The Reading Experience

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.'"
Confessions of an Aesthete

April 19, 2004

The latest burst of debate about the relationship between politics and art is wending its way around the literary blogosphere. (Perhaps the locus of the current debate is this post by Mark Sarvas–itself a well-expressed bit of reflection.) This is of course a highly charged subject, one that frequently applies a heavy jolt to those who touch it, since it quickly gets to the core assumptions many readers bring to the act of reading works of literature. Better in most cases not to question these assumptions too strongly, rather than risk embroiling literature in the very dispute over politics that I, for one, always want to avoid in the first place.

In the present round of commentary, however, one claim in particular requires some response. Scribbling Woman makes the following assertion:

. . .all writing — all human endeavour — is political in one way or another. It could not be anything but, as we are all political creatures who exist in the world. The absolute disdain for politics of the aesthete is in itself a political choice. Of course, to a large extent when we are talking about artistic products, given our culture's continuing Romantic hangover, the inherent politics are not always overt or even conscious. But that does not mean that they are not there.

My criticism is not directed primarily at the author of this passage. Unfortunately, she repeats what has become a mantra chanted incessantly by many current academic critics, an invocation of "politics" so all-encompassing as to make any disagreement with it almost literally impossible (anything you say is "political") and so final in its judgment as to safely keep anyone who wishes to study literature rather than its political exploitation decidedly in his/her marginal place.

I'm perfectly willing to accept the label of "aesthete," although I know it's meant to be a term of horrible abuse. Speaking as one of these aberrant creatures, I will state categorically that my expectation that art will be "aesthetic" has no political content at all. None. It's not a disdain for politics, just a recognition that politics and aesthetics aren't the same thing. I have political views about politics and aesthetic views about art. You can mix the two if you wish, but don't tell me that in refusing to do so I'm doing it anyway. And I don't have any political views that are covert or unconscious. They're all out in the open (in the appropriate forum), and I happen to feel strongly about them. The assertion that they must be unconscious is just Freudianism smuggled into politics.

This totalizing view of the scope of the political is itself finally just a choice, a preference for politics over art, a way of maintaining that politics is the most important subject with which a serious person ought to occupy him/herself. It's a view that's now pandemic in the academy. If we are all "political creatures who exist in the world," are we not also "sociological creatures," "historical creatures," "cultural creatures," "economic creatures"? Such abstractions are so cosmically extended as to be meaningless. And to say that politics is everything, of course, is ultimately to say that politics is nothing in particular. If by saying everyone is "political" we mean everyone has his/her interests all well and good, but this is not the way "political" is used in the argument that all art is political art.

Frequently various "thinkers" are here invoked as authorities who have supposedly "established" that politics pervades everything (Marx or Baudrillard or Althusser or whomever). I've read these writers too, and to the extent they say that art is always political they don't know what they're talking about. They trivialize art and politics alike, and collapsing the distinction between the two is actually a way of avoiding thinking. (Although it's often the uninformed distortions of these thinkers that are really to blame.) No matter how many such thinkers are piled atop one another, the belief that "all writing is political in one way or another" is just a way of justifying one's own preference for politics and polemics over literature. I understand why some people prefer these things (although most can't seem to understand why I don't), but simply repeating the formula that all writing is political doesn't make it so.

There's nothing "Romantic" about my status as as aesthete. I think in fact that it's quite pragmatic. There's art and there's politics. "Political art" does exist, but it's not all art. Sometimes when we read works of literature we have an "aesthetic" experience, sometimes we can limit this experience to whatever political implications we can squeeze out of it. I think this latter is a very impoverished concept of reading, but I would. To say finally that all human endeavor is political (including the effort to create art) would be a pretty sad commentary on human potential, if it were true.
The Critic as Hanging Judge

April 5, 2004

It would seem that a significant number of people whose opinions I otherwise respect, including not a few literary webloggers, have great admiration for the British literary critic James Wood. (Or at least they profess to admire him–one could wonder whether some of those who have extolled his critical virtues aren't trying to stave off some of the critical barbs he might at some point hurl in their direction.) I would like to say I share the high opinion of Wood so many others have expressed, since in some ways he does continue a tradition of informed, wide-ranging literary criticism not tied to the careerist norms of the academy that desperately needs to be revived. But I just can't. Ultimately his reviews and essay-reviews are detrimental not just to the cause of literary criticism but to the continued appreciation of the possibilities of literature itself.

Last year in a review of Wood's novel The Book Against God, Wyatt Mason made some telling points against Wood as a critic, some of them similar to those I will make here, so I would recommend reading Mason's essay for an even more extensive discussion of the topic. However, I am going to use Wood's most recent review, of John Le Carre's Absolute Friends in The New Republic, to illustrate my particular problems with Wood's criticism. I should say that I am neither a fan nor a detractor of Le Carre. I have read a few of his books and found them entertaining enough. I would not be among those Wood takes after for elevating Le Carre above his merits to the status of "literary" writer. Perhaps thus I am even better able to see the limitations of Wood's approach to both criticism and literature than if he were attacking a writer I greatly esteem.

I will also say that I do not question Wood's intelligence, his preparation to be a critic, or his motives. I think he believes his approach to literature is the correct approach. (And unlike Dale Peck, Wood's harsh judgments are usually backed up with reasons, even reasons that have something to do with the book at hand.) I simply think that this approach exemplifies what's finally wrong with the kind of literary criticism he attempts to perpetuate.

It would indeed be easy to maintain that Wood sees literature as a kind of religion-substitute, a charge Wood has himself acknowledged and to an extent accepted. But it's not so much questions of religious belief or "philosophy" more generally that Wood wants to find addressed in works of "serious" fiction. It's that he wants to take literature seriously in the same way the devoted take their religion. Just as they often believe their religious tradition gets things right in a particular way, Wood wants to believe there's one true path to writing a serious novel, one which makes all other paths not just more full of obstacles but actual roads to perdition. Wood's attacks on writers like Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon can be seen as motivated by this larger belief.

In the case of Le Carre, his first sin is to have written genre fiction. Although Wood tries not to condemn the whole enterprise outright in this review, it's clear enough he has no use for it. We can't even say that in reading Le Carre we learn anything about spying because, Wood declares, "much of Le Carre's detail was entirely invented, including the terminology, and there were old intelligence hands who complained that his picture of the service, while intended as an anti-James Bond demystification, was itself a species of romance." Not only is Le Carre a genre writer, then, but he writes. . .fiction.

Next Wood goes after LeCarre's reputed "political complexity" (which of course Wood thinks is anything but):

. . .In fact, instead of analyzing the political complexities of the Cold War, Le Carre's books narrate the functional complexities of the political complexities; that is, they show us, mainly, that the two espionage systems often worked in matching ways. This insight then locks the mazy plots in place, essentially closing the door on further analysis: the two-sided mirror dazzles further curiosity. And so the form of the books tends toward a self-cancelling amnesty, each side a little shabbier at the end of the story than it was at the start.

I sure hope I am not alone in finding this passage mostly gibberish. To be fair, it has probably come out this way because Wood is trying to hide, as he does through most of the review, what he really finds objectionable about Le Carre: he doesn't like the man's politics, especially the "anti-American" turn his politics has seemed to take of late.

We are told that Le Carre "can write very well," even in this latest book, which Wood clearly despises. However, after quoting a passage of ostensibly good writing, and even explaining why some might find it good, Wood eventually concludes that Le Carre's "prose announces, in effect: 'here is what the world looks like according to the conventions of realism.' It is a civilized style, but nonetheless a slickness unto death." Apparently even what Le Carre actually does well he doesn't do well at all. (Or, he writes well very badly.)

Which brings us to the real nub of the issue, the failing of Le Carre's that is most debilitating, the overriding purpose novels must embody that Le Carre doesn't understand. In his essay, Wyatt Mason observes that ""How somebody felt about something' is precisely what Wood wants from a novel; reaching into character is what he expects. Consciousness is the ultimate freedom, and its honest representation in fiction is what draws us into sympathy with the created, not with its creator. This is the hallmark of the work of those authors. . .for whom Wood has the greatest regard." Of Le Carre Wood says: [His] character portraits are not themselves complex, merely complex relative to the rolled thinness of most characters in contemporary thrillers." Le Carre's characters, like those of Hemingway and Graham Greene, "are, paradoxically, alert but always blocking the ratiocinative consequences of their alertness. Such characters are not minds but just voyeurs of their own obscurities."

Frankly this is just a very pompous way of saying that Le Carre–and by extension almost all of the writers who come up short in Wood's estimation–does not employ the technique of "psychological realism," the revelation of consciousness that seems to be for Wood the most important legacy of the modernist fiction writers. To this extent Wood is stuck in the early twentieth century, taking what was indeed at the time an innovation in the presentation of character and a step beyond the realism of earlier writers as the final word about what novels ought properly to do. Clearly it fulfills his own needs as a reader of fiction, filling in whatever void was left when he abandoned religion, but to write this out as a prescription for what novels must be like for everyone else seems hardly tenable, just as other, differing prescriptions (for "plot," for "clarity," even for "originality") shrinkwrap fiction into easily storable commodities but don't allow for the flexibility of the form.

Wood is sometimes compared to the academic critic F.R. Leavis, and indeed Wood's prose does have some of the smug lecture hall certainty and harsh evaluative tone of Leavis at his worst. But there's very little in Wood's writing that conveys an enjoyment of literature (sometimes a failure of Leavis's as well), even of those literary artists he appears to admire. Furthermore, Wood's own criticism is very seldom enjoyable–it creates the tense atmosphere suitable to a hanging judge. (Note how seldom he reviews writers he actually does admire–and certainly very few current writers, unless they're to be sent to the gallows–preferring the already indicted malefactors.)

Wood also shares something with the "moral critics" such as the poet-critic Yvor Winters or Lionel Trilling (or even Irving Howe.) With all of them, literature is a rather sour and sober affair, the critic its grave taskmaster. I will take Wood's word for it that Absolute Friends is spoiled by the inserted political rhetoric he describes, as fiction usually is by such propagandizing. But one can't help but feel that by the end of the review Wood has converted what should be an aesthetic flaw into a flaw of the author's own character ("this humanly implausible and ideologically enraged novel"–enraged at George W. Bush). If Le Carre is not exactly judged to be a bad man, he is judged to be a "bad writer" solely because he has ideas different than James Wood's, ideas about the world and about fiction. To this extent, Wood shows himself to be a remarkably intolerant critic, just as "ideological" in his way as Le Carre is accused of being.

If this is the remaining legacy of the "great tradition" of British literary criticism (or American, for that matter), better that we should refuse it.
Not Really About Shakespeare

March 31, 2004

In the March issue of First Things, R.V. Young, an English professor at North Carolina State University, seeks to praise Shakespeare, and not to bury him. Here is the first paragraph of his essay:

More than any other writer, Shakespeare embodies the distinctive principles of Western Civilization. Men and women of the West are drawn to Shakespeare because his plays and poems continue to express their aspirations, to articulate their concerns, and to confront the tensions and contradictions in the Western vision itself. He is admired not as an uncritical encomiast of his own culture and society, but rather as an exemplum of the spirit—both critical and conservative—that is among the West’s most enduring legacies to the world. It is, therefore, no surprise that academic literary critics, who owe their very existence to Shakespeare and other great writers, have cast doubt upon Shakespeare’s exalted position at exactly the moment in history when the societies of the West have become most anxious about their own integrity and probity.

Now, I think Shakespeare is indeed the greatest writer in the English language (and I have read all of the plays). I also think the passage just quoted is garbage.

When I come upon essays like this one, ostensibly defending Shakespeare from all of his many supposed detractors, I also come as close as I ever do to feeling sympathy for the academic critics who have rejected "bardolatry" and used Shakespeare as one more opportunity to "depreciate the merely literary" (Sven Birkerts) and politicize literary study to advance their own agendas. These critics assume (wrongly, in lots of cases), that this sort of Western-Civ rah-rah was really the goal of academic literary study all along and have understandably enough recoiled from it.

But of course to uniformly boo and hiss at "the West" is no better than to always celebrate its wonders, and my sympathy is short-lived.

What I really seem to hear when reading passages like the one above is the sound of Shakespeare himself frantic to free himself from the grave if only to seek out the likes of Professor Young and throttle him. Shakespeare of course had no interest in the "distinctive principles of Western Civilization" (wouldn't have known what they were), did not in the least express something called the "Western vision," was certainly no "encomiast of his culture and society" (far from it), and sought to exemplify nothing but the possibilities of the forms in which he wrote and whatever personal "vision" of human existence he had managed to acquire. (And fortunately he did possess a vision that has seemed to express the aspirations and concerns of many of the rest of us–the one point on which I agree with Professor Young.)

But in Professor Young's "vision" Shakespeare's plays and poems disappear in favor of an "encomium" on behalf of Western Civilization, Shakespeare becomes a Great Figure to admire and exalt (but not to read), an opportunity for the Professor himself to posture and declaim. And Shakespeare is not the only writer to fall victim to this sort of reactionary praise ("reactionary" in the literal sense of the term, as it is a reaction to the perceived loss of prestige among the "great" Western writers). Sadly, writers from Milton and Swift to Emerson and Twain are accorded this dubious defense, their obvious enough human limitations in terms of racial attitudes or class solidarity not simply acknowledged or explained but erased. Young, for example, struggles mightily in his essay to demonstrate there's really nothing at all wrong with Shakespeare's depictions of Shylock and Othello, that in fact he really portrays Jews and "Moors" as stand-up guys. I would agree that there's great amibivalence in the portrayal of these characters, and that the plays in which they appear ought not to be merely dismissed, but there's no point in denying that some of the ambivalence is unattractive, to say the least.

Sometimes people come to have questions about even great writers not because they despise Western Civilization but because every new generation of readers has to be convinced anew that the work of these writers actually stands up to present scrutiny. (The sort of indoctrination Professor Young seems implicitly to favor never works.) "Criticism" of the kind this First Things essay represents doesn't help to resolve such questions because it ultimately discourages serious reading in the first place. An acquiescent and unequivocal esteem will do. It might still be presumed that previous generations of academic critics all essentially engaged in this kind of empty rhetorical gesturing, but most of them did not. "Close reading" was an approach to literature that precisely encouraged readers to take literature seriously, but, at its best, it attempted to show these readers a more resourceful way to do this.

Ordinarily, First Things has a relatively limited audience, one that is presumably already receptive to the message R.V. Young has come to bring them. But the essay was featured at Arts & Letters Daily, so it might have reached others who could be tempted to believe it. The more broadly such misguided and unhelpful messages manage to get purveyed, the more important it becomes to intercept them.
Too Much Writing

March 24, 2004

The Association of Writing Programs (AWP) puts out a review/journal called The Writer's Chronicle (sadly, not available online), similar in many ways to Poets and Writers. As does Poets and Writers, Writer's Chronicle always steers pretty close to the mainstream, dispensing "advice" and "analysis" that seldom strays from the conventional and currently accepted.

Rarely, however, has WC printed an essay as vapid and uninformed as "Translating Ideas: What Scientists Can Teach Fiction Writers About Metaphor," written by Debra Fitzgerald and featured in the new issue of the journal (March/April 2004). The essence of her argument in favor of "scientific" uses of metaphor can perhaps be gleaned from this analysis rather late in the essay. First she quotes a passage from Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn:

The cat walked in from the main room and stood on my outstretched thighs and began kneading them with its front paws, half-retracted claws engaging the material to make a pocka-pocka-pocka sound. . .The cat was black and white with a Hitler moustache, and when it finally noticed I had a face it squeezed its eyes at me. . .The big Nazi cat went on raking up thread-loops from my trousers, seemingly intent on single-handedly reinventing Velcro. . .its uneven cackling purr. [Ellipses inserted by Fitzgerald.]

Fitzgerald's critique:

There is a clearly defined object here–the cat–but there are three different images attached to it. The big Nazi cat with the Hitler moustache and cackling purr intent on reinventing Velcro conjures up simultaneous images of an ethnic cleanser, a witch, and, I don't know, an inventor. While these images are fun and evocative, they are a dead-end. They do not heighten our understanding of the idea of this cat. It's a passage full of nonfunctional, decorative metaphors, a good example of writing that is all style, no substance.

This reading of the passage is so ham-handed that I can't entirely be sure I know what it's getting at, but the point seems to be that Lethem (it would be more accurate to say Lionel Essrog, the narrator), is not sufficiently concerned with giving us a clearly "functional" description of the cat, one that gives us an "idea" of the cat. (Why that would be necessary is not explained.) It's apparently not enough that Lethem would use the cat as an opportunity to create a word-portrait, a verbal construction, one that might go beyond the merely "functional" to help us see the "clearly defined object" in a less clearly defined, but perhaps more insightful way. Or, more importantly, that he would use this scene and Essrog's perception of the cat to help us more fully understand Essrog's own, I don't know, peculiar relationship to the world (keeping in mind his own Tourette's-induced verbal habits.)

I once taught a course in contemporary American fiction in which during our discussion of John Updike's Rabbit Run a student bitterly complained about Updike's generous (my word) prose style. In another class I had recently heard a similar complaint about Madame Bovary. (All that description.) I was led to say to the Updike-fatigued student–perhaps more harshly than I should have–that I found it strange to be accusing a writer of engaging in "too much writing." (The rest of the class did find it amusing.)

I have to say that I think this is what Debra Fitzgerald's argument boils down too. Too many writers doing too much damn writing. Too much style, and not enough substance. This is not the occasion for going into a lengthy disquisition about the interaction of style and substance, about the way in which style creates its own substance, etc., etc. Suffice it to say that Fitzgerald wants writers to follow scientists in providing strictly functional metaphors that help to explain and instruct, and that I think this couldn't be a more unfortunate and almost willfully obtuse understanding of what serious fiction–literature–ought to be about. Certainly there are plenty of writers who take the merely "decorative" as the index of good writing, but Lethem isn't one of them, and neither is Updike.

(And frankly I often find the use of these "functional" metaphors by scientists and science writers to be annoying and implicitly condescending, a way of dumbing down science for the rest of us yokels.)

What finally disturbs me the most about "Translating Ideas" is precisely that it is published by Writer's Chronicle and at least implicitly has its imprimatur. I can't be certain about the editors' intentions in publishing the essay, but I have to assume they at least in part found it compelling and worth passing along to its readers. And since a very large part of its readership consists of student and aspiring writers, that this is the advice they get from an influential "professional" organization to me borders on scandalous. If the powers that be in Creative Writing programs hope to turn out writers who follow this advice, Heaven help us. Literature has already been shown the door in departments of literary study; is writing to be expelled from Creative Writing?
The Poet-Critic

March 22, 2004

T.S. Eliot once wrote that in his view "Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author in composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism; and. . .that some creative writers are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior." (Eliot means not that such writers should be judged superior because they manifest this critical faculty, but that it is the possession of this faculty that has made them "superior" in the first place.)

Eliot is himself perhaps the most distinguished example, in the twentieth century at least, of the "poet-critic," the "creative" writer who also feels the need to write literary criticism, as if the creative act of writing poetry is not quite finished unless it is accompanied by some critical analysis that goes beyond the kind he ascribes here to the writer performing such analysis on his own work. (It should be said that Eliot has been accused, with some justification, of writing criticism that ultimately works to confirm the kind of poetry he wrote, even when ostensibly writing about other poets. This does not make his criticism less valuable to us now, however.) There have been many such poet-critics, especially in British literature: Dryden, Johnson, Pope, Coleridge, later Eliot, Empson, Auden, and others. In American literature such "poet-critics" have often enough been novelists: Henry James, Ralph Ellison, Mary McCarthy, among living writers Norman Mailer, Gilbert Sorrentino, John Updike, very recently writers like Jonatham Lethem and Michael Chabon.

Some think that "creative writers" ought to refrain from writing criticism, especially in the form of reviewing their colleagues and potential competitors. However, Eliots's statement explains why poet-critics ought to be encouraged to engage in literary criticism: they know best of all what is really required of poetry and fiction for it to be aesthetically and intellectually credible, "crafted" in all the best senses of the term. In fact, in today's literary climate, where few literary critics who both respect literature and wish to write about it in generally accessible terms are actually to be found (or have a forum in which to do it), the criticism of practicing writers might be the most important available source of sound critical judgment.

In my lifetime, the most distinguished "poet-critic" has been, in my view, William H. Gass. Although he has published at least two works of fiction, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and The Tunnel, that stand up to the work of any of his contemporaries, he has also produced half a dozen collections of critical essays that will surely endure as among the best criticism to appear in the second half of the twentieth century. The day his "Collected Essays" appears will be a notable one in American literary history.

Although he is a fiction writer and not a poet, his criticism may in fact be the best example to be found of criticism as poetry. In this he exemplifies Eliot's claim that the critical and the creative are, in the best writers, inextricable. This is the beginning of the first essay in Gass's first critical book:

So much of philosophy is fiction. Dreams, doubts, fears, ambitions, ecstasies. . .if philosophy were a stream, they would stock it like fishes. Although fiction, in the manner of its making, is pure philosophy, no novelist has created a more dashing hero than the handsome Absolute, or conceived more dramatic extractions–the soul's escape from the body, for instance, or the will's from cause. And how thin and unlaced the forms of Finnegans Wake are beside any of the Critiques, how sunlit Joyce's darkness, how few his parallels, how loose his correspondences. With what emotion do we watch the flight of the Alone to the Alone, or discover that "der Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist," or read that in a state of nature the life of man is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' . . .

Novelist and philsopher are both obsessed with language, and make themselves up out of concepts. Both, in a way, create worlds. Worlds? But the worlds of the novelist, I hear you say, do not exist. Indeed. As for that–they exist more often than the philosophers'. Then, too–how seldom does it seem to matter. Who honestly cares? They are divine games. Both play at gods as others play at bowls; for there is frequently more reality in fairy tales than in these magical constructions of the mind, works equally of thought and energy and will, which rise up into sense and feeling, as to life, acts of pure abstraction, passes logical, and intuitions both securely empty and as fitted for passage as time.

Few writers of criticism are able to combine such a compelling and frankly "superior" prose with correspondingly apposite critical insights as does William Gass. To this extent, I would not hold him up as a model. Gass's example, as well as Eliot's, does illustrate, however, that the "poet" and the "critic" can coexist comfortably. More importantly, poets and novelists might learn from them to less reluctantly admit that the creative work to some extent requires the "frightful toil" of the critical. At the same time, critics, perhaps especially critics who are not themselves "creative" writers, ought more often to acknowledge that this toil is only compounded in the labor performed by poets and novelists. It is not a simple matter of unsightly "expression" being confronted with the "handsome Absolute" of critical judgment.
Realism

March 9, 2004

In a previous post I referred to a discussion in the weblog s1ngularities:criticism in which John Updike was quoted as saying that in the U.S. "realism is kind of our thing." The quote was in reference to Donald Barthleme and his supposed decline in influence, but I've looked up the Salon interview in question (it's actually quite an old one, going back to the pubication of In the Beauty of the Lilies) and Updike had actually mentioned both Barthelme and John Barth, remarking, in full, that "There are fads in critical fashion, but a writer at his peril strays too far from realism. Especially in this country, where realism is kind of our thing. Writing that gives you the real texture of how things look and how people acted. At least there's something there beyond your self and your own wits to cling to, a certain selflessness amid the terrible egoism of a writer."

Updike doesn't necessarily speak contemptuously of either Barthleme or Barth, and if they were "out of fashion" in 1996, they are indeed even more so now. However, Updike's assertion that "realism is kind of our thing" is simply wrong. It can't stand up to an analysis of American literary history in any way.

I'm not sure that Updike's own fiction validates a statement like this one, in fact. Certainly his work represents an effort to give "the real texture of how things look and how people acted," but a number of his books defy the label "realism" in any meaningful sense of the term: The Centaur, The Coup, The Witches of Eastwick, Brazil, S, most recently Toward the End of Time. Furthermore, Updike's sinuous prose style is probably not what most people have in mind when they think of "realistic" storytelling.

Much of the most important American fiction fits more comfortably into the the category of "romance" than realism. (The term goes back to the medieval narrative form, and doesn't have any connection to the modern "romance novel.") Hawthorne famously set out the terms in which the romance is to be understood in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables: "When a writer calls his work a Romance. . .he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material"; this "latitude" allows him to present the "truth" of human experience "under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation" and to "manage his atmospherical medulm as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture."

Going back to the beginnings of American fiction, "romance" would thus encompass the work of Charles Brockden Brown (often identified as the first important American novelist), Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, much of Twain, the later Henry James, Faulkner, Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, Malamud, much of the later Roth, and, in my opinion, almost all of the writers called "postmodern." Of the "great" American writers, only Crane, the earlier James, Edith Wharton, Dreiser, Steinbeck and Hemingway could plausibly be called "realists." (And there are those who think the latter would more aptly be called a "symbolist" rather than a realist.) Currently the followers of Raymond Carver or Richard Yates might fit the description.

Perhaps it's just that the term "realism" gets tossed around much too lightly, used to signal other assumptions about what fiction ought to do: tell dramatic stories, create sympathetic characters, depict current social conditions, reflect "life" as most readers would recognize it. If so, I can't believe Updike actually thinks that this kind of "realism" is either fiction's "proper" mode or that most readers actually do prefer fiction that really, truly, tells the "truth" about human existence or the common lot of most people in our beloved U.S. of A. In my somewhat jaded opinion, most readers still want "escapist" literature–to the extent they want literature at all–that nevertheless doesn't stray too far from ordinary experience. American "literary" writers have really never provided them with this, so the test of how many people are reading a given writer at a certain time is wholly irrelevant.

Having said all this, I like much realist fiction perfectly well. Flaubert is a great writer, as is Chekhov, as is James, as is, in a much different way, Thomas Hardy. If the complaint is that current writers don't write like these folks, well, few writers could. If it's that writers like Bartheleme or Barth don't write conventional narratives with "real" people and identifiable "themes," then it's really a complaint that serious fiction doesn't remain static and hidebound. This is not Updike's complaint, but it's one I hear often enough.

For a much fuller treatment of the romance tradition I've sketched out here, see Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition, one of the books I listed in a previous post ("On Reserve") as among the ten critical works with which all serious readers should be familiar. That such books have fallen into obscurity is itself perhaps one of the reasons many people misunderstand what the history of American literature actually shows us–and thus what many contemporary writers are actually up to.

Essays in Criticism

Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction