The Reading Experience

The Larger Scope of Literature

In a response to this post, Kevin Holtsberry writes:

I think what Dan is talking about is a different form of "review." I would label this as criticism. Criticism takes the process a little deeper and has a different perspective. This is where concern for and judgments about "literature" come into play. Often these type of reviews engage the work at a deeper level and the result is more of an essay than a review. Criticism is for people who have already read the work and have a background with which to judge more broadly. There is no attempt to leave plot twists or unique characters unexplored. Criticism seeks to unpack a work, judge its effectiveness, and place it within the larger body of the author's work and within the larger scope of literature.

I don't necessarily disagree in principle with the distinction Kevin is making, but in my opinion we live in an era when those of us who love literature can't really afford to let "criticism" be relegated to the backwaters of literary commentary (which is where essays of the sort Kevin describes are often published--when they're published at all). Academic criticism no longer preserves a role for the kind of essay that "unpack[s] a work" and "judge[s] its effectiveness." At best academic critics use works of literature to illustrate favored theories or a brand of cultural analysis, but the time has long passed when "scholarly" criticism bothered with such things as "the larger body of the author's work" and "the larger scope of literature."

Thus, this kind of more reflective criticism has to be done in magazines and newspaper book reviews (perhaps in literary magazines as a supplement to the fiction and poetry these publications mostly feature) or it won't be done at all. Critics such as James Wood, Sven Birkerts, and Daniel Mendelsohn do engage in this sort of criticism, and they generally do so in the form of book reviews. It's not just a matter of the extra space allotted to some reviews in publications such as The New Republic or the New York Review of Books. These critics bring something other than "consumer guidance" to their reviews, even when (as they do) they write newspaper reviews. They bring a wide and deep knowledge of literary history, an ability to place current works of fiction or poetry within the context of that history, and an understanding that expressions of judgment need to be grounded in honest analysis. Even when I don't agree with them, I usually feel that they have proceeded through a "familiarity with the practices generally associated with the 'literary,'" (as I put it in my original post) and that they are ultimately most concerned to advance the cause of literature as a whole.

Furthermore, "analysis" doesn't have to be something dry and pedantic. In the context of book reviewing, it simply means that an attempt has been made to relate the parts to the whole, both in the work under review and between the work and the tradition or genre to which it belongs. A review does not itself have to be written in the form of a "critical analysis" as such; it merely needs to allow the reader to feel with some confidence that the reviewer has indeed paused for some reflection and analysis, has thought seriously about "the larger scope of literature."

If anything like "criticism" is to survive, it's going to have to be through book reviews and other forms of non-academic literary discourse--blogs, in fact, have made a good start at providing a forum for this kind of discourse. (And in this context, the "reviews of reviews" that are being done on several lit blogs are performing a very useful service, despite what some at the New York Times seem to think.) I wouldn't want to see book reviewing become dull and pompous, or, for that matter, entirely lose sight of the need to inform ordinary readers about new books that have been published so that those readers can decide whether to acquire any of them or not. But some effort to, as Kevin puts it, "engage the work at a deeper level" is never inappropriate, especially if you think that readers of serious books are more than just "consumers" and that literature is more than just another product to be sold.

Textuality

Trent Walters replies further to some things I had to say about style in fiction (also to this post by Jeff VanderMeer):

Style is the feeling you get from reading the text. In order to capture this feeling, you must temporarily remove the meaning of the words and listen to their music only--like mentally peeling off the lyrics of a song to hear what feelings the tone is revealing.

I don't entirely disagree with this, but to emphasize "feeling" and to disembody "meaning" so thoroughly takes our attention too far way from the fact that finally style is a matter of words on a page. It's a concrete realization of what might at first be a kind of "feeling," and certainly an element of verbal music is involved as well, but to really appreciate style, in my opinion, we have to keep our eyes on the real prize: the play of words into sentences and sentences into the larger structures that literally produce the "text" we are reading.

In this context I do disagree with Trent when he writes that style produces "the texture of the overall story." This way of understanding style only reinforces the idea that style is really just a sort of verbal ornament, the surface feature of a work of literary prose that takes us to the more substantive stuff below the surface: character, plot, theme, etc. Certainly a successful prose style can work to create the illusion that these other things are what we're really interested in, but ultimately it is an illusion. Style can't be "the texture of the text"; it is the text, since finally a work of literature is only words. Perhaps we could say that a measure of a writer's prose style is the extent to which he/she can trick you into thinking there's more to it than that. Trent succumbs somewhat to such a trick in speaking of the so-called "invisible" style, which "calls more attention to the myth of the narrative as reality and forces the viewer to deal with the content more than a stylistic choice." Perhaps some plain styles can conjure up notions of the "myth of the narrative" and of a story's "content," but these are still functions of style. The writer just doesn't want you to think that they are.

And I certainly can't agree that "Style is an expression of ego: Look at what I do, says the writer of style, with the way I put words on the page." Perhaps bad writers proceed in this way, producing work that is supposed to be received as finally a variety of "personal expression," but such writing assuredly doesn't rise to the level of art. I won't go so far as T.S. Eliot and say that an accomplished literary style amounts to an "extinction of personality," but good writers channel ego into style, giving language life, not reflecting back on the author's own. In my view, even in a good memoir, the writer succeeds by focusing our attention on what is being done with words, using his/her experience as inspiration but not bringing us to "know" the writer in any real sense.

I would still argue that while discussions of such things as character or plot or point of view are perfectly useful ways of exploring our reactions to a work of fiction, we shouldn't delude ourselves into believing they're anything other than devices of convenience. Other devices could be made to substitute. Finally, writing is style.

One Screenful

Adam Kotsko has a theory:

I might be wrong, but it seems like the optimal length for a blog post is something that's going to be one screenful on a 1024x768 monitor (that's the standard size for laptops and most non-stupidly-huge desktop monitors). For every paragraph you go over that length, your risk of going unread grows exponentially. If you go over two screenfuls, you virtually guarantee that people will scroll down, see that it's over two screenfuls, and either just say, "Screw it," or else put you on their "read later" list (i.e., forget to come back and read your post).

If this is true, then TRE is in a world of shit, since I'm afraid a majority of my posts violate the Kotsko one screen rule. A number of them surely spill over the two screen precipice as well. Does this mean most of my posts are languishing as "read later" bookmarks? Honest readers are inivited to set me straight on this.

Adam further speculates that although "The genre of 'blog post' is of course an evolving genre. . .it's going to turn out to be a short genre." However, "arguments unfolded in a short form can have their own kind of rigor" and "blogging can be a kind of discipline, rather than a kind of sinkhole." Adam seems to be suggesting that although most readers lack patience with extremely long posts, shorter but carefully considered posts can still be intellectually credible. The blog post doesn't have to compete with the longer printed essay, surely not with the scholarly article, but this doesn't make it inferior to these forms. It's different, and the protocols and conventions associated with it have yet to be fully worked out. I think this is what Adam is saying. Something like it is what I had in mind when I started The Reading Experience. To quote from my "Statement of Purpose": "I would like to test the proposition that the internet, in the form of the so-called "blogosphere," can provide a forum for a new kind of literary criticism, more compacted and concise, perhaps, than conventional print lit/crit, but serious criticism nonetheless."

I still think this is possible. I still hope an audience--a small one, perhaps--exists for such an endeavor. The trick is to be both concise and incisive. Or, as Adam puts it, a "short genre. . .doesn't have to mean a thoughtless genre."

Getting the Joke

In his latest post on William Gaddis's The Recognitions, Bud Paar remarks that

The world Gaddis created is ours, a look in the mirror, certainly, the way a good comedian can be so funny because they make fun of some little quirk that we identify with because we thought that idiosyncrasy was ours alone.

It is notable that Bud compares Gaddis to a "good comedian," because it is often overlooked that Gaddis is a very funny writer. (If anything, JR is even funnier than The Recognitions.) Certainly it's true that Gaddis has a reputation as a "difficult" writer, and "difficult" often translates into "heavy-handed," or "deadly serious," but it's also true that Joyce's Ulysses is a "difficult" novel, which doesn't prevent it from being one of the funniest books ever written. In my opinion, those who accuse such books of being inaccessible usually mean by it that they aren't plot-driven in some obvious way, or that the authors don't signal to us clearly enough "what happened," or at least how we're supposed to interpret what happened. Such impatient readers don't seem to realize that most of these ostensibly difficult works are essentially comic novels, their comedy intended as a kind of substitute for other more obvious "entertainment" devices.

Indeed, many of the postmodern mega-novelists--Barth, Coover, Pynchon, even some of DeLillo--are basically comedians, and would, I'm sure be quite content if one of the lasting judgments of them as writers was that they wrote some very funny books. This doesn't mean that laughter is the only response readers might have to their work, but it does mean that the critics of modern/postmodern comedy ought to themselves lighten up a bit. Postmodernists want their books to be enjoyed just as much as any formula novelist; although the comedy in these books can sometimes be unsettling, even extreme, finally they just show us how much of human existence is mostly worth a good belly laugh. And even that most notorious technique of postmodernism, self-reflexivity, is really as much a way of poking fun at the pretentions of fiction writers, their claims to adequately represent the world of experience in a direct and unmediated way, as it is to frustrate the expectations of unwary readers. Although admittedly it is also way of mocking the sobriety of a certain kind of reader, who can't finally accept that even serious fiction might occasionally aspire merely to tell a good joke.

(Bud points out in his post how Gaddis occasionally pokes fun at himself as well.)

Thinking About Things

Amardeep Singh recently put up a very intelligent post on Lionel Trilling's notion of "complexity." Amardeep quotes from Trilling's essay, "The Function of the Little Magazine":

. . .The writer who defines his audience by its limitations is indulging in the unforgivable arrogance. The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon [creative spirit] and his subject. . . .

Amardeep's gloss on this passage:

In short, there should be a place where people write, freely assuming their audience knows way more than the average reader of USA Today. Serious writers and thinkers should feel free to take advantage of such an intellectually enlivened -- if rarefied -- space to work out complex ideas. And if that means a few thousand readers a day rather than a few million, then so be it. The circulation of your magazine (or today, your hitcount) is not everything; if it is, you're probably not doing your best thinking.

I agree with this entirely, but in further commenting on Trilling's analysis of Wordsworth's second thoughts about the French Revolution, Amardeep says that "what Wordsworth wanted to do was use art to think about things that are too complicated (which could also mean: too personal, too mysterious, too dynamic) to be represented via any available political or ideological system. Trilling would equally value the pursuit of complexity to anyone engaged in artistic creation or serious criticism of the arts." Perhaps at his weakest Wordsworth wanted to "use art to think about things," but I like to think that what Wordsworth finally wanted to do was write poems that were complex not in their "thinking" per se, but that were "complex" in their expressions of experience, a complexity that only poetry could embody because of its non-propositional nature.

I am not so much questioning Amardeep's interpretation of Trilling as identifying the inherent limitations of Trilling's own notion of "complexity," limitations suggested in one more passage that Amardeep quotes, from The Liberal Imagination:

It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify, and this tendency is natural in view of the effort which liberalism makes to organize the elements of life in a rational way. And when we approach liberalism in a critical spirit, we shall fail in critical completeness if we do not take into account the value and necessity of its organizational impulse. . .The lively sense of contingency and possibility, and of those exceptions to the rule which may be the beginning of the end of the rule--this sense does not suit well with the impulse to organization. So that when we come to look at liberalism in a critical spirit, we have to expect that there will be a discrepancy between what I have called the primal imagination of liberalism and its present particular imagination. The job of criticism would seem to be, then, to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.

Trilling's hesitations over the bureaucratic "rationalism" of liberalsim are only superficially about "complexity" as the word might be understood by literary criticism. Trilling wants something like the consciousness of sin injected into liberalism, and the "job of criticism" is thus the moral critic's job of raising our awareness of humankind's fallen state, something for which Trilling finds literature eminently useful. "Complexity and difficulty" in Trilling's vocabulary have little do with their aesthetic manifestations. As Amardeep notes, it has more to do "with the connection between a kind of intellectual discipline to a humanist ethical imperative."

When Amardeep says "Trilling would equally value the pursuit of complexity to anyone engaged in artistic creation or serious criticism of the arts," I actually have my doubts. The pursuit of complexity in criticism is one thing, and it is certainly true all critics need not be generalists, hoping one day to reach even that reader of U.S.A. Today. But I don't really think that the sort of complexity one finds in literary works such as, say, Ulysses or The Recognitions or Gravity's Rainbow is what Trilling has in mind, except to the extent one can catch the authors of these books using them as a way "to think about things." In fact, one suspects such books are too complex for critics like Lionel Trilling. They only demonstrate, in their formal and thematic intricacies, that the kind of purely moral complexity he was looking for is itself way too simple.

Fair Negative

Laura Demanski's review of Elizabeth McKenzie's Stop That Girl in last Sunday's Chicago Tribune is an admirable example of what might be called the "fair negative" review. Demanski concludes that the book is "a disappointment despite all of its promising elements and McKenzie's obvious talent," but she also patiently describes what McKenzie seems to be attemping in the novel, arriving at her ultimately negative assessment only after showing that, in the reviewer's opinion, the execution of the author's purpose comes up short.

Early in the review, Demanski writes:

. . .The nine stories that make up "Stop That Girl" cover Ann Ransom's life from age 7 until she's a 20-something mother. But we stop and look in on her only every couple of years, and a lot more happens offstage than on.

It's an unconventional method that may leave completists unsatisfied. In the typical bildungsroman, we closely follow the major events of a young person's life and see how they form the adult she becomes. The success of that kind of novel depends in part on how convincingly the results follow from the causes. McKenzie's method shoots for different effects and delivers different pleasures. When the reader doesn't know everything--not even close to everything--mystery and surprise are added to the mix.

From this description we understand that McKenzie is writing a variation of the "bildungsroman" (the coming-of-age novel), and that she is taking something of a risk in experimenting with the form. McKenzie's reader is going to be asked to read between the lines--or more precisely, between the stories--and make connections that in most such fictions are made more explicitly by the author him/herself. This provides what Demanski calls "breathing room," but obviously it would require some deftness on the writer's part to keep the reader interested after the more conventional strategy has been abandoned.

And it is precisely the writer's skill in maintaining the form she's adopted that is the basis of Demanski's subsequent judgment of this "novel in stories." She hasn't insisted that, in effect, the author should have written a different kind of book, merely that the results achieved do not really measure up to what seems to have been the writer's ambition.

Even so, Demanski's judgments are judiciously expressed:

What's left out between these stories isn't a problem; what's left out in them, however, sometimes is. McKenzie's deadpan, minimalist narration is well-suited to conveying Ann's chronic disenchantment with life; but over the course of the book it comes to feel stingy, shrunken and empty. To some degree this is a built-in problem with writing about disillusion and disenchantment: How does one represent them in one's characters without reproducing them in one's readers? McKenzie doesn't find a solution.

She also describes a selected number of stories from the book, giving the reader an opportunity, ultimately, to compare his/his own impression of them, and their relative degree of success, to the reviewer's. Or at least giving the reader some confidence that the reviewer has read the book carefully and has attempted to ground her evaluation in specific examples from the text.

Where one might question Demanski's evaluation is in a passage like this one:

The standard novel about growing up tells a protracted tale of learning and gradual loss of innocence. Ann, however, experiences disillusionment so young--in the first story--that the usual tale is moot. Beyond a point that comes especially early for her, Ann is incapable of being truly thrown by life, or truly moved by it. What, then, remains to be narrated? Neither Ann nor McKenzie seem to know for sure; there's a fair amount of floundering on both sides.

It seems to me possible for the reader to accept this early disillusionment and to want to read the rest of the book anyway, not as the story of the protagonist's disillusionment per se but as the account of how she subsequently manages to deal with it or not--as the "narrative" of how innocence lost affects a human life that nevertheless continues on. Perhaps McKenzie does "flounder" in her effort to carry this out, but one wonders whether Demanski isn't finally missing something in the book, after all.

Still, I am actually more inclined to read Stop That Girl than I was before reading the review, the reviewer's qualified negative assessment notwithstanding. If nothing else, I would like to determine for myself whether Demanski's view of the possibilities of the modified bildungsroman is a sound one or not. Finally, Demanski has both convinced me that she has taken her responsibilities as a reviewer seriously, and that her conclusions are worth testing in a kind of reviewer-reader dialectic. In my opinion, this means the reviewer has not only decidedly earned her pay (meager as it probably was), but also my gratitude as her reader.

Popular Diction

And on the heels of the previous post, Camille Paglia thinks that

. . .Poetic language has become stale and derivative, even when it makes all-too-familiar avant garde or ethnic gestures. Those who turn their backs on media (or overdose on postmodernism) have no gauge for monitoring the metamorphosis of English. Any poetry removed from popular diction will inevitably become as esoteric as 18th-century satire (perfected by Alexander Pope), whose dense allusiveness and preciosity drove the early Romantic poets into the countryside to find living speech again. Poetry's declining status has made its embattled practitioners insular and self-protective: personal friendships have spawned cliques and coteries in book and magazine publishing, prize committees and grants organisations.

In other words, poetry has lost touch with the People. And the People are to be found, astonishingly enough, in the "media," which to Paglia is essentially television and popular music. Paglia's intellectual slumming in front of the tv and the boom box has always seemed to me her least appealing quality (I liked Sexual Personae, but even it is not free of this pop-idolizing cant), and it does nothing to make her new poetry anthology seem something we ought to take seriously. Paglia (correctly) emphasizes the way in which English is constantly changing--which makes it an ever-renewable source of new kinds of writing--but she ought to consider this when elevating the Romantic poets' "living speech" over "dense allusiveness and preciosity." Try putting even one of Wordsworth's sonnets in front of a classroom of freshman literature students. To them, Wordsworth's language is just as "precious," and just as difficult, as that of any Augustan satirist.

(I will admit that a consequence of literature's relatively small audience is the insularity she describes. But this is finally a problem only if we can't separate the "literati" from literature itself. The former ought simply to be ignored, although in a celebrity culture like ours even the big fish in the small pond are going to get their unfair share of attention.)

I do agree with Paglia in her observation that "over the [last several] decades, poetry and poetry study were steadily marginalised by pretentious 'theory' - which claims to analyse language but atrociously abuses it. Poststructuralism and crusading identity politics led to the gradual sinking in reputation of the premiere literature departments, so that by the turn of the millennium they were no longer seen, even by the undergraduates themselves, to be where the excitement was on campus. One result of this triumph of ideology over art is that, on the basis of their publications, few literature professors know how to 'read' any more - and thus can scarcely be trusted to teach that skill to their students." But she doesn't inspire much confidence in her own alternative practice, which is apparently buttressed by her own kind of "theory":

. . .Animated by the breath force (the original meaning of "spirit" and "inspiration"), poetry brings exhilarating spiritual renewal. A good poem is iridescent and incandescent, catching the light at unexpected angles and illuminating human universals - whose very existence is denied by today's parochial theorists. Among those looming universals are time and mortality, to which we all are subject. Like philosophy, poetry is a contemplative form, but unlike philosophy, poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech.

Now, it's all well and good to hope that a poem might be "iridescent and incandescent," but exactly how does this happen? One can only conclude from what Paglia says in this piece (admittedly an edited version of the introduction to her book) that it's just some kind of magic, akin to the "divination" she says is practiced by critics of poetry, which resembles "the practice of oracles, sibyls, augurs, and interpreters of dreams."Although Paglia claims to "maintain that the text emphatically exists as an object," she doesn't offer any suggestions as to how that object comes into being. There's no indication in her discussion that she understands that poetry--all art--is at least as much craft as it is inspiration. Her exhortations that poets create the "powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem" are all very vague and mystical, leading one to suspect her book won't have much to offer to either writers or readers interested in experiencing everything that poetry might have to offer.

Furthermore, her dismissal of contemporary poets is equally vague:

. . .In gathering material, I was shocked at how weak individual poems have become over the past 40 years. Our most honoured poets are gifted and prolific, but we have come to respect them for their intelligence, commitment and the body of their work. They ceased focusing long ago on production of the powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem. They have lost ambition and no longer believe they can or should speak for their era. Elevating process over form, they treat their poems like meandering diary entries and craft them for effect in live readings rather than on the page. Arresting themes or images are proposed, then dropped or left to dribble away. Or, in a sign of lack of confidence in the reader or material, suggestive points are prosaically rephrased and hammered into obviousness.

It's revealing she won't name names, relying instead on such smug generalities. Perhaps she doesn't because if she did cite any specific poets who are supposedly guilty of these sins, she, and we, would discover in examining "the body of their work" that Paglia's description is a caricature, a glib excuse for ignoring the work of poets that doesn't measure up to a preconceived notion of what poetry is supposed to be. I really would like to see Paglia engage in a close reading of the work of eight or ten of the most respected living poets--say Jorie Graham or John Ashberry, Derek Walcott or Seamus Heaney, one or more of the "language poets"--and honestly conclude that their best work resembles in any way the cliched rendition Paglia rehearses in this passage.

"Artists are makers," says Paglia, "not just mouthers of slippery discourse. Poets are fabricators and engineers, pursuing a craft analogous to cabinetry or bridge building." But nothing else in her essay is consistent with this description. It's all about "primal energies" and "illuminating human universals," about the sacred and the sublime. If she were truly to accept that poets are "makers," she would also have to admit that what they sometimes make will not be immediately recognizable to the People, will either ignore "popular diction" or turn it inside out. In my reading of this essay, Paglia does not really want a poem to be a verbal object but instead some kind of oracular pronouncement, a pronouncement in which "art" really has little if any role.

Finally, Paglia informs us that "All literary criticism should be accessible to the general reader." All criticism? There's no role for criticism that assumes a "general" knowledge on the part of the reader and seeks to take the reader beyond the most obvious surface features of the text? I agree that surveying these features is where criticism should begin (something that has indeed been forgotten by most academic critics), but does it have to end there? Presumably it does if the experience of literature is essentially a religious one: "I sound out poems silently, as others pray." By definition poetry as holy text does not really allow for an appreciation of what "individual poems" are really like; in Paglia's scheme they're to be recited, but not understood.

In my opinion Paglia has let her contempt for the politicizing of postmodernism get the better of her. Poets may not be "mouthers of slippery discourse," but I don't think many of them believe they are. If academic criticism has reduced poetry to this, the academic critics are to blame, not the poets. And in her zeal to discredit these critics, Paglia indulges in some pretty slippery discourse herself. She appropriates poetry to a version of "spiritual renewal." To me, this doesn't seem like much of an improvement.

Promotion

I agree with A.C. Douglas when he writes:

. . .much as one wishes it were not the case, classical music is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever even marginally be, an object of mass or even widespread appeal no matter how vigorously and assiduously it may be promoted.

And, as Douglas adds, this "applies, mutatis mutandis, to all the arts of high culture," including literature. Where Douglas goes wrong, in my opinion, is in further claiming that serious art is, "by its very nature, a fundamentally elitist enterprise, and should never be viewed or promoted as anything other."

Art is "elitist" only if an "elite" audience can be defined as "small" or "self-selected." If Douglas means to suggest, as I suspect he probably does, that those who appreciate serious art are for that reason, or because of some preexisting set of chararcteristics, a superior caste, I cannot go along with him. I defer to no one in my enjoyment of the products of what Douglas calls "high culture," but there is nothing about my preferences that makes them objectively "finer" than someone else's preferences. Where would such putatively objective standards come from, except from the practices of those who also enjoy serious art, who have enjoyed them in the past and have passed along both the standards and the works of art and literarature to which they have been applied? Those of us who accept these standards might like to think of ourselves as an "elite" because we have put in the time and attention required to understand their relevance, but this only means we like to spend our time on certain kinds of music or certain kinds of writing rather than others, not that we're privy to secrets that others can't share.

I do agree that it's futile to "pander" to audiences who don't otherwise seem to care about classical music or lyric poetry or abstract art. If the actual audiences for such endeavors are small, what, finally, is the problem? Only when a subsidiary cultural "industry" grows up around these pursuits, an industry that must have its financial needs met, does it become crucual to sell more books and fill more concert halls. Plenty of people might be led to appreciate classical music or serious fiction, but not through artificial efforts to reach the People, which only distort the very art supposedly being defended.