The Reading Experience

Ladies Only?

When is "chick lit" actually chick lit? That is, when is it more, or less, than "a lucrative niche in an otherwise struggling fiction industry"? Is it a legitimate "genre" of contemporary literature? Is it an inherently derogatory term? If a book concerns a single and/or educated and/or young-ish woman "worrying about" her status, her love life, her family, does it automatically qualify as belonging to the genre? Can the "lit" part be completely spelled out into "literature"?

These questions occur to me as I finish reading When the Messenger is Hot, a debut collection of stories by Elizabeth Crane. Many of the reviews of the book referenced "chick lit" (at least one referring specifically to Bridget Jones, presumably the Ur-text of chick lit), and the stories, most of them revolving around the kind of urban woman mentioned above, certainly seem directed to readers who would find fiction about unmarried heterosexual women and their travails immediately appealing.

But ultimately the stories do also seem--or at least their cumulative effect seems--more substantive than the term "chick lit" appears designed to allow for. At the same time, their almost obsessive concern with dating and sex, lifestyle and love, makes one hesitate to think of them as "literary" in the fully amplified sense of that word.

Most of the stories are tinged with a melancholy and frustration that certainly elevates them above the Candace Bushnell-level of "women's writing." The best story in the book, "Privacy and Coffee," about a woman who in essence avoids committing suicide by "falling up" to a secluded part of a friend's apartment house rather than "jumping down" from it, is tonally right-on in capturing the protagonist's subdued despair. The second best story, "Something Shiny," is a mordantly funny tale of, literally, a loss of identity.

Formally and stylistically the book displays some imagination and skill as well. Crane is not afraid to break out of the mold of the well-made story, experimenting in many of the stories with structure and character-creation, venturing sometimes, with varying degrees of success, into fantasia and reverie. Crane's style, generally consistent across all the stories, is also unconventional in a pleasingly unwieldy kind of way. (In a profile published in New City Chicago, Crane intimates she wanted to emulate David Foster Wallace, but her style reminds me somewhat of the decidedly non-chick writer Stephen Dixon.)

And yet, my enduring impression is that When the Messenger is Hot to some degree expends the writer's talents and insights on overly flimsy material. Even the recurring motifs of death and grief (in most cases for the protagonist's mother) ultimately lead less to reflection on these unavoidable occurences than to assertions of the characters' sorrow in dealing with them--as if they're just one more obstacle in the way of these characters finding "fulfillment" in a rather hackneyed and familiar way. It would finally be unfair to label Elizabeth Crane a writer of "chick lit," but fans of the genre would still probably find her book more than faintly recognizable.

William Gaddis

Where I live the mail is very slow, and I've just now received the February 20 issue of the Times Literary Supplement. Not that the belatedness of this post matters that much, since the item in question, "Famously Obscure," an omnibus review of William Gaddis by Stephen Burn, was not available on the TLS website, anyway.

The review is a very good introduction to Gaddis's work for those unfamiliar with it or who have shied away from it. (Burn is also the author of a book on David Foster Wallace.) Gaddis is perhaps the poster boy for "difficult" and "experimental" fiction (most likely a "Wanted" poster), but as Burn points out, "Gaddis's gift for capturing the clipped patterns of American speech is unparalleled among contemporary writers, and although his novels are undeniably complex, his eruditon is mixed with his characteristically dark humor."

Gaddis is precisely the sort of writer whose books require reading, slow and deliberate, not the kind of scanning (looking for the elements that might make the novel in hand a really nifty movie) that unfortunately much current fiction practically encourages. His books may even seem confusing, at least at first, but staying with them really pays off. They are not merely formally complex, but their complexity serves their material, which is ultimately the sheer babble and noise of American culture.

Although The Recognitions is perhaps the most impressive debut novel in postwar American fiction, I would start by reading JR, published in 1975. As Burn says of it, "the atmosphere of the novel may be anarchic, but the narrative is clear and the book is extremely readable." At least after you've caught on to Gaddis's method of revealing everything--everything--through dialogue. But in addition to its formal challenges, JR is the most incisive and at the same time most savage dissection of the American commercial/financial culture you'll likely ever read. In my opinion it's one of the greatest American novels ever written.

The review's title refers to Gaddis's penchant for staying out of the limelight. However, it is somehow telling that discussions of Gaddis's fiction must usually work in some mention of this idiosyncrasy, as if even in avoiding publicity Gaddis manages to elicit commentary in which publicity takes center stage, so to speak.

There's a very thorough Gaddis website, overseen by the perhaps foremost Gaddis scholar Steven Moore, at www.williamgaddis.org. Several books on Gaddis have been published, among the ones I own being Carnival of Repetition, by John Johnson, and The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis, by Gregory Comnes. The chapters on Gaddis in Tom LeClair's The Art of Excess and Susan Strehle's Fiction in the Quantum Universe are also very good. The jargon factor in all four of these books is not that pronounced, but it would probably be most useful to read them after reading at least JR and The Recognitions.

On Reserve

Literary criticism is in a sorry state these days. Discussion of books and writing has been superseded by gossip about writers (Elias Canetti/Iris Murdoch) and even about critics (Naomi Wolf/Harold Bloom), the most talked-about critic has become so because he indulges in hysterical and ad hominem attacks on writers who don't write books like his own (Dale Peck), not a single book nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of "criticism" is actually a work of literary criticism. Literary webloggers have so far focused their attention on what passes for literary "news" (a useful enough service nevertheless), book reviews of fiction are gradually being abandoned, academic critics concern themselves with literature at all only to the extent of instructing their students to despise it.

There was a time when well-read and skilled critics wrote books intended to enlighten interested readers--all interested readers--about the nature and possibilities of literature, in effect to show them how to read fiction, poetry, and serious drama more profitably. Very little of this is done anymore. Most literary journalists don't seem to know how to read profitably themselves (there are exceptions, always exceptions), most academic critics simply aren't interested in it. I am thus providing here a list of the kinds of books I have in mind, books that are still eminently readable and that would educate anyone who picked them up about literary forms, style, history, predominant themes, etc.

Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American
Literature
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition
Eric Auerbach, Mimesis
Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn
William Empson, 7 Types of Ambiguity
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden
Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970

These are not the "top ten," certainly not the only ten, merely ten. Many others could be added. I have not included books on individual authors, of which there are scores of good ones. Again, I would have included books of equal merit of more recent vintage, but there really aren't any, at least not books that are designed to demonstrate to readers and potential readers the rewards of serious literature.

Actually such books would greatly benefit all would-be writers as well. They would learn how to build on the accomplishments of the past, how to think clearly about the requirements of literary form, as well as when to alter and rebel against the practices of the past. Many writers who went through college, possibly graduate school, when these books were routinely assigned would undoubtedly testify to this. It is a great failing of the literary academy, and the literary culture more generally, that so few people now seem to recognize the value of this critical heritage.

The Idiocy of Synopsis

The New Critics sometimes appealed to what they called the "heresy of paraphrase." As defined by Hugh Holman in A Handbook to Literature, this meant that " a work of art means what it means in the terms in which it delivers that meaning, so that paraphrase, summary, abridgement, expansion, or translation is bound to miss the point, usually by understating the complexity and misconstruing the uniqueness of the original statement." Pretty clearly, the word "synopsis" could be added to this list.

As usual, the New Critics needlessy phrased this idea in religious language, but the underlying principle is sound enough. And it was this New Critical dictum I immediately recalled when reading Robert McCrum's "The Curse of the Synopsis" in Sundays Guardian/Observer.

As I compose this post, both the Literary Saloon and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind have already commented on this article, but while in both cases their comments are completely well-taken, I don't think they go nearly far enough in capturing the sheer idiocy of judging the quality of a given book--at least when it comes to fiction--on a "synopsis." Perhaps this practice works well enough for some works of non-fiction--those in which information and "content" clearly overshadow all other considerations--but only the most reductive, simplistic approach to fiction or creative nonfiction could settle for synopsis.

Put simply, what does a novel have to do with synopsis, or synopsis with a novel? A synopsis is usually a plot synopsis, and such an account of a work of fiction doesn't come close to describing what the reader will actually experience in reading the work, and with modern/contemporary fiction it's a total disaster. Even most forms of neorealism don't put much emphasis on plot--writers having sensibly concluded there's no point in competing with movies for the slam-bang scenario--and what would be the point of laboriously describing in a synopsis the details of character and setting that the reader simply has to encounter in the finished work?

Think of the great novels that would necessarily seem silly in synopisis: Catch-22? Gravitys Rainbow? JR? Even Rabbit, Run or The Assistant? All of these books have to be experienced in their unfolding on the page for their qualities of language, form, tone, the intangible elements creating a good novel's distinctive voice. If a novel's essential attributes can be presented in a synopsis, why not just save time and go with the synopsis?

Perhaps--perhaps--some genre fiction in which plot is clearly king could be adequately previewed in a synopsis. But even here, can we be certain that a really good genre novel is going to get published because of what is known about it through a synopsis? Do all the movies made recently from Philip K. Dick's novels (a film version being a kind of synopsis) really capture what Dick's fans love about his books?

Most likely publishing through synopsis is just a way of making the job easier for editors and publishers, allowing them to perpetuate the blockbuster syndrome. In my view, most editors and publishers at the "major" houses don't know what they're doing anyway--certainly they know little about literature--and the "curse of the synopsis" is actually a curse on literature itself.

Preceding Essence

A review of Bernard Henri-Levy's Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century (unfortunately featured at Arts & Letters Daily) that couldn't be more wrong about Sartre.

The reviewer, Brian C. Anderson, offers up this thesis: "What Sartre actually offers us is a paradigmatic example of the leftist mind, in all its dodgy enthusiasms." Putting aside for the moment that Anderson's own account of Sartre's career belies this statement, Sartre was not "paradigmatic" of anything except his own thinking and writing. He's become a handy tool to use in bashing left-of-center thinkers, writers, and ideas (even just poor tepid liberalism), and this to a significant extent through his own mistakes: his later Marxist and Maoist phase was indeed "dodgy," his actions and statements frequently obnoxious and just plain stupid.

But his fiction up to the 1950s, as well as at least Being and Nothingness among his philosophical works, remain essential reading. Even Anderson admits to the value of this work, although his praise is grudging enough. (He is wrong to say that the fiction and drama of this earlier period should be read as "a description not of a permanent truth of man’s fate but of the predicament of a certain kind of modern man." These works precisely describe a "permanent truth of man's fate.") No one who reads Nausea shorn of the preexisting animus expressed by Anderson could say it does not remain a readable and affecting novel.

Moreover, the idea that Sartre's misguided politics were somehow an intrinsic feature of his philosophy is simply incorrect. There's nothing inherently leftist, much less Marxist, about existentialism. If there was, such concerted efforts to hold up Camus as a cold-warrior alternative to Sartre as have been made would not be possible. Nausea and Being and Nothingness were not the products of the "leftist mind." The review's biographical sketch of Sartre itself shows that his leftism was something Sartre came to embrace, not something latent in the earlier books. One could argue that Sartre willfully distorted these early ideas in order to justify his politics, but this was a weakness in the man, not in the ideas.

Anderson doesn't really bother to seriously critique Sartre's work, anyway. He contents himself with ad hominem attacks against both Sartre and Henri-Levy, along with a heavy barrage of adjectival bombast--"nihilistic,""nasty,""relativistic," "atheist." I'd be willing to bet that, despite the attempt by those like this reviewer to bury Sartre, his work will still be read well into the future and he will be considered an original thinker and important writer--both in philosophy and in literature. Perhaps Henri-Levy's biography will help to hasten this process, although one suspects that the possibility it might do so is one reason this review has appeared.

One of the things the review also points up is the inadequacy of using biographies of writers as a way of assessing that writer's body of work. Inevitably the focus of such reviews returns to the limitations and foibles of the man or woman in question, and the work becomes a way of exemplifying these "character" traits. Sartre may have been, at various times, maybe even most of the time, an unpleasant man, but this says nothing about the abiding merits of his best books.

Postmodern Beckett

Two interesting posts at the weblog acdouglas.com--interesting in large part because in tandem the one seems to contradict the other. The first, an "archive of the day" post from 2003, discusses a televison production of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It speaks in glowing terms of the play and of Beckett, an appraisal of this writer with which I agree (although I would also say I think Happy Days is just as good). In essence it discusses Godot as if it were, perforce, a classic.

The second, an account of Douglas's attempt to write a piece of "literary fiction," is interesting enough in and of itself--I particularly like his description of the amount of work that was involved--but what struck me most strongly was this apparently offhand comment: "I loathe -- heartily loathe -- the studied conceits of PoMo fiction, and just as heartily adore the antediluvian form of the omniscient, intrusive, third-person narrator, and a story with beginning, middle, and end, that last preferably with a wrenching twist."

In light of Douglas's admiration of Beckett, one does wonder what he would make of Beckett's own fiction, the work for which, in my opinion, Beckett will be most enduringly remembered even beyond his groundbreaking drama. This fiction, even his earlier work such as More Pricks Than Kicks or Murphy, is characterized by nothing if not its "studied conceits," to the point that Beckett's late work becomes almost nothing but such conceits. Perhaps Douglas likes Beckett's plays but not his fiction (although I must say I find the same sensibility informing both) and at any rate he is thoroughly entitled to his preference for the kind of old-fashioned (as in 19th century) fiction he describes.

But in the final analysis, can we even have literature--presuming we consider fiction to be a form of literature--without "studied conceits" at its core? Does poetry exist without them? Why should fiction not use them as well? Isn't any writing that resists this sort of imaginative transformation something other than "creative" writing, something other than literature? Maybe the postmodernists Douglas loathes take it all too far, forget their putative obligation to "entertain." This is something different, however, from creating carefully considered "conceits" in the first place. And if entertainment is the issue, Beckett himself probably fails this test, perhaps, for many people, in Godot itself.

Somehow the term "postmodern" as applied to contemporary literature has, I think, become conflated with the worldview or "philosophy" of academic postmodernism,--although perhaps not for Douglas, who may understand the distinction perfectly well. But postmodern fiction is not postmodern because it is "leftist," or "relativistic," or "self-reflexive" or any of the other bad things (some of them bad indeed) academic postmodernism has been called. The original postmodern writers--and the term predates its adoption by acdemic scholarship--simply believed themselves to be continuing the challenges to conventional, formulaic thinking about literature begun by the modernists. Loathing them for it seems an overreaction, to say the least.

Wrong Right Thinking

Roddy Doyle thinks James Joyce is overrated. Terry Teachout thinks the same of Virginia Woolf. Doyle's comments can be taken as the know-nothing envy of a mediocre writer in the shadows of another writer of infinitely greater accomplishment. Teachout, however, joins the ranks of other conservative authors and commentators who have recently been expressing their disdain for "modern" art and literature--going back several years to Jacques Barzun and including in the last year or so Paul Johnson and Charles Murray.

I have always considered this conservative scorn for modern art rather peculiar. (I should make it clear that I am myself not a political conservative. Most conservatives would no doubt find many of my political, as opposed to aesthetic, views considerably to the left.) To take literature specifically, a number of great modern writers--Yeats, Eliot, Wyndam Lewis--have themselves been conservatives (certainly not left-wing radicals, although one such radical, John Dos Possos, later became a political conservative in a very prominent way), while others--Joyce, Faulkner, Proust--were at worst apolitical. Indeed, the literary darling of the modern right, Evelyn Waugh, wrote novels that were in no way aesthetically conservative. Moreover, it is precisely the traditional and the representational forms of art (the sort of art these conservatives would prefer, one has to assume) that have most been exploited for left-wing political purposes over the course of the twentieth century--the "proletarian" writers of the thirties, "socialist realism," etc.

To take this point even further, the disdain Dale Peck has now famously declared for writers like Joyce and Faulkner stems from the fact that these writers are not political, not "engaged" sufficiently, but instead players of literary games. One would think that conservatives would value an approach to literature that keeps the emphasis on its literary qualities, on its capacity to reinvigorate the aesthetic impulse, to exemplify imaginative "human accomplishment," to use Murray's phrase. In my mind a truly conservative approach to art would seek to preserve the Western tradition of artistic skill and innovation to which writers like Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf decidedly belong.

Perhaps conservative critics are still reacting to the attempt made in the 1950s and the 1960s to unite radical politics and modernism. This attempt failed, however, if the contempt for high art to be found among left wing academic critics is any measure. These conservatives excoriate such left-wing academic literary critics for their excesses--their politicization of literature that drains it of its aesthetic value. If we take Teachout, Murray, and Johnson as representative of "conservative" criticism of the arts, however, one suspects their real complaint about left-wing political dominance in the academy is that it's not a right-wing dominance. Their views are equally blinkered by politics.

Life's the Thing

I read few memoirs and biographies, perhaps as a reaction against the trendy popularity of both forms over the past 10-15 years, but more significantly because of my sense of the ultimate limitations of the conventional sort of "life writing" represented by memoir and biography as they now exist. I can't really remember the last memoir I was able to read all the way through, and I generally read biographies only of literary and historical figures in whom I already have an interest and even then only after I have become familiar with the writer or thinker's work and have read most of the important commentary on that work.

In a January 11 column posted at Triangle.com , the online site of The News and Observer (link originally found at Arts & Letters Daily), J. Peder Zane criticizes the contemporary memoir for its superficiality and misunderstanding of the possibilities of the memoir. According to Zane, current memoirists

want the best of both worlds: fiction's flexibility and nonfiction's oomph. Their efforts do not represent a moral failure because they think they are pushing the envelope, not breaking the rules. Instead, they signify a failure of the imagination, a lack of the talent or courage required to make their own lives -- their real lives -- compelling.

This is an insightful comment, and I would take it further. It is not only fiction's "flexibility" memoirists seem to be after, but the form and feel of fiction, at least in its conventional, pre-modern/postmodern manifestation. The specific memoir Zane discusses, for example, Susan Shapiro's Five Men Who Broke My Heart, does indeed seem inspired by an idea--the narrator finds five old boyfriends in an attempt to "find out what went wrong"--that could have been transformed into a novel if the author had more trust in and commitment to the literary imagination. That Shapiro further chose to alter the "facts" in her treatment of the subject nevertheless only reinforces the sense that she wanted the narrative economy of fiction but thought that "real life" was preferable to made-up stories. Memoirists seem to occupy a half-world of actual experience only partially submitted to narrative transformation.

If memoirs could be said to now substitute for traditional 1st-person confessional fiction, biographies seem to satisfy the need for the kind of 3rd-person omniscience associated with much 19th century fiction. Many current biographies even replicate the density and the heft of the Victorian "triple-decker." If the memoir provides the intimacy of the 1st-person narrative, perhaps the biography provides a corresponding need for some perspective and dispassionate reflection. In my experience, however, this sort of biography produces (with some exceptions) mostly tedium. A relatively recent biography of Emily Dickinson, for example, which I went to out of the preexisting interest mentioned above, barely got me past the first few pages, which clearly indicated the book was going to go into exhaustive detail about the Dickinson family, in the style of a historical novel, when I was looking for useful information about Dickinson and her work.

Maybe this sort of clutching onto the conventions of realistic narrative should only be expected when serious literary fiction has in many ways abandoned those conventions. (Even minimalism and contemporary neorealism seem blanched and attenuated in comparison to the novels of Hardy or Dickens or Steinbeck.) Memoir and biography keep them alive for some readers, readers who apparently still want them alive. I think it just as plausible, however, to consider the real "failure of imagination" to be among those who retreat from the challenges of imaginative fiction, especially in its more innovative forms, for the established safety of the familiar and the traditional. Certainly the memoir especially should not be taken as a "literary" form simply because it imitates literary forms of the past. Perhaps the more challenging styles of contemporary fiction will inevitably attract a smaller audience (although this need not be the case), but I can't think of it as a service to literature to settle for the tried and true merely because it's more popular.

Relevancy Redux

TEV asks (in a comment below) whether a distinction can be made between the relevant and the merely "topical" in literature. I do acknowledge the difference, and would even admit that sometimes even "topical" fiction can transcend its topicality to be relevant both to contemporaneous and to subsequent readers--The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps. Clearly Steinbeck's novel engaged its readers on a level much deeper than the merely topical, and to some extent continues to do so--except when it is considered primarily as reflective of "social history," the death chamber of literature.

But Steinbeck did not, at least in my view, achieve this feat by striving to be "relevant" first and foremost. Instead, he effectively carried out his relatively simple idea--a family of Okies on the road--to its logical culmination. The story he tells proceeds at least as much as a skillful working out of this literary idea as anything else, and thus it is still able to provide some readers with a satisfying reading experience. If it didn't, it would now be worthwhile only as social history. That it also engages with larger political and historical issues is, in literary terms, a bonus. (That is, if getting your politics from literature is a motive for reading it.)

Stone's Dog Soldiers does not rise to the literary occasion in this sense. It is, at least to this reader, almost purely an attempt to "comment" on the Vietnam War and its effect on American culture. It doesn't have the same mythic resonance as a novel like The Grapes of Wrath and doesn't provide many other readerly pleasures, as I tried to point out in my initial post. And when it's all said and done, who really cares about the "commentary," no matter how relevant, supplied by a novelist? We ought to turn to novels and poems because their authors know how to create good ones, not because they have extra-literary "ideas." (Although some writers undeniably do.)

Reviewing Literature

I would not want my previous posting to leave the impression I think the current dehydrated state of literary criticism is due entirely to the failings of academe. Mainstream "literary journalism" is at least as culpable as the academy in its inattention to what is actually being written by contemporary poets and fiction writers. Few and far between are the general interest publications that feature any extended analysis of contemporary literature, and those that do usually have an underlying ideological agenda to advance in the guise of literary criticism (The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, The New Criterion.) This is partly what makes the current turmoil at the New York Times Book Review so frustrating, since it is one of the few publications to examine poetry and literary fiction without such obvious biases.

Still, criticism of fiction from a political point of view would arguably be preferable to none at all, as long as not only explicitly "political" fiction was chosen for review. At The Nation, for example, one can comb through issue after issue and find almost no reviews of current fiction. Granted, The Nation is a political magazine, but I can recall a time when this magazine did review fiction, even though one knew such reviews would be filtered through the "progressive" political lens. At its online site (current issue February 16), vaguely "literary" reviews are offered of Terry Eagleton's After Theory and Colin McCabe's Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, but neither could be said to concern literature (or in the latter case film) in any meaningful way. The Eagleton review identifies Eagleton's discipline as "literary study," but goes on to discuss politics and cultural theory as if this is of course what a literary scholar studies. The Godard review (by David Thomson, otherwise an excellent film critic), by its nature discusses Godard's "life" (and his politics), although Thomson does attempt a little discussion of Godard's work, as if taking whatever small opportunity being assigned a biography affords him.

Something like this obtains as well at National Review Online, the conservative counterpoint to The Nation, where in fact no books are discussed at all, only politics. Again I seem to remember that this magazine at one time did attempt to engage with current works of literature, although perhaps I am merely waxing nostalgic for my student days when I pored over all new publications for their coverage of literary news. I myself don't agree with the relentlessly political attitude toward culture to be found in both of these publications, but as more broadly "journals of opinion" such magazines could be asked to consider fiction and poetry as aspects of culture more expansively conceived. Couldn't they?

Reclaiming Literature

I do not intend for this weblog to become obsessed with the academy or an excuse for my recurrent attacks on academic criticism, although since I am trained as an academic critic and continue to monitor such criticism, I probably will occasionally comment on developments in this corner of what we might still want to call the literary world. The current posting is occasioned by 3 articles/essays that have appeared recently that do provide an opportunity to assess current attitudes toward literature in the academy.

The January 27 issue of the Christian Science Monitor contains an article, "Theory in Chaos," that purports to reveal that literary theory no longer has the appeal among academic critics it had a decade ago. While this may be true (pure theory has been out of fashion even longer than that), it does not follow that the academy is returning to the study of "literature itself." Certain political orientations (feminism, Marxism) unquestionably still obtain, but these approaches are themselves now put in the service of what is generically called "cultural studies," which increasingly dominates most up-to-speed English departments. Cultural studies approaches literature as just another form of expression (just another kind of "text") to be examined for its cultural and political implications. In other words, literary study in these departments is becoming merely a branch of sociology. The "traditionalists" referred to in the article are no closer to regaining control of the study of literature than they were in the salad days of high theory.

In the January 16 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Peter Brooks reviews Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe. Even more than the title itself, Graff's subtitle says it all: "How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind." I actually have great respect for Gerald Graff, who has been willing to consider the state of higher education, and the place of literature more broadly, with honesty and in plain language. However, even though Graff at least implicitly concedes that the study of literature no longer plays a significant role in the academic curriculum, he doesn't show much concern for it once this has been granted. Instead, his commitment is still to the academy--or to the "life of the mind" more broadly--and he continues to look for ways to reconfigure the curriculum so that English professors, at least, continue to have a role to play. As Brooks points out, Graff now focuses on the teaching of English composition as a way to maintain some integrity in the English curriculum. (Previously he had emphasized the possibility of accenting the "conflicts" among different approaches to literature, but that has not worked out so well.)

In ths same issue of the TLS, Patrick Wormald, a Cambridge don, has an essay, "The Proper Study," that rehearses all of the familiar arguments for retaining the Humanities as a core part of the academic curriculum. Wormald's arguments are all cogent enough, but by now such a brief on behalf of the "elevating" and "humanizing" benefits of the study of the humanities, in this case specifically history, sounds like mere boilerplate. It is precisely this insistence that we get our history and our literature from attending "the university," in fact, that has bleached both endeavors of all visible color. Both Graff and Wormald take for granted that the life of the mind, an interest in history, a love of literature, are all synonymous with occupying a place, as student or as teacher, in the academy. Why should this be so? Inevitably, as has happened with literature, the priorities of academe take precedence over the substance of the "subjects" being taught, so that something like the current mess that is literary study becomes more or less inevitable.

Somehow or other, literature needs to be rescued from those in the academy who have almost tortured it to death. One reason I have become interested in the weblog phenomenon is that it might potentially become part of such an effort, along with the appearance of literary web journals and other literary sites that seek alternative ways of publishing creative and critical work (and perhaps with a move by mainstream literary magazines to revive general interest literary criticism). Literature--embodied in its writers and its readers--has nothing to lose but its soul.

The Price of Relevancy

In his comment on my Statement of Purpose below, Mark of The Elegant Variation asks about the continued "relevancy" of literature, an issue he takes up further in an exchange with Splinters. Here he explicitly wonders about the novel's ability to "shake up society" as it has arguably done in the past. These are perfectly good questions at a time when one could wonder about the future not just of specific literary forms but of written language itself, and I would like to address them in an indirect way by examining one novel in particular.

It was fortuitous that TEV raised the issue while I was reading Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers (1974). Although I have read other of Stone's books, this was the first time I had read this novel, the one that essentially put Stone on the literary map to begin with. I have had a mixed reaction to his other books: I liked A Flag for Sunrise and Outerbridge Reach, disliked both Children of Light and Damascus Gate so much I couldn't finish either. I was able to complete Dog Soldiers, but not without some undesired labor.

The novel narrates a heroin smuggling effort gone disastrously awry, but the story itself is fairly obviously the vehicle for an expose of sorts of the state of American society in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In other words, it is an explicit attempt to be "relevant," to use fiction as a way of critiquing culture. And it is precisely this approach that makes the novel difficult to read now as a work of literature rather than as just a cultural artifact from the period. I would argue that in striving to be relevant, Stone actually created a work destined to seem irrelevant.

The novel does enact an interesting switch in character identification. One expects the smuggler, John Converse, to be the story's protagonist, but ultimately this role is given to the man acting as courier, Ray Hicks, who bears the brunt of the danger and the decadence that has overtaken American society--at least the slice of society the novel portrays, the drug scene, the counterculture--and whose plight seems most compelling. Converse turns out to be a very bland character, as does his wife, who runs off with Hicks only to become hooked on the dope they're trying to sell. Hicks and the wife are pursued by a trio of perfunctorily portrayed crooked cops, and wind up in the desert domain of an equally stereotypical countercultural guru gone to seed. The problem, then, is that all of the characters are assigned a particular role to play in the social picture Stone wants to paint, and, especially now, this makes the novel a less than inspired performance in purely literary terms. Even Hicks comes to seem just the sacrificial lamb the novel needs to make its cultural drama complete.

Further, because the novel's message must take precedence over its methods--otherwise the cultural analysis is blunted--it is presented through highly conventional, or at least very familiar, means. Stone uses a stripped-down version of the "scenic method," in which the narrative voice simply moves the characters around, sets the scenes, occasionally provides some further description. A premium is placed on dialogue, which is deliberately "pungent" and "gritty," an attempt to capture the countercultural patter of the time. One might have accepted this technique readily enough seventy-five years ago, but by now it all seems, at least to this reader, more an effort to duplicate the effects of film, to compete with movies by using the narrative conventions film has assimilated to itself. There are very few episodes in the book, in fact, that could not be transferred directly to film (a movie was made of the book, retitled Who'll Stop the Rain), and frankly the same thing is true of the other Stone novels I have read. He uses this narrative method skillfully enough, but I don't think that novels can become more "relevant" by doing the sorts of things that movies can arguably do better.

If one test of "literature" is that it stands up over time--even a relatively short amount of time--I for one don't believe a novel like Dog Soldiers can accomplish the task. Not that current events and the cultural climate in which one lives should play no role in literary fiction. It is hardly possible to ignore either of these. But I have always found the effort to simply "capture" these events and this climate in fiction beside the point and anyway doomed to make such fiction seem dated in the long run. (This is why Jonathan Franzen's lament over the demise of "social fiction" left me cold.) Better to focus on those things only fiction can do--or unquestionably does better--and to struggle to make the form "relevant" by creating a readership for it based on its strengths rather than the pretense it can compete with movies and the other popular arts.