The Reading Experience

Entry Fee Enclosed

Alan Cordle has become "cynical about the whole enterprise" of contemporary poetry as a result of his efforts at "exposing fraudulent contests" and "tracking the sycophants" at his website Foetry. He thought poetry was about beauty, but the publishing of poetry has turned out to be about "cozy cronyism."

It's hard to believe that Cordle was really as naive as he claims he was when he discovered that judges of poetry contests sometimes select the manuscripts of "students, friends, and even their lovers." Poets are as fallibly human as anyone else, and surely Cordle did not assume that writing poetry afforded some kind of exemption from this truth. But perhaps Cordle should give himself a break--he thinks he's discovered that poets are unscrupulous and poetry contests financially corrupt, but he's really discovered that poets (and editors) prefer what they prefer and that getting published (in fiction as well as poetry) is not simply a matter of producing good work and having it recognized as a matter of course. In some ways it is only to be expected that poets would choose to extol the work of their own former students, since presumably those students exemplify in their work the qualities valued by the teacher to begin with, in some cases writing poetry directly influenced by the teacher's work.

To the extent that poetry/fiction prizes are explicitly "fixed"--the winner is known in advance, the other contestants deliberately bilked of their entry fees--Cordle's efforts to uncover the practice would be both welcome and justified. But I can't see that any of the examples described at the Foetry website reach this level. Few of them go beyond the "this poet knows that poet/this poet previously expressed admiration for that poet" variety of accusation. In my opinion, the fact of the matter is this: All poetry and fiction prizes, either those rewarding entire manuscripts or those that identify individual poems or stories as "winners" in literary journals, are inherently suspect, what might be called systemic scams. Print journals continue to proliferate, as does the cost of printing them, and since the readership of these journals is too small to support them through subscription, and the support provided by universities (where most of the journals reside) only weakens (as does support for university press poetry publication), these meaningless prizes and the entry fees they generate have arisen as a way of maintaining the supply of ink and paper.

I believe Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, when he says that most contests simply allow small presses to scrape by. Surely no one thinks large sums of money are at stake in the publishing of poetry and short fiction. Nevertheless, without the sums that are produced, such publishing would likely collapse from its own puffed-up weight. Contest money serves the system as a whole, at least for the moment, to forestall the day when small-scale print publishing as it has been conducted for the past forty years (a period that also coincides with the growth of creative writing programs) can no longer be sustained. In the meantime, aspiring and lesser-known writers will undoutedly continue to pay for the opportunity to be rejected by the literary journals or presses of their choice.

Why anyone would willingly participate in his/her own exploitation and disillusionment in this way is beyond me, but I guess the allure of being published in a literary magazine, even if most copies will sit unread on library shelves, or by a poetry press, whose books probably won't even make it to most libraries, is still strong for some writers. Moreover, such writers ought at least take to heart what Foetry has managed to make clear: Editors do indeed prefer what they prefer, and mostly what they prefer is the familiar and the compatible. And this is true both of those publishing conventional work and those who tend to publish more experimental fiction or poetry. (We are told in the L.A. Times Article that NEA chairman Dana Gioia has contacted Alan Cordle "to offer support for Foetry's goals." One suspects that Gioia, a poet in what Ron Silliman calls the "School of Quietude," would like to combat the influence of "post-avant" poetry--more highly esteemed in some quarters of the poetry world--and the venues that favor it.) The chances your work will meet the expectations of these editors is slight, even when you're seeking ordinary, non-contest-related publication.

Perhaps the greatest harm these literary contests do is to collectively perpetuate the idea there are commonly recognized standards by which all literary work is judged suitable for publication, that work submitted for publication to the most desirable venues will be assessed dispassionately and will get into print only if it is objectively the most meritorious. Where would these standards come from? Literary criticism of the kind that might help to establish such standards hardly exists any more, having been replaced by a species of academic criticism that finds value in literature only in its utility for advancing outside agendas and by newspaper-based book reviewing that rarely does more than provide crude consumer advice. At best, it seems to me, literary journals and many small presses proceed according to a kind of literary conventional wisdom whereby everybody publishes what everybody else is publishing. It isn't cynicism to think that literary publishing in the United States is far from a meritocracy (even if you don't think those involved are necessarily morally corrupt). It's common sense.

Spurious Motives

Katherine A. Powers loves a "good read":

In fiction the qualities essential to a good read are generous portions of character, character development, and plot; a palpable sense of place and material reality; reoccurrences of situations and quirks that become an inside joke between writer and reader; some seriousness -- though not solemnity -- of purpose; and, above all, consistency and follow-through. You have to trust your writer not to let you down: not change the tacit rules of the narrative or simply be sloppy. He must not disobey the laws of nature or time. He mustn't cry wolf more than once or twice, or trump up spurious motives. And he will never be forgiven for simply calling it a day, leaving a mess of loose ends at the end. . . .

Perhaps this description is an acceptable enough account of "escapist" fiction, but why must such escapism be equated with a good read? Is this truly what makes reading worthwhile? Encountering a novel that's so predictable, so easily reduced to "generous portions" of character development, plot, "material reality"? That doesn't challenge one's accepted notions of "consistency and follow-through"? Isn't the implicit message here that a "good" read is an easy read?

What among Powers's list of desirable attributes couldn't be done just as readily in a film, or even a situation comedy? What on this list gets at the distinctive qualities of reading, those qualities that involve not merely being mesmerized ("intoxicated" is Powers's preferred term) by the secondary effects of prose fiction ("generous portions of character," "the tacit rules of the narrative") but lead to reflection or rumination, or to an enhanced appreciation of the possibilities of writing and reading? That ask the reader to participate in the creation of meaning or value? Would a book that encouraged its readers to engage in these sorts of activities rather than sit back passively, as Powers would have it do, be a "bad read"?

This implicit equation of the pleasures of reading with mindlessness is one reason I can't accept the commonly-held notion that getting people (especially young people) simply to read--it doesn't matter what, as long as they're reading--should be the goal of language/literary instruction. The idea seems to be that once we've encouraged non-readers to find in book form the equivalent of what they enjoy in movies or video games they'll move on to more challenging books providing other, more complex reading experiences. I don't see how this could happen. If what you want can be offered more readily, with more immediacy, in these other media, why would you settle for the diluted version in a book, much less seek out different kinds of gratification in more difficult books? What service to either reading or writing is it to suggest that books are worth our attention because sometimes they're almost as good as movies?

Why not let movies do what they do, and books do what they do--which is something qualitatively, not just relatively, different? Wouldn't even Katherine Powers more reliably find what she thinks of as a "good read," something to which she can "surrender," at her local cineplex?

Changing Moods

Reviewing Ann Beattie's Follies, Donna Rifkind asserts that "once the pioneers of a directionless generation," Beattie's characters "are now at best supporting players in a drama whose mood has changed. The trademark passivity of Beattie's characters has given way to a new generation's urgency, passion, religious and political conviction, determination and certitude. Serving as a generation's voice has its limits: One day the action moves on."

This is the literature-as-fashion view of fiction. According to this view, a writer reflects the "drama" ongoing in the social theater the writer is presumably attending. This drama is judged to be particularly intense when the writer is young and can be claimed as an especially astute critic of the theatrical trappings considered most illustrative of the advanced trends of the day. Once these trends have been exchanged for a new set, as inevitably they will be, the writer formerly thought to provide keen "insights" into the way we live now is dismissed as thoroughly retro. This has clearly happened to Beattie, at least as far as Donna Rifkind is concerned. "One day the action moves on."

Rifkind can't be urging Beattie to adjust her focus, to start chronicling "a new generation's urgency" et al, since if she did she would surely be accused of horning in on the new generation's territory, her fiction judged to be hopelessly unconvincing. Beattie does anomie, not "determination and certitude." She is instead announcing both to Ann Beattie and to the readers of the Washington Post Book World that Beattie's work is now passe, not worth the attention of readers hoping to keep their fingers fastened to the social pulse. And clearly it is the sociological information that can be gleaned from fiction that interests Rifkind, since elsewhere in her review she allows that Beattie's style "remains distinctive and surprisingly fresh." Her characters, alas, just aren't with it: Where they "used to seem thoroughly familiar and fashionable, both they and the bland world they inhabited have now been kicked to the curb." How awful to be middle-aged and to be stuck writing about such "supporting players."

I myself have never been that enamored of Ann Beattie's fiction. But my problem has always been precisely with its literary qualities, which Rifkind accepts as not yet "out of style." I find Beattie's writing itself to be bland and mostly unengaging. I don't object to the plotlessness of her stories, or even the repetitivenes of her themes and situations. I just think her affectless prose style strains too much to mimic the impassivity of her characters and becomes merely numbing. And I thought this about her work when I first read it in the 1970s, when Beattie could still be called "a generation's voice." What continues to bother me about her fiction is that her "method" remains dull and unimaginative, not that she writes about the same sorts of characters she's always depicted, as they now struggle through middle age. Why would such characters necessarily be less interesting than younger characters and their own ephemeral "trademarks"?

I don't believe Ann Beattie ever claimed to be "a generation's voice." This was a label slapped onto her by critics who, like Donna Rifkind, thought of fiction-writing as a generational contest in which the new always triumphs over the old, simply because it is new. Beattie is now being held responsible for an insipid practice among reviewers she herself never endorsed. This is no way to perpetuate a literary tradition, one in which past or aging writers still have something to offer and are not disparaged simply because "the action moves on" among the literary trendsetters. Rifkind's review not only fails to assess Beattie's book by any kind of legitimate literary criteria, but it assumes that readers, both young and old, are as shallow in their judgments as the reviewer seems to be.

Thresholds

Brian Ames's stories are reminiscent of both Hemingway and Raymond Carver, but where Hemingway's characters are stoically going about the business of living up to their own self-images of masculinity, and Carver's characters struggle to live with their failures as men, Ames's male protagonists in Eighty-Sixed (Word Riot Press, 2004) are, if not exactly "hapless," as the book's subtitle has it, comically unable to recognize their failures even while they're enduring them.

"Ajax the God" concerns a former major league baseball player whose career bursts quickly into success--a no-hitter in his second season--only to then fizzle even faster. The story follows him on a post-career elk hunt (an activity that figures into several of the stories in Eighty-Sixed), during which he thinks back on the important stages of his life as a baseball player, but he seems mostly puzzled by it all, not anguished, or even regretful. The protagonist of "This Organization Must Keep Iowa's Roads Open" is the operator of a snow plow whose rig is hijacked by a truly hapless thief who has just robbed a convenience store in the middle of an Iowa blizzard. At the end of the story the protagonist vows to never again be away from his family on such a day, "Not until they have all grown very old." "The Law of Club and Fang" is narrated by a man whose own account shows him to have been a poor excuse for both husband and father, but this is about as far as he can get by way of self-reflection:

Look, I'm not unaware that there is some question whether I was a good husband to Aurora. I know all that. Believe me, there is no one in the world who has asked these questions more than I have. I wonder whether I should have tried just a little bit more. I wonder why it is that I came to a certain point with her, a threshold, and determined I could go no further.

The distance between these characters' self conceptions and the objectively pathetic situations in which they find themselves--extending even to the middle-class characters, such as the protagonist of "The Small Things in Life," who obsesses over toast--creates a kind of sadsack comedy that makes the almost exclusive focus on male characters and their problems much easier to take than a detached description of the stories' plots--man gets in trouble with his drug dealer for nonpayment of debts; woman hires lowlife to kill her husband--might suggest. Some of the stories are just plain hilarious, regardless of the underlying theme of masculine degeneration: "Simultaneous Submission," about a "writer" who sells tall tales for alcoholics to use at A.A. meetings, or "Physics Package," about a man who purchases a shoulder-fired missle (which mysteriously grows in size over time) to help out his minister in "chasing the devil out of town."

A few of the stories are really rather touching. "Monocle" depicts the travails of a man born with only one eye--situated in the middle of his face, Cyclops-style. "Matahir's Flight" narrates the harrowing tale of an Indonesian man who stows himself away inside the wheel well of a jumbo jet on a flight from Jakarta to Los Angeles. A few others occupy a fairly eerie middle ground between comedy and tragedy through what they don't say and don't reveal (the Hemingway "iceberg effect"): "Arbor Day," which ends with the grievous injuring of a man hired to remove a tree from the narrator's yard, and "Down at the Igloo," about a bleeding man who walks into a diner and is served an ice cream cone. "The Man Who Loved Jimi Hendrix" (the title sums it up), "Affliction" (an ordinary story about a man pining for his secretary), and "At the Treeline" (a confusing story about armed revolutionaries) are among the stories I would call more or less complete misses, but in a book of 22 stories, the quality of execution in Eighty-Sixed is admirably consistent.

Few of the stories in this book were originally published in big-name literary journals. A number of them were published in online journals such as Coelacanth and Prose Toad. And, of course, Word Riot itself hardly qualifies as a BEA behemoth. That a writer of Brian Ames's obvious ability finds his publishing outlets in these modest venues tells us either that such venues are coming to take on an increasingly significant role in the publication of good writing or that the big names in both book and journal publishing are becoming less and less reliable as standard-bearers, less and less able to identify good writing with sufficient acuity that we can be confident talented writers and worthwhile books are being made available to their potential readers. (Or both.) Perhaps not all the fiction published by web-based or small-circulation magazines and out-of-the way presses measures up to the highest literary standards (neither does the fiction appearing in McSweeney's or The Paris Review), but if you can find Brian Ames there, you're doing pretty well.

First-Growth Postmodernism

The newest issue of Bookforum has lots of good stuff in it, although unfortunately much of it remains inaccessible online. The quality of the reviews in this issue, however, well justifies shelling out the cost of a print copy, with which you can spend several hours, if not days, enjoying one of the few national book reviews that doesn't consider books an excuse for allowing reviewers to natter on about their "ideas" and that provides ample space for reviews of current fiction alongside the well-chosen nonfiction reviews also included.

If you pick up a copy, you might want to look especially at Mark M. Anderson's thoughful examination of A New History of German Literature (a review which raises a number of important questions about current academic approaches to the study of literature), Robert Polito's brief essay on Harry Mathews, and Marjorie Perloff's review of two books by Nobel-winner Elfriede Jelinek, which provides a useful corrective to the witless musings on Jelinek by, among others, Stephen Schwarz and Ruth Franklin. There's also Christine Schutt on Aimee Bender and Maggie Paley on Nicole Krauss.

Of the content available online, I found James Gibbons's essay on William Vollmann especially judicious. I have tried reading Vollmann on several different occasions, but frankly I've been unimpressed. Gibbons's piece makes me want to give Vollmann another try. This, for example, is something I would not have deduced given the public persona created by many other reviews of Volmann's books:

For all his audacious travels, Vollmann's feats never come across as exhibitionistic. Acutely aware of human vulnerability, he seems incapable of swagger. He never attempts to hide his physical awkwardness. As a reporter confronting degradation and atrocity, his forthright, unidealized self-presentation is alien to the school of writer-adventurers to which he belongs. We know from his fiction that he can write in any register, delighting in baroque metaphors and elaborate prose fantasias, so the account of his 1992 visit to besieged Sarajevo in The Atlas is all the more powerful for its plainspoken restraint. . . .

The centerpiece of this issue is undoubtedly Gerald Howard's reconsideration of Gravity's Rainbow. It's certainly well worth reading, although I have to say I question some of Howard's assumptions. I am especially puzzled by his recollections of what first drew him to the work of American postmodernists such as Pynchon, which he presents as mostly sullen and full of gloom ("Malamud was a downer, but not our kind of downer"), a kind of social fiction full of ideas about the horror of American culture.

These ideas were our mental tools as we romped in the forest of first-growth postmodernism. What was strange and gratifying was how completely in sync this writing was with our educated baby-boomer sense of squalor and betrayal. Then, no less than today, a culture war was being fought—but the battleground was an interior one, within our minds and souls.

I find it hard to think of the postmodern fiction of the 1960s and 70s as any kind of "downer," or as engaged in any kind of social commentary (advocating either inward or outward change) except in the most indirect and contingent way. It seems to me that what postmodern fiction shares with the social climate of the 60s is a spirit of excess and playful innovation, a sense that old forms are bursting at the seams. The work of such writers as Barthelme and Barth, Coover and Elkin, Sorrentino and Hawkes (all named as among Howard's favorites at the time) is most notable for its formal and stylistic energy, almost exuberance, which transmits to the reader at least as much excitement about the untapped possibilities of fiction as it does criticism of political and social arrangements. (This is true even of Pynchon; Gravity's Rainbow surely does critique the Western technosystem, but it is also stylistically ebullient and great fun to read.)

I also think Howard is wrong to describe GR as less "a novel in the generally accepted sense" than "a text, intended for moral instruction"--or if he is correct, then he has actually identified one of its most serious flaws. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call Gravity's Rainbow a "Menippean Satire," as a number of Pynchon scholars have pointed out, but one of the great accomplishments of the novel has been its ability to incorporate other and multifarious literary (and non-literary) forms without sacrificing its own integrity as an identifiable (if omni-directed) literary form in its own right. In this way, the novel has proven itself to be almost inherently experimental in the opportunities it affords to the adventurous writer. To restrict "novel" to something more conventional and domesticated than Gravity's Rainbow is to deny the actual history of the novel as a structurally unstable form.

And as a Menippean satire (which is "chaotic in organization" and in which "it's usually difficult (if not impossible) to pin down the specific targets of ridicule"), Gravity's Rainbow resists being used as "moral instruction." Unlike the more familiar kind of "corrective" satire, Menippean satire is not a mode of moral discourse. It does not urge us to change our ways. It's closer to travesty or farce--it depicts human behavior as just hopelessly ridiculous. I would argue that GR at its best rises (or sinks) to this level. However, to the extent this novel does leave readers feeling they've been delivered a lecture, admonished to stop participating in the global system of mechanical destruction, it probably does fail to carry through its postmodern version of the Menippean satire thoroughly enough. (In my opinion, V does a better job of embodying this kind of postmodern satire, and is thus an even better book than Gravity's Rainbow.)

If GR is becoming "dated," as Howard speculates it might be, this would be the reason, at least in my view. Finally I can't agree with Howard that "Pynchon is a pure product of the cold war and the arms race and the adversary culture that opposed them." That "pure" goes too far. If Gravity's Rainbow can't be appreciated except as a specific response to the cold war--even more particularly as a meditation on the Western worldview as it mutates through World War II and, at least implicitly, comes to inform political debates in the postwar era--it will indeed become merely a strange historical document, although at least it will probably continue to seem strange. But if its strangeness--its aesthetic singularity--is able to be explained away as tangential to its "intervention" in cold war politics, as merely a curious (albeit frequently hilarious) supplement to its value as "moral instruction," I'm not myself sure how much of the blame would be borne by Pynchon himself and how much by what seems to be our culture's insistence that even complex works of art like Gravity's Rainbow be explicable in simplistic political terms.

Sleep Disorder

Once again, I am posting what was to be half of a pair of "dueling reviews" as a forlorn and solitary free-standing review. Unfortunately, my reviewing counterpart was prevented by external circumstances from completing the assigned assessment of the NBA-nominated Madeleine is Sleeping. Readers who liked this book more than I did are invited to provide supplementary counter-views in the Comments section.

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's Madeleine is Sleeping reads like some kind of amalgamation of Angela Carter and Steven Millhauser, cross-bred with a little garden-variety surrealism. The problem is that the novel bears these influences or commonalities too obviously, in my opinion failing to assimilate them into a fresh or distinctive work of literary art.

Thus I was unable to read Madeleine is Sleeping with consistent enjoyment, finding too much of it perfunctory and predictable, sometimes to the point that I skimmed through whole sections under the assumption that the details of that particular section were finally insignificant if not mostly irrelevant. It seems to be a novel in which mood and atmosphere are more important than the narrative particulars, its initial conceit more central than what could be discerned as its structural unity. There's nothing per se wrong with such an approach, but, again, I must say I found the execution rather uninspired.

I will quote from Scott Esposito's very thorough review of Madeleine is Sleeping, since he seems to have understood the book's entwined plots more clearly than I did:

It is the story of Madeline, a little girl meandering between two worlds separated by the soap-bubble of her sleep. On one side is her family, living in a verdant French countryside and keeping vigil over the sleeping Madeline; on the other side Madeline roams, living with a troupe of gypsies which includes a woman who plays herself like a viol and a flatulent man who can imitate an amazing array of sounds. . .

Madeline’s fall within her dream world is paralleled by the fall of her family: The fruit in the family’s orchard, from which Mother makes her treats, goes rotten; Madeline’s brothers and sisters grow gradually more feral; and the villagers begin to treat Madeline’s family with contempt. Perhaps intuiting a link between Madeline’s dreams and her family’s plight, Mother decides that the only way to make things better is to marry off the sleeping Madeline (whom she now considers indolent) to the village idiot.

As I have already indicated, I found most of the details of the paired dream/"reality" plots cursory, not finally important to the overall effect the novel is intended to convey. Certainly I found their relation largely unengaging. Perhaps the primary reason why the novel failed to capture my interest except intermittently--some of the scenes are odd enough that they do have a certain degree of charm--lies in the writing itself. Too much of it seems to be straining after a kind of pictorial effect, an effort to report the story as it might be seen in an animated film or, indeed, in a vivid dream:

The curtains open onto a darkened hallway, so dark that she must run her fingertips along the walls, and at the end of it, there are more curtains, as dense and velvety as the first, Then there is a warm room, with walls the color pomegranates, where she is given toast with raisins, told to take off her shoes, placed before the fire on a footstool. And above her, on the mantelpiece, is a miniature circus made all of tin, with its stiff pennants flying and its elephants parading.

There is a certain energy to the prose in Madeleine is Sleeping, but it is all expended on simply reciting the weirdness of Madeleine's dream, of her situation more generally. In the work of Carter or Millhauser, the fairy tales and fables these writers bend and distort are only half the story; language itself it often the real subject of their fiction, as it is used to transform these fables into meditations on the possibilities of fiction, on the nature of art and imagination. Bynum's writing does not rise to this level, as if she is too intent on merely recording the bizarre events in her narrative vision to attend to the more wide-ranging implications such a vision might carry.

I admire Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's ambition, her apparent desire to write something other than the usual coming-of-age story. I'd even be willing to read her next book, to see where her instincts for the unconventional take her. But Madeleine is Sleeping strikes me as apprentice work, evidence of a talent not yet ready to transcend its own audacity into something more artful. Certainly I would not judge it worthy of the critical acclamation it received by being nominated for the National Book Award. While I also admire the resolve of last year's judges in identifying lesser-known writers and less-conventional books, as with The News from Paraguay, Madeleine is Sleeping is nevertheless not really up to the challenge.