The Reading Experience

Just for Kicks

Although I do not have the same degree of distaste for Neil LaBute's work as a certain other distinguished blogger (I continue to think that In the Company of Men is a very good movie), this week's NYTBR review of his collection of short stories, Seconds of Pleasure, makes it sound pretty dreadful. It's not so much the subject matter--the usual LaButian insights about the casual cruelty of men, and the monstrousness of human nature more generally--but instead the apparent incompetence with which these insights are translated specifically into fiction. (I haven't read the book. Like Mark S. I won't, so obviously my comments here will based on the reviewer's remarks about the book. If someone else reads Seconds of Pleasure and thinks Jennifer Egan's description is off the mark, please let me know.)

According to Egan, "Writing Fiction would seem to offer LaBute a chance to plumb his characters' inner lives more fully, but the opposite proves to be true: being in the head of a LaBute protagonist is like flying in a plane with blackened windows--the rage so many of them feel toward the women who engross them obscures virually eveything else." Further: ". . .the protagonist's inner machinations [in one of the stories] are merely caricaturish. What's lacking here is the subtlety, the intimations of a larger world that gives the best short fiction. . .its insinuating power."

Egan thinks that the "inner lives of Labute's perennial manipulators. . .turn out to be less interesting in these transparent incarnations than when left opaque," as in LaBute's films. This is a convincing enough insight about the kinds of characters in which LaBute is interested, and perhaps if he were to turn his attention to a different sort of character he might produce more compelling works of fiction. But I think it is more likely that LaBute's conception of both character and story are inherently better suited to film, and that his forays into theater and, especially fiction, only reinforce this perception and suggest he ought to stick to making movies. I do not necessarily mean to imply that writing good fiction is harder than writing screenplays, nor that screenwriting is finally inferior to fiction writing; I would say, however, that much mainstream fiction, even much "literary fiction," has been influenced in its formal and narrative assumptions at least as much by movies as by other fiction, and that this influence is not for the better where the future of fiction is concerned.

In a previous post, I observed that what seemed most notable about the rush to adapt certain "chick lit" novels to the screen was that it seemed these novels had been written to achieve such film deals in the first place, that fiction was only the first step in a process that led to the most important accomplishment--having one's story made into a movie, with all of the glamour and the publicity and the talk about grosses that this entails. I didn't exactly suggest that they had been written as if they were actually movies, but that much contemporary fiction--beginning with the popular potboilers, but extending as well to many of the novels that are praised by ostensibly serious reviewers in newspaper book reviews--does indeed leave the impression that it seeks to emulate the storytelling and character-creation conventions of film seems to me, at least, undeniable. Perhaps this comes from the actual influence of film on the authors of such fiction, perhaps unconsciously from the assumption that these conventions are the ones with which even most readers of fiction are now most familiar. At any rate, too many novels I read (or choose not to read, because the reviews make it clear it will be a book of this type) proceed as if what the author really has in mind is the movie version the story at hand merely transcribes into prose; few of them manifest any particular qualities that couldn't also be achieved on screen.

Thus, I would maintain that most fiction labeled "realistic" by critics and readers does not really belong to the tradition of "realism" as it was developed in nineteenth century fiction, but instead merely adopts the elements of conventional narrative as they are exemplified most recognizably in American movies. Such movies perhaps are themselves operating under the assumptions emodied in the traditional "well-crafted" story (at least where plot and character is concerned, both of which must follow certain patterns of "development" it is assumed an audience expects), but again our idea of what such a story is like is almost certainly more influenced now by the movies we see than the books we read. Moreover, realism of the classic variety, as illustrated by such writers as Flaubert, James, and Chekhov, doesn't really bear much resemblance to either mainstream Hollywood narratives or to what is called realism in much current fiction. I always encountered great resistance from students when I would teach any of these writers in intro to lit classes. Most often they would complain that in the assigned fiction "nothing happens," or there's "too much description." Clearly these students have become especially accustomed to a certain kind of story (where the focus is all on what does happen) arising from their movie-watching habits, but I think even more dedicated readers of current fiction might be surprised upon reading, say, Chekhov to find so little emphasis on plot, or even conventional character identification, of the kind films have prompted us to expect.

Two writers who seem to me to illustrate the phenomenon I am discussing would be Tom Wolfe and Richard Price. However much Wolfe wants to imitate Dickens or Thackeray, his books are cinematic, focused on visual detail and dialogue in such a way that whoever attempts a screenplay adaptation of them must find they provide an enormous headstart. Price is a better writer than Wolfe, but he began his career writing novels that, if not exactly movie-like, were readily assimilable to film. This may be why his services as a screenwriter were solicited in the first place. The books he has published since his immersion in Hollywood script-writing certainly seem if anything more cinematic than his early books, as if they began as movie ideas that Price couldn't sell or thought would work better--would provide him with a larger canvas--as novels.

LaBute appears to have been after what is conventionally called "psychological realism." The problem is, judging from the passages Jennifer Egan quotes, he uses it very perfunctorily, with no apparent feel for the possibilities of writing at all. It is as if the thoughts attributed to the characters are merely lines of dialogue LaBute has instead decided to place "inside" the character's heads. What it again seems to betray is the notion that fiction is much like film, only a little bit different, affording the opportunity to make explicit what in LaBute's films is implicit. But what works pretty well in his movies--focusing on his characters' behavior without explaining it, giving it a creepily mysterious quality--can't survive the necessary exposition fiction usually requires, or that LaBute at any rate wants to provide. In this sense, he would definitely be well advised to go back to film, unless he wants to change directions completely and instead explore more fully what fiction might be capable of evoking in him as a writer, as a stylist, rather than as half-hearted exercise one takes up just for kicks.

Lost in the Funhouse

Ray Davis (Pseudopodium) suggests that, while such books as Nabokov's Pale Fire and Cortazar's Hopscotch can be appropriately labeled "experimental" fictions, the fiction of John Barth is instead only a "generic" member of a category that has come to be identified as "experimental fiction." Barth's work, presumably, simply makes a number of familiar moves that have been accepted as "experimental" in this generic sense.

I would agree that such a category exists, and that those writers who could be consigned to it do indeed mostly reprise certain recognizable techniques or repeat what have become by now fairly well-worn tropes. But I can't see how Barth belongs to this category. Many if not most of the techniques in question (techniques of self-reflexivity, self-reflexively applied) were actually introduced by Barth in the first place, and the idea that conventional fiction had become "exhausted" in its ability to keep serious fiction afloat--and that a new kind of fiction able to confront this fact head-on was needed--was Barth's idea.

Certainly Barth had his own precursors. In "The Literature of Exhaustion," he cites Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett as the kind of technically adventurous writers whose company he would like to join, and, even further, praises Borges for his recogniton that no writer is truly original--such a writer would be unreadable, would make it so difficult for us to find our literary footing that the effort wouldn't finally be worth the trouble--but in effect is merely commenting on what's already been done. ("Pierre Menard," for example.) Thus Barth acknowledges that all literary writing is, in this broadest sense, generic writing. Moreover, Barth also confesses that he himself is a writer who "chooses to rebel along traditional lines," perhaps only inviting the charge that he's really not very innovative after all, merely imitative of his own favorite innovators--who themselves aren't really innovative, either, etc., etc.

But I really don't see how anyone could read Barth's early work, from The Floating Opera to, say Chimera, and conclude that Barth is not engaged in a fairly earnest kind of literary experimentation. If any of these books seem deriviative at all, they would be the first two, The Floating Opera and End of the Road, which are not only fairly conventional narratives (with a few modernist flourishes) but also embody "existentialist" themes of a kind rather popular in the 1950s/early 1960s. On the other hand, The Sot-Weed Factor clearly shows Barth looking for inspiration elsewhere than modernism, specifically 18th century picaresque narratives. The picaresque had not been entirely abandoned, of course (The Grapes of Wrath), but I think Barth can genuinely be credited with refocusing attention on the picaresque specifically as an alternative to both modernist introspection and the well-crafted realistic story. This may not be sui generis experimentation, but it seems to me that in the context of the time it is undeniably a literary experiment.

Giles Goat-Boy is an even more thoroughgoing effort to reconfigure the mid-century American novel, and to explore more fully the potential of "archetypes" (a la Borges) and of what Robert Scholes called "fabulation." . Although I myself find it less compelling than The Sot-Weed Factor (it's an example of the "art of excess" that's finally just too excessive), again I find it hard to believe that many readers could attempt this novel without finding it quite a singular work of fiction, at least within the context of postwar American literature. Forty years later it can try one's patience, but this is because Barth was trying to do too much, not because he was just working over a formula inherited from his literary forebearers.

But it is Lost in the Funhouse in which Barth most purposefully engages in literary experiment. So singlemindedly does he do so, in fact, that readers who encounter this book now, shorn of the context in which it was both so controversial and so influential, might think it dated, a relic of an era in which experiment in fiction could be so noteworthy. (They would be mistaken to judge it so, however, as it is an example of the sort of fiction that, in Barth's own words, is still "au courant" but also "manage[s] nonetheless to speak eloquently and memorably to our human hearts and conditions, as the greatest artists have always done.") Here readers will find: a story in the form of a cutout Mobius strip; a story narrated by a spermatazoon on its journey of fertilization; a story in which the narrator (the author's recorded voice) pleads with the author himself (standing by) to put it out of its misery; a story narrating its own coming-into-being; a story about speaking in tongues in which each of six brief speeches is "metrically identical" to the Lord's Prayer; a story that takes the notion of story-within-story to its hilarious limits; and stories such as "Life-Story" and "Lost in the Funhouse" itself, perhaps the prototypical and most influential metafictions in postmodern American literature.

Again, perhaps reading such stories after close to forty years of "experimental" fiction by other writers coming to terms with the implications for the future of fiction these very stories themselves brought into the open makes it easier to see how their innovations are to some extent coterminous with the practices of other forward-looking writers throughout literary history, might even by this point seem overused. But that in 1968 Lost in the Funhouse was unlike anything else being done by Barth's contemporaries (with perhaps the exception of his like-minded colleague Robert Coover) seems to me indisputable.

Barth is perhaps legitmately vulnerable in his later work to the charge of repeating himself, of abandoning the kind of focused experimentation to be found in Lost in the Funhouse in favor of a more lighthearted self-reflexivity drawing on Barth's own life and probably more interested in depicting his native Chesapeake Bay region than in advancing the cause of innovative fiction. Books like Letters, The Tidewater Tales, and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor have their pleasures (I find the latter to be a particularly affecting novel), but certainly Barth's reputation as an important American writer could not really rest on them, however much they add to a critical consideration of Barth's work as a whole. And I do believe Barth will ultimately be judged an important postwar writer, largely because of the accomplishment of a book like Lost in the Funhouse, which, however much it absorbs the influence of writers such as Borges and Nabokov, also transforms that influence into a frequently outrageous kind of comic fiction that discloses the many ways in which storyelling can trip over its own narrative feet, but in the process demonstrates that fiction still has plenty of innate if unexploited resources from which it might continue to draw.

Ultimately Pointless

The biggest problem with Julian Evans's "The Return of Story" in the December Prospect is that its central contention, on which the burden of his anti-aesthetic argument is placed, is simply wrong. "In the cinema" Evans writes, "a core of narrative innocence survives across a spectrum of values represented by Spielberg at one end and Abbas Kiarostami at the other. In the novel, however, story has gone down in a blaze of modernist attitudes. . ." Clearly Evans doesn't really read very many of the scores of novels published every year in both Great Britain and the United State. If he did, he would certainly discover that almost all of them--perhaps not exactly 100% of them, but pretty close to that--do indeed tell stories, and almost as many (90%? 95?) tell very traditional stories of a sort Evans's most conventional "storyteller" from the past would immediately recognize and heartily endorse.

(Evans is notably reluctant to name names in his indictment against contemporary novelists for abandoning narrative, but he does cite Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. Come again? Amis doesn't tell stories? How did I miss that? And Rushdie? Midnight's Children? Perhaps one could call this novel "magical realism," but since when has magical realism done anything but tell stories? One Hundred Years of Solitude? If Evans has indeed read these books but still would claim they don't tell stories, he's a pathetically poor reader.)

But Evans gives the game away when he praises Fitzgerald's "The Rich Boy" because it "consists of a linear narrative managed by a modern consciousness." It's not that modern/postmodern novels jettison narrative altogether, it's that they don't stick to linear narrative. One might have thought that the history of fiction in the 20th century had at least demonstrated that stories don't need to be "linear" to be stories or to engage a reader's attention, but apparently not. Apparently most of this fiction is to be dismissed as so many "literary bleeps and squeaks," although Evans is assuredly mistaken if he really thinks fiction will be returning to the practices of the past in some ingenuously earnest kind of way ("down with self-consciousness!") or that the fiction characterized by "modernist attitudes" will just disappear. It prompts one to ask: If Evans really dislikes what fiction has become, why does he bother with it all, even to deplore it? He's stuck with it, so perhaps he should just console himself with the "narrative innocence" of movies. (Except that we all know that "the cinema" at its best lost its narrative innocence a long time ago as well.)

(The bit about "modern consciousness" takes us into James Wood territory, and I have made a resolution to not go back there again, at least for a while.)

What Evans really dislikes is art itself, at least as far as it has dared to sully the innocence of fiction: "The histories of the novel and of storytelling ran together until the early 20th century; since the 1920s, that history has been one of formal drift, away from the novel as a social form that described how characters live in relation to others. . ." It's telling that, for Evans, any deviation at all from the tradition of "storytelling" must be "drift," almost literally, given the language here, some kind of ethical betrayal. To be a muddle-headed aesthete, even to be interested in the aesthetic qualities of literature at all, has long been anathema to a certain kind of critic, grounds for accusing writers of being morally deficient, but why, for example, would it probably not occur to these critics to declare, say, composers too interested in art, too attentive to the needs of form over those of morality? Even the most conventionally tonal music is by its very nature about form, about the relationships between sounds and the interaction of purely musical qualities. Is fiction not allowed to explore the possibilities of the linguistic medium in something like the way music explores the possibilities of the aural medium? Why when a fiction writer does this is he/she more likely to be considered some kind of malefactor?

Furthermore, Evans is again simply wrong in his assertion that "The histories of the novel and of stroytelling ran together until the early 20th century." This is a common, but mistaken, belief about the development of fiction even in the 19th century. Evans cites Henry James as one of his storytelling heroes, but who would say that James's real preoccupation was telling stories? That he wasn't more interested in the "how" of storytelling--point of view, style"--than in the "what"--events, narrative progression, the details of "what happens"? For some reason it is assumed that the great figures of literary realism were also tale-spinners, but who can read Chekhov and say this? His stories are about character, situation, revelatory moments. As far as narrative is concerned, in most of them almost nothing happens. The fact is, the more fiction "drifted" toward realism, the less it focused on story at all--"story" was an artificial construction that was not faithful to the way real people actually experienced their lives.

But for Evans, fiction is not about individuals at all, which is presumably also an ethical breach: "Novelists may want to write narrowly or widely; but the novel remains a social form, and our fiction should communicate that whatever identity we may have is composed not merely of ourselves but of others. The novel, in its fully realised state, exists to reflect on those links between us - on their making and breaking. How can it do that other than through stories?" Evan's assumption couldn't be clearer: novels are not about art, they're sociology. Moreover, they're a particularly smarmy form of sociology, in which we are lectured to about our duties to others. They're a handy form of indoctrination and propaganda. Stories just keep it simple. And Evans's superior insights are apparently not restricted to moral issues: He also knows what novels are really for, has somehow acquired a knowledge of what they would appropriately be like in their "fully realized state." It's always nice when a critic is able to share his god-like wisdom and set poor novelists straight about what they ought to do.

According to Evans, one of the judges of the most recent Man Booker prize has finally learned her lesson. "Reading 132 books in 147 days," she is quoted as saying, "you learn a great deal about why so many novels - even well-written, carefully crafted novels, as so many of those submitted were - are ultimately pointless." And thus we arrive at what always turns out to be the crux of the matter for people with the attitude toward fiction exemplified by someone like Julian Evans: novels must have "a point," they can just be "well-written" and "carefully crafted." For Evans, the point must be "social," but for others it need not be socially redeeming per se. It just needs to be something more than "mere" art--indeed, more than "merely literary." This attitude, while ostensibly looking out for the welfare of literature, actually couldn't be more dismissive. Who needs literature, anyway, when you can just go around making points?

Myself, I love pointless novels. They can even tell stories, but when they start to "communicate" to me about our shared identities, I stop turning the pages.

SF/Fantasy

What follows is the third in a series of "dueling reviews" to appear on this site--although readers may conclude that in this case, as in the previous reviews of Gilbert Sorrentino's The Moon in Its Flight, there's not that much dueling going on. Nevertheless, Matt Cheney (The Mumpsimus) and I have teamed up to review a recent science fiction/fantasy anthology entitled Polyphony 4, published by Wheatland Press. Since much of what I discuss in this weblog would generally be described as "literary fiction," I wanted to extend my horizons to a consideration of genre fiction as well. And I would like to do more. (Hint to any bloggers or writers who might want to join up with me in a future such set of paired reviews.)

FROM POLYPHONY 4 TO POLYPHONY 4.1: A BETA-TEST IN THE SLIPSTREAM MAKES THE MEDIOCRITY GO DOWN

By Matthew Cheney

Within the cosy ghetto of serious science fiction and fantasy readers, the term "slipstream" is sometimes used as a label for stories that linger in the liminal borderlands between die-hard genre definitions. The fourth volume in the Polyphony anthology series, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, offers just over 400 pages of such stories, but only a quarter of those pages are of a particularly high quality, causing me, at least, to feel that reading the book was more akin to slipping into a swamp than a stream.

I have positive things to say about the good writing in the book, but first I need let some negative waves crash to shore. Before I can even comment on the content, I have to note that Polyphony 4's pages are pocked with typos, making the whole thing appear to be thrown together before it was ready for prime time. It's asking a lot for readers to take a book seriously when the publishers apparently didn't care enough to make sure the authors' words were presented clearly. I've read uncorrected proofs that have fewer errors per page than Polyphony 4. There may be good excuses -- Wheatland Press is a small and honorable operation -- but there is no way to excuse the fact that typographical errors are disrespectful to the authors whose work the book presents.

Speaking of the authors' work... Well, people often call anthologies "a mixed bag", and this bag is so mixed it's muddled. There are a few ways to view this. We could say that the editorial vision is eclectic and that the editors tried to provide something for nearly every taste. Or we could be less charitable and say that there seems to be no editorial vision. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle, but the effect is clear: Only a few of these stories truly deserve a reader's attention. Many of the stories could have been effective with some revision and the guidance of an editor. Not every anthology editor considers it their job to help writers revise promising stories, but editors who don't should then issue rejection slips with utter abandon and keep their anthologies short.

There is a good book buried in Polyphony 4, though, and it is that book I want to celebrate. It begins with "Down in the Fog-Shrouded City" by Alex Irvine, though to get in touch with the inner anthology we will dispense with the last page or so of that story, because the ending is so pat and sentimental that it threatens to destroy every good word Irvine wrote. And he wrote some great ones -- the story is marvelously weird, a tale of amnesia and love and monkeys with typewriters.

Next, we skip to page 169 and Gavin Grant's "A Storyteller's Story". This would be a good piece to start the anthology with, because it is carefully written, it explores ideas of fiction and dreaming and reality, and it treats its audience as if they are intelligent and capable of both thought and honest feeling. It's fairly innocuous fare, but that's not necessarily bad. Save the fireworks for later.

Polyphony 4 gets better in its second half, and there we've got a few more pieces to choose from. "The Eye" by Eliot Fintushel is prototypical Fintushel, which means that it's hilariously strange and a bit disturbing. "The Eye" is about a very small man who is a voyeur, and his quest for love and friendship in a world of powerful plastic surgery. It's romantic absurdism with fangs, and I suspect it's the sort of thing you either love or hate. I've yet to meet a Fintushel story I hate.

We have to do to "The Train There's No Getting Off" (a collaboration between Bruce Holland Rogers, Ray Vukcevich, and Holly Arrow) what we did to "Down in the Fog-Shrouded City" and save the best parts while tossing out a lot of the rest. The story is at least twice as long as is justified by its concept or execution, but the first parts offer a compellingly confusing study of fertility and sterility. Dr. Frankenstein recommends that for his version of Polyphony 4 we sever the healthy first thirteen of the story's thirty-five pages from the rot of the rest.

The next story to keep is Tim Pratt's "Hart and Boot", the kind of story you might get if a schizophrenic fabulist decided to recount the plot of a spaghetti western. Like the two previous stories we've decided to keep, "Hart and Boot" is full of odd and amusing details, which may signal a bias on the part of the first-person-plural guiding you through this book at the moment. On the other hand, the similar narrative and tonal strategies of "The Eye" and the good parts of "The Train There's No Getting Off" may indicate that certain strategies work better than others at piercing the membrane between specific styles of fiction. Absurdism (in this context at least) doesn't seem to lead to earnest mediocrity as easily as other techniques.

Other techniques are available, though, in the remaining four stories that deserve attention: "Ataxia, the Wooden Continent" by Stepan Chapman, "Tales from the City of Seams" by Greg van Eekhout, "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" by Theodora Goss, and "Three Days in a Border Town" by Jeff VanderMeer.

"Ataxia, the Wooden Continent" continues the absurdism, but does so with entries from an encyclopedia of a floating continent full of sentient wood. Consider: "EYE KNOBS: These organs provide vision for the clans of the Ebony Dressers, the Acacia Tallboys, and the Sectional Cabinets. Eye knobs are still collected illegally by the Cannibal Pantries of the Off-True Archipelago and used in their hideous cork gumbos." The story ends with a beautiful, funny, sad creation myth, a nice capstone after so much wit.

I hesitated about whether to keep "Tales from the City of Seams", because on a first reading the various little stories it includes didn't seem to add up to anything. On reflection, though, I realized I didn't care. Let mathematicians do sums; I'm content with pieces of unarithematized words. Each piece captured my imagination, and in the end the universe coalesces in a restroom. It is unseemly to ask more from a story!

"The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" is one of the most traditional stories in the book, a story that would even be appropriate for children, but it is captivating and feels fresh because it is all told so well. The young narrator, unhappy at home, takes lessons from a nomadic German violinist who happens to believe in a flying city and wants to build a glider to fly there. It is the kind of story that a book like Polyphony 4 exists to publish -- a story that doesn't fit easily into any marketing category (is it a fantasy? historical fiction? young adult?), but which is written with skill and sensitivity and will delight most readers.

"Three Days in a Border Town" is the masterpiece of the anthology, and the editors have quite rightly placed it last -- it must be saved for last, because it makes just about everything else in the book seem pedestrian. It is dense, thick, rich with imagery and, by the end, emotion (though it is not at all sentimental). The prose is sharp and rhythmic, and it makes the second-person narration (which in most writers' hands is cloying) feel natural and intimate. It has some of the elements of an adventure story, but it's an adventure story as filtered through the sensibility of Samuel Beckett, a post-adventure story, a story of the dry, nasty purgatory between adventures. We're thrown into the hangover of lost love, the numbing pain of remembered mysteries. Fantasy and reality confuse each other, history and storytelling don't solve anything, and in the end all you can do is keep walking, and that is enough.

Other readers might prefer other stories to the ones I have chosen -- plenty of readers will be entertained by Lucius Shepard's "The Blackpool Ascensions", for instance, which I thought was a mess -- and so the book's size and variety might be justified. The anthology I assembled above from the raw materials of Polyphony 4 (call it Polyphony 4.1) would only contain about 160 pages of fiction. For me, the other pages were a distraction, because I'm a slow reader and prefer to read a book that has been scrupulously, even ruthlessly, edited.

Kelly Link proved with her anthology Trampoline that it is possible to assemble a rich and consistently interesting collection of stories that defy labels. Polyphony 4 proves just how difficult that task can be.

MONOPHONY

By Daniel Green

Polyphony 4 makes it clear enough that a spirit of experimentation exists among those writers who have chosen to work within the uber-genre of science fiction/fantasy, much more so, if this anthology is at all representative, than among those who still aspire to the putative respectability of "literary fiction." The latter category encompasses a small subset of writers who are in effect granted a license to call themselves "experimental," but the degree to which these writers are truly willing to reconsider the ultimate purposes and unexamined proprieties of fiction is really quite limited. And while occasionally this or that ostensibly unconventional approach manages to create a modest stir or even for a time to catch on as the latest in literary fashion, my impression after monitoring the wandering course innovative fiction has followed over the past twenty years or so is that only a few experimental writers are able or willing to stick to that course very firmly in the face of both complete commerical irrelevance and a general lack of informed critical attention.

SF/Fantasy of all the genres presumably offers through its fundamental enabling conventions the most explicit alternative to mainstream literary fiction, which, even at its most experimental, mostly aims, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, to capture present circumstances, things as they are, or at least as they can be seen to represent abiding concerns in human existence more generally. Science fiction deliberately foregoes a direct engagement with the world literary fiction confronts more squarely, preferring instead imaginative extrapolations from existing conditions in that world; fantastic fiction ignores the restraints of realism in coming to terms with that world altogether. But the stories in Polyphony 4 don't just exemplify the alternative strategies embodied in their genres. They manifest an obvious effort to question inherited assumptions about storytelling, the basic principles of fiction-making.

And yet my most immediate response to this anthology was disappointment, even boredom. While the ambitions motivating most of these stories are entirely admirable, the realization of these worthy ambitions is not often equal to the potential for "making it new" the anthology itself represents. Too frequently the stories seem to settle for, at worst, an indulgence in superficial whimsy, at best, a cultivation of the bizarre in situation and event that, at least as I read them, can't bear the weight they're asked to bear when left to provide the primary source of dramatic interest. Somtimes, the piling-up of bizarre details and frankly silly conceits simply substitutes for any further attempt to additionally develop the work into something more aesthetically compelling, as in "Ataxia, the Wooden Continent":

ATAXIA: A floating continent, entirely composed of wood. Populated by various races of arboids, celluloids, and laminates. Ruled by the priest cult of the Great Lectern at Shellac-Veneer. This magnifcent city surrounds the sacred lectern's base. The cupolas and minarets of Shellac-Veneer rise from the Plain of Lath, Ataxia's central plateau. The Lectern's high priest administers the Holy Ataxic Empire from the Shrine of the Thrones of Nails. Defended by armies of Drillers under the command of the Walking Barn Roof. . .Major Cities: Shellac-Veneer, Cambium, Silo, and Wharftown. Main rivers: The Timber, the Pellet, and the Tanbark. Chief imports: screws, bolts, and brackets. Chief exports: Shovelers and toothpick hay.

Moreover, the editors have not made it easier to appreciate the worthwhile stories that are included in Polyphony 4 by arranging it so that the most tiresomely whimsical and/or hackneyed stories are the ones at the front of the book (the very best story, in fact, is literally saved until last), thus only increasing the possibility that a casual or curious reader will give up on the anthology and conclude that sf/fantasy may not reward further sampling. By my count, the first really good story doesn't come along until page 169 ("The Storyteller's Story"), althought at least four of the following eight stories ("Memree," "Baby Love," "Hart and Boot," and "Bagging the Peak") are also quite good. Of the remaining 100 pages, readers might disagree about the quality of such stories as "The Journal of Philip Schuyler," and "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" (historical fantasies of a sort), while "Tales from the City of Seams, and "Three Days in a Border Town" are two of the best stories to be found in Polyphony 4, almost (not quite) redeeming the tedium one must unfortunately endure through the largest part of this anthology.

Perhaps the most significant contributing factor to the general lassitude Polyphony 4 induces is that, with exceptions, the writing itself in most of these stories is really quite lackluster, not at all commensurate with the colorful concepts from which the stories seem to emerge. The very first paragraph of the very first story sets the tone for the mostly flat and stale style of writing one encounters in too many of the stories:

Emelia's home is in a city where only children are allowed to draw graffiti on the crumbling walls. The old bricks and stones are covered in crude pictographs and stick figures, smoking chimney houses and bicycles with four wheels and two seats. Chalk is a penny a piece, any color to be had. A little old lady with gnarled fingers and crooked eyes sells the sticks out of cigar boxes on street corners, even in the rain.

The open-eyed wonderment conveyed by this passage cannot, for me, mitigate the otherwise bland prose and the cloying and cliched effect it produces. Overall, the most lasting impression the writing in many of these stories left with me is the sense that all too often their authors were so enamored of the "idea" being pursued they couldn't really bother with composing satisfying prose to go along with it. In the most extreme cases, I could only conclude that the sensibilty informing the stories was finally more cinematic than literary, more concerned with narrative immediacy than with the opportunity to do something interesting with words, at least where style is concerned.

Nevertheless, if I were to point interested readers to stories in Polyphony 4 that would reward the effort to locate a copy of the anthology, regardless of one's interest in genre, there would be two: Michael Bishop's "Baby Love" and Jeff VanderMeer's "Three Days in a Border Town." I would be hard put to classify the former story as science fiction or fantasy at all: It tells in a more or less straightforwardly realistic but effectively understated way the story of a man who loses his wife in an auto accident and must care for his infant daughter by himself. It is an engaging story that concludes in a quiet but really very emotionally crushing way. "Three Days in a Border Town" is to some extent a fairly familiar tale of the postapocalypse, but its central conceit is executed very effectively (it is thematically integrated in a manner that succeeds in purely literary terms and is not merely clever or fanciful) and the writing is evocative and assured: "When you come out of the desert into the border town, you feel like a wisp of smoke rising into the cloudless sky. You're two eyes and a dry tongue. But you can't burn up; you've already passed through flame on your way to ash. Even the sweat between your breasts is ethereal, otherwordly. Not all the blue in the sky could moisten you." If VanderMeer's story is a good example of what current sf/fantasy is capable of achieving, I would definitely like to read more.

Full Stop

This essay by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Telegraph is really quite thoughtful about "silences" and endings in fiction. For instance:

. . .writing is always partial: it involves the choice of some words rather than others, and choice requires rejection. As Henry James observed, "Stopping, that's art": the writer must know what to shut out, when to shut up.

But even stopping need not be an imaginative curb, because alerting us to what is not being said can also remind us of how often life gives words the slip, whether through secrets, reticence or repression.

And:

Fictional endings are the moments when speech topples over into silence, so they regularly provide concentrated images of the horror of death, from the corpse-strewn scenes that conclude Shakespeare's tragedies, to the newer worry over entropy that filters into a novel such as Forster's Howards End, which begins with Mrs Wilcox looking "tired" and ends with Mr Wilcox "Eternally tired".

But endings can also be more lively and enlivening than this. "Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending": George Eliot's "Finale" to Middlemarch points out that it is no easier to tie up all loose ends in a novel than it is to draw a sharp line between one life and another life.

The insights here about the use of silence in works of serious literature are especially useful. What's not said, of course, is often as important as what is--Beckett, for example, seems to me the writer who has most profoundly understood the literary possibilities of silence, as well as the advantages of saying too little rather than saying too much. Somehow, these seem to me to be the real choices available to serious writers--either refusing to say what readers can be led to hear nevertheless, or saying so much that readers similarly come to understand what words can "say" and what they can't. (In contemporary American fiction, Carver on the one hand, Elkin on the other.) Saying just the right amount seems to me the most boring approach one can take. And it is the role of literary criticism, one it's no longer much assuming, to help readers prepare themselves to note the silences and make sense of the noise.

But I can't quite accept Douglas-Fairhurst's descriptions of the role of endings. He speaks of them as "stopping," as the final point in the narrative line a novel or play has drawn. This line, he suggests, is extended further by the reader into "life." (The final ending, of course, being the Big Ending awaiting us all.) "Above all," he writes, "good endings take us to the point where we emerge from reading better prepared to meet the challenges of the world." Perhaps some, perhaps many, readers have had this experience in reading narrative literature, but surely this can't be the more immediate purpose of endings in literature. Most writers have no better idea of how "to meet the challenges of the world" than anyone else.

Writers do, however, presumably have a somewhat better idea of how to shape works of fiction into literary art. They know how the ending relates to the other parts of the novel or story. They ought to know how they want the reader to relate the way the story ends to what has come before. In other words, an ending is more like a completion, the final piece of what should be the artistic whole, the last element in the literary design that allows the reader--perhaps forces the reader--to take a figurative step back and perceive that whole as it has now been finally presented. In this respect, it is no more--also no less--important than any of the other parts of the whole.

Douglas-Fairhurst's notion of the function of endings in fiction only reinforces the too widely-held idea that fiction is all about, is only about, "the story." Stories are a dime a dozen. There probably is some inherent fascination with stories hard-wired into the human brain, but most people would rather get their stories from movies and television. Fiction writers aren't going to get anywhere by continuing to compete with these media. The best writers stopped competing long ago. If fiction is going to survive as a vital--although not necessarily "popular"--literary art, writers will have to turn their attention away from stories in the simplisitic sense Douglas-Fairhurst's otherwise very intelligent remarks nevertheless still invoke and instead concentrate on the more dynamic possibilities of fiction as a form aside from the requirements of narrative. At the very least, they need to think through unexamined assumptions about how stories work and what they accomplish. ("Dumbing down" complex ideas or dramatizing "issues" just won't do.) Great writers have never been simply great storytellers, although some have indeed been great ones; a story may keep you reading until the end, but if you don't go back and retrace the steps that got you there it may well prove to be an "imaginative curb."

Character

In a recent post at s1ngularity, Trent Walters objects to the paucity of compelling characters in the horror fiction he's been reading for review. He then goes on to speculate about how "character" in fiction is created.

There are two obvious extremes of characterization (obvious because of their extremity) that help writers to quickly sketch a vividly realized character. One is the crazy or really weird character common to the literary story. Writers do this often to get noticed by a literary magazine, to do something that hasn't been seen. The other is the object or affectation of the character's that distinguishes this character from the others. He's the thin man, the fat man, the girl with the bone through her nose, the three-legged dog, the boy who stutters.

But neither rendering has much to do with character except that they both quickly sketch what a character appears to be, but appearances don't capture the reality of a character. Actions characterize the character (or, in the case of Hamlet, inaction, which is still an act). . . .

It may be true that in some fiction--perhaps in horror fiction more than most, although I have my doubts about this--character emerges mostly from "action," but I would propose that in the very best fiction, genre or otherwise, character is actually just an illusion created by the use of language in a particular way--by a writer's style, although the illusion thus created may be more or less a conscious act, may in fact be simply an artifact of the stylistic choices the writer has made to begin with. This may seem a preposterous notion, way too "postmodern" to be taken seriously, so I will further illustrate with examples of writers who couldn't be considered postmodern by anyone.

It is sometimes said that among the first "realistic" characters in works of fiction are those to be found in the novels of Jane Austen. They seem quite firmly rooted to the soil of real life, restrained in their actions and words in comparison to most of the fiction of the 18th century, where realism tends to be sacrificed in favor of color and dynamism. But isn't this a consequence of Austen's style, which is itself quite understated and restrained? To the extent a character like Elizabeth Bennet seems to us a very levelheaded and quietly witty woman, isn't this because Jane Austen is a very calm and quietly witty writer? What else do we need to know about Jane and Elizabeth Bennet beyond what we learn from this brief exchange early on in Pride and Prejudice about Mr. Bingley: "He is just what a young man ought to be," said [Jane], "sensible, good-humored, lively; and I never saw such happy manners!--so much ease, with such perfect good breeding!" "He is also handsome," replied Elizabeth, which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete." How much of the effect on our perception of character comes from the revelations of "speech" in the ordinary sense, and how much from the fact Jane Austen is a master at composing very sly and exquisitely worded dialogue?

Likewise, Dickens's characters are usually described as outsized and vigorous (and they are), but how often do we pause to consider how outsized and vigorous Dicken's own style actually is? Don't his characters come across to us in the way they do because of that style? Even the minor characters in Dickens are always vivid, partly because of Dickens's strategy of picking out one or two habits or features and exaggerating them, but also simply through Dicken's forceful and distinctive way of writing, as in this brief account of "Mr. Fang," from Oliver Twist:

Mr. Fang was a lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, middle-sized man, with no great quality of hair, and what he had, growing on the back and sides of his head. His face was stern, and much flushed. If he were really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good for him, he might have brought an action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages.

It could be said that the effect of a passage such as this comes more from what is ususually called "voice" rather than style per se, but what else is voice in writing but the concrete effect created on the printed page by an appropriate arrangement of words and sentences and paragraphs? Dickens's style, garrulous but pointed, seemingly ingenuous but actually quite caustic at times ("brought an action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages" seems a delicate way to put it, but is really very cutting), might be called "theatrical," but so might all of his characters, their theatricality a reflection of the language used to create them.

Similarly, the characters in Henry James's fiction, which most readers find quite convincing even when the fictions themselves are judged to be somewhat short on dramatic action, share the obsessed and ratiocinative qualties of James's style. When James Joyce or Virginia Woolf create character through the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, the characters that emerge, Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Dalloway, aren't compelling because of the "content" of their thinking or even because we're given a glimpse into the way they think, but because of the manipulations of language and expected novelistic discourse that each author performs. Literally, it's the strange way in which the words--broken up, rearranged, discontinuous--are put down on the page. "Character" in Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway can't be separated from these puposeful arrangements of words.

To use an example from genre fiction: How much more do we ever really learn about Chandler's Philip Marlowe than we do from the very first paragraph of The Big Sleep, as Marlowe stands before the Sternwood house?:

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Everything we associate with Marlowe is here, manifested in this brief but punchy paragraph: his powers of observation, his self-deprecating, wiseass attitude, accomplished through a demotic yet also eloquent style. And in this case it is specifically a writing style, as Marlowe is the narrator of his own adventures, which ultimately makes it impossible for us to separate Marlowe the writer from Marlowe the "character." The "action" in which Marlowe always becomes embroiled is fun to read, perhaps even keeps us reading, but for me such action adds little to my perception of him as a character, which is also always being reinforced by the way in which he describes this action to us.

First-person narration makes it most apparent that it is style--voice, if you wish--that evokes character, not action, certainly not the quirks or affectations that some writers try to use to force characters into being "vivid," to return to Trent's comments quoted above. Not only is the narrator's own character what we discern through his/her style, but all the other characters about whom such a narrator might speak clearly enough are what they are because of the way this narrator speaks about them. But good writers approach third-person narration in the same way they would a first-person narrator. It is itself a character, a voice, with his/her/its own distinctive way of summoning a fictive world through writing. Perhaps at his point you have to say that character and style are indivisible, but this is where "the reality of a character" has to start.

There are some writers for whom style supersedes character, for whom the "authorial" character is the main character, and their fiction doesn't suffer in the least from it. Stanley Elkin is such a writer. His characters are believable enough, vivid certainly, but their vividness comes not from any externally imposed "features," fastened onto the characters like artificial limbs. It comes from Elkin's inimitable and inexhaustibly inventive style. Here is a third-person account of Ben Flesh, protagonist of The Franchiser:

Forbes would not have heard of him. Fortune wouldn't. There would be no color photographs of him, sharp as holograph, in high-backed executive leathers, his hand a fist on wide mahogany plateaus of desk, his collar white as an admiral's against his dark, timeless suits. There would be no tall columns of beautifully justified print apposite full-page ads for spanking new business machines with their queer space-age vintages, their coded analogues to the minting of postage, say, or money--the TermiNet 1200, the Reliant 700, Canon's L-1610, the NCR 399--numbers like licence plates on federal limousines or the markings on aircraft.

Though he actually used some of this stuff. G.E. had an anwer for his costly data volume traffic; Kodak had found a practical alternative to his paper filing. He had discussed his microform housing needs with Ring King Visibles. He had come into the clean, bright world of Kalvar. A special card turned even a telephone booth into a WATS line. Still, Fortune would do no profile. Signature, the Diners Club magazine, had never shown an interest; TWA's Ambassador hadn't. There was no color portrait of him next to the mail-order double knits and shoes.

(It's worth noting how Elkin here describes Flesh by what he's not; all the clutter of detail only produces a stereotype that Ben Flesh mercifully avoids.)

Here's a first-person narrator, from The Bailbondsman:

So I'm Alexander Main, the Phoenician Bailbondsman, other men's difficulties my heritage. Alexander Main the Ba'albondsman, doing his duty by the generations and loving it, thriving on the idea of freedom which is my money in the bank, which is my element as the sand was my ancestors'.

So give the Phoenician your murderer, your rapist, your petty thief yearning to breathe free. Give him your stickup guy and embezzler, your juvenile delinquent and car robber. Give him you subversives and menslaughterers. I like dealing with the public.

Pretty clearly both Ben Flesh and Alexander Main are really Stanley Elkin. Or "Stanley Elkin," the manufactured authorial presence. In many ways, all of Elkin's characters seem just like all the others, are versions of this most important character, the writer. No one who loves Stanley Elkin's work, as I do, could want it any other way. Who needs characters when you can be carried along by writing like this?

Cultivate Your Gardens

The gloom that descended on the literary blogosphere on the day after the election could not have been heavier or more dismal. Most disquieting were the comments by various bloggers avowing, either implicitly or directly, that books and book blogging hardly seemed important after Bush's victory.

Surely in most cases this is a temporary affliction; the gloom will lift and the literary discussions will begin again. Still, I do hope that the disappointment over the election results--they've bummed me out too--will not cast a more lasting pall on the activities of literary weblogs, which have become not merely a respite from the even gloomier poltical circumstances we've been enduring for quite a while now, but have provided a real alternative to media-ized discourse on books and culture, which in my opinion only further pollutes the already foul political climate in which we are quite obviously going to have to continue to live. In my view, the endless series of rabid political books by journalists and other self-syled pundits that appeared over the past year or so only made the outcome we just witnessed all the more certain.

Books--fiction more specifically--seem trivial in comparison to politics and political awareness only if you've really invested most of your intellectual resources in the notion that political movements and ideas finally determine the degree to which serious engagement with ideas can be made at all, that everything else curious and creative people might find worthwhile must be subordinated to "political critique" or else it's just so much fluff. (That we invest a great deal of our emotional resources in particular political campaigns or outcomes certainly can't be avoided, nor the subsequent disappointment when our hopes are dashed.) It may be true that in large quarters of Bushworld books don't count for much, but it seems to me that we give in to the very attitude toward books and reading we deplore when we also declare in the wake of political disillusionment that we don't care much about them, either. If the outlook and assumptions that led to these most recent election results are really to be understood and confronted, it will only be, in my opinion, through the books--fiction and nonfiction--and the commentary about them that will appear over the course of the next four years.

Yesterday my mother called me to talk about the election. I was born and raised in a red county in a red state--a rural Missouri county of a pretty thoroughly lower-middle/working-class sort--and she still lives there. (She voted for Kerry. bless her.) She related her distress at those around her, her friends and acquaintances, who ignored all the ways in which the Bush administration had made their lives harder and less prosperous and voted instead on such issues as abortion and gay marriage. She doesn't think much of gay marriage herself, but she correctly observed that nothing would be done about these issues, anyway, and in the meantime the Iraq War would only get worse, jobs would get even scarcer, and the environment would be further degraded. She just couldn't understand how such people could so completely ignore their real political interests and vote on these cultural matters instead. (She is, of course, providing anedotal confirmation of the thesis of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas, although she hasn't read it. I suggested that she should read it, and should pass it around to her friends.)

Yet neither she nor I would say that these people who voted for Bush in the face of all the reasons why they shouldn't are bad people. They're really quite mild and unassuming in most respects. When I go back there to visit, I don't expect any of them to come after me with torches because I'm a liberal. I think it's really misguided to call them fascists and morons, words I have seen used in some places to describe these red-staters. (Yes, George W. Bush, and much of his administration, is indeed "scum," but most of the people living in St. Francois County, Missouri are not.) They need to be talked into voting for the more inclusive agenda, helped to see where their true interests lie, not called names or dismissed as hopeless. As it turned out, Bush got "only" about 53% of the vote in Missouri. A little more talking, a little more cajoling, among some of these very people might have made the difference. If they're to be persuaded the next time around, a few books might come in handy.