The History of Change
In a post on his blog, Ron Silliman argues that "the history of poetry is the history of change in poetry," that the critics of innovation in literary practice are themselves writers and critics likely to be swept away by the historical currents that favor innovation and are thus mostly engaging in "tantrums" over their own unavoidable fate, and that the "new" and the fashionable are not synonymous terms in our appreciation of the innovative in poetry (or fiction.).
Literature certainly is more the history of its own evolving forms than it is an assemblage of "great works," although I would substitute for "change" John Dewey's notion of "growth" as the inevitable outcome of artistic traditions that manage to extend themselves over time--"growth" not as simplistic "progress" but as the expansion of available approaches to the form, an increase of insight into the variety of its possibilities. Indeed, even if we were to consider literary history as the accumulation of great works, in most cases these works are great precisely because they represent some new direction taken by the form employed. Surely English drama was not the same after Shakespeare finished stretching its boundaries, nor was English narrative poetry (narrative poetry in general) after Paradise Lost. Although we now think of the realistic novel as the epitome of convention in fiction, there was of course a time when it was on the cutting edge of change and writers like Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Henry James were writing what was for the time experimental fiction.
Thus I am less willing than Silliman to dismiss the "well-wrought urn" as a metaphor for aesthetic accomplishment in works of literature. A poem or novel may indeed be "well-wrought" without conforming to pre-established models. Perhaps the passage of time does allow us to see more clearly the craftedness of some works of art that at first seemed simply model-breaking, but ultimately I see no conflict between innovation in poetry or fiction and the skillful construction of individual poems, plays, short stories, or novels.
On the other hand, Silliman is certainly correct in characterizing most of the critical resistance to change in literary forms as a kind of lashing-out against writing implicitly exposing most of the otherwise critically favored writers of the moment as aesthetically tame and unadventurous, tied to the critical nostrums of the day (which, especially with fiction, are typically not only aesthetically conservative, but often not really focused on aesthetic achievement at all but on what the writer allegedly has to "say" about prominent "issues"). American experimental fiction of the post-World War II era has been especially subjected to these "tantrums"—If anything they have only increased in intensity—concerted efforts to marginalize this fiction by accusing it of lacking seriousness of purpose, of indulging in games and jokes rather than sticking to straightforward storytelling, of striving after effects that turn out to be "merely literary." In my opinion, however, it will be the work of writers like John Hawkes, Robert Coover, and Gilbert Sorrentino that will be recognized as the indispensable fiction of this period, not that of the more celebrated but less formally audacious writers such as Bellow or Styron or Vidal.
Eventually almost all postwar writers whose work departs significantly from convention have come to be labeled "postmodernist," a term that has definable meaning but that also has been used as an aid in this lashing-out, a way to further disparage such writers both by lumping them together indiscriminately and by identifying their work as just another participant in literary fashion. Ron Silliman points out that a distinction can be made between fashion in the arts and the truly new:
Each art form has its own dynamic around issues such as form and change. For example, one could argue that the visual arts world, at least in New York & London, has become self-trivializing by thrusting change into warp drive because of the market needs of the gallery system. There, capital demands newness at a pace that hardly ever lets a shift in the paradigm marinate awhile. I seriously wonder if any innovation in that world since the Pop artists let in the found imagery of the mid-century commercial landscape has ever had a chance to settle in. That settling process seems to be an important part of the run-up in helping to generate the power of reaction, to motivate whatever comes next. The problem with the visual arts scene today is that innovation is constant, but always unmotivated.
Poetry has the advantage of not being corrupted by too much cash in the system. That ensures that change can occur at a pace that has more to do with the inner needs of writers as they confront their lives. . . .
The New York art world has become so dependent on "the latest thing" that aesthetic change becomes "unmotivated" except by the need for individual artists to enter the system that confers purpose on their work. And although fiction is probably more tied to the cash nexus than poetry, most serious literary fiction is much less so, and the degree of change and resistance to change, while perhaps somewhat less pure than in discussions of poetry, is largely determined by honest beliefs about the direction fiction ought to take.
In this context, to regard experimental fiction as "fashion" is essentially to believe there can be no "shift[s] in the paradigm" in the development of fiction, that the experimental must always represent an irritating deviation from the accepted unitary model of how fiction should be written. It forecloses the possibility that the established paradigm might "shift" if something genuinely new were to appear and transform our assumptions about the nature of the novel and/or the short story. Even if it is allowed that the occasional genius comes along to produce work that stands out from the mainstream, such work is considered a singular achievement, a momentary departure from the otherwise settled paradigm granted only to the genius. The exceptional, extraordinary talent thus helps to preserve the status quo since no one else can be expected to rise to his/her level.
In reality, the "postmodern" period in American fiction came close to establishing a new paradigm insofar as it seemed to validate the experimental impulse behind modernism, its own even more radical experiments extending the reach of literary experiment beyond modernism and implicitly suggesting it can always be extended farther still. But ultimately experimental fiction can provide a paradigm only if it is one that rejects the creation of paradigms except in the loosest possible sense of the term—the model fiction writers should follow is the absence of a model. However desirable such a model might be in the cause of aesthetic freedom, it isn't likely to offer much stability to literary culture, and thus it was almost inevitable that some sort of reaction against the postmodern would set in to restore good critical order. The past thirty years or so has not seen a shift in paradigm but a reinforcement of conventional practices, a widespread return to narrative business as usual.
Such an embrace of convention—of the assumption that the art of fiction = storytelling, that the writer's job is to create characters who can be regarded as if they were persons, persons with "minds," etc.—can't really be said to be a part of the kind of dialectical process Ron Silliman describes. Postmodernism in fiction didn't "settle in" and then become the impetus for a new a refreshed practice but was considered a temporary aberration until writers could be brought back to producing "normal" fiction. Experimental writers have not disappeared altogether, but those sometimes still called "experimental"—Lethem, Saunders, Wallace—are surely much less resolutely so, much more restrained, than Hawkes and Coover, et. al. Normal fiction is precisely what is taught to aspiring writers in most creative writing programs.
Literary change will continue to occur, of course, but in fiction it won't come in paradigm shifts but through the persistence of individual writers impatient with normal fiction. These fiction writers will be motivated by the need to preserve the integrity of their own work and by the desire to ensure that fiction has a purpose beyond providing the "book business" with a commercial product designed to be another entertainment option. Their work will continue to demonstrate that the aesthetics of fiction are manifested more in the continued reinvention of the form than in the successful reinscription of the existing form.
Beyond the Narrative Arc
In the epilogue to Meander, Spiral, Explode, a book that ostensibly tries to make a case for unconventional form in fiction, Jane Alison writes:
So often, fictions that experiment formally do so at the expense of feeling. They toy on surfaces or are purely cerebral affairs, don’t explore human complexities. But the mostly unconventional narratives I’ve been discussing have dealt powerfully with core human matters. . . .
This is not an uncommon accusation against experimental fiction, but usually it is made by people without sympathy for formally adventurous fiction, not writers who have just otherwise expressed approval of work that seeks out alternative narrative strategies in a book about such strategies. It almost seems as if Alison is worried that readers might confuse the kind of writing she has discussed for that arid “game-playing” sort of fiction with which “experimental writers” are most often identified.
But exactly how “often” does experimental fiction sacrifice “feeling” for formal invention? Who exactly does Alison have in mind as writers who “toy on surfaces” (which is a rather peculiar complaint in a book that extensively praises the work of Nicholson Baker), or produce “purely cerebral affairs”? Perhaps it is unfair to ask the author to name names in a brief epilogue such as this, but since Alison does include among her book’s exemplary cases a few writers (B.S. Johnson, David Foster Wallace) who could be (and are) accused of being too frivolous or too “cerebral,” her insinuation that a certain (vague) kind of experimental fiction is too bloodless makes the question seem apposite. If Alison’s analysis can be applied to, say, David Markson (also a focus of attention in one of the chapters), then presumably we might find as well that “postmodern” innovators such as John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, or Steve Tomasula (the sort of writers I suspect are the targets of Alison’s indictment) can be approached through her interpretive frame. That Alison doesn’t give us the particulars we need to adequately assess the distinction she’s making ultimately means we can’t really fully assess the scope of her whole critical project in Meander, Spiral, Explode.
The closest we can come to making such an assessment of Alison’s assertion is to consider the emphasis she puts on “feeling,” on “human complexities,” and “core human matters.” Presumably these are essential elements missing from game-playing experimental fiction and that she is assuring us we will find in the works she explicates in her book. Indeed, since formal experiment characterizes both these works and the other, flawed kind of experiment, it must be this concern for feeling, the attention to “core human matters” that most distinguishes her chosen writers and their works. The effort to “experiment formally,” then, is, or should be, one that finds the right form — beyond the usual “narrative arc” — to communicate feeling and render human complexities, presumably the true goal of art. While it is tempting to adduce a list of experimental writers (the “wrong” kind) whose work is profoundly concerned with “human complexities” and “human matters,” that would again only belie the fact that Alison gives us no examples with which we can contrast the treatment of “complexities” and “matters” to be found in the works her book endorses.
It seems quite likely that Alison could not actually provide many — if any — compelling examples of experimental fiction that avoids “human complexities” or ignores “core human matters.” But, putting aside how we determine what qualifies as a “core” concern or how we register a human complexity, is it in fact the case that fiction should be devoted first to the delineation of its “human” content, to the cultivation of “feeling”? Why would the exploration of the formal possibilities (in all their complexity) not be just as crucial to the integrity of fiction as evoking emotion in the reader — arguably more so, as it is the shaping of language into dynamic form that confers on fiction the status of art in the first place? If Jane Alison truly intends her book to be a primer on how to “keep making our novels novel,” as she puts it at the end of her epilogue, it would seem advisable not to at the same time imply that such novelty (which is nothing if not itself a significant “human” achievement) should still be secondary to its content, the content that reliably appeals to emotion and restricts itself to established “core” themes.
The kind of formal experiment Alison is eager to encourage is pretty much encapsulated in the book’s title. Meander, spiral, and explosion are forms of spatial movement, although Alison also discusses additional such forms: waves, “wavelets,” fractals. These are all forms that mirror forms of organization in the natural world. One could say that while Alison seeks alternatives to the kind of traditional arc that is described by Freytag in his famous “triangle,” her counter-forms nevertheless reinforce the conventional practice of realism by stressing form as itself a “mirror of nature.” This is not to say that all of the writers she examines in illustration of these could adequately be described as realists (although many of them could), but Alison finds even those works that might otherwise seem the farthest removed from traditional realism to be less daunting in their departures from convention than we might think. “Cloud Atlas got lots of attention for its postmodern, metafictional cleverness,” she writes, “each story being nested within the next makes the ‘reality’ of any dizzying. But I think this contrivance is the least interesting thing about it.” Further: “I insist that Cloud Atlas is not only clever, not only designed, but earnest and moving. Its playful elements add to its depth.”
Again, it seems peculiar in a book ostensibly defending (and trying to advance) adventurous formal arrangements in fiction to decry as “contrivances” devices that contribute to the effort to reconfigure form. Cloud Alas, it seems, would have been one of those books that settle for being clever, merely “designed,” if it didn’t transcend its cleverness to become “earnest and moving.” Being “playful” in its effects is acceptable if those efforts augment the work’s “depth,” which clearly Alison values most of all. Formal experiment is only useful for Alison if, as in Cloud Atlas, it can enhance the “earnest” qualities of a novel, and its use diminishes it if the playfulness is in effect “merely literary.” Whether David Mitchell would be content with the perception his novel is “earnest and moving” above all, or whether he might like his design, his “metafictional” ingenuity, to be appreciated as well (else why apply it in the first place?) seems to me a question whose answer seems obvious enough.
Meander, Spiral, Explode is not without value as a briskly written, compact overview of the various spatial strategies writers have successfully employed, and might continue to be fruitfully employed if writers had a more synoptic view of them, along with a few models of the way they can work. Many of the illustrative readings are enlightening about the works discussed: Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus as a “wave” (as well as the underlying redescription of a narrative arc itself as more usefully perceived as a wave); Raymond Carver’s “Where I’m Calling From” as a “wavelet” (“seemingly small undulations” of story); Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever as an “explosion” (or “radial”). Others are less evocative, or the text in question might just as accurately have been placed in one of the other categories, or described in other terms entirely. Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, for example, does not readily seem to fit Alison’s characterization of it as a “meander.” While it is certainly true that the novel “gives us elaborate dilatory detail” that constantly interrupts the miniscule “forward motion” it ultimately gains, it is finally hard to regard this as a “meander.” It seems more like a deliberate subversion of the very notion of “forward motion,” a playful (but also urgently serious) displacement of that expectation most readers bring to reading a novel. Alison proposes the intriguing interpretation that the form of The Mezzanine actually mirrors its content, whereby “we experience a slight rise of forward motion, then a flattening digression, another slight rise, then a flattening digression . . . in the shape of an escalator” (riding which, of course, is really the novel’s only “action”). But it seems to me that this novel wants to arrest all sense of “motion” (as much as is possible in a medium made of sequential words); if it has a spatial rather than a chronological form, the movement of The Mezzanine is not “forward” at all but outward, in an attempt to expand the few minutes of its narrative clock time and its protagonist’s place in it to a kind of sustained instant of experience.
Finally, however, it is probably not so important whether Alison precisely identifies each of the spatial forms, or that writers have the “correct” name for them. To the extent that her book convinces writers there are indeed credible alternatives to the reflexive preference for Freytag’s “arc,” alternatives that do not imply a fall into formlessness but challenge inculcated expectations without necessarily alienating readers, Alison will have served a worthy purpose. But the book never really destabilizes the notion of “story” itself as the ultimate object of the fiction writer’s craft. Meanders or spirals do not, at least in Alison’s analysis, abandon narrative in its very loosest sense — a prose description of “what happens” to one or more characters — or deflect attention away from the “content” the narrative embodies in any significant way. In fact, it is in Alison’s account precisely the writer’s “craft” to embody the content by the most efficacious means available. (Form suits content.) Thus, Meander, Spiral, Explode is finally not really a book about formal experimentation in fiction but at best an effort to encourage a freer approach to form that forestalls a complete acquiescence to stale routine.
That the book’s intended audience is primarily writers seems fairly unambiguous. Although the analyses provided could be of interest to some readers not themselves writers (especially readers of some of the more “difficult” writers, such as Sebald or Robbe-Grillet, readers who have found their work foreboding), the book would likely be most useful as a supplementary text in a creative writing workshop. Perhaps this also accounts for Alison’s at times somewhat breathless prose and frequent reliance on figurative phrasing rather than a more analytical critical language. One could wonder, though, whether this gives the book greater accessibility or underestimates most writers’ (and writing students’) tolerance of more critical rigor. A book that considers thoroughly the principles animating the impulse to “experiment” in fiction, and looks at all the formal strategies adventurous writers have attempted, would surely be a service to readers and writers alike. That book has yet to be written.
The Eminently Sayable
If we take The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House to be a representative gathering of critical wisdom from current American writers, what does it ultimately tell us about these writers' understanding of the purpose of fiction, their widely-shared assumptions?
Unfortunately, in my view it tells us that their understanding of fiction's purposes is very limited indeed, their assumptions about its possibilities, its potential to surprise and to creatively challenge established conventions, very narrow and constricted. Almost none of the essays included in the volume even suggest that fiction ought to be challenging in this way, and some even explicitly express impatience with adventurous, unconventional fiction. Most of the essays—all of them originally delivered at Tin House's Summer Writers Workshop—discuss works of fiction as if they were products to be assembled from blueprints exploiting familiar devices, the writing of fiction as adherence to certain fundamental truths universally acknowledged.
Perhaps this is to be expected in a book presenting "craft essays." A "writers workshop" is centrally focused on "craft" as an element of fiction writing that can be taught (or at least talked about), and as working writers those participating in the workshop presumably do have advice to dispense at the level of craft. Perhaps it is too much to expect that writers themselves would feel comfortable emphasizing "art " over craft, since arguably the best most of them can do is hope that careful attention to craft will ultimately give rise to art. Distinguishing what is successfully artistic, which is a function of the experience of reading fiction, from the mere application of craft is the critic's job, not the writer's.
But in publishing a book like The Writer's Notebook, Tin House is putting its imprimatur on the "craft" approach, and one might presume that those writers who heed the kind of advice dispensed in the book might ultimately be producing the kind of work that could find its way into print in this journal. That this work would be safe, formally "sound" and stylistically "fine," would only conform to the mission of journals like Tin House: to a) reinforce the existing structure of academic writing programs and workshops, providing their graduates with a place to publish, and b) associate themselves as much as possible with "quality" writing, which can't be just anything and everything and thus needs to be narrowed down to its embodiment in "craft," the boundaries of which are laid down in The Writer's Notebook.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that Tin House or other high-profile literary magazines are actively hostile to adventurous or experimental fiction (sometimes an unconventional story or two can be squeezed into the mix), but the discussions of the nature of fiction and the writing of fiction in The Writer's Notebook assume a form that is relatively fixed, comprising such staple elements as "dialogue," "scene," and "character motivation," a practice that is subject to improvement through increased skill with these tools. Such a conception of fiction as a handy collection of pre-approved devices doesn't much encourage departures from standard practice or questioning of the place of these devices in composing works of fiction. (Why, for example, is "dialogue" to be expected in stories or novels? Shouldn't this be something that might be useful in some circumstances, when contributing to an overall aesthetic effect, rather than a convention all fiction must "get to" at some point?) It shouldn't be surprising that most issues of Tin House don't feature short stories that seem to question the short story as a stable, identifiable thing reproducible through the application of "craft."
Thus Tom Grimes informs us that "our stories are amorphous until we discover how time controls them. Every great story contains a 'clock,' an intrinsic timekeeper." "Determine whether or not your story has a 'clock,'" he concludes. "It can be a day, a week, a month, a season, etcetera, but the story has to have it." If a story "has to have" a clock, then should one discover one's story doesn't really seem to depend much on timekeeping, on the sort of narrative "development" the passage of time provides, then apparently one doesn't really have a story at all. This seems a reductively literal insistence on "story" as the sine qua non of short fiction, when of course much modern/postmodern fiction has explicitly worked to undermine "story" as the essence of fiction. Not many of Donald Barthelme's stories, for example would be able to pass the "clock" test administered by Grimes. They're much too "amorphous."
Anna Keesey tells us that a "scene" is "fiction's fundamental unit." "Part of what makes fiction writing so difficult," she claims, is that "the writer must decide what's going to happen, to whom, and why, but is simultaneously loaded up with another set of decisions: who'll be telling the story, in what order, with what level of detail and at what speed of revelation." Here again is a recipe for conventionality in fiction, by which "story," ("what's going to happen") takes precedence and all of the other "decisions"—themselves highly conventional and formulaic—are made as ornamental on the primary illusion of narrative immediacy. "We see the action occur; we feel the time pass," as Keesey puts it later in the essay. Keesey acknowledges that writers like Woolf and Proust slow down the unfolding of scene—which Keesey calls "infolding"—but she can't see this as an implicit repudiation of "scene" except in its most perfunctory role as a framing device. She chooses instead to regard it as just an indication that scene "is superbly elastic." Why not just say that in some fiction "scene" is as irrelevant as "clock time"?
Even when otherwise acknowledging the limitations of one or another conventional approach, as in Keesey's essay or Aimee Bender's essay on "character motivation," the writers can't seem to give up on the assumptions giving rise to the approach. Bender cautions against making "motivation" explicitly clear. Instead, she writes, it's acceptable "not really to know what's going on with your characters and to let the writing be a process of discovering that." This sort of "complexity" is truer to human psychology, after all. But what if "motivation" never becomes clear, or is not even necessary? What if "psychology" itself is irrelevant to a particular's writer's concerns? One gets the sense that this would not be acceptable, since it jettisons one of the underlying assumptions of mainstream literary fiction—it's all about "understanding" character—that supports all of the accompanying assumptions about "craft."
The only two essays in The Writer's Notebook that really do depart from conventional thinking, the only two essays that finally are about the art of fiction, are Lucy Corin's "Material" and D.A. Powell's "(Mis)Adventures in Poetry." Corin specifically abjures the impulse to "find the form to 'suit' your content, your material." Instead, she describes her own practice of regarding words as her "material," from which come other words that finally cohere into form. Her advice to writers: "you should look at the material you produce to find your material." This can include the visual arrangement of the words on the page, and Corin spends much of her essay comparing different kinds of arrangements of "material." The essay undermines much of the other "advice" to be found in The Writer's Notebook and is really the only essay in this book that makes it worth having. Powell posits that in poetry "often it's the inexact, the awful, the mistaken linguistic turn that manages to say the right thing because it unmoors us from our perceived relationship to the subject about which we're trying to write." "The subjects of poetry are always the same," he concludes, "so lend your ear to the language instead." "Dare to say the unsayable in a new way." If only as many fiction writers could find a way to heed this advice as, in my opinion, many poets already do.
Unfortunately, readers of The Writer's Notebook won't get exposed to much discussion of language as the fundamental "unit" of fiction. They'll mostly discover essays that invite the writer to say the same old things, the eminently sayable, in the same old ways, but to think of this as "craft."
Where Our Stories Chart
Lincoln Michel makes some very good points in his recent essay about the limitations of our loose way of referring to "realism" in fiction, usually when thinking about the alternatives to this practice, in particular the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Indeed, Michel's argument is framed specifically as an effort to deconstruct the binary opposition of realism and science fiction/fantasy that so often obtains in discussions of the artistic value of the latter. (In my experience, the distinction is upheld most vehemently by the science fiction writers themselves, usually in denigration of realism as compared to the greater imagination shown in their own genre.)
Michel wants to regard realism as a "spectrum," with gradations of realist practice that take some works of literary realism farther from the genres associated with the "fantastic," while taking others closer. He creates a chart in which the primary distinction is between the "naturalistic" and the "expressionist" but allows for works that might straddle the line as well as fall more clearly on one side or the other, and that might also incorporate elements of both modes to a greater or a lesser extent. Michel assures us that his chart does not assign inherent value to any of the practices that are thus duly located, but instead "Every single point on this chart has its own strengths and possibilities. The pleasures of fabulist literature are simply different from the pleasures of hard science fiction, just as the effects of noir are different than the effects of autofiction."
"Naturalistic" and "Expressionist" are perfectly useful terms in identifying very general tendencies among the multifarious works of fiction writers actually create. They might ease the confusion that can arise when we try to categorize using more specific designations: surrealism, absurdism, minimalism, etc. Of course, their utility is limited if the goal is to accurately encompass what makes a particular work or writer distinctive, not in order to make comparisons (writer x is a true postmodernist, not that poser writer y) but to make literary criticism relevant beyond the temptation to imperiously pass judgment. Part of criticism's responsibility should be to scrupulously describe, and in doing so essentially create a form of knowledge, characterizations and taxonomies that ideally can be applied in other contexts, perhaps by other critics. Writers might indeed synthesize different--even nominally opposing--modes or strategies, but it is still good to have names for those modes that aren't just subsumed to broad invocations of "naturalistic" or "expressionist."
Michel does not do this. He wants to show that both realism and the modes of anti-realism come in different versions, which he is again entirely correct in pointing out. Michel goes further, however, and maintains that labeling a work of fiction "realistic" has become "more ideological than it is aesthetic." Using the term to contrast the practice of "straight white" writers and those "from other cultures, backgrounds, and traditions" is, he writes, "to privilege a certain experience of reality," This seems to me a dubious proposition, not because white American writers haven't dominated American literary culture (it is undeniable they have), but because Michel's foundational definition of "realism" in this context seems inadequate. The assertion that realism is about the representation of a "certain experience of reality" implies that realism arises from the content of that experience, and thus, since people from different "backgrounds" presumably have different experiences, the issue at hand is whose experience is depicted.
But realism, at least when considered in its rise and development as part of literary history, is identified not as much by the content of any particular experience as by the nature of the depiction of that content. Thus when William Dean Howells, perhaps the 19th century American writer who most directly proselytized on behalf of the new realism, urged writers to cast their attention on "ordinary" people, he was trying to move the focus away from the quasi-heroic or "larger than life" characters often featured in the fiction of the previous era (Hawthorne, Melville) toward "real" people of the kind more often encountered in actual life, but he was also advocating a new kind of narrative that attempted to convince readers, through the kinds of actions portrayed and details presented, they were witnessing life as lived. Realism consisted of using literary strategies, which, generally speaking, involved evoking a sense of lifelike authenticity in setting and traits of character (including, say, local details and habits of speech), as well as de-emphasizing artificial plot devices and cultivating a "plain" prose style.
Thus the original expression of the antithesis between the naturalistic and the expressionistic in fiction can be found in this emerging divide in the mid to late 19th century between realism and romance. The issue is whether, in Hawthorne's words, "to pursue a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience" or whether the writer might instead "manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture," perhaps to the extent of introducing what Hawthorne called the "marvelous." If Raymond Carver is considered a realist, it is because he believed the characters and experiences on which he wished to focus would be best served by the former approach, and if Toni Morrison could be called an expressionist, this is because the stories she wanted to tell are better suited to the latter. I see little evidence that Carver is more favored than Morrison because they work in different modes.
The tenuousness of Michel's conception of realism is only reinforced by his additional juxtaposition of two other writers on either side of the boundary: "Are [James] Salter’s stories more real than, say, the stories of George Saunders, which may include fantasy or SF elements yet more clearly evoke the daily news?" I'm not quite sure why Michel suggests that the inclusion of "fantasy or SF elements" would make it surprising that a work of such fiction might still "evoke the daily news." Doesn't science fiction ground itself in "news" (current conditions in the world) that is projected into the future through "speculative" narratives? Isn't most "expressivist" fiction similarly attuned to actually existing conditions to which the author is implicitly responding? How many writers live their lives totally isolated from "the daily news"?
However, these quibbles aside, the real problem with Michel's rhetorical question is the inference that the soundness of fiction's relationship to reality somehow corresponds to it's assimilation of "the daily news" to begin with. Are we really to accept that direct references to current topical concerns makes fiction more "real"? I can certainly see how including such references might sometimes accompany realism in a given story or novel, as part of the portrayal of characters' interaction with their environment or as a specific plot device, but otherwise this requirement seems to reduce realistic fiction to something like reporting, which I suppose in certain kinds of autofiction might actually happen, but surely the "daily news" as a measure of a work's engagement with "the real" is the most superficial test imaginable.
If Michel's ultimate goal is to drop "realism" altogether from the literary/critical lexicon (his final sentence suggests it is), he needs to make it clearer what he actually does mean by the term, because his operative definition doesn't sufficiently reflect its actual historical meaning. Michel is probably correct in asserting that "In modern American literature, both the literary fiction world and the SFF world have a bias toward naturalistic modes," if by "modern" he means the last 25-30 years, but during the previous 80 years or so (since the beginning of high modernism), and in American literature, especially the previous 25 years (since the 1960s), realism was a greatly contested practice. (Indeed, Carver, the writer Michel seems to lean on as an example of the sort of writer on whose behalf this "bias" works, to a great extent was trying to retrieve realism as a viable practice after the postmodernist years.) Whether or not the current preference for "naturalistic modes" is in fact a reinforcement of realism per se (I think it probably is not), Michel's proposal to abandon the term is not an abandonment of actual realism, because finally his essay doesn't fully explicate that.
In his conclusion, Michel suggests that for writers the main advantage to his cataloguing schema is that "understanding where our stories chart helps us improve and sharpen the work," while for critics "understanding the multiple directions that reality can be skewed might help avoid the still-far-too-common complaints about 'unrealistic' elements of intentionally unreal works." Although I don't think complaints about lack of realism in "intentionally unreal works" come from a lack of appreciation of the range of non-realistic methods that might be available (they come from objections to non-realism itself), nevertheless a more extensive vocabulary for discussing the variety of such methods would certainly be a good thing.
On the other hand, the notion that writers should consult a chart like Michel's to locate and "sharpen the work" seems to me almost totally misbegotten. This is an invitation to conform to expectations in order to reduce the risk of "complaints." "Sharpen the work" becomes "standardize the work." It narrows the possibilities of innovation even within the boundaries of pre-existing categories, much less extending those boundaries (or perhaps prompting a new category). Writers should disregard such categories altogether and instead trust their inner inspirations. What critics might later call the result is not as important.
Literary Citizenship
"Literary citizenship" is a concept that many writers apparently take quite seriously, as it has evolved from a metaphorical notion that writers should advocate on behalf of literature generally to a quasi-literal requirement that they be good citizens in the "literary community" at large, whose well-being they are expected to consider.. According to Lori A. May in her book The Write Crowd: Literary Citizenship and the Writing Life (2015),
Literary citizenship takes the power of the individual and puts it to use in fostering, sustaining, and engaging with the literary community for the benefit of others. The concept is to pay kindness and skill forward, to offer something to the community so that others may learn, engage, and grow from combined efforts. And the possibilities for how that is accomplished are wide and varied, both in effort and in outcome. At the heart of literary citizenship, though, is one constant: contributing something to the literary world outside of one's own immediate needs.
The biggest motivating factor in the rise of literary citizenship as an ideal to which writers should aspire is likely to be found in that "constant" May identifies in the final sentence. "One's own immediate needs" in the literary world, are of course, to be published, to find readers, if lucky to make a career of writing. At a time when it has become harder to do all of those things (and when there even more writers trying to do them), "literary citizenship" and the "community" work together as appealing alternatives to the publish-or-perish ethos that dominated not just academic publishing but in effect all of publishing and the old "literary world" associated with it. While "contributing something" to the community free of self-interest is ostensibly the goal of literary citizenship, surely the ultimate benefit of such a contribution redounds to the contributor in some way (tangible or intangible), or it simply wouldn't be worth making. One's "immediate needs" aren't necessarily identical with one's long-term hopes.
Considered most generously, the creation of community through literary citizenship is a way of preserving a space for literature that isn't dependent on (although ultimately by no means completely separate from) a hyperactive capitalist economy that has so distorted social and commercial values as to otherwise leave little room for such a relatively nonprofitable enterprise as literary writing, except at the most crass and mercantile levels of the "book business." From this perspective, cultivating the literary garden as a whole is the only way to ensure that the garden survives to provide a spot for one's own harvest.
But while such an effort to affirm literary value for its own sake is both commendable and necessary, how many would-be literary citizens really are as dedicated to Literature in the abstract as the rhetoric of literary citizenship would have them be? Are there many who would be willing to cultivate the garden even if it wasn't going to be open to their own work, after all? Perhaps I am overly cynical in suspecting that the ranks of good literary citizens would thin out appreciably under those circumstances, that Literature as a sovereign territory worth defending would be a less compelling cause if one's loyalty to it were so purely conceptual. But even if what might be gained through exemplary literary citizenship is not careerist in the narrowly commercial sense, the urge for recognition and status can't help but dilute the purity of motive that supposedly underlies the practice of literary citizenship.
That in itself does not invalidate the call for literary citizenship. Human motives can never be pure, and none of the strategies for manifesting one's citizenship described by May--attending readings, starting a journal, writing reviews, joining literary organizations, etc.--are in themselves at all objectionable (although it is certainly possible to question the reliance on the Reading as the most visible representation of the "literary world"). There is a point, however, beyond which the breadth of responsibilities May suggests the writer might shoulder actually seems to appease the very market forces that literary citizenship is supposed to counteract. Corporate publishers have already contracted out most marketing and advertising to writers themselves, who must relentlessly promote their own work through book touring and maintaining a social media "presence." Should writers aid and abet this process by voluntarily enabling the system in the name of literary citizenship? As Becky Tuch has written on this subject, "Today’s writers are expected to do more marketing work than ever before while not expecting much in the way of compensation or benefits. It’s what we are being 'trained' to do."'
If literary citizenship "takes the power of the individual and puts it to use" on behalf of all writers, what about the much greater power of publishers and publicists, who are surely in a much better position to be "fostering, sustaining, and engaging with the literary community"? Is the push for literary citizenship another way of acknowledging that the era of the publisher has come to an end? Is the logical extension of literary citizenship a literary world dominated by self-publishing as well as self-promotion, which becomes the only way to do business in books? Although, to again assume the sincerity of those advocating for a writing community built around literary citizenship, presumably "business" would not be the center of activity: payment comes in "kindness and skill," receipt of which cumulatively allows everyone to "learn, engage, and grow."
But would real growth actually occur if all that was "paid forward" was "kindness"? Would the "skill" also offered in payment include a critical skill, an ability to honestly assess what a writer has produced, even when that assessment might be negative? Is literary citizenship specifically about ensuring a certain kind of "literary life," as May's subtitle suggests, or should it also encourage a serious engagement with literary works that in taking them seriously accepts that some literary efforts are more successful than others? In the literary world that emerges from the congruence of idealism and the obsolescence of the old publishing model, will there be a role for literary critics, who sometimes are accused of something less than kindness, but from whom much can often be learned? It is hard to imagine that a "literary" culture (or "community") with any credibility and integrity could be sustained if frank but impartial criticism was unwelcome.
It is not exactly the case that readers seem to be unwelcome in the literary community as described in The Write Crowd, but as the title suggests, literary citizenship is practiced primarily by writers, although finding ways of "reaching out" to readers is certainly encouraged. Indeed, in addition to the decline of publisher support, an underlying assumption of both May's book and the appeal to citizenship and community more generally is that there aren't enough readers to go around and thus writers need to support each other, offering themselves as especially dutiful readers who will not just content themselves with the reading experience but will supplement it through recommendations on social media, reviews, and attendance at author events. Writers act as readers on steroids, giving the literary community a semblance of vitality, even when most writers struggle to find readers for whom reading is not so freighted with external obligation.
What about the apostate, the writer who resists the call to literary citizenship, either through obstinacy or through a sincere belief that the writer's job is to write, not to network? Although May frequently insists that the writer's first responsibility is indeed to his/her own writing, those who might deny the value of literary citizenship when it is made into a de facto requirement of living a "writing life" would surely provoke resentment for not carrying his/her weight in propping up the remaining structures that make a literary life still marginally possible. More importantly, what about the true literary apostate, who violates community norms, who produces work even the best literary citizens might have trouble celebrating, or even understanding? What if the demand for literary citizenship had been made of Samuel Beckett or William S. Burroughs (or even a more conventional curmudgeonly type such as, say, Philip Larkin)?
The work of Beckett and Burroughs was surely abrasive (to some, incomprehensible) enough to its original audience that, absent some expression of solidarity with their fellow writers by each of them, it was almost foreordained to at first be rejected or ignored (or both) by the literary community of the time, however that would have been defined. Perhaps we feel that now the more self-identified literary community is inclusive enough that iconoclastic writers such as these would be acknowledged. Still, it seems to me that the inevitable tendency of a "literary community" expecting its members to be "good literary citizens" is an at least implicit regulation of what counts as worth supporting, what can be recognized as "literature" in the first place. Bad literary citizens are going to continue to disregard the exhortations to blend harmoniously into the growing crowd of writers, but will also manage to write what turns out to be great works of literature, nevertheless.
Disassembling Empire
University creative writing programs have proven to be a conservative force in literary culture, for reasons that probably could not have been avoided. Once these programs reached such a level of ubiquity that virtually all aspiring writers enrolled in writing workshops, the most ambitious pursuing an MFA degree as a matter of course (not to mention ultimately teaching in a creative program as well), it was almost inevitable that the collective “Program” would assume the task of regulating practice and enforcing norms among its graduates—who are overwhelmingly the authors of most published literary fiction, at least in the United States. Since most “little magazines”—whose numbers have proliferated at an astonishing rate over the past 20-years, particularly as these journals migrated online--exist primarily to provide a place of publication for Program writers (who need such publications to secure and maintain jobs among creative writing faculty), that “serious fiction” would reflect the assumptions of creative writing instruction should not be surprising.
It is not coincidental that from the time creative writing programs really began to expand in the 1960s and 70s to the present, the “cutting edge” in American fiction has shifted from the formally challenging work of postmodern writers such as Donald Barthelme or Gilbert Sorrentino to fiction featuring previously marginalized or unheard writers or characters, much of which tends to emphasize subject and content and is mostly conventional in form. An increasing aesthetic conservatism among students and instructors in creative writing programs cannot, of course, alone account for this movement from formal innovation toward a greater emphasis on theme. (Nor is this separation between manner and matter necessarily as stark as these generalizations might imply: some postmodernists used formal or stylistic experimentation as the best way to evoke complex subjects, while many current writers are as attentive to form as to content.) However, to the extent that the university writing program increasingly became an instrument of professionalization, the preparation of students for a career in writing and writing instruction, it was destined to exert an increasingly conservative influence.
The varieties of this influence (and they are expressed in discrete ways that seem to go unnoticed because they so integrally inform creative writing practice) can be seen in three books conveniently published at about the same time in 2021: Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping, Lisa Zeidner’s Who Says?: Mastering Point of View in Fiction, and George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. These books 2reveal the by now fixed assumptions about both workshop practice and the aesthetics of fiction that have shaped the “disciplinarity” of academic creative writing, and are likely to determine its legacy in whatever future serious fiction might still have remaining—likely outside the academy, moved aside along with all the other humanities disciplines as the university ever more obediently submits to its political and economic overlords.
The most conservative of these books is Salesses’ Craft in the Real World, even as it presents itself as something of a revolutionary manifesto. Salesses wants to transform the notion of “craft” to more properly suit the needs of a changed clientele (and a modernized faculty as well), but his effort merely replaces one set of critical precepts based on abstracted technique with another based on political and sociological doctrines derived from a generalized concept of cultural difference. If anything, the new rules Salesses lays down for the conduct of the writing workshop are even more rigid and uncompromising than the ones they are to replace: Under the old dispensation, the consequences for disobeying the rules are merely the disfavor of one’s peers and the skepticism of the marketplace; under the dominion of the new, one is likely to be regarded as morally derelict and exiled to the land of lost souls—although, given the sort of strictures Salesses’ revamped writing course would impose, it is no doubt the instructor who would be most subject to the sanctions in force.
Salesses wants to bring the writing workshop out of its fixation on mechanical details and a false claim to universality (“‘Pure Craft’ is a Lie” proclaims the title of the first chapter) and instead make it face the concerns of the “real world.” This is, of course, the world as understood by the workshop’s diverse and varied students. To adapt ourselves to this world will require a wholesale transformation of the concept of craft, since craft as we have known it until now “is part of the history of Western empire that goes back even to the Ancient Greek and Empires, upon which American democratic values are based.” Salesses’ ambitions thus are radical indeed, to help literature do its part in disassembling Empire by overturning the reign of “craft” as it has been regarded until now.
But has craft in the definition of the term Salesses wants to use, as an assemblage of well-know guidelines used by “Western” cultural gatekeepers to enforce an insular perspective on the nature of literary writing, actually held dominion over the course of Western literary history? To say that Salesses does not provide much in the way of evidence or illustration of this central assumption of his book would be a lenient way of putting it. Aristotle and E.M. Forster are really the only examples he cites (both on plot) of historical figures formulating or perpetuating the principles of craft, but of course neither of these men would have understood their comments to have anything to do with craft, even if we were to update them on how we currently use the term. We should in fairness likely assume that Salesses is knowingly simplifying, for rhetorical convenience, the relationship of such figures to what he is calling craft, but still it is difficult to imagine Aristotle believing that what he was doing in the Poetics was providing advice to writers about how to do their job.
If there are examples of establishing craft rules in Western literary history, most of them during most of this history would apply to poetry, but Salesses doesn’t discuss poetry or the appropriate conduct of poetry workshops at all. Whether he would acknowledge that poetry does have certain canons of procedure that are more or less consistent across languages and traditions—canons that are necessary for the genre to exist in the first place—is thus uncertain, but it would seem to be a devaluation of fiction as a form to say that it does not call for the same sort of consideration of intended verbal effects as poetry, to deny that some essential features of prose narrative are recognizable to almost all humans. If Salesses is not resisting the salience of the traditional “elements of fiction”—the devices that allow for the full embodiment of narrative—but certain ritualized applications of those elements, almost their fetishization, the solution would seem to be to no longer apply them, to abandon the fetish.
But however much Salesses professes to want a different version of craft than the one putatively dominating creative writing workshops, he does not propose doing without craft as either an approach to the creative writing classroom or to the critical consideration of fiction in general. It is somewhat difficult to see why: Salesses objects to the way craft-talk excludes writers with a different understanding of fiction’s purpose and possibilities that traditional craft does not accommodate, but such writers include not only those with non-Western cultural inheritances but many writers from within the Western cultural tradition who also find the imperatives of craft confining and alienating. Many of these writers deliberately avoid the institutional machinery of the academic creative writing Program (although some are just excluded), but even those holding out for the benefits of a creative writing degree might ask of this book and its author why exchanging one set of restrictions on the writer’s creative judgment and imagination for another is necessarily an improvement.
Most of Salesses’ directives, in fact, have little to do with “technical” matters encompassing style or form. They seem designed primarily to focus the writer’s attention on content—more specifically, on the “world” to which the work points and away from the individualism of either character or author-as-artist. Thus, “whether positive or negative, fiction always says something about how we live, and not in an individual sense but a contextual one. When we write fiction, we write the world.” And, “it’s about time that individual agency stops dominating how we think about plot or even causality.” This is because “being in the world is much more about dealing with effects than with causes.” As a student himself, Salesses tells us, “story arc was always presented to me as something more like plot, something like how the character’s situation changes or fails to change. . .It might be more useful to consider instead how the world is changed or fails to be changed.” Since the purpose of Salesses’ redefinition is clearly to minimize—if not eliminate—attention to the elements of fiction that highlight instrumentalized “method,” it is at first unclear why Salesses retains such a term as “story arc” rather than just dispensing with it.
If what Salesses—and other like-minded critics of current literary education—really wants is a learning environment free of traditional craft conventions, which they believe unduly inhibits some students from fully realizing their artistic visions, he ought to declare that there are no rules the writer must learn to follow, that in fact as long as such rules continue to be assumed, it should be entirely appropriate to break them. He should insist that the very notion of “craft” entails a conception of a unitary “art of fiction” that is bound to exclude any writer who resists the officially approved practices. What better way to ensure that the aesthetic preferences of all student writers be fairly considered than to simply relinquish the idea that to “learn” the art of fiction involves adopting the right assumptions and procedures, developing a suitable facility with whatever approach the currently established authority favors? Artificial distinctions between genres and modes, including the unhelpful distinction between “mainstream” and “experimental” fiction would collapse: all efforts to write a work of fiction would be experimental, attempts to sound out the possibilities of the form without conforming to any one conception of its proper mission.
Something tells me, however, that this is not what Salesses has in mind. Too much of the work would be left to the students to read widely and discover how other writers have redeemed these possibilities. The teacher could no doubt assist in this process of discovery, but that would require suppressing narrow beliefs about the function of literary art. While many creative writing teachers would certainly be able to accomplish such a task, it seems unlikely that Salesses, for one, with his stringent view of developing writers who “think critically about how they are working with and contributing to culture” would be prepared to discard this imperative. Salesses is too committed to the transformation of the fiction workshop into a reflection of the cultural multiplicity of “the real world” to give much attention to the critical multiplicity of fiction’s aesthetic projects.
The strength of Lisa Zeidner’s Who Says? is that she does attempt to account for such multiplicity, at least in the use of point of view. Zeidner covers each of the main types of point of view, differentiating in detail both third-person omniscient and the third-person limited (“central consciousness” or “free indirect”), as well as the issues that emerge in the use of first-person (reliable vs. unreliable, the rise of the self-conscious narrator, etc.). She also devotes space to the less common (although in some cases increasingly common) exercises in point of view (second-person, the communal “we,” “whiplashing” point of view), child as well as non-human narrators, and compares the effects of point of view in fiction and film.
Zeidner also has what is essentially a thesis about the importance of point of view: point of view is the most important consideration in fiction, involving “skillful manipulations in, and motivations of, your alliance with your characters,” manipulations that are “more central and crucial than plot.” She emphasizes the centrality of point of view in an initial chapter that examines the impression created by first lines and paragraphs: “My argument is that point of view in good fiction is embedded in every choice about tone, description, and diction, even about plot and pacing, and furthermore it has to be established very quickly.” One could disagree with Zeidner about the foundational status of point of view in prose fiction (as I do: surely style, the particular way language is ordered for effect, is even more primary) while still acknowledging that Zeidner has identified and explicated more comprehensively an element of the art of fiction that is often treated more cursorily than it deserves.
Who Says? ranges widely in its choice of sample texts, especially across genres and modes. The author clearly also makes the effort to reach across “cultures” in Salesses’ sense of the term (Susan Choi, Percival Everett, Junot Diaz, among others). Point of view is an aspect of craft that Salesses actually does not much discuss at all, and it is hard to know whether it is simply an element of fiction he takes for granted without submitting it to a critique of its real-world relevance, or whether as a purely “technical” issue, it is inherently too far removed from the “real” world to which Salesses wants fiction to be faithful that it simply evades the reach of his critique. If point of view is as crucial to the way fiction works as Zeidner would have it, however, Salesses’ notion that craft in its traditional guise is wholly irrelevant (even destructive) to the present and future direction of both fiction and creative writing instruction is altogether unfounded. The sorts of choices confronting the writer of fiction in achieving the most artful effects that Zeidner surveys in fact seem the craftiest of craft decisions.
Still, because of the relatively comprehensive treatment Zeidner provides, Who Says? would be the sort of book that might be used with students in presenting them a wide spectrum of possibilities relevant not just to point of view but to the creation of effects in fiction that in general expand the writer’s (and ultimately the reader’s) focus of attention beyond plot and character (while also obviously contributing to both). Zeidner does not take any strong position on the advisability of venturing a particular effect, although she does point out how some point of view choices work better than others for producing some particular effects, and thus the book does indeed offer young or inexperienced writers an abundant selection of approaches to point of view for inspiration or emulation. However, this very impression of a kind of exhaustive sampling may actually encourage such writers not so much to perform their own variations on these models but to imitate them. This is surely not Zeidner’s intention, but may in fact accentuate an inherent limitation to the efficacy of academic creative writing instruction.
The widespread establishment of creative writing as an academic field of “study” (by its nature creative writing is really closer to a professional program than a true academic mode of inquiry) quickly enough, if predictably, developed its own hierarchy of programs (perhaps with the Iowa workshop at the top), and from there a relative uniformity of practice—eventually the instructors were usually themselves the products of creative writing programs. In such a setup, it would surprising if the long-term effect was not a substantial degree of conformity among those making their way through this system. Such conformity would indeed arise at the level of craft, since craft is something that presumably can be taught, Under the circumstances, “craft” acquires preeminent importance—so important that a writer like Matthew Salesses sees control of its operating assumptions as a compelling source of cultural power, “rethinking” its definition akin to an act of political revolution. But the successful transformation of the creative writing program in the manner Salesses envisions will change only the terms of compliance with the norms of the Program, not the reality.
Outside of its possible use in a creative writing course, Lisa Zeidner’s book on point of view certainly provides interested readers with a breadth of coverage of the various options available to the writer of fiction when thinking about the enactment of point of view, but it is not really a book that probes very deeply into the potential transmutations of point of view that can make it a source of literary innovation and originality. You can gain a great deal of valuable insight about the application of point of view to the overall configuration of works of fiction from Who Says?, but not about how a writer can disregard the standard approaches taken by the preponderance of professional writers and discover a less-travelled path to follow.
George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is essentially a craft book, pursuing “craft” more or less in the apolitical inherited understanding of the term Matthew Salesses wants to disown. But Saunders approaches teaching the principles of good writing from an unorthodox angle, offering a course (this book is a version of it) that looks closely at a few stories by the 19th century Russian masters of the short story—Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy. Saunders moves methodically through each story, querying students about how the stories seem to be working on them. Saunders in the book often summarizes their responses, but he is more likely simply to move right to his own explication—done in an affable, humorous tone that perhaps readers expect from him. The overall impression created by Saunders’s leisurely walk through these stories is not of a teacher giving instruction but an enthusiastic reader drawing on his own experience as a writer to help us appreciate the stories’ effects.
The biggest drawback to Saunders’s admittedly engaging pedagogical strategy, at least in its implications for understanding the art of fiction, is of course that for English speakers these works are in another language. Certainly much can be learned about the structural order of fiction from the likes of Chekhov and Gogol, but inevitably the linguistic subtleties of their work remains inaccessible to those who read it only in translation, and such intricacies of structure and style is important not only in recognizing the full artistry of these Russian writers but in appreciating that form at its most fundamental level is realized through style—the writer’s particular way of shaping language. Of course, even Russian readers cannot finally learn to write “like” Chekhov or Tolstoy, but the broader sensitivity to the reverberations of language a writer’s style can provide seems like something a serious writer would want to cultivate.
The strengths and weaknesses of A Swim in the Pond in the Rain are well-displayed in the book’s first two chapters, on Chekhov’s “In the Cart” and Turgenev’s “The Singers.” The chapter on “In the Cart” is the most systematic demonstration of Saunders’s approach to teaching the Russian writers, as he moves page by page through the story, contemplating Chekhov’s technique and speculating about the effects he seems to be after. Saunders also uses the story to draw conclusions about the nature of stories and the writer’s objectives:
We might think of a story this way: the reader is sitting in the sidecar of a motorcycle the writer is driving. In a well-told story, reader and writer are so close together that they’re one unit. My job as the writer is to keep the distance between motorcycle and sidecar small, so that when I go right, you go right. When I, at the end of the story, take the motorcycle off the cliff, you have no choice but to follow. . . .
Although Saunders is absolutely correct, here and throughout the book, to emphasize the importance of the reader’s experience of a work of fiction, the implication in this motorcycle conceit is that such experience is most intensively directed to plot, an assumption that is sustained throughout the analysis of “In the Cart,” at least insofar as the focus of attention remains on what happens. Indeed, “what happens” is very consequential in Chekhov, since our grasp of character must depend on our alert apprehension of what they say and do, usually in ordinary moments, but a consideration of what a Chekhov story has to offer an aspiring writer might also stress the way Chekhov is able to build such resonance into stories that are so minimalist in both structure and tone. This is something that happens beneath or around the narrated events themselves, not in the story as such.
Saunders’s method works somewhat better in the examination of “The Singers,” since this is a story in which what happens is clearly the focal point—although the reader may be more preoccupied by the story’s lack of action (aside from the singing contest to which the narrator’s account leads and the narrator’s approach to and exit from the scene he describes, what happens is almost literally nothing) than by contemplating the narrative. But in this case Saunders’s effort to understand the singing contest and its ramifications prompts him to compel our attention on the details of the contest (on the details in general), in turn making the story’s aftermath take on increased importance. Saunders ultimately affirms Turgenev’s emphasis on description rather than narrative, characterizing it as Turgenev’s disinclination to accommodate contemporaneous notions of “craft” emphasizing plot. (Noting here that description is a compositional mode about which Matthew Salesses again has very little to say.) He might have gone farther, in the discussions of both Turgenev and Chekhov, and reminded us that each of these writers is considered an important figure in the development of literary realism, which in its classic form is meant to expel all conceptions of craft, leaving only life.
But, as Saunders observes at the beginning of the chapter on Gogol, close reading of stories such as “In the Cart” and “The Singers” shows these ostensibly realistic stories to be “compressed and exaggerated, with crazy levels of selection and omission and shaping going on in them.” If in Turgenev and Chekov these distortions are in the service of a greater fidelity to the “feel” or ordinary life, in Gogol’s “The Nose” the distortion isn’t hidden in “selection and omission” but is a blatant artifice the reader can’t miss. Saunders is perhaps at his best in this book in the analysis of “The Nose,” but this isn’t really surprising, since Saunders as a writer of fiction is closer in spirit to the representational breaches in Gogol than the other writers examined in this book. Saunders maintains that a story such as “The Nose” should not be regarded as absurdism or fantasy, but as a work that depicts “the process of rationality fraying under duress” in a way that reveals a more essential reality going beyond “the way things seem to how they really are,” no doubt similar, Saunders would say, to the way his own fiction incorporates the surreal and absurd.
In this chapter on “The Nose,” Saunders does address the limitations of reading a writer like Gogol in translation, since in particular much of the humor in the story lies in Gogol’s use of the Russian language. But he does perhaps get as close to Gogol’s Russian prose as we are likely to get by focusing on Gogol’s invocation of the “skaz” mode of narration—featuring an unreliable narrator speaking in something closer to an oral than a written idiom—and by emphasizing Gogol’s creation of voice. The instability of the voice (half formal, half awkwardly demotic), Saunders argues, points us to an instability in the human use of language:
Language, like algebra, usefully only operates within certain limits. It’s a tool for making representations of the world, which, unfortunately, we then go on to mistake for the world. Gogol is not making a ridiculous world; he’s showing us that we ourselves make a ridiculous world in every instant, by our thinking.
This is surely a valuable lesson about the writer’s medium for the apprentice writer to learn, and if in his course Saunders offers the kind of thorough analysis found in this book, students must indeed emerge from it more enlightened about craft as employed by these great Russian writers. A course such as the one Saunders teaches seems to me, at least, a better way of emphasizing “craft” than the entrenched workshop method. That it would not pass muster with Matthew Salesses seems like the most severe judgment on the merits of his “rethinking” of the principles of fiction and the teaching of writing.
Comments