The Reading Experience

The Middle of the Journey

The two middle sections in John Updike's The Early Stories, "Family Life" and "The Two Iseults" offer a grab-bag assortment of stories united by the shared subjects of family and/or marriage, the latter increasingly portrayed as a locus of dissatisfaction and betrayal, of real but fleeting pleasures and of dashed hopes. There are two more Maple stories, "Eros Rampant" and "Sublimating," which cast these themes in the starkest relief, but most of the other stories as well work, to the extent they do work, to sketch a collective image of midcentury family life in suburban America.

Perhaps the most representative stories in this middle part of the book are two that serve as bookends of a sort for the two sections, "The Day of the Dying Rabbit" and "I Will not let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me." The first simply depicts a family vacation in a "five-room shack" to which the family retreats every summer, this one ultimately memorable for the incident named in the title (the family cat brings in a baby rabbit that finally can't be saved), but it in turn only serves to fix in place this particular vacation as a kind of emblem of the quiet joys of family life. The father and narrator, a photographer, wonders aloud: "What was it in the next twenty-four hours that slowly flooded me, that makes me want to get the day on some kind of film?" He answers his own question at the end of the story, as the narrator and his son are paddling their way across a pond back to the shack, about to strike land: "The days since have been merely happy days. This day was singular in its, let's say tone, its silver-bromide clarity. Between the cat's generous intentions and my son's lovingly calm warning, the dying rabbit sank like film in the developing pan, and preserved us all." The story works because it is fully dramatized (unlike some other other stories in these sections) and because it works out its structural metaphor (story as photo) with a satisfying aesthetic logic, allowing the story to avoid sentimentality. The dying rabbit introduces an element of tragedy into the "happy days" of family life, but, like the day itself, the rabbit's very suffering gets preserved as a kind of testimonial to all of life's realities.

"I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me" is an equally simple but amply realized story that focuses on a farewell party being held for a couple about to move from their Connecticut suburb to Texas. In this awkward transition period, "The familiar lulling noises--car horn and dog bark, the late commuter train's slither and the main drag's murmur--had become irritants, the town had unravelled into tugging threads of love. Departure rehearses death." At the party, the husband dances with a woman the story clearly intimates is a former adulterous lover, her stony indifference to him now both a painful reminder of what they once meant to each other and a telling sign (to readers) of the malaise into which the husband and wife have fallen and from which they are fleeing. The story's closing dialogue captures this fatigue quite nicely:

Safely on the road, Lou asked, "Did Maggie kiss you goodbye?"
"No. She was quite unfriendly."
"Why shouldn't she be?"
"No reason. She should be. She should be awful and she was." He was going to agree, agree, all the way to Texas.
"She kissed me, Lou said.
"When?"
"When you were in the bathroom."
"Where did she kiss you?"
"I was standing in the foyer waiting for you to get done admiring yourself or whatever you were doing. She swooped out of the living room."
"I mean where on you?"
"On the mouth."
"Warmly?"
"Very. I didn't know how to respond. I'd never been kissed like that, by another woman."
"Did you respond?"
"Well, a little. It happened so quickly."
He must not appear too interested, or even to gloat. "Well," Tom said, "she may have been drunk."
"Or else very tired," said Lou, "like the rest of us."

Unfortunately, many of the other stories in these two sections are very slight and expose some of Updike's weaknesses as a writer. Too often he relies on lyricism to raise his subjects to a level of profundity they just can't reach on their own, as in "The Morning," literally a story about mornings: "At moments his dull attention caught, like a slack sail idly filling, a breath, from this multifaced horizon, of the hope that set in motion and sustained so many industrialized efforts, so much commercial traffic, such ingenious cross-fertilization of profit, such energetic devotion to the metamorphosis of minerals, the transport of goods. . . ." The same lyricism that breathes life into Updike's characters and their situations in his best stories here just goes blowing off into nowhere.

And too many of the stories are really just excuses for rather cloying reflections on the various aspects of family life. Among these would be "The Family Meadow" (you can guess its subject), "Plumbing," "The Orphaned Swimming Pool," "Son," "Daughter, Last Glimpses of," "Solitaire," and "Leaves." Other stories--"How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time," The Music School," "Museums and Women," "Four Sides of One Story"--are "experiments" in chronology or perspective or presentation as alternatives to scenic or episodic realism, but in my view they only suggest that Updike is much more skilled at this kind of realism. One understands why a writer like Updike would attempt such experiments--for a little variety, if nothing else--but most of these stories seem to me, at least, more a consequence of the need to keep churning out short stories than a real interest in literary experimentation.

It must also be said that in some of Udike's fiction the overall characterization of women can be unpleasant, bordering on the misogynistic. In "The Stare," a woman initially defined by her "blunt and elusive" demeanor is further described in this way: "In the months that unfolded from this, it had been his pleasure to see her stare relax. Her body gathered softness under his; late one night, after yet another party, his wife, lying beside him in the pre-dawn darkness of her ignorance, had remarked with the cool, fair appraisal of a rival woman, how beautiful she--she, the other--had become, and he had felt, half dreaming in the warm bed he had betrayed, justified. Her laugh no longer flashed out so hungrily and her eyes, brimming with the secret he and she had made, deepened and seemed to rejoin the girlishness that had lingered in the other features of her face. Seeing her across a room standing swathed in the beauty he had given her, he felt a creator's, a father's pride." The masculine vainglory here is pretty unattractive, and although the exposure of such male conceit seems built into Updike's project as a writer, there are times when one wonders whether some authorial condescension isn't seeping through, nevertheless.

For posts on the first three sections of The Early Stories, go here, here, and here.

Ronald Sukenick

I believe I first became aware of Ronald Sukenick when, as an undergraduate, I began to cultivate an interest in experimental fiction and came across a book called Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, edited by Raymond Federman (author of Double or Nothing and a writer with whom Sukenick would himself long be associated). Published in 1975, this was one of several "academic" books from this period that were being produced as a result of the successful introduction of contemporary fiction as a legitimate subject of academic study. Most of these books were indeed about postwar experimental fiction, the sort that would later become categorized as "postmodern."

Sukenick was a contributor to Surfiction, through an essay entitled "The New Tradition in Fiction." Thus I initially thought of Sukenick as a literary critic of sorts, an advocate of the experimental and the innovative in fiction. Yet it is significant that this essay speaks of a "new tradition." Sukenick saw experimental fiction as merely the latest phase in a literary history, at least where the novel is concerned, itself characterized by continual experiment. The essay begins: "Obviously there's no progress in art. Progress toward what? The avant-garde is a convenient propaganda device, but when it wins the war everything is avant-garde, which leaves us just about where we were before. The only thing that's sure is that we move, and as we move we leave things behind--the way we felt yesterday, the way we talked about it. Form is your footprints in the sand when you look back." "The first thing that must be said about the new tradition of the novel," he writes a few paragraphs later," is that it's not modern." The new fiction, in Sukenick's view, could trace its roots at least as far back as Cervantes and Rabelais. And it should be pointed out that Sukenick's first book was not fiction but a study of the poetry of Wallace Stevens, where he found inspiration for the kind of writing he himself would later do in fiction.

This sort of what might be called traditionalist iconoclasm, by which the very act of rebellion against past or established practices is done in the name of preserving the continuity of past and present, was greatly inspiring to me, as I loved both the great literature of the past I was then studying and the current fiction I was also reading, the latter otherwise so often dismissed by professors specializing in the older periods. I also found it in such writers as John Barth, Robert Coover, and Gilbert Sorrentino, who were writing what some people wanted to call anti-literature, but in my view were doing it because they too loved literature and did not want to see it become ossified in particular forms and assumptions. Anybody who really pays attention to what writers like Sukenick actually did in their own practice of fiction, and to what they actually said about that practice, knows that all talk about how postmodern literature is anti-literary or contemptuous of the past or is engaged in irresponsible game-playing is just plain nonsense. These writers knew more about their great predecessors in literary history and about how contemporary literature could contribute to this ongoing tradition than all of their detractors put together could ever hope to know.

Although I ran across this piece only recently (courtesy of the Literary Saloon), I was gratified to learn that Sukenick also held this view, one which I myself have come to hold, although I arrived at it separately from my interest in Sukenick's work:

Innovative fiction is not inherently better than any other kind of fiction. It’s a genre like any other, and like any other there are mediocre examples as well as a few brilliant ones.

I personally am enamored of the traditional Canon but not interested in repeating it. . . .

Too many critics of the innovative and the postmodern in contemporary fiction think that those of us who defend such writing do so because we think it is the only legitimate way to go about writing fiction, that more conventional or recognizable styles and forms have no value. This is not true at all, at least not in my case. I simply feel that it is a legitimate "genre," one that has the added benefit of provoking us into thinking about other alternative ways of fulfilling the possibilities of fiction as a literary mode. And, with Sukenick, I think there's merit in not wanting to merely repeat what's already been accomplished.

Sukenick's own fiction was characterized by the critic Jerzy Kutnik (The Novel as Perfomance, 1986) in this way: "As a result of its abstractness and opacity, the kind of novel Sukenick has in mind is neither a mirror nor a window, and not a lamp illuminating some other reality, either. As such, it resists interpretation in terms other than its own and directs our attention to its own reality as both an imaginative and a concrete structure. The technological aspect of the novel, its objecthood, is for Sukenick as important as the imaginative aspect, for it plays a crucial role in making the transaction between the author and the reader possible. A novel is most immediately apprehended as a book. . . ." Sukenick himself adds to this in the Surfiction essay: "A writer may wish to convey an illusion, an imitation of reality, or he may wish to create a concrete structure among the other concrete structures of the world, although one which, like a piece of music, may alter our perceptions of the rest."

In practice, this means unorthodox uses of syntax and punctuation, of paragraphing, of typography, all done to emphasize the "technological" qualities of the book as book, of fiction as print. These experiments with "inscription" are perhaps at first perplexing, even frustrating, but one comes to understand what Sukenick is up to, and his books are in their own way both aesthetically coherent and even, ultimately, enjoyable to read. His first novel, UP (1968) is less experimental in this way, and might be a good place for those unfamiliar with Sukenick to start reading his work. However, I believe that his best book is 98.6 (1975), which also is somewhat less freewheeling in its typographical idiosyncracies but is nevertheless thorougly representative of Sukenick's achievement as a writer. It's a metafiction which also manages to present a compelling portrayal of the America of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Also worth seeking out are Death of the Novel and Other Stories (if you can find it), Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues, The Endless Short Story, and Mosaic Man, the latter also perhaps one of Sukenick's more accessible books.

Sukenick remained a passionate advocate on behalf of innovative fiction throughout his career, founding American Book Review for its discussion, and the Fiction Collective (now FC2) for its publication. At its homepage, ABR announces that, fortunately for us, Sukenick completed a final novel, entitled Last Fall, to be published by FC2 next year. ABR also tell us that "The November/December issue of American Book Review will be dedicated to Ron and will contain statements from his many friends and admirers. Selected statements will be published in the special memorial section of the issue, and all of the statements will be posted on ABR’s Web site."

Intellectual Vocations

Dale Peck must be wondering if his strategy for calling attention to himself and for waging verbal war against most of his fellow writers was worth the consequences of actually gaining that attention. Now that the whole thing has degenerated into the ugly farce of "bitch-slapping" discussed on tabloid tv, one hopes he has decided that literary warfare of this kind only trivializes the cause of serious writing, the very endeavor Peck professed to be defending. If Peck had been engaged in honest literary criticism in the first place, rather than merely projecting a kind of free-floating, incendiary "attitude," I might feel sorry for him, but as it is I can't help concluding he has received the very response his "hatchet jobs" were inviting.

In the aftermath of Crouch vs. Peck, however, I am more interested in the comments made by Leon Wieseltier, as reported in the New York Observer. As the literary editor of The New Republic, Wieseltier was ultimately the one responsible for soliciting, editing, and publishing Peck's "reviews" of Rick Moody, Stanley Couch, et. al., and even more than Peck he should have known what kind of reaction they would provoke. What does he now have to say for himself?

Mr. Peck’s unpopularity, Mr. Wieseltier said, "makes it more necessary to be clear that what Stanley did is unacceptable.

"Hitting someone for something they’ve written represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the intellectual’s vocation," Mr. Wieseltier said. . . .

Mr. Wieseltier said that after Mr. Peck’s review ran in The New Republic, he offered Mr. Crouch—also a contributor to the magazine—"ample space" to write a rebuttal. "I knew that Dale’s piece would be very wounding," Mr. Wieseltier said. "And I wanted to be fair."

Having known that Peck's review would be "very wounding," Wieseltier chose to run it anyway, but now "hitting someone" is a betrayal of "the intellectual's vocation?"? What sanctimonious blather. Which wound is likely to be the longest-lasting and was the most unprovoked: the bitch-slap or the hatchet job? Is inflicting any kind of wound part of the intellectual's vocation? And who's most reponsible for Dale Peck's current "unpopularity"? Who encouraged him to be an irresponsible critic in the first place, to substitute invective for analysis?

Wieseltier surely has a lot of gall to talk about the "intellectual's vocation" in this context. There was nothing "intellectual" about Peck's reviews. (This doesn't mean that Peck isn't or can't be an intellectual, to the extent anyone would want to be one of those. It does mean that his reviews were themselves the betrayal of the intellectual's vocation: to interpret carefully, to give good reasons for one's judgments, to avoid self-display.) Publishing them in The New Republic was not a contribution to intellectual debate, but a wholesale attack on contemporary fiction for not measuring up to the ponderous standards of literary moralism Wieseltier's book review section purports to uphold.

For Wieseltier and the reviewers he most often turns to are indeed exemplars of the current version of "moral criticism," the approach to literature that, in the succinct definition provided by Hugh Holman, "judges art according to ethical principles." At its best, moral criticism considers literature to be the greatest repository of illustrated "ethical principles," and takes works of literature seriously for this reason. (Although I myself can't see that literature really serves this purpose, or that it does so other than serendipitously.) At its worst, moral criticism is interested in literature only tangentially, to the extent it provides the occasion for moral reflection or discourse. This kind of criticism frequently dismisses the aesthetic qualities of literature outright (usually moral critics discuss only fiction, since poetry is obviously already too aesthetic for its own good). Here's Wieseltier approvingly describing Lionel Trilling in his introduction to the Trilling anthology The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent: "He did not read to be ravished. He was exercised more by 'the moral imagination' than by the imagination. And he grew increasingly suspicious of art. . .In works of literature Trilling found mainly the records of concepts and sentiments and values. . .Trilling was a very unliterary literary critic. His conception of his critical duty was less professional and less playful--and bigger. The novels and the poems that he pondered were documents for a moral history of his culture. Finally, he was a historian of morality working with literary materials. . . ."

Although Wieseltier remarks that these obsessions on Trilling's part "marked his limitation as a critic of literature," they are limitations only if you think there's merit in being a "literary literary critic," which Wieseltier and most other moral critics pretty clearly think there isn't. And I invite readers to determine for themselves how many of the attitudes attributed here to Trilling seem to be shared by Dale Peck. "Suspicious of art"? Novels as "documents for a moral history of his culture"?

Exactly how moral is it to write and publish essays that verbally attack most writers in sight, that condemn current writers en masse as morally defecient in too many ways to count, and to do so in language and tone (and this is true not just of the reviews by Peck in The New Republic) that is by turns smarmy, cynical, and mocking? In the final analysis, what kind of contribution to literary culture, to literature, is it to pronounce almost all contemporary fiction a waste of one's time? How many clueless, narrow-minded, self-righteous killjoys have said similar things in the past about books now unambiguously considered great?

Violence certainly is a violation of the intellectual's responsibilities, but so are disingenuousness and hypocrisy.

A Show About Nothing

In many ways, "In the Penthouse of the Ivory Tower," Gideon Lewis-Kraus's essay in the July issue of The Believer, is just the latest rehearsal of what is by now a very tired journalistic routine: Go to the MLA convention and report on how absurd and silly most English professors are. (I've been reading versions of this exercise since at least 1985.) In this case, the author is able to cover the convention at somewhat greater length than usual, and he seems somewhat more interested and informed than most garden-variety journalists who have performed the routine in the past. He even tries to dredge up a little sympathy for the out-of-touch professors, although by the end of the piece this effort has mostly come to naught. However, the final verdict is expected enough: "So as much as I want to grab the panelists by their modish lapels and shake them and demand to know exactly what the hell they're talking about, it is not my right to do so, for I am not there by invitation, I am not a member of their community, and I have no right to expect that their words should mean anything to me. I still think their tortured, overwrought sentences are for the most part patently absurd. . . ."

It's not that I don't think that most sentences read aloud at MLA conventions--I've attended many--are "for the most part patently absurd." They are indeed. It's just that, like most of his predecessors in the laugh-at-the-professors genre, Lewis-Kraus doesn't really seem to comprehend just why they're so absurd, so overinflated, so utterly irrelevant. He thinks it's just a failure to speak in fathomable language, an unthinking capitulation to the professionalization of academic discourse. He thinks English professors are finally too insular. But that is not the problem, that is not it at all. English professors no longer have a subject. They are literally speaking and writing about nothing.

Almost immediately upon listening to the first group of speakers at the 2003 convention, Lewis-Kraus is struck by the degree to which these people are asking, implicitly and explicitly, what it is that an English professor is supposed to be doing: "what is an English professor for?" It wasn't that long ago that such a question had a relatively straighforward answer. English professors taught literature, helped to keep the tradition of serious literary writing alive, introduced students and others to this tradition through the classroom and what was called "scholarship" about literature. In the very broadest sense, English professors were the caretakers in charge of maintaining some historical perspective on the language itself, studying literature as the greatest expression of the possibilities of this language. No professor of English today could claim these endeavors as the justification for English as an academic discipline. English professors have now dedicated themselves to the task of "interrogating" the literary tradition, as if it were an intellectual infection whose toxic elements have to be identified. And the only interest in the language most of them show is in injecting it as often as possible with rhetorical formaldehyde.

Lewis-Kraus writes of the papers he hears delivered at one session that they "are so bizarre and freakish and sodden with jargon as to make them utterly incomprehensible." I don't doubt that this was the case, but unfortunately he is unable to give us much in the way of quoted illustration of this kind of discourse. However, in looking at the most recent issue of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (a publication to which I still subscribe and have myself contributed), one quickly comes upon a passage like this, from an essay on Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations: "Across the various epistemic systems of encyclopedic information, diachronic narrative processes self-organize reactions and catalyze reciprocal, feedback relations across the textual network. The structure of the system evolves as the product of co-evolution between system and environment, involving a multidirectional collection of linear and nonlinear processes." This is incomprensible enough, even, as far as I can tell, meaningless, but it's not really the jargon that makes it so. For comparison, here is the beginning of the second paragraph of Eric Auerbach's Mimesis, one of the greatest works of literary criticism ever written. He is describing a scene in the Odyssey:

All this is scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion. The two women express their feelings in copious direct discourse. Feelings though they are, with only a slight admixture of the most general considerations upon human destiny, the syntactical connection between part and part is perfectly clear, no contour is blurred.

Later in the same paragraph:

The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to one another, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; like the separate phenomena themselves, their relationships--their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations--are brought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.

I'm pretty certain that most students, as well as most other readers unpracticed in literary criticism, would find the Mimesis passages almost as incomprehensible as the previously quoted passage about "epistemic systems" or as the scholarly papers Lewis-Kraus sat through. The difference is not that one uses jargon and the other doesn't. (Keeping in mind that Mimesis is a translation.) Both use jargon of one kind or another. Any kind of considered literary criticism is almost by necessity going to be caught using language that offends general-interest sensibilities. The real difference is that Auerbach is attempting to explicate the text in front of him, to help the reader "see" more fully what is really going on in the scene from the Odyssey. He has to use terms ("direct discourse") one wouldn' think of while reading the scene for the first time. The discussion of The Gold Bug Variations, on the other hand, has itself translated the novel into something else, an excuse to use abstraction and scientific-sounding argot and to discuss a subject the critic has invented. It has nothing to do with the novel it otherwise pretends to analyze.

Which is why Lewis-Kraus is on firmer ground when he comments that the kind of "scholarship" to which he is being exposed exhibits "a truly virtuosic incomprehensibility that makes sense only as a kind of poetic performance." It's not even that these scholars are communicating only with one another. They're not trying to communicate. It's all self-display and an allegiance to external agendas of the scholar's own choosing, agendas themselves important only to the extent that the professor in question can give it his/her own scholarly spin. (For a more extensive discussion of this, go here.)

In a response to Lewis-Kraus's essay, Sharleen Mondal makes a valiant effort to defend the contemporary literary scholar: "Literary scholars already hold themselves to a very strict standard when it comes to the validity of arguments--we are supposed to contextualize everything to the nth degree, historicize our analyses, enter the academic conversation, offer 'evidence' through the use of quotations and page references, are supposed to be clear about what we are contributing to existing work on the topic, show which theorists we are using to construct the basis for our argument, etc. If a reader is willing to do what it takes to become acquainted with all these processes, then I am perfectly happy to consider criticism. But my sense is that the reason why our work is often inaccessible to people outside our field is that most people. . .simply aren't interested--the immediate and personal experience of reading is enough."

Mondal is living in another academic age. None of the things she describes are any longer important, except when a "senior scholar" wants to have an excuse for denying a junior colleague tenure. (Even in using the word "colleague," I can hardly manage to suppress a sneer at the idea that English departments are any longer involved in any kind of collective enterprise.) All of them presuppose an existing interest in literature and in advocating on behalf of literature, but the literary academy as a whole can no longer summon up such interest. Lewis-Kraus's essay makes this patently obvious. There's scarcely a mention of literature in it except as "what you teach to your students" for the professors on hand at the convention. The fact of the matter is that not even most English professors care much about the "work" being done by those who have inherited the space inside the ivy-covered halls. Charles Bertsch, a professor who accompanies Lewis-Kraus to the convention, practically admits he has more interest in PAC-10 basektball. Literature is passe, and it's hard to muster up much enthusiasm for a fragmented curriculum that mostly rewards self-obsession.

In my opinion, it's this self-obsession that Lewis-Kraus mistakes "for a faint tremor of heroism in the air" as he sums up his experience of the MLA convention.

Making Believe

John Holbo has recently posted two lengthy discussions of the concept of "fiction" as it would be understood using the tools of analytic philosophy. I am by no means well-read enough in analytic philosophy to assess these posts in technical terms, although I do think I know enough to follow along and perhaps make a few comments from a purely literary perspective.

Holbo is responding to a book that analyzes fiction as a "prop" readers use to engage in what this author wants to call "make-believe." Holbo believes that this view is too simplistic, reducing fiction to a device that prompts readers to create mental images, or that works to "prescribe imaginings." Holbo thinks that this simplistic view is especially infelicitous in describing our reading of novels, which do not provoke these kinds of "imaginings" in the same way that other, more explict games of make-believe do. As Holbo points out, reading a novel is not like playing with toy trucks.

It seems to me that Holbo is trying to say that works of literature have effects on us that cannot easily be accounted for by philosophical analysis. The words in a novel work differently than words in other contexts:

Now with regard to novels there is certainly at least a little something to the idea that, in at least some cases, there is at least something inessential about the prop, i.e. all the words - because the story is the thing, and any given story can be narrated any number of different ways. But indifference to the specifics of the narrative, i.e. all the words, is really not a standard attitude. You don't have to be much of a critic to care how a given story is told, i.e. to care about the prop itself, as well as what the prop makes us imagine (if it does make us imagine.)

I think this is exactly right, although, again, I couldn't provide an argument of my own that would satisfy most analytic philosophers. Part of the problem with approaching fiction from the vantage point of philosophy is that it excludes certain considerations that would otherwise help to explain what we in fact do enounter in reading fiction or poetry. (Although of course if these considerations were taken into account, the result would be literary criticism and not philosophy.) For example, I would argue that the novel, the literary category of "fiction" more generally, has developed less as a reaction among writers to the requirements of "story" per se than as a sequential reaction to what previous writers have done within the tradition of the novel or the short story as it is passed along from one cohort to the next. Sometimes this means thinking through the implications of narrative itself, sometimes ignoring story in order to concentrate on style or "stream of consciousness" or something else. In other words, most writers are at least as interested in what they can do with language itself as what they can do through telling stories.

A related problem is the need to collapse poetry and fiction (as Holbo does in an earlier post) into a single category of "imaginative" writing in which the arrangement of words works differently than in non-literary writing--it is less propositional, less laden with "information," etc., a difference that invokes the specific analysis of such writing as "fiction" in the first place. What is gained by looking at these modes through this fairly narrow philosophical lens (which is not at all neglible) is balanced by the loss of those other features of poetry and fiction that have appeal to us for other than their roles in the game of fiction-making or make-believe.

Perhaps the most significant drawback to considering "fiction" as more or less identical with "story" is identified by Holbo himself:

. . .The more paradigmatically story-like the representational content of a work, the more comfortable we are classing it as a work of fiction.

One exception: experimental literary works that strive to undermine narrative and story conventions – i.e. that willfully lack beginnings, middles and ends, characters, so forth – are usually quite easily classified as fiction (unless they seem to be turning into poems.) I take this ease of classification to be the result of a sort of grandfather-clause. Or maybe an Oedipus-like father-clause: if you are trying so hard to overthrow story, you must be story, ergo fiction. (A bit of a puzzle.)

I don't think this really is a puzzle. These kinds of experimental "fictions" are, in my view, precisely trying to undermine the reflexive association of fiction with story, although perhaps not completely enough that we would want to categorize it as something other than fiction. To this extent, "fiction" becomes simply a literary identifying mark, an acknowledgment of the tradition of prose writing from which it emerges, but no longer very helpfully describes what a work so designated does in terms of storytelling alone. But perhaps at this point as well such a work no longer lends itself very usefully to the kind of analysis a philosopher might want to do of the more ordinary understanding of the term.

Communication Skills

In one of the most recently published diatribes against unconventional literature (this time poetry), Joan Houlihan declares that

Like all other forms of writing, poetry is a communication. The evidence is in its release from the poet's brain onto a medium designed to be read. The fact that it was written down, made readable, makes it a communication even if its only reader turns out to be its creator at a later time. Furthermore, whatever one feels about the role of the reader, or author-as-reader, there's no dispute that there is a role—a poem without a reader is not a poem, but just an artifact of the imagination.

This is so profoundly wrong in so many ways that I have been unable to resist examining the passage for its more egregiously mistaken assumptions.

Neither poetry nor fiction is "a communication" in the way Houlihan clearly intends the term to be understood here. Poets and novelists do not "communicate" information or messages or ideas or propositions or wisdom or anything else by writing poetry or fiction. If these forms of writing are to be considered methods of communication, they are very poor ones indeed, since in most acccomplished poems or novels the best that can be said is that their messages or "points" are communicated in a very roundabout way, a strategy that would seem merely self-defeating if the goal of writing them is to satisfy readers looking for the points being made or the message communicated. Most of the great works of literature would surely by now have been judged failures by the communication test: if the value of those works from the past we still read were to be found in their clearly signalled meanings, their unambiguosly announced "themes," we probably would not still be reading them. Why bother? Just take the message and run.

That poetry is written down, "designed to be read," doesn't in itself demonstrate it's to be taken as communication, although most of us do admittedly have a harder time separating the medium in which the literary arts are created from the artistic effects of which that medium might be capable than we do with painting or sculpture or music. Since we do use language to communicate, we assume all language must be used for that purpose--or that all uses of language can't escape its origins in communication or discourse. We are much more willing to grant that music, say, (the scores of which are also "written down") is something other than communication, in most cases, in fact, would resist the idea that behind the music we like is primarily an effort to communicate ideas or messages. But why is it not possible simply to grant that when poets or novelists set to work they are using language for some purposes that can't be reduced to "communication?" A poem or novel is an artificial construction of words. You may not like what has been constructed in a specific instance, but it hardly seems useful to say that it didn't communicate with you.

All of this is just confirmed if we further consider Houlihan's own contention that a poem communicates "even if its only reader turns out to be its creator at a later time." This seems frankly bizarre. If a poet at some future date "reads" a poem she has written, is she really "communicating" with herself? Would this poet even be aware of what's being communicated? Wouldn't she be looking at the poem's formal qualities, the aptness of its word choice, etc.? Why couldn't other readers look primarily to such things as well? Did Emily Dickinson consider herself finally a failure because the vast majority of her poems didn't "communicate" with anyone? Might she have been satisfied simply that she had created hundreds of well-made poems?

Even more bizarre, at least to me, is the claim that "a poem without a reader is not a poem, but just an artifact of the imagination." I will agree that ultimately most writers want readers, but what's wrong with those readers considering a given work as "an artifact of the imagination"? Isn't this the very way to define all works of art? Perhaps the problem Houlihan sees here is not that poems are products of the human imagination, but that they might be regarded as "artifacts," something that has been made by "artificial" means. Presumably poetry ought to be "natural," indeed an effort at communication. This distinction is probably at the heart of most complaints against works of art and literature that go too far in their brazen use of artifice or that are pronounced "obscure." But anyone taking up the writing of poetry and fiction is committed to an endeavor that is inescapably artificial. Poetry is an inherently unnatural disruption of our ordinary sense of what language is for (just ask all those freshmen struggling through intro to lit), but if you really resent writers playing this kind of game with words (game-playing, however, being just as integral to human nature as the need to communicate), you probably shouldn't be reading (or writing) poetry in the first place.

I looked for evidence in Houlihan's essay that I was myself misreading her message, misconstruing her point, but was only reinforced in my analysis by her conclusion, in which she writes of "poets who betray what talent they may have for the approbation of peers, who engage in the worst self-delusion: that they have something to say that can only be said in a poem." Once again we are dealing with the assumption that literature is a forum for "saying something," even if it is something "that can only be said in a poem." I've never been clear exactly what things "can only be said in a poem." If you can reformulate the poem into what it "says," then obviously you have said it in another way. If you can't put what it says into words, then just as obviously it's not saying anything. The only other alternative is that a poem just is what it is, in most ways precisely avoiding saying anything in particular. If what we have in such a piece of writing is a failure to communicate, this failure is the poem's greatest success.

Not in this Lifetime

I greatly admire Helen Vendler. She is perhaps the greatest living close reader of poetry, especially modern poetry, in the United States. She is also passionately committed to the task of explicating the value of poetry, of literature in general, to as wide an audience as possible, as her recent Jefferson lecture, "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar," makes abundantly clear. Cynics are advised to not go near this lecture: not only will they immediately encounter a student of literature utterly convinced of its centrality to human life, but they may wind up convinced of this centrality themselves if they read the lecture through to the end.

But it is precisely Vendler's sincerity and her eloquent communication of her own passion for poetry that ultimately, for me at least, make reading this lecture a rather sad experience. She's right about almost everything she says in trying to argue for making art and literature the curricular centerpiece in the study of the "Humanities" in American universities, but given how thoroughly the study of literature (art more broadly) has been rejected in this country, by administrators, politicians, students, parents, employers, and most pathetically, by literature professors themselves, the context in which her words are offered make this lecture sound more like a funeral oration than an inspirational address, an elegy for what might have been than a proposal for curricular reform. It's almost as if she hasn't noticed that the academic and business elites in America ooze contempt for art and literature, or, more to the point, that literary academics long ago stopped pretending they had any real regard for what is supposed to be the subject of their scholarly study.

Vendler is certainly correct in saying that "When it became useful in educational circles in the United States to group various university disciplines under the name 'The Humanities,' it seems to have been tacitly decided that philosophy and history would be cast as the core of this grouping. . .Philosophy, conceived of as embodying truth, and history, conceived of as a factual record of the past, were proposed as the principal embodiments of Western culture, and given pride of place in general education programs." Americans' demand for "facts" and "hard" knowledge, their disdain for the fluff that is fiction or poetry or painting or music, were reflected even in that realm of academic study that was--grudgingly--ceded to "humanists." She is also justified in claiming that "Confidence in a reliable factual record, not to speak of faith in a reliable philosophical synthesis, has undergone considerable erosion. Historical and philosophical assertions issue, it seems, from particular vantage points, and are no less contestable than the assertions of other disciplines." Finally, she makes as compelling a case that serious engagement with the arts is good for you as anyone is likely to make.

But her answer to her own posed question, "If the arts are so satisfactory an embodiment of human experience, why do we need studies commenting on them?", is not so compelling, at least if she means by this, "Why study the arts in college?" Or, "Why create an academic caste of professional 'scholars' to comment on art as a 'discipline?'" I unhesitatingly agree that "reminders of art's presence are constantly necessary," but is the best way to do this to relegate the study of art to universities, where the most concrete result has been the very maginalization, the trivialization, of art and literature? Vendler's second reason for installing the arts in the curriculum of universities, that "such studies establish in human beings a sense of cultural patrimony" is, in my opinion the weakest argument that can be made on behalf of the academic study of art or music or literature, since it threatens to reduce them to a form of nationalist propaganda--or a reaction against such perceived propaganda, which is largely what has indeed happened to literary study in particular. But Vendler doesn't finally seem to believe very strongly in this argument herself.

The real weight of Vendler's defense of "the products of aesthetic endeavor" falls on her contention that studying works of art and literature "helps us to live our lives," and that scholars are best situated to show us how this can be true. The weight of this argument, in turn, rests on her reading of three poems by Wallace Stevens, poems in which Stevens does indeed speak of the indispensability of art--specifically poetry--and of the scholar's role in reminding us of this. I have no intention of disputing Vendler's reading of these poems. I couldn't plausibly do it even if I wanted to. But I do think she overgeneralizes Stevens's reference to the "scholar, separately dwelling," who "Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,/Which, as a man feeling everything, were his" to mean the academic scholar of the sort we find in American universities. As Harold Bloom points out in Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, the scholar of "Somnambulisma" is likely an allusion to Emerson's "American Scholar," who is not exactly the tweedy gentleman available for office hours we all know and love. If Vendler means in her discussion of this poem that it is desirable if not necessary that some people devote themselves to perpetuating the legacy of still vital poets and artists from the past, reminding us of the "pervasive being" Stevens identifies in his poem, I would have no quarrel with her. But I have a hard time believing there are many such scholars around any more, the very denotation of the word "scholar" now understood as it is to designate exactly the gentleman/woman in the office.

Bloom additionally points out that "Large Red Man Reading," the second poem Vendler discusses, as well contains allusions to Emerson, who also saw the poet's job as writing the "poem of life," was also concerned with the "vatic" power of the poet, but again it is difficult to imagine that either Emerson or Stevens conceived of this "earthly giant of vital being" (Vendler's words) as a "scholar" of the modern kind. Is it part of the job description of the scholar nowadays that he hold his students in rapt attention as he teaches them that "the experiences of life can be reconstituted and made available as beauty and solace, to help us live our lives"? If such scholars as Vendler seems to evoke here ever existed, they surely no longer stride through the halls of the general classroom building, if only because such activity as Vendler wants to describe through her explication of this poem will certainly not get you tenure. The "Large Red Man Reading" helps us pay attention to what we otherwise wouldn't notice; the modern scholar only notices what is otherwise not worth our attention.

Although clearly what Helen Vendler values most in art and literature is the stimulation and pleasure they afford in their own right, in order to duly place them at the center of humanities education, she is ultimately forced to appeal to other services they might perform ("training in subtlety of response," enhancing "scientific training" through the "direct mediation. . .of feeling, vicarious experience, and interpersonal imagination"), as is any proposal to include art in an academic curriculum. She is also led to adopt very dubious--and somewhat naive--theories about how training in the arts is to be accomplished: "Once the appetite for an art has been awakened by pleasure, the nursery rhyme and the cartoon lead by degrees to Stevens and Eakins. A curriculum relying on the ocean, the bird, and the scholar, on the red man and his blue tabulae, would produce a love of the arts and humanities that we have not yet succeeded in generating in the population at large." I am not aware of any evidence that the aesthetic domino effect--from the nursery rhyme ultimately to Wallace Stevens--actually ever happens with other than those students who were always going to get to Stevens or Eakins anyway. And if "the population at large" were going to be led to a love of the arts, we would already have witnessed the appearance of this heaven-on-earth, since much of the justification for teaching the arts and humanities to captive student audiences during the last seventy-five years was based on some such theory. Everyone should read Helen Vendler's poetry criticism, as it indeed can lead individual readers to an appreciation of what makes poetry worth reading. Her Jefferson lecture, however, mistakenly assumes that this kind of concrete experience of literary art can be universalized into a system of academic intruction, still mistaken no matter how well-intentioned the effort might be. Or how nice it would be if it could actually work.

Look Who's Talking

There's one good point lurking in Christina Nehring"s otherwise incoherent essay, "Books Make You a Boring Person," in the June 27 New York Times Book Review: simply reading a book, any book, does not confer any special glory on the reader so moved, is not itself necessarily a better way to spend time than watching tv or lolling around on the street corner. Reading good books, however, books conveying knowledge or providing an engaged experience that cannot be duplicated in other ways, is an invaluable activity--even if reverse snobs writing for the New York Times think it's boring.

But Nehring doesn't seem to comprehend this basic distinction. And, after making her initially valid point, she immediately veers off into a supposedly illustrative reference to a film called Stone Reader (I haven't seen it), which, according to Nehring, is about the "fetishization" of books. There are indeed a large group of book fetishizers in America, although they are otherwise known as book collectors. (See this post.) The participants in the film, according to the dialogue Nehring herself quotes, have actually read the books they "fondle," so it's hard to know why Nehring thinks their "raves about the joy of reading" amount to a fetish. Furthermore, what exactly would the two people quoted want to say about the "contents" of The Old Man and the Sea? Does she want a book report? A disquisition on fishing? Wouldn't they look silly if they suddenly broke out into an academic lecture on Hemingway's symbolic naturalism? It's a movie. Try as I might, I can't see how a documentary about a "search for a lost novelist" (Nehring's summary of the plot) has anything to do with the actual writing and reading of books. How many readers go around making documentaries about their favorite books in the first place?

"It is not because something comes between two covers that it is inherently superior to what passes on a screen or arrives on the airwaves," Nehring tells us. But her jeremiad is not about the dangers of fondling books; it's about the limitations of going on to read them. If she means the physical artifact of the book has no special value, I agree with her. What is valuable about a book, what academics generally refer to as "the text," is not specific to its printing in any particular edition. However, this is not what Nehring is saying. She appears to say--it's a little hard to keep it straight--that precisely the written text itself is "inherently" no different than these visual media in what it does or how it affects an audience. This is simply wrong. No movie version of The Old Man and the Sea, no matter how "faithful" to the source, will ever substitute for reading the novel. Film creates its own kind of artistic effects, and by this measure is not inherently inferior to fiction, but it cannot provide the same depth of experience, the same layered immersion in detail and nuance, as a novel. Similarly, no television documentary or "special report" will ever rival serious history, biography, or any other kind of well-presented nonfiction in communicating information in a way that adds up to knowledge. Ken Burns's film was great, but if I really want to know about the Civil War, I'm still going to go first to James McPherson or Bruce Catton.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about Nehring's essay, at least to me, is her attempted use of Ralph Waldo Emerson to help make the case against reading. "Books are for a scholar's idle times," she quotes him as saying, implying that in his use of the word "idle" Emerson meant to denigrate those periods of reflection in which we are not engaged in "activity," something Nehring suggests is more likely to bring us real knowledge. The statement is from "The American Scholar," but Nehring doesn't quote what follows on from it in the rest of the paragraph: "When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must--when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining--we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, 'A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.'" These are not the words of someone who could ever maintain that "books make you a boring person." Reading in "idle times" is a continuation of our "reading" during the rest of the day. Emerson doesn't want a simplistic division of life into active and idle periods: our daylight activities must be "idle" as well, else we become simple drudges; reading requires "work," else it becomes mere trifling. As much as Emerson wants us to be "self-reliant," he would not have accepted a defintion of the concept that so artificially separated "our own judgments" (Nehring's words) from our experience of "the best books," as Emerson says further in "The American Scholar": "They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads."

And when Emerson writes that "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books" he is attempting to subvert the practice of appealing to authorities, whether the authority of divines, of the ancients, or of modern scientists and philosophers, on religious and intellectual questions, reminding his own readers that these figures were once themselves only readers trying to find their way. They were not oracles speaking wisdom that simply appeared fully-formed, ready to be pronounced. Emerson did not want the young men of his day to refrain from reading. He wanted them to read for themselves.

I can't help but suspect that Nehring's essay is meant to be an implicit defense of the new policy toward books at the New York Times Book Review itself, previously characterized by new editor Sam Tanenhaus as an attempt to foster "debate," to use the Book Review as a continuation of the news and editorial pages of the newpaper. In this approach, as exemplified by Christina Nehring, books are good as "invitations to fight," as opportunities "to argue with them" but apparently not to read. Certainly nothing Nehring says in her essay has any application to fiction or poetry. Despite her call for discussion of rather than simple enthusiasm for a novel such as The Old Man and the Sea, her focus is almost entirely on the "ideas" contained in books, defined in the most simplistic of terms as something books present as on a tray, the savor of which we then judge according to our own intellectual/gustatory tastes. (Tastes derived from where?) Nothing like the attitude Nehring advocates we take toward nonfiction (itself tellingly equated with "books") could be seriously adopted in our reading of literature, since it is precisely the kind of immediate immersion such works invite that Nehring seems to find so alarming. If "Books Make You a Boring Person" can be read as a kind of advance warning, expect that in the New York Times Book Review under its new overseers not only will fiction that doesn't obviously provide "food for thought" be ignored, but the very idea that serious people might want to read such fiction will be considered literally incredible, "too extraordinary and improbable to be believed" (Merriam-Webster). These readers will be declared boring indeed.