reading and provide knowledge that goes more than skin deep, but that "used the right way" is everything, of course.

ADDENDUM One has to wonder what Bauerlein makes of the new NEA report on reading that shows "literary reading" has increased substantially over the past several years. Especially of the finding that "Eighty-four percent of adults who read literature (fiction, poetry, or drama) on or downloaded from the Internet also read books."

John Lingan's essay on William Gaddis in the latest Quarterly Converstation is very good, one of the best analyses of Gaddis's work I've read recently. I particularly like this description of The Recognitions and JR:

Gaddis anticipated postmodern American literature’s obsessions with entropy and the “death of the author,” but he shared the high modernists’ attention to form. Like Joyce peppering Ulysses’s newsroom scene with capitalized headlines, Gaddis constructed The Recognitions and JR as mimetic of their subjects—the former is as bulging and ornate as the Flemish paintings that protagonist Wyatt Gwyon is paid to forge, and the latter is one continuous flood of voices, frequently unidentified, that recall either a stock ticker’s relentlessness or an overlapping teleconference. . . .

I also mostly agree with this characterization of Gaddis's work:

Just as his novels JR and A Frolic of His Own announce their subjects (”Money . . . ?” and “Justice?” respectively) in their opening sentences, William Gaddis’s career could have started with the question, “Work?” No single word better encapsulates the concerns and organizing metaphor for Gaddis’s artistic project, in which he chronicles the myriad ways that postwar industrial American culture devalues and drowns out individual expression in an endless barrage of information. His concerns were weighty—nothing less than the erosion of western culture and society—but Gaddis’s novels are ultimately saved from grim systemic coldness by his emphasis on work, which he defined strictly and defended with religious zeal. To Gaddis, work equaled an individual effort (best exemplified by the sympathetic and underappreciated artists of his first novels, The Recognitions and JR) to sort through the swarming cultural ephemera and create, with monastic persistence, something that no machine or business could adequately reproduce. Since Gaddis believed the two to be tantamount, his emphasis on the value of work was nothing less than a defense of the artistic impulse itself.

I don't think that Gaddis avoids "grim systemic coldness" simply through his depiction of work (a point on which I elaborate below), but that the "work" of art holds special value for him is clearly enough illustrated in his novels.

However, I can't really accept the implications of Lingan's conclusion about the "difficulty" of Gaddis's fiction:

The Recognitions and JR. . .are not books that function as the literary equivalent of a player piano. They are not “hot media,” to borrow one buzz term that Gaddis quoted in his National Book Award acceptance speech for A Frolic of His Own. Rather, they require effort, metaphorical reading between the lines, and ideally a little research, as evidenced by the encyclopedic website The Gaddis Annotations, devoted to annotations of the novels. They require, in other words, the readerly equivalent of a Protestant work ethic.

Gaddis is indeed one of those modern/postmodern authors whose writing is considered "difficult," requiring more effort than the casual reader is likely to expend. While it is true that books like The Recognitions, JR, and A Frolic of His Own call for a special kind of attention on the reader's part, an attention capable of reading not just between but around the lines of dialogue that comprise so much of these novels, I don't believe that referring to the act of reading Gaddis as encompassing "the readerly equivalent of a Protestant work ethic" is ultimately very useful or very accurate in commending his novels to potential readers. It suggests that, as the "last Protestant," his "work" privileges moral critique over art, is more ponderous matter than engaging aesthetic manner, and I don't think either is true.

Lingan quotes Gaddis himself protesting this austere view of his fiction:

. . .I think the reader gets satisfaction out of participating in, collaborating, if you will, with the writer, so that it ends up being between the reader and the page. . . . Why did we invent the printing press? Why do we, why are we literate? Because of the pleasure of being all alone, with a book, is one of the greatest pleasures.

The perception of Gaddis as a moralist depends largely on construing his fiction as essentially a kind of satire of what Lingan calls "postwar industrial American culture." There is undeniably an element of satire in Gaddis's novels but in my view to settle for that in responding to these novels is to settle for the least possible interest one might find in them. Satire is ultimately a one-channel mode of discourse: the satirist mocks, and the reader is duly edified. There is no "participation," no "collaboration" on the reader's part–except to agree that the subject at hand is worth mocking. When Gaddis says that what his fiction offers "ends up being between the reader and the page," he is asserting that it provides a much more complex reading experience, one that is itself the source of "pleasure" and that transcends the lesser value to be found in satirical correction.

However much fiction like Gaddis's challenges some complacent reading habits, it does so in the service of expanding our capacity to read abundantly, and thus our capacity to take "pleasure" in what we read. An assumption that seems to be held by those who decry "difficulty" in fiction is that the ideal reading experience is one in which little is asked of the reader, who judges the value of the experience by how quickly we can get from one sentence to another, one paragraph to the next. A reading experience is worthwhile if reading is in effect concealed, the reader made to forget that words are interceding between him/her and the "story," that a work of fiction is ultimately a verbal composition the patterns and internal logic of which are more immediately the object of the reader's engagement than any "content."

But I think many readers implicitly reject this notion of reading, and many others could be led to do so if confronted by a text whose initial difficulty–which is to say unfamiliarity–is eventually ameliorated by the work itself, which teaches us how to read it as we go, and which proves to be as aesthetically pleasing as any more transparently "enjoyable" conventional narrative–indeed, perhaps even more so, since this pleasure has been earned more rigorously. Gaddis's novels are of this type, it seems to me, and fans of these novels are not just responding to their invocation of a "work ethic" but are finding the work exerted amply rewarded by the subtleties of effect that become available and by the very heightened attention that makes these effects more visible. Both the volubility evoked by Gaddis's emphasis on talk and the silences such talk obscures, the reader asked to make those silences speak, act to make Gaddis's fiction very active, and thus very entertaining in its own way. This is what makes his fiction appealing to most of his readers, not the prospect of gaining glory through hard work.

See also this previous post on Gaddis.

I'm astonished to be saying so, but William Deresiewicz's review of James Wood's How Fiction Works provokes me to come to Wood's defense. Although Deresiewicz correctly points out the narrowness of Wood's conception of realism, ultimately he is less concerned with Wood's near-dogmatism on this subject than with what he considers the narrowness of Wood's approach to criticism. According to Deresiewicz, a great critic should exhibit "not great learning, or great thinking, or great expressive ability, or great sensitivity to literary feeling and literary form. . .but a passionate involvement with what lies beyond the literary and creates its context." In other words, literary criticism should not concentrate too strenuously on the "merely literary."

James Wood's greatest strength as a critic is that he does not spend much time and space on "what lies beyond the literary." He certainly could not be accused of lacking "a passionate involvement" with literary texts–even if he can be charged with restricting his involvement too exclusively to a certain kind of text–but to his credit he devotes most of his attention to a close reading of the fiction he considers and leaves what's "beyond" to those less interested in literature than he is.

According to Deresiewicz, the exemplars of modern criticism are the so-called New York critics, specifically Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe:

Wilson, who wrote about everything during his teeming career, from politics to popular culture, socialist factions to Native American tribes, warned about "the cost of detaching books from all the other affairs of human life." Trilling's whole method as a critic was to set the object of his consideration within the history of what he called "the moral imagination." Kazin, whose criticism, like [Elizabeth] Hardwick's, focused on the literature of this country in particular, sought to illuminate nothing less than "the nature of our American experiences." The goal of Howe's criticism, he said, was "the recreation of a vital democratic radicalism in America." The New York critics were interested in literature because they were interested in politics, culture, the moral life and the life of society, and all as they bore on one another. They placed literature at the center of their inquiry because they recognized its ability not only to represent life but, as Matthew Arnold said, to criticize it–to ask questions about where we are and how where we are stands in relation to where we should be. They were not aesthetes; they were, in the broadest sense, intellectuals.

With the possible exception of Wilson (who did indeed write about many subjects but whose essays on literary works were attentive to form and style and did mark him as, in part, an "aesthete"), Wood is a much better critic than any of these writers. Trilling is one of the most overrated critics of the 20th century, unwilling as he was to consider works of literature as anything other than what even his acolyte Leon Wiseltier describes protectively as "records of concepts and sentiments and values," apparently unable to describe "the moral imagination" except in platitudes. Kazin is simply hopeless, a truly awful critic whose essays and books on literary topics are simply useless to anyone interested in criticism that might enhance the reading experience. On Native Grounds is a bloated assemblage of historical generalizations mostly about writers, not writing. It's full of "remarks" about literature but no actual criticism. Like Trilling, Kazin bypasses the literary in order to arrive at banalities about "the nature of our American experiences." Howe is somewhat better–he does often enough really examine the texts on which he is pronouncing–but why would anyone want to rely for insight into literary texts on a critic who confesses he is most interested in "the recreation of a vital democratic radicalism in America"?

It's really rather amazing that Deresiewicz seems to believe that the approach to criticism represented by the New York critics has somehow been lost. In reality, criticism that obsesses about "politics, culture, the moral life and the life of society" is the dominant mode of criticism today, especially in academe and even more especially among so-called "intellectuals." These critics condescend to put "literature at the center of their inquiry because they recognize its ability not only to represent life but. . . to ask questions about where we are and how where we are stands in relation to where we should be," blah, blah, blah. James Wood stands out as a critic willing to challenge this tedious preoccupation with "context" and to make an "inquiry" into the literary nature of literature his "center" rather than the intellectual pomposity of "questions about where we are," questions that for Deresiewicz's preferred kind of critic take precedence over all that "aesthetic" fluff, finally over literature itself. In my opinion, it is all in Wood's favor that "what has happened in England since the end of World War II–anything that has happened in England since the war, politically, socially or culturally–simply doesn't enter into his thinking," and a testament to the force of his style, sensibility, and, yes, learning that he has managed to become widely known as a critic through publication in magazines that otherwise insist on relevance to politics and "the life of society."

Some of the responsibility for casting Wood in this particular sort of negative light undoutedly lies with the magazine publishing Deresiewicz's artice, The Nation. Left-wing editors, journalists, and "intellectuals" have always been particularly suspicious of "aesthetes," of writers and artists who emphasize the formal elements of their work and are too far "removed from commerce with the dirty, human world." Indeed, one hardly ever finds in The Nation reviews of fiction or poetry that isn't either obviously politically intentioned or can't be made to seem so. (Mostly, it has increasingly seemed to me, the magazine just doesn't review fiction or poetry much at all.) Attacking James Wood as a pointy-headed aesthete is a convenient way for the magazine to restate the long-standing "progressive" disdain for art in any of its non-partisan manifestations. I don't question that Deresiewicz believes all the things he says about Wood's failure to engage with the world "beyond the literary," but his conception of the role of both literature and criticism is clearly enough consistent with the Left's utilitarian attitude toward both.

Deresiewicz observes that Wood "ignores the meanings that novelists use [their] methods to propose. . . Wood can tell us about Flaubert's narrator or Bellow's style, but he's not very curious about what those writers have to say about the world." This actually makes me feel reassured about James Wood's prominence in current literary criticism. At least there is one critic with access to high-profile print publications who knows it isn't the novelist's job to "propose" anything and focuses his attention on writers' art rather than on what they allegedly have "to say."