The Reading Experience

Safely Ensconced

Apparently Steve Wasserman believes that "The best reading experience is to occupy your time with the worthy dead rather than the ambitious living."

This remark (actually among the first words to come out of Wasserman's mouth during the Open Source interview) certainly tells us a great deal about why the Los Angeles Times Book Review has never fulfilled its promise, or really even come close to being a reliable guide to contemporary letters.

The truth is pretty close to exactly the opposite of what Wasserman would have us believe. Not only is it the case that, as Ed Champion has put it, "the very form of the novel has evolved precisely because of efforts from the ambitious living" (one could say the same thing about other literary forms as well), but the "worthy dead" were probably the most intensely "ambitious" writers one could imagine--not necessarily ambitious for worldly success (although many would have no doubt gladly accepted it) but, because until the mid-nineteenth century (at the earliest) financial success as we would define it was more or less unthinkable (not enough readers), for "literary immortality." The great writers of the past literally wanted their work to survive through the ages, as testimony to their "success" as literary masters. (Remember the first stanza of Paradise Lost?: "Sing, Heav'nly Muse. . .I thence/Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous Song,/That with no middle flight intends to soar/Above th' Anonian Mount, while it pursues/Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme." How audacious to think your poem could successfully "justify the ways of God to men"!)

Furthermore, one suspects that Wasserman finds reading the "worthy dead" the best way to occupy his time precisely because it doesn't have to be an overly strenuous "reading experience." After all, these writers have already been pronounced "worthy"; all one has to do is nod sagely while passively absorbing all the greatness previous generations of readers have been kind enough to pre-determine for you. What a nice way to pass a rainy day. Some people might even be impressed with your good taste and admirable discernment.

In fact, the best (defined as "challenging") reading experience is precisely to read the "ambitious living." Judgments have yet to be reached about these folks; their work has to be explored and assessed. Some of it even strikes out in directions with which one is unfamiliar, and requires more than ordinary concentration. This sort of writing has yet to be certified as Literature, and while reading it might not provide the same sense of security that one's experience will be "worthy," it does test one's ability to comprehend what makes literature literary in the first place.

Ultimately, Wasserman's pronouncement is at least as condescending to the "worthy dead" as it is to the "ambitious living." It implies that their work is safely ensconced in the collective literary mausoleum, no longer embroiled in the petty concerns of the living. It expresses a view of Literature that only makes living readers less likely to be interested in the literature of the past, held out by the likes of Wasserman as something so much grander than what the puny present could produce. Younger readers especially recoil (justifiably so) at such a display of supercilious superiority (itself so thoroughly unjustified). In my opinion, if the literary work of the "worthy dead" is perceived as detached from the affairs of the present, with nothing to say to those who must live in it--and in many cases this is simply not the case--it doesn't have much value to anyone. It's not what is passed on to us from the worthy dead. It's just dead.

This is Not a Post About Cormac McCarthy

In one of his comments on this post below, James Wood writes:

I happen to think that the thriller genre is a limited, maimed, reduced thing, and unworthy of a writer of [Cormac] McCarthy's powers. So I think that however well he fulfilled his ambitions -- and it's a very sleek piece of work -- his ambitions deserve censure.

This is a view likely shared by many people who prefer their literary writers to avoid such disreputable genres as the thriller. To some extent, I probably share it myself, although if you categorize as "thriller" the sort of thing written by, say, James M. Cain or Jim Thompson, as opposed to the sort of thing written by Tom Clancy, I'd say that thrillers can be very good indeed.

But is it really the case that a talented writer such as Cormac McCarthy (and almost everyone seems to agree he is a talented writer) cannot write a thriller worthy of his talents? I'm prepared to believe that No Country for Old Men is not that book (although Wood now appears to concede that it's a "sleek piece of work" for a thriller), but isn't it conceivable that McCarthy could have written a successful thriller, one that both fulfills the expectations of the genre and can be admired simply for its superior literary qualities? I am at the very least uncomfortable with the idea that such an achievement is impossible because the underlying narrative and/or character conventions are too "maimed." Couldn't a good writer heal them?

And is it the critic's role to "censure" a writer's ambitions? Again, many other critics and their readers probably do consider this within the legitimate purview of literary criticism (especially of "literary fiction"), but what gives a critic (and I don't mean just James Wood--any critic) the moral authority to wag a finger at writers in this way? One might say that such a rebuke is being made on literary rather than moral grounds, but do literary critics have a better idea of what a novelist's ambition ought to be than the novelist him/herself? A critic is well-entitled to say "I didn't like that book" (for whatever specified experential reasons), but is he as entitled to say "You shouldn't have written that book"?

Something like this issue arose for me during the Litblog Co'op's consideration of the books nominated for our first Read This! selection. I felt that Case Histories, the ultimate selection, failed to satisfy as a detective novel, that it appropriated the form associated with detective/mystery fiction for purposes the form did not support very well because they were inessential to it. I thought the author had chosen the form for arbitrary reasons, and thus her novel couldn't be judged a successful novel of its kind. Could she have written a good detective novel, even one that satisfied both the criteria usually applied to detective fiction and those that should be applied to all fiction? I think so. I don't see why these need to be, a priori, mutuallly exclusive standards.

Rigid and Impacted

James Wood indulges in his usual hectoring sermon masquerading as a book review. This time it's Cormac McCarthy who just doesn't understand that James Wood's approach to fiction is the only one possible:

. . .McCarthy has never been much interested in consciousness and once declared that as far as he was concerned Henry James wasn’t literature. Alas, his new book, with its gleaming equipment of death, its mindless men and absent (but appropriately sentimentalized) women, its rigid, impacted prose, and its meaningless story, is perhaps the logical result of a literary hostility to Mind.

Actually, it's James Wood's criticism that represents a "literary hostility to Mind," since it almost never engages in honest analysis of a given text in terms of what it seeks to accomplish, but instead just endlessly repeats the same old formula: psychological realism is all, psychological realism is all.

Rules for Writers

I'm not going to defend John Irving. I liked The World According to Garp, but almost nothing else he's published since then. (I was at least able to finish The Cider House Rules.) His new novel, Until I Find You, is getting mixed reviews, and it's quite possible all the bad things being said about it (see especially this review by Marianne Wiggins) are true.

However, in his review in The Boston Globe, Kurt Jensen says this:

. . .One senses Irving's attempt to achieve comic effect with such human oddities, and to some extent he succeeds. Yet there is nothing interestingly funny -- much less comically smart -- about any of it. The literary effect is one of extraordinary aesthetic banality.

What exactly makes something "interestingly funny" except for the fact that it is funny? Presumably, if it's funny it's also interesting, or it wouldn't be funny in the first place. Is this a way of saying that what Irving does is funny, but no more than funny? If so, this seems to me a moral judgment--Irving's fiction settles for mere comedy and doesn't dress its humor up in something more profound--and has nothing to do with the aesthetic quality of Until I Find You, banal or otherwise. If it does indeed achieve a "comic effect," it is, at least in this respect, perforce aesthetically successful.

By insisiting that the novel should be more "comically smart," Jensen seems to be asking that it "say something" with its comedy, that it in fact transcend the aesthetic altogether. Or at least that it transcend its own comedy. I won't claim that John Irving is a first-rate comic novelist (although the creation of a kind of Dickensian comedy is certainly the best thing he does), but Jensen's objection is less to Irving's comic method per se than to comedy in general, which, if inadequately leavened with "human interest." can only be, apparently, "aesthetically banal." Again Jensen confuses the moral and the aesthetic.

To be fair, Jensen wants Irving's characters to be more interesting, more "credible." I can imagine readers finding Irving's characters to be "flat," but in some ways this is the inevitable consequence of the kind of comedy he works in. Asking that these characters be more realistic, more rounded, would be to ask that Irving abandon his comedic strategy altogether. As David Markson says in a previously cited interview, a writer writes the way he does because he has to, and this is the way Irving writes. One can have more or less tolerance for it, but it doesn't really do anyone any good to request he write in some other way.

Furthermore, here is Jensen's idea of what makes for credibility in a fictional character:

Credible complexity in a character can be achieved in at least two ways: Either distinctiveness is a matter of the sometimes gaudy and eye-catching methods of personality -- stark red hair, deep sag to the breast, the tortured lisp of the poorly born -- or it can be a presentation of the sometimes invisible but momentously significant suasions that inhabit us all -- the ''not-thought" in thought, the unseen in the visible, the places into which the imagination must reach.

If anybody knows what the second half of this sentence means, please let me know. Although I'm pretty sure I don't usually look for the presentation of "suasions" in most characters I come across, whether they be "not-thought" or actually thought. As to the first kind of complexity: If this is a "credible" method of character-creation, why does Jensen go on to say that "If the novelist cannot, or is not inclined to, perform the second with his words, he may take recourse in the first" and reprove Irving for doing so? It must not be so credible after all.

Maybe Jensen should just have declared he doesn't have a taste for the kind of novel Irving has written, or that Irving's approach doesn't work so well this time around, and forgotten about making his own rules for writers.

Making Life Beautiful

I have hesitated to comment on this Terry Teachout essay about political art because there's so much in it with which I agree. I've not seen the plays he judges to be "crude and predictable" (including The God of Hell, by Sam Shepard, whom I generally admire), but I'm pretty sure he's right. I also agree that "Turning messy fact into orderly fiction necessarily entails simplification; turning it into artful fiction demands as well that this simplification acknowledge the full complexity of human nature and human experience." And that "Any work of art that seeks to persuade an audience to take some specific form of external action, political or otherwise, tends to be bad." (Although I am more dubious about his further qualification that "it is possible to make good, even great art that is intended to serve as the persuasive instrument of an exterior purpose." Perhaps some great art has had a persuasive effect of this kind, but I doubt many artists have conceived their work primarily as "instruments" for an "exterior purpose." It's hard for me to see how one could maintain the integrity of one's "art" while focusing on the potential propaganda value of what one is creating.)

But Teachout does say some other things about the nature of art that I find puzzling:

Exactly what is it that art does? Countless books have been written to answer this question, and I can do no more in the compass of an essay than to suggest something of what they tell us. To begin with, it’s generally agreed that great art has some mysterious yet ultimately intelligible relationship to truth. The nature of that relationship was nicely described by Fairfield Porter, a major American painter who was also a gifted art critic. “When I paint,” Porter said, “I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful.” No matter who said it first, this statement points gracefully to one of the most important things that art does: it portrays the world creatively, in the process heightening our perception and awareness of things as they are. . . .

I've probably read many of the books to which Teachout is referring, but I don't recall any such general agreement that art is a way of seeking "truth." I, for one, don't agree with this at all. If Teachout means to say that art takes "life" as its subject and for that very reason winds up (at its best) disclosing something truthful about it, then this seems trivial to me. Where else would art finds its subject? If he means that truth in this context is something less tangible, something inherent to ordinary reality but not necessarily perceptible by ordinary means, then this already starts to make the pursuit of "truth" rather slippery. Whose truth are we talking about? Surely he can't mean that all artistic truths are equal, as long as they are ultimately "intelligible." One doesn't read Terry Teachout for a celebration of aesthetic relativism.

"Make everything more beautiful." Doesn't this contradict the notion that art aspires to truth? If art makes "things as they are" more beautiful, isn't this indeed a deliberate falsification? Life is something less than beautiful and art improves on it. This is a perfectly good thing for it do, but whatever "truth" emerges has to be truth about art, not about life. Again, if Teachout thinks this is where the truth in art resides, I'd happily agree, but somehow I don't think he means to suggest this. Perhaps he believes that in making everything more beautiful some "inner truth" about the world emerges, but once more the need to discriminate between artistic truths arises. "That truth is really true," the critic must say, "while that one merely masquerades as truth." Certainly some critics do engage in this sort of thing, but in my opinion it takes them outside the realm of art into morality and metaphysics.

It's hard to disagree with the notion that art "portrays the world creatively, in the process heightening our perception and awareness of things as they are," except that this seems a secondary effect of art, not its raison d'etre. According to John Dewey (to whom much of my own view of the nature and efficacy of art is indebted), art does indeed heighten perception and awareness, but what it most immediately heightens is our apprehension of what an experience can be like. The experience of art, Dewey says, is the most acute kind of experience we can have, and before we move on to the "subject" of the work we first of all clarify our perception of the art work itself, becoming aware (ideally) of the efforts the artist must have made in creating the work. To say that art primarily directs us to "things as they are" is to deny the "creative" integrity of art in favor of the representation of reality it purportedly gives us. Presumably, for Teachout it is the "truth" of this representation that is most important.

It is certainly the case that political art most insistently points us to "things as they are," and Teachout is correct in contending that political art is, usually, bad art, or at least that it's very difficult for most political art to succeed. Political artists are almost by definition more interesed in the representation of reality they convey than in the subtleties of form and expression. They are after Truth in its most unadorned manifestation. They want to heighten our awareness in no uncertain terms. But I don't think that the way to counter bad art of this kind is to delineate more intricate gradations of "truth." I think you should just commit yourself to the art and let truth take care of itself.

Funeral Rites

Judith Halberstam thinks the Department of English needs to go:

I propose that the discipline is dead, that we willingly killed it and that we now decide as serious scholars and committed intellectuals what should replace it in this new world of anti-intellectual backlash and religious fundamentalism. While we may all continue doing what we do — reading closely, looking for patterns and disturbances of patterns within cultural manifestations, determining the complex and fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies — once we call it something other than “English,” (like cultural studies, critical theory, theory and culture, etc.) it will neither look the same nor mean the same thing and nor will it occupy the same place in relation to the humanities in general, or within administrative plans for down-sizing; it will also, I propose, be better equipped to meet the inevitable demands (which already began to surface after the last election) for an end to liberal bias on college campuses and so on.

I heartily endorse this idea. By all means, let Halberstam and her confreres establish a new Department of Patterns and Disturbances of Patterns Within Cultural Manifestations. This would allow them to do what they most dearly wish to do--distance themselves from the study of mere literature--and would further allow whatever renegade elements there are within the exisiting English deparment who still find themselves interested in the "merely literary" either to reclaim "English" as the name for what they study or perhaps to join in on the makeover fun and establish a Department of Literary Study, in which what actually goes on is the study of literature. The latter could perhaps be done by incorporating extant creative writing programs, and such a department would probably continue to offer traditional composition and linguistics courses. (Surely administrators would not want to entrust such courses to a department that otherwise focuses on "the complex and fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies." This very phrasing suggests that professors in the new department would not be the logical choice to teach courses the goal of which is to teach students to write.)

I believe that such a bifurcation of English would turn out to be a swell deal for us renegades. Given a choice between the PDPWCM department and its ersatz sociology and a Literary Study department honestly devoted to studying literature, I predict that many undergraduate students would turn to the latter. After all, most English majors have traditionally been drawn to the discipline simply because they like to read. If departments of English and comparative literature are currently suffering "massive declines in enrollment," as Halberstam herself allows they are, I'd suggest that one of the reasons is that what students find when they get there--and what they would continue to find in the PDPWCM department--is a pedantic, turgid, supercilious, and utterly joyless approach to reading. Should the new department of Literary Study reemphasize some of the pleasures of reading, and some of the delight of discovery in the study of literature, it would do just fine in a competition to avoid "down-sizing."

Michael Berube doesn't much care for Halberstam's proposal, for reasons that aren't very clear. "[No] kind of renaming or reorganizing is going to make English a coherent, tidy discipline," he writes. "It would be hard enough to make it coherent if it were devoted solely to literature. . ." Berube doesn't seem to understand: Halberstam is advocating that those very tendencies in academic criticism that make English as it now stands incoherent be transferred to the PDPWCM department. The English department left behind would be entirely coherent, despite Berube's doubts. Without those scholars more interested in "cultural production" and "hegemonies" than in works of fiction or poetry or drama, other scholars and critics who think studying such works as forms of literary art is a perfectly nice thing to do would be left alone to get on with the task. Berube continues: "literature, as even the most hidebound traditionalists ought to admit one of these days, is a terribly amorphous thing that touches on every conceivable facet of the known world—and, as if this weren’t enough, many facets of worlds yet unknown as well. . . ." I'm not a hidebound traditionalist--in my version of a Department of Literary Study, periodization and other manifestations of curricular slicing would be absent; professors would be free to teach what they want to teach, as long as the ultimate goal was to understand the literary qualities of literature--but in my experience literature is a perfectly morphous subject. Individual works of literature certainly do explore "every conceivable facet of the known world," but the study of literature concentrates on delineating the way they do this, not on using literature as an excuse to pronounce on such "facets" oneself.

What Halberstam and Berube share, ultimately, is a plain impatience with if not disdain for trifling old literature. Halberstam sneers at the notion of "aesthetic complexity," notes approvingly the way "queer theory, visual culture, visual anthropology, feminist theory, literary theory began to nudge the survey courses, the single-author studies and the prosody classes aside," recommends that the study of Victorian literature be replaced with "studies of 'Empire and Culture,' romanticism with “the poetries of industrialization.” Berube wants to preserve close reading as "our distinct product line," as "what we sell people" (so much for resisting the corporatization of academe), but reduces such readings to "skills in advanced literacy," something that promotes students' "own symbolic economy." Besides, "you don’t have to confine yourself to literary works, either. You can go right ahead and do close readings of any kind of 'text' whatsoever, in the most expansive sense of that most expansive word." Berube forgets that "close reading" was developed specifically as a method of reading literary works, which required close reading because they don't give up their intended meanings so easily, are not storage centers of "meaning" at all but occasions for a reading experience of a distinctive kind. His appropriation of "close reading" is really just a theft of the term for purposes to which true close reading is simply not applicable. (But of course the New Critics have become the collective bogeymen of contemporary literary study, returning now and then from their repressed state to scare the children. They and their appalling practices must be warded off.)

Really and truly, the best thing that could happen to literature would be, once the Department of Patterns and Disturbances of Patterns Within Cultural Manifestations (or some equally dreary equivalent) was actually created, for it to disappear from academic curricula altogether. After eighty years of experimenting with the study of literature as an academic subject, those carrying it out (myself included) have made a complete hash of it. Literature itself is held in contempt not just by the majority of ordinary people but by those professing to teach it. "Literature Professor" has become a near-synonym of "lunatic." That literary study would come to such an end was probably inevitable, since the primary imperative of academe--to create "new" knowledge--is finally inimical to something so difficult to dress up in fashionable critical clothes as serious works of fiction or poetry. Once it was perceived that "aesthetic complexity" was a spent force (at least as the means for producing new monographs and journal articles), approaches to literature that essentially abandoned its consideration as an art form were practically certain to follow. If Judith Halberstam is proposing that, in this context, everyone should acknowledge that the experiment failed, she's performing a useful service. Give literature back to the amateurs.

(Thanks to Scott Esposito for providing both of these links.)