The Reading Experience

A Sad Commentary on Our Age

As much as my instincts tell me I should take issue with this essay on Shakespeare (by Paul A. Cantor) in The Claremont Review of Books, I just can't. All too much of it is all too true. Still, this summary passage has its own conceptual problems:

It is a truism that every age remakes Shakespeare in its own image. If so, Wood's Shakespeare is a sad commentary on our age. In both academic scholarship and popular accounts like Wood's, people today struggle to translate Shakespeare into contemporary terms, to make him speak our language and echo our peculiar concerns. The result is to cut Shakespeare down to size and lose sight of everything that makes him unique among authors. In the distorting mirror we hold up to Shakespeare, we see reflected back only what we wish to see—all the obsessions of our particular moment, and that means chiefly the obsession with victimization, of people oppressed in terms of race, class, and gender. In the age of victimology, Wood thinks he has done Shakespeare a favor; he has found a way to present Shakespeare himself as a victim, a closet Catholic in a Protestant police state. "Catholic" is about the only oppressed minority to which Wood could assign Shakespeare with any plausibility.

The approaches to Shakespeare these days are particularly reductive, but I really can't see an alternative to the attempt "to translate Shakespeare into contemporary terms, to make him speak our language and echo our peculiar concerns." If we can't make Shakespeare's plays "speak" to us in our own historical circumstances, then literally he can't speak to us at all. And, as Cantor acknowledges, all generations of readers and critics rewrite Shakespeare for their own purposes. This includes the generations who presented us with Shakespeare the pillar of culture and civilization, which was no more accurate an "image" of Shakespeare as the one Cantor deplores. The only way to appreciate the plays of Shakespeare both for what they were and what they are is to devote much, much time to studying them and their various contexts. This is, unfortunately, probably no longer something many people are willing to do.

Postmodernism

In a comment on my recent post about "metafiction," Nick Kerkhoff (whose relatively new blog can be found here) wonders about the precise relationship between metafiction and postmodernism:

Meta-fiction does not seem to require a social understanding, for the self-reference is inherent to the story (am I right about that?). Whereas postmodernism can only be understood in the context of the social climate. (If I could make an analogy to painting: any human in the world should possess the prerequisites to understand a Pollack (if they let themselves), and even though it's illusionary, most people who have seen a regular drawing before, should be able to understand the meta-tricks of MC Escher, but only a person immersed in our culture could understand the point of a enlarged Warhol soupcan (otherwise they'd be appreciating merely the original Campbell Soup-employed artist)).

In the post I had stated that metafiction was really the original movement in the contemporary arts to be called "postmodern." In fact, arguably the first substantive use of the term was by the literary critic Irving Howe in 1959 to describe a kind of postwar fiction that was, in Howe's view, clearly departing in its assumptions and methods from prewar modernism. (Howe and his fellow New York Critics always felt that this rupture was a mortal one, as most of them had first become prominent literary critics through their championing of high modernism.) Only later--in the 1970s and even 1980s--did "postmodernism" become the label for a broader cultural tendency that theorists of all kinds found convenient in their analyses of, variously, consumer capitalism, identity politics, and historical change, or for engaging in a certain kind of highly abstract "philosophical" debate. Postmodernism in literature, or in the arts more generally, in turn became merely illustrative examples that one could handily appeal to as embodiments of one's favored theory.

It is, I think, this version of postmodernism that Nick has in mind when he says that "postmodernism can only be understood in the context of the social climate." Warhol's paintings, in this view, can be called postmodern because they "say" things to us about consumerism, about the fetishizing of objects or the artistic tastes of "elites," etc. One would indeed need to be "immersed in our culture" to get all this, but it is, of course, a central tenet of postmodernism-as-cultural-analysis that everyone is inescapably immersed in it, so the problem of interpretation is not acute.

Nick also asks "if metafiction could be labeled a piece, a subset, in the overall postmodern impulse." Indeed it could be, as long as we restricted our use of the term to mean the kind of literary postmodernism Howe was talking about and that later was applied to Barth and Coover, Barthelme and Pynchon. All of these writers were in one way or another responding to the challenge laid down by the high modernists, and in most cases they were trying to experiment further with the innovative techniques associated with modernism, not to overturn or abandon them. If "postmodern" can no longer be reclaimed from the school of cultural analysis I have described, however, I would rather discard it altogether, since I don't think metafiction, or experimental fiction more broadly, has much to do with that kind of politically-motivated criticism. Although it is certainly true that such fiction potentially has much to say about such things as the slipperiness of our notions of "identity" or the way in which stories are often used to give order to a chaotic reality in ways that are often more dangerous than the underlying chaos.

I prefer to think of metafiction as indeed existing outside the immediate requirements of "social understanding." That is, reading it, like reading any worthwhile fiction, is first of all a literary experience, not an experience in social criticism or cultural recognition. While there are some things about the "postmodern" critique of culture with which I agree, one of its most baneful conseqeunces is the way in which it has swept up what was postmodern fiction into its smothering arms and blocked our view of what this fiction is really like. It has little to do with Marx, or with Boudrillard, or with Jameson, or with any other so-called postmodern theorist. It has much more to do with Joyce, or Woolf, or Beckett. Or, for that matter, Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding.

Metafiction

At a time when the idea of self-reflexive art has become commonplace, if not itself a kind of established convention, it may be useful to reconsider the original appearance in contemporary literature of what came to be called "metafiction." Not only was this strain of American fiction--taken up by several different writers, in slightly different ways--probably the first of all of the contemporary arts (including the popular arts) to explore the possibilities of self-reflexivity, but arguably it was this approach to fiction that initially provoked the coinage of the term "postmodern" to describe it. Since both "metafiction" and "postmodern" have by now clearly become terms of abuse as much as descriptive labels, perhaps reexamining what the writers associated with the use of metafiction believed themselves to be up to might clarify what is still valuable about their work, as well as what the literary strategy involved still has to offer current and future writers of fiction.

As I wrote my own doctoral dissertation on the "rise of metafiction," I do feel I have a familiarity with the subject that is sufficiently informed that my comments amount to more than just superficial impressions or an unexamined enthusiasm. At the same time, I am not in this relatively brief post attempting a full-blown crtical analysis of metafiction. I hope merely to suggest that granting the original metafictionists some integirty in their literary goals and methods can only remind us why many serious, accomplished writers found various self-reflexive techniques to be, collectively, an aesthetically satisfying way both to follow up on the exploration of fiction's possibilities undertaken by the modernists and to create a then-contemporary mode of fiction that would in its own way capture the tenor of the times in which it was written. Perhaps this in turn would illuminate the further possibilities of metafiction--if any--current writers might find in it as fiction itself continues to define its place among other visual/narrative arts that feature "story" as their ostensible center of interest.

In my view, the foundational works of American metafiction are John Barth's story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association (1968), as well as Coover's collection Pricksongs and Descants (1969). These books of course themselves show the influence of various precursors in the work of, among others, Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov, but finally they are the books that brought together most explicitly those characteristics of all previous fiction that work against simply producing transparent realism, that point the reader away from the unfolding narrative and toward the artificial devices by which all literary narratives are constructed and embellished. In so doing, Barth and Coover created a kind of "self-conscious" fiction that would decidedly--and perhaps irretrievably--alter perceptions of the role of convention in fiction.

In Barth's fiction, these conventions were challenged directly, in stories that blatantly reveal themselves to be fabrications, that examine self-reflexively the process and the tools of storytelling, that delight in all the contrivances and tricks that are involved in storytelling even as they acknowledge that such contrivances are always involved. Coover's fiction indulges in these sorts of diversions as well, although his work is perhaps more likely to explore the ways in which fiction and fiction-making incorporate, perhaps inevitably, elements of ritual and myth, as in UBA or "The Magic Poker," and to explode the conventions of realism and traditional narrative from within, to produce a kind of kaleidoscopic surrealism, as in "The Babysitter," rather than the comic anatomies of storytelling to be found in Lost in the Funhouse. (Although Barth is certainly interested as well in the mythic/ritual origins of storytelling.) But even as both Barth and Coover were seemingly set on demolishing the established conventions of narrative fiction, both also clearly revelled in storytelling and in finding new ways for stories to be "relevant" in a period of upheaval and radical change, as the 1960s clearly was.

Thus, metafiction was simultaneously an attempt to clear the ground of the remaining inherited presuppositions about the "craft" of fiction and to make possible a more unrestricted viw of what actually constitutes literary craft, to open up the ground for new practices that might expand fiction's potential range, that might even lead to a renewal of storytelling in new forms and styles. Most importantly, Barth and Coover went about this without sacrificing fiction's "entertainment" quotient. (In my opinion, at least.) The Universal Baseball Association is an engrossing read (even if you don't like baseball), "The Babysitter" an intensely compelling story despite the fact that what's "reallly going on" is impossible to determine. A story like Barth's "Menelaiad" is great fun to read, as long as you're willing to go along with its almost literally infinite regress of story-within-story. Other readers might not find them as entertaining as I do, perhaps, but that the authors meant them to be entertaining in their own way seems to me indisputable.

A list of subsequent metafiction of equal value and accomplishment would have to include William Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (1971), Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) and Mulligan Stew (1979), as well as some of the work of Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman. These writers continued to ask questions not just about the conventions of fiction but about the very medium of writing, about the established usages of language itself. Gass and Sukenick play games with typography, Sorrentino adds to metafiction his outrageous humor and inveterate experimentation, Federman uses metafiction (or what he called "surfiction") to question the "reality" of reality. Taken together, they remain the literary touchstones of American metafiction. Their books may occasionally go out of print, but they will always be rediscovered because they still seem innovative despite the passage of time and the borrowing of their innovations by later writers.

By the 1980s a backlash of sorts had set in, both among other writers, who increasingly went for minimalist neorealism, and among critics, who increasingly called such fiction "self-indulgent" rather than "self-reflexive." Nevertheless, all of the metafictionists continued to write some very good books, and younger writers emerged who were clearly influenced by their earlier work. There are metafictional elements in the work of Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace, of Steve Stern and Steven Millhauser. A good deal even of Philip Roth's later work would clearly not have been the same without the prior efforts of the metafictionists. Other writers, from Michael Chabon to Ian McEwan and David Mitchell, would not necessarily be called metafictionists, but their books show a preoccupation with writing and with forms of storytelling that can be traced back to the related but different kind of preoccupation to be found in Lost in the Funhouse and The Universal Baseball Association.

However, the real promise of metafiction has not yet really been fulfilled. Its true legacy is to be found in the way it calls writers' (and readers') attention to the attributes of fiction as art, potentially making all of us more immediately aware of the limitless ways in which works of fiction can be shaped into artful verbal creations. Too often self-reflexive devices and strategies are still used simply as gimmicks, empty gestures, strategems employed by those wishing to appear clever and knowing. Not enough effort has been made to redeem the still latent possibilities of fiction when approached as an aesthetically malleable form waiting to be adapted to various imaginative purposes. (For an example of how one of the founding metafictionists is still able to do this, read Robert Coover's most recent novel, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre.) The unmitigated commercialism and careerism of the publishing "industry" as it now exists is not going to make this sort of effort more likely in the near future, nor will the disciplinary imperatives of academic creative writing, which mostly makes for the homogenization of product. But anyone who might like to strike out on a different path anyway, to understand how fiction might be freed of its encrusted layers of formula and routine, could do worse than to read (or re-read) the books and writers I have mentioned.

Strange and Wild Books

This essay by nature writer David Gessner is really quite provocative. Here are the first two paragraphs:

I AM SICK of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean. It's been almost four years now, four years of sitting quietly in my study and sipping tea and contemplating the migratory patterns of the semipalmated plover. Four years of writing essays praised as "quiet" by quiet magazines. Four years of having neighborhood children ask their fathers why the man down the street comes to the post office dressed in his pajamas ("Doesn't he work, Daddy?") or having those same fathers wonder why, when the man actually does dress, he dons the eccentric costume of an English bird watcher, complete with binoculars. And finally, four years of being constrained by the gentle straightjacket of the nature-writing genre; that is, four years of writing about the world without being able to use the earthier names for excrement (while talking a lot of scat).

Worse still, it's been four years of living within a literary form that, for all its wonder and beauty, can be a little like going to Sunday School. A strange Sunday School where I alternate between sitting in the pews (reading nature) and standing at the pulpit (writing nature). And not only do I preach from my pulpit, I preach to the converted. After all, who reads nature books? Fellow nature lovers who already believe that the land shouldn't be destroyed. Too often when I flip through the pages of contemporary nature books the tone is awed, hushed, reverential. The same things that drove me away from Sunday School. And the same thing that drove me, unable to resist my own buffoonery, to fart loudly against the pews.

Gessner goes on in the next paragraph to observe astutely:

As the 150th anniversary of "Walden" approaches on August 9, it may pay to remember that Thoreau's great book also has its share of fart jokes, including references to Pythagrians and their love of beans. Bad puns, too, but you get the feeling that that isn't what the anniversary party is going to focus on. Instead the same, tired old cut-out of Thoreau as nature saint will be dragged out, St. Francis of Concord, our sexless -- and increasingly lifeless -- hero. It makes you wonder if anyone's actually taken the time to read his strange and wild book lately. If they did they would find sentences that fulfill Emerson's epigram: "My moods hate each other." Sentences that are, in turn, defensive and direct, arch and simple, upright and sensual, over-literary (even for the times) and raw. Of course I'm not claiming that Thoreau's book is free of nature reverence, just that the pious tone is often contradicted -- delightfully, thornily -- by moments like his confession that, for all his reasoned vegetarianism, "I could sometimes eat a fried rat with good relish, if it were necessary."

In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that not many people, including most nature writers, have "taken the time to read [Thoreau's] strange and wild book lately." Indeed it wouldn't surprise me to learn that few people have really read Walden at all, at least as it really is and not through the prism of a romanticized revisionism that sees the book as the kind of prissified environmental tome most people take it to be. There's plenty in it that's cranky, imperious, inflexible, and manifestly not politically correct. Most of all there's Thoreau's sometimes dense and allusive style: "I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders, as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something, about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of the tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars--even thes forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness."

This hardly seems the sort of thing one would now expect of the tea-sipping kind of nature writing Gessner describes, writing that seeks to describe nature in translucent language and dulcet tones and that seeks to elevate the scenery so described above the writer's own subjective perceptions. In effect, an image of Thoreau as a certain sort of nature-worshipper has replaced Thoreau the writer his texts actually present him to be.

One might say that this kind of inattention to what objectively characterizes the work of writers from the past, a failure to actually read it, is almost inevitable when these writers become known to us only--or at least mostly--through their inclusion in curricula of academic study--through being listed on course syllabi of various kinds. Familiarity with their books or plays or poems comes entirely in the "textbook" variety, although we don't necessarily read them only in literal textbooks. We read them in snippets, abridgements, condensed versions. It becomes very easy in this context for Thoreau to become the solemn nature-writer or Dickens to become the creator of Tiny Tim and other sentimental characters, or Hawthorne to become the grim chronicler of Puritanism, tags that efficiently describe them--or a version of them--and make it unnecessary to read them further.

This dilemma becomes especially acute with Shakespeare, who becomes the great Bard, the English National Treasure, the all-wise and perfect poet, and, most frequently, the measure by which we judge our qualifications to "culture." It was Shakespeare who created the most towering monuments of Culture in its pristine form, and thus the reason to read or view Shakespeare is to admire these monuments. That some people would rather not do this, especially when they're given little help in further understanding why their admiration is warranted, is perfectly understandable, this conclusion being my immediate response to a recent newspaper article explaining its author's refusal to any longer accord Shakespeare such reflexive respect. (This article is unfortunately no longer available online, but I thank The Elegant Variation for the link to it, nevertheless.) The author is wrong in assuming that Shakespeare really doesn't have anything to say to him, at least in my view, but it's hard to deny that the general assumption shared by too many of those who highly value Shakespeare is that one should esteem the plays because, well, just because one should.

Since the dominant attitude toward canonical literature among those who would otherwise be entrusted with educating readers or playgoers in the appropriate strategies for appreciating literature--that is, in the academy--has actually become a skeptical if not belligerent one, this situation will only get worse.The culture mavens will continue to insist on the spiritually pharmaceutical properities of Literature, and the professors will continue to use the snippets and abridgements to advance whatever preconceived agendas they have in mind.

Yet at some point it does become necessary to acknowledge that perhaps some writers, perhaps some great writers, just no longer engage present-day readers as effectively as they seem to have done in the past. Perhaps people no longer read Walden because its voice seems too alien, too prickly, for current sensibilites. Perhaps even the time will come when overcoming all the obstacles to understanding Shakespeare in his own language and according to the appropriate literary conventions will become too difficult, at least for all but the few. Neither insisting on the greatness of these writers nonetheless, nor attempting to reinterpret or literally retranslate them into contemporary idioms and assumptions will forestall this for long. It is true that we live in a time when any kind of difficult or unorthodox writing is often decried as an offense to the "common reader," and it is possible that at some time in the not so distant future such writing will again be welcomed. At that time the difficulties involved in reading works of literature from the past might again be seen as worth the effort as well. But there is effort involved, and it remains an open question whether "literary reading," as it was called in the recent NEA report, will ever really be an interest shared by more than a small, if ardent, minority. And, if not, whether this would be such a bad thing.

David Foster Wallace

I am with this post beginning what I hope will become a regular if occasional feature on this blog. I want to do more reviews of current books, but I really don't want to offer just my own single-perspective commentary. Instead, I've decided to ask another blogger or writer to write a parallel review, which I will post along with mine. The idea is to present two separate readings of the book chosen, readings which may or may not come to the same conclusions or focus on exactly the same issues. Readers can of course post their own comments on these reviews, and the final result could be a wide-ranging and, one could always hope, illuminating debate about the merits/demerits and implications of the book at hand.

For this initial experiment in dueling reviews, I have asked Tom Rakewell, of Rake's Progress, to join me in reviewing David Foster Wallace's Oblivion. Tom's review appears first. Mine follows immediately afterward. Thanks to Tom for helping me try out this idea.

Consider Oblivion

By Tom Rakewell

To begin: I like David Foster Wallace’s writing in general, but I pretty much dread his short fiction. And further: I thought Brief Interviews With Hideous Men was an almost unmitigated disaster, to the point that thinking about reading Oblivion and having to say something bad about it made me feel a little nauseated. Then came the Michiko Kakutani review. Oboy. By this time I’d already agreed to make an ass of myself by appearing next to Mr. Dan Green in a critical forum and so was stuck. Ah, but never fear. Oblivion turned out to be a solid book. Not solid enough to convert the nonbelievers, perhaps, but full of the DFWian goodness that his readers and friends have come to expect over the course of a couple novels, two short story collections, a heaping helping of essays, and, of course, Mr. Wallace’s book-length forays into mathematics and politics (Up, Simba!, anyone?). In Oblivion, Wallace was even nice enough to leave behind some of his worst tendencies as captured in Brief Interviews—specifically, stories reading as if they had been conceived and cooked up in a laboratory, redolent of rubber tubing, acetone, and benzene.

And so I wrote a short and cautious “yes-but” review in the accepted book review boilerplate and then put it aside for a few days. At some point in that span, crippling anxiety and self-doubt took over, and I realized the review was very bad. Worse, it was incomplete, but I wasn’t sure why. Something about Oblivion bothered me. It wasn’t until I read Wallace’s essay “Consider the Lobster” in Gourmet that I saw what the problem was: I had/have some rather embarrassing and unfashionable moral qualms about the stories in Oblivion.

But let’s back up a bit, shall we? As I’ve detailed elsewhere, “Consider the Lobster” is, ostensibly, a fish-out-of-water exercise that in content and tone reminds one of Wallace’s earlier essay “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All.” In the latter, Wallace unleashes his powers of perception on the Illinois State Fair, going so far as to land in the ER as he tries to make nice with the natives at the Fair’s Dessert Competitions. “Getting Away” proceeds in more-or-less linear and expected fashion and ends on the lovely and enigmatic image of an East Coast Yuppie swinging in a massive arc high above the sticky carnival on something called the SKY COASTER. “Consider the Lobster,” however, is a good-natured description/indictment of the Maine Lobster Festival until about the halfway mark, at which point it delightfully and somewhat perversely morphs into an examination of the morality of killing, cooking, and eating lobster (and pretty much any other living thing). Characteristic angst aside, what struck me about the latter half of “Consider the Lobster” is the naked humanity therein—that is, Wallace asking a simple (and uncool) question of himself and us: How do I do what is right? (Or more simply: What to do?) Thus I realized that Oblivion suffers by avoiding this most simple and knotty of questions: What to do?

This is not to say that Oblivion is an immoral book, or even a bad one. It is, in my opinion, an unremittingly bleak book and nearly devoid of anything so banal as human tenderness. There are eight stories in the collection: five or six of them are lengthy (depending on your definition of lengthy), and length seems to serve Wallace best. Of these, “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” “Good Old Neon,” and “The Suffering Channel” stand out as the high points. They are horror stories of a sort, developing through aggregation, with the great gravitational force of Wallace’s smart, self-questioning, and digressive prose hoovering up shocking details and ultimately assembling them into messy puzzle box stories, overstuffed with clues and MacGuffins. If you like a tidy narrative topped off with a little epiphanic cherry on top, these stories are not for you.

In “Smithy,” two parallel stories—a terrifying mental breakdown of a substitute teacher in front of his 4th grade classroom and the gory, cartoonish story imagined by the narrator during same—give rise to yet another small horror: the narrator’s nightmares of the anonymity and boredom of “adult life” and his childhood ignorance of his father being enmeshed in this very anonymity and boredom. Wallace nicely evokes the tragedy of the father’s existence by describing the bench where he spent every weekday lunch break. The narrator admits the difficulty in:

…imagin[ing] what words he might have used to describe his job and the square and the two trees to my mother. I knew my father well enough to know it could not have been direct—I am certain he never sat down or lay beside her and spoke as such about lunch on the bench and the twin sickly trees that in the fall drew swarms of migrating starlings, appearing en masse more like bees than birds as they swarmed in and weighed down the elms’ or buckeyes’ limbs and filled the mind with sound before rising again in a great mass to spread and contract like a great flexing hand against the downtown sky.

This is an accomplished passage: empathic, lovely, and rare. Another fine moment comes in “Good Old Neon,” when Wallace rather deftly sneaks in the old pomo gambit of including himself as a character, entering in the guise of “Dave Wallace” to ponder the suicide of one of his high school’s golden boys, who turns out to be a tedious navel-gazer and self-diagnosed “fraud.” Wallace has covered this territory before—notably in “The Depressed Person”—but succeeds here with softer brushstrokes.

Other stories don’t hold up so well, however. “Mister Squishy” involves impending disasters and corporate double- and triple-crossings—every character is equally cutthroat and untrustworthy here—and it heartily appropriates advertising and business jargon to do so. At length. We know this jargon is bankrupt and often ironic, but the amusement wears off after the first ten pages and there are still fifty or so pages left.

The title story, “Oblivion,” suffers from the narrator’s annoying verbal tics:

And yet Hope has been wholly obdurate and unyielding on this point, insisting that it was I who was ‘the one who’s asleep,’ and that if I could or would not acknowledge this, my refusal to ‘trust’ her indicated that I must be ‘angry at [her]’ over something, or perhaps unconsciously wished to ‘hurt’ her, and that if anyone around here needed to ‘make an appointment’ it was myself, which according to Hope I would not hesitate to do if my respect and concern for her even slightly outweighed my own selfish insistence on being ‘right.”

and a “twist” ending that would make most soap opera fans blush. “Another Pioneer” is a parable-like tale that reads like an outtake from BIWHM’s “Octet.” “The Suffering Channel” moves along amiably enough, but nonetheless dogs this reader with the feeling that he’s reading an elaborate poop joke disguised as a mystery story.

This leaves the collection’s two short pieces. “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” is a humble grotesque that gamely tackles spider husbandry, botched plastic surgery, sociopathy, and the politics of riding the bus. The two-and-a-half page “Incarnations of Burned Children” has garnered some high praise in critical circles, although it’s hard to pinpoint why. Wallace abandons his usual style and tells the tale in a single telegraphic and breathless paragraph, appropriate to the panic of the young mother and father who tend to their scalded infant. There’s a trick of sorts coming, but this time it’s on the characters, who, just when they seem out of the woods, make a horrible discovery—Wallace deftly drops in a variation of an old chestnut (“If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child.”) and ratchets up the tension with a description of the poor, burned infant that is almost unbearable. Wallace might well have left it there—unfortunately, he adds on a fuzzy coda of sorts, employing pretty but empty prose that lessens the story’s visceral impact:

… when it wouldn't stop and they couldn't make it the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child's body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

This sounds nice but comes apart like wet sand in one’s hands upon further scrutiny; transcendence is simply not earned through this kind of writing.

Despite their shortcomings, these are, on the whole, solid stories, and even the worst of them (“Mister Squishy,” I’d submit) has its rewards. If so—you might be asking—what is the real problem here? Well, for me, it centers on an exchange in a DFW interview from 1993—specifically, a section where Wallace addresses (among other things) Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho:

DFW: …I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself?

DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis's "American Psycho": it panders shamelessly to the audience's sadism for a while, but by the end it's clear that the sadism's real object is the reader herself.

LM: But at least in the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

DFW: You're just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it's a kind of black cynicism about today's world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that.

LM: Are you saying that writers of your generation have an obligation not only to depict our condition but also to provide the solutions to these things?

DFW: I don't think I'm talking about conventionally political or social action-type solutions. That's not what fiction's about. Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being.

In short, what bothers me is that the stories composing Oblivion—although they satisfy on a certain level and are good enough at what they set out to do—seem less about “what it is to be a fucking human being” and more about “dramatiz[ing] how dark and stupid everything is.” That “Consider the Lobster” is happily concerned with the former only drives home the point that Wallace can do more, and has—recently, too. The whole issue puts me in mind of John Gardner’s criticism of Donald Barthelme in “On Moral Fiction.” According to Gardner, Barthelme:

knows what is wrong, but he has no clear image of, or interest in, how things ought to be…[his] diagnosis of the evils of the age can be amusing, and perhaps, for some readers, moving. On occasion he celebrates a real human value, such as stubbornness, or touches on our tragic vulnerability, as in “Sentence.” The world would be a duller place without him, as it would be without F.A.O. Schwartz. But no one would accuse him of creating what Tolstoy called “religious art.” His world is not one of important values but only values mislaid, emotions comically mislaid or sadly unrealized, a burden of mysteries no one has the energy to solve.

Now, this is pretty withering criticism, and I’m going on record with (1) my disagreement, at least as far as the most Barthelme is concerned; and (2) my reluctance to join Gardner on this crusade for “moral fiction” and/or “religious art.” Yet, it strikes me that when writers like Donald Barthelme (and Wallace) fail, they fail much as Gardner describes, erring on the side of coldness and anthropologic satire. In other words, they write stories that you can respect, but never love. (Don B. seems to agree. When an interviewer once asked him “What’s your greatest weakness as a writer?” Barthelme replied: “That I don’t offer enough emotion. That’s one of the things people come to fiction for, and they’re not wrong. I mean emotion of the better class, hard to come by.”) Further, it strikes me that in Oblivion Wallace struggles when it comes to following his own rubric—under which “good art” is “art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” Oblivion’s stories do have “as dark a worldview as [they] wis[h],” which Wallace clearly carves out a space for; they do not, in my view, “illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human.” The child in “Incarnations” might have to “liv[e] its life untenanted” (“its”!?), but that hardly helps us. No doubt this is a tough standard for a writer to live up to, and I would not expect Wallace to listen to you or me when we suggest ways of meeting it. Nonetheless, I wonder: Is it too much to ask that he simply listen to himself? That he follow his own example?

But let’s get to the point: Should you read David Foster Wallace’s new story collection, Oblivion? Yes, I think you should. Wallace is frustrating at times, and I’m contending that here, in Oblivion, he frustrates by focusing so intently on the dark and stupid that he all but denies the existence of the human and magical. But I’d also like to contend that Wallace is funny, smart, and—deep down—considerate of the reader’s precious (good) time. He has, as had D. Barthelme, “a sharp eye for modern man’s doubts and anxieties, free-floating guilt, politics, manners, turns of speech.” (That’s Gardner, again.) Wallace can drive you to throw a book across the room but offer enough to make you pick it back up again. And I hope you will at least pick this one up.

I’d also like you to join me in hoping that Wallace, in his next book, offers more illumination, more possibilities, more of that “emotion of the better class.” That the simple humaneness and poignancy found in his best essays and in the high points of Infinite Jest bleed over into his short fiction a little more, giving Mr. Wallace the ability to begin mending hearts just as he breaks them. He’s more than capable, and we as readers require nothing less.

The Nature of the Container

By Daniel Green

Reviewers of David Foster Wallace's books are often moved to speak of his intelligence, his mastery of information, his capacious knowledge of many different subjects and sub-subjects. Some are even prompted to use the word "genius" in describing their perception of Wallace as a finally very cerebral writer. John Freeman in the Denver Post, while avoiding the g-word, nevertheless concludes his own intelligent review of Oblivion with a faily representative judgment of Wallace's writing: "The real joy of reading these stories, then, is not having Wallace ferry us from point A to point B, but in watching his reptilian intelligence slither and snake across the page, flicker out its forked tongue and nab yet another linguistic fly off the wall."

I would not want to deny that Wallace is an especially intelligent writer, nor that his fiction displays a great deal of acquired knowledge, sheer information. But to describe Wallace's fiction in these terms doesn't quite capture what he really seems to be attempting in much of his most interesting work. In some ways to categorize Wallace as cerebral or to dwell on his intelligence (which many reviewers and readers seem to find intimidating) is to assign him a convenient and even ultimately condescending label--the brainy writer--and to overlook his actual, if somewhat off-centered, achievement as a writer of fiction.

In my view, Wallace's real subject is language, but not just language as the medium in which writers create stories, not just style, and not exactly the "failures of language," as Freeman has it, although ultimately language can only fail to communicate fully or to cohere into an entirely satisfactory aesthetic rendering of the world. What Wallace's stories try to do is to inhabit the consciousness of the characters they feature, but this can only be done by inhabiting the language-world of these characters, a world itself evoked by the very language they habitually use in confronting it and only through which can they perceive it to be comprehensible at all. His stories are composed of the stream of words by which his characters construct a manageable account of the reality they negotiate--although in most cases these characters do not literally speak in their own voice, tell their own stories.

Thus the beginning of "The Depressed Person," the best story in Wallace's previous collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men:

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.

Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utterness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain's context, its--as it were--shape and texture. The depressed person's parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played. . . .

This is, of course, the sort of language, used to create a distinctive discourse of jargon words, filler phrases, and practiced rhetorical moves, by which we might expect a "depressed person" to negotiate the therapeutic world she lives in. Going back to Wallace's very first collection of stories, Girl With Curious Hair, something similar is being done with characters like the Account Representative and the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production in "Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR":

There were between these last two executives to leave the Building the sorts of similarities enjoyed by parallel lines. Each man, leaving, balanced his weight against that of a heavily slender briefcase. Monograms and company logos flanked handles of leathered metal, which each man held. Each man, on his separate empty floor, moved down white-lit halls over whispering and mealy and monochromatic carpet toward elevators that each sat open-mouthed and mute in its shaft along one of the large Building's two accessible sides. . .

Particularly the divorced Account Representative, who remarked, silently, alone, as his elevator dropped toward the Executive Garage, that, at a certain unnoticed by never unheeded point in every corporate evening he worked, it became Time to Leave; that this point in the overtime night was a fulcrum on which things basic and unseen tilted, very slightly--a pivot in hours unaware--and that, in the period between this point and the fresh-suited working dawn, the very issue of the Building's ownership would become, quietly, in their absence, truly an issue, hung in air, unsettled.

The Account Representative hung in air, dropping on his elevator's wire. This again-single junior executive was spare, lithe, had about him an air of exteme economy, was young for an executive (almost literally a junior executive), was most at ease with those he countenanced at a distance of several feet, and had a professional manner, with respect to the accounts he represented for the firm, describable along a continuum from smoothly capable to cold. His elevator descended with a compact hum that was usually hard to hear.

Again, these characters and their actions are being described through the kind of no-nonsense, robotic language that would mirror the perceptions of characters who can be adequately identified as "Account Representative" and "Vice President of Overseas Production." Thus, readers of Wallace's fiction ought to be thoroughly prepared for the first story in his new book Oblivion, "Mister Squishy":

In an unconventional move, some of this quote unquote Full-Access background information re ingredients, production innovations, and even demotargeting was being relayed to the Focus Group by the facilitator, who used a Dry Erase marker to sketch a diagram of Mister Squishy's snack cake production sequence and the complete adjustments required by Felonies! at select points along the automated line. . . .

The Focus Group facilitator, trained by the requirements of what seemed to have turned out to be his profession to behave as though he were interacting in a lively and spontaneous way while actually remaining inwardly detached and almost clinically observant, possessed also a natural eye for behavioral details that could often reveal tiny gems of statistical relevance amid the rough law surfeit of random fact. Sometimes little things made a difference. The facilitator's name was Terry Schmidt and he was 34 years old, a Virgo. Eleven of the Focus Group's fourteen men wore wristwatches, of which roughly one-third were expensive and/or foreign.

The story is a kind of inventory of the observations and memories that roll through Terry Schmidt's mind as he "facilitates" his Focus Group, captured entirely in this kind of advertising/marketing-speak. What unites all of the passages I have quoted is that they reveal the extent to which we all inhabit such language-worlds, ways of thinking that determine our interactions with the "outside" world, except that, caught as we are in these linguistic and syntactical webs, there really is no outside. And what each of these slightly different webs have in common is that they blanch our words of most of their vigor, leaving only edgeless, etiolated husks. If there are overriding themes in Wallace's fiction, this portrayal of an exhausted language has to be one of them.

Ultimately, this does not seem to me a particularly "postmodern" technique, although Wallace is of course tagged with that label and does acknowledge the previous generation of posmodernists as inspiration. It is more an attempt to capture the Way Things Are, in other words a modified version of realism. (Although there is an undeniable accompanying emphasis on monitoring the way things are, as well.) The "stream of consciousness" method used by many of the most prominent modernist writers was itself a modification of realism, an attempt to get at what is most immediately "real" in human experience, consciousness itself. What Wallace is doing seems to me a further development of this kind of psychological realism, although he finds himself writing in an era when even human mental processes can't really be trusted as authentic, determined as they are by culture, by genetics, by forces beyond conscious human control. Wallace might be most usefully considered as a realist writer caught in a postmodern age in which "old-fashioned" realism has been discredited.

How then to tell stories when the language you must use is so thoroughly inflected by artificial discourses, however authentically you manage to portray the inauthentic? Of course, you really can't, except by simultaneously noting the way in which what you're doing is telling a story. Again Wallace could be said to be a writer of "metafiction," perhaps the original brand of postmodern fiction, but that his fiction is so often fiction about fiction-making is really a function of the essentially realist strategy I have described: since the artificial discourses permeating postmodern culture are themelves used to construct stories about the world, an unavoidable subject of Wallace"s fiction is going to be the ways in which these stories work. Thus in Oblivion, almost all the stories are in part about the fashioning of stories, two of them, "Another Pioneer" and "Good Old Neon" quite explicitly.

One could certainly have greater or lesser enthusiasm for an approach to fiction like the one employed by David Foster Wallace. I have considerable enthusiasm for it, but it does make for especially hit-or-miss results. In my view, in Oblivion "Another Pioneer," Incarnations of Burned Children," "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," and "The Suffering Channel" are mostly misses, either because they don't add up to anything in particular or because they go on far too long in carrying out fairly obvious or simply uninteresting ideas. However, if Wallace's stories are to be assessed fairly, it has to be done by judging how well or how provocatively he accomplishes the aesthetic tasks they seem to be pursuing, how much he makes us believe that the kind of fiction he wants to write has produced genuinely engaging and artful works of fiction.

"Mr. Squishy" pays off its initial premise simply as a bravura performance that does make us believe in the portrayal of its protagonist's own feelings of being trapped inside a worldview he really no longer believes in. One even comes to have some sympathy for his plight, as it becomes ever clearer that he has gone as far in his chosen "profession" as he's likely to get, having accomplished little of value. "The Soul is Not a Smithy" succeeds in finding a fresh angle on a somewhat familiar story of sociopathic frustration turned deadly. (The story is narrated by a daydreamy student who tells us, ultimately, what happened on the day his substitute teacher ran amok.) The title story turns out to be a rather affecting account of a couple dealing with their own peculiar version of empty nest syndrome, although even here the story could be read as at least as much about the narrator's attempt to understand through recounting them his own ongoing experiences as best he can--or, as it turns out, perhaps his wife's attempt?

In my opinion, the best story in the book, perhaps one of the best things Wallace has yet written, is "Good Old Neon." In some ways the story brings together many of the concerns of the book as a whole (the existence of unexplained, and unexplainable, suffering, our fear of "oblivion" even as we rush headlong toward it), but ultimately it will stand alone as a compelling and provocative piece of fiction that successfully uses the presuppositions of metafiction to both create a worthy addition to the canon of such works but also to transcend the narrowly schematic uses to which those presuppositions are often put. At its core, "Good Old Neon" is indeed a story about a story, although we don't know that until its conclusion. We do then discover, however, that "Good Old Neon" has been an impersonation by "David Wallace" of one of the latter's high school classmates who died in a "fiery single-car accident he'd read about in 1991," an attempt by the fictionalized author of Oblivion to "imagine what all must have happened to lead up to" that crash, why someone "David Wallace had back then imagined as happy and unreflective and wholly unhaunted by voices telling him that there was something deeply wrong with him that wasn't wrong with anybody else and that he had to spend all his time and energy trying to figure out what to do and say in order to impersonate an even marginally normal or acceptable U.S. male" would drive into a bridge abutment.

It is a wholly convincing impersonation, and emotionally charged in a way we perhaps don't expect from David Foster Wallace. And it is precisely in the act of "baring the device"--the story self-reflexively disclosing that it is indeed a story--that "Good Old Neon" produces its greatest emotional effect. For in addition to the genuine human feeling for the distress of its imagined protagonist the story encourages in us, even more compelling is the revelation that it was some such feeling on its author's part that led "David Wallace" to write the story in the first place. Although Wallace has of course enjoyed his share of critical acclaim and a surprisingly wide readership for a body of work that presents its own share of "difficult" reading, he has also provoked some hostility among those put off by the surface mannerisms of his work. In not a few of the reviews of Oblivion can be detected a demand of sorts for more heart and less brainpower. But displays of emotion in themselves do not gain a writer much aside from cheap effects. It's the way emotion (or ideas or insights or anything else) gets embodied in felicitous forms and resourceful language that matters. Wallace's fiction contains plenty of emotion, it's just that he's a writer who's also always interested in the nature of the container.

Different Ways of Reading

Matt Cheney at The Mumpsimus has put up an interesting post in which he grapples with the question of whether there is "artistic merit" in the fiction of Stephen King. It seems to me, however, that King has himself implicitly dismissed this question in the comments he has made about the literary elite's disdain for "popular fiction": this disdain, King seems to be saying, comes precisely from expecting too much "art" in one's fiction. He thinks fiction is about immediacy of effect and storytelling, not from style or formal manipulations or other fancy-pants stuff. There are obviously millions of readers who agree with him, and if he and they don't particularly care for art, that's ok with me.

As it happens, Maine PBS ran an interview with King just a few nights ago. (A transcript is not yet available, but some brief clips are available here.) King again made some remarks similar to the ones he made at the National Book Awards ceremony, although in this case he complained about the "intellectual games" that some writers play, insisting that such games are inappropriate in works of fiction. "Literature" is instead about the "sweaty embrace" (I'm not sure this was exactly the term he used, but it's close) that fiction makes with the reader willing to do his share of the perspiring as well. The working-class sensibility King is trying to evoke with this image is pretty obvious, as was his choice of John Updike as the primary culprit in the literary crime of intellectual game-playing.

King didn't elaborate much on why Updike in particular is guilty of this crime (just that, in King's words, Updike "drove me crazy"), but it was pretty clear that he had Updike's style in mind. (He also linked him with Jonathan Franzen, for, I assume, the same reason.) Now, John Updike is actually one of the least "intellectual" writers I can think of. Updike's fiction is all about surface, sensual detail, about capturing the look of things through equally sensual verbal tropes. And he plays few games with form, at least in the fiction for which he is best known. It can only be Updike's effort to write well that bothers Stephen King, and his comments strike me as implicit arguments that writing well in this way isn't worth the bother. Furthermore, later in the interview King agreed that his own novels could indeed be read as "allegories"--something about exposing the American unconscious in times of uncertainty. Of all the narrative forms a writer might take up, allegory is among the most "intellectual". Allegories are vehicles for thought, ways of proposing "ideas." So it really can't be that Updike is too intellectual; he just writes too damn much.

Of King's now infamous speech at the NBA ceremony, Matt proposes that "King unfortunately fell into the trap Harold Bloom prepared for him, issuing broad generalizations to castigate his audience. What I'd hoped he would point out -- because, as Danse Macabre proved, he can be an occasionally insightful critic -- is that there are different ways of reading and valuing books, and perhaps there is some overlap within the standards those different ways of reading assume." I wish Matt was right in assuming King would accept some such formulation. But in the interview King was very categorical. Literature was about the sweaty embrace and that was that. The insistence on retaining the word "literature" for what he does unfortunately reminds me of those doctrinaire Christians who on the one hand castigate science as unreliable, mere theory, but who on the other hand go to great pains to make their own creationist theories sound as scientific as possible. It suggests some lack of confidence in one's underlying beliefs.

I entirely agree with Matt Cheney's conclusion that popularity, or the lack of it, has no bearing on how accomplished a given writer's work might really be. I especially agree that "good critics make clear what aspects of a work they value or disdain, being careful to avoid too many categorical judgments." I'm perfectly willing to believe that Stephen King has written some fiction I myself might like, that among all those novels and stories he's produced there are a few that will stand "some sort of test of time." Although I must say that if King were less defensive, and could himself see the merit of other kinds of fiction less dependent merely on what Matt calls "tremendous narrative momentum," I would be more willing to seek out these works and give them a chance.

Literary Realism

I have some problems with Scott McLemee's recent article on "literary realism" in the July 30 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. While I would agree with the article's contention that, given the sociological and political approach exemplified by the realist writers McLemee discusses, it is surpising that academic critics do not give more attention to these writers, the reason that it is surprising is that the approach taken by most of these critics is itself emphatically sociological and political. On the other hand, it is not suprising that critics interested in the specifically literary and aethetic accomplishments of fiction would shy away from such writers as Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and James T. Farrell. Their work has little aesthetic appeal in the first place, although, to be fair to them, these writers really did not take up the writing of fiction for its aesthetic potential, anyway.

I'm not quite clear why McLemee chose to focus on these particular writers if the object is to bring some attention to "realism" as a literary mode. The realists in American fiction are writers like James, Twain, Crane, and Edith Wharton, or the "colorists" such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather. Lewis, Sinclair, Farrell, and Theodore Dreiser are really "naturalists," a further development of realism to be sure, but one that is inherently programmatic, that is to say, it is an approach that deliberately uses fiction to illustrate larger ideas about, in this case, the biological determinants of human nature and the clash of the biological and the social. Most of the naturalists would be more accurately called commentators or polemicists rather than artists. Again, since the overwhelming trend in academic criticism is to view literature as, at best, an opportunity for polemics and social analysis, it is perhaps correct to say that these naturalist writers are unduly neglected, but if literary study was still mostly about literature these writers would quite rightly get little atttention.

I think we should preserve a distinction between the kind of social realism discussed in Scott McLemee's article and "literary realism" more concretely understood. If analysis of social conditions is what you want from fiction, then probably social realism is where you should go. Realism as an aesthetic strategy, however, requires that both writers and readers first of all put aside the consideration of social conditions and political debates. Well-conceived and -crafted literary realism might finally lead the reader to reflect on the state of society or on political ideas, but this would be a secondary effect, a consequence of the fact that the writer has taken a particular aesthetic strategy--to create an illusion of "real life" sufficiently compelling that the reader is willing to put aside the knowledge that it's constructed, finally just words on a page--and allowed it to discover the integrity of its own internal logic, to go where it will. If social analysis is what the writer wants to provide instead, then that's what we'll get. But it won't be something that could plausibly be called literary art. And no argument is going to convince me, at any rate, that writers like Sinclair and Farrell (or for that matter Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer) are anything but polemicists and would-be social philosophers.

As it happens, at least one of the writers to whom McLemee refers, Dreiser, managed to produce work that can be regarded as literary art, even though it's clear enough in reading his books that he had the ambition to be a social philosopher as well. But Dreiser is a good example of a writer whose instincts for fiction to some extent subverted his more schematic intentions. (Flannery O'Connor is another example.) Although Dreiser was surely not subtle, his narratives have a power that comes much less from any insights he may have had into the grinding away of the social machinery than from the impression his novels create that they have proceeded from their original arresting images--a young girl from the provinces on her way to start a new life in the city, a family of itinerant Christian proselytizers plying their trade on the streets--to dramatize the possiblities inherent in those images with great amplitude and discernment, the narrative unfolding in what finally seems the only way it could have developed. Both Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy seem "real" in that they are faithful to the particulars their subjects already--naturally--seem to possess, their worlds and their characters built up out of accumulated details that give them credibility as fictions, no matter how readily we are tempted to interpret them as vehicles for the author's social commentary.

Something like this has to be true of any realist fiction that makes a claim on us as fiction rather than an excuse for dubious political or cultural analysis--and the latter would have to be dubious because making up stories is first of all not a very efficient way of engaging in such analysis and because there's nothing inherent in the act of writing fiction that gives the writer any particular wisdom to convey about politics or social arrangements. Again, an artfully composed work of realist fiction might provoke in readers some reflection on these topics, but it would be the result of the work's success in literary terms, its capacity to stand up to subsequent readings because of its aesthetic interest. Otherwise it is inevitable that "realist" works such as The Jungle or Babbitt or Studs Lonigan are ultimately going to be of concern mostly to the kinds of historians who, as McLemee laments, "treat realist fiction strictly for its documentary value" and who, in the words of one scholar McLemee quotes, "[l]ike strip miners,. . .rampage through texts, interested in only the most obvious social references." Unless it can be shown that books like these work first of all as skillfully shaped and convincing examples of literary art (and I admit I don't think this can be shown), they will in the future attract few readers other than these kinds of historians.

If you want to see a good illustration of the kind of distinction I have in mind, compare the stories of Chekhov with those of his contemporary Maxim Gorky. Chekhov's fiction reveals a great deal about the state of Russian society in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, but we still read these stories because they're splendid examples of the artistic possibilities of a certain kind of realism. Gorky's stories will perhaps tell you something about a Russian radical's attempt to change this society through fiction, but only if you're able to actually read them as something other than propaganda--that is, if you're even able to read them at all.

One final issue. In his conclusion, McLemee discusses a current scholar's attempt to show that "a careful reading of the American writers reveals a stronger influence that issued from an incongruous source: the deep current of literary romance, exemplified in American literature by the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne." He claims further that "The genre of romance -- with its strong tendency toward symbolism and its eruptions of the fantastic and the supernatural -- seems like an improbable influence on, say, Frank Norris." But the very first book to propose the Romance as the dominant strand of American fiction, Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), included a chapter on "Norris and Naturalism." Writes Chase: ". . .the youthful father of naturalism was in dead earnest in describing his works as romances. . .And in the brief years of his growing maturity. . .he wrote books that departed from realism by becoming in a unified act of the imagination at once romances and naturalistic novels." And of Dreiser Chase writes "[He] performed the considerable service of adapting the colorful poetry of Norris to the more exacting tasks imposed upon the social novelist--very much as James assimilated Hawthorne's imagination of romance into novels."