The Reading Experience

Mirrors

As a response to some of the questions I posed in my recent review of Lily Tuck's The News from Paraguay, The Little Professor points to this essay by the historian and historical novelist Jeanne Reames-Zimmerman. Reames-Zimmerman does a very thorough job of elucidating what she takes to be the task of historical fiction, but for my purposes this passage seems particularly revealing:

I grew up with one foot in a culture that regards storytelling as teaching, not just entertainment. Both my grandfathers told stories, but one told stories that meant something. He never got beyond an 8th grade education while here I sit with a Ph.D, hoping that one day, I live to be as wise as he was. That's my tradition. My mother told stories, and so did her brother and another sister, and now, so do I. My niece tells stories in her art, and one of my cousins directs theater. We're a family of storytellers. It's sacred business. I even use stories in my classes -- which I think my students basically enjoy, but some aren't too sure what to do with because it's not standard Western pedagogy, especially when I don't then lay out the salient points in nice bullet-style format. I want them to string the beads themselves.

Thus, I'm a big believer in narrative instruction. Stories touch the capacity of the heart, move us in ways visceral as much as intellectual. They inspire us to good or to evil. They're powerful things -- strong medicine -- and should be treated with due respect. They move us so deeply precisely because we don't live amputated at the neck. The best stories evoke our compassion.

Perhaps this is why, by and large, I've never much enjoyed historical fiction. I said in my review that I didn't quite understand the purpose of historical fiction, but Reames-Zimmerman spells out quite explicitly what must be the purpose of a great deal of such fiction: to teach us about the past, or help us draw some moral lesson from it, to make history (and thus fiction as well) have "meaning" and evoke "compassion." I have explained in a number of previous posts why I don't have much patience for this view of both storytelling and the art of fiction, so I won't go on further about it here, except to say I am dubious that fiction can have the kind of instructional value Reames-Zimmerman so urgently wants it to have. And it my opinion it really does no service to the aesthetic possibilities of narrative to so firmly tie it to its putative ability to teach. Taken to its extreme, this approach takes all the joy out of storytelling indeed.

But Reames-Zimmerman makes another point that is well worth heeding:

Historical fiction is never really about who any given historical figure actually was, but with who we are now and what it's possible for us to become -- or what we might want to avoid at all costs. And in truth, don't we study the past in order to understand where we're going now, too . . . and what we might want to avoid at all costs? Pursuing the details can be fun -- I'm one of those nutty people who actually enjoys spending hours in a big research library chasing down epigraphical evidence for the origin of a name -- but it's never purely an antiquarian pursuit for me. I find myself asking, 'What's the POINT of this? What do we learn about ourselves in the process?'

This may sound like amplification of the underlying argument about the pedagogical value of historical fiction, but to the extent that Reames-Zimmerman is suggesting that "history" really isn't the point of historical fiction, that it is just another way of approaching the present, as well as the ongoing dilemmas human beings continue to face, I think she goes some way toward justifying historical fiction as a form of literary art.

Although we would also have to accept the further distinction she makes between two kinds of historical fiction:

. . .To my mind, the primary division is between historical fiction and historical allegory. While as I said above, historical fiction is never really about who any given historical figure was, the sleight-of-hand is less evident. The mark of good historical fiction lies in the quality of research as well as how effectively the author draws the reader into the world of the story.

Historical allegory, however, succeeds or fails by the strength of the symbolic hermaneutic between the past and the present. The veil between past and present is mighty sheer -- and should be. One of the best examples of historical allegory that I've found in ATG fiction is Indo-Irishman Aubrey Menen's wickedly funny A Conspiracy of Women. Ostensibly, the book is about the final years of Alexander's reign, his time in India, and the mass weddings that followed. But it's really about the British in India and the clash of an imperialistic nation with a Traditional one. It holds up a mirror so we can see ourselves more clearly.

I will accept this argument if it also means that among the things to which a mirror can be held is history itself. If, as I said in my discussion of The News From Paraquay, the fiction writer might view his/her approach to history as one of "interrogating it, forcing it to testify, as it were, to the veracity of accepted representations of it, to the hidden truths behind these representations that have been hidden so well their revelation seems as surprising as any unexpected plot twist in a skillfully told tale. For these writers, 'history' becomes just more material for the novelist's imagination to transform, at times simply offering itself up as the inspiration to the novelist's own powers of invention."

Popularity

Steve Mitchelmore on Jonathan Yardley as "photocopier":

Jonathan Yardley's photocopier was in action over the weekend. In his review of a John Grisham novel he almost writes: The prevailing assumption among the literati is still ... that popularity equals mediocrity.

How many times have we read opinions like this? It's like the same article is photocopied to save the 'author' from having to write, let alone think. As usual, no examples are given of members of the literati expressing the assumption.

Yardley - or rather the photocopier - goes on:

The assumption is entirely invalid, since it requires us to dismiss out of hand the immensely popular and notably distinguished work of Graham Greene, Charles Dickens, Eudora Welty, William Styron and Anne Tyler, to name five who come immediately to mind.

Although I think four of the above are pretty mediocre (I don't know anything about the fifth), I wouldn't argue for the assumption; after all my favourite author Thomas Bernhard is a bestseller in Europe. But I do wonder what Yardley is bothered about.

Indeed. Steve believes that Yardley, one of "those in a privileged position (that is, who are able to devote their working lives to reading to inform and guide the rest of us)" is being irresponsible in refusing to really explore the assumptions behind these comments, the most important of which is that if "popularity doesn't equal mediocrity and, its correlate, that popularity doesn't equal superiority, the question then becomes: how can we make the distinction?".

But I wouldn't say that Yardley is necessarily avoiding the issue by refusing to engage with the question Steve poses. In my opinion, Yardley simply doesn't know how to make this distinction. He knows what he likes, and everything else be damned. He doesn't like pretentious "literary" writing, he can't abide fiction that foregrounds formal experimentation, he almost always dismisses any writers who seem to take literature seriously as a form of art--basically, he doesn't seem to like literature very much at all. It's perfectly ok with me if Jonathan Yardley has philistine tastes in fiction, but one would swear that he has been given prominence in the Washington Post for all these years because he represents the similar philistine tastes of most of those who write for and edit American newspapers, and can be counted on to give those artsy-fartsy novelists (the "literati" more generally) a good smack in the face every once in a while.

Yardley's modus operandi is illustrated very well by his recent review of Bret Lott's Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life. (I haven't read this book, and my point is not that it's a good book while Yardley says it's bad. It's his method I'm interested in.) It proceeds almost entirely by staging a temper tantrum of name calling: "Still, the rise of the writing schools has added whole new universes of meaning and possibility to hackery, a word that demands redefining above and beyond (or below and beneath?) its present meaning as, according to Webster, "a bullock cart" used in India"; "Smug, self-referential and self-obsessed, literal-minded and careerist to a fare-thee-well, Lott indicts himself -- and by implication all those who dance with him in the assembly-line daisy chain -- on every page of this genuinely repellent book." It's full of unsupported assertions: "The Catcher in the Rye may have its uses for the adolescent reader -- indeed, it seems to have become an obligatory part of the American rite of passage -- but there's precious little in it for the mature adult." Even when he attempts some sort of specific analysis, he doesn't bother to analyze, as when he quotes a couple of passages from Lott's book and simply expects us to agree with him that they're badly written. As far as I can tell, Yardley objects to these passages because the sentences are sort of long.

This is the literary criticism of the middlebrow American journalist who's learned that some readers like attitude and a little colorful or intemperate language. I've never read a review by Yardley that I thought stood up as even a modest example of literary analysis. He feels perfectly free to spew out his prejudices and expects us to accept it as serious criticism. It isn't. In fact, it illustrates everything that is wrong with "mainstream" literary journalism/criticism. Such criticism makes no attempt to accurately describe the work under review but immediately proceeds to free-floating pronouncement. At best, as Steve says, it "photocopies" conventional wisdom. It doesn't "enliven" the literary debate, it only debases it. It's the sort of literary criticism that might itself be "popular," but in this case the literati are correct: It's also mediocre.

General Symbolic Interpretation

An essay in the most recent issue of New Literary History ("The Critic as Ethnographer," by Richard Van Oort) gives the game away:

The discipline of literature is no longer restricted to literature. Literature still forms a large part of what we study in English and Modern Language departments, but our interest in the interpretation of classic works. . .has been extended to embrace all kinds of other texts, including texts that do not appear to be literary at all, for example, oral testimonies, rituals, advertisements, pop music, and clothing.

But in what sense are these nonliterary objects "texts"? They are texts because they invite interpretation. But what is interpretation? Interpretation is the symbolic process whereby we translate the significance of one thing by seeing it in terms of another. For example, to those who worship it, the totem at the center of the rite is not just a piece of wood (that is, an object to be described in terms of its intrinsic physical and chemical structure); it is also a symbol of the deity who inhabits the wood as a living presence. . .

This irreducible anthropological fact explains the current preoccupation in literary studies with culture as an object of general symbolic interpretation. For if humanity is defined as the culture-using animal, and if culture is defined as that object which invites symbolic interpretation, then it follows that literary studies stands at the center of an anthropology founded on these assumptions. For who is better trained than the literary critic in the exercise of searching for symbolic significance, of reading beyond the literary surface to see the deeper, more sacred meaning beneath?

This passage is if nothing else refreshingly honest in admitting that those engaged in academic literary study really aren't much interested in literature anymore. Even if you accept the qualifying statement that literature "still forms a large part of what we study in English," the rest of the passage makes it clear to what use literature is being put by the "ethnographic" approach described by this writer: The study of literature is merely an "anthropology" whereby, along with the other "non literary objects" mentioned, it serves as a case study for interrogation into "culture as an object of general symbolic interpretation."

The view of literature represented by Van Oort differs from that expressed recently by Amardeep Singh in a post on his blog, to which I have responded elsewhere. Amardeep wants to continue to teach and study literature because he finds it valuable in and of itself, but he has discovered that the most effective way to reach his students is through a "utilitarian" approach through which literature can provide "lessons for life." Van Oort advocates reducing the study of literature to a branch of the social sciences, bypassing whatever purely "literary" value a work of literature might have in favor of the social and cultural "information" that might be wrung from it. I would argue that this has become the most prevalent approach to literary study among academic critics, and its hold is only going to get stronger.

I don't particularly have any objection to studying such things as rituals or pop music or clothing, "texts" about which interesting things might be said using a method of analysis that could very loosely be called "literary"--one of my own academic subspecialties was film--but the move toward critically examining such things has a) siphoned off interest in literature itself, the subject that ostensibly forms the core of this discipline, and b) led to a general levelling of evaluation, by which literature is seen as no more interesting, meaningful, or valuable than these other objects of scrutiny. I don't even necessarily have a problem with this, but it does seem to me that those engaged in this sort of "general symbolic interpretation" ought to confess that they don't really care much about literature, and ought as well to be willing to relinquish title to "literature" as the nominal subject of their critical efforts. If "culture" needs to be studied in the way Oort would have it, fine, but why not allow literary crticism per se, which has now been held hostage by academic critics for forty years or more, to be returned to those who want to read and write about literature for its own sake?

In my opinion, many academic scholars want to retain "literature" as the name of what they profess because they perceive it to still have a certain intellectual cachet they couldn't claim if they admitted they'd rather study clothing. They do their best to dress up their real interests by talking about "interpretation" and "symbolic processes," but finally studying advertisements and tv sitcoms just doesn't elevate their sense of worth as highly as the title of "literature professor" in the college catalog. That Van Oort is driven to speak of the "sacred meaning" to be found in the subjects of "ethnographic" crticism to me only suggests that he and his like-minded colleagues are desperate to find profound significance in their study of trivia and detritus.

And not only is Van Oort's definition of interpretation itself--"searching for symbolic significance"--the sort of thing that has always struck fear in the freshman literature student, but it is precisely the orientation to reading and to the formal study of literature that Susan Sontag had in mind when she wrote "against interpretation" and called for a new "erotics" of art, including literature. The description of the "discipline of literature" provided here by Van Oort is one that indeed enforces "discipline" on works of literature, of a sort more reminiscent of the archaeologist than the anthropologist, digging "beyond the literary surface" to the foundational "meaning" to be discovered there. Sontag had this to say about such an endeavor:

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art--and, by analogy, our own experience--more, rather than less real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Of course, I would not claim that something like Sontag's notion of an "erotics" of reading--an unmediated or aesthetically pure experience of a work of literature--could be the basis of academic literary study in any sustained way commensurate with the requirements of disciplinary scholarship, if at all. While I can't finally think of anything more truly useful to students of literature than the attempt to encourage this kind of reading, the difficulties of accomplishing it in a high school or college classroom are probably insurmountable. Finally it can only be left to individuals to learn for themselves how to value literature simply for the pleasure of reading it. But the heavy-handed approach advocated by the likes of Richard Van Oort is not an adequate substitute. If "ethnography" is the only way by which literature and literary criticism can be incorporated into a college curriculum or into academic scholarship, best to leave them be. As Robert Nagle put in a recent post at his blog Idiotprogrammer: "where is the harm of relegating the study of literature and culture to passionate amateurs? I’m not convinced that we need people permanently ensconsed in academia to keep the flame of humanism alive."

Readings

Hot on the heels of the previous "dueling reviews" of The News From Paraguay comes the following reviews of the National Book Award-nominated Florida, by Christine Schutt. Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading joins me to review the book, and, as you will see, in this case a critical duel of sorts has actually broken out.

In Our Faces

By Scott Esposito

Toward the end of the movie, A. I., a disastrous “collaboration” between Stephen Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick, our protagonist, a little robot boy, is stuck at the bottom of the sea safely beneath a plate glass. Just out of his reach is his adopted mother and like the wanton little puppy that he is, the robot boy pays single-minded vigil over the visage of his beloved parent, his pathetic little eyes pressed up again that glass for all of eternity.

Florida is more than a little bit like that scene. It’s an almost drastically sad story about Alice, a young child who has lost her mother and is shuffled from surrogate parent to surrogate parent. Unlike the robot in A. I., Alice is separated from her mother by social workers and spends her childhood with her aunt, uncle, and grandmother. Like the robot in A. I., however, Alice harps on the same pieces of information with such single-minded fascination that one begins to wonder if she is not a robot after all.

The book is narrated in lyrical strands of thought that range in length from one paragraph to a few pages. Schutt is clearly able to turn a nice phrase, and early on her descriptions of Alice’s mother, aunt, uncle, grandmother, and Arthur (kindly domestic help) are quite nice. We quickly become familiar with characters, places, and the alienation that Alice, abandoned in every sense of the word, is suffused in.

I was ten--ten was my age when mother left for good, and this sleep-over life began. I was sleeping at my Uncle Billy’s desert house that time we took the Dutchman’s trek, and I drank my water early, and Uncle Billy would not share his. He said, "Let that be a lesson to you, sweetie."

But then an unfortunate thing happens: like ingratiating guests that have no sense of space, Florida’s characters remain crowded up against our faces, apparently ignorant of the fact that they must do something. Instead of delving much into these characters’ pasts or exploring their future, Schutt keeps relating their present in repetitive detail. The problem isn’t that time doesn’t pass (it does) but that the events that transpire are so muted and are so seldom contrary to the characterizations Schutt establishes early on that the book feels locked in stasis. In other words, the basic relationships between Alice and her surrogate parents don’t really change, they only get described in greater and greater detail. It’s an interesting trick and Schutt pulls it off quite conclusively, but it doesn’t create the sort of book that holds a reader’s attention.

It must be said in Schutt’s favor that Florida is an exquisitely written book. Schutt has chosen to write Florida in the form of a prose poem and her skills are up to the challenge. The writing is at once unencumbered and elaborate, full of sentences that stand at once sturdy and aesthetic like Greek columns. Few as they are, Schutt’s words carry substantial heft and are clearly chosen by a patient author with a careful eye.

It’s unfortunate then that all this fine writing was in service of such a poorly plotted book. Schutt’s unremitting repetition of the same sad facts strips the story of its poignancy and dignity. After a certain amount of hearing how Alice’s mother’s boyfriends are jerks, how her father died in a car accident, how her uncle is a grubbing ass, Florida simply loses its ability to depress us. Even the acute pain of a dentist’s drill will become dull if it is prolonged indefinitely, and Florida, considerably more passive than a drill, forces readers to concoct their own entertainment. One begins to imagine what a book Florida would be if Alice had any personal agency, if she ever did anything for herself, or even if we knew more about the Alice who doesn’t exist only in relation to the adults in her life. One begins to think what a fine book Ms. Schutt, with her clear aptitude for writing, could have made if only her focus had not been so singular, so severe.

On page 113, placed in italics at the beginning of the book’s fourth and last section, are words we are clearly not supposed to miss: “Plot abandoned in favor of insight.” In Florida, Schutt only garners the first half of the equation, “plot abandoned.” The insight is not forthcoming. In theory, I have no qualms with Schutt’s desire to abandon plot; certainly there have been many, many anti-narrative books that have held a reader’s attention with as much force as the most suspenseful of novels. The works of Gilbert Sorrentino come to mind, as does Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, and many of Borges’s stories.

The thing, however, is that these works justified their lack of plots with gripping insights and incredible details. Generally, a reader’s attention is held through dramatic suspense, but many works that have jettisoned a narrative focus have provided, in exchange, such original thoughts, details, and insights that the plot was hardly missed. These fictions are such a feast of delights, or the ideas at work are so well elaborated, that it is okay that there is no drama. Unfortunately, what Schutt has chosen to present of Alice’s life is far too familiar to work in this way—it is neither interesting insight nor original detail. The best I can say is that it is well-written and that, for a while, the language keeps the mind occupied.

Accumulations of Detail

By Daniel Green

If the primary substantative complaint (as opposed to simple whining on the part of publishers) about the 2004 National Book Award nominees was that "big" novels full of ideas and ambition, novels written in the literary version of Cinemascope, were ignored in favor of more modest, more exquisitely crafted fictions, Christine Schutt's Florida must certainly have been exhibit one. It is the very antithesis of the engaged social novel, the grand narrative, the "compelling read" straining to be a blockbuster.

And I rather like it.

Florida is a thin wisp of a book, without question, and its pleasures are to be gathered gradually, through a quiet accumulation of detail and episode, recalled moments from the narrator's past that are revealed in a kind of associative memory chain that makes up in continually freshened insight --prompting the reader to remain receptive to such revisions--what it might lack in narrative momentum. Although the novel has a story to tell, the narrator's compressed account of a life spent dealing with, first, the death of her father, and, subsequently, the mental instability of her mother, both of which necessitate that she be raised by an aunt and uncle, that her childhood memories be of a child trying to understand what has happened to her childhood, this story can't be separated from the method of telling it.

In recording the events of her materially comfortable but emotionally restless life, the narrator, Alice Fivey, seems clearly enough attempting to make it settle down for herself, to give it the kind of stability a precise and evocative language can give it and that can provide her with a perspective by which to really perceive it whole. The result is less a novel structured through narrative revelations that lead both protagonist and reader to some final moment of recognition or understanding than a prose portrait the last flourishes of which merely complete the realized work. This requires a certain degree of detachment, even neutrality, toward her own life story on the narrator's part, and indeed Alive Fivey seems to regard her past with a certain dispassion, although this does not mean there is no feeling in her account, no human connections to be made between Alice's lyrically fragmented story and attentive readers. Indeed, Alice provides affecting accounts of both aunt and uncle, who seem hardly more certain how to form a family than Alice herself, of her grandmother, Nonna, unfortunately unable to communicate with her granddaughter, and of the family chauffeur/handyman, Arthur, to whom Alice arguably feels a closer bond than to any member of her actual family.

For this reader, it is the very effort to find the words that will evoke her past and clarify her present problems--she has not altogether avoided some of her mother's self-destructive habits--that makes Alice Fivey's story emotionally engaging. It's an effort that avoids sentimentality and easy pathos, even though Alice is depicting a set of lives that do turn out sadly enough, that fail to bring much happiness or accomplishment despite their promise and material advantages. At the end of the very first chapter, Alice writes:

. . .We all smiled a lot at the breakfast table. We ate sectioned fruit capped with bleedy maraschinos--my favorite! The squeezed juice of the grapefruit was grainy with sugar and pulpy, sweet, pink. "Could I have more?" I asked, and my father said sure. In Florida, he said it was good health all the time. No winter coats in Florida, no boots, no chains, no salt, no plows and shovels. In the balmy state of Florida, fruit fell in the meanest yard. Sweets, nuts, saltwater taffies in seashell colors. In the Florida we were headed for the afternoon was swizzled drinks and cherries to eat, stems and all! "Here's to you, here's to me, here's to our new home. One winter afternoon in out favorite restaurant, there was Florida in our future while I was licking at the foam on the fluted glass, biting the rind and licking sugar, waiting for what was promised: the maraschino cherry, ever-sweet, every time.

Of course, no one in the family ever does reach this Florida (the mother does find her way to a sanitarium that will be "her Florida"), although Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy eventually do settle in Tucson, a desert location that seems more symbolically appropriate to the familial desolation Alice experiences than the fertility of Florida.

Still, whatever empathy one has for Alice Fivey and her family, however much one finds Alice's narrative compelling, depends finally on the quality and sharpness of Schutt's prose. And her writing has plenty of both.

Old dead hands prayered, a draped arrangement of draping skin, a fleshy hem colored to look alive by the gentle mortician. Nonna was in the casket, and I was at her side, yet "the glazing eyes shunned my gaze," or that was what I was remembering about her as we drove to her internment.

Arthur had driven us--Uncle Billy, Aunt Frances, me--through a gardener's rain that gullied the tent as we stood at the site, Nonna's gravesite, brighter greens, June, plate-sized peonies beaten in the downpour, the coffin shiny.

Who can forget? some said. Description of the too long-alive, now dead. The homily went on and on, and Arthur had to wait.

Who would have guessed there was so much left to say?

At the novel's conclusion, Alice is visiting her mother at a nursing home, where, prematurely aged, she has had to be confined:

The wind is an assault and the sound of water bewilders her, and I wonder: What does she think? Does she think?

"I have to go home now, Mother." Good-byes, those little deaths, rasp my throat, but I am not sure she has heard what I have said. I am not sure she understands what we are looking at: so much water and the line that is the other side. Mother is in the sun; she is in her Florida. Squinting in that tin box of refracted light, she has to frown to see, and what does it mean what she sees? The world is a comfort and then it is a discomfort. Mother is all thin hair and vacancy, tears and starts, a small clutch of bones, an old woman, grown innocent.

Who will forgive me if I do not come again?

"Alice," she speaks, and she looks at me, and it has been a long time since Mother has used my name, which is also her name, as a good-bye, and I think she knows, as once she knew, what will happen to us. "Alice," she repeats. It may be no other words will follow or it may be a downpour of speech.

Such writing, like the novel as a whole, doesn't call attention to itself, but it is both honest and incisive. Florida is not a novel full of conspicuous ambition and tricked-up effects, which is perhaps why it was dismissed as an NBA nominee for being "slight." It is instead a modest but serious work of fiction that highlights what is perhaps the most important feature of serious literary art in the first place: good writing.

Use Values

In a comment on this post, Amardeep Singh writes:

My main question for you so far is why you feel the "literary" value of literary texts is separate from the other values those texts contain. Much of what one finds in really good literature has to do with philosophy, history, and yes, politics.

In a separate post on his own blog, Amardeep explains further:

The reason I feel confident teaching literature for its potential social usefulness (again, broadly conceived) is that I think that an overwhelming number of writers, British, American, and non-Western, themselves write with some idea of usefulness in mind. The value of literature is almost never just "literary," even for writers; one also reads (or writes) literature to engage ideas from philosophy (inclusive of ethics and morality), history, and politics. None of these related regimes of thought are by any means required to be obviously present, and some writers might really not be interested in things like politics or history. There aren't many of them, and most who say they aren't interested are lying. Even the great, "literary literary" T.S. Eliot explicitly coupled his taste in literature ("classicist") with a politics ("royalist") and a religion ("Anglo-Catholicism").

I well understand the point Amardeep is making--literature has potential use value in multiple contexts separate from one's purely "literary" experience of poetry or fiction--but quite frankly I do indeed feel that "the 'literary' value of literary texts is separate from the other values those texts contain" because otherwise the word "literary" simply has no meaning. If the literary value of a work of literature can't be separated from the other values Amardeep, or anyone else, finds there, then in what sense is there any such thing as literary value at all? Otherwise isn't the value philosophical, historical, or political? I suppose one could say that finally "literature" itself doesn't exist except as a vehicle for philosophy or politics, but I can't say that and never will.

Similarly, there certainly are many writers who want to engage with philosophical or cultural issues, but to the extent they become preoccupied with these issues it seems to me they are no longer fiction writers or poets per se. They've become philosophers or cultural critics. This is ok by me, but I don't see why I have to consider them as literary artists when clearly their goal is not to create literary art but to "say something." Just say it.

This problem has only become more acute as the goal of academic literary study has drifted away form the study of literature "in, of, and for itself" and toward adopting the practices of all other discpilines in the pursuit of "knowledge." This was probably inevitable, and I am really only responding to my sense of its inevitabilty by suggesting that perhaps literature and the academy have finally proven to be not such a good "fit." If historians or philosophers or sociologists (or literature professors, for that matter) want to use works of literature to illuminate or illustrate non-literary issues in those disciplines I surely have no objection, but I just can't see how such practices could be called part of "literary study" unless, again, the word "literary" is simply an empty expression having something to do with "writing." I have an especially hard time seeing how adopting such practices in courses nominally devoted to "literature" adds much to either the understanding of literature or any of the other "regimes of thought" Amardeep mentions.

"Are there forms of cultural expression that contain "literary value" that are not themselves literature?" I suppose if "literary value" is reduced to something like "storytelling" or "personal expression," then perhaps other, non-literary forms could be said to have it. Surely, however, this is so reductive that almost everyone would finally agree there isn't much point to hanging on any longer to either the concept of "literary value" or the category of works now called "literature." At what point do we say that, as far as the academy is concerned, both literature and "the literary" have become so thoroughly shorn of any values in particular that it's no longer very useful to claim them as subjects at all?

Bridging Gaps

Scott Esposito describes this dilemma about as succinctly as it can be:

To a certain extent, however, doesn't innovation require that a book is actually read? It's all well and good if, say, 100 readers and writers collectively are at the forefront of literary innovation, but what is their work really worth if no one knows it exists? I'm all for authors snubbing the marketplace and coming up with great books that are like nothing I've read before. However, it seems to me that if their work is going to be meaningful in terms of changing the way novels are thought of, at some point readers and writers of experimental fiction need to bridge the gap to a mainstream audience.

I'm with Scott on this right up to those last words about bridging the gap to a "mainstream audience." Experimental fiction will never appeal to a "mainstream" audience. The very notion of the mainstream requires that there be practices that just don't belong there, that won't ever make their way to the center of the stream and will always be marginal to it, if not flowing in a different direction altogether. Attempting to take experimental fiction mainstream would only, in effect, cancel out its usefulness.

Of course some experiments in fiction eventually do make it to the mainstream, but usually only after great initial resistance and after enough time has passed that such experiments don't seem all that radical, indeed, seem to have always been among the writer's repertoire of available tricks. Modernist "stream of consciousness" now seems so unexeptional that a critic like James Wood can use it as a stick with which to thrash the postmodernists in an essentially conservative rearguard action, for example.

However, all fiction, even the most outrageously "innovative," does indeed need readers. More readers is better than fewer. However, they need to be the sort of readers for whom innovation in fiction is not just something to be occasionally tolerated, at best, but for whom experiment seems one of the indispensable tests of literature's vitality. Unfortunately, most readers seem to prefer the familiar and the conventional, and, in my opinion, it doesn't accomplish much to insist that these readers change their silly habits and read Beckett or Gaddis instead. This only produces backlash, something often enough inflicted on innovative fiction as it is. The readers who really value experimental fiction will keep it alive until additional interested readers--perhaps a generation later--seek it out. Beckett's fiction is an example. It's only just beginning to be appreciated.

What experimental fiction could use would be more sensitive readers among literary critics, critics who could do something useful toward "changing the way novels are thought of." (And I must say that I am seeing such sensitivity in a number of literary bloggers, among them Scott Esposito, another indication that litblogs may themselves manage to provide that "bridge" Scott speaks of.) Such critics would, ideally, not only make sure that potential readers of experimental fiction "know it exists," but would also attempt to explain why experimental fiction is not an aberration from or exception to literary history, but an inseparable part of that history. In other words, critics who see the value in experimental fiction would find ways to explain that they do so not out of contempt for the accomplishments of literature taken as a whole but from an understanding of them and a fundamental respect for what literature is capable of accomplishing. They would say of experimental fiction something like what Ron Silliman says of "language poetry," which is sometimes considered a wholesale rejection of the "poetic" tradition: "Langpo in this sense was hardly a break with anything. Rather, it was a selective re-envisioning of literary history – and possibility – bringing forward aspects of several tendencies, arriving (hopefully) at a new intersection not as any end point, but rather as an additional jumping-off place for still further, newer modes of art."

TEV vs. TRE

I'm very happy to say that Mark Sarvas (TEV) has agreed to join me in reviewing Lily Tuck's National Book Award-winning novel, The News from Paraguay. This is the first of a series of reviews of all the NBA-nominated books that will appear on this site over the next weeks. Perhaps this endeavor will add some perspective and some insight on the books that otherwise are perhaps mostly known as the source of a controversy that arose over the NBA nominating process.

The News from Paraguay

By Mark Sarvas

1.

More than half of Paraguay's population was wiped out in the War of the Triple Alliance. During the six years of the ill-advised conflict (1864-1870), in which the dictator Francisco Solano Lopez invaded neighboring Brazil (which subsequently brought Argentina and Uruguay down on his head), the country's numbers fell from 525,000 to 221,000.

The impulse for this catastrophic military adventure is traced by some to his 1853 trip to Europe, during which time he was deeply impressed by two things in particular: the imperial grandeur of the French Empire, and a beautiful Irishwoman named Ella Lynch.

From these under-traveled historical backwaters, Lily Tuck delivers The News from Paraguay, winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction. Any consideration of this novel after the fact must address this controversial distinction that engendered a number of pitched battles of its own. But more on that shortly. First, the book on its own terms.

Tuck propels the story fast and furiously from the first chapter, in which we learn at the outset:

At age ten, Eliza Alicia Lynch had left Ireland; at fifteen, Elisa Alice Lynch married a French army officer; at nineteen, divorced and living with a handsome but impecunious Russian count, Ella Lynch needed to reinvent herself.

Despite a nice of bit of business with the evolving names of Ella Lynch, we feel at the outset like we're in something that's dismaying like a literary treatment of a Harlequin romance. And despite Tuck's fine, restrained prose style, that sensation never fully departs as Ella progresses from her poverty in Paris, to mistress of the heir apparent, to mother of the children of the president (bastard children though they may be), to her final poverty back in Paris. It's the familiar arc of many a bodice-ripper, in which the plucky, self-assured, stylish heroine faces the dangers of the wild. It all reaches an unintentionally hilarious apotheosis in which Ella, protecting her children from rebels, wields sword and dispatches a blackguard.

Ella looked up and saw two Brazilian infantrymen with bayonets running toward them through the woods. From where he was sitting on his horse, Colonel von Wisner fired at one; in his haste, Colonel von Wisner fired too close to his horse's head and the horse reared and bolted. Left alone, Ella picked up Lazaro's sword, which lay next to him on the ground, and standing up, she faced the other infantryman. The man was black, a slave probably, and startled to see a woman, he did not fire right away. Ella saw him frown then open his mouth to say something but he was too late. Before the man could shut his mouth or move to defend himself, Ella pursued her next advantage, that of a left-handed fencer, and lunged forward with the sword. She cut him in the neck.

The narrative beats that comprise The News From Paraguay more or less conform to the romantic archetype. Beautiful woman down on her luck catches the eye of powerful man. Abandoning the comforts of the known, an arduous journey is undertaken. Headstrong heroine arrives intact in foreign land, is established in comfort by her lover, provides offspring. Withstands the slings and arrows of jealous backbiters and schemers, pines for home, is susceptible to the advances of lovers. Enemies begin to coalesce and collaborate. The center cannot hold, things begin to fall apart and inner reserves of pluck are summoned. In the end, tragedy envelopes all. There's even a pair of fat, evil sisters. Can a glass slipper be far behind?

This summary is, perhaps, a bit glib. It's clear that Tuck has stumbled onto an episode of history whose players and events have captured her imagination. And amid these machinations, we're treated to remarkably detailed and vivid glimpses of Paraguayan life. Although it's a short book, Tuck introduces many characters, travels over a wide and diverse landscape, and is a trustworthy and diligent tour guide. She manages to render the supporting players vividly and memorably, and they subsequently linger in memory. But Tuck herself concedes a central difficulty in her Afterword: " … the need to explain and the need to dramatize are often at odds." And in the end, The News from Paraguay feels more like a history lesson than a novel.

This may be partially attributable to Tuck's choice to use a coolly omniscient third person voice. Although there is a taut, spare elegance to her prose, an absence of flourish, this leanness creates a distancing effect that extends to her treatment of her central characters who remain frustratingly opaque. One is unsure what to make of Ella, who fiddles as Rome burns. Neither her letters to a friend in Paris detailing her newfound life nor her journal entries--the news from Paraguay--mention the brutalities of the Lopez regime. As the population is being slaughtered, Ella's thoughts are primarily for her beloved horse Mathilde. In the end, Ella seems irretrievably vain, shallow and selfish. Clearly, Tuck has chosen to lay these events before us at from a distance and allow us our own conclusion. But as the self-destruction of the Lopez administration reaches its climax, the depiction of unrelenting cruelty, violence and paranoia, though no doubt accurate, becomes tedious and numbing, particularly with no real sense of Ella's reaction to the madness that surrounds her.

Tuck can also be surprisingly heavy-handed at moments. When the arrival of a new opera is mentioned, it is none other that La Forza del Destino--historically accurate, no doubt, but decidedly portentous. Elsewhere, during a fencing lesson, Ella is taught the technique of fléching, "a very difficult position because the fencer cannot protect himself and he cannot stop halfway. It's a total commitment to attack." It's one of several oddly on the nose moments for so skilled a writer. Similarly, motifs and symbols are dutifully deployed throughout in what begin to feel like a workshop exercise – pairs, particularly brothers and sisters, dot The News from Paraguay, as do miscarriages and cigars. The color blue is frequently deployed to tie together the elements of this canvas. (Although Ella's eyes are gray, they are mistaken for blue.) And then there are the parrots.

Ella and Lopez first meet when a (blue) parrot feather falls from Ella's hat, and parrots figure prominently throughout. Lopez advises his son (too late) that it's "Bad luck to kill a parrot," and the sickening of the birds in an aviary suggests the imminent disintegration and collapse of the country. And perhaps Ella – with her superficial dispatches to Paris – is the ultimate of parrots, as she increasingly adopts Lopez' positions in her letters home. In the end, la forza del destino is unavoidable and parrots die, Mathilde the horse dies, loved ones die and, of course, hundreds of thousands of Paraguayans die, the result of Lopez' ill-fated fléching.

The final toll is tragically high but The News from Paraguay only occasionally rises above the ploddingly solid – an earnest if minor work.

2.

It's a mistake to assume one can know what informed the deliberations of the National Book Award folks. Still, one cannot fully consider this book without looking at it in light of its selection. Is The News from Paraguay the best that contemporary fiction has to offer? Surely not. (Despite 2004's having been, by common consent, a weak year for American fiction, even my own admittedly spotty reading would put The Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Plot Against America above it.) It may be a solid, respectable if somewhat staid effort, but one presumes the NBA is not an award for good intentions or near misses. Since one must take at face value Moody's assertions that no deeper agenda was at work, perhaps the more interesting questions are does the NBA undermine its own credibility with such choices? And does it really matter to a book? The questions are separate but intertwined.

If I may be permitted leave by my host to touch on an area that I know is a hot-button for him, the clearest measure of whether the NBA matters can be examined by its impact on book sales. An admittedly unscientific measure is to examine Amazon's rankings. The day prior to the National Book Award announcement, The News from Paraguay sat at 3,462. The award shot it up to 44, and it stayed in double digits for – precisely two days. It spent a month in the triple digits before settling back to 2,583, where it sits today. Compare that to Cynthia Ozick's Heir to the Glimmering World–- not nominated for anything --which is ranked at 3,297. Furthermore, last year's winner, Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire is nearby at 4,029 and Three Junes, Julia Glass' 2003 winner, is ranked 2,525 – a few points above this year's winner. (Only The Great Fire made it onto any bestseller list, and even that one was from the notably independent BookSense.)

What does this brief and imprecise examination suggest? Well for one thing, if Rick Moody's unstated mission was to elevate hitherto unacknowledged fiction, he appears to have flunked – the sales of The News from Paraguay are more or less indistinguishable from winners from prior years as well as from writers not even nominated. But perhaps the larger conclusion to be drawn is that the NBA doesn't particularly matter, at least from the vantage point of sales. It might succeed at pointing out a title to an audience already predisposed to following literary fiction but, unlike the Oscars, whose Best Picture award generally translates into significant box office impact, the NBA would appear to be relatively toothless. And if it fails to move books, what's the point?

Well, clearly, the point is to acknowledge the best that this country has to offer. And that seems, at least to me, like a worthwhile goal in and of itself, but on that score the NBA, at least recently, appears to have an uneven record at best. The 90s saw titles like Sabbath's Theatre and The Shipping News share space with the likes of Cold Mountain. And for all its ambition, The Corrections was a disappointing mess that probably claimed the award on momentum.

Which brings us back to The News from Paraguay. Setting aside for the time being post-modern notions of "best" or "better" (no doubt legions of MFAs are spitting out their Ticonderoga No. 2s in apoplexy), it seems reasonably clear that it isn't the best American book of the year, not by quite a bit. Can an award survive and stay relevant with such oddly hermetic tastes? Time will tell. The NBA isn't going anywhere, at least not soon. But it appears headed toward mattering less and less.

Old News

By Daniel Green

I've never been sure what the purpose of historical fiction is supposed to be. Merely to re-create the past? Why? It is, of course, interesting enough to discover what "things were like" in the past, but what does reading a novel about the past--deliberately presented as "about" the past--do for us that just reading well-researched history can't provide? A fuller sense of character? The pleasures of narrative? So much so-called popular history is written as if the unfolding narrative and its cast of characters was indeed a novel that it's hard to see how a narrative about history that calls itself "fiction" really differs much from nonfiction history, except that the author considers him/herself more at liberty to alter minor details to suit dramatic convenience.

Some historical novels try to burrow beneath the received wisdom about history, or to illuminate some of its blurrier quarters, and while this is a praiseworthy endeavor, it's still hard to see how such an effort ought to be considered "literary" rather than a useful adjunct to history-writing. If the idea is still to re-create the past so we might consider it as the past, I'm still not clear how such work really advances the cause of fiction-writing.

Other ostensibly historical fiction, such as Robert Coover's The Public Burning or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, aren't really concerned with reproducing history but rather with interrogating it, forcing it to testify, as it were, to the veracity of accepted representations of it, to the hidden truths behind these representations that have been hidden so well their revelation seems as surprising as any unexpected plot twist in a skillfully told tale. For these writers, "history" becomes just more material for the novelist's imagination to transform, at times simply offering itself up as the inspiration to the novelist's own powers of invention. (Other novels that belong to this category: DeLillo's Underworld, Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, T.C. Boyle's Worlds End, Pynchon's later Mason and Dixon.) Such writers approach history not as the ersatz historian hoping to recount the past but as literary artists for whom the past can be turned to use for present purposes. Is this the best approach for the novelist (or reader) interested in events from the past as subjects for fiction?

Lilly Tuck's The News from Paraquay again raises all of these issues for me as a reader of fiction, but unfortunately it doesn't much clarify them, except to suggest that the Coover/Pynchon approach finally does seem the more interesting. I don't think it's a bad book, but neither can I see why it really needed to be written in the first place. My awareness of Paraquay and it history is increased slightly (although, sadly, it would seem its past isn't substantially different than its present, both entirely representative of Latin America's troubled political history), but I probably could have learned as much, probably more, from reading a straightforward historical account of mid-19th century Paraguay. Moreover, the Paraguayan dictator depicted in the novel seems as predictably brutal and self-obsessed (with a dollop of superficial charm) as any other dictator, coming across as little more than a stereotype, and his mistress, on whom the novel ostensibly focuses, isn't really made to seem any more distinctive as a literary character. She's mostly quite unsympathetic in her indifference to what's going on around her, and it's difficult to tell whether this is the response from the reader Tuck was attempting to invoke, or whether Ella Lynch is meant to be some sort of proto-feminist in her assertions of self and her ability to survive. I have to confess that finally I myself didn't really have a strong reaction to her one way or the other, largely because I couldn't engage with her as anything other than a "historical figure" being put through her paces in a novel of mere historical re-creation. She remains rather ghostly.

The novel's episodic structure works reasonably well, and some of the individual episodes are affecting enough. Those scenes toward the end of the book depicting the ghastly consequences of the dictator Francisco Lopez's insane decision to go to war with Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina are particularly well-rendered. In general, the novel's account of the living conditions of 19th century Paraquay--the oppressive heat, the diseases, the primitive tools available for enduring such conditions--seems authoritative, and is in some ways the feature of this novel that one remembers most after reading it. But, again, this is the sort of thing one could discover by reading actual histories of the country and the period, and I, for one, don't really very often look to novels as an alternative way of gaining such information.

The writing in The News from Paraguay is never less than capable, at times rising to a kind of restrained lyricism that nevertheless avoids any obviously "poetic" language. Most often it gives the impression of aspiring to an accuracy of detail that would give the story being told the requisite degree of plausibility, as in the descriptions of Ella's ocean-crossing from Paris to Paraguay:

The sea was black, the waves, large arching ones, were veined and capped with foam. The booms swinging, the spars cracking, the ship bucked its way through the heavy sea: first landing heavily in a trough, as if to rest for a moment, before another wave broke over its bow, sending water rushing and swirling on the deck and forcing the passengers down below; then pitching up again.

On the one hand, such a style seems perfectly appropriate for a novel that seeks to capture the feel of life as it's lived for characters otherwise relegated to the past, to the superficial features of their already completed "life story." Certainly a historical novel of this kind needs first of all to seem credible. But finally that's really all this novel manages to be. I kept waiting for Tuck to draw on the novelist's most precious resources--stye, imagination--and transform the story of Ella Lynch and Franco Lopez into something more surprising or strange (beyond the "exotic" setting), frankly into something more interesting as a purely literary creation. But she never really does.

I do like the way in which the novel is fragmented into often brief accounts of relatively self-contained moments and sometimes veers off to give us glimpses of the lives of characters other than Ella and Franco. In particular, the stories of the women surrounding and waiting on Ella can be quietly moving, perhaps even more so than Ella's own story. (Although in the end this is probably a liability; is Ella meant to be such a cipher that all of the color is drawn off onto the other characters?) Among the fragments are passages from Ella's letters and diary, which do their part in forward the plot, but again even hearing about these events in Ella's own voice doesn't ultimately accomplish much toward making her a compelling character.

Fans of historical fiction, fiction that slices off a piece of the past and presents it to us as "drama," that converts figures from the past into reasonably convincing characters that seem to approximate what these figures might have been like, would probably enjoy The News From Paraguay well enough. If you really want to know what a place like Paraguay might have been like 150 years ago, this novel might be worth your time. However, had it not won the National Book Award, and had I not set myself the task of reviewing it for that reason, I probably would have stopped reading it after the first 50 pages or so. It seems to me a competent, but finally rather perfunctory novel that neither illuminates the past in any particularly discerning way nor reimagines history so that its bearing on the present becomes any more urgently apparent.

In, Of, and For Itself

The latest MLA convention has predictably enough sparked another round of discussion about the state of literary study and, more specifically, what the role of literary study ought to be. In my opinion, that this happens almost every year suggests in itself that most academic scholars and critics don't really know what that role should be, and the current drift in literary study simply reflects this underlying reality.

Some would like to persist in their denial of this reality, dismissing the low esteem in which literary scholars are generally held to be essentially a public relations problem. "They" just don't understand how vital the service we perform really is. Others, however, are beginning to acknowledge that the study of literature has lost its way. Amardeep Singh, for example asks:

. . .Do we really know what we're doing when we teach literature? If so, why do I have so many graduate students who -– even after doing classes, exams, and even dissertations with me –- don't quite know what it is they should be doing? Why did I myself feel this way throughout graduate school? Moreover, are we doing the best job we can with our undergraduates? What are we training them for?

These are admirably pragmatic questions, to which, it seems to me, there are really just two answers, although the second one does open up a Pandora's Box of additional questions. 1) We teach literature in order to introduce students to the inherent pleasures and challenges of poetry, fiction, by focusing on the singular qualities of "literature itself." 2) We teach literature in order to get at other issues of educational value, using literature as convenient illustration or as case studies. Amardeep acknowledges that literature does indeed have singular qualities, which in a way leads him to choose answer 2:

The Canon Wars question and the Social Relevance question come together in literary studies around the question of the Usefulness of the text, which can also be called the Educative Value of the text.

I find it increasingly difficult to reject the criticism that the humanities is useless on the basis that works of art are by definition intentionally, Sublimely Useless (that's Kant's idea, isn't it? Also Oscar Wilde's, as I recall). There has to be more to it than simply shrugging our shoulders at the technocrats who run things (including, in most cases our own universities). The dominant principle of utility can be accepted, but reworked so as to better explain (and defend) the value of literature in an era of multiculturalism, pop-culturalism, and instrumental technocracy.

I think that good Art is useful for a particular kind of educative function, which need not mean a crude idea of 'social improvement'. I mean that reading literature (especially in a classroom) is most interesting when readers expect to learn something about themselves or the world along the way. A John Updike story about a man trying to come to terms with the failure of his marriage and the failure of his divorce is educative in the sense that it aims to make a point about the difficulty in finding independent meaning or emotional stability in the contemporary world. George Eliot's novels, and even Joyce's Ulysses in a certain way of reading it, are also educative. Eliot's Middlemarch is an argument about the limits of individualism (especially as it relates to women). And Joyce's novel is perhaps an argument about reconfiguring the idea of family away from blood and legal status (marriage, paternity) and towards a voluntaristic idea of affinity. If presented that way, students might well be able to say, “this relates to me, I can learn something from this that will help me in my life, and make me a smarter person.” If presented as merely a virtuosic display of literary power and imagination, however, it means a little less.

Such an approach has the virtue of being honest in the setting of its goals: to help students "learn something about themselves or the world," something that will "help" the student in coming to terms with "life." There's nothing wrong with such goals in the abstract, although they could as stated be the goals of almost any other subject in the academic curriculum. Which is, I take it, precisely the point. The study of literature does indeed become like any other subject, inlcuded in the curriculum in the first place for its "educative" value: educative in a specifically "scholastic" sense--part of what we learn in school. It does, of course, almost necessarily exclude works of literature that are most intensely literary, most deliberately "useless," as Amardeep admits when he says his approach has trouble with "more esoteric, 'problem' texts," such as those of Gertrude Stein or Salman Rushdie.

Dr. Crazy also admits that literary study is "in the midst of a major identity crisis," but she doesn't think the answer is to halt the movement away from literature and toward cultural studies, a movement that, in my opinion, is the fundamental cause of that very crisis:

And I do think there is value in studying things like the word "dude" or orgasms or representations of defecation or whatever. Just because these things aren't boring doesn't mean they aren't worthy of study. Sometimes I think that's what the populace demands of us - that we study only boring things. . . These [former] things are part of our culture and they are part of the art that we study and that makes them worthy of our inquiry not just because they are racy things to talk about but because they potentially tell us more about who we are and about the cultural moment in which the text was produced.. . . .

Presumably it is literature that is the primary "boring thing" Dr. Crazy has in mind (although her post is ostensibly about "literary study," she doesn't really have anything else to say about literature at all.) I assume that at best it would just be one of those "things [that] are part of our culture" that are "worthy of our inquiry" because "they potentially tell us more about who we are and about the cultural moment in which the text was produced." This approach to literary study, which is probably shared by a large number of literature professors, has implicitly concluded that literature is not really capable even of helping students "learn something about themselves or the world along the way" and has essentially foresworn the study of literature altogether for the kinds of objects Dr. Crazy mentions. And even when a work of literature is the object of study, it is not for its literary value but because of what it reveals about "the cultural moment."

In both of these views of "what we're doing when we teach literature," literature itself, for itself, is omitted almost entirely, in Amardeep's case grudgingly, in Dr. Crazy's quite easily. Literature in this sense just doesn't have much "educative" value, doesn't tell us enough about cultural moments or provide sufficient excitement for the bored scholars and students. It simply doesn't have broad enough appeal.

And finally I myself don't disagree much with that conclusion. That some works of literature are exceptionally good, even great, and might repay the student's time in reading them really isn't enough to justify including them in an academic curriculum. Why do we need classes in literary study simply to say "read this book, you'll like it"? For a while the problem with this kind of simple "appreciation" was solved by making critical approaches to literature the real subject of literary study, but that obviously no longer suffices if it means abandoning the literature part altogetherfor more and more desparate attempts to trump the most recently ascendant critical approach. And this kind of critical one-upsmanship is probably unavoidable in the long run, given the academic imperative that disciplines must "create knowledge" on a continual basis. Even if the academy were to return to a focus on "literature itself," this would inevitably turn out to be only a temporary fashion, to be superseded by the next generation of cutting-edge "knowledge." Under these circumstances, the only real alternatives available are to do something like what Amardeep suggests, using literature for its most palpably utilitarian value as education for life, or to give up literature altogether as subject of academic study and return it to those who find it valuable in, of, and for itself. I have more or less concluded that the second option is the best.

Very Perceptive

Jonathan Mayhew recently put in a much more elegant and succinct way an idea I have tried to convey in some previous posts of my own about book reviewing:

My strategy for reviewing is to perceive the book in as precise a way as possible rather than to praise or dispraise. The praise or dispraise, such as it is, should arise organically out of the perception.

This is an admirably concise way of indicating why mere "praise or dispraise" cannot be the most important point of book reviewing/literary criticism. Such value judgments cannot be trusted at all if they're not supported by a clear "perception" of what the work under review actually does, what, to the extent it can be gleaned from the text itself, the aesthetic intention of the work seems to be. Thus a credible piece of criticism must include some degree of informed description of the work at hand. Jonathan is speaking specifically of poetry, but I believe the same principle he enunciates applies to fiction as well.

Behind the Text

In a review of A. Alvarez's The Writer's Voice and James McConkey's The Telescope in the Parlor, Christine Thomas writes:

For though Alvarez and McConkey's criticisms are distinct, they both agree on a condemnation of New Criticism. Despite his spurning of the cult of personality, Alvarez sees that "the sin of the New Critics was [treating] writers as second-class citizens whose function was merely to provide the raw material that the critic then dignified with meaning and relevance." McConkey, likewise, believes it "impossible to interpret any text as a thing-in-itself, a work separate from the knowledge we bring to it through previous readings or anything else we carry in memory." For both, the text is ultimately more than just words, and they each seek to find its essence, which, as writers, is inevitably entwined with their own lives.

Now what in the world could it possibly mean to say that it is "impossible" to interpret a literary work as autonomous, a "thing-in-itself"? What makes it impossible? If I so choose to regard a poem or novel in this way, as something made, something embodied, something lying before me as indeed a "thing" waiting to be experienced, does this mean that in doing so I am performing something that literally can't be done? Has it been an illusion, something I didn't really do but only fooled myself into thinking I'd done? Is my reading per se to be dismissed out of hand because I shouldn't have done it in the first place? Have I violated the McConkey rule?

Even more bizarre, at least to me, is the notion that "the text is ultimately more than just words." What else is it then? Radio broadcasts? Chicken noodle soup? Is it something invisible, something being manipulated by Venusians who are too small for me to see? What could a text's "essence" be? Is this something like what Dr. Strangelove's Jack D. Ripper calls his "purity of essence" being polluted by flouride? Are the "words" just pollution, something obstructing or destroying the work's purity? Writing as flouride? I confess I always find this sort of talk about literature's presumably mystical qualities, so far out of the grasp of the mere literary critic, just plain loopy. It's the kind of thing that makes onlookers from other, non-literary perspectives think writers and critics aren't worth their time.

Although it's not, to say the least, phrased very felicitously, presumably what both Alvarez and McConkey are getting at is what Thomas suggests in describing this "essence" as "inevitably entwined with [these writers] own lives." (But really, does no one edit these things to eliminate the most obvious howlers?) This is probably some version of the idea, usually promulgated by those who don't really like reading anyway (too many words), that literature is just a way of representing the writer's own life, that biography is destiny. Steve Mitchelmore, at Splinters, has nicely formulated this notion as "a book is a person." Steve also provides the best response to this idea, so I won't try to improve on it: "The interesting question is: what is left over after a biographical reading? One might say any reading. The answer, I would say, is literature."

Finally, however, what probably annoys me the most about the above quoted passage, as well as other similarly know-nothing comments about the New Criticism, is the degree to which New Critical formalism continues to be regarded by some (whether, in this case, by the two critics at issue or by Christine Thomas--I have to rely on her characterization since I haven't read the books) as an over-intellectualized, reader-unfriendly method of interpretation. Actually, New Criticism was not "interpretation" at all, since the very enabling idea of the New Criticism was that great works of literature resisited unitary, theme-focused interpretation. New Criticism was an approach that encouraged a real reading of works of literature, reading that was alive to literature's inherently non-discursive nature. Ambiguity and complexity, both of which New Criticism urged readers to value rather than deplore, are hardly the sorts of things to appeal to the truly imperious literary critic. Far from treating readers as "second-class citizens," New Critics, at their best, sought to instruct such readers how to find "meaning and relevance" for themselves.

As for McConkey's admonition that we not try to approach a work of literature "separate from the knowledge we bring to it through previous readings or anything else we carry in memory": How trivial can you get? We can't do much of anything separate from our established knowledge and previous experiences. Why does this invalidate the observation that a text is a text and not a person? McConkey is working from a false premise. He is correct that "the imaginative participation of the reader" is required to complete what might be called the literary exchange. But the participation of the reader joins with the original creative act of the writer, which is embodied in the text. McConkey wants to skip the text altogether and go right to "knowledge of the author, her memory and experience" (Thomas). He wants to find the writer behind the text. Good luck.

Rewards and Remunerations

If you want to know why writing is not likely to prove a very remunerative career choice, this and this are about the most lucid and honest explanations I have seen. Anyone who thinks either that writing just must be a lucrative endeavor or that American culture values what writers do should read them.

However, as compelling as these pieces are as testimony to the mythos of the writing life, they do leave unadressed two underlying questions: Why do would-be writers think the "literary world" overflows with treasures waiting to be claimed? Why does the United States reward its writers so stingily, if at all?

No doubt many people see that a few writers (mostly authors of potboiling trash, but a few real writers as well) manage to write books that actually reach a paying audience, or to sell a book to Hollywood and apparently make a tidy sum out of it, and conclude that it must be a more common phenomenon than it is. Perhaps they simply feel that they, too, have the kind of undeniable talent that will make them financially successful at it as well. It's probably a good guess, however, that these very naive sorts give up on the notion of being a "published author" when they discover that writing actually involves hard work or they get their first rejection slips.

Perhaps some people think of book publishing as just another quarter of Celebrityville--and book publishers certainly are doing everything they can to validate such a conception--and assume that, like the other more glittery sections, it mush be awash in cash. Unfortunately, the "book industry" only illustrates, rather pathetically, how the entertainment industry more widely is ruled by the laws of commerce rather than the dictates of art: the money goes where more money can be made, and where entertainment dollars are concerned, books attract very few.

Quite possibly, however, many starry-eyed writers believe there must be money to be made through plying the writer's trade for a perfectly good reason. Producing good and useful books is an important thing to do, and, well, those who do it should be rewarded for it. And it's hard to argue with this logic. They should. Only the free-market ideologues and the grumpiest defenders of the "commercial" could deny that the creation of literary art in any genre is an inherently worthy endeavor that ought to be supported at least to the extent of allowing writers of proven talent to earn a living at it. And as John Scalzi makes plain in his essay, writing is damn hard work--much harder work than Donald Trump has ever done--hard enough to satisfy even the hoariest demands of the most Puritanical of work ethics.

Which of course brings us to the second question. Why are American writers compensated so poorly, even when many agents, editors and publishers live in high style? Mostly because they allow themselves to be. Most writers who really like what they do are willing to do it despite being shafted by the powers that be. They think the rewards lie elsewhere, or will come later, maybe even when it's too late to enjoy them. When it comes down to it, most truly dedicated writers don't care enough about monetary reward (although it would surely be nice as a side benefit) to put up much of a fight against a system that exploits them at best, ridicules them the rest of the time. They just want to write, and any arrangement that allows them to do so will suffice.

And what would American literature be without these dedicated types. Hawthorne and Melville, Dickinson and Whitman. Faulkner. Even Wallace Stevens, who managed himself to exploit the system in order to provide himself with the means to write poetry no one would have ever paid for. Closer to our own time, Joseph Heller and William Gaddis spent years in obscurity doing menial writing-related work in order to write novels that at first few people cared about. Richard Yates endured years of misery in order to keep writing. It could be argued that the much-derided creative writing programs are really just a prop that writers have found to support the writing habit itself, the possibility of being paid a living wage while continuing to write, although even this is done indirectly, a sinecure provided in return for scholastic services rendered. Unfortunately, there aren't enough of them to go around.

Just a cursory glance at literary history (or simply at the history of book publishing) is enough to show that serious writing (serious art in general) is finally not something that American culture has much use for. The very words "serious" and "literature" and "art" have mostly been held in contempt as vestiges of all that European fol-de-rol as an alternative to which God created Americans. Where there's money to be made from it, as there is with the ocassional literary writer, the capitalist vultures will pounce on it, and this keeps the publishing belly full for a while. Otherwise, the best a serious writer could probably hope for is that they'll ignore you.

Original link provided by Tingle Alley.