The Reading Experience

The Dustbin of Literary History

The proposition that academic literary criticism has by now become a discipline that is no longer much interested in the literary seems to me indisputable. If "theory" initially  diverted the critic's attention away from literature as a subject sufficient to itself as a "field" of inquiry,  the modes of critical discourse that have followed up on theory's demotion of literature to a supporting role in their pursuit of more ambitious goals-e.g., the "new" historicism, cultural studies, ecocriticsm--have further reconfigured academic criticism into an endeavor that, while applying ostensibly separate methods, has converged around a broadly political project--a project that is pretty conspicuously "progressive" in its presumptions.

Concerns about this trajectory in literary study have been expressed since at least the 1980s, but resistance has been largely symbolic and carried out mostly in alarmist books and mass media reports and perhaps reached a crescendo in the early 1990s. Since then, the movement toward politically-motivated criticism and scholarship has only accelerated, and at present there is decidedly little opposition to it from within academic criticism, aside from someone like Rita Felski and the "post-critique movement--and Felski mostly objects to the methodological dominance of political critique, not to the underlying politics. There has been more abundant criticism of the direction literary studies has taken--or at least of the supposed baneful influence of an over-politicized English department--in the popular media, but probably the most palpable sign that something like a reckoning with the consequences of the political transformation of literary study (at least in the United States) is the increasing willingness of legislatures, governing boards, and University Presidents to withdraw support from departments engaged in literary studies (from humanities programs in general), resulting in the closure of such programs in some cases, and a diminution in their size in others. For the first time since the creation of modern literary studies in the early 20th century, the study of literature in the university may actually be at some real peril. 

As a kind of implicit response to these rising voices of dissatisfaction--but more specifically as a response to the efforts of Felski)--Bruce Robbins has written what he calls a "polemical introduction" to the subject of politically-motivated literary criticism, titled simply Criticism and Politics. Robbins wants both to trace the development of such criticism and to defend it. The two dominant influences in Robbins's analysis are the various "liberationist" movements of the 1960s and the work of Michel Foucault. Robbins essentially identifies post-60s academics as the inheritors of the civil rights/women's rights/gay rights struggles of the 60s, translated into the various preoccupations these academics have pursued in scholarly work, while an in-common methodological inspiration is Foucault's critique of the circulation of power in Western culture. Robbins's "polemic" could be said to begin in the limitations of Foucault's approach: Foucault teaches a deep-seated skepticism about the presence and exercise of power, ultimately ruling out any overarching political commitments beyond its diagnosis, since all such efforts would themselves be assertions of power. Robbins doesn't caution about an excess of commitment to politics in academic criticism--he wants it to go even farther, becoming more comfortable with the role of "governing," not just analysis. Only when criticism has led to action can its full promise be fulfilled.

If the notion that university English departments might one day comprise the ruling party in Congress seems too ludicrous even for dwellers in the ivory tower to entertain, I should note that for the most part when Robbins refers to the "literature professor" in this book, he does not have in mind the tweedy gentleman extolling the virtues of Shakespeare. The literature professor now does not really profess literature at all, but continues to go by the name for its institutional status and prestige. The model of the critic Robbins evokes is Matthew Arnold, but Arnold is a critic of culture, not of literature per se, and, despite Arnold's reputation for upholding cultural values the modern academy has come to reject, it is Arnold's attitude to the culture of his time--that it was going in the wrong direction--and his conception of the task of criticism--to oppose "the way things are" in a wayward society--that implicitly motivate academic criticism in the years since the 60s. Robbins casts Foucault as an heir of sorts, "the closest thing the last half century produced to a Matthew Arnold," but whose skepticism toward culture is even more pronounced. 

Literary criticism, then, has become almost entirely cultural criticism. At best, strategies associated with the close reading of literary works might be applied to cultural objects in general, but to think of academic criticism as literary criticism in its more traditional guise is so anachronistic that most critics would not even begin to think of their work in such terms. This is not at all a recent development, but it is one that Robbins takes for granted in his reflections on the political work of criticism. However, as someone who believes in the hoary old notion that literature is literature and politics is politics, that the two mix uneasily at best,  I can't really begrudge Robbins his political program: Literature actually has precious little to do with this program, and if he and others want academic criticism to be a discipline engaged in cultural critique with the ultimate goal of political transformation, I suppose he is welcome to it. I confess I find his belief that academic critics might thus accomplish "governance' (except of its own practices) more or less delusional, but "criticism" in this form has become so divorced from anything that interests me or that I recognize as literary criticism, its ultimate fate leaves me indifferent.

For me, a book like Criticism and Politics leaves lingering in its wake the summary question of why institutional support for the systematic study of literature ultimately failed so utterly to maintain itself. Certainly it showed itself to be vulnerable to shifts in critical fashion. It was arguably New Criticism that solidified the establishment of literary study as part of the curriculum of American universities (although other methods also developed in parallel with New Criticism), but when challenges to the purportedly "disinterested" qualities of these methods began to be heard (presumably from the post-60s insurgents Robbins examines), soon enough a seemingly perpetual series of methods competing for the role of acceptable substitutes ensued, each more determined than the last to avoid the stigma of appearing to be "merely literary" in their assumptions, leading to the current situation in which the literary has finally and emphatically been eliminated altogether. Perhaps academic literary study was always destined to evolve in this way, given the expectations of scholarly "progress" implicit in the academic system, but the ritual scapegoating of New Criticism for its methodological sins has persisted now for so long that it seems to suggest a true antipathy for literature except insofar as it can be enlisted for the scholar's own more "serious" agenda--politics, of course, being the most serious subject of all in our present dispensation.

Presumably the idea of progress in literary study came to seem in conflict with the more "conservative" justifications for the literary curriculum offered by some (but not all) of its 20th century proponents. Such advocates spoke of "preserving" a heritage or "appreciating" a tradition, and while such notions surely did influence the establishment of the "coverage" model in departments of English--attaining the knowledge offered by literary study would require some familiarity with all periods of English and American literature--the methods of teaching these courses always varied according to the predilections of the professors involved, not all of them so focused on reinforcing tradition. The overall effect of this older curriculum was no doubt largely to "conserve" a coherent program of literary study, but so too were all the subsequent efforts to reorganize and transform this curriculum in order to meet changing expectations. Today's literary curriculum is surely not simply random and arbitrary. The difference is that the older one cohered around an informal but mostly understood definition of literature, while the present one coheres around an informal but mostly understood conception of social relevance.

I myself chose to major in English because I wanted to acquire this knowledge of literature. I wanted to read all the books I could that might conceivably be part of literature, although of course I knew that this was something that could not be done simply while I was in college but would be a task that would take a lifetime to complete. If I were entering college today I would not make such a choice. Even if I wanted to read all the books that might conceivably be related to social justice (the option I would now be given), I would see no reason to major in English or literary study to do it. Perhaps my younger self is no longer very representative of the aspirations of artistically or intellectually-inclined college students. But I have to suspect there still are youthful readers who want to discover worthy literary works of both the past and present, works that expand horizons and enlarge experience that have value in themselves as literary art rather than their utility as a means to arrive at the correct political analysis. Of course, these readers do not finally need a program of academic course offerings to accomplish this goal. Indeed, such readers likely need to resort to this sort of self-directed even now,  and the gloomy prospects for the future of literary study in the university at all may mean that a self-education in literature will be the only option available.

Something like this seems to me the only plausible future for literary criticism as well. There are academic critics who review new fiction in newspaper book reviews or general-interest publications, but this sort of criticism remains separate from the work that is rewarded by the academy, which, if not explicitly political in the mode described by Robbins, must still remain in the broader realm of cultural criticism that confers disciplinary credibility. Otherwise, already literary criticism exists only in nonacademic venues, although this does not mean either that most book reviews are engaged in rigorous analysis, or that all book reviewers focus their efforts on assessing the work at hand for its own sake. Many book critics are also more interested in cultural assessment than aesthetic analysis, or at least make their evaluation of a particular book contingent on its value in representing tendencies in culture. Still, this approach mostly rises from the assumption that the literary value of a work, particularly a work of fiction, is in fact to be found in its ability to register the complexities of social and cultural life, not the outright denial of the literary as the subject of critical attention. I am myself not much in sympathy with this mode of critical writing, but if a rejuvenation of literature-centered literary criticism is to occur--and I'm not predicting such a thing--it will have to happen among critics in the popular press, who at least still do not wholly subsume the literary to the project of political transformation.

The metamorphosis of academic literary criticism into the instrument for this political transformation is ultimately regrettable to me not just because my primary commitment as reader and critic is to literature and the critical explication of literature but also because my own political orientation is not that far removed from the aspirations motivating academic criticism as they are delineated in Robbin's account--although I do believe that the appropriate means of political engagement is through direct participation in political actions and not indirectly through politicized scholarship. This is not to suggest that scholarly work should never be political, but the current situation essentially mandates that it should all be political. Similarly, I would not deny the legitimacy of literary works that engage with political themes or express a political commitment. Political questions are as relevant to human reality as any other social influences, and when a skilled writer represents them with the complexity they deserve, of course criticism must attend to the writer's political themes or ideas, but without losing sight of the interplay of these ideas with form or style--the qualities of a piece of writing that make it literary in the first place.

For all of his focus in on the political mission of academic criticism, Bruce Robbins discusses virtually no works of literature that are political in this way. To be sure, his book is a "polemic" about politics and criticism, not politics and literature more broadly, but this omission only reinforces how thoroughly literary study has dislodged literature as its disciplinary subject and academic criticism has ceased to approach the objects of its attention as discreet expressions whose features the critic attempts to make more fully apprehensible. It's no longer just that critics have substituted various works of popular art and media for literary works, but that finally it doesn't really matter what form of expression is involved: the goal of criticism now is to valorize itself, to assert itself as the most essential discursive activity. For Robbins, it is on the verge of seeking real power, "having an impact beyond the world of scholarship" and helping to achieve "solidarity." What is the mere analysis and appreciation of literature when we can instead become a vanguard of liberation?

With the reelection of Donald Trump, doubtless this ambition seems even more quixotic. Academics, in fact, are never likely to be more distant from political power than they will be during this presidency, and the powers that be promise to increase that distance by marginalizing universities even more emphatically, while university administrations will probably only accelerate their defunding and deemphasizing of humanities programs in particular. Of course, academic critics might just redouble their efforts to fashion a newly militant form of academic discourse, but it is hard to figure out exactly what constituency they would be addressing. (The election results suggest that a significant portion of the constituency on whose behalf they assumed they were working actually shifted toward Trump.) This would seem to be the time to recommend some sort of return to the bygone days when academic critics focused their efforts more squarely on studying "literature itself," but this hardly seems a realistic goal--even in the long term, it seems improbable that academics would regain the enthusiasm for simply teaching literature that characterized the discipline's earliest years. The availability of the internet as a medium for engaging in critical discourse, and possibly finding an audience, holds out opportunities for cultivating and sustaining a form of literary criticism not subject to the whims of academic fashion and the regulations of a disciplinary establishment, a path that some readers and critics still drawn to literature might follow. But the era in which perceptions of Literature are dominated by its residence in the university curriculum is about to be consigned to the dustbin of literary history, a history that long preceded it and that will continue after its demise.

Repetition Compulsion

It has been 60 years and more since the first writers we have now come to identify as postmodernists began to make their presence known in American literary culture. The term, "postmodern," has been applied narrowly, to classify this particular group of writers, and more broadly, to name an entire "era" that is said to entail a distinctive political and philosophical orientation to knowledge and perception separating it from the "modern" assumptions that preceded it. Over the last 10 to 20 years, its application to literature has been very loose indeed, as a way of characterizing any work of fiction that breaks from convention or seems at all "experimental." In the process, the term, and more generally the concept of innovative fiction, has become less tied to the original set of writers whose work prompted the coining of the term--Coover, Barth, Barthelme, etc.-- and used more simply to separate non-realist works of fiction from mainstream "literary fiction."

This broader assimilation of the postmodern as a discernible tendency in contemporary fiction has, however, entailed, perhaps paradoxically, a diminished awareness of the specific practices and identifiable achievements of the original postmodernists and their immediate successors--a loss of historical context. Thus work by writers of otherwise conventional fiction that departs even modestly from the most conservative expectations of the form is reflexively applauded for its daring and originality, even though whatever strategy or device has prompted such praise is actually at best a modification of a an already existing approach, at times just plain derivative of a move made more persuasively by an earlier, genuinely experimental writer. The notion that unconventional approaches to form or style deserve critical respect (when done well) presently seems to be a common enough assumption in most literary commentary, but this apparently is not accompanied by a recognition of the development of such strategies through the efforts of adventurous writers of the relatively recent past.

Even when some writers are ostensibly challenging conventional forms and language more radically, beyond the enhancements of realism for which many putatively experimental devices tend to be employed, these writers themselves often simply recapitulate strategies devised by writers in the previous generation of postmodernists, or, indeed, essentially reiterate an existing form created by an earlier writer. Frequently enough we can surmise that such borrowing is to some degree a tribute to the precursor, an acknowledgment that the formal strategy invoked is a compelling substitute for conventional strategies. It is not per se an invalid approach, since arguably one of the objectives of experimental fiction might be to make available alternatives to conventional storytelling that other writers might additionally develop, but again such alert distinctions are not likely to be made in a literary-media culture that discounts historical perspective and is impatient with nuanced judgments--if more adventurous fiction manages to attract any attention at all.

Although occasionally I come across a review of a new work of adventurous fiction that draws my interest, most of the time I become aware of potentially interesting adventurous/experimental books when I am offered review copies by authors, author's agent, publicist, or publisher. This is how I came to read Ben Segal's Tunnels (published by Scism Press), a work whose experimental intentions are immediately revealed when first looking inside, where we find on each page a grid of squares (nine, in rows of 3), each containing a snippet of prose, rather than a continuous prose text. A second book by an author with whom I was previously unfamiliar, Fictions, by Ashley Honeysett, did in fact become known to me through a review, in an online journal known for its focus on independent presses. This work announces in its title that it is likely to be unconventional, but one has to read it for a while before recognizing the sort of alternative strategy it is pursuing. If it announces its "experimental" intent less obviously than Tunnels, it serves just as readily to illustrate a dilemma adventurous writers can face when attempting to escape the constraints imposed by the accepted formal conventions of literary fiction.

Segal's formal device locates his book among those works generally categorized as prose fiction but that attempt to redirect the reader's attention away from "prose" as traditionally defined and toward a more expansive conception of "text" as something that exploits the material features "book" and "printed page." This approach can be seen in such works as William Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (1971), as well as, most audaciously, Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It (both 1976), but the most direct expression of the goals animating the approach can be found in Federman's essay, "Surfiction--Four Propositions in the Form of an Introduction," the first entry in Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, which Federman edited and published in 1975. The future of fiction, Federman maintains, will reject "the traditional, conventional, fixed, and boring method of reading a book" linearly and consecutively in favor of "innovations in the writing itself--in the typography and topology of [the] writing." These innovations should replace "grammatical syntax with 'paginal' syntax that grants to the reader a new "freedom" that will "give the reader an element of choice (active choice) in the ordering of the discourse and the discovery of its meaning." 

Although this is not the only kind of innovation inwhat Federman calls "surfiction"--which covers writers such as Beckett, Borges, and Calvino, as well as American postmodernists such as Barth, Barthelme, and Sukenick--it is most conspicuous in the experiments of Federman's own early fiction (as anyone who has even dipped into Double or Nothing or Take It or Leave It, their "texts" roaming the page in endless configurations and unruly fonts, knows) and is arguably the most radical of his four "propositions." The implicit appeal to visual effects in the notion of "paginal syntax" was exploited further by such successors as Steve Tomasula and Mark Danielewski (Tomasula more effectively), and various other "illuminated" novels incorporate visual elements as well. Tunnels could be said to feature a prominent visual device in its use of the grid whose divisions govern the page, although its uniform appearance on each page eventually becomes less noticeable in and of itself as a purely visual object of attention. Instead, this novel follows Federman's proposal by giving the reader a role in assembling the text, literally a "choice in the ordering of the discourse."

The novel does not offer a single narrative but rather a succession of narratives, often using the same character names but occurring at different times, although all of them have a common setting, in, or around, or associated with a complex of tunnels somewhere in the California desert. The grids thus themselves represent a metaphorical version of the tunnels, which the reader is invited to navigate according to his/her own inclination: "There is no 'correct' order of reading," we are told in a brief preface, and we are advised to approach the text in a way that "treats the space of the book as something to be explored rather than exhaustively or systematically read." The reader's discovery of the work's "topology," to again invoke Federman, finds the "space" of reading to be as meandering as the tunnels the characters inhabit, the intent being, presumably, to collapse the distinction between the "content" the novel presents and its form as thoroughly as possible, but also to assert the space of the page itself as the medium of fiction, not the organization of language into compelling prose per se.

The strategy animating Tunnels is probably closer to the method employed by Julio Cortazar in his novel Hopscotch than to the experiments in typography and illustration in Federman or Tomasula. It asserts a certain aleatoric procedure into the discursive organization of the novel, so that the reader is allowed to create a narrative structure of his/her own. For such a strategy to work, the narrative (in this case, multiple interlocking narratives) should, it would seem, have some intrinsic interest (if not necessarily the sort of interest usually attributed to traditional stories). Unfortunately the truncated narratives in Tunnels, no matter how one might order them, are not long enough to be compelling in themselves, nor are the characters given the sort of development that might make them a consistent source of the reader's concern, while the language in most of the narrative fragments distributed in the squares is predominately functional and expository, advancing the briefly  unfolding and often crisscrossing storylines without much stylistic embellishment. This leaves the governing formal mechanism and its appeal to active reading as the dominant object of the reader's attention, and the novel struggles to sustain that attention.

Eventually this narrowing of the reading experience threatens to make the novel's structural device seem too much like a gimmick rather than an attempt to adapt and extend an experimental approach to freshly conceived purposes. I believe that Segal's ambition is indeed to extend and not merely to repeat already existing strategies for challenging conventional thinking about fiction, but the realization of the strategy in Tunnels, given the length and the constricted focus of the novel does leave the reader (this reader, at least) with the impression that the "freedom" granted to order the discourse leads mostly to a repetition of a formal conceit carried out more audaciously and propounded more cogently by various predecessors. Certainly, even an effort to break convention that comes up short on originality but is clearly enough sincere is a welcome alternative to the usual run of literary fiction that settles for the currently approved practices or sacrifices aesthetic complexity in the name of "saying something." Still, if an objective of adventurous, experimental fiction is to extend the formal potential of fiction itself beyond its current confines into yet unmapped spaces of aesthetic possibility, Tunnels unfortunately doesn't quite venture that far.

Something similar could be said of Honeysett's Fictions. In this case, the writer offers a version of metafiction, literally fiction about a writer writing fiction--as it turns out, writing the book we are reading. It is tempting to regard the book also as a memoir of sorts, since the narrator does indeed seem to be the author, not a separately named "character" who is a thinly disguised version of her, but the narrative so insistently focuses on the effort to write stories that the author's identity as living person collapses into her role as writer and the distinction between life and work becomes irrelevant as well. However much we learn about the various issues in the author's life (especially the problems experienced by her sister), the emphasis is finally on the process of storytelling, understood as the struggle of one writer to produce stories that can be published and meet with the approval of readers. While most of those stories about which we are told or allowed to sample do not seem particularly experimental, the chronicle of her progress in becoming a successful writer does finally result in a book that evokes one of the most identifiable experimental strategies in American fiction of the 1960s and 70s.

But Fictions is no Lost in the Funhouse or Universal Baseball Association. The book echoes the approach modeled in such classic works of metafiction, but its ambitions are much more modest. It isn't attempting to challenge preconceptions of the required transparency of fictional narrative--but it couldn't, since that challenge was issued decades ago and has been regularly renewed in the interim--but is appropriating the gestures associated with that challenge in order to suggest the metafictional, while also endeavoring to smooth the edges of self-reflexivity as an unconventional device so it might blend into something closer to autofiction. This latter mode could actually be taken as the offspring of metafiction, but at the core of most autofiction is a mistaken assumption about the intention behind the work of such writers as Barth or Coover, or at least about the presumed message readers should take from their work.

The self-reflexivity of metafiction deliberately disrupted the inherent presumption that in approaching a work of fiction the  reader will suspend disbelief and accept the artificial reality invoked by the work for the duration of the reading experience. It made the reader aware of the artifice, as well as the implicit presence of the writer in creating it. The autofictionists for the most part seem to have interpreted this acknowledgment of the writer behind the text not as the first step in granting fiction a greater freedom in formal arrangement beyond the requirements of traditional narrative, but as a move made to focus more attention on the writer as the ultimate subject of the work. Thus autofiction's emphasis on the author's life as source of interest, often examined in great detail. While this approach often does call into question the distinction between fiction and life, it does this by playing coy with details that may indeed be untransformed autobiography but presenting them in a work still  labeled "fiction." It has become memoir for writers who would rather forego the stricter conventions of that form. 

I would still call Fictions metafiction rather than autofiction, but, while the book is not without interest and does not lack craft, the craft is applied to help forge an alternate path to realism, with just enough roaming into the discursive underbrush along the way to complicate the journey. The book reminds us occasionally of the more adventurous route once followed by its more experimental forerunners, but ultimately doesn't really want to go there. In this way, the innovations of metafiction really have become more established, available to a writer like Honeysett to achieve goals different from those that motivated the original innovators. Fictions is a lively enough account of one writer's perseverance in achieving artistic success, but its rebellion against conventional narrative is muted, evoking an avant-garde practice only as a way of being more punctilious in depicting the protagonist's concrete circumstances. Similarly, Tunnels enlists a disruptive strategy because, paradoxically, it helps to bring a kind of mimetic authenticity to the depiction of both character and setting.

As someone who tries to keep up with the the publication of new experimental fiction, I would observe that a majority of the works that appear are something like these two books, adapting existing techniques and approaches associated with postmodern or experimental fiction either for purposes that turn out to be surprisingly conventional or that simply repeat what has come before. There are certainly writers who authentically try to extend the boundaries limiting what "experimental" might mean, writers like Gabriel Blackwell, Christian TeBordo, or Evan Dara, whose formal and stylistic challenges to both conventional and pseudo-adventurous fiction are both credible and refreshing. But while these writers have their fervent admirers (me, for one), they are also writers without a high profile in mainstream literary culture. Perhaps this is the way it should be, but previous innovative writers such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme did arguably change literary culture, for however fleeting a time. Literary culture at present may just be impermeable to this kind of change. Literature itself may have to cling to the margins, if it survives at all.

New Supplemental Site

I have created a new site that features the reviews of adventurous, unconventional fiction, mostly from independent presses, that I have written/published over the past decade or so. This site will basically replace the Substack review publication I have been offering over the past few years, which I have decided to discontinue.

Sorrentino Book

I have a relatively short book on the work of Gilbert Sorrentino partially completed. It is intended as a critical introduction, and is currently around 22,000 words. I would anticipate it to finally be about 50,000 words. I have been working on it for quite a long time, since it appeals to a small audience (fans of the writer and of experimental fiction) and completing it hasn't seemed urgent. I assume there are no publishers who would be interested in such a book, so I have simply made it available on pdf and online. I am currently working on another chapter, but finishing the book still doesn't seem urgent, unless some niche publisher or other might indeed be interested in it. If such a publisher happens upon this blog, you could either dm me here or email at my blog address. Suffice it say I don't expect any responses to this, but it seemed worth a try.

To Blog or to Newsletter?

In addition to The Reading Experience, I have also been producing a Substack publication,  Unbeaten Paths, that usually consists of multiple book reviews of “adventurous fiction” and appears every 2-3 months. Until now I have retained both of these publications as complementary endeavors, largely because the blog has been around for a long time (20 years) and still attracts some visitors, so I have been reluctant to give it up.

I have considered converting the blog to a Substack newsletter (it covers a wider range of literary subjects, whereas the newsletter form accommodates motley book reviews somewhat awkwardly and so far has garnered a limited audience). I am hesitant to do so because, again, of the blog’s longevity and because I still also think the blog form has value. On the other hand, I would like to see if I could get a broader audience than currently on Substack.

The present owner of Twitter has basically ruined it as a means to steer people to external publications (not just Substack), another reason to move wholly to the newsletter format. I may indeed convert TRE to newsletter form, while keeping the blog and continuing to post here as well. I may go over completely to newsletter. Things could stay the same, but this is the choice that likely produces maximum frustration. The decline of blogs, the growing degradation of social media as a method of engagement, and the uncertainty that still obtains with a medium such as Substack, as well as the drying-up of outside online and print venues open to reviews and literary criticism (at least for me) have seemingly converged to make the prospects for the kind of criticism I write wobbly indeed.

New issue of Unbeaten Paths:

Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries

ON SUBSTACK

• Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction

 

 

 

The Fictional Self

Sheila Heti is known as a writer who seems to blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in the three novels that brought her to prominence: How Should a Person Be? (2012), Motherhood (2018), and Pure Colour (2022). This strategy underpins the mode that has commonly come to be known  "autofiction," and of the writers associated with it, Heti is arguably the exemplary figure. Yet while the term itself is now pervasive in discussions of fiction that at one time might simply have been called "autobiographical," Heti's novels don't altogether seem autobiographical if we expect such fiction to not merely borrow various details from the author’s life but to provide a credible depiction of a character’s actions and circumstances that we could imagine also derives from the author's life--in other words, we expect an autobiographical fiction to be essentially realistic. Heti's novels don't really meet this expectation.

The first two certainly seem to meet the initial criterion, as the characters are preoccupied with issues that Heti has verified were also her own concerns. (In How Should a Person Be?, the character is even named "Sheila," although we still could (and should) question how absolute is the connection between author and character). In both novels, form is loosened up considerably in an apparent effort to accommodate the protagonists' ruminative way of thinking, and emphasize the drift of their experiences as they ponder the ramifications of the questions they are asking and the answers they seek. But in each novel there is a kind of willful naivete or a kind of deliberate ingenuousness shared by the protagonists that makes these characters more caricature than lifelike representation--not quite surreal, but exaggerated versions of a woman seeking to discover the key to becoming an authentic self or sort through the benefits and risks of motherhood. This seems deliberate, not a deficiency of craft.

If anything, Pure Colour departs even more obviously from the protocols of realism, veering into outright fantasy--at one point in the novel both the protagonist and her deceased father find themselves trapped inside the leaves of a tree! This novel may draw on the author's youthful experiences--in particular Heti's relationship with her own father--but they are thoroughly transformed into fiction, indeed a patently artificial kind of fiction. But if Pure Colour is more overt in its divergence from reality, all three of these novels strike me as pretty unmistakably fictions, however much the critical response to them emphasized the "auto" qualities, thus establishing them as among the integral works in the category of autofiction, a category that has grown to encompass practically any work of fiction that leaves the impression it originates in the author's life circumstances. At some point it becomes difficult to see how any work of ostensible fiction doesn't somehow derive from the writer's experiences in some way, but since no other trend or movement in current fiction has arisen to capture critics' fancy, "autofiction" has expanded sufficiently to become the defining literary mode of the early twenty-first century. 

Alphabetical Diaries (2024) would seem to take autofiction away from fiction altogether into pure personal confession. Literally a selection from Heti's diaries over a ten-year period, the book actually turns out to be less directly personal in its effect and more artificial in its form than the three previous novels. It seems to present more personal revelations than the novels, but these revelations ultimately seem instead attached to a fictional character the diaries have created rather than to Sheila Heti, the putative author of the book, whose method of constructing the book has rendered her youthful self in a discontinuous, fragmented way that decreases identification of that self with the autobiographical Heti and refocuses our attention on those patterns, repetitions, and mannerisms we more commonly track in our apprehension of invented characters. One suspects that Heti herself experiences a certain distance from this version of herself recorded in the diaries, and the randomly ordered method with which the diary entries have been assembled contributes to a kind of distance between reader and protagonist that most memoir writers likely would not seek to create.

Instead of presenting the diary in the normally expected chronological order (or perhaps some thematic adaptation of chronology or narrative), Heti has arranged them alphabetically according to the first letter of each sentence. This eliminates ordinary coherence, but the technique provides an alternative sort of coherence based, again, on repetition and the appearance of patterns that might not be as readily perceptible in a conventionally published journal. Some words are lengthily repeated--the sentences beginning with "I" and "We," for example, occur for multiple pages in a row--and certain names as well are not only repeated serially but reoccur frequently throughout the book. ("Lars" seems to reoccur the most.) At other times the juxtaposed entries are humorous in their unexpected resonances, either through some unintentional connection or in some cases what seems to be directly contradictory statements. ("The book feels arid and empty to me now, like a shriveled arm that can't raise itself to shake your hand, a withered arm and hand. The book is beautiful and practically perfect.") As a whole, the entries don't always seem to express a unified personality: partly this is the effect of mixing and matching utterances composed at different times (at a relatively formative stage of developing a personality), but such variety in sensibility surely also means to suggest that a human identify isn't so easily integrated.

Thus while the choice to reconfigure the diary according to a pre-set scheme initially does seem random, the experience of reading Alphabetical Diaries conveys the strong impression of deliberation and design. Where How Should a Person Be or Motherhood seem casually organized, without overarching structure, Alphabetical Diaries is all structure Form in those two novels threatens to undermine the feel of "life";  this book really only exists because of its form. Not only is it doubtful we would have that much interest in Heti's diaries if they were published "straight" (she has herself said in an interview that she would have never considered publishing them this way), aside from the salacious details provided about her sex life, the "content" of Alphabetical Diaries really has minimal interest. Witnessing a writer anguishing over her romantic relationships or worrying about the progress of her work neither contributes much to our understanding of the progress of love, nor are we given enough detail about what worries her about the work (what she is working on is always just referred to as "the book") for our appreciation of Heti's literary achievement to be enhanced. The significance of Alphabetical Diaries lies entirely in its status as an unorthodox (and arguably innovative) exercise in form.

Heti previously enlisted chance as a compositional method in Motherhood, in which the narrator/protagonist flips a coin in a form of divination to get answers about the pressing questions she is asking about herself and her life. But here the strategy doesn't provide the novel itself with its organizing principle but assists the protagonist in her process of self-examination, otherwise offered as a more or less conventional first-person account. It acts to reinforce the protagonist's uncertainties and ambivalence, contributing in this case to the unity of characterization--the protagonist is defined by her doubts and her prolonged inability to finally resolve the dilemma she believes she faces. The question-and-answer sessions with the coins (or whatever metaphysical presence it is that speaks through the coins) make concrete the novel's questioning of the expectations society places on women (and often enough women place on themselves, as the protagonist increasingly discovers) that is the ultimate unifying element in Motherhood, although this larger thematic exploration requires a plausibly consistent--in this case consistent in regarding her questions as important--protagonist character exploring her conflicted feelings.

It is surely not the accuracy of the answers she gets in response to the coin flips (which are only "yes" or "no"), but the salience of the questions she poses that help this protagonist (and us) to judge the wisdom of her ultimate decision. Nevertheless, one suspects that Heti wasn't entirely confined to actual coin flips in determining the answers, that she massaged the results somewhat for the occasional surprise or other dramatic effect. Likewise, it seems more than likely that some entries in Alphabetical Diaries were trimmed away or alphabetical order fudged a bit in arranging the contents of the diaries for extra continuity or for humor's sake. Both books involve artifice, even though Motherhood (as well as How Should a Person Be?) ostensibly tries to conceal it while Alphabetical Diaries announces it. Moreover, although Motherhood presents without equivocation as a novel, it pretty clearly mirrors Heti's own experience struggling with the question of motherhood, and for all practical purposes could pass for autobiography. Superficially, at least, Alphabetical Diaries presents as nonfiction, but in its aesthetic order ("aesthetic" partly be design and partly contingent) finally it fulfills the expectations we have of works of fiction as much as, or even more than those of memoir or autobiography, or, indeed, those now associated with autofiction.

In this way, I myself found Alphabetical Diaries more satisfying than any of her previous books, even if in general I don't much care for memoir and don't read writers' diaries. The book refurbishes the concept of "creative non-fiction," although it is almost certainly not what the creators of that label had in mind. I am tempted to say it is not nonfiction at all but in fact a novel, if we understand the distinction between a novel and a work of nonfiction to be less the presence of a made-up story vs. the recording of literal truth and more a question of the attention paid to form and prose style, not just as the means for addressing a subject but for making the reader aware of language as the writer's medium, the ultimate subject of any writing we want to call "literary." However, I recognize that there is nothing inherent to nonfiction that precludes this approach to literary language, so perhaps Alphabetical Diaries could be regarded as that "hybrid" of fiction and nonfiction that does manage to inhabit a space precisely in-between the two modes, justified in claiming admittance to both.

If this is the direction in which "autofiction" has taken Sheila Heti, toward a genuine contestation of the separate domains assigned to fiction and nonfiction, and Alphabetical Diaries stands as its current, albeit provisional, expression (more to come), then I think it is legitimate to consider her an "experimental" writer. "Autofiction," given the presently broad applications of the term, would seem to be at the limits of its utility as a critical tool in explicating a practice in contemporary fiction. It has become so conflated simply with "fiction that draws on the author's real-life experiences" that it is essentially meaningless--the concept has become so capacious that it potentially includes everything that isn't avowedly fantastic. The relative popularity of autofiction (to the extent  "literary fiction" can be popular) is no doubt attributable mainly to its exploitation by publishers as a publishing gimmick, as well as its compatibility with the congruent rise in popularity of creative nonfiction and social media. (These may not be mutually exclusive explanations.) Still, the idea of autofiction might have developed into a weightier endeavor if it had explicitly sought to undermine long-established beliefs about the connections between "life" and literary "art": Isn't fiction always already a reflection of "life?" To what extent is life governed by fictions in the first place? How much does form itself always distort life? Such questions are perhaps implicit in the early works to be designated "autofiction," but most critical discourse about it, at least, has stopped asking them.

Alphabetical Diaries makes me think that Sheila Heti had them in mind when she wrote How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood  and wants to renew them with this latest book. Her interest in employing nonconventional literary devices is clear enough in all of her books, and if she no longer has much interest in producing "autofiction" (if she ever had any), it would be surprising if her subsequent work reverted to workshop narrative strategies or a regressive realism. In a literary culture that has otherwise lost interest in experimental fiction, that would be worth something.

 

Reading Culture

In her review of Lauren Oyler's No Judgment, Becca Rothfeld takes Oyler to task for including too little judgment, asserting that "her book's title is more accurate than she thinks." Although Oyler intends in her essays to defend judgment in criticism, few of them contain much of it, defined as specific analysis of the artistic works she discusses. Instead she merely displays attitude (an "edgy personality") to convey the superiority of the underlying judgments she leaves undeveloped. "Judgment," Rothfeld more than implies, is a requisite feature of criticism, and her review emphasizes the surprising lack of it in a book written by a critic who is otherwise well-known for her strong judgments (often negative) in many of the reviews she has written.

We can of course distinguish between "judgment" as assessment of quality and as cogency of insight or interpretation. Rothfeld seems to be faulting Oyler for including too little of the latter, but No Judgement is conspicuously a collection of essays (all of them written for inclusion in this book), not a selection of Oyler's reviews, in which the judgments are indeed usually expressed through relatively close attention to the work's manifest features, although among her critical writings are a number of essays less interested in appraisal of particular works than in examining a broader practice the critic has identified or a cultural phenomenon that is really the subject of the essay. The essays in No Judgement don't seem radically different from these other essays not categorizable simply as reviews, except that they are, for the most part, more directly personal, focused on Oyler's own life and circumstances. 

The essays included in Rothfeld's own recent collection of essays, All Things are Too Small, are, in fact, just as personal and discursive, although in her role as a regular staff reviewer for a major American newspaper, Rothfeld in most of her reviews both readily passes judgments  (as her review of Oyler's book itself shows) and endeavors to support them through evidence of careful reading. Finally both Rothfeld and Oyler understand criticism as the rendering of judgment, although of the two Rothfeld seems more committed to its execution in a rigorous version than Oyler. And indeed this orientation to criticism is shared by almost all general-interest reviewers (of all forms, both popular and "high" art), prompting the most widespread impression of the "critic" among most consumers of reviews as a kind of referee--a figure who pays close attention to the art activity in question to note if it has been carried out according to the rules and to signal us if there is a violation.

This is the most benign view of the critic, as an intrusive if necessary personage who is granted a certain degree of authority on artistic matters by possessing the right credentials or through force of personality and track record (which doesn't mean we can't argue vociferously if we believe the call is wrong). Some spectators, however, regard the critic with more disdain, as a purely unwelcome presence who rudely interposes him/herself between us and the objects of our admiration when the critic pronounces a negative judgment. In their willingness to express negative judgments, both Oyler and Rothfeld might certainly be vulnerable to this hostility toward the efforts of critics, but in the present critical culture both of them are rather unusual in their propensity for such judgments. Oyler in particular, as a novelist as well as a critic, should be credited for ignoring the implicit restriction on negative reviews that is generally observed by current reviewers of fiction. The blandly affirmative reviews that dominate most review spaces only reinforce the marginalization of critics by not merely trivializing the act of judgment but precluding the need for it altogether. 

In both No Judgment and All Things are Too Small, negative and positive judgments are expressed as part of larger arguments or surveys of broader phenomena, not as the goal of any individual piece--these are not collections of reviews, and few of the essays contain much extended specific analysis of a particular work or aesthetic object. (Rothfeld's "Our Entertainment was Arguing," mostly about Norman Rush's novel, Mating, with some additional discussion of His Girl Friday, is an exception.) Rothfeld's book makes an impassioned, if somewhat discontinuous argument on behalf of maximalism, in both art and life. In doing so, she criticizes minimalism in fiction, art and design, as well as the retreat from bodily pleasures represented by appeals to "mindfulness" and a resurgence of what seems like puritanism is sexual attitudes and practices. Oyler's concerns are a little more amorphous, but much of the book is taken up with critique of social media,both good and bad, including lengthy examinations of the machinations that go on at Goodreads, as well as a spirited defense of autofiction (in which category Oyler's own novel, Fake Accounts, is often counted).

Each of these authors explicate the works they do discuss amply enough for their purposes, but in both cases the essays are developed primarily through personal experience and a kind of cultural observation that bespeaks intimate familiarity with the products of popular culture (Oyler in particular through participation in social media, while Rothfeld seems less "online," more attuned to books and movies). Neither book shies away from personal revelation. Oyler wants us to know why she moved to Berlin, why she likes gossip, and where her sometimes debilitating anxiety comes from. Rothfeld freely discusses her own sexual desires and her impatience with expectations of feminine restraint, although her use of her own circumstances and experiences is more more integral as reinforcement of her book's rhetorical intentions, actually making it less purely confessional than in No Judgments, despite, for example, the provocative description of her lustful feelings about her future husband she provides in one of the essays.

But it would not really be accurate to call either No Judgment or All Things are Too Small examples of personal writing above all. Both books belong to what is now called cultural criticism, by self-identification and by a fair accounting of the subjects they address. This classification seems to fit because of the wide range of cultural objects covered (most of the essays could not properly be called "literary criticism" since works of literature are only occasionally their focus) and because ultimately each of these critics is most concerned with understanding the cultural significance of the subjects they examine, not their value as aesthetic expressions. This at first seems paradoxical given both writers' penchant for making and valorizing judgments, but the essays included in Rothfeld's book are pretty consistent with her approach elsewhere, and even Oyler's most infamous negative reviews often wander away from pure aesthetic analysis, while in other essays she is as likely to consider trends and tendencies as closely assess individual works. 

It seems to me that a preference for cultural criticism, in which books, both fiction and nonfiction, are enlisted in a superseding critique of culture, is shared by many of the most prominent American book reviewers, and not a small number of readers as well, especially readers not looking to reviews simply for recommendations or straightforward value judgments. Although such critics might explicitly identify themselves as cultural critics, as both Oyler and Rothfeld do in these two books, they are just as likely to be considered as "literary" critics taking a broader approach to analysis and interpretation than is allotted to aesthetic evaluation alone. Perhaps insisting on a distinction between these terms might be perceived as overly punctilious, a purist's attempt to maintain clear lines of demarcation between text-based literary analysis and an approach that sues the literary work as a means of tracking cultural tendencies, but I do believe these are different activities requiring a different orientation to both literature and to methods of criticism. Being clear about the substance of these differences can help in appreciating the relevance of a piece of criticism to the sort of interest one has in literary works as opposed to cultural observation, but also tells us something about the status of the literary in American culture--or at least about how that term is understood, especially among those who might be expected to uphold its ostensible value.

American culture has never exactly been regarded as especially literary. The U.S. has produced its share of important writers, but any survey of American literary history that accurately measures such writers against their prominence in culture at large would have to note that many of them were, for lengthy sketches of their careers (in some cases all of their careers), mostly unknown to their contemporaneous publics, either under-recognized or completely ignored (Melville, Dickinson, early Faulkner).The work of many of these writers challenged existing practices in both poetry and fiction, and it is questionable that it would have ever gained more attention if later critics had not made efforts to reckon with it and begin bringing it to wider readership. Many of their efforts were carried out through the auspices of the burgeoning field of academic literary study, which certainly included critics preoccupied with historical and cultural inquiry, but which eventually was dominated by those who were devoted to the explication, interpretation, and analysis of literary works as literature, seen as a subject valuable for its own sake. 

The establishment of literary study in the university also effectively created an American literary culture (and did much to endow the very term "literature" with its overtones of elevated significance), even if it was to some extent confined to those associated with or influenced by the university. The consolidation of academic authority to shape our conceptions of literature and the literary was only enhanced by the introduction of creative writing programs. Now not only was the study of "literature" and the practice of literary criticism confined almost exclusively to the academy--or at least most prominent critics came to have some connection with it--but the university would become the primary site for the production of literature as well, eventually all but excluding anyone but their graduates not only from being taken seriously as writers, but even from being published at all. In this context, "literary culture" became simply an outgrowth of the campus, an extension of academic life.

Creative writing still exercises its dominion over the direction of current poetry and literary fiction, but academic criticism has long ceased to concern itself with delineating the literary qualities of literature or accumulating knowledge about literature that isn't also or primarily knowledge about other subjects or about the nature of academic inquiry itself. At one time ti was not unusual to see some academically-employed critics doubling as general-interest critics as well, writing reviews of new books that signaled their active engagement with literature but avoided heavy-handed academic discourse. Very few such critics exist today. While it is true that some current popular reviewers have university experience, most of them abandoned academic literary study (voluntarily or involuntarily, due to the collapse of the job marked in literary study) in exchange for the chance to write about the intellectual and literary developments of the present. Becca Rothfeld is reflective of this reality: although she continues to be a candidate for a Ph.D (in philosophy), she has clearly enough opted to pursue a career in writing and editing, and her prose in All Things are Too Small shows little preoccupation with current academic discourse and its jargon.

Academic critics have virtually no influence on the reception of new work by American writers, and few readers would turn to them as the putative experts on the current state of American fiction. Yet at the same time, even though new fiction continues to be widely reviewed (as widely as the declining number of outlets for reviews allows), the kind of reviews that are available don't often rise above the formula of synopsis-summative judgment, unless  it is to incorporate memoir-ish anecdotes and excursions into cultural generalization. (Not unlike what we find in No Judgment and All Things are Too Small, although both Oyler and Rothfeld do it better than most.)

The majority of such reviews are written not by critics per se, but by other writers of fiction and poetry, who in the current critical culture have been deemed especially qualified to pass judgment on a practice they share and on which they are presumed to be experts. The consequence has been not a critical culture of deeply applied knowledge or candid assessment (although some writers indeed have and do these), but mostly of bland conformity with the predominant judgments rendered in most reviews--a kind of reflexive praise, either expressed in empty superlatives or a more reticent approval that seems calculated to preclude ruffling many feathers. Reviewers do not seem interested in contributing to a critical practice based on defensible standards and that encourages lively debate, but seem most concerned to maintain a critical establishment dedicated most of all to avoid giving offense.

In their reviewing, both Oyler and Rothfeld provide admirable exceptions to this unproductive state of affairs. On the other hand, in the two essay collections, they mostly choose not to include or expand on such reviews, or to offer essays that extend the sort of analysis used in the reviews to engage in further consideration of current literary practices, or the practice of criticism itself. Instead we have the exercises into autobiographical and cultural criticism comprising these books, which, however interesting in their own right they may be, reinforce the impression that critics and "criticism" in literary journalism have followed the lead of academic critics in forswearing the "literary" in literary criticism in favor of more socially "relevant" issues. In academic criticism these issues are like to be explicitly political, whereas in cultural criticism as practiced by Oyler and Rothfeld (and numerous others), they are broadly cultural: critics should use their powers of discernment and interpretation to "read" the landscape of popular culture. Works of art play a purely symptomatic role in this criticism, as the manifestation of cultural expressions the critic hopes to elucidate. 

Literary works are just one such symptom that might be considered, and, since works of fiction and poetry are not as transparent to this kind of inquiry as other popular forms, they are arguably less useful to the cultural critic as objects of analysis. There are literary critics covering primarily fiction and poetry who take this approach--some of them among the most recognized reviewers and critics--but the works they examine are generally those most likely to mirror the visible currents in popular culture by adhering to recognizable conventions of realism or participating in particular fashions that have caught on among writers themselves. The kind of writing that is neglected in this dispensation, putting aside poetry, which unfortunately goes neglected in the popular press almost as a matter of course, is the very most "literary" writing, that is to say, fiction that is unconventional and experimental, that concerns itself not merely with making fictional representations of reality but exploring different possible ways of creating such representations  through form and style--through questioning how writing becomes literary in the first place.

I am not suggesting that literary criticism must focus exclusively on formally adventurous fiction to be genuinely literary. But even fiction that might be only modestly experimental in its manner isn't likely to get very close attention in the most-read review outlets unless it also is perceived as culturally relevant in its matter (its "content"). Neither do I believe that cultural criticism inherently has less value than the direct examination of literary texts (even if I do myself have more interest in the latter). The development of digital and electronic technologies has certainly brought us to a point where popular culture has become more widely dispersed and more insistent. It would obviously be shortsighted to ignore it. Yet there is an important difference between attending to a phenomenon because it has clear and measurable (and often adverse) effects and doing so because that phenomenon has been deemed more worthwhile than all others. Serious writers are more worthy of consideration than lifestyle gurus, and serious criticism should reflect that. 

New Issue of Unbeaten Paths

Issue 8 of Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction is now available: 

Reviewed in this issue:

James Elkins, Weak in Comparison to Dreams (Unnamed Press)

John Madera, Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press)

Christina Tudor-Sideri, Schism Blue (Sublunary Editions)

Babak Lakghomi, South (Dundurn Press)

Gone South

On the surface, Babak Lakghomi's South takes on the characteristic features of conventional allegory. Predominantly emphasizing narrative, it tells the story of a quasi-innocent protagonist (innocent in his understanding of the true dangers lurking in the world he inhabits) who undertakes a journey (in this case, to the "south") that, should he successfully complete it, will bring him good fortune (since the protagonist is a writer, the reward will be publication that will presumably bring more financial stability and help heal his troubled marriage). The novel's allegorical framework is reinforced by the cast of characters and the way they are portrayed: in the protagonist's first-person account, only his wife is given a proper name (Tara), while he is himself referred to simply as "B." All of the other characters are identified by their relationship to B. and their function in his story--"the Editor," "the Publisher," "the Assistant Cook,"-- or are described only vaguely--"the man with the deflated face." Finally, the novel's pared-back style de-emphasizes extended sensory description or other lyrical flourishes and focuses our attention resolutely on what happens, even when what is happening seems hallucinatory or surreal.

Ultimately we indeed might read South as broadly allegorical, a story about one man's confrontation with a reality more precarious than he had imagined, but it in fact winds up undermining the fundamental mechanism of allegorical narrative. A classic allegory is a narrative that proceeds on dual levels: the manifest, literal level on which the directly depicted events take place, and an impalpable, symbolic level of secondary, augmented meaning to which the first level alludes, but does not articulate. In this sort of allegory (as in, say, Pilgrim's Progress or some of the short stories of Hawthorne), that secondary level is charged with specific, relatively fixed meaning, although such meaning must be filtered through a reader's act of interpretation. But in South, the meaning is finally indeterminate, especially to the protagonist whose experience the narrative relates.

B. is a mostly unsuccessful writer whose most recent effort, an "essay about the extinction of painted storks," has failed to  be published, although he has also written a book about his father that is being considered by the Publisher. As the novel begins, he has been given an assignment by the Editor to visit an oil rig in the South and report on labor unrest reputed to be occurring there. B. is not entirely sure why he has been given the assignment (and by the end of the novel, we're not sure, either), and when he arrives at the rig, he discovers that although the powers that be have been informed of his task and are prepared to allow him access, no one, including the workers supposedly threatening to strike, welcomes his presence. He receives no cooperation, except from his bunkmate, the \Assistant Cook, a veteran rig worker who provides him witb mostly general information about the Company, owners of the rig, and about the history of the rig's operation. He is also unable to communicate directly with anyone outside the rig, compelled to instead write brief notes to Tara and the Editor that are then relayed by the Secretary through Company email. 

Gradually B.'s situation degrades from mere non-cooperation to more actively sinister actions taken against him, presumably at the behest of a white-haired man with whom B. meets several times and who seems to be the man in charge (at least on the rig). B. is held in increasing isolation, and seems also to be administered certain mind-numbing and mind-altering drugs. Most likely, B.'s increasing paranoia is an effect of these drugs, although it certainly seems to be the case that someone in the power structure is definitely after him--but by this time B. has also become an unavoidably unreliable narrator, so it becomes all but impossible for us to come to any definitive conclusion about what is actually happening. Eventually B. is able to escape the rig with the help of a woman he has managed to befriend, although it turns out she has also been an agent of the Company. Whether her assistance in enabling B to swim from the rig to a nearby island is a sincere gesture of kindness to B. or is still part of her collaboration with the Company is something neither B. nor we can decide, but B. does finally manage to get back home (to the City), where we next find him being tended by Tara.

B.'s experiences on the oil rig are prefaced by his initial account of driving to the south, in which he stops to witness a ceremony performed by locals, apparently an exorcism of wind spirits. Being haunted by the wind becomes a recurring motif  in the novel, broaching the possibility that B.'s dilemma might involve such a haunting, a fate that might, as well, have afflicted his father, a poet and activist who disappeared when B. was a small boy. (Excerpts from the father's dream journal are provided at intervals during B's narration.) The man with the white hair strongly suggests that his interest in B. is as much an interest in his father's activity as in B.'s own, which further suggests that the line between the Company and the government is thin indeed. Exactly what B.'s father might have done to warrant the government's concern remains unspecified (it is suggested that among his reputed offences could have been that he was a homosexual), and it is additionally unclear whether its interest in B. himself extends beyond the information he might provide about the father.

Perhaps the offence committed by both B. and his father is simply that they are writers, naturally and therefore dangerously inquisitive. To the extent that the novel does point us toward some sort of unified allegorical meaning, this might be it: the writer's indulgence of curiosity and imagination is always a threat to the reigning powers.. Yet even this interpretation is not unambiguously supported by B.'s narrative. B., while still mostly a sympathetic character, does not always show a great sense of purpose or determination: his commitment to writing seems hesitant, and he hardly seems a stalwart defender of artistic freedom or a seeker of the truth.  Even at the novel's conclusion, when he does seem prepared to persist in writing about what he has seen, his life (not to mention his memory) has been sufficiently impaired that the reader must wonder how successful he will be. But we may also end up feeling even more disturbed about a world in which even such a tentative truth-teller as B. is considered subversive.

What is communicated most forcefully in the story of B.'s journey to the south is how elusive meaning can be, how fragile our grasp of the truth. If it is becoming clearer that we in the putatively civilized world are not invulnerable to the dissolution of democratic norms and long-held assumptions, South provides a bracing glimpse at what living in a world in which arbitrary authority prevails is like.

The Shape of His Departure

Many readers of Christina Tudor-Sideri's Schism Blue would likely find it initially to be somewhat static and abstract, perhaps even obscure. The two figures who will be the novel's characters--the only characters--are rather indistinct at first, and where such qualities as their appearance or their manner of speaking are concerned, they remain indistinct throughout. There is no story of any conventional kind, except for what could loosely be called the story of the main character recollecting (and recreating) her now dead lover, Few concrete events aside from this recollection are related in present narrative time (it could  be said that part of the main character's motivation is to, in effect, annul narrative time altogether), although eventually we are presented with brief episodes of more concrete activity occurring in the past. The novel seems to be set nowhere in particular, but wherever it is it is cold, and it seems to snow quite a lot.

These formal features are reinforced in the novel's style, which is highly metaphorical but doesn't provide a lot of close figurative description, the language more philosophical and rhetorical than lyrical:

    Between them, the night, its shadows, ambivalent as to whom to protect, him or her; the night that cannot tear itself asunder, the night that cannot offer itself to both of them; the night, its shadows in disarray, from her steps to his hesitations and back again, from the idea, no from the essence of a god, the god of this painting in reverse, this painting that shows her leaving when it was, in fact, that reality took the shape of his departure; from this essence of a god to the rest of the world, in throes, to the world immersed in petty passions and ebbing desires and folding of the senses.

This language is employed to disclose the efforts of the main character, who is a writer, to not merely remember her lover, who was a painter, but to in effect keep him alive in her continuing acts of imagination. It might be said that the novel as whole comprises this character's attempt to meld past and present through a kind of perpetual visionary projection.

Thus, while Schism Blue never does develop the drama or narrative movement of the kind readers might expect, it does acquire its own sort of fascination as a contemplative metafiction that ruminates on the process of fiction-making--or on the process of fiction-making as it unfolds within the consciousness of its main character. This character is not relating her experience in her own voice, so it as if the larger narrative voice observes these cerebral acts of creation, although it is more like this voice reports on the character's awareness as she creates, while the actual creation--the fictional character that is the lover, and the specifics of his actions (his "story")--remains unavailable to us, tucked inside the writer's desk. The "narrative" offered by the novel, is indeed the story of the storytelling, without access to the story told.

Because of this odd narrative structure (a narrative that is a supplement to another narrative that is hidden), the pleasures to be found in Blue Schism are realized in individual passages of writing rather than the architectural whole to which they nominally belong. In an extended reverie in which she summons the lover by thinking about the image of a red house (presumably an image in one of his paintings), the main character reflects: 

     A beautiful echoing, this memory now for assembling all that she has gone to assemble; a house amidst spruces; a house he made for her; a house on the beach; a house, emergent, on the highest of crests, in the deepest of caves, a house from the hands of a painter, from the mind of a writer, from a beautiful creator of tiny red houses.

     She is able to apprehend the nature of this red house. And that is happiness. That too is paradise. She is able to situate this house inside the human space of the mind. She is able to create correlation and contain absence and presence and coming-into-being inside of its redness. She is able to carry this house.

The novel is best at offering this sort of insight into the aesthetic transformation of experience, expressed metaphorically and rhapsodically, ultimately making such transformation what the novel is actually "about," acting as both the object of its discourse and the engine of that discourse. Schism Blue pushes against the tyranny of the conventions of plot, character, and setting as strongly as any novel I've read, even though I wouldn't really call it a work of experimental fiction. It is more like a prose poem than a formal or stylistic experiment.

Still, I wouldn't call Schism Blue "poetic" as that term is usually applied in reference to works of fiction. Its metaphorical language is used not as lyrical embellishment but as a formal pattern that  brings a unity to the novel that usually comes from plot. The novel does depict characters, even if they are less explicitly delineated than in most novels. And if the setting is also mostly nonspecific, it actually figures into the living memory the protagonist is attempting to create by serving as evocative imagery. This novel definitely blurs strict boundaries between fiction and poetry, but it works most provocatively as an unorthodox work of fiction.

No doubt some readers would find it too unorthodox, too dependent on its elaborate prose, providing too few of the usual signposts by which we navigate most works of fiction. For those who absolutely require those signposts in order not to lose their way, perhaps Schism Blue would prove too perilous. For those willing to get lost once in a while but trusting that the work itself will ultimately guide them back, the effort is fully worth the risk.

New Supplemental Site

I have put together a selection of essays and reviews of mine examining various works of literary criticism that have (mostly) appeared in the last few years. These essays cover issues in criticism that most stimulate my interest. It can be found here. (A link can also be found on the left sidebar,) This group of essays is in some ways a sequel to Beyond the Blurb. 

I also have another supplementary site gathering many of the reviews of experimental fiction I have written in the last decade, both for this blog and other publications. It can be found here.

Damaged by Reality

John Madera's collection of stories, Nervosities, is not "experimental" in that it rejects most readers' expectations of form in fiction: Most of the stories feature well-developed characters from whose relatively accessible points of view (both first-person and 3rd-person "free indirect") the events in the stories are related. Although these are not "plot-driven" stories with carefully laid-out scenes contributing to a narrative "arc," they are indeed stories; things happen to and through the characters, and these things have dramatic significance, especially in the conclusions to many of the stories. What is dramatized serves the stories' thematic purposes, which in most cases are relatively apparent, although they are not insistently accented, instead realized through setting and character interaction.

But all of these elements are mediated through Madera's dynamic style, which does take the stories out of the ordinary, marking them as separate from conventional "literary fiction." At its most adventurous, this style seems a kind of untamed amalgam of Gary Lutz and Thomas Bernhard: 

Here is my brain: a swollen sewage grate after rainfall--inkbled newprint, leafy bits, had-it twigs, mucosal drift bunging up the holes. Listing in my mind different things that fall (like petals, leaves, and pinecones; like acorns, berries, and other fruit; samaras, and seed pods; like shushing rain and silent snow; like sleet and hail, pellets, a perpetually whisked beaded curtain, clattering up the ground; like massy meteorites mussing up the mud) was, perhaps, superfluous; and thinking about how human beings (who are, in one sense, natural objects themselves, subject to all the causal laws of the physical world), if dropped from a height, will fall at a rate of thirty-two feet per second per second, until the rate of their fall reaches terminal velocity, was not an adequate replacement for the pernicious idea of the so-called great fall of man; but these thoughts, of falling things, while perhaps so much belly lint-picking, kept me from thinking about other things I should have been thinking about but did not want to think about. . . . ("Bees Build Perfect Hexagons with Their Spit")

More controlled than Bernhard's headlong expository monologues, less obsessively focused on surprising verbal devices than Lutz (although evoking each of these strategies), Madera's style isn't simply the vehicle for relating character and event, and doesn't serve as the kind of verbal decoration that often passes for "good writing." Language in most of these stories doesn't serve their conventional elements at all but instead makes manifest something like the reverse: plot, character, setting are a function of the use of language, its particular qualities invoking the illusions of plot or character in a particular way. This is actually true of all works of fiction, but Madera's stories are most unconventional in their rejection of the usual attempts to conceal the artifice of language, to make language transparent to the needs of narrative.

The book's first few stories are rather more verbally constrained than some of the later stories, which suggests a process of discovering a more audacious prose style, although these stories still do not rely on familiar sorts of characters or ordinary situations. Indeed, "Some Varieties of Being and Other Non Sequiturs" and "Notes Toward the Recovery of Desiderata." the first two stories, incorporate uncommon settings (not to mention story titles), the first featuring a man who has moved to an Indian city on the Ganges, where apparently he hopes to die, the second recounting the story of a Cuban girl who becomes a participant in the Mariel boatlift, a notorious mass emigration to the U.S. Both stories introduce a background of political turmoil, hints of which also recur in later stories but never really become a primary focus of the book's concerns. "Some Varieties of Being" does present us with a character whose general type--alienated both from his circumstances and from himself--recurs in later stories and whose predicament more nearly illustrates a dominant theme in the book ("Nervosities" seems a coinage particularly applicable to these characters.)

Although many of the characters in Nervosities are dissatisfied with their lives (some more consciously than others), two stories ("Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan" and "An Incommodious Vehicle") feature a protagonist who has essentially given up on conventional social existence, drifting without a fixed abode or much desire for remunerative work. In each case the character accepts temporary lodging with friends, but the events in the stories really only reinforce the protagonists' social estrangement, although in the first the character does strike up a friendship of sorts with a local homeless man, with whom at the story's conclusion he shares a convivial home-cooked meal. In some stories there are indications by story's end that the protagonist has come to a decision that might alter his/her circumstances (a man abandons his "dingy apartment," clearly an emblem for the dinginess of his life, a woman finally ends things with the boyfriend she clearly doesn't love), but in others no such decision seems possible. (In "Nature Under Constraint and Vexed," a man suffers a ruptured appendix that is going to kill him.) The characters in Nervosities inhabit an American culture that is hostile to their well-being and for which they have little affinity.

Perhaps the grimmest story in the book is "To Have Done with the Division of Moving Bodies," featuring a man, an Iraq War veteran, who has just killed his girlfriend's dog after the girlfriend has broken up with him. Although the story circles back to depict how the man (called simply "the killer") was affected by his experiences in Iraq (three deployments) and his difficulties in adjusting to life back home with the girlfriend, it nevertheless doesn't hesitate in showing the merciless brutality of the man's action. The story both maintains a clinical distance from the compromised protagonist (partly by never giving him a name) and takes us far enough into the man's mind that he doesn't become merely a brute, his behavior entirely unaccountable. There is no sentimentality in Nervosities: the stories concern characters who are damaged by reality, but they don't make excuses for the characters. They just register the damage in Madera's kinetically alert language.

Although these stories are by no means formally conservative (several feature unconventional formal devices), for the most part all of them could really be called works of a particularly disabused kind of realism, depicting a mostly broken culture. However, this realism is itself a route on the way to style, not vice-versa. Through reminding us that the reimagining of reality through the devices of language is the essence of literary art, Madera's stories both heighten our impression of the disenchanted lives they portray and challenge our passive reading habits.

The Tawdry Spectacles of Culture

In her review of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, Hilary Plum contends that the flaw in the book’s analysis of contemporary American fiction “arises out of the genre of scholarship,” suggesting that literary scholars are inclined to stick to “what scholarship is supposed to be about, which is what scholarship has already been about.” Thus Sinykin focuses his attention on the corporate book business, which is where “scholarship” can reveal the social and cultural processes at work in “literary production,” the orientation to both literature and culture that today’s scholarship is almost always “about.” The kind of non-conglomerate, non-commercial writing published by small presses, Plum points out, is more or less irrelevant to this analysis.

Plum is certainly right that by far most formally adventurous work that resists the homogenization of fiction (a state of affairs that Sinykin collapses into the broader economic concept he calls “conglomeration) is published by smaller presses—smaller than the non-profit presses Sinykin presents as the primary alternative to conglomerate publishing—and that Sinykin almost completely ignores them. I would also agree with Plum that the constricted attitude toward both writers and readers—neither of which count for much in the book’s consideration of the broader circumstances in which a “book” comes to be—in Big Fiction is a direct function of the work of literary scholarship as it is currently practiced.  But scholarship as we find it in Big Fiction is not, in its relationship to works of literature and to literary history in general, inherently the manifestation of “what scholarship is supposed to be about,” at least not simply as the extension of what it “has already been about” unless scholarship of literature came into existence only in the 1980s.

While it may indeed be the case that academic literary scholarship in its current form has entrenched itself firmly enough that it seems the authentic expression of the scholarly approach to what we call literature, some of us received a literary education under entirely different circumstances, in which the object of the scholar’s attention was not (or not only) the various contexts of literary activity but literary art itself. Literary history focused on the first term, not the second: history as the means to assess the different manifestations of the literary through time, not to subsume it to historical inquiry. Historical, political, and cultural context could serve as disparate avenues of approach to the study of literature, but all of the avenues were assumed to converge on a shared destination where the distinct views offered by these different approaches might be synthesized. This unifying, if unstated, assumption no longer obtains, mainly because literary academics lost confidence in literature as a self-sustaining subject suitable to academic study. Securing literature as the center of literary study in the first place had required the displacement of interest to criticism rather that simply “literature itself,” but over the past forty years academic literary critics have inexorably excluded literature as an artistic practice or as aesthetic experience from their understanding of “criticism” so they might focus instead on more consequential concerns, as if conceding to the original resistance to literary study as something too lightweight for serious scholars.

Hilary Plum is correct in her perception that Big Fiction is quintessentially a scholarly book as literary scholarship is currently defined in that it situates an ostensibly literary subject in an external context—in this case, economic—that is of greater interest to the author than what makes the subject literary. It is true that Sinykin often enough includes extended passages of close reading, but it is close reading of the sort academic criticism has appropriated from the New Critics without including the New Critics’ insistence on the aesthetic autonomy of the literary text. Sinykin shows how the literary works he examines reflect\ the economic context that is his overriding concern. His readings do offer interpretations, but they are interpretations that reduce the fiction of several prominent writers (E.L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison) to the material conditions of their publication. If Sinykin’s readings provide an angle by which we might approach an understanding of Doctorow’s Ragtime or Morrison’s Beloved, they do so by implicitly cutting off other angles as at best naïve in their failure to appreciate the determining influence of those material circumstances.

Sinykin isn’t really hesitant to assert a very wide scope for the interpretive lens afforded by the concept of “conglomerate fiction.” The term doesn’t just denote the dominance of corporate capitalism in the acquisition and dissemination of books but should be understood to encompass the actual authorship of the fiction written in the last 50 years. So pervasive is the ethos of conglomeration and so extensive are the tentacles the big five publishers send out to all the stages of book production that the writer can be seen to serve as something like the point of origin in a process that goes well beyond the scene of writing itself—which Sinykin believes has been overly romanticized—and involves so many participants under the corporation’s command that it should be said that conglomerate publishing itself is the true author of the fiction it publishes. Although Sinykin attempts to avoid interpretive overreach by emphasizing that with writers such as Morrison and Doctorow the conglomerate outlook is indirect, manifested allegorically rather than literally, it is finally difficult to know just how seriously we are ultimately to take his conceit. As a rhetorical exaggeration used to underscore the extent to which contemporary literature is subjugated to the needs of high-stakes commerce, it perhaps has some force; as a concept that accurately captures the reality of contemporary writers’ situation, it is, of course, absurd.

Sinykin’s critique does seem more justly applied to the career of Cormac McCarthy (perhaps explaining the frequent mentions of Sinykin's  discussion of McCarthy in the initial reviews of Big Fiction). Sinykin justifiably notes that McCarthy’s first five novels (through Blood Meridian gained the writer increasing acclaim as a distinctive stylist but very meager financial rewards. When McCarthy, almost in a gesture of desperation, acquired an agent and a new publisher, both of whom encouraged McCarthy to alter both his style and his Southern settings (essentially extending the Western backdrop of Blood Meridian), McCarthy’s novels, beginning with All the Pretty Horses, broke through and achieved substantial commercial success. It could indeed plausibly be said that McCarthy’s later fiction bears the imprint of conglomerate influence, but in fact McCarthy’s case seems more an instance of capitulating to commercial imperatives—old-fashioned “selling out.” No doubt there are numerous enough writers who would be willing to sell out if the financial rewards were sufficiently reliable, and probably even more quite willing to produce conglomerate fiction entirely to order at the right price. It seems improbable that many good writers are trying to create artistically credible fiction but just can’t avoid giving over their sincerely held objectives to the all-powerful hand of the publishing conglomerates.

This imprisonment in the assumptions of conglomeration is an especially inapt way to envisage the efforts of writers whose work not merely appears in small presses but can be described as adventurous or experimental. There was a time not so long ago when academic critics took a keen interest in such fiction—it could be argued that the arrival of contemporary fiction as a reputable subject of academic inquiry coincided with the rise to prominence of such fiction (eventually called “postmodern”) in the 1960s and 1970s—but the current scholarly preoccupation with sociological and cultural criticism has led to the virtual disappearance of academic criticism of experimental fiction written during the period (1980s to present) witnessing the triumph of what Sinykin now calls conglomerate fiction.

If “autofiction” and fiction written by “previously marginalized voices” do merit attention in Sinykin’s book, it is because they are assimilable in subject and theme to conglomerate expectations—both have some proven appeal to identifiable readers, and increased publication of the latter, at least, credits a degree of social conscience to the commercial publishers that softens perceptions of their otherwise mercenary business model. Innovative, challenging fiction may at one time have brought publishers a semblance of literary respectability that could be valuable, but this sort of respectability, rooted in the recognition of aesthetic complexity as a primary literary value, is now considered dispensable by mainstream publishing and dismissed by literary scholarship as irredeemably subjective and elitist.

Recognition of aesthetic achievement may indeed by subjective (although surely the concept of the “aesthetic” itself is not), but it has never been clear to me why this is perceived as problematic. While there are certainly “objective” features of literary writing and history with which the scholarly study of literature might be concerned, ultimately the purpose of a work of fiction or poetry is to engage the reader in a distinctive experience. It is entirely possible for a critic to describe the experience honestly and deliberately, but finally the experience can only be reported, not repeated among all other readers—even if we thought such a thing was desirable in the first place. This solitary nature of the reading experience (and the experience of art in general) has always caused literary scholars ambivalence: if finally a work of literature in its most essential expression doesn’t result in shareable “knowledge,” what is the point of devoting “study” to it? Even New Criticism, which was partly an attempt to meet this objection by making the method of study just as important as the texts examined, was eventually judged as too implicated in the mere aesthetic appreciation of literature, and its provisional attempt to produce something like knowledge of literature has been superseded by more radically “objective” approaches such as computational analysis and the various kinds of cultural analysis drawing on empirical description, such as Sinykin’s sociological criticism.

Given the specialized, technical, and often esoteric knowledge applied to and derived from literary texts through these approaches, it is hard to regard seriously the charge that the purely aesthetic response to works of literature is elitist. Literary academics are proficient at interrogating a literary text for its relevance to the critic’s preferred theory or extra-literary concerns, but it is clear from most “readings" by contemporary academic critics that reading closely for the qualities of artistic expression that bring literature into existence to begin with and that motivates most readers is no longer a skill much practiced, although presumably it is a skill no longer much learned (or taught) in colleges and universities.  If this is so, it can hardly be regarded as an “elite” practice.

Needless to say, the disinclination to consider the formal and stylistic features of literary texts in general would make serious inquiry into those features as they are extended and transformed in experimental fiction even less urgent. And, indeed, perhaps no change in my own perception of the priorities of academic literary studies has been as noticeable as the seeming loss of interest in the consideration of formally innovative fiction (except when the apparent innovation can be made to serve as a political gesture: challenge to literary form=challenge to the political order). When contemporary fiction started to become acceptable as an academic specialty, much if not most of the scholarly criticism that began to appear concerned the generation of experimental, postmodern writers that seemed to be offering the literary variation on the rebellion against established norms that characterized the 60s more generally. The confluence of the dissident impulses of the times and the heterodox practices of the postmodernists perhaps led to the current tendency to politicize perceived experimental strategies, but neither the first generation postmodernists nor many academic critics accentuated the political: for the writers, the political implications of their work were secondary to the work’s challenges to inherited techniques—challenges that represent an attempt to revivify literary form, not to enlist form in a political gesture. For the critics, while the parallels between the audacious breaking of rules among the insurgent postmodernists and the general disregard of conventional assumptions occurring in the 60s were tacitly acknowledged, what occupied their attention was the sheer variety of the experimental methods these writers employed and the expansion of possibilities in literary form they seemed to promise. If the immediate postwar period had featured a return to pre-modernist realism as a default expectation in American fiction, the adventurous fiction of the 1960s and 1970s augured a return to the innovative spirit of modernism.

By the time I became aware of these writers and wanted to read their work more comprehensively, they were not longer so new or notorious, and  the idea that one could devote “academic study” to the--as well as other branches of contemporary fiction, including those which came to overshadow postmodernism--was no longer so novel. I earnestly aspired to be become a scholar of postmodern American fiction, and to that end published a few scattered articles about writers I especially admired, although I fully intended to write more and made assorted plans to write various books in my “field,” but even before I could actually commit to a particular project I could tell that the trends in that field were shifting away from explication, formal analysis, or thematic surveys to a kind of critical writing whose ultimate object of interest lay “outside the text.” I was not an enemy of all forms of critical theory or cultural analysis, but keeping up with the changing fashions of academic criticism was not after all why I aspired to be an academic critic.

The only way to continue practicing the kind of criticism to which I was most naturally inclined was to acknowledge that it would no longer pass muster in the academic journals devoted to contemporary literature. To me it seemed that contemporary literature would not continue to be afforded the kind of critical elucidation given by modern literary study to all previous periods of literary history, at least by academic critics. It would at best be exploited for its utility in advancing other causes. It would not be allowed to advance its own cause: its value as verbal works of art. This might be still accomplished, but not through academic programs of literary study. Academic criticism had a more or less guaranteed audience, however small and confined mostly to other academic critics, although the jargon and deference to certain rites of scholarly decorum that make most current academic criticism unappealing to most readers were not then so pervasive, and much of the critical work still useful. If I was to continue to be a literary critic, and to extend my interest in experimental fiction, I would need to find a different audience,

In my subsequent efforts to do this, I have found that, first of all, interest in pushing against the limits of acceptable practice as illustrated in most seriously-minded fiction—what has come to be called “literary fiction”—by writers themselves is still quite keen. The postmodernists provided a template for literary exploration that has continued to inspire subsequent writers who are not content merely to apply the inherited methods of “craft,” but wish to modify the concept of craft to mean the artful transformation of form or style in fiction –art is not to be found in the skillful repetition of known strategies, but the discovery of alternate strategies employed with equal skill. Indeed, there might be more writers attempting this latter approach than in the immediate wake of the original postmodern era, although the very success of the earlier writers in offering new variations on fictional form requires the critic to recognize when these later writers are themselves contributing something new or inventive, or are merely reiterating an innovative move made by their experimental predecessors. Such moves can easily enough become as standardized as the conventional devices experimental writers ostensibly want to question, and, while I certainly do not set myself up as the judge of all that is worthily experimental in experimental fiction, I have increasingly focused my critical attention on assessing works of unconventional and adventurous fiction with the underlying assumption that these works are the continuation of the project to open up the art of fiction to perpetual invention and re-invention.

There do seem to be readers interested as well in critical engagement with this project (if not always my own expression of it), and there is certainly an audience for critical engagement with fiction published by smaller independent presses in general, which by necessity are the primary publishers of experimental fiction but of course do not restrict themselves to this single mode (although there are several estimable publishers whose lists are weighed more heavily toward experimental fiction than otherwise). Neither the writers nor most readers of the work supported by these presses, I would argue, are prompted by the concerns that Sinykin seems to suggest motivate those who choose conglomerate fiction. They want from literature a stimulating aesthetic experience, not bland entertainment or therapeutic comfort. They expect criticism to be of some assistance in reflecting on this experience, not be preoccupied with analyzing the commercial machinations of big publishers as emblems of the capitalist system. They are interested in literature, not the tawdry spectacles of culture.

Although Hilary Plum is entirely persuasive in her assessment of the limitations of Sinykin’s book, even she wants finally to frame these limitations as a failure of sociopolitical diagnosis. Sinykin doesn’t see (or want to see) the existence of this dissident corner of publishing as the noncommercial resistance to commercial dominance. It is that, but the real alternative these indie presses provide is not to the profit-driven motives of capitalism but to the non-literary (even anti-literary) attitude toward writing and reading that permeates conglomerate fiction as it has totally surrendered to the imperatives of the bureaucratic corporate system. Considerations of art or knowledge no longer play a role in this system at all (except when someone within it consciously ignores its strictures).These are the considerations that still influence what is published and discussed in the milieu surrounding small presses, and, for me, at least, they loom largest in the discussion of experimental fiction, the kind of writing that stands in the starkest contrast to conglomerate fiction.

Just how mercenary conglomerate fiction has become is made clear not just in Sinykin’s book but also very plainly in a recent essay that closely examines the court proceedings in the antitrust case brought against Penguin in its attempt to purchase Simon & Schuster (Elle Griffin, “No one buys books.”) The impression that emerges from this scrutiny of the testimony is of a corporate publishing business that both yokes itself to the logic of finance capitalism and demonstrates the utter insanity of that logic when applied to the writing of books. Why anyone who takes writing seriously would conclude that this business is worth the time and effort to “study” it escapes my comprehension. If it is necessary to regard this appalling entity as the co-creator of current literary work in order to understand culture more broadly, then I’d prefer to discount culture altogether and stick to literature. Even now, I know where to look for that.

Zombie Zoo

It is hard to say whether Samuel Emmer, the protagonist of James Elkins's Weak in Comparison to Dreams, should be regarded as a "reliable" narrator of his story. On the one hand, there is no reason to believe he is telling us a false story about his experiences as a municipal employee in Guelph, Ontario, assigned to make a series of visits to various zoos to ensure the new Guelph Zoo avoids their problems with neurotic animals, or even that these experiences are being distorted (especially where the narrator's behavior is concerned). Yet we also can't finally be certain that we have perceived this character's true nature, because he may not possess a true nature--the enigma that persists even after we have come to the end of the narrative presented in this novel may just be an artifact of the protagonist's mutable personality.

The novel begins normally enough, the first chapter an apparently conventional first-person narrative, as Samuel recounts one of his zoo visits, although the setting does seem a bit unusual: the city zoo in Tallinn, Estonia. After a brief flashback to the circumstances surrounding his assignment to the Zoo Feasibility Committee and to his first such visit, to the Bronx Zoo, Samuel goes on to relate his encounters in Tallinn with the zookeeper and her assistants, as well as his observations of the conditions in which the animals are kept. As he continues to make these visits (Finland, Germany, Salt Lake City and Knoxville in the United States), his obsession with the animals and their inhumane imprisonment intensifies. This is not conveyed to us directly through internal deliberation but in the narrator's depicted behavior in the narratives of his visit. The narrator not only becomes more strident in his insistence to his hosts that their animals are expressing deep-seated distress, but in doing so he increasingly affects a knowledge and expertise he does not possess. It is not so much that he is trying to be more forceful in his disapproval of the treatment of zoo animals but that in each of his zoo experiences he is becoming a different person.

His metamorphoses in these scenes are aided and abetted by a series of "reports" provided to him by his Guelph laboratory assistants (although one of them is actually a former assistant), papers and case studies ostensibly meant to add to Samuel's knowledge of animal behavior but that are also intended, we discover, to provoke Samuel into noticing that his own behavior, as observed by the assistants, shows some of the same disturbances exhibited by captive zoo animals (repetition -compulsion). The graphical elements included in these reports--charts, tables, drawings--are paralleled by many photographs that appear throughout the text, especially photographs that accompany Samuel's reports of a series of dreams that alternate with his accounts of the zoo visits. At first, the dreams, invoking his childhood in Watkins Glen, New York, seem harmless enough, but eventually they begin to obsessively revolve around fires in woods and mountains. The dreams seem to reinforce Samuel's erratic conduct during his interactions with the zoo personnel to suggest a psychological breakdown, toward which the novel seems to be heading.

But after losing his job in Guelph due to his erratic behavior, Samuel essentially runs away, driving north ("toward the Arctic"), where apparently we leave him. He reappears to us as a much older man, living in northern Ontario but shortly to move to live with daughter. Here Samuel's narration is more lucid and controlled, but still obsessive, except that in this case his obsession is with the music he plays on the piano, most of it written by obscure modern composers whose methods of composition are likewise at times repetitive and compulsive, like both Samuel and the animals he observed many years previous. It it is unclear whether Samuel is himself aware of the correspondence between this music and his own personality traits, but it seems likely that he is, and his incessant playing of the music both continues to manifest the protagonist's obsessive-compulsive behavior and also allows him to express it in a way that brings a degree of satisfaction not evident in the earlier scenes. If compulsive behavior is in part a full immersion in the present, in the here and now (or a way of coping with that immersion), Samuel Emmer seems poised in the present, quietly situated between the turbulent events depicted in his previous narrative and the change that awaits (at the end of the novel, Samuel is preparing to move out of his home).

He has been living in the home for 40 years, but this novel passes over those 40 years in silence. Samuel occasionally alludes to these years, but we never get a fully articulated account of how he spent this large portion of his life (or, for that matter, why this elision is significant.) Such a discontinuity in Samuel's story has the effect of suggesting a discontinuity in the personality of Samuel Emmer, a suggestion that is not fully realized in the depiction of the character in Weak in Comparison to Dreams but becomes more visible as both character trait and formal device in the many documents relating to other volumes in the Samuel Emmer saga that Elkins has made available on his website. This novel is merely one in a series of five that, as we are also told on the website, Elkins has mostly completed but remain unpublished. Our current lack of access to the further context and elaboration these other books would provide ultimately presents the biggest obstacle to a full appreciation of Weak in Comparison to Dreams: the portrayal of Samuel Emmer and his life presumably requires all of the volumes in the series to be complete so that interpretation based solely on this novel is itself incomplete--not just a question of creative ambiguity but a constraining uncertainty. If it is finally a part of a larger whole, surely we do need to comprehend the whole in order to properly comprehend this portion.

Nevertheless, Weak in Comparison to Dreams still provides a rewarding reading experience. Although it is no longer such a novelty to encounter a work of fiction that incorporates photographs or other visual imagery, Elkins integrates them with his verbal text very dexterously, and ultimately text and visuals seem fully complementary, both of them necessary to the story the writer wants to tell, not an exercise in ornamentation. That story is certainly not a conventional one, but its mysteries and surprises are revealed in a skillfully calibrated way that keeps the narrative lively enough that the novel's length does not seem excessive and maintains the oddity in the protagonist's character that justifies its formal indirection. (In addition to the photos, drawings, and diagrams, the novel also includes numerous interpolated documents, as well as several extended fantasias in which Samuel imagines the interplay between his two assistants.) Overall, the novel exhibits laudable ingenuity and manifest intelligence. I hope to hear the other four novels have found their publishers. 

What Hath the Blog Wrought?

That we live in a ubiquitously connected electronic world is by now such a firm fact of 21st century life that it hardly seems worth noting, no matter how much we worry it may be altering the nature of human experience in ominous ways. Diminished attention spans and a narrowed conception of social relations may indeed be among the consequences of the ascendancy of the internet, but there is currently not  much reason to believe its reach will soon be curtailed by our concerns about these matters. The story of how the world we inhabit increasingly became a cyberspace is certainly incomplete, although that space is likely to become more all-encompassing, as the serviceability of online technology continues to be extended and refined.

A recent book focusing on the story so far, Extremely Online (Taylor Lorenz), contends that the internet has taken its present form not so much through the efforts of those developing the technology but the collective efforts of users who through their resourceful adaptations of the possibilities offered by the internet enhanced its character and shaped its ethos. Although the book emphasizes the evolving economic dominance of the internet and the cultural impact of "influencers," it maintains that "the web" served as a means of expression not previously so widely available and empowered enterprising individuals to create novel forms of communication and association. 

If the influencer addressing popular subjects of widespread interest could ultimately accumulate a very large audience, smaller communities of interest might also begin to appear through this new mode of connection. Thus arose what came to be called the "blogosphere," that domain of cyberspace occupied by versions of the weblog, the form of online communication that became the first manifestation of the web's capacity to produce new channels of discourse that bypassed the officially sanctioned practices to be found in print publications. One of the variants of the blog was the literary weblog, or "litblog," which, as the name suggests, was concerned with books and literary culture, although eventually some litblogs focused even more particularly on various eras of literary history or on specific literary forms.

Litblogs still exist, but many of the blogs that initially brought attention to the phenomenon of litblogging do not, or have been modified into more general literary websites. At first, litblogs were pretty closely tied to the established print media that devoted space to books coverage and other literary news. Blog posts were usually quite brief, often mostly links to print sources, and were largely intended to provide wider access to developments in the literary world. As more readers became aware of the early blogs, and the number of blogs began to proliferate (often launched by these very readers), the comments section of litblogs became more active as well, as the common practice of offering a "blogroll" identifying other blogs and bloggers engaged in what increasingly seemed a common project, served to create an informal community of readers, whose interest in books, and literature more generally, were evidently not being adequately satisfied by the mainstream literary press. 

Soon enough, then, just linking to reviews or noting daily literary developments started to seem a limited use of the weblog's potential, and litblogs began to feature more substantial commentary, still mostly informal in tone and relatively modest in length, but attempting to augment the consideration of literary matters rather than simply relating it through links. This happened as more people joined the litblogosphere, from a variety of backgrounds but seeming to share a belief that the blog as a medium presented an opportunity for both a broader and deeper engagement with books and writing than the existing hierarchy of the "mainstream media" could accommodate. Among the new bloggers were academic literary critics testing out the form, some as a forum for amplifying their academic work, but others writing about literature more directly, either as a supplement to academic writing or in some cases an alternative to academic criticism in its then current version.

I myself belonged to this group of converts to the litblog (although I decided to adopt the form relatively early, when only a few of those who would become the most recognized of the early litbloggers had already established their blogs, bloggers such as Maud Newton, Laila Lalami, and Mark Sarvas). My goal in starting The Reading Experience from the beginning was to see if serious literary criticism could be carried out on a blog. As I tried to suggest through the name I chose for the blog, I was attempting neither to use the site as a way of providing a broader context for my work as an academic critic, nor to turn it into an outlet for an academic criticism modified to a new medium. Instead I imagined the weblog and its growing audience as a potential opportunity to bridge differences between the kind of academic criticism I had learned to practice and a more general-interest criticism that attempted to reach a larger, less insular audience but emphasized the analytical as much as the evaluative.

I would not say that my motivation was strictly shared by other bloggers who helped expand the scope of the litblog. My posts on The Reading Experience were likely the product of my own idiosyncratic notion of what a "literary" blog could be, although I did receive enough encouragement from readers and other bloggers about my approach--encouragement that indeed may have been prompted by a perception that what I was doing was something different--that I felt sufficiently motivated to do almost all of my writing on the blog (no more academic articles or lengthy literary essays pitched to whatever publication might seem a promising target). At first I didn't really write many straight-out reviews, as the goal was not to reproduce mainstream book review discourse but to develop a less formalized kind of commentary that still offered more than facile judgments of either praise or disapproval.

Many of the posts I wrote in the early days of the blog were in fact not close readings of individual works at all. They were instead direct reflections on the practice or criticism that, at least in retrospect, were more like lectures than book chat. Indeed, I now cringe somewhat at the rather high-handed manner of some of these posts whenever I re-read them, although perhaps the tone seems high-handed because it is no longer so unusual to find an elevated level of discourse on blogs and websites devoted to literature and literary discussion. Such discourse can take for granted that its audience shares assumptions and expectations, but since I really didn't know what knowledge or interest my readers actually brought to the perusal of my blog, I chose to address them as just the sort who would be receptive to the kind of analysis and appraisal I hoped my blog could provide--curious and intelligent, but otherwise more accustomed to the existing norms of mainstream literary journalism.

I can't exactly say that I had in mind from the beginning to overthrow these "norms" of mainstream critical writing, but gradually this did indeed more or less become an implicit--in some cases explicit--ambition as The Reading Experience became more established. (Given the low traffic this blog presently attracts, I am always rather astonished to look back at the user numbers from its early years--although my blog was not among the very most popular litblogs, from my current perspective those numbers nevertheless seem huge.) And in this I believe I can say I was joined by a significant number of other litbloggers for whom "mainstream" increasingly became a term of abuse. Certainly through distinguishing ourselves from mainstream print publications we were engaged in a fair amount of self-promotion, setting ourselves up as "alternative" sources of information and judgment (even though more often than not the information came from the print sources we otherwise disdained). Yet I do think that as a whole this early group of litbloggers (a snapshot of my blog's blogroll from the time can be found here) did share an enthusiasm for literary works, new and old, that were outside mainstream reading habits and that did not merely reinforce the dominance of the biggest publishers.

This broader orientation was ultimately reflected in the creation of a cross-blog alliance we called (somewhat clumsily) the "Litblog Co-op" (link). This group in its mission statement explicitly declared itself to be "uniting the leading literary blogs for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors, and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace." Ultimately the co-op's activities were largely restricted to making a quarterly selection of one new book to be highlighted through a prize-like announcement on the group's collective website and accompanied by individual posts related to the selection, written by various members. (These weren't always laudatory. I myself registered a couple of dissenting views regarding the selected books.) The endeavor was short-lived: the first "Read This!" selection was made in 2005, and by 2007 the group disbanded. 

In retrospect, this project was clearly enough an attempt by the "leading" litbloggers both to reinforce their status as a vanguard of sorts in the rise to prominence of the literary weblog and to certify the litblog as the successor to print-dominated literary journalism. The first ambition was perhaps temporarily fulfilled, but even during the two brief years of the group's existence, new literary blogs continued to emerge, and while to an extent the LBC (as we referred to it) tried to accommodate this reality by periodically adding new members, that this endeavor finally could only reinscribe the hierarchical order against which the literary blogosphere was supposedly standing seems perfectly obvious now, and this would have become a debilitating contradiction even if the Litblog Co-op had continued a while longer. The second aspiration likewise could be dismissed as mostly presumption and hubris, except that the underlying supposition was in fact ultimately confirmed: the litblog itself did not become the successor to print journalism as the primary source of literary discussion, but the blog did prove to be the herald of a large-scale migration of serious literary discourse from existing print publications to various kinds of literary-focused sites online.

Intellectual discussion of numerous other subjects also appeared with more regularity both on blogs and in other web-based forms, but the resistance to the idea that substantive literary journalism and criticism (aside from informal "book chat") might be carried out on the internet was particularly strong and persisted longer--except when such resistance just disappeared. Many if not most of the literary blogs associated with the LBC began posting less often and eventually stopped altogether. I myself put The Reading Experience on an extended hiatus, and when I decided to bring it back, the audience for a blog such as mine had clearly diminished. But in the meantime other websites centered on literature and literary criticism had appeared and were replicating the kind of close monitoring of developments in the book world that litblogs had supplied. They were also more like conventional publications with a "staff" of writers and editors rather than the personal journals of the proverbial bloggers in their pajamas. And not only were the legacy print publications no longer condescending to online literary conversations but soon enough were themselves joining in with their own blog-like venues, such as the New Yorker's "Page-Turner."

New web publications offering thoughtful longer-form literary criticism--mostly in the form of book reviews but not necessarily confined to reviews--also began to appear with some frequency, and when I began to less frequently update The Reading Experience, I turned to these publications to pursue my own continuing interest in cultivating a kind of criticism that had intellectual credibility without simply mirroring the periodical book review or the academic essay. Luckily there were a number of web-based publications that allowed me to do this, such periodicals as The Quarterly Conversation, Open Letters Monthly, 3:A.M. Magazine, and Full Stop. Writing for these outlets was, on the one hand, fully comparable to writing for traditional print publications--being assigned a review or making a pitch for one, working with an editor--but on the other felt more like enhanced blogging. The books included for review were much more varied than in mainstream book review sections, including more books in translation and from smaller presses, and the editors demonstrated a greater interest in unconventional, adventurous works. Reviews were less formulaic, with a greater tolerance for longer and more digressive analysis, while some reviewers made their reviews less formal and more personal as compared to typical newspaper and magazine reviews. Still, these web publications maintained a relationship to the reading audience that was closer to the one-way communication enforced by traditional print newspapers and periodicals. They brought in a wider  range of contributors, but there were few of the interchanges between wrier and reader that on occasion enhanced the discourse on literary blogs. 

Like literary blogs themselves, these initial online book reviews went through a process of waxing and waning. Some of them are now discontinued or curtailed in their scope. What seems like a fresh opportunity to develop more a capacious kind of literary criticism generates some enthusiasm, but that enthusiasm can't compete with the greater resources devoted to subsequent sites that appropriate the approach taken by those who established the practice, while redirecting the coverage and focus of interest to a broader consideration of literary culture (and culture in general) and ultimately a more mainstream audience. And gradually the new literary websites come to seem in their organization and outlook more like the sort of conventional literary organs we bloggers wanted to challenge.

While some of us had entertained fantasies of some such consortium of litblogs as the LBC replacing conventional literary organs, the kind of web publication that evolved during the 2010s actually did replace them. There is no doubt that the New York Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement continue to be the most prestigious and influential standalone book reviews, but they are indeed standing pretty much alone among newspaper book reviews. The book review sections of most newspapers have either been eliminated or severely cut back, and the New York Review of Books is about the only remaining independent print publication in the United States exclusively offering book reviews. Magazines such as The Nation and The New Republic still offer book reviews, but I daresay most readers access these publications online and experience them as essentially another online site. The extent to which this erosion is due to the increased availability of online book review websites is debatable, but there is no doubt that competition from the internet has contributed to it. Coverage of books, and the arts more generally, seems to has substantially been left to web-based publications.

Certainly it is not the case that literary commentary has migrated to the web simply because it has been abandoned by financially straitened print publications. The quality of the commentary is indeed high in such places as the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, and Public Books, arguably as high or higher than it ever was in all but the most distinguished print magazines. In these publications it can perhaps be said that the potential for the online medium not merely to reproduce the literary discourse of traditional print criticism but to augment or supersede it is realized. But in the process, they have also recreated the rhetorical situation in which pre-web criticism was produced, with status and authority invested in the editorial distinction presumed by the publication itself, which in turn confers it on the critics and reviewers featured. Even when the subjects covered in these journals are associated with mass entertainment rather than works of high seriousness, a kind of highbrow importance is still attached to the analysis provided, with little or no audience participation encouraged.

Arguably there is a need for criticism and commentary that offers an authoritative perspective, supported by the critic's manifest knowledge and critical acumen. Any perceived distance between critic and readers or even critic and other critics is less important than the model of serious reading provided by the most committed critics. The sorts of critical sites I have mentioned are more likely to feature critics whose primary calling is as a critic rather than a fiction writer, and the underlying motivation for much of what is published in them more often seems to be first of all as an exercise in critical understanding, not the provision of consumer information, as continues to be the case with the majority of newspaper book reviews. Neither do they focus so relentlessly on just the currently "newsworthy" releases, and what coverage there is of foreign titles in American book review spaces is largely found in online publications. In all of these ways, a good deal of the literary criticism published online redeems the proposition inherent to the early litblogosphere  that the internet could serve as a medium for substantive engagement with literature.

Yet even if consequential literary criticism can now abundantly enough be found online, the evolution of online literary discourse from the blog to highbrow online journals has taken us from the possibility that a critical space might be created for a different kind of criticism, neither "general" (although accessible) nor "academic (although serious-minded), to a reoccupation of such space by critical writing that is intellectually credible but almost as insular and remote as the mainstream establishment practices against which the literary blogosphere reacted in the first place. In their commission of reviews and choice of critics, they are just as likely to to apply the criteria conventionally used to produce "interesting" pieces--interesting in subject or theme but not necessarily focused on pure literary interest--and to "match" the book under review to reviewer with the right credentials or a currently high profile. While book reviews and literary commentary certainly pay very little, attitudes have shifted back to the assumption that "real" reviews are those that are paid, with the accompanying inference that such reviews are credible because they are published through a reputable editorial process. In short, the literary weblog may have prepared the way for a critical writing about literature online that not just rivalled but eventually exceeded both in quantity and depth what had been available in general-interest print publications, but in the end it has reconstructed the apparatus that makes literary commentary an elite practice.

This was perhaps inevitable. Just as the internet itself was consolidated into the American media system (and into the capitalist system as a whole), the literary version of this system seized on the developing online modes of communication and was able to dominate them. Resistance to this takeover was not very strenuous, as writers, as they always will, sought readers, as well as recognition from perceived authorities, and critics sought to be recognized as such authorities. Looking back at it, it seems pretty clear that my early blogging colleagues not so secretly hoped that the increasing attention paid to them as bloggers would ultimately lead them to opportunities in the establishment media we were supposedly challenging (and I don't exempt myself from having such thoughts). A significant number of them succeeded in their ambitions, and some of them now occupy prominent places in that since-transformed establishment. I am perfectly happy with their success, but I am undecided whether finally I consider ti a sign of the larger triumph of literary blogging or a token of its surrender.

Although perhaps the real surrender of blogging occurred with the rise of social media, but most especially Twitter. It is almost certainly true that Twitter appropriated from the early blogs the short digest form of post--usually brief notices of literary news, often joined to some  pointed commentary, or sometimes just a brief outburst of opinion. This sort of proto-microblogging was, in fact, popularly associated with blogging at first, serving a function similar to Twitter but without the centralized address. The one-stop convenience of Twitter eventually rendered digest posts superfluous, and when Twitter and other social media sites began developing their own books-based communities, there was no longer a reason to visit litblogs that primarily featured these Twitter-like posts. Many of those blogs simply ceased activity, and the literary blog itself more or less faded from prominence as a phenomenon of literary culture.

Individual blogs by writers focused on literature of course persist, but few of them maintain any kind of steadily high traffic, although this is not really the ambition behind most of them. Unlike the early blogs, they don't really seek to challenge existing literary discourse but to provide an alternative for readers not keenly attuned to it. Some are more narrowly specialized--Neglected Books, The Untranslated--while others allow their authors to register their ongoing responses to the books they read (fulfilling one of the paradigmatic functions of litblogging). Those seeking a larger audience have instead turned to Substack, which (along with other, similar newsletter services) takes the writer's efforts directly to the reader via email rather than waiting for readers to arrive--a blog on wheels, perhaps. To some extent the popularity of Substack as a way of  distributing blog-like writing suggests that the impulse originally satisfied through the development of the weblog still motivates writers and would-be writers to take advantage of internet technology to circumvent traditional modes of publication. On the other hand, both phenomena might just be evidence of the way in which the technology creates the need for its use. Surely the growth of Substack has encouraged the proliferation of newsletters covering less-than-urgent topics, and it is likely we will reach a point of diminishing returns for the paid newsletter, as readers reach their limit in spending on subscriptions.

At the least, however, the technology did make available an opportunity to create an "in-between" kind of literary discourse (in between a purely personal reading journal and officially sanctioned literary criticism) open to the unmediated discussion of books and writing, separate from the constraints imposed by established literary journalism as well as academic criticism. (And when literary journalists and academic critics did come to participate in the blogosphere, it was usually according to the protocols attached to blogging, not the other way around, as at, for example, an "academic" blog called The Valve, to which I was a contributor for several years.) But as audiences grew and the lure of profit beckoned (although we now know that this prospect has turned out to be an illusion), the technology changed ("improved"), and the conditions on the ground, so to speak, also inevitably changed, The blog would turn out to be only the initial step in transferring American literary culture online; the simple tools of blogging alone would prove inadequate to such an epochal task.

If literary blogging helped lead us to the much-expanded online network that now serves as the locus of establishment literary activity, this process has unfortunately left no place for blogging. Even with the current unsettled circumstances in both internet publishing and social media (publishers keep going out of business, social media keeps fragmenting), I do not expect that litblogging as we knew it at the beginning will make any kind of significant comeback. Which is not to say that blogging will not survive, just that it won't again have the same king of salience to the direction literary culture takes as it briefly did in the nascent days of the blogosphere. Bloggers will have to be satisfied with a medium that offers limited reach but allows them maximum freedom and infinite space to say what they have to say at whatever length, and perhaps find an audience who wants to hear it. This may be the most invaluable promise the blog made to writers in the first place.

Many Windows: On Experimental Fiction

I have made available a collection of my essays and reviews focused on experimental fiction. It can be found here.

 

The Mandate of Reviewers

The title of Phillipa K. Chong's 2020 book, Inside the Critics' Circle, juxtaposed with its subtitle, "Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times," immediately announces its foremost limitation as an account of the state of literary criticism in these "uncertain times." Casually assuming the conflation of "criticism" and "reviewing" (an assumption no doubt shared by most potential readers of a book like this), the title raises the stakes in our consideration of the scope of Chong's study: will we indeed gain some sort of clarity about the practice of criticism at this stage of history, literary and otherwise? If Chong had simply used the subtitle as her title (which is actually more accurate to her book's real focus), it is likely we would regard it as much more limited in its reach.

In fairness, however, Chong herself goes on to make the kind of distinction between criticism and reviewing I am suggesting should be made, although she still designates the different approaches to literary discussion as forms of criticism--journalistic criticism, essayistic criticism, and academic criticism--even if her description of the first clearly enough distinguishes it from the other, more exploratory, forms: "Journalistic critics traditionally write reviews for daily or weekly publications (i.e., newspapers) and have the widest mandate of the three forms of criticism: to review newly published fiction." Indeed, Chong seems to narrow the mandate of reviewers (to write for newspapers), more stringently than even I would have it, since reviews by any conventional delineation of the form could and do appear in weekly and monthly periodicals (the forum for essayistic criticism according to Chong), as well as web journals and magazines. Even more narrow, of course is the restriction to coverage of "newly published fiction," which oddly both makes the focus exclusively literary (where reviewing must be more purely a critical act) and makes the consideration of fiction by critics more like reviewing any new "product."

By the time we have gotten to the first chapter that takes us "inside the critics' circle," it is manifestly apparent that the circle is a tightly encompassed one and that to the extent Chong's sociological study of the processes of literary judgment will inform or enlighten us, it will be through a very narrow focus on the contingencies of current book reviewing (fiction only) in the United States. Moreover, the study arises from interviews only with reviewers who "had published a review in at least one of three influential review outlets," producing what she admits is an "elite bias." This makes Chong's book, on the one hand, practically useless for comprehending the broad range of reviewing practices readers might encounter in the various forms of literary discussion now available, but, on the other, very helpful, even essential, in understanding why American book reviewing at the "elite" level is in its presently dismal condition (which actually it has been in for quite a long time).

In Chong's telling, the inherent confusion that besets reviewing in prestige venues proceeds from various kinds of "uncertainty" that attends the practice. (Chong presents these uncertainties as more or less unavoidable according to established book reviewing protocols, but those protocols themselves are incoherent bordering on irrational). The first kind of uncertainty is "epistemic," which begins in the unavoidable subjectivity of judgment but extends further to the choice of books to be reviewed in the first place and the selection of "appropriate" reviewers. The subjectivity of literary judgment is indeed an intrinsic feature of all literary criticism, but both Chong and the literary establishment she surveys proceed as if it is something to deplore and avoid. It is not. Literary criticism can exist, in fact, only as the explicit exchange of subjective perspectives. If it were actually possible to arrive at objective assessment, this would presumably be a "correct" conclusion  to which all readers would willingly consent. Criticism would come to an end.

Certainly the editors Chong interviews do not seem overly concerned about "objectivity"--and certainly very little about literature--in deciding what books should be reviewed and who should review them. Although Chong's survey doesn't really reveal any new information about the procedures involved in carrying out these tasks, her account makes plain the extent to which American editors and reviewers adhere to a set of imperatives that, to say the least, are not much concerned  with ensuring that literary merit is either identified or evaluated. The books chosen are those that are "newsworthy" or that are "interesting" to the editor or reviewer involved (subjectivity doesn't seem to matter here), although not necessarily interesting for artistic reasons (interesting "ideas" will do). And of course the "big books" have to be reviewed, books by famous writers or that are already creating a "buzz." Her discussion of editorial decision-making certainly justifies Chong's declaration that "Readers may be surprised that 'quality' is not chief among the criteria guiding the culling process." 

Neither is choice of reviewer a question of securing the most critically cogent review. Here again the criterion is "interest," not quality. Editors often attempt to create an artificial kind of interest by seeking out a "good match" between book and reviewer, a match that sometimes means a critic who might bring special insight into the work under review but that at other times iis based on perceived connections (often superficial) between book and reviewers, suggested by the book's content and the reviewer's professional or personal identity. Achieving a "good match" might thus produce newsworthy commentary of a very muffled sort, but it is external to the literary value of the work considered. Still, many book review editors consider the search for the good match to be the most essential part of their job.

Many people would say, of course, that in following these procedures in the production of book review pages, both editors and most of the reviewers they select are simply carrying out the tasks assigned to the literary journalist. And if most editors and reviewers perceive themselves to be primarily literary journalists, then there is some truth in this claim, to the extent that literary journalism is mostly an effort to report on current events. But many reviewers, at least, would like to believe that both the books they review and the reviews they write have a value beyond their transitory status as cultural news item, that both might still be read by future readers for whom the urgency of the original cultural context surely will have faded. Arguably what readers would want from critical writing in such a situation is that it illuminate the work as a literary creation not dependent on the immediate circumstances attending its reception. While certainly some reviews provide solid literary analysis transcending the contingencies of their commission, the "system" by which mainstream American book reviewing operates hardly seems one that seeks out literary merit for its own sake or that values literary criticism as a self-sufficient practice.

The choices made by reviewers themselves turn out to be almost as antithetical to the integrity of criticism as the systemic biases that govern editorial decisions--perhaps more so. In what is the most discouraging chapter in her book, Chong discusses the "social uncertainties" that putatively beset reviewers in trying to conscientiously carry out the book reviewer's responsibilities. "Social" in this case means almost entirely the social situation occupied by most book reviewers, in which they must defensively guard against reprisal for negative reviews (in the form of a negative review in return), risk embarrassment at social gatherings, and avoid cultivating a reputation for dispensing harsh assessments, especially when "punching down" at younger or less successful writers. Reviewers admit to Chong that they try to avoid assignments that might provoke these social tensions and professional hazards, and some make it plain enough that they hold back on strong expressions of judgment, "play nice," in  Chong's formulation. Finally the impression Chong's survey of the practices of American book reviewers leaves is one of equivocation and evasion, when not outright dishonesty.

At times Chong herself seems on the verge of invoking such language in response to what her reviewers tell her, but instead chooses to maintain a discreet scholarly distance. In her chapter on the "institutional uncertainties" of book reviewers, she is more critical of book reviewing as a collective enterprise, noting that the reviewers she interviewed in fact had little sense of themselves as part of such an enterprise, to the point that many of them doubted that they should be called "critics." At the same time, they are quite insistent that they should be distinguished from bloggers and other "amateurs," although very little in their own self-conceptions as reviewers provides for such a separation. Writing for one of the "elite publications" acts a form of official approval, an "objectified signal of one's belonging to the wider literary community"--although not a community of critics. A critic in the more rarefied sense is occupied not so much with the valuation of a text but the exercise of critical intellect more generally, which most of the critics quoted in the book insist remain outside their purview, These reviewers ultimately can't really decide if they are simply the designated intermediaries between writers and readers, here to provide a thoughtful recommendation, or credible critical voices ready to wield an authority conveyed through deeper reading.

In my view, Chong is too hasty in making such a clear-cut distinction between the newspaper reviewing she considers in her book and the "essayistic criticism" to be found in some weekly and monthly magazines or some web journals, where she believes something closer to intellectual seriousness can be found. But while such publications (what remains of them) do publish longer and less insistently evaluative reviews and essays, many such pieces still exhibit the same features revealed in Chong's study: a focus on "subject" beyond all other considerations, a reluctance to criticize too harshly (whether through fear of retribution or a sincere desire to be considerate), and an ultimate commitment to maintaining a literary community over advocating for literary values more generally. Of course there are critics who reinforce these values at a very high level, including in newspapers (Sam Sacks comes to mind) as well as in various other publications that feature "essayistic" reviews (both The Baffler and The Point have recently become valuable sources of such criticism). But unfortunately Phillipa Chong's report on the assumptions shared by her more narrowly chosen representatives just doesn't seem that far removed from the similar assumptions widely shared by of many of those who belong to what can be designated as today's "critical establishment."

This establishment is the logical outcome of what is now decades in which general-interest literary critics have been replaced by other writers of fiction as the go-to authors of book reviews, while fewer and fewer academic critics have been willing (or able) to cross over into general-interest criticism. At the same time, the critical tenor deemed acceptable in book reviews of fiction has followed the culture in becoming literally less judgmental--when fiction is regarded primarily as a form of "expression," who's to say when someone else's expression is flawed? But judgment is not simply (or not only) an act of moral or aesthetic evaluation but is also the process of perception and analysis that precedes any such evaluation. In the current critical order, book reviewers are reluctant to invoke judgment in this latter sense, while academic critics are reluctant to engage in mere evaluation (and these days don't exercise judgment about mere literature, which is only the conduit for the analysis of culture). A kind of criticism bridging the gap between the literary focus of popular book reviewing and the analytical scrutiny of academic criticism would be beneficial to literary culture, but it is presently without a proper place in the existing literary domain.

New Issue of Unbeaten Paths

A new issue of Unbeaten Paths is now available. Includes reviews of:

Dave Fitzgerald, Troll (Whiskey Tit)

Matt Bucher, The Belan Deck (Sideshow Media Group)

Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture (Black Cat)