The Reading Experience

The Names of Our Predecessors

February 16, 2009

In his essay "New Novel, New Man," from For a New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet defends the "New Novel" against some of the main criticisms directed at it (and at Robbe-Grillet's previous defenses of the practice). Among those criticisms was the charge that the New Novelists devalued the past, or, as Robbe-Grillet put it, that they "made a tabula rasa of the past." Robbe-Grillet replies that this charge can only itself proceed from an incomplete appreciation of the history of fiction:

Not only has the development been considerable since the middle of the nineteenth century, but it began immediately, in Balzac's own period. Did not Balzac already note the "confusion" in the descriptions of The Charterhouse of Parma? It is obvious that the Battle of Waterloo, as described by Stendhal, no longer belongs to the Balzacian order.

And, since then, the evolution has become increasingly evident: Flaubert, Dostoevski, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett. . .Far from making a tabula rasa of the past, we have most readily reached an agreement on the names of our predecessors; and our ambition is merely to continue them. Not to do better, which has no meaning, but to situate ourselves in their wake, in our own time.

Robbe-Grillet has himself, of course, now become one of those "names," one of the predecessors in whose wake writers inspired by his adventurousness might wish to "situate" themselves. But his account of the impulse behind experiment in fiction-the New Novel being a very prominent variety of experimental fiction in the post World War II era–is still compelling and goes some way toward clearing up a confusion about what motivates the best experimental writers.

Such writers do not consider themselves or their work either as cut off from the flow of literary history or as actively hostile to the acccomplishments of the past. Indeed, as Robbe-Grillet points out, they are likely to see the history of fiction as itself a history of innovation and the greatest writers as the greatest innovators. Experimental writers such as John Barth or Donald Barthelme or Robert Coover saw themselves as continuing the adventurous spirit embodied in their esteemed predecessors (Borges for Barth, for example, the surrealists for Barthelme) and Barth, for one, reached back for inspiration all the way to the beginnings of the novel for his first foray into "experimental" fiction, The Sot-Weed Factor. I'm certain that most younger experimental writers similarly look to the past for innovative touchstones, including the work of Barth, Barthelme, and Coover.

Those who don't risk producing fictions that seem merely eccentric, idiosyncratic, unattached to the historical tradition that itself represents a "development" of a form without "strict and definitive rules" and that proceeds through challenges to "order." Experimental fiction that seeks to be perceived as irrevocably "other" implicitly does regard the history of fiction as without notable predecessors and its writer does suggest he/she can "do better" than Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, et al. (or better than Balzac, for that matter). Absent this tradition, such doing better would, as Robbe-Grillet reminds us, have "no meaning."
Snarking On You

February 3, 2009

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.
Young Americans

January 20, 2009

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."
Separation Anxiety

December 30, 2008

In this comment thread on my recent post defending James Wood against William Deresiewicz's critique of his aestheticism, Richard Crary claims to be confused by my distinction between reading within an always-present context and reading "for aesthetic purposes."

. . .nearly every post you put up gives readers the impression that you do read entirely for aesthetic purposes, while strongly giving the impression that you see aesthetic issues as somehow easily distinguished from others (political, etc). I think readers might be forgiven for repeatedly coming to the conclusion that you think context can and ought to be ignored altogether!

This seems as good an opportunity as any to try to clear up this confusion, which perhaps can be reduced to a lack of clarity about uses of the word "reading." In one of my own responses to Richard, I maintained that while "Aesthetic 'issues' are easily distinguished from others," it is nevertheless impossible to read "absent any consideration of context," since it "plays a part whether I like it or not." In the latter case, I am "reading" in the common, most literal sense of the term: encountering the text for the first time, reading it as innocently as I'll ever be able to, as purely for the experience of reading the words on the page as will ever likely be possible. When I'm reading in this way, "context" refers to all of the ideas, emotions, and experiences I bring to the reading experience, which indeed I couldn't discard even if I wanted to. (Among those experiences would be my previous experiences with this author, or with this kind of fiction, etc.)

But I can also engage in a "reading" of the text following some reflection on the initial reading, after consulting critical commentary on the text, and perhaps after re-reading the text itself, wholly or in part. (This is not quite the same thing as interpretation, which generally narrows the text's possibilities in order to pin down its "meaning"; the kind of reading I am describing is an attempt to expand those possibilities, to open up the text in order to make its palpable qualities more accessible.) It does seem to me that at this stage it is entirely possible to separate aesthetic "issues" from other issues on which one might want to focus attention and that, depending on the specificity of one's definition of "aesthetic," such a separation is not difficult. Some people might think this separation is undesirable, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

It's probably because I do often insist that the aesthetic qualities of a literary text ought to be at the forefront of the reader's initial encounter with it (notwithstanding the "context" within which this occurs, which nevertheless cannot be denied), and because my own preference as a critic is to concentrate on "aesthetic issues" that I am called an "asethete" and that I am accused of believing that reading can occur in a context-free zone. I don't mind the first, but the second assumes I am some sort of aesthetic ideologue willing to deny reality in order to keep my beliefs conceptually afloat.

I insist on this blog that we attend to the aesthetic prerogatives of literature because in today's literary culture, both academic and generalist, those prerogatives are so often denied in favor of sociological analysis or a concentration on what a writer has "to say." The formal and stylistic accomplishments of fiction especially are frequently dismissed as "merely literary." My perspective on literature has become a minority view, but just because this approach to literature and criticism has become unfashionable does not make it therefore wrong. I don't know if some form of aesthetic analysis will again become more acceptable, but even if it doesn't, I still intend to speak up as one of its proponents. Thus the sometimes emphatic manner in which I do often defend aesthetic criticism on this blog.

As an illustration of the way "aesthetic issues" can legitimately be trumped by "context," by political or cultural considerations, I would agree with Jacob Russell's comments on the subject of this previous post, James Wood: "It's the unexamined claim that the books he prefers more powerfully or more accurately represent "the real," the validity of which is not a matter that can be decided within the limits of aesthetics. It's that extra-aesthetic claim that generates economic, political and social implications." Although I think it is possible to have an aethetic preference for realism over its alternatives, and vice versa, James Wood unfortunately does not really support this preference "within" aesthetics, as Jacob puts it. It's at best a metaphysical preference for Wood, and his clinging to his metaphysical conception of the "real" as represented in fiction does make his criticism useful to the "status quo" for the "economic, political and social implications" to which Jacob alludes. I cannot myself overlook these implications in judging Wood's critical writing, however much I do admire his commitment to "close reading."
The Reader and the Page

December 22, 2008

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.
Beyond the Literary

December 10, 2008

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."
Deserving Little Praise

December 4, 2008

In the New York Times recently, Joe Queenan acknowledges that "the vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books deserve little praise." Queenan proceeds as if this were a revelation of a carefully-guarded secret, but anyone who reads newspaper book review sections with any frequency knows that they are filled with reviews that are not just reflexively laudatory but are rhetorically empty in every way that might otherwise qualify them as "criticism." Plot summary substitutes for analysis, effusive approval for critical judgment, nitpicking for reasoned objection.

Queenan believes this happens because "Reviewers tend to err on the side of caution, fearing reprisals down the road" or "because they generally receive but a pittance for their efforts, they tend to view these assignments as a chore and write reviews that read like term papers or reworded press releases churned out by auxiliary sales reps." While neither of these explanations speaks well of American book reviewing–even though Queenan does try to make excuses for it–I believe the simplest explanation goes even farther in clarifying the problem with newpaper book reviews: Honest criticism can't be found in these pages because criticism itself can't be found there, for reasons that are inherent to the medium.

Newspaper book reviews exist as extensions of "lifestyle" reporting. Some books also provide more refined grist to the conventional newsreporting mill, but in either case reviews function not as instances of literary criticism, not even in its most limited gereralist mode, but as sources of information, sometimes as "stories" in their own right. Since most readers of lifestyle journalism undoubtedly want mostly feel-good stories (negative stories only get in the way of "lifestyle" contentment), it only makes sense to provide book reviews, book coverage in general, that portrays the "bookworld" as full of pretty nice stuff. Anyone who thinks that real criticism–either as the serious examination of literary works in general or as the frank assessment of any particular "current book"–can be found in such coverage just hasn't come to terms with the shallow and complacent practices of contemporary journalism.

In the most recent issue of The Jewish Quarterly, Tadzio Koelb makes a similar point concerning the adulatory reception of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française:

Whichever approach reviewers of Suite Française took — whether they followed the ‘lost book by dead writer’ angle, or played the French guilt card — they all used the limited space left after biography to indulge in fulsome but often strangely detached praise. In a perfect example of the abdication of critical responsibility in exchange for the more sensational copy to be had from Némirovsky’s biography, many reviewers used the language of the marketing material (e.g., ‘… hailed as a masterpiece …’, Financial Times; ‘hailed as a lost masterpiece’, The Times; ‘… hailed …as “a masterpiece…”’, The Scotsman). Some reviewers compared Némirovsky to great writers (to Tolstoy in the Saturday Guardian; to Chekhov in the New Statesman). Others, however, preferred to note that Némirovsky herself mentioned Tolstoy in her journals (see reviews in the London Review of Books, for example, or the Telegraph Magazine) or wrote a biography of Chekhov (as in the Evening Standard or the New Statesman) and let the implication sink in.

Both the sensationalism and the emphasis on biography, as well as "the fulsome but often strangely detached praise," to be found in the reviews of Némirovsky’s unfinished novel are entirely representative of the kind of attention works of fiction especially are accorded in newspaper book sections. Only books that will satisfy readers' desire for "quality," or that can be made to seem such through the reviewer's hyped-up language, are reviewed in the first place. Appropriate commentary then becomes an issue of finding the right kind of perfunctory praise, in some cases an emphasis on the "sensational copy" that occasionally accompanies this or that book.

I partially blame academic criticism for the dismal state of generalist book reviewing. First the wholesale retreat of criticism behind the walls of academe and then the virtual abandonment of text-based literary criticism for the treatment of literary texts as occasions for social, historical, and theoretical analysis left serious readers with few other organs of literary discussion than newspapers and a handful of magazines. These organs have been dominated by literary journalists more attuned to the protocols of journalism than to those of literature, and by writers who proceed according to the precautions outlined by Queenan. The paradoxical result is that now criticism exists neither in the academy nor in mainstream print publications. (Which is one reason that someone like James Wood, all of his shortcomings notwithstanding, has acquired the prominence he has. As someone who both closely reads and does so in accessible language, he's such an anomaly.)

Némirovsky's Suite Française is a book that could have used some actual literary criticism, by critics (maybe even "scholars") rather than "book reviewers." Such critics might have been able to explicate the novel more rigorously and with a more informed perspective on its historical, national-literary, and biographical contexts. Tazdio Koelb maintains that for fiction to be examined adequately on its own merits "we will have to resurrect the critic." I agree, but I don't see how this will be possible from within the existing conventions of either book reviewing or academic analysis.
The Pedagogical Habit

November 12, 2008

In a recent post, Rohan Maitzen suggests that responsible criticism (she has academic criticism in mind, but the point would seem to apply to generalist criticism as well) should concentrate not on "comparative measures of ‘worth’" but on "seeking out the measures that fit the particular case." She continues:

One of the key features of this approach is working with a text on its own terms–trying to understand how to read it so that it best fulfills its own potential. This means not holding it up to a particular, preconceived standard of excellence ("good novels do this“), whether that standard is formal or ideological. Now, depending on the occasion, there may be a second phase in which you move back from internally-generated norms and question them against external ideas; often, in teaching, this kind of questioning arises just from moving to the next book on the syllabus and discovering that its norms differ widely from–and thus, implicitly or explicitly, challenge–the ones we’ve just left behind (reading North and South right after Hard Times, or Jane Eyre soon after Pride and Prejudice, for instance, will certainly have this effect). But it’s difficult to see either a method or a reason for evaluating, say, Pride and Prejudice, as better or worse than Jane Eyre. It’s only if you have a set notion of what makes good fiction in general that you could fault either one for not measuring up.

Rohan seems to assume that because in my posts both here and at my own blog I defend the view that "philosophizing, politics, or social commentary are unimportant (even undesirable) in the novel, or at least far less significant than aesthetic effects" (really more the latter than the former) I would not accept the approach to literary criticism she is describing. But in fact I wholeheartedly endorse Rohan's critical pragmatism; indeed, this kind of pragmatism is at the very core of my philosophy of criticism, along with John Dewey's insistence that it is the aesthetic experience of literature that is the immediate object of critical appreciation, an experience that can be satisfied in a multitude of ways. I do not agree with Ronan McDonald and others that "if [literary criticsm] is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative" Even if I acknowledged that criticims needs "to reach a wide public" (which I emphatically do not), I could, I think, make a plausible argument that this "wide pubic" would be better served by a descriptive mode of criticism that seeks to carefully elucidate the manifest qualities of a given text than by an evaluative act that in effect disclaims the reader's own powers of judgment by rendering them unnecessary.

I would also agree that it isn't the case "that reading a novel on its own terms should always be the end point of criticism," although I do maintain–this is really what my allegiance to "aestheticism" finally amounts to–it is a indispensable and necessary beginning point. And I also assume that the act of writing a novel is inescapably an aesthetic endeavor. There would be no point, except in the crudest forms of propaganda, to write fiction in the first place if the primary goal was not to produce a work that succeeds most immediately as art. Since novels and short stories inherently equivocate, unavoidably qualify and make ambiguous anything that might be straightforwardly "said," anyone who wants to "comment" on social life or engage in philosophical speculation would be well advised to do so more directly than fiction allows.

Which is why I can't agree with Rohan that approaching "a novel in which philosophizing, politics, or social commentary are extremely important" is simply a matter of adjusting critical focus away from aesthetic considerations and toward the "something said," judging it by the non-aesthetic criteria it seems to propose for itself. At this point, the pragmatic impulse threatens to become an all-purpose excuse for whatever aesthetic lapses are deemed irrelevant to the larger goal of "philosophizing, politics," etc. It comes close to allowing that some novels don't need to offer "aesthetic effects" at all, if this means interfering with the "philosophizing, politics, or social commentary" with which they are principally concerned. Even if you emphasize "how the form and artistic strategies of the novel serve those [ulterior] purposes," as Rohan suggests, this is a pretty tepid measure of the work's literary value. If the primary requirement is not that the work engage us through "form and artistic strategies" above all, its ulterior purposes aside, it is hard for me to understand why fiction should be distinguished from other modes of discourse in the first place, why it should be included with poetry as part of "literature" at all.

Rohan says she's "wondering about the relationship between what I’m calling the 'pedagogical' habit of trying to find the best reading tools, the right measures, for any given example, and other critical strategies or purposes." I believe that by now the "pedagogical habit" has subsumed all other "critical strategies or purposes," to the extent that the need to adapt literature to the academic curriculum has become the overriding consideration in academic criticism. Periodization makes it necessary to find a "place" for texts "in which the form and aesthetics are far less impressive" than others and to accentuate "the contingency of different standards." The rise of theory made it necessary to situate the text in the framework of external schemes that supposedly broaden the context in which literary works can be studied. While it is true that a literary criticism not bound to academe might still give attention to "philosophizing," et.al., it is hard to imagine that such criticism would so willingly apologize for aesthetically inferior work as academic criticism in its current guise is forced to do. It's possible that literary criticism might one day free itself from the pedagogical imperatives with which the academy has burdened it. When that happens, "artistic merit" might not be as dispensable as many academic critics want to find it.
The Big Dialogue of Literature

October 29, 2008

By now, everyone attuned to the literary news is no doubt aware of Horace Engdahl's comments that "Europe still is the center of the literary world" when it comes to the awarding of the Nobel Prize, that "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," and that American writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."

On the one hand, it seems likely that Engdahl's remarks were motivated by a non-literary (and entirely justified) dissatisfaction with American political and military actions over the last eight years, a dissatisfaction widely shared across all of Europe these days. Engdahl assumes, wrongly, that American writers, American "culture" more generally, are somehow complicit with these actions or at least haven't done enough to express their solidarity with European critics of American hubris as embodied by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. To this extent, one might grant Engdahl some forebearance, since his attitude probably reflects a momentary unhappiness with the United States that will surely abate with the passing of the Bush administration.

But on the other hand, Engdahl's comments do reflect some underlying assumptions about both American literature and the role of literature more generally that certainly warrant scrutiny. For one thing, while I suppose it is possible for writers to become "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture" (especially if we take "mass culture" to be something other than "culture" itself, a separate realm driven by the same mindless forces that drive the American government), most depictions of "mass culture" in American ficion tend to be critical of that culture, if not outright satirical. Insofar as Engdahl has read much contemporary American fiction, it would seem he hasn't read it very well. Especially among those writers who might be seriously considered for the Nobel Prize–Roth or Pynchon or Barth–"mass culture" is an object of concern and ridicule, not something these writers seek to reinforce. That Engdahl would think otherwise does call his qualifications for the job of awarding a literary prize–the most esteemed literary prize of them all–into question.

One would have to presume that Europe remains "the center of the literary world" because its writers do not have such an unseemly obsession with their own nations' culture, but of course this hardly seems credible. However, since Engdahl provides no additional englightenment about what it actually means to be the world's literary center an alternative presumption would seem to be that Europe is central because, well, the Nobel committee most often awards the prize to European writers. I admit both a professional and personal bias toward American fiction in my own reading habits, but to the extent Engdahl is claiming the greatest contemporary writers are to be found on the continent of Europe, I must further admit I find the notion thoroughly unsupportable. There are certainly some very fine writers in Great Britain, but most of them are undoubtedly obscure to someone like Horace Engdahl (writers such as Tom McCarthy and Rosalind Belben), and among them are decidedly not the "name" writers Engdahl probably does have in mind–Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. There are also excellent writers in France and the German-speaking countries, and I have recently found myself particularly taken by several Eastern European writers whose work I had not previously read, but again the notion that any of these writers are "greater" than Roth, Pynchon, Coover, or Stephen Dixon seems to me palpably absurd. And that such now deceased postwar American writers as John Hawkes or Stanley Elkin or Gilbert Sorrentino were never even remotely considered for the Nobel Prize only highlights the essential cluelessness of those at the "center" of the European literary world.

The comments that have received the most attention in the print media and on literary blogs are Engdahl's suggestions that American writers are "too insular" and "don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." Most people have interpreted this to be a criticism of American writers for not reading enough translated work, or for focusing on domestic "issues," but I find the claims as worded to be virtually incoherent. Either Engdahl is asserting that not enough American writers are contributing to some ongoing "dialogue" about literature separate from their own writing, or the allegation is that they don't conceive of their writing as a contribution to "the big dialogue of literature." As far as I'm concerned, both notions are equally preposterous. The first requires that we think of world literature as some kind of super seminar in which writers are the invited panelists and collegiality the expected behavior. It seems to subsitute "dialogue" among writers for literary criticism.

Most likely, of course, Engdahl means something like the second. American writers are too "insular" in that they don't offer their work as part of a cross-cultural discourse that Engdahl is defining as "literature." They are too "isolated" to see the value of this discourse. But literature isn't a "dialogue" monitored by self-appointed arbiters who decide what part of the conversation deserves a prize for its insight. It isn't an attempt to "say" anything, except circuitously or by accident. I'm tempted to construe Engdahl's scolding of American writers for their insularity as just another expression of impatience with the "merely literary," with writing that isn't morally or politically useful, but I doubt he really meant to go quite that far. He is simply reiterating a commonly-held, if implicit rather than thought-out, view that literature is more about dialogue and discussion and nicely articulated platitudes. less about art and aesthetic consummation, which indeed often occurs in isolation and, in literature, as a "dialogue" only between the author and his/her text.

One reason that poets are so infrequently awarded the Nobel Prize has to be that it is much harder to value poetry primarily for its relevance to "the big dialogue." Poetry more clearly foregrounds the aesthetic amibitions of literature, and even those who read novels for the "something said" are often willing to concede that this model is overly reductive as applied to poetry (when such readers even admit to reading poetry–many simply confess they don't "get" it). But since the Nobel Prize seems to be decided according to the criterion that a writer "say" things (that, and the implicit requirement that the prestige of the prize be spread around a little–every once in a while a Chinese or Arabic writer–to enlarge the "dialogue"), poetry, or, God forbid, experimental writing, is neverthless going to be left at the door. Such exclusion of writing that in its necessary inwardness doesn't meet the blandly humanitarian standards of the Nobel committee is just one of the reasons why this literary prize, the biggest, is also the most idiotic.
The Realm of Elegance and Grace

October 21, 2008

Steven Millhauser is correct to defend the short story as a form of "radical exclusion" that works through "austerity" but that can also through this very austerity "body forth the whole world." However, in making his case that the short story mostly settles for "a grain of sand" and leaves the rest of the observed world as the subject of novels, I think Millhauser is exaggerating the differences between the two forms, in a way that actually does an injustice to the novel.

According to Millhauser,

Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The novel is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.

The most immediate overstatement here is in the association of novels with the "large" and the "exhaustive." This characterization clearly enough describes historically the practice of certain writers–Dickens, Dreiser–but not others–Hawthorne, Emily Bronte, certain novels–Moby-Dick, The Mill on the Floss–but not others–The Red Badge of Courage, The Trial. It also more accurately encompasses the Anglo-European novel than the American novel, which has always edged closer to what is generally called "romance" than to the "novel" and its inexhaustible realism. The romance, although not necessarily always "small," is nevertheless "selective," content, as Hawthorne put it, to "manage [its] atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture." Romance doesn't seek to "devour" the world but to transform a discrete portion of it into a version of the writer's own imagining.

This "tendency" in American fiction persists among contemporary writers, especially those commonly identified as "postmodern." Thus even meganovels such as Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest, as "large" as they undeniably are, do not threaten to become "unwieldy, clumsy, crude." In both structure and style they bear the hallmarks of writers more interested in "hidden powers" than "things in plain view," intimate the possibility of "revelation," even if such revelation is perpetually deferred. Their "ponderous mass" belies an intensity of effect traceable in manner to Charles Brockden Brown, to Hawthorne and Melville, not to Richardson or Trollope, nor even Tolstoy. In American fiction, at least, the opposition between the hulking, indecorous novel and the delicate short story just doesn't very cogently apply.

A very good example of fiction to which this opposition decidedly does not apply can be found in the novels of Steven Millhauser himself. Edwin Mullhous, Portrait of a Romantic, and Martin Dressler require somewhat more room for their stories of obsession to be fully developed, but they are hardly recognizable as the sort of graceless beast Millhauser describes in his essay. They might be said to breathe a little more expansively, but they are otherwise as stylish and fully-shaped as any of Millhuaser's short stories (which themselves do have the kind of "completeness" Millhauser attributes to the short story.) Moreover, Millhauser has worked extensively in the novella, a form that at the very least straddles the divide between short story and novel, and as employed by Millhauser really only further undermines his own hard distinction between the two. Millhauser's novellas, collected in such books as Little Kingdoms and The King in the Tree, are just as elegant and selective as his stories (as anyone else's stories, for that matter), but they certainly do not shrink from assertions of "power," which in Millhauser's case results from the effort to encapsulate the world through fable and a twisted kind of allegory.

I think that ultimately all fiction involves a degree of "Faustian" striving, and that no fiction accomplishes "perfection." Fiction can never sufficiently "attain its desire" such that no further variations on a theme can be achieved, no additional aesthetic avenues of approach explored. And while it is possible to identify a strategy of "radical exclusion" that often does allow us to differentiate between story and novel, there is no reason why this strategy can't be practiced in those longer prose narratives we can't categorize as "short" stories and by tradition call novels. Millhauser's novels and novellas do this, as do, in different ways, the novels of Nicholson Baker, for example.If a novel has to conquer "territory" for it to be classified as a real novel, then I suppose Millhauser's taxonomy makes sense, but I don't see why this needs to be a defining feature of the novel in the first place.

Essays in Criticism

Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction