The Reading Experience

Heavy Burdens

I do not read the Wall Street Journal and know nothing about Eric Gibson, the features editor of its "Leisure and Arts" section. My comments are restricted to this article (May 28) about the recent fire in a London warehouse that destroyed a large collection of contemporary art. Neither do I know anything about the specific art works for which Gibson expresses his particular scorn (the usual kind of philistine skepticism), although I will say it's an especially cheap device to pick out just two of over one hundred works and implicitly hold them to be representative of the whole.

What's really objectionable about this article is the attitude it betrays toward not just contemporary art but toward the nature of art in general, an attitude, I'm afraid, shared by all too many self-appointed arbiters of contemporary art (and literature) given all too much space in "mainstream" newspapers and magazines. (In this case I am able to say that it is an attitude most academic critics have abandoned, although in many cases an equally extreme and unthinking attitude in the other direction has been adopted instead.) This view of art is pretty much encapsulated in this statement: "It's not that I think incinerating art is a good thing. It's just that the work of these artists--as of all contemporary artists--is too new and untested to have acquired the cultural heft that makes it seem an indispensable part of one's existence. I regret the fire happened, but I can't quite see it as a body blow to civilization."

The key words here are "cultural heft" and "civilization." According to the definition of "art" apparently being used by Gibson, art is about "culture," and a work of art becomes a part of culture by acquiring "heft." It would indeed seem that a work of art doesn't necessarily reveal this heft upon initial examination since new art is too "untested" to have it. It's a weight that, presumably, subsequent critcs load onto it. (Now you know why all those "great works" of art and literature you were exposed to in school seemed so heavy on the spirit.) Related to this is the art work's relationship to "civilization." Civilization, one has to conclude, is that ponderous institution wherein all of that great mass of art can be stored, and such lightweight fare as was being kept in that flimsy warehouse burned through lack of time to bulk up.

A little later in the article Gibson also pronounces on the role of critics: "Criticism used to be about detachment, discernment and making rigorous judgments about artistic quality. Critics used to refrain from applying the word 'masterpiece" to any work less than a few hundred years old." Putting aside for now the questionable assumptions behind the description of what criticism "used to be," there seems an elemental lapse in logic here. How can criticism be about "making rigorous judgments about artisitic quality" if you have to wait around several hundred years to say anything at all?

Art is not for culture or for civilization. Art and literature are for the enjoyment and edification of people, individual people, artists, writers, viewers, and readers who live now and can't really hold off until someone three centuries from now says its okay to call it art. "Civilization" may not have suffered from the London fire, but it's quite likely that potential viewers of this art have suffered a loss, the loss of a possible experience of some worthy art that can't be replaced by going to a museum to look once again at certified "masterpieces." Not to mention the loss felt by the artists themselves, which is real enough despite the "perspective" Gibson appeals to at the end of his article.

Nor is true that criticism has always been about "detachment, discernment and making rigorous judgments about artistic quality." Detachment and discernment (the latter predicated on the former) were indeed qualities valued by certain kinds of modern critics, but they were mostly attempting to show how works of art and literature that seemed alien and unconventional (not unlike the works Mr. Gibson disparages) could be judged artistically accomplished if you regarded them in the appropriate ways. Actually very few of these critics were known for "rigorous judgments" about inferior art, as the consideration of such works added nothing to their broader goal of enlarging our understanding of what "art" could be. Only certain newpaper-based critics interpret the requirements of their job in this way.

We'd all be much better off if critics in Eric Gibson's position, able to discuss art with a relatively wide audience, would forget about culture and civilization and making rigorous judgments about quality and stick to describing and explaining the works of art they actually encounter. Consigning it all to the "bonfire of the vanities" only makes them look silly.

Updike

I am making my way through John Updike's The Early Stories. The book has been patiently waiting its turn on my To Read book carousel, its very heft causing me to turn right by it several times in favor of something smaller, something less demanding of my fully engaged attention. Reading a writer like Updike, a writer for whom language is more than a transparent covering on the "reality" it evokes, always requires one's willing attention, or there's no point in reading him at all. To make your way through 103 stories and 828 pages of Updike, however, makes one hesitate before finally summoning the commitment to go ahead with it.

I have read many of these stories before, but Updike has re-arranged them in the way in which he presumably now wants them to be read, the arrangement that will convey most felicitously what they have to offer us. The fresh connections this arrangement makes between the stories, whether written as early as 1953 or as late as 1975, must surely also make them, if not more meaningful, at least meaningful in a different way than when they are read in isolation, or even in their original published context. Thus I do intend to read the book as it is presented to us, from first story to last.

However, I also intend to pause after reading each section or two (there are eight sections, each containing 10-15 stories) and discuss the stories assigned to these sections, perhaps as much for my own benefit in thinking through my response to Updike's writing as for the opportunity to share my responses in a blog post. Those not interested in Updike's fiction--and there are perfectly good reasons why one might not have had a positive response to Updike, on which more later--can of course simply skip these posts. However, I do hope that others wishing to know more about this writer, or to check his/her own responses with mine, might find something of value in this discussion and the ones to follow.

The first section of the book is dedicated to the "Olinger stories," written between 1954 and 1961 and clearly based on Updike's own youth in Shillington, Pennsylvania. I have never really thought of Updike as an autobiographical writer per se. Although much of his fiction is clearly anchored by his own experiences first in Pennysylvania and ultimately in Massachusetts, many of his books are not autobiographical at all, taking as their subjects characters completely unlike John Updike--The Coup, Roger's Version, The Witches of Eastwick, In the Beauty of the Lilies, the Bech books. Even Rabbit Angstrom is obviously not an autobiographical character, however much some of his responses to his situation and his experiences might have come from Updike's familiarity with his mileu and his background.

The Olinger stories, however, are relentlessly autobiographical, so much so that when taken together their value as literary art, as fictional creations with full aesthetic integrity, is somewhat less than I expected it to be. One thing that even this initial section of The Early Stories begins to demonstrate is the price to be paid by a writer determined to survive simply as a writer, to have a "career" in fiction writing and not to either martyr himself in his poverty or take up a supporting career as professor or editor. The consequence is that some of the work is written as work, stories written to pay the bills or keep one's presence up but not necessarily because they were otherwise stories that just had to be written. Several of the stories in this section seem to me to be of this kind, written to first establish Updike's presence and then to help the writer earn his keep. There's nothing morally objectionable about this, but stories like the first one, "You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You," a coming-of-age vignette similar to Joyce's "Araby," but much less accomplished, or "In Football Season," an equally slight reminiscence of high school football games, are perhaps interesting enough to read in charting the development of John Updike's career but surely won't stand the test of time as short stories.

As a whole, these stories revolve around the same set of characters, given different names in some of the stories, but clearly the same nevertheless: a young man with a tendency to brood and to speculate about what his life will be like, as well as with some latent talent as a writer or artist, his parents, the mother somewhat frustrated with her lot but also capable of enjoying life, a father stuck in a low-paying job as high school teacher and given to a fair amount of brooding of his own, which he hides in a facade of cheerfulness, sometimes one or more elderly grandparents, the boy's real connection to the past, the history of the community in which he lives. This is all clearly enough a version of John Updike's own family and their travails, of his own trajectory from small-town boy to aspiring writer. But the effort seems so intensely focused on recreating these circumstances and tracing that trajectory that one finishes these stories thinking more about John Updike's life and his desire to portray it in fiction than about the achievements of the stories in literary terms.

Probably the best-known story among the group of Olinger stories is "Pigeon Featherss," the title story of Updike's second collection, published in 1962. This is also a coming-of-age story (Updike seems fond of this conceit), in which the Updike character, in this case named David Kern, is seized with a kind of premature existential crisis. "Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. . . ." No doubt this is as well one of the earliest stories in which religious faith becomes a foregrounded theme, a theme that has led many critics to label Updike in part a "religious" writer. David's crisis is resolved in the story's conclusion, when, after ridding the family's barn of a group of pesty pigeons, David looks at one of the dead pigeons and "lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a contolled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him." David buries the pigeons, and as he finishes "crusty coverings were lifted from him" and "he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever." One wants to think there is some irony in this, that it is not being suggested that the slaughter of "these worthless birds" (pigeon as Christ figure?) is not necessary to save David's soul, but I, for one, have to conclude that this revelation is meant to be taken precisely as such, the pleasing lyricism of the passage notwithstanding.

In my opinion, the two best stories in this section are "The Persistence of Desire" and "The Happiest I've Been." In the former, the Updike stand-in, here called "Clyde Behn," returns to Olinger after a number of years and meets a former girlfriend. There is clearly unfinished business between the two of them, although they both understand why their relationship had to end. The ex-girlfriend, it seems, is willing to betray her husband for a sexual encounter with Clyde and leaves Clyde with a note: "The glimpse, through the skin of paper, of Janet's old self quickened and sweetened his desire more than touching her had. He had tucked the note back into his shirt pocket and its stiffness there made a shield for his heart. In this armor he stepped into the familiar street. The maples, macadam, shadows, houses, cars were to his violated eyes as brilliant as a scene remembered: he became a child again in this town, where life was a distant adventure, a rumor, an always imminent joy." The tone of regret and sorrow for things passed that runs through all of these stories is perhaps most effectively sounded here, an effect Updike achieves entirely through the aptness of phrasing and the rythmic ease of his language. "The Happiest I've Been" is an equally quiet story in which the narrator ("John") is a college sophomore about to drive back to school with a local friend. Before leaving they stop off at a party where the narrator meets up with some old acquaintances and eventually winds up sitting in a kitchen with a girl he doesn't know well but with whom he has a tender moment nevertheless: "She drew my arm around her shoulders and folded my hand around her bare forearm, to warm it. The back of my thumb fitted against the curve of one breast. Her head went into the hollow where my arm and chest joined; she was terribly small, measured against your own body. Perhaps she weighed a hundred pounds." This is all that happens, but it makes the narrator "happy" that she "had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me," as does his friend, Neil, as the narrator later drives away from Olinger. (We have also learned that "after we arrived in Chicago I never saw him again either.")

The wistful quality that many of these stories seem to be after comes through most affectingly in these two stories because they're understated, don't try as hard as does even the staged epiphany in "Pigeon Feathers." The remaining Olinger stories perform variations on the themes of these two stories, to greater or lesser effect, but ultimately work, at best, to sketch out the overall portrayal of Olinger and its influence on David/Clyde/John Updike. In my view "The Persistence of Desire," "The Happiest I've Been," and perhaps "Pigeon Feathers" are the works that will continue to attract readers among this grouping of stories. (Also in my view, the essay-like "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island" and "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car" just don't work at all.)

Throughout all of these stories, however, Updike's impressive prose style is in evidence, although it is here perhaps somewhat less florid, but also somewhat less assured, than it will later become. In addition to the passages I have already quoted, this paragraph, the opening paragraph of "In Football Season," shows Updike the pure stylist at his best:

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold on the dark slop of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

Some readers find Updike's style excessive, too intoxicated with the description of things, but I find it irresistable, the style of a writer trying to discover in all good faith what words can really say.

In many ways, the real culmination of the Olinger stories is Updike's novel The Centaur (1963). Perhaps because it was Updike's immediate follow-up novel to Rabbit, Run, in my opinion it really did not then and to some extent still has not received the credit it is due. Containing essentially the same cast of characters, this novel really completes the portrayal of Olinger and its place in Updike's fiction, and is the most compelling portrait as well of Updike's father (or at least of his fictional transformation.) The novel additionally shows Updike beginning to depart from strict conventional realism, as it alternates the story of the father and the son with a depiction of the father as literally a centaur, the mythological creature who is half man and half graceful beast. It really is a completely successful novel, and it is to be hoped that in the future it acquires the many readers it deserves.

That Was Then, This Is Now

Since I was (or tried to be) an academic "specialist" in contemporary American literature, you might think I would approve of this trend in high school English classes, as reported by USA Today. According to the article, "Faced with declining reading scores on national tests and the steady buzz of movies, TV and video games, teachers trying to entice students are increasingly turning to contemporary literary fiction and non-fiction, often picked fresh from best-seller lists." Although I cringe at the idea that teachers are turning to "best-seller lists," in theory I do in fact think that using more recent works of fiction or poetry to introduce readers (not just students) to the possibilities of literature could work perfectly well.

In some ways, using contemporary literature in this way is the most accurate and honest way of teaching literature. If "literature" is something that is still vital and ongoing, then the poetry and fiction being written now is the most representative example, perhaps the only representative example, of what is currently understood by the term; what writers and readers seem to agree is "literature" at this historical moment really has the only plausible claim to be in fact regarded as literature. This doesn't preclude acknowledging that certain works of the past ought also to be regarded as such--in many cases as providing the inspiration for current writers--but exactly which works are to be seen as particularly "literary" and for what particular reasons are matters that each generation of writers, critics, and readers is always going to be debating and reevaluating.

The alternative, formulating a rigid definition of "literature" rooted in past practice and long-gone assumptions and then judging all subsequent "literary" efforts by this standard, only results in a) contemporary works (including contemporary works later generations consider unambiguously great) being slighted as inferior to what has come before and b) the works of the past being saddled with a portentous amount of baggage that newer readers understandably don't want to carry. Literature--or at least English--becomes that proverbial subject that everybody hates.

On the other hand, I don't see many indications in this article that those advocating the contemporary over the classic have any better idea of what these works are being taught for. From the remarks made by the teachers quoted, there seems scant justification for the change other than that current books seem easier for the students to read and easier for the teachers to teach: "There's a lot more competition for people's attention than there was in the '70s"; "No one is going to read The Scarlet Letter until they're reading something they're enjoying." That some students are led to enjoy reading these books is probably a good thing, but why is it being done in school?

The closest thing to an explanation of what's being done with these books is this (actually from a Colorado State professor): "Whereas we might have taught Great Expectations because it was a classic, because you could talk about plot and setting and stylistic details, it is not a book that contemporary teenagers ... can relate to. So it loses its value." If teaching "plot and setting and stylistic details" means introducing some of the principles of literary criticism (which in turn might have salience beyond the analysis of literature per se), this is unobjectionable, but what such a thing usually amounts to is establishing some supposed norm that works of literature are supposed to embody, not a preliminary way of illustrating how, in general, the human imagination can be organized in various ways to create what we choose to call literature. And my suspicion is that the ultimate goal of teaching any and all of these books is really just to find something the kids "can relate to," itself a goal without substance as far as teaching is concerned.

I have myself almost come to the conclusion that literature ought not to be taught in the schools at all. Any use of it is destined to reduce it to stale schoolroom platitudes and musty classification. The most common justification is the one quoted above, that students will be led to read The Scarlet Letter after they've read Tuesdays With Morrie. It doesn't happen, or at least it only happens with students who were probably going to seek out Hawthorne or Dickens for themselves anyway. It happens so rarely that if this is the primary reason why literature is taught in school it's going a long way and to a lot of trouble to accomplish very little. Perhaps students who show an interest in reading serious literature should just be given a list of books they might want to seek out. If they'd like, maybe they could talk it all over with the teacher after school. In this scenario it wouldn't matter if the books were contemporary or classic, just as long as the student wasn't made to hate them or to trivialize them and maybe even indicated an interest in reading other books without being prompted.

One Thing After Another

In the May/Summer issue of The Writer's Chronicle, Alice Mattison offers an interesting essay (not available online, but the issue's table of contents is available here) defending the use of coincidence in fiction. Subtitled "An Essay Against Craft," the essay commends the use of coincidence as a way of taking risk, which Mattison feels is discouraged in a literary world dominated by the workshop "rules" implicitly taught in creative writing programs. Writes Mattison: "I don't think directions or rules are available, just terms. . .that undeniably simplify discussions of writing and literature." Such simplification is at times useful, but "the problem arises when we begin to draw conclusions from succesful choices, assuming that what works once will work in every instance."

A few paragraphs after the statements just quoted, Mattison is discussing a Charles Baxter essay in which "Baxter glances at the sort [of stories] that were rejected as old-fashioned by the authors who first made stories turn on insight. He characterizes the stories that Henry James and James Joyce rejected as those with 'plot structures tending to require a set of coincidences or connivances of circumstance.'" Mattison comments: "It hadn't occured to me, before I read Baxter's sentence, that coincidence defines the type of story in which it appears. I hadn't noticed that such stories. . .were helpless without coincidence."

Although Baxter and Mattison don't use the word, what they are both describing is the influence on early novels in English of the "picaresque" narrative. The picaresque story--derived from the term identifying the protagonist of such stories, the "picaro"--was introduced by Spanish writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and is essentially a journey narrative in which the picaro, usually a rogueish character, embarks on a journey in which, literally, one thing happens after another. There's not really a sense of progression in the picaresque narrative, just a series of episodes, and usually the protagonist remains more or less unchanged, undergoing no transformation or "epiphany." The most famous picaresque novel is undoubtedly Don Quixote, in which Cervantes alters the form by making his protagonist a deluded but not antisocial or rascally character.

The early British novelists of the 18th century were greatly influenced by the picaresque narrative, especially such writers as Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. Fielding's Tom Jones is probably the most famous of these British picaresque novels. It adopts the journey conceit, the episodic structure, and adds an element of explicit comedy that exceeds even the kind of doleful humor to be found in Don Quixote. (Tom Jones remains a tremendously readable book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know what the picaresque form can accomplish.) Charles Dickens was in turn profoundly influenced by Smollett and Fielding, and his novels represent a further fashioning of the picaresque into a narrative technique of great flexibility and latent aesthetic potential.

But this was indeed the "old-fashioned" kind of storytelling that came to be rejected by later writers more concerned about the "craft" of fiction. Perhaps the first writer to really move away from the picaresque was Flaubert, and he may be the writer most responsible for converting fiction into a more gracefully "shaped" kind of storytelling, and therefore a form that could be taken seriously as a mode of literary art. (I greatly admire Flaubert, and nothing I say here is meant to denigrate his achievement in any way.) Mattison identifies James and Joyce as the writers who came to "shape" their stories around the occurence of an "epiphany," but it was really Flaubert who showed James and Joyce that such an aesthetically intricate effect could be brought off in fiction.

Since Flaubert, the notion of "story" in fiction is thus usually associated either specifically with the kind of dramatic narrative leading to revelation or epiphany pioneered by James and Joyce or more generally with the kind of carefully structured narrative encapsulated in "Freytag's triangle": exposition, rising action, climax, denoument, etc. Most genre fiction probably uses the latter, most "literary" fiction the former. Most best-selling potboilers are likely to use the Freytag-derived narrative filtered through Hollywood melodrama. In this context, the picaresque story almost doesn't seem like a story at all, since it doesn't arrange itself in some shaped pattern, but is instead just a series of incidents strung together.

I go over all this not to offer some kind of lesson in literary history but ultimately to suggest, with Mattison but more broadly than her advocacy of "coincidence" goes, that the picaresque ought to remain a viable option and can provide an alternative to the workshop-reinforced domination of the revalatory narrative. To some extent the picaresque style was revived by postwar American writers such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, but in my opinion it still contains much untapped potential. It can free the writer from the tyranny of story--the creation of narrative tension by which too many stories and novels are reductively judged--but at the same time allows for the depiction of external events, provides an aesthetically justified motive for abjuring the directive to probe the psychological depths, and perhaps most of all makes available all kind of other effects--satire, subplots, a larger cast of characters--that the craft-like story discourages. Of course, this is not the 18th century, and writers now would be using the picaresque form in a much more self-conscious way, but that in itself would likely give such fictions a "shape" that would rescue them from mere formlessness. (Although attempting a truly "formless" novel might be an interesting experiment in itself.)

I am not suggesting that the picaresque narrative is superior to the more conventionally shaped narrative most novels employ. The possibilities in "shaping" the latter kind of narrative have by no means been exhausted, although most published novels don't seem much interested in exploring these possibilities. A renewed interest in the picaresque might, however, help demonstrate that there is more than one way to tell a story, multiple ways to "shape" a work of fiction, without sacrificing readibility or even fiction's "entertainment" value. (Both Don Quixote and Tom Jones are nothing if not entertaining.) And in the final analyis using such a narrative strategy wouldn't really involve abandoning "craft"; ideally it would further demonstrate that craft is just as much involved in the breaking of convention as in its repetition.

Literary Magazines and the Web

New Pages Weblog provides a very useful list of print literary magazines that have at least some minimal internet presence. (There's also an equally useful list of online magazines, and for other expansive lists of both print and online magazines see www.litline.org). What one discovers in going through this list is that very few of them make any of their actual contents availabe to web readers, and almost none of them make all of their contents available.

At first this might seem an entirely reasonable thing for these journals to do, since presumably they'd prefer to sell some copies to interested readers instead. But as we all know, very few copies of literary magazines are in fact ever sold to readers in the conventional over-the-counter way; at best some readers who are especially dedicated to supporting new writing subscribe to them (but of course only to a few of them), and in general most literary magazines would collapse from lack of circulation if they didn't manage to get themselves into a few libraries.

Literary magazines are still valuable, nevertheless, since they are usually the point of initial publication for lots of good and ultimately successful writers. (Although a perusal of the New Pages list also brings home the fact that ultimately more of these magazines, more with marginal influence, at least, are being published than is really helpful. Such a surfeit of lit mags only persuades many potential readers that there are too many to keep up with.) Clearly, however, they don't have the exposure to general readers--as opposed to creative writing students themselves eagerly trying to get published in them--that they ought to have, and I can't see why they wouldn't be willing to make their contents available on the web, if in fact getting readers for the writers they publish is really the goal.

Part of the explanation for why they aren't so willing is just old-fashioned elitism. Print's the thing, and cyber-printing, in the minds of many editors (and probably many writers) is an inferior alternative. But of course many lit mags published only online are fast achieving the quality of even the better print magazines. As Maud Newton says in a recent article in Doublethink, “I think the mainstream publications resist innovation and that the better stories generally are being published outside their pages. Some of the most vital short stories are published on the Internet these days.” If the print magazines insist on their own inherent superiority for too much longer, they may find themselves just plain irrelevant. (And then they'll come running to web publication.)

I myself still prefer print on paper for most longer essays and stories, just because I find it more convenient and less wearing on the eyes, and to the extent that literary magazines are resisting a cyberspatial presence for some similar reason I understand the reluctance. But ultimately most web-printed material can be made available in print-to-paper form, and then the only real objection remains a stubborn preference for traditional modes of publication. But I repeat: if getting readers for writers is the ultimate ambition of the literary magazine, then refusing to consider the many additional readers that might be available via web publication is only a way of thwarting that ambition. Furthermore, with all of the very good literary weblogs that are now up and running, the possibility that webloggers will gladly make their way through the cyberpages of these magazines and discuss in their blogs the poems, stories, and essays found there is so manifestly real that literary journals would likely get a kind of attention they've never gotten before.

I don't expect that many of the print lit mags will make their concessions to the internet very soon. (Although I have some hope that newer magazines such as Swink and The Black Clock may be smarter in their approach to the web.) Snobbery and luddism run deep in the literary world. But in my opinion such concessions are ultimately going to be necessary. At best in the battle between traditional print and the web, the partisans of print will manage only an uneasy truce. The print literary magazines might continue to exist, but their innate prestige value will diminish, and they'll only lose readers to the equally good online alternatives. Literature isn't literature because it comes to us on paper. It's an effort to make language yield compelling and challenging art. This can be done just as readily in cyberspace as on the printed page.

Style as Moral Failure

The Mumpsimus points me to an essay on Angela Carter in which Carter is quoted as saying "I've got nothing against realism. . .[b]ut there is realism and realism. I mean, the questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality. I would like, I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS, but I, I haven't. I've done other things. I mean, I'm an arty person, ok, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose - so fucking what?"

The defensiveness with which Carter speaks here is well-justified. Not only was she accused of being un-British in her choice of subjects and her prose style, but writers like Carter, who willingly employ an "overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose" are frequently treated not like they are in some way bad writers but are actually bad people. I am frequently amazed at the vehemence with which some reviewers and readers react against stories or novels that are unconventional or stylistically "excessive." The authors of such works are regarded as deviant, hostile to "ordinary" readers, just plain contemptuous of good order in matters of storytelling and style. (Even a writer as conventional as John Updike is sometimes attacked for these sins.) And woe indeed to the writer who, like Carter, combines an extra-realistic approach and a "purple" prose.

An essay in the current issue of Raritan (Spring 2004) reprises these once-infamous remarks by Philip Roth:

. . .I set myself the goal of becoming the writer some Jewish critics had been telling me I was all along: irresponsible, conscienceless, unserious. . .A quotation from Melville began to intrigue me, from a letter he had sent to Hawthorne upon completing Moby Dick. . ."I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as a lamb." Now I knew that no matter hard I tried I could never really hope to be wicked; but perhaps if I worked long and hard and diligently, I could be frivolous.

And indeed from Portnoy's Complaint on, Roth produced numerous books that were "frivolous" in comparison to his earlier work, that went beyond the bounds of decorum in structure and good taste in style, that were "excessive" in many, many ways, but . . .so fucking what? They are also books that will continue to stand as among the best American novels written in the latter part of the twentieth century. They are all clearly the consequence of "hard and long and diligent" work, and in their very excesses and frivolity are as serious as anything written by more obviously earnest writers of the time, including Roth's colleague Saul Bellow.

Yet there are still readers who can only see the frivolity--that is the comedy, as savage as it can sometimes become--and the excesses--Roth's frequently freewheeling style--and who regard books like Sabbath's Theater and Operation Shylock as fundamentally not serious, as irresponsible treatments of subjects that ought to be treated in a grim and sober way. They welcomed, on the other hand, American Pastoral, because it seemed closer to this more earnest approach. (I like American Pastoral as well, but not for this reason.) I think Roth would probably agree with Carter in every particular of her statement, and both of these writers could serve as models of the sort of writer willing to endure the charges that their writing is an example of moral failure, as long as they were ultimately seen, rightly, as aesthetic triumphs.

Whenever I hear or read someone urging writers to be "clear," to "communicate," to avoid "trickery," I can only take it as an exhortation to be good. Not to offend official sensibilities or imply that many readers are too timid in their willingness to take risks. In the name of literary decency not to engage in "too much writing." Perhaps in the long run these stylistic gatekeepers can be persuaded that literary form and style have nothing to do with morality, but most of them probably don't really much like literature, anyway, if "literature" is more than just an opportunity to assert your own virtue.

Reading and Writing

I have previously written here about the "poet-critic," the creative writer of poetry or fiction who also takes literary criticism seriously enough to attempt it as well. As I said in that post, in some ways poets and fiction writers are in the best position to discuss what goes into the creation of works of literature in the first place, and a willingness among creative writers to also write serious literary criticism (including book reviews, but going beyond them as well) could only be welcome. (Even if it's Dale Peck.)

However, there has also undeniably always been an uneasy relationship between creative writing and literary criticism, sometimes verging on hostility, and I don't just mean the "snarkiness," as it's now called, that some creative writers justifiably resent vis-a-vis some book reviewers. At one extreme are poets and fiction writers (and some readers) who find criticism an unwanted imposition on works of creative writing, something that only impedes the direct appreciation of poetry or fiction on the part of their ideal readers. In some cases these writers (I've known a few) almost regard criticism as an affront to the practice of their art.

At the other extreme are critics who at least implicitly regard works of literature to be incomplete, untested, until criticism has been able to appropriately classify, dissect, and evaluate them. With some critics (I've known a few of these, as well), especially of the academic variety, works of literature are finally only "cases," grist for the critical and scholarly mills. Academic criticism ultimately became so suffused with this attitude toward literature that now there's barely any pretense to an interest in literature itself. It's finally just a convenient starting-point for advancing other agendas.

Most readers probably are, of course, somewhere between these two extremes in their attitudes toward the proper relationship between literature and literary criticism. Most would likely welcome constructive critical consideration of poetry and fiction, as long as such criticism seemed to acknowledge that ultimately it is the means to greater understanding and appreciation of literature, both in regard to individual books and poems and to a broader perspective about the nature and goals of literature. In my opinion, writers and critics, as well as those who simply consider themselves interested readers, ultimately spring from the same source: a rapt, transforming act of reading. The critic emerges from this experience saying "I want to know how this thing (poem, story, novel) works"; the writer emerges saying "I want to do something like that." What the critic and writer subsequently go on to pursue is divergent from this initial experience, but ideally both can be traced back to the common source.

Perhaps the very abandonment of real literary criticism by academic critics represents an opportunity to rediscover this common source. I've noticed lately that many literary weblogs are indeed trying out more ambitious ways of engaging with current books and writing--longer reviews, shorter but pithier reviews, well-conducted interviews with authors (Robert Birnbaum obviously, but Mark Sarvas's interview with Andrew Sean Greer could also serve as a model of the form), extended commentary of various sorts--but reattaching criticism to literature needn't take place only in blogs. Other kinds of online or print forums in which writing and the engaged appraisal and appreciation of writing were both encouraged would be most apropos. Certainly criticism can't exist at all without a flourishing literary culture of poets and fiction writers. But in the long run I'm not sure that serious poetry and fiction can themselves survive--at least in a wholly healthy form--without interested readers willing to convert their interest into intelligent criticism.

Politics Before Literature

Artforum alerts us to this bit of aesthetic wisdom from the editor of The American Spectator: "Outrage at obscene photos would be a little easier to take from liberal senators if they didn't have a history of financing them. Had Robert Mapplethorpe snapped the photos at Abu Ghraib, the Senate might have given him a government grant. Jesse Helms would certainly be surprised at the moral horror on display these days in the Senate. In 1989, he asked his fellow senators to stop funding degrading photography coming out of the National Endowment for the Arts. They refused. . . Who knows, perhaps the photos from Abu Ghraib will reappear as modern art at one of the museums the senators have patronized over the years. . .The Abu Ghraib scandal did not happen in a cultural vacuum. It is a reflection of the libertine pop culture the American left has long tried to impose on a military culture it considers too 'rigid'. . . ." And Rush Limbaugh apparently added: "You can see these pictures on American websites where they win awards. These kinds of pictures with these kinds of acts depicted. They win awards. They are considered progressive, they are considered enlightened. . . ."

All of this would be just too stupid for further comment, if it didn't conveniently reveal the utter bankruptcy of what has become the "conservative" philosophy of art. (Not among all conservatives, for sure. And the far left has its own problems in coming to terms with art as well.) On the one hand, when these conservatives look at the Mappelthorpe photographs, or any other kind of iconoclastic art, all they can see is a posed rearrangement of the "real"--the depravity and the obscenity of it all, whatever aesthetic effects the artist intended to create notwithstanding. On the other hand, when viewing the Abu Ghraib photos, all they can see is the posed rearrangement, the depravity and obscenity of what really happened notwithstanding. Apparently only when a photograph is an actual record of "degrading" acts can they manage to call attention to what they can then identify as the "art" in photography, "libertine" though it may be. Art becomes reality and reality art, each act of critical appraisal, of course, determined by the political ideolgy it ultimately is meant to buttress.

A less obvious, if no less telling, strategy for insinuating a conservative critique of the arts--in this case literature specifically--can be seen in Max Watman's omnibus review of recent fiction in The New Criterion. Watman makes no explicit political judgments about the fiction he reviews, relying instead on this initial remark in the form of a thesis:

I recently saw a man wearing a t-shirt that said “I bring nothing to the table.” These t-shirts should be handed out at the orientation session of every MFA program in the country. Not as a rebuke, but as celebration and encouragement. It is not always a new angle, or a new approach, or a new gimmick that your book needs. Don’t add something just for the sake of adding. That’s destructive. How about bringing nothing to the table? How about thinking inside the damn box every once in a while?

If this were simply an exhortation to take the form of fiction seriously, to avoid extraneous tricks or "gimmicks," I might agree with Watman. But I fear it's not. It's just another attack on attempts to experiment with fiction ("new angle," "new approach"), but in this case it's also an attempt literally to banish conceptual thinking from the writing of fiction. "Thinking inside the damn box" can only mean not thinking at all.

In the rest of the review, this translates to the criticism that The Confessions of Max Tivoli is too clever, The Dew Breaker too "exotic," Little Children too jokey. The current release Watman approves of most unambiguously is Stuart Dybek's I Sailed With Magellan. Presumably this is the book in which Watman finds the least "on the table." (I don't mean to criticize Dybek, rather the way in which Watman is using Dybek's book for the larger purposes of his review.) This is Watman's conclusion:

Dybek knows the rhythm of his streets and his voices. He can put them to use. His fiction is subtle, strikingly original, and brilliant. He never pushes too hard for effect, and he never lets you down.

These are elusive stories. One is not entirely sure what to think. These days, where authorial intention and opinion are so easy to spot, where writers hang little flags on the characters they use to make points, it is refreshing to see a writer so involved in the art. He is carefully, subtly putting together human emotions, not to make a point, not to disapprove or champion, not to comment, but to illustrate.

I haven't read Dybek's book, so those who have will have to decide whether these superlatives are deserved. (I'm perfectly willing to believe they are.) And if Watman means to discourage the use of fiction for polemical and political purposes, I'm with him. But I confess I don't really know what that last sentence means. How does one "subtly put together human emotions"? Doesn't a writer put together words? More importantly, what's the difference between putting these words together "to make a point" and doing so "to illustrate?" Something has to be illustrated, and it can't be just human emotions. A story full of emotions without shaping or intention or, indeed, hanging flags on the characters, is just emotional, not necessarily artistic. Subtlety is good, but it's not inherently superior in an aesthetic sense to other effects an author might want to create. Like any other strategy, it's the means to an end.

I must say I also find it somewhat strange that critics with conservative political leanings would embrace an approach to fiction (loosely, "urban realism") that has traditionally been used most often indeed to "make points," and in fact has been associated with left-leaning writers. (I've read other reviews in conservative publications where realism has been embraced in this way as well.) Have these critics come so strongly to detest the unconventional approaches associated with modernism/postmodernism that any fiction that seems content with traditional realism gets their support? As long it's not "degrading" or "obscene"?

F.O. Matthiessen

A while back, I offered a list of older works of literary criticism that I think are increasingly neglected but still have a great deal of value. I considered putting F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance on this list, but I had not read the book in quite a long time, and it was besides somewhat more narrowly focused on a particular period in American literary history--roughly the mid-nineteenth century--than I thought was appropriate for a list of "general" criticism.

I have now re-read the book (itself an act of supreme patience, since it contains over 650 densely-packed pages), and I would have to say I still would not include it on a list of critical books that non-academic readers might want to check out--at least not at first--but for reasons that have nothing to do with its quality. It is in fact, a book of great erudition and discernment, and is probably more responsible for the very concept of the "American Renaissance," and thus for the multitude of survey courses on this period that followed in the wake of the book's publication (1941) for at least the next fifty years than any other single work of literary criticism or scholarship. It may even be said to have provided the model for this kind of "periodization" in academic literary study in the first place.

Furthemore, the book clearly has played a large role in the way its five chosen writers--Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman--are understood by subsequent readers interested in the period. I think Matthiessen undervalues Emerson, overvalues Thoreau, and exaggerates the degree to which Hawthorne was simply trying to provide a more sober view of human nature than was implied in the transcendental assumptions of Emerson and Thoreau. However, I also think the chapters in American Renaissance on Melville and Whitman are just about the best things I've ever read about those two writers. At any rate, the overall picture that emerges from this book of the literary goals and accomplishments of each writer is probably the starting-point from which different pictures might ultimately be portrayed.

But ultimately its impressive learning and lengthy explications are, paradoxically perhaps, the very reasons I probably would not recommend the book to readers without an existing interest in these writers and this period or who would rather read the writers themselves than such an extended work of critical commentary. Matthiessen's approach is essentially historical (in the "undertheorized" way of scholars from this generation more interested in literary history than in "subverting" this history), although Matthiessen also states that his primary interest lies "with what these books were as works of art, with evaluating their fusions of form and content." In essence, he wants to understand what these writers thought they were doing, how each of them in turn influenced what the others were trying to do, to let them as much as possible speak for themselves through judicious analysis of selected texts and passages, ultimately to help readers understand why these were and are writers worth reading and taking seriously. What a concept!

However, this has become in so many ways such an alien concept that many readers of American Renaissance might think it quaint, even a little bizarre. Why would someone so obviously spend so much time reading Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman so thoroughly, so clearly attempt to think through the implications of why and what they wrote, so patiently take the reader through their essays, fictions, and poems and invite this reader to think further about it all him/herself? Where's the attitude, the jargon, the theoretical superstructure, the knowing superiority to the writers being examined? Matthiessen barely mentions Whitman's homosexuality (or Melville's suspected same-sex orientation), isn't much interested in gender (although is plenty interested in class), only touches on these writers' attitudes toward race, doesn't seem concerned to pivot his analysis in an appropriately progressive political direction, actually thinks the writers he discusses ought to be read on their own terms. In some cases, these omissions are indeed problematic (the omission of race particularly), but more to the point, the book's overall focus on those qualities in these writers that make them important writers in and of themselves just isn't done any more.

And American Renaissance is admittedly somewhat digressive, moving ahead or backward from one writer to the other seemingly in midstream, breaking off for a discussion of the painter Thomas Eakins before returning to the homologies between Eakins and Whitman, etc. Its very breadth of knowledge can be intimidating if not irritating--it isn't always clear why we need to know quite so much just to appreciate Hawthorne's stories or Leaves of Grass--and its footnotes frequently insert what just seems superfluous information. It's a book for readers of its five chosen writers who are already convinced of their centrality--at least it is for readers now--and who would like to know more about why they wrote what they wrote when they wrote it.

Which is finally why it probably wouldn't be of interest to those who wouldn't already describe themselves as readers of this sort. Anyone who really wants to know what the "American Renaissance" was all about and what these five writers contributed to it couldn't really claim to have this knowledge without reading F.O. Matthiessen, but I fear there aren't many people around anymore who want to know these things. Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe books like Matthiessen's were written according to a "scholarly" model that is ultimately inappropriate for the appreciation of literature. I sometimes think this myself. But I'm glad to have read American Renaissance (twice), and my subsequent readings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman will be richer and more informed because I did.

James Wood Responds

In fairness to James Wood, who has come in for a fair amount of criticism on this weblog, I reprint here an e-mail message he just recently sent to me. The subject is his Guardian essay on comedy in fiction.

Dear Mr Green,

You are of course entitled to whatever opinions you want about me. But you shouldn't graze on edited texts (the Guardian ran the introduction to my new book at half the length) and then invert my meaning. When I write that in the modern novel 'the reader is not to be overly helped by the author. We must find out for ourselves how much we know of a character, and we may find that what we know is that we do not know enough', and when I go on to write that 'this alternative picture comes closest to my notion of the modern novel's unreliability or irresponsibility, a state in which the reader may not always know why a character does something or may not know how to "read" a passage,' I am PRAISING precisely the uncertainty or 'irresponsibility' of this kind of comedy. The Guardian piece -- even in its edited form -- makes very clear that I promote THIS kind of comedy as distinctively modern, as the great creation of the modern novel. I distinguish this comedy from the kind of satire (the comedy of correction) which trades in KNOWABLE typologies (the miser, the hypocrite, the fool, etc). Yet you write that I 'dismiss' this comedy of irresponsibility of uncertainty. The opposite of the truth. You seem to be unaware that my forthcoming book is called 'The Irresponsible Self" -- this is a self I approve of! And though you accuse me of using religious language, the kind of modern comedy I praise is the comedy that I explicitly distinguish as SECULAR comedy (to distinguish it from the the more religious comedy of 'correction.)I know that bloggers do everything at breakneck speed -- the hermeneutics of multi-tasking -- but you should read people a bit less rapidly, and -- hey, what a notion! -- think before you write. No amount of Bakhtin will save the careless reader. Oh, and Green's Loving is a far greater book than, say, Brideshead Revisited, but no one reads Green.

best wishes
James Wood

To the extent I misrepresented Mr. Wood's views by relying on the Guardian's truncated version of his essay, I apologize. However, I do not think I missrepresented his relative dismissal of the "hysterical realism" (the kind of comedy Bakhtin describes) of Sterne, Pynchon, and Rushdie. Their kind of comedy is not what Mr. Wood has in mind in speaking of the "comedy of forgiveness." And I agree that Brideshead Revisited is not one of Waugh's best books. Readers should seek out instead A Handful of Dust or Vile Bodies. I don't agree that no one reads Henry Green.

Bellowing

I dislike the fiction of Saul Bellow. I offer no apologies or excuses for this. I simply do. I've written an essay expanding upon my reasons for disesteeming Bellow's work (Northwest Review, Vol. 41, No. 1), so I won't recapitulate those reasons here. I bring the subject up now only becasue of J.M. Coetzee's review of Bellow's first three novels, now republished by the Library of America, in the New York Review of Books.

Coetzee's review begins as if it will be just another of the hagiographic treatments Bellow has received over the last several years--"Among American novelists of the latter half of the twentieth century, Saul Bellow stands out as one of the giants, perhaps the giant"--but his appraisal of these three books is rather more tepid. He prefers The Victim, and I guess I would agree with that assessment although I myself find it only mildly interesting, yet even here Coetzee concludes that Bellow "has not made Leventhal [the protagonist] enough of an intellectual heavyweight to dispute adequately with [the antagonist] Allbee (and with Dostoevsky behind him) the universality of the Christian model of the call to repentance."

Coetzee is correct to find Dostevsky "behind" The Victim, as well as most of Bellow's other novels. Bellow takes from Dostevsky a conception of the fiction of "ideas," and if anything makes those ideas even less interesting and more intrusive than they are in Dostevsky's novels. There's lots of anguish and philosophizing and gesturing after profundity in Bellow, and mostly (not completey) I find it all very tiresome. Other readers, of course, are free to disagree. (Obvioulsy most other readers do.)

The most revealing part of Coetzee's review, however, is his distinctly unenthusiastic estimation of The Adventures of Augie March. This is his ultimate judgment of the book:

Once it becomes clear that its hero is to lead a charmed life, Augie March begins to pay for its lack of dramatic structure and indeed of intellectual organization. The book becomes steadily less engaging as it proceeds. The scene-by-scene method of composition, each scene beginning with a tour de force of vivid word painting, begins to seem mechanical. The many pages devoted to Augie's adventures in Mexico, occupied in a harebrained scheme to train an eagle to catch iguanas, add up to precious little, despite the resources of writing lavished on them. And Augie's principal wartime escapade, torpedoed, trapped with a mad scientist in a lifeboat off the African coast, is simply comic-book stuff.

What Coetzee doesn't come right out and say is that Augie March is basically unreadable. I labored through it many years ago, but more recently I tried to re-read it and made it only halfway through. Coetzee thinks its the unearned "exuberance" of the style that bogs the novel down, but I think it's just badly written and terribly paced. The Adventures of Augie March in many ways marks the beginning of the cult of Bellow, and if now a writer as well-respected as Coetzee is willing to say it's not so good, the future of Bellow's reputation could prove to be in some doubt.

Coetzee thinks that Herzog is Bellow's most successful book (at least it's what he implies), and I would also agree with this judgment. Herzog is the sole Bellow novel that I, at any rate, would call a superior work of fiction--although even here the book is marred by Bellow's typically unpleasant portrayal of women. Form and subject mesh together seamlessly, and Bellow's style (which again I mostly find annoying) conveys both in an aesthetically satisfying way. It's finally the only Bellow novel I would gladly recommend to others as a book worth reading.

After Herzog, in my view only parts of Mr. Sammler's Planet, most of Humboldt's Gift, and a few short stories are any good at all. Everything else represents a calamitous falling-off in quality. Has anybody tried to read The Dean's December? Don't bother. At best these books represent a chronicle of Bellow's personal peeves and petty squabbles. They provide a distinctly disagreeable reading experience.

The only reference in Coetzee's review to Bellow's "greatness" is in that first sentence I've quoted. I'd like to think that even this statement is Coetzee's way of describing the current state of Bellow's reputation, but not necessarily his work as a whole. If a few of Bellow's books were to survive as minor novels I wouldn't be saddened, as long as in the long run Bellow's fiction doesn't overshadow the work of his much more accomplished colleagues, including his fellow American Jewish writers Malamud and Roth. That one hundred years from now Bellow would be seen as the "giant" post-World War II American novelist is inconceivable to me. But perhaps I'm just missing something.

Disillusioned

I rarely disagree with the Literary Saloon, but in this case I think I do. I am, in fact, somewhat startled that the Saloon would so readily concede to the assumptions of the "book-buying world," the very assumptions it normally dissects quite trenchantly, but that it appears to accept in this post.

I'm as little "in the know" about publishing practices as the Saloon confesses itself to be, except that I do know what mainstream publishing actually makes available to readers, and what it does offer, what it pines to offer even more reliably, is for the most part utter, 100% pure, laboratory-tested garbage. Agents play their duly-appointed part in this farcical process, although the agent subjected to the Saloon's criticism in this current post seems somewhat more conscientious about his own contribution to the "book industry," which is why I find the post rather curious.

This agent, Andrew Wylie, is particularly ridiculed for saying of Grace Metalious, the author of Peyton Place, that " Her name is now barely known. She wrote a book called Peyton Place, which is badly written, out of style, out of date, out of print, valueless. Her publisher has disappeared. The publishers of Calvino, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner abide. Who made the better investment?" The Saloon takes Wylie to task for the misstated "facts" here, noting that the book is still in print, her name still known, at least as the author of this book, etc. It even provides Amazon ranking numbers to show that Peyton Place still outsells Faulkner's The Town and Calvino's The Baron in the Trees (both from roughly the same era).

We'll put aside the fact that less than fifty years have passed since the publication of PP, not nearly enough time to measure success in the literary "long term." We'll also just mention that sales of Peyton Place have long been propped up by the existence of the movie adapted from it (and its sequel), as well as the television show. Finally, we'll not dwell either on the fact that no other book by Metalious will ever again be read by anyone, while the body of work by both Faulkner and Calvino (especially Faulkner) surely reaches greatly more readers than Peyton Place, and in the true long term will only outdistance Metalious by even greater numbers.

What surprises me most about the Literary Saloon's ruminations on this subject, however, is this disturbing claim: "Yes, we like Calvino's The Baron in the Trees better than Peyton Place, and think it's far superior, but even we would recommend a publisher publish (or re-publish) the Metalious-title before they tackle the Calvino. There's no contest: printing Peyton Place was -- and probably still is -- like printing money."

So even the Literary Saloon accepts the proposition that finally book publishing is all about the opportunity to "print money"? Perhaps this only ratifies the judgment that I am completely out of sync with the publishing times, am so marginal in my view about this that I can be safely disregarded, but frankly the last thing I would ever do is advice someone to publish the likes of Peyton Place, especially if Calvino could get published instead. To favor Metalious over Calvino is so alien to me I can't understand why serious people could even consider it, her potential as cash flow notwithstanding. It is tantamount to admitting that finally publishing books is just a species of commerce, and that literature only gets in the way.

I am by no means an ideological anti-capitalist. Capitalism is good for many things, but some endeavors ought not be cut to fit capitalism's trim. Health care is one of these. In my opinion book publishing is another. I understand that books like Peyton Place keep the "book industry" afloat, but that in itself is a profoundly sad commentary, and eventually this practice isn't going to work anymore. When the ability to read is finally so coarsened that even Peyton Place is too much for the "general" reader, the "book industry" will of course collapse. Book publishers might instead (but won't) concentrate now, before it's too late, on cultivating those readers who still take books and reading seriously. These are the readers who will continue to read Falukner and Calvino in the long run, and eventually might be the only readers left for new fiction at all. If Andrew Wylie wants to try and cater to these readers, please let him.

Teaching Literature

Terry Eagleton now appears to find the state of literary study to be as dreadful as he claims the late Edward Said found it to be. Given that both Eagleton and Said played major roles in bringing academic criticism to the dire straits in which it now has trouble maneuvering, it is on the one hand difficult to have much sympathy with Eagleton's own current displeasure. However, one might on the other hand see the later frustration of both Eagleton and Said as a welcome sign they had come to see their own contributions to the politicization of literary study to be a terrible mistake.

Yet, that Eagleton finally doesn't really get it is revealed to me, at least, in this seemingly innocuous comment about Said: "Said's concern was justice, not identity. He was more interested in emancipating the dispossessed than in celebrating the body or floating the signifier. As a major architect of modern cultural theory, he was profoundly out of sympathy with most of its cerebral convolutions, which he correctly saw as for the most part a symptom of political displacement and despair."

This is all well and good and, for that matter, I believe that Said (Eagleton as well) was indeed concerned with justice and with "emancipating the dispossessed." But why in the world would either of these men have thought that a good way of achieving these ends was to become literature professors in British and American universities? To the extent that both of them (Said more than Eagleton) actually took their concerns into the real world and acted on them in properly political ways, I admire them. To the extent they used their sinecures in academe to pollute literary study with political dogmatism, I find their actions pernicious in the extreme.

In championing Said's "humanism," Eagleton asserts that "What he is after. . .is what one might call a reconstructed or self-critical humanism--one that retains its belief in human value and in the great artistic works that embody it, but which has shed the elitism and exclusivism with which literary humanism is currently bound up. We would still read Dante and Proust, but we would also extend the very meaning of humanism in order to 'excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility.'" What I myself finally don't get about this project is why reading Dante and Proust would ultimately have anything to do with the desire to "excavate the silences," etc. What it does suggest is that it really is impossible to "teach" literature as an academic subject without in the end resorting to literature as a secondary means to "teach" something else entirely, whether it be humanism, postmodernism, gender studies, or all the other possible "approaches" one could take to not reading literature.

I would really not even have commented on Eagleton's brief essay-review if I hadn't also at about the same time read two very thoughtful and intelligent posts on academic weblogs dealing with the very subject of what's wrong with academic literary study. Erin O'Connor, who maintains the weblog Critical Mass, recently discussed her reasons for leaving her tenured position for a job teaching at an independent high school. Her reasons are all most honorable, and she should be commended for her decision. But this was the passage in her post that struck me as most revealing: "[Others who have made the same decision say] they are able to do the sort of intensive, personalized teaching they dreamed of doing as college teachers, but could not do in a higher ed setting; all say they feel more intellectually alive than they did in academe; and all say, too, that they have a much greater sense of purpose and of professional satisfaction than they did in academe. They are palpably happy, and the differences they are making in kids' lives are real and meaningful."

Even those academic scholars who don't have an allegiance to a particular agenda probably feel as O'Connor does about what their job is really all about. It's about making a difference in "kids' lives," about (ideally) "intensive, personalized teaching." I certainly wouldn't say I have an objection to any of this, but for O'Connor teaching literature is first about the teaching, not about the literature.

In an equally sensible reply to O'Connor, Tim Burke, in attempting to formulate solutions to the problems from which O'Connor is fleeing, writes that "Graduate pedagogy needs to shift its emphases dramatically to meaningfully prepare candidates for the actual jobs they ought to be doing as professors, to getting doctoral students into the classroom earlier and more effectively, to learning how to communicate with multiple publics, to thinking more widely about disciplines and research."

Again, this proposal is all about making academe a more congenial place for the teacher, and again I don't object to it per se, but I do note that neither in O'Connor's nor Burke's post, nor in Eagleton's essay, is there much consideration of the role literature itself plays in literary study. This disjunction seems to be so commonplace, so much taken for granted by "literary" academics, that it makes the academy seem an even more disembodied, insular place than it actually is. (And it truly is disembodied and insular.)

I don't have a proposal of my own for changing the situation. The prerogatives of academic life are always going to take precedence over a mere interest in or concern with the intricacies of literature. Teaching literature is not the same thing as writing it or even reading it. It may even not require that the teacher actually like or respect it. All of which suggests, perhaps, that literature would be better off if the teachers stayed away from it. At the moment, it certainly isn't benefiting from their ministrations.

A Musical Interlude

Not long ago I participated in a lively comments discussion at another weblog wherein I defended "modern" art music. (I actually enjoy modern music, not just admire it in a detached sort of way.) The majority opinion among those commenting seemed to be that modern music isn't music at all, just noise, and that only pre-twentieth century music, or modern music hearkening back to it, could even be called musical. This is an argument easily transferable to literature, since modern literature too is senseless, too difficult, and only pre-modern fiction and poetry are real, "normal" works of literature.

The April 23 issue of the Times Literary Supplement offers a version of this debate, as David Pitt, a philosopher at Cal State-Long Beach, reviews two books by the music critic Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding, and Introduction to a Philosophy of Music. Kivy is the anti-modernist, arguing, in Pitt's words, that "the emotions we ascribe to music are properties of the music, not the listener." Music doesn't evoke an emotional response, it embodies emotion in its very nature. Thus, any music that doesn't manifest a recognizable emotion (by implication at least, all of "dissonant" modernist music) couldn't be music.

This is a fairly transparent way of rejecting experimental music--just as many others reject experimental fiction or poetry because it's also "dissonant"--and Pitt does a good job of diagnosing its flaws. In responding to Kivy's claim that "when we characterize music as yearning, or angry, joyous or melancholy, we. . . are not saying. . .that the music makes us yearn, or be angry, joyous, or melancholy, but that it is those things," Pitt quite rightly points out that "Taken literally,. . .this would be absurd. A piece of music is not a sentient being, and cannot itself be in an emotional state." But arguments about music of the sort Kivy advances are intended to be taken literally, since if we settle for the listener's experience of various emotions (or anything else you'd care to call them), an irretrievable element of subjectivity is being granted, the kind of subjectivity that makes "modern" atonal music possible in the first place. It's all in the ear of the listener.

What really interests me most about Pitt's account of Kivy's books, however, is the additional discussion of what Kivy calls the "problem" of opera. According to Pitt:

. . .at one point Kivy claims that the crux of the problem of opera (and all music with text) is that music is essentially a repetitive art form, while literature is not. Musical form is determined by musical repetition, whereas literature (especially narrative fiction) is ongoing, unidirectional, and non-cyclical. There is thus a deep incommensurability between them, and, hence, the problem of opera is insoluble.

Kivy must have "narrative fiction" in mind (although the real analogy would seem to be with drama), since poetry is of course full of repetition. Nevertheless, Pitt convincingly observes that the "repetition" involved in music "does not have to be literal" since "[in] the freely atonal piano pieces of Berg and Webern, for example, coherence and structure are achieved without literal repetition of whole sections. These works. . .have structure and coherence, though the musical relations that determine them are rarely on the surface of the music and almost never involve literal repetition."

Pitt also questions Kivy's assertion about literature, but not nearly as strenuously as he could. To what extent is it true that literature, even granting the narrowing of the term to fiction, is "ongoing, unidirectional, and non-cyclical"? Surely everyone can think of reputable works of literature that are either discontinuous, omnidirectional, or entirely cyclical, if not all three at the same time. Finnegans Wake? To the Lighthouse? Naked Lunch? V? Of course, these are all experimental, dissonant books, and the point of describing literature in the way Kivy appears to be doing it (at least according to Pitt) could well be to exclude such books from the category of "literature," just as Berg and Webern are excluded from the category of "music."

Moreover, why couldn't "repetition" be as valid a structuring device in fiction as it is in music? Pitt observes that "[c]ompletely non-repetitive music would be incoherent. If no musical event in a work bore any relation whatever of similarity or sameness to any other event, the work would not make any sense." He further observes that the same thing must be true of fiction. I would only add that to the extent any work of literature is literally a composed and arranged text of written language, it is quite like music.

Really the terms "ongoing, unidirectional, and non-cyclical" are a way of reducing literature to the element of "story." Literature, or at least fiction, is story. Which brings me to my real subject, although I will leave it with a series of questions, questions I pose in all sincerity, even if the reader probably knows how I would answer them. Must fiction's core identity ultimately be understood in terms of story, however much other elements are also emphasized? In an era when the need for story seems to be quite well met by films and television, should fiction writers also be pigeonholed as storytellers? Couldn't they simply be considered "writers," some of whom tell stories to meet particular artistic goals, others of whom essentially discard narrative, taking fiction closer to the model of lyric poetry--without quite crossing the line? Couldn't fiction do without "story" altogether?

Very Funny

In a previous post I explained why I have less admiration for the literary critic James Wood than conventional literary wisdom suggests I ought to have. I don't want to rehearse the argument I made there in discussing his introduction to The Irresponsible Self: Humour and the Novel (available at the Guardian website), although I would like to suggest that the views Wood presents here only reinforce my belief that his very understanding of what "literature" is all about--in his case, literally what it's good for--finally just gets in the way of a broader understanding of what works of literature more generously conceived are actually capable of accomplishing.

This is essentially the burden of Wood's analysis of "humor":

In literature, there are novels. . .in which a mild tragi-comedy arises naturally out of context and situation, novels which are softly witty but which may never elicit an actual laugh; and there are also "comic novels", which correspond to the man who comes up to you and says, "have you heard the one about...?", novels obviously very busy at the business of being comic. Tristram Shandy, for instance, is in multifarious ways a marvellous book, but it is written in a tone of such constant high-pitched zaniness, such deliberate "liveliness", that one finds oneself screaming at it to calm down a bit. The "hysterical realism" of such contemporary writers as Pynchon and Rushdie is the modern version of Sterne's perpetual excitements and digressions.

I don't doubt the applicability of Wood's distinction between "mild tragi-comedy"--what he will go on to identify as "humor" more properly understood--and the "comic" as illustrated in Sterne or Pynchon. I do question the soundness of Wood's implicit judgment that the kind of humor he describes is to be preferred, is in some way more "literary" than the "hysterical" comedy of writers descending from Sterne. That he would use this term, as well as the equally condescending "zany" in referring to this latter comedy makes his valuation of it clear enough, but later he also remarks that "Evelyn Waugh, alas, still represents the great image of English comedy in the 20th century, rather than his subtler and gentler contemporary, Henry Green." That humor deserves to be taken more seriously because it is "subtler and gentler" is the obvious conclusion Wood hopes his readers will draw from his essay.

This "humor" Wood is after he more precisely calls a "comedy of forgiveness," and he uses explicitly religious language rather freely in defining this brand of humor. That James Wood likes to see such humor in the books he reads is fine by me, but readers ought also to know that it is not per se the style of comedy practiced by the "better" writers and that a good argument can be made that the "hysterical comedy" he deprecates is more suitable to a view of literature that demands of "serious writing" that it be more than "gentle," that it in some ways be unforgiving, deliberately withholding reassurance or consolation.

The best definition of this unforgiving kind of comedy, in my opinion, was offered by the Russian critic M.M. Bakhtin, who wrote that "laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it." Elsewhere Bakhtin writes that this kind of comedy embodies an attitude of "radical skepticism" against all forms of "straightforward seriousness." Paradoxically, then, comedy is itself most serious when it casts doubt on what is otherwise considered to be serious. Nothing escapes the maw of this sort of "radical" comedy, including the pretensions of those engaging in it, and thus it goes beyond what Wood calls the comedy of "correction."

This kind of comedy can be seen in many of the great twentieth-century writers--Joyce, Beckett, Ionesco, such American writers as Barth, Heller, and Stanley Elkin. (To avoid charges of pretentiousness myself, I would also say it can be seen in the films of the Marx Brothers and the sketch comedy of Monty Python.) It can be "zany" or not (Beckett is zany in Waiting for Godot, not in How It Is or The Unnameable, but the effect is the same). But in its refusal to take anything seriously it performs at least as useful a service as does that humor preaching "forgiveness" that Wood celebrates. It asks us to question everything, to be willing to laugh at everything, ultimately to resist the temptation to settle for easy consolation. Wood essentially dismisses this kind of modern writing when he describes "the modern novel's unreliability or irresponsibility, a state in which the reader may not always know why a character does something or may not know how to 'read' a passage, and feels that in order to find these things out, he must try to merge with the characters in their uncertainty." Since our common plight is precisely to live in such uncertainty, what's wrong with this?

In the final analysis my disgreement with Wood is undoubtedly an issue of taste. I don't mean to disparage those who prefer Green to Waugh or Austen to Dickens. I respect many of the authors who employ "humor" of the sort Wood identifies, although I often get the sense Wood doesn't respect those writers whose comedy is "hysterical." But in Wood's own "typology" of humor, the "gentle" comedy he likes seems unavoidably sentimental to me. And in my reading, at least, I have found that the greatest literature avoids sentimentality with the most radical kind of skepticism.