The Reading Experience

There Are Books, And Then There Are Books

The April 25 issue of The Boston Globe includes in its "Ideas" section an article by Edward Tenner entitled "Rebound." It offers a fairly useful accounting of where the "book industry" now stands in terms both of sales and of its encounter with the technologies of the electronic age. It seems to bring good news about the ability of books to withstand the challenge of these technologies, but there are also plenty of reasons, as the article itself reveals, to wonder what the future of serious writing, as opposed to the fate of "the book" as itself a technological device, will really look like.

The good news is that "books have multiplied partly because they have become less and less important as information storage technologies. As our dependence on them has shrunk, their number and variety has increased, and their status has been if anything enhanced by the attention that the Web has showered on them through online bookselling and discussion groups."

Here I think Tenner makes a very important point. To the extent that we rely less on books simply for "information storage," we might actually see them as even more valuable as the means by which writers (artists, thinkers, real journalists--in other words, creative and serious people) explore the possibilities of books as that form that allows for certain kinds of literary work to be carried out. "Books" might come to be seen as the only medium in which this kind of work can be done. (Whether such books continue to be printed on paper in the currently conventional way seems to me a separate, and frankly not very interesting, issue.)

Teller is surely also correct in pointing out that "the Web" has paradoxically enough elevated the status of books by making them more available and enlivening the discussion of books of all kinds. Those of us who maintain lit blogs might want to call Mr. Teller's attention to the contributions this form is making to the consideration of books and writing, but his larger point is cogent enough. And he is right as well in observing that "books [continue to] survive because technology has made it much easier to write and publish them."

But here the picture starts to seem somewhat cloudier. That more books can be produced doesn't mean they should be. Throughout the last decade, Teller asserts, "More and more people came to believe they could publish and flourish. According to a recent survey, 81 percent of Americans would like to write a book. Some of them are aspiring authors of serious fiction and nonfiction, who have never had an easy road and who now exist in greater numbers than ever, thanks in part to the proliferation of academic writing programs."

Now we all know that if 4 out 5 adult Americans published books, in the vast majority of cases their only readers would be close family members and perhaps the next-door neighbor. (If the author promised to reciprocate.) And it seems overwhelmingly likely that the book most such people really want to write is an autobiography or memoir--some kind of "life story." If the number of "life stories" being published continues to increase, this will only lead, in my view, to the ultimate cheapening of the value and integrity of books as the kind of distinctive medium I described above. And should the "proliferation of academic writing programs" continue without some fundamental change in the goals of such programs, they too will finally help to hasten the decline of genuine "creative writing."

All of which leads us to the truly bad news in Tenner's article:

Were the doomsayers needlessly gloomy? Not entirely. There does seem to be less zest for reading among today's college students than there was in the 1960s and early `70s. In the American meritocracy, general culture ranks far behind job-related learning. In Europe and the United States, demand has not kept up with the expansion of new pages, leading to sagging unit sales. . . .

So the increase in the number of books published doesn't really matter that much after all. What good does it do if no one really wants to read them or, more distressinlgy, knows how to read them, anyway? "Job-related learning" can certainly be done without books. The "zest for reading" is only becoming less zesty given the way literature and writing is currently being taught in most colleges and universities. If anything the oversupply of books can only make these problems worse, since even if you wanted to keep up on your reading, who can do so with so much coming over the transom?

I would like to suggest that the healthiest development in American publishing would be not publishing more books but publishing many fewer. This might result in feeding the American appetite for trash, but the loss of enthusiasm for reading is ultimately going to include the "commercial" authors as well. (It might hit them the hardest of all.) Most best-sellers are written to be movies in the first place, and I think that eventually they'll just be movies. In the meantime "the book" might be preserved as a space for serious writing, a mode of "communication" that might find the right audience for its method of communication. If the Book survives as something with a smaller but more dedicated audience, so be it. At least it survives. And might flourish.

Stanley Elkin

I want to join with Rake's Progress (a blog that just keeps getting better, by the way), in recommending the latest issue of Harper's. In addition to Lance Esplund's excellent piece of art criticism (quoted in my previous post), there's a provocative essay by Richard N. Rosenfeld proposing that the U.S. Senate be abolished. But most of all I want to echo RP as well in calling attention to William Gass's essay on Stanley Elkin.

Gass provides a very good introduction both to The Living End, his essay's immediate subject, and to the nature of Elkin's work in general. He concludes with some reflection on the ultimate decline of his friend's health (the two were colleagues for many years at Washington University in St. Louis) that paradoxically explains a great deal about the overpowering energy and vitality of Elkin's fiction.

Although Elkin has been dead for less than a decade, it's my sense that already his work does need this kind of introduction for readers who did not follow his career while it was still ongoing. Elkin has many passionate admirers, but ultimately they probably comprise only a coterie. This is not enough for a writer as prodigious in his gifts as Elkin, whose books are of the kind that can make the act of reading a transcendent experience.

It's hard for me to avoid such superlatives when discussing Elkin's work. He's probably the postwar American writer I most admire, a writer who indeed shows us how prose can become poetry. But he's also damn entertaining. Probably no other writer (with the possible exception of Dickens) makes me laugh out loud so often (and so loudly) as Stanley Elkin. When trying to get across what Elkin has to offer, it's probably best just to quote him.

This is from The Franchiser, perhaps Elkin's greatest novel--although The Living End might indeed be a good book for those unacquainted with Elkin to pick up first. Here Ben Flesh, literally a "franchiser," is trying to explain why he'll need to shut down one of his businesses (an H & R Block office):

"Finish your case load. Take twice your commission. Triple. We're closing shop, we're going out of business, everything must go."

"But--"

"I told Evelyn Wood the same. What, you think you're a special case? I told Evelyn Wood, I told her, 'Eve, there's trouble in Canada, in the forest. The weather's bad, the stands of trees are lying down. There's no wood in the woods, Wood. The pulp business is mushy. Where's the pulp to come from for the speed readers to read? They're reading so fast now they're reading us out of business. Publishing's in hot water. Magazines are folding, newspapers. (What, you never heard of folded newspapers?) If we want to keep up with the times we have to slow down, go back to the old ways. We have to teach them to move their lips.'"

Confessions of an Aesthete

The latest burst of debate about the relationship between politics and art is wending its way around the literary blogosphere. (Perhaps the locus of the current debate is this post by Mark Sarvas--itself a well-expressed bit of reflection.) This is of course a highly charged subject, one that frequently applies a heavy jolt to those who touch it, since it quickly gets to the core assumptions many readers bring to the act of reading works of literature. Better in most cases not to question these assumptions too strongly, rather than risk embroiling literature in the very dispute over politics that I, for one, always want to avoid in the first place.

In the present round of commentary, however, one claim in particular requires some response. Scribbling Woman makes the following assertion:

. . .all writing — all human endeavour — is political in one way or another. It could not be anything but, as we are all political creatures who exist in the world. The absolute disdain for politics of the aesthete is in itself a political choice. Of course, to a large extent when we are talking about artistic products, given our culture's continuing Romantic hangover, the inherent politics are not always overt or even conscious. But that does not mean that they are not there.

My criticism is not directed primarily at the author of this passage. Unfortunately, she repeats what has become a mantra chanted incessantly by many current academic critics, an invocation of "politics" so all-encompassing as to make any disagreement with it almost literally impossible (anything you say is "political") and so final in its judgment as to safely keep anyone who wishes to study literature rather than its political exploitation decidedly in his/her marginal place.

I'm perfectly willing to accept the label of "aesthete," although I know it's meant to be a term of horrible abuse. Speaking as one of these aberrant creatures, I will state categorically that my expectation that art will be "aesthetic" has no political content at all. None. It's not a disdain for politics, just a recognition that politics and aesthetics aren't the same thing. I have political views about politics and aesthetic views about art. You can mix the two if you wish, but don't tell me that in refusing to do so I'm doing it anyway. And I don't have any political views that are covert or unconscious. They're all out in the open (in the appropriate forum), and I happen to feel strongly about them. The assertion that they must be unconscious is just Freudianism smuggled into politics.

This totalizing view of the scope of the political is itself finally just a choice, a preference for politics over art, a way of maintaining that politics is the most important subject with which a serious person ought to occupy him/herself. It's a view that's now pandemic in the academy. If we are all "political creatures who exist in the world," are we not also "sociological creatures," "historical creatures," "cultural creatures," "economic creatures"? Such abstractions are so cosmically extended as to be meaningless. And to say that politics is everything, of course, is ultimately to say that politics is nothing in particular. If by saying everyone is "political" we mean everyone has his/her interests all well and good, but this is not the way "political" is used in the argument that all art is political art.

Frequently various "thinkers" are here invoked as authorities who have supposedly "established" that politics pervades everything (Marx or Baudrillard or Althusser or whomever). I've read these writers too, and to the extent they say that art is always political they don't know what they're talking about. They trivialize art and politics alike, and collapsing the distinction between the two is actually a way of avoiding thinking. (Although it's often the uninformed distortions of these thinkers that are really to blame.) No matter how many such thinkers are piled atop one another, the belief that "all writing is political in one way or another" is just a way of justifying one's own preference for politics and polemics over literature. I understand why some people prefer these things (although most can't seem to understand why I don't), but simply repeating the formula that all writing is political doesn't make it so.

There's nothing "Romantic" about my status as as aesthete. I think in fact that it's quite pragmatic. There's art and there's politics. "Political art" does exist, but it's not all art. Sometimes when we read works of literature we have an "aesthetic" experience, sometimes we can limit this experience to whatever political implications we can squeeze out of it. I think this latter is a very impoverished concept of reading, but I would. To say finally that all human endeavor is political (including the effort to create art) would be a pretty sad commentary on human potential, if it were true.

Caution!

Ron Silliman, a stalwart champion of what he calls "post-avant" writing, nevertheless has problems with what he calls in an equally colorful way "retro-avant-gardism," particularly the sort of poetry "that tends to employ new technology in order to generate post-rational texts, ranging from tossing dice to the latest in flash technology. I often feel that such writing is too in love with techné & not with the text, sort of an avant-gardism at all costs strategy. . . ." To put it another way, this kind of writing takes the "experimental" writer's concern with technique and reduces it to an expression of technology. This kind of approach, Silliman suggests, "is best practiced in moderation, for what it can teach about the limits of meaning & intention, not as the central project of anyone’s work."

I am and have long been myself a partisan of "experimental" or "innovative" fiction (choose your adjective), but, like Silliman, have always been less enamored of work that literally "exceeds the page," that takes the search for new forms of literary expression over the borders of literature itself into new media altogether. ("Multi-media," this endeavor was once called.) It is for this reason that I have never really been able to see the point of "hypertext" fiction--except, perhaps, as Silliman has it, as a way of instructing oneself about the "limits" of literary experiment, something that can be brought back to "the text" as a refreshment of purpose.

Even when a writer I greatly admire, Robert Coover, became rather a champion of hypertext, I just couldn't bring myself to take the thing seriously as literature because clearly enough it was no longer literature but something else, a new form of expression entirely, with it own separate, newly developing conventions and ambitions. I had no problem with the idea that this new form might coalesce into a new artistic mode of its own, in the same way cinema had done this, eventually, but since works of literature are aesthetic constructions of language, the spatial and visual qualities added by hypertext just seemed a different kind of practice. (After his initial experiments in hypertext, Coover himself came back with two of his best print fictions, Ghost Town and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, so perhaps the kind of reinvigoration I mentioned did occur in his case.)

Perhaps this is the bedrock of tradition that still underlies my more overt enthusiasms for experimental fiction. Once you abandon that tradition completely, you're no longer experimenting with the forms that interested you in the first place. There's not even anything left to challenge. John Barth once wrote that he was "of the temper that chooses to rebel along traditional lines." He preferred "the kind of art. . .that requires expertise and artistry as well as bright aesthetic ideas and/or inspiration." This Barthian kind of experimental fiction in turn could invoke a number of oxymoronic descriptions: "conservative radical"; "cautious iconoclast"; "pragamatic revolutionary." (I especially like the last one.) But in some ways it's only in the contradictions between these terms that actual experiment with literary form can take place. Or at least that's a way of thinking about it.

High Culture?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attention Please

Notwithstanding this rather hysterical response to it, the Camille Paglia essay recently featured at Arts & Letters Daily is really very good. It's in the more scholarly mode of Sexual Personae, and is well worth reading. Here are her main points:

Decade by decade since the 1960s, popular culture, with its stunning commercial success, has gained strength until it now no longer is the brash alternative to organized religion or an effete literary establishment: it is the culture for American students, who outside urban centers have little exposure to the fine arts...

Interest in and patience with long, complex books and poems have alarmingly diminished not only among college students but college faculty in the U.S. It is difficult to imagine American students today, even at elite universities, gathering impromptu at midnight for a passionate discussion of big, challenging literary works like Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. . .

Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick's epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space. The new generation, raised on TV and the personal computer but deprived of a solid primary education, has become unmoored from the mother ship of culture. . . The ironically self-referential or overtly politicized and jargon-ridden paradigms of higher education, far from helping the young to cope or develop, have worsened their vertigo and free fall. Today's students require not subversion of rationalist assumptions—the childhood legacy of intellectuals born in Europe between the two World Wars—but the most basic introduction to structure and chronology. Without that, they are riding the tail of a comet in a media starscape of explosive but evanescent images. . . .

Since Paglia herself has been among the most vocal champions of "popular culture" among academics and intellectuals, the essay can almost be read as a kind of apology for her own excesses in encouraging us to "become unmoored from the mother ship of culture," or at least as an expression of second thoughts about her own possible collusion with the powers that be in the academy in "subverting" literature and the fine arts.

Anyone who has tried to teach literature to either high school or college students over the past 15 years knows, however, that she is correct in her description of these students' capacity to read not just long books but any works of literature that require careful attention. It is also true that the prevailing models of literary study actively encourage this corruption of reading by dismissing, both implicitly and explicitly, what gets called "elite" culture as the encoded propaganda of the Oppressor. Students are assured that they don't need to take art and literature seriously because it will only hurt their feelings, or worse. (This is itself an inherently patronizing approach, since it assumes that only the tenured among us need to consider such works in the first place in order to determine they are indeed bad for us.)

I don't think computers have much to do with this state of affairs, although television certainly does. Computers--the internet more generally--requires the active agency of its users, and there's nothing wrong with sampling some of what art and literature have to offer for the first time in cyberspace rather than in a museum or classroom. Television, on the other hand, is entirely passive and does promote the kind of impatience with anything that can't be reduced to its demands that Paglia discusses.

Paglia then goes on to describe the way she tries to introduce her own students to visual art, and although her approach seems reasonable enough, others more competent to assess it would have to do so. I'm also not sure that this kind of remedial, catch-up work will in the long run be very effective. It may be too late. My impression of much of the current discourse on art, music, and literature, even among professed enthusiasts, is that all of these arts have gotten too "difficult," too "cerebral," too far away from what "common people" like. In discussions of literature, much of this criticism seems to take writers to task for not writing books that could easily be made into movies and tv shows. If the experience of reading a novel is ultimately judged by whether it seems like watching television sitcoms, then there's no reason to read (or write) novels at all.

In the response to which I linked above, Paglia's analysis is labeled "cultural conservatism." It is only conservative if we stick to the core meaning of the term--to "conserve." Given that presently in American culture there's not much left of either the ability or the desire to experience any works of art in a substantive way, conserving it is now probably beside the point. Bringing art and literature back into the lives of people of any age--or at least the knowledge of how to do that for themselves--would actually be a fairly radical act. It's the partisans of the current media culture and the mavens of academic criticism who have become the "cultural conservatives."

Let's Review

It's always good when a reviewer voluntarily reveals his/her biases or preconceptions. In last Sunday's Boston Globe, Caroline Leavitt says this of Mark Dunn's Ibid: A Life--A Novel in Footnotes:

The writing's playful and witty, and there's a good bit of inventive silliness to the tale. Young Jonathan misinterprets a wink as a sign that a young girl likes him, when actually it's a spasm. There's a wry running joke that all the loves of Jonathan's life are killed in freak Boston accidents, including the Great Molasses Flood. It's all sometimes dazzling fun, but the truth is, I wasn't lost in the book the way I wanted to be. I was always aware of the writer's sprightly mind at work here, when what I wanted was the feeling that his characters were real, that they might knock on my door any second and ask for a cup of tea

Ms. Leavitt is of course entitled to her preferences, but, really, what is a reader to do with this? The reviewer refers to what seem like good qualities in the novel, but then in effect dismisses them. What if you are a reader who actually would enjoy a novel that's "witty," "inventive," has good jokes, is "dazzling fun," and reveals "the writer's sprightly mind at work"? Should you then disregard the reviewer's judgment that the novel lacks "real" characters and conclude this book is probably rather promising, despite the reviewer's ultimate "thumbs down"?

And what of this?:

What do we want from our books? Of course it depends on the reader, but personally, I think that new shouldn't just be novelty. Heart should override mind. And always, always, the characters -- be they investment lawyer or circus attraction -- should let us into their souls.

Disregarding the illogic of the claim that the new shouldn't be novel, isn't it just patently untrue that all good novels "always, always" feature characters whose "souls" we enter? Can't some good novels emphasize plot instead? Shouldn't some novelists be allowed to be "witty" and "inventive," qualities in some cases that might override the creation of character in the first place? Aren't novels that are primarily comic almost necessarily limited in their capacity to create "soulful" characters? (Such characters are by the requirements of comedy inherently two-dimensional.)

My problem is really not so much with Caroline Leavitt, who may like or dislike whatever she wants. But why does the Boston Globe print such a review? Of course reviews are matters of opinion (sometimes), and various opinions ought to be expressed. But the statements made in a review like this are enormously sweeping, to the point that they finally make the review almost impossible to use in any serious way to decide whether to read Ibid or not. If we don't share the reviewer's assumptions, are we likely to actually enjoy this novel? If we do share them, will we dislike it because it's too inventive and "fun"? The review fails in its presumably assigned task of informing readers about the book under review.

Or is this indeed the task of a book review? If lit blogs hope to devote more space to reviewing books rather than just linking to print reviews (as some have recently intimated they want to do), perhaps some rethinking of both the purpose and the form of the book review is in order. Is a book review primarily informative or evaluative? If the former, then the greatest hazard is that it will become a kind of book report, a record of the fact that you read and can summarize the assigned book. If a review should be primarily evaluative, then the danger is that, given the space usually alloted to book reviews, you'll wind up with something like Caroline Leavitt's review--all unsupported assertion with little effort to justify the underlying assumptions.

To indulge in my own very sweeping statement, my general impression of book reviewing in most print publications, both newspapers and magazines, is that it includes too little description of what the works reviewed actually do, what they are (aside from simple plot summaries), and too much glib evaluation. Partly this is a result of the limited and shrinking space being given to the consideration of books and writing at all. Partly it is the consequence of too often assigning reviews to reviewers who seemingly have little acquaintance with or, frankly, much interest in literature in the first place. It's probably also a consequence of the general American propensity to have an opinion without feeling much need to support it.

Blogs can be relativey free of such constraints. (Although others, such as screen fatigue, do come into play.) I don't mean to suggest that reviews of books or poems or plays or films should be free of evaluation, by any means. But literary weblogs could in effect show more respect than is often shown in the mainstream press for the variety of work being published by both small and large presses, in print and online, through devoting a little more time to describing what seem to be the goals and ambitions of the writers so published, not just expressing unexamined opinions. (At the same time, some indulgence in pointed commentary, if not snark, can be "dazzling fun" and the right to do this ought to be preserved.)

This kind of descriptive analysis could be done in numerous ways and with the kind of rhetorical freedom the blog form allows. Long, rambling essays are not really what I have in mind--although sometimes these can be useful, too. Devising methods of discussing books and literature that take them seriously in an at least implicit way would be limited only by the imagination of the blogger. In a recent post James Tata writes that blogs (or at least his blog) should not seek to be "a space for definitive judgements that better belong in print somewhere." I like James Tata's blog very much, but here I think he's wrong. Why should "definitive judgments" be reserved for print? As often as not, the definitive judgment turns out to be of the sort exemplified in Caroline Leavitt's review--larely because "judgment" is understood in simplistic like it/don't like it terms. What are most print publications doing for books and serious writing now that justifies leaving to them the job of literary arbiter?

The book review is itself a literary form that is too important to be left to the whims of newspaper and magazine editors. Its potential needs to be rediscovered.

Eliminating Scam

The current issue of Poets & Writers prints a very pointed query from a reader:

I just tabulated the cost for entry fees listed online from the May/June 2003 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. If I submitted work to every contest, it would cost me $727 in entry fees alone. Then there is the cost of round trip postage, the cost of duplication, the cost of envelopes, the cost of paper, the cost of computer printer cartridges, and the cost of waiting for the never-to-happen response that one might expect from such an immense fiscal contribution to the publishers. Is the issue of entry fees something that P&W accepts without question?

The editor provides a very evasive answer that essentially indicates P&W does indeed accept this practice without question. Since Poets & Writers is a publication that really exists to serve the interests of publishers and writing programs, not poets and writers, this answer is not surprising.

What is most evasive about Therese Eiben's response is that it fails to address the ethical issues raised by the very existence of these "contests." While no individual literary magazine or journal is necessarily attempting to dupe gullible potential entrants (although editors surely can't be so naive as to think there are no such gullible entrants, who from the start have no chance of winning), collectively this whole enterprise is nonetheless a colossal scam.

The popularity of these contests has risen to such an extent that probably a majority of existing literary magazines sponsors one. It is pretty clearly a way to raise a little cash for an endeavor that doesn't otherwise produce much. That literary magazines, which exist on the margins of the publishing "industry" but nevertheless often provide first publications for writers who go on to have considerable success in this industry, would have to resort to such devices is to an extent understandable, and ought to be occasion for shame among those in the "industry" (if they were capable of it), and for bitter disappointment among those who think American culture as a whole actually values serious writers and writing. Some worthy writers no doubt win these contests, but other worthy writers just as surely don't, and a culture that took literature seriously wouldn't require its aspiring writers to undergo such a humiliating (as well as expensive) dance of subjection.

But the editors and patrons of literary magazines still might feel some compunction about staging these contests. There probably are some writers who spend, if not the thousands of dollars tabulated by the letter writer, a great deal of money they really can't afford to spend just to get themselves published. (The cost of simply submitting manuscripts can easily run into the hundreds of dollars.) Does everyone have to stage a contest? Does anyone? Couldn't some of this money be more profitably spent publishing more issues and thus more writers? Couldn't the publishing "industry" help defray the cost of printing the little magazines? Couldn't the universities housing many of these magazines be more generous?

And couldn't Poets & Writers be honest and admit it's all ethically dubious? Or would this go too far in the direction of actually caring about poets and writers?

Perhaps the proliferation of online literary magazines will help to alleviate this problem. Perhaps the less onerous costs of publishing poetry and fiction in this form will make the scandal of these contests moot. In the meantime, my advice would be to not enter any such contest, even if you think you can win. Refuse to be scammed.

The Critic as Hanging Judge

It would seem that a significant number of people whose opinions I otherwise respect, including not a few literary webloggers, have great admiration for the British literary critic James Wood. (Or at least they profess to admire him--one could wonder whether some of those who have extolled his critical virtues aren't trying to stave off some of the critical barbs he might at some point hurl in their direction.) I would like to say I share the high opinion of Wood so many others have expressed, since in some ways he does continue a tradition of informed, wide-ranging literary criticism not tied to the careerist norms of the academy that desperately needs to be revived. But I just can't. Ultimately his reviews and essay-reviews are detrimental not just to the cause of literary criticism but to the continued appreciation of the possibilities of literature itself.

Last year in a review of Wood's novel The Book Against God, Wyatt Mason made some telling points against Wood as a critic, some of them similar to those I will make here, so I would recommend reading Mason's essay for an even more extensive discussion of the topic. However, I am going to use Wood's most recent review, of John Le Carre's Absolute Friends in The New Republic, to illustrate my particular problems with Wood's criticism. I should say that I am neither a fan nor a detractor of Le Carre. I have read a few of his books and found them entertaining enough. I would not be among those Wood takes after for elevating Le Carre above his merits to the status of "literary" writer. Perhaps thus I am even better able to see the limitations of Wood's approach to both criticism and literature than if he were attacking a writer I greatly esteem.

I will also say that I do not question Wood's intelligence, his preparation to be a critic, or his motives. I think he believes his approach to literature is the correct approach. (And unlike Dale Peck, Wood's harsh judgments are usually backed up with reasons, even reasons that have something to do with the book at hand.) I simply think that this approach exemplifies what's finally wrong with the kind of literary criticism he attempts to perpetuate.

It would indeed be easy to maintain that Wood sees literature as a kind of religion-substitute, a charge Wood has himself acknowledged and to an extent accepted. But it's not so much questions of religious belief or "philosophy" more generally that Wood wants to find addressed in works of "serious" fiction. It's that he wants to take literature seriously in the same way the devoted take their religion. Just as they often believe their religious tradition gets things right in a particular way, Wood wants to believe there's one true path to writing a serious novel, one which makes all other paths not just more full of obstacles but actual roads to perdition. Wood's attacks on writers like Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon can be seen as motivated by this larger belief.

In the case of Le Carre, his first sin is to have written genre fiction. Although Wood tries not to condemn the whole enterprise outright in this review, it's clear enough he has no use for it. We can't even say that in reading Le Carre we learn anything about spying because, Wood declares, "much of Le Carre's detail was entirely invented, including the terminology, and there were old intelligence hands who complained that his picture of the service, while intended as an anti-James Bond demystification, was itself a species of romance." Not only is Le Carre a genre writer, then, but he writes. . .fiction.

Next Wood goes after LeCarre's reputed "political complexity" (which of course Wood thinks is anything but):

. . .In fact, instead of analyzing the political complexities of the Cold War, Le Carre's books narrate the functional complexities of the political complexities; that is, they show us, mainly, that the two espionage systems often worked in matching ways. This insight then locks the mazy plots in place, essentially closing the door on further analysis: the two-sided mirror dazzles further curiosity. And so the form of the books tends toward a self-cancelling amnesty, each side a little shabbier at the end of the story than it was at the start.

I sure hope I am not alone in finding this passage mostly gibberish. To be fair, it has probably come out this way because Wood is trying to hide, as he does through most of the review, what he really finds objectionable about Le Carre: he doesn't like the man's politics, especially the "anti-American" turn his politics has seemed to take of late.

We are told that Le Carre "can write very well," even in this latest book, which Wood clearly despises. However, after quoting a passage of ostensibly good writing, and even explaining why some might find it good, Wood eventually concludes that Le Carre's "prose announces, in effect: 'here is what the world looks like according to the conventions of realism.' It is a civilized style, but nonetheless a slickness unto death." Apparently even what Le Carre actually does well he doesn't do well at all. (Or, he writes well very badly.)

Which brings us to the real nub of the issue, the failing of Le Carre's that is most debilitating, the overriding purpose novels must embody that Le Carre doesn't understand. In his essay, Wyatt Mason observes that ""How somebody felt about something' is precisely what Wood wants from a novel; reaching into character is what he expects. Consciousness is the ultimate freedom, and its honest representation in fiction is what draws us into sympathy with the created, not with its creator. This is the hallmark of the work of those authors. . .for whom Wood has the greatest regard." Of Le Carre Wood says: [His] character portraits are not themselves complex, merely complex relative to the rolled thinness of most characters in contemporary thrillers." Le Carre's characters, like those of Hemingway and Graham Greene, "are, paradoxically, alert but always blocking the ratiocinative consequences of their alertness. Such characters are not minds but just voyeurs of their own obscurities."

Frankly this is just a very pompous way of saying that Le Carre--and by extension almost all of the writers who come up short in Wood's estimation--does not employ the technique of "psychological realism," the revelation of consciousness that seems to be for Wood the most important legacy of the modernist fiction writers. To this extent Wood is stuck in the early twentieth century, taking what was indeed at the time an innovation in the presentation of character and a step beyond the realism of earlier writers as the final word about what novels ought properly to do. Clearly it fulfills his own needs as a reader of fiction, filling in whatever void was left when he abandoned religion, but to write this out as a prescription for what novels must be like for everyone else seems hardly tenable, just as other, differing prescriptions (for "plot," for "clarity," even for "originality") shrinkwrap fiction into easily storable commodities but don't allow for the flexibility of the form.

Wood is sometimes compared to the academic critic F.R. Leavis, and indeed Wood's prose does have some of the smug lecture hall certainty and harsh evaluative tone of Leavis at his worst. But there's very little in Wood's writing that conveys an enjoyment of literature (sometimes a failure of Leavis's as well), even of those literary artists he appears to admire. Furthermore, Wood's own criticism is very seldom enjoyable--it creates the tense atmosphere suitable to a hanging judge. (Note how seldom he reviews writers he actually does admire--and certainly very few current writers, unless they're to be sent to the gallows--preferring the already indicted malefactors.)

Wood also shares something with the "moral critics" such as the poet-critic Yvor Winters or Lionel Trilling (or even Irving Howe.) With all of them, literature is a rather sour and sober affair, the critic its grave taskmaster. I will take Wood's word for it that Absolute Friends is spoiled by the inserted political rhetoric he describes, as fiction usually is by such propagandizing. But one can't help but feel that by the end of the review Wood has converted what should be an aesthetic flaw into a flaw of the author's own character ("this humanly implausible and ideologically enraged novel"--enraged at George W. Bush). If Le Carre is not exactly judged to be a bad man, he is judged to be a "bad writer" solely because he has ideas different than James Wood's, ideas about the world and about fiction. To this extent, Wood shows himself to be a remarkably intolerant critic, just as "ideological" in his way as Le Carre is accused of being.

If this is the remaining legacy of the "great tradition" of British literary criticism (or American, for that matter), better that we should refuse it.