The Reading Experience

Critiquing American Society

Although Michael Collins describes his ambitions perhaps somewhat more boldly than most, these remarks illustrate a common enough view of the ultimate purpose of fiction:

"After I was shortlisted for the Booker, I learned that no one reads literary fiction any more". . ."That's because the action--the novel's crises--are all in a character's head, not in on-page action. So I got to thinking about using crime to critique American society, perhaps a dismemberment murder mystery to echo the dismantling of the U.S. middle class."

Never mind the distinction between "literary fiction" and genre fiction. As far as I can tell, Collins himself has never written the kind of literary fiction he describes, but clearly he thinks of his work as serious nevertheless; even if he did prefer fiction in which the "action" is "all in a character's head," this doesn't preclude the larger goal of critiquing society. Indeed, writers of literary fiction are more likely to think in such terms than those who work in the genres, where in many cases--especially science fiction or detective/crime fiction--some sort of implict examination of "society" is built into the very nature of the genre, almost hard to avoid.

Those listening to Collins make this remark did not seem to object to the idea that writers might want to "critique society," merely to Collins's further theories about "the peculiar suitability" of the United States to this kind of crime fiction: "Europeans, he said, tend to visit only coastal America, and have no idea of the bizarre religious beliefs and brooding violence exhibited by the mad inhabitants of the territory between New York City and San Francisco." What the author of this Macleans article calls "Collins' naked ambition and political paranoia" apparently did not appeal to this audience, but they surely would not have taken exception to a writer's claim to be "critiquing" society, since the notion that this is what fiction does, at some fundamental level, is very widespread.

This kind of social commentary, if not exactly political propoganda, is certainly "political" in that it values social or cultural change as the potentially most salutary benefit of writing and reading fiction. Like satire, it seeks "correction" of the flaws and mistaken beliefs it portrays. Such a conception of literature's relevance to its readers views political change and the consideration of essentially political issues to be the most important, if not the only, way for literature to be serious in the first place. Aesthetic achievement is not dismissed altogether, but it becomes at best a trick used by the skillful writer to draw the reader's attention to those sociopolitical concerns that are really what have motivated the writer to begin with.

How many works of literature from the past have survived because what they provide is deemed to be social commentary, offering insight into the cultural mechanisms and assumptions of a particular time and place? Hardly any. It is sometimes said that, for example, Dickens gives us this kind of window onto the social landscape of his time, but to the extent this is true--and it is partly true--it is a consequence of Dickens's much broader aesthetic ambition to build a whole fictional world, related to the concrete realities of Victorian England, but thoroughly transformed, out of the socially determined materials he had to work with. (And he had no other materials; he lived in Victorian England and not somewhere else.) Works of literature, especially fiction, can always be used by the cultural historian as the source from which to dredge up "information." But a novel or poem or play that can only be used as such a source has already been judged no longer worth reading.

As I mentioned earlier, it hardly seems necessary to insist that a genre like crime fiction should seek to "critique" society. Given the various conventions of the genre--the focus on law enforcement (or on the attempt more broadly to redress lawless acts), the inherent need to "investigate" a particular social mileu, the search for an explanation, to the extent it can be found, for what motivates people to violate social and cultural norms--a critique of sorts will almost always arise from a crime or detective novel. The hard part for a crime novelist (at least it seems to me) is to find suitable ways of making this intrinsic kind of commentary aesthetically satisfying as the subject of a work of fiction. Literary novelists have on the one hand an easier job--they don't have to fulfill these generic expectations (at least not these particular ones) and ought to be less constrained in the attempt to find aesthetically satisfying forms--and an even harder one--to find such forms absent the inherent interest-value these embedded conventions additionally provide. Perhaps this makes it all the more tempting simply to fall back on "commentary" as fiction's ultimate justification.

It is not, I hope, simply contrarian to suggest, on the eve of a very important American election, that politics is not the most important, certainly not the only important, endeavor with which a serious-minded person might want to occupy him/herself. Nor is it necessary that he/she engage in social commentary in order to be discharging the duties supposedly assigned to the writer of fiction. If this were the case, it would be much easier, and ultimately more useful, to forego fiction altogether and write political speeches or make documentary films. (There seems to be more money in the latter as well.) It may or may not be true that "no one reads literary fiction any more," although I myself think such a claim is asinine. There are, in sheer numbers, way more readers of serious fiction than there "used to be," given the vast increases in population just over the past half-century. Probably the percentage of serious readers within these populations isn't significantly lower, either. Even if fewer people do want to read "literary fiction," it's precisely because it has increasingly become reduced to an attempt to "critique American society," through the combined efforts of certain so-called literary journalists, by academics, and by the editors of prominent book reviews.

Given a choice between such lugubrious stuff--at least in the way it is presented--and more artfully done "entertainment," some readers have understandably gone for the latter. (One wonders how popular Michael Collins will be among such readers.) As well: If I have to choose between the social critic and the artist, my vote goes to the artist.

(Link provided by Sarah Weinman.)

A Prized Local Specimen

Near the beginning of this New York Times Magazine "profile" of Alice Munro, we are told that "she is famously private, someone who needs to be coaxed into giving interviews and finds book touring an ordeal." She ought to have continued to insist on her privacy and turned down this opportunity to meet with Daphne Merkin as well.

Is there some reason why Merkin, who calls Munro "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," also had to tell us that she has "relatively unlined skin," that one finds an "undercurrent of quiet amusement emanating from her gray-green eyes"? Why Munro needed to be quoted as saying that ''I was bulimic for a while before the word existed. I thought I was the only person who discovered it. Most women I knew got a heavy maternal figure. I was determined not to, as part of maintaining my identity.'"? Why we need to know that Daphne Merkin feels "A witty, sometimes brutally observant self, held in check by the need to pass herself off as conventionally and graciously female" while talking to her?

In what way does it help us understand Alice Munro's fiction to know that, where her eldest daughter is concerned, Munro confesses ''She wasn't the utter joy of my life she might have been. I was emotionally more open to the second''? That in high school "I was nice looking, but they left me alone. I would have been so unhappy if I had married one of the boys I went to high school with"? That "Having married at 30 after carving out an independent existence for herself as a schoolteacher, her mother seems always to have yearned for more psychologically and financially luxuriant vistas"?

Is this all a way of cutting the writer down to size, reminding us that, as accomplished a writer as she might be, nevertheless as a human being she's had the same problems as the rest of us, has been as clueless about how to live as we all are? Didn't we already know this? Don't we always know that a given writer has had her share of problems and disappointments, that after searching around for "more clues to the psychological whereabouts" of this writer we're only going to find the same old familiar things? What makes us think that a writer's life must have special interest, or at least that we can't understand her work unless we know for sure her life hasn't? Is this a way of avoiding the task of reading the work in the first place, of finding some external and easy solution to the problem of paying attention to the work itself, taking it on its own terms and settling for the incomplete understanding we'll surely end with?

Must we treat even serious writers of fiction or poetry as if they were celebrities to be interviewed and examined for the quality of their clothing? I have never understood the idea that novels or poems, or even a writer's entire body of work, can't be assessed without knowing something further about the personal circumstances behind them. Nor why biographies of writers have become such a cottage industry. With a few exceptions, most such biographies I have read are essentially excuses for spreading gossip or engaging in ludicrous psychological speculation. Even when the speculation might even illuminate some aspect of the writer's troubled life, rarely does it help us come to terms with the work. Nothing in Daphne Merkin's article helps me understand Alice Munro's fiction more clearly, or, since I have not in the past actually found her fiction all that engaging, why I should it give it another chance. Shouldn't either or both of these goals be more important than that she has "coiffed silvery gray hair," in contrast to "the slightly unkempt curls of her early photos"?

Telling Stories

This Boston Globe article about Charles Hoffer's book decrying the current state of history writing doesn't really provide any fresh insights about the plagiarism scandals involving Goodwin et al, but this description of Hoffer's thesis does put the conflict between popular and academic history into useful relief:

"American history," he writes, "is two-faced" -- split between celebratory popularizers who often value rousing narrative over scholarly rigor and academic specialists whose jargon-riddled, often dour monographs ignore the ordinary reader. Meanwhile, Hoffer accuses the American Historical Association (AHA), where he has served as an adviser on plagiarism and a member of its professional standards division, of abdicating its responsibility to enforce basic scholarly principles in both realms.

It is often said that such "celebratory popularizers" as Goodwin, Ambrose, and McCullough apply "literary" techniques to the writing of history, but essentially all this means is that their books indeed seek to present history though "rousing narrative." What is most objectionable about this formulation is its implicit denigration of what literature is really all about. The kind of transparent, "rousing" narrative to be found in the books of these history writers has nothing to do, at least as far as I can tell, with even the most conventional narrative strategies employed by 19th century novelists. (At least the 19th century novelists we still read; sometimes it is claimed that certain kinds of stories, both fiction and nonfiction, are "Dickensian," but as The Little Professor likes to point out, those who use this term usually reveal only how little they know about Dickens.) Serious writers of fiction use narrative to get at the sort of truth that the simple recitation of facts overlooks. Writers like Ambrose and McCullough use narrative as a way of whitewashing these truths in a smooth, even coat of received wisdom.

In my opinion, Hoffer (or at least the author of this article, Matthew Price) exaggerates the extent to which academic historians have "retreated behind a wall of footnotes and obscure jargon." Some of the very academics cited in the article as defenders of academic history--Eric Foner, for example--also write history as a form of narrative. Perhaps the scholarly journals print their share of data-oriented papers, but most books by academic historians that get any kind of coverage in mainstream book reviews seem to proceed through at best a more muted form of "rousing narrative." Gordon Wood, one of the more esteemed historians in the United States, is quoted in the article as defending McCullough.

Is it really true that readers of history can only be led to take it seriously through the distortions of narrative most simplistically conceived? Is it really the case that human beings can make sense of what's happening to them, and what has happened, only through the imposition of "story" onto reality? Are we really that feeble-minded? Over the course of the 20th century, most serious writers of fiction--presumably the natural home of "story'--have come to see the limitations of stories as understood in such reductive terms as are frequently used to define them. Will journalists and historians ever come to see these limitations as well?

Jumping Around

Two post-World War II novels that seem to me to belong to a tradition of "experimental fiction"--fiction that deliberately and self-consciously manipulates what are taken to be the established conventions of the form and thus provide a fresh perspective on the possibilities of the form--and that together perform a similar kind of experiment with traditional, linear narrative, are Nabokov's Pale Fire and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, the latter of which I have just re-read. In each case these novels jumble the order in which the parts of a prose narrative are expected to be related, each allowing the reader several different ways to put the narrative together in the process of reading it.

Pale Fire's initial gambit is to derive its "story" from the critical annotations to a poem presented as the novel's ostensible subject. The real story, however, emerges from the annotations themselves, shifting the focus to the circumstances and life-story of the annotator. But the annotations can be read either in the numbered order in which they occur, or one can follow the internal references and "jump around" in the notes until this buried narrative has been completely revealed. Hopscotch does something similar, offering up its story either as a series of linear episodes and an additional series of appended episodes and commentaries beginning roughly two-thirds of the way into the book, or as another version of the same story as revealed when read according to an alternative number map (the numbers of the episodes) provided by the author. One can "hopscotch" one's way through the text--as can be done with Pale Fire as well.

Thus, both novels offer the reader multiple perspectives on the core narrative, creating a kind of prismatic effect by which the narrative itself becomes less important and the way in which it can be put together, the way in which it can be "seen," takes precedence. In each, the underlying story remains the same, but the experience of reading it will be different depending on which route through it the reader chooses to take. Implicitly, each novel suggests to us that a story is just a story, but that the way it is told, the way it is constructed (in this case as much by the reader as by the author) is what finally matters--what finally contributes the "art" to literary art.

Stories are held in common by novels, plays, films, tv shows, video games. Surely it can't be the story alone, even if it is skillfully told, that commends a given work of fiction to us as worthy of our consideration. Most stories are, in fact, usually told with more immediacy of effect in these other forms than in novels and short stories. (My impression, as I have commented in previous posts, is that all too many current novels are written primarily under the hope they might eventually be made into movies. They are, in effect, movies presented through other means--certainly not through the belief that novels have a distinctive approach to story that can't be duplicated in movies.) A compelling narrative may hold one's attention during the process of its unfolding, but this in itself doesn't make it literature.

Experimental fiction does its job in reminding us of this fact. Sometimes, as is the case with both Pale Fire and Hopscotch, in doing so it also results in a fully satisfying work of literary art that will continue to stand up to subsequent readings by new generations of interested readers. At other times the experiment leaves us feeling it was interesting as an experiment, but didn' quite rise to this next level. (I would put John Barth's Letters in this category, for example, as well as Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves.) But we usually know when an author is attempting a literary experiment of the sort I am discussing, as opposed simply to trying out a new way of accomplishing an already existing set of familiar aesthetic goals--which is not, of course, itself something to be lightly dismissed.

Joseph McElroy

Joseph McElroy is usually grouped among those postwar American experimental writers--most often he is compared to Pynchon, Gaddis, and DeLillo--known for stretching the limits of both form and acceptable content in fiction. Such a conclusion is understandable, given McElroy's seemingly elusive and disjointed prose and his use of various scientific and technological tropes, but it is not really one that can stand up to an analysis of McElroy's actual strategies and assumptions--or at least I have always thought so. In fact, reading McElroy's most recent novel, Actress in the House, has only reinforced my judgment that McElroy is in many ways a conventional, even derivative, writer engaged in the effort to use the novel as a means of projecting human consciousness through a fairly obvious method of "psychological realism."

McElroy has long been championed by a certain kind of academic critic who sees contemporary ficition as an opportunity to indulge in abstruse talk about technology and communications theory, about suitably abstract and "scholarly" issues of cultural concern, about everything except what it's like to read McElroy's work, of what its aesthetic accomplishents might be. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this would be the chapter on McElroy in Tom LeClair's The Art of Excess (still a valuable book, nevertheless), which contains passages like this: "The formulating or mastering capabilities of systems are, for McElroy, closedly tied to a 'massed variety of information.' More consistently than any other writer in the systext, McElroy has registered the systems pardigm's contemporaneous scale of information. . .Systems-influenced, information-dense, variously excessive, McElroy's novels are themselves 'collaborative networks,' distinctive and distinguished models of our postindustrial world. Like the other systems novelists, McElroy uses his fictive networks to defamiliarize common experience while pressing the reader to whole-seeing. . . ."

As it happens, the electronic book review is currently running a series of scholarly essays on McElroy. These essays are admirably sweeping in their survey of McElroy's career, but unfortunately they are mostly characterized by observations like these (by Tim Keane):

For over four decades, McElroy's innumerable characters, his voracious novels, and his grammatical and linguistic explorations, not to mention his willful readers, have adhered to the letter of Rilke's famous dictum that we should live out the questions. His novels are not full of events any more orderly than actuality. Nor are they contained by time. Rather, in book after book, his writings are dramatic investigations of noesis - that abstract but evocative concept rooted in Platonic idealism and redefined by philosophers (through Phenomenology) as those ineluctable acts of consciousness that constitute reality. . .

A writer necessarily concerned with the mental acuities and cognitive refinements that constitute the life-work of his characters and their worlds is essentially a poet of emotional intensity and tangible intimacies. For all the comparisons made between Joseph McElroy and half a dozen other brainy American novelists of the Information Age, not one of them comes close to achieving so consistently the emotional truthfulness and the zealous humanism of McElroy's work.

This is the groundwork for essays that go on to discuss such topics as "noesis," "coordinate equality," de-automatization," and describe McElroy's style as the process by which "the reader follows the lines and blind leads of a syntax that defines patterns recursively and as a matter of palimpsestual depth. Focus on the interlacing of cause and effect because they correspond in a strange bilaterally fearless symmetry: causes create effects, which in turn effectively create causes." Taken together (with exceptions, one of them being Charles Molesworth's discussion of The Letter Left to Me), they are, unfortunately, a very pompous and self-involved way of saying what should be apparent to anyone attempting to read McElroy: His books narrate whatever stories they have to tell by focusing on his character's ongoing mental processes, in a rather straightforward "stream of consciousness" style strongly reminiscent of Joyce and Woolf.

Here is the first paragraph of Actress in the House: "A shock, that's all it was, in the darkened house. The girl struck by her partner very hard. It had staggered her, it was over the line, you wondered how she was standing. Her partner had clapped her one to the side of her face with the full flat of his hand, and it had swung her right around toward the audience, almost knocked her off the stage, and she was hurt. The man in the eighth row from his angle hadn't seen it coming, but neither had she seen it you could almost believe, the actress herself. Something wrong up there. He was stunned and amazed, he was honestly thrilled, not stunned at all." After the initial external identification of "the man in the eighth row," the remainder of the novel unfolds through this man's "central consciousness" as he (a lawyer named Daley) proceeds to have a sexual affair with this very actress being slapped. Along the way we learn various things about Daley's past, through Daley about the actress's past, etc., and the narrative ends after the first week of their acquaintance.

To the extent the novel is "difficult"--and it can indeed be frustrating--it is the consequence of its thoroughgoing dedication to the stream of consciousness method. Everything is oblique and discontinuous. Explanations are sometimes delayed for pages and pages, sometimes never materializing at all. McElroy is frequently called "uncompromising" in his use of this method, but in this case the uncompromising merely becomes tedious. (Although frankly this is the response I've had to other McElroy novels as well.) Nothing very special ever happens, and the characters never become interesting except as "ordinary people" in the most dramatically unpromising sense of the words.

I don't think the problem is so much that McElroy is a bad writer but that in the final analysis the stream of consciousness techique, in my opinion, is an extremely limited approach to writing fiction except in short doses or when "compromised" by mixing it with other strategies. (Which, for example, Joyce does in several episodes of Ulysses). We do, by the conclusion of Actress in the House, come to feel we've been exposed very intimately to Daley's preoccupations and habits of thought, but this in itself doesn't get us very far. It proves to be a clinical exercise in psychological speculation--Here is Man Thinking--but not much of an artistic endeavor.

I have in previous posts complained that too many book reviewers engage in free-floating evaluation rather giving an accurate account of what a given writer is trying to accomplish. In the ebr essays I have mentioned, the opposite and abiding flaw of much academic criticism, especially about contemporary literature, can be seen. There's a great deal of very elaborate description of Joseph McElroy's purported intentions as a writer of fiction, but not much in the way of an assessment of that fiction, which conveniently leaves out a very important point to be made about it, especially Actress in the House: It's really pretty boring.

Derrida

Seldom has an important thinker or writer been as thoroughly abused by those who professed to be his admirers than Jacques Derrida. Both his approach and his assumptions were, for a time at least, held up as the "next big thing" in literary theory, but, unfortunately, few who invoked his name really understand his approach or, ultimately, shared his assumptions. These feeders of the English Department publication maw allowed Derrida's name to be associated with all that was foolish and inane in the literary academy in the name of their own careerist ambitions, and when it became clearer and clearer that what Derrida had in mind didn't really fit well with the next next big thing in academic literary study--multiculturalism, cultural studies more broadly--they abandoned him like a snake his old and useless skin.

(Which makes this letter, signed by some of the very people responsible for helping to create the image of Derrida they're now decrying in the New York Times obiturary, disingenuous in the extreme.)

Although Derrida was very important to me when I was still a budding "literary scholar," I have delayed making any remarks upon his death until surveying some of the many other blog discussions the occasion has provoked. And indeed, some of these have produced comments much like those I would make myself.

Trent Walters, for example, emphasizes that Derrida is actually enjoyable to read. He's an adventurous (but disciplined) and often witty writer who only seems "difficult" or "obscure" if you're expecting him to do philosophy in the supposedly more rigorous style of Anglo-American philosophy. Moreover, Derrida actually cared passionately about literature, something his more ideologically rigid followers finally couldn't tolerate, as Leonard Bast astutely points out: "I think that the people who cared most about politics, not literature, realized that Derrida was unnecessary and might even be an obstacle to their goals. Why go through the trouble of decoding him when you could be much more direct and simply rant against literature as an instrument of oppression?" And as In Favor of Thinking further observes: "What the right wing and the general media never seemed to understand, in characterizing all literary theory, and especially deconstruction, as the Evil Force of Chaos about to Destroy the Canon (remember the so-called Culture Wars?), was that in order to really understand Derrida's work, you had to be steeped in the Western literary and philosophical tradition."

Moreover, Derrida's critical method--and the method that could most efficaciously be adopted from his approach--was not all that radical, at least not in the way that too many of his acolytes wanted it to be. As Miriam Burstein quite correctly has it, deconstruction

In its applied American form. . .generally amounted to hyper-intensified close reading, a practice more amenable to discussions of metafiction than to feminism. Language was the big thing, not cultural criticism. Moreover, because it was in so many ways (again, in its applied American form) a souped-up New Criticism, deconstructionism tended to emphasize not the non-canonical but the very canonical indeed.

Derrida's goal was not to subvert the canonical--although neither was it to exalt it--but finally to illuminate a little further how we might actually read it. "Logocentrism" is not the tyranny of Reason, as so many of both Derrida's critics and his defenders would have us believe, but is the tendency to read texts, especially those philosophical and literary works reflexively assumed to be great, as if their authors were simply speaking to us, pronouncing on whatever subject the text is presumed to evoke. This is not even misreading but a refusal to read at all, and Derrida's project was to insist we attend to the text as a text--which might involve examining those elements that might otherwise seem "marginal," not quite the "point" at all. This was not an attempt to interpret a text in some idiosyncratic or inflammatory way--the usual criticism of Derrida was that he claimed a particular work to be "saying" the "opposite" of what it seemed to say--but to point out that in most cases we hadn't even yet begun the process of interpretation at all.

These criticisms of Derrida's work seem to me to behind Spurious's comment that he "avoided taking issue with [Derrida's] work because he was perpetually under attack from Analytic philosophers. This is my weakness: a kind of paranoia prevents me from being able to turn on those philosophers whose work, it seems to me, needs protecting. Whenever I read a book by Derrida I feel as though I have committed a great transgression, as though I had committed a crime (at the university I studied, Hegel was deemed unphilosophical; we were not allowed near Nietzsche, let alone Husserl. At that university we focused for the most part on texts published in the English speaking world over the last twenty years. Nothing older, nothing French or German, nothing ‘Continental’). Among Anglo-American philosophers, Derrida could not be taken seriously because his work slashed right at the heart of the Analytic assumptions about the goals of philosophy and the status of Reason. Younger philosophers like Lars Iyers had good reason to feel protective of their interest in Derrida's work.

But in the United States, Derrida clearly had the greatest influence in departments of literary study. There too, many people felt themselves to be committing "a great transgression" by reading and adapting Derrida to literary criticism and scholarship. The established forms of literary study were presumed to be rigid and authoritarian--"logocentric"--although for the most part they simply were not. If anything, New Criticism privileged an emotional, almost mystical response to literature, and the emphasis on close reading precisely encouraged the kind of open-ended interpretation Derrida championed. But, as LB points out, Derrida's writing was at first taken as some kind of politically liberatory gesture, and so the era of deconstruction and French theory began.

The great damage that was done both to literary study and to Derrida's reputation is perhaps summed up by Timothy Burke, who correctly notes the way in which during this era what came across most loudly was "the cry of all or nothing at all, that if communication could not be perfected, then there was no communication, if texts could not have a correct meaning, they meant everything, anything, nothing in particular." This was not, I hasten to add, what Derrida himself believed, but unfortunately what was most often represented as "Derridean" was indeed this sort of anti-intellectual nonsense (its anti-intellectualism disguised by much obscurantist theory-ese), the result of which, finally, was the complete loss of credibility on the part of academic literary study and, unfortunately, the labeling of Derrida as the obscurantist-in-chief. (I myself tried to use my own dissertation to show how Derrida's work could be used to elucidate actual works of literature, in my case, American metafiction, but very little of this kind of work was really done. Most academic criticism from that period done in the name of Derrida is now almost completely unreadable.)

Those who would like to know what Derrida was really all about should just read his books, particularly the earlier ones and especially Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of Philosophy, and Dissemination. The best book about Derrida, bar none, is Christopher Norris's Derrida (1987), which portrays Derrida as the serious student of philosophy and literature--"my most constant interest," he once said, "coming before even my philosophical interest I should say, if this is possible, has been directed toward literature, toward that writing which is called literary"--that he was. Although Derrida had long before his death become passe in academic literature departments, what he has to offer to the appreciation of "that writing which is called literary" has barely begun to be understood.

James Wood

It is a very peculiar definition of "comedy" in literature that values such comedy for the way in which it manages to restrain itself from actually producing laughter, and that identifies as among the greatest comic writers in modern fiction the likes of J.F. Powers, Henry Green, and V.S. Pritchett. But this is indeed the view of comedy that emerges from James Wood's The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel.

I have nothing against the work of Powers, Green, and Pritchett (or, for that matter, many of the other writers Wood discusses in his book), but they are not the writers anyone surveying the landscape of 20th century Western fiction with any real concern for historical development or descriptive accuracy could plausibly select as exemplars of "comic fiction" as it has been practiced over the course of that century. They are instead exemplars only of Wood's particular, and particularly parched and narrow, preference for a kind of fiction "in which a mild tragicomedy arises naturally out of context and situation, novels which are softly witty. . . ." (Note the words "mild" and "softly"; they are the kinds of words Wood resorts to repeatedly--along with "gentle," which must be used a dozen times or more--in his descriptions of the "comic fiction" he most admires.

Again, Wood has every right to prefer this sort of fiction, indeed, to write essays extolling the virtues of those writers who provide it and belittling those who don't, but to elevate this preference to a critical principle of universal salience is something else. Although, one has to simply accept that Wood's critical principle is both incontestable and universally applicable, since Wood doesn't really carry through his notion of "the irresponsible self" and the gentle comedy accompanying it in any kind of sustained argument. Once he has set out his case for what he calls the "comedy of forgiveness" in the Introduction, in many of the ensuing essays he at best merely assumes the reader will remember the previous discussion and apply it for him/herself to the subject at hand. Certainly Wood does not engage in much of the kind of close analysis an argument as sweeping as that which he wants to make about both comedy and modern fiction would require. Frequently there is no further discussion of comedy of any kind in the essays collected in this book, and there are some essays included on writers--Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Joseph Roth--whose work hardly has any relation to comedy--certainly not as "humor"--at all. One essay is not about fiction at all, but is merely a review of V.S. Naipaul's Letters Between a Father and a Son.

Of course, it might be objected that these essays were written for publication separately, in various magazines and book reviews, and expecting them to cohere more systematically when collected in a book would be unfair. But what justification is there for them to be reprinted as a book if no real effort is made to make them readable as a book?

Although Wood ostensibly disparages the category of "religious comedy" (which he associates with satire), his own explanation of the secular "comedy of forgiveness" seems to me essentially religious in its expectations of fiction:

The comedy of what I want to call "irresponsibility" or unreliability is a kind of subset of the comedy of forgiveness; and although it has its roots in Shakespearean comedy (especially soliloquy), it seems to me the wonderful creation of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel. This comedy, or tragicomedy, of the modern novel replaces the knowable with the unknowable, transparency with unreliability, and this is surely in direct proportion to the growth of characters' fictive inner lives. The novelistic idea that we have bottomless interiors which may only be partially disclosed to us must create a new form of comedy, based on the management of our incomprehension rather than on the victory of our complete knowledge. . . .

This is a notion of "comedy" that ignores what is comedic in comedy in favor of the revelations of character, a spiritual communion with "fictive inner lives." Wood further muddies, rather than clarifies, the conceptual waters by opposing this comedy of forgiveness against the "comedy of correction"--satire--as if all other manifestations of the comic in literature were perforce satirical, only versions of what is to be found in Moliere or Swift. Such a reduction of the possibilities of comedy is not just an oversimplification; it completely ignores a vast body of comic fiction that is neither primarily satirical nor "tragicomic" in the "mild" and "gentle" mode Wood celebrates.

Mikhail Bahktin described this kind of comedy as embodying an attitude of "radical skepticism" that excludes as just another form of "seriousness" both conventional satire, which does indeed, as Wood maintains, seek to eradicate vices and flaws, and the "comedy of forgiveness," which is a thin veneer indeed on a form of fiction that otherwise could not be more "straightforwardly serious" in its intent. (Sentimentally serious might be a better way to describe it.) It is the kind of comedy to be found in Joyce rather than Henry Green, Beckett rather than V.S. Pritchett, Nathanael West rather than J.F. Powers. It is the comedy of Catch-22, of Gravity's Rainbow, of Mulligan Stew, and of the fiction of Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and Stanley Elkin. If a book were to be written that was truly about "laughter and the novel"--not about "mild tragicomedy"--these would be the books and the writers that would have to be examined.

The closest Wood comes to assessing this brand of fiction is his back-of-the-hand dismissal of what he calls "hysterical realism." Wood identifies Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, and Thomas Pynchon as the chief hysterics in question, but one suspects he would accuse many of these other writes I have mentioned of being unduly hysterical as well. He never really defines "hysterical realism" at any great length or with any great analytical precision, but the following passage comes pretty close to capturing the essence of the idea: ". . .there are also 'comic novels,' novels which correspond to the man who comes up to you and says, 'Have you heard the one about. . .?' novels obviously very busy at the business of being comic. Tristram Shandy, for instance, is in multifarious ways a marvelous book, but it is written in a tone of such constant high-pitched zaniness, of such deliberate 'liveliness," that one finds oneself screaming at it to calm down a bit."

There are indeed comic novels that embody the sort of laughter associated with jokes and comic routines. (Catch-22 is one of these, as is Portnoy's Complaint and most of Elkin's novels), and many more that are broadly funny in a fashion James Wood no doubt finds excessively "lively." Frankly, I am surprised to find that Wood admires Cervantes, since Don Quixote is quite a "zany" book (or so it seems to me), as are most of the many novels influenced by Don Quixote throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Furthermore, few of these kinds of comic novels could convincingly be labeled "hysterical realism" because almost none of them are realistic in any credible sense of the term. In fact, comedy is almost by definition not realistic, depending as it does on a deliberate distortion of reality, even to the point of completely reversing its normal assumptions. To the extent works of fiction seek first of all to be "realistic," whatever comedy they might also contain is almost certainly going to be incidental, the sort of "mild" and "gentle" amusement Wood clearly enough enjoys.

(The one writer Wood discusses to whose work the term "hysterical realism" seems appropriate is Tom Wolfe, whose novels Wood accurately judges to be shallow and really not very funny. It is one of the few essays in The Irresponsible Self with which I unreservedly agree--one of the others is the essay entitled "Shakespeare and the Pathos of Rambling.")

Finally, both "hysterical realism" and the book's occasional analyses of comedy more generally seem really to be devices Wood has adopted in his essays to make a more compelling case for the kind of fiction he manifestly most esteems: loosely, the sort of late 19th/early 20th century fiction that added to the realism that had come to be valued by writers like Flaubert and Tolstoy and George Eliot a further "psychological realism" that located the real truth about human reality in the disclosures of consciousness. Much of this fiction remains vital and important, and many of the strategies developed by writers like James and Woolf and Henry Green continued to be adapted by later writers in different and interesting ways. But the pure form of pyschological realism Wood continually returns to--"a state in which the reader may or may not know why a character does something, or may not know how to read a passage, and feels that in order to find these things out he must try to merge with characters in their uncertainty"--is not a method that most subsequent 20th century writers continued to practice as if it had been determined to be the "correct" way to write novels and stories. (Neither it nor "mild tragicomedy" have been been greatly favored in, especially, American fiction, which by and large Wood doesn't emphasize much at all in The Irresponsible Self; in most of his critical writing Wood appears to be particularly dismissive of post-60s American fiction, which has most consistently sought alternatives to the approach Wood seeks to privilege.)

It doesn't bother me in the least that James Wood approves of psychological realism and the creation of the "irresponsible self" more than any other technique a writer of fiction might choose to employ. To each his own where taste in fiction is concerned. However, Wood's overriding critical precept, that things were done much better back when, that the way things were done then is the only right way, performs no service (no useful service, at least) for the cause of contemporary fiction whatsoever.

Literary Pedagogy

In Favor of Thinking wonders why her students seem so intent on reading literature biographically:

. . .in the classroom, any discussion of an author's life inevitably seems incredibly reductive -- 10 minutes, 20 minutes even, to explain a whole life? And worse yet, some students want to take whatever tiny smidge of biographical information I or the anthology have given them, and construct elaborate and usually patently misguided readings of the texts.

This is not an issue only for teachers of literature. Many readers want to similarly reduce a poem, story, or novel to some expression of the author's life experiences, or at least to understand a given work by appealing to biographical information that might "explain" it, and thus this is an issue of concern to literary criticism as a whole. Literary study used to be, in part, about intructing inexperienced or casual readers to overcome this habit, to substitute for it a way of reading that did more justice to works of literature by focusing on how they work, that did more justice to the reader's own potential for reading skillfully by developing more informed reading skills. This is no longer the case, and no doubt most students, even students who have majored in a discipline ostensibly devoted to literary study, now emerge from college likely to go on misreading in the way IFOT describes.

Yet I sense in this post some dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs:

. . .faced with a text that might be deliberately ambiguous in its "message" or alluding to various layers of literary history that my students are relatively deaf to, they fall back on biography as the explanatory model. Obviously, my job is to explain those multiple layers of meaning, and I think I do that fairly well in the classroom. But then I still get one or two papers that insist "Robert Browning wrote this poem because he was jealous of his wife's success" with absolutely no way of backing up their claim. Sure, I can treat it as a problem of evidence, which I often do in my comments. But it seems to me there's a larger question about literary pedagogy here.

Indeed there is. And the real problem is that there isn't much that could be called "literary pedagogy" being practiced anymore. The students come to college with almost no familiarity with specifically literary questions at all--as far as I can tell high school literature classes are entirely about "issues for further reflection," but not about literature--and too many departments of university literary study are now only interested in using literature as just one of the possible subjects of "cultural studies." In these circumstances learning how to actually read works of literature is not just dispensable, but actually works against the larger goal of reducing literature to sociological evidence.

IFOT speculates that the source of the problem is that "our general culture still valorizes a Romantic model of artistic production that equates the text (or song, etc) with the author's own feelings and is very resistant to models of aesthetic signification that complicate or pluralize the possible meanings in a text. And, faced with a text that might be deliberately ambiguous in its 'message' or alluding to various layers of literary history that my students are relatively deaf to, they fall back on biography as the explanatory model." This is certainly part of the explanation, but since students are no longer taught to value "a text that might be deliberately ambiguous in its 'message'"--in other words, a work of literature--and there's no longer much interest in finding out about "various layers of literary history"--as opposed to cultural or social history--the Romantic model can't really be challenged.

Moreover, IFOT actually dismisses the very approach to literary study that did try to counteract the Romantic model. It's not, she says, that "I believe in Transcendent Literature that escapes all place and time (in fact, quite the opposite) or because I'm a staunch Formalist/New Critic /Deconstructionist who only wants to look for linguistic patterns of meaning." About the worst thing that can happen to a current literary academic is to be accused of harboring secret "Formalist/New Critic" sympathies. How dreadful to believe that literary criticism should focus on the literary qualities of texts, that literary study ought to be about literature! However, if students, readers in general, are going to be convinced to leave biography--or sociology, or politics--behind in favor of the actual literay work at hand, they'll have to be instructed in some form of this benighted method. There's no other alternative.

I have of course generalized, even exaggerated, the extent to which literary study has gone over exclusively to the cultural studies model. (I hope that certain very able critics of such generalization will forgive me.) There are, there always are, important exceptions to this practice, but I don't really think it can be argued that attention to the formal and aesthetic properties of literature is a priority among those practicing the predominant methods of academic criticism in the "advanced" quarters of the academy. If IFOT wants students to focus more on "the text," she might try to convince her colleagues to start bringing literature back into literary study in the first place.

More of the Same

Sam Tanenhaus has been making it clear for months that the New York Times Book Review is no longer much interested in books. He has now made this about as plain as it could be made. Under his watch, Tanenhaus says, the Book Review will not concern itself with actually reviewing books at all:

It's less about "looking at a book to see whether it's worthy than about whether something interesting can be said about it," he says.

Trust me: given the sorts of reviewers to which Tanenhaus has been turning, and given the attitude toward books they embody, readers of the Book Review have little reason to believe that in future issues "something interesting" will be said about the books it is ostensibly reviewing.

Ed Champion has very ably demonstrated that the "redesigned" Book Review fails to measure up in any way to the expectations serious readers should have of such a high-profile book review. I won't join in on this analysis myself, except to say that Ed is correct on every point. I would instead like to focus on the statement quoted above and its implications for what remains of general-interest book reviewing in what used to be the premier book-centered publication in the United States.

As we have seen, finding "something interesting" to say about Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint meant ignoring the book altogether in order to focus instead on the reviewer's dubious analysis of current political discourse. In the August 29 issue of the Book Review, "finding something interesting to say" meant considering the 9/11 Commission Report a "book" in the conventional sense and giving it a lengthy (four pages) front-page review in which Richard Posner solved our terrorism problem for us but had little to say that illuminated the report as something anyone should read. (The next-longest piece was Jacob Weisberg's review of three of the latest of the everflowing series of political books with which we have been inundated--every one of which the Book Review finds it necessary to cover.) The October 3 issue featured Paul Berman's tedious and interminable review of The Plot Against America, in which Berman joined the long line of reviewers who are doing exactly what Roth has warned them not to do, which is to read the book as a thinly veiled allegory of current political events. Thus, in this case finding "something interesting" to say means distorting the book under review and using it as an excuse to weary us with the reviewer's vapid remarks ("In the political culture of modern-age totalitarianism, there are soft doctrines for the fellow-traveling innocents around the world, and hard doctrines for the political insiders").

In the October 10 issue (not yet available online), finding "something interesting" to say means reviewing Ha Jin's new novel, War Trash, but doing it in a way that puts most of the emphasis on the book's depiction of American abuse of Chinese prisoners during the Korean War. (Abu Ghraib obviously looms in the background.) To be fair, this is not really the focus of Russell Banks's review (he mentions it), but it is the first thing discussed in an accompaying interview with Ha Jin, as if Banks had not totally succeeded in finding "something interesting" to say and so the Editor decided to help him out a little. The next-longest piece in this issue is a review (I think it's a review) of several books on. . .you guessed it, politics, this time a totally superfluous reflection on conservatism by Franklin Foer, which takes up two complete, ad-free pages.

And then there's the review of a new book by Nora Roberts. It would appear that Tanehaus also intends to make good on his promise to review more trash in the New York Times Book Review.

Ultimately, what the effort to find "whether something interesting can be said about" new books really amounts to is giving over the pages of the NYTBR to various hack journalists (in my opinion, Paul Berman belongs to this crowd) for their "insights," their "reflections," their so obviously superior sense of the "zeitgeist," the "global situation." Blech! As I have said before, the NYTBR is going to be a poor man's version of The New York Review of Books, in which, most often, self-important so-called pundits have an opportunity to self-display and in the process bore us to tears.

But of course who ever heard of a book review whose first responsibility would be "looking at a book to see whether it's worthy"?