The Reading Experience

Making Believe

July 12, 2004

John Holbo has recently posted two lengthy discussions of the concept of "fiction" as it would be understood using the tools of analytic philosophy. I am by no means well-read enough in analytic philosophy to assess these posts in technical terms, although I do think I know enough to follow along and perhaps make a few comments from a purely literary perspective.

Holbo is responding to a book that analyzes fiction as a "prop" readers use to engage in what this author wants to call "make-believe." Holbo believes that this view is too simplistic, reducing fiction to a device that prompts readers to create mental images, or that works to "prescribe imaginings." Holbo thinks that this simplistic view is especially infelicitous in describing our reading of novels, which do not provoke these kinds of "imaginings" in the same way that other, more explict games of make-believe do. As Holbo points out, reading a novel is not like playing with toy trucks.

It seems to me that Holbo is trying to say that works of literature have effects on us that cannot easily be accounted for by philosophical analysis. The words in a novel work differently than words in other contexts:

Now with regard to novels there is certainly at least a little something to the idea that, in at least some cases, there is at least something inessential about the prop, i.e. all the words – because the story is the thing, and any given story can be narrated any number of different ways. But indifference to the specifics of the narrative, i.e. all the words, is really not a standard attitude. You don't have to be much of a critic to care how a given story is told, i.e. to care about the prop itself, as well as what the prop makes us imagine (if it does make us imagine.)

I think this is exactly right, although, again, I couldn't provide an argument of my own that would satisfy most analytic philosophers. Part of the problem with approaching fiction from the vantage point of philosophy is that it excludes certain considerations that would otherwise help to explain what we in fact do enounter in reading fiction or poetry. (Although of course if these considerations were taken into account, the result would be literary criticism and not philosophy.) For example, I would argue that the novel, the literary category of "fiction" more generally, has developed less as a reaction among writers to the requirements of "story" per se than as a sequential reaction to what previous writers have done within the tradition of the novel or the short story as it is passed along from one cohort to the next. Sometimes this means thinking through the implications of narrative itself, sometimes ignoring story in order to concentrate on style or "stream of consciousness" or something else. In other words, most writers are at least as interested in what they can do with language itself as what they can do through telling stories.

A related problem is the need to collapse poetry and fiction (as Holbo does in an earlier post) into a single category of "imaginative" writing in which the arrangement of words works differently than in non-literary writing–it is less propositional, less laden with "information," etc., a difference that invokes the specific analysis of such writing as "fiction" in the first place. What is gained by looking at these modes through this fairly narrow philosophical lens (which is not at all neglible) is balanced by the loss of those other features of poetry and fiction that have appeal to us for other than their roles in the game of fiction-making or make-believe.

Perhaps the most significant drawback to considering "fiction" as more or less identical with "story" is identified by Holbo himself:

. . .The more paradigmatically story-like the representational content of a work, the more comfortable we are classing it as a work of fiction.

One exception: experimental literary works that strive to undermine narrative and story conventions – i.e. that willfully lack beginnings, middles and ends, characters, so forth – are usually quite easily classified as fiction (unless they seem to be turning into poems.) I take this ease of classification to be the result of a sort of grandfather-clause. Or maybe an Oedipus-like father-clause: if you are trying so hard to overthrow story, you must be story, ergo fiction. (A bit of a puzzle.)

I don't think this really is a puzzle. These kinds of experimental "fictions" are, in my view, precisely trying to undermine the reflexive association of fiction with story, although perhaps not completely enough that we would want to categorize it as something other than fiction. To this extent, "fiction" becomes simply a literary identifying mark, an acknowledgment of the tradition of prose writing from which it emerges, but no longer very helpfully describes what a work so designated does in terms of storytelling alone. But perhaps at this point as well such a work no longer lends itself very usefully to the kind of analysis a philosopher might want to do of the more ordinary understanding of the term.
Communication Skills

July 7, 2004

In one of the most recently published diatribes against unconventional literature (this time poetry), Joan Houlihan declares that

Like all other forms of writing, poetry is a communication. The evidence is in its release from the poet's brain onto a medium designed to be read. The fact that it was written down, made readable, makes it a communication even if its only reader turns out to be its creator at a later time. Furthermore, whatever one feels about the role of the reader, or author-as-reader, there's no dispute that there is a role—a poem without a reader is not a poem, but just an artifact of the imagination.

This is so profoundly wrong in so many ways that I have been unable to resist examining the passage for its more egregiously mistaken assumptions.

Neither poetry nor fiction is "a communication" in the way Houlihan clearly intends the term to be understood here. Poets and novelists do not "communicate" information or messages or ideas or propositions or wisdom or anything else by writing poetry or fiction. If these forms of writing are to be considered methods of communication, they are very poor ones indeed, since in most acccomplished poems or novels the best that can be said is that their messages or "points" are communicated in a very roundabout way, a strategy that would seem merely self-defeating if the goal of writing them is to satisfy readers looking for the points being made or the message communicated. Most of the great works of literature would surely by now have been judged failures by the communication test: if the value of those works from the past we still read were to be found in their clearly signalled meanings, their unambiguosly announced "themes," we probably would not still be reading them. Why bother? Just take the message and run.

That poetry is written down, "designed to be read," doesn't in itself demonstrate it's to be taken as communication, although most of us do admittedly have a harder time separating the medium in which the literary arts are created from the artistic effects of which that medium might be capable than we do with painting or sculpture or music. Since we do use language to communicate, we assume all language must be used for that purpose–or that all uses of language can't escape its origins in communication or discourse. We are much more willing to grant that music, say, (the scores of which are also "written down") is something other than communication, in most cases, in fact, would resist the idea that behind the music we like is primarily an effort to communicate ideas or messages. But why is it not possible simply to grant that when poets or novelists set to work they are using language for some purposes that can't be reduced to "communication?" A poem or novel is an artificial construction of words. You may not like what has been constructed in a specific instance, but it hardly seems useful to say that it didn't communicate with you.

All of this is just confirmed if we further consider Houlihan's own contention that a poem communicates "even if its only reader turns out to be its creator at a later time." This seems frankly bizarre. If a poet at some future date "reads" a poem she has written, is she really "communicating" with herself? Would this poet even be aware of what's being communicated? Wouldn't she be looking at the poem's formal qualities, the aptness of its word choice, etc.? Why couldn't other readers look primarily to such things as well? Did Emily Dickinson consider herself finally a failure because the vast majority of her poems didn't "communicate" with anyone? Might she have been satisfied simply that she had created hundreds of well-made poems?

Even more bizarre, at least to me, is the claim that "a poem without a reader is not a poem, but just an artifact of the imagination." I will agree that ultimately most writers want readers, but what's wrong with those readers considering a given work as "an artifact of the imagination"? Isn't this the very way to define all works of art? Perhaps the problem Houlihan sees here is not that poems are products of the human imagination, but that they might be regarded as "artifacts," something that has been made by "artificial" means. Presumably poetry ought to be "natural," indeed an effort at communication. This distinction is probably at the heart of most complaints against works of art and literature that go too far in their brazen use of artifice or that are pronounced "obscure." But anyone taking up the writing of poetry and fiction is committed to an endeavor that is inescapably artificial. Poetry is an inherently unnatural disruption of our ordinary sense of what language is for (just ask all those freshmen struggling through intro to lit), but if you really resent writers playing this kind of game with words (game-playing, however, being just as integral to human nature as the need to communicate), you probably shouldn't be reading (or writing) poetry in the first place.

I looked for evidence in Houlihan's essay that I was myself misreading her message, misconstruing her point, but was only reinforced in my analysis by her conclusion, in which she writes of "poets who betray what talent they may have for the approbation of peers, who engage in the worst self-delusion: that they have something to say that can only be said in a poem." Once again we are dealing with the assumption that literature is a forum for "saying something," even if it is something "that can only be said in a poem." I've never been clear exactly what things "can only be said in a poem." If you can reformulate the poem into what it "says," then obviously you have said it in another way. If you can't put what it says into words, then just as obviously it's not saying anything. The only other alternative is that a poem just is what it is, in most ways precisely avoiding saying anything in particular. If what we have in such a piece of writing is a failure to communicate, this failure is the poem's greatest success.
Not in this Lifetime

July 4, 2004

I greatly admire Helen Vendler. She is perhaps the greatest living close reader of poetry, especially modern poetry, in the United States. She is also passionately committed to the task of explicating the value of poetry, of literature in general, to as wide an audience as possible, as her recent Jefferson lecture, "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar," makes abundantly clear. Cynics are advised to not go near this lecture: not only will they immediately encounter a student of literature utterly convinced of its centrality to human life, but they may wind up convinced of this centrality themselves if they read the lecture through to the end.

But it is precisely Vendler's sincerity and her eloquent communication of her own passion for poetry that ultimately, for me at least, make reading this lecture a rather sad experience. She's right about almost everything she says in trying to argue for making art and literature the curricular centerpiece in the study of the "Humanities" in American universities, but given how thoroughly the study of literature (art more broadly) has been rejected in this country, by administrators, politicians, students, parents, employers, and most pathetically, by literature professors themselves, the context in which her words are offered make this lecture sound more like a funeral oration than an inspirational address, an elegy for what might have been than a proposal for curricular reform. It's almost as if she hasn't noticed that the academic and business elites in America ooze contempt for art and literature, or, more to the point, that literary academics long ago stopped pretending they had any real regard for what is supposed to be the subject of their scholarly study.

Vendler is certainly correct in saying that "When it became useful in educational circles in the United States to group various university disciplines under the name 'The Humanities,' it seems to have been tacitly decided that philosophy and history would be cast as the core of this grouping. . .Philosophy, conceived of as embodying truth, and history, conceived of as a factual record of the past, were proposed as the principal embodiments of Western culture, and given pride of place in general education programs." Americans' demand for "facts" and "hard" knowledge, their disdain for the fluff that is fiction or poetry or painting or music, were reflected even in that realm of academic study that was–grudgingly–ceded to "humanists." She is also justified in claiming that "Confidence in a reliable factual record, not to speak of faith in a reliable philosophical synthesis, has undergone considerable erosion. Historical and philosophical assertions issue, it seems, from particular vantage points, and are no less contestable than the assertions of other disciplines." Finally, she makes as compelling a case that serious engagement with the arts is good for you as anyone is likely to make.

But her answer to her own posed question, "If the arts are so satisfactory an embodiment of human experience, why do we need studies commenting on them?", is not so compelling, at least if she means by this, "Why study the arts in college?" Or, "Why create an academic caste of professional 'scholars' to comment on art as a 'discipline?'" I unhesitatingly agree that "reminders of art's presence are constantly necessary," but is the best way to do this to relegate the study of art to universities, where the most concrete result has been the very maginalization, the trivialization, of art and literature? Vendler's second reason for installing the arts in the curriculum of universities, that "such studies establish in human beings a sense of cultural patrimony" is, in my opinion the weakest argument that can be made on behalf of the academic study of art or music or literature, since it threatens to reduce them to a form of nationalist propaganda–or a reaction against such perceived propaganda, which is largely what has indeed happened to literary study in particular. But Vendler doesn't finally seem to believe very strongly in this argument herself.

The real weight of Vendler's defense of "the products of aesthetic endeavor" falls on her contention that studying works of art and literature "helps us to live our lives," and that scholars are best situated to show us how this can be true. The weight of this argument, in turn, rests on her reading of three poems by Wallace Stevens, poems in which Stevens does indeed speak of the indispensability of art–specifically poetry–and of the scholar's role in reminding us of this. I have no intention of disputing Vendler's reading of these poems. I couldn't plausibly do it even if I wanted to. But I do think she overgeneralizes Stevens's reference to the "scholar, separately dwelling," who "Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,/Which, as a man feeling everything, were his" to mean the academic scholar of the sort we find in American universities. As Harold Bloom points out in Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, the scholar of "Somnambulisma" is likely an allusion to Emerson's "American Scholar," who is not exactly the tweedy gentleman available for office hours we all know and love. If Vendler means in her discussion of this poem that it is desirable if not necessary that some people devote themselves to perpetuating the legacy of still vital poets and artists from the past, reminding us of the "pervasive being" Stevens identifies in his poem, I would have no quarrel with her. But I have a hard time believing there are many such scholars around any more, the very denotation of the word "scholar" now understood as it is to designate exactly the gentleman/woman in the office.

Bloom additionally points out that "Large Red Man Reading," the second poem Vendler discusses, as well contains allusions to Emerson, who also saw the poet's job as writing the "poem of life," was also concerned with the "vatic" power of the poet, but again it is difficult to imagine that either Emerson or Stevens conceived of this "earthly giant of vital being" (Vendler's words) as a "scholar" of the modern kind. Is it part of the job description of the scholar nowadays that he hold his students in rapt attention as he teaches them that "the experiences of life can be reconstituted and made available as beauty and solace, to help us live our lives"? If such scholars as Vendler seems to evoke here ever existed, they surely no longer stride through the halls of the general classroom building, if only because such activity as Vendler wants to describe through her explication of this poem will certainly not get you tenure. The "Large Red Man Reading" helps us pay attention to what we otherwise wouldn't notice; the modern scholar only notices what is otherwise not worth our attention.

Although clearly what Helen Vendler values most in art and literature is the stimulation and pleasure they afford in their own right, in order to duly place them at the center of humanities education, she is ultimately forced to appeal to other services they might perform ("training in subtlety of response," enhancing "scientific training" through the "direct mediation. . .of feeling, vicarious experience, and interpersonal imagination"), as is any proposal to include art in an academic curriculum. She is also led to adopt very dubious–and somewhat naive–theories about how training in the arts is to be accomplished: "Once the appetite for an art has been awakened by pleasure, the nursery rhyme and the cartoon lead by degrees to Stevens and Eakins. A curriculum relying on the ocean, the bird, and the scholar, on the red man and his blue tabulae, would produce a love of the arts and humanities that we have not yet succeeded in generating in the population at large." I am not aware of any evidence that the aesthetic domino effect–from the nursery rhyme ultimately to Wallace Stevens–actually ever happens with other than those students who were always going to get to Stevens or Eakins anyway. And if "the population at large" were going to be led to a love of the arts, we would already have witnessed the appearance of this heaven-on-earth, since much of the justification for teaching the arts and humanities to captive student audiences during the last seventy-five years was based on some such theory. Everyone should read Helen Vendler's poetry criticism, as it indeed can lead individual readers to an appreciation of what makes poetry worth reading. Her Jefferson lecture, however, mistakenly assumes that this kind of concrete experience of literary art can be universalized into a system of academic intruction, still mistaken no matter how well-intentioned the effort might be. Or how nice it would be if it could actually work.
Look Who’s Talking

July 1, 2004

There's one good point lurking in Christina Nehring"s otherwise incoherent essay, "Books Make You a Boring Person," in the June 27 New York Times Book Review: simply reading a book, any book, does not confer any special glory on the reader so moved, is not itself necessarily a better way to spend time than watching tv or lolling around on the street corner. Reading good books, however, books conveying knowledge or providing an engaged experience that cannot be duplicated in other ways, is an invaluable activity–even if reverse snobs writing for the New York Times think it's boring.

But Nehring doesn't seem to comprehend this basic distinction. And, after making her initially valid point, she immediately veers off into a supposedly illustrative reference to a film called Stone Reader (I haven't seen it), which, according to Nehring, is about the "fetishization" of books. There are indeed a large group of book fetishizers in America, although they are otherwise known as book collectors. (See this post.) The participants in the film, according to the dialogue Nehring herself quotes, have actually read the books they "fondle," so it's hard to know why Nehring thinks their "raves about the joy of reading" amount to a fetish. Furthermore, what exactly would the two people quoted want to say about the "contents" of The Old Man and the Sea? Does she want a book report? A disquisition on fishing? Wouldn't they look silly if they suddenly broke out into an academic lecture on Hemingway's symbolic naturalism? It's a movie. Try as I might, I can't see how a documentary about a "search for a lost novelist" (Nehring's summary of the plot) has anything to do with the actual writing and reading of books. How many readers go around making documentaries about their favorite books in the first place?

"It is not because something comes between two covers that it is inherently superior to what passes on a screen or arrives on the airwaves," Nehring tells us. But her jeremiad is not about the dangers of fondling books; it's about the limitations of going on to read them. If she means the physical artifact of the book has no special value, I agree with her. What is valuable about a book, what academics generally refer to as "the text," is not specific to its printing in any particular edition. However, this is not what Nehring is saying. She appears to say–it's a little hard to keep it straight–that precisely the written text itself is "inherently" no different than these visual media in what it does or how it affects an audience. This is simply wrong. No movie version of The Old Man and the Sea, no matter how "faithful" to the source, will ever substitute for reading the novel. Film creates its own kind of artistic effects, and by this measure is not inherently inferior to fiction, but it cannot provide the same depth of experience, the same layered immersion in detail and nuance, as a novel. Similarly, no television documentary or "special report" will ever rival serious history, biography, or any other kind of well-presented nonfiction in communicating information in a way that adds up to knowledge. Ken Burns's film was great, but if I really want to know about the Civil War, I'm still going to go first to James McPherson or Bruce Catton.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about Nehring's essay, at least to me, is her attempted use of Ralph Waldo Emerson to help make the case against reading. "Books are for a scholar's idle times," she quotes him as saying, implying that in his use of the word "idle" Emerson meant to denigrate those periods of reflection in which we are not engaged in "activity," something Nehring suggests is more likely to bring us real knowledge. The statement is from "The American Scholar," but Nehring doesn't quote what follows on from it in the rest of the paragraph: "When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must–when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining–we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, 'A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.'" These are not the words of someone who could ever maintain that "books make you a boring person." Reading in "idle times" is a continuation of our "reading" during the rest of the day. Emerson doesn't want a simplistic division of life into active and idle periods: our daylight activities must be "idle" as well, else we become simple drudges; reading requires "work," else it becomes mere trifling. As much as Emerson wants us to be "self-reliant," he would not have accepted a defintion of the concept that so artificially separated "our own judgments" (Nehring's words) from our experience of "the best books," as Emerson says further in "The American Scholar": "They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads."

And when Emerson writes that "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books" he is attempting to subvert the practice of appealing to authorities, whether the authority of divines, of the ancients, or of modern scientists and philosophers, on religious and intellectual questions, reminding his own readers that these figures were once themselves only readers trying to find their way. They were not oracles speaking wisdom that simply appeared fully-formed, ready to be pronounced. Emerson did not want the young men of his day to refrain from reading. He wanted them to read for themselves.

I can't help but suspect that Nehring's essay is meant to be an implicit defense of the new policy toward books at the New York Times Book Review itself, previously characterized by new editor Sam Tanenhaus as an attempt to foster "debate," to use the Book Review as a continuation of the news and editorial pages of the newpaper. In this approach, as exemplified by Christina Nehring, books are good as "invitations to fight," as opportunities "to argue with them" but apparently not to read. Certainly nothing Nehring says in her essay has any application to fiction or poetry. Despite her call for discussion of rather than simple enthusiasm for a novel such as The Old Man and the Sea, her focus is almost entirely on the "ideas" contained in books, defined in the most simplistic of terms as something books present as on a tray, the savor of which we then judge according to our own intellectual/gustatory tastes. (Tastes derived from where?) Nothing like the attitude Nehring advocates we take toward nonfiction (itself tellingly equated with "books") could be seriously adopted in our reading of literature, since it is precisely the kind of immediate immersion such works invite that Nehring seems to find so alarming. If "Books Make You a Boring Person" can be read as a kind of advance warning, expect that in the New York Times Book Review under its new overseers not only will fiction that doesn't obviously provide "food for thought" be ignored, but the very idea that serious people might want to read such fiction will be considered literally incredible, "too extraordinary and improbable to be believed" (Merriam-Webster). These readers will be declared boring indeed.
Marital Matters

June 29, 2004

Probably it will be John Updike's "domestic fiction" for which he will be best remembered and perhaps on the basis of which he will be judged as a writer. And indeed "The Married Life," the third section of The Early Stories, provides the most provocative and most consistently accomplished set of stories in this book so far. (For a discussion of the first two, go here and here.) Of the fourteen stories in this section, probably only "The Crow in the Woods" and "Wife-Wooing" fail to reward a careful reading.

Which is not to say these stories are unequivocally agreeable, without their disturbing qualities. The portrayal of marriage that emerges probably has at least as many shadows as warm light, although that is ultimately what makes them seem more honest than not and gives them the dramatic tension they need to succeed as short stories. The underlying assumptions about gender roles can at times seem questionable–again the majority of the stories were written in the 1950s and early 1960s–as can some of the attitudes toward unfolding political and cultural changes that are at times expressed or at least implicitly suggested. However, many of these problematic features can be interpreted as inherent in the circumstances and the mindsets of the characters themselves, whose assumptions and actions are precisely the focus of Updike's depiction of marriage in postwar America.

Most of the stories in "The Married Life" are in the form of vignettes or isolated episodes, episodes that nevertheless reveal much about the characters and their moments of heightened awareness of the pain and toil involved in married life. It is a form that Updike handles well (and that he had perfected long before it was taken up by the minimalists and neorealists of the 1970s and 1980s), seems perfectly suited to the disclosure of small insights Updike seems to be after, and that also allows him to exercise his stylistic gifts in a way that can transform the stories into something like lyrical set-pieces. (Readers will of course have greater or lesser tolerance for fiction of this kind.) Even the slighter stories have these kinds of lyrical moments, as in the conclusion to "The Crow in the Woods": "Something happened. Outdoors a huge black bird came flapping with a crow's laborious wingbeat. It banked and, tilted to fit its feet, fell toward the woods. His heart melted with alarm for the crow, with such recklessness assaulting an inviolable surface, seeking so blindly a niche for its strenuous bulk where there was no depth. It could not enter. Its black shape shattering like an instant of flak, the crow plopped into a high branch and sent snow showering from a sector of lace. Its wings spread and settled. The vision destroyed, his heart overflowed. . . ."

Perhaps the very best story of this type in the group at hand is "Unstuck." The story can be easily summarized: A married man wakes up to find that a heavy snowfall has occured overnight. He goes outside to dig his car out from under a snow bank that has hemmed it in. Unable to do so, he enlists his wife to help him. They succeed. The story begins by telling us of the husband and wife that "They had made love last night and again she had failed to have her climax." Later: "She wanted to make a holiday of it. And she wanted, he thought, to bury the aftertaste of last night." In the story's conclusion, the wife has navigated the car out of its snowbank: "[The car's] driver, silhouetted with her nose tipped up, looked much too frail to have managed so big a thing. . .Mark shouted 'Great!' and leaped over the shattered ridge, brandishing the shovel. . .He walked to his car and opened the door and got in beside his wife. The heater had come on; the interior was warm. He repeated, 'You were great.' He was still panting. She rosily smiled and said, 'So were you.'" The not-so-subtle humor of the sexual suggestions here are nicely balanced, at least in my reading of the story, by the authentic generosity of the wife's words, making the story itself the most generous vision of the rewards of marriage in this section of the book.

This generosity toward her husband is shared by Joan Maple, wife of Richard, the two of whom are featured in a series of stories from the 1960s and 1970s chronicling the break-up of their marriage. Five of these stories are featured in "Married Life": "Snowing in Greenwich Village," which introduces the couple, and the four concluding stories in this section, "Giving Blood," "Twin Beds in Rome," "Marching Through Boston," and "Nakedness." Taken individually, these are not necessarily the best stories in part III of The Early Stories, but collectively they are probably the most significant of these fictions when considering the development of Updike's career as a whole. They clearly serve a dual purpose: to give an account of the difficulties of marriage in America, but also to register the social cultural changes in postwar life that contributed to these difficulties.

It is a good thing for Richard and Joan Maple's marriage that Joan exhibits some generosity of spirit, some forebearance and acceptance, since Richard Maple doesn't himself possess many such characteristics. The stories, although told in the third-person, are deflected through Richard's central consciousness, and while this technique almost always creates some initial bond between character and reader, it isn't long before this bond is frayed and Richard comes to seem a frightened and insecure man with some very unpleasant habits and assumptions. He's inclined to be patronizing toward his wife, mostly because he's the man and she's the woman, but he also comes to be envious of her, almost afraid. Joan takes the social changes of the 1960s in stride, attempting to accomodate herself to them, but Richard does so with great reluctance, sometimes out of jealousy that Joan's increased activism is taking her away from him, and frequently lashing out because of it. His racial attitudes and his contempt for "liberals" like his wife come to seem unsavory indeed. Some readers might be inclined to think that Richard's attitudes are given too much prominence, suggesting they might be shared by the author himself, but Updike elsewhere, particularly in the Rabbit books, has demonstrated his ability to explore the mindset of characters whose views he himself does not share, and the portrait of Richard Maples that emerges from these stories finally comes off, to this reader, at least, as an honest attempt to present such a character from the inside, so to speak, to depict Richard Maples the middle-class American male of this period as authentically as possible.

"Snowing in Greenwich Village" shows Richard already, early in the marriage, not entirely comfortable in the role of young husband, as in this story he escorts a dinner guest back home, going up to her apartment and at story's end obviously tempted to take things further. "Giving Blood" begins "The Maples had been married nine years, which is almost too long," and shows the marriage to be indeed quite fragile. "Twin Beds in Rome" begins this way: "The Maples had talked and thought about separation so long it seemed it would never come. For their conversations, increasingly ambivalent and ruthless as accusation, retraction, blow, and caress alternated and cancelled, had the final effect of knitting them together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy." The couple's vacation in Rome perhaps momentarily revivifies the marriage, but Richard's bad faith (in a noxious alliance with his genuine love for his wife) is sufficient to guarantee that this reprieve won't last long. "Marching Through Boston" and "Nakedness" most directly chronicle the Maple marriage in conflict with social change, in the former case the civil rights movement and in the latter the sexual revolution. "Marching Through Boston" casts Richard in an especially ugly light, as his latent bigotry is exposed quite explicitly, although some of his vilest words are clearly enough spoken in his own protest against the changes taking place in his relationship with his wife. (The story literally narrates Richard's participation with Joan in a civil rights march in Boston. It only drives them farther apart.)

What these Maple stories most memorably offer is a representation in fiction of the way in which the neuronal threads constituting the male psyche, perhaps reinforced by that patriarchal cultural climate of the 1950s, began to unravel during the 1960s and 1070s. This unsettling of gender roles and perspectives is further reflected in such stories as "Sunday Teasing" and "Should Wizard Hit Mommy?" (A parallel kind of turmoil in racial perspectives can be seen in the story "A Gift from the City," perhaps the most direct confrontation with these kinds of changes.) The male characters in these stories are not completely aware of the way in which their assumptions are being overturned, and perhaps Updike himself could not have entirely recognized the long-term consequences of those social forces causing the marital tension he was attempting to depict in these stories. Perhaps all of this makes the fiction collected in "Married Life" at least as interesting for sociological as for aesthetic reasons. But in all of the ways I have indicated, most of the stories as well show Updike's talent for writing poetically insightful short fiction coming to be confirmed, the WASP-y, middle-class focus on marital matters notwithstanding.
Dissecting Literature

June 26, 2004

Over at The Weblog, Adam Robinson wonders about the value of literary criticism. Although acknowledging that inferior works of literature can sometimes provoke instructive criticism, he's not so sure what criticism can actually say about great literature:

Literary criticism stretches the distance between life and art to a near breaking point. Scratch that–it completely severs any connection between our life and the beauty we can find in it. It contrives terms and categories that are natural to our instincts but not to our existence. For instance, when we apply the force of love between Romeo and Juliet to our own lives, when we derive our definition from their relationship, we've made love into something concrete, definable, and weird. Now we feel funny about having a crush, and we hope no one makes fun of our emotions or plagues our houses behind our backs.

This is nicely put, and, up to a point, I agree with it. Sometimes it is better to say of a book, play, or poem that has moved you or has enhanced your appreciation of what literature is capable of doing simply that it has moved you, enhanced your appreciation, etc. In other words, sometimes you just want to savor the reading experience. However, it is just as true to say that often criticism appropriately "stretches the distance between life and art to a near breaking point." Life isn't art, and it's probably Romeo and Juliet, not criticism of it, that encourages us to unfavorably compare our experiences of love to those of its protagonists. Criticism, at its best, would warn of us of the dangers of doing this: It's only a play, and look what happened to Romeo and Juliet, anyway.

Ultimately I think Adam's post carries some unexamined assumptions about "criticism." I do think criticism can perform a useful function on behalf of great, or even just good, works of literature, as long as we recognize that these assumptions are not inherent to literary criticism as it has been practiced by great critics or to criticism as it might be more efficaciously practiced in the future.

The first assumption is that literary criticism is essentially academic criticism, the kind of thing done by those belonging to a "profession" and according to the standards of that profession's "discipline." A literary critic is someone who works for a university and observes the conventions of what has become (or what once was) literary study. This is the kind of criticism engaged in, as Adam puts it elsewhere in his post, "vivisecting Ulysses. . .to try and make a relevant point." It is certainly true that for the better part of the last half-century literary criticism has essentially been subsumed to the prerogatives of the academy (for reasons that seemed good ones at the time), but must it remain there? The "advanced" forms of academic criticism at the moment–cultural studies, critical theory in its most politicized version–have almost nothing to do with literature, so this would be an especially good time to reclaim literature on behalf of a literary criticism that rejects both the conversion of criticism into sociology and the practice of "vivisection."

The second assumption is that criticism is primarily evaluative. Whereas Adam finds that it is with the lesser books, "those that you laugh at because they're so bad" that he "can find a compelling essay" to write, he is hard put to write about the books he loves because, by my reading of his remarks, he would simply want to describe them, better yet, just tell other people to read them. But a form of literary criticism could be developed to do both of these things. Describing a work of literature and what seem to be its aesthetic ambitions is not as straightforward as it might seem, and many good books and poems have suffered from the inability of critics and reviewers to fairly and accurately give readers an account of what reading them might be like. And criticism that ultimately convinces readers to give a particular book a try, but perhaps also provides perspective or information that makes reading it more rewarding, would be in my opinion criticism that redeems the very potential of literary criticism.

Unfortunately, there's very little criticism to be found these days that doesn't proceed according to at least one of these assumptions. Academic criticism has, to be sure, performed vivisection on a body of work that was still living, although now is indeed nearly dead. "General interest" criticism, even as practiced by intelligent and informed critics who don't accept the first assumption, is almost entirely evaluative, usually in ways that limit readers' ability to comprehend the range of possibilities available to writers of fiction and poetry and that foreground the critic's own superior sensibilities–not just superior to those of the larger mob of readers but to the writers whose work is being evaluated. Valuable criticism of worthwhile and accomplished works of literature could be written, but it would first of all have to arise from the conviction that literature itself is valuable, and would in addition have to be open to the myriad ways in which works of literature are and can be created.
Updike Redux

June 14, 2004

The second set of stories in John Updike's The Early Stories is a more miscellaneous grouping, united only very loosely through their characters' shared circumstance of being ""Out in the World," as this section's title has it. Whereas the first section, "Olinger Stories," (a discussion of which can be found here) is worth reading as a whole because of its portrayal of Olinger (a fictionalized version of Updike's home town), the second can probably be read selectively, focusing on the better stories and skipping over the less substantial. I will try to identify what seem to me to be the better stories, and perhaps suggest how these stories might be read within the context of Updike's then developing career as a writer.

The characters in this group of stories, most of them still recognizably some transformed version of Updike himself (or at least of Updike and his experiences taken as representative of certain kind of postwar American, an aspirant to the educated middle class), are "out in the world" as students, as recent college graduates, as husbands starting families, or in some way getting an idea (in at least one case, not getting it) of what the world "out there" is really like. Like the Olinger stories, these stories were all written between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s, and if one were to judge by these first two sections of The Early Stories, it would seem that Updike set out to be a writer who would chronicle the coming-of-age and the subsequent experiences of that generation of Americans who were born before World War II but came to maturity and adulthood in the immediate postwar period. In Updike's case this also entails chronicling the journey from small-town America and its assumptions to those of the more "wordly" suburbs and cities.

Some of the stories are slight and, in my opinion, readers could safely pass on them: "The Kid's Whistling,""Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow," A Trillion Feet of Gas," Dear Alexandros, and "At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie" would fit into this category. "The Lucid Eye in Silver Town" and "His Finest Hour" are worth reading, but are ultimately fairly recognizable kinds of maturation stories (the latter confronting its married protagonists with the reality of domestic violence just next door) that, after promising beginnings, more or less disappoint by the end. One group of stories–"Dentistry and Doubt," "A Madman," "Still Life," and "Home"–portray their student protagonist's visit to and return from England, but only the last, which concerns this character's return and the beginnings of his readjustment to "home" and career, could really be classified as among Updike's more compelling stories.

This leaves "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth," "The Christian Roommates,""The Doctor's Wife," and "Ace in the Hole" as the cream of this crop. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" depicts an episode between a young male schoolteacher (still somewhat earnest and unsuspecting) and what he assumes to be a female student with a crush on him. (She is caught conspicuously passing a note that expresses her love for him.) It turns out, however, that this girl has been buttering up all of her teachers, and it is the protagonist who indeed winds up crushed. After discovering her strategem, "Mr. Prosser took his coat from the locker and shrugged it on. He placed his hat upon his head. He fitted his rubbers over his shoes, pinching his fingers painfully, and lifted his umbrella off the hook. He thought of opening it right there in the vacant hall, as a kind of joke on himself and decided not to. The girl had been almost crying; he was sure of that." (This latter is a repetition of the same thought he had had upon confronting the girl with the note) Many of Updike's stories end with these epiphanic moments of truth, but this is a story in which that moment is particularly affecting.

"The Christian Roommates" is finally less effective as a story, but is remarkable for the current of barely concealed homoeroticism that runs through it. Otherwise a more or less conventional story of "the college experience," it presents probably the most naive and sheltered character in this group of stories, Orson Ziegler, who "came straight to Harvard from the small South Dakota town where his father was the doctor," confronted with his assigned roommate, "Hub" Palamountain, an unconventional fellow of a sort Orson certainly has never before encountered. Orson comes to hate Hub, but the hate clearly enough hides a simultaneous attraction. It all comes to a climax, so to speak, when Hub steals a parking meter and brings it into their room. Orson is scandalized and the two of them finally have it out: "Orson came up behind him and got him around the neck with one arm. Hub's body stiffened. . . Orson experienced sensations of being lifted, of flying, and of lying on the floor. . .He scrambled to his feet and went for Hub again, rigid with anger and yet, in his heart, happily relaxed. . .Hub's body was tough and quick and satisfying to grip. . .Orson felt a blow as his coccyx hit the wood; yet even through the pain he perceived, gazing into the heart of this forced marriage, that Hub was being as gentle with him as he could be. . .He renewed the attack and again enjoyed the tense defensive skill that made Hub's body a kind of warp in space through which his own body, after a blissful instant of contention, was converted to the supine position. . . ." By today's wised-up standards, this scene has a barely suppressed hilarity about it, but Updike's language is clear enough to conclude he knew what he was doing.

"The Doctor's Wife" in a sense takes us farthest "out in the world," to an out-of-the-way Caribbean island where a young American family is vacationing. The doctor and his wife are permanently resident caucasians, and the story impressively enough depicts some of the racial tensions being felt during the early 60's. (As, in its way, does "The Christian Roommates.") The doctor's wife has come to have the attitude of the white colonialist toward the black inhabitants of the island ("Unnatural, childish ingratitude. You just don't know how unnatural these people are"), and at the end of the story she tells the American husband that the locals think his own wife's "good tan" means she is "part Negro." The husband is left brooding on his own reaction to this: "She [his wife] would have wanted him to say something like yes, her great-grandfather picked cotton in Alabama, in America these things are taken for granted, we have no problem. But he saw, like something living glimpsed in a liquid volume, that his imaginary scenarios depended upon, could only live within, a vast unconscious white pride; he and the doctor's wife were in this together."

The most noteworthy story among the "Out in the World" group may be "Ace in the Hole," and not just because it is clearly a precursor to Rabbit, Run. It is an interesting and accomplished story in its own right, perhaps the most successful of those stories (so far) in which Updike tries to move beyond his own experiences and create a protagonist who is not merely a fictional persona. Like Rabbit Angstrom, Ace is a former high school basketball hero no longer in the spotlight. But unlike Rabbit, Ace Anderson seems only obliquely aware that his glory has irretrievably faded, and although he clearly is just drifting through his life as depicted in the story, he can't quite let go of the happy-go-lucky attitude of his basketball days. The story ends with a confrontation between Ace and his wife (Eve) that doesn't bode well for the future, reinforcing the uneasiness Ace has been feeling of late: "He wasn't hungry; his stomach was tight. It used to be like that when he walked to the gymnasium alone in the dark before a game. . .But once he was inside, the locker room would be bright and hot, and the other guys would be there, laughing and towel-slapping, and the tight feeling would leave. Now there were whole days when it didn't leave."

What Ace Anderson lacks is Rabbit's self-awareness that his life has become tragic in an archetypally American way. Having made it to the top so early (and under such unavoidably consticted circumstances), Rabbit isn't likely to have another chance, and his horror at this prospect is what gives Rabbit, Run its sense of urgency and inescapable failure. Ace is less astute than Rabbit, and it's unlikely that as written his character could have developed the alertness to his situation that made it possible for Rabbit to be the center of a full-length novel. But the very qualities that distinguish Ace from Rabbit still illuminate for us the realities of American life Updike seems to be exploring in both "Ace in the Hole" and Rabbit, Run. In the one case a growing sense of quiet desperation that will probably remain muted, in the other a prolonged outcry against the conditions that create that desperation in the first place.
Sclerotic and Irrelevant

June 12, 2004

In the Times Literary Supplement, Peter Brooks (author of Reading for the Plot) recently wrote of the conquest of academic literary study by "theory" that "the coming of theory actually rescued the study of literature at a time when it was threatened with sclerosis and irrelevance. In particular, it brought students back to literary studies with a sense that there was something exciting going on."

There are several things wrong with this contention, although I do not myself believe that "theory" of the kind Brooks discusses (he is reviewing a book centered mostly on figures like Foucault and Derrida, the "poststructuralists") was itself necessarily a bad thing for literary study. Much of Derrida's work, for example, is perfectly compatible with the kind of "old-fashioned" literary study focused on the close reading of literature for what it as literature has to offer us, and he could not have been happy when the notion of "deconstruction" eventually became, among some alleged "followers," essentially a synonym for trashing the place.

But I do have problems with idea that the study of literature needed to be "rescued," and I do not believe that the coming of theory "brought students back," since they hadn't gone anywhere in the first place and since every account I have read about the level of student interest in English or comparative literature or Romance Languages suggests that enrollment in such departments has only declined since the advent of theory. If Brooks has the graduate study of literature in mind, then bringing students into a field where finding a job upon completing one's study, no matter how "exciting" it may have been, has now become difficult approaching impossible performs a service for no one.

More to the point: literary study may or may not have become "sclerotic" pre-theory, but so what? If this means that literature professors were just teaching students how to approach works of literature–defined sclerotically as poetry, fiction, and drama–so they might read them more profitably, and were trying to point them to the kinds of novels or poems that might be worth their attention, then they were doing their jobs as efficiently as it could be done. Unless you think that studying literature in this way just isn't peppy and glowing enough and requires a dose of "excitement" in order to show it off in meetings with the Dean. But this is just another step in the process of making "literature itself" secondary to other more suitably "advanced" methods of academic inquiry, methods that have now become themselves the subjects of academic literary study, leaving literature far behind.

This yoking of literature to other purposes and other causes is equally typical of more traditional humanists who wouldn't otherwise countenance notions about the "subversive" quality of critical inquiry. In a recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 4, 2004), Vartan Gregorian pleads for a return of liberal arts instruction to higher education. In many ways, this essay is just the usual blather one would expect from a certain kind of college president, pitched at such a high level of generality that he really never even bothers to define what he means by "liberal arts." It's pretty clear nevertheless that included in Gregorian's liberal arts curriculum would be the study of literature, perhaps even as its centerpiece. But what Gregorian wants is "to integrate learning and provide balance," to "help our students acquire their own identity," to "provide a context for technical training" so students may "understand the general nature and structure of our society, the role of the university, or the importance of values." All worthy goals, I suppose, and if you wanted to include works of literature in an ethics class, or a psychology class, or a political science class, this might be a perfectly sound strategy. But if you set up whole departments devoted to literary study, and then charge them with helping to "understand the general nature and structure of our society," you're using extremely indirect means to arrive at results better pursued in other ways. And you're implicitly demeaning what literature might really do for individual readers quite apart from your social engineering scheme–although perhaps that's really the point.

Probably what bothers me most about Peter Brooks's claims about theory is the appeal to the potential "irrelevance" of literary study without it. I'm not even sure Brooks himself means to suggest that literature ought to be "relevant," given that immediately following the passage I've quoted he goes on to say that theory "was something that might in the long run turn out to be unsubstantiable, and perhaps unusable–but then most literary undergraduates aren't planning to build a career on how they have read either Milton or Foucault." Thus Brooks acknowledges that the study of literature is indeed irrelevant in the context in which universities generally function. A few students are in college or graduate school just to learn, literally to become "learned," less ignorant, but everyone will acknowledge they're a vast minority. Even fewer would like to become more skilled readers of literature. But this is really the only authentic consituency literary study has. Everything else is just defensiveness and empty rhetoric. Literature can't be relevant to civic responsibility and reform agendas except in defying them.

To be defiantly irrelevant. How subversive is that?
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.

Essays in Criticism

Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction