The Reading Experience

Keenly Observed

May 27, 2005

According to Morris Dickstein,

To understand the changes that shook the modern world, my students and colleagues have returned in recent years to long-neglected writers in the American realist tradition, including William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. For readers like me who grew up in the second half of the 20th century on the unsettling innovations of modernism, and who were attuned to its atmosphere of crisis and disillusionment, the firm social compass of these earlier writers has come as a surprise.

Dreiser, Crane, Wharton, and Cather are "long-neglected"? As far as I can tell, the latter two especially have become increasingly popular, both among academics and ordinary readers, over the past two decades. This must be just another anti-modernist rhetorical gesture–surprisingly, from someone who has in the past written insightfully about both modernism and postmodernism. (See his Gates of Eden, actually one of the very best books about American fiction in the 1960s.)

I can't really see that the "unsettling innovations of modernism" provide a very clear opposition to the "firm social compass" of the writers Dickstein lists. The modernists didn't lack a social compass, did they? Joyce? Faulkner? They simply weren't as interested in "social fiction" as Dreiser or Lewis. Their "innovations" were directed elsewhere–to the depiction of consciousness, the fragmentation of form, etc.

Dickstein continues:

Like Henry James before them, they saw themselves less as lonely romantic outposts of individual sensibility than as keen observers of society. They described the rough transition from the small town to the city, from rural life to industrial society, from a more homogeneous but racially divided population to a nation of immigrants. They recorded dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns. Novels like Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" and Wharton's "House of Mirth" showed how fiction paradoxically could serve fact and provide a more concrete sense of the real world than any other form of writing.

Were these writers really as immodest as to consider themselves "keen" observers? Isn't it only literary critics who want to confine such writers to their putative powers of observation in the first place? Did Crane or Dreiser or Wharton believe this was their primary talent as writers? Was mere "observation" all they had to offer?

The rest of Dickstein's paragraph actually does no service to any of these writers. It makes them sound like journalists or historians, but not like novelists that anybody would voluntarily read. If you want information about "the rough transition from the small town to the city" and "dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns," why not go straight to the historians? Why bother with novelists? Just for a little dramatic illustration? Is this any reason why readers interested in literature rather than history or sociology would now turn to these writers? And exactly why do we need a "concrete sense of the real world" from our writers? Don't our own eyes put us in contact with this world every day? Besides, what other world could novelists be writing about? Where else would their subjects come from?

Dickstein concludes:

This is how most readers have always read novels, not simply for escape, and certainly not mainly for art, but to get a better grasp of the world around them and the world inside them. Now that the overload of theory, like a mental fog, has begun to lift, perhaps professional readers will catch up with them.

How does Dickstein know "how most readers have always read novels"? Exactly how would he have gleaned this information? Professor Dickstein wouldn't be generalizing from his own reading habits, would he? Or those of other "professional readers"? I've known many more people who say they indeed read novels for "escape" rather than something as earnest as "a better grasp of the world around them." For that matter, if this latter were indeed the reason why most readers turn to fiction, would Lewis, Howells, et. al. be as "neglected" as Dickstein contends? Wouldn't they be the most beloved writers in the American canon?

How disdainful is that "certainly not mainly for art." Disdainful of those readers who do seek out "art," disdainful of the possibilities of fiction as art, implicitly disdainful of "most readers," who apparently couldn't appreciate it even if it were present. Unfortunately for Dickstein, it's precisely the lack of "art" in the work of writers like Howells and Lewis (and sometimes in Dreiser and Cather) that accounts for whatever "neglect" they have suffered. No matter how thoroughly the postmodern fog lifts, they're not going to be rediscovered as anything other than than the dreary documentarians they were.
Triangulation

May 18, 2005

Noting yesterday's post on this blog, A.C. Douglas maintains that I share with Michael Blowhard "the curious notion that the actual writing in a work of fiction is somehow separable or exists apart from the work's story." Linking to a previous post of his own, Douglas futher asserts that

There are two fundamental elements that go into making a work of prose fiction — every work of prose fiction — both of which are sine qua non. First and foremost, of course, is a story. No story, no work of prose fiction. Lousy story, lousy work of prose fiction. Nothing will save a work of prose fiction that's absent a first-rate story. Second, is human characters or a character (whether they take actual human form or not) through whom the story is played out.

If Douglas is suggesting that the "story" in a work of "prose fiction" can't be separated from the way in which it's told–which includes more than just "writing" per se, although finally everything in a work of literature does come down to writing, the words on the page–I entirely agree with him. I was objecting to a view of fiction that abstracts story from style or form and proclaims it to be the "real" object of interest to most casual readers. I simply want to insist that there are some readers who are more than casual in their approach to fiction and that these readers aren't just pointyheads because they sometimes do other than read for the plot.

I tend to stay away from claims about the "fundamental" elements of anything. It was once thought that among the fundamental elements of poetry were meter and rhyme, but only the most adamant anti-modernist would now deny that perfectly good poems have been written without either of these devices. And no one is saying that fiction should do without either story or character. As Jonathan Mayhew said in a comment on my original post, "Even experimental fiction tends to use proper names attached to bundles of seemingly human characteristics and move these bundles forward in some kind of narrative." I can't myself think of any fiction, experimental or otherwise, that doesn't present such bundles of "human characteristics" and have them do something or other. But of course it's a question of emphasis. Some writers want to know what the boundaries are–how much can you de-emphasize story or create less than "rounded" characters or manipulate the point of view and still engage the attentive reader's interest? There's nothing wrong with this. If some writers didn't do it, fiction as a form would simply calcify.

Douglas uses Lolita as an example of a novel that has "a great story to tell," despite what some readers and critics have had to say about Nabakov's prose style or his use of black humor. But I don't know that this book really provides such good support for Douglas's position. What exactly is the "story" Lolita has to tell? A dirty old man travels across country with his nymphet? Is it really this slender narrative thread that pulls the reader along through Nabokov's novel? Aren't there really many different stories in Lolita, most of them attached to this thread but many of them more or less self-sufficient? Are we really in reading Lolita sitting on the edge of our seats to find out what will happen to Humbert and to Lolita? Don't we know? Isn't it finally indeed Nabokov's style and wicked humor, his skill at manipulating the loose requirements of the picaresque narrative, that keep us reading?

In identifying story as the "sine qua non" of fiction, hasn't Douglas himself "separated" story from its effective embodiment and privileged narrative over all the other strategies a writer might use and all the other effects a work of fiction might create? In my view, if the words "literary fiction" have any meaning in the first place, they refer to the way in which a given writer has managed to convince us there is no such thing as a sine qua non in literature, except for the skill with which the writer is able to marshal the resources of language for whatever aesthetic purposes he/she has in mind.
Psychological Realism

May 12, 2005

Responding to Lee Siegel's assertion that "Nowadays, often even the most accomplished novels offer characters that are little more than flat, ghostly reflections of characters. The author's voice, or self-consciousness about voice, substitutes mere eccentricity for an imaginative surrender to another life," Maud Newton further describes the way in which she decided to focus her own attention on "books that delve into a character's thoughts and motivations and idiosyncratic take on the world." Both Maud and Siegel are expressing a preference for "psychological realism" (a preference also shared by the literary critic James Wood, among others), an approach to the writing of fiction that perhaps gained its initial impetus in the late work of Henry James, but that probably became most identified with the work of such modernists as Joyce or Woolf.

(I think Siegel is wrong in claiming that 19th century writers "plumbed the depths of the human mind with something on the order of clairvoyance." Before James (or Flaubert, or Chekhov), the reigning narrative model was the picaresque, which surely emphasizes event over reflection, and which generally produces characters that are flat indeed–although not necessarily without color or vibrancy. One could say that writers such as George Eliot or Hawthorne or Melville plumbed the depths of the human soul, but they did not do so using the techniques of pyschological realism as we have come to know them. It was as an addition to the strategies used by 19th century writers that stream of consciousness and what might be called psychological exposition–in which the writer describes what's going on inside a character's mind in the same way he/she might describe landscape or event–came to be identified as "modern" in the first place. And while Siegel blames Freud for the ulimate decline of "character" in fiction, he neglects to mention that the great modernist writers were partly inspired by Freud to try out the possibilities of "plumbing the depths" in the first place.)

I would argue that it is a misperception of most contemporary fiction to claim that it neglects either character or psychological "insight." Siegel identifies "postmodern and experimental novels" as the main culprits in fiction's deliberate turning-away from psychological depth, its refusal to "surrender to another life," but the vast majority of current fiction still focuses resolutely on character, and most of it uses the same strategies pioneered by Joyce and Woolf. Maud thinks that creative writing workshops put too much emphasis on "externalizing" through the "show, don't tell" rule, but most writers are neither minimalists nor postmodernists, and the chances are that if you were to pick out at random a work of literary fiction on your Borders shelf, you would find an entirely recognizable attempt both to establish character as the center of interest and to present the character's thought processes as the primary way of making him/her seem "realistic."

To this extent, Siegel's essay is just another backhanded slap at literary postmodernism (and some further by now superfluous stomping on the grave of Sigmund Freud), and in my opinion not to be taken seriously as a critique of contemporary fiction. However, Maud's concern for the "novel's pyschological possibilities" is not misguided (and to her credit she correctly identifies the temptation to "endless, largely banal psychological reflection" as one of the pitfalls of psychological realism). That the novel has "psychological possibilities" is undeniably true. Indeed, the illusion of psychological depth is something fiction can provide more thoroughly than the other narrative arts, and if you think "imaginative surrender to another life" is finally what fiction is all about, then such illusion is one of the defining features of fiction as a form. But it is an illusion, and in my view if you're going to stories and novels to acquire your understanding of human psychology, you're going to the wrong place. First of all, what gives novelists themselves a superior understanding of the psychological make-up of human beings? Isn't this like expecting them to somehow possess a special wisdom about human life simply because they're novelists? Second, is merely recording in prose what one considers to be the typical operations of thought (which can finally only be done in a kind of shorthand, anyway) really probing human consciousness in anything but the most superficial way?

Better to think of psychological realism as just another strategy a writer might use to give a work of fiction a sense of unity or purpose–another way of getting the words on the page in a way that might compel the reader's attention. This might be done through other means, including the "self-annulling irony, deliberate cartoonishness, montage-like 'cutting'" Lee Siegel disdains. Privileging "psychological realism" over all the other effects a work of fiction might convey, all the other methods of creating an aesthetically convincing work of literary art, ultimately only diminishes fiction as literary art. It perpetuates the idea that fiction is a "window"–whether on external reality or the human psyche–rather than an aesthetic creation made of words. (Perhaps some still consider fiction to be an inferior or inappropriate form for achieving this kind of creation, at least as compared to poetry, but why should those who condescend to the form get to pronounce on its possibilities to begin with?) It reduces fiction to a case study in social science just as much as the insistence that it "reflect" social and political realities. There are plenty of great novels that reveal human motive and the operations of the human mind. But their authors didn't necessarily set out to make such revelations. They set out to write good novels.
Who?

April 28, 2005

In the April 25 New York Times profile of novelist Steve Stern, we get this from Harold Bloom:

"I started to read Stern thinking I would just dip into it," Mr. Bloom said in a telephone interview from his home in New Haven. "But he has gusto, exuberance, panache; this is immensely readable and vibrant."

And then Mr. Bloom asked, "Who is he?"

I have great respect for Harold Bloom as a literary critic. If anything, his response to Steve Stern only reinforces my high opinion of his critical acumen. But that Bloom was unfamiliar with Stern's work not only indicates the degree to which Stern is unjustly neglected by the current literary scene, but also how little we should in general rely on English professors, "literary scholars" more broadly, for insight about contemporary literature. Bloom keeps up with current writers more thorougly than most academic critics–especially for a critic whose specialty is Romantic poetry–but that a writer as accomplished as Steve Stern remains unknown to him speaks volumes about the essential disconnection between literary academics (excluding creative writers) and the larger literary world populated by writers and readers of contemporary work.

In my opinion, a good case can be made that the operative definition of what constitutes "literature" in the first place should come from the practice of current writers. They–and their readers–have inherited the literary tradition studied by academics and are expanding and modifying that tradition through their ongoing work. Thus critics and scholars interested in understanding the literary impulse, the nature of literature and the possibilities of literary form, ought to be attending to contemporary writers.

But this is not what happens, of course. Through academic study the procession of writers and works that make up literary history are carved into periods and "specialties," and academic scholars, even those most up-to-date on reigning theories or critical approaches, usually spend their time becoming experts on these periods. I know from experience that many such scholars think of "their" writers as the most interesting or rewarding writers one might study, and tend to regard contemporary writers as so much fluff, a sad decline from the standards set in the Renaissance, or the 18th century, or even in the first half of the twentieth century. In this context it would not be surprising at all for most English professors to respond to the names of even more well-known writers than Steve Stern with Bloom's "Who is he/she?" (A notable exception in the blog world is Miriam Burstein (The Little Professor), who specializes in Victorian literature but who frequently posts very intelligent reviews of current fiction on her weblog.)

Over the past thirty years or so an academic specialty called, strangely enough, "Contemporary Literature" arose partly as a reaction to this attitude on the part of literary scholars. It was designed by those who helped establish it as an academic discipline to bring more attention to contemporary writing, to demonstrate that it, too, was worthy of serious academic attention. For a while this happened. Current writers were the subjects of numerous very good scholarly books in the 1970s and 1980s, and courses in contemporary literature came to be taught in most English departments. But even this "specialty" in contemporary literature has, in my opinion, turned out to be mostly unhelpful in creating real interest in current writing and in contributing to anything that could be called a "literary culture" in the United States. It, too, has been carved into various sub-specialties, has become atomized and fragmented. Scholars of postmodernism don't often have much to say to scholars specializing in feminist writers, who don't generally have much to say to those studying minority writers, and none of these academic critics usually speak much to the creative writers.

Thus the last person you should probably approach for an informed opinion of contemporary literature would be an English professor. The best you will probably get is someone like Bloom, who is willing to read current writing and take it seriously; at worst you will get outright disdain or condescension. (Which doesn't mean the professor will refrain from making a pronouncement on the writer or work in question.) Most literature professors don't think that much about what "literature" might be as a vital, continuing practice, only about what it was at some time in the past. The word has indeed meant different things to different people at different times. "Historicizing" is a perfectly nice thing to do, and sometimes it tells us interesting things about the poetry and fiction we still continue to read. For myself, I generally prefer to concentrate on what serious writing can do for us in the here and now, which requires keeping up a little bit on the new books and writers who can help us achieve this goal.
Popular Diction

March 14, 2005

And on the heels of the previous post, Camille Paglia thinks that

. . .Poetic language has become stale and derivative, even when it makes all-too-familiar avant garde or ethnic gestures. Those who turn their backs on media (or overdose on postmodernism) have no gauge for monitoring the metamorphosis of English. Any poetry removed from popular diction will inevitably become as esoteric as 18th-century satire (perfected by Alexander Pope), whose dense allusiveness and preciosity drove the early Romantic poets into the countryside to find living speech again. Poetry's declining status has made its embattled practitioners insular and self-protective: personal friendships have spawned cliques and coteries in book and magazine publishing, prize committees and grants organisations.

In other words, poetry has lost touch with the People. And the People are to be found, astonishingly enough, in the "media," which to Paglia is essentially television and popular music. Paglia's intellectual slumming in front of the tv and the boom box has always seemed to me her least appealing quality (I liked Sexual Personae, but even it is not free of this pop-idolizing cant), and it does nothing to make her new poetry anthology seem something we ought to take seriously. Paglia (correctly) emphasizes the way in which English is constantly changing–which makes it an ever-renewable source of new kinds of writing–but she ought to consider this when elevating the Romantic poets' "living speech" over "dense allusiveness and preciosity." Try putting even one of Wordsworth's sonnets in front of a classroom of freshman literature students. To them, Wordsworth's language is just as "precious," and just as difficult, as that of any Augustan satirist.

(I will admit that a consequence of literature's relatively small audience is the insularity she describes. But this is finally a problem only if we can't separate the "literati" from literature itself. The former ought simply to be ignored, although in a celebrity culture like ours even the big fish in the small pond are going to get their unfair share of attention.)

I do agree with Paglia in her observation that "over the [last several] decades, poetry and poetry study were steadily marginalised by pretentious 'theory' – which claims to analyse language but atrociously abuses it. Poststructuralism and crusading identity politics led to the gradual sinking in reputation of the premiere literature departments, so that by the turn of the millennium they were no longer seen, even by the undergraduates themselves, to be where the excitement was on campus. One result of this triumph of ideology over art is that, on the basis of their publications, few literature professors know how to 'read' any more – and thus can scarcely be trusted to teach that skill to their students." But she doesn't inspire much confidence in her own alternative practice, which is apparently buttressed by her own kind of "theory":

. . .Animated by the breath force (the original meaning of "spirit" and "inspiration"), poetry brings exhilarating spiritual renewal. A good poem is iridescent and incandescent, catching the light at unexpected angles and illuminating human universals – whose very existence is denied by today's parochial theorists. Among those looming universals are time and mortality, to which we all are subject. Like philosophy, poetry is a contemplative form, but unlike philosophy, poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech.

Now, it's all well and good to hope that a poem might be "iridescent and incandescent," but exactly how does this happen? One can only conclude from what Paglia says in this piece (admittedly an edited version of the introduction to her book) that it's just some kind of magic, akin to the "divination" she says is practiced by critics of poetry, which resembles "the practice of oracles, sibyls, augurs, and interpreters of dreams."Although Paglia claims to "maintain that the text emphatically exists as an object," she doesn't offer any suggestions as to how that object comes into being. There's no indication in her discussion that she understands that poetry–all art–is at least as much craft as it is inspiration. Her exhortations that poets create the "powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem" are all very vague and mystical, leading one to suspect her book won't have much to offer to either writers or readers interested in experiencing everything that poetry might have to offer.

Furthermore, her dismissal of contemporary poets is equally vague:

. . .In gathering material, I was shocked at how weak individual poems have become over the past 40 years. Our most honoured poets are gifted and prolific, but we have come to respect them for their intelligence, commitment and the body of their work. They ceased focusing long ago on production of the powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem. They have lost ambition and no longer believe they can or should speak for their era. Elevating process over form, they treat their poems like meandering diary entries and craft them for effect in live readings rather than on the page. Arresting themes or images are proposed, then dropped or left to dribble away. Or, in a sign of lack of confidence in the reader or material, suggestive points are prosaically rephrased and hammered into obviousness.

It's revealing she won't name names, relying instead on such smug generalities. Perhaps she doesn't because if she did cite any specific poets who are supposedly guilty of these sins, she, and we, would discover in examining "the body of their work" that Paglia's description is a caricature, a glib excuse for ignoring the work of poets that doesn't measure up to a preconceived notion of what poetry is supposed to be. I really would like to see Paglia engage in a close reading of the work of eight or ten of the most respected living poets–say Jorie Graham or John Ashberry, Derek Walcott or Seamus Heaney, one or more of the "language poets"–and honestly conclude that their best work resembles in any way the cliched rendition Paglia rehearses in this passage.

"Artists are makers," says Paglia, "not just mouthers of slippery discourse. Poets are fabricators and engineers, pursuing a craft analogous to cabinetry or bridge building." But nothing else in her essay is consistent with this description. It's all about "primal energies" and "illuminating human universals," about the sacred and the sublime. If she were truly to accept that poets are "makers," she would also have to admit that what they sometimes make will not be immediately recognizable to the People, will either ignore "popular diction" or turn it inside out. In my reading of this essay, Paglia does not really want a poem to be a verbal object but instead some kind of oracular pronouncement, a pronouncement in which "art" really has little if any role.

Finally, Paglia informs us that "All literary criticism should be accessible to the general reader." All criticism? There's no role for criticism that assumes a "general" knowledge on the part of the reader and seeks to take the reader beyond the most obvious surface features of the text? I agree that surveying these features is where criticism should begin (something that has indeed been forgotten by most academic critics), but does it have to end there? Presumably it does if the experience of literature is essentially a religious one: "I sound out poems silently, as others pray." By definition poetry as holy text does not really allow for an appreciation of what "individual poems" are really like; in Paglia's scheme they're to be recited, but not understood.

In my opinion Paglia has let her contempt for the politicizing of postmodernism get the better of her. Poets may not be "mouthers of slippery discourse," but I don't think many of them believe they are. If academic criticism has reduced poetry to this, the academic critics are to blame, not the poets. And in her zeal to discredit these critics, Paglia indulges in some pretty slippery discourse herself. She appropriates poetry to a version of "spiritual renewal." To me, this doesn't seem like much of an improvement.
Promotion

March 12, 2005

I agree with A.C. Douglas when he writes:

. . .much as one wishes it were not the case, classical music is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever even marginally be, an object of mass or even widespread appeal no matter how vigorously and assiduously it may be promoted.

And, as Douglas adds, this "applies, mutatis mutandis, to all the arts of high culture," including literature. Where Douglas goes wrong, in my opinion, is in further claiming that serious art is, "by its very nature, a fundamentally elitist enterprise, and should never be viewed or promoted as anything other."

Art is "elitist" only if an "elite" audience can be defined as "small" or "self-selected." If Douglas means to suggest, as I suspect he probably does, that those who appreciate serious art are for that reason, or because of some preexisting set of chararcteristics, a superior caste, I cannot go along with him. I defer to no one in my enjoyment of the products of what Douglas calls "high culture," but there is nothing about my preferences that makes them objectively "finer" than someone else's preferences. Where would such putatively objective standards come from, except from the practices of those who also enjoy serious art, who have enjoyed them in the past and have passed along both the standards and the works of art and literarature to which they have been applied? Those of us who accept these standards might like to think of ourselves as an "elite" because we have put in the time and attention required to understand their relevance, but this only means we like to spend our time on certain kinds of music or certain kinds of writing rather than others, not that we're privy to secrets that others can't share.

I do agree that it's futile to "pander" to audiences who don't otherwise seem to care about classical music or lyric poetry or abstract art. If the actual audiences for such endeavors are small, what, finally, is the problem? Only when a subsidiary cultural "industry" grows up around these pursuits, an industry that must have its financial needs met, does it become crucual to sell more books and fill more concert halls. Plenty of people might be led to appreciate classical music or serious fiction, but not through artificial efforts to reach the People, which only distort the very art supposedly being defended.
Mediocre Novelists

February 27, 2005

Inside Higher Education reports on the discovery that a 19th century novelist named Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins (I confess to not having heard of her before) was not African-American, as previously believed.

In her [Boston] Globe article, [Holly Jackson] recounts how she made the discovery about Kelley-Hawkins, about whom relatively little had been known. In short, a tip led her to records revealing the author's parents, and that in turn led to the discovery that several generations of her family about whom records exist were all white. (Jackson explored, and rejected, the hypothesis that the family was "passing" for white.)

What's most interesting about IHE's report, however is the quoted reponse from Henry Louis Gates, who himself included Kelley-Hawkins in a series of books by African-American Women Writers that he edited:

He said Kelley-Hawkins was a "mediocre novelist" and that he thinks the primary impact of the discovery will be that people won't write about her any more. There are so few black women authors in the 19th century that every single one matters, he says. "Anyone matters," he said.

But Gates said that he doubted that feminist scholars would now start studying Kelley-Hawkins, since there are so many better writers for them to examine in the 19th century. "It's less important to add one more white woman," he said.

I've always admired Gates, but I find his reaction to this controversy rather astonishing in at least two ways.

First, why would he want to include in a high-profile library of African-American literarure a novelist he readily concedes is "mediocre"? Was the purpose of this series merely to have in print a few more books scholars could "write about" (and therefore are really just more cogs in the academic tenure machine), or did Gates believe ordinary readers might want to read these books as well? If the latter, what kind of impression of the quality of 19th century African-American writing does it leave if you implicitly encourage people to read mediocre novels simply because an African-American name is attached? Is it really the case that "anyone matters?" Matters for what? We all know why it would have been difficult for African-American women (and men) to write and publish novels in 19th century America, and we know further that plenty of talented African-American writers emerged in the 20th century. What real purpose–especially what real literary purpose–is served by preserving a "library" of books many of which presumably aren't particularly satisfying to read in the first place?

Second, how does Gates expect his comment that ""It's less important to add one more white woman" to be taken? Since he acknowledges that quality is not a particularly important criterion for "inclusion" on the list of authors academic scholars might "write about," what earthly reason does he have for excluding "one more white woman" from consideration? All those white women are the same, anyway? Same old complaints about patriarchy and the terrors of middle-class existence? And what can it possibly mean to say there are "better" women writers to study? If the purpose of constructing such lists and compiling such libraries is primarily just to identify as many writers of a specified identity as possible, what's the problem with adding "one more"? The more the merrier, at least where course syllabi are concerned.

But this whole affair only illustrates the deep-seated problems with installing identity politics as the basis of literary study in the first place. From the very beginning of this process, the "literary" drops out of consideration altogether, to be replaced by sociology and cultural history and group solidarity. Perhaps these are more worthy endeavors than the merely trifling study of literature for its own sake, but those engaging in them ought to admit they're no longer studying literature. After all, look what this very case says about the current corruption of academic literary criticism and schlolarship. In her Globe article, Jackson writes:

. . .the readings of Kelley-Hawkins's novels that have been offered over the past 20 years–as critics have labored to account for the overwhelming, almost aggressive whiteness of her characters–now seem notably strained.

Many noted black authors. . .have depicted light-skinned ''mulattos'' with blue eyes as a way of pointedly exposing race as a social construction, instead of a biological fact. Kelley-Hawkins's novels, on the other hand, lack any such political thrust. Scholars have explained this away by arguing that the abundance of white signifiers is actually politically radical, with some even going so far as to argue that this extremely white world depicts a kind of post-racial utopia.

In other words: By the current rules of academic commentary, unconstrained by silly questions of form or style or quality of execution, or any of those other outdated "literary" notions, you can take any book and, imputing to it the sociological or biographical characterstics of choice, make it mean anything you want it to mean.

In this case, literally, white is black and black is white.
Shaking You Out of Your Complacency

February 27, 2005

I generally don't much care for Gore Vidal, either the man (or at least his public persona) or his work, but all praises to him for his essay on James Purdy in this week's New York Times Book Review.

''Gay'' literature, particularly by writers still alive, is a large cemetery where unalike writers, except for their supposed sexual desires, are thrown together in a lot well off the beaten track of family values. James Purdy, who should one day be placed alongside William Faulkner in the somber Gothic corner of the cemetery of American literature, instead is being routed to lie alongside non-relatives.

It is interesting that in a time of renewed debate over sexual matters (disguised clumsily as ''moral values'') James Purdy is re-emerging from the shadows. The first shadow fell upon him with his first novel, ''63: Dream Palace'' (1956), described by the publisher as ''dealing with obsessive love, homosexuality and urban alienation,'' and ending ''with fratricide. . . . Purdy writes about men who are unable to express their love for other men because homosexuality is unthinkable to them.'' Actually, as Purdy demonstrates, it is quite thinkable to everyone else. He has gone his lonely way; sometimes darkly comic, other times tragic as he faces down the ''kindly ones'' in his path, the Greeks' euphemism for the Furies that forever dog mankind.

We can only hope that Purdy is "re-emerging from the shadows." He is the very defininition of "unjustly neglected writer," and Vidal's extended discussion of Eustace Chisholm and the Works perhaps suggesst why he's neglected, at any rate. It's a creepy but brutally honest (and compulsively readable) novel that many readers no doubt find disturbing. (The scenes depicting Daniel Haws's excruciation by Captain Stadger are as unsettling as anything you'll ever read.) Most of Purdy's books are "disturbing," but in the very best way: they shake you out of your complacency and make you think–about the kinds of lives your fellow human beings really live, about the damage we do to each other, about the ways in which American culture preys on human frailty. They also can only make you admire the skill with which Purdy manipulates the formal properties of fiction in order to accomodate his uncompromising subjects and his frequently unmoored characters.

In addition to Eustace Chisholm, these would be good introductions to Purdy's work: The Nephew (1960, in my opinion his best novel), Cabot Wright Begins (1964), In a Shallow Grave (1975), and Narrow Rooms (1978).
Picking Up the Gauntlet

February 24, 2005

I long ago reconciled myself to the fact that in the "mainstream" print press, only new works of fiction or poetry will be discussed in anything like an approach that could be called "literary criticism." Most book reviews are long on unsubstantiated judgment and free-floating attitude and short on real critical analysis, but at least they do usually concern themselves with the book–the "text"–itself rather than other superfluous items related to the author's life or the sociological context in which the book was written. With most writers from the past–even the very recent past–the situation is quite different. Rarely are the books these writers actually wrote ever regarded as worthy of ongoing consideration in themselves. Instead we get only reviews of the seemingly endless stream of biographies of such writers, themselves a symptom of the way in which talk about writers' lives sadly substitutes for accessible but informed analysis of writers' work.

One might think that real criticism could be found in publications such as the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books, both generally considered "highbrow" sources of book discussion, but even these more intellectual book reviews more often than not confine their "criticism" to reviews of new biographies. Andrew O'Hagan's review of a new biography of Robert Louis Stevenson in the LRB is a good example.

O'Hagan practically admits that interest in Stevenson has been expressed almost exclusively through an obsession with his "life-story":

Robert Louis Stevenson’s afterlife has proved to be an adventure about an adventurer. Friends fought over his belongings, his writings, and the meaning of his character, from the minute he died, and people have never stopped imagining that his life tells a story of human endeavour mounted in the face of impossible odds. Every squeak and turn of his prose has been sounded out for evidence of the living man. . . .

Stevenson is certainly not the only writer whose work "has been sounded out for evidence of the living man." Encyclopedic, multi-volume, and serial biographies of novelists and poets have become commonplace products of the "book industry," and for many readers these biographies must take the place of familiarity with the novels and the poems. Why this should be so is something I don't entirely understand. I am tempted to conclude that "people" aren't finally much interested in works of the imagination, are really much more interested in hearsay and chatter and thus gravitate toward what Steve Mitchelmore in a related post calls "gossipy biographies."

O'Hagan remarks further:

Stevenson’s life has come to seem one that can offer unlimited insight into the mysteries of literary temperament, as if he, practically alone, a hothouse plant, can indicate exactly what it takes to make a human being into a literary personality. . . .

Perhaps this is it. We're more interested in "literary personality" than literature. In the pre-Hollywood past, this is perhaps the closest analogue to a movie star? And for bookish types, obsession with "literary personality" can be safely indulged without seeming as star-crushed as the similar obsessions of the vulgar sorts who read People?

More:

. . .Stevenson’s was a life full of creative compulsions – including the compulsion to be compulsive – and more than other writers he stepped into the role, appearing always to delineate in theatrical detail what it meant to be a writer in the modern world. What it meant to be a male writer, at any rate.

For the psychologically inclined, then. "What it meant [or means] to be a writer in the modern world." I suppose this is more interesting (for some) than "what it means to be a carpenter in the modern world," but, myself, I can't think of a more tedious or inane subject. What it means to be a writer in the modern world is that one writes.

The following is as close to real literary analysis as O'Hagan gets, and, although disappointingly brief, it is exactly the sort of critical insight the further elaboration of which casual readers of Stevenson might appreciate:

For all his verses, his childhood vapours, his vagabond adventures, Stevenson’s real job was to enlarge the psychological potential of the novel. He has nothing in common with Rider Haggard or Jack London. Stevenson’s imagination was filled with the uncanny.

Robert Louis Stevenson is especially the kind of writer who could benefit from, whose books could benefit from, some focused textual analysis. (Not necessarily belabored or overly "academic" exegesis but some "close reading" with a lighter touch.) Too many people think of Stevenson as merely a writer of children's books. Those who have read (seriously read) Kidnapped or The Master of Ballantrae (or even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) know that this is a profound oversimplification. But biographies and reviews of biographies are not going to fulfill the need for extended critical appraisal, without which Stevenson's books may be consigned to the limbo of unread classics.

Are readers really allergic to the kind of modestly-ambitioned literary criticism I am talking about? Given that academic criticism has lost touch with literature itself, not to speak of the needs of general readers, is literary criticism that actually attends to the experience of reading works of literature to be dismissed as a quaint vestige of the past? Perhaps literary weblogs can pick up the gauntlet. (Perhaps they already have.)
Consciousness Raising

February 20, 2005

In his Feb. 14 column at Moby Lives, Steve Almond gets it all exactly backward:

This country's chief signifier is our staggering capacity to isolate ourselves from the effects of our political and lifestyle choices.

This is the reason, for instance, that so many people can vote for a party that believes gays are sub–human but still watch "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy," (because fags are so darn funny!). It's also the reason liberals can drive around in SUVs, while decrying policies driven by oil–dependency.

But of course it is one of the functions of art (yes, even popular art) to call people on such bullshit, to raise people's consciousness, to awaken their capacities for compassion.

William Faulkner probably put this best in his 1951 speech, upon accepting the Nobel Prize: "The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

It seems to me that the time has come answer this call.

I don't mean to suggest that writers should begin cranking out polemics. Art resides in an argument with the self, not others.

What I am suggesting is that artists need not regard their political identities as wholly separate from their artistic ones — especially given our unique historical circumstance.

Almond is upset because a number of readers, allegedly spurred on by a particular review at The National Review, objected to what Almond himself characterizes as the "lefty diatribes" in his book Candyfreak. And while he should have known that such diatribes would alienate certain readers of his book, I don't finally blame him for protesting against such responses. This is a work of nonfiction, the structure of which ("an account of my cross–country journey to various small, independent candy bar manufacturers") almost demands the sort of informal talk (the author's ramblings while rambling) these "diatribes" seem to be. Self-styled "conservatives" could surely have determined from reviews such as the one in National Review that Almond was a "lefty" and should have restrained themselves from buying Candyfreak if the expression of lefty views was offensive to them.

But I can't see why Almond would leap from this perfectly coherent defense of revealing one's polticial views in a work of nonfiction to a polemic on behalf of political art. Candyfreak was not a work of literary "art" in the first place. It was clearly some kind of hybrid of memoir and journalism, and although such a book can certainly be artfully written, it hardly warrants such a distinction-begging declaration that artists should become politicians. Does he think that the very readers who objected to his politics when expressed in nonfiction would change their minds if they read some politicized fiction? Since these are the very people who have to be persuaded that the current state of affairs in the United States has become unacceptable, to whom, exactly, would such political fiction appeal to other than those readers who already agree with it? And what would this accomplish other than further degrading the critical atmosphere in which literary art is received and discussed?

(I especially cannot see what connection the Faulkner passage Almond quotes has to do with the need to create political art. Surely Faulkner was himself not "calling" for such a thing. The "props" and "pillars" he speaks of are decidedly not of the sort that would substitute for a political soapbox. Faulkner is speaking of the much more durable qualities of art and literature as consolation and distinctive modes of understanding, the qualities that allow art to transcend historical circumstances. If Almond means to suggest that even now art might act as such a bulwark–although I don't really think our circumstances are "unique"–against frustration and outright despair, I might agree with him, but I don't think this kind of mere consolation is what he has in mind.)

The purpose of art is not to "call people" on their political derelictions. It might be about hypocrisy, but almost never directly (where it becomes a sermon) and, it is be hoped, never about liberals' hypocrisy in their driving habits (where it becomes just boring). Similiarly, while art might in some instances "awaken" our compassionate impulses, almost always when works of art or literature take this as an explicit goal the effort fails, often devolving into didacticism or sentimentality.

Moreover, artists and writers should "regard their political identities as wholly separate from their artistic ones." As soon as artists become political commentators, to that extent they cease to be artists. I know that many, perhaps most, people who care about such things disagree with me, but I simply don't understand how art can be art unless its effects are primarily "artistic." If instead they can also be "political"–that is, if the art in question also seeks to express the artist's opinions about this or that–then we might as well agree that "art" is no longer a term with much meaning. It's just a fancier way to talk about "our political and lifestyle choices" (as Almond puts it elsewhere in his essay).

Almond quotes from one of his "lefty diatribes":

. . .The Bush tax cut had sopped the rich and wiped out the federal surplus. The economy was in the crapper. Dubya was doing everything in his power to hand the planet to Exxon.

Two years earlier, I'd sat in front of another TV and watched him steal the Presidency in broad daylight. Then a bunch of vicious air–borne murderers had come along and scared the commonsense out of everyone. In one morning, they'd managed to bestow upon this evangelical simpleton an air of presidential dignity.

I don't much disagree with any of that. But believing such things to be true makes me want to express my beliefs directly, to convince others through real political argument to believe them as well, perhaps makes me want to become more active politically by joining groups or supporting candidates. It doesn't make me want to write a story or a novel to encapsulate my beliefs. I'm afraid that, under our admittedly dismal political circumstances, too many writers will take Almond's admonitions to heart, will try to merge their identities and produce equally dismal fiction that won't either make any difference to Bush voters or be very fun to read.

What Hath the Blog Wrought?

The Dustbin of Literary History

Additional Essays in Criticism

Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction