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The Art of Disturbance: On the Novels of James Purdy

  • Word To Thing

    At Wet Asphalt, "J.F. Quackenbush" defends B.R. Myers against his blogospheric critics. (Which, of course, includes me.) As I read the post, JFQ argues that, read comprehensively (a courtesy Myers himself was not willing to extend to Denis Johnson when reviewing Tree of Smoke), Myers is focused on essentially two flaws in contemporary fiction: an overemphasis on "the sentence as a unit of composition" and a concomitant focus on "novelty at the expense of meaning," as well as a kind of slippage between "authorial voice" and "character voice." The latter seems to be Myers's special bete noire, and according to JFQ, is "the one point that his critics have to counter if they want to save Myers' targets from his attacks." Further: "if his critics are going to respond to him, they need to create an argument that supports the trumping by authorial voice. This is something that his critics do not attempt."

    I hereby take up this challenge, and intend to both "counter" Myers's analysis and supply an argument justifiying "the trumping by authorial voice" in works of fiction.

    As someone who does indeed read fiction more for the "sentences" than for the plot or the "meaning" or whatever it is Myers thinks is being obscured by "too much writing," I am not well-disposed to Myers's reiteration of this complaint. However, to the extent that he is pointing out an overemphasis, as much by critics as by fiction writers themselves, on conventionally "poetic," writing, on prose that, as JFQ puts it, relies on "fresh" imagery in the form of pretty figures of speech (the kind of writing often privileged in writing workshops), I actually agree with some of this line of criticism. "Fine writing" of this sort too often substitutes for more challenging explorations in style and distracts attention from relevant formal considerations (such as point of view).

    Unfortunately, Myers's review of Tree of Smoke offers no evidence that this sort of stylistic vapidity is what he has is mind in lamenting the dominance of the sentence in contemporary prose. The sentences Myers isolates are either accompanyed by no stylistic analysis at all, or are criticized for their denotative lapses, as defined by Myers's own schoolmarm-ish principles of "good English": characters do and say things that Myers finds objectionable, are described in terms he can't assimilate, objects and images are deemed inappropriate according to the most narrowly-focused notions of context ("from the villagers' perspective a less appropriate word than bric-a-brac is hard to imagine"), syntax ("Johnson fills the space between purple passages by dropping his sentence subjects, leaving bursts of adjectives to stand alone") and word choice ("As for snickering and creak, they will please only those who skim for startling word combinations"). Just as often his judgments are simply wrong. There's nothing "slapdash" about this sentence: "Listening for his murderers, he became aware of the oppressive life of the jungle, of the collective roar of insects, as big as any city's at noon." This seems to me a perfectly coherent account of the character's state of mind at this moment, and I do not in the least have to "linger over" these words "in order to make sense of them."

    Myers is finally not at all interested in "style" as that word can be meaningfully applied to works of literature. His bilious examination of Denis Johnson's sentences ultimately can be reduced to the charge that Johnson doesn't understand the "proper use of words," doesn't obey the rules governing "application of word to thing" that Myers wants so desperately to enforce. He understands style to mean "which words are right for a given context" and thus the most damning indictment he can make of a writer like Denis Johnson is that "he does not respect words enough to think they should mean something," a formulation by which "meaning" in construed in the most literal, predetermined, unimaginative of ways. Fiction writers should get it "right," should find what's "proper" in their choice of words, should make sure they correctly evoke the plain meaning of words and represent the transparent relationship of "word to thing." Any writing that isn't pristine in this fussy Myersian mode is, per se, overwriting.

    This indignation about writing that refuses to tame itself in a manner acceptable to B.R. Myers is related to JFQ's second point about "voice." JFQ elaborates:

    The argument runs that an author's voice ought to subsume itself to the voice of a character at all times through a book rather than pushing through and printing itself on the characters. The reason that an author ought to do this is that not doing so displays a lack of the multivalence that characterizes novels and a lack of sensitivity to difference in the human condition as evidenced in language.

    This is really quite an astonishingly autocratic dictate: "an author's voice ought to subsume itself to the voice of a character at all times." It necessarily restricts an author using 3rd-person narration to a formulaic version of "psychological realism" in which the author's prose style "subsume[s] itself to the voice of a character," whether that "voice" is literally the character's way of speaking or more broadly the "voice" in which the character's subjective perception is expressed. (Presumably this restriction would be eased for 1st-person narratives, as long as the "voice" is plausibly the voice of the character as well, and not just a fancy or idiosyncratic style imposed by the author–but then isn't narrative voice always imposed by the author?) It essentially eviscerates the concept of literary style itself, since the writer's prose is reduced to its most functionary role, as the medium in which the character's manner of thought and speech is reflected as transparently as possible.

    As for "multivalence": How multivalent is Hemingway's fiction? Faulkner's? No two writers could have more contrasting prose styles, but what they do have in common is that their work does have a distinctive style. In both cases, I would argue, the author's own voice "push[es] and print[s] itself on the characters." If this were not the case, we would have no reason to consider Hemingway's "style" to have been as revolutionary as it in fact was, since he wouldn't be using his autistically laconic style for deliberate effect but merely to "reflect" the thinking of a series of autistically laconic characters. And what about those characters in Faulkner's work who "think" in Faulkner's own circuitous, declamatory style? Is Faulkner to be removed from the pantheon of American writers because in retrospect he failed to observe the Myers Rules of Decorum? Did he show "a lack of sensitivity to difference in the human condition as evidenced in language"? For that matter, how "multivalent" is the fiction of, say, Virginia Woolf, one of the great pyschological realists? Even when she's dipping in and out of the consciousness of multiple characters, how aware are we of the individuality of each voice, as opposed to Virginia Woolf and her fluent prose style in the process of dipping?

    A writer who especially challenges the Myers/Quackenbush philosophy of prose style is the American writer Stanley Elkin. No writer in literary history has ever "printed" his own characeristic style "on the characters" more than Elkin. Here's a passage from his 1983 novel, George Mills:

    Mills was always thirsty now. Talking to his horse, coaxing him along the orbit of the salt carousel, his tongue flecked with salt dust, his throat burned raw with the dry pebbles, gagging and talking baby talk, horse talk, nonsense, philosophy. He did not know what the other horse talkers told their beasts–the merchant was disinterested; it made him drowsy, he said, to listen; he did not like, he said, to stay long in the farm– because they spoke in what Mills did not even know was Polish, and in addition to his constant thirst, to the annoyance caused him by his great raw burning and wounded mouth, to his stinging eyes and smarting, salt-oiled skin like the sticky, greasy glaze of ocean bathers, there was the problem of finding things to say to it, of saying them, getting them out through the hair-trigger emetic atmosphere of his throat and mouth. And in the mitigated light, watery, milky as the hour before sunrise save where the torches, igniting salt, exploded into a showerwork of sparkler ferocity, white as temperature. But mostly the talk, what to say.

    Here's another from his 1971 novel, The Dick Gibson Show:

    By now he had enough experience in radio to handle anything. He was an accomplished announcer, a newsman, an MC, an actor. He could do special events, remotes, panel discussions. He had a keen ear for which songs and which recordings of which songs would be the hits, and was even a competent sports announcer. Though he had not yet broadcast a game from the stadium, he had done several off the Western Union ticker tape, sitting in a studio hundreds of miles from the action and translating the thin code of the relay, fleshing it out from the long, ribbony scorecard. More than anything else this made him feel truly a radio man, not just the voice of radio itself, the very fact of amplification, the human voice lifted miles, beamed from the high ground, a nexus of the opportune. See seven states! And everything after the fact so foreknown, the game itself sometimes already in the past while he still described it; often the afternoon papers were on the streets with the final box score while he described for his listeners the seventh-inning stretch or reported a struggle in the box seats over the recovery of a foul ball–his foreknowledge hindsight, a coy tool of suspense: "DiMaggio swings. That ball is going, going, oh, it's foul by inches."

    Both of these passages are ebullient, robust, bordering on excessive. (In my opinion, gloriously so. In his later work, Elkin's prose style became if anything more mannered, more extravagant, as if over the course of his career he'd learned to shrug off the nagging demands of character development, point of view, and plot construction to concentrate solely on the still untapped resources of writing itself.) They contain truly novel and "fresh" images–"the hair-trigger emetic atmosphere of his throat." Neither of them bother with the distinction between "author voice" and "character voice," neither of them bow to the commands of critics urging "multivalence." It's all Elkin, even Dick Gibson, who is after all a radio "voice" of great skill but who ultimately still speaks Elkinese.

    In the literary world of B.R. Myers's dreams, we would presumably be rid of writers like Stanley Elkin, in my opinion one of the great writers of the post-World War II era. Anyone who is inclined to give Myers's criticism of contemporary fiction the benefit of the doubt should take that warning under advisement.

    Readers like B.R. Myers and J.F. Quackenbush are of course entitled to their preference for writers who toe the stylistic line, who are careful not to intrude too much prose onto their prose styles. But no one should accept their criticism of writers who don't provide this service as anything but a stentorian defense of their preferences. If they don't like writers who write too much, they should stay away from them and not elevate their intolerance of style into some sort of universal principle of literary correctness.

  • Style and Depth

    B. R. Myers's critique of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke essentially amounts to these two complaints: a) Johnson is not a psychological realist, and b) there are passages in the book that Myers doesn't like. To my mind, neither of these points is relevant to an honest assessment of Johnson's novel, and thus Myers's "review" should be read (as the Rake also points out) as another installment in his "manifesto" against contemporary fiction and its readers and should not be confused with actual criticism of Tree of Smoke.

    In his admitted ignorance of Johnson's other fiction, Myers finds it a crippling flaw that this latest novel does not "depict characters with extraordinarily rich and complex inner lives." Myers warns potential readers of Tree of Smoke: "Anyone expecting a psychological novel from characters so lacking in complexity deserves to be disappointed."

    But what if, in fact familiar with Johnson's other books, we don't expect this latest one to be a "psychological novel"? What if we have concluded that Johnson's strengths as a writer don't lie in detailing the "extraordinarily rich and complex inner lives" of his characters? And what if this is so because Johnson so often portrays characters who lack an ability to reflect much on their actions, whose lives seem propelled by forces they don't control or who get caught up in events they can't foresee? What if in taking up a Denis Johnson novel we just don't think Tolstoy is a particularly apt touchstone in beginning to evaluate it?

    Further, what if we think the very concept of "psychological realism" is specious to begin with? Myers thinks that the mark of a good novel is "style and depth" and that it's the psychologizing that brings the "depth." A "psychological novel" is one in which the novelist descends into the murk of human consciousness and brings up nuggets of clarity and enlightenment. Exactly what it is that makes a novelist a sufficiently expert analyst of the human mind that I would care what he/she comes up with in this dive into the depths, or that qualifies some passages of discontinuous prose or halting exposition as "psychology," has never been adequately explained to me. Pretending to mirror the ongoing operations of consciousness (or to translate those operations into coherent language) is just another way of getting words onto the page, and by now it's a dull and overused strategy. It has no special merit that entails an inherent superiority to other ways of writing.

    For me, that Denis Johnson is not a psychological novelist is one of the primary reasons I would want to read his fiction in the first place.

    And then there are Johnson's putative lapses in style. I'm prepared to believe that in a book as long as Tree of Smoke there will be some sluggish moments, some stylistic treading of water, or even that in this particular novel Johnson's subject has not called out the best in his prose style. However, I can't rely on Myers's analysis in order to entertain these possibilities, mainly because he doesn't provide any analysis. Most of the examples of bad writing he cites are condemned for their lack of psychological astuteness–surely a colonel would never use an "artsy compound adjective thrown in with profanity and genteelisms"–for trivial "mistakes" in word choice–apparently one must never use the word “bric-a-brac” if Vietnamese villagers are in the vicinity–for insufficent knowledge of physics–"Could someone standing in such a noisy place hear even his heartbeat, let alone his pulse?"–or an overreliance on "startling word combinations"–one's pulse shouldn't "snicker" and one's sweat shouldn't "creak–but rarely are they examined in any detail or with much insight. Frankly, many of the passages Myers cites seem ok to me. But because I don't share Myers's assumptions about how a novelist's words "should mean something," I guess I'm just one of those who "contribute to the rot" of the King's English.

    Certainly Myers does almost nothing to demonstrate that Johnson's prose style actually is deficient, aside from quoting a number of passages and making some irritated remarks about them. He assumes we will agree with him that the passages are indeed bad, but I don't, or at least I want some close reading of them that points out their particular flaws. Instead I get this, about one extended sample of "bad prose":

    It is not always easy to tell whether Johnson is being serious or merely unfunny, but I sense no irony here. Rather than disdain Edward’s puerile humor and self-importance, we are to share his condescension toward a society that would never “get” his lampoon, which, by the way, has little chance of being off-color with an “unmountable” lead (another case of Johnson canceling out his own words). We are also to accept that although Edward is now the kind of man who lets puppies starve to death, and is something of a sociopath to boot, his experiences afford him unique insight into Philippine society. In a mad world only the madmen are sane, and all that. . . .

    Note that what is supposed to be an example of bad prose turns out to be a criticism of one character's "puerile humor and self-importance" and of the notion that "in a mad world only the madmen are sane," etc. Nothing in Myers's commentary is an examination of style. Perhaps he tells me that I might not like this particular character or that the underlying theme is banal (both a matter of individual judgment of course, each requiring a separate critical argument), but he tells me nothing about Denis Johnson as a stylist. In fact, there is nothing in Myer's review that suggests to me that he knows anything at all about what makes for an effective prose style, nor that he read Tree of Smoke in order to fairly appraise it for what it is trying to accomplish rather than find in it what he wanted to find–an excuse to engage in more splenetic denunciation of contemporary fiction.

    Myers's review serves to remind us that he doesn't much care for contemporary fiction. (Although, having read A Reader's Manifesto as well as several of his subsequent reviews, I still don't really know why.) I'm not sure, however why the Atlantic Monthly's book editor otherwise thought it was something worth publishing. As a piece of literary criticism, it's pretty wretched.

  • The Burden of Criticality

    Johanna Drucker sums up her argument in her book, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as follows:

    . . .the critical frameworks inherited from the avant-garde and passed through the academic discourses of current art history are constrained by the expectation of negativity. Fine art should not have to bear the burden of criticality nor can it assume superiority as if operating outside of the ideologies it has long presumed to critique. Fine art, artists, and critics exist within a condition of complicity with the institutions and values of contemporary culture. (247)

    According to Drucker, artists of the 2000s (representatives of which her book discusses in some detail), no longer see "complicity" with mass culture as an evil to be avoided. These artists use mass culture to create dynamic, visually arresting works the ultimate ambition of which is to be aesthetically pleasing. No requirement of "criticality" is necessary for ideological correctness: the purpose of art is to be aesthetic, and contemporary artists are exploiting the aesthetic possibilities of mass culture to create "fine art" that doesn't pretend to an inherent "superiority" over that culture. Complicity is ok, as is taking sensory pleasure in art.

    I'm ultimately fine with this argument, although it's unfortunate that a defense of aesthetic value in art has to in effect make common cause with mass culture in order to ensure that "art" survives as a viable endeavor to begin with. (It's the devil's bargain that's unfortunate, not popular culture, or at least particular productions of popular culture, some of which I enjoy just as much as the next guy.) And why is it necessary to equate autonomy in art with a claim of "superiority"? Earlier in the book, Drucker tells us that the high modernist view of art as in its separate sphere actually did damage to the aesthetic claims of art:

    By appearing to be entirely aesthetic (its forms and expressions entirely contained in the visual appeal to the senses and lacking in any prescribed or circumscribed purpose), fine art sustains the concept of value as a notion by pretending to be autonomous. The "value" of a work of art is never to be accounted for in the costs of materials and labor or in the investments in production. Fine art appears to be far from the crass worlds of commerce and remote from the real of factory production. Fine art distances itself from the systems that in turn exploit these myths to advantage. Art is not a shell game or a poker bluff, but an assertion of the symbolic basis of value production. . . .

    It seems that Drucker is reciting the oft-told story of how modernist art took itself to be free of complicity, innocent of ulterior "purpose," by "appearing to be entirely aesthetic" and "pretending to be autonomous" but really wasn't after all, blather, blather, blather. It's an article of faith that academic criticism clings to like piranhas: art can't assert autonomy or singularity, can't carve out an aesthetic space beside the "crass worlds of commerce," because all expressions are socially or culturally or historically determined. Works of art can be studied alongside tv shows and pop albums because they're just as inevitably a part of "culture" as any other commodifed object.

    I say this is an article of faith because although it is true that all human beings creating works of art are subject to the prevailing assumptions of time and place, this does not seem to me to be a very profound observation. It amounts to saying that living artists are, well, alive rather than dead. (Or that deceased artists lived on this planet rather than on one in some adjacent solar system.) Yet is is held as an unassailable truth in post-New Critical academic criticism that literature must be historicized, that the unavoidable fact that writers put the fruits of their influences into "circulation" means that culture authors texts to the extent that the notion of aesthetic autonomy is just a nefarious illusion.

    But why does the fact that any artistic work can be seen to one degree or another as illustrative of cultural forces rule out the possibility it might also be granted a kind of autonomy? If your goal is to show that all cultural expressions are subject to the historical mediation demanded by a properly Marxist view of culture, you can certainly do so, and arguments about the "autonomy" of certain excluded expressions would correctly be dismissed as incoherent. But they would be incoherent only when considered from within this interpretive framework, which is being posited as the only acceptable way of making sense of works of art or literature.

    However, if this particular way of making sense of artistic and cultural expression has the virtue of being "true"–albeit in the trivial sense I have indicated–it can hardly claim exclusive rights to truth since its own investment in it rests on the underlying assumption that truth is relative. If literary texts cannot claim to embody universal or unmediated or noncontingent truth because everything is an artifact of incidental human activity, I cannot see any logically disallowed reason why one such activity could not be the study of literary texts for their posited "literary" qualities conceived as separate from their status as cultural representations, congeries of historical forces, conduits of sociological information, or whatever else works of literature can be considered good for. To object that such an approach to literary study (or the study of any of the arts) presumes itself "outside of the ideologies" is either irrelevant–since all critical approaches must scramble to the "outside" in order to speak authoritatively about the "inside"–or just wrong. The "autonomy" game does not presuppose itself outside the rules of relativism; it simply solicits recognition as one game among the others. "Pretending to be autonomous" is good enough for those who think this particular aesthetic game yields interesting insights. "Appearing to be aesthetic" is, in fact, to be aesthetic.

    Thus the real question at issue is not whether autonomy is a valid concept in art/literary criticism but which concepts are to be accorded primacy in academic criticism. If the notion of the "autonomous object" is accompanied by close and accurate reading that results in a coherent account of a text or work of art , it can hardly be dismissed as fallacious. It can be assigned a lesser significance in the critical heirarchy, deemed less "serious" in an environment in which the merely literary and the merely aesthetic are identified with a dandy-ish formalism and can be marginalized safely enough while real scholars get on with the business of interpreting history, explaining culture, and intervening in politics. It can be made the scapegoat for all the shortcomings of the previous generation's critical assumptions and duly assigned its own historicized place in the critical, and curricular, past. In the struggle for dominance in that small part of academe originally (if reluctantly) set aside for "literature," the proposition that poems, stories, and novels are best regarded as wholly unlike other, more transparently discursive verbal texts, self-enclosed, formally intricate, autonomous, and that the critic's job is to advance ways of reading such textd that enhance the reader's experience of them, has clearly lost out. It is unlikely to make a comeback, although periodic efforts like Drucker's to defend aesthetic pleasure will no doubt still persist.

    Although it does seem to me that a debate about terminology, about the conventionality of the critical lexicon, is still in order: When the powers that be in literary study want to show they have not entirely abandoned the old critical order, they like to point out that much current academic criticism is underpinned by what they want to still call "close reading." But this term has become so overstretched through misuse that, at best, it now merely means "paying attention" and at worse means "interrogating" the text vigorously enough that you finally do find there what you wanted to find. "Close reading" for the New Critics was a reading adjusted to the contours of the text, a reading that seeks to conform itself to the demands made by the text itself and doesn't demand that the text conform to the critic's preconceptions. It does so by, indeed, assuming the work's autonomy.

    "Literary criticism" is still identified as the task undertaken by academics who study and write about literature. But academic criticism often seems to have little use for the "literary" as a subject of inquiry except when it can be shown to be illusory, or elitist, or a prop supporting various evil hegemonies. Since it is clear enough that many academic critics would rather be engaged in cultural criticism, ideological criticism, or sociological analysis–anything but the lowly explication of literary texts–perhaps the term "literary criticism" could be turned back to those who do have an interest in exploring, even "appreciating" the possibilities of the literary when considered as an autonomous practice. I'm really not sure why cultural studies scholars and historicists would want to hold on to the designation, anyway.

    Then there are terms such as those used by Drucker: "negativity"; "complicity." By the first, Drucker seems to mean the incorporation of images, motifs, and sensibilities from mass culture only to "subvert" these references by using them to implicitly critique the insipidity of mass culture. This has been a common response to the encroachment of mass culture on high art, and Drucker is right to suggest that sometimes high art simply borrows from popular culture and that such borrowing is not always an attempt by the artist or the writer to "say something" about culture. That this move attributing "criticality" to works is so familiar only reinforces (for me) the extent to which criticism of art and literature has become wholly fixated on the something said at the expense of the forms of saying (and how form itself mutates straightforward "saying"), but I'm not sure why she needs to use "complicity" as a description of the act of avoiding negativity.

    The term only reinforces the notion that artists and writers must be judged by the sociopolitical consequences of their work. Drucker wants it to be acceptable for them to refuse the "burden of criticality," but to be inevitably "complicit" with cultural practices and attitudes expressing sometimes dubious "values" can't help but suggest there is a lack of integrity in the art work found complicit, a lack of purity that makes art and literature questionable allies in the fight against temporal Power.

    For me, that they are weapons of questionable efficacy in this ideological skirmish is the mark of their most indispensable value. In their excesses and frequent ungainliness, their refusal to submit to the expectations of ordinary discourse, works of art and literature manifest an a-temporal power that compels succeeding viewers and readers to consider them anew (sometimes to enlist them in ideological skirmishes), to regard them as representations informed by their origins in historical circumstance but not bound by them, however culturally complicit they ulimately must be. If this is not quite metaphysical "autonomy," it's also not an illusion.

  • Market Penetration

    In his recent disquisition on fiction's loss of audience to television shows about the Mafia, John Freeman opines that "America's most powerful myth-making muse long ago moved in to Hollywood" and that the novel has additionally "been whacked by a number of things," such as the decline of public education and the rise of advertising.

    While the spread of a kind of voluntary illiteracy in American culture certainly doesn't help in the effort to perhaps entice a few current nonreaders into becoming readers, I really don't think The Sopranos has likely distracted the attention of many people who might otherwise have been reading novels, certainly not many people who under different circumstances might have spent their time with Nabokov or Beckett. Would it really be a coup for literature if some of those watching The Sopranos were instead reading James Michener or Mario Puzo, in reality the true "myth-making" alternatives to "the screen in its many incarnations"? And if by pointing out the dominance of the "language of advertising" Freeman is criticizing the "book business" for its marketing of trash of all kinds, including that which is sandwiched between covers and called a "book," then I certainly agree with him, although presumably he would be satisfied if such advertising were used to attract readers to real books. Indeed, later in his article Freeman lauds the way such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Ralph Ellison, and Jack Kerouac managed to combine literary ambition with "market penetration."

    Freeman is probably correct, however, to cite competition from Hollywood as a detrimental influence on the standing of fiction, but its influence is not of the kind he imagines it to be. If the novel is being marginalized, it is not because too many people are watching HBO; it's because too many novelists are writing novels that are clearly meant to be made into movies. If fiction is being undervalued, by readers and critics alike, it's not because shows like The Sopranos are better, or more accessible, than contemporary novels; it's because fiction writers themselves implicitly concede that film and television are the narrative forms to which they ultimately aspire. If certain movies and the various cable miniseries programs seem livelier than fiction, it's not because fiction no longer "develops characters" on a grand scale, or has abandoned "some of the primary themes of the Great American Novel" or fails to render itself in "a deeply American language," characteristics Freeman believes are positively in evidence in The Sopranos; it's because too few novelists manifest any interest in sounding out the yet undiscovered possibilites of fiction as an alternative to the conventional narrative practices upon which film and tv continue to rely.

    It is precisely the desire to achieve "market penetration" (a market that the movie business has not only penetrated but has saturated with its seed) that has caused fiction to become less and significant to the development of American culture.

    I began to ponder these issues well before reading Freeman's article. I have long thought that most mainstream "literary fiction" was inspired less by writers' familiarity with literary history and more by the narrative demands of film. This doesn't necessarily mean that most writers want to produce plot-driven thrillers and melodramas or sweet romantic comedies. Indeed, the sensibility exhibited in much contemporary literary fiction is perhaps closer to that informing the "art film," the "independent" movies that can be described as "quirky" or "offbeat" or, simply, "serious." This kind of film has the advantage of combining a degree of artistic credibilty with some plausible prospect of popularity, should the film in question "find its audience," manage to accomplish a measurable act of "market penetration." With many writers, my impression is that their most deeply-held ambition is to see their work adapted into such a film, which would allow them to maintain their artistic cred while also having the work affirmed by those attuned to and sanctioned by our "most powerful myth-making muse."

    But I was especially provoked into examining this phenomenon more closely when I recently watched Todd Field's adaptation of Tom Perotta's novel Little Children (screenplay written by Perotta himself.) I found it to be a reasonably pleasant, mildly "quirky" satire of suburbia, one that especially zeroes in on Americans' increasingly fraught attitudes toward parenting, fraught because so many parents have hardly ceased being "little children" themselves. My impression of the novel, based on the reviews and weblog discussions I'd read at the time of its release, was that it was a relatively unquirky literary satire written by someone specializing in the "youth" scene (his previous novels were Joe College and Election, the latter also made into a well-known film.) I decided to read Little Children to see if I had perhaps too quickly discounted him as a writer, although I suspected I would find the novel just another in the very long line of mediocre works of fiction that Hollywood directors and scriptwriters had managed to elevate into better films.

    What I found was not just a mediocre work of fiction that managed to be transformed into a watchable film, but a mediocre novel that was mediocre precisely because it was obviously written in order to be so transformed.

    If ever a movie could be said to have "filmed the book," the Field/Perotta version of Little Children is it. Very little of the book is left behind in the transference to film. The plot remains virtually undisturbed, much of the dialogue comes from the novel verbatim or with very minor changes, and almost all of the characters introduced in the novel are included in the film (although a couple of them, such as the husband of co-protagonist Sarah, have a diminished role, and the husband's subplot in particular–concerning his obsession with an online porn vixen–is pared back). The novel's scenic narrative structure, by which relatively brief, self-enclosed scenes, alternating primarily between those involving Sarah and those involving Todd, the "Prom King" with whom Sarah begins an extramarital affair, move us forward in a leisurely, episodic fashion is faithfully reproduced in the film. The ending is changed slightly, but not in such a way that the novel's underlying point ("boy, aren't these people pathetic!") is lost. One can easily imagine the screenwriter making his way, page by page, through this novel and converting its prose into scene headings and dialogue.

    And yet the film, as an aesthetic experience, is an improvement over the novel. It's not a great film, but as "quirky" independent films go, it holds one's attention and provides the occasional amusing insight into the reverse trajectory (it's all downhill after college) so many Americans have followed in the last few decades. (In this way the film–but not the novel–is reminiscent of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, although Yates's novel is much bleaker, less content with mere amusement.) The novel, on the other hand, is a slog, full of uninspired prose and hackneyed observations. And this difference, in my opinion, is all the difference in the world. The movie spares us Perotta's labored, cliche-ridden, "unobtrusive" writing. It spares us passages like this:

    Aaron had discovered his penis. Whenever he had a spare moment–when he was watching TV, say, or listening to a story–his hand would wander southward, and his face would go all soft and dreamy. This new hobby coincided with a sudden leap forward in his potty training that allowed him to wear big boy underpants at home during the day (at night, during naps, and in public he still needed the insurance of a diaper.) Because he often had to sprint to the bathroom at the last possible moment, he preferred not to wear pants over the underwear, and this combination of easy access and an elastic waistband issued a sort of standing invitation that he found impossible to resist.

    Almost every sentence here is built out of banal phrasing and worn-out expressions: "had discovered his penis"; "a spare moment"; "soft and dreamy"; "a sudden leap forward," etc. The last sentence in particular is a headlong accumulation of cliches. (I can't decide if the "standing invitation" is meant as a pun–a bad one–or is just lazy writing.) This is supposed to be a "plain style," but its effect is precisely, through its very shoddiness, to draw attention to itself rather than away. I spent more of my time wincing at the woodenness of the prose than following the story, and without "story" a novel like Little Children has nothing. The film rescues the story from the writer, as the director has at least some "style" in cinematic terms. The novelist has none.

    One might say that since Perotta himself wrote the screenplay he was able to preserve most of the story another screenwriter might have altered, or that since it is his story he clearly does have some talent as a writer. But these claims only reinforce for me the conclusion that the novel was probably written with the screen version in mind and that the talent Perotta has is precisely a talent for screenwriting. The concepts of "story" and "character" his novel manifests are those prized by moviemakers. Aside from the adultery plot and the supporting cast of "offbeat" characters, Little Children (the novel) has little else to offer, nothing readers who read novels that in one way or another advance the form (even a little bit) would find compelling. I understand that practically everyone in the world has a "screenplay" in the works, and that few of them will ever be produced, but if you're going to write a novel that exists only as a proto-movie, why not just write it up as a script to begin with?

  • “The Circuit I’d Been Following Up to Now”

    For me, the most indispensable element in the aesthetic success of Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder is McCarthy's use of the novel's brain-damaged protagonist as its first-person narrator. Not only is this unnamed narrator's earnest but affectless voice crucial to the novel's cumulatively mesmerizing effect, but none of its other pleasures–its deadpan humor, its wide-eyed fixation on the details of mundane and seemingly trivial activities, its creation of "plot" out of the narrator's own incurable plotting–would be possible if this otherwise undistinguished man who happened to have been hit by "something falling from the sky" and is now trying to cope with the aftermath were not telling his own story.

    One review of Remainder maintains that in reading this story we readers "remain firmly inside the narrator's head." Another has it that McCarthy's intention is to "understand how a traumatized mind might put its broken pieces back together again." But this emphasis on the narrator's "mind" is not quite right, although the seeming disorder of his mind (which, in my reading, at least, is actually an attempt to reassert order) is certainly pushed to the foreground of the novel he is (unwittingly) composing. We are not, as in most conventional "psychological realism," thrust "inside the narrator's head." We are thrust into his words, where we are, undeniably, caught up in the same obsessions and compulsions, the same damaged processing, that he is. But in dramatizing the way "a traumatized mind might put its broken pieces back together again," McCarthy is not ""exploring" his character's thoughts or attempting to track those thoughts in its "stream." He is personifying the character's state of mind through his words (often enough words whose import the narrator only dimly recognizes, if at all) and his seemingly deranged actions.

    In effect, McCarthy reverses the conventional approach to "Mind" in fiction as advocated by the likes of James Wood and others. For Wood, fiction itself exists to reveal Mind; this is its raison d'etre, its claim to superiority over other narrative arts that are not as supple in their ability to "get inside" the human head. Pyschology uses fiction to render itself more dramaticaly. McCarthy, on the other hand, uses Mind to render fiction more authentically. Remainder doesn't pretend to anatomize the human mind, translating its ineffable qualities into sensible prose, as so much middling psychological realism post-Joyce and post-Woolf generally settles for. It re-enacts the irresistable impulses and the skewed perspective the narrator's altered mental state is producing, just as the narrator himself re-enacts events that make him feel more at ease in his transformed world, that give him a sense of belonging in an environment that has otherwise become unacceptably alien.

    Often the narrator's actions seem wholly devoted to materializing these impulses, although the narrator isn't fully aware of his submission to them:

    I was heading down the hallway back towards the main room when I noticed a small room set off the circuit I'd been following up to now; I'd moved round the kitchen each time in a clockwise direction, and round the main room in an anti-clockwise one, door-sofa-window-door. With the short, narrow corridor between the two rooms, my circuit had the pattern of an eight. This extra room seemed to have just popped up beside it like the half had in my Settlement: offset, an extra. I stuck my head inside. It was a bathroom. I stepped in and locked the door behind me. Then it happened: the event that , the accident aside, was the most significant of my whole life.

    It isn't so much that the narrator seems to have "lost" his mind. He has lost the part that made his actions seem natural, unpatterned, subservient to his own will, however much they were always already a product of the brain's mechanical operations. Now those operations have been laid bare, the clockwise motions and figure-eights of his damaged brain compelling his movements just as much as his undamaged brain had done, but without that "extra", naturalized patina that allows us to overlook our actual subservience to the brain's creation of patterns. He's lost the "remainder" that makes us feel at home in our reality.

    The "event" that proves to be the "most significant" in the narrator's life thus ensues, his account of it typically (and hilariously) straight-faced:

    . . .I'd used the toilet and was washing my hands in the sink, looking away from the mirror above it–because I don't like mirrors generally–at this crack that ran down the wall. David Simpson, or perhaps the last owner, had stripped the walls, so there was only plaster on them, plus some daubs of different types of paint where David had been experimenting to see how the room would look in various colors. I was standing by the sink looking at this crack in the plaster when I had a sudden sense of deja vu.

    A memory from his pre-accident past has apparently emerged, complete with "a window directly above the taps just like there was in this room," outside of which "there'd been roofs with cats on them." "People had been packed into the building; neighbours beneath me and around me and on the floor above. The smell of liver cooking in a pan had been wafting to me from the floor below–the sound too, the spit and sizzle."

    With the help of his large "Settlement" vis-a-vis the accident, the narrator goes about trying to re-create this scene. Much of the novel is devoted to this effort, and it makes for surprisingly compelling reading, the sheer audacity of it (both on the narrator's and McCarthy's part), as well as the unquestioning participation in it of those the narrator enlists to bring it all off, both strangely entertaining and just strange. Eventually other events are re-created as well, as the narrator increasingly becomes dependent on the "tingling" he feels whenever the recreations work especially well.

    In her review (linked-to above), Margot Kaminsky asserts that Remainder is a "chillingly clever novel of patterns that fools you into thinking it's a novel about plot." Chilling it certainly is, but I'm not sure "clever" is exactly right. Relentless in its unfolding of the narrator's, and its own, inherent if scary logic is more like it. And I don't really think it's accurate to call it a "novel of patterns" rather than "a novel about plot." McCarthy isn't so much imposing a "pattern" as exposing our human preoccupation with pattern-making (which includes our need for "plot"–the narrator's reenactments are nothing if not precisely crafted stories in which he is the protagonist), a preoccupation that of course extends to and finds culmination in fiction itself, as well as art more generally. One could say that the only thing that really separates the artist from McCarthy's unnamed narrator is that the artist indulges his/her taste for pattern-making in works of imagination that merely echo life. Our narrator tries to make his life conform to patterns, to force it into order and meaning, climaxing in events that only confirm and disastrously reinforce the closed loop his life has become.

    Readers who like to have an immediate, transparent "bond" with their first-person narrators may or may not find Remainder a comfortable read. It surely isn't easy at first to like, or even to understand, its narrator-protagonist, and his behavior only becomes more extreme as he figure-eights his way through his story. His narrative voice remains spookily matter-of-fact throughout. On the other hand, it is hard not to summon up some sympathy for this character, since we, too, if befallen by our own "accident," would likely find ourselves confronting a similarly alien world and might respond to it, almost certainly would respond to it, in the best way our addled brains could contrive. Our mental machinery would be exposed as similarly fragile. We would become our own remainder.

    But even if you're not sure this kind of character would appeal, you should read Remainder nevertheless. It's not only the most impressive debut novel I've read in a very long time. It's one of the best novels I've read recently, period.

  • Of Limited and Personal Interest

    John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? is a very strange book. It's first half seeks to demonstrate that art doesn't really exist and that, if it does, it doesn't do anyone any good. The second half essentially ignores the case that Carey has just made and asserts that art does indeed exist after all and does some people quite a lot of good.

    The first half is actually the more interesting and lively part of the book. Here he surveys all the various efforts made to define art and finds them wanting, concluding that "Anything can be a work of art. What makes it a work of art is that someone thinks of it as a work of art." The relativist in me wants to concede that ultimately this is true: no Platonic definition of art that thoroughly delineates those properties inherent to art and that marks it off from all those other phenomena that are "not art" exists. We wouldn't want one even if we could get it. Rogue artists who confabulate our notions of what art is and isn't are always going to come along, and we should be grateful for them, even encourage them. "Art" is, finally, whatever succeeding generations of human beings determine it to be.

    On the other hand, when we all put on our logical thinking caps, we know that if "anything" is art, nothing is. There are just "things" that provide us with enjoyment, pleasure, instruction, or whatever we want to call whatever it is we get from these things. One could plausibly enough adopt this view (the pragmatist in me thinks it wouldn't ultimaty matter because it wouldn't really affect our sense of the value of what it is we do "get" from these things), but Carey himself finally doesn't want to go this far. He wants to retain the word "art," even if it does it does reduce art objects to those "things" someone, somewhere, thinks to call art. (Later in the book Carey tries to raise "art" back up to a more dignified status by stressing its utilitarian applications, but for it to have such applications it surely does have to exist in the first place, or those using it won't exactly know what they're applying.)

    Thus Carey is able to argue further that "art" as it is celebrated by its snootier adherents doesn't have the morally elevating qualities they want to claim for it. No plausible evidence exists that art makes us better people. Most of the rhetoric used to pronounce on its spiritual qualites Carey incisively, and rightly, points out is so much bluster and metaphysical cant. If we can't provide specific scientific descriptions of the effect art actually does have on us (and Carey maintains that we can't) then better to remain silent than to make grandiose assertions about its "spiritual authenticity" or its ability to evoke "a peculiar emotion" that is "independent of time and place," as Clive Bell had it. And not only is the "religion of art" rhetorically bankrupt but it in fact "makes people worse, because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic."

    Curiously, then, Carey winds up not so much rejecting the ethical function of high art but affirming its ethical dimension: Too much attention to the wonders of art and too much discussion of those wonders only work to make us bad people. That art turns out to be morally enervating rather than elevating doesn't make it any less "moral" in its implications.

    Carey's inability to rid himself of the very assumptions he wants to decry runs throughout the chapter charging arts enthusiasts with turning it into religion. Such enthusiasts apparently are wrong not so much in thinking that art might have beneficial effects but in failing to spread those effects around widely enough: "Turning art into religion often carries with it the assumption that there is a higher morality of art, distinct from conventional morality." The religion of art "devalues, by comparison with itself, ordinary life and ordinary people." Furthermore, it is the focus on the appreciation of, rather than participation in, the arts, that keeps it floating above the outstretched arms of those "ordinary people" who might after all be made into better people if they were to experience the joy of art for themselves. As evidenced by various studies Carey cites, feelings of powerlessness might be alleviated (resulting in a decrease of violence), self-esteem might be raised, and an epidemic of depression might be halted. Thus, "Another thing we should do is to switch the aim of research in the arts to finding out not what critics think about this or that artwork–which is necessarily of limited and personal interest–but how art has affected and changed other people's lives."

    Notwithstanding that Carey's contentions in this chapter essentially contradict everything he's said before–art can't be "anything" or there would be nothing specific to apply in the kinds of arts programs whose beneficent effects he lauds, and there would be no reason to enlist the arts at all in such programs if they can't change lives–they don't even count for much in Carey''s own ultimate valuation of "art" in the second section of the book, "The Case for Literature." It turns out that Carey's brief on behalf of participatory art was only a kind of gesture toward a quasi-Deweyan program of "making art," good for bashing the swells and the necessarily limited efforts of critics, perhaps, but not really a serious defense of an alternative to Art. Literature, it would seem, actually is art, and its primary effects are to be located in the secondary act of reading. (I agree that they are, but in the context of Carey's overall argument about the subjectivity of standards, it nevertheless brings the critic back into prominence, as the reader who proves to be especially attentive.)

    Carey titles his first chapter on the subject "Literature and Critical Intelligence," but his initial argument seems to place "critical intelligence" in literature rather than the reader: "The first claim I would make is that, unlike the other arts, [literature] can criticize itself." It "shows itself more powerful and self-aware than any other art." Perhaps this is true, but if so, it very nearly belies Carey's larger point that art–even the premier art of literature–doesn't have any particular, objective value. (Yes, Carey assures us that his valuation is indeed his unavoidably subjective own, but still. Carey's very attempt to offer concrete reasons for literature's superiority seems to assume at least an objective method of assessing its superiority.) "More powerful" suggests that works of literature do have some experiential qualities that can be measured. Furthermore, Carey believes that literature "is the only art capable of reasoning" and that "only literature can moralize." (He seems to be using "moralize" in a sense that makes it a good thing, something like a "critique" of human behavior.) Swift and Johnson are presented as authors whose works illustrate these capacities.

    Carey appears to have adopted some variation on the otherwise presumably "elitist" French-theoretical idea that language, not writers, create texts, since it is "literature" that reasons and moralizes. If he means instead to say that individual authors such as Swift are moralists, this is just another way of describing their particular interests. It says nothing about literature as "art" per se. According to the terms of Carey's discussion, it is literature that moralizes, literature that reasons.

    I confess I find this idea absurd in the extreme, essentially insane. Carey is hearing voices speak through literary texts that no critic or reader with a decent respect for fiction or poetry as distinctive modes of discourse would hear in such an unmediated way. Moreover, Carey himself apparently doesn't really accept these formulations. The final chapter of What Good Are the Arts? tries to make a case for literature based on the its characteristic "indistinctness."

    All written texts require interpretation and are, to that extent, indistinct. But with Shakespeare something new happened. An enormous influx of figurative writing transformed his language–an epidemic of metaphor and simile that spread through all its tissues. . . So when writing is dense with metaphor and simile. . .the imagination has to keep fitting things together that rational thought would keep apart. It has, that is, to keep ingeniously fabricating distinctness–or whatever approximation to distinctness it decides to settle for–out of indistinctness. . . .

    As it happens, I thoroughly agree with all of this. "Indistinctness" is a perfectly good name for that evasive quality in works of literature that sets them apart from straightforwardly discursive forms of writing, that in the most intensive way requires we really read the text before us. But I don't see how at the same time we are grappling with the "indistinctness" of literature we can also comfortably accede to its "reasoning"–after all, "the imagination has to keep fitting things together that rational thought would keep apart"–or its "moralizing." Either literature "says something" about morality or politics or ideas in the kind of readily accessible way Carey's discussion of it implies, or it is "indistinct" and thus all of its putative messages are unavoidably ambiguous when they're not just hopelessly garbled.

    Carey wants to have it both ways: it is because literature can "communicate" more effectively and it can also remain "indistinct" in the manner common to all the arts that it is ultimately the most valuable of the arts. Perhaps this is just the consequence of the fact that literature emerges from language as its medium and that language is inevitably burdened with "meaning" (although it is also the consequence of a failure to consistently distinguish between the use of language for meaning and the use of language for aesthetic effect), but it nevertheless results in the most crippling contradiction in a book full of contradictions. Literature can't both produce an indistinctness that every reader makes distinct in his/her own way (or leaves it indistinct) and make moral and rational claims that are presumably universal in their appeal.

    As far as I can tell, Carey seems to have written this book in order to upbraid the likes of Geoffrey Hartman, who, according to Carey, believes "the experience he gets from high art is better than that others get from the mass media." Since there is no way of establishing that high-art lovers do obtain a "better" experience therefrom, or even of establishing what "better" might mean, all defenses of high art are simply expressions of elitism dressed up in patronizing rhetoric.

    But what if the experience of art does contribute to human improvement? Not because art's moralizing or "spiritual" qualities directly lead to social change or self-actualization, but because close consideration of art enhances our ability to have fulfilling experiences? Because complex works of art encourage us to pay attention in a way that does not direct it into pre-existing channels or entirely cut off the very possibility of sustained, fully-engrossed attention by settling for the superficial or the sanctimonious. Even if there is no way of measuring the quality of experiences of this sort vs. the quality of the "anything" someone might want art to be, who really thinks that anything will do? Near the end of the book, Carey offers a sop to art-lovers: "That the arts are enjoyable to those who enjoy them is a fact that it may seem I have not emphasized enough in this book. If I have not done so, it is partly because it is obvious, and partly because being enjoyable does not distinguish the arts from a vast range of other human activities." But what if it's why the arts are enjoyable "to those who enjoy them" that's important? Not because it confers some special honor on their declared tastes but because the enjoyment comes from having one's powers of apprehension challenged?

    And why can't the objects of this particular kind of enjoyment be called "art" by those who care about it? Why does John Carey want them to stop calling it that, unless they also stipulate that "anything" can be art if claiming otherwise makes the "inartistic" feel bad? It's finally only Carey who seems to believe that "art" must have a metaphysically-fastened, all-encompassing definition, or else there's nothing.

  • Just Do It

    I finally managed to watch on C-SPAN the "Ethics in Book Reviewing" panel discussion from the recent Book Expo America. Quite frankly, most of it was pablum (except for John Leonard's remarks and some of David Ulin's), when it wasn't largely just self-serving. The discussion really wasn't so much about "ethics" as it was about insuring that most of the assumptions motivating mainstream book reviewing remain resolutely unexamined. The general impression I got from the panelists was that what reviewers and editors are doing these days is just fine, except in the rare instances when it's not, but those don't really matter since print book reviewers are clearly so well-intentioned.

    One of the unexamined assumptions that seems to be shared by these book reviewers is that the reviewer should not look at other reviews before doing his/her own, an issue that came up near the end of the session. "Just review the book" seemed to be the consensus advice among those left to discuss the matter.

    There are several problems with this notion that reviews should be written in a critical vacuum, however. One is that it implicitly posits a recognized, shared set of criteria by which reviewers should go about "just" reviewing the book at hand. The reviewer needn't look at what others are saying because everyone is applying these same standards, even though they might come to different conclusions in the process. Ignoring those other reviews presumably avoids contaminating one's own conclusions with theirs, leaving the purity of one's response intact.

    There is no such purity of response. If there is a shared set of critical standards that reviewers must apply, that in itself is the product of reviewers' assimilation of those standards through reading other reviews. If there are no critical standards to be uniformly and objectively applied in particular cases, then the reviewer's response is unavoidably intuitive and subjective, and while this sort of encounter with the text might thus be more recognizably "pure," I don't see the point in protecting it from intelligent or provocative things other reviewers might be saying. As a reviewer, you might be overlooking something in your own apprehension of the text, and to be alerted to this by another review can only be helpful. Why let your impoverished reading stand when you can easily enough enrich it?

    In my opinion, this hands-off approach to reviewing only reinforces the idea that book reviews are essentially "consumer reports," an attitude to which Francine Prose earlier in the discussion took exception. Each reviewer goes about his/her business of "just" reviewing the book and sends the results out to the reading public. These readers then consult a sampling of such assessments and make a decision about which one to trust, or how each one contributes to an overall assessment that helps the reader choose to purchase or not to purchase the "product" in question. Unless you think the reader is only going to read your review, which is possible but not likely, and certainly not likely among readers of the more intellectually weighty book review publications such as the NYTBR or Bookforum or The Atlantic, to refuse to consider the commentary other serious reviewers and critics have already provided seems to me a refusal to engage in the kind of ongoing critical discourse about new works they most decidedly need if they're not to become like most movies–appear with great fanfare in the form of reviews (mostly offered up over the same weekend) and then, after the equivalent of the obsession with a movie's "grosses," effectively disappear.

    Certainly not all reviewers would be able to cite other reviews even if they wanted to. With every new book, some reviewers have to go first. But surely Prose and Leonard and Carlin Romano don't really have these kinds of "notices" in mind. (Although there probably is some pressure among editors to get his/her review out first, itself a destructive impulse that's all about bringing attention to one's own publication rather than considering the literary quality of new books.) They're interested in the kinds of reviews that might also claim the status of criticism, even if of a relatively preliminary sort. I, for one, don't see how serious criticism can occur without the critic taking some account of what other critics have said. Moreover, to maintain that reviewers ought to actively avoid engaging with other analyses, should consider book reviewing as the opportunity to "just do it," seems to me an outright repudiation of criticism as anything other than the insulated opinion-mongering of self-appointed "experts."

  • Only Read By Literary People

    It's too bad that the National Book Critics Circle has now so thoroughly discredited itself and its "save book reviews" crusade through its inability to curb its blog-hatred, since buried beneath the ignorant rantings Critical Mass has been posting is also this short piece on the role of criticism in literary journals by novelist Eric Miles Williamson, who is also an editor at American Book Review.

    And while our efforts are noble at saving the book review sections of newspapers, it seems to this Board member that the battle we're fighting will ultimately be lost. Newspapers exist to make money. They are commercial enterprises. The Hearst Corporation (from which I receive checks) is not, ultimately, concerned with advancing culture or belle lettres. It wants, like any other creature, not only to survive, but, as Faulkner says of man, to prevail. . .

    This said, I believe the book review is in better health than it has ever been in this country. I have in front of me a recent issue of Kevin Prufer's Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, the literary journal published out of the University of Central Missouri. It comes out twice a year, and the issue on my desk has 27 reviews totalling over 100 pages, some as long as 4500 words. None of these reviewers get paid a nickel. Also on my desk is American Book Review, for which I edit. We publish six times a year, and our most recent issue has 30 reviews, each of which is at least 1000 words. We pay fifty bucks, but we beg our reviewers to accept a subscription or a gift subscription, and most of them forgo the cash. Then there's The Georgia Review, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Chelsea, The Southern Review, The Arkansas Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and hundreds of other literary journals published both independently and by universities. . . .

    I certainly agree with Williamson that the book reviews to be found in publications like Pleiades, ABR, Bookforum, and Context (alert: I've written for three of these journals) are more fully developed and considered, are better, than most of the glorified plot summaries that pass for fiction reviews in American newspapers. Good reviews are to be found frequently enough in the literary magazines Williamson lists as well (further alert: I've also written for two of them), but unfortunately the ones on the list are just about the only print literary magazines that do regulalry publish book reviews and literary criticism. The principle, and partial reality, that Williamson champions in his post is well worth stating and defending. Literary magazines (what used to be called "quarterlies" or "little magazines") should play a vital role not just in publishing fiction and poetry but in maintaining criticism as an ongoing practice. However, this principle is not followed, perhaps is not even recognized, by the editors of most of these magazines (of which there are indeed hundreds).

    (I have to say I think online literary magazines are doing a better job of providing reviews and criticism than their more-established print brethren. Why this would be true I can't quite say. Perhaps there's a feeling that print space is too valuable, more long-lasting, and thus ought to be taken up primarily by fiction and poetry. It is true that perfunctory reviews of the newest and the latest aren't likely to seem that urgent in retrospect, but good reviews that aspire to the status of criticism don't have to be mere book reports and don't have to focus only on upcoming releases. Some extended discussion of books that have already passed the window of immediate critical regard but that remain well worth readers' attention would do American fiction a lot of good right now.)

    A very good reason why literary magazines ought to cultivate critics and criticism stems from Williamson's own honest assesement that "the battle we're fighting [on behalf of newpaper book sections] will ultimately be lost." It will be lost. Newspapers are well advanced in their furious endeavor to alienate as many of their natural allies (readers) as possible, and in a few years we may well look back on the idea that serious book reviewing could be sustained in American newspapers with some hilarity. Without some system of critical support, none of the writers featured in our literary magazines are going to be able to make much in the way of long-term connection to readers who might be interested in their work. The mere appearance of the work in these magazines, absent attention to it when it later appears in a collection or leads to a first novel, isn't going to suffice. Simple concern for the careers of the writers they're promoting ought to motivate litmag editors to include thoughtful reviews among their offerings.

    There will continue to be resistance to the idea that book reviewers should seek the more congenial, if also more narrowly focused, space afforded by the quarterlies (or, for that matter, literary blogs). Such resistance is vividly illustrated by the very first comment offered on Williamson's post: "I'm all in favour of literary journals; but they are only read by literary people. Surely the importance of having fiction and non-fiction reviewed in daily newspapers is that books remain an essential part of everyday culture, rather than becoming the preserve of a select few." Martin Levin also voiced a similar objection in last weekend's Globe and Mail: "Here's what worries me: The malignant idea that books, and book talk, are culturally marginal, even irrelevant, to be consigned to special publications and websites. Newspaper book reviews are often the first voice in public conversations about issues and ideas and writing that matter. And that's what we're in danger of losing."

    I just can't agree that book reviews have ever been, or are ever likely to be, part of "everyday culture." Like or not, book culture is "the preserve of a select few," although a "select few" in a population of 300 million can still add up to a lot of people. "Book talk" may not be entirely "culturally marginal," especially if that includes talk about nonfiction books related to current events, public policy, and history, but it's hard to make a case that book talk about fiction and poetry occurs anywhere but among the "select few" who think such works are important. Perhaps it is true that "Newspaper book reviews are often the first voice in public conversations about issues and ideas," but those conversations also take place mostly among a "select few" and again the books Levin must have in mind are mostly nonfiction. Moreover, this more rarefied view of the role of book reviews seems at odds with Levin's previous claim that "book review sections are still where casual readers, and that's most readers, go to find out what books they might possibly want to read." (I don't think this is true. I think most "casual readers" go to libraries and bookstores and look around, or get recommendations from their friends. I doubt that many such readers ever seriously consult book review sections to determine what "they might possibly want to read.")

    There's something very peculiar about the notion that literary journals are insufficient because they appeal primarily to "literary people." Literary people are people who take books and reading seriously. They want to know not only what new titles have been published this week but also how these books relate to other books (including other books by these authors) and what the experience of reading any one of them was like for an engaged reader. Book reviewers who want to keep plying their trade are going to have to get over the idea that they're bringing culture and edification to the great unwashed. Even if the unwashed wanted to get clean, newspapers (and many magazines) clearly are no longer going to pay for the effort. We should be content discussing the literary with literary people.

  • Undervaluing Comedy

    In this essay at Prospect, Julian Gough lucidly describes the kind of comedy he traces back to the Greeks and that the Russian linguist/theorist/philosopher M.M. Bakhtin called "carnivalesque." In this tradition of comedy, the comedic text (or performance) presents a thoroughly undeceived view of human life, responding to "our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it," with unremitting laughter. Although Gough doesn't use the term in his essay, Bakhtin further called such an attitude toward human affairs "radical skepticism." No authority is spared the corrosive perspective afforded by this sort of laughter, no conduct or discourse presented with "straightforward seriousness" can finally be taken seriously.

    Such later European writers as Rabelais and Swift were literary comedians of the radically skeptical kind, but, as Gough also emphasizes, it was the development of the novel as a literary form that really gave writers the opportunity to exploit this comedy to its full potential. Gough includes Swift and Rabelais as "novelists," but even though Gargantua and Pantagruel and Gulliver's Travels could be called proto-novels, the tradition of carnivalesque comedy in the English novel would include some of the very first writers to produce what we now agree are novels: Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, as well as their greatest disciple, Charles Dickens. Bahktin admired all of these writers, and the broad, thoroughgoing comedy they practiced–separate from whatever "happy ending" their books supplied–is what Gough seems to have in mind when he writes of the novelist as one "who did not have a holy book. The novelist was on his own. Sometimes he's even a she. There were no rules. The chaos of carnival had found its form. The fool's sermon could be published, could live on."

    Gough is right to assert that

    The novel, when done right—when done to the best of the novelist's abilities, talent at full stretch—is always greater than the novelist. It is more intelligent. It is more vast.

    This is especially true of comic novels, or at least those novels that are truly "comic" in the Bakhtinian sense and not just "satirical." Satire has traditionally been corrective, a way of using laughter to mock attitudes and behaviors the author wishes to reform. In other words, satire is usually another way of "saying something." It is not radically skeptical because it holds out one source of authority–the writer him/herself–as immune from such skepticism. The author's ultimate goal, cloaked in humor, is to be serious about the errors both individuals and society are prone to. He has a point to make, and the point exceeds the reach of comedy. The satirist doesn't willingly satirize himself.

    Perhaps this is one reason why, after Dickens, comedy in fiction–satirical or otherwise–recedes in importance, replaced by realism and naturalism, both of which assume the structure of tragedy and essentially express the tragic view of life. This is, of course, "straightforward seriousness" of the highest order, and, as Gough points out, to be taken as a "serious" novelist required privileging tragedy over comedy:

    . . .western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. . .

    The fault is in the culture. But it is also internalised in the writers, who self-limit and self-censor. If the subject is big, difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must be in the tragic mode. . . .

    With the occasional exceptions Gough notes–Evelyn Waugh, Flann O'Brien–comedy essentially disappears from fiction, or at least so Gough appears to believe. He certainly does imply that little noteworthy comic fiction has appeared since Waugh, especially in the United States. Through the professionalization of fiction writing via creative writing programs, he writes:

    The last 30 years have seen the effects of turning novel writing into an academic profession with a career path. As they became professional, writers began to write about writers. As they became academicised, writers began to write about writing.

    And the language of the American literary novel began to drift away from anything used by human beings anywhere on earth. Thirty years of the feedback loop have led to a kind of generic American literary prose, instantly recognisable, but not as instantly comprehensible. Professions generate private languages designed to keep others out. This is irritating when done by architects. But it is a catastrophe for novelists, and the novel.

    Here, I'm afraid, Gough really misses the boat. Comedy in fiction–comedy as Bakhtin would recognize it–has flourished in American fiction since at least the 1960s. One of the few postwar American novels Gough mentions is John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. This is a fine book, but it is far from the only "carnivalesque" novel to be found in postwar fiction. (And I'm not sure I would finally identify it as truly carnivalesque, at least not insofar as this kind of comedy requires "radical skepticism." Ignatius J. Reilly is surely a Rabelaisian character who rejects the authority of everything associated with the "modern," but his own superior status–despite his vices–as one who sees through it all is never really questioned, nor is the authority of his anti-modern views, which have been especially lauded by contemporary conservatives who see Reilly as a kind of moral hero.) Perhaps the finest postwar American writer (in my view) is Stanley Elkin, whose work is relentlessly comic in an almost vaudevillian way, and which implicitly includes within its comic purview Elkin's own hyperactive, gloriously excessive style, its at times ridiculously extended tropes and setpieces offered up as the focus of laughter in and of themselves. Gilbert Sorrentino takes fiction itself as a subject of merciless laughter, in novels such as Mulligan Stew submitting all of its assumptions and devices to his inspired mockery. Novels such as Catch-22, Portnoy's Complaint, Gravity's Rainbow, and The Public Burning stretch satire almost to the breaking point, using comedy to deflate even the most "profound" of subjects–war, sex, democracy–and reveal them to be laughing matters like anything else.

    Furthermore, despite Gough's quick dismissal of writers "who began to write about writing," this particular mode of postwar American fiction–metafiction–is actually the most radically comic writing yet produced in American or English fiction (with the possible exception of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which was uproariously metafictional before its time). The fiction of writers like Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, as well as Sorrentino, through its self-reflexivity, its insistence that readers be aware of writing as writing, exposes the act of writing, of fiction-making, to a kind of ridicule. These are the calculations that writers make? Here's how a "story" gets strung together? This is what writers do? In the end, the grand pretensions of fiction are shown to be very artificial indeed, novels and short stories unmistakably disclosed as only words. These writers have been accused of frivolity, of–wittingly or unwittingly–undermining their own craft. But this is the very goal of this kind of comedy. Only by stripping even literature itself of its dignity, of its pretensions to "signify," can fiction keep faith with what I agree with Gough is its real mission: "The task of the novelist is. . .not to fake a coherence that does not exist, but to capture the chaos that does. And in so doing, perhaps we shall discover that chaos and permanence are not, in fact, opposed. The novel, self-renewing, self-destroying, always the same, always new, always… novel… is the art of permanent chaos."

    I also agree with Gough that the academization of fiction through creative writing programs has probably discouraged writers from further exploring the possibilities of Bakhtinian comedy. It probably has contributed to the creation of "a kind of generic American literary prose." But I can't agree that it has done so by valorizing metafiction. The problem is not that there's too much postmodernism floating around; it's that there's not enough of it. In my view, only someone who's willfully misreading American postmodernism–the most indispensable ingredient in which is laughter–would say that "Since Joyce and Woolf (and Eliot), the novel's wheels have spun in the sand." Postmodern comedy has taken the anarchic comedy implicit in Joyce and made it explicit. It's the rejection of this liberating anarchy by "professional" Creative Writing that has stultified "literary prose," not the acceptance of a "private language" too influenced by postmodernism. If Gough wants American writers to again see the virtues of his "divine comedy," he could start by urging them to read carefully the very postmodernism he for some reason wants them to think "never happened."

  • Where Are the Novelists With Their Indictments?

    My first impulse in reading this essay by Henry Porter in The Observer was to take it as just another siren song about the need to combine art with politics, to toughen up the former by encouraging writers to tackle the "serious" issues of the day. It's a song that ought to be resisted, to be sure, but I was ultimately most struck by how thoroughly cacophonous Porter's version of the tune turns out to be. His argument really is quite astonishingly incoherent.

    Porter begins by quoting a typically dull piece of prose written by a "policy expert" and suggests that commentary on current affairs might be more lively if it were in part written by real writers, "public intellectuals" and novelists or dramatists:

    This may seem harsh, but where are the novelists with their indictments of government and society? Where are exposés of some unregarded part of the termite heap? Where are the dramatists who can barely speak for their anger? Harold Pinter opposed the war vociferously and David Hare wrote a terrific play about it called Stuff Happens, but there has been very little thinking outside that which isn't either controlled by or seeks the approval of the political parties.

    It probably is true that the public discourse would be enlivened, its collective prose style invigorated, if such writers participated more regularly. However, it's really not very clear what Porter is asking them to do. It seems he wants them to "indict," "expose" and "speak," all of which are presumably forms of non-literary public expression. Yet he also endorses Hare for writing his anti-war play, and elsewhere he praises "engaged" novelists such as Nadine Gordimer and Orhan Parmuk. "This is not to say," he writes, "that writers should go on forced missions of social realism, give up their stylistic experiments or stop writing about themselves." Instead, they should be writing fiction that is as keyed to "issues" as certain TV dramas Porter evidently admires.

    Novelists have just as much right to speak about public affairs as anyone else, and I have no problem with poets, fiction writers, or dramatists commenting on political and social issues outside of their work as poets, novelists, and dramatists. Indeed, their penchant for speaking forcefully and straightforwardly about such issues, free of the cant of media blowhards and the "professional" coating of putative experts, can sometimes be refreshing. However, if Porter is exhorting them to write more "political" works of literature, then he's asking them to abandon their art in favor of artistic cant and ill-concealed propaganda. I don't know why any novelist or poet would want to take Porter up on this offer. If political salience is the question–more rather than less–wouldn't it be more fruitful to speak directly about politics through essays, op-eds, and speeches than to distort one's "creative" work by bending it to the political winds?

    But it's impossible to tell which approach Porter is truly advocating. On the one hand, "we desperately need the moral force of an independent-minded writer training his or her guns on a target that journalists may not have seen and politicians may not want us to see." This sounds like the writer as direct and unmediated "voice," the writer as citizen. On the other hand, Porter directs our attention to all the subjects that require "the urgent attention of a writer's sensibility." This sounds like political agitation filtered through the steadying perception of the novelist-at-work. Does Porter want "writers" to produce tracts, or creative works colored by politics? He doesn't really seem to know.

    My biggest objection to the idea that writers should "say something" about current politics and social controversies is that I don't understand why they should be presumed to know anything in particular about these subjects. Ideally, what novelists and poets know is how to create compelling novels and poems. Their expertise should be in aesthetic invention. To assume that the writing of fiction and poetry is about intervening in public debates in most cases only warps and inhibits aesthetic invention. It encourages writers to be blowhards themselves rather than artists, fosters the perception that fiction or drama are just thinly-disguised varieties of polemic. I get enough partisan rhetoric in newspapers and magazines; I don't need any more in the fiction I read.

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