The Reading Experience

Travels With Famke

August 9, 2005

The danger of reading a novel primarily for the opportunity to "identify" with its characters–as well as to interpret their actions by judging them on moral grounds–seems well-illustrated by this guest review at The Mumpsimus of Susann Cokal's Breath and Bones (Unbridled Books). The reviewer, Catherynne M. Valente, writes of the novel's protagonist:

Famke is a horrible woman, and despite the narrative's assurances that we must love her, the reader cannot identify with such a shallow, idiotic, and careless person.

Even if it were true that this character is "a horrible woman"–deliberately portrayed as such by the author–would this be a good reason to so dislike this novel as to call it "truly, shockingly bad"? (Vallente's focus is almost entirely on the moral failings of this character, although she does pause occasionally for an ad hominem comment on the author herself, as when she wonders "if she has had any practical experience with human bodies at all.") Surely we can all think of fiction we've read in which one or more of the main characters are morally dubious, if not just plain repulsive, but which we nevertheless judge to be compelling and aesthetically powerful books. (Journey to the End of the Night? Naked Lunch? Much of Flannery O'Connor?) Shouldn't it be a critical rule of thumb that in order to fairly assess a work of literature for what it seems to be offering us we make an effort to put aside moral judgment, especially judgment of fictional characters, until we have honestly determined the role these characters play in the work's aesthetic order and in the context of its broader thematic concerns?

However, it simply is not the case that the protagonist of Breath and Bones is the "shallow, idiotic, and careless person" this reviewer takes her to be. Famke Summerfugl (or Ursula Summerfield, or Dante Castle–her identity is as quickly changed as her location as she travels across the western United States) is determined to get what she wants (a reunion with the artist for whom she has served as a model back in her native Denmark), but her very single-mindedness is at least as much the product of an uncertain sense of self as it is a more willful character flaw. Indeed, it is her lack of a truly developed personality, her ability to become the object of others' obsessions, to take on whatever attributes are required to survive in an environment she is in some ways too inexperienced to know is hostile to her presence, that really define her as a character. Famke leaves a fair amount of distress and destruction in her wake, but little of it is due to her "careless" or "idiotic" behavior. If anything she cares too much (especially in comparison to many of the people she encounters, who have more or less acceeded to their limited circumstances), as her quest is motivated by her belief in the artistic genius of Albert Castle and in her own role as his inspiration, and she is anything but an idiot. When finally she does reunite with Albert, she has been able to learn enough both about herself and human nature to recognize he's not nearly the man she had in her earlier romantic haze taken him to be.

It might be that Catherynne Valente reacted as she did to Famke because she failed to consider that Breath and Bones is essentially a picaresque novel, Famke its picaro. One doesn't normally approach a picaresque novel with an assumption that its protagonist will be a "rounded" character who will provoke either emotional attachment or moral revulsion. Since the root meaning of "picaro" is "rogue," if we were to demand of such a character that he/she be a model of propriety, we would be denying the picaresque form its motivating agency. It's the "adventures" of the picaro that solicit our attention in this kind of fiction, and whatever change or enhancement of character that emerges is secondary to the experiences to which the character is submitted, to the process by which change or growth might (or might not) occur.

Cokal has in this case herself enhanced our perception of the picaresque form by making her protagonist a woman. Famke is neither more nor less "horrible" (or desperate or confused) than most picaresque anti-heroes, but surely one of the problems Catherynne M. Valente has with her is that she's an anti-heroine, a woman taking on the role traditionally associated with misfits and outcasts, one that inherently calls for a certain amount of guile and disregard for moral niceties. One wonders if Valente would express the same contempt for a male character engaged in similarly venturesome conduct as Famke Summerfugl. Is a picaresque narrative acceptable for exploring the moral margins of male behavior, but inappropriate for depicting women who also find themselves caught in marginal circumstances? Are women, even in fiction, to be judged by different standards than men? If we find ourselves having moral qualms about a female character acting in ways that are conventional in a literary mode usually reserved for men, should we be rethinking our expectations of "female behavior" or our assumptions about those conventions? Perhaps these are questions Susann Cokal would like us to ask while reading her book.

(And I certainly don't think that Cokal's narrative insists that "we must love" Famke. It seems to me that Cokal has written the kind of novel she's written precisely to induce in us a degree of ambivalence about her main character. To engage in the kind of questioning of literary means and ends I've just outlined almost requires that we feel uneasy about our response to a character like Famke.)

At one point Valente calls Breath and Bones "a romance novel that thinks it's too good for the genre" and at another claims it falls into a certain kind of "realist trap," so it's hard to know whether she thinks it strays too far from reality or not far enough. However, it is certainly true that the kind of quest narrative the novel uses allows for a fair amount of exaggeration, coincidence, and melodrama (think of Tom Jones, of many of Dickens's novels, or, indeed, of Huckleberry Finn.) Breath and Bones incorporates its share of all of these, but never to the extent that we begin to disbelieve in its created illusion of an historical time and place. (In this regard, I actually found the historical epigraphs presented at the beginning of chapters completely superfluous. The novel's success depends on the integrity of its own narrative logic, not on the broader historical picture it presents.) Thus, although B & B is not recognizably "postmodern," it also is not simply a "realist" novel retreating into the past. (And, again, the only reason I can see to call it a "romance novel" is that its protagonist is a woman who believes herself to be in love.)

Finally, Valente says of the style of Breath and Bones that "the language of the novel was so simplistic as to give Potter and Co. a run for their broomsticks." She must have in mind a passage such as this, as Albert Castle is working on his pre-Raphaelite portrait of Famke as Nimue:

. . .He had beautiful fingers, long and bony, with a rainbow of paint always under the nails, and to Famke's mind they produced wonders. They had drawn her as an earthly Valkyrie, in a cloak made of swans' feathers (and nothing else); painted her as a nearly naked Gunnlod, the loveliest of the primordial Norse giants, watching over the three kettles of wisdom in a deep, deep cave (Albert seemed to very fond of caves.) And now this Nimue, a wizard's lover, who could be from icy Scandanavia but would be of great interest to the English critics who could make Albert's fortune. Famke had never heard of Merlin or of Nimue, but Albert was teaching her a great deal about the mythology of her people. He liked to set her lessons from the traveler's guidebooks scattered over the mantel.

There is a certain ingenuousness to a passage like this (although the novel does not stick exlusively to Famke's implied point of view), but ultimately it works as much to expose the pretensions of Albert Castle ("Albert seemed very fond of caves") as the "simplicity" of Famke's perceptions. And this clash between Famke's innocence and the rather sordid actualities she encounters (both in America and in Denmark) ultimately provides the novel with what might be its most resonant conflict.

Catherynne M. Valente and I seem to have read different books. She read a story motivated by the actions of a morally compromised romantic heroine. I read a well-executed variation on an always-renewable form that if anything explicitly challenges a reflexively "moral" response to works of literature.
Flaubert’s Children

August 2, 2005

I have not read Peter Brooks's Realist Vision, the ostensible subject of James Wood's essay "The Blue River of Truth" (The New Republic, August 1, 2005), so I will not comment on its argument until I have. However, Wood introduces many of his own ideas into his discussion of "realism" as prompted by Brooks's book, and I would like to comment on a few of those.

1) Wood begins his essay by quoting two "anti-realist" statements (one by the novelist Rick Moody) and declares them to be "typical of their age." Realism, we are told, is now widely considered "stuffy, correct, unprogressive." It's a little hard to know whether Wood considers this attitude "typical" only of critics and other commentators on contemporary fiction or whether this is a "finely characteristic" belief about realism held by most writers and readers. If he means the latter, he couldn't be more wrong. Judging from the fiction that actually gets published and reviewed, the vast (vast) majority of literary fiction is still safely realistic, even to the extent of focusing on "Mind," the source for Wood of most of fiction's satisfactions. (I have in the past referred to this kind of fiction as "psychological realism," but since Wood has expressed a dislike of the term, I won't use it here. Nevertheless, any honest assessment of the kind of novels showing up on Borders' and Barnes and Noble's fiction shelves would have to conclude that pyschological realism is still the order of the day. That Wood would disregard this fact is not that surprising, since most of these books are thoroughly mediocre and, if anything, illustrate quite persuasively that this mode of realism is indeed, as John Barth once put it, "exhausted.")

2) "The major struggle in American fiction today is over the question of realism," writes Wood. "Anywhere fiction is discussed with partisan heat, a fault line emerges, with 'realists' and traditionalists on one side, and postmodernists and experimentalists on the other." I think this is wrong as well. Postmodernism began to be superseded by various neotraditional practices in the mid-to-late 1970s, although some of the true postmodernists–Barth, Coover, Sorrentino–did continue to produce interesting work on into their literary dotage. And compared to the "experimental" work of these writers–Lost in the Funhouse, Mulligan Stew, etc.–the more adventurous writers who followed them are hardly radical innovators. I think Richard Powers is a great writer, but he's hardly a programmatic metafictionist. T. Coraghessan Boyle has settled into a more or less conventional kind of satire. In my opinion, David Foster Wallace is closer to being a psychological realist–albeit of a somewhat twisted kind–than he is a postmodernist. There are other, less well-known writers who continue to explore the possibilities of self-referentiality or who have revived a form of surrealism, but let's not pretend that they have a very high profile or constitute some kind of "movement" against realism comparable to the postmodernism of the 1960s and 1970s. If there is a "struggle" in current fiction, it is between those who write a conventional kind of character- or plot-driven fiction more or less auditioning to become movies and those who still seek to discover what the possibilities of fiction might be beyond its role as source of film adaptation, what fiction can do better than other narrative or dramatic arts. Realism itself doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this.

3) I agree with Wood that too many people think of realism as a "genre," confusing realism per se with "a certain kind of traditional plot, with predictable beginnings and endings." Moody is quoted as deploring realism's "epiphanies, its rising action, its predictable movement. . . ." But these things are more properly associated with orthodox narrative conventions (embodied in "Freytag's Triangle") than with realism strictly understood. Indeed, one could argue that truly realistic fictions would avoid neat divisions of plot and anything at all "predictable," since "real life" does not unfold like well-made stories. I also agree that the great 19th century realists were actually radicals in their time, overturning as they did the picaresque and romantic modes of storytelling they'd inherited from the first generation of novelists in favor of narratives that focused more on details of setting and on creating plausibly "lifelike" characters. And I certainly agree that "There is no writing without convention," making it most important to "be alive to the moment when a literary convention becomes dead," not to assume that the ultimate goal is to free fiction from convention altogether.

4) Perhaps my biggest problem with James Wood's approach to fiction is embodied in this statement: "There is, one could argue, not just a 'grammar' of narrative convention, but also a grammar of life–those elements without which human activity no longer looks recognizable, and without which fiction no longer seems human." Much of the fiction Wood reviews unfavorably is, in one way or another, ultimately charged with this offense, that it doesn't "seem human." He so conflates a particular aesthetic strategy with the representation of the "human" that the writers of whom he disapproves are more or less declared "inhuman," their work morally grotesque. (This seems to me the upshot of Wood's recent dismissal of Cormac McCarthy, for example.) But this is a wholly unjustified substitution of "human" for "realistic." Since all writers are human beings writing about their own human experiences or those of other human beings, how can any work of fiction be something other than "human" at its core? It may not provide James Wood with a sampling of the human that meets his high moral standards, but to suggest that the dispute between realists and anti-realists is over who gets to be more "human" seems to me supremely unjust, if not simply absurd.

Furthemore, it turns out that what a work of fiction needs to be "recognizable" as human is to conform to W. J. Harvey's "constitutive category":

The four elements of this category are, he suggests, Time, Identity, Causality, and Freedom. I would add Mind, or Consciousness. Any fiction that lacked all five elements would probably have little power to move us. The defense of this broad idea of mimesis should not harden into a narrow aesthetic, for it ought to be large enough to connect Shakespeare's dramatic mimesis, say, with Dickens's novelistic mimesis, or Dostoevsky's melodramatic mimesis with Muriel Spark's satiric mimesis, or Pushkin's poetic mimesis with Platonov's lyrical mimesis.

As far as I can tell, what this means is that fiction needs to be "realistic" enough that it doesn't collapse into the "entirely random and chaotic." (Although in adding "Mind, or Consciousness," Wood again ups the ante. Now it must not only depict "plausible human activity," it must do so with psychological plausibility.) Does Wood really think there are many works of fiction that don't meet this minimal standard? Is experimental fiction merely a descent into chaos? In order to rescue the innovative fiction he apparently likes, Wood broadens his definition of "plausible" even further: "Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Hamsun's Hunger and Beckett's Endgame are not representations of likely or typical human behavior; but they draw their power, in part, from their connection to the human." Well, of course they do. How could they do otherwise? The question is whether in so doing they have done it artfully, and whether the art involved had to be "realistic" in the less sweeping sense of the term. ("Melodramatic mimesis"?)

5) This is perhaps the most provocative thing Wood has to say in his essay: ". . .both sides in this argument are perforce Flaubert's children–Flaubert being at once the greatest realist and the great anti-realist, the realist who dreamed of abolishing the real, the luxurious stylist who longed to write 'a book about nothing, a book with no external attachment.'" Unless Wood deplores Flaubert for his "luxury," for his effort to transcend mere documentary description, one now wonders why he finds fault with the anti-realists. If they too are among Flaubert's children, then they are only attempting to live up to his ideal of the autonomy and integrity of literary art. They just don't think that realism as he understood it is the only way to accomplish this. Wood says further of Henry James that he "found Flaubert's realism exemplary but lacking, because he felt that it did not extend to a subtle moral scrutiny of the self." If Wood agrees with James, then we have arrived at his real complaint against the anti-realists: It's not that they fail to recognize the centrality of "realism" (Wood has already defined the term so broadly as to essentially render it meaningless, anyway), it's that they fail to engage in "moral scrutiny." He objects to this group of Flaubert's offspring not on aesthetic but on moral grounds.

6) In his concluding paragraph, Wood asks us to "imagine a world in which the only possible novel available was, say, Pynchon's Vineland and books like it. It would be a hysterical and falsifying monotony. By contrast, a world in which the only available novel was, say, A House for Mr. Biswas would be a fearfully honest, comic, tragic, compassionate, and above all deeply human place." Now, I happen to like both of these books (Vineland less than either V or Gravity's Rainbow, however). I'm glad we live in a world where both kinds of books are available. It would seem, however, that Wood could be perfectly content in the world occupied only by Naipaul. No variety is necessary because this would be a "deeply human place." (What kind of place would the Pynchon world be? Superficially primatial?) Note as well the way in which this comparison is made in the form of moral judgment. Pynchon is "hysterical" and "falsifying." Naipaul is "honest" and compassionate." James Wood is perfectly entitled to elevate Naipaulian realism and denigrate Pynchonian anti-realism (if that's what he wants to call them–I don't think either term does either writer much justice). I do wish he wouldn't call those of who like the sort of thing a writer like Pynchon does hysterics and liars.

(At the beginning of his essay, Wood speculates that the struggle between realism and anti-realism is especially intense in the United States because of our "anti-intellectualism" and because of "the perceived traditionalism of creative writing programs, long suspected of exerting a gray monopoly over American writing." I think this analysis is also profoundly wrong, but would prefer to put off further discussion of it specifically for a separate, and later, post.)
Safely Ensconced

July 25, 2005

Apparently Steve Wasserman believes that "The best reading experience is to occupy your time with the worthy dead rather than the ambitious living."

This remark (actually among the first words to come out of Wasserman's mouth during the Open Source interview) certainly tells us a great deal about why the Los Angeles Times Book Review has never fulfilled its promise, or really even come close to being a reliable guide to contemporary letters.

The truth is pretty close to exactly the opposite of what Wasserman would have us believe. Not only is it the case that, as Ed Champion has put it, "the very form of the novel has evolved precisely because of efforts from the ambitious living" (one could say the same thing about other literary forms as well), but the "worthy dead" were probably the most intensely "ambitious" writers one could imagine–not necessarily ambitious for worldly success (although many would have no doubt gladly accepted it) but, because until the mid-nineteenth century (at the earliest) financial success as we would define it was more or less unthinkable (not enough readers), for "literary immortality." The great writers of the past literally wanted their work to survive through the ages, as testimony to their "success" as literary masters. (Remember the first stanza of Paradise Lost?: "Sing, Heav'nly Muse. . .I thence/Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous Song,/That with no middle flight intends to soar/Above th' Anonian Mount, while it pursues/Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme." How audacious to think your poem could successfully "justify the ways of God to men"!)

Furthermore, one suspects that Wasserman finds reading the "worthy dead" the best way to occupy his time precisely because it doesn't have to be an overly strenuous "reading experience." After all, these writers have already been pronounced "worthy"; all one has to do is nod sagely while passively absorbing all the greatness previous generations of readers have been kind enough to pre-determine for you. What a nice way to pass a rainy day. Some people might even be impressed with your good taste and admirable discernment.

In fact, the best (defined as "challenging") reading experience is precisely to read the "ambitious living." Judgments have yet to be reached about these folks; their work has to be explored and assessed. Some of it even strikes out in directions with which one is unfamiliar, and requires more than ordinary concentration. This sort of writing has yet to be certified as Literature, and while reading it might not provide the same sense of security that one's experience will be "worthy," it does test one's ability to comprehend what makes literature literary in the first place.

Ultimately, Wasserman's pronouncement is at least as condescending to the "worthy dead" as it is to the "ambitious living." It implies that their work is safely ensconced in the collective literary mausoleum, no longer embroiled in the petty concerns of the living. It expresses a view of Literature that only makes living readers less likely to be interested in the literature of the past, held out by the likes of Wasserman as something so much grander than what the puny present could produce. Younger readers especially recoil (justifiably so) at such a display of supercilious superiority (itself so thoroughly unjustified). In my opinion, if the literary work of the "worthy dead" is perceived as detached from the affairs of the present, with nothing to say to those who must live in it–and in many cases this is simply not the case–it doesn't have much value to anyone. It's not what is passed on to us from the worthy dead. It's just dead.
Funeral Rites

July 3, 2005

Judith Halberstam thinks the Department of English needs to go:

I propose that the discipline is dead, that we willingly killed it and that we now decide as serious scholars and committed intellectuals what should replace it in this new world of anti-intellectual backlash and religious fundamentalism. While we may all continue doing what we do — reading closely, looking for patterns and disturbances of patterns within cultural manifestations, determining the complex and fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies — once we call it something other than “English,” (like cultural studies, critical theory, theory and culture, etc.) it will neither look the same nor mean the same thing and nor will it occupy the same place in relation to the humanities in general, or within administrative plans for down-sizing; it will also, I propose, be better equipped to meet the inevitable demands (which already began to surface after the last election) for an end to liberal bias on college campuses and so on.

I heartily endorse this idea. By all means, let Halberstam and her confreres establish a new Department of Patterns and Disturbances of Patterns Within Cultural Manifestations. This would allow them to do what they most dearly wish to do–distance themselves from the study of mere literature–and would further allow whatever renegade elements there are within the exisiting English deparment who still find themselves interested in the "merely literary" either to reclaim "English" as the name for what they study or perhaps to join in on the makeover fun and establish a Department of Literary Study, in which what actually goes on is the study of literature. The latter could perhaps be done by incorporating extant creative writing programs, and such a department would probably continue to offer traditional composition and linguistics courses. (Surely administrators would not want to entrust such courses to a department that otherwise focuses on "the complex and fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies." This very phrasing suggests that professors in the new department would not be the logical choice to teach courses the goal of which is to teach students to write.)

I believe that such a bifurcation of English would turn out to be a swell deal for us renegades. Given a choice between the PDPWCM department and its ersatz sociology and a Literary Study department honestly devoted to studying literature, I predict that many undergraduate students would turn to the latter. After all, most English majors have traditionally been drawn to the discipline simply because they like to read. If departments of English and comparative literature are currently suffering "massive declines in enrollment," as Halberstam herself allows they are, I'd suggest that one of the reasons is that what students find when they get there–and what they would continue to find in the PDPWCM department–is a pedantic, turgid, supercilious, and utterly joyless approach to reading. Should the new department of Literary Study reemphasize some of the pleasures of reading, and some of the delight of discovery in the study of literature, it would do just fine in a competition to avoid "down-sizing."

Michael Berube doesn't much care for Halberstam's proposal, for reasons that aren't very clear. "[No] kind of renaming or reorganizing is going to make English a coherent, tidy discipline," he writes. "It would be hard enough to make it coherent if it were devoted solely to literature. . ." Berube doesn't seem to understand: Halberstam is advocating that those very tendencies in academic criticism that make English as it now stands incoherent be transferred to the PDPWCM department. The English department left behind would be entirely coherent, despite Berube's doubts. Without those scholars more interested in "cultural production" and "hegemonies" than in works of fiction or poetry or drama, other scholars and critics who think studying such works as forms of literary art is a perfectly nice thing to do would be left alone to get on with the task. Berube continues: "literature, as even the most hidebound traditionalists ought to admit one of these days, is a terribly amorphous thing that touches on every conceivable facet of the known world—and, as if this weren’t enough, many facets of worlds yet unknown as well. . . ." I'm not a hidebound traditionalist–in my version of a Department of Literary Study, periodization and other manifestations of curricular slicing would be absent; professors would be free to teach what they want to teach, as long as the ultimate goal was to understand the literary qualities of literature–but in my experience literature is a perfectly morphous subject. Individual works of literature certainly do explore "every conceivable facet of the known world," but the study of literature concentrates on delineating the way they do this, not on using literature as an excuse to pronounce on such "facets" oneself.

What Halberstam and Berube share, ultimately, is a plain impatience with if not disdain for trifling old literature. Halberstam sneers at the notion of "aesthetic complexity," notes approvingly the way "queer theory, visual culture, visual anthropology, feminist theory, literary theory began to nudge the survey courses, the single-author studies and the prosody classes aside," recommends that the study of Victorian literature be replaced with "studies of 'Empire and Culture,' romanticism with “the poetries of industrialization.” Berube wants to preserve close reading as "our distinct product line," as "what we sell people" (so much for resisting the corporatization of academe), but reduces such readings to "skills in advanced literacy," something that promotes students' "own symbolic economy." Besides, "you don’t have to confine yourself to literary works, either. You can go right ahead and do close readings of any kind of 'text' whatsoever, in the most expansive sense of that most expansive word." Berube forgets that "close reading" was developed specifically as a method of reading literary works, which required close reading because they don't give up their intended meanings so easily, are not storage centers of "meaning" at all but occasions for a reading experience of a distinctive kind. His appropriation of "close reading" is really just a theft of the term for purposes to which true close reading is simply not applicable. (But of course the New Critics have become the collective bogeymen of contemporary literary study, returning now and then from their repressed state to scare the children. They and their appalling practices must be warded off.)

Really and truly, the best thing that could happen to literature would be, once the Department of Patterns and Disturbances of Patterns Within Cultural Manifestations (or some equally dreary equivalent) was actually created, for it to disappear from academic curricula altogether. After eighty years of experimenting with the study of literature as an academic subject, those carrying it out (myself included) have made a complete hash of it. Literature itself is held in contempt not just by the majority of ordinary people but by those professing to teach it. "Literature Professor" has become a near-synonym of "lunatic." That literary study would come to such an end was probably inevitable, since the primary imperative of academe–to create "new" knowledge–is finally inimical to something so difficult to dress up in fashionable critical clothes as serious works of fiction or poetry. Once it was perceived that "aesthetic complexity" was a spent force (at least as the means for producing new monographs and journal articles), approaches to literature that essentially abandoned its consideration as an art form were practically certain to follow. If Judith Halberstam is proposing that, in this context, everyone should acknowledge that the experiment failed, she's performing a useful service. Give literature back to the amateurs.

(Thanks to Scott Esposito for providing both of these links.)
Entry Fee Enclosed

June 29, 2005

Alan Cordle has become "cynical about the whole enterprise" of contemporary poetry as a result of his efforts at "exposing fraudulent contests" and "tracking the sycophants" at his website Foetry. He thought poetry was about beauty, but the publishing of poetry has turned out to be about "cozy cronyism."

It's hard to believe that Cordle was really as naive as he claims he was when he discovered that judges of poetry contests sometimes select the manuscripts of "students, friends, and even their lovers." Poets are as fallibly human as anyone else, and surely Cordle did not assume that writing poetry afforded some kind of exemption from this truth. But perhaps Cordle should give himself a break–he thinks he's discovered that poets are unscrupulous and poetry contests financially corrupt, but he's really discovered that poets (and editors) prefer what they prefer and that getting published (in fiction as well as poetry) is not simply a matter of producing good work and having it recognized as a matter of course. In some ways it is only to be expected that poets would choose to extol the work of their own former students, since presumably those students exemplify in their work the qualities valued by the teacher to begin with, in some cases writing poetry directly influenced by the teacher's work.

To the extent that poetry/fiction prizes are explicitly "fixed"–the winner is known in advance, the other contestants deliberately bilked of their entry fees–Cordle's efforts to uncover the practice would be both welcome and justified. But I can't see that any of the examples described at the Foetry website reach this level. Few of them go beyond the "this poet knows that poet/this poet previously expressed admiration for that poet" variety of accusation. In my opinion, the fact of the matter is this: All poetry and fiction prizes, either those rewarding entire manuscripts or those that identify individual poems or stories as "winners" in literary journals, are inherently suspect, what might be called systemic scams. Print journals continue to proliferate, as does the cost of printing them, and since the readership of these journals is too small to support them through subscription, and the support provided by universities (where most of the journals reside) only weakens (as does support for university press poetry publication), these meaningless prizes and the entry fees they generate have arisen as a way of maintaining the supply of ink and paper.

I believe Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, when he says that most contests simply allow small presses to scrape by. Surely no one thinks large sums of money are at stake in the publishing of poetry and short fiction. Nevertheless, without the sums that are produced, such publishing would likely collapse from its own puffed-up weight. Contest money serves the system as a whole, at least for the moment, to forestall the day when small-scale print publishing as it has been conducted for the past forty years (a period that also coincides with the growth of creative writing programs) can no longer be sustained. In the meantime, aspiring and lesser-known writers will undoutedly continue to pay for the opportunity to be rejected by the literary journals or presses of their choice.

Why anyone would willingly participate in his/her own exploitation and disillusionment in this way is beyond me, but I guess the allure of being published in a literary magazine, even if most copies will sit unread on library shelves, or by a poetry press, whose books probably won't even make it to most libraries, is still strong for some writers. Moreover, such writers ought at least take to heart what Foetry has managed to make clear: Editors do indeed prefer what they prefer, and mostly what they prefer is the familiar and the compatible. And this is true both of those publishing conventional work and those who tend to publish more experimental fiction or poetry. (We are told in the L.A. Times Article that NEA chairman Dana Gioia has contacted Alan Cordle "to offer support for Foetry's goals." One suspects that Gioia, a poet in what Ron Silliman calls the "School of Quietude," would like to combat the influence of "post-avant" poetry–more highly esteemed in some quarters of the poetry world–and the venues that favor it.) The chances your work will meet the expectations of these editors is slight, even when you're seeking ordinary, non-contest-related publication.

Perhaps the greatest harm these literary contests do is to collectively perpetuate the idea there are commonly recognized standards by which all literary work is judged suitable for publication, that work submitted for publication to the most desirable venues will be assessed dispassionately and will get into print only if it is objectively the most meritorious. Where would these standards come from? Literary criticism of the kind that might help to establish such standards hardly exists any more, having been replaced by a species of academic criticism that finds value in literature only in its utility for advancing outside agendas and by newspaper-based book reviewing that rarely does more than provide crude consumer advice. At best, it seems to me, literary journals and many small presses proceed according to a kind of literary conventional wisdom whereby everybody publishes what everybody else is publishing. It isn't cynicism to think that literary publishing in the United States is far from a meritocracy (even if you don't think those involved are necessarily morally corrupt). It's common sense.
Changing Moods

June 21, 2005

Reviewing Ann Beattie's Follies, Donna Rifkind asserts that "once the pioneers of a directionless generation," Beattie's characters "are now at best supporting players in a drama whose mood has changed. The trademark passivity of Beattie's characters has given way to a new generation's urgency, passion, religious and political conviction, determination and certitude. Serving as a generation's voice has its limits: One day the action moves on."

This is the literature-as-fashion view of fiction. According to this view, a writer reflects the "drama" ongoing in the social theater the writer is presumably attending. This drama is judged to be particularly intense when the writer is young and can be claimed as an especially astute critic of the theatrical trappings considered most illustrative of the advanced trends of the day. Once these trends have been exchanged for a new set, as inevitably they will be, the writer formerly thought to provide keen "insights" into the way we live now is dismissed as thoroughly retro. This has clearly happened to Beattie, at least as far as Donna Rifkind is concerned. "One day the action moves on."

Rifkind can't be urging Beattie to adjust her focus, to start chronicling "a new generation's urgency" et al, since if she did she would surely be accused of horning in on the new generation's territory, her fiction judged to be hopelessly unconvincing. Beattie does anomie, not "determination and certitude." She is instead announcing both to Ann Beattie and to the readers of the Washington Post Book World that Beattie's work is now passe, not worth the attention of readers hoping to keep their fingers fastened to the social pulse. And clearly it is the sociological information that can be gleaned from fiction that interests Rifkind, since elsewhere in her review she allows that Beattie's style "remains distinctive and surprisingly fresh." Her characters, alas, just aren't with it: Where they "used to seem thoroughly familiar and fashionable, both they and the bland world they inhabited have now been kicked to the curb." How awful to be middle-aged and to be stuck writing about such "supporting players."

I myself have never been that enamored of Ann Beattie's fiction. But my problem has always been precisely with its literary qualities, which Rifkind accepts as not yet "out of style." I find Beattie's writing itself to be bland and mostly unengaging. I don't object to the plotlessness of her stories, or even the repetitivenes of her themes and situations. I just think her affectless prose style strains too much to mimic the impassivity of her characters and becomes merely numbing. And I thought this about her work when I first read it in the 1970s, when Beattie could still be called "a generation's voice." What continues to bother me about her fiction is that her "method" remains dull and unimaginative, not that she writes about the same sorts of characters she's always depicted, as they now struggle through middle age. Why would such characters necessarily be less interesting than younger characters and their own ephemeral "trademarks"?

I don't believe Ann Beattie ever claimed to be "a generation's voice." This was a label slapped onto her by critics who, like Donna Rifkind, thought of fiction-writing as a generational contest in which the new always triumphs over the old, simply because it is new. Beattie is now being held responsible for an insipid practice among reviewers she herself never endorsed. This is no way to perpetuate a literary tradition, one in which past or aging writers still have something to offer and are not disparaged simply because "the action moves on" among the literary trendsetters. Rifkind's review not only fails to assess Beattie's book by any kind of legitimate literary criteria, but it assumes that readers, both young and old, are as shallow in their judgments as the reviewer seems to be.
First-Growth Postmodernism

June 13, 2005

The newest issue of Bookforum has lots of good stuff in it, although unfortunately much of it remains inaccessible online. The quality of the reviews in this issue, however, well justifies shelling out the cost of a print copy, with which you can spend several hours, if not days, enjoying one of the few national book reviews that doesn't consider books an excuse for allowing reviewers to natter on about their "ideas" and that provides ample space for reviews of current fiction alongside the well-chosen nonfiction reviews also included.

If you pick up a copy, you might want to look especially at Mark M. Anderson's thoughful examination of A New History of German Literature (a review which raises a number of important questions about current academic approaches to the study of literature), Robert Polito's brief essay on Harry Mathews, and Marjorie Perloff's review of two books by Nobel-winner Elfriede Jelinek, which provides a useful corrective to the witless musings on Jelinek by, among others, Stephen Schwarz and Ruth Franklin. There's also Christine Schutt on Aimee Bender and Maggie Paley on Nicole Krauss.

Of the content available online, I found James Gibbons's essay on William Vollmann especially judicious. I have tried reading Vollmann on several different occasions, but frankly I've been unimpressed. Gibbons's piece makes me want to give Vollmann another try. This, for example, is something I would not have deduced given the public persona created by many other reviews of Volmann's books:

For all his audacious travels, Vollmann's feats never come across as exhibitionistic. Acutely aware of human vulnerability, he seems incapable of swagger. He never attempts to hide his physical awkwardness. As a reporter confronting degradation and atrocity, his forthright, unidealized self-presentation is alien to the school of writer-adventurers to which he belongs. We know from his fiction that he can write in any register, delighting in baroque metaphors and elaborate prose fantasias, so the account of his 1992 visit to besieged Sarajevo in The Atlas is all the more powerful for its plainspoken restraint. . . .

The centerpiece of this issue is undoubtedly Gerald Howard's reconsideration of Gravity's Rainbow. It's certainly well worth reading, although I have to say I question some of Howard's assumptions. I am especially puzzled by his recollections of what first drew him to the work of American postmodernists such as Pynchon, which he presents as mostly sullen and full of gloom ("Malamud was a downer, but not our kind of downer"), a kind of social fiction full of ideas about the horror of American culture.

These ideas were our mental tools as we romped in the forest of first-growth postmodernism. What was strange and gratifying was how completely in sync this writing was with our educated baby-boomer sense of squalor and betrayal. Then, no less than today, a culture war was being fought—but the battleground was an interior one, within our minds and souls.

I find it hard to think of the postmodern fiction of the 1960s and 70s as any kind of "downer," or as engaged in any kind of social commentary (advocating either inward or outward change) except in the most indirect and contingent way. It seems to me that what postmodern fiction shares with the social climate of the 60s is a spirit of excess and playful innovation, a sense that old forms are bursting at the seams. The work of such writers as Barthelme and Barth, Coover and Elkin, Sorrentino and Hawkes (all named as among Howard's favorites at the time) is most notable for its formal and stylistic energy, almost exuberance, which transmits to the reader at least as much excitement about the untapped possibilities of fiction as it does criticism of political and social arrangements. (This is true even of Pynchon; Gravity's Rainbow surely does critique the Western technosystem, but it is also stylistically ebullient and great fun to read.)

I also think Howard is wrong to describe GR as less "a novel in the generally accepted sense" than "a text, intended for moral instruction"–or if he is correct, then he has actually identified one of its most serious flaws. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call Gravity's Rainbow a "Menippean Satire," as a number of Pynchon scholars have pointed out, but one of the great accomplishments of the novel has been its ability to incorporate other and multifarious literary (and non-literary) forms without sacrificing its own integrity as an identifiable (if omni-directed) literary form in its own right. In this way, the novel has proven itself to be almost inherently experimental in the opportunities it affords to the adventurous writer. To restrict "novel" to something more conventional and domesticated than Gravity's Rainbow is to deny the actual history of the novel as a structurally unstable form.

And as a Menippean satire (which is "chaotic in organization" and in which "it's usually difficult (if not impossible) to pin down the specific targets of ridicule"), Gravity's Rainbow resists being used as "moral instruction." Unlike the more familiar kind of "corrective" satire, Menippean satire is not a mode of moral discourse. It does not urge us to change our ways. It's closer to travesty or farce–it depicts human behavior as just hopelessly ridiculous. I would argue that GR at its best rises (or sinks) to this level. However, to the extent this novel does leave readers feeling they've been delivered a lecture, admonished to stop participating in the global system of mechanical destruction, it probably does fail to carry through its postmodern version of the Menippean satire thoroughly enough. (In my opinion, V does a better job of embodying this kind of postmodern satire, and is thus an even better book than Gravity's Rainbow.)

If GR is becoming "dated," as Howard speculates it might be, this would be the reason, at least in my view. Finally I can't agree with Howard that "Pynchon is a pure product of the cold war and the arms race and the adversary culture that opposed them." That "pure" goes too far. If Gravity's Rainbow can't be appreciated except as a specific response to the cold war–even more particularly as a meditation on the Western worldview as it mutates through World War II and, at least implicitly, comes to inform political debates in the postwar era–it will indeed become merely a strange historical document, although at least it will probably continue to seem strange. But if its strangeness–its aesthetic singularity–is able to be explained away as tangential to its "intervention" in cold war politics, as merely a curious (albeit frequently hilarious) supplement to its value as "moral instruction," I'm not myself sure how much of the blame would be borne by Pynchon himself and how much by what seems to be our culture's insistence that even complex works of art like Gravity's Rainbow be explicable in simplistic political terms.
Walbert

May 29, 2005

Kate Walbert's Our Kind is pretty obviously conceived against the grain of the typical work of American fiction published these days. Instead of focusing on the young, it features a cast of mostly elderly characters. Instead of concentrating on the experiences of a single character coming to terms with contemporary reality, it presents a collection of characters united by age and experience whose stories are related mostly through the collective "we." Instead of spinning out another version of the bildungsroman, it narrates a series of loosely-structured stories about people who have long passed their prime and who spend much of their time reflecting on what has been rather than what is to come.

Whether Our Kind was actually sold to its publisher as some such kind of "high concept" (or possibly what is coming to be called "niche") book or not, unfortunately it is finally more interesting as an idea than as a realized work of fiction. Its aging characters are depicted in various overly cute or suitably somber situations, but none of these characters impress themselves on the reader's attention very deeply and few of the situations are interesting enough to sustain the individual stories as anything other than anecdotes or vignettes. One finishes the book feeling indeed that one has been given a certain kind of "information" about the generation of women around whom the book is centered, but not provided with a compelling reading experience of the sort one wants from a well-executed novel or collection of short fictions.

Our Kind is yet another "novel in stories," a form that is becoming increasingly popular among current writers (and, one presumes, readers as well). It is a form the possibilities of which have certainly not yet been fully worked out, but it can't really be said that Walbert's book does much to contribute to the ongoing exploration of those possibilities. It is too fragmented to really cohere as a novel, although it does leave a stronger (although still disappointlingly faint) impression in aggregate than in its individual parts. There isn't a firm enough narrative thread to make the book a likely candidate for adaptation as a Lifetime movie, but unfortunatly it doesn't rise much above this sort of earnest entertainment. Walbert does bring the social and cultural expectations that shaped these women's lives under some scrutiny, but not with a hard enough edge that middlebrow readers might be offended (or even challenged) by it.

The book's second half is better than the first, the stories, among them, "Sick Chicks" and "Back When They Were Children," more substantive and more capable of standing alone as short stories. Perhaps the best story is the last, "The Beginning of the End," which tells the life story of a woman named Viv, who passes up the opportunity to become a literary scholar–at a time when few women became scholars at all–in favor of the marriage and family expected of her. The story concludes with a flashback to a moment with her soon-to-be husband, Don, at their engagement party:

She moves in closer to Don and bumps the umbrella, its slick sides dripping on their shoulders as they kisss beneath the dome, already bound. And there will never be a stepping back, nor a fork in the road, nor a deferral of what had been a clear direction. You made your bed, the women say, etcetera, et cetera.

This is how Viv would describe, if asked, the beginning of the end, but the conversation never gets around to her.

The reality of opportunity lost is conveyed very painfully here, but unfortunately some readers may have given up on the book before getting to this story. Actually, I would advise that readers skip directly to "The Beginning of the End," since it really encapsulates much of what the book has to say. If you're interested in reading additional stories about the consequences of cultural expectations on women who succumb to them, you could go back and read the rest of the book by the light provided by this concluding story. You might also just settle for it.
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.

Essays in Criticism

Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction