The Reading Experience

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.
A Quirk of Language

September 23, 2008

Most of the reviews of Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States (including the British reviews of the book under its original title of Miss Herbert) concentrated on its idiosyncratic structure and unceremonious tone (idiosyncratic and unceremonious for a work of literary criticism, at any rate). Reviewers seemed to find both annoying distractions from the occasional critical insight Thirlwell offers, and their reservations about Thirlwell as a critic were generally confined to these admittedly unorthodox features of his book.

While it is true that the central argument Thirlwell wants to make in The Delighted States could probably have been made in a much shorter book, perhaps even in a critical essay, I can't say I found either Thirlwell's circuitous method of analysis, which proceeds both back and forth across time and national literatures and sideways from author to author (at times providing unusual and surprising juxtapositions), or his conversational style particularly bothersome. I take the travelogue approach to be Thirlwell's attempt to reinforce the book's overriding point–that fiction in effect speaks an international language that manages to survive its migration through translation from one literary tradition to another–in the form his book assumes, and it is an effective enough device. It might not be the sort of method one expects from a work of serious literary criticism, but there is no inherent reason criticism can't accomodate such an alternative strategy.

Further, both the looser, more informal structure and the reader-friendly critical language Thirlwell employs seem to me to work to accomplish one of criticism's legitimate tasks, which is to explicate features of literary works that are not necessarily obvious to all readers, that require the critic to call attention to them as evocatively as possible. In The Delighted States, Thirlwell is making a case for the efficacy of translation that calls for numerous and at times subtle comparisons and analogies, and his manner of leading the reader along his route of unexpected congruences, pointing out the connections more as an enthusiastic guide than as a source of critical pronouncements, is a perfectly sound way to proceed. If the test of a worthwhile critic is whether his reader is able to regard an author. a text, or literary history with enhanced understanding, then Thirlwell passes this test readily enough.

Something that may have contributed to reviewers' lack of enthusiasm for The Delighted States is Thirlwell's emphasis on innovation in fiction, a preference that consistently informs his survey of literary influence and the role of translation in the evolution of fiction as a form. Along with his related emphasis on form (which he often conflates with "style"), Thirwell's focus on aesthetic innovation must have grated on the sensibilities of mainstream reviewers, who generally look askance at innovation as manifested in contemporary fiction and mostly ignore form in favor of what a work of fiction has "to say" (when they're not simply judging it for its superficial entertainment value, its success or failure at being a "good read"). For me, that Thirlwell's book illustrates the extent to which the history of fiction is the history of inspired change is its greatest virtue, but for some of its reviewers its own unconventional form as literary criticism may have only reminded them of Thirwell's implicit defense of the role of the unconventional in literary history.

None of the book's reviewers, however, chose to examine what to me is its most problematic claim–or, as it turns out, series of claims. In his commitment to the idea that all works of fiction are translatable, even down to a particular writer's distinctive "style," Thirlwell makes the following observations:

. . .A style may be as large as the length of a book. Its units may well be moe massive, and more vague, than I would often like.

A style, in the end, is a list of the methods by which a novelist achieves various effects. As such, it can seem endless.

In fact, it can become something which is finally not linguistic at all. For the way in which a novelist represents life depends on what a novelist thinks is there in a life to be represented. A style is therefore as much a quirk of emotion, or of theological belief, as it is a quirk of language.

A style does not entirely coincide with prose style, or formal construction, or technique. (20)

In order to maintain his position that fiction can be translated without appreciable dimunition in the integrity of the translated text, Thirlwell needs to minimize the obstacles posed by "style" understood as a writer's characteristic exploration of the resources of his/her native language. One way to do that would be simply to dismiss the importance of style in comparison to all of the other elements of fiction that could well come through in a good translation without loss of effect. To his credit, Thirlwell does not do this; instead, he radically expands the meaning of "style" so that it includes. . .well, just about everything: It is "a list of the methods by which a novelist achieves various effects. As such, it can seem endless."

But, of course, if style is everything, so "various" as to be "endless" in its features, it is actually nothing. Thirlwell in fact deprives it of its one materially definable quality when he asserts that it might be "something which is not linguistic at all." This notion, that style is not fundamentally a phenomenon of language, recurs throughout Thirlwell's discussions of his international (although primarily British and European) cast of writers, even of those writers, such as Flaubert or Chekhov, known for their attention to "linguistic" style. He picks up on Marcel Proust's comment about style as "quality of vision" and uses this phrase as a kind of summary concept encapsulating his definition of style in ist most "massive" incarnation. What persists in a translation, then, is this quality of vision, which in its grand scope dwarfs mere facility with language.

I confess I don't finally understand the need for this erasure of style in its tangible, most coherent form. However much it grasps metaphorically at a less tangible if still apprehensible object of our experience of fiction, to speak of "quality of vision" does not adequately account for the concrete achievements of writers as stylists. However much I value Flaubert's "quality of vision" (which is a lot), it just seems to me manifestly obvious that reading Flaubert in English is not the same experience as reading him in French. Reading Virginia Woolf in French cannot be more than a necessary if barely sufficient substitute for those French speakers without English who want to read her work. While I am reasonably sure that the comic vision of Stanley Elkin would still be preserved for those reading his fiction in a translation, how in the world could this writer's style survive the crossing-over?

Near the end of The Delighted States, Thirlwell scales back the grandiosity of his claims about translation:

All through this book, I have been arguing that style is the most important thing, and survives its mutilating translations–that although the history of translation is always a history of disillusion, something survives. . . . (429)

Yes, of course something survives. What serious reader sadly restricted to one language (or even two or three) would claim otherwise? Certainly I wouldn't. But I'm comfortable with accepting that this "something" includes inspired storytelling or formal inventiveness or compelling characters, but not style except in a more or less successful approximation. To stretch "style" into "vision" or "theological belief" is way too misty and metaphysical for me. I'm willing to settle for style as irretrievably "linguistic," a writer's artful way with words.
Litblogs and Critblogs

September 16, 2008

The increase in numbers of what are still generally called "literary weblogs" has been really quite astonishing. When I started this blog 4 1/2 years ago, there were a few dozen such blogs, perhaps 15-20 of them blogs I tried to read regularly. (I still think of these as the "original" literary blogs, and many if not most of them are still around.) By now, there are so many literary weblogs, approaching all genres of writing, literary news and the publishing business, and the role of literary criticism and book reviewing from so many different angles and to so many different purposes that the very term "literary weblog" does seem hopelessly imprecise. And even if one wanted to keep up with all the blogs that concern themselves in one way or another with literature or criticism, that would now be almost impossible.

Some of the new blogs that have appeared in the last couple of years, in particular blogs such as Paper Cuts, The Book Bench, and The Book Room, all sponsored by various print publications, have not, in my opinion, contributed much to the development of the litblog as a medium, however. These blogs have only reinforced the most reductive and stereotyped views of the litblog as a source of superficial chitchat and literary gossip. Few of the posts on these blogs explore any issue in depth or examine any particular book with even cursory specificity. There is no attempt to provoke cross-blog critical discussion, either vis-a-vis specific posts or generically–of the blogs I have named, only The Book Bench even includes a blogroll, and it is very short and limited to the usual suspects. Whatever links that are provided are to the same old mainstream media stories to which so many other blogs are also linking and which, of course, ultimately only reinforces the supposed first-order authority of the kinds of print publication hosting the blogs in question. I don't know if I would go so far as to speculate that these newspaper and magazine-centered blogs are deliberately working to undermine the potential authority of literary blogs by creating examples demonstrating their vapidity, but the concept of the "litblog" they embody surely does trivialize what literary blogs have accomplished and might still accomplish.

Admittedly this concept was not created out of whole cloth by those operating these print-adjunct blogs. From the beginning, one model of the literary weblog has been the daily digest, brief entries on media-reported literary news along with links to specific news items or reviews or opinion pieces. Often enough, however, the blogger's underlying attitude toward the item at hand, the blogger's own literary sensibility, was really the point of such posts, and so even bloggers who stuck to the digest form usually managed to convey a point of view about the subject at hand–indeed, litblogs would never have captured the attention they did attract, prompting the appearance of these old-media blogs in response, if they hadn't offered a perspective on current books and other literay matters not to be found in existing media. Nevertheless, the literary blogosphere as a whole relatively quickly progressed beyond the daily digest, and while posting became less frequent it also became longer and more fully developed. If literary blogs have not exactly become substitutes for book reviews and critical journals, they have become sources of genuinely engaged literary discussion, ranging from conventional book reviews to both short and long-form critical analyses to full-blown scholarly essays. Combined with the ability through commenting and linking to extend critical discussion immediately and directly, the scope and the quality of literary blogs have allowed them, at least for me, collectively to supersede in interest and utility most of the remaining newspaper book review sections and those few magazines that still occasionally offer literary content. (I stopped reading scholarly essays published in academic journals a long time ago.)

As a way of noting the evolution of the literary weblog to its current form as a medium for serious literary inquiry (and as a way of calling attention to the retrograde assumptions of the old-media blogs), I have re-categorized my blogrolls to reflect the present state of the literary blog more accurately. I have made a basic distinction between what I would still call a "litblog" and the kind of more critically expansive blog I now think of as a "critblog." (Not all of the blogs listed under "critblogs" are focused only on literature.) The line I have drawn between the two is no doubt a little blurry in some instances, but the litblogs are the blogs that still fulfill some of the functions assumed by the first wave of literary weblogs but do so in a particularly enlivened and useful manner (I think them useful, at any rate), while the critblogs feature, either regularly or with some reliable frequency, posts explicitly intended as criticism. The latter may or may not be conventionally discursive literary criticism, but sheer length and adherence to the customs of critical writing are not the qualities I necessarily look for in a critblog. Quality of insight and/or specificity of analysis are what I hope to find. I will continue to identify blogs that exemplify these virtues and will add them to the blogroll as warranted.

And as a way of perhaps further contributing to the evolution of the litblog to the critblog and beyond, I am planning within a few months to inaugurate a new project that will, I hope, extend the reach of the kind of critical writing originating on blogs, the kind of writing to which I have mostly restricted myself on this blog, to encompass more formally-developed critical essays, specifically essays on contemporary American fiction. I intend to write some of the essays myself, but I would like to open up this new site (which will still be attached to The Reading Experience) to other contributors as well. However, unlike, say, Scott Esposito's The Quarterly Conversation–which has otherwise led the way in demonstrating what a web-based literary review can accomplish–I would like this site to focus not on new books but on books from the recent past (post-1980) that deserve additional close reading beyond the attention they received in their initial reviews, by writers who deserve careful consideration (perhaps more careful consideration than they've previously received) as writers whose work may last. At this point, the plan is for these essays to appear on an ongoing or rolling schedule rather than in separate "issues" so that the whole archive of posted essays would always be readily available. I am currently writing an essay on Russell Banks's Affliction, which will presumably be the first of such essays to appear, but I will have more information about this projected site in the very near future.

Finally, I have reconfigured my "literary criticism" blogroll to include in one place all of the non-blog websites I can find that offer reviews and criticism (not including newspaper book pages). The list contains both web-only publications and print publications that offer at least a significant portion of their content online. If there are other sites that might be added to the list, I would appreciate being notified of such.
The Inner Needs of Writers

September 10, 2008

There is much in Ron Silliman's recent post on the process of historical change in poetry with which I agree, and in fact I would extend most of what he says to include the history of all literary forms. Among his most salient points are that "the history of poetry is the history of change in poetry," that the critics of innovation in literary practice are themselves writers and critics likely to be swept away by the historical currents that favor innovation and are thus mostly engaging in "tantrums" over their own unavoidable fate, and that the "new" and the fashionable are not synonymous terms in our appreciation of the innovative in poetry (or fiction.).

Literature certainly is more the history of its own evolving forms than it is an assemblage of "great works," although I would substitue for "change" John Dewey's notion of "growth" as the inevitable outcome of artistic traditions that manage to extend themselves over time–"growth" not as simplistic "progress" but as the expansion of available approaches to the form, an increase of insight into the variety of its possibilities. Indeed, even if we were to consider literary history as the accumulation of great works, in most cases these works are great precisely because they represent some new direction taken by the form employed. Surely English drama was not the same after Shakespeare finished stretching its boundaries, nor was English narrative poetry (narrative poetry in general) after Paradise Lost. Although we now think of the realistic novel as the epitome of convention in fiction, there was of course a time when it was on the cutting edge of change and writers like Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Henry James were writing what was for the time experimental fiction.

Thus I am less willing than Ron to dismiss the "well-wrought urn" as a metaphor for aesthetic accomplishment in works of literature. A poem or novel may indeed be "well-wrought" without conforming to pre-established models. Perhaps the passage of time does allow us to see more clearly the craftedness of some works of art that at first seemed simply model-breaking, but ultimately I see no conflict between innovation in poetry or fiction and the skillful construction of individual poems, plays, short stories, or novels.

On the other hand, Ron is certainly correct in characterizing most of the critical resistance to change in literary forms as a kind of lashing-out against writing implicitly recognized as destined to be remembered precisely because it exposes most of the otherwise critically favored writers of the moment as aesthetically tame and unadventurous, tied to the critical nostrums of the day (which, especially with fiction, are typically not only aesthetically conservative, but often not really focused on aesthetic achievement at all but on what the writer allegedly has to "say" about prominent "issues"). American experimental fiction of the post-World War II era has been especially subjected to these "tantrums"–if anything they have only increased in intensity–concerted efforts to marginalize this fiction by accusing it of lacking seriousness of purpose, of indulging in games and jokes rather than sticking to straightforward storytelling, of striving after effects that turn out to be "merely literary." In my opinion, however, it will be the work of writers like John Hawkes, Robert Coover, and Gilbert Sorrentino that will be recognized as the indispensable fiction of this period, not that of the more celebrated but less formally audacious writers such as Bellow or Styron or Vidal.

Eventually almost all postwar writers whose work departs significantly from convention have come to be labeled "postmodernist," a term that has definable meaning but that also has been used as an aid in this lashing-out, a way to further disparage such writers both by lumping them together indiscriminately and by identifying their work as just another participant in literary fashion. Ron Silliman points out that a distinction can be made between fashion in the arts and the truly new:

Each art form has its own dynamic around issues such as form and change. For example, one could argue that the visual arts world, at least in New York & London, has become self-trivializing by thrusting change into warp drive because of the market needs of the gallery system. There, capital demands newness at a pace that hardly ever lets a shift in the paradigm marinate awhile. I seriously wonder if any innovation in that world since the Pop artists let in the found imagery of the mid-century commercial landscape has ever had a chance to settle in. That settling process seems to be an important part of the run-up in helping to generate the power of reaction, to motivate whatever comes next. The problem with the visual arts scene today is that innovation is constant, but always unmotivated.

Poetry has the advantage of not being corrupted by too much cash in the system. That ensures that change can occur at a pace that has more to do with the inner needs of writers as they confront their lives. . . .

The New York art world has become so dependent on "the latest thing" that aesthetic change becomes "unmotivated" except by the need for individual artists to enter the system that confers purpose on their work. And although fiction is probably more tied to the cash nexus than poetry, most serious literary fiction is much less so, and the degree of change and resistance to change, while perhaps somewhat less pure than in discussions of poetry, is largely determined by honest beliefs about the direction fiction ought to take.

In this context, to regard experimental fiction as "fashion" is essentially to believe there can be no "shift[s] in the paradigm" in the development of fiction, that the experimental must always represent an irritating deviation from the accepted unitary model of how fiction should be written. It forecloses the possibiltiy that the established paradigm might "shift" if something genuinely new were to appear and transform our assumptions about the nature of the novel and/or the short story. Even if it is allowed that the occasional genius comes along to produce work that stands out from the mainstream, such work is considered a singular achievement, a momentary departure from the otherwise settled paradigm granted only to the genius. The exceptional, extraordinary talent thus helps to preserve the status quo since no one else can be expected to rise to his/her level.

In reality, the "postmodern" period in American fiction came close to establishing a new paradigm insofar as it seemed to validate the experimental impulse behing modernism, its own even more radical experiments extending the reach of literary experiment beyond modernism and implicitly suggesting it can always be extended farther still. But ultimately experimental fiction can provide a paradigm only if it is one that rejects the creation of paradigms except in the loosest possible sense of the term–the model fiction writers should follow is the absence of a model. However desirable such a model might be in the cause of aesthetic freedom, it isn't likely to offer much stability to literary culture, and thus it was almost inevitable that some sort of reaction against the postmodern would set in to restore good critical order. The past thirty years or so has not seen a shift in paradigm but a reinforcement of conventional practices, a widespread return to narrative business as usual.

Such an embrace of convention–of the assumption that the art of fiction = storytelling, that the writer's job is to create characters who can be regarded as if they were persons, persons with "minds," etc.–can't really be said to be a part of the kind of dialectical process Ron Silliman describes. Postmodernism in fiction didn't "settle in" and then become the impetus for a new a refreshed practice but was considered a temporary aberration until writers could be brought back to producing "normal" fiction. Experimental writers have not disappeared altogether, but those sometimes still called "experiemental"–Lethem, Saunders, Wallace–are surely much less resolutely so, much more restrained, than Hawkes and Coover, et. al. Normal fiction is precisely what is taught to aspiring writers in most creative writing programs.

Literary change will continue to occur, of course, but in fiction it won't come in paradigm shifts but through the persistence of individual writers impatient with normal fiction. These fiction writers will be motivated by the need to preserve the integrity of their own work and by the desire to ensure that fiction has a purpose beyond providing the "book business" with a commerical product designed to be another entertainment option. Their work will continue to demonstrate that the aesthetics of fiction are manifested more in the continued reinvention of the form than in the successful reinscription of the existing form.
The Minds of Characters

September 2, 2008

The contributors to the blog OnFiction profess to be doing "research on the psychology of fiction." If we take this to encompass broadly the increasing popularity of "cognitive theory" and neuroscience in the analysis of literature and our response to literature, "psychology of fiction" attempts to describe our reaction to fictional characters as if those characters were real people with minds, who, as a recent post at OnFiction has it, provoke us to "wonder what they are up to." In this view of the reading experience, "we readers imagine ourselves into the minds of characters as we run the simulation which is the literary story." So do writers, which accounts for the reported instances of characters "exhibiting apparently autonomous agency" during the composing process.

As a reader, I have never "imagined myself into the minds of characters" while running "the simulation which is the literary story." Neither can I really believe that anyone else has done this. In the first place, in most fiction that to any significant degree asks us to consider the mental life of its characters, we are not encouraged to imagine ourselves "into" their minds. Their mental life is presented to us explicitly, often in the narrative mode called the "free indirect" method, sometimes directly through a stream of consciousness, or near stream of consciousness, point of view. We don't have to "wonder what they are up to" because the author/narrator makes it perfectly plain what they are up to. Perhaps it is the case that in some first-person narratives we are invited to read between, or behind, the lines the narrator literally offers us, resulting in a perception of the narrator's state of mind to which even he/she has little access, but I don't think this relatively special circumstance is what the "psychology of fiction" generally emphasizes.

Second, in what way does "the simulation which is the literary story" differ or depart from the literary story itself? Are we being told that the "literary story" exists as a way for us to imagine the characters in other situations, situations the story doesn't relate? That the story is merely an excuse for us to wonder abstractly about the characters in all of their "autonomy"? Or is it that the "simulation" we "run" is just the story itself and that when we "imagine ourselves into the minds of characters" we are simply envisaging what it would be like to be these characters involved in this story? If "character" is so overridingly important in a work of fiction that we are led to detach it from all other elements of the work and regard the characters as real people we might ask over for drinks, then why bother with the other elements of the story? The author could just send us a character sketch of his protagonist, whom we could then imagine in any circumstance we'd like. And while I do believe some readers project themselves into the situations in which fictional characters are portrayed, this has more to do with the operations of the readers' minds than those allegedly at work in the characters' minds. Such readers are more engaged with the story in which the characters appear than with the characters themselves, certainly more than they're connected to the "minds" of those characters.

Similarly, I'm sure that some writers do experience their characters exhibiting "autonomy," taking the narrative in directions the author didn't anticipate, but I doubt that very often this is a result of the author dwelling in the characters' "minds." In my own on-and-off career as a fiction writer, I have had characters wander off the plotted path, but never because I could read in their minds that they thought it best to do so. Either the character's voice seemed to provoke a change in plan, or the story itself prompted a change in character, or the character just didn't seem in general to be the sort of character who would do that rather than this. Realizing that a narrative needs to be readjusted because one's preconceptions about a character's role in it have been altered is an aesthetically sound decision, but it has very little to do with remaining alert to the "psychology of fiction."

If anything, a fixation on "character," even more reductively on the "inner life" of a character, only makes our response to the whole work of fiction more impoverished. The very best fiction, like the very best art in general, widens our perspective on the possibilities of the form as a form. It helps us enhance our experience of fiction by remaining alert to all of the artistic choices the writer has made. In John Dewey's words, "The artist selected, simplified, clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest. The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest." Isolating character as the most essential element in works of fiction potentially circumscribes our response to them, blinkers our awareness of the other aesthetic "operations" at work in the text. It inherently declares fiction to be this sort of thing–a way of meeting up with imaginary characters–rather than all the other things it might be. It renders stories and novels into case studies for psychologists rather than complex works of art.

Essays in Criticism

Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction