The Reading Experience

New Critical Compilation

Preface

            The following essays do not make a sustained argument on behalf of the efficacy of an approach to literature and literary criticism I am calling “literary pragmatism.” They do attempt to show how such an approach can be grounded in the aesthetic philosophy propounded by John Dewey and can be developed in a more particular way by focusing specifically on literature than Dewey’s own synoptic focus on all the manifestations of art in Art as Experience allows. Perhaps this entails taking the pragmatic view of art in a different direction than Dewey himself might  have done, or questioning the views expressed by others influenced by Dewey, but I believe that my explication of a pragmatic form of criticism remains true to the underlying principle Dewey wanted to advance—that art is indeed a singular human activity, valuable for its own sake beyond the multifarious uses to which it might be put, but that its value is to be found not in the particularity of the art object—its tangible “beauty”—but in the existential event of expanded consciousness by which the work of art makes itself known.

            The first section, “John Dewey and Literary Criticism” explicates Dewey’s theory of art at length, more or less chapter by chapter. Here I am less interested in subsuming Dewey’s book to the selectivity and shapeliness of a critical essay and more concerned to elucidate the progression of Dewey’s thinking on a granular level. In this section I also attempt to show how a pragmatic conception of criticism might function as a corrective to some of the less tenable assumptions of New Criticism.

            “Dewey’s Disciples” focuses on perhaps the two most important exponents of Dewey’s thought, Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish—in Rorty’s case, surely the most important philosopher to adopt (and extend) Dewey’s conception of pragmatism in the post-World War II era, while Fish formulated probably the most significant critical approach drawing on Dewey’s emphasis on the role of reader/audience in the acts of perception and interpretation—his famous “reader response” theory. In the Rorty essay, I take some exception to his somewhat superficial dismissal of “aestheticism” as it applies to the work of Vladimir Nabokov.

            In “Pragmatic Applications,” I attempt to pull away even more fully from a purely explicative approach to the particulars of Art as Experience in exploring some of the implications of thinking about literature from a pragmatic perspective, first as literature might provide a beneficial model for thinking about politics (“Liberalism and Literature”) and then in a critique of what I find to be seriously deficient thinking about literature by Steven Pinker in his book, The Blank Slate. In a third essay on Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature, I discuss Attridge’s experience-based approach to teaching and reading literature in all of its “singularity” as a phenomenon of consciousness, but ultimately as well attempt to reconcile this singular raw experience as Attridge evokes it with the needs of literary criticism to describe and analyze a work of literature as an “object.”

            The final essay is a response to Mary Jane Jacob’s book, Dewey for Artists, published in 2018. I have used the essay (not quite a review) to both recapitulate the core principles of Dewey’s philosophy of art as delineated in the first section and to address the misperceptions specifically of Art as Experience that I feel a book like Jacob’s could encourage. Dewey for Artists is assuredly a well-intentioned book, but its exposition of Dewey’s concept of “aesthetic experience” falls short of capturing what he really means by “aesthetic.”

            Most of these essays originally appeared on my literary blog, The Reading Experience, or as articles/reviews in other publications. They are the product of my own integrated thinking about the application of pragmatism as manifested in Art as Experience to literature and literary criticism, but they, and the collection as a whole, do not possess the sort of structural rigor associated with academic criticism. Probably the content expressed in the essays would be similar if I were still an academic critic, but the presentation is necessarily more various.

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The Experience of Experience Itself

In her book, Dewey for Artists (University of Chicago Press, 2018) Mary Jane Jacob admirably attempts to explicate the philosophy of John Dewey--not just Art as Experience--as a useful guide for artists (and also curators and art teachers) in considering the implications of their own practices, as well as the social and cultural role of art in a democratic society. The book effectively explicates the main ideas of Art as Experience  and also provides a generally reliable (if brief) synoptic survey of Dewey's thought as a whole. However, in correctly emphasizing Dewey's abiding commitment to democracy, both political and cultural, and his equally abiding dedication to upholding human rights and achieving social justice, Jacobs misrepresents Dewey's conception of "aesthetic experience" and leaves the misleading impression that Dewey believed art was most beneficial as an aid in effecting social and political change.

Jacobs appropriately devotes her first two chapters to "Making" and "Experiencing," Dewey's twinned activities that when bound together through an act of perception is the realization of art. Jacobs is right to emphasize the extent to which Dewey wanted to challenge then-standing distinctions between "high" and "practical" art, which he did by defining "art" not as the product of certain long-established forms but as a process. In the maker's case, the process is one of heightened care for the very act of making, a fully engaged attention to the act in and for itself--any human creation most immediately carried out not to accomplish a utilitarian purpose but to validate its own creative integrity (by, in Dewey's terms, becoming an "integrated" experience) can be regarded as art. Activities that might have been considered merely "artisinal" rather than "artistic" can be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities (as long as the artisan was him/herself preoccupied first of all by aesthetic quality) just as readily as the greatest masterpieces of traditional art history. There are still differences between these kinds of artistic practice, but one of Dewey's ambitions in Art as Experience is to establish that the making of art is not confined to the chosen few but is something that is available to all, in whatever medium they might work.

To this extent, the "democratization" of art is certainly one of Dewey's aspirations as expressed in his writing about the aesthetic, but it is a misreading of Art as Experience to maintain that "democracy" in art entails that all artistic activity is inherently equal simply because it is available to everyone. Effort and attention are required in both the making and experiencing of art, and rendering each of these in the way that Dewey prescribes is an exacting task that some people are not willing to undertake. Dewey indeed believed the satisfactions of creativity and aesthetic experience were widely attainable human aspirations, and that existing social arrangements too often impeded their fulfillment, but even if those arrangements were altered (something Dewey tried diligently to effect in both his public activism and his other writing), obstacles to the creation and the vibrant reception of art might remain.

These obstacles would arise from individual human imperfections, not from social constraints. When every citizen is finally free to cultivate whatever kind of artistic inclination he/she might possess (or perhaps acquire), some will succeed less readily than others. Some will not succeed at all, although not necessarily because of lack of the requisite "talent" as conventionally understood. "Sensitivity to a medium as a medium is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception," Dewey writes in Chapter 9 of Art as Experience ("The Common Substance of the Arts"), and here is the explanation of the potential for failure. By "sensitivity to a medium as a medium," Dewey does not mean some sort of exquisitely calibrated sense of "taste," but the ability to achieve something like a pure state of attention. Attention to "medium" entails not just appreciation of the particular raw material of the artist's chosen form but a kind of a radical attention in itself, a state of being rather than an artistic act per se.

There will always be failures of attention. On the artist's part, such failures could originate in cliched or rote execution, a lack of insight into the possibilities of the medium, but also in devoting disproportionate attention to the subject of the art work, the "message" or "statement" to be taken from it. Efforts to treat art as "communication" and "expression" can also misdirect the artist's interest, replacing concern for the "medium as a medium" with  the opportunity to "say" something or convey "inner feelings." Dewey would not deny that art can communicate or express, but these are done indirectly, as the secondary effects of "making," giving order to emotions and integrating message and means. In this way, the making of art, a general human capability, remains a rigorous act, or else it would not be the source of such profound value of the sort Dewey ascribes to it.

This value inheres in the experience of art as well, thus a focus on medium in and for itself is also a prerequisite for "esthetic perception." If the making of art requires diligent attention by the artist, so too does aesthetic experience if such experience is to redeem its full potential, both for aesthetic appreciation and for the consummation of experience itself. And, since for Dewey "art" takes on substance only in the meeting of a perceiving consciousness and the artist's effort as manifested in the work, art is, most immediately and unavoidably, an existentially particular phenomenon, an individual encounter not a social project. Indeed, Dewey describes it as an almost inescapably personal abandonment of inhibition: "I do not think it can be denied that an element of reverie, of approach to a state of dream, enters into the creation of art, nor that the experience of the work when it is intense often throws one into a similar state" (Art as Experience, Ch. 12).

An "intense" aesthetic experience is not something that suddenly happens but again, as in the making of art,  requires concerted concentration. Jane Jacob acknowledges the requisite effort involved in this process, noting that "Dewey was clear that perception involves hard work" and quoting his warning that "the one who is too lazy, idle, or indurated in convention to perform this work will not see or hear." Yet at times in Dewey for Artists she seems to deny Dewey's admonition in favor of a more comfortable appeal to "real life" as source of art's attraction, both for artist and perceiver. She takes Dewey's insistence that both the creation of art and the ability to appreciate are natural impulses continuous with other forms of human experience to mean that the practice of art should make explicit connections to the "everyday," as if "life experience" itself somehow needs to be made art's explicit subject, so that we don't forget that life and art are inseparable.

The work of art offered by the artist and our attentive experience of that work are continuous with "life" simply because they proceed from the activity of what Dewey calls a "living creature"--a human being. When Dewey maintains that art and life are not separate, he is trying to extricate art from the ossified carapace  of its "classic status" that has accumulated over time and to return it to "the human conditions under which it was brought into being" and "the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience" (Art as Experience, p.1). I think Dewey would have it that all art is connected to the "everyday" as long as it is an honest response by the artist to his/her experience of the world that is transformed through the "ordering" the artist provides. There is always "a direct transmission of experience at an aesthetic level" in  successful art, notwithstanding that Jacob seems to think this is some special accomplishment of what she calls "social practice art." What else would the artist be transmitting?

According to Jacob, Dewey is urging us to accept that "When we have an aesthetic experience, we experience the world in a revitalized way," but it is difficult to know whether she is saying that after an aesthetic experience we are more open to heightened experience in general (which certainly could happen), whether during the aesthetic experience we are somehow encountering "the world" as depicted in the work of art, or whether she is speaking not of art at all but of the aesthetic response we can have to elements of the "real" world. Since she makes this statement while discussing "socially engaged art" that "goes directly to the source--to life itself--drawing out the aesthetic experiences that the everyday affords and bringing life for a time into the frame of art," it is likely the second, but the assertions she is making verge on incoherence: Why go to everyday life for its sort of "aesthetic experiences" that are then reproduced in a work of art? Why is the art needed if life itself has already provided the experience? And what can it mean that the socially engaged artist "goes directly to the source--to life itself?" Where are all the other artists going for subjects or inspiration? Somewhere other than life?

One of the examples of this socially engaged art that Jacob cites is Future Library, by Katie Paterson, an installation employing "a forest of spruce trees and library of books." This work "is not an avant-garde gesture but. . .a reinvestment in the world around us through art. . .The duration required to grow a forest suggests it is worth investing in the future, expressing the hope that humanity will survive another hundred years and more. . . ." Everything about Jacob's description here suggests that this art work is making a political statement, that it exists in order to advance that statement, not to offer an aesthetic experience of the kind Dewey describes in Art as Experience.  One could very well agree with the statement, even find the installation itself inspiring, but also consider it to be something other than art, unless it does in fact invite the viewer to consider it first only as a work of art--at which point its status as "a reinvestment in the world around us" becomes irrelevant. If instead a work's primary ambition is to "express the hope" that we make such a reinvestment, it is not in that aspiration functioning as art.

Nothing in my reading of Art as Experience suggests to me that Dewey thought the goal of art is to "revitalize" or "invest" in the world, or to "express hope" (or despair). These are all gestures, pronouncements made by the artist through the art but seem to have little room for the perceiving consciousness that must complete the process by which art comes to be. It certainly might happen that an ancillary effect of the experience of a work of art would be to further think about the work's subject or theme, even to be energized by a presumed "message." But if these are the only felt effects, then the point of art has been lost. Although Jacob goes beyond "making" and "experiencing" as topics in Dewey for Artists, providing a rather wide-ranging (especially for a fairly short book) discussion of Dewey's thought as she believes it might apply to art practice and curation, these are the crucial concepts underlying his theory of art as articulated in Art as Experience, his most thorough and most essential inquiry into the subject. In my view, Jacob distorts this book's careful delineation of the nature of aesthetic experience by overemphasizing John Dewey's concern with social context and underemphasizes his recognition that art is first a phenomenon of human awareness that can become aesthetic only when the social drops away in the experience of experience itself.

Going Where There's No Intepretation

Sebastian Smee is quite right that the recent cancellation of a Philip Guston exhibition is an act of abject cowardice on the part of the four museum directors responsible for it. Apparently, a cultural institution's "responsibility to meet the very real urgencies of the moment" (as the museum directors put it in their joint statement) is to protect people from art that might offend or disturb. Most likely, the cancellation actually represents the directors' attempt to protect themselves from even the possibility of controversy, controversy that exposes them to the pitchforks of the social media mob.

Smee is certainly correct that the directors' assertion that the Guston exhibition should wait until "his work can be more clearly interpreted” betrays an assumption that is "utterly antithetical to what art is about," but I think that such a demand is not really so much for "clear" interpretation as it is for no interpretation. If a work of art has been "clearly" interpreted, its "meaning" has been fully assimilated, presumably because it was always obvious. The work was not intended to be interpreted--it offers no resistance to understanding and communicates its purpose (usually an easily discernible "message") quite directly and transparently. The artist speaks, the audience listens.

We appear to be quite rapidly becoming a culture that wants its art delivered in this way. The act of interpretation, it would seem, is too likely to lead to messy areas of ambivalence and ambiguity. Interpretation means the work's significance requires the participation of viewers (or readers or listeners) to be deduced, and they might differ about it, both among themselves and with the artist. Better to go with "clarity." But if there is no interpretation, there is no art, only declarations, decrees, and lectures. Yet this seems to be the order of the day.

Artists are actually very poor choices to act as founts of wisdom and virtue. Historically speaking, only the most benighted or deluded have claimed to be sages (and usually they're very poor artists, anyway). Artists can be plenty self-absorbed, but that's because they're preoccupied with the materials of their art, of shaping those materials so as to realize a vision of what the form of art they practice can be made to do. This sort of preoccupation can make artists seem disconnected from ordinary concerns (which they often are), but this is the price to be paid for the attention that must be given to making art that is true to that vision. It is not a particularly expedient place from which to make pronouncements about how to live or what to believe.

I have little doubt that Philip Guston fits this profile quite readily. Certainly the intensity of focus on the structure of painting itself is reflected in the major shifts or phases in his career, from the early social realism to the abstraction of his middle phase (for which he initially became well known ) to the final return to something like figuration (though surreal and fragmented). Paradoxically, his paintings in the first and third phases frequently incorporate images that can be taken as forms of political commentary (satirical, anti-racist, and generally anti-establishment) of the sort that ought to be welcome to the progressive contingent that the directors seem most concerned about, but it is these very images that have driven the museum directors to terminate the exhibition (at least for now). Perhaps Guston's own contention that "painting is 'impure,'" that "It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity" helps account for the disquiet Guston's work has caused these directors. Guston's use of these impudent images still needs to be interpreted: their impurities provoke, but they don't explain.

In his statement of support for the museum directors' action, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker asserted that "the context in the US has fundamentally, profoundly changed on issues of incendiary and toxic racial imagery in art, regardless of the virtue or intention of the artist who created it." Apparently Walker doesn't agree with the museum directors that Guston's work is too ambiguous. He has determined that it is "incendiary and toxic," a pretty clear interpretation. Perhaps it is incendiary, since it irritated both those who thought it had become too obviously political (Robert Hughes, among others) and now those who think it isn't political in exactly the right way. But if it is "toxic," it is for reasons that have little to do with the paintings themselves. It should be the purpose of a museum exhibition to make this point clear, to help viewers to, indeed, interpret complex works of art more fruitfully. Museums should not just abandon interpretation altogether.

Review of Alice Knott

My review of Blake Butler's Alice Knott is now available at Full Stop:

. . .But it is here, at the intersection of Butler’s style and the heterodox psychological realism he invokes, where the most severe problem with both The 300,000,000 and Alice Knott. Butler’s treatment so strenuously seeks to evoke the erratic awareness of the characters with its sinuously articulate language that, at the length at which such episodes of streaming memories and distorted perceptions are presented, Butler’s prose simply becomes wearisome.

Go to review

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.

Baring the Contrivance

Whether or not readers in fact find Andrew Farkas's Big Red Herring (Kernpunkt Press) to be entertaining, there would seem to be little question that it is a novel intended to entertain. Its plot, if such a pastiche of the very concept of pastiche could be said to have one, is so blatantly silly, so undisguised in its celebration of artifice and contrivance, that we know it is all an invitation to the reader to enjoy the silliness and to take the usual narrative machinery of fiction altogether less seriously (at least this once). Moreover, the contrivances are so shamelessly deployed, so extravagant, that the novel's very excess provokes a kind of fascination in itself.

And indeed this novel is entertaining enough--at least at first. At its core is a radio drama called Vayss Uf Makink You Tock, concerning a hapless protagonist called Wall, who is menaced by the Gestapo (hence the title of the play), except that the play takes place in the present of an alternate history. The U.S. and the Soviet Union, which still exists, actually collaborated during the ostensible Cold War to in fact keep the world safe. The Nazis, it would appear, survived World War II (what we call World War II) by developing a rocket ship that transported a contingent of them to the moon, which they have colonized. The Gestapo agents have come to earth to discover who has leaked news of their existence, and Wall has come under suspicion. 

Almost immediately it becomes clear that this narrative is mostly nonsensical, so that keeping track of the various intrigues, counterfactuals, and plot twists (Vayss Uf Makink You Tock is only a part of the novel's overall narrative structure) hardly seems essential. And there are many such entanglements: a parallel murder mystery that develops due to the fact that a dead body just happens to be under Wall's sofa, a radio within the radio play that narrates the alternate history by which World War II was really just a show while the Americans and the Russians set about faking the Cold War and the Nazis conquered space, an extended treatise on the physics of the knuckleball, a panel of experts who help us understand the literary and historical particulars of the story we are reading, and much more. The primary subplot actually concerns the narrator of the radio drama, Edward R. Murrow (a stage name of sorts for a character whose job is to narrate, not the historical journalist Murrow), who is appalled by the script he must voice and struggles to avoid changing it, which is forbidden. The novel uses Murrow to raise questions about storytelling conventions, but it does so in such an outrageously explicit way that the usual complaints about the "game-playing" of metafiction surely seem pointless. The whole novel is quite obviously a game.

But this is also surely the chief limitation of a novel like Big Red Herring. In treating the customary goals of metafiction--to remind readers of the artificiality of all the structural devices of fiction, particularly those that seem most familiar, most "natural"--as the subject of farce, the artifice is assuredly on display (perhaps even more conspicuously than in most works of metafiction), but that very artificiality essentially itself becomes the center of interest, as the very broad comedy makes it less likely that many readers would find reason to see in it anything other than a kind of benign mockery. The Gestapo dialogue--“Ve are establishink Ihr Hintergrund. Your background. For instance, how lonk haff you liffed here?”--and the deliberately hare-brained absurdity of the "alternate history" premise makes it additionally difficult to take the various goings-on any more seriously than does Edward R. Murrow. That they are intermittently funny, which poor Edward R. himself doesn't have the luxury to see, doesn't seem a sufficient reward for indulging some of them.

Nevertheless, it is always laudable that a writer is willing to take risks, and it is encouraging that there are presses like Kernpunkt willing to publish a work like Big Red Herring, a novel that surely both writer and publisher knew full well would not likely find a big audience. Its "entertainment" value is finally too dependent on readers already disposed to appreciate jokes about literary theory (an "ambiguity expert" named Polly Semmy, a drug called Narratol that helps its user "construct a coherent narrative out of his or her life"), readers who are familiar by now with the assumptions of metafiction. Even for these readers, however, the jokes may not be enough to sustain a novel of 460 pages. 

Enacting the Problems of Language

Since the mid-1990s, after the waning of postmodernism, as well as the minimalist neo-realism that succeeded it, no comparable practice has really emerged that aims to revise and reconfigure wholesale the formal and stylistic moves with which writers have been working. There has certainly been increasing emphasis on diversity and inclusion in recent American fiction, but generally this is a diversity of themes or perspective that does not privilege formal or stylistic variation, at least not for their own sake.

Still, there continue to be writers who challenge expectations and deviate from established norms, writers who risk confounding readers by seeking out less familiar methods and unaccustomed arrangements, whether of language or form. If there has been an approach that more than any other identifies such writers, without quite acquiring a particular nomenclature to unite a fairly disparate group of writers, it is a broad tendency to fantasia or surrealism, although in some cases the writer indeed favors outright fantasy through something close to fairy tales, as in, say, some of the stories of Aimee Bender, while in others the ultimate effect might more accurately called surrealist, or perhaps absurdist, more reminiscent of the fiction of George Saunders.

These two writers might in fact be cited as the most recent progenitors of this mode of non-realist fiction, presaged in their early books The Girl in The Flammable Skirt (Bender) and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (Saunders), although they were of course not the first modern writers to depart from the canons of realism, nor are they necessarily the primary influences on all of the later writers who have worked in this mode. Some of these writers seem to be influenced by fantasy and science fiction, producing work that is more a hybrid of genre fiction and literary fiction, with some of the tropes and imagery of the former but the attention to language and broader thematic focus of the latter.  But while the work of both Saunders and Bender signaled a shift among non-genre writers to something like fantasy, and even if their fiction as well as the subsequent fiction they influenced clearly enough has something "surreal" about it, finally neither of these terms quite adequately names the practice that has come to characterize much of the more adventurous American fiction in the first part of the 21st century.

This problem of fully accounting, at least in critical terms, for the strategies at work in certain works of otherwise indisputably unconventional fiction seems to me particularly acute when considering the work of Christian TeBordo, a writer well enough known to dedicated followers of small presses, but whose name is probably less familiar to readers who tend more strictly to the mainstream. Since 2005, he has published four novels and two collections, the latter of which includes his newest book, Ghost Engine (Bridge Eight Press). A survey of his published books would suggest an evolution of sorts from the first three (The Conviction and Subsequent Life of Savior Neck [2005], Better Ways of Being Dead [2007], and We Go Liquid [2007]), all novels), to the most recent (in addition to Ghost Engine, the novel Toughlahoma, published in 2015, and the collection The Awful Possibilities, from 2010). The early novels conjoin elements of black humor and a kind of farcical absurdism: much about the actions, behaviors, and situations in these novels is strange and at times disturbing, but there is also in all three of them an underlying spirit of slapstick comedy that in a sense still grounds the characters and events in a recognizable reality--the reality encompassed by the act of comic exaggeration.

The most disturbing of these might be We Go Liquid, and the strangest Better Ways of Being Dead (which finally seems like a puzzle without an obvious solution), but it may be Savior Neck that enacts this non-realist realism most deftly. Resembling a portrait of a decayed town in upstate New York akin, perhaps, to an early Richard Russo or Russell Banks novel but as if written by Terry Southern or Thomas Pynchon, the novel depicts the inhabitants of Discord, New York, specifically the denizens of the Thirteenth Step tavern, which includes Savior Neck, who also lives in a room above the tavern. Savior Neck is introduced to us first as a young boy, as he wakes up one morning to "the smell of his own death," and when we flash forward to the much older Savior with his "wrinkled gray face and thin white hair," he does indeed look "except for the puddle of drool that had slipped from his mouth, like a dead man." In fact, he's "been a dead man for years." 

Soon after, Savior Neck has a run-in with the local policeman, "Officer Longarm," with whom Savior continues to clash throughout the novel, leading to various encounters with characters such as Harold Esquire, Esq., Penny Dreadful, Richie Repetition, and Grace X. Machina. The plot, such as it is, is as preposterous as the character names, involving mistaken identities, a murder for hire gone wrong, and a search for the owner of a pair of pumps, culminating in the demise of the Thirteenth Step in a conflagration. We are always seemingly on the verge of a revelation that will conjure sense out of the contorted narrative, but it never arrives. This is of course deliberate, as the novel is essentially an extended exercise in controlled absurdity. Inevitably we do feel some sympathy for the sad sack Savior Neck, but his misadventures are not of the sort to be resolved into a final retrospective concordance. They are to be appreciated for their very absurdity, acknowledged as misadventures with their own kind of outlandish integrity.

Something similar can be seen in Better Ways of Being Dead, although if anything the incongruities here are even more emphatic, even more directly enlisted as a structural principle. The novel begins conventionally enough as the story of a college student taking a class he knows little about in order to maintain eligibility for insurance (he suffers from severe dermatitis that makes him break out in terrible skin lesions). But it doesn't take long for him (and the reader) to discover that both the students in the class and the professor behave oddly indeed, and the story itself soon becomes just as odd. However, again it is an oddness that, perhaps because it is allied with a mystery plot of sorts, seems to promise the telling details that will provide the key to the characters' puzzling behavior and the story's contradictions and discrepancies, yet even when the contents of a mysterious box (which must surely hold the key) are revealed, they really only intensify the confusion--unless of course the solution to the mystery is simply that there is no mystery.

We Go Liquid is a more accessible story that like Better Ways of Being Dead begins with a recognizable situation: a boy coping with the death of his mother, as well as his father's own inability to cope with it. But the situation only deteriorates after the boy receives a spam email appropriating his mother's name as the sender and responds to it as if he is communicating with his dead mother. Further emails arrive offering various products which the boy purchases, in particular a penis enhancer called Cocksure. Meanwhile he also develops a crush on a girl who lives across the street, whose later departure from town seems to finally take the boy across a line into outright delusion--as opposed to the almost willed naivete with which he has previously warded off the latent desperation of his circumstances. This novel leans less on the absurdist or the surreal than the first two (although it is surely strange enough), but while this perhaps makes We Go Liquid the least "weird" of TeBordo's books--it actually winds up being a rather poignant account of adolescent trauma--it doesn't really presage the direction his subsequent writing would take.

The only novel TeBordo has published since We Go Liquid has been 2015's Toughlahoma, and if the former is among the writer's books the most explicable as a work of fiction enlisting the traditional elements of fiction in a more or less customary way (although we may conclude that the protagonist is somewhat of an unreliable narrator), the latter might be the most wholly subversive of traditional practice. There are characters in Toughlahoma, but they are mostly deliberately cartoonish figures whose actions work to fulfill the book's primary ambition, which is to imagine the land of Toughlahoma itself, a primordial realm situated among its rival states, Roughlahoma and Ughlahoma (Toughlahoma is the land-locked of the three). The story of Toughlahoma begins with its origins in the "Time of Truth," when "a man could kill a man and that man be killed, and the killer be a killer in truth, in Truth" and loosely (very loosely) chronicles the attempt by Jesus Cristal (later also called Jesus Crystal and Jesus Chrysler) to fulfill the prophecy of the Toughlahoman holy book, Toughlahoma: You Are There!. The quest mostly fails, although Jesus Cristal manages to liberate himself after a fashion, while the Toughlahomans are more or less left to their primitive ways (which they mostly enjoy, anyway).

Such a synopsis hardly captures the demented spirit of the novel, however, which combines mythological fable and anachronistic social satire: While the guardians of the lair of the Great Teen Spirits, monstrous teenagers to whom unlucky Toughlahomans are fed, are busy at the local community center, Jesus Cristal enters their lair and slays a Spirit. A consultant (named Nicky) lays out an elaborate plan to conquer Toughlahoma, not through military action but through "I. Capitol Expansion (CE) II. Horizontal Exegration (HE) III. Strategic Disinformation (SD)." (Nicky advises against building more condominiums, since they won't help procure "exponentially more cheddar biscuits and crabcakes.") Near the end of the novel, the Toughlahomans win a decisive battle against the Ughlahomans by burning down a brand new Applebees. ("We didn't know much about Applebees, but we knew it was an Ugly thing").

Among the incongruities characteristic of this novel are the frequent references to "the problem of language," especially as formulated by the philosopher Mediocrates. Dispensing wisdom at the community center, he declares that "The problem of language. . .cannot be expressed, much less solved, in language, any more than a broken bone can be mended by the breaking of more bones." Asked how it can be expressed, Mediocrates takes the questioner to the roof of the community center "and shoved him over the edge. I have splattered your brains on the pavement. . .My saying this is an enactment of the problem of language." Language inherently distorts the reality it is meant to be representing, so that a project to enlist language for the purposes of "realism" is a hopeless task (although Mediocrates concedes that the expression of the problem perhaps "could be hinted at with language"). With Toughlahoma, TeBordo presumably is in part affirming an aesthetic philosophy in which material reality remains a necessary predicate that nevertheless cannot be delineated in itself, making reality instead a source for imaginative transformations enacted in language.

Such transformations are arguably most impressively achieved in TeBordo's two collections of short fiction, The Awful Possibilities and his most recent book, Ghost Engine. These stories are in general just as committed to imagination and invention as responses to the "problem of language," but they are also more sober in subject than the burlesque myth and legend of Toughlahoma allows. "SS Attacks," the very first story in the book, depicts a frustrated teenager (from Brooklyn, Iowa) fighting the impulse to carry out a school shooting, while "The Champion of Forgetting" is the young narrator's account of his kidnapping and coerced participation in an organ harvesting operation. Other stories involve car accidents, the fashioning of a pair of gloves out of human skin, and various forms of anomie and social isolation. Many of the stories hover in an uncomfortable zone somewhere between absurdity and pathos so that, although none of them depart from ordinary reality as arrantly as Toughlahoma, the dominant tone throughout the book is one of lurking menace, disorder and chaos barely held at bay.

This effect arises less from what the characters do or say, from what explicitly happens, than from what remains latent but unknown: the awful possibilities. The situation described by the narrator of "The Champion of Forgetting" seems almost inexplicable until we suddenly realize the horror that is occurring as if in slow motion, a horror the narrator cannot directly articulate. Something similar is achieved by "Moldering," in which the narrator's account of his trip (at midnight) to the tanner's for a new pair of gloves seems weirdly genteel until he finally encounters the tanner and ultimately commits a casually savage act. In this story the narrative manner acts as a distancing device that reinforces the shock value, and the adventurous formal variety in many of the other stories (e.g., the second-person narration of "SS Attacks") also create distance--or at least a kind of dynamic uncertainty--that heightens the unease they gradually induce. 

Ghost Engine more closely resembles Toughlahoma in its use of non-realist strategies, but it does seem like a more miscellaneous collection than The Awful Possibilities, not as unified in theme and approach. On the other hand, the balance between consequential subject and humorous treatment lends more to the latter in this book, even if the humor can be bleak. In "Hard Times at Galt's Gulch," the humor is in part ostensibly at the author's own expense, the story being in the form of an email sent by an old girlfriend to "TeBordo." Before taking up the real subject of her email, the girlfriend observes: "You were going to go to college, move to the city, become the voice of your generation. How'd that work out, TeBordo? I've seen the Amazon rankings, read the reviews." The email relates the story of the girlfriend's brother and his unfortunate infatuation with Ayn Rand, which leads to serial failure and eventual residency in the sister's basement. Conceding her brother is a loser, she nevertheless exhorts Tebordo to draw attention to his fate: "Copy and paste this motherfucker into one of your books, a mediocrity within a mediocrity." A brief epilogue from Tebordo explaining why he has done so extends the story into something like autofiction (most likely pseudo-autofiction).

A darker, finally almost maniacal story is "Bear Country," in which a chronically depressed father determines he will not teach his young son a children's book version of reality but will illustrate the truth about life early, before he can disillusioned about it. The effort--the father puts on a panda suit and menaces the child--traumatizes his son, but the father is only further resolved: "I love my son with such a deep, dark, ghastly love, that when I die, hopefully when he is much older than I am now, for his sake, not mine, I will haunt him like some specimen from the deepest, most gorgeous pit of hell." A more purely comic story is "Whose Bridesmaid?," a mock scholarly article examining the place of a band called Bridesmaid in the annals of black metal. Ostensibly a Christian rock band, Bridesmaid becomes an icon of black metal when a famous metal musician, "Gaahl" of the band "Gorgoroth," is sent into a frenzy by a Bridesmaid song, viciously attacks a man, then "drained his blood into a chalice and sipped it contemplatively." The story seems both a fan's tribute to black metal as a youthful enthusiasm and a send-up of the genre's ultimate silliness.

This story as well shares with several of the other stories in the book, and in TeBordo's fiction as a whole, an immersion in American popular culture, frequently satirical (and caustically so) although not just in mockery of its shallowness or absurdity but in recognition of the way it accurately gauges the shallowness and absurdity of American life. Such attention to popular culture now perhaps seems a commonplace in contemporary fiction, but as recently as the 1970s writers such as Ann Beattie and Bobbie Ann Mason were still criticized for too blatantly referring to "brand names" and other supposedly trivial features of ordinary life, and a story such as Donald Barthelme's "The Joker's Greatest Triumph" could seem an audacious crossing of boundaries in its appropriation of comic book characters. Tebordo's invocation of pop culture iconography does not at all seem exploitative--the author's interest in black metal and the logistics of fame whoring as cultural barometers seems authentic enough--but one could still wonder whether the humor of recognition in stories about The Ultimate Warrior and characters from The Cosby Show will remain as compelling for future readers as it might be now.

Arguably the most interesting stories in Ghost Engine are those that continue to develop the irrealism employed in Toughlahoma. "The Wrong Mother" is narrated by a mother who watches her twin sons try to launch a flying machine, and when they succeed, rather calmly settles on a plan to get them back down (which she won't carry out until the next morning). This story could perhaps be called whimsical, although its humor comes from the annoyance the mother feels at having to deal with such recalcitrant children. But especially notable are the four connected stories (interspersed throughout the book) featuring two characters named Frag and Watt and their ongoing work on the titular ghost engine. Mostly the two (who may be robots) engage in abstract discussions about semantics or existentialism (at one point discussing Christian TeBordo), while periodically pausing to inflict violence on each other. Only occasionally do they refer to the ghost machine they are trying to build, so that it remains a mysterious entity the nature of which is left unclear. What is ghostly about it? (It seems quite material, its "bolts tightened" and its "surfaces sparkling.") By the end of the final story, Watt has been eviscerated (although he has no internal organs, it turns out), and Frag is dismembered and tossed into the ghost engine in an effort to see if that will animate it. Watt jumps in after, but apparently to no avail.

It is difficult to put a critical name to the strategy at work in these stories that would altogether capture the aesthetic effect created. Neither "surreal" nor "absurd" will suffice, since both of those terms more precisely identify previous literary movements with definitive assumptions and distinguishing features Christian TeBordo's work doesn't necessarily share. Simply to declare that this fiction uses "non-realist" devices leaves important underlying motives obscure. Is this an attempt to repudiate realism? To mock it? To achieve a kind of realism by other means? Perhaps it is a strength of TeBordo's fiction that it does all of these things, in different instances or simultaneously, but criticism still needs to catch up to the variety of non-realist practices found in adventurous fiction in the early 21st century, especially as offered by independent presses.

Brief Encounters

It seems safe to say that more writers have access to more book publishers than at any other time in literary history. While "mainstream" publishing is still dominated by only a few big publishers, copious numbers of independent presses make available the work of writers who in previous eras likely would not have been published. Although some of this increase can be attributed to the concurrent development (at least in the United States) of university creative writing programs and their need for publication credits, surprisingly little of the work to be found through independent presses seems merely perfunctory, without discernible literary merit. Indeed, the existence of these presses has almost certainly made available to readers works of fiction (and poetry as well) that in their departures from the more constrained practices reinforced by most "literary fiction" have expanded the horizon of possibility for more venturesome writers.

Among those departures have been challenges to conventional "development" in fiction, signaled most immediately by a radical shortening of form, specifically in what is called "flash fiction" or "microfiction" but also in works ostensibly called novels that are much shorter than the traditional kind offered by big commercial publishers. Flash fiction, while it still potentially evokes the traditional elements of fiction--plot, setting, character--does so in a way that alters--or should alter--our perception of their purpose in a short story, but it also brings a renewed attention to style, to the writer's arrangement of language, sometimes to the point that a microfiction starts to closely resemble a prose poem. Shorter works (fewer than, say, 50 pages, which would preclude calling it even a novella) that seem structured not as short stories but with the more unhurried development of a novel perhaps also work to foreground language, but such works most obviously complicate assumptions about the formal requirements of novels.

Joshua Rothes' William Atlas (Osmanthus Press) takes the form of a picaresque fable of sorts, a would-be allegory that seems to deliberately frustrate its own pursuit of meaning. The titular character finds himself standing "in a shallow sea--in truth more of a hyper-expansive puddle" that extends "as far as he could see, an uncanny distance" and begins to walk, to a destination unknown except that at the end, he is certain, he will "return home" (wherever that might be). Although there are hints that this might be a journey of self-discovery--the first stage of the trip "taking him directly through himself," we are told--nothing much that happens in William Atlas's effort in "getting from point A to point B" seems to bring much in the way of enlightenment or illumination. There are ominous but elliptical references to "bodies" in his path, but whose they are or why they might be there remain mysterious. William comes upon a hill, ascends it, then descends it to a body of water below. He builds a boat, which then dissolves, as does the narrative itself does when William Atlas again finds himself moving in the muck.

Near the conclusion, the story's narrator makes explicit an analogy that has perhaps been implicit throughout: "William Atlas walks as the writer who commits to her mistakes, who undermines plot with chance meanders that, like the folds of a river, are contingent and changeable, and, to the outside observer, could be absolutely no other way, each oxbow just so." Such a writer is actually "among the more accurate, eschewing arcs for perturbations and eddies." This passage reinforces the metafictional gestures made elsewhere in William Atlas, particularly in relation to descriptions of the environment through which William Atlas traverses, as the narrator discusses the role of the "ecological novelist," thus raising the possibility that the book is a metaphorical rendering of the writer's plight, "trapped in a sub-optimal loop for our stubbornness in recognizing our own limitations."

If we do take the story to be (in part) an allegory of novel writing, it thus seems appropriate that the narrative itself is less than novel-length, even as it evokes the novel as a "system" of representation--the story of William Atlas's journey would threaten to become merely diffuse if extended much longer, considering its ending's implication that the journey indefinitely continues. Still, the story has ambitions beyond the metafictional, often manifested directly in allusions to other writers (Valery, Umberto Eco) or  discursive asides (on the nature of myth, for example). William Atlas's experience climbing hills and trudging through the muck is strongly suggestive of Beckett in its depiction of elemental human circumstances, even as it is related in a discursive mode reminiscent of John Barth. The amalgamation never quite transcends its derivation from each of these previous writers, although William Atlas is certainly not an ordinary work of literary fiction.

 

Christopher Linforth's Directory (Otis Books) is perhaps at first glance a more conventional work, at least in that the form it takes, a collection of stories meant to cohere as a whole, is recognizable enough. Even as a gathering of connected flash fictions it is not unfamiliar, although the connections are through echo, variation, and point of view rather than more direct continuities of character or setting. Loosely similar situations recur, with subtly shifting characters and events, all of them narrated in the first-person plural point view--usually from the perspective of a set of twins or triplicates who relate their often troubled experiences (especially as children, when they are at times on the tormentor's end of bullying behavior, likely the consequence of trauma.)

This extended experiment with the first-person plural is both the most impressive achievement of Directory and its central unifying device (that it succeeds so well at the latter being no small part of its achievement). While the "we" narrator is a kind of unifying character that in a sense acts as the protagonist not just of the individual characters but of the book as a whole, this plural narrator is not strictly speaking a character at all but a literally disembodied voice whose blunt recitations of anecdote-sized exploits animate the stories:

Our misdeeds--let's start with those. We made our old man piss his pants. He limped away, sopped the urine with a kitchen rag and kept his hand over his crotch. He swore at us, said we were no good since our mother left. We laughed. We didn't care. We filched his bottom-shelf vodka and terrorized the neighborhood, rode our dirt bikes up and down the road, burning rubber outside of Mrs. Macomber's house. She watched us from her bedroom window. Her flash of silvery hair a clear sign we had her spooked. . . .

Much of the first half of the book is comprised of episodes like this, relating less than admirable behavior by a trio (in some cases duo) of young boys who are also clearly from unstable families. Thus while the point of view provides a formal (if unorthodox) unity throughout the book, the identity of the narrator(s) fluctuates, as do the particulars of each vignette. Some of them are narratives, but some are more impalpable memories, others more like mini-sagas compressed into 500-word recaps, some indeed approaching prose poetry in their lyricism, such as "Belief," a reverie-like story which begins, "On the day we flee town, we will want the neighborhood to know what happened. We will tell stories about our stepfather to the kind and not-so-kind men on our street, to the cops who size us up to see if we are underage, turning tricks, will turn a trick with them." Escape must remain in the future, but the story concludes with the assurance, "Any day now we will shout."

The second half of Directory contains more thematically varied stories that take exclusive focus away from the narrator, such as "The Temple," chronicling the arrival of a "pastor" who converts a tenement building into a mysterious temple, into which people enter but don't necessarily come back out. Panhandlers go inside but leave "with expressions of fear." "Zia" and "Showtime" are about the "we" narrator's sister, although the brothers lurk at the edges, their adolescent curiosity aroused by her near-exotic appeal. "Layover" focuses on "our shared wife" during a layover in an airport caused by ash from a volcanic eruption, into which the wife disappears at the story's conclusion. If the stories in the first half of the book create a disturbing but essentially realistic version of family dysfunction and adolescent defiance, the second half takes the exercise in first-person plural narration into different kinds of situations, more fanciful and extreme, extending into the narrator's later years. By the book's end, it is more explicitly suggested that this narrator may be a single individual after all, the various episodes perhaps representing multiple embellished iterations of this individual's life.

Although to say that Directory has the unity and focus of a novel would not be entirely misleading, to call it a "novel in stories" would really erase what is distinctive about the book, its use of the story-fragment to both exploit brevity as a self-sufficient narrative strategy and to organize a series of such brief stories so that the result is a work that has structural coherence without strictly conforming to a pre-established form--something independent of both story and novel. Perhaps we could say as well that Rothes in William Atlas has also created a work of fiction with the characteristics of both short story and novel that doesn't comfortably belong in either category. Of the two, Directory seems the work whose departures from the norm most readily suggest future possibilities for writers who might further explore its hybrid form, but certainly neither of these are books one could imagine appearing on the seasonal lists from the risk-averse publishing houses of the mainstream "book business."

                                      

Fierce Politicalness

            You won’t learn a lot about communism from Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, but you will learn a good deal about the emotional and psychological needs that in the first half of the twentieth century brought many people to join the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and that, to judge by the testimony given by those profiled in the book, were satisfied to a remarkable extent by membership in the Party. Gornick’s title might suggest that such people were merely infatuated with the idea of communism, but the often fervent insistence that life in the CPUSA actually was their life offered by most of Gornick’s subjects belies the notion that their commitments were so tenuous. Even those voicing some regrets about their years in the Party—and this would be a majority of them—do not seem to regret having joined the Communist Party in the first place, precisely because it was belonging to it that initially awakened in them a sense of purpose in their lives.

            Gornick herself takes for granted that her readers are familiar enough with both the tenets of Marxism and the history of the CPUSA that any extended exposition of the Marxist program that appealed to very wide range of people who joined the Party—from the down and out working class to bourgeois intellectuals to the children of the upper class—is apparently superfluous. Few of the subjects interviewed themselves reflect much on the intellectual content of either Marxism or socialism more generally (at least in Gornick’s account), so although presumably many current readers come to the book without some foundational knowledge of Marx and Marxism, The Romance of American Communism won’t provide much enlightenment about exactly what the Party members thought were the political and economic structures that would replace the existing structure they so wanted to replace.

            Similarly, one doesn’t really learn that much about the workings of the Party itself, except, of course, indirectly through the various particular experiences offered by Gornick’s subjects. Since Gornick has obviously selected the people that will help her fill out her tripartite organizational scheme—what it was like to join the party, what membership in the Party was like, and how it felt to leave the Party—this sort of oblique look at the Party’s internal operations is inevitable. But while we do get a general sense of the Party’s highly organized community outreach and, through at least one person’s testimony a glimpse at the process by which a member might be accused of apostasy or expelled from the Party (although “process” hardly describes it), given that the interviewees express few reservations about casting their lot with the Communist Party, the depiction of the CPUSA that emerges from The Romance of American Communism is at best incomplete.

            These limitations of the book really only matter because its republication seems clearly enough designed to coincide with the resurgence of interest in socialism, obviously manifested in the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, as well as the increased prominence of the Democratic Socialists of America. The book’s intended audience surely includes those associated with this new movement, who perhaps might find the account of leftist political activism it offers edifying in various ways—including as testimony to the perseverance of idealism even in the face of the greatest adversities. However, The Romance of American Communism is not without its own romantic view of its subjects’ experiences (although not of Communism itself), so the effect on these readers is likely to be less illumination of the historical realities of Communism in America that a reinforcement of an already existing enthusiasm for radical activism (“radical” as such readers now understand the term, at least).

            Despite Gornick’s occasional reminders of the dogmatic intolerance of the Communist Party, and the real damage done to some of its members because of it, the book ostensibly now stands as a testament to the endurance of progressive ideals. Indeed, in the conclusion Gornick explicitly attempts to recuperate American Communism as an indispensable link in the development of radical consciousness: “first had come the visionary socialism of the nineteenth century, then had come the fierce politicalness of the Communists, and now had come the unaffiliated consciousness of contemporary radicalism.” The “radical” consciousness Gornick invokes here is that of 1977, the year of the book’s original publication, which from our current perspective surely doesn’t seem very radical at all. Gornick acknowledges the changed circumstances in her new introduction to the book, commenting that “Today, the idea of socialism is peculiarly alive, especially among young people in the United States, in a way it has not for decades,” but that “peculiarly” would seem to then require some further observation about the implications of her book for a revived socialist movement, but intuiting that is ultimately left to the reader.

            Many of the contemporaneous reviews of The Romance of American Communism were quite hostile, essentially accusing it of whitewashing the CPUSA’s collusion with the Soviet Union and its intolerance of dissent. Perhaps the most prominent critic of the book was Irving Howe, who thought the subject—looking back on the appeal of Communism—might have produced a useful book but that in her execution, Gornick was much too indulgent of her subjects’ nostalgia. “One sometimes has to remind oneself,” he wrote, “that in her evocation of coziness and warmth [Gornick] is writing about the CP in the time of Stalin and not about a summer camp. This is perhaps overly harsh, but Howe adds that “quite apart from the usual risks of alloy and contamination, idealism can in its very purity be a source of moral corruption,” Howe was, of course, one of the foremost of the liberal—in his case, still socialist—anti-Communists, but his comment still resonates beyond the polemical positioning of the cold war.

            The expression of moral certainty does indeed now seem to be widespread among those who call themselves democratic socialists. Since “democratic” socialism would seem to entail some tolerance for uncertainty—if everyone shared the same values and interests, there would be no need for democracy in the first place—that socialists would become better known for the vehemence with which they denounce those perceived as insufficiently progressive than for making alliances that might actually facilitate the enactment of policies they favor seems self-defeating, to say the least. If the goal of democratic socialism is to bring about not just political but also social and economic democracy, working within the constraints of existing political democracy is likely the only available strategy, unless of course it is in fact revolution, the forcible overturning of that democracy for a truly socialist alternative, that is still the implicit goal.

            It is hard to imagine how such a revolution would actually be possible. Certainly if it is to be a violent revolution, the notion that armed socialists will somehow defeat American militarism and gun-toting white nationalists is far-fetched in the extreme. That the very idea such a conflict might plausibly break out seems manifestly absurd only confirms that talk of “revolution,” at least among self-identified democratic socialists, is for rhetorical display only, a reflexive gesture intended to underline the urgency of making change. This means, of course, that any such change will occur only from within the system, however much replacing that system with a more humane and, indeed, democratic one might still be the ultimate goal. Unless the socialist position is fated to remain merely spectatorial, allowing for a maximum expression of outrage and invective but a minimum of practical achievement, something even resembling a socialist future will have to come through participation in democratic politics.

            In Achieving Our Country, his 1998 book warning the contemporary left that its distance from practical politics was likely to help create conditions very much like we face today (he even speculated about the rise of a political figure remarkably like Donald Trump), Richard Rorty advises that “In democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you might have grace doubts.” I’m confident that Rorty would have been much in sympathy with the policy proposals featured in the 2020 Sanders campaign, but his admonition here has surely been rejected by Sanders and most of his supporters, who routinely derided not just other candidates but also many ordinary voters backing those candidates, accusing them of holding merely liberal values that remain in complicity with the neoliberal status quo. Although the primary target of Rorty’s criticism in Achieving Our Country is what he calls the “cultural left,” located largely in academe, this group shares with the current more populist left an ultimate detachment from the political process itself. For the former such detachment is a necessary correlative to the insularity of its academic setting, but for the former it is a paradoxically self-inflicted separation while ostensibly attempting to engage in electoral politics.

            The Romance of American Communism is unlikely to be of much help in reinforcing the need for real political participation, including strategic cooperation with some “about whom you have grave doubts.” Rorty also reminds us that

. . .the Communist Part of the United States was of very little importance to the political life of our country. It marshaled some good picket lines, and it recruited a few good agents for Soviet intelligence. But the most enduring effects of its activities were the careers of men like Martin Dies, Richard Nixon, and Joseph McCarthy.

This may seem a severe judgment, but Rorty is concerned here with the political efficacy of the CP, not the actions of individuals, many of whom Rorty agrees “worked heroically and made very painful sacrifices in the hope of helping our country to achieve its promise.” But Rorty thinks also that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, represented by such anti-Communist intellectuals as Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith, also helped “achieve our country” through enhancing civil rights and social welfare programs and that reverence for the first group while showing contempt for the second is a counterproductive attitude for progressives to take.

            While Rorty wants to pragmatically endorse all efforts to create a “fairer, less cruel” society as worthy of progressive affirmation, this move does blur distinctions that are nevertheless relevant to present circumstances. Those individual CP members, who “worked heroically” for change, are better described as activists engaged not so much in politics as dissent and resistance. The CP itself, however excluded from the existing political process, embodies the bureaucratized, hierarchical logic of organized party politics. The oppressive structure of the CPUSA surely resulted in part from a kind of bureaucratic, hierarchical purity that came from the CP’s enforced separation from democratic politics; overcoming this separation would have inevitably loosened Party discipline and would have compelled negotiation and compromise for any kind of real influence.

            But of course this would have been almost literally impossible: As a party organized around pure ideology, for the CP to make compromises with ordinary political parties and groups would undermine the ideology, which depends on its systemic integrity. (I make a distinction here between Marxism as a source of political, cultural, and economic analysis and communism as the expression of a political program rooted in Marxism.) The radical certitude of communism is thus entirely justified according to its own inherent logic, but it is this certitude, even putting aside the sadism of Lenin or Stalin or the petty authoritarianism of the CPUSA leaders (which no one in the democratic socialist movement excuses) that still threatens to render socialism an ineffective agent of progressive politics, as its performance in the 2020 presidential primaries has already demonstrated. Solidifying a small but enthusiastic segment of the left-of-center electorate accomplishes little if it deliberately alienates the rest of that contingent. Readers of The Romance of American Communism might usefully reflect on how easily idealism congeals into dogma.

Based on Real Life

The description on the back cover of Lee Klein's Neutral Evil))) (Sagging Meniscus) explicitly labels it an "autofiction." Whether the publisher intends by this to directly associate this novel (or perhaps, more accurately, novella) with the mode of fiction most prominently represented by, say, Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgard, or simply to signal that the book loosely originates in autobiographical experience (but in the process capitalizing on the current fascination with autofiction) is not altogether certain, but presumably the author consented to this characterization of his work, so inevitably our response to Neutral Evil ))) will be influenced by what we think this relatively new, (some might say trendy) conception of the relationship between art and life has to offer in reckoning with works of fiction. 

Presumably the term is not just a reformulated label for what used to be called simply autobiographical fiction but is meant to signify a different kind of interaction between the writer's work and life circumstances: rather than merely drawing on personal experiences in creating ostensibly fictional characters, in autofiction the protagonist is identified directly with the author, inviting us, at least, to consider the protagonist's actions to be those the author has performed, the protagonist's words representing the author's unmediated report of those actions. If this seems to erase the difference between memoir and fiction, that seems to be the point, as autofiction is said to expose the extent to which the real is always conditioned by the fictional and the fictional a pathway to the real. As Rebecca Van Laer puts it, "By using the author’s name and some real details while spinning fictional webs, [autofictions] intentionally blur the line between truth and fiction and encourage readers to look at all literature—even what we might usually call nonfiction—as fiction" (Ploughshares, 2018).

Neutral Evil))), however, doesn't seem all that eager to explore this supposed aporia blurring the fictional and the nonfictional. It is a more or less straightforward account of an evening its protagonist (not identified explicitly as Lee Klein, in fact) spends at a concert by the drone metal band, Sunn O))), an evening vouchsafed by the protagonist's wife as she is about to go on a business trip that will leave the protagonist to assume all household duties, including child care. The "action" is largely nonexistent. The protagonist travels to the concert (ingesting some recreational drugs in preparation), waits around for it to begin, and returns home after it is over. Most of the novel is occupied with the narrator's reflections on the current state of the world and of his life, but especially his own interest in music, reflected in his obsession with guitars and guitar equipment. After a fairly lengthy buildup, the attention given to the actual concert once it begins is actually rather attenuated, suggesting that Neutral Evil))) is less interested in the somewhat extreme music that ostensibly attracts the narrator's attention than in the increasing extremity of mind he is experiencing--caused by both political (the election of Donald Trump) and personal uncertainty.

And yet finally this extremity doesn't seem all that extreme. While the narrator's account could certainly be called meandering, it doesn't really deviate that much from the kind of digressiveness that would naturally accompany extended observation and rumination. Indeed, the novel has both a psychological and an experiential realism, related in a transparent and lucid way that, far from prompting us to regard "what we might usually call nonfiction" as fictional, mostly muddies the distinction between fiction and nonfiction by leaving the former almost entirely notional, merely a designation useful in placing the book in the right section of the bookstore. This is not to say that Neutral Evil))) is a flawed piece of writing, merely that it seems content enough with its status as a novel that could just as easily be called a kind of slice-of-life memoir (or even a narrative essay), without really challenging our pre-established assumptions about any of these forms. After reading the book, I am not much compelled to ponder whether its narrator-protagonist is in fact the authorial Lee Klein or a fictional creation, because it doesn't really seem to matter that much.

Perhaps it does matter in considering the book's thematic implications. Neutral Evil))) is surely not just a primer on guitar technology or a guide to the finer points of a particular genre of heavy metal music. We might take it as a meditation on the anxieties of life in the time of Trump, but Sunn O)))'s performance of its rather ominous music is finally depicted cursorily enough that it can't entirely bear the burden of symbolically representing those anxieties. Ultimately, the narrator's chronicle of his autumnal evening out seems a story about growing up, about finally accepting the prerogatives of adulthood and, if not renouncing, beginning to let go of childish things. This narrative mode is of course one of the principal devices of literary fiction (here becoming a delayed coming-of-age story, perhaps), and Neutral Evil))) renders the story mostly without the suffocating, self-distancing irony found in much autofiction. It's a quality of the book that most clearly marks it as fiction, the "auto" merely a means to an end.

 

Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction (Work in Progress)

(All three chapters as single pdf available here.)

Chapter 1: Sorrentino the Poet 

    There is no question that Gilbert Sorrentino considered himself first of all to be a poet. He began his writing career not just writing but also reviewing and publishing poetry, most prominently in the little magazines he edited, Neon and Kulchur. While it now seems almost certain that Sorrentino will be remembered primarily as a writer of fiction, certainly that fiction is sufficiently unconditional in its rejection of the traditional core elements of fiction—plot, character, setting, theme—and so unmistakably focused instead on creating alternative formal arrangements of language that it is considerably more than a fancy to say that essentially Sorrentino remained a poet throughout his whole body of work, whose key aesthetic assumptions are recognizably embodied in the poetry as well as the fiction. (Continue)

Chapter 2: Sorrentino the Realist

    The publication of Sorrentino's first novel after he had established himself as a poet—at least in those quarters of the poetry world whose notice would have meant the most to him—perhaps conveys the impression that writing fiction was a kind of literary second thought. Even while Sorrentino continued to write lyric poetry for the remainder of his life, the succession of novels that followed the publication of The Sky Changes in 1966 certainly did soon enough foster the perception that he had altered his career course to become primarily a novelist. But a proper appreciation of Sorrentino's whole body of work can be gained only be recognizing that the poetry and the fiction are not divergent practices, that the fiction represents Sorrentino's effort to engage with language for the purpose that also motivates the poet: sounding out the artistic possibilities that can be realized through the imaginative arrangement of words. (Continue) 

Chapter 3: Sorrentino the Metafictionist

    Part 1: “Of and For Itself”: Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

    Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things marks a clear turn in Sorrentino’s conception both of the formal requirements of a novel—of fiction in general—and of the specific imperatives implied by his own aesthetic inclinations as a writer. Indeed, while this turn is obvious enough to anyone considering Sorrentino’s career in retrospect, it must have been apparent to Sorrentino, even if he did not begin writing this successor to Steelwork having explicitly determined to make it. Although the move from Sorrentino’s first two novels to Imaginative Qualities could be characterized as the final abandonment of literary realism, the alternative he embraced is even more sweeping. If both The Sky Changes and Steelwork retained a loose allegiance to realism (the latter even more tenuously), neither novel cast its realism in conventional narrative form. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things takes its divergence from conventional form to the point that realism becomes simply extraneous. (Continue)

    Part 2: "Walking Around Inside": Mulligan Stew

    In many ways, the publication of a novel like Mulligan Stew in 1979 should not have seemed especially startling. Not only had it been preceded by Sorrentino's own Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, perhaps the most radical work of postmodern metafiction to have yet appeared, but the entire period in American fiction from the early 1960s to the late 70s was notable for the number of writers employing a kind of iconoclastic, "carnivalesque" comedy--the term used by Bakhtin to describe a spirit of comedic abandon that subjects everything in its purview to parody and mockery. The black humor of Heller and Vonnegut explicitly adopts this attitude, while the equally mordant if less readily categorizable comedy of writers such as Stanley Elkin or Thomas Pynchon participate in this spirit as well. Although not indulging in quite the sort of outrageous self-parody characterizing Mulligan Stew, novels like William Gaddis's JR, Robert Coover's The Public Burning, and John Barth's Letters nevertheless were equally ambitious, comedically extravagant novels published in the mid and late 1970s (Letters the same year as Mulligan Stew). (Continue)

Still to come (tentatively): 4) Sorrentino the Anarchist; 5) Sorrentino the Craftsman; 6) Sorrentino the Oulipian; 7) Sorrentino the Aesthete; 8) Sorrentino the Moralist;  9) Sorrentino the Humorist 

The Temporal Compression of Daydream Experience

A brief synopsis of S.D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid (Coach House Books) certainly makes it sound like a work of science fiction or fantasy, or perhaps a futuristic dystopia: a man given to idleness and daydreaming, recently unemployed and occupied mostly with sleeping, meets a man who claims to be the "Ambassador of the Free Republic of Onirica," literally the land of dreams. This man, Chevauchet, recruits our narrator, after leading him on visits into other people's dreams, to join him in his mission to combat the modern plague of sleeplessness and to restore the value of reverie and dreams. Eventually the narrator begins to recruit people to go underground with him (literally) and symbolically resist society's increasing intolerance of sleep and dreams (they impede productivity, of course) by, well, sleeping. Unsurprisingly, the mission doesn't end well.

However, the reader who would thus expect The Eyelid to conform to the expectations we might have of fantasy fiction would probably be disappointed with this book. It does not render its story in the scenic, episodic way a work of fiction prompted first of all by a commitment to narrative would, as the story that finally gets told is secondary to the essentially expository discourse offered by the narrator, a very learned and allusive discourse incorporating 16th century French philosophy, neoplatonism, modern political theory, and numerous other references to European intellectual history. Most of these disquisitions are summaries of Chevauchet's philosophy of dreaming and its roots in dissident thinkers and emancipatory ideals. "Novel of ideas" is a label that certainly does fit  The Eyelid, although even here its ideas are not the occasional subject of conversation or remain merely metaphorical and emblematic; their explicit exposition by the narrator is the primary focus of much of the novella.

Perhaps the most sustained act of storytelling in The Eyelid occurs when Chevauchet takes the narrator on the journeys into the ongoing dreams of various dreamers, an endeavor in which, the narrator tells us, "Chevauchet made himself my Virgil, a genial cicerone through the circles of Hell and along the terraces of Purgatory, raising my hopes of Paradise." The narrator witnesses "dreams of love," dreams of dread," and other types of night-dreams experienced by the dreamers of Onirica, which, as we come to understand, is really a kind of distillation of dreaming, Chevauchet its keeper. But it is not only the night-dream (over which we have less control)  that Chevauchet seeks to protect but also daydreams and reverie, which can be more fruitful sources of human creativity. 

This series of scenes is relatively brief, however, as the focus switches to the exposition of Chevauchet's theories about the importance of dreaming to human fulfillment and, ultimately, the narrator's act of resistance against a society that eventually tries to eliminate dreaming altogether by simply forbidding it, substituting for it a mind-numbing drug that induces a "beatific state of high-functioning sleeplessness." (The novella is nominally set in Paris, but it is a Paris that has been absorbed into a "Greater America" that has imposed its exploitative ways on much of the world.) This drug, CI, might be a supercharged kind of opioid, but its effects might also reflect our now all-pervasive virtuality: "The masterminds of CI sought by degrees to replace all natural creative imagination with artifice. They claimed it was for the sake of quality control: optimized content and better use of time, what with advances in the temporal compression of daydream experience. In reality, it was to abolish mental activity that was off the grid and went untracked."

In the end, Chevauchet disappears, presumably enfeebled by the cessation of dreaming, leaving the narrator to persevere with his own meager rebellion, but soon enough his clandestine sleep sessions are discovered, and he must flee for his life--unsuccessfully, as it turns out. Thus the novella as a whole does advance a narrative, however interrupted or suspended at times, beginning with the recently unemployed narrator meeting Chevauchet on a park bench and ending with his presumed death. But it finally conveys less the impression of a story told than of a story added to a philosophical rumination on the ebbing of introspection and imagination in the 21st century, a reverie of its own that can be categorized as fiction because the story is quite obviously all made up, while the ruminations filtered through the characters seem just as obviously to reflect the thinking of the author.

Is this necessarily a problem, though? Since the author clearly does not intend to offer a conventional dystopic narrative but to use the conceit of dystopia to directly contemplate the actually existing conditions that might lead us to such a state, we can't really say that the book fails to fulfill its ambitions: It couldn't be called an aesthetic failure if its purpose is not primarily aesthetic to begin with. Finally the fantastic elements in conjunction with the frequent expository passages lead me to regard The Eyelid as an allegory, but an allegory of the pre-modern kind in which the allegorical meaning is not concealed within the symbolic design of the story, to be released through interpretation, but lies plainly on the surface, communicated directly.

An appreciation of this novella thus depends on the reader's acceptance not just of the allegorical mode but of this particular undisguised version of it. For myself, I can say that the book certainly does conceptualize the effects of our current hypercapitalist culture and its brutal work ethic in a way I find illuminating and insightful, although I confess I am also less able to take from it the sort of aesthetic gratification I normally hope to find in works of fiction. Still, when I consider whether the insights Chrostowska provides are more emphatically and memorably expressed in the form she has chosen than might be the case in more straightforward critical discourse, I would have to say they are.

Just Weird

Guillermo Stitch is not the sort of writer who is going to get a lot of mainstream press coverage--the very title of his novel Lake of Urine (Sagging Meniscus Press) seems an immediate thumb to the nose where the mainstream is concerned--but such discussions of his work that can be found (mostly on blogs) use such terms as "bizarro," "new weird," and "absurdist" to characterize his fiction. It is easy enough to see why such terms would suggest themselves as appropriate to a novel like Lake of Urine, but while they might apply up to a point, this novel finally doesn't very comfortably fit into any of these categories.

"Weird" and "bizarre" would each certainly apply to Lake of Urine as simply a general description of the novel's setting and various plot turns (although it can't really be said to have a straightforward plot), yet to the extent each is also more specifically identified with the kind of fiction that such adjectives have come to designate--"bizarro fiction," "the new weird"--the novel falls short of (or exceeds) the definitions given to these modes. While Lake of Urine has its disgusting moments--particularly in regard to the lake in question--it really lacks the full punkish grotesquerie associated with bizarro fiction, and its weirdness doesn't quite take it into the realm of science fiction but is just, well, weird (often rather amiably so).

"Absurdist" doesn't quite capture the quality of the novel's humor, either. Historically speaking, an absurdist novel distorts reality in order to unsettle our notions of the "reality" of the real, or even to sharpen our perception of the real. The comedy in Lake of Urine, however, which follows on directly from its weirdness, serves Stitch in his effort at what is called world-building, even if it is an out of phase and peculiar world. Indeed, this seems to be the primary aesthetic ambition of the novel: to get us to accept its peculiar world as itself "real," at least as far as language and the tools of fiction can work to create this illusion.

As if to underscore the urgency of this task, Lake of Urine offers numerous passages like this, especially at the beginning of chapters:

Two pairs of heavy brocade curtains emit two razor-sharp slits of hard light into the cool, quiet gloom. One of these lines dissects the plum and bamboo motif of the upholstery on a cabriole sofa that sits in the middle of the room--laser-like as it cuts across the floorboards and splits the oriental design from floor to high, curved back.

A reading table is tucked behind the sofa and on it stands a lamp. From the lamp, a gas tube winds upward like a charmed cobra to a ceiling fixture overhead. . . .

The descriptions of the particulars of this world are, as here, almost minutely exact ("the plum and bamboo motif"), not unlike what we might expect to find in a straightforwardly realist novel. In fact, one could say that this is a realist novel, except that the writer's realism presumes a world in which a man wishes to measure the depth of a lake so attaches first a dog and then a woman to the end of his very long rope and plunges them to the bottom (neither return), another woman (the dead one's sister) escapes her home town to the city and almost immediately becomes the CEO of a very large corporation (admittedly she seems at least as competent and well-informed as the other members of the company's board), and, at the novel's conclusion, the dead woman (her name is Urine, hence the novel's title) is herself resurrected from the lake as something like a zombie. The novel's task is to convince us this world makes its own kind of sense, not to suggest that our own reality lacks it.

There are elements of satire in Lake of Urine, but it tends to be of the rather mild and somewhat obvious sort, as in the scenes depicting Norambole (the surviving sister) interacting with her colleagues in the boardroom, an amusing enough send-up of the shallowness and cupidity of corporate values but really more just a part of the comic eccentricity of the characters' behavior in the novel than biting satire of the world outside it. This eccentricity almost necessarily makes most of the characters in the novel two-dimensional, but this does not really affect our ability to accept both them and their world as provisionally convincing fictional creations.

Perhaps the least caricatured character in the book is Emma Wakeling, mother of Urine and Norambole. About half of the novel is in fact narrated by Emma, as she tells, in reverse chronological order, the stories of her eight marriages. (Urine and Norambole were the product of the first.) These chapters are enjoyably outrageous, Emma's pride in being a master at masturbating the men in her life ("He would squeal and cry like a girl while I did it") providing especially hilarious moments. Her manual dexterity aside, Emma is not exactly a man-pleaser; she uses her skills to control them, although this does not prevent her from making some pretty bad choices in husbands. We are also offered scenes from Emma's childhood, which among other things, gives the novel some historical grounding, enhancing the overall exercise in world-building.

Lake of Urine as a whole is enjoyable. Its "bizarre" elements--including the potentially unsavory ones--do not make it a less agreeable work but help it rise above whimsy or "quirk." But, in succeeding at building its off-kilter world, paradoxically by using the strategies of realism, does this novel also enhance our appreciation of the ways in which the evocation of the irreal extends the aesthetic horizon of the novel? Should we be content with the world that is built, or should the way of building hold its own interest, so that such worlds do not come prefabricated? Do these things matter? Perhaps not, not always. Lake of Urine is unlike most other novels, which makes it admirable enough.

On Dodge Rose

My essay on Jack Cox's Dodge Rose (a "cold take" on a less recently published work) is now available at Splice: 

Finally it seems to me that Dodge Rose provokes reflection on two different conceptions of “experimental fiction”. One focuses primarily on the subversion of familiar form for its own sake, without necessarily emphasising the reconfiguration of form anew. The other is also concerned to challenge pre-existing form, but as well is still occupied with creating form, however unwonted. If we simply acknowledge the formal eccentricities of a novel like Dodge Rose but don’t much ask that they transcend mere eccentricity or caprice to achieve some sort of aesthetic continuity, I, for one, would find the work ultimately disappointing. The quirks of Dodge Rose threaten to become just quirks on their way to an unorthodox but ultimately intelligible political critique, unless we recognise its aesthetic effects as being at least as fully realised as its message.

Giving Voice: On the Work of Evan Dara

      (Pdf version)       

            Although the term “postmodern” is still used often enough by critics as a convenient label for certain works of fiction that are considered out of the “mainstream” of current literary fiction, and descriptions of new books ladled with adjectives such as “unconventional,” “original,” or “innovative” are quite common, the era of “experimental” postmodern American fiction—when experimental fiction could be said to have any kind of real cultural salience—was in fact relatively short-lived: 10-15 years, from the mid-1960s to about 1980. This is not to say there were no formally or stylistically adventurous writers of fiction before this period, nor necessarily that no comparably adventurous writers at all have appeared in the years since. But writers willing to jettison all assumptions about the formal properties of novels and attempt building something entirely new in their place have been relatively few and far between in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two of the twenty-first.

            One such writer, however, is Evan Dara. (Or at least the writer presenting his work under that name, since so little is known about him beyond the work—he makes the elusiveness of Thomas Pynchon seem like a craving for celebrity in comparison—we can’t be sure this is other than a pseudonym.) Dara’s first novel, The Lost Scrapbook, was published in 1995, and has been followed by two other novels, The Easy Chain (2007) and Flee (2013), as well as a play, Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins (2018), all of them published by Aurora, a press apparently owned and administered by Dara himself. All three of the novels challenge the expectations of readers accustomed to fiction that observes the post-postmodern consensus that novels need not scrupulously follow entrenched conventions of linear narrative and the kind of expository prose associated with it, but should otherwise still offer readers some recognizable variant of the form historically tied to works of fiction: an invoked world in which created characters engage in observable human activities (even if they might be subject to various departures from strict realism), activities that follow some version of narrative logic. Dara’s novels, especially the first two, instead present us with disembodied voices in place of characters and events that seem to arise arbitrarily and to bleed into each other without warning—or any immediately apparent purpose.

            If nothing else, it is obvious once one begins reading these novels that the author wants to subvert any presumptions we might have that the novel we are reading will bear enough family resemblance to those we have read before that it will be explicable according to the “rules” we believe we have learned about how novels should proceed. Clearly it intends to replace those rules with others applicable only to this work (although any one of Dara’s novels certainly does then provide direction in reading the others), rules that we will have to learn as we read. In this way, Dara’s novels work like all of their predecessors in the lineage of “experimental” fiction, presenting the reader with a heterodox formal arrangement the reader must learn to assimilate by attending closely to the new patterns the work establishes as alternatives to those patterns more conventional fiction has predisposed us to expect. Indeed, in the challenge they pose to the assumption that the conventional patterns define the novel as a form, Dara’s novels are arguably the most radically disruptive books in American fiction since, say, Gilbert Sorrentino in a work like Mulligan Stew (1979).

            The most formally radical of the novels is The Lost Scrapbook. The initial readers of this book might understandably have thought it is in fact essentially formless, although eventually the formal logic of the novel does become more discernible. The first half or so of what is a very long book (a little under 500 pages) seems to consist of a series of disconnected episodes (some longer than others) leaning heavily on interior monologue and introducing “characters” whose relationships to each other are not immediately apparent. Moreover, these self-standing scenes don’t merely succeed each other but at times appear to merge, one dissolving into the other, as if the novel’s discourse represents a radio set whose dial is being tuned, bringing in one station before moving on to another. Ultimately we reach a program to which presumably the search has been dedicated: most of the remaining part of the novel focuses on the plight of Isaura, a town in Missouri on which an ecological catastrophe has been inflicted by a chemical company that has exploited the forbearance of the community for many years (as the narrative reveals).

            This relatively extended narrative focusing on the depredations of the Ozark Chemical Company and their effect on the citizens of Isaura—by no means related in straightforward expository prose but narratively coherent nevertheless—of course inevitably prompts the reader to ponder the structural connections between it and the concatenation of voices and episodes preceding it. In the only contemporaneous review of The Lost Scrapbook (really the only review of Dara’s work to appear in a “major” American publication—the Washington Post—at all), Tom LeClair suggests that all of the prior voices are displaced victims, “literal and figurative,” from the calamity at Isaura. Perhaps this is a fruitful way of considering the structural integrity of The Lost Scrapbook, although too much emphasis on the “literal” connections among the characters and events threatens to impute a more seamless structure to the novel than it actually contains: to an extent, its most radically adventurous quality is the absence of an ultimate integration of its parts, the possibility that a novel might still achieve authentic thematic and aesthetic coherence even when connections are left unmade and conventional unity disregarded, even deliberately undermined.

            This sort of comprehensive fragmentation makes The Lost Scrapbook more audacious than most of the other works over the past twenty-five years received as “experimental, which in comparison still seem more faithful to the norms of current literary culture. (Perhaps books like David Markson’s Readers Block and This is Not a Novel might rival Dara’s novel in its claim to be “something new”—certainly the more flamboyantly experimental novels of a writer such as Mark Danielewski are just gimmicky when judged next to either The Lost Scrapbook or The Easy Chain.) Dara appears to trust the reader’s ability to infer connections and notice implicit patterns of situation and reference, to tolerate the ambiguities and uncertainties in which the novel persists without necessarily expecting the writer to remove them through any contrived devices. The rhetorical irresolution created by the novel’s extreme fragmentation is reinforced within the discrete narrative fragments (and most of them do relate a story or scene) by the emphasis on speech—both in monologue and dialogue—rather than expository prose, which further requires the reader to discern continuity in the various episodes by carefully registering what the voices are talking about absent direct description. Luckily Dara proves himself exceptionally adept at rendering contemporary American speech, making the task enjoyable in itself, and the enactment of this strategy in the rendition of Isaura’s ordeal is especially impressive.

            Unfortunately, this concluding story also works to produce what is ultimately the most significant weakness of The Lost Scrapbook. It is not inaccurate to call this final section of the novel an expose of entities like the Ozark Chemical Company, companies that in carrying out the prescribed mission of American capitalism are in the process of degrading and despoiling the natural environment, apparently without compunction. When we recall the scenes that have come before, we can see that the depiction of the ruin of Isaura is the culmination of a portrayal of America in all its social, cultural, and economic dysfunction—an America in which the atomizing effects of capitalism have spread to all features of ordinary life. In this way, it seems to me, The Lost Scrapbook in effect neutralizes its own formal audacity by making it too easy for the reader to resolve (at least in retrospect) the interpretive dilemma posed by the seemingly dissociated episodes that have brought us to the Isaura narrative, to integrate all of the novel’s parts in what turns out to be an unorthodox but finally structurally harmonious story about the baneful influences of late twentieth century American capitalism, its elevation of profit to preeminent value and disregard for the common good determining the shape of human interaction and inhibiting even our ability to communicate (a motif to which Dara returns in his most recent work). However accurate this vision of the degeneracy of current reality might be (and I for one accept its accuracy), ultimately it comes close to undercutting the novel’s integrity as experimental fiction, arguably converting it to a work of realism by other means.

            Although The Lost Scrapbook is often quite funny, it would not really be appropriate to call it satire. The humor is not of the regenerative kind that implies the offenses portrayed might be ameliorated. It does indeed provoke the more corrosive kind of laughter associated with postmodern writers such as DeLillo, Pynchon, and Gaddis, or even the “black humor” of Vonnegut or Heller. But finally the humor seems part of the larger effort to critique, to “say something” about the dismal state of American culture and the dangers of unchecked capitalism. Dara’s critique is perhaps more vehement than most, and offers no false hope that the conditions imposed by advanced capitalism will be overcome any time soon, but in its substance it hardly differs much from similar critiques increasingly to be found in mainstream literary fiction. What makes The Lost Scrapbook distinctive, of course, is its formal innovation, the quality that presumably has also caused readers to balk at the “difficulty” such a work is presumed to pose. While these readers would find The Lost Scrapbook in fact to be an invigorating reading experience that rewards the effort to meet its challenge, they might also finally be disappointed that the ingenuity the novel exhibits seems to be employed in support of a conventionally polemical purpose.

            Still, if a writer’s commitment to a theme or idea (political or otherwise) inspires a genuinely adventurous approach to form or style—that is, serves the ultimate purpose of experimental fiction to revitalize the form itself—probably we ought to grant that writer his subject. Some might say that the novel’s length does not justify the thematic payoff, but I would contend that such length is required for the formal effect to be adequately felt: if The Lost Scrapbook could be regarded as a version of a picaresque narrative, the journey taken is by the reader in the experience of reading, and as with all picaresque narratives, much of the interest lies in the journey itself, not the destination. However, both Dara’s aesthetic approach and his political critique are more effectively realized in his second novel, The Easy Chain. In some ways it is surprising that this novel did not win Dara a somewhat larger audience and more attention from critics (again only one review, again by LeClair, in Bookforum), since, while it is hardly a conventional narrative, something like a recognizable story “arc” can be perceived behind the multiple registers of talk and shifts of setting. It even has a kind of mystery plot (actually several mysteries), even if those mysteries never quite get resolved.

            Perhaps the most significant departure in The Easy Chain from the strategies employed  in The Lost Scrapbook is that it features a protagonist—albeit one who is present only fleetingly (most directly at the novel’s beginning) and is depicted in a mosaic-like fashion, from a multitude of perspectives, so that we cannot really say we have a very firm grasp on his personal qualities or his motivations. In this novel, Dara takes the method introduced in The Lost Scrapbook, its emphasis on speech and soliloquy, and applies it to the development of the main character. We know Lincoln Selwyn mostly from what others say about him—although we often don’t know who these others are beyond their disembodied voices. The outline, if not all the details, of Lincoln’s story is clear enough: The son of English parents but raised in the Netherlands, Lincoln emigrates to the United States to attend college (the University of Chicago), but instead finds himself, through mechanisms that often remain shrouded from our direct observation, a wildly successful entrepreneur and man about town, steadily accruing admirers and gaining influence. Then, apparently Selwyn disappears. (Later we learn he probably gained much of his success through shady means, although the investigators from whom we get this information are themselves not altogether reliable.) After a break in the narrative (represented in the text by a series of blank pages), we encounter Lincoln back in Holland, where he seems to be trying to fill in lacunae in his own knowledge about his family, including his mother and an aunt who had emigrated to the United States before him and whose whereabouts he has unsuccessfully tried to uncover. Next we discover that Lincoln has returned to the U.S., where at the novel’s conclusion we are shocked to find him preparing to blow up the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and, when the attempt fails, to shoot the private investigator he had tasked with finding the aunt.

            The story, of course, does not come as an uninterrupted linear narrative. Not only are we sometimes not aware of Lincoln’s specific activities, but the interruptions in the story of Lincoln Selwyn are often filled with other, seemingly unrelated stories featuring independent characters, such as the story about a Boulder, Colorado restaurant forced out of business when the rent on their building is arbitrarily raised. As with The Lost Scrapbook, these set-pieces are thematically related to Lincoln’s story: the restaurant’s plight turns into an apocalyptic narrative about the collapse of civilization itself and the reversion of the land to nature. The Easy Chain is ultimately centered around the same concern animating the previous novel, the ravages of advanced capitalism, but Lincoln Selwyn’s life provides a more consistent, and more compelling, unity in the novel’s aesthetic design. Indeed, it seems more fitting to speak about “design” in The Easy Chain than in The Lost Scrapbook (which does not mean the latter is simply chaotic). We see in The Easy Chain similar disruptions of narrative continuity and conventional prose (variations in textual arrangement, graphical effects such as those in the novel’s final section, with its seemingly random divergences in capitalization, punctuation, and spelling), yet here they more readily seem part of the novel’s unified portrayal of Lincoln Selwy, his elusiveness, his contradictory impulses, his lack of a core identity we can easily recognize.

            This does not mean that The Easy Chain abandons experiment for convention or too comfortably courts facile accessibility. Readers not familiar with The Lost Scrapbook are unlikely to think it too conspicuously conforms to expectations of conventional literary fiction. Its achievement consists not simply of the application of “craft,” but from a successful attempt to bring artistic coherence to a work that doesn’t settle for familiar means of character development or rely on a stable point of view. “Experimental” is not synonymous with “anarchic” when applied to formal innovations in fiction, and The Easy Chain adeptly achieves a totality of vision in a way that is perhaps more acutely visible than in The Lost Scrapbook. The balance between invention and design in The Easy Chain is the most finely measured among Dara’s novels.

            If that balance skews somewhat to the former in The Lost Scrapbook, it skews more decidedly to the latter in Dara’s third novel, Flee. Certainly to readers for whom it might be their introduction to Dara (especially because it is the briefest of the three), this novel again would hardly seem a mainstream literary novel, but its more unconventional strategies—which are largely the same ones introduced in the first two novels—are employed to limited enough effect that it is more apparent they are designed to support the novel’s quasi-absurdist story. In Flee it is the story that is emphasized through the novel’s strategies of indirection and omission much as the character of Lincoln Selwyn is evoked in The Easy Chain. However, a story about the gradual abandonment of a good-sized city (most likely based on Burlington, Vermont) after its university shuts down due to it its own malfeasance is inherently improbable and incongruous, and these qualities are only heightened through Dara’s by now signature methods—sudden discontinuities, multiple voices, etc. So compatible are form and content in Flee, in fact, that this novel can indeed be accurately described as satire, allowing Dara’s recurrent focus on capitalist values acting to impede human flourishing to be rendered more distinctly as satirical judgment.

            In its more compact form, Flee demonstrates that Dara’s invocation of multiple voices and perspectives can operate to relate a story that doesn’t flash the usual narrative signals and create characters that are shorn of information beyond the clues offered in their talk—a local couple attempting to profit from the emptying out of their town are tracked throughout the novel and act, if not as protagonists, as narrative anchors, individual representatives of the broader dilemma facing the town whose particular experiences the reader can follow for continuity—but for the first time in Dara’s fiction the strategy seems overly familiar, too derivative of the work of William Gaddis, whose voice- and dialogue-centered novels provide the primary touchstone for Dara’s fiction. Ironically, Flee seems a bit too much like Gaddis’s JR in miniature, even though it is The Easy Chain that is more reminiscent of Gaddis’s novel in its subject and featured protagonist.

            Perhaps it is a realization that this method has become somewhat perfunctory that led Dara to offer as his most recent work not a novel, but a play, the Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins, available as a download on the Aurora website. Here, of course, human speech is the form’s natural medium, and the play is stripped down to just characters and talk, the stage “As bare as you can stand it.” (It has something of the feel of a Greek drama, individual characters set off against a chorus-like group called “the Swirl.”) Mose Eakins is (as described by one of the Swirl) “an American field-risk analyst working for Concord Oil.” He is introduced to us speaking to various co-workers—none of them actually present on stage—in a briskly efficient  but largely supercilious manner. Not long afterward, Mose begins to notice that people are beginning to react strangely in his presence: they seem not to hear what he is saying and instead speak about themselves in ways that strike Mose as wholly inappropriate, as if he is overhearing them reveal their unguarded thoughts. Eventually, Mose is informed he suffers from “imparlance,” a disorder that causes people to “lose the capacity to infuse their words with intelligible significance.” As a side effect, those to whom the sufferer speaks “often give voice to thoughts they usually keep hidden.” Mose’s life steadily deteriorates, and even though he comes to recognize that he himself has participated in the degradation of language, its reduction to utilitarian exchange and self-advancement, his ultimate fate is not a happy one.

            Although Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins focuses on a theme central to much postmodern fiction, the failures of language to “communicate” reliably, that failure is tied to the debasement of language inflicted by society under capitalism, situating the play squarely among the three novels as cultural critique. (There may also be a sly dig at the incomprehension with which the literary establishment has greeted Dara’s novels, as many readers and critics profess that such works lack “the capacity to infuse their words with intelligible significance.”) The novels as well concern themselves, both implicitly and explicitly, with the obstacles language must overcome in order to be intelligible, but they do achieve their own kind of cogency. As does Mose Eakins, suggesting that finally Evan Dara belongs with the original generation of postmodernists in the audacity of his invention but doesn’t really seem to share the postmodernist skepticism about language as a representational medium. In Mose Eakins, he memorably represents the corruption of language by forces that have emptied it of all but the most crudely functional signifying potential, the destruction of literary power it would otherwise possess. Ultimately Dara is a moralist, not an aesthete.

On Lance Olsen

My review of Lance Olsen's My Red Heaven, at Heavy Feathers Review:

Regardless of the label we might want to assign it, My Red Heaven fulfills the promise of experimental fiction: it challenges complacent reading habits at the same time it also offers to renew the conceptual resources upon which fiction might draw to engage the reader in new and myriad ways. . .My Red Heaven might be the sort of book that convinces skeptical readers experimental fiction can be compelling reading even if it does not complacently fall back on the most comfortable modes of storytelling.

On Michael Martone

My essay on the fiction of Michael Martone is now available at the Cleveland Review of Books.

Martone’s characters take up the kind of ordinary, recognizable activities—setting up the searchlight displays that announce the new fall Chevrolets have arrived or observing a school carnival, with its obligatory fish ponds and cake walks—that might elicit a knowing smile, not a belly laugh, and does not at all raise the suspicion that the characters in carrying out these activities are being subjected to mockery. Really no other current American writer manages to effect quite such a union of an underlying realism of character and place with an inevitably distorting comic outlook as successfully or distinctively as Michael Martone 

On Krasznahorkai

My review of Laszlo Krasznakorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming at Splice:

    The quartet of novels that now collectively comprise what Krasznahorkai designates as “my one book” certainly do not project a sunny view either of contemporary Hungary or of humankind in general. Baron Wenckheim’s homecoming to a Hungary that has exchanged Communist rule for Viktor Orbán hardly reveals the country to have made ‘progress’ (it largely still resembles the country depicted in Satantango), but it doesn’t seem that Krasznahorkai’s overriding artistic purpose is to specifically provide social or cultural critique — the characters in all of these novels exhibit their fair share of ignorance and venality (although also just fear and confusion), yet surely no more so than the common run of humanity. Krasznahorkai is indeed interested in the more universal corruptions of human behaviour, and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming seems to declare a sentence of metaphysical doom on human existence.

The Old is New Again (Or Not)

Way back in 2005, I wrote a few short reviews for a now defunct publication called Playback St. Louis. I had thought these reviews were forever lost, but have now successfully retrieved them. Because I feel I owe it to posterity (someone's posterity, anyway), I am here posting two of them, a review of Steve Stern's The Angel of Forgetfulness and a combined review of Ronald Sukenick's Last Fall and Rikki Ducornet's The Word "Desire."

                                                 Fuel For Stories

In his first novel since Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Underground (1991), Steve
Stern has produced what is probably his most ambitious work to date. The Angel of
Forgetfulness ranges over two different epochs in American history, several centuries of
Jewish history, and relates three interconnected stories. It attempts a kind of literary
archaeology of Jewish life on the Lower East Side of New York in the early twentieth
century, while also depicting one character’s ultimate rediscovery of the lasting vitality of
Jewish culture. And it seeks to provoke reflection on the way in which storytelling and
imagination can often disarm our merely rational powers. Happily, the novel carries out
every one of these tasks with great skill, making it both an impressive display of literary
artistry and a virtuoso act of storytelling in its own right.

In the years between Harry Kaplan and The Angel of Forgetfulness, Stern
published one collection of novellas, A Plague of Dreamers (1994), and one short story
collection, The Wedding Jester (1994), which, along with the previous story collection
Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (1987), contain some of the finest short fiction by an
American writer to appear in the past twenty years. Stern’s stories are part fable, part
comedy routine (the two come together most explicitly in the title story of The Wedding
Jester), reminiscent to some degree of the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard
Malamud, and Stanley Elkin. His earliest fiction depicted a Jewish enclave in Memphis,
Tennessee called The Pinch, but more recently he has broadened his focus to include
characters and settings beyond the somewhat peculiar (although vividly rendered)
circumstances of an American Jewish community attempting to maintain itself in the
post-Civil War South.

Saul Bozoff, the protagonist of The Angel of Forgetfulness, is a native of
Memphis, but the novel follows him on his journey out of the city of his birth and toward.
. .he doesn’t really know what. The first chapter (a tour de force in and of itself) finds
Saul attending college in New York City, where he meets Aunt Keni, one of the few
surviving residents of what was a thriving Jewish neighborhood. Saul is drawn to Keni
and her stories about the old neighborhood, and she passes on to him a manuscript—The
Angel of Forgetfulness—written by Nathan Hart, Keni’s long-dead lover. The rest of the
novel alternates between Saul’s subsequent experiences on a hippie commune and as an
instructor in a small New England college, a reconstruction of Nathan Hart’s life story as
a recent immigrant and then a writer for the Jewish Daily Forward, and excerpts from the
manuscript itself, which tells the fantastic tale of an angel named Mocky, who prefers life
on earth to a less eventful existence in heaven.

The connections between the three stories remain tantalizingly open for most of
the novel, but they eventually come together in a wholly satisfying way that reveals them
to be much more than simply parallel narratives. And the ingenuity with which Stern
molds his stories one from and into the other is matched by the color and the vigor of his
prose style, which has always been, in tandem with his powers of invention, the great
delight of his fiction. Steve Stern is, finally, a writer able to unite imagination and skill
with language in an almost unbeatable combination.

After he begins composing his Angel of Forgetfulness, we are told of Nathan Hart
that “Experience was the raw material of fiction, and Nathan had had so little of it,
nothing that he believed would translate readily into stories. He had for his fuel only
secondhand stories, though he couldn’t recall ever having read the one he found himself
writing now.” Readers are likely to conclude they’ve never read anything quite like the
stories Steve Stern has to tell, either.

                                                Off The Beaten Path

The American novelist Ronald Sukenick died of a degenerative muscle disease in
2004. His legacy includes not only his numerous works of fiction and criticism but also a
collection of publications and presses that attempt to maintain a place for innovative
writing in contemporary literary culture. Directly, Sukenick founded the Fiction
Collective (now FC2) as a publishing venue for experimental fiction, as well as American
Book Review, which focuses its attention largely on new works of experimental fiction
and poetry and in general works to remind us that the sort of book discussion to be found
in the New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books does not begin to
get at the variety of serious writing to be discovered at smaller presses more dedicated to
literature than to commerce. Indirectly, Sukenick forged an alliance of sorts with the
Center for Book Culture, which publishes the journals Context and the Review of
Contemporary Fiction and helped to subsidize Dalkey Archive Press, which both
publishes new fiction—especially fiction in translation—and preserves an invaluable
backlist of important if unjustly neglected innovative fiction published during the last
century or so.

Together, FC2 and Dalkey Archive probably represent the most concerted and
successful effort in American publishing to present an alternative to mainstream “literary
fiction” that is at least as “literary” without being stylized and “serious” in a
conventionally earnest way. Unorthodox storytelling (as well as imaginative
reconsiderations of storytelling itself) and challenges to the dominance or realism are the
norm at these presses, and both qualities can be found in two of their recent releases, The
Word “Desire” by Rikki Ducornet (actually a reprint by Dalkey Archive of a 1997 book
first published by Henry Holt) and Sukenick’s own final novel, Last Fall (FC2). Both
books will provide readers with something other than familiar reading experiences, and
both will introduce new readers to authors whose other works are well worth seeking out.
(Five of Ducornet’s other books are available at Dalkey Archive, while many of
Sukenick’s previous books—including such seminal experimental fictions as 98.6 and
The Death of the Novel and Other Stories—are also to be found on FC2’s backlist.)

Ducornet writes erotically charged fables and fairy tales to some degree
reminiscent of the fiction of the British writer Angela Carter. As its title suggests, The
Word “Desire” is indeed focused on love and sex, especially on moments of sexual
awakening, of recognition of the irresistible power of desire. In “The Chess Set of Ivory,”
the book’s first story, a young girl is confronted with the fact of her mother’s infidelity
and its effect on her father, a professor teaching in Egypt. In “Roseveine,” a man tells the
story of his childhood infatuation with a mature woman (his mother’s friend) that has, to
say the least, contributed to his apparent insanity. While telling the tale of her own sexual
awakening, the narrator of “The Many Tenses of Wanting” sets forth what might be the
primary theme of the book: “I believe it is so that one’s sexuality is fixed at an early age.
One is impressionable and a visual experience has the impress of a firebrand. I mean one
see something so puissant it sets the mind on fire, an inextinguishable fire that—if it
cools to embers with the passage of hours and days—can be rekindled by a random
word.”

In one of the best stories in The Word “Desire”, “The Foxed Mirror,” a priest
otherwise repulsed by sex (“the thought of a woman’s thighs is terrible”) becomes
sexually obsessed with a male artist. Perhaps the most outrageous stories (which is saying
something) are “Fortune,” narrated by the pet dog of Napoleon’s Josephine, and
“Opium’” about a dying Pope who is suckled by a wet nurse. While plot descriptions
such as these do begin to suggest the extraordinary qualities of Ducornet’s fiction, the
reader will also find her stories replete with vividly rendered scenes, etched by
Ducornet’s incisive prose style, and satisfyingly bizarre plot turns.

Sukenick’s Last Fall shares something of Ducornet’s surrealistic approach,
although in this case the novel’s skewed perspective on specifically contemporary reality
(the novel is set in New York just before and just after the events of 9/11/01, and contains
a very compelling account of the immediate aftermath of the Trade Tower collapses)
might more accurately characterized as what the novelist John Barth called “irrealism.”
The characters and events depicted in Last Fall are located just on the other side of the
line separating the plausible from the implausible (although one might say that 9/11
represents the moment when the unreality of American life can no longer be
exaggerated), but not so far as to make them unrecognizable as a version of the world we
readers must otherwise inhabit. It tells the story of the “Museum of Temporary Art” and
those associated with it, its plot (which is mostly displaced by the ongoing historical
events) centering on an ostensible theft from the museum’s collection. This theft remains
the novel’s unresolved mystery, since a museum of “temporary” art has no collection:

It was a matter of theft, but the problem was that nobody knew what had
been stolen. The museum was banking on my expertise as a professor of postcontemporary art both to identify the stolen work and, if possible, to get it back.
None of this had been made public and, in fact, even the personnel of the
museum were unaware, except for a vague feeling of unease, which was itself part
of the evidence. Because the feeling that something, something important, was
gone was a factor. That is, how else, other that through feeling, were they to know
that something was gone when they didn’t know what it was?

Last Fall is a rather more straightforwardly rendered narrative than most of
Sukenick’s fiction (although it does move from character to character in a way that
requires the reader’s careful attention). It does not much feature the kind of play with
typography and sentence boundaries typical of Sukenick’s other work, and while readers
new to Sukenick might find this beneficial and Last Fall a more accessible introduction
to his brand of experimental fiction, others might prefer his less explicitly allegorical,
more formally challenging work. Nonetheless, the posthumous publication of Ronald
Sukenick’s final novel is a valuable reminder that Sukenick was a figure central to the
flourishing of American postmodern fiction, an important writer whose achievement is
now complete and available for discovery and rediscovery by readers looking for an
alternative to the “mainstream” in American fiction.

 

In his first novel since Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Underground (1991), Steve
Stern has produced what is probably his most ambitious work to date. The Angel of
Forgetfulness ranges over two different epochs in American history, several centuries of
Jewish history, and relates three interconnected stories. It attempts a kind of literary
archaeology of Jewish life on the Lower East Side of New York in the early twentieth
century, while also depicting one character’s ultimate rediscovery of the lasting vitality of
Jewish culture. And it seeks to provoke reflection on the way in which storytelling and
imagination can often disarm our merely rational powers. Happily, the novel carries out
every one of these tasks with great skill, making it both an impressive display of literary
artistry and a virtuoso act of storytelling in its own right.

In the years between Harry Kaplan and The Angel of Forgetfulness, Stern
published one collection of novellas, A Plague of Dreamers (1994), and one short story
collection, The Wedding Jester (1994), which, along with the previous story collection
Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (1987), contain some of the finest short fiction by an
American writer to appear in the past twenty years. Stern’s stories are part fable, part
comedy routine (the two come together most explicitly in the title story of The Wedding
Jester), reminiscent to some degree of the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard
Malamud, and Stanley Elkin. His earliest fiction depicted a Jewish enclave in Memphis,
Tennessee called The Pinch, but more recently he has broadened his focus to include
characters and settings beyond the somewhat peculiar (although vividly rendered)
circumstances of an American Jewish community attempting to maintain itself in the
post-Civil War South.

Saul Bozoff, the protagonist of The Angel of Forgetfulness, is a native of
Memphis, but the novel follows him on his journey out of the city of his birth and toward.
. .he doesn’t really know what. The first chapter (a tour de force in and of itself) finds
Saul attending college in New York City, where he meets Aunt Keni, one of the few
surviving residents of what was a thriving Jewish neighborhood. Saul is drawn to Keni
and her stories about the old neighborhood, and she passes on to him a manuscript—The
Angel of Forgetfulness—written by Nathan Hart, Keni’s long-dead lover. The rest of the
novel alternates between Saul’s subsequent experiences on a hippie commune and as an
instructor in a small New England college, a reconstruction of Nathan Hart’s life story as
a recent immigrant and then a writer for the Jewish Daily Forward, and excerpts from the
manuscript itself, which tells the fantastic tale of an angel named Mocky, who prefers life
on earth to a less eventful existence in heaven.

The connections between the three stories remain tantalizingly open for most of
the novel, but they eventually come together in a wholly satisfying way that reveals them
to be much more than simply parallel narratives. And the ingenuity with which Stern
molds his stories one from and into the other is matched by the color and the vigor of his
prose style, which has always been, in tandem with his powers of invention, the great
delight of his fiction. Steve Stern is, finally, a writer able to unite imagination and skill
with language in an almost unbeatable combination.

After he begins composing his Angel of Forgetfulness, we are told of Nathan Hart
that “Experience was the raw material of fiction, and Nathan had had so little of it,
nothing that he believed would translate readily into stories. He had for his fuel only
secondhand stories, though he couldn’t recall ever having read the one he found himself
writing now.” Readers are likely to conclude they’ve never read anything quite like the
stories Steve Stern has to tell, either.

                                                Off The Beaten Path

The American novelist Ronald Sukenick died of a degenerative muscle disease in
2004. His legacy includes not only his numerous works of fiction and criticism but also a
collection of publications and presses that attempt to maintain a place for innovative
writing in contemporary literary culture. Directly, Sukenick founded the Fiction
Collective (now FC2) as a publishing venue for experimental fiction, as well as American
Book Review, which focuses its attention largely on new works of experimental fiction
and poetry and in general works to remind us that the sort of book discussion to be found
in the New York Times Book Review or the New York Review of Books does not begin to
get at the variety of serious writing to be discovered at smaller presses more dedicated to
literature than to commerce. Indirectly, Sukenick forged an alliance of sorts with the
Center for Book Culture, which publishes the journals Context and the Review of
Contemporary Fiction and helped to subsidize Dalkey Archive Press, which both
publishes new fiction—especially fiction in translation—and preserves an invaluable
backlist of important if unjustly neglected innovative fiction published during the last
century or so.

Together, FC2 and Dalkey Archive probably represent the most concerted and
successful effort in American publishing to present an alternative to mainstream “literary
fiction” that is at least as “literary” without being stylized and “serious” in a
conventionally earnest way. Unorthodox storytelling (as well as imaginative
reconsiderations of storytelling itself) and challenges to the dominance or realism are the
norm at these presses, and both qualities can be found in two of their recent releases, The
Word “Desire” by Rikki Ducornet (actually a reprint by Dalkey Archive of a 1997 book
first published by Henry Holt) and Sukenick’s own final novel, Last Fall (FC2). Both
books will provide readers with something other than familiar reading experiences, and
both will introduce new readers to authors whose other works are well worth seeking out.
(Five of Ducornet’s other books are available at Dalkey Archive, while many of
Sukenick’s previous books—including such seminal experimental fictions as 98.6 and
The Death of the Novel and Other Stories—are also to be found on FC2’s backlist.)

Ducornet writes erotically charged fables and fairy tales to some degree
reminiscent of the fiction of the British writer Angela Carter. As its title suggests, The
Word “Desire” is indeed focused on love and sex, especially on moments of sexual
awakening, of recognition of the irresistible power of desire. In “The Chess Set of Ivory,”
the book’s first story, a young girl is confronted with the fact of her mother’s infidelity
and its effect on her father, a professor teaching in Egypt. In “Roseveine,” a man tells the
story of his childhood infatuation with a mature woman (his mother’s friend) that has, to
say the least, contributed to his apparent insanity. While telling the tale of her own sexual
awakening, the narrator of “The Many Tenses of Wanting” sets forth what might be the
primary theme of the book: “I believe it is so that one’s sexuality is fixed at an early age.
One is impressionable and a visual experience has the impress of a firebrand. I mean one
see something so puissant it sets the mind on fire, an inextinguishable fire that—if it
cools to embers with the passage of hours and days—can be rekindled by a random
word.”

In one of the best stories in The Word “Desire”, “The Foxed Mirror,” a priest
otherwise repulsed by sex (“the thought of a woman’s thighs is terrible”) becomes
sexually obsessed with a male artist. Perhaps the most outrageous stories (which is saying
something) are “Fortune,” narrated by the pet dog of Napoleon’s Josephine, and
“Opium’” about a dying Pope who is suckled by a wet nurse. While plot descriptions
such as these do begin to suggest the extraordinary qualities of Ducornet’s fiction, the
reader will also find her stories replete with vividly rendered scenes, etched by
Ducornet’s incisive prose style, and satisfyingly bizarre plot turns.

Sukenick’s Last Fall shares something of Ducornet’s surrealistic approach,
although in this case the novel’s skewed perspective on specifically contemporary reality
(the novel is set in New York just before and just after the events of 9/11/01, and contains
a very compelling account of the immediate aftermath of the Trade Tower collapses)
might more accurately characterized as what the novelist John Barth called “irrealism.”
The characters and events depicted in Last Fall are located just on the other side of the
line separating the plausible from the implausible (although one might say that 9/11
represents the moment when the unreality of American life can no longer be
exaggerated), but not so far as to make them unrecognizable as a version of the world we
readers must otherwise inhabit. It tells the story of the “Museum of Temporary Art” and
those associated with it, its plot (which is mostly displaced by the ongoing historical
events) centering on an ostensible theft from the museum’s collection. This theft remains
the novel’s unresolved mystery, since a museum of “temporary” art has no collection:

It was a matter of theft, but the problem was that nobody knew what had
been stolen. The museum was banking on my expertise as a professor of postcontemporary art both to identify the stolen work and, if possible, to get it back.
None of this had been made public and, in fact, even the personnel of the
museum were unaware, except for a vague feeling of unease, which was itself part
of the evidence. Because the feeling that something, something important, was
gone was a factor. That is, how else, other that through feeling, were they to know
that something was gone when they didn’t know what it was?

Last Fall is a rather more straightforwardly rendered narrative than most of
Sukenick’s fiction (although it does move from character to character in a way that
requires the reader’s careful attention). It does not much feature the kind of play with
typography and sentence boundaries typical of Sukenick’s other work, and while readers
new to Sukenick might find this beneficial and Last Fall a more accessible introduction
to his brand of experimental fiction, others might prefer his less explicitly allegorical,
more formally challenging work. Nonetheless, the posthumous publication of Ronald
Sukenick’s final novel is a valuable reminder that Sukenick was a figure central to the
flourishing of American postmodern fiction, an important writer whose achievement is
now complete and available for discovery and rediscovery by readers looking for an
alternative to the “mainstream” in American fiction.

RIP, Stephen Dixon.

From my 2016 review of his Late Stories:

Reviewers of Stephen Dixon’s fiction often take note of the author’s continuing lack of widespread recognition, despite the high esteem for his work expressed by many writers and critics. By now it is no doubt unlikely that Dixon’s work will gain the kind of attention that would in any way equal its genuine achievement — and since Dixon is now 80, and has been forced to publish his most recent books with very small presses, there doesn’t seem much future opportunity for him to capture such attention. Dixon himself has long acknowledged this, telling interviewers — in the few he has given — that he writes for the sheer gratification of it, adhering to his own aesthetic standards and offering his stories and novels to available readers. Those of us who have accepted these offerings all along should ourselves be grateful he perseveres in spite of undeserved neglect and gives us his singular fiction with seemingly undiminished dedication.