The Reading Experience

Lyrical Commentary

March 13, 2007

In some ways, the critical response to John Updike's recent work seems to me similar to that accorded to Harold Bloom's, even though Updike is a novelist and Bloom a critic. Most of it is rankly opportunistic, as if it is now clearly time, given these writers' advancing age, for Our Best Critics to prepare us for their impending deaths and certain subsequent neglect, at least if these critics' own level-headed standards are to be applied. Most of it is directed at the authors rather than the work, as if the reviewers have stored up their animus against both writers' misguided if inexplicably successful ways and are now able to let them have it. And most of it is pretty stupid.

Terrorist is certainly not one of Updike's best novels. Literary posterity will probably regard it as an interesting but failed experiment, taking Updike away from his usual themes and mileu, although not completely: its exploration of religious belief is consistent with much of his previous fiction, and the town of New Prospect, New Jersey could easily enough be a depiction of Brewer, Pennsylvania in its own decayed postindustrial latter days. But it certainly does not deserve the kind of critical censure it often enough did receive upon its publication. (Amitav Ghosh: "the end result is that Updike is unable to cut his brown characters loose from texts, scriptures and ideologies. As for his belief that elaborate descriptions of skin color are a form of insight, it is not wholly without merit, for it does serve to occasionally enliven the prose"; Floyd Skloot: "the novel is almost wholly without credibility"; Jonathan Shainin: the novel is full of "consummately pretty descriptions of everything under the sun"; Michiko Kakutani: "the ensuing developments in this maladroit novel prove to be every bit as dubious as Ahmad is as a recognizable human being."

To some extent, Christopher Hitchens's ravings can be dismissed as just further proof of what an incompetent literary critic he is. (For more on this, go here.) One combs through his review looking for substantive support for his assertion that "Updike has produced one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon" but finds little beyond dissatisfaction with the author's pop culture references and impatience with his "grueling homework." Updike's portrayal of a religiously-obsessed Muslim clearly does not satisfy Hitchens, but then, given Hitchens's own record of misjudgment of the influence of religion in Iraq, one would hardly want a protagonist who does fit his image of what a true believer might be like. If I had to choose between John Updike and Christopher Hitchens for "insight" into or "imaginative sympathy" with a young man caught up in the struggle between religious belief and the physical/material temptatations of secular American society, I wouldn't have to weigh the alternatives for very long.

James Wood, on the other hand, doesn't have the excuse of being a generally inept critic, certainly not if his hyperelevated reputation for "intelligence" and "close reading" is to be taken seriously. And, indeed, Wood's familiarity with modern fiction (especially English and European fiction) can't be impugned, and, unlike Hitchens, he does take care to cite text and offer support for his judgments (which are in turn literary judgments rather than political arguments or expressions of dyspepsia). Yet Wood's negative review of Terrorist essentially rests on the conclusion that Updike isn't Dostoevsky or Conrad and that, surprise! surprise!, he isn't a psychological realist. These seem to me to be charges Updike would pretty readily confess to, and they only seem like damning criticism because Wood, as is his wont, advances his own preference for psychological realism, for realistic fiction that gives us an account of Mind, to the front of the line where proper literary strategies are concerned. Only psychological realism is a proper literary strategy, according to Wood, and writing that doesn't conform to his prejudice gets labeled "hysterical" or worse. Wood's reviews would be much easier to take if he began every one of them with a disclaimer: I have a particular hobbyhorse I like to ride when reviewing fiction, and in this case I have chosen a writer who allows me to ride it like the wind!

Wood tells us that the fatal flaw in Terrorist is that it shows Updike's failure "at the essential task of free indirect style." Updike "will begin a paragraph in his character's voice, and then, apparently losing any capacity for the necessary ventriloquism, decide utterly to write over his character." Updike's protagonist, Ahmad, "has no personality, no quiddity as an eighteen-year-old American, so he is Updike's serf, ready for whatever the writer chooses to do with him. In Updikeland, this means lyrical authorial commentary." In other words: Updike does not give over his prose to the task of probing his character's consciousness; he does not present us with a psychologlical portrait that subsumes either style or form to fiction's putative capacity to delve within, to make characters "real" to us by inviting us into their minds.

Updike's "lyrical authorial commentary" in Terrorist is not much altered from what we find in much of his other fiction, so Wood's complaint can't really be about this novel alone. This is Wood attempting a takedown of Updike based on a perceived flaw in one particular book, in which Updike has taken a risk by treating a subject not immediately and recognizably Updikean, however much he is able to render it with his usual precisely observed style. It allows Wood to make the same kind of criticism that has always been made of Updike, but to dress it up in fancier crittalk ("free indirect style"): Updike is too besotted with language. He writes too much.

It is true that Updike does not use the free indirect style. It is true that he "writes over" his characters. Although his third-person narratives (and most of his fiction does use third-person narration) do center on particular characters and their responses to events, Updike does not "inhabit" them in a way that would erase his own stylistic tracks. As I said in a previous post, Updike's writing draws on his characters' "mental storehouse of memories and images, but does not dwell in [their] immediate awareness. It creates writing out of that storehouse." Updike does not prove himself inadequate at psychological realism. He doesn't attempt it. Wood's criticism is thus entirely irrelevant and his review utterly useless.

Both Hitchens's and Wood's reviews seem to me of a piece with Leon Wieseltier's condemnation of Updike for "aestheticizing" the ruined World Trade Center in his depiction of the scene that appeared shortly after the events of 9/11/01. Updike merely applied his considerable powers of visual description to the task of evoking the disaster and was denounced as some kind of moral leper. It isn't surprising that Hitchens and Woods, themselves both moral critics suspicious of the merely aesthetic, would join in on the faultfinding once Updike dared to write a whole novel steeped in associations with the events of that day.
Refurbishing the Wheel

March 6, 2007

K. Silem Mohammad (Lime Tree) contends that "new forms" in poetry can be just as stultifying as the conventional kind if the poet comes to believe that "the mechanics of composition are more important than the experience created by the work."

He goes on to suggest that Ezra Pound's command to "make it new"

does not mean to reinvent the wheel every time you write a poem. The original image associated with this phrase was that of the (same) sun rising every morning, always new. The wording could just as easily be "make it fresh," or "make it seem as though new." It's more about what the reader is enabled to perceive than it is about the writer's use of novel formal techniques.

I would agree that the attempt to create something "new" in either poetry or fiction does not necessarily involve the reinvention of form, if that means ignoring literary history. The poetic "wheel" would require reinvention only if it could be established that the wheel wasn't really a wheel after all. One's precursors not only wrote poems of a sort one no longer fancies, but they didn't actually get at what poetry really is, did not instigate or participate in a tradition that can now be accepted as properly "poetic."

In this sense, making it "fresh" seems entirely sufficient, although one could still be "reinventing" if this is understood to mean adding to the existing tradition something that hasn't been tried before (or something that hasn't been tried in this or that way). A writer who thinks of him/herself as "innovative" because he/she has determined to take nothing for granted, to assume that literary forms can always be reshaped and reconceived, would, in my opinion, be justified in using that designation. This would be less a matter of developing "novel formal techniques" than regarding the existing presumptions about form to be always potentially expandable.

Mohammad's own definition of form as "near-physicalizations of possibility, not yet quite frozen into fact, but charged with fact's imminence" thus seems entirely satisfactory to me, although I would be less inclined to think of achieved form as "fact" except insofar as the poem produced does indeed embody the sense of potential with which the poet began. Even here, however, the "physicalizations of possibility" would need to be inherent in the poem itself, represented in its formal turns and rhetorical processes but not necessarily literally "physicalized." The poem does not seek to be encased in its form but to demonstrate in its pursuit of form both the strugge to attain aesthetic completion and the ultimate impossibility of achieving that goal, especially if it entails reaching a perfection of sorts in the exploitation of form. Other, equally good if not yet imagined explorations in form are always possible. (The work of Wallace Stevens seems to me a good example of this kind of approach to aesthetic form.)

Undoubtedly it is still easier to debate this conception of "form" in poetry than in fiction. For better or worse, fiction is still tied to story as its irreducible form, even though "story" (telling it, relating it, making it known) is more an excuse for invoking form than a formal property itself. Thus, different kinds of narrative strategies, different ways of arranging and disclosing the story, are acceptable, are even praised as the appropriate kind of "experiment" in fiction, as long as they are there in order finally to present the story in the most dramatically effective manner. But few readers and critics seem willing to consider other kinds of formal structures, structures that foreground language and the non-linear ways in which it might be manipulated, that experiment with other "shapes" a work of fiction might take, as an alternative to the predominance of story. This need not mean dispensing with narrative altogether–although at this point the distinction between poetry and prose fiction might break down in a way that could provide further fruitful experiment and critical discussion–but it would mean acknowledging once and for all that, now we are entering a second century in which visual means of storytelling are proving more effective at satisfying most people's narrative needs, "telling a story" is not the most relevant skill a good fiction writer possesses.

It does seem to me that the wheel that has allowed the oxcart of fiction to keep moving for the past 250 years has begun to break down due to overuse and the tremendous weight it has been asked to bear. A sturdier, more adaptable model might be in order.
Telling Your Story

February 28, 2007

I've just re-read Jim Thompson's The Grifters, and the farther into it I got, the more apparent it became to me that Thompson's novels provide an especially useful illustration of the differences between third- and first-person narration in fiction. I still enjoyed The Grifters, which is narrated in the third person, but reading it a second time made me more aware of its limitations, as well as the virtues of the first-person narratives to be found in novels such as The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280, and After Dark, My Sweet.

Here are a few paragraphs near the beginning of After Dark, My Sweet. The story is being told by "Kid" Collins, the novel's protagonist, and he has stopped in at a roadhouse for a glass of beer:

The bartender slopped a beer down in front of me. He scooped up the change I'd laid on the counter, sat down on the stool again, and picked up a newspaper. I said something about it was sure a hot day. He grunted without looking up. I said it was a nice pleasant little place he had there and that he certainly knew how to keep his beer cold. He grunted again.

I looked down at my beer, feeling the short hairs rising on the back of my neck. I guessed–I knew–that I should never have come in here. I should never go in any place where people might not be nice and polite to me. That's all they have to do, you know. Just be as nice to me as I am to them. . . .

We then learn that Kid Collins has spent some time in "institutions" (eventually that he has just escaped from one), but we really don't need that information to know that something's not quite right with the Kid. His very need to elicit a response from the bartender and those short hairs rising tell us what we need to know. And we wouldn't know it in the same way if the Kid himself wasn't telling us. The novel immediately plunges us into the world of Kid Collins as he is able to articulate it, and most of its melodramatic punch comes from being jolted by the Kid's direct verbal flourishes. (And he is, it turns out, an ex-boxer.)

The Grifters starts out pretty well, too:

As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony. A hard blow in the guts can do that to a man, and Dillon had gotten a hard one. Now with a fist, which would have been bad enough, but from the butt-end of a heavy club.

Somehow, he got back to his car and managed to slide into the seat. But that was all he could manage. He moaned as the change in posture cramped his stomach muscles; then, with a strangled gasp, he leaned out the window.

Several cars passed as he spewed vomit into the street, their occupants grinning, frowning sympathetically, or averting their eyes in disgust. . . .

This also steeps us immediately into the world as experienced by Roy Dillon, but in The Grifters he shares our narrative attention with his mother Lilly and his girlfriend, Moira Langry, and so the story involving the three of them will have to be told by a third-person narrator who has access to their thoughts and emotions but filters them through his own more distanced narrative voice. It's not quite full-blown "pyschological realism," but Thompson nevertheless can achieve his signature hard-boiled, scary/depraved effects only by fishing around in the characters' minds for their perceptions of and reactions to the inevitably untoward situations they encounter. The verbally-constructed "voice" of a character like Kid Collins is lost, and we have to pick our way through such vague verbiage as "incredible agony" and be satisfied that just "somehow" Roy Dillon returned to his car.

Thus, while the novel commences with a typical Thompsonesque bang, it's not long before we get a little bogged down in passages like this:

. . .He had looked around extensively and carefully before choosing Los Angeles as a permanent base of operations, and his capital was now reduced to less than a thousand dollars.

That was a lot of money, of course. Unlike the big-con operator, whose elaborate scene-setting may involve as much as a hundred thousand dollars, the short-con grifter can run on peanuts. But Roy Dillon, while remaining loyal to the short con, was abandoning the normal scheme of things.

At twenty-one, he was weary of the hit-and-get. He knew that the constant "getting"–jumpring from one town to another before the heat got too hot–could absorb most of the hits, even of a thrifty man. So that he might work as hard and often as he safely could, and still wind up with the wolf nipping at the seat of his threadbare pants. . . .

In my view, we're being given way too much "information" in a passage like this, information that is perhaps important for us to have but that would be less intrusive if it were parceled out gradually by a first-person narrator or if it was at least provided to us dramatically–through showing rather than telling. It would be better, for example, if we saw Roy Dillon "abandoning the normal scheme of things" rather than being told this was the case through an awkward inventory of the contents of Roy's mind. A secondary effect of this third-person technique is the fuzzy, flabby language: "He had looked around extensively"; "can run on peanuts"; "the wolf nipping at the seat of his threadbare pants". Not only does such writing lean heavily on cliche–which again might be more tolerable if it were issuing from a first-person narrator–but it helps to make passages like this themselves seem like just so much perfunctory "scene-setting."

Perhaps this is why I actually prefer the Stephen Frears movie made from The Grifters to the novel, something I would not say of the film adapted from After Dark, My Sweet. Frears's film is able to dispense with the third-person narrator and focus on the characters and their overlapping stories in a direct, unmediated way. We get Thompson's lowlife plot without his narrator's sometimes laborious attempts to move it along. It is also probably why I think Thompson's best novels are those related to us by his sublimely scuzzy first-person narrators. It's impossible to reproduce these novels on screen because their narrators are so inseparably a part of their appeal. Such is undoubtedly true of most well-devised first-person narrators, which is one reason I believe this method of storytelling is almost always more promising as a way of creating distinctive, aesthetically pleasing works of fiction than the kind of close-in third-person narration that has in most literary fiction become more or less the only available alternative (and that is probably often used precisely because it does lend itself more easily to screen adaptation.)
Purely Negative Achievements

January 11, 2007

Apparently there are those who do indeed regard "military sci-fi" as a forum for "taking stands." From an obituary of Jim Baen, publisher of Baen Books:

Baen Books offered an antidote to leftism generally in science fiction. It helped rescue science-fiction publishing from the leftist, nihilistic "New Wave" science fiction that had arisen in the 1960s and was concerned, in parallel with postmodernism and deconstructionism in other literature and art, with denigrating Western traditions and values. The "New Wave" was never really popular (New Worlds, the major New Wave magazine in Britain, was bailed out by public money after the buyers and readers stayed away in droves), but it might well have had the purely negative achievement of driving traditional science-fiction writers out of publishing. Baen Books gave — and still gives — a voice to stories of traditional Western values like honor, patriotism, chivalry, duty and military valor.

It was probably Jim Baen, more than any other, who rescued the "military science-fiction novel," carrying on into the future and to other worlds the highly honorable tradition associated with the likes of Hornblower and C. S. Forester, and offering a voice against the anti-Western adversary culture so common in modern literature. In its way, and without beating up any obvious political message, Baen Books has played its part in the Culture War, on the right side.

Link provided via Collected Miscellany.
A Convenient Facade

January 10, 2007

In a review of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream, Dave Itzkoff asserts that Scalzi might prove himself worthy of comparison with an SF icon such as Robert Heinlien "if he uses [his future] work to articulate a firm position on the political issues that will inevitably define his historical moment, take a stance that considerate readers might potentially disagree with, and even risk the possibility that a half-century later, some petulant, know-nothing critic will dismiss his ideas as dangerous and obsolete".

I haven't read The Android's Dream, but if it does not "take a stance" on issues defining our "historical moment," for me that is in its favor and only makes me more likely to give it a try.

Itzkoff's take on science fiction in general (or at least that branch he calls "military sci-fi") leads me to think I might not clearly understand the ambitions of science fiction, at least among its more serious-minded authors and critics. Although I have only relatively recently begun to sample noteworthy science fiction novels and writers (that is, I am most assuredly a johnny-come-lately), I have done so under the assumption it is a genre that seeks to provide an alternative to "realism" and other conventionally "literary" practices, not just by evoking speculative worlds and looking to the future rather than the past or present but also by creating alternative forms and experimenting with the established elements of fiction (plot, setting, point of view, etc.). That SF is inherently a kind of experimental fiction is a proposition I have been convinced to take seriously by some of the more intelligent critical discussion of the genre, both on SF litblogs and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find this proposition very persuasively confirmed. The novels I have attempted, by among others Philip K. Dick, China Mieville, and Samuel Delaney, while they certainly do engage the imagination well beyond what is offered in most humdrum literary realism, do not seem to me especially preoccupied with formal experiment or stylistic innovation. (Which is not to deny that the latter two, at any rate, do write well.) Traditional plotting prevails, setting is described in the kind of minute detail a Flaubert-inspired realist would almost certainly admire, and point of view (at least in the particular novels I have read) remains transparent and undisturbed. They are, finally, resolutely traditional novels, if anything overloaded with conventional storytelling, marked as "other" only by their deliberately exotic subjects.

And now Dave Itzkoff tells me that SF writers ought to emphasize "stance" and "ideas" in a way that makes even these exotic subjects just a convenient facade behind which to hide the writer's ultimate intent to "articulate a firm position." Indeed, writing science fiction, it turns out, is just another way of conveying a "philosophy": In one of Scalzi's other books, the characters read Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which "they collectively decide 'had some good action scenes but required too much unpacking of philosophical ideas.'" "Heinlein may have cultivated a philosophy that now seems distasteful bordering on appalling," says Itzkoff, "but it is unfair to criticize him for simply having a philosophy. At a time when endless war is not just a nightmarish fictional scenario but a real and looming possibility, there is still a position less commendable than having dangerous ideas, and that is having no position at all."

Perhaps having "no position at all" on real war isn't very "commendable," but declining to take positions in fiction, even if war is the ostensible subject, brings no moral opprobrium at all. In purely literary terms, refusing to "take a position" by sticking to, well, literature, and leaving the moral or political discourse to other, more suitable forums is as much of a "stance" most fiction writers ought to feel comfortable assuming. If John Scalzi thinks his job is to write engaging works of fiction rather than "cultivate a philosophy" by indirection, it's all to his credit. But is Itzkoff's own position, that the work of the science fiction writer can be reduced to the attempt to stake out a position on this or that, really shared by most writers and readers who lay claim to this genre? Is it the literary "philosophy" of SF?

I have every intention of carrying on with my survey of science fiction, both current and classic. The next writer whose work I've decided to assay is Stanislaw Lem. Perhaps here I will find at least as much art as philosophy, an equal effort to explore the possibilities of fiction as a literary form as to "say something." I continue to expect (hope) that eventually I will find that science fiction truly can be a genre that expands these possibilities, that in my initial forays into SF I just didn't get it because of my own limitations or presuppositions. That critics like Dave Itzkoff themselves underestimate SF's potential to escape the tedious restrictions of polemics and "message."

UPDATE In a response to this post, Niall Harrison at Torque Control suggests I am "under the unfortunate impression that Dave Itzkoff knows what he’s talking about." This may be right. I don't know much about Itzkoff, and I should certainly be wary of taking reviews that appear in the New York Times Book Review as representative or authoritative about anything. Otherwise, Niall says that my attempt to find SF that does "something formally new not found in other kinds of fiction" is probably "doomed to fail" because "sf stories won’t often look like experiments, because the point is the subject." I'm not sure I know exactly what he means by that last statement, but at first glance it doesn't seem that far removed from Itzkoff's "taking a stance" except that the "point" to be made is inherent in the act of imagining alternative worlds.
Mainly Negentropic

December 26, 2006

In an essay at electronic book review on "ecocriticism," Andrew McMurry writes:

. . .The resources of poetry and literature and art are not particularly suited for stopping or even slowing the headlong rush into destruction (and this is where I differ from some in ecocriticism. . .who imagine that poetry and art and film can help us tread more lightly on the earth) because the roots of the problem go far deeper than culture can penetrate. Still, a study of culture helps us to understand what sort of creatures we are that we can effectively choose to immolate ourselves and the planet. Literature, as we all know, is the human pageant distilled; but it's equally the transhistorical record of a sad and furious primate, a mirror held up to our species' ugliness. Passed through the interpretative lens of ecocritical theory, literature reveals instance after instance of our inability to project, limit, and control the mainly negentropic quality of all our activities in our environments. In simple terms, the price we have paid for the complexity of our things is the decomplexity of earth's things. As a species, we have the power to modify our surroundings to suit our needs but not the wisdom to suit our needs to our surroundings.

This seems to me an admirably succinct account of what might be called the unromantic school of ecocriticism (disencumbered of the notion that literature can and ought to be deployed as a weapon in the battle to stave off our "headlong rush into destruction," that it might "help us tread more lightly on the earth"). It recognizes that the "resources" of art and literature are wasted when expended on agitprop and ill-disguised moral instruction, and it doesn't insist that writers exchange art for "relevance." McMurry clearly enough believes that literature does have relevance of a sort, but it isn't the kind that must be channeled into particular programmatic or ideological forms.

But he is stuck with a conception of literature that equates it with "content," that reduces it to its role in facilitating our understanding of "what sort of creatures we are," its status as "transhistorical record." Literature, through providing "a mirror held up to our species' ugliness," offers us information about ourselves, in this case disturbing information further clarified "through the interpretative lens of ecocritical theory." Literature's mirror and criticism's lens reflect back to us in a handily focused and duly intensified image "instance after instance of our inability to project, limit, and control the mainly negentropic quality of all our activities in our environments."

That works of literature do frequently reveal "the mainly negentropic quality of all our activities" is undeniable, although this is so mainly because serious writers do not shy from portraying human activity in all of its manifestations (many of which are ugly indeed), not because ecological degradation in particular seems especially pertinent. One might just as easily say that, viewed in the right way, literature reveals "the highly erotic quality of all our activities" or the necessarily "economic" character of those activities. An "interpretive lens" of any sort that directs its attention to what a literary work "reflects" is necessarily going to distort the work, in most cases extracting from it what it hoped to find in the first place, but approaches as determined to "see" only content as ecocriticism puts into high relief this tendency to appropriate the incidental characteristics of the work for external and purely utilitarian purposes, leaving the "merely literary" properties of novels and poems and stories to those who, in this case, seem blithely unaware of the overriding need to save the planet.

(Which is not to say that ecocritical insights never contribute to our understanding of particular works. To add such an insight to others that might be gathered in considering a given text is a perfectly sound strategy, but of course in most cases the ecocritic would likely not appreciate ecocriticism being subsumed to the broader goal of literary understanding in this way. It only makes the ecocritical agenda seem secondary to the protocols of reading literature efficaciously.)

Thus while McMurry is able to resist concentrating the interpretive lens of ecocriticism even more narrowly on the therapeutic possibilities of literature (convincing us "to tread more lightly on the earth"), he remains content with the metaphors of literature as mirror and criticism as lens. There's no doubt that all works of literature refer us to and illuminate human reality, if not always so directly and so simply as the mirror metaphor implies. But Stendhal's notion of the "mirror in the roadway," when taken too literally, too quickly sanctions the assumption that literature is important for its content and that its most immediate use is to enlighten us about this or that "issue," to serve as the "subject" of some such mode of analysis as ecocriticism. By deflecting attention away from the work itself and onto the "reality" it supposedly reflects, the mirror metaphor encourages us to ignore those elements of literature without which literary texts would be no different than any other species of writing: form and style.

In fact, Andrew McMurry might go some way toward easing his own dyspepsia caused by the depravity of human nature if he were to pay some attention to the aesthetics of literature. By putting aside the mirror and considering the way fiction and poetry transmute human experience into complex and challenging verbal forms, he might come to appreciate one kind of human activity devoted to creating rather than destroying. He might learn that art is one way by which the human imagination is able to realize its more beneficent possibilities. It's all right there in front of us, but sometimes we seem too busy staring at our own reflections in the mirror to see it.
Stephen King

December 19, 2006

In a response to a recent post of mine which included some disparaging comments about two of Stephen King's novels, Jahsonic suggests that my criticism is "for a large measure based on content related rather than style related criteria."

Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Jahsonic concedes, I would hardly be enthusiastic about the film versions of Carrie and The Dead Zone if I objected to their "content"–by which I assume Jahsonic means their horror/fantasy narratives, the supernatural occurences the novels are "about." My dislike of these two novels, as well as much of the rest of King's work (although not all–The Shining is a passably good horror novel, and I like the screenplay he wrote for George Romero's Creepshow), is based almost entirely on "style related criteria." I think Stephen King is a bad writer. More precisely, whereas Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg (as well as John Carpenter in his adaptation of Christine) treat the "content" of the source novels with exemplary style, are nothing if not great cinematic stylists, as a writer of prose fiction Stephen King has no style.

Jahsonic quotes Susan Sontag on invidious distinctions between style and content: "It would be hard to find any reputable literary critic today who would care to be caught defending as an idea the old antithesis of style versus content. On this issue a pious consensus prevails. … In the practice of criticism, though, the old antithesis lives on, virtually unassailed. Most of the same critics who disclaim, in passing, the notion that style is an accessory to content maintain the duality whenever they apply themselves to particular works of literature." Presumably I was guilty in my original post of inappropriately cordoning off style from content in King's fiction, in order to assail the latter. But it's precisely because I cannot so easily separate style and content that I find his fiction hard to take seriously. In fact, it seems to me that it is Stephen King himself who is guilty of detaching style from content, of not understanding that the two ought to work in concord and not at cross purposes, which in my opinion they too often do in his books.

At best, King's prose is blandly functional, a "plain" style occasionally gussied up with pseudo-colorful idioms. Here's a passage from The Dead Zone, describing the accident that sends Johnny Smith into a coma:

There was the sound of smashing glass. A huge gout of flame stroked its way up into the night. Johnny's head collided with the cab's windshield and knocked it out. Reality began to go down a hole. Pain, faint and far away, in his shoulders and arms as the rest of him followed his head through the jagged windshield. He was flying. Flying into the October night.

Dim flashing thought: Am I dying? Is this going to kill me?

Interior voice answering: Yes, this is probably it.

Flying. October stars flung across the night. Racketing boom of exploding gasoline. An orange glow. Then darkness.

His trip through the void ended with a hard thump and a splash. Cold wetness as he went into Carson's Bog, twenty-five feet from where the Charger and the cab, welded together, pushed a pyre of flame into the night.

Darkness.

Fading.

Until all that was left seemd to be a giant red-and-black wheel revolving in such emptiness as there may between the stars, try your luck, first time fluky, second time lucky, hey-hey-hey. The wheel revolved up and down, red and black, the marker ticking past the pins, and he strained to see if it was going to come up double zero, house number, house spin, everybody loses but the house. He strained to see but the wheel was gone. There was only blackness and that universal emptiness, negatory, good buddy, el zilcho. Cold limbo.

Johnny Smith stayed there a long, long time.

Does anyone want to defend this as good writing? When it's not straining after poetic phrasing that just lies limply on the page–"A huge gout of flame stroked its way," "His trip through the void ended with a hard thump," "revolving in such emptiness as there may between the stars"–it presents us with awkward repetitions–"up into the night," "into the October night," "pushed a pyre of flame into the night"–and just purely embarassing expressions–"Reality began to go down a hole," "only blackness and that universal emptiness, negatory, good buddy, el zilcho." King is trying to describe an extraordinary event as vividly as he can, but his relentlessly routine language simply isn't up to the task.

Here's another passage depicting Johnny's post-crash psychic abilities:

Johnny stopped suddenly and stiffened like a dog on point: "here," he muttered. "He did it right here."

Images and textures and sensations flooded in. The copper taste of excitement, the possibility of being seen adding to it. The girl was squirming, trying to scream. He had covered her mouth with one gloved hand. Awful excitement. Never catch me, I'm the Invisible Man, is it dirty enough for you now, momma?

Johnny began to moan, shaking his head back and forth.

Johnny's power of "second sight" is this novel's primary "supernatural" device (as are similar powers in other of King's books), but it's really hard to accept it with a straight face, much less experience it viscerally as a gateway to "horror," when the writing is as flat and listless as it is in a passage such as this. King renders the most extraordinary (and inherently incredible) occurences in the most ordinary kind of language, although it's hard to know whether he employs such language deliberately–in which case it's a very poor choice for bringing scenes like this to life–or whether this is just King's conception of what the language of fiction should be like, in effect the best he can do given the assumption that "content" is everything, style much less than even an afterthought. Ultimately, Stephen King is a realist despite himself, and despite his genre, as the burden of his prose style seems to be to present his characters and their predicaments in as transparently "lifelike" way as possible, adhering to conventional methods of plot, setting, and characterization even when the plot features outbreaks of "unreal" events and the characters find themselves in the most outlandish of situations. Paradoxically, however, his pedestrian prose fails to make his creations seem "real" in the manner demanded of works that violate the suppositions of ordinary reality: by making the depicted world a vivid, aesthetically transformed alternative to that reality so beguiling it makes those suppositions irrelevant.

Thus I just can't agree with Jahsonic that Stephen King's novels qualify as "transgressive fiction," fiction that "transcends everyday life" and "makes you curious of what life can and can’t be about." King's novels don't transcend everyday life so much as they make the strange events they portray seem almost as prosaic in the way they unfold as anything else in the routine of human affairs. And, in my opinion, they certainly don't make us "curious of what life can and can't be about." Their "content" is so perfunctorily related, so lacking in texture, that they only make us more aware that life will never be like that.

Nor can I agree that in the long run King will rank with other ostensibly "popular" writers such as Charles Dickens. Dickens's books still reveal to us a writer of prose that is vibrant, surprising, and transformative, that makes the long-vanished world of Victorian England as alive as it could have seemed to those who belonged to it–probably more so. King's fictional worlds are already dead (except when they are revived and reinvented by more talented filmmakers), done in by a prose style that withers on the page.
The Content and Form of American Fiction-Writing

November 20, 2006

It may be true that, as Michael Blowhard contends, Gold Medal Books, publisher of pulp/noir fiction in the 1950s, "had a greater impact on the content and form [of] American fiction-writing than any other postwar book publisher," although he doesn't really provide much support for this claim beyond citing a few films that were adapted from Gold Medal books, as well as various filmmakers who obviously enough have been influenced by the noir style. To say that "pulp fiction" has influenced storytelling in the movies, or even that some otherwise "serious" writers (Lethem, Chabon) have paid homage to it in their work, is one thing, but to assert it has "had a greater impact on the content and form" of postwar fiction than anything else is quite another. I'm willing to entertain this idea, but I'd really like to have a somewhat more specific idea of what "content and form" means in this context. Does MB really mean to say that Gold Medal-style fiction has so overwhelmingly influenced both the subjects chosen by postwar writers (is this what he means by "content," or is it a looser reference to what might be called "atmosphere" or "ideas"?) and the "form" these writers adopt? What writers does he have in mind? How does their work show this influence?

Perhaps MB clarifies his point just a bit in the sentence following the one I've quoted: "Gold Medal novels were intended as reliable, disposable entertainments: fast, short, and full of action. Noir-ish intrigue, westerns, and adventure tales were the general rule; sensationalism and sleaze were encouraged." It would seem that MB is trying to expand the definition of "American fiction-writing" by insisting we include the practice of those writers aiming for a popular audience. Postwar fiction includes the Mickey Spillanes and the John D. McDonalds as well as "Capote, Cheever, Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Pynchon," et al. Surely there is some justice in this contention, especially if the measure applied is sales or total books in print or name recognition rather than aesthetic accomplishment as determined by sensible literary standards. (And I would even concede that some of the pulp writers MB identifies–Jim Thompson and Richard Matheson, for example–have some claim to aesthetic accomplishment as well.) Undoubtedly most of the fiction published in the postwar era was meant to provide "entertainment" ("disposable" or not), and no one has ever gone broke overestimating the American taste for "sensationalism and sleaze." If Michael Blowhard thinks pulp fiction should be respected for its capacity to satisfy popular tastes, I'm not going to quarrel with him.

Yet underlying MB's paean to the pulps is a palpable resentment against those in certain "stuffy" literary quarters who just won't grant such fiction its due. And its hard not to conclude that this resentment lies not just against readers and critics who disdain "entertainment" but against those who won't admit such fiction is also just as artistic as "literary fiction," perhaps more so, since it has after all influenced Godard and Truffaut and Tarantino, who must know art when they see it. It has good-old fashioned masculine "raw energy," a better criterion for judging narrative art than that applied by those now in control of American publishing, which has become "feminized and corporate." It gives the people what they want (and makes money too!), and people who won't settle for its "gritty fun" are just "prisses."

As always in populist screeds such as this, the primary target of ire is the "canon-maker-wannabes" in universities. The professors have told an "official story of postwar American fiction [that] recoiled entirely from the Gold Medal writers." They've withheld their markers of "respectable culture." Putting aside the fact that writers who valorized "sensationalism and sleaze" probably were never looking for the approval of "respectable culture," MB really ought to take a closer look at what academic critics are actually up to these days. Contemporary literature has been a substantial part of the literary ccurriculum for only about 30 years, and "scholars" of contemporary literature have long since abandoned a gatekeeping role, anyway. Breaking the canon–in this case before it was even clearly established–is much more popular than making it. And as MB himself admits, "Many colleges now offer a course or three in the history of hardboiled and/or detective fiction." Indeed, it is much more likely for students to find "a course or three" in not just detective fiction but genre fiction of all kinds than a course designed to teach "canonical" postwar writers in the solemn manner MB describes. Genre fiction is much more amenable to the kinds of historical and sociological analyses literary academics now undertake than "merely literary" works by Roth or Pynchon.

MB imagines a critical-literary establishment that disdains popular and pulp fiction. (It's hard for me to believe that much of this establishment resides in "the New York City trade publishing biz." As far as I can tell, popularity now means everything to this "biz.") When Gold Medal Books was founded in 1949, it probably could be said that "respectable" literary opinion" was appalled. But it seems to me that genres like detective fiction and SF, "noir" fiction in general, has been embraced by many if not most readers and critics whose most immediate preference is simply for challenging and aesthetically credible work. It is just as likely that accomplished writers are going to emerge from these genres as from "literary fiction," a designation that has now become just another marketing category. A lot of dull, formulaic genre fiction gets published these days, but the same thing is also decidedly true of literary fiction.

It is also true, at least in my opinion, that most of the Gold Medal fiction was indeed "reliable, disposable entertainment." The serious writers (and also filmmakers such as David Lynch) who were subsequently "inspired" by this fiction have not settled for the disposable and the sensationalized. They have in some ways transcended the original limitations of the pulp fiction form by filtering the conventions and images of this fiction through a more developed aesthetic sensibility. They write better than Mickey Spillane. To make a case for these pathbreaking pulp fictions as art seems to me on a par with the attempts by creationists to make "intelligent design" acceptable as "science." (They want the approval of scientists, whose domain they otherwise reject.) You can believe in intelligent design if you like, but it isn't science. Have all the fun you want with fiction that is "fast, short, and full of action," but, in most cases, it isn't art.
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.

Essays in Criticism

Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction