The Reading Experience

Updike

May 27, 2004

I am making my way through John Updike's The Early Stories. The book has been patiently waiting its turn on my To Read book carousel, its very heft causing me to turn right by it several times in favor of something smaller, something less demanding of my fully engaged attention. Reading a writer like Updike, a writer for whom language is more than a transparent covering on the "reality" it evokes, always requires one's willing attention, or there's no point in reading him at all. To make your way through 103 stories and 828 pages of Updike, however, makes one hesitate before finally summoning the commitment to go ahead with it.

I have read many of these stories before, but Updike has re-arranged them in the way in which he presumably now wants them to be read, the arrangement that will convey most felicitously what they have to offer us. The fresh connections this arrangement makes between the stories, whether written as early as 1953 or as late as 1975, must surely also make them, if not more meaningful, at least meaningful in a different way than when they are read in isolation, or even in their original published context. Thus I do intend to read the book as it is presented to us, from first story to last.

However, I also intend to pause after reading each section or two (there are eight sections, each containing 10-15 stories) and discuss the stories assigned to these sections, perhaps as much for my own benefit in thinking through my response to Updike's writing as for the opportunity to share my responses in a blog post. Those not interested in Updike's fiction–and there are perfectly good reasons why one might not have had a positive response to Updike, on which more later–can of course simply skip these posts. However, I do hope that others wishing to know more about this writer, or to check his/her own responses with mine, might find something of value in this discussion and the ones to follow.

The first section of the book is dedicated to the "Olinger stories," written between 1954 and 1961 and clearly based on Updike's own youth in Shillington, Pennsylvania. I have never really thought of Updike as an autobiographical writer per se. Although much of his fiction is clearly anchored by his own experiences first in Pennysylvania and ultimately in Massachusetts, many of his books are not autobiographical at all, taking as their subjects characters completely unlike John Updike–The Coup, Roger's Version, The Witches of Eastwick, In the Beauty of the Lilies, the Bech books. Even Rabbit Angstrom is obviously not an autobiographical character, however much some of his responses to his situation and his experiences might have come from Updike's familiarity with his mileu and his background.

The Olinger stories, however, are relentlessly autobiographical, so much so that when taken together their value as literary art, as fictional creations with full aesthetic integrity, is somewhat less than I expected it to be. One thing that even this initial section of The Early Stories begins to demonstrate is the price to be paid by a writer determined to survive simply as a writer, to have a "career" in fiction writing and not to either martyr himself in his poverty or take up a supporting career as professor or editor. The consequence is that some of the work is written as work, stories written to pay the bills or keep one's presence up but not necessarily because they were otherwise stories that just had to be written. Several of the stories in this section seem to me to be of this kind, written to first establish Updike's presence and then to help the writer earn his keep. There's nothing morally objectionable about this, but stories like the first one, "You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You," a coming-of-age vignette similar to Joyce's "Araby," but much less accomplished, or "In Football Season," an equally slight reminiscence of high school football games, are perhaps interesting enough to read in charting the development of John Updike's career but surely won't stand the test of time as short stories.

As a whole, these stories revolve around the same set of characters, given different names in some of the stories, but clearly the same nevertheless: a young man with a tendency to brood and to speculate about what his life will be like, as well as with some latent talent as a writer or artist, his parents, the mother somewhat frustrated with her lot but also capable of enjoying life, a father stuck in a low-paying job as high school teacher and given to a fair amount of brooding of his own, which he hides in a facade of cheerfulness, sometimes one or more elderly grandparents, the boy's real connection to the past, the history of the community in which he lives. This is all clearly enough a version of John Updike's own family and their travails, of his own trajectory from small-town boy to aspiring writer. But the effort seems so intensely focused on recreating these circumstances and tracing that trajectory that one finishes these stories thinking more about John Updike's life and his desire to portray it in fiction than about the achievements of the stories in literary terms.

Probably the best-known story among the group of Olinger stories is "Pigeon Featherss," the title story of Updike's second collection, published in 1962. This is also a coming-of-age story (Updike seems fond of this conceit), in which the Updike character, in this case named David Kern, is seized with a kind of premature existential crisis. "Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. . . ." No doubt this is as well one of the earliest stories in which religious faith becomes a foregrounded theme, a theme that has led many critics to label Updike in part a "religious" writer. David's crisis is resolved in the story's conclusion, when, after ridding the family's barn of a group of pesty pigeons, David looks at one of the dead pigeons and "lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a contolled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him." David buries the pigeons, and as he finishes "crusty coverings were lifted from him" and "he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever." One wants to think there is some irony in this, that it is not being suggested that the slaughter of "these worthless birds" (pigeon as Christ figure?) is not necessary to save David's soul, but I, for one, have to conclude that this revelation is meant to be taken precisely as such, the pleasing lyricism of the passage notwithstanding.

In my opinion, the two best stories in this section are "The Persistence of Desire" and "The Happiest I've Been." In the former, the Updike stand-in, here called "Clyde Behn," returns to Olinger after a number of years and meets a former girlfriend. There is clearly unfinished business between the two of them, although they both understand why their relationship had to end. The ex-girlfriend, it seems, is willing to betray her husband for a sexual encounter with Clyde and leaves Clyde with a note: "The glimpse, through the skin of paper, of Janet's old self quickened and sweetened his desire more than touching her had. He had tucked the note back into his shirt pocket and its stiffness there made a shield for his heart. In this armor he stepped into the familiar street. The maples, macadam, shadows, houses, cars were to his violated eyes as brilliant as a scene remembered: he became a child again in this town, where life was a distant adventure, a rumor, an always imminent joy." The tone of regret and sorrow for things passed that runs through all of these stories is perhaps most effectively sounded here, an effect Updike achieves entirely through the aptness of phrasing and the rythmic ease of his language. "The Happiest I've Been" is an equally quiet story in which the narrator ("John") is a college sophomore about to drive back to school with a local friend. Before leaving they stop off at a party where the narrator meets up with some old acquaintances and eventually winds up sitting in a kitchen with a girl he doesn't know well but with whom he has a tender moment nevertheless: "She drew my arm around her shoulders and folded my hand around her bare forearm, to warm it. The back of my thumb fitted against the curve of one breast. Her head went into the hollow where my arm and chest joined; she was terribly small, measured against your own body. Perhaps she weighed a hundred pounds." This is all that happens, but it makes the narrator "happy" that she "had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me," as does his friend, Neil, as the narrator later drives away from Olinger. (We have also learned that "after we arrived in Chicago I never saw him again either.")

The wistful quality that many of these stories seem to be after comes through most affectingly in these two stories because they're understated, don't try as hard as does even the staged epiphany in "Pigeon Feathers." The remaining Olinger stories perform variations on the themes of these two stories, to greater or lesser effect, but ultimately work, at best, to sketch out the overall portrayal of Olinger and its influence on David/Clyde/John Updike. In my view "The Persistence of Desire," "The Happiest I've Been," and perhaps "Pigeon Feathers" are the works that will continue to attract readers among this grouping of stories. (Also in my view, the essay-like "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island" and "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car" just don't work at all.)

Throughout all of these stories, however, Updike's impressive prose style is in evidence, although it is here perhaps somewhat less florid, but also somewhat less assured, than it will later become. In addition to the passages I have already quoted, this paragraph, the opening paragraph of "In Football Season," shows Updike the pure stylist at his best:

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold on the dark slop of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

Some readers find Updike's style excessive, too intoxicated with the description of things, but I find it irresistable, the style of a writer trying to discover in all good faith what words can really say.

In many ways, the real culmination of the Olinger stories is Updike's novel The Centaur (1963). Perhaps because it was Updike's immediate follow-up novel to Rabbit, Run, in my opinion it really did not then and to some extent still has not received the credit it is due. Containing essentially the same cast of characters, this novel really completes the portrayal of Olinger and its place in Updike's fiction, and is the most compelling portrait as well of Updike's father (or at least of his fictional transformation.) The novel additionally shows Updike beginning to depart from strict conventional realism, as it alternates the story of the father and the son with a depiction of the father as literally a centaur, the mythological creature who is half man and half graceful beast. It really is a completely successful novel, and it is to be hoped that in the future it acquires the many readers it deserves.
One Thing After Another

May 24, 2004

In the May/Summer issue of The Writer's Chronicle, Alice Mattison offers an interesting essay (not available online, but the issue's table of contents is available here) defending the use of coincidence in fiction. Subtitled "An Essay Against Craft," the essay commends the use of coincidence as a way of taking risk, which Mattison feels is discouraged in a literary world dominated by the workshop "rules" implicitly taught in creative writing programs. Writes Mattison: "I don't think directions or rules are available, just terms. . .that undeniably simplify discussions of writing and literature." Such simplification is at times useful, but "the problem arises when we begin to draw conclusions from succesful choices, assuming that what works once will work in every instance."

A few paragraphs after the statements just quoted, Mattison is discussing a Charles Baxter essay in which "Baxter glances at the sort [of stories] that were rejected as old-fashioned by the authors who first made stories turn on insight. He characterizes the stories that Henry James and James Joyce rejected as those with 'plot structures tending to require a set of coincidences or connivances of circumstance.'" Mattison comments: "It hadn't occured to me, before I read Baxter's sentence, that coincidence defines the type of story in which it appears. I hadn't noticed that such stories. . .were helpless without coincidence."

Although Baxter and Mattison don't use the word, what they are both describing is the influence on early novels in English of the "picaresque" narrative. The picaresque story–derived from the term identifying the protagonist of such stories, the "picaro"–was introduced by Spanish writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and is essentially a journey narrative in which the picaro, usually a rogueish character, embarks on a journey in which, literally, one thing happens after another. There's not really a sense of progression in the picaresque narrative, just a series of episodes, and usually the protagonist remains more or less unchanged, undergoing no transformation or "epiphany." The most famous picaresque novel is undoubtedly Don Quixote, in which Cervantes alters the form by making his protagonist a deluded but not antisocial or rascally character.

The early British novelists of the 18th century were greatly influenced by the picaresque narrative, especially such writers as Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. Fielding's Tom Jones is probably the most famous of these British picaresque novels. It adopts the journey conceit, the episodic structure, and adds an element of explicit comedy that exceeds even the kind of doleful humor to be found in Don Quixote. (Tom Jones remains a tremendously readable book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know what the picaresque form can accomplish.) Charles Dickens was in turn profoundly influenced by Smollett and Fielding, and his novels represent a further fashioning of the picaresque into a narrative technique of great flexibility and latent aesthetic potential.

But this was indeed the "old-fashioned" kind of storytelling that came to be rejected by later writers more concerned about the "craft" of fiction. Perhaps the first writer to really move away from the picaresque was Flaubert, and he may be the writer most responsible for converting fiction into a more gracefully "shaped" kind of storytelling, and therefore a form that could be taken seriously as a mode of literary art. (I greatly admire Flaubert, and nothing I say here is meant to denigrate his achievement in any way.) Mattison identifies James and Joyce as the writers who came to "shape" their stories around the occurence of an "epiphany," but it was really Flaubert who showed James and Joyce that such an aesthetically intricate effect could be brought off in fiction.

Since Flaubert, the notion of "story" in fiction is thus usually associated either specifically with the kind of dramatic narrative leading to revelation or epiphany pioneered by James and Joyce or more generally with the kind of carefully structured narrative encapsulated in "Freytag's triangle": exposition, rising action, climax, denoument, etc. Most genre fiction probably uses the latter, most "literary" fiction the former. Most best-selling potboilers are likely to use the Freytag-derived narrative filtered through Hollywood melodrama. In this context, the picaresque story almost doesn't seem like a story at all, since it doesn't arrange itself in some shaped pattern, but is instead just a series of incidents strung together.

I go over all this not to offer some kind of lesson in literary history but ultimately to suggest, with Mattison but more broadly than her advocacy of "coincidence" goes, that the picaresque ought to remain a viable option and can provide an alternative to the workshop-reinforced domination of the revalatory narrative. To some extent the picaresque style was revived by postwar American writers such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, but in my opinion it still contains much untapped potential. It can free the writer from the tyranny of story–the creation of narrative tension by which too many stories and novels are reductively judged–but at the same time allows for the depiction of external events, provides an aesthetically justified motive for abjuring the directive to probe the psychological depths, and perhaps most of all makes available all kind of other effects–satire, subplots, a larger cast of characters–that the craft-like story discourages. Of course, this is not the 18th century, and writers now would be using the picaresque form in a much more self-conscious way, but that in itself would likely give such fictions a "shape" that would rescue them from mere formlessness. (Although attempting a truly "formless" novel might be an interesting experiment in itself.)

I am not suggesting that the picaresque narrative is superior to the more conventionally shaped narrative most novels employ. The possibilities in "shaping" the latter kind of narrative have by no means been exhausted, although most published novels don't seem much interested in exploring these possibilities. A renewed interest in the picaresque might, however, help demonstrate that there is more than one way to tell a story, multiple ways to "shape" a work of fiction, without sacrificing readibility or even fiction's "entertainment" value. (Both Don Quixote and Tom Jones are nothing if not entertaining.) And in the final analyis using such a narrative strategy wouldn't really involve abandoning "craft"; ideally it would further demonstrate that craft is just as much involved in the breaking of convention as in its repetition.
Literary Magazines and the Web

May 21, 2004

New Pages Weblog provides a very useful list of print literary magazines that have at least some minimal internet presence. (There's also an equally useful list of online magazines, and for other expansive lists of both print and online magazines see www.litline.org). What one discovers in going through this list is that very few of them make any of their actual contents availabe to web readers, and almost none of them make all of their contents available.

At first this might seem an entirely reasonable thing for these journals to do, since presumably they'd prefer to sell some copies to interested readers instead. But as we all know, very few copies of literary magazines are in fact ever sold to readers in the conventional over-the-counter way; at best some readers who are especially dedicated to supporting new writing subscribe to them (but of course only to a few of them), and in general most literary magazines would collapse from lack of circulation if they didn't manage to get themselves into a few libraries.

Literary magazines are still valuable, nevertheless, since they are usually the point of initial publication for lots of good and ultimately successful writers. (Although a perusal of the New Pages list also brings home the fact that ultimately more of these magazines, more with marginal influence, at least, are being published than is really helpful. Such a surfeit of lit mags only persuades many potential readers that there are too many to keep up with.) Clearly, however, they don't have the exposure to general readers–as opposed to creative writing students themselves eagerly trying to get published in them–that they ought to have, and I can't see why they wouldn't be willing to make their contents available on the web, if in fact getting readers for the writers they publish is really the goal.

Part of the explanation for why they aren't so willing is just old-fashioned elitism. Print's the thing, and cyber-printing, in the minds of many editors (and probably many writers) is an inferior alternative. But of course many lit mags published only online are fast achieving the quality of even the better print magazines. As Maud Newton says in a recent article in Doublethink, “I think the mainstream publications resist innovation and that the better stories generally are being published outside their pages. Some of the most vital short stories are published on the Internet these days.” If the print magazines insist on their own inherent superiority for too much longer, they may find themselves just plain irrelevant. (And then they'll come running to web publication.)

I myself still prefer print on paper for most longer essays and stories, just because I find it more convenient and less wearing on the eyes, and to the extent that literary magazines are resisting a cyberspatial presence for some similar reason I understand the reluctance. But ultimately most web-printed material can be made available in print-to-paper form, and then the only real objection remains a stubborn preference for traditional modes of publication. But I repeat: if getting readers for writers is the ultimate ambition of the literary magazine, then refusing to consider the many additional readers that might be available via web publication is only a way of thwarting that ambition. Furthermore, with all of the very good literary weblogs that are now up and running, the possibility that webloggers will gladly make their way through the cyberpages of these magazines and discuss in their blogs the poems, stories, and essays found there is so manifestly real that literary journals would likely get a kind of attention they've never gotten before.

I don't expect that many of the print lit mags will make their concessions to the internet very soon. (Although I have some hope that newer magazines such as Swink and The Black Clock may be smarter in their approach to the web.) Snobbery and luddism run deep in the literary world. But in my opinion such concessions are ultimately going to be necessary. At best in the battle between traditional print and the web, the partisans of print will manage only an uneasy truce. The print literary magazines might continue to exist, but their innate prestige value will diminish, and they'll only lose readers to the equally good online alternatives. Literature isn't literature because it comes to us on paper. It's an effort to make language yield compelling and challenging art. This can be done just as readily in cyberspace as on the printed page.
Style as Moral Failure

May 20, 2004

The Mumpsimus points me to an essay on Angela Carter in which Carter is quoted as saying "I've got nothing against realism. . .[b]ut there is realism and realism. I mean, the questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality. I would like, I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS, but I, I haven't. I've done other things. I mean, I'm an arty person, ok, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose – so fucking what?"

The defensiveness with which Carter speaks here is well-justified. Not only was she accused of being un-British in her choice of subjects and her prose style, but writers like Carter, who willingly employ an "overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose" are frequently treated not like they are in some way bad writers but are actually bad people. I am frequently amazed at the vehemence with which some reviewers and readers react against stories or novels that are unconventional or stylistically "excessive." The authors of such works are regarded as deviant, hostile to "ordinary" readers, just plain contemptuous of good order in matters of storytelling and style. (Even a writer as conventional as John Updike is sometimes attacked for these sins.) And woe indeed to the writer who, like Carter, combines an extra-realistic approach and a "purple" prose.

An essay in the current issue of Raritan (Spring 2004) reprises these once-infamous remarks by Philip Roth:

. . .I set myself the goal of becoming the writer some Jewish critics had been telling me I was all along: irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious. . .A quotation from Melville began to intrigue me, from a letter he had sent to Hawthorne upon completing Moby Dick. . ."I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as a lamb." Now I knew that no matter hard I tried I could never really hope to be wicked; but perhaps if I worked long and hard and diligently, I could be frivolous.

And indeed from Portnoy's Complaint on, Roth produced numerous books that were "frivolous" in comparison to his earlier work, that went beyond the bounds of decorum in structure and good taste in style, that were "excessive" in many, many ways, but . . .so fucking what? They are also books that will continue to stand as among the best American novels written in the latter part of the twentieth century. They are all clearly the consequence of "hard and long and diligent" work, and in their very excesses and frivolity are as serious as anything written by more obviously earnest writers of the time, including Roth's colleague Saul Bellow.

Yet there are still readers who can only see the frivolity–that is the comedy, as savage as it can sometimes become–and the excesses–Roth's frequently freewheeling style–and who regard books like Sabbath's Theater and Operation Shylock as fundamentally not serious, as irresponsible treatments of subjects that ought to be treated in a grim and sober way. They welcomed, on the other hand, American Pastoral, because it seemed closer to this more earnest approach. (I like American Pastoral as well, but not for this reason.) I think Roth would probably agree with Carter in every particular of her statement, and both of these writers could serve as models of the sort of writer willing to endure the charges that their writing is an example of moral failure, as long as they were ultimately seen, rightly, as aesthetic triumphs.

Whenever I hear or read someone urging writers to be "clear," to "communicate," to avoid "trickery," I can only take it as an exhortation to be good. Not to offend official sensibilities or imply that many readers are too timid in their willingness to take risks. In the name of literary decency not to engage in "too much writing." Perhaps in the long run these stylistic gatekeepers can be persuaded that literary form and style have nothing to do with morality, but most of them probably don't really much like literature, anyway, if "literature" is more than just an opportunity to assert your own virtue.
F.O. Matthiessen

May 15, 2004

A while back, I offered a list of older works of literary criticism that I think are increasingly neglected but still have a great deal of value. I considered putting F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance on this list, but I had not read the book in quite a long time, and it was besides somewhat more narrowly focused on a particular period in American literary history–roughly the mid-nineteenth century–than I thought was appropriate for a list of "general" criticism.

I have now re-read the book (itself an act of supreme patience, since it contains over 650 densely-packed pages), and I would have to say I still would not include it on a list of critical books that non-academic readers might want to check out–at least not at first–but for reasons that have nothing to do with its quality. It is in fact, a book of great erudition and discernment, and is probably more responsible for the very concept of the "American Renaissance," and thus for the multitude of survey courses on this period that followed in the wake of the book's publication (1941) for at least the next fifty years than any other single work of literary criticism or scholarship. It may even be said to have provided the model for this kind of "periodization" in academic literary study in the first place.

Furthemore, the book clearly has played a large role in the way its five chosen writers–Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman–are understood by subsequent readers interested in the period. I think Matthiessen undervalues Emerson, overvalues Thoreau, and exaggerates the degree to which Hawthorne was simply trying to provide a more sober view of human nature than was implied in the transcendental assumptions of Emerson and Thoreau. However, I also think the chapters in American Renaissance on Melville and Whitman are just about the best things I've ever read about those two writers. At any rate, the overall picture that emerges from this book of the literary goals and accomplishments of each writer is probably the starting-point from which different pictures might ultimately be portrayed.

But ultimately its impressive learning and lengthy explications are, paradoxically perhaps, the very reasons I probably would not recommend the book to readers without an existing interest in these writers and this period or who would rather read the writers themselves than such an extended work of critical commentary. Matthiessen's approach is essentially historical (in the "undertheorized" way of scholars from this generation more interested in literary history than in "subverting" this history), although Matthiessen also states that his primary interest lies "with what these books were as works of art, with evaluating their fusions of form and content." In essence, he wants to understand what these writers thought they were doing, how each of them in turn influenced what the others were trying to do, to let them as much as possible speak for themselves through judicious analysis of selected texts and passages, ultimately to help readers understand why these were and are writers worth reading and taking seriously. What a concept!

However, this has become in so many ways such an alien concept that many readers of American Renaissance might think it quaint, even a little bizarre. Why would someone so obviously spend so much time reading Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman so thoroughly, so clearly attempt to think through the implications of why and what they wrote, so patiently take the reader through their essays, fictions, and poems and invite this reader to think further about it all him/herself? Where's the attitude, the jargon, the theoretical superstructure, the knowing superiority to the writers being examined? Matthiessen barely mentions Whitman's homosexuality (or Melville's suspected same-sex orientation), isn't much interested in gender (although is plenty interested in class), only touches on these writers' attitudes toward race, doesn't seem concerned to pivot his analysis in an appropriately progressive political direction, actually thinks the writers he discusses ought to be read on their own terms. In some cases, these omissions are indeed problematic (the omission of race particularly), but more to the point, the book's overall focus on those qualities in these writers that make them important writers in and of themselves just isn't done any more.

And American Renaissance is admittedly somewhat digressive, moving ahead or backward from one writer to the other seemingly in midstream, breaking off for a discussion of the painter Thomas Eakins before returning to the homologies between Eakins and Whitman, etc. Its very breadth of knowledge can be intimidating if not irritating–it isn't always clear why we need to know quite so much just to appreciate Hawthorne's stories or Leaves of Grass–and its footnotes frequently insert what just seems superfluous information. It's a book for readers of its five chosen writers who are already convinced of their centrality–at least it is for readers now–and who would like to know more about why they wrote what they wrote when they wrote it.

Which is finally why it probably wouldn't be of interest to those who wouldn't already describe themselves as readers of this sort. Anyone who really wants to know what the "American Renaissance" was all about and what these five writers contributed to it couldn't really claim to have this knowledge without reading F.O. Matthiessen, but I fear there aren't many people around anymore who want to know these things. Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe books like Matthiessen's were written according to a "scholarly" model that is ultimately inappropriate for the appreciation of literature. I sometimes think this myself. But I'm glad to have read American Renaissance (twice), and my subsequent readings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman will be richer and more informed because I did.
Bellowing

May 12, 2004

I dislike the fiction of Saul Bellow. I offer no apologies or excuses for this. I simply do. I've written an essay expanding upon my reasons for disesteeming Bellow's work (Northwest Review, Vol. 41, No. 1), so I won't recapitulate those reasons here. I bring the subject up now only becasue of J.M. Coetzee's review of Bellow's first three novels, now republished by the Library of America, in the New York Review of Books.

Coetzee's review begins as if it will be just another of the hagiographic treatments Bellow has received over the last several years–"Among American novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century, Saul Bellow stands out as one of the giants, perhaps the giant"–but his appraisal of these three books is rather more tepid. He prefers The Victim, and I guess I would agree with that assessment although I myself find it only mildly interesting, yet even here Coetzee concludes that Bellow "has not made Leventhal [the protagonist] enough of an intellectual heavyweight to dispute adequately with [the antagonist] Allbee (and with Dostoevsky behind him) the universality of the Christian model of the call to repentance."

Coetzee is correct to find Dostevsky "behind" The Victim, as well as most of Bellow's other novels. Bellow takes from Dostevsky a conception of the fiction of "ideas," and if anything makes those ideas even less interesting and more intrusive than they are in Dostevsky's novels. There's lots of anguish and philosophizing and gesturing after profundity in Bellow, and mostly (not completey) I find it all very tiresome. Other readers, of course, are free to disagree. (Obvioulsy most other readers do.)

The most revealing part of Coetzee's review, however, is his distinctly unenthusiastic estimation of The Adventures of Augie March. This is his ultimate judgment of the book:

Once it becomes clear that its hero is to lead a charmed life, Augie March begins to pay for its lack of dramatic structure and indeed of intellectual organization. The book becomes steadily less engaging as it proceeds. The scene-by-scene method of composition, each scene beginning with a tour de force of vivid word painting, begins to seem mechanical. The many pages devoted to Augie's adventures in Mexico, occupied in a harebrained scheme to train an eagle to catch iguanas, add up to precious little, despite the resources of writing lavished on them. And Augie's principal wartime escapade, torpedoed, trapped with a mad scientist in a lifeboat off the African coast, is simply comic-book stuff.

What Coetzee doesn't come right out and say is that Augie March is basically unreadable. I labored through it many years ago, but more recently I tried to re-read it and made it only halfway through. Coetzee thinks its the unearned "exuberance" of the style that bogs the novel down, but I think it's just badly written and terribly paced. The Adventures of Augie March in many ways marks the beginning of the cult of Bellow, and if now a writer as well-respected as Coetzee is willing to say it's not so good, the future of Bellow's reputation could prove to be in some doubt.

Coetzee thinks that Herzog is Bellow's most successful book (at least it's what he implies), and I would also agree with this judgment. Herzog is the sole Bellow novel that I, at any rate, would call a superior work of fiction–although even here the book is marred by Bellow's typically unpleasant portrayal of women. Form and subject mesh together seamlessly, and Bellow's style (which again I mostly find annoying) conveys both in an aesthetically satisfying way. It's finally the only Bellow novel I would gladly recommend to others as a book worth reading.

After Herzog, in my view only parts of Mr. Sammler's Planet, most of Humboldt's Gift, and a few short stories are any good at all. Everything else represents a calamitous falling-off in quality. Has anybody tried to read The Dean's December? Don't bother. At best these books represent a chronicle of Bellow's personal peeves and petty squabbles. They provide a distinctly disagreeable reading experience.

The only reference in Coetzee's review to Bellow's "greatness" is in that first sentence I've quoted. I'd like to think that even this statement is Coetzee's way of describing the current state of Bellow's reputation, but not necessarily his work as a whole. If a few of Bellow's books were to survive as minor novels I wouldn't be saddened, as long as in the long run Bellow's fiction doesn't overshadow the work of his much more accomplished colleagues, including his fellow American Jewish writers Malamud and Roth. That one hundred years from now Bellow would be seen as the "giant" post-World War II American novelist is inconceivable to me. But perhaps I'm just missing something.
Teaching Literature

May 6, 2004

Terry Eagleton now appears to find the state of literary study to be as dreadful as he claims the late Edward Said found it to be. Given that both Eagleton and Said played major roles in bringing academic criticism to the dire straits in which it now has trouble maneuvering, it is on the one hand difficult to have much sympathy with Eagleton's own current displeasure. However, one might on the other hand see the later frustration of both Eagleton and Said as a welcome sign they had come to see their own contributions to the politicization of literary study to be a terrible mistake.

Yet, that Eagleton finally doesn't really get it is revealed to me, at least, in this seemingly innocuous comment about Said: "Said's concern was justice, not identity. He was more interested in emancipating the dispossessed than in celebrating the body or floating the signifier. As a major architect of modern cultural theory, he was profoundly out of sympathy with most of its cerebral convolutions, which he correctly saw as for the most part a symptom of political displacement and despair."

This is all well and good and, for that matter, I believe that Said (Eagleton as well) was indeed concerned with justice and with "emancipating the dispossessed." But why in the world would either of these men have thought that a good way of achieving these ends was to become literature professors in British and American universities? To the extent that both of them (Said more than Eagleton) actually took their concerns into the real world and acted on them in properly political ways, I admire them. To the extent they used their sinecures in academe to pollute literary study with political dogmatism, I find their actions pernicious in the extreme.

In championing Said's "humanism," Eagleton asserts that "What he is after. . .is what one might call a reconstructed or self-critical humanism–one that retains its belief in human value and in the great artistic works that embody it, but which has shed the elitism and exclusivism with which literary humanism is currently bound up. We would still read Dante and Proust, but we would also extend the very meaning of humanism in order to 'excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility.'" What I myself finally don't get about this project is why reading Dante and Proust would ultimately have anything to do with the desire to "excavate the silences," etc. What it does suggest is that it really is impossible to "teach" literature as an academic subject without in the end resorting to literature as a secondary means to "teach" something else entirely, whether it be humanism, postmodernism, gender studies, or all the other possible "approaches" one could take to not reading literature.

I would really not even have commented on Eagleton's brief essay-review if I hadn't also at about the same time read two very thoughtful and intelligent posts on academic weblogs dealing with the very subject of what's wrong with academic literary study. Erin O'Connor, who maintains the weblog Critical Mass, recently discussed her reasons for leaving her tenured position for a job teaching at an independent high school. Her reasons are all most honorable, and she should be commended for her decision. But this was the passage in her post that struck me as most revealing: "[Others who have made the same decision say] they are able to do the sort of intensive, personalized teaching they dreamed of doing as college teachers, but could not do in a higher ed setting; all say they feel more intellectually alive than they did in academe; and all say, too, that they have a much greater sense of purpose and of professional satisfaction than they did in academe. They are palpably happy, and the differences they are making in kids' lives are real and meaningful."

Even those academic scholars who don't have an allegiance to a particular agenda probably feel as O'Connor does about what their job is really all about. It's about making a difference in "kids' lives," about (ideally) "intensive, personalized teaching." I certainly wouldn't say I have an objection to any of this, but for O'Connor teaching literature is first about the teaching, not about the literature.

In an equally sensible reply to O'Connor, Tim Burke, in attempting to formulate solutions to the problems from which O'Connor is fleeing, writes that "Graduate pedagogy needs to shift its emphases dramatically to meaningfully prepare candidates for the actual jobs they ought to be doing as professors, to getting doctoral students into the classroom earlier and more effectively, to learning how to communicate with multiple publics, to thinking more widely about disciplines and research."

Again, this proposal is all about making academe a more congenial place for the teacher, and again I don't object to it per se, but I do note that neither in O'Connor's nor Burke's post, nor in Eagleton's essay, is there much consideration of the role literature itself plays in literary study. This disjunction seems to be so commonplace, so much taken for granted by "literary" academics, that it makes the academy seem an even more disembodied, insular place than it actually is. (And it truly is disembodied and insular.)

I don't have a proposal of my own for changing the situation. The prerogatives of academic life are always going to take precedence over a mere interest in or concern with the intricacies of literature. Teaching literature is not the same thing as writing it or even reading it. It may even not require that the teacher actually like or respect it. All of which suggests, perhaps, that literature would be better off if the teachers stayed away from it. At the moment, it certainly isn't benefiting from their ministrations.
Very Funny

May 3, 2004

In a previous post I explained why I have less admiration for the literary critic James Wood than conventional literary wisdom suggests I ought to have. I don't want to rehearse the argument I made there in discussing his introduction to The Irresponsible Self: Humour and the Novel (available at the Guardian website), although I would like to suggest that the views Wood presents here only reinforce my belief that his very understanding of what "literature" is all about–in his case, literally what it's good for–finally just gets in the way of a broader understanding of what works of literature more generously conceived are actually capable of accomplishing.

This is essentially the burden of Wood's analysis of "humor":

In literature, there are novels. . .in which a mild tragi-comedy arises naturally out of context and situation, novels which are softly witty but which may never elicit an actual laugh; and there are also "comic novels", which correspond to the man who comes up to you and says, "have you heard the one about…?", novels obviously very busy at the business of being comic. Tristram Shandy, for instance, is in multifarious ways a marvellous book, but it is written in a tone of such constant high-pitched zaniness, such deliberate "liveliness", that one finds oneself screaming at it to calm down a bit. The "hysterical realism" of such contemporary writers as Pynchon and Rushdie is the modern version of Sterne's perpetual excitements and digressions.

I don't doubt the applicability of Wood's distinction between "mild tragi-comedy"–what he will go on to identify as "humor" more properly understood–and the "comic" as illustrated in Sterne or Pynchon. I do question the soundness of Wood's implicit judgment that the kind of humor he describes is to be preferred, is in some way more "literary" than the "hysterical" comedy of writers descending from Sterne. That he would use this term, as well as the equally condescending "zany" in referring to this latter comedy makes his valuation of it clear enough, but later he also remarks that "Evelyn Waugh, alas, still represents the great image of English comedy in the 20th century, rather than his subtler and gentler contemporary, Henry Green." That humor deserves to be taken more seriously because it is "subtler and gentler" is the obvious conclusion Wood hopes his readers will draw from his essay.

This "humor" Wood is after he more precisely calls a "comedy of forgiveness," and he uses explicitly religious language rather freely in defining this brand of humor. That James Wood likes to see such humor in the books he reads is fine by me, but readers ought also to know that it is not per se the style of comedy practiced by the "better" writers and that a good argument can be made that the "hysterical comedy" he deprecates is more suitable to a view of literature that demands of "serious writing" that it be more than "gentle," that it in some ways be unforgiving, deliberately withholding reassurance or consolation.

The best definition of this unforgiving kind of comedy, in my opinion, was offered by the Russian critic M.M. Bakhtin, who wrote that "laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it." Elsewhere Bakhtin writes that this kind of comedy embodies an attitude of "radical skepticism" against all forms of "straightforward seriousness." Paradoxically, then, comedy is itself most serious when it casts doubt on what is otherwise considered to be serious. Nothing escapes the maw of this sort of "radical" comedy, including the pretensions of those engaging in it, and thus it goes beyond what Wood calls the comedy of "correction."

This kind of comedy can be seen in many of the great twentieth-century writers–Joyce, Beckett, Ionesco, such American writers as Barth, Heller, and Stanley Elkin. (To avoid charges of pretentiousness myself, I would also say it can be seen in the films of the Marx Brothers and the sketch comedy of Monty Python.) It can be "zany" or not (Beckett is zany in Waiting for Godot, not in How It Is or The Unnameable, but the effect is the same). But in its refusal to take anything seriously it performs at least as useful a service as does that humor preaching "forgiveness" that Wood celebrates. It asks us to question everything, to be willing to laugh at everything, ultimately to resist the temptation to settle for easy consolation. Wood essentially dismisses this kind of modern writing when he describes "the modern novel's unreliability or irresponsibility, a state in which the reader may not always know why a character does something or may not know how to 'read' a passage, and feels that in order to find these things out, he must try to merge with the characters in their uncertainty." Since our common plight is precisely to live in such uncertainty, what's wrong with this?

In the final analysis my disgreement with Wood is undoubtedly an issue of taste. I don't mean to disparage those who prefer Green to Waugh or Austen to Dickens. I respect many of the authors who employ "humor" of the sort Wood identifies, although I often get the sense Wood doesn't respect those writers whose comedy is "hysterical." But in Wood's own "typology" of humor, the "gentle" comedy he likes seems unavoidably sentimental to me. And in my reading, at least, I have found that the greatest literature avoids sentimentality with the most radical kind of skepticism.
There Are Books, And Then There Are Books

April 28, 2004

The April 25 issue of The Boston Globe includes in its "Ideas" section an article by Edward Tenner entitled "Rebound." It offers a fairly useful accounting of where the "book industry" now stands in terms both of sales and of its encounter with the technologies of the electronic age. It seems to bring good news about the ability of books to withstand the challenge of these technologies, but there are also plenty of reasons, as the article itself reveals, to wonder what the future of serious writing, as opposed to the fate of "the book" as itself a technological device, will really look like.

The good news is that "books have multiplied partly because they have become less and less important as information storage technologies. As our dependence on them has shrunk, their number and variety has increased, and their status has been if anything enhanced by the attention that the Web has showered on them through online bookselling and discussion groups."

Here I think Tenner makes a very important point. To the extent that we rely less on books simply for "information storage," we might actually see them as even more valuable as the means by which writers (artists, thinkers, real journalists–in other words, creative and serious people) explore the possibilities of books as that form that allows for certain kinds of literary work to be carried out. "Books" might come to be seen as the only medium in which this kind of work can be done. (Whether such books continue to be printed on paper in the currently conventional way seems to me a separate, and frankly not very interesting, issue.)

Teller is surely also correct in pointing out that "the Web" has paradoxically enough elevated the status of books by making them more available and enlivening the discussion of books of all kinds. Those of us who maintain lit blogs might want to call Mr. Teller's attention to the contributions this form is making to the consideration of books and writing, but his larger point is cogent enough. And he is right as well in observing that "books [continue to] survive because technology has made it much easier to write and publish them."

But here the picture starts to seem somewhat cloudier. That more books can be produced doesn't mean they should be. Throughout the last decade, Teller asserts, "More and more people came to believe they could publish and flourish. According to a recent survey, 81 percent of Americans would like to write a book. Some of them are aspiring authors of serious fiction and nonfiction, who have never had an easy road and who now exist in greater numbers than ever, thanks in part to the proliferation of academic writing programs."

Now we all know that if 4 out 5 adult Americans published books, in the vast majority of cases their only readers would be close family members and perhaps the next-door neighbor. (If the author promised to reciprocate.) And it seems overwhelmingly likely that the book most such people really want to write is an autobiography or memoir–some kind of "life story." If the number of "life stories" being published continues to increase, this will only lead, in my view, to the ultimate cheapening of the value and integrity of books as the kind of distinctive medium I described above. And should the "proliferation of academic writing programs" continue without some fundamental change in the goals of such programs, they too will finally help to hasten the decline of genuine "creative writing."

All of which leads us to the truly bad news in Tenner's article:

Were the doomsayers needlessly gloomy? Not entirely. There does seem to be less zest for reading among today's college students than there was in the 1960s and early `70s. In the American meritocracy, general culture ranks far behind job-related learning. In Europe and the United States, demand has not kept up with the expansion of new pages, leading to sagging unit sales. . . .

So the increase in the number of books published doesn't really matter that much after all. What good does it do if no one really wants to read them or, more distressinlgy, knows how to read them, anyway? "Job-related learning" can certainly be done without books. The "zest for reading" is only becoming less zesty given the way literature and writing is currently being taught in most colleges and universities. If anything the oversupply of books can only make these problems worse, since even if you wanted to keep up on your reading, who can do so with so much coming over the transom?

I would like to suggest that the healthiest development in American publishing would be not publishing more books but publishing many fewer. This might result in feeding the American appetite for trash, but the loss of enthusiasm for reading is ultimately going to include the "commercial" authors as well. (It might hit them the hardest of all.) Most best-sellers are written to be movies in the first place, and I think that eventually they'll just be movies. In the meantime "the book" might be preserved as a space for serious writing, a mode of "communication" that might find the right audience for its method of communication. If the Book survives as something with a smaller but more dedicated audience, so be it. At least it survives. And might flourish.
Stanley Elkin

April 23, 2004

I want to join with Rake's Progress (a blog that just keeps getting better, by the way), in recommending the latest issue of Harper's. In addition to Lance Esplund's excellent piece of art criticism (quoted in my previous post), there's a provocative essay by Richard N. Rosenfeld proposing that the U.S. Senate be abolished. But most of all I want to echo RP as well in calling attention to William Gass's essay on Stanley Elkin.

Gass provides a very good introduction both to The Living End, his essay's immediate subject, and to the nature of Elkin's work in general. He concludes with some reflection on the ultimate decline of his friend's health (the two were colleagues for many years at Washington University in St. Louis) that paradoxically explains a great deal about the overpowering energy and vitality of Elkin's fiction.

Although Elkin has been dead for less than a decade, it's my sense that already his work does need this kind of introduction for readers who did not follow his career while it was still ongoing. Elkin has many passionate admirers, but ultimately they probably comprise only a coterie. This is not enough for a writer as prodigious in his gifts as Elkin, whose books are of the kind that can make the act of reading a transcendent experience.

It's hard for me to avoid such superlatives when discussing Elkin's work. He's probably the postwar American writer I most admire, a writer who indeed shows us how prose can become poetry. But he's also damn entertaining. Probably no other writer (with the possible exception of Dickens) makes me laugh out loud so often (and so loudly) as Stanley Elkin. When trying to get across what Elkin has to offer, it's probably best just to quote him.

This is from The Franchiser, perhaps Elkin's greatest novel–although The Living End might indeed be a good book for those unacquainted with Elkin to pick up first. Here Ben Flesh, literally a "franchiser," is trying to explain why he'll need to shut down one of his businesses (an H & R Block office):

"Finish your case load. Take twice your commission. Triple. We're closing shop, we're going out of business, everything must go."

"But–"

"I told Evelyn Wood the same. What, you think you're a special case? I told Evelyn Wood, I told her, 'Eve, there's trouble in Canada, in the forest. The weather's bad, the stands of trees are lying down. There's no wood in the woods, Wood. The pulp business is mushy. Where's the pulp to come from for the speed readers to read? They're reading so fast now they're reading us out of business. Publishing's in hot water. Magazines are folding, newspapers. (What, you never heard of folded newspapers?) If we want to keep up with the times we have to slow down, go back to the old ways. We have to teach them to move their lips.'"

What Hath the Blog Wrought?

The Dustbin of Literary History

Additional Essays in Criticism

Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction