The Reading Experience

Forget Fiction

Lee Siegel recently opined that "fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the nonfiction writers":

You want to read a great story about American politics today, overflowing with sharp character portraits, and keen evocations of American places, and a ripping narrative? Read Mr. Remnick's book on Obama, because you won't find it in American fiction. Looking to immerse yourself in a fascinating tale of contemporary finance? Forget fiction. Pick up Michael Lewis' latest book-not to mention his earlier ones. Yearning for a saga of American money and class? Well, Dreiser is dead, and there sure isn't anyone to take his place, so go out and get T.J. Stiles' The First Tycoon, an epic telling of the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

No doubt if you think fiction ought to be "about American politics today," or provide a "fascinating tale of contemporary finance" or a "saga of American money and class," you might agree with Siegel's claim that contemporary fiction doesn't measure up. On the other hand, Siegel doesn't really establish that in the "Golden Age" of American fiction many writers did these things, either. He rattles off a list of names, but among them--"Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Malamud"--I can't identify one who will be remembered for writing novels about "American politics today" or "contemporary finance." I suppose a couple of them might be said to have written loosely about "money and class," but the best ones weren't directly considering money and class but were writing fiction in which "class" was tangentially involved. (Or if they did write directly about "money and class" --Rabbit is Rich comes to mind--this work was minor at best.) Those of us who cringe at the idea of novels about contemporary finance can only be thankful that neither these writers nor most current writers find it a fit subject for fiction regarded as literary art.

Siegel's displeasure doesn't really seem to be with fiction writers, anyway. He's lamenting that there aren't enough literary critics of the old school around, critics like Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, who focused not on art but on "questions of life and society that a particular novel evoked." Siegel is himself a critic of this sort, and I'm sure if he really put his mind to it he could take almost any work of fiction and, ignoring its aesthetic qualities, belabor these "questions of life and society" to death. I assume that either he no longer wants to do this (diminishing returns) or contemporary fiction really has moved away from the need to "say something" about political and social affairs. I myself come across enough works of fiction that pretty clearly haven't renounced the effort of saying something that I can't really agree there's no longer enough grist for the cultural critic's mill, but if the embrace of nonfiction by people like Lee Siegel means they will henceforth just leave fiction and fiction writers alone, I heartily endorse it.

I am left with a similar feeling about Terry Teachout's recent assertion that "Reading demands a greater investment of time than looking at a complicated painting, and the average reader is not prepared to invest that much time in a book, no matter what critics say about it. I feel the same way. I suppose I could get to the bottom of "Finnegans Wake" if I worked at it—but would it be worth the trouble?" As with Siegel, I think Teachout is both correct and deeply wrong. It is probably true that "the average reader" is not going to devote much time to "difficult" books, but literature-as-art necessarily isn't much interested in the "average reader." Average readers can no longer summon up much patience with Shakespeare, or with Dickens or Melville or Henry James, or most poetry. These writers, as well as Joyce in Finnegans Wake, assumed that most of their readers (or, with Shakespeare, their listeners) would make the effort needed to appreciate their work on its own terms or else leave it alone. I can't see there's anything untoward about this arrangement. That some readers might find the work excessively difficult certainly isn't an argument that writers ought to avoid alienating such readers.

If Terry Teachout thinks Finnegans Wake wouldn't reward his effort, so be it. Many others find its singular kind of difficulty especially rewards the attempt to "get to the bottom of" it (and it would be the attempt that matters, since no one will ever really get to the "bottom"--something that is true of all great literature). Should serious fiction ultimately have to do without Terry Teachout (or Lee Siegel) as audience members, I don't think their absence will be registered that keenly.

Turning Pages

Sven Birkerts has been developing a critique of "electronic media" for quite a long time, publishing The Gutenberg Elegies in 1994, well before the rise of blogs, stand-alone news sites, and critical webzines, so his cyber skepticism is not to be dismissed as simply more defensive posturing by an endangered gatekeeper. I have myself taken issue with some of Birkerts's more uninformed outbursts, but his concern for "unhurried" reading is usually expressed in an equally unhurried analysis of the act of reading (specifically reading fiction), not as the high dudgeon of a book critic protesting his imminent loss of status.

This is especially true of a recent essay by Bikerts in The American Scholar, "Reading in a Digital Age." The essay is framed as yet another inquiry into the way the digital information "environment" is making serious reading harder to accomplish, but ultimately it is really a candid inquiry into his own reading habits and an attempt to generalize from his conclusions to a theory of sorts both about reading and about the nature of fiction. Much of this theory seems to me perceptive, and generally correct, but parts of it as well seem an overly roundabout way of describing our experience of fiction that would benefit from a consideration of John Dewey's own "experiential-phenomenological" analysis in Art as Experience. There is overlap between the accounts offered by Dewey and Birkerts, but finally Dewey's comes closer to doing full justice to the role of "imagination" in reading, both writer's and reader's.

Birkerts associates imagination with the mental state of "contemplation," which he in turn contrasts with "analytic thought." Contemplation is "intransitive and experiential in its nature, is for itself"; analytic thought  "is transitive, is goal directed. . .a means, its increments mainly building blocks toward some synthesis or explanation." Contemplation is, or should be, the preferred mode of reading fiction, by which "enhancement" and "deepening," end-states in themselves, are achieved. But Birkerts finds this "deepening" moving in just one direction: the purpose of fiction "is less to communicate themes or major recognitions and more to engage the mind, the sensibility, in a process that in its full realization bears upon our living as an ignition to inwardness, which has no larger end, which is the end itself."

Birkerts's insistence that the reading of fiction leads to experience and not "explanation" is wholly appropriate and does seem to coincide with Dewey's contention that art is an "enhancement" of experience. However, while Dewey might accept "sensibility" as the name for the human receptivity to art, he would not characterize our response to art and literature as primarily an opportunity "to enage the mind," especially if this means a retreat into an "inwardness" that is itself the ultimately desired state, cut off from the projected space occupied by the work instigating the experience in the first place. A Deweyan representation of the reading experience (the experience of art in general) would balance the inwardness Birkerts evokes with an outwardness that also seeks satisfaction in the perception of form and style. If "contemplation" involves the heightened awareness both of the palpable qualities of the created work and of our own awareness of those qualities, then the term might accurately capture the nature of aesthetic experience, but I think Birkerts privileges the activity of "mind."

When Birkerts writes that fiction provides "an arena of liberation. . .where mind and imagination can freely combine," he is not describing an interaction between the reader's "sensibility" and the the work as an act of imagination but is positing "mind" and "imagination" as faculties exercised by the reader. When a little later he allows that "I tend to view the author as on a continuum with his characters, their extension," it seems to me he is explicitly discounting the artistic shaping that is finally the role of "author." In merging the author and his characters, Birkerts is putting most value on fiction's ability to induce "empathy," which in his case means the opportunity to connect with another "mind": "It is the proximity to and belief in the other consciousness that matters, more than its source and location." It is presumably this proximity to the "other" as evoked in fiction that constitutes "imagination" for Bikerts, not the unencumbered immersion in aesthetic experience as a whole.

On the other hand, I do identify with Birkerts's account of the "residue" his reading experiences leave:

. . .the details of plot fall away first, and so rapidly that in a few months’ time I will only have the most general précis left. I will find myself getting nervous in party conversations if the book is mentioned, my sensible worry being that if I can’t remember what happened in a novel, how it ended, can I say in good conscience that I have read it? Indeed, if I invoke plot memory as my stricture, then I have to confess that I’ve read almost nothing at all, never mind these decades of turning pages.

What does remain is "A distinct tonal memory, a conviction of having been inside an author’s own language world, and along with that some hard-to-pinpoint understanding of his or her psyche." "Tonal memory" seems to me a good way of characterizing the lingering impression a strong work of fiction leaves, although it is a memory the work has indeed impressed upon the memory rather than the sort of mechanical effort of "recall" the recounting of plot entails. For myself, not only do I usually have trouble retrieving specific episodes from novels I have read more than a few months in the past, I often enough lose all but a general sense of the voice or behavior of the characters, in the case of minor characters sometimes forgetting their existence altogether. Yet I continue to feel a tangible connection to the "language world" I have encountered, which to me is the surest sign my experience of the text was worthwhile.

The storage model of reading thus threatens to reduce the reading experience to the acquisition of "information," which Birkerts rightly resists. But I would take Birkerts's invocation of the "language world" as the ulimate source of value in fiction even farther. Reading a work of literature should always imply the possibility, even the desirability, of re-reading. Suspension in the language-world rather than the collection of facts about the work is much more likely to encourage later re-reading, both because one wants to abide there again and because the work in its particulars hasn't already been thoroughly assimilated and duly packed away. I can read it again and still have a worthwhile literary experience. (Presumably Birkerts might think that re-reading would give him further insight into the author's "psyche" as well; I cannot accept this particular element of his theory of reading, as I cannot see how the created language-world that is the text could possibly reveal anything about the actual author's mental states, except through free-floating speculation irrelevant to the text itself, nor why I should care even if it could.)

Birkerts concludes by encapsulating his claim about "deep reading":

Serious literary work has levels. The engaged reader takes in not only the narrative premise and the craft of its realization, but also the resonance—that which the author creates, deliberately, through her use of language. It is the secondary power of good writing, often the ulterior motive of the writing. The two levels operate on a lag, with the resonance accumulating behind the sense, building a linguistic density that is the verbal equivalent of an aftertaste, or the “finish.” The reader who reads without directed concentration, who skims, or even just steps hurriedly across the surface, is missing much of the real point of the work; he is gobbling his foie gras.

While there are still assumptions here that seem to me unwarranted--why must the core element of fiction be its "narrative premise," which would only re-introduce "plot" as a barrier between the reader and the "language world"--ultimately this is a credible description of what is involved in serious reading. Unfortunatey, Birkerts seems motivated to offer this description mostly in order to bolster his conviction that this kind of reading is endangered by the transition to screen-reading. I am unconvinced, to say the least. If Birkerts were suggesting that deep reading is succumbing to the general human inclination to give in to distraction, to settle for what's easiest, he would perhaps be on firmer ground, although this weakness has always plagued us and can hardly have been induced by the presence of computers. But he clearly enough wants to insist there is something inherent in cyberspace and e-books that make them inimical to "serious literary work" and the reading it requires.

A generation or two from now, serious readers--and they will still be around--will look back at Birkerts's claims and find them deeply puzzling. They will find the notion that literary texts published on pieces of glued-together paper are somehow metaphysically superior to those published electronically difficult to comprehend. I find it hard to comprehend the idea now. I can understand continuing to find the printed book more convenient, or more comforting,  but to maintain that serious, sustained reading can take place only when enabled by print-on-paper just isn't  plausible. Birkerts is a trustworthy literary critic and a reliable authority on the pleasures of reading, but as a seer into the future of literature he will surely prove inadequate.

 

Moral Chaos

When reading Roger Scruton, one can always be sure that the ideas and sentiments expressed are being offered with utter sincerity. The extent to which he is willing to defend a view of the world and the place of humans in it that seems not simply conservative but thoroughly antique can be astonishing, but he does defend it, seriously and systematically. As a philosopher, Scruton sticks to the most fundamental questions of social and cultural value, in many instances raising questions long assumed satisfactorily answered and renewing conservative objections to the direction taken by much of modern culture.

Those who might rebut Scruton's case against modern art and popular culture are perhaps tempted to simply dismiss his invocations of such seemingly agreeable concepts as "order" and "beauty" as so much opportunistic cant. This would be a mistake, not merely because Scruton makes his arguments in an intellectually honest way but because the role of order or beauty in art ought not be denied outright. Scruton is not wrong to consider "beauty" a relevant consideration in the assessment of art. He is wrong in his conception of beauty as it manifests itself in works of art.

In a recent essay, "Beauty and Desecration," Scruton asserts that "the sacred task of art. . .is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty." Since the era of modernism, however, deliberate ugliness has usurped the place of beauty and "[a]rt increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes."

Note that is the transgression not of aesthetic standards but of "moral certainties" to which Scruton objects. Scruton rightly notes that in the 20th/21st centuries "expression" has become the underpinning of most movements in and commentary on "new" art, but rather than examine the specifically aesthetic flaws in an approach anchored in "expression," Scruton instead recoils from the moral anarchy unleashed by the modern Romantic rebel: "This emphasis on expression was a legacy of the Romantic movement; but now it was joined by the conviction that the artist is outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it, so that artistic self-expression is at the same time a transgression of ordinary moral norms."

Scruton uses as an example the widespread habit in productions of opera to alter the staging and the dramatic vision to produce a "modernized" version. He cites a particular production of Mozart's The Abduction From the Seraglio set "in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, copulating couples littered the stage, and every opportunity for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. . .The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the scenes of desecration, murder, and narcissistic sex."

Even if we accept that Scruton's description of the staging of this opera is true to its director's intent--and I would guess that many others in the audience that night did not see it in this way--his outrage is directed at its moral implications. It is "an example of something familiar in every aspect of our contemporary culture. It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction." Scruton manages to connect this sort of "re-visioning" in the high arts to the music video, which "is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos."

Scruton cannot appreciate that the operatic production he attended committed an aesthetic offense, not a moral one. I am quite willing to believe that those responsible for it thought it a clever idea to "set the opera in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes," but ultimately this is just an aesthetically vacuous attempt to "update" Mozart, to run roughshod over Mozart's original vision of his opera and establish their own overwhelmingly lame one in its place. It is a practice to be found not only in opera but in theater in general, whereby directors and producers with the aesthetic sensibilities of lizards attempt to keep the great works "relevant." One could, I suppose, call this artistic cluelessness a "moral" problem, but most of what Scruton sees as the unleashing of "moral chaos" is finally just the consequence of the aesthetic incompetence of some those entrused with the job of re-presenting the theatrical art of the past.

I suspect that Scruton does not want to examine the art he despises for its specific aesthetic failings because the very introduction of the "aesthetic" leads for him to the moral decadence he fears. "Beauty" is not to be found in the creations of artists separated from the moral universe to which they must conform:

We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.

In this view, beaty is not even a "creation" of artists. It is a discovery by artists of "harmony," of the "order" that is "already" there "in our perceptions." Artists, such as the great landscape painters, are, if they are to be artists at all, "devoted to moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things."

This harmony and order--a moralized nature--is what Scruton means by the "sacred," the capturing of which is the duty of artists. Modern art is engaged in desecration--the inversion of the sacred. In suggesting that human beings are other than "at home in the world" or that the world itself is not always "fit," modern artists mock and undermine the moral order that art should be celebrating and supporting. It is time, according to Scruton, to recover the sacred, "to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized."

Scruton's is an entirely coherent argument if you accept the underlying world view according to which the role of art is to "affirm" the deep, if not always completely visible, truth in "the scheme of things" that manifests itself in beauty. If you believe, however, that the world at times betrays an order that isn't necessarily beneficent, or that as Scruton puts it in his repugnance at another kind of "truthful" art, a human being can be reduced by life to "a lump of suffering flesh made pitiful, helpless, and disgusting," you might find Scruton's "truth" to be partial indeed. You might, in fact, find it a delusion and the idea that a great artist can't redeem "suffering flesh made pitiful" by an act of imagination (or, as Susan Sontag would have it, "will") anything but an affirmation of life.

Bending Over Backwards

According to Lionel Shriver:

Literature is not very popular these days, to put it mildly. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly half of Americans do not read books at all, and those who do average a mere six a year. You'd think literary writers would be bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves to readers -- to make their work maximally accessible, straightforward and inviting. But no.

But why in the world would anyone think that writers should be "bending over backwards" to appeal to people who have no interest in reading? What bizarre conception of literature would have it intended primarily for nonreaders? The mangled logic of this view, which perversely seems to be widely shared by many who do read, seems to me so far removed from any plausible assessment of the place of "literature" in our culture as to be pretty close to insane. That "literature is not very popular" at a time when the most potent measure of popularity is American Idol ought to be seen as a sign it still offers some hope of resistance to the values of commerical culutre. Most of all it should be seen precisely as an opportunity to experiment with aesthetic strategies that challenge audiences rather than giving in to the inexorable pressure to "dumb down."

Since when have serious writers sought to be "maximally accessible, straightforward and inviting" above all? Until the 19th century, "Literature" (or what was then simply considered "poetry") could only appeal to that minority of the population who literally could read, and most writers wanted to be "maximally accessible" not to contemporaneous audiences so much as to posterity, where the final verdict on literary greatness would be rendered. It's doubtful that Spenser or Milton thought that this audience would consist of readers for whom they needed to slavishly "ingratiate" themselves in advance. Some like to point out that Shakespeare in his time appealed to a relatively popular audience, but who could carefully examine Shakespeare's texts and conclude other than that the "accessibility" of his language comes not from any attempt to be more "straightforward" but from an assumption that his audience had sufficient listening skills to invite themselves into his imaginative world?

"Literature" of course is itself a concept that develops during the 19th century and after as an umbrella term that attempts to gather "poetry" together again with its now renegade forms, fiction and drama, precisely in order to make them available to the newly literate middle class as "good for" such readers. However, even this dilution of literary value--by which literature becomes valuable not in and for itself but as a tool of education and emergent nationalism--assumed that the appreciation of works of literature was something to aspire to, that "great books" required an elevation of taste and skill, although "common readers" could indeed reach this higher level.We now appear to have reached the point where literature can be relevant only if it turns itself into just another "inviting" mass entertainment.

The larger point of Shriver's essay, about the use of quotation marks, is just puerile: "By putting the onus on the reader to determine which lines are spoken and which not, the quoteless fad feeds the widespread conviction that popular fiction is fun while literature is arduous." Forget that the "quoteless fad" has been around since at least James Joyce and William Gaddis. Forget that not just quotation marks but dialogue itself are optional in fiction--who said that novels should record speech in this way at all? Heaven forbid that any "onus" be put on the reader to recognize that fiction isn't just a prosy version of a tv drama, with some written-out bits to supplement the talking. If Lionel Shriver's version of "literature" is what it takes to move the average books read per year from six to seven, writers ought to preserve their backs and refrain from bending over too frequently.

Betraying the Novel

In this interview, William Gaddis scholar Steven Moore says of populist attacks on experimental writers that

Of course you don't have to like Joyce (or Pynchon or Gaddis), they’re certainly not for everyone, but to dismiss them as pretentious frauds and to glorify simpler, more traditional fiction struck me as an example of the growing anti-intellectualism in our country, right in step with schools mandating that evolution was just a “theory” and that creationism should be taught alongside it in science classes.

I couldn't help but detect some laziness as well; some people don't want to “work” at reading a novel (or listening to a complex opera, or watching a film with subtitles, etc). I said earlier I liked a challenge; many people obviously don’t, or not when it comes to novels. I got the sense from these critics that they feel the novel is a democratic, middle-class genre that anyone should be able to enjoy, and that these experimentalists were betraying the novel (and their readers) by trying to turn it into something (high art) it was never intended to be. . . .

I don't think I'd call the American impatience with aesthetically complex fiction "anti-intellectualism." Plenty of intellectuals themselves express the same disdain for writers like Pynchon and Gaddis, whose work can't be reduced to sociological observation or political agitation. It's more a resentment of complex art, a disinclination to give such art the sustained attention it requires. It's less "laziness" than it is a fundamental suspicion of anything that isn't useful in a readily apparent way. Critics want novels to be useful as tools of cultural analysis, while ordinary readers want novels to be entertaining, an escape from their own everyday reality.

Nor do I think that this impatience is necessarily "in step" with right-wing cultural values. The radical left can be just as impatient with art that isn't useful to their political battles as the radical right. In fact, the political left is probably more hostile to the "merely aesthetic," which is taken to be an expression of bad faith when it isn't being deconstructed and shown to be ideologically complicit with the political right. It isn't necessary to associate resistance to challenging art with politically conservative attitudes in order to account for its existence.

What may account for it, however, is precisely the assumption Moore detects in many readers and critics that "the novel is a democratic, middle-class genre that anyone should be able to enjoy, and that these experimentalists were betraying the novel." This is an assumption held not just by critics and readers, but by some writers as well, writers who shape their work so that "anyone should be able to enjoy" it, who count themselves failures if their work doesn't reach the broadest audience possible, who are willing to take on themselves the roles of marketer and publicist in order to accomplish this task. It is an assumption that counts novels as just another transitory amusement in competition for the entertainment dollar.

In his book The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt convincingly establishes that the rise of the novel and the rise of the middle class were parallel developments and that this correlation was not just incidental. Novels did pose an opportunity for this now literate social class to exercise its newly-acquired skill. But to insist that novels should (or could, considering the other entertainment options now available) continue to perform this same function 200 years later, after Flaubert, after Henry James, and after all the other writers in their wake who saw that the novel could indeed be "high art," can only be an effort to put the genie back in the bottle. To this extent, the distinction between "popular fiction" and "literary fiction" is quite sensible. Let those who prefer a "democratic" form of mass entertainment stay with the kind of books that dominate the best seller lists. Let those who prefer "challenging" fiction with claims to high art stay with the comparatively few such works that manage to get published. The two groups don't have to intermingle at all.

I don't really mind being identified with the "elitist" group. Nor do I mind that the larger group wants fiction without artistic pretensions. I only mind when writers or readers want it both ways, when they want their books to be "good reads" but also want them to be taken seriously as works of literary art. This usually involves dismissing "high art" standards as "narrow" and elevating popular standards to a place higher than high art. Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Gravity's Rainbow don't "betray" the novel. They confirm its possibilities. To deny that the novel has such possibilities is the real betrayal.

A Normative Conclusion

In his recent post on his Think Again blog about the misappropriation of deconstruction by American academics, Stanley Fish writes:

. . .No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown — can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one.

Among literary scholars, there are many who regard works of literature as a kind of social construction. In this view, a given work cannot be granted a special status as "art" separated from history or culture, since it is permeated with both. For literary study in its historicist and cultural studies incarnations, literature gives us access to the historical/cultural forces that worked through the writer to author the work, the exposure of which forces is the most important work of academic criticism. Literary art as an autonomous accomplishment that deserves consideration in its own right is not just shunted aside, but is dismissed outright as a delusion.

Behind this rejection of the "literary" as anything other than a window on culture and beyond that mostly an imposition by overweening writers claiming an exalted power they don't ultimately possesses is an attitude that might indeed be described as "normative conclusion" as Fish uses the term. Writers are inevitably responding to the social conditions of their time; they can't escape the historical contingencies that inform their assumptions about the world; their works might help us understand how culturally-bound beliefs get circulated around and through all culturally-inscribed modes of expression, but they certainly can't be considered as distinctive aesthetic objects produced by the play of human imagination. The notion that a work of literature might, in its encounter with particular readers, transcend the conditions, contingencies, and cultural presuppositions of its creation, at least for the moment of the reader's experience, just can't be countenanced. No text can escape the confines of its social construction.

Thus all literary works are "just" social constructions. And this conclusion has become the basis of the most widely-practiced forms of academic criticism, whereby poems and stories and novels (particularly the latter) are scrutinized for their socially-constructed representations, as if they were being punished for being found complicit with all the evils with which "culture" can be charged. But, as Fish points out, a specific work can be criticized for advancing a particular socially constructed vision that might be found objectionable (which in most cases means it has failed at being art in the first place), but it can hardly be criticized for being a social construction to one degree or another. Writers are human beings, not members of some alien species, so they cannot finally escape their circumstances as human beings, their being alive at a certain time, in a certain place, with all the attendant assumptions and perspectives that time and place embody.

Thus, to say that a work of literature is inescapably a social construction is precisely to say nothing. Of course it is. How could it be otherwise? That it can also be a work of art, "art" being defined not as something insulated from history and culture, outside of time and place, but as we human beings in all our socially constructed atttitudes and expectations choose to define it as we go along, seems to me not only possible but indispensable. Sometimes writers manage to raise themselves to an awareness of the social constructedness of aesthetic conventions and conventional discourse and compel their readers to rise to such an awareness as well. Sometimes they even work toward the dissolution of certain especially noxious social constructions. They don't always succeed in these efforts to confront social constructions, because they can't. We remain blind to some of them, especially if they're constructions of which we approve or which otherwise help us get our work done. But this is no reason to hold all of literature responsible for this unavoidable human failing.

The Burden of Criticality

Johanna Drucker sums up her argument in her book, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as follows:

. . .the critical frameworks inherited from the avant-garde and passed through the academic discourses of current art history are constrained by the expectation of negativity. Fine art should not have to bear the burden of criticality nor can it assume superiority as if operating outside of the ideologies it has long presumed to critique. Fine art, artists, and critics exist within a condition of complicity with the institutions and values of contemporary culture. (247)

According to Drucker, artists of the 2000s (representatives of which her book discusses in some detail), no longer see "complicity" with mass culture as an evil to be avoided. These artists use mass culture to create dynamic, visually arresting works the ultimate ambition of which is to be aesthetically pleasing. No requirement of "criticality" is necessary for ideological correctness: the purpose of art is to be aesthetic, and contemporary artists are exploiting the aesthetic possibilities of mass culture to create "fine art" that doesn't pretend to an inherent "superiority" over that culture. Complicity is ok, as is taking sensory pleasure in art.

I'm ultimately fine with this argument, although it's unfortunate that a defense of aesthetic value in art has to in effect make common cause with mass culture in order to ensure that "art" survives as a viable endeavor to begin with. (It's the devil's bargain that's unfortunate, not popular culture, or at least particular productions of popular culture, some of which I enjoy just as much as the next guy.) And why is it necessary to equate autonomy in art with a claim of "superiority"? Earlier in the book, Drucker tells us that the high modernist view of art as in its separate sphere actually did damage to the aesthetic claims of art:

By appearing to be entirely aesthetic (its forms and expressions entirely contained in the visual appeal to the senses and lacking in any prescribed or circumscribed purpose), fine art sustains the concept of value as a notion by pretending to be autonomous. The "value" of a work of art is never to be accounted for in the costs of materials and labor or in the investments in production. Fine art appears to be far from the crass worlds of commerce and remote from the real of factory production. Fine art distances itself from the systems that in turn exploit these myths to advantage. Art is not a shell game or a poker bluff, but an assertion of the symbolic basis of value production. . . .

It seems that Drucker is reciting the oft-told story of how modernist art took itself to be free of complicity, innocent of ulterior "purpose," by "appearing to be entirely aesthetic" and "pretending to be autonomous" but really wasn't after all, blather, blather, blather. It's an article of faith that academic criticism clings to like piranhas: art can't assert autonomy or singularity, can't carve out an aesthetic space beside the "crass worlds of commerce," because all expressions are socially or culturally or historically determined. Works of art can be studied alongside tv shows and pop albums because they're just as inevitably a part of "culture" as any other commodifed object.

I say this is an article of faith because although it is true that all human beings creating works of art are subject to the prevailing assumptions of time and place, this does not seem to me to be a very profound observation. It amounts to saying that living artists are, well, alive rather than dead. (Or that deceased artists lived on this planet rather than on one in some adjacent solar system.) Yet is is held as an unassailable truth in post-New Critical academic criticism that literature must be historicized, that the unavoidable fact that writers put the fruits of their influences into "circulation" means that culture authors texts to the extent that the notion of aesthetic autonomy is just a nefarious illusion.

But why does the fact that any artistic work can be seen to one degree or another as illustrative of cultural forces rule out the possibility it might also be granted a kind of autonomy? If your goal is to show that all cultural expressions are subject to the historical mediation demanded by a properly Marxist view of culture, you can certainly do so, and arguments about the "autonomy" of certain excluded expressions would correctly be dismissed as incoherent. But they would be incoherent only when considered from within this interpretive framework, which is being posited as the only acceptable way of making sense of works of art or literature.

However, if this particular way of making sense of artistic and cultural expression has the virtue of being "true"--albeit in the trivial sense I have indicated--it can hardly claim exclusive rights to truth since its own investment in it rests on the underlying assumption that truth is relative. If literary texts cannot claim to embody universal or unmediated or noncontingent truth because everything is an artifact of incidental human activity, I cannot see any logically disallowed reason why one such activity could not be the study of literary texts for their posited "literary" qualities conceived as separate from their status as cultural representations, congeries of historical forces, conduits of sociological information, or whatever else works of literature can be considered good for. To object that such an approach to literary study (or the study of any of the arts) presumes itself "outside of the ideologies" is either irrelevant--since all critical approaches must scramble to the "outside" in order to speak authoritatively about the "inside"--or just wrong. The "autonomy" game does not presuppose itself outside the rules of relativism; it simply solicits recognition as one game among the others. "Pretending to be autonomous" is good enough for those who think this particular aesthetic game yields interesting insights. "Appearing to be aesthetic" is, in fact, to be aesthetic.

Thus the real question at issue is not whether autonomy is a valid concept in art/literary criticism but which concepts are to be accorded primacy in academic criticism. If the notion of the "autonomous object" is accompanied by close and accurate reading that results in a coherent account of a text or work of art , it can hardly be dismissed as fallacious. It can be assigned a lesser significance in the critical heirarchy, deemed less "serious" in an environment in which the merely literary and the merely aesthetic are identified with a dandy-ish formalism and can be marginalized safely enough while real scholars get on with the business of interpreting history, explaining culture, and intervening in politics. It can be made the scapegoat for all the shortcomings of the previous generation's critical assumptions and duly assigned its own historicized place in the critical, and curricular, past. In the struggle for dominance in that small part of academe originally (if reluctantly) set aside for "literature," the proposition that poems, stories, and novels are best regarded as wholly unlike other, more transparently discursive verbal texts, self-enclosed, formally intricate, autonomous, and that the critic's job is to advance ways of reading such textd that enhance the reader's experience of them, has clearly lost out. It is unlikely to make a comeback, although periodic efforts like Drucker's to defend aesthetic pleasure will no doubt still persist.

Although it does seem to me that a debate about terminology, about the conventionality of the critical lexicon, is still in order: When the powers that be in literary study want to show they have not entirely abandoned the old critical order, they like to point out that much current academic criticism is underpinned by what they want to still call "close reading." But this term has become so overstretched through misuse that, at best, it now merely means "paying attention" and at worse means "interrogating" the text vigorously enough that you finally do find there what you wanted to find. "Close reading" for the New Critics was a reading adjusted to the contours of the text, a reading that seeks to conform itself to the demands made by the text itself and doesn't demand that the text conform to the critic's preconceptions. It does so by, indeed, assuming the work's autonomy.

"Literary criticism" is still identified as the task undertaken by academics who study and write about literature. But academic criticism often seems to have little use for the "literary" as a subject of inquiry except when it can be shown to be illusory, or elitist, or a prop supporting various evil hegemonies. Since it is clear enough that many academic critics would rather be engaged in cultural criticism, ideological criticism, or sociological analysis--anything but the lowly explication of literary texts--perhaps the term "literary criticism" could be turned back to those who do have an interest in exploring, even "appreciating" the possibilities of the literary when considered as an autonomous practice. I'm really not sure why cultural studies scholars and historicists would want to hold on to the designation, anyway.

Then there are terms such as those used by Drucker: "negativity"; "complicity." By the first, Drucker seems to mean the incorporation of images, motifs, and sensibilities from mass culture only to "subvert" these references by using them to implicitly critique the insipidity of mass culture. This has been a common response to the encroachment of mass culture on high art, and Drucker is right to suggest that sometimes high art simply borrows from popular culture and that such borrowing is not always an attempt by the artist or the writer to "say something" about culture. That this move attributing "criticality" to works is so familiar only reinforces (for me) the extent to which criticism of art and literature has become wholly fixated on the something said at the expense of the forms of saying (and how form itself mutates straightforward "saying"), but I'm not sure why she needs to use "complicity" as a description of the act of avoiding negativity.

The term only reinforces the notion that artists and writers must be judged by the sociopolitical consequences of their work. Drucker wants it to be acceptable for them to refuse the "burden of criticality," but to be inevitably "complicit" with cultural practices and attitudes expressing sometimes dubious "values" can't help but suggest there is a lack of integrity in the art work found complicit, a lack of purity that makes art and literature questionable allies in the fight against temporal Power.

For me, that they are weapons of questionable efficacy in this ideological skirmish is the mark of their most indispensable value. In their excesses and frequent ungainliness, their refusal to submit to the expectations of ordinary discourse, works of art and literature manifest an a-temporal power that compels succeeding viewers and readers to consider them anew (sometimes to enlist them in ideological skirmishes), to regard them as representations informed by their origins in historical circumstance but not bound by them, however culturally complicit they ulimately must be. If this is not quite metaphysical "autonomy," it's also not an illusion.

Goodness and Functionality

In this essay called "Our Creed and Our Character," Terry Teachout notes:

No less deeply rooted in the national religious past, one might add, is our distrust of art for art’s sake. Over much of the country’s history, many artists, like most of their countrymen, have favored an art that exists not autonomously but in the service of some cause whose goodness or functionality justifies its existence. In the 19th century, that cause was usually religious; nowadays, it is far more often political. But in both cases, it is hard to escape the conclusion that something in the American national character is inimical to the uncomplicated enjoyment of beauty. We prefer our art to be earnest, and that preference is another survival of American Puritanism.

One might expect Teachout, who has been known in his own criticism to take pleasure in beauty, to point out the way in which this Puritan distrust of the aesthetic and accompanying demand for "functionality" distorts and marginalizes American art (not so much among artists as among critics and audiences), but instead he seems to accept David Gelernter's mawkish notion that there is such a thing as "Americanism," essentially religious in nature, of which American art is, or should be, an expression. "Secular-minded historians who fail to acknowledge this fact—and like-minded aesthetes who believe only in the gospel of art for art’s sake," writes Teachout, "are incapable of seeing either America or its earnest, achieving, incurably idealistic, and wildly gifted people as they really are."

So those of us who are "secular-minded" or who do profess "an uncomplicated enjoyment of beauty," or both, are not real Americans, are irreparably distant from Americans "as they really are"? Only those who accept "Americanism" in all its anhedonic glory need apply for citizenship, a precondition for which is knowledge of Gelernter's "sacralized reading of American history"? Only paintings of kittens or poems about Thomas Edison can really capture "earnest, achieving, incurably idealistic America," an endorsement of which is the true test of art?

Teachout almost says as much when he asserts that "one learns surprisingly little about American religiosity from modern American art," as if this does indeed disqualify it from being considered art, disqualifies it from even being accepted as truly "American," since "religiosity" defines us. "Though some of our major novelists, most notably Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, have been preoccupied with religious matters," he continues, "it is far more common for American writers either to ignore religion altogether or to portray it as a destructive feature of American life. Similarly, few of our major composers have produced religious compositions of any significance—there is no American counterpart to Verdi’s Requiem or to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s G Minor Mass—and even fewer of our major painters have made use of Judeo-Christian iconography except as a kind of cultural local color."

Is Terry Teachout proposing "earnestness" (understood mostly as an expression of "religiosity") as the primary standard for judging works of art? Is indifference to religion among artists a crippling flaw? I realize that this is a view very commonly advanced by certain "conservative" cultural commentators, but I always thought Teachout managed to avoid such a narrow, agenda-driven (indeed, thoroughgoingly "political") approach to art in most of his better criticism. I'm disappointed to find him vouching for it here.

UPDATE Terry Teachout responds.

Tethered to the World

I stopped watching Saturday Night Live a number of years ago. I did so primarily because I no longer found it very funny, but I was also able to determine exactly why I didn't find it funny: Since I had little familiarity with the pop cultural referents--the tv shows, the pop bands, the reigning celebrities of the day--I almost literally couldn't get the jokes. It wasn't that the current version of the show (which was roughly the latter days of the Will Ferrell-era cast) had suddenly become dependent on popular culture and thus required the viewer's "knowingness"; this had always been the case, going all the way back to the golden era of Aykroyd, Belushi, and Radner. But then I had been knowing. I knew the names, the styles, the programs. The jokes seemed pertinent to the world in which I was immersed, and thus I found them funny (sometimes).

(I realize that SNL is also know for its occasional "political" sketches, but even these I always considered part of the focus on popular culture--politicians as another kind of celebrity who was famous through being on tv.)

In the previous post, I defined literary satire as "corrective, a way of using laughter to mock attitudes and behaviors the author wishes to reform." Satire is a form of commentary on human misbehavior and social stupidity, usually anchored in a particular time and place. Daniel Septimus puts it this way: "satire must be tethered to the real world in some way. It must reference a reality we know in order to enlighten us with its absurdist twists." Satire points us to "a reality we know" in order to highlight its implicit if concealed deficiencies, which are mocked. Like SNL's Weekend Update, it is news with a "twist."

Septimus believes that satire without such a "tether" to the world it presumes to mock becomes merely "cartoonish." I think there's something to be said for cartoonish comedy, although I agree that if it is indeed presented as satire its satiric edge is blunted. Catch-22, it seems to me, is cartoonish comedy that is not primarily satirical. It presents us with a world that has itself become cartoonish; it can't be mocked because it can't ultimately be escaped. The comedy in Catch-22 penetrates all the way down because its "reality" is itself absurd, not merely in need of improvement. The fiction of, say, George Saunders is, on the other hand, cartoonish but also clearly meant as satire. In my opinion, the result is a brand of surrealistic comedy without sufficient roots in the "real world" to be anything other than silly. Its humor is whimsical at best and it doesn't really engage the world we live in firmly enough to be effective as satire.

But I digress. Saturday Night Live qualifies as satire, in my view, but the "world" it surveys is circumscribed by the narrow measurements of American popular culture. Those who enjoy the show inhabit that world, and presumably wish to continue living there, and thus the mockery of its manifestations and assumptions remain usefully "corrective," reminding them that it can all be quite ridiculous. SNL, of course, occupies its own fairly prominent place in that world, so its humor ultimately can reach only so far. "TV" is an open target for ridicule, but not to the point that we'd want to see it smashed up altogether. And SNL's own role in maintaining pop culture's hold on us couldn't be questioned. As I also said in the previous post, the satirist doesn't willingly satirize him/herself.

Those of us who no longer pay much attention to the world as rendered through tv and other forms of mass media (and perhaps wonder why we ever did) thus are outside the circle within which the humor of SNL and other tv comedy shows seems humorous. This isn't to say that the objects of this humor don't deserve to be mocked. It's just that they generally seem to survive such mockery perfectly well.

Instrumentalities

In an essay reporting on William Safire's speech before Americans for the Arts, Philip Kennicott observes:

Safire's speech was evidence of how thoroughly the instrumental viewpoint, and the conservative one, now dominate in public discussions of art. In a speech that pointed prominently to Richard Nixon's early support for the NEA, Safire all but said that the best hope for arts advocates is to line up behind the conservative consensus. If you want arts traction in Republican Washington, it makes sense to stick to Shakespeare and education initiatives (a path the NEA has taken, productively, and is now being followed all too predictably by the Kennedy Center, which has announced the last thing we really need: a six-month Shakespeare "festival").

Safire used the word "classic" repeatedly. He spoke of the hope that "cognitive science today can help illuminate classic art." He even referred to the creation of "new classics," an odd locution for an expert on speech.

Arts advocates are no doubt very happy to have allies such as Safire and may not notice the subtle shift in vocabulary toward the dominance of words like "classic" -- which suggests art that is widely admired, consensus-building and essentially noncontroversial. And Safire's devotion to the arts is certainly genuine. But walk outside, onto the terrace above the Potomac, and read what's written on the walls of the Kennedy Center. The president for which it is named once said, "I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty."

That kind of thinking has been fundamental to the thought of arts advocates for generations now. They defined the challenge facing them as a public that fears art, or is simply ignorant of art, or can't get access to art. If only arts lovers had the right arguments in their quiver (art can improve cognition, for example), then the arts might take on a central place in American life.

And then asks:

But what if the problem is more fundamental than that? What if the real problem is that some significant portion of the U.S. population simply hates art? Not fear. Not ignorance. Not even indifference. But loathing.

What would that look like? If you don't like to listen, or observe, if you don't like ambiguity or complexity, if you prefer to shout your opinion (even if you openly acknowledge you know nothing about what you're saying), you are, perhaps, someone inclined to hate art. It's possible that for years now, arts advocates have been wasting their breath, arguing into a black hole, with opponents who will never happily yield an inch to art.

My answer: What that would "look like" is precisely the situation that already obtains in the United States, despite the efforts of the NEA and the Kennedy Center. (In my opinion, if both of these entities were to disappear tomorrow, the arts in America would not be in discernibly worse shape, and their situation might even improve to the extent that the very definition of "the arts" would be less under the control of bureaucrats.) Every proposal "to make the arts, especially the classic masterpieces, accessible and relevant to today's audience," as Safire puts it, is just another step in the process by which art will ultimately disappear, replaced by the kind of safe, bloodless diversion of which Richard Nixon would have indeed been proud.

"Arts advocates" ought simply to say "no thanks" to Safire's advice. If art needs to accept the "conservative consensus" (or the "liberal consensus," for that matter--the instrumental view is equally obnoxious whether originating on the left or the right) to receive public support, then better there be no public support. Which do we want, art that pursues its own agendas, implicit in the work itself, or art that helps out the politicians in "consensus-building"?

Although I do disagree with Kennicott that what is needed is a willingness "to confront openly what H.L. Mencken called 'the booboisie' rather than persuade soccer moms and uber-parents that art will help Junior ace his SATs." Just leave the booboisie--if that's what you want to call them--alone. They have every right to hate or ignore art. Confronting them--especially within the work of art itself in an empty gesture of "rebellion"--will accomplish nothing, since they'll never know you've done it. Kennicott is correct, however, in suggesting that the argument art is good for you--at least if it helps you pass the test--is equally useless. Perhaps Junior will come to see the value of real art on his own, but one way to insure he never will is to make it just another checked-off item on the list of things to study for the SATs.

Thanks to Kevin Holtsberry for forwarding me the essay.

A Measure Beyond Art

In an essay in the December issue of The New Criterion (unfortunately no longer available at the website except through the purchase of a "token"), Roger Kimball offers a laudatory account of Art in Crisis, written by the Austrian art historian (and Nazi party member) Hans Sedlmayr. “Autonomous man,” according to Sedlymayer, “does not and cannot exist—any more than can autonomous art, architecture, painting and so on. It is of the essence of man that he should be both natural and supernatural … . Man is fully human only in so far as he is a repository of the divine spirit.”

Kimball shares Sedlymayer's contempt for the notion that art might have autonomous value:

One need not, I think, share Sedlmayr’s theological convictions in order to appreciate the power of his strictures about the search for autonomy. “The fact is,” he argues, “that art cannot be assessed by a measure that is purely artistic and nothing else. Indeed, such a purely artistic measure, which ignored the human element, the element which alone gives art its justification, would actually not be an artistic measure at all. It would merely be an aesthetic, and actually the application of purely aesthetic standards is one of the peculiarly inhuman features of the age, for it proclaims by implication the autonomy of the work of art, an autonomy that has no regard to men—the principle of l’art pour l’art.” Art has its own aesthetic canons of legitimacy and achievement; but those canons are themselves nugatory unless grounded in a measure beyond art. That is the ultimate, indispensable, lesson of Art in Crisis.

One hears this sort of thing all the time, and not just from conservatives such as Kimball. Art that is "purely artistic" (itself such a logically dissonant notion--what proportion of art should be something other than artistic? 5%? 50%?--as to make all accounts of art proceeding from this assumption inherently absurd) lacks the "human element," privileges the autonomy of art over "regard to men." Art needs to accomodate itself (or be made to accomodate) some larger, more important conceptual order: if not religion, then politics, history, ethics, or "culture" regarded as a kind of substitute for "theological convictions."

But, since art is made by human beings for the consideration of other human beings, I just find it puzzling what it means to say that some art might be "inhuman." Is the "human element" in art something mystical to be intuited from the work, or is it stirred in like the secret ingredient in the spaghetti sauce? (Of course, in the case of the Nazi Sedylmayer, we can make a pretty good guess about who and what is being identified in his use of the word "inhuman.") What, finally, can be more "human" than to exercise the imagination in such a thoroughgoing and transformative way as to create a poem, painting, or musical composition that seems so self-sufficient that we want call it "autonomous"? What's inhuman about admiring such an effort to the extent of creating a vocabulary to describe its effects? In my opinion, people who opine about the "merely aesthetic," who find aesthetic values "nugatory" unless they are subservient to a higher principle of judgment, manifestly disdain art except as an illustrative aid, a utilitarian convenience.

It has always been relatively clear (at least to me) that Roger Kimball's protestations against the coarsening of art and the study of art have always been hollow, at best a rhetorical expedient in the broader struggle against liberalism, in the "arts" branch of which Kimball has been one of the most prominent combatants. But it is additionally illuminating to find him admitting that aesthetics mean little to him. (Although it is a little surprising that he would explicitly cite the anti-modernist ravings of a fascist art historian to support his position.) The view of art Kimball expresses here is in many ways representative of the long-standing conservative belief that art should serve simply as one of the props of culture (as it also explains the reflexive horror with which many conservative commenators recoil from unconventional or transgressive art), but the essay should also be a useful reminder the next time Kimball--or one of his like-minded colleagues--rails against the latest outrage among artists or literary critics that artistic accomplishment is really the least of his concerns.

Native Sensibilities

In his otherwise very interesting Bookforum essay on Georges Perec, James Gibbons asserts that

. . .there is also something about Perec's brand of postmodernism that seems inimical to many American writers' attitudes toward their craft. The encyclopedic expansiveness of Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, William Vollmann, et al. has never been harnessed to an especially exacting formal rigor, and the impulse of meticulous description so fundamental to a writer like Perec may seem, to native sensibilities, overly fussy, even effete. Put another, metaphorical way, American writers tend toward an expressive register commensurate with the open spaces and endless distances of our continent; Perec's magnitude is no less great, but his vastness is essentially urban, highly structured, and by necessity constrained, entailing complex negotiations and yielding delight in serendipity, surprise, and incongruity.

Gibbons draws a viable enough distinction between the intricate formalism of Perec's fiction and the "expansiveness" of Pynchon, Wallace, and Vollmann (whose work might be more accurately characterized by what Tom LeClair has called the "art of excess"), but I wonder about the utility of of attributing these differences to national or geographical qualities--"commensurate with the open spaces and endless distances of our continent." (I would also question the extent to which Pynchon in particular lacks "formal rigor"; V seems to me a "highly structured" novel indeed, one that requires multiple readings for its skillfully patterned motifs to become entirely visible.) At best this seems to suggest that American writers are simply energetic primitives, at worst that the likes of Wallace and Vollmann are "manly" writers, while Perec is some sort of pantywaist.

Vollmann was born in Los Angeles, Wallace in upstate New York, Pynchon on Long Island, so it would be hard to argue that they have literally channeled these "open spaces and endless distances" in their fiction. Perhaps Gibbons is only attempting to account for some essential difference between the "postmodernism" of American writers and that of Europeans, or, indeed, between American and European fiction in general. But this difference surely wouldn't be something bred in the bones or absorbed through the soil, but is instead a matter of influence. American writers are more likely to be influenced by other American writers--many of whom have written fiction that does attempt to capture those things that are peculiary "American" about America--while, say, French writers are more likely to have gone to school, so to speak, on their own literary tradition. This isn't so much a question of how culture and environment themselves shape an artist's sensibilities or predilections but of the way in which culture unavoidably points the artist in one direction rather than another. What might American fiction look like if Perec and his fellow Oulipians--including the American Oulipian Harry Mathews--did become more fully available to would-be writers?

But then we Americans inhabit a culture that seems to find "literary" writing in general (much less the "complex negotiations" of a Perec) to be suspiciously "effete." That American postmodernists might seem laggardly in their capacity for game-playing and their delight in "incongruity" when compared to a Georges Perec or a Raymond Queneau would no doubt strike certain no-nonsence American readers and critics as outlandish. Too many American writers disdain "psychological realism" or good old-fashioned storytelling as it is. Thus, except through the admirable efforts of publishers like Godine (publishers of Perec) or Dalkey Archive, we probably shouldn't expect to see books by such unmanly Europeans make much of an incursion on American literary life any time soon.

Tout Court

Surprisingly enough (to me), Roger Kimball and I seem to agree at least on one subject:

The issue, it is worth stressing, is not the orientation of the politics–Left vs. Right–it is rather the politicization of intellectual life tout court. That is, the task is not to replace or balance the left-wing orientation of academic life with a right-wing ideology but rather to de-politicize academic, i.e., to champion intellectual, not political, standards.

If I thought Kimball truly believed this, I'd say that the "conservative" critique of the humanities as they are now taught in American universities would be worth taking seriously. Unfortunately I just can't accept that he does, largely for reasons that are implicit in some of Kimball's additional comments in this interview:

I believe that the arts provide a good barometer of cultural health. They reflect the fears, obsessions, aspirations, and ambitions of a culture. It tells us a great deal, I think, that terms like "transgressive" and "challenging" have emerged as among the highest words of praise in the critical lexicon. It tells us, among other things, that much art today is less affirmative than corrosive, that it places itself in an adversarial attitude toward the traditional moral, aesthetic, and cultural ambitions of our culture.

I would agree that the arts are a good indicator of "cultural health," if by this we meant that a healthy culture manifests a great deal of artistic activity--that it produces a significant number of people who value art enough to want to create it. But of course this is not what Kimball means. He means that art is directly reflective of a culture's "health" in moral and spiritual terms. He means that art is valuable primarily if not exclusively to the exent it works to foster such health, ideally to "affirm" traditional assumptions and practices.

A culture doesn't have "fears, obsessions, aspirations, and ambitions." Only people have these things, individual people. Ultimately a critic like Roger Kimball doesn't have much use for individual artists, individual readers or viewers or listeners. Art is not about heightened experience or even simple pleasure; it's about "culture," about the social norms that art can help to reinforce, the ideological "ambitions" it exists to define. Even when Kimball speaks of the "silence" great art can provoke, he's really talking about the silence enforced by the cultural authority which can be conferred upon art (by people like Kimball), which demands recovery of "a sense of the unfailing pertinence of our cultural inheritance." It's the "inheritance" that matters, not the particularity of works of art, nor the distinctive kind of experience (which can indeed involve "silence") that they afford.

Kimball's insistence on the cultural relevance of art is finally not that different from the similar insistence by current academic criticism that art is most useful as an object of "cultural study." Both look past the aesthetic properties of art in order to examine its purported efficacy as a cultural force or its illustrative value as a cultural "symptom." The biggest difference between conservative critics such as Kimball and most academic critics is that for Kimball art should be "affirmative," while for the academic critics--and Kimball is correct about this--it is precisely the transgressive and corrosive qualities of art that are most highly prized. I believe that art at its best is indeed "subversive," but not in the narrow political sense of the term presently conveyed by academic criticism. As I put it in a previous post, "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. . ." Which is why Roger Kimball probably will never really advocate for the "de-politicization" of art or of academic study. His view of what art is good for is always already intensely political.

Most People

According to Michael Blowhard:

. . .the interest most people have in most fiction depends on story, hook, subject matter, and character. Without the chance to relate to and enjoy these elements, 90% of people would lose their interest in fiction. They'd turn elsewhere for story-and-character satisfactions: to history, to journalism, to gossip, even to reality television. (Hey, a lot of people have already turned away from respectable fiction to these other media for their story pleasures. You don't think there's a connection, do you?) But we aren't going to live life without enjoying stories and characters, that's for sure.

Another way of putting it: while the occasional individual work of fiction may fare well enough without much in the way of story, the well-being of fiction generally depends on a shared interest (on the part of readers and writers) in characters, stories, hooks, and subject matter.

In fact, I do believe there's a connection between the popularity of such things as reality television and the relative non-popularity of literary fiction: "most people" have no interest, have never had any interest, in the sorts of things serious art and literature have to offer. For whatever reason, "most people" are incapable of paying attention to the formal and stylistic qualities that most artists seek to embody in their work, the qualities that make art art. In the case of literature, "most people" pay no attention to the "writin'" (as MB puts it) because "most people" are barely capable of using the language well enough just to get by in their own daily lives, never mind being able to appreciate the skill with which some poets and novelists can make the language say things it's never said before.

These are not "elitist" observations. They are simply facts. It is also a fact that literature has never been something of interest to "most people." But why should it be? MB seems to think he's punctured literary fiction's pretensions by asserting that "90% of people would lose their interest in fiction" if it didn't include "hooks" and other mindless devices, but why would writers want to solicit the attention of people who are more interested in Wife Swap to begin with? I don't know if 90% of us are this shallow or not, but even granting the claim, what's the problem with appealing to the 10% who want more, who are capable of paying attention? Why not just leave the "fancypants" writers to the fancypants readers and otherwise ignore them? Why MB's apparent need to denigrate the tastes of these readers even though by his own admission he has the vast majority of non-readers on his side anyway?

To be somewhat more charitable, MB apparently believes that the "well-being of fiction" can only be assured if it competes with other forms of narrative entertainment. But why should this be the case? Why should the measure of the accomplishments of literary fiction--of any form of art--be the degree to which it has appealed to a mass audience? MB clearly enough shares the tastes of this audience himself, but surely even he doesn't think that sheer popularity confers artistic success. I don't myself necessarily think it is the function of serious literature to deliberately reject success in the marketplace or to brandish its unpopularity like a rebel's sword. I think serious writers ought merely to ignore marketplace imperatives when those imperatives are at odds with their artistic integrity. If some readers find this elitist and alienating, so be it. In my opinion, it's better to have readers in sympathy with one's goals, even if this means having fewer readers, than to court readers who can't bother to question their reflexive demand for "story."

MB allows that "Writers can (and will) do as they please. Of course, readers can (and will) read to please themselves too." But he can't resist adding that "It's idiotic to think that the fundamentals of most people's interest in fiction will ever extend too far beyond storytelling, subject matter, hook, and character." Again back to "most people." As far as I'm concerned "most people" can "read to please themselves" as well. (Actually, I'm pretty sure "most people" don't read at all.) But I don't really spend that much time obsessing over their reading habits, or putting up lengthy posts explaining why they're so misguided.

Promotion

I agree with A.C. Douglas when he writes:

. . .much as one wishes it were not the case, classical music is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever even marginally be, an object of mass or even widespread appeal no matter how vigorously and assiduously it may be promoted.

And, as Douglas adds, this "applies, mutatis mutandis, to all the arts of high culture," including literature. Where Douglas goes wrong, in my opinion, is in further claiming that serious art is, "by its very nature, a fundamentally elitist enterprise, and should never be viewed or promoted as anything other."

Art is "elitist" only if an "elite" audience can be defined as "small" or "self-selected." If Douglas means to suggest, as I suspect he probably does, that those who appreciate serious art are for that reason, or because of some preexisting set of chararcteristics, a superior caste, I cannot go along with him. I defer to no one in my enjoyment of the products of what Douglas calls "high culture," but there is nothing about my preferences that makes them objectively "finer" than someone else's preferences. Where would such putatively objective standards come from, except from the practices of those who also enjoy serious art, who have enjoyed them in the past and have passed along both the standards and the works of art and literarature to which they have been applied? Those of us who accept these standards might like to think of ourselves as an "elite" because we have put in the time and attention required to understand their relevance, but this only means we like to spend our time on certain kinds of music or certain kinds of writing rather than others, not that we're privy to secrets that others can't share.

I do agree that it's futile to "pander" to audiences who don't otherwise seem to care about classical music or lyric poetry or abstract art. If the actual audiences for such endeavors are small, what, finally, is the problem? Only when a subsidiary cultural "industry" grows up around these pursuits, an industry that must have its financial needs met, does it become crucual to sell more books and fill more concert halls. Plenty of people might be led to appreciate classical music or serious fiction, but not through artificial efforts to reach the People, which only distort the very art supposedly being defended.

Rewards and Remunerations

If you want to know why writing is not likely to prove a very remunerative career choice, this and this are about the most lucid and honest explanations I have seen. Anyone who thinks either that writing just must be a lucrative endeavor or that American culture values what writers do should read them.

However, as compelling as these pieces are as testimony to the mythos of the writing life, they do leave unadressed two underlying questions: Why do would-be writers think the "literary world" overflows with treasures waiting to be claimed? Why does the United States reward its writers so stingily, if at all?

No doubt many people see that a few writers (mostly authors of potboiling trash, but a few real writers as well) manage to write books that actually reach a paying audience, or to sell a book to Hollywood and apparently make a tidy sum out of it, and conclude that it must be a more common phenomenon than it is. Perhaps they simply feel that they, too, have the kind of undeniable talent that will make them financially successful at it as well. It's probably a good guess, however, that these very naive sorts give up on the notion of being a "published author" when they discover that writing actually involves hard work or they get their first rejection slips.

Perhaps some people think of book publishing as just another quarter of Celebrityville--and book publishers certainly are doing everything they can to validate such a conception--and assume that, like the other more glittery sections, it mush be awash in cash. Unfortunately, the "book industry" only illustrates, rather pathetically, how the entertainment industry more widely is ruled by the laws of commerce rather than the dictates of art: the money goes where more money can be made, and where entertainment dollars are concerned, books attract very few.

Quite possibly, however, many starry-eyed writers believe there must be money to be made through plying the writer's trade for a perfectly good reason. Producing good and useful books is an important thing to do, and, well, those who do it should be rewarded for it. And it's hard to argue with this logic. They should. Only the free-market ideologues and the grumpiest defenders of the "commercial" could deny that the creation of literary art in any genre is an inherently worthy endeavor that ought to be supported at least to the extent of allowing writers of proven talent to earn a living at it. And as John Scalzi makes plain in his essay, writing is damn hard work--much harder work than Donald Trump has ever done--hard enough to satisfy even the hoariest demands of the most Puritanical of work ethics.

Which of course brings us to the second question. Why are American writers compensated so poorly, even when many agents, editors and publishers live in high style? Mostly because they allow themselves to be. Most writers who really like what they do are willing to do it despite being shafted by the powers that be. They think the rewards lie elsewhere, or will come later, maybe even when it's too late to enjoy them. When it comes down to it, most truly dedicated writers don't care enough about monetary reward (although it would surely be nice as a side benefit) to put up much of a fight against a system that exploits them at best, ridicules them the rest of the time. They just want to write, and any arrangement that allows them to do so will suffice.

And what would American literature be without these dedicated types. Hawthorne and Melville, Dickinson and Whitman. Faulkner. Even Wallace Stevens, who managed himself to exploit the system in order to provide himself with the means to write poetry no one would have ever paid for. Closer to our own time, Joseph Heller and William Gaddis spent years in obscurity doing menial writing-related work in order to write novels that at first few people cared about. Richard Yates endured years of misery in order to keep writing. It could be argued that the much-derided creative writing programs are really just a prop that writers have found to support the writing habit itself, the possibility of being paid a living wage while continuing to write, although even this is done indirectly, a sinecure provided in return for scholastic services rendered. Unfortunately, there aren't enough of them to go around.

Just a cursory glance at literary history (or simply at the history of book publishing) is enough to show that serious writing (serious art in general) is finally not something that American culture has much use for. The very words "serious" and "literature" and "art" have mostly been held in contempt as vestiges of all that European fol-de-rol as an alternative to which God created Americans. Where there's money to be made from it, as there is with the ocassional literary writer, the capitalist vultures will pounce on it, and this keeps the publishing belly full for a while. Otherwise, the best a serious writer could probably hope for is that they'll ignore you.

Original link provided by Tingle Alley.

High Culture?

I'm going to take up the gauntlet thrown down by Kevin Holtsberry at Collected Miscellany, who apparently agrees with Anne Applebaum's recent observation (Washington Post) of a "divide" between "high culture" and "low culture," one that has allegedly been growing larger of late. In identifying the possible cause of this divide, Kevin proposes that

Without falling into a blind nostalgia about the past, it is safe to say that middle and even lower class citizens looked to high society and art for inspiration. Those with the means and the leisure time attempted to set a standard for taste and class. Sure this didn't always reflect a true meritocracy and it had its share of problems, but there was a sense of responsibility and a sense of standards. The iconoclasm and egalitarianism of the counter-culture sought to destroy this system. Its inspiration was relativistic and anti-hierarchy. Rules and standards; culture and custom; traditions and mores; these were all oppressive tools the powerful used against the weak. They must be thrown off to achieve freedom.

Everything that's wrong with Kevin's argument is contained in that first sentence. In order: 1) He has fallen not into "blind nostalgia" about the past, but utter fantasy. There's never been--never--such a thing as "high culture" in America, or there has been only in "relativistic" terms: some things might be "higher" than others, but when everything's hugging the ground in the first place, the distance isn't very great. This is not to say there haven't been serious artists, writers, thinkers--there are plenty of them around, even now--but that no one in the rest of the culture ever considered such people, or their work, as particularly important or worthy of recognition. Such figures in American intellectual and cultural history have always worked in isolation and took whatever audience they could find. Later on some of these figures have been "canonized" as great American writers or artists, but this is merely a form of nationalism, and doesn't have much to do with "culture" in the way Kevin wants to use the word. The prevailing American attitude toward "high culture" has always been that it's one of those attributes of "old Europe" that America can do without

Thus, 2) It isn't at all "safe to say that middle and even lower class citizens looked to high society and art for inspiration." Most citizens of these classes have been mostly unaware that such a thing as high art exists, or if they were so aware they had long been instructed to view it as suspicious, a conspiracy against "normal" Americans. Even now, from both the right and the left, high art is assailed as "elitist" or "nihilistic" or just plain sissified. At one time the universities did make a little room for the study of serious art and literature, but, perhaps inevitably, they too succumbed to the general disdain for such stuff long embedded in American culture. Conservatives have taken what's left of this legacy and now use it as a weapon in the culture wars. I'm sorry to say that Kevin seems to have adopted this strategy as well.

3) Surely we can all agree that "high society" and "art" are not the same thing. Perhaps in old Europe the two have been and to some extent still are on speaking terms, but "high society" in America" is "high" because that's where the wealth is, and the only place art has here is as an entry in one's investment portfolio. If by "high society" we mean the fashionable crowd, then art is for this group if anything even less important. It's a bauble, a frill, the latest and the newest, a way to get into the papers. (Getting into the papers is the real core value of American culture.)

Art and literature are the products of hard work and seriousness of purpose, and what's produced frequently enough outrages the denizens of high society and the standard-setters of culture (a large portion of the latter are just baffled by it). However, perhaps this is all to the good. If art and literature in the United States were ever accepted into something called "high culture," this would probably be an indication that they've entered into their death throes.

The Literary Saloon also questions the validity of the high/low distinction, but for reasons somewhat different than the ones I've given.