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.

Comments

[birnbaum]

Okay, I'll bite. Wwhich 4 of the 5 do you consider "pretty mediocre"?

[Richard]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I've never liked Yardley. Your post is much more to the point than the diffuse rant I've been meaning to write about his "reviewing" for some time... Mitchelmore's "photocopy" analogy is apt. Yardley likes to repeat his bugaboos (like the swipes at workshops) over and over. And whenever someone comes along (B.R. Myers, Dale Peck) with a manifesto or something attacking the kind of literature he doesn't like, he jumps right on, citing the controversy, repeating what they've said with approval, never noticing--or caring--that their analysis is suspect at best. His recent "reconsideration" about Catcher in the Rye was ridiculous. I tend to think the book is overrated, too, but his review was incoherent...

[Dan Green]

Robert: The "4 out of 5" comment was Steve Mitchelmore's.

[Chris]

Dan,
It's not just "everything that's wrong with 'mainstream' literary journalism/criticism." It's everything that's ALWAYS been wrong with it. You are probably not a person who needs to be directed to Jack Green's (no relation, I presume) FIRE THE BASTARDS. But I think the method is tried and true. The idea of reading for style is unacceptable, and so it follows that the only thing worth reading in a book is the story. If a book falls short on those terms (falls short according to the reviewer's arbitrary measure: depth of the characters, verisimilitude of the settings, accuracy in the historical details, all that "important" folderol) the book fails. The problem is so ingrained that--speaking of Gaddis and Jack Green--there was a book that came out a couple of years ago, a good first novel called RADIANCE, about the nuclear weapons industry, that obviously and unabashedly was written in homage to Gaddis' mature (i.e., JR and beyond) style. Not a single review made mention of this obvious (to me) fact, neither in a Gotcha! way nor as something that might be of passing interest to the reader.

PS: It is a little strange to read a salaried "professional book reviewer" (not to mention the author of something called THE CAT SITTERS) skewering someone as "careerist to a fare-thee-well."

[Matthew C Harrison]

At the risk of blurring the lines between The Reading Experience and Outside the Text, how is any quasi-critical position about the nature, quality, or intent of fiction any more or less justifiable than any other?

Dan himself recently pointed out the inevitable failure of reason to provide any basis for "justified true belief." The positivist-Popperian-Kuhnian debate on the nature of science has as much to say on the nature of art, literature, and specifically criticism. Kuhn's position that the dominant paradigm achieves its success through political means rather than through logical means is certainly true of the literary world, if not entirely of the scientific world. On what grounds can a populist paradigm of literary criticism be compared to an aesthetic one when either position has no basis in fact, but are each little more than highly developed personal responses? What difference does it make that one position might be somewhat more developed than another, when each is completely arbitrary to begin with?

The failure of literary theory to recognize this problem, much less engage with it, endangers the very basis upon which it can convincingly call itself criticism. Why should I care what one critic says or how another responds when there is no rational correlation between the two? In this mode their underlying goal regarding literature is clear: it is an appropriation of the artist's work to illuminate and justify their own opinions, and therefore to dominate the reader's perception not only of the work(s) in question, but of philosophy and politics as well. Without having some basis upon which to compare competing theories, literary criticism ceases to be critical at all, it merely employs selective evidence for the benefit of a canned, pre-formulated logic demonstration. Logic, applied to such groundless claims as "this book is better than this other," and disengaged from competing claims, is meaningless.

I for one am uncertain as to whether there is any reasonable purpose for literary criticism other than simplified regurgitation of the ideas already present in the work, of providing a structure of introduction to the arts (which therefore risks indoctrination), or verification of basic claims of fact. As a means of bridging the gap between the wholly rational, and the wholly creative, literary criticism (and its philosophical correlates in academic theory) is a dead end.

Of course, that's just my opinion.

[Dan Green]

I don't have any particular objection to "a populist paradigm of literary criticism." But in my opinion it makes a great deal of difference whether such a paradigm is "developed" or not. That all such paradigms are in some sense arbitrary--although some are more compelling than others--is completely beside the point.

[birnbaum]

I guess I was (easily) fooled by the switch from the italic to regular type , confusing who it was that the speaking.

Still, is any one else interested in which what's his name is trashing , Dickens or Greene?

[Chris]

Robert:

I think he's wrong, but de gustibus--you know?

[Richard]

I believe I've seen Steve Mitchelmore discuss elsewhere that he hadn't read any Dickens (I believe in response to a Reading Experience post about Dickens), so...

[Steve Mitchelmore]

I've never finished a Dickens novel. But one can hardly be unaware of his stories. (I was born within three miles of his birthplace).

Anyway, I was being wilfully provocative in what had been the dim silence of a quiet blog. I'm glad Dan bypassed the sideshow and discussed the issue.

If you must know, though, I have never read and know nothing of the work of Eudora Welty. The rest are horribly sentimental, which equates to mediocrity for me.

I would also add that I think the most "pretentious literary writing" (the kind Yardley apparently dislikes) is the kind of thing we see in John Grisham novels; that is, genre fiction. It is does not try to reach outside of itself. When the issued is addressed, such as in Coetzee's extraordinary novel "Elizabeth Costello", Yardley is pathetically inadequate - or rather, his photocopier is:
http://tinyurl.com/6ec7u

[birnbaum]

I like Yardley. What I have read of him, that is —which admittedly ,as with any critic, is a small amount.

I especially like his Second Readings, both the idea of it ,and his choices.

I thought some of his comments (or at least the ones Carrie at Tingle Alley quoted) on Brett Lott were dead on. Lott's posturing struck me as worthy of a bludgeoning.