The Reading Experience

The Specific Aspects of the Trouble

August 16, 2006

Brock Clarke does an effective job of undermining the assumptions about "realism" embraced by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Rachel Donadio:

. . .as Wolfe makes clear, a writer needs to be big and strong because a real writer is more warrior than artist: “At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.” According to Wolfe, once we have mounted our steeds, we should turn to journalists for our riding lessons: “The answer is not to leave the rude beast, the material, also known as the life around us, to the journalists, but to do what journalists do, or are supposed to do, which is to wrestle the beast and bring it to terms.” Or, if there aren’t any journalists on hand, we (meaning literary novelists—that is what I mean, and that is what Wolfe means as well) should look to writers of popular fiction, who “have one enormous advantage over their more literary confreres. They are not only willing to wrestle the beast; they actually love the battle.”

The hilarity here is high (one imagines Wolfe in his famous white suit wrestling and defeating a beast—any beast will do—and one feels sorry for the poor beast, too, who no doubt entered the wrestling match thinking he was about to do battle with a mere writer of literary fiction and not Tom Wolfe), but to be fair, the metaphors of the hunt, the battle, are merely goofy and shouldn’t concern us overmuch, except that we’re still using them, and we’re also still repeating Wolfe’s dire warning from seventeen years ago: “If fiction writers do not start facing the obvious, the literary history of the second half of the twentieth century will record that journalists not only took over the richness of American life as their domain, but also seized the high ground of literature itself.”

The question of whether or not journalists have “seized the high ground of literature itself” aside, that verb—“seized”—is a significant one, in part because Donadio uses a similar verb in her essay. Her essay’s first sentence, for instance, aligns itself with V. S. Naipaul in claiming that “nonfiction is better suited than fiction to capture the complexities of today’s world” (emphasis mine). Later in the essay, Donadio repeats that “To date, no work of fiction has perfectly captured our historical moment” (emphasis mine). What we’re meant to learn through Donadio’s use of capture is that literature at its best doesn’t evoke its subjects, or create them, or transform them, or render them, or distort them, or reinvent them, but rather captures them, as though they were enemy soldiers or Wolfe’s beast. This is not so—in fact, the idea that fiction can or should “capture our historical moment” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what fiction can do to and with the world, and what the world does to it. But it is a useful misunderstanding, and we should be grateful for it, and for Donadio’s use of the word capture, too, because if, as both Donadio and Wolfe claim, one of nonfiction’s unique capacities is to capture our historical moment (I have doubts that this is so, but so many nonfiction writers insist upon it that I’m just going to go ahead and agree with them), then Donadio’s use of capture lets us know precisely how far afield the tools and goals of nonfiction have led some novelists, and it also lets us see how important fiction is to our world and our imperfect understanding of it, even (especially) if fiction is never able to capture anything. Nor should we expect it to; nor should we want it to, except insofar as we’d like to live in a world simple enough to be captured.

Clarke correctly maintains that the call for writers to "capture" their times is really a plea for simplicity, for easy answers and for a brand of fiction that differs from nonfiction only in that novelists are able to use their "imaginations" to make up stuff in a way forbidden to journalists. This attitude toward the role of fiction results in the kind of cartoonish simplicity to be found in Wolfe's own novels, but this is just one method of, in Donadio's words, "illuminating today’s world most vividly," which is presumably what journalists like Donadio want to get from the fiction they deign to read.

Which makes it all the more mystifying to me that Clarke goes on to asset that "Wolfe believes in width (as when he casts his wide net and hauls in the names of New York’s neighborhoods and nationalities), but a novel is a novel not because it spreads wide, but because it goes deep, just as a novel is a novel not because it captures our troubled times, but because it illuminates and imagines the specific aspects of the trouble."

I just can't see that there's that much difference between capturing "troubled times" and imagining "the specific aspects of the trouble." I'm not even sure what the latter means. Unfortunately, Clarke's subsequent discussion of Heidi Julavits's The Effect of Living Backwards doesn't do much to clarify. Julavits "creates a stylized, surreal, but not unrecognizable version of our own world, a world which evokes our own world’s confusions and contradictions without attempting to be a replica of our world." This is fine, but if the author's ultimate goal is still to provide "a vantage point from which we can look at our moment," as Clarke puts it later, what does it matter if the novel otherwise pretends to be a "replica" or is instead "stylized" and "surreal"? Ultimately, in both cases it is the "trouble" that is being brought to the reading's attention, not the novel's own formal and stylistic features, nor even the specifically aesthetic implications of the fictional world being evoked. The focus is on the sociological, not the literary.

And then there's that familiar assertion that what distinguishes fiction as a form is that it "goes deep." At the risk of repeating myself too often on this subject (see this post, or this one), I will again say that, while it is true that some novels have explored human consciousness in very interesting ways, and that fiction generally provides an opportunity for this sort of exploration more readily than film or narrative nonfiction, this approach is one among many available to fiction writers and in no way defines fiction as a literary genre. It's an approach that long ago ossified into convention, and most literary fiction that continues to adopt it, and most critics who defend it, strike me as, frankly, just plain boring. Furthermore, I don't understand at all what relevance "going deep" has to Clarke's broader argument. Apparently, The Effect of Living Backwards is a first-person narrative, so it's ability to even go deep at all is inherently limited–to the narrator's understanding of her own mental processes. We are restricted to the narrator's point of view, which necessarily does introduce a degree of subjectivity ("uncertainty," as Clarke would have it) that we as readers must accept, but a) this kind of narrative uncertainty is a far cry from "going deep" in the stream-of-consciousness mode, and b) providing us with a "vantage point" on the confusions of post-9/11 American society still doesn't seem to me qualitatively different from attempting to render our "historical moment" in more straightforwardly objective ways. The ends are the same: to depict the times in which we live.

Clarke essentially admits as much himself in his conclusion. "Wolfe," he writes, "argues. . .that 'The future of the fiction novel would be in highly detailed realism based on reporting.' By this, Wolfe means that fiction best approaches its big subjects directly, head-on, which—to use Wolfe’s rhetoric—is the only effective, honorable way of wrestling the beast." On the other hand, "Julavits shows [that] we might better take on such massive subjects intelligently, indirectly, in ways that might not exactly comfort us but are surprising, irreverent, provocative, entertaining, and edifying." "Direct" vs. "indirect." This is a difference in tactics, not in strategy. Presumably both Tom Wolfe and Heidi Julavits (as well as Brock Clarke) agree that summoning up an era ought to be one of the novelist's objectives, it's just that Julavits's novel has more subtly "represented our era in its difficulty, in its absurdity and tragedy." Julavits has shown "that fiction doesn’t have to capture an era to engage with it."

Again, this seems to me a distinction without a difference. If your ultimate purpose as a writer is to "engage" with the sociopolitical conditions of your time, you would indeed be better off sticking to nonfiction. Or at least not claiming that in being more "indirect," you've thereby seized upon what "literature at its best" is all about.
Deep Inside

July 19, 2006

Recently Matt Cheney (and later Miriam Burstein) discussed the kind of narrative exposition pejoratively called the "infodump," in which "an author needs to convey a lot of information and does so by coming out and stating it. Telling vs. showing. Choosing efficiency over subtlety."

To me, Matt's most interesting musing on this point is this:

Does a foregrounding of psychology rather than action in a story reduce the challenges of exposition? If we're deep inside, for instance, Mrs. Dalloway's mind are we less concerned about expository lumps than if we're reading about Mrs. Dalloway's adventures in time and space? It could be that the tangential and associational writing associated with the representation of a mind undercuts the need or desire for straightforward exposition. But probably only if the setting and situation are ones that a general audience can be assumed to have some familiarity with. If Mrs. Dalloway were thinking about buying flowers on the planet Xsgha, where the riuGsj splort the frunktiplut, the need for some sort of exposition would increase. But would it look different as exposition because we're so deep inside Mrs. D's brain than it would were we following her from a more objective viewpoint?

Although Virginia Woolf's version of "psychological realism" needs to be taken as a special case–it's so pure an attempt to stay within the flow of her character's stream of thought–I would argue that most expository passages in modern fiction do in fact take place as part of the "foregrounding of psychology." We may not always be as "deep" into a character's consciousness as we are in Mrs. Dalloway, but in most ordinary "literary fiction" (by which I mean literary fiction that adopts established strategies and techniques as the markers of "craft") we are certainly at the very least being oriented to the world in which the characters move as it is inflected through their awareness of it. If anything, this makes information-laden passages of exposition, however brief, even more conspicuous and artificial: fiction in which external rather than internal realism is the goal surely has a good excuse for resorting to the infodump, since providing information is a large part of its job, but psychological realism, in theory at least, is restricted to the kind of "information" a character him/herself would regard as such. In this context, the infodump seems like the author's intrusion on what has otherwise been set up as the character's "space."

Matt is certainly correct in maintaining that "If Mrs. Dalloway were thinking about buying flowers on the planet Xsgha, where the riuGsj splort the frunktiplut, the need for some sort of exposition would increase." In fact, this very feature of much science fiction has made it difficult for me to enjoy it as much as I'd like, given my admiration for the intelligent commentary on the genre provided by critics such as Matt Cheney. I've found that the problem extends even to what are generally considered the greatest SF writers. Take, for example, this brief passage from Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:

In the miserably high-number conapt building 492 on the outskirts of Marilyn Monroe, New Jersey, Richard Hnatt ate breakfast indifferently while, with something greater than indifference, he glanced over the morning's homeopape's weather-syndrome readings of the previous day.

The key glacier, Ol' Skintop, had retreated 4.62 Grables during the last twenty-four-hour period. And the temperature, at noon in New York, had exceeded the previous day's by 1.46 Wagners. In addition the humidity, as the oceans evaporated, had increased by 16 Selkirks. So things were hotter and wetter; the great procession of nature clanked on, and toward what? Hnatt pushed the 'pape away, and picked up the mail which had been delivered before dawn. . .it had been some time since mailmen had crept out in daylight hours.

This bit of exposition doesn't necessarily originate from "deep inside" Richard Knatt's mind, but it does arise from his specific consideration of the "homeopape" and the information it conveys–information that is surely intended for the reader's edification as much as Richard's. We need to know that he lives in a world of homeopapes and Grables and Selkirks, and that the oceans are evaporating. And when Richard pushes the 'pape aside and takes up his mail, we are clearly to accept as his own rumination that "it had been some time since mailmen crept out in daylight hours."

Unfortunately, I am unable to read this whole passage, providing such specific details about a wholly nonexistent world, without finding it just a little bit silly. I don't think it's because I can't accept such imaginary worlds per se, as I frequently like SF movies, including some made from Dick novels, perfectly well. There's something about evoking such worlds in prose, burdening that prose with exotic information, that makes reading this kind of SF a chore. Indeed, a passage such as this one more or less defeats me:

Shortly, he was aboard a thermosealed interbuilding commute car, on his way to downtown New York City and P. P. Layouts, the great synthetic-cement building from which Perky Pat and all the units of her miniature world originated. The doll, he reflected, which had conquered man as man at the same time had conquered the planets of the Sol system. Perky Pat, the obsession of the colonists. What a commentary on colonial life. . .what more did one need to know about those unfortunates who, under the selective service laws of the UN, had been kicked off Earth, required to begin new, alien lives on Mars or Venus, or Ganymede or wherever else the UN bureaucrats happened to imagine they could be deposited. . .and after a fashion survive.

Probably even partisans of Philip Dick's work would concede that he is not a particularly notable stylist. From what I can tell, story in a Dick novel is more or less all. I don't necessarily have a problem with that approach (and there are SF novelists–China Mieville, for example–who could be called stylists), but the stories he tells are indeed crammed with "information," and relating this information in such an otherwise unadorned prose style only makes the limitations of this style more evident. Dick's approach also underscores the extent to which even pulp or genre fiction has absorbed the conventions of what I'm calling psychological realism. One might say that Dick attempts to portray an unreal world by realistically depicting his characters' response to living in that world. The "infodump" remains a perhaps unavoidable limitation of such an effort, one that may even call into question the aesthetic integrity of the effort in the first place.
Many Families Like the Ziskinds

June 26, 2006

Dara Horn's The World to Come begins with these two paragraphs:

There used to be many families like the Ziskinds, families where each person always knew that his life was more than his alone. Families like that still exist, but because there are so few of them, they have become insular, isolated, their sentiment that the family is the center of the universe broadened to imply that nothing outside the family is worth anything. If you are from one of these families, you believe this, and you always will.

Lately it had begun to seem to Benjamin Ziskind that the entire world was dead, that he was a citizen of a necropolis. While his parents were living, Ben had thought about them only when it made sense to think about them, when he was talking to them, or talking about them, or planning something involving them. But now they were always here, reminding him of their presence at every moment. He saw them in the streets, always from behind, or turning a corner, his father sitting in the bright yellow taxi next to hs, shifting in his seat as the cab screeched away in the opposite direction, his mother–dead six months now, thought it felt like one long night–hurrying along the sidewalk on a Sunday morning, turning into a store just when Ben had come close enough to see her face. It was a relief that Ben could close his office door.

No doubt this seems thoroughly unexceptional to most readers of fiction (which is actually one of the problems with Horn's novel), an expository passage that begins to acquaint us with the themes the book will explore and introduces us to the character whose present actions and experiences provide the hinge by which the rest of the novel moves. But that we have become accustomed to this kind of discourse, all but take it for granted, suggests it has hardened into a convention we simply accept as the strategy appropiate for a certain type of third-person narrative, which itself has become more or less a default setting for our sense of what narrative discourse should be like. I would submit that this strategy has outlived its usefulness and often inhibits the discovery of fresh, genre-expanding aesthetic approaches to fiction, even approaches to the representation of consciousness, which in a novel like The World to Come is carried out in such a perfunctory way that it becomes harder to appreciate some of the novel's other virtues.

Although the reader's attention is first of all directed by the Tolstoy-like opening to what presumably will be the novel's overarching theme, the encompassing context within which the story (as it turns out, multiple and intertwining stories) will proceed. To me, the real work being done by this paragraph is in the way it settles the reader into the novel's discursively shaped world, begins to evoke a particular kind of relationship between narrator and character. Are these generalizations about "family" being offered by a hovering, all-knowing narrator, or have they been filtered through the consciousness and specific experiences of Benjamin Ziskind? The second paragraph confirms that it is the latter, and we are thereafter comfortably placed as readers inside Benjamin's awareness (and, later, several other characters' awareness) and way of thinking about things.

I say "comfortably" because by now this mode of psychological realism, by which the depicted world in a work of fiction comes to us not through omniscient description but through the perception of that fiction's characters ("Lately it had begun to seem to Benjamin Ziskind that the entire world was dead"), has become so thoroughly familiar that it acts as a kind of narrative machine, spinning out sundry versions of what Henry James called third-person "central consciousness" stories in what has admittedly become a very efficient manner. In order to provide a little variety in what is otherwise a rather uniform approach, one can include multiple or alternating centers of consciousness, as Horn does in The World to Come, but even here readers are ultimately encouraged to regard the storytelling as more or less transparent, if anchored in a particular character's version of reality, and the style as unintrusive, if sometimes decorated with a suitable figurative flourish. It is precisley the expecation that the reader will be satisfied with this mechanical, mass-produced variety of storytelling that makes me unable to read a book like The World to Come with much enthusiasm, even though I can acknowledge that Dara Horn does have some narrative imagination and that the novel weaves together its various strands–which include both invented characters and real historical figures, occurences in the present interlaced with episodes from the past–with admirable skill.

In his Editor's Note to the latest issue of Agni, Sven Birkerts describes the mindset with which he approaches the submissions the magazine receives:

Basically—short version—a work of prose (or poetry) can no longer assume continuity, not as it could in former times. It cannot begin, or unfold, in a way that assumes a basic condition of business as usual. The world is no longer everything we thought was the case, and the writing needs to embody this—through sentence rhythm, tone, camera placement, or some other strategic move that signals that no tired assumptions remain in place. This writing must, in effect, create its own world and terms from the threshold, coming at us from a full creative effort of imagination and not by using the old world as a prop. Now, this last is a tricky assertion and it will be very hard to make clear, not to mention binding. I don’t mean for a moment that the world as we know it cannot be invoked, or used, or dissected. Of course it can. But it cannot be taken simply on faith, as unproblematic, treated as a natural signifier; nor can it be cashed in as if it were a treasury bond from the literature of a former era.

I agree entirely with Birkerts, and if I were an editor beginning to read The World to Come for potential publication, I would almost immediately conclude that it "assumes a basic condition of business as usual," that numerous "tired assumptions remain in place," that while the novel does attempt to "create its own world," this attempt comes not from the "threshold," but from a place where fiction is regarded as a set of fixed assumptions and techniques from which is chosen the one that will most efficaciously carry the narrative burden to be placed on it. In this case, Horn doesn't so much lean on the "literature of a former era" (she actually takes this as part of her subject, and her examination of Jewish artistic/literary traditions is one of the more compelling aspects of the novel) as on this set of presently-established conventions, themselves a product of "modern" storytelling practices but, as I have been contending, now urgently in need of reexamination. In invoking the "world to come," Horn's novel is, of course, endeavoring to capture something essential about this world, about our longings and frustrations, but it is impossible to read such passages as the one quoted above without thinking that this is at odds with its very prosaic language and method of character creation, which do depend on customary "props."

As if the author herself recognizes that this method lacks dynamism, especially when confined to a single character over the course of an entire narrative, she presents us with multiple characters and their interconnecting stories and makes of the larger narrative of which these are a part a kind of mystery tale embedded in recent history. These are Dara Horn's efforts to embody a "full creative effort of imagination." The result is entertaining enough, at least when I am able to ignore the listless "sentence rhythms" created by Horn's adherence to the central consciousness-style of narrative exposition. (And all too many other novels require that I similarly put aside any expectation of stylistic vigor, narrative innovation, or formal invention, novels that aren't even going to manifest to me the intelligence and skill with which Dara Horn shuffles around the conventional elements she has chosen to use, or won't manifest anything more than such skill with the conventional.) But, ultimately, I don't want to put these things aside, and I'm increasingly uncertain why so many writers–especially among "emerging writers"–think its appropriate to ask me to do it. There are far too few original stories and arrestingly portrayed characters around to justify losing interest in new ways of telling them and uncommon means of summoning them up.
Fixations

June 12, 2006

In last weekend's Los Angeles Times Book Review, editor David Ulin (who has, in my opinion, considerably improved this publication since taking it over several months ago) contributes a generally insightful review of the Library of America's collection of early Faulkner novels. However, in his conclusion, Ulin suggests that in Faulkner's fiction

The fixation with time is hardly a modernist sentiment. Rather, it's a classical perspective, in which everything matters and nothing is forgotten or forgiven or redeemed. Yet this is Faulkner's genius: the way he uses modernist strategies but is, in the end, not really a modernist — his ability to be of his time and timeless at once. Unlike Joyce or Pound, there is no orthodoxy in his writing; unlike Stein, he is not using language to play games. No, for Faulkner, stylistic innovation — the lack of punctuation, the run-on sentences, the blurring of chronology, of memory and action — becomes a matter of emotional impact, of the effort to re-create life as it is lived. That's an idea he had to learn how to inhabit, as he moved from the studied diffidence of "Soldiers' Pay" to an aesthetic more three-dimensional and profound. In "Novels 1926-1929," we see the arc of this development, the dramatic shift from artifice to art.

That Faulkner conveys a worldview incorporating "classical" qualities must certainly be true, but I don't see why this feature of his work makes it incompatible with modernism. Does this mean T.S. Eliot, a self-confessed classicist, was also no modernist? Has our definition of "modernist" evolved to the stage where it simply means "chaotic"? No work that moves through apparent disorder to achieve a different kind of order need apply to the "timeless" club? With modernists, nothing matters?

I'm pretty sure I don't at all understand what Ulin means to imply in asserting there is "orthodoxy" in the work of Joyce and Pound. That they are orthodox modernists? That they were thus too committed to the idea of originality, of "making it new"? This strikes me as a pretty bizarre notion. Is he suggesting that some other kind of political, cultural, or religious "orthodoxy" gets expressed in their work? That Pound had some thoroughly obnoxious political views is well known, but Joyce was surely one of the least ideological of writers. What Ulin is getting at remains to me mysterious, but at any rate his degree of orthodox whatever seems a pretty thin measure with which to separate William Faulkner from the other important modernists.

I have to say I find the claim that Faulkner "is not using language to play games" the most wildly mistaken assertion in this whole generally misleading summation. Faulkner at his best is full of game-playing. When Vardaman, the young illiterate Bundren in As I Lay Dying, narrates one of his sections of the book in hyper-fluent Faulknerese, most readers must find the device first of all hilariously funny and probably conclude it is an example, in part, of Faulkner indeed playing a game, having a little fun with the reader. (If this was not Faulkner's intent, it is certainly an effect of this section, one that only enhances the novel's appeal, at least for me.) Or to take The Sound and the Fury: Is not Benjy's chapter an example of verbal/rhetorical gamesmanship? We accept that it is an attempt to reproduce the thought process of a mentally handicapped character, but would Benjy's monologue really stand up to scrutiny as an accurate rendition of the way such a person thinks? I don't think so. It's a compelling illusion, created by Faulkner's skill with words.

The enabling assumption behind Ulin's effort to disentangle Faulkner from the modernist web seems to me to be expressed in the observation that his "stylistic innovation" is really just "a matter of emotional impact, of the effort to re-create life as it is lived." In other words, if you ignore "the blurring of chronology, of memory and action"–the textual features of Faulkner's books that are otherwise their most notable achievements–he's really a perfectly conventional novelist. To give Ulin more credit, he probably means to say that Faulkner's innovations have a purpose, that they are alternative methods of making "art" out of "life," the latter being the subject held in common by all great writers, conventional or experimental. But can't the same thing can be said of Joyce, Proust, or Kafka, of all the modernist poets? Isn't modernism all about finding new ways of portraying an enduring human reality? Ulin's prejudice seems to be for fiction that "re-create[s] life as it is lived," but no writer is in the business of "re-creation of life." As I've insisted before, a novel is a construction of words, "artifice" by nature. No "life" is to be found anywhere within it, only words, sentences, paragraphs. Some writers want to convince you that their words evoke images of the world as we think we know it, summon up "characters" we can accept as like real people; the best of these writers do produce powerful illusions of this kind, but they are illusions, the strategies involved as artificial as any of those dismissed as less "three-dimensional." Faulkner is at times a writer like this, but his fiction always forces awareness of the way these images are produced, and it's hard to believe he didn't know this. Such self-awareness makes him a quintesstial modernist.

I have highlighted this passage from Ulin's review because it encourages a view of both modernism and postmodernism that distorts and devalues their aesthetic ambitions. This view makes precisely the distinction between "artifice" and "art" that Ulin thinks distinguishes Faulkner's lesser from his greater work. "Artifice" is about style or form, while "art" is about life. But how can any work of fiction or poetry be about anything but life? On what can a writer base his art other than his experience as a living human being? That some modernists/postmodernists are preoccupied with aesthetic questions is true enough, but why are these kinds of questions not considered properly "human"? Isn't the ability to formulate the concept of the aesthetic one of our defining features as a species? Presumably Ulin wants Faulkner's books to be sources of wisdom, while I want them to be sources of aesthetic delight. But I can see no reason why the former rather than the latter should be the deciding factor in judging a writer's work sufficiently "profound" to be art.
What I Meant to Say

May 31, 2006

In "Questions of Intent," from his recent book Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog, Louis Rubin asserts:

It is all very well, when disputes about an author's intentions arise, to insist that it is the written-down story that should command our attention as readers, and that questions about what the author may have intended to do, what his literary models may have been, or what may have been going on in his personal life or that of his community at the time ought not make the least difference to us.

Why, however, go to hear novelists give readings and talk about their work? Why do they wish to know what kind of person it is who wrote the fiction? What can account for their interest in the creative process that produced it? Why are literary biographies written and published, and why do readers buy and read them? Is no more than idle curiosity involved?

I think not. Certainly the story itself is where everything begins (and, ultimately, ends) for the reader. What happens, however, is that readers of fiction, caught up in the telling of a tale, are drawn into the imaginative orbit of the teller. They become interested in how and why the author wrote what they have been reading. Assuredly the reader of a good novel is no purist. The literary theorist, like the passionate trout fisherman discoursing upon the presentation of artificial flies, may hold forth on what is and is not the proper way to go about reading a novel, yet the very nature of the fictional imagination itself invites complicated response. For just that reason, authorial intentions become of interest to us.

I am generally an admirer of Louis Rubin (especially for his book The Comic Imagination in American Literature and for his efforts as founding publisher of Algonquin Books), but this passage proceeds upon so many false assumptions and reaches so many flawed conclusions (in addition to raising many of the questions with which this blog has been especially preoccupied) that it's all but impossible for me to resist commenting on them. In the process, perhaps I will additionally clarify the underlying assumptions about literature that inform many of my own posts here at The Reading Experience.

First of all, I have never really understood why it is that "disputes about an author's intentions arise" in the first place. In some instances such disputes can indeed be easily resolved (ask the author, or read what he/she had to say on the subject), but no doubt Rubin has in mind those that can't be–the author is long dead and made no comments about intent in particular cases. Yet, in neither situation does it seem to me important to know the author's intentions, beyond knowing that he/she considered this compostion to be a poem, that one a work of fiction, etc. Once the work has gone out into the world as a poem, a novel, a play, how it is to be understood or interpreted is out of the author's hands, and that is a good thing, both for readers and, ultimately, for the work itself. It may be of interest to know that a writer hoped to accomplish a certain goal in composing this work, to treat an especially urgent theme or explore a specific idea, but if subsequent readers' interpretations are to be constrained by these intentions, held to account by their fidelity to them, the work in question no longer really invites close reading: Just tell me what the writer meant to say and save me the time and effort required to read it.

Rubin's phrasing is in addition rather peculiar: "It is all very well. . .to insist that it is the written-down story that should command our attention as readers". Written-down story? This seems to me a rather awkward attempt at minimizing the differences between literary texts and orally-related stories and thus to secure for the former some of the authority that does indeed belong to the oral storyteller. Because the latter remains present, and is able to exploit the resources of tone and gesture, he/she does have a firmer claim on "intention," while the writer has to settle for his disembodied words becoming fixed to the page. But precisely because they are disembodied, the writer's words are inevitably subject to the interpretive efforts of readers who do not regard themselves as the passive vessels of the author's intent, especially since that intent is usually only obscurely apparent in the first place. Writing down stories is what brings readers into existence, so why negate the significance of this act by dwelling on authorial intent?

In enumerating the possible areas of inquiry one might pursue "outside the text," Rubin unfortunately confuses some perfectly good ones with others that are of extremely dubious value. What a writer's "literary models may have been" is a potentially very useful thing to know, since this may have a very direct bearing on the text at hand, influencing both its form and its statement of theme, while "wondering what may have been going on in his personal life" takes us away from the text and focuses our attention instead on gossip, just as an "interest in the creative process" might enrich our appreciation of particular strategies or techniques as they manifest themselves in the work, while wishing "to know what kind of person it is who wrote the fiction" diverts us into hearsay and frivolous speculation that has more to do with tabloid journalism than with literature. Sometimes literary biographies are written by people with a genuine interest in such things as literary models and the creative process, who produce books that offer valuable insights into the literary work of the writers featured, but I'm afraid that most readers buy and read biographies as a way of avoiding deeper enagement with that work, at worst as a way of indulging our taste for gossip.

Rubin is half right when he claims that "readers of fiction, caught up in the telling of a tale, are drawn into the imaginative orbit of the teller." Surely we are caught up in what could be called an "imaginative orbit," a fictional world evoked by the writer, but if by "teller" Rubin means the biographical author him/herself, then I think he is encouraging an inattentive and oversimplified view of what reading fiction is like. The "teller" (in a 3rd person narrative–1st person narration makes Rubin's account seem only more inadequate) in a work of fiction is just as much a character–just as much a fiction–as any of the more obviously identified kind. It is a construct the author has created to get the story told, although more precisely it is a character evoked by the habits of language the author has given it. It is not the author. How could it be, since, again, a work of fiction is a text, an artificial arrangement of words on a page, not a recitation by an actual person fully present to his/her listeners? And, speaking for myself at least, I may ultimately become interested in "how and why the author wrote what [I] have been reading" (if by "how" is meant how the work itself is structured or how its story is related), but not while I am reading a work for the first time or if "why" means digging around into the author's purely personal circumstances.

It may indeed be true that most readers are not "purists" (and that I probably am), and it is certainly true that "the very nature of the fictional imagination itself invites complicated responses." But I would argue that many readers might find their enjoyment of fiction actually enhanced if they allowed the complexities of "the fictional imagination itself" to play themselves out as part of a reading experience more attuned to the more "pure" possibilities of fiction as an aesthetic medium rather than closing off those possibilities in favor of biographical or sociological speculation. The latter does not so much "complicate" our response as readers as divert our attention away from the exigencies of reading. Since Rubin himself goes on in this essay to warn against taking the author's projected image too seriously (in particular using Hemingway as an example), it is difficult to understand why he would lend respectability to a reading practice that continues to direct our attention to that image in the first place.

NOTE: Jonathan Mayhew has just posted on this subject as well, concluding that "the process of creating any work of art is too complex, involving too many levels of intentionalilty and the surrender of intentionality, for it to be meaningful to talk about the intention of a work as a single entity."
Harold Bloom

May 15, 2006

Since the publication of The Western Canon, Harold Bloom has become something of a caricature, derided on the one hand for the vehemence of his displeasure with the direction literary study has taken over the past quarter century, his opposition to the politicized, anti-aesthetic criticism he identifies collectively as the "school of resentment," while on the other he is frequently invoked as a kind of cultural mandarin dismissive of the pleasures ordinary people take in the products of popular culture and contemptuous of all books that can't be assigned to the canon of high literature. (Although James Wood accuses him of abandoning the role of critic for that of "populist appreciator," his populism surely extends no farther than to those who might conceivably be convinced of the greatness of what Bloom calls "strong poets," whose work certainly cannot be dumbed down in order to reach the masses.)

This image of Bloom as traditionalist curmudgeon is considerably at odds with the impression one might have gotten from his critical writings of the 1970s and 1980s, in which Bloom advances his own intricate (if ultimately rather private, even hermetic) theory of literary production and reception that does indeed focus on poetic greatness but hardly defends tradition for tradition's sake. Bloom makes elevated claims for the value of poetry, but these are not claims for the utility of poetry in the service of "culture" as moral critics would define it nor an Arnoldian attempt to construct a version of literary history that isolates works of literature as "the best" of their kind. Bloom's theory of literary influence certainly does assume a continuity of vision over the course of this history (although it also frequently alludes to writers and writing not necessarily considered to be "literary" per se), but the core principle of his theory–that great poetry is always a "misreading," sometimes radically so, of "precursor poets"–in essence holds that literary history is actually in a perpetual state of disruption and revision.

In my opinion, Bloom's 1982 book Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism provides the most complete and coherent account of his ideas about both literary history and the role of the literary critic, and thus will probably be the book of his that survives into the next generation of literary study (although Bloom's approach is idiosyncratic enough–deliberately so– that a future cadre of neo-Bloomians is certainly an implausible notion). Indeed, this passage from the book's essay on John Ashbery is as succinct a statement of Bloom's prevailing assumptions as readers of his work are likely to find:

A strong poem, which alone can become canonical for more than a single generation, can be defined as a text that must engender strong misreadings, both as other poems and as literary criticism. Texts that have single, reductive, simplistic meanings are themselves already necessarily weak misreadings of anterior texts. When a strong misreading has demonstrated its fecundity by producing other strong misreadings across several generations, we can and must accept its canonical status.

Yet by "strong misreading" I mean "strong troping," and the strength of trope can be recognized by skilled readers in a way that anticipates the temporal progression of generations. A strong trope renders all merely trivial readings of it irrelevant. . .

There is a true law of canonization, and it works contrary to Gresham's law of currency. We may phrase it: in a strong reader's struggle to master a poet's trope, strong poetry will impose itself, because that imposition, that usurpation of mental space, is the proof of trope, the testing of power by power. . . .

"Misreading" (or "misprision," as Bloom would have it) is the motivating force, the ultimate inspiration, behind all poetry (which, in Bloom's critical universe, is synonymous with "literature" and is not to be attributed solely to self-identified poets). In the effort to emulate and finally surpass "anterior" texts, poems that fire the poet's passion for poetry in the first place, strong poets "misread" these texts in a psychoanalytically defensive gesture that allows the "something new" of literary creation to occur. Milton misreads Shakespeare, Blake misreads Milton, etc. Weak poets merely imitate their predecessors, fail to engage with the deeper and more unwieldy impulses that ultimately account for great poetry.

And it is these impulses that are ultimately responsible for all strong poetry. As Bloom writes elsewhere in Agon: "No one 'fathers' or 'mothers' his or her own poems, because poems are not 'created,' but are interpreted into existence, and by necessity they are interpreted from other poems. Whenever I suggest that there is a defensive element in all interpretation, as in all troping, the suggestions encounter a considerable quantity of very suggestive resistance. All that I would grant to this resistance is its indubitable idealism, its moving need of the mythology of the creative imagination, and of the related sub-mythology of an 'objective' scholarly criticism." Again the perception of Bloom as hidebound conservative does not fit well with assumptions like these. How far are they from the notion that there is "nothing outside the text," that language authors poems, not writers? (Although Bloom rejects this latter idea; to him this formulation reduces "language" to "the very odd trope of a demiurgical entity. . .acting like a Univac, and endlessly doing our writing for us.") "Creative imagination" and "objective scholarly criticism" are equally feeble concepts for describing what is really going on in the production and reception of poetry as Bloom understands it.

A "strong trope" is a use of language (whether in individual lines or phrases or the poem as a whole) so powerful in its implications that, as he puts it in another book, it creates meaning that "could not exist without" it and produces an "excess or overflow" that "brings about a condition of newness." Indeed, its force is so irresistable that it "will impose itself," although such a struggle with the text is carried out only by the "strong reader" who seeks to come to terms with it through an act of troping of his/her own. When he complains about the "school of resentment" or about the politicization of literary criticism more broadly, he is reacting against the establishment of a mode of academic criticism that validates weak reading, that diminishes the power of literature and the passion of reading. He is not lamenting the loss of "sweetness and light" as a goal of literary study, nor the rejection of New Critical formalism, which he considers a form of rhetorical criticism that equally fails to accentuate what is truly at stake in the "troping" of both poetry and criticism.

In what he apparently takes to be a telling criticism of Bloom's practice as a critic, Benjamin Balint remarks that "We might say that Harold Bloom is the Rashi of misreadings, a kind of contemporary sage who, due perhaps to the excesses of reading itself, himself misreads—sometimes forcefully, sometimes weakly." But of course Bloom already admits this, dismissing the notion that criticism involves something like accuracy of interpretation:

To read actively is to make a fiction as well as to receive one, and the kind of active reading we call "criticism" or the attempt to decide meaning, or perhaps to see whether meaning can be decided, always has a very large fictive meaning in it. I continue to be surprised that so many literary scholars refuse to see that every stance in regard to texts, however professedly humble or literaral or prosaic or 'scientific' or 'historical" or 'linguistic" is always a poetic stance, always part of the rhetoric of rhetoric. . . .

Balint further proposes that Bloom "turns out to be a reader par excellence, but also perhaps merely a reader," suggesting that he is finally unable to distinguish between his beloved texts and non-literary spiritual or religious "encounters." This surely fails to recognize that for Bloom "reading" is more than an "encounter" with words (although it begins there), just as " poetry" is more than a composition in verse. I would not go so far as to say that for Bloom reading is religion, but one might conclude from most of his books that the kind of experience to which reading works of literature gives access is for him about as close to what could be called a religious experience as is possible in a universe in which God probably does not exist.

This is perhaps where most readers depart company with Bloom, concluding that his kind of reading is finally an idiosyncratic and insular one, Bloom himself seated aloft in his own peculiar aesthetic empyrean. This is a mistaken impression, not least because it takes Bloom's very real passion for literature as a preoccupation with the aesthetic such as ordinary "rhetorical criticism" would describe it. James Wood asserts that whenever Bloom's commentary verges on becoming "openly evaluative, it becomes Freudian and biographical" and that "if he were just choosing one poet over another for purely aesthetic reasons, then he would have no need of his Freudian system of anxiety and repression." This assessment has validity, and aptly sums up the major weakness in Bloom's critical system. One reads Bloom for inspiration, for further amplification of the way in which his account of literary influence applies to specific writers or texts, for the occasional insight that reinforces the general claim of Freud's work on literary criticism, but not for sustained and careful explication of individual texts. That Bloom initially developed his theory of poetic influence to directly contest the New Critics' dismissal of subject-centered criticism and of Romanticism in general of course explains this absence, but I often wonder whether in his dismay at the direction literary study has taken he doesn't sometimes think he might have done more justice to New Criticism and its insistence that the aesthetic attributes of literature ought to be the proper focus of criticism.

Perhaps the most intriguing feature (to me) of Agon is Bloom's attempt to align his own approach to criticism with that of American pragmatism. Partly this is due to his admiration of Emerson as an American "seer," a fellow strong misreader whose habits of thought provided the true source of pragmatism. But pragmatic thinking also offers Bloom a touchstone that further vindicates his own self-reliant mode of reading:

. . .American pragmatism, as [Richard] Rorty advises, always asks of text: what is it good for, what can I do with it, what can it do for me, what can I make it mean? I confess that I like these questions, and they are what I think strong reading is all about, because strong misreading doesn't ever ask: Am I getting this poem right? Strong reading knows that what it does to the poem is right, because it knows what Emerson, its American inventor, taught it, which is that the true ship is the shipbuilder. If you don't believe in your reading, the don't bother anyone else with it, but if you do, then don't care also whether anyone else agrees with it or not. . . .

I must say this seems a fairly ordinary reading of Emerson (who surely does ask of poetry, "what can it do for me?") and a weak misreading of Rorty (as well as Dewey and James before him). Putting aside the fact that both Rorty and Dewey believe literature does serve some generalizable good (for Rorty, helping us to become "less cruel," for Dewey, clarifying the nature of experience), it is very convenient for Bloom to exploit this overly literal interpretation of pragmatism's goal-oriented analysis so that it winds up justifying critical eccentricity for its own sake. For me, a thoroughgoingly pragmatic literary criticism might indeed put aside the question "Am I getting this poem right?" but would still find the question "Am I getting literature right?" an appropriate one to ask. Does "literature" as a category exist primarily to allow Harold Bloom or other like-minded critics to misread, strongly or otherwise, in any way they want, or does it also carry out a useful purpose by identifying a kind of text upon which some agreed-upon constraints do apply? Couldn't we say that both writing and reading works of literature pragmatically involves observing these contraints so that the activities themselves might be sustained?

I always find reading Harold Bloom's books a bracing experience, but I don't think I'm prepared to regard them as contributions to the elucidation of pragmatism.
Tools

May 3, 2006

I agree with Brendan Wolfe that book reviews can be "tools that teach us how to think about books, how to read books, how to judge books." I also agree that a negative review can be used as such a tool just as readily as a positive review–but only just. If a negative review needs to be more than "snark," a positive review needs to be more than simple praise. Reviews ought to go beyond being simply "consumer research tools" (quoting Brendan), whether they result in readers seeking out a book or in leaving it alone.

(I can't agree with Brendan, however, that Dale Peck in particular is a reviewer who "writes well, makes interesting & thoughtful arguments, advances the discussion, advocates for the relevance of art," even if his judgment can ultimately be called into question. In my opinion, Peck is, snark aside, a dull writer who rarely offers thoughtful insights that aren't just bluster, "advances the discussion" only in the sense Scott Esposito has in mind when he complains about reviewers whose reviews are ultimately "more about [the reviewer] than the book," and advocates only for himself.)

However, I still question the utility of negative reviews that are not focused on a flaw that can be used by the reviewer to illuminate some larger issue relevant to literature as a whole. If, for example, a first novel illustrates an endemic problem the reviewer finds in first novels in general (or recent first novels, at least), then a negative review can be entirely justified, but I don't see the point in trashing a writer's first effort just for the sake of registering one's disapproval. (Or even books by established writers. Recently I've had the displeasure of reading a series of books by otherwise well-known writers that, unfortunately, I didn't like. In some cases, I couldn't even finish the book because of my extreme boredom with it. But I haven't posted about them or attempted a review of them simply to make my indifferent response a part of the public record. Here, William Gass's advice that an unworthy book will be "quickly forgotten" if we "simply not speak its name" seems appropriate.) I also think that negative reviews of books or authors whose reputation is (in the reviewer's opinion) unduly inflated are perfectly acceptable, if the reviewer is able to again make the question of "how to read books" and "how to judge books" central to the review.

If, however, I had to declare which kind of review or critical essay, the censorious or the laudatory, has in my experience more effectively allowed me to discharge what I consider to be the critic's most important tasks–to describe and evaluate the various ways writers can exploit the possibilities of fiction or poetry–I would say it is the latter. I feel I am doing some kind of service (or attempting to do so) toward the maintenance of these possibilities by calling attention to writers and works that embody them in compelling ways, more than I am usually able to by focusing on what's wrong or what isn't there.
The Ways That Poetry Gets Taught

March 28, 2006

In a debate about the efficacy of "teaching poetry" as a way of increasing the audience for it (with, among others, Josh Corey), Eric Selinger asserts:

I would say that some poets don't have many readers because of the sorts of poems they write, but that the reason most poets don't have many readers is because of the ways that poetry gets taught in this country–or not taught, as the case may be–from grade school onward. If poetry were taught, for example, as part of the national patrimony, with the assumption that elementary students should know their Whitman and Dickinson, Hayden and Hughes, because these are our great national poets, just as French students and Italian students learn Baudelaire or Petrarch early on, there would probably end up a wider audience for poetry.

I'm continually surprised by how thoroughly the idea that literature is ulimately something to be taught in schools has become unexamined wisdom. At best, works of poetry or fiction might be useful in building vocabulary or learning the role of figurative language, or as supplements to other courses such as history or social studies, but in these instances literature itself is not really the "subject" at hand. (Which itself is problematic. If literature is finally pedagogically helpful only as something that can be added for illustrative purposes to other areas of study, most students are likely to view it in their future lives as nonessential, purely as the means to another, more important, end.) To study poetry as poetry requires a sensitivity to language and to the possibilities and purposes of aesthetic form that, frankly, most teachers lack and most students have no interest in developing. But I'm not sure why either should be expected to possess such sensitivity. A taste for poetry is a minority taste, has always been a minority taste, and, despite all the efforts to make poetry "relevant" to readers who otherwise couldn't care less (perhaps because of them), will always be a minority taste. And I don't understand why this is considered to be a problem. Physics is a minority taste as well, but physicists don't seem to spend much time brooding over the fact that most people don't read physics journals..

Thus the only really feasible argument on behalf of teaching poetry in school is the one Selinger advances here–"as part of the national patrimony, with the assumption that elementary students should know their Whitman and Dickinson, Hayden and Hughes, because these are our great national poets." But this "national greatness" approach is probably the very worst way of convincing young readers to give a poetry a chance. Whitman and Dickinson get elevated (or, more accurately, reduced) to the level of all the other "great" historic figures whose achievements are duly recited but otherwise ignored. To tell these young readers that such poets are part of their "patrimony" is only another way of saying they should read poetry because it's good for them, a strategy that will only make it certain they'll never want to read a line of verse ever again.

I favor the opposite strategy: take literature out of the schools altogther, even out of college (at least as a required course). Those who might realistically develop an interest in poetry or serious fiction will come to it not because it's been forced on them but because it's been freed of all taints of the "academic," of something one learns in school and then forgets. Emphasize the way poetry embodies values and practices that are precisely at odds with the conformist attitudes enforced by "school." Take it out of the classroom and let it breathe.
Defending Barth

February 14, 2006

In his review of John Barth's Where 3 Roads Meet, Traver Kauffman maintains that the book consists of a "trio of loosely connected novellas." I have to disagree. That the book is a "trio" is true enough (and the word itself highlights the book's central conceit), but the three novellas it includes are actually very tightly connected, although not through overlapping characters or setting or some other superficial element of continuity. Where 3 Roads Meet is very much a composed book, and anyone who reads it as merely a conveniently collected group of fictions somewhat longer than short stories but too short to be called novels will be missing out on the features of the book most relevant to Barth's purpose.

The book is unified, first and foremost, through the motif named in its title. It acts as both a structural and a thematic device, at the same time foregrounding the image of three roads meeting (for Barth a symbol of fertility, both physical and artistic) and providing a rich source of cross-textual echoes and recurrences that substitute for the narrative momentum that, in typical Barthian fashion, is constantly interrupted and redoubled, seemingly always about to move dramatically forward but never quite doing so. Thus there are corresponding situations/groups of characters: three college students (who also play together in a jazz trio) in the first novella, Tell Me; the three elements in the literary interchange, Tale, Teller, Reader, embodied as characters in the unabashedly metafictional I've Been Told; three sisters (symbolically representing the Three Graces) in the final novella, As I Was Saying.

In Tell Me, the three students are engaged in a love triangle, in I've Been Told (the "story of the Story"), tale and reader are carried successfully by their Dramatic Vehicle (driven by the teller) away from the place where three roads meet to a narrative climax of sorts, while the three sisters tell (in a series of three tapes) how they came to inspire a celebrated writer to compose his trilogy of novels, The Fates. And, of course, Where 3 Roads Meet is itself a more modest reduction of this imaginary trilogy, a triumvirate of fictions that presents to its own readers a place where three roads meet–three ways of exploring the sources and the fascinations of storytelling. (There are even more instances of such tripling, as readers of W3RM will discover.)

These days Barth is most often criticized for failing to "move past" the metafictional game-playing for which he has become perhaps the emblematic figure. But where, exactly, is he to go? Toward some more conventional kind of narrative strategy? Presumably he determined long ago that this was not the direction in which his talents would take him or he would never have abandoned conventional techniques in the first place. Moreover, to call self-reflexivity in fiction a matter of "game-playing" is to undervalue what metafiction is ultimately all about. There is an element of game-playing in John Barth's work–he wants his fiction to be entertaining, if not in the way stories are expected to entertain–but the self-reflexive gesture ("baring the device") is also the first and necessary step in establishing fiction as an aesthetic form whose limits are only the limits of language itself. Once we've acknowledged that a work of fiction does not require a suspension of disbelief, that its possibilities are not exhausted by the orthodox telling of tales, fiction as a literary form becomes that much more malleable, more open to other kinds of formal patterning.

Where 3 Roads Meet participates in this project in its modest way, allowing Barth to reinforce, through the cross-referential scheme I've described, more familiar metafictional devices with an intricate aesthetic design that balances the deconstruction of conventional narrative strategies and a simultaneous construction of alternative structures (much as Barth himself once posed the "literature of replenishment" against his previously elucidated notion of the "literature of exhaustion"). I would not claim that this is one of Barth's best books, although it might provide uninitiated readers with a pretty good introduction to his approach and assumptions. I would even agree with criticisms of Barth's late, mock-heroic style as a bit too mock- and more than a bit too mannered, as exemplified in a passage like this: "An upbeat, firm-willed, independent-spirited lass, be it said, who welcomed [her grandparents'] monitoring, took the loss of her not-much-of-a-mother in stride, comforted he not-all-that-bereft father as best a third- or fourth-grader can, and threw herself into her schoolwork, music lessons, team sports, and bosom-buddyhood with young Al Baumann. To whom she enjoyed mischievously displaying and even offering to his touch the not-yet-budding bosoms that anon would blossom into adolescent splendor.

No one will ever claim John Barth as either a plain stylist or a spinner of conventional yarns (although he does like to spin versions of yarns already spun). But that he is less than a conscientious writer concerned to enhance readers' appreciation of the art of fiction is an unsustainable argument.
“I Don’t Want to Lose What I Called to Say”

January 31, 2006

The fiction of Stephen Dixon starkly illustrates the difference between realism as a literary effect and "story" as a structural device, a distinction that is often enough blurred in discussions of conventional storytelling. "Realism" is the attempt to convince readers that the characters and events depicted in a given work are "like life" as most of us experience it, but, as Dixon's stories and novels demonstrate, story or plot conceived as the orderly–or even not so orderly–arrangement of incidents and events for explicitly dramatic purposes need not be present for such an attempt to succeed. Few readers are likely to finish his latest novel, Phone Rings (Melville House Publishing) thinking it does not provide a comprehensive and intensely realistic account of its characters and their circumstances, and of the family relationships the novel chronicles, but many if not most will have concluded that fidelity to the stages in Freytag's Triangle has very little to do with its realism.

Which is not to day that Phone Rings has no story to impart, only that it is one that emerges in the narrative long run, through the accumulation of episodes and interchanges (in this case, as in Dixon's previous novel, Old Friends, interchanges over the telephone), although the episodes themselves retain a kind of narrative autonomy separate from their placement as points on a narrative arc. Ultimately, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but the relationship between the parts is lateral, not linear, the story an aftereffect of Dixon's relentless layering of these episodic elements. (In some Dixon novels, such as, for example, Interstate or Gould, the repetitions, reversals, and transformations he effects through such layering become the story, or at least what makes the story memorable and gives these novels their aesthetically distinctive shape.) One could say that Dixon's commitment to realism precludes imposing "story" when doing so would only be a way of distorting reality by imputing to it more order and more direction than it in fact has.

Dixon's strategy of allowing his fiction to register the mundane and the contingent can seem obsessive, even perverse. In section 7 of Phone Rings, the novel's protagonist, Stu, makes breakfast for his wife. Through a chain of banal actions, Stu accidentally cuts himself with a bread knife. He serves the breakfast and talks with his wife about the fact that he's just cut himself with a bread knife, then, returning to the kitchen and seeing the knife, he wonders what might have happened if the knife had struck his carotid artery. He returns to his wife, who suggests he put a Band-Aid on the cut. The chapter concludes with Stu going back to the kitchen, where he attempts to recreate the situation that led to the accident:

He went back to the kitchen and got the bread knife and opened the refrigerator and wanted to reproduce the way the knife got stuck in the door, but couldn't find a place where it could have got caught. Just somewhere here, in the top shelf of the door, and then before he could do anything about it the knife, buckling under the pressure and something to do with realizing it was stuck and perhaps overcorrecting the situation by pushing the door too far back, sprung out of whatever it was into his neck. Okay, enough; forget about it as you said.

In section 10, "Brother of a neighbor dies. Stu reads about it in the Sun. " Stu wonders whether he should send condolences, starts walking up the hill to the neighbor's house, decides not to after all, and returns home. "I'll just send a condolence card. I'll get it at the drugstore and speak to Peter about his brother sometime after," he says to his wife in the section's closing line.

While these set-pieces are loosely connected to the novel's overarching depiction of Stu's grief over the death of his brother, it certainly cannot be said they advance "plot" in any but the most incremental sort of way–they present us with additional scenes from Stu's life, but do not reduce that life to the bare sum of those scenes. Each provides an equally significant account, however brief or however extended, of Stu's experience (just as the telephone conversations that make up a large portion of the novel's "action" remain self-contained exhanges that allow Stu to invoke past experiences), but Phone Rings, like much of Dixon's fiction, encourages us to consider the portrayal of its characters' experiences as an end-in-itself, not as the prop for a conventional narrative structure artificially imposed on these experiences.

However, if Phone Rings is a novel of character rather than plot, Dixon doesn't always seem at pains to delineate his characters with the expected kind of specificity. Here is a phone exchange between Stu and his brother Dan:

. . ."I'm only calling to tell you something that might interest you that happened today. Of course, also to hear how you are. But that, later, for I don't want to lose what I called to say, unless everything with you's not okay," and Dan said, "No, we're fine. What?" "I was going through my top dresser drawer to throw out all the useless papers and single socks and so on, and came across Dad's old business card," and Dan said "Which one? His dental office or the one he used after he lost his license and sold textiles for what was the company called. . .Lakeside?" and he said "Brookhaven. On Seventh Avenue and 38th." "And a third card. In fact, four," and Stu said "This one was for his 40th Street dental office–his last," and Dan said, "That's what I was getting to. First the Delancey Street offfice, which he had from 1919 till we moved to the West Side in '37, and he set up his practice there. Then Brookhaven, if you're right, and it sounds right–Brookfield or Brookhaven," and he said "Take my word, Haven. . . ..

It is nearly impossible to distinguish between Stu and Dan based on their speech patterns and characteristics alone–and in this novel they are known primarily through their speech. Both exhibit the same tendency to free association and other kinds of roundabout locutions (perhaps influenced by American Jewish speech patterns), to digressive asides and fragmentary utterances. Moreover, many of the other characters in the novel talk like this as well, as if the novel's primary objective is to project a kind of collective voice or to create out of workaday language itself a collective character that is the utlimate focus of Dixon's interest.

This does not mean that the characters in Phone Rings are inadequately rendered or fail to convince as plausibly "real" people. If anything, Dixon's emphasis on the quotidian and the conditional only lends them authenticity–this is the way people actually do talk and act, after all–and his prose style more broadly so insistently restricts itself to the plain narrative essentials, refusing to indulge in figurative embellishments and descriptive decoration (literally sticking to the prosaic) that it might seem these characters are not the creations of writing at all but are merely being caught in the midst of their ongoing, prexisting lives. Thus, chapters begin like this:

His younger daughter comes into the bedroom and says, "Phone call for you." He's working at his work table and says, "Darn, I'm right in the middle of something. That's why I turned the ringer off." "Next time tell us to tell callers you're busy and you'll call back," and he says "Next time I will, thanks," and gets up and picks up the phone receiver and says hello. "Uncle Stu, it's Manny.". . .

This goal of representing life as lived (right down to including details and dialogue most other writers would simply eliminate for efficiency's sake) may also be the motive behind Dixon's often exessively long paragraphs. To adjust his prose to the artificial demands of paragraphing would be a false way of representing the flow of experience, and Dixon's method in effect forces the reader to regard experience in this way–one thing after another. His style–and it is such, a deliberate effort to compose a style that seems without style–does produce a flattening effect, by which actions, thoughts and speech seem to occur on the same discursive plane and receive the same degree of emphasis, but this is more fundamentally the consequence of an approach that seeks to make its treatment of reality as material as possible. We don't get "psychological realism" from Stephen Dixon, at least insofar as that term indicates an effort to plumb the depths of consciousness, to approximate the ineffable. His characters think out loud: "He'd never told Dan this. Thought several times to but then thought better. Made Isaac swear not to tell Dan or Zee about it. 'Oh, on second thought, you can tell her,' after Isaac swore he'd never tell either, 'but not Dan. You do, he won't let me take you anywhere for the next few years. I know him. . . .'"
What originates in Stu's ruminations becomes just another form of exposition.

I find Dixon's strategies fascinating (he ususally manages to extend them just a little bit farther with each book) and his ability to elicit from them compelling and often emotionally affecting fictions impressive indeed. He's one of the few writers to whose work the descriptions "experimental" and "realistic" seem to apply equally, although his inclination to the former is almost always a way of further securing the latter. His relative lack of popularity among even readers of serious literary fiction is both surprising and understandable: Surprising because he's finally such an engrossing and rewarding writer, understandable because his style of realism, shunning as it does the facile resort to "story," calls into question the idea that fiction functions to elucidate life by, figuratively at least, whipping it into shape.

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