The Reading Experience

Blood from a Stone

In a review of Jay Parini's biography of William Faulkner, J. Peder Zane writes:

We hope that biographies such as Jay Parini's "One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner" will illuminate such episodes. Where did Faulkner get the fortitude to continue chasing what the world and experience saw as only windmills? How to explain the grand artistic leap that produced "The Sound and the Fury"? Perhaps if we know how he did it, we might be able to accomplish the same!

Surely this can't be the reason why otherwise intelligent people would want to read a biography of a writer, particularly one about a writer so disinctive in his accomplishments as Faulkner. Perhaps the idea is that the reader might learn not how to write like Faulkner, but how he summoned up the "fortitude" to continue writing in the face of all evidence that it wasn't getting him anywhere. One could imagine some readers who might be curious about such a thing, but if they have to see the reality of a writer dedicated enough to his talent and his vision to keep at it despite what the world seems to think of him corrorborated in a biography, those readers aren't likely to be the type to "accomplish the same" to begin with.

Why should we want to read biographies, perhaps multiple biographies, of writers whose primary claim on our attention is that they were writers, presumably producing work good enough that we continue to read it? I can't think of any viable reasons why we should. The facts of writing itself, the wheres and hows and how oftens, aren't that interesting, and it is these facts that define the writer's "life" insofar as we ought to have any interest in most writers' lives at all. We should settle for the primary fact that a particular writer found the time and the appropriate circumstances in which to write. Everything else is gossip, at best a record of the sorts of things a writer did when he wasn't writing, which again ought not to be of much concern to us since what separates a writer from everyone else, aside from those facts of writing already mentioned, is the work left behind.

What do biographies usually tell us about that work? In my experience, very little. Perhaps there are some truly great biographical works--Ellman's on Joyce, Edel's on James--that provide insight into their subject's work, that provide us with a way of approaching the work we can't get elsewhere, but unfortunately such books are few and far between. I'm sure Parini's book is perfectly competent, will give its readers a satisfactory enough sense of what Faulkner's life was like. Since Parini is himself both a novelist and a critic, it's quite possible what he has to say about Faulkner's books is interesting as well. But if I want some additional commentary about the books, I'd rather turn to a critical book Parini might want to write about Faulkner's work rather than a biography, which almost inevitably gets caught up in discussions about where ideas came from, upon whom certain characters are based, what episodes in the writer's life were transformed into fiction. I'm more interested in the ideas themselves, in experiencing the characters in their artistically embodied forms. I'm more interested in the fiction.

Zane concludes his review by declaring:

Many questions surrounding Faulkner's life are even harder to answer. Parini does not adequately explain the source of Faulkner's signature achievement: Yoknapatawpha County. Parini focuses on that "matchless time" from the late 1920s to the early 1940s when Faulkner produced at least a half dozen masterpieces, but can't begin to explain why his writing fell off thereafter. And the biographer doesn't explore the suicidal tendencies that fueled his drinking and later his horsemanship (which almost killed him on several occasions).

But then, you can't get blood from a stone. Parini's biography is about as good as it will get, which suggests the need for a different approach. Faulkner requires the kind of attention that has been lavished on another enigmatic William, Shakespeare -- a speculative biography modeled after Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant "Will in the World" or a novel such as Richard Nye's masterful "The Late Mr. Shakespeare." Only by discarding convention can we hope to one day know this unconventional man.

I suppose readers interested in such voyeuristic subjects as Faulkner's drinking or his "horsemanship" might be disappointed in Parini's handling of them, but I can't imagine that anyone interested in Faulkner's fiction rather than his flaws as a human being would care even a microbit about these things. And why Faulkner's "writing fell off" after the early 40s--although I would argue it merely became more uneven--is less important than the fact that it did. The "why" question can even be answered more immediately by looking at the writing itself: Faulkner wrote less well, the concrete explanations for which can be discerned by examining the work itself carerfully.

What would it mean to "explain the source of Faulkner's signature achievement: Yoknapatawpha County." Explain what? Why it is his "signature achievement"? Read the books and find out. Where an analogy to such and such a location or dwelling or geographical feature depicted in the novels might be found in or around Oxford, Mississippi? Who cares? How Faulkner brooded on the history and social realities of Oxford and its environs and was able to transform it all into compelling fiction that also managed to capture something essential about the American south? This is indeed an interesting question, well worth a book, but unfortunately a biography is not the sort of book that is going to be able to answer it very effectively.

As to a "speculative biography" along the lines of Greenblatt's book on Shakespeare: Why on earth would we need such a thing? Greenblatt has written a "biography" meant to compensate for the lack of known facts about Shakespeare. We know the facts about Faulkner. No "unconventional" reshuffling of these facts is going to shed any more light on Faulkner's work. (If we knew the facts about Shakespeare, no such biography of him would accomplish much, either.) I don't know if it's true or not that "Only by discarding convention can we hope to one day know this unconventional man." I still can't figure out why anyone wants to know the "unconventional man" in this way in the first place. Read the books, dammit.

Serious

It's no wonder that the very term "serious art" is so completely misunderstood, the art it names so often dismissed and laughed at, when reviewers and arts journalists seem so often not to have a clue as to what it actually might mean. This article in the Boston Globe is a good example. Ed Siegel tells us:

It often seems that there's as big a gap between so-called Hollywood movies and "serious films" as there is between red states and blue states. Hollywood movies cater to adolescents and families at megaplexes, while what are loosely, and usually inaccurately, termed independent films cater to those looking for more celluloid thoughtfulness in art houses.

But:

What is particularly interesting about the serious film as opposed to the Hollywood movie is how there are traces of Hollywood in even the most serious of films, whether they're the brainchildren of auteur directors, playwrights, or Booker Prize-winning novelists.

Of what do these "traces of Hollywood" consist? Apparently it is in the "happy ending," which, according to Siegel, even "serious" filmmakers can't quite resist:

In Hollywood films of old, the leading man almost always got the girl. But as girls became women and directors in the 1970s started subverting the Hollywood film, escapism became a thing of the past in serious films.

Sort of.

Now the aesthetic has become: The guy may or may not get the girl. Thus "Sideways" ends with Miles knocking on Maya's door. This implies some ambiguity, but the opinion on the way out of the theater seemed to be that they would get together.

It is striking that in differentiating serious films from "Hollywood" films Siegel can only point to the way in which these films conclude. (He does speak of an "emotional honesty to all these films that make the quasi-happy endings something between forgivable and desirable," but it isn't very clear what he means by this.) The unhappier the ending, the more serious the film? Because this implies a more "serious" view of life? It's not a bed of roses? No matter how slipshod or dishonest the rest of the film might be, if you tack on an unhappy ending this redeems the whole enterprise?

I'm sure that Siegel did not intend to imply such things (or I hope not), but it's what happens when the "seriousness" of a film (or any work of narrative art) is reduced to what the "moral" of its story seems to be. And this is essentially what a fixation on happy/unhappy endings amounts to. Of course one could dispute that such films as Sideways or Closer, upon which Siegel bases his analysis, are particularly serious films to begin with, but surely even these films display features that separate them from run-of-the-mill Hollywood product: Narrative ingenuity? Attention to detail? Care in composition and camera work? Directorial style in general? These sorts of things can even be brought to bear on films with conventional happy endings. Is an unhappy ending all that a filmmaker needs to provide to be taken seriously?

Ultimately Siegel's focus on how the story turns out is symptomatic of much criticism of both film and fiction. It is finally a way of reducing a film or a novel to its story. I suppose that when story is everything--as opposed to the artful ways in which stories can be told, or even to the attempt to get by without "story" in this most simplistic sense--the ending is going to take on extra gravity. In determining what is "serious" about films or novels, however, such a consideration is more often just dead weight.

In Defense of It's a Wonderful Life

Gerard Baker calls It's a Wonderful Life "Frank Capra’s hymn to sentimentalism." Nonsense. Sentimentality is created through an excess of sentiment or feeling--in excess of what is warranted by the situation from which it arises--and It's a Wonderful Life is not excessive in any respect. It's a skillfully made film in which the strong feelings the film does evoke--but not until the very last moment--are manifestly appropriate and entirely well-earned. It is not only among Capra's least sentimental films--both Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (also great movies, nevertheless) come closer to sentimentality--but it is among the least blatantly sentimental of any of the classic Hollywood films, few of which really avoid sentimentality altogether or for very long.

I have always found it rather puzzling that It's a Wonderful Life became a Christmas-time perennial in the first place. What it has to say is actually quite un-American: wealth corrupts, the powerful are out to get you, ambition is overrated, the "American Dream" itself only leads to nihilism and despair if pursued to its logical conclusions. Some say that the character of Mr. Potter is overdrawn, a caricature of the rapacious businessman (compensating for his own deficiencies), but I don't think so at all. He's monomaniacal, indifferent to the consequences of his actions for other people, dedicated to the proposition that owning everything and operating it all according to his own notions of efficiency and bottom-line results are what life is all about. In other words, he's everything the modern CEO has proven himself to be.

Sam Wainwright, the film's "entrepreneurial" character, comes off no better. He's every bit the braying jackass his constant "hee-haws" suggest he is. Something like Sam's life, escaping Bedford Falls, "doing things," making his mark on the world through his acquired skills, is what George Bailey dreams for himself, but of course the film shows that these are not things worth aspiring to. They only separate you from life as it's really lived, blind you to your own real talents, to your own humanity, and the film finally suggests that George is well rid of them. How many Yale undergrads are going to benefit from this advice?

It's a Wonderful Life is one of the few Hollywood films, maybe the only one, to show its protagonist going through an authentic existential crisis. He's forced not just to think about what his own life has been about, but he confronts the prospect of annihilation itself, literally looks into the void of his own nonexistence. The extreme close-up of Jimmy Stewart's terrified face, looking in utter despair from side to side after his own mother has denied him, as if he's looking for some other universe to inhabit than the nightmarish one in which he's currently trapped, is, to me, one of the most frightening and truly emotion-provoking images I think I've ever seen. This is hell indeed.

George Bailey is authentically plunged, through circumstances not of his own making, into an episode of despair so profound he seriously considers suicide but after pondering the implications and the possible consequences of his act (and finally this is what the encounter with his guardian angel and the subsequent nightmare vision of Bedford Falls, though rendered symbolically as narrative, really comes down to) decides to try living again. This is sentimentality? How many of us can really say that?

It has become more fashionable to deride Frank Capra for his sentimentality, even his hypocrisy, since the publication of Joseph McBride's Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. This is a dreadfully-written, -researched, and -argued book that makes much of the fact that Capra came from a bourgeoise background and was a registered Republican. It becomes the main prop for the book's argument about Capra, that he and his films were not what they seemed, were instead simply opportunistic excuse for Capra to become famous while making movies whose "progressive" themes he didn't really believe in. This is again all nonsense. Nobody who bothers to examine Capra's body of work could say the best of his films are anything but superbly made comedies of American life that could not have the impact they do if Capra hadn't believed strenuously in his own artistic integrity. Ignore anyone who comes speaking of "Capra-corn."

I first saw It's a Wonderful Life when I was helping to teach a large undergraduate film class at a Midwestern university in the early-to-mid 1980s. We sometimes forget that this film has been a "classic" Christmas movie only for the last 15 years or so. Before that it was almost forgotten. I think it was forgotten because it is indeed a disturbing film that seemed both at odds with its Christmas setting and not really consistent with our notions of what Hollywood studio films are like. I can't really say why it was embraced in the superficial and ill-informed way characterized by Baker's remarks, but I do recall that when I watched it for the first time I was overwhelmed by it. It may have been the first movie I had ever seen that did truly earn its happy ending. I also recall that the students in the class seemed genuinely moved by it. Unfortunately, while some people may still claim to be moved by it, most likely it is no longer possible for their response to be genuine.

Aesthetic Heroes

Terry Teachout recently put up a provocative post on the adaptation of fiction into film in which he raises at least two very interesting issues. The first has to do with the critic's responsibilities in reviewing films adapted from fiction:

. . .full-time film reviewers. . .rarely have sufficient time to do the research that would allow them to intelligently compare film adaptations to their sources. The classics, yes—we all at least pretend to have read them—and it’s also taken for granted that film-to-source comparisons will be made in the case of Gone With the Wind-type blockbusters, if only because the first thing everybody wants to know about such films is how faithful the screen version is to the original book. But when it comes to old movies adapted from obscure novels, who bothers?

Terry seems to conclude that finally it isn't necessary to read the book from which a film has been adapted, affirming the principle more or less accepted ever since George Bluestone's Novels Into Film (1957) that fiction and film are separate media embodying separate artististic ambitions that need to be judged by critical standards appropriate to each. And as Lance Mannion points out in a response to Terry's post, "it's generally agreed around Hollywood that the best movies are made from the worst novels." In other words, the artistic goals of the two media are so disinctive that, by and large, good novels almost never make good films (they were not written to be films in the first place), whereas bad or pulpy novels, which often borrow heavily from movie conventions and are usually so focused on plot or punchy dialogue they can be adapted fairly directly, often make great ones. They were movie-friendly to begin with.

But Terry draws another conclusion from this that strikes me as rather peculiar. "Most of us prose-oriented types," he writes, "have a sneaking suspicion that film is by definition a lesser art form than the novel. We like the idea that every word of a novel is personally written by the person who signs it (even though we also know that an anonymous editor may well have played a more or less substantial part in its creation). . . ." Although he accepts that "[i]t’s the work that matters, not the attribution," still "there’s a difference between knowing that to be true and feeling it in your bones. It takes a special kind of confidence to buy an unsigned painting without a provenance, based solely on the evidence of your eye. Most of us aren't nearly so sure of ourselves. We like to see that signature in the lower right-hand corner." Speaking as a "prose-oriented type" myself, I don't believe that "film is by definition a lesser art form than the novel," just that it's different, and different in ways that are important to remember. What's most peculiar in this passage, however, is the apparently Romantic preference (I wouldn't have expected Terry Teachout to express such a preference) for the "signature," the assurance that the work in question is the product of individual vision. Would Terry think less of Shakepeare's plays if it were discovered that not just one or two of them had been written in collaboration with other playwrights, but several of them, even some of the best ones? I would not, but if he really believes what he says here, one would have to conclude that Terry Teachout would have second thoughts about them.

The second issue has to do with the so-called "auteur theory." Writes Teachout: "Film, after all, is a radically collaborative process in which creative responsibility can only be assigned tentatively and on a case-by-case basis. This is something that all but the most rabid auteuristes accept as a given. . . ." And later: "In short, most of us stubbornly persist in believing in aesthetic heroes, a belief which I think goes a long way toward explaining why the auteur theory caught on. It goes against human nature to accept the attributional ambiguity inherent in the process of making films, in the same way that you’d think less of, say, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony were some musicologist to discover that it had been orchestrated by a student of the composer." Terry thinks the auteur theory goes too far in assigning "authorship" of films to the director, that it doesn't sufficiently account for the "radically collaborative process" of making films. The "radically" here is telling. Plenty of art forms are collaborative: classical music (where would the composer be without the orchestra?), dance, theater, etc. Why is film "radically collaborative"? Is it more collaborative than opera?

I understand that the word "auteur" has been horribly abused by those who, if they've read the Cahiers du Cinema critics or their American followers at all, have interpreted the notion of the cinematic "auteur" in the most simplistic and reductive ways. However, it is worth remembering that the auteur critics were responding precisely to the collaborative nature of filmmaking and were attempting to rescue, specifically, American cinema from the assumption that this sort of collaboration meant films could not be accomplished works of art. If movies were in effect assembled rather than made, if creative responsibility was too dispersed for the result to be considered artful in any meaningful way, why were so many films from the 1930s and 40s (or from the silent era, for that matter) so good? The auteurists posited that directors were in the best position to provide a film with its signature style and outlook, and that the best directors (not all directors) did just that, as any careful analysis of the body of work of a John Ford or an Alfred Hitchcock would manifestly show. Can anyone really examine the careers of directors like these and deny that their films are of a piece, products of an artistic vision as coherent as any other artist's, and this despite the fact that the screenplays of their films were mostly written by other and diverse hands?

For people like Truffaut and Godard--later Andrew Sarris--directors like these were indeed "aesthetic heroes." (Although perhaps Sarris could be charged with diluting the strength of the auteur theory in his book The American Cinema by in effect spreading it too thin, celebrating too many truly minor directors at the expense of obviously accomplished writer-directors such as Billy Wilder. Still, The American Cinema remains one of the most consequential books I've ever read, having literally changed the way I watch movies.) Perhaps Terry is only explaining why movies do still appeal to us as works of art, challenge us to account for this effect by identifying the "artistry" involved. In this sense, something like the auteur theory was inevitable. It has resulted in its share of excess in its application, and any number of hack directors have illegitimately claimed its favors, but it did indeed save many great movies from unwarranted neglect.

Since TEV has worked as a screenwriter, I'd be very interested in his views on this subject.

Attitude Police

In an essay in The Hindu Literary Review, novelist Tabish Khair makes a number of provocative points about historical inaccuracy in contemporary British fiction. Particularly good is this general discussion of the role of readers:

. . .The reader, not as a blank receptor of the intentions of the author or the text, but as someone who actually reads. The reader as the critic. Here the etymology of the word "read" has to be kept in mind: to read is to "think, suppose, guess; discern the meaning of (chiefly in read a riddle, a dream); inspect and interpret... " Related, as the word is, to the Sanskrit rãdh and the Old Slavonic raditi, it also includes the active sense of "accomplish" and "attend to" respectively. Moreover, one of the original senses of the Germanic root is that of "taking charge" and the act of interpreting written symbols is suggested by its Old English root.

But then he adds:

Reading is also an act of digging. A reader is not only someone who stays on the surface of the text, but an active thinker and interpreter. She attends to the text, but she also accomplishes and takes charge.

It seems to me that attending to a literary text is one thing--something that in fact too many readers don't do carefully enough--but to "dig" into it in the way Khair has in mind is something else. The reader participates in the creation of the text's "meaning" (more loosely, whatever significance a particular text is going to have for a particular reader), but to "take charge" of the text almost seems to undermine the very purpose of reading a work of literature in the first place, to make the act of reading always the possibility of waging war on the text. (Granted, this is the preferred strategy of much of current academic criticism, but it's obnoxious nonetheless.)

Simply taking pleasure in the reading of literature is converted by Khair into a "passive celebration" of it. Again, I understand that this kind of wariness of being "passive" and of being insufficiently skeptical of literary representation when it purports to depict marginalized groups is built into the project of contemporary cultural studies, especially that version that has come to be called postcolonial studies, but at what point does such wariness simply become an impatience with literature altogether? Must a poem or a novel always be ultimately an excuse to determine what improper attitudes it's illustrating? If, as a reader, you're looking for that work that's going to express only pure thoughts and pristine beliefs, or as a writer you want to produce such a work, you're not going to succeed. And even if you do, how boring that book is likely to be.

The literary offenses Khair uncovers seem to me pretty minor. Zadie Smith seems to be confused about a character's religious affiliation. Yann Martel gets a name wrong. Monica Ali appears too enamored of Britain's cultural freedoms. It's an awfully puritanical view of a poor novelist's obligations to insist that mistakes can't be toleratied, that a novelist can't just write novels without being held to account by the politically-inspired "diggers" and the attitude police.

Khair concludes by speculating that "one can only imagine the Reader-without-History as a non-reader, as a passive receptor, as a simple celebrator of the text, not as someone who interprets, guesses, digs. It is at best a reader — to the extent that she is brought into being — who wants to escape from history. It is a reader who wants to feel good about being who or what she is, and a knowledge of history — even one's own history — does not always cause one to feel good." How about a reader who neither wants to escape from history nor "feel good about being who or what she is" but instead read novels for the aesthetic pleasure they might provide? Is such a reader also being irresponsible? Are aesthetic resources not precious enough to dig for?

Thanks to Amardeep Singh for the link.

Blissfully Free of Politics

Moorish Girl's guest blogger, Randa Jarrar, recently asserted the following:

However, some writers have a responsibility, and a burden, to write politically. Someone black, or gay, or Arab, or handicapped, or HIV-positive, or Jewish, or raising a child alone, or Latina, or living on a reservation, may write a book that is not political. That book may be read as such anyway; this is true. But chances are that someone who fits those descriptions is going to have something political to say when they write fiction. Someone black, or gay, or Arab, or handicapped, or HIV-positive, or Jewish, or raising a child alone, or Latina, or living on a reservation, may write a book that is not political. -- and not only because everything they write or say is automatically, in the world we live in, considered political, but because they actually want to write activist fiction.

Now it is certainly true that some people want to write "activist fiction." They have every right to do so, and what they produce may even have some beneficial and appropriately "activist" consequences. (I am, however, rather hard pressed to think of much fiction that has had such consequences. The sort of folks on whose behalf such fiction is written themselves don't usually read it, and for those who are receptive to activist gestures--the already convinced--reading fiction is probably among the least efficacious sources of social change one can think of.)

And not only is it true that "Someone black, or gay, or Arab, or handicapped, or HIV-positive, or Jewish, or raising a child alone, or Latina, or living on a reservation, may write a book that is not political," many, many writers who could be assigned to one of these categories have indeed written non-political books. (Although looking over this list, it wouldn't seem to leave too many people who might be allowed to write non-politically: Heterosexual white men? Christian married women?) Why is it assumed that a writer "fitting these descriptions" who nevertheless wants to write a book, fiction or nonfiction, that doesn't "intervene" politically is unusual, even an aberration?

Is it really the case that "chances are" writers who can be pigeonholed into one of these categories "is going to have something political to say when they write fiction"? I understand that this a fundamental assumption of identity politics, but hasn't it really become an unexamined assumption that desperately needs to be examined? Isn't it ulimately an exclusive, not an an inclusive, view of what members of these identified groups can bring to the writing of fiction? What if someone who, given the terms of this imposed contract, ought to want to write political fiction really doesn't? Is the fiction this writer might produce then to be dismissed because it doesn't fulfill the expectations such a writer did not accept as valid in the first place? Writers like this aren't allowed to follow their bliss and write fiction blissfully free of politics?

I certainly hope it isn't true that "some writers have a responsibility, and a burden, to write politically." Or that whatever they write "may be read as such anyway." I really can't see why anyone, regardless of identity or affiliation, should be burdened with a preconceived notion of what or how he/she should write. Doesn't this make the writer into a victim of the cause, a drudge? Perhaps some writers do feel compelled to write politically some of the time, but always? Shouldn't someone who feels the compulsion to do nothing but write politically decide not to write fiction at all but instead take up "activist" nonfiction, even just become an activist? And if writers are stereotyped as political writers simply because of their perceived identity group, this is the reader's problem, not the writer's. Presumably the writer still gets satisfaction from the act of writing, from accomplishing the task at hand, despite whatever misunderstanding may ensue because of "politics." The reader who insists on misreading, on regarding everything as political even when it isn't, has only deprived himself of whatever other pleasures he might well have enjoyed.

Farts and Fetters--Daily

Somehow, the three new items posted at Arts & Letters Daily on Friday, December 3 seem wholly typical of the kind of commentary this otherwise useful website has favored almost since it made its appearance in the cultural cybersphere. In general, A&L Daily likes to present links to articles the editors seem to think are "contrarian," but they're really not. Most of the time they're entirely consistent with prevailing ideas among conservative writers, journalists, and academics who have themselves more or less become the established sources of opinion in a mainstream media and political culture that has been given over to conservative conventional wisdom. And it will become only more firmly embedded now that G.W. Bush has been reelected.

The first, an essay from Art News Online that would otherwise, shorn of the reactionary context a link from A&L Daily provides, seem innocuous enough, describes a return to representation among painters previously known to use abstraction. What seems to be at issue is not a rejection of abstraction per se, but the shift from one mode to the other by artists who find working in only one needlessly restrictive. The essay concludes by asserting that "Today, deciding to paint figuratively or abstractly, artists and curators agree, is no longer considered a problem. 'My own sense is that it is now a false distinction,' says Robert Rosenblum, a professor at New York University and a curator at the Guggenheim. . .'The issue is why paint at all versus whether what you paint is representational or not,' adds [Russell] Ferguson. 'If you are going to paint, paint what you want.'"

This seems to me a perfectly sensible view. Indeed, if painting has reached the stage where both representation and abstraction are seen as possible strategies to be used to accomplish particular goals, then the modernist/postmodernist "revolution" has triumphed. Painting "what you want" is now an uncontroversial approach.

But anyone who visits Arts & Letters Daily knows perfectly well that this is not the idea it wants to promote by linking to Art News. As it did vis-a-vis writers and narrative in the recent link to Julian Evans's silly essay on the "return of story," A&L Daily is instead suggesting that in returning to representation artists are perhaps now coming to their senses, have rejected all that fancy-pants avant-garde stuff and are again defining "art" as it ought to be defined: the painting of pretty pictures. This is analagous to Evans's notion that linear narrative is needed in fiction to overcome the "modernist attitudes" and "the meanness and the fear of involvement" brought on by "introspection and irony." Can't all those writers and artists just get with the program and play nice?

The second item, a Wall Street Journal article by Roger Kimball on Umberto Eco's History of Beauty, might again seem to the uninitiated a hamless enough discussion of Eco's book, except that Kimball is of course a well known conservative arts critic, writing in perhaps the foremost conservative newspaper in the country. (And both Kimball and the WSJ are frequently featured on A&L Daily.) Kimball, at least, disavows the association of art and beauty with fluff. He has much bigger ideas in mind:

Mr. Eco is ever alive to such paradoxes of beauty, its strange filiations with its opposite--the ugly--and with its explosive counterpart, the sublime, which might be described as the beautiful startled by an electric current. His book touches on the melancholy fact that much contemporary art is less about beauty than other more brittle realms of experience: "the interesting," "the challenging," "the transgressive," not to mention the perverse and the inane.

And what about beauty? We live at a time when many important words and ideas survive in maimed or diminished form. Think of what has happened to the word "virtue," for instance, or "respectable," and the realities they name. It is the same with "beauty." Sometimes it seems synonymous with the merely pretty or insipidly anodyne. The real pulse of art, of life, seems elsewhere.

Mr. Eco seeks to disabuse us of such diminishment. He does not, I believe, quote Dostoyevsky, but "History of Beauty" might be taken as an illustration of Dostoyevsky's observation that "beauty is the battlefield where God and the Devil war for the soul of man."

It's telling that in attempting to revitalize the concept of beauty, Kimball wants to connect it with "virtue" and "respectability," but what's most interesting in this passage is that after noting that many people seem to find beauty frivolous, he doesn't try to rescue aesthetic beauty from such misconceptions at all but instead quotes Dostovesky on beauty as theology. Dostoevsky? I'm admittedly less taken with Dostoevsky as a writer than most other people seem to be, but where in any of Dostoevsky's fiction is there any evidence that he cared about the creation of aesthetic beauty in the least? (If we heed Nabokov's critique of Dostoevsky as a stylist, we know he certainly had no interest in language as an aesthetic medium.) Kimball seems more concerned with religion and with abstract metaphysical doctrines than with anything that could tangibly be called beauty--in an aesthetic or any other material sense.

The third article is a straighforward political screed in which Anne Applebaum dismisses anyone who questions American policy toward Ukraine, or any other aspect of American foreign policy, as being "freedom haters" and "anti-American." Its the sort of blinkered and paranoid neocon argument to which we have by now surely become accustomed, but its appearance on A&L Daily is also entirely typical of the kind of political view this site implicitly endorses. (How often does it link to articles in Counterpunch, or even The Nation, that challenge the accepted wisdom of what has become the conservative establishment, that question such wisdom at least as vehemently as Applebaum seems to question the views of the "Western left"?) I think it would be very hard for anyone who monitors Arts & Letters Daily on any kind of consistent basis to deny that the neocon-ish sneering at the antics of "the left" represented by Applebaum's article is essentially A&L Daily's own preferred political take on current affairs.

The Arts & Letters Daily worldview seems to perceive all truly contrarian opinions and practices, whether in politics or art and literature, as the collective expressions of radical leftists and dippy postmodernists. They are approached not usually with outright scorn but with mock surprise (Can you believe these people?) and unconcealed sarcasm. Usually they are conflated, as if political dissidents and artists were all members of the same infernal club, always conspiring to undermine Western values and American hegemony. This is done both through the specific articles to which the site links and the often unfair characterizations of other articles provided by the site's own teasers. The result is a website whose motto, "truth hates delay," would appear to mean that all those enemies of truth--those who don't accept the political wisdom of the Bushworld idea men, who don't accept the reduction of art and culture to social ritual and traditional metaphysics--need to be dealt with posthaste. Because of its permanent links, and because it does still occasionally link to worthwhile items from non-mainstream sources, A&L Daily remains a site worth visiting. But in my opinion, if you think what you're getting there is an objective survey of "arts and letters," you're not paying very close attention.

Showing Constraint

As regular litblog readers probably know (if you don't, you should), Derik Badman of MadInkBeard is probably the blogospheric expert on the "Oulipo" movement. According to the Oulipo Compendium,

The Oulipo - in full, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature - was founded in France in 1960 by the French author Raymond Queneau and the mathematical historian François Le Lionnais. Made up of mathematicians as well as writers, the group assigned itself the task of exploring how mathematical structures might be used in literary creation. The idea of mathematical structure was soon broadened to include all highly restrictive methods, like the palindrome and the sestina, that are strict enough to play a decisive role in determining what their users write. The most notorious example of this approach is Georges Perec's novel, A Void, written without a single appearance of the letter e.

Derik has focused more intensively on the literary use of "constraint": "A constraint can be syntactic, semantic, or formal. Syntactic constraints are by nature easier to define strictly than semantic constraints. Syntax is already a limited systematic field, while the semantic field is much broader. Because of this there has tended towards more syntactic constraints (lipograms, anagrams, and such). Formal constraints are often more obvious and less rigorous. None of these three categories are necessarily mutually exclusive." Anybody who has visited the MadInkBeard site will have seen both critical discussions of the use of such constraints in various contexts (including film) and also Derik's own ongoing fiction, "Premises in the Snow," which attempts to demonstrate the use of constraint.

I find all of this inherently fascinating, but I do have something of a problem with the breadth of application it sometimes seems to inspire. Thus, I'd like to pose a few questions about the potential utility of the concept of "constraint," to which I hope both Derik and anyone else interested in these issues might like to respond.

Most generally: How does "constraint" in literature fundamentally differ from what I have just generically called in several of my own posts "experiment"? Isn't most experimental fiction--from the modernists to Sorrentino or Barth--the deliberate adoption of some kind of what could loosely be called constraint? Joyce constrains himself to writing a novel whose "plot" can be paralleled with The Odyssey.
Nabokov constrains himself to the kind of story that can be "told" through a fictional poem and the annotations attached to it. Robert Coover limits himself in telling the story of one man's mental deterioration to what can be revealed through this man's interaction with an imaginary baseball game he invokes through rolling dice (a constraint within a constraint).

Is the technique of using constraint thus just another word for experiment or innovation in literature, is it a special subset of such experiments, or is it separate from this more "mainstream" experimentation altogether?

Further: Is constraint to be understood in essentially negative terms, as something that is held back or taken away? Does this assume conventions or conditions for literature that are more "normal" (or at least expected), from which the use of constraint is a departure? Or can constraints be considered as an affirmative act, an adding to, by which the writer demonstrates that fiction can be whatever we want it to be? Is such a writer actually illuminating the ways in which constraints can be taken simply as contributions to the open-ended repertoire by means of which literature can be "made"?

Finally, to what extent is it true that all works of literature involve constraint in their very terms of existence? A widely-held view of what motivates someone to write fiction or poetry--and I think this view can be challenged-- is that he/she has some vital concern or idea to express but has chosen to embody this idea indirectly in a work of literature rather than state it outright. This seems to be an initial constraint intrinsic to choosing literary form in the first place. Also, when a writer such as Chekhov (whom few people would call experimental) decides that, in effect, he'll write a kind of fiction that mostly sacrifices "plot" in favor of character or setting, is this a manifestation of constraint? Or when Beckett decides to write a kind of fiction that sometimes sacrifices character as we usually recognize it, is this constraint? And of course in choosing to write poetry of any kind, a poet agrees to "constrain" language to its use in artificial creations of sound and verse pattern. Is poetry as a whole the most salient exemplar of "contraint"?

For myself, I would say that perhaps the most ideal situation for writers and readers of literature would be when constraint, or any other device, is simply accepted as an example of the myriad kinds of devices a writer might put to use to compose a work of fiction or poetry. In other words, when it is acknowledged as that sort of thing the appearance of which in a piece of writing marks it as being literary to begin with.