Taking on Problems
In the first chapter of his 2005 book, Realist Vision , Peter Brooks writes:
With the rise of the realist novel in the nineteenth century, we are into the age of Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle, of Karl Marx and John Ruskin, of Charles Darwin and Hippolyte Taine: that is, an age where history takes on new importance, and learns to be more scientific, and where theories of history come to explain how we got to be how we are, and in particular how we evolved from earlier forms to the present. It is the time of industrial, social and political revolution, and one of the defining characteristics of realist writing is I think a willingness to confront these issues. England develops a recognizable "industrial novel," one that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict, and France has its "roman social," including popular socialist varieties.
To the extent that Brooks wants to link the rise of realist fiction to the rise of science and "theories of history," I can't really see how the former is influenced much by the latter, except specifically in the fiction of naturalist writers such as Emile Zola or, in the United States, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. These writers did indeed try to depict human behavior as it was defined by science—especially Darwinism—and by the forces of history. But these were writers who were deliberately using realism to illustrate a view of human life as determined by such external forces, not exploring the purely literary possibilities of realism as a still relatively new aesthetic strategy. They may have in a sense been portraying "things as they are," but they were doing it from an abstract philosophical perspective, not as an attempt to first of all render life in all of its particularities.
I equally don't understand why a defining feature of realism would be the willingness to "confront" issues or to "take on" social problems. If works of fiction are truly "realistic," immersed in the details of life as lived, they will naturally, sooner or later and in one way or another, engage with the issues and the problems of the times. There is no need to take that extra step, to insist that "issues" be confronted, unless the writer's (and the critic's) real interest lies in "taking on" social problems, on using fiction as a tool of social amelioration rather than regarding it as a self-sufficient form of literary art. To me, a "defining characteristic" of any fiction that can make a claim to be literary art, that can still be taken seriously in the long run, after the "social problems" of the day have been replaced by the next set, is that it not "confront" any issues or problems other than the literary problems immediately at hand.
Brooks's own insistence here that realism must "take on" larger social and cultural questions is actually contradicted, it seems to me, by what he asserts just a few paragraphs later:
You cannot, the realist claims, represent people without taking account of the things that people use and acquire in order to define themselves--their tools, their furniture, their accessories. These things are indeed part of the very definition of "character," of who one is and what one claims to be. The presence of things in these novels also signals their break from the neoclassical stylistic tradition, which tended to see the concrete, the particular, the utilitarian as vulgar, lower class, and to find beauty in the generalized and noble. The need to include and to represent things will consequently imply a visual inspection of the world of phenomena and a detailed report on it--a report often in the form of what we call description. The descriptive is typical--sometimes maddeningly so, of these novels. And the picture of the whole only emerges--if it does--from the accumulation of things.
This seems to me a pretty good account of what the best realist novels do: Draw the reader into a meticulously described world that the reader can accept as like the "real" world (keeping in mind that realistic description in fiction is just another device the writer can use, no more "authentic" than any other, given that what the reader is finally "confronted" with are just words on a page) and allow the reader to "see" the approximated world as fully as possible. If this sort of realism does bear philosophical implications, they are centered around the idea that the real is what is perceived. (Later, the "psychological" realists such as Woolf and Joyce would reject this; their fiction finds the real in how things are perceived, by focusing on the internal processes of consciousness.) But finally the art of realism lies in the way "things" are organized, in the manner and the skill with which the writer entices the reader to take note of the illuminating details.
Such an approach seems wholly at odds with the notion that realist fiction makes the reader aware of historical abstractions and social "issues." (The "generalized" rather than the "concrete.") "Things as they are" in the one seem on a wholly different scale than "things as they are" in the other. We can be made aware in fiction, subtly if implicitly, of historical change or social conflict, but only by acknowledging that the "defining characteristic" of realism is its particular approach to aesthetic representation, not its willingness to "take on" non-literary "problems.”
Thus, an analysis of realism that emphasizes taking on social problems as a defining characteristic requires a skeptical attitude toward the literary art of two of realism's ostensible founding figures, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert. Brooks writes of Dickens's Hard Times, perhaps his own most concentrated portrayal of the social conditions of Victorian England:
By its play on the streets and surfaces of Coketown, the narratorial prose upholds that ideal evoked in the allusion to the Arabian Nights: the play of fancy, of metaphor, of magic and the counterfactual. The narratorial language is constantly saying to Coketown, as to Gradgrind and company, I am not prisoner of your system, I can transform it, soar above it, through the imaginative resources of my prose.
This is Brooks's ultimate judgment on Dickens as a writer who evokes the surfaces of realistic description, at times soars above them, but doesn't really grapple with the "issues" behind them: he writes too much. As Brooks puts it a little later, Dickens engages in "the procedure of turning all issues, facts, conditions, into questions of style." Rather than acknowledging that "Everything in the conditions of Coketown. . .cry out for organization of the workers," Dickens just plays his grandiose language games. He makes "the questions posed by industrialism too much into a trope."
For Brooks, Hard Times is not so much a "taking on" of the harsh realities of 19th century England but a retreat from them into. . .literature. Dickens doesn't attempt the politicallydirected representation of these forces but instead the "nonrepresentation of Coketown in favor of something else, a representation of imaginative processes at work, a representation of transformative style at play on the world." It is difficult at times in reading this chapter to remember that Brooks intends such words as criticism. The "representation of imaginative processes at work" that Brooks describes here has always seemed to me one of the triumphs of Dickens's fiction.
Brooks gestures at granting Dickens his artistic preferences, but it's pretty clear from his discussion of Hard Times that he doesn't value these preferences in the same way he values fiction "that takes on the problems of social misery and class confict," or at least that does so without turning them into tropes. Certainly Brooks doesn't want to admit Dickens's fiction, with its out-of-control "narratorial prose" and its stubborn insistence on imagination, into the club of respectable realism.
With Flaubert, Brooks is less impatient with his style per se but still essentially accuses Flaubert of writing too much--of being preoccupied with writing, in this case of being fixated on structure and on detail ("le most juste"). According to Brooks:
. . .it may be precisely in this disciplining of his imagination to something he loathes that the arduous perfection of Madame Bovary is forged. There is nothing natural about this novel. It is absolutely the most literary of novels, Henry James said--which he did not mean entirely as praise. There is indeed something labored about the novel, its characters, plot, milieux are all constructed with effort. Everything, as Flaubert understands it, depends on the detail.
Flaubert's insistence on detailed description makes Brooks think that Madame Bovary "is the one novel, among all novels, that deserves the label 'realist'," but this conclusion does not leave him sanguine. Flaubert's sort of realism is too insular, too much the excuse for building an elaborate aesthetic construction where "everything depends on the detail." Unfortunately, the detail doesn't add up to a "confrontation" with the world, doesn't even add up to a coherent whole at all:
Rhetorically, I suppose you would call all of those riding crops and cravats and shirt buttons in Balzac's world synecdoches: they are parts that stand for an intelligible whole. In Flaubert's world, however, they seem more like apparent synecdoches, in that often the whole is never given, never quite achieved. While Emma is frequently described, we never quite see her whole. She and her world never quite cohere.
Further: "It is as if the parts of the world really are what is most significant about it—the rest may simply be metaphysics." Flaubert's very approach to realism, then, precludes a fiction that takes on problems other than the problems of representation themselves, beginning with the representation of Emma Bovary: "Emma is surely one of the most memorable 'characters' of the novels we have read, we want to construct her fully as a person, we live with her aspirations, delusions, disappointments. Yet we repeatedly are given to understand that as a living, breathing, character-construction, Emma is a product of language—of her reading, and reveries on her reading, and of the sociolects that define her world." When Brooks claims there is "something labored" about Madame Bovary, he intends it as "le mot juste" in describing Flaubert's relationship with language: "Writing was such a slow and painful process for Flaubert because he had to make something new, strange, and beautiful out of a language in essence commonplace."
"New, strange, and beautiful," it would seem, are finally incommensurate with "realism" as Peter Brooks would have us define it. Despite their importance as writers moving fiction toward a greater realism of representation—the attempt to create the illusion of life as lived by ordinary people—neither Dickens nor Flaubert can finally be embraced as true-blue realists dedicated to confronting the issues of the age. Both of them seem too interested in writing to be reliable social critics, the role Brooks appears to think supersedes all else in the realist's job description. Brooks almost seems to suggest that "art" and "realism" are mutually exclusive terms.
Failure to Communicate
Joan Houlihan declares that
Like all other forms of writing, poetry is a communication. The evidence is in its release from the poet's brain onto a medium designed to be read. The fact that it was written down, made readable, makes it a communication even if its only reader turns out to be its creator at a later time. Furthermore, whatever one feels about the role of the reader, or author-as-reader, there's no dispute that there is a role—a poem without a reader is not a poem, but just an artifact of the imagination. (The Boston Comment)
Neither poetry nor fiction is "a communication" in the way Houlihan clearly intends the term to be understood here. Poets and novelists do not "communicate" information or messages or ideas or propositions or wisdom or anything else by writing poetry or fiction. If these forms of writing are to be considered methods of communication, they are very poor ones indeed, since in most accomplished poems or novels the best that can be said is that their messages or "points" are communicated in a very roundabout way, a strategy that would seem merely self-defeating if the goal of writing them is to satisfy readers looking for the points being made or the message communicated. Most of the great works of literature would surely by now have been judged failures by the communication test: if the value of those works from the past we still read were to be found in their clearly signaled meanings, their unambiguously announced "themes," we probably would not still be reading them. We would have gotten the point long ago.
That poetry is written down, "designed to be read," doesn't in itself demonstrate it's to be taken as communication, although most of us do admittedly have a harder time separating the medium in which the literary arts are created from the artistic effects of which that medium might be capable than we do with painting or sculpture or music. Since we do use language to directly communicate, we assume all language must be used for that purpose—or that all uses of language can't escape its origins in communication or discourse. We are much more willing to grant that music, say, (the scores of which are also "written down") is something other than communication, in most cases, in fact, would resist the idea that behind the music we like is primarily an effort to communicate ideas or messages. But why is it not possible simply to grant that when poets or novelists set to work they are using language for some purposes that can't be reduced to "communication?" A poem or novel is an artificial construction of words. You may not like what has been constructed in a specific instance, but it hardly seems useful to say that it didn't communicate with you.
All of this is just confirmed if we further consider Houlihan's own contention that a poem communicates "even if its only reader turns out to be its creator at a later time." This seems frankly bizarre. If a poet at some future date "reads" a poem she has written, is she really "communicating" with herself? Would this poet even be aware of what's being communicated Wouldn't she be looking at the poem's formal qualities, the aptness of its word choice, etc.? Did Emily Dickinson consider herself finally a failure because the vast majority of her poems didn't "communicate" with anyone? Might she have been satisfied simply that she had created hundreds of well-made poems?
Even more bizarre, at least to me, is the claim that "a poem without a reader is not a poem, but just an artifact of the imagination." I will agree that ultimately most writers want readers, but what's wrong with those readers considering a given work as "an artifact of the imagination"? Isn't this the very way to define all works of art? Perhaps the problem Houlihan sees here is not that poems are products of the human imagination, but that they might be regarded as "artifacts," something that has been made by "artificial" means. Presumably poetry ought to be "natural," indeed an effort at communication. This distinction is probably at the heart of most complaints against works of art and literature that go too far in their brazen use of artifice or that are pronounced "obscure." But anyone taking up the writing of poetry and fiction is committed to an endeavor that is inescapably artificial. Poetry is an inherently unnatural disruption of our ordinary sense of what language is for (just ask all those freshmen struggling through intro to lit), but if you really resent writers playing this kind of game with words (gameplaying, however, being just as integral to human nature as the need to communicate), you probably shouldn't be reading (or writing) poetry in the first place.
I looked for evidence in Houlihan's essay that I was myself misreading her message, misconstruing her point, but was only reinforced in my analysis by her conclusion, in which she writes of "poets who betray what talent they may have for the approbation of peers, who engage in the worst self-delusion: that they have something to say that can only be said in a poem." Once again we are dealing with the assumption that literature is a forum for "saying something," even if it is something "that can only be said in a poem." I've never been clear exactly what things "can only be said in a poem." If you can reformulate the poem into what it "says," then obviously you have said it in another way. If you can't put what it says into words, then just as obviously it's not saying anything. The only other alternative is that a poem just is what it is, in most ways precisely avoiding saying anything in particular. If what we have in such a piece of writing is a failure to communicate, this failure is the poem's greatest success.
Subversive
When writers or critics speak of fiction as being "political," they most often mean that it engages with a subject or idea that if it is portrayed forcefully enough in its imaginative transformation could lead to fruitful social and cultural change (usually of the "progressive" variety). The website Literature and Social Change puts it this way:
Imaginative writing can be both literary and political simultaneously, and inevitably is, to varying degrees. In its own way, fiction can accomplish something similar to what Noam Chomsky and many other progressive workers try to accomplish through non-fiction: the creation of works that clarify and better the world socially, politically, culturally. . . .
Notice how this very definition actually erases itself: How can fiction "be both literary and political simultaneously" if it is attempting to do what "many other progressive workers try to accomplish through non-fiction"? If the goal is so resolutely political, it can't also be literary, or the two terms are simply washed of their meaning. Further, since the goal, to the extent it can be reached, is going to be reached more readily through non-fiction, why not just stick to expository nonfiction? Is it somehow not glamorous enough? Needs the imprimatur of "literature"?
Perhaps when some people speak of the "political" impact of fiction, they really just mean that works of fiction "reflect" the society that produces them, or that some readers might find what they read in a work of fiction to have some sort of broader, social relevance. But this is then made out to be something with much more significance than it really has. How can a work of literature not reflect the social forces that have made themselves felt to the writer, since the writer belongs to his/her society and unavoidably responds to such forces? Readers may indeed find a particular novel or poem to have social implications, but this does not mean that the work was written to have this effect. Certainly such implications can be a salubrious side-benefit to an otherwise attentive reading experience, but surely few writers really want these particular implications to be the only ones their work might have. I don't want to close off the possible meanings a work of literature might have for an individual reader, but to value fiction or poetry primarily for its social commentary is not really to give your full attention to what literature has to offer.
Sometimes, especially among academics, the "political" value of literature is identified more specifically as its capacity to be "subversive" or "transgressive." As M. Keith Booker puts it in his book Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature, "After all, even the most transgressive works of literature do not in general immediately send their readers into the streets carrying banners and shouting slogans. Transgressive literature works more subtly, by chipping away at certain modes of thinking that contribute to the perpetuation of oppressive political structures." To the extent that literature professors still put any value at all on literature itself, it is usually through this construct of the subversive. Not all works of literature finally measure up, of course—some are simply hopeless in this context, and since for such critics there is no other context, they are better consigned to the trash heap of literary history—but even those that don't seem to hold out much promise of being transgressive in any obvious way can be shown to have their transgressive moments if the critic digs hard enough and misreads strenuously enough. Booker, for example, finds Gilbert Sorrentino hopeless, his "mere rule breaking for the sake of rule breaking" insufficiently "transgressive in a genuine political sense, i.e. challenging existing dominant ideologies in a way that contributes to the process of social change." On the other hand, the fiction of Monique Wittig " [harnesses] the transgressive techniques that are inherent in sexuality not in the service of subjectivized experience but of a socialized and communal political statement." Beware of those "subjectivized experiences."
So-called "conservative" defenders of art or literature are finally no better, even though they frequently claim to be "depoliticizing" the arts. In a recent interview at Front Page, for example, Roger Kimball says of academic criticism in general that "One common ingredient is an impatience with the idea of intrinsic merit or intrinsic worth: a poem, a novel, a ‘text’ of any sort never means what it appears to say but is always an essentially subversive document whose aim is to undermine established values." One might think this is a defense of the aesthetic in art, but it's really just another version of politics. "Intrinsic merit" is itself a political tool; as Kimball also puts it in the same interview: "The great enemy of the totalitarian impulse, in intellectual life as well as in politics, is the idea of intrinsic worth." Putting aside the unexamined metaphysical assumptions informing the notion of "intrinsic worth," what Kimball really wants to recover is not art itself but "the traditional fabric of manners and morals that stands behind the work of art." For someone like Roger Kimball, art is no more to be valued for its real aesthetic qualities (which do often indeed rip at the "traditional fabric" he wants to preserve), but for the way in which it can be enlisted to enforce a "traditional" social order. In the end, people like Roger Kimball and M. Keith Booker are dancing a kind of vicious dance together, each partner despising the other but unable to let go.
Do I then think literature is merely a "subjectivized experience" or, even worse, just "entertainment"? Absolutely not, although it is those things first and foremost. A "subjective experience" of art or literature can indeed be a very profound one, even transforming the way the subject thinks about him/herself as well as the social world into which the reader must inevitably return. I might even say that such an experience can ultimately prove "subversive" in its effects, as long as the word is used in something like the sense conveyed by the poet Stephen Dunn, also in a recent interview:
No, I don't think [artists] have a moral obligation, except maybe to be interesting. Or, if they do, it's to subvert the status quo by resisting official versions of it, then reconstructing it so others can see it anew. Not with an agenda in mind, but through simply trying to find the right language for what is elusive. . . (Poets & Writers)
"Official versions" of the status quo are not just political. Such versions can be imposed by family or by our own incuriosity, or by society and culture more broadly. They are all "official" versions of the way things are that we have simply come to accept and haven't questioned much. Works of literature can provoke us into questioning them by showing us that there are always alternative versions, that descriptions of reality are only tentative and that a final understanding of the way things are isn't going to be possible. (Art that suggests there can be a final understanding isn't really art.) Literature does this both through its content—the alternative versions we're presented with—and through form—the way in which the perceived world is "reconstructed," to use Dunn's word. Literature in its aesthetic dimension—literally, the "art" by which it is made—displays to us the imagination at work, reminds us that there are effectively no limits to the human imagination.
To me, this is all indeed powerfully subversive. Through art we become aware that the world can always be remade. Art is the enemy of all certainties and settled doctrines. This is not likely to be acceptable to political critics of either the left or the right, the Bookers or the Kimballs, which is why I would say that in the final analysis such critics don't really much value art at all. They literally don't have any use for it, unless it can be distorted to suit their own ideological predispositions. As Stephen Dunn says, poets and fiction writers are "trying to find the right language for what is elusive." And afterwards, it remains elusive. In my opinion, the only way that literature can "clarify and better the world socially, politically, culturally" is by revealing to us, perhaps to our dismay, that this is a fact.
Moral Improvement
Arthur I. Blaustein obviously believes in the socially redeeming effects of fiction:
. . . Novels offer genuine hope for learning how to handle our daily personal problems— and those political issues of our communities and our country—in a moral and humane way. They can help us to understand the relationship between our inner lives and the outer world, and the balance between thinking, feeling, and acting. They awaken us to the complexities and paradoxes of human life, and to the absurd presumptuousness of moral absolutism. They can give us awareness of place, time, and condition—about ourselves and about others. As our great Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner said, the best literature is far more true than any journalism. (Mother Jones)
I know that Blaustein believes he is valorizing fiction by describing its ethical utility in such terms, but in my opinion he is advocating that we read fiction for all the wrong reasons. Far from elevating fiction to some kind of privileged place as an object of our regard, Blaustein's encomium to "moral fiction" really subsumes it to the prerogatives of good citizenship and reduces it to its potential value as instruction and therapy. When Faulkner said that literature is more "true" than journalism, he certainly did not mean that it was instead a way to deliver "metaphoric news," as Blaustein puts it later in his essay; he meant that it grappled with those "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself" that surely transcend our concern with the lying and deceit of the Bush administration.
Indeed, Blaustein trivializes those problems Faulkner identifies by diminishing them to our "daily personal problems" and by implying that fiction aims to teach us how to resolve "those political issues of our communities and our country." The writer, said Faulkner, must leave "no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed." Otherwise, "His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands."
I really don't know what it means to say that novels "can help us to understand the relationship between our inner lives and the outer world." Are out "inner lives" not part of the "world"? And if in teaching us about "the balance between thinking, feeling, and acting," Blaustein is suggesting that, used properly, novels will encourage us to do more of the lastnamed, presumably in the name of the "outer world," I can only say that if you need novels to tell you that living in the world is important, that we must balance "thinking, feeling, and acting," you're not likely to take their lessons to heart, either. Not to mention understand why most writers take up fiction in the first place, which is precisely to avoid delivering lessons.
It is certainly the case that fiction "awaken[s] us to the complexities and paradoxes of human life, and to the absurd presumptuousness of moral absolutism." This is the one point on which I wholeheartedly agree with Arthur Blaustein. But it's hard to accept that he really believes this when most of his essay concentrates on the way in which reading fiction can simplify our current conundrums, can uncover for us the essence of our mass-marketed and politically corrupt social world and perhaps return us to the time when "the imaginations of young people have been fired by characters that function as role models." And it's equally hard to take Blaustein's own lessons to heart when most of his essay is as morally absolutist as this: "How has it come to pass that our founding fathers gave us a land of political and economic opportunity, and we have become a nation of political and economic opportunists? As we have come to worship the idols of power, money, and success, we have neglected the core political principles of justice, equality, community, and democracy." Or this: "This McNews approach has undercut our moral values and civic traditions. We have sought simplistic answers to complex problems without even beginning to comprehend the consequences of our loss."
(I don't necessarily disagree with these statements, but they're not conclusions one reaches from reading novels. They're moral declarations.)
Blaustein would like to see more people forming reading groups in order to share the socially constructive messages of fiction. Here are the questions he thinks such people should ask of the novels they read:
What do you think is the central theme? What are the underlying themes?
Did the author raise any emotional conflicts you may have had… or resolve any? Did the author challenge any political, economic, social, or cultural beliefs that you may have held with regard to race, sex, gender, class, or ethnicity?
Conspicuously absent is any question inquiring about those features of a novel that make it a compelling work of art. They're questions about "themes," emotions, and beliefs. Of course, I wouldn't want to prevent anyone from joining a reading group organized around such questions, but finally I can't quite see why in order to discuss them it would be necessary to read novels. Couldn't everyone get together and talk about certain pre-determined themes (perhaps even ones extracted from this or that novel by someone who'd once read it), specified "emotional conflicts," and selected "political, economic, social, or cultural beliefs"? If you're going to target novels because they might be useful as curatives or for raising consciousness, why not just dispense the cure or proceed with enlightening insights and save time?
The time actually spent with a work of fiction is the most valuable part of the reading experience. It is, in fact, everything. The "reading group experience" is something else altogether. Innocuous enough, undoubtedly, and maybe even helpful in the therapeutic sense, but ultimately a poor substitute for sustained engagement with a novel or short story at its deepest formal and linguistic levels or with works of fiction that aren't obviously congenial to "moral" readings.
The Big Dialogue of Literature
Accoring to Horace Engdahl, secretary of the Swedish Academy, "Europe still is the center of the literary world" when it comes to the awarding of the Nobel Prize, that "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," and that American writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture."
On the one hand, it seems likely that Engdahl's remarks were motivated by a non-literary (and entirely justified) dissatisfaction with American political and military actions over the last eight years, a dissatisfaction widely shared across all of Europe these days. Engdahl assumes, wrongly, that American writers, American "culture" more generally, are somehow complicit with these actions or at least haven't done enough to express their solidarity with European critics of American hubris as embodied by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. To this extent, one might grant Engdahl some forbearance, since his attitude probably reflects a momentary unhappiness with the United States that will surely abate with the passing of the Bush administration.
But on the other hand, Engdahl's comments do reflect some underlying assumptions about both American literature and the role of literature more generally that certainly warrant scrutiny. For one thing, while I suppose it is possible for writers to become "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture" (especially if we take "mass culture" to be something other than "culture" itself, a separate realm driven by the same mindless forces that drive the American government), most depictions of "mass culture" in American fiction tend to be critical of that culture, if not outright satirical. Insofar as Engdahl has read much contemporary American fiction, it would seem he hasn't read it very well. Especially among those writers who might be seriously considered for the Nobel Prize--Roth or Pynchon or Barth--"mass culture" is an object of concern and ridicule, not something these writers seek to reinforce. That Engdahl would think otherwise does call his qualifications for the job of awarding a literary prize--the most esteemed literary prize of them all--into question.
One would have to presume that Europe remains "the center of the literary world" because its writers do not have such an unseemly obsession with their own nations' culture, but of course this hardly seems credible. However, since Engdahl provides no additional enlightenment about what it actually means to be the world's literary center an alternative presumption would seem to be that Europe is central because, well, the Nobel committee most often awards the prize to European writers. I admit both a professional and personal bias toward American fiction in my own reading habits, but to the extent Engdahl is claiming the greatest contemporary writers are to be found on the continent of Europe, I must further admit I find the notion thoroughly unsupportable. There are certainly some very fine writers in Great Britain, but most of them are undoubtedly obscure to someone like Horace Engdahl (writers such as Tom McCarthy and Rosalind Belben), and among them are decidedly not the "name" writers Engdahl probably does have in mind--Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. There are also excellent writers in France and the German-speaking countries, and I have recently found myself particularly taken by several Eastern European writers whose work I had not previously read, but again the notion that any of these writers are "greater" than Roth, Pynchon, Coover, or Stephen Dixon seems to me unsupportable. And that such now deceased postwar American writers as John Hawkes or Stanley Elkin or Gilbert Sorrentino were never even remotely considered for the Nobel Prize only highlights the essential cluelessness of those at the "center" of the European literary world.
The comments that have received the most attention in the print media and on literary blogs are Engdahl's suggestions that American writers are "too insular" and "don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature." Most people have interpreted this to be a criticism of American writers for not reading enough translated work, or for focusing on domestic "issues," but I find the claims as worded to be virtually incoherent. Either Engdahl is asserting that not enough American writers are contributing to some ongoing "dialogue" about literature separate from their own writing, or the allegation is that they don't conceive of their writing as a contribution to "the big dialogue of literature." As far as I'm concerned, both notions are equally preposterous. The first requires that we think of world literature as some kind of super seminar in which writers are the invited panelists and collegiality the expected behavior. It seems to substitute "dialogue" among writers for literary criticism.
Most likely, of course, Engdahl means something like the second. American writers are too "insular" in that they don't offer their work as part of a cross-cultural discourse that Engdahl is defining as "literature." They are too "isolated" to see the value of this discourse. But literature isn't a "dialogue" monitored by self-appointed arbiters who decide what part of the conversation deserves a prize for its insight. It isn't an attempt to "say" anything, except circuitously or by accident. I'm tempted to construe Engdahl's scolding of American writers for their insularity as just another expression of impatience with the "merely literary," with writing that isn't morally or politically useful, but I doubt he really meant to go quite that far. He is simply reiterating a commonly-held, if implicit rather than thought-out, view that literature is more about dialogue and discussion and nicely articulated platitudes. less about art and aesthetic consummation, which indeed often occurs in isolation and, in literature, as a "dialogue" only between the author and his/her text.
One reason that poets are so infrequently awarded the Nobel Prize has to be that it is much harder to value poetry primarily for its relevance to "the big dialogue." Poetry more clearly foregrounds the aesthetic ambitions of literature, and even those who read novels for the "something said" are often willing to concede that this model is overly reductive as applied to poetry (when such readers even admit to reading poetry--many simply confess they don't "get" it). But since the Nobel Prize seems to be decided according to the criterion that a writer "say" things (that, and the implicit requirement that the prestige of the prize be spread around a little--every once in a while a Chinese or Arabic writer--to enlarge the "dialogue"), poetry, or, God forbid, experimental writing, is nevertheless going to be left at the door. Such exclusion of writing that in its necessary inwardness doesn't meet the blandly humanitarian standards of the Nobel committee is just one of the reasons why this literary prize, the biggest, is also the most idiotic.
Positive and Ennobling
In discussing "Banned Books Week," David Ulin asks:
The basic message here is one of astonishment: Why would anyone ban books when literature is such a positive and ennobling force? Yet while I agree with that, I also believe that some books truly are dangerous, and to ignore that is simply disingenuous. (Los Angeles Times)
He continues:
Yet it's foolish, self-defeating even, to pretend that books are innocuous, that we don't need to concern ourselves with what they say. If that's the case, then it doesn't really matter if we ban them, because we have already stripped them of their power.
Throughout his essay, but especially in these quoted passages, Ulin betrays the sort of sloppy thinking and confusion about the nature of literature so prevalent among the practitioners of "literary journalism" in the mainstream print media. His ultimate point--that even obnoxious books ought to be tolerated--is cogent enough, if something of a bromide. But his enlistment of "literature" in the cause of defending "dangerous" books is hardly credible.
The most immediate flaw in Ulin's thinking is in his casual conflation of "literature" and "books." He invokes "literature" and its "positive and ennobling" associations, only to base his analysis on "books" understood as those works advancing an argument, that make a claim on us through "what they say." Ulin's analysis works only if he first evokes the literary as "ennobling" and then contrasts it with particular (in some cases repellent) books that no one would categorize as "literary" in the first place. It's a move that depends on the reader accepting the blithe but shoddy equation, books = literature, on which Ulin balances his argument.
But works of literature are not identical with "books." A literary work is a verbal composition that exists independently of its medium of transmission. It can be presented on paper, through bytes in cyberspace, or can be stored in a word processing file. (It could also, of course, be recited orally.) It is an act of linguistic imagination that does not coincide with any of these methods of publication (as in "making public") and can exist simultaneously in all of them. A book is a commodified object, an artifact of the printing press, the culturally-sanctioned form of communication assigned to journalists like Ulin for their "coverage." No matter how much they try to smuggle in references to literature in describing their subject, such journalists are always going to prefer books to literature because the former are presumed to have something to "say," provide the reviewer with the opportunity, as Ulin also puts it, "to confront someone else's ideas." Books are what prompt the editor of the New York Times Book Review to convert that publication into a forum for dreary "cultural criticism" and the pedestrian discussion of media-filtered "ideas." Literature is not to be found in its pages, except through the fortuitous conjunction of fiction and news, or an accident of publication date.
I would agree with Ulin that both good books and works of literature ought to "make us uncomfortable," but where the former do this by challenging established ideas about the subject at hand, the latter make us uncomfortable with our own reading practices, with our unsustainable assumptions about the very nature of the "literary." Literature is inherently neither "positive" nor "ennobling," and the "danger" it poses is not to be found in the printed embodiments of "someone else's ideas" but in the reading experience itself, the complacency of which is threatened by works of literature that seek to reconfigure perceptions of the literary. A preoccupation with "ideas" only reinforces such complacency, reducing the more expansive power of literature to the ordinary charge provided by "books."
Full of Ideas
In his review of Siri Hustvedt’s 2008 novel, The Sorrows of an American, Ron Charles calls it “a radically postmodern novel.” This is a rather astonishing claim. Although this novel could be described as somewhat fragmented, containing numerous flashbacks and some interpolated documents, primarily a journal kept by the narrator’s deceased father, it could hardly be called formally adventurous at all, much less “radically” so. It is a mostly conventional first-person narrative, even if Hustvedt does exploit the narrator’s occupation as a psychoanalyst, as well as the general intellectual milieu he inhabits, to evoke various philosophical and scientific “ideas.” Perhaps it is this impression of intellectual density that leads Charles to consider The Sorrows of an American “postmodern,” but this seems an odd criterion for identifying the postmodern, since the “novel of ideas” surely antedates postmodernism. The fiction of Dostoevsky or Saul Bellow is probably even more intellectually dense than Hustvedt’s novel, but of course nobody thinks to call these writers postmodern.
Hustvedt’s new novel, The Blazing World, is likewise full of ideas, in this case, the ideas of Harriet “Harry” Burden, the novel’s artist protagonist. Readers familiar with Hustvedt’s work will thus find familiar in The Blazing World not only the references to Husserl or Kierkegaard but also the focus on art and the creation of art, as this is the focus as well of Hustvedt’s most well-known novel, What I Loved (2002). What I Loved featured a male conceptual artist whose idiosyncratic work ultimately finds an audience, but this novel is also a study in friendship, family dynamics, and dysfunction, narrated by the artist’s best friend, whose own story receives equal emphasis. By contrast, The Blazing World, although it includes a plethora of peripheral characters, in themselves of varying interest, uses these characters to provide perspective on Harry Burden, whose status as a female artist is the novel’s sole focus.
Like Bill Wechsler in What I Loved (Wechsler’s name is invoked in The Blazing World as an influence on Harry’s work), Harry Burden is also a conceptual artist, but unlike Wechsler Harry was never able to sustain herself as an artist, instead being known primarily as an art collector and the wife of a prominent art critic. Harry believes that the neglect of her work as an artist can be attributed to her gender, to the perception of her as the art critic’s wife, the hostess at his parties. After her husband’s death, Harry conspires with three men, one a well-known artist in his own right, to produce three separate exhibitions of her work, presented under their names. The shows are successful, seeming to confirm Harry’s notion that literally these works are being perceived differently when assumed to be created by male artists than they would be if exhibited with her name attached.
At the time of her own death, then, Harriet Burden had begun to get some of the attention she so clearly desired, although as we are introduced to the “case” of Harriet Burden, we are also told that her hoax is still somewhat controversial, the authenticity of the work still in some dispute. The novel we are reading, we also discover immediately, is in fact a kind of memorial volume dedicated to Harriet Burden and the scandal she created, a collection of interviews, reminiscences, and critical considerations, as well as selections from several different notebooks kept by Harry herself. The Blazing World is thus manifestly more adventurous formally than The Sorrows of an American (than What I Loved as well), but of course as a form of epistolary fiction such an approach is hardly new and could not be cited in support of a claim that this novel shows Siri Hustvedt to be a postmodern writer.
Harry’s notebooks feature her reflections on what she is up to, the recorded interviews with family, friends, and co-conspirators adding perspective on her behavior and to some extent a response to the work Harry produced from the motives and ideas revealed in the notebooks. The animating assumption Harry believes her art confirms — that aesthetic perception is never pure, is always colored by acquired preconceptions and implicit biases — is provocative enough, but again it can’t really be called an original insight, and it doesn’t become more exceptional or more interesting when it is illustrated not simply through one example by which Harry demonstrated her work was misperceived and undervalued, dismissed when directly attributed to her but extolled when accompanied by a male artist’s name, but three separate episodes related in considerable detail and reiterated in the surrounding commentary. One finishes this novel convinced that Harriet Burden certainly has a point in contending that women’s art is literally not seen on its own terms, but having long conceded that point at the price of diminished interest in the details of the story making it.
The Blazing World seems very much a novel with something to “say,” not just generally about human motives and behavior but very specifically about art and artists, and about “gendered” perception. The “ideas” the novel invokes, ideas drawn from neuroscience and philosophy, are thus ideas that Harry directly explicates and are offered to us as the inspiration for Harry’s practice. While this linking of art and idea may be an accurate enough reflection of the close relationship that does indeed obtain between art and idea in contemporary conceptual art — where art has arguably become subordinate to idea — it doesn’t serve well as material for the art of fiction. If conceptual art often reduces the experience of art to the contemplation of the idea that the art serves to bring into focus, The Blazing World settles for the ideas leading to the ideas leading to the art whose existence must remain imaginary. This problem is not solved by the literal, extended descriptions of the works Harry Burden exhibits, which are mostly colorless and functional, assuming, presumably, we will find these works inherently compelling because they are unusual and “quirky” (an assumption that plagues What I Loved even more severely). The Blazing World is “about” art in the least interesting way a work of fiction can be “about” something: as direct communication, as exposition of the subject’s “content.” What if in A Farewell to Arms Hemingway had given us a detailed analysis of the Battle of Caporetto, complete with reflections on its role in determining the outcome of World War I, instead of a story about a doomed romance? Surely this is not what we want from a novel “about” war.
The novel is not without its more admirable and more artfully executed features. Harriet Burden is by no means a one-dimensional figure without interest aside from her role in illustrating the status of women artists. She is obviously thoughtful and determined, but can also be exasperating and irascible, so that the discussions of Harriet that testify to all of these qualities don’t seem inconsistent. She can be clear-eyed and calculating, but also openly emotional, vulnerable to disappointment. If The Blazing World can be rescued from its own didacticism, it would be because the reader finds Harry Burden more interesting than the art world issues with which she is preoccupied. (More interesting than the art world itself as portrayed in the novel.) For this reason, the multiple perspectives from which we approach Harry turns out to be an effective strategy, since her intensity might be more difficult to take if she were in effect the narrator of her own story.
Still, however fortuitous the novel’s formal structure is in reinforcing its strongest feature, ultimately this structure has been employed primarily because it is the most convenient way to organize a novel that is essentially a consideration of a topic. Had that topic more consistently been the existential and psychological travails of a woman in Harry Burden’s personal and professional circumstances, rather than the exposition of her aesthetic philosophy, The Blazing World would be a better book.
Capturing His Generation
Justin Taylor's The Gospel of Anarchy has received mixed reviews at best, and the most common complaint against has been that it is flawed in what is usually called "character development." Steve Almond asserts that its characters "seem more like mouthpieces than genuine people. We learn little about them beyond their half-baked dogma, and the point of view shifts frequently" (Boston Globe). Brain Evenson criticizes Taylor for merely "creating character images that contrast from scene to scene, allowing these unexplained changes to do the work of character development" (Bookforum). Carolyn Kellogg regards its mode of narration as "a distancing agent, seeding a ubiquitous narrative skepticism" (Los Angeles Times).
While I would agree that The Gospel of Anarchy is a disappointing first novel, I don't think its main problem lies in a failure to create vivid characters. Indeed, since the novel is largely about the way its characters are willing to subsume their identities to the tenets of a burgeoning sect (some might say cult), or at least to find their identities in the formation of a collective, it seems very strange to fault it because it lacks distinct characters beyond the "half-baked dogma" they embrace. Similarly, since these characters are precisely trying to "distance" themselves from society at large, it's a curious response to them that finds "a distancing agent" inappropriate.
Furthermore, the injunction to develop "round" characters seems quite a reactionary expectation of a young writer, who may or may not find this a desirable goal, as is Almond's further pronouncements that novels "depend on rising action" in which "conflicts. . .have to be dramatized" and finding The Gospel of Anarchy wanting in fulfilling these hoary requirements. There's nothing in The Gospel of Anarchy that suggests Justin Taylor wants it to be judged as an "experimental" novel, but it nevertheless seems pretty dogmatic in its own right to demand that it provide "sympathetic" characters, a fixed point of view, and adherence to Freytag's triangle to be judged acceptable.
If The Gospel of Anarchy is not particularly audacious in form or style, Taylor is clearly a skilled enough writer, and the "shifts" in point of view help maintain interest in the story, however much the story is unfortunately all too predictable, the outcome of its depiction of a failed punk commune implicit in its origins in youthful naiveté, rigidity of belief, and in the narratives of failed utopias that precede it (I often thought in particular of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance while reading The Gospel of Anarchy.) Taylor's first book, the story collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, was widely praised for its portrayal of disenchanted youth, but part of the trouble with The Gospel of Anarchy is that it ultimately leaves the impression it began as one of those highly compacted stories and has been stretched beyond its capacity to bear the burden of both invoking its characters' spiritual ennui and depicting their attempts to re-enchant the world they've inherited.
The biggest problem with The Gospel of Anarchy, however, is that it is stretched to bear that burden in such a relentlessly earnest way its author seems not to be aware he is telling on overly familiar tale whose outcome is foreordained. In his review of the novel, Joe Coscarelli in the Village Voice complains there is too much "ambiguity as to whether [Taylor] means to mock his characters or endorse their anti-capitalist paradise," but actually whatever ambiguity there might be on this point is really all there is to maintain any interest in the story. Ultimately it doesn't really matter: the narrative seems designed to establish that the beliefs motivating the characters in their attempt to create an "anti-capitalist paradise" are precisely the sort of beliefs such characters in such a place and at such a time would hold--or did hold. Whether we are to find them compelling or ridiculous isn't finally what's at stake, although most readers will probably find themselves considering that question.
The novel begins well, with a portrait of its ostensible protagonist (the focus soon shifts away from him and settles on "Fishgut," a haven for the disaffected and the dropouts of the college town of Gainesville, Florida) in a state of extreme apathetic discontent, listlessly sorting through online porn while trying to decide whether to finish his education at the University of Florida. This character, David, meets up with an old friend who has fallen even farther into discontent, and who at the moment is engaged in a systematic act of dumpster-diving on behalf of his fellow residents of Fishgut. These episodes are fairly bracing, offering a vivid depiction of generational alienation, but they are not so freshly conceived or rendered to really seem shocking.
As if recognizing that such sketches of dissatisfaction and implicit despair can go only so far, Taylor devotes the rest of the novel to sketches of his characters attempting to ameliorate their despair. This is not an unreasonable or illegitimate thing to do, but the vehicle for this attempt, a hybrid ideology combining elements of anarchism, existentialism, and Christianity the group's de facto leader, Kate, calls "Anarchristianity," is not nearly as interesting as she--and perhaps Taylor--thinks it is. Apart from some scenes depicting David's sexual escapades with Kate and Kate's girlfriend, Liz, escapades that are themselves meant to represent a living-out of important tenets of the creed, most of the novel is taken up with an exposition of "anarchristianity" as inspired, at least retroactively, by a Fishgut resident named Parker, long since departed. While this part of the novel has some interest as an account of how religious sects (ultimately religion itself) get started, on the whole The Gospel of Anarchy doesn't give enough emphasis to this subject, either formally or thematically, to rescue it from the tedium that sets in when Parker and his "wisdom" become the novel's center of attention.
By the time we get to several pages of excerpts from the "holy book" concocted by Kate and David from some unorganized journals left behind by Parker, we've already been so immersed in the awkward hybrid of politics and religion that is anarchristianity it is very difficult to read these pages with the degree of interest Taylor clearly enough intends them to have. If the writings themselves were more lively, their ideas more provocative, we might still concede their importance to the novel, but instead we are given passages such as this:
Faith is the power by which we leap over the unbridgeable chasm, burst through the wall of the asymptote, realize Heaven on Earth. Grace is us granted that power, the fuel injected into faith's engine, the energy generated from its burning up.
Even if we could determine what such a claim is really supposed to mean, it's likely it would turn out to be just as banal as it seems. In my opinion, these pages act to finally bring down the novel as an aesthetic achievement. However much notions like this might appeal to susceptible twentysomethings, they're neither so vitally expressed we want to carefully consider them, nor so obviously ludicrous we know that satire is intended. They're just boring, and the eyes glaze while reading this collection of jottings.
It seems to me that Justin Taylor is too concerned in The Gospel of Anarchy with "capturing" his generation, with "saying something" about that generation's search for solutions to what they perceive as the problems of modern existence. This search is certainly a universal enough phenomenon, but unfortunately the novel essentially offers the same account of it as previous generations of literary seekers. Is fitting this particular kind of quest narrative to the changing if superficial particulars of each succeeding generation's social circumstances a worthwhile goal for the novelist? I tend to think not.
The Saying and the Said
Hilary Plum’s Strawberry Fields will no doubt be labeled a “political” novel, but that would serve only to bind this novel to an already ill-defined concept (when applied to literature) that becomes even more opaque at a time when political awareness has become especially urgent and we are frequently told that “all art is political.” Strawberry Fields addresses a subject (more precisely, an array of connected subjects) that certainly elicits deeply felt political responses, in the novel mostly centered on American foreign policy, although also including other government misadventures, such as the Hurricane Katrina debacle, but can we say that such responses are the effects the author most wants to provoke? Is Strawberry Fields a “critique” of American political derelictions, an effort to express a political perspective through fiction?
Of course, we can never be certain about a writer’s intentions short of direct testimony by the writer, and even then such testimony is not decisive, since what an author claims she intended to achieve in a work of fiction may or may not correspond with what readers value in that work, and does not finally determine how it should be interpreted. Still, it seems relatively certain that Hilary Plum would not want her novel to be received as if its political content—especially as that content is reduced to what the author purportedly wants to “say”—is to be regarded as its only source of interest. If the novel is meant primarily as a condemnation of American imperialism or the depredations of Western technological capitalism, surely such a critique could be carried out much more directly and without the contingencies and ambiguities created by the segmented formal structure Plum has employed.
The novel includes a large cast of characters, but most of these characters appear only once, in a self-enclosed episode centering exclusively on that character’s experience. Most of the episodes as well have little if any connection to the others, except insofar as the characters find themselves in vulnerable or extreme situations, often associated, although not always, with political instability (especially related to the Iraq War). The closest thing to a linear narrative the novel offers are the sections headed “Alice,” which feature the titular character, a journalist, and detective named Modigliani, who, we learn, first teamed up to investigate a pair of suspected murders during the aftermath of a destructive hurricane, and in the present action of the novel have joined together again after five veterans of the Iraq War are found murdered.
It would be misleading, however, to say that these recurrent sections devoted to Alice and Modigliani (sometimes Alice alone) really constitute a “story.” The crime that brought them together originally remains unsolved, and their inquiries into the circumstances of the veterans’ deaths come to no more decisive conclusion. Indeed, both Strawberry Fields as well as Plum’s previous novel, They Dragged Them Through the Streets, are strongly informed by the conceit of investigation or inquiry, the desire to know, but in both cases the desire can’t really be fulfilled; the novels are as much about the limitations of our ability to know as they are their ostensibly more immediate subjects, about which we are given hints and intimations rather than definite answers to the questions their situations prompt. Thus, in Strawberry Fields we are given reasons to suspect that a shadowy military contractor called Xenith (likely modeled on Blackwater) might have been responsible for the killings in each of the cases Alice covers, but finally they, as well as Xenith itself, continue to be murky and mysterious.
This, however, is a strength of the novel rather than a narrative defect or a sign of the author’s lack of commitment. Few novels could be as literally plotless as Strawberry Fields, but this is because the novel resists the sort of narrative progression plot brings with it, progression that entails a kind of closure that Plum wants to suggest is unavailable at a time when events seem determined by forces beyond our reach, shady actors good at concealing their traces, when we live in a world that has grown ever more connected but that in the process seems only to magnify the perception that we are powerless to mitigate or even understand the turmoil that ceaselessly confronts us. The order enforced by plot no doubt would seem a falsification of reality for a writer who, however much her novel departs from ordinary expectations of what makes a novel a novel, clearly does want to render a truthful portrayal of 21st century reality and of the efforts made by her novel’s characters to cope with it.
Alice is the most thoroughly developed character in the novel (Modigliani remains somewhat enigmatic), although the characters featured in the individual episodes are vividly evoked despite the relative brevity of their appearances. The portrayal of Alice partly works to illustrate the burdens of journalism in the world we currently inhabit. Alice sincerely wants to uncover the truth, but finds it nearly impossible to locate. The private detective Modigliani ostensibly also seeks the truth, although he seems more removed, more resigned, perhaps, to the obstacles in his path. A number of the other characters introduced are writers of various kinds, and ultimately it is as if the author of Strawberry Fields mirrors in her own novel’s inconclusion and fragmentation the efforts many of these characters themselves make to bring words to account in the face of a recalcitrant reality, finding through such efforts that a coherent perspective on this reality remains elusive. When the expressive power of language falters, perhaps the best a writer can do is represent attempts to express, in the case of Strawberry Fields, by juxtaposing multiple such attempts and achieving, if not a final, comprehensive view of the truth, at least a cross-section of efforts to discover it, putting us in the presence of a recognizable truth even as its definable characteristics lurk beyond our immediate apprehension.
The vision that the novel’s unorthodox formal structure serves, then, is ethical, not specifically political. In its purposeful discontinuity, the novel assumes the task of bearing witness to the impediments obstructing the truth, as well as the hardships endured by those living in a world where truth seems so obscure. While America’s 21st century military adventures and inattention to suffering most prominently contribute to perpetuating such conditions, these are not the only sources of venality and corruption surveyed by Strawberry Fields, and the ultimate barrier to human flourishing is the more general human capacity to regard the lives of others as dispensable, collateral damage to the pursuit of power and control. The novel’s predominantly bleak tone, reinforced in its conclusion, which seems at first an attempt to rally some final conviction in the efficacy of writing only to falter via a final reminder of its insufficiency, doesn’t really position it as an appeal to political action; it does establish the novel as a painstakingly honest exploration of the conditions that make such a bleak outlook sadly appropriate.
If Strawberry Fields deflects some of our attention away from the usual interest in plot and character, its formal arrangement deftly reinforces its ethical ambitions. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the ethical content itself emerges from the formal design Plum has used. Strawberry Fields may be one of those rare novels in which what the novel wants to “say” is virtually indistinguishable from the way it is said.
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