The Reading Experience

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.
Something New to Do

August 28, 2008

Britt Peterson's Chronicle of Higher Education article on the champions of "literary Darwinism" portrays these "scientific" literary scholars as threatening to overturn the currently entrenched academic approaches associated with Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. But at the level of its basic assumptions about literature–about why we study literature in the first place–there's absolutely nothing "new" about literary Darwinism, as Peterson makes clear, perhaps unwittingly, in his description of this method:

The most prominent [of the new science-based scholars] are the Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism.

To emphasize "evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts" is not different in kind from an emphasis on cultural patterns or historical patterns or, indeed, the kind of class-centered "patterns of behavior" emphasized by Marxism. What all of these appropriations of literature have in common is that they're really not about literature. Marxists have their political agenda for which literature seems a useful prop, cultural critics have theirs, and the literary Darwinists are now making a play at getting theirs a prominent place within the scholarship factory that academic criticism has become. Readers truly interested in the study of literature–not the study of science or sociology–have no more interest in reading Jane Austen for her representation of "mating rituals" than in reading James Joyce for his putative insights into the nature of Empire. These readers want to "study" both of these writers in order to more fully understand how their texts work, how they expand our ability to experience works of literature, to transform experience into aesthetic "patterns." Literary Darwinism will do nothing to assist such readers in the goal of engaging with literature as a singular form of art.

In this way, it isn't surprising that the Darwinists are encountering resistance from from "those you might think would be allies — other members of the loosely defined group of literary critics breaking new ground with studies that incorporate scientific theory and even, in a few cases, empirical method." The "science" being employed by the Darwinists is not quite compatible with the "science" used by those enamored of "cognitive psychology," and thus the latter consider the former to be rivals in the competition to create the latest academic fad. And it is certainly not surprising that this whole "loosely defined group" would be opposed by the theorists and the sociologists, since they are in danger of being unseated at the academic big table, just as the theorists themselves began unseating the New Critics and the traditional historical scholars thirty-five years ago.

Prominent Darwinian Joseph Carroll gives the game away when he observes that

"The stick is that [mainstream academics are] going to feel more beleaguered and provincial and left out in the cold, and the carrot is that they're going to feel that here's something new to do."

The worst thing that could happen to an ambitious academic critic is to be "left out in the cold," methodologically speaking. One wants to have tenure and as many publications in prestigious places as one can before the next group of promising scholars looking for something "new" comes along.

Carroll's Darwininian colleague Jonathan Gottschall makes it even more explicit:

"I think that ambitious young scholars, graduate students and so forth, will see something of glamour in here, something that can motivate their studies."

I don't know if Gottschall is being unusually honest or if he simply got careless in his word choice, but his invocation of "glamour" as the motivating goal of literary scholars, however dim and degraded such glamour might be–these are professors we're talking about, after all–only underscores how utterly trivial the "discpline" of academic literary study has become. It is about, and only about, itself as a "field" in the academic curriculum. All concern for literature as something that might be valued in its own right dissipated into the ivy-scented air long ago.

Peterson wonders whether literary Darwinism will "save literary criticism," but the only thing that will save literary criticism is, well, a revival of actual literary criticism. What the Darwinists are proposing is certainly not that. It's an effort to dislodge the "literary" from literary study once and for all. It seeks to subdue literature and all the remaining "subjective" responses to it and pin it to the wall of scientific scrutiny (at least to the extent that "literary Darwinisim" is actually science, which is altogether questionable). Gottschall is pretty clearly contemptuous of the established approaches to literary study, which, astonishingly enough, he seems to consider still too literary to be taken seriously. He's apparently an advocate of the notion that literary study has to be destroyed in order to be saved, although what remains as the object of scholarly study will then have no resemblance to literature whatsoever.
Lost in Translation

August 26, 2008

In a recent post at his Sentences blog, Wyatt Mason examines a passage from Robert Chandler's translation of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate and enthuses over its wonders. Although Mason acknowledges that it is a translation, and rightly notes that without it we who have no Russian would have no access to Grossman's writing at all, still, I am reluctant to myself conclude definitively that the quoted passage has precisely the qualities that Mason otherwise ably explicates. Indeed it is a translation, and it is possible the translator has actually improved it in its transformation into English, or made it worse, or in some other way failed to adequately render the original in a way that would dupicate the Russian reader's experience of Grossman's text.

This is not to say that the passage does not have the qualities Mason describes, and certainly not that Chandler's translation is ultimately a failure. I have no way of knowing whether it succeeds or not, and while I am usually willing to take the word of a critic proficient in another language that a given translation is acceptable or not, I am not thereby sufficiently emboldened to approach the text as a critic in the same way I am willing to work with a text written in English. Since I am a critic still attached to "close reading," to examining a work for its stylistic felicities and its formal characteristics, the awareness that with a translated text I am at best confronting it in a second-hand version is enough to warn me away from making any confident assertions about it.

Which is why I concentrate, both on this blog and in my other critical writing, mostly on fiction written in English, even more specifically on American fiction since I feel most able to engage with texts composed in American English (and also with the cultural realities often underlying American language conventions). In a sense I feel I am only capable of making specifically literary judgments on works in English, although I'm relatively certain the kinds of judgments I might make vis-a-vis American fiction are also relevant to fiction written in other languages. I just can't get close enough to such texts to be sure. There are times when the formal invention in an other-language work is evident enough that I can point it out with some confidence my critical eye is appropriately focused–most recently this happened with Magdalena Tulli's Flaw–but generally I stay away from making pronouncements on texts that in a sense I have not really been able to read in their native state.

I recognize that there are some critics fluent enough in second or third languages that they are perfectly reliable close readers of both English-language texts and of literary works in other languages. Unfortunately, the Spanish and French I learned well enough to pass a proficiency exam in graduate school are not good enough to allow me to pretend to read works in those languages other than in translation. This is probably a kind of self-imposed limitation on my range as a critic, but on the other hand I do feel that by restricting my critical commentary to (mostly) American fiction, I am able both to anchor my comments more firmly, and more deeply, in a particular literary tradition and its distinctive practices and to provide a context within which new works can be profitably read. It allows me to, perhaps, speak with somewhat more authority about American writers and writing by demonstrating a familiarity with the enabling assumptions, including assumptions about language, that have characterized American fiction over the long run.

I certainly don't want to imply that translations perform no useful service or that we in the United States need fewer, rather than more, of them. It's a scandal that so comparatively few translated works are made available to American readers and that so comparatively few of those readers seem to be demanding them. Translations allow us an important, if ultimately somewhat cloudy, window on the literary practices of the rest of the world, practices from which both readers and writers can and must learn. But given the haphazard way in which translations come to us (without much useful information about why this writer has been translated or why that writer is important), as well as my professed limitations as a reader of translations, I expect to continue emphasizing them on this blog only periodically.
“Might Not the Painted Knife Slip From the Painted Table?”

August 19, 2008

Steven Millhauser could not really be called a neglected writer. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, his books are reviewed relatively widely and usually respectfully, and he has his share of admiring readers. But I don't think he has been sufficiently recognized as the important and accomplished writer he really is. Since the early 1970s, he has produced a series of novels and short fiction collections that easily rival the fiction of any of his contemporaries in their imaginative depth, stylistic vigor, and formal ingenuity.

Millhauser's novels Edwin Mullhouse, Portrait of a Romantic, and Martin Dressler form a significant part of his body of work, each of them singular achievements that nonetheless display Millhauser's signature preocccupation with the processes of imagination and with protagonists who become obsessed, even possessed, by the need to explore the limits of their own perpetually active imaginations. Each of them provides a reading experience unlike any the reader is likley to recall, and each of them should be included on any list of superior American novels of the past thirty-five years. But in my view, Millhauser's short stories and novellas are even better and constitute the core of his achievement. While the longer form allows Millhauser to demonstrate the breadth of his inventive powers, the concentrated intensity of the shorter forms seems especially suited to his particular kind of storytelling.

Millhauser's fiction is a variation on the mode of postwar American fiction Robert Scholes labeled "fabulation" (Fabulation and Metafiction, 1979). According to Scholes, "Delight in design, and its concurrent emphasis on the art of the designer. . .serve in part to distinguish the art of the fabulator from the work of the novelist or satirist. Of all narrative forms, fabulation puts the highest premium on art and joy." The work of few other writers manifests in both its own formal patterns and its emphasis on protagonists with various kinds of of artistic ambitions as much "delight in design" as Steven Millhauser's. While the "joy" that this art produces doesn't always lead to fulfillment in life, Millhauser's characters are nevertheless fixated on perfecting their work and cultivating the satisfactions that only it is able to bring them.

A very good example of this sort of art-focused fabulation can be seen in "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne," a novella from the 1993 collection, Little Kingdoms. J. Franklin Payne is a newpaper cartoonist who begins to apply his talents to the then (1920) embryonic form of the animated cartoon. His efforts prove artistically successful, but as he explores the possibilities of this new medium, continuing to use thousands of individual drawings rather than adopt time-saving background cels, he finds his painstaking art already at odds with the increasingly commercial practices of the film business. Franklin remains faithful to his artistic vision and methods, even as his domestic life is falling apart and his wife leaves him. He completes his magnum opus, Voyage to the Dark Side of the Moon, but by this time he is not only the work's one true audience but in fact its only audience, however much he might imagine others there "to applaud him in the warm and intimate dark."

Like most of Millhauser's fiction, "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" is partly about an individual human being with intensely focused creative impulses, and partly about the way those impulses are transformed into works of aesthetic beauty and complexity. LIke many of Millhauser's protagonists, Franklin Payne's imagination leads him to unorthodox expression, to forms, such as the animated cartoon, that allow for the transgression of realism and aesthetic convention. Franklin, we are told,

. . .felt the desire to accept a certain challenge posed by the artificial world of the animated drawings: the desire to release himself into the free, the fantastic, the deliberately impossible. But this desire stimulated in him an equal and opposite impulse toward the mundane and plausible, toward precise illusionistic effects. As the violations of the real became more marked, the perspective backgrounds became fuller and more detailed; and as he gave way to impulses of wild, sweet freedom, he found himself paying close attention to he look of things in the actual world: the exact unfolding of metal steps at the top of a down escalator, the precise patterns of reflections in the panes of a revolving door seen from inside. . . .

This view of art's purchase on reality is in keeping with that delineated by Scholes in his section on "fabulation and reality":

Fabulation, then, means not a turning away from reality, but an attempt to find more subtle correspondences between the reality which is fiction and the fiction which is reality. Modern fabulation accepts, even emphasizes, it fallibilism, its inability to reach all the way to the real, but it continues to look toward reality. It aims at telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional.

The pursuit of "such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional" leads Millhauser in other stories to more openly experiment with form rather than narrate the stories of fictional characters such as Franklin Payne who themselves are driven to artistic experimentation. "Revenge," from Millhauser's 2003 book, The King in the Tree, is a good example of such an effort. It takes the form of a woman showing her house to a potential buyer, who is addressed throughout, in the first person, as "you": "This is the hall. It isn't much of one, but it does the job. Books here, umbrellas there. I hate those awful houses, don't you, where the door opens right into the living room. Don't you?" Gradually we learn the "buyer" is a woman who had a long-term affair with the narrator's now-dead husband and that the narrator is taking the occasion to exact a sort of revenge by informing the mistress of the damage her actions have inflicted. The narrator takes the mistress on a tour of each room of the house, in effect using them to present her (and us) with an anatomy of the narrator's life and marriage.

"The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" and "Revenge" show Steven Millhauser to be a writer of great inventiveness and storytelling prowess, one whose work emphasizes the wonders of artifice–including the artifice that is fiction–but also tempers our delight in its artifice by truthfully depicting the limitations of such artifice in its ultimate confrontation with the irresistable forces of reality. These qualities can be found in equally compelling measure in Millhauser's most recent collection of short stories, Dangerous Laughter (2008). The author's use of fabulation to evoke fantastic worlds is memorably evident in "The Dome," a Barthelmean story about the erection of domes above and around homes, towns, and eventually whole countries, "The Other Town," about a town that has replicated itself, creating an "other" town the citizens of the "real" town visit in order to give themselves a more vivid sense of its (and their) existence, and "The Tower," about the aftermath of a multi-generational effort to build a tower that "grew higher and higher until one day it pierced the floor of heaven."

The focus on artist figures perfecting their craft in their own visionary if idiosyncratic ways can be found in "In the Reign of Harad IV," which tells the story of a court miniaturist who is able to reduce the size of his miniatures to the point of invisibility, in "A Precursor of the Cinema," which relates the life and career of a painter able to create such realistic effects that his subjects can be seen moving on the canvas, even to leave the canvas altogether, and, in its way, in "The Wizard of West Orange," a story about Thomas Edison and his work on the "haptograph," a device that simulates tactile sensations. "Cat 'N' Mouse" is a verbal rendition of a Tom and Jerry-like cartoon, "History of a Disturbance" is a final communication from a man who has given up on words, while "Here at the Museum" is a docent's guide to the "New Past" on display at the institution named in the title.

"Real life" is portrayed more directly, if still with Millhauser's usual fanciful conceits, in "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman" and "Dangerous Laughter." In the former, Elaine Coleman has indeed disappeared, although she has neither run away nor been abducted. She has simply ceased to exist, a condition that, as the story makes clear, essentially mirrors her circumstances when she ostensibly did exist. As the narrator of the story puts it, "If it's true that we exist by impressing ourselves on other minds, by entering other imagainations, then the quiet, unremarkable girl whom no one noticed must at times have felt herself growing vague, as if she were gradually being erased by the world's inattention." The latter story relates how a group of teenagers during summer vacation begin holding "laughing parties," in which all involved break out in willed laughter. (Later, the laughing parties are replaced with weeping parties.) One girl, Clara Schuler, proves particularly adept at laughing out loud (it may be her only talent), but when the laughing fad fades she holds one last party at her own home, after which "The local paper reported that Mrs. Schuler discovered her daughter around seven o'clock. She had already stopped breathing. The official cause of death was a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, but we knew the truth: Clara Schuler had died laughing."

Both of these stories use fabulation as the best way to get at the reality experienced by those like Elaine Coleman and Clara Schuler, who feel marginalized and ignored, to find those "correspondences between the reality which is fiction and the fiction which is reality." They don't allow escape from the world through simple fantasy but aim at "telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional."

Millhauser's most provocative fantasies generally explore explicitly the gray areas between art and reality. In Dangerous Laughter, the most striking example of such a story is "A Precursor of the Cinema." Harlan Crane is a "Verisimilist" painter whose invention of "animate" paint allows him to to take his paintings a step beyond realism to the kind of photographic illusion of the real achieved by film. According to the story's narrator (an art historian of sorts) "Harlan Crane's animate paintings are more unsettling still, for they move back and forth deliberately between representation and deception and have the general effect of radically destabilizing the painting–for if a painted fly may at any moment suddenly enter the room, might not the painted knife slip from the painted table and cut the viewer's hand?"

Part of the humor of the story (and there's almost always an embedded humor in Millhauser's fiction) is in in the narrator's matter-of-fact way of presenting Harlan Crane's "invention" as if the idea of animate paint were not manifestly ludicrous, but the notion that art can "move back and forth deliberately between representation and deception" in a move that has the effect of "radically destabilizing" the work is one that has resonance not just for the paintings of Harlan Crane but also for the fabulative fiction of Steven Millhauser. His fiction consistently moves "back and forth" between the world we think we live in and the invigorating deceptions with which it both warps and truthfully renders that world. It "destabilizes" our idea that these two things are incompatible if 'realism" is the goal.

Steven Millhauser is one of the remaining postmodernists (a late postmodernist, perhaps) still publishing vital, challenging work. Dangerous Laughter is a book long-time readers of Millhauser's fiction will certainly value, but also one that could provide readers less familiar with Millhauser a compelling introduction to that fiction. Although such readers will then want to turn to the previous books for a more complete appreciation of one of the best living American writers.
Max Apple

July 21, 2008

Max Apple's debut, the short story collection The Oranging of America, was published in 1976, and in retrospect seems a kind of transitional work between the energetic postmodern comedy represented by, say, Stanley Elkin and the sort of "minimalism" practiced by a writer like Bobbie Ann Mason, whose fiction was widely noted for its references to the various brand names and other cultural artifacts of contemporary American popular culture. Apple's fiction, both in The Oranging of America and his 1978 novel, Zip, shared the comic perspective of Elkin's fiction, although in a somewhat more muted, less astringent way, but it also signalled some paring-down of postmodern excess, an affinity with the minimalists and their implicit critique of maximalist postmodernism, their return to quieter forms of storytelling.

To some extent, we have been deprived of the opportunity to witness Apple's further development of this hybrid mode of fiction. Since Zip, he has published only two other works of fiction, the 1984 collection Free Agents and a second novel, The Propheteers. Free Agents was actually an even stronger set of stories than The Oranging of America (with its famous title story about motel magnate Howard Johnson), more adventurous, less tied to conventional narrative. (Oranging was innovative in terms of subject matter, but not so much in the narrative forms employed.) It includes several stories that provocatively blur the lines between fiction and autobiography, employing "Max Apple" as their protagonists, while some of the other stories, such as "An Offering" and "Post-Modernism," are humorously unconventional in form (the former is an initial stock offering for "Max Apple, Inc.," which markets Max Apple's "private fantasies" through "stories, novels, and essays fit for mass consumption"), what might be considered kinder, gentler versions of postmodernism–which the latter story describes as the effort to compensate for the fact that writers "are stuck with beginnings, middles, and ends, and constantly praying that the muse will send us a well-rounded, lifelike character." The Propheteers, on the other hand, is in my view a weak novel expanding on the story "Walt and Will" from Free Agents and to me inferior to the story and its more typically Applesque concision and concentrated humor.

Thus we now have The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories (Johns Hopkins University Press), Apple's first book of fiction in over twenty years. In many ways it certainly seems of a piece with Apple's previous work. His signature low-aggression comedy remains mostly intact, although it now seems less a variant of postmodernism than a kind of benevolent satire that registers the odd and the peculiar in human behavior, the strange turns taken in people's lives, without presuming to correct human folly or critique social convention. Neither is American culture skewered or subverted, even though the stories in The Jew of Home Depot also continue Apple's focus on shopping-mall America, on characters who want to meet Yao Ming, who own an auto salvage company, sell Star Wars swords, industrial equipment, have inherited a package goods store, work at Home Depot. These characters go about their daily business with utter sincerity, their activities and occupations assumed to be normal and ordinary, even if in the context of the stories related they seem unavoidably if amusingly off-center.

This slightly off-kilter tone is usually established at the beginning of an Apple story, as in "Stepdaughters":

My wife sits beside me on our new leather couch. Strength is between us. "Who would have ever thought of this," Helen says. "I worried about boys, not about male hormones."

Our family life had been serene and moving toward joyful until Stephanie began shot-putting. Her eight-pound steel ball is now hammering all three of us. Stephanie is training for the state meet; Helen is fighting for her daughter's female body, and perhaps her soul. I am stepfather number three trying to stay on the sidelines.

The conceit of stepdaughter-as-shot-putter is carried through the story in this same matter-of-fact style as the stepfather comes to feel by the end of story some solidarity with his goal-driven stepdaughter:

When she opens her eyes I am standing across the room imitating her stance. Stephanie laughs. "At least take off your tie," she says. "Nobody shot-puts in a tie."

Even before I begin my arm feels sore. My legs are fifty–I remember the insurance company table. I feel the cholesterol, the blood pressure, the statistical saga of a tired body that must gear itself up each day for a 150-pound throw against the darkness. Yet, I feel as filled with hope and prayer as she is.

Steph and I point our left feet at one another like swordsman in a Douglas Fairbanks movie.

"On three," she says. And we begin.

This conclusion full of "hope and prayer" seems to me to represent, on the other hand, a perceptible shift in Apple's fiction toward a more unambiguously affirmative outlook on the world, a tendency to accentuate possibility and purpose. Certainly Apple's fiction has never been a slough of Beckettian despond, but the stories in The Jew of Home Depot do seem more generally optimistic, even celebratory. In "Proton Decay" and Sized Up" (the latter perhaps being the best story in the collection), the male protagonists wind up, in however unorthodox a fashion, looking forward to the marriages they have (presumably) arranged for themselves, while in "Peace," a businessman stuck with unsellable merchandise for which he has paid all the money he has is rescued when for the "International Day of Peace" a religious assemblage purchases the Star Wars swords, "freshly stamped 'Turn Star Wars into plougshares.'" Even "The Jew of Home Depot," which ends with an apparent murder and with the protagonist's alienation from his Orthodox Jewish background, has really chronicled his ultimate recognition of honest human desire.

Which is not to say these stories avoid grim realities or turn away from pain and suffering. A soldier about to be shipped to Iraq plays a role in "House of the Lowered," "Talker" involves a man raising his brain-damaged daughter, while both "Strawberry Shortcake" and "Adventures in Dementia" depict a son's struggle to care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. The comedy in these stories, while not entirely abandoned, is notably dampened; their placement at the end of the volume additionally gives it a kind of sobriety we don't really find in his previous books. The stories in those books certainly were examples of what Robert Scholes called "fabulation" in contemporary fiction, but the stories in The Jew of Home Depot seem to intensify this quality in Apple's fiction, although one could ask whether the corresponding loss of comedic subtlety is really a fair trade.

Also contributing to a perceived narrowing of focus in Apple's fiction is the fact that of the thirteen stories in the book, nine of them are narrated in the third-person, yet another departure from Apple's previous practice. Both of the earlier collections as well as Zip featured agreeable first-person narrators whose accounts of their experience, like that of the narrator of "Stepdaughters," added through their deadpan, slightly befuddled delivery an element that can't easily be approximated in a third-person narrative. And while Apple avoids facile "psychological realism"–the emphasis in these stories remains resolutely on what happens, not on how what happens is filtered through consciousness–the shift to third-person storytelling further suggests, to me at least, a less adventurous approach to the writing of fiction than might have been expected from Max Apple, especially after such an extended period of time during which to refresh one's sense of fiction's aesthetic possibilities.

It isn't that the book Apple has produced lacks all appeal. It is a diverting enough collection of stories. However, too many of them could have been written by other, ordinarily talented writers, and I had not previously thought of Max Apple as an ordinary talent.
Betraying the Novel

July 1, 2008

In this interview, William Gaddis scholar Steven Moore says of populist attacks on experimental writers that

Of course you don't have to like Joyce (or Pynchon or Gaddis), they’re certainly not for everyone, but to dismiss them as pretentious frauds and to glorify simpler, more traditional fiction struck me as an example of the growing anti-intellectualism in our country, right in step with schools mandating that evolution was just a “theory” and that creationism should be taught alongside it in science classes.

I couldn't help but detect some laziness as well; some people don't want to “work” at reading a novel (or listening to a complex opera, or watching a film with subtitles, etc). I said earlier I liked a challenge; many people obviously don’t, or not when it comes to novels. I got the sense from these critics that they feel the novel is a democratic, middle-class genre that anyone should be able to enjoy, and that these experimentalists were betraying the novel (and their readers) by trying to turn it into something (high art) it was never intended to be. . . .

I don't think I'd call the American impatience with aesthetically complex fiction "anti-intellectualism." Plenty of intellectuals themselves express the same disdain for writers like Pynchon and Gaddis, whose work can't be reduced to sociological observation or political agitation. It's more a resentment of complex art, a disinclination to give such art the sustained attention it requires. It's less "laziness" than it is a fundamental suspicion of anything that isn't useful in a readily apparent way. Critics want novels to be useful as tools of cultural analysis, while ordinary readers want novels to be entertaining, an escape from their own everyday reality.

Nor do I think that this impatience is necessarily "in step" with right-wing cultural values. The radical left can be just as impatient with art that isn't useful to their political battles as the radical right. In fact, the political left is probably more hostile to the "merely aesthetic," which is taken to be an expression of bad faith when it isn't being deconstructed and shown to be ideologically complicit with the political right. It isn't necessary to associate resistance to challenging art with politically conservative attitudes in order to account for its existence.

What may account for it, however, is precisely the assumption Moore detects in many readers and critics that "the novel is a democratic, middle-class genre that anyone should be able to enjoy, and that these experimentalists were betraying the novel." This is an assumption held not just by critics and readers, but by some writers as well, writers who shape their work so that "anyone should be able to enjoy" it, who count themselves failures if their work doesn't reach the broadest audience possible, who are willing to take on themselves the roles of marketer and publicist in order to accomplish this task. It is an assumption that counts novels as just another transitory amusement in competition for the entertainment dollar.

In his book The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt convincingly establishes that the rise of the novel and the rise of the middle class were parallel developments and that this correlation was not just incidental. Novels did pose an opportunity for this now literate social class to exercise its newly-acquired skill. But to insist that novels should (or could, considering the other entertainment options now available) continue to perform this same function 200 years later, after Flaubert, after Henry James, and after all the other writers in their wake who saw that the novel could indeed be "high art," can only be an effort to put the genie back in the bottle. To this extent, the distinction between "popular fiction" and "literary fiction" is quite sensible. Let those who prefer a "democratic" form of mass entertainment stay with the kind of books that dominate the best seller lists. Let those who prefer "challenging" fiction with claims to high art stay with the comparatively few such works that manage to get published. The two groups don't have to intermingle at all.

I don't really mind being identified with the "elitist" group. Nor do I mind that the larger group wants fiction without artistic pretensions. I only mind when writers or readers want it both ways, when they want their books to be "good reads" but also want them to be taken seriously as works of literary art. This usually involves dismissing "high art" standards as "narrow" and elevating popular standards to a place higher than high art. Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Gravity's Rainbow don't "betray" the novel. They confirm its possibilities. To deny that the novel has such possibilities is the real betrayal.
Dead Systems

June 10, 2008

In his essay "On Several Obsolete Notions," Alain Robbe-Grillet describes the novel in its "classic" phase:

All the technical elements of the narrative–systematic use of the past tense and the third person, unconditional adoption of chronological development, linear plots, regular trajectory of the passions, impulse of each episode toward a conclusion, etc.–everything tended to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal universe. Since the intelligibility of the world was not even questioned, to tell a story did not raise a problem. The style of the novel could be innocent.

He continues:

But then, with Flaubert, everything begins to vacillate. A hundred years later the whole system is no more than a memory, and it is to that memory, to that dead memory, that some seek with all their might to keep the novel fettered. . . .

It is tempting to say that Robbe-Grillet's account of the 19th century novel and the shadow it cast on subsequent novelists still seems relevant, fifty years later, and that many readers still think of the "innocent" narrative as the novel's natural form, from which any variation or experiment in form is merely a temporary departure. However, an honest consideration of Robbe-Grillet's bill of particulars would have to conclude that fiction over the course of the 20th century did in fact move beyond the model Robbe-Grillet associates with Balzac and other early novelists.

While much current fiction does continue to employ third-person narration–usually the "free indirect" variant through which a character's thoughts, recollections, and emotions provide a perceptual matrix but are not directly stated by the character–first-person narratives are probably more prevalent than ever before, as are experiments in shifting, alternate, and multiple points of view. Similarly, stories related in the present tense have become so common that what was once a notable divergence from the norm is probably no longer noticed by most readers. And while most novels still rely on "plot," their plots are by no means always "linear," such chronological development as they possess often enough supplied by the reader after piecing together the fragments of narrative presented without much immediate regard for chronological continuity. It could perhaps be argued that too many novels do still imply a "decipherable universe"–decipherable insofar as it can be adequately rendered through the protocols of realism–but most literary fiction is not so tied to a 19th century worldview as to portray human experience as "stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal."

Indeed, to the extent that contemporary life seems to many of us discontinuous and indefinite, the modernist-derived strategies emphasizing subjectivity and fragmentation seem justified in the name of realism itself. And to this extent, Robbe-Grillet has been proven correct when in the same essay he predicts that this sort of modernist experimentation (with which he more or less associated his own fiction) will become "assimilated," viewed by critics still attuned only to the past as the most recent golden age of storytelling. Thus, esteemed critics such as James Wood point us back to Henry James or Virginia Woolf as writers who set a standard of inner-directed realism, a realism of the mind and its subjective perceptions rather than a realism of the material world presented as a collection of facts. Wood is certainly not alone in holding up the psychological novel as the apogee of the novel as a literary form. The notion that in fiction, and only in fiction, we can "get inside" a character, can "feel" what it's like to negotiate the world from a perspective other than our own, is very widespread. But, I would argue, this is because one part of the modernist project, the extension of realism into "psychological realism," has been successful, while that part setting a prececent for aesthetic innovation ("make it new") as a measure of artistic achievement has not been embraced as firmly by either writers or critics. The set of accepted conventions for the writing of fiction has been advanced from about 1825 to about 1925, but those voices that "seek with all their might to keep the novel fettered" to a "dead system" can still be heard, even if that "system" has incorporated some of the strategies for which Robbe-Grillet himself was an advocate.

Although "innocent" novels are still being written (particularly within some forms of genre fiction), very few serious writers have failed to notice fiction's loss of innocence. But the expansion of techniques available to the modern writer has developed into its own kind of "systematic" practice that can be just as stubborn an obstacle to the development of a "new novel" as the traditonal story form Robbe-Grillet wanted to clear away. It is probably inevitable that strategies and approaches once regarded as mold-breaking will eventually become conventional, established techniques for the novelist to adopt when they suit his/her need. But this only makes it more important that writers like Robbe-Grillet or Donald Barthelme or Gilbert Sorrentino emerge to point out that such techniques have become hidebound and to offer fresh alternatives.

Essays in Criticism

Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction