The Reading Experience

Tout Court

Surprisingly enough (to me), Roger Kimball and I seem to agree at least on one subject:

The issue, it is worth stressing, is not the orientation of the politics–Left vs. Right–it is rather the politicization of intellectual life tout court. That is, the task is not to replace or balance the left-wing orientation of academic life with a right-wing ideology but rather to de-politicize academic, i.e., to champion intellectual, not political, standards.

If I thought Kimball truly believed this, I'd say that the "conservative" critique of the humanities as they are now taught in American universities would be worth taking seriously. Unfortunately I just can't accept that he does, largely for reasons that are implicit in some of Kimball's additional comments in this interview:

I believe that the arts provide a good barometer of cultural health. They reflect the fears, obsessions, aspirations, and ambitions of a culture. It tells us a great deal, I think, that terms like "transgressive" and "challenging" have emerged as among the highest words of praise in the critical lexicon. It tells us, among other things, that much art today is less affirmative than corrosive, that it places itself in an adversarial attitude toward the traditional moral, aesthetic, and cultural ambitions of our culture.

I would agree that the arts are a good indicator of "cultural health," if by this we meant that a healthy culture manifests a great deal of artistic activity--that it produces a significant number of people who value art enough to want to create it. But of course this is not what Kimball means. He means that art is directly reflective of a culture's "health" in moral and spiritual terms. He means that art is valuable primarily if not exclusively to the exent it works to foster such health, ideally to "affirm" traditional assumptions and practices.

A culture doesn't have "fears, obsessions, aspirations, and ambitions." Only people have these things, individual people. Ultimately a critic like Roger Kimball doesn't have much use for individual artists, individual readers or viewers or listeners. Art is not about heightened experience or even simple pleasure; it's about "culture," about the social norms that art can help to reinforce, the ideological "ambitions" it exists to define. Even when Kimball speaks of the "silence" great art can provoke, he's really talking about the silence enforced by the cultural authority which can be conferred upon art (by people like Kimball), which demands recovery of "a sense of the unfailing pertinence of our cultural inheritance." It's the "inheritance" that matters, not the particularity of works of art, nor the distinctive kind of experience (which can indeed involve "silence") that they afford.

Kimball's insistence on the cultural relevance of art is finally not that different from the similar insistence by current academic criticism that art is most useful as an object of "cultural study." Both look past the aesthetic properties of art in order to examine its purported efficacy as a cultural force or its illustrative value as a cultural "symptom." The biggest difference between conservative critics such as Kimball and most academic critics is that for Kimball art should be "affirmative," while for the academic critics--and Kimball is correct about this--it is precisely the transgressive and corrosive qualities of art that are most highly prized. I believe that art at its best is indeed "subversive," but not in the narrow political sense of the term presently conveyed by academic criticism. As I put it in a previous post, "Through art we become aware that the world can always be remade. Art is the enemy of all certainties and settled doctrines. This is not likely to be acceptable to political critics of either the left or the right. . ." Which is why Roger Kimball probably will never really advocate for the "de-politicization" of art or of academic study. His view of what art is good for is always already intensely political.

Gangs of Dullards

In a post commenting on Jack Schafer's recent defense of bias in book reviewing, Kevin Holtsberry (Collected Miscellany) correctly identifies this statement as the core asssumption of Shafer's argument:

The point of a book review isn't to review worthy books fairly, it's to publish good pieces.

Shafer continues: "Better to assign a team of lively-but-conflicted writers to review a slew of rotten books than a gang of dullards to the most deserving releases of the season."

Kevin takes issue with Shafer's "discarding" of the standard of fairness, asking "Isn't a fair review of worthy books what [readers of book reviews] are looking for?".

If I have to choose between "fair" reviews and "good pieces," I'll side with Kevin and take the former, if by "fair" we mean attentive to the tangible features of the book under review, as well as to the needs that a reader might have in placing the book in an appropriate context. Apparently Shafer believes this leads to "dull" writing, but that will be true only if the reader is more interested in the forced "liveliness" so many American journalists seem to think is a good substitute for thinking, or if the reviewer implicitly believes that reading the book in question is probably too much to ask of most readers and thus the "piece" he or she is writing ought to itself substitute for doing so. (Kevin identifies the problem with Shafer's position by noting how publications like Slate "get on [his] nerves" because so many of their writers "seek to be clever and entertaining" rather than informative.)

Shafer cites a review of John Updike's Villages Walter Berthoff as an example of the kind of "gutless" reviewing he opposes. Reviewers like Berthoff "genuflect to 'major writers'. . . composing fawning reviews that barely hint at how bad the books are." But Berthoff doesn't think Villages is a bad book. He attempts to put it in the context of Updike's other novels about his native region of Pennsylvania, establishes that it is "the most directly autobiographical of all Updike's novels," calls attention to Updike's signature prose style and attempts to describe how it works, provides a judicious summary of the novel's plot and characters. In other words, he tries to give as thorough an account as he can of the relevant issues to be considered in assessing this novel, to be as "fair" as possible both to a writer who's surely earned fair treatment and to readers who may or may not be as familiar with Updike's work as the reviewer. In my opinion it's a very scrupulous review, and why Shafer would choose to characterize it as "fawning" and "gutless" is a mystery to me.

(Obviously Shafer disagrees with Barthoff's conclusion that Villages embodies "a certain rueful but forgiving intelligence and, yes, wisdom about the accumulating passages, overt and hidden, of ordinary human existence," but that Walter Berthoff liked this novel while Shafer did not certainly seems an insufficient reason to call Berthoff dishonest. Shafer disdainfully notes that Berthoff is "the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and American Literature Emeritus on Harvard University's faculty of arts and sciences," but if anything this information makes me more inclined to take his review seriously, while Shafer's qualifications to judge American fiction are. . .well, whatever they are.)

On the other hand, this is what Shafer takes to be a model of book-review prose:

Not all American novels are too long, but most novels which are too long these days are American. The bloated book belongs in a category with the yard-long hot dog and the stretch limo. The main difference is that the craving for extended sausage and limo comes from the customers—the eaters, the renters.

The need to publish ever-larger books, such as John Irving's 800-plus page Until I Find You, is a mysterious part of the psychology of the writer. It may be that readers like a book they can get their teeth into, but one which will dislocate their jaws? Not likely.

AS far as I'm concerned, this is babble. The generalization in the first paragraph is vacuous, and the remaining "clever" analogies are just puerile. Quite frankly, whenever I encounter a book review employing these kinds of tricks, I stop reading. The reviewer wants to impress me with his peppy prose and his cheeky views, wants to convince me his knowing attitude is much more entertaining than anything I'll find in the target of his wit. (Writers like Irving, who have unfortunately made themselves an easy mark for this kind of approach, are especially likely to receive such sophomoric treatment.) But I'm not interested, thanks. Maybe I'm just a dullard, but I'd rather have book reviews that take literary works seriously, that are not just excuses for the posturing of reviewers.

Shafer suggests that the best policy for book reviewing is anything goes, that even biased reviews can create "tension": "Can the prejudiced reviewer write against his personal feelings to tell the truth, the readers wonder?" But why should the reader have to wonder this? Why should I be more interested in some ridiculous squabble going on behind the scenes or in the banal jabbering of mod book reviewers than in the book purportedly under consideration? I take this issue of what book reviewing is for seriously because newpaper and magazine book sections are about the only forums remaining for what used to be called literary criticism. Academic journals have long abandoned text-based criticism, and literary magazines, which might be expected to compensate for this lack of serious criticism where contemporary fiction is concerned, publish very little critical commentary at all.. If general interest literary criticism is reduced to Shafer's brand of "let it all hang out" hokum, the future of serious writing in this country is bleak indeed.

Objects of Contemplation

I almost put Miljenko's Jergovic's Sarjevo Marlboro (Archipelago Books) aside when I read this passage from Ammiel Alcalay's introduction:

One novel or book of poems by a single writer, removed from the cluster of other writers and artists from which it has emerged, unbuttressed by correspondence, biographies, or critical studies--such a work of translation in America too often functions as a means of reinforcing the assumptions behind our uniquely military/industrial/new critical approach to the work of art as an object of contemplation rather than a call to arms, a cry for justice, an act of solidarity or a witness to history.

"Military/industrial/new critical approach"? Now, I understand that New Criticism (formalism more generally) was guilty of a multitude of sins--primary among them a preference for literature over propaganda and polemics--but to associate it with the military-industrial complex? This is so over-the-top that it convinces me once and for all that such frenetically politicized prattle masquerading as literary commentary really is just plain silly, not worth the attention of anyone who believes that a work of fiction or poetry is under no obligation to be "a call to arms, a cry for justice, an act of solidarity or a witness to history" or who wonders why calls to arms or cries for justice have to be also labeled "art" for them to be worth doing. Why not a place for political agitation or acts of solidarity and a place for art less grandly defined? And how thoroughly has Alcalay turned formalism on its head! Gone is the idea that a work of literary art, including translated work, has even a shred of formal integrity, that it can be appreciated without resorting to secondary "information." Now we need "correspondence, biographies, or critical studies" or our reading experience is "unbuttressed."

I concluded that Miljenko Jergovic could not be held responsible for the inanities of someone chosen by others to write about his book, so, free entirely of external buttresses--including the remainder of Alcalay's introduction--I did read Sarajevo Marlboro. And I'm certainly glad I did, since it is a very good book, worthy even of being regarded as (gasp) "an object of contemplation." It certainly does act as a "witness to history"--the seige of Sarajevo during the 1990s--but if we were to take it simply as that we would be willfully ignoring both the quiet artistry of the individual sketches making up the book and the cumulative effect of these sketches as they work to depict an enclosed world struggling to maintain itself against destructive forces (themselves largely kept outside the frame of the book's portrayed world) threatening to overwhelm it. These forces are not preternatural--the Serb militias are real enough--but by the end of the book one does feel that the Sarajevans are being subjected to a speeded-up version of the distress and ill-fortune life ulitmately inflicts on almost everyone.

In calling these pieces "sketches" I don't mean to suggest they lack something in formal substance compared to a more fully-formed "story." Most of the sketches in Sarajevo Marlboro are no more than 5-8 pages, and although some of them compress fairly long stretches of time, few take on the characteristics of the "well-made" story. But to do so would actually detract from the overall coherence of the book, which depends upon each of the more modest parts adding up to a powerful whole. This is not to say that individual sketches lack their own kind of force. Most of them present memorable characters Jergovic is able to draw in a minimum of brush strokes but who are also representative of the sorts of people who inhabit a city like Sarajevo, itself a kind of crossroads of cultures. Most focus on ordinary activities--ordinary if you're living in a city under bombardment--but through understatement and, at times, a kind of grim humor the sketches seem laden with significance.

If all that such sketches did was to announce, over and over again, that "war is hell" or "injustice reigns," in my opinion they really wouldn't be worth reading. I'm pretty sure I already know that these things are true, as well as that the Bosnian war was particularly senseless. Perhaps there are some readers who will settle for the canned interpretation of a book like Sarajevo Marlboro as a literary "indictment" of war or of the political powers that enage in it or fail to stop it, but they will be ignoring the way Jergovic portrays a multifarious array of human beings discovering their own hidden reserves of dignity and endurance at the same time he portrays the most ruinous expressions of human nature. They'll be overlooking the way he chooses just the right aesthetically restrained means of creating a fictionalized Sarajevo whose plight we can appreciate not because it seems exotically terrifying but because it seems recognizably human. In short, they would be missing out on a work of literary art that can also be an "act of solidarity" only because it's first of all very skillfully made.

The Difficulties of the Fiction Market

Raymond Federman, author of the great postmodern novels Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It, now has a blog. This post, on the fate of his new novel, The Farm, is hilarious, discouraging, and enraging, all at the same time. If you think being a critically-acclaimed writer with umpteen published books, some of which literary history will surely judge as among the more important of their time, means you have a secure place in the "book business," this post will probably be enlightening. Here's a letter from an agent (with Federman's interpolations) commenting on The Farm:

Dear Raymond,

I'm very grateful for this opportunity to see The Farm. I really like it a lot and believe it will be published. [it would have been interesting, and perhaps even useful if Mitch at this point would have said why he loved the book and where he thinks it could be published]

Alas [well I like Alas better than just But], the difficulties of the fiction market [and now we have it – the pathetic predictable mercantile aspect of publishing] gets the better of me these days [poor Mitch -- maybe we could try to console him by writing a nice piece of shit] and even with books that I like [one is tempted to ask Mitch what kind of books he likes], I have a hard time placing them [maybe Mitch would have an easier time selling shoes or salamis in a delicatessen]. Even with the positive views that I did have for The Farm [Mitch could you please clarify what these positive views are so maybe I can feel good about them], I just didn't feel confident enough overall as to that right spot to suggest the possibility of getting together on it [perhaps Mitch should take a composition course to learn to write a decent readable English sentence before undertaking to peddle literature]. I just do know how many times that I have been off in the past and another will believe the opposite and set it right away [damn I wish Mitch had sent me this letter before I sent him The Farm -- I would have written him a warm decent rejection letter. Telling him that I didn't think he was the right agent for this book. I have no idea how such illiterate people become literary agents].

Thanks, again, and best to you for every success with The Farm. [I have no idea what that again is doing here, but I am deeply touched by Mitch's good wishes.]

Federman also tells us that Double or Nothing was rejected by 27 publishers, and that these are among the rejection notices he's received in the past:

we find this book too complicated for our readers
we think they are too many fucks in this book
we wouldn’t be able to sell more than 12 copies of this book
we cannot take a risk with such a postmodern novel
we could face a lawsuit with this book
we find this book totally unreadable
we find this book too narrow in scope
we think the characters need fleshing out
we think this book could use a good rewriting – it’s too short
we are tired of publishing books about the holocaust
we are looking for books that teach people how to improve their lives
we think your book would make the readers suffer
we think your book needs a happy ending
we think nobody gives a shit about the life of farmers in Southern France
we love the subject of your book but at the present time the relations between England and France being what they are we feel that your book would not receive favorable attention with the British reader.

A Newsy Time

In Rachel Donadio's August 7 New York Times article on the purported eclipse of fiction by nonfiction, she asserts that "the novel isn't dead; it just isn't as central to the culture as it once was."

The article itself really proceeds from this assumption--that novels used to be "central to the culture" but are not so now. My immediate response to this rather peculiar notion is to ask just when this fiction-friendly era occurred. It must have been before my time; for as long as I've been reading novels, in fact, I've also been reading essays and articles similar to this one announcing that the novel is passe, that fiction no longer engages with society at large, that film or television or some other medium has stolen fiction's audience, that, indeed, readers prefer nonfiction because, as Cullen Murphy puts it, "certain traits that used to be standard in fiction, like a strong sense of plot and memorable characters in the service of important and morally charged subject matter, are today as reliably found in narrative nonfiction as they are in literary fiction." At what point in the recent past did fiction really have the "cultural currency" Adrienne Miller thinks it's lost? When have we not been, in Philip Gourevitch's words, "living in a newsy time"?

The deck is stacked even more heavily against the efficacy of fiction when Donadio declares that fiction is losing out to nonfiction at the task of "illuminating today's world most vividly." Statements like this (as well as Murphy's rehearsal of those hardy conventions fiction has abandoned) really do seem to indicate that in the minds of certain editors and journalists, at least, fiction is still associated with social realism and the well-constructed narrative. Or at least that it's currently failing to live up to these established responsibilites, thus allowing nonfiction to take over the job of "making sense of a complicated and fractious world." But has it ever really been the role of fiction, of literature more generally, to "make sense" of the world, fractious or not? Doesn't literature help us to understand that the world is a complicated place, not always amenable to straightforward description and simple explanation? Can't it "illuminate" reality not by claiming to represent "today's world" but by delineating smaller pieces of it, or even by simply illustrating the power of human imagination and letting the "world" take care of itself?

If the editors of publications like Atlantic Monthly, Esquire (or, as far as I'm concerned, The New Yorker) want to deemphasize fiction in favor of "long-form narrative reporting," I say they should just go ahead and do it without any fol-de-rol about how they still respect fiction and might get back to it later. None of these publications has done very much for the cause of fiction, anyway, at least not recently. Most of what they publish is safe and pre-digested, altogether reflective of the condescending attitude toward the value of fiction on display in Donadio's article. Serious fiction will survive their disdain for the merely literary, even while it's dismissed by those who can find "important and morally charged subject matter" only in "topical" nonfiction. In fact, without their leaden sensibilities determining what gets published and what doesn't, it might even flourish.

Travels With Famke

The danger of reading a novel primarily for the opportunity to "identify" with its characters--as well as to interpret their actions by judging them on moral grounds--seems well-illustrated by this guest review at The Mumpsimus of Susann Cokal's Breath and Bones (Unbridled Books). The reviewer, Catherynne M. Valente, writes of the novel's protagonist:

Famke is a horrible woman, and despite the narrative's assurances that we must love her, the reader cannot identify with such a shallow, idiotic, and careless person.

Even if it were true that this character is "a horrible woman"--deliberately portrayed as such by the author--would this be a good reason to so dislike this novel as to call it "truly, shockingly bad"? (Vallente's focus is almost entirely on the moral failings of this character, although she does pause occasionally for an ad hominem comment on the author herself, as when she wonders "if she has had any practical experience with human bodies at all.") Surely we can all think of fiction we've read in which one or more of the main characters are morally dubious, if not just plain repulsive, but which we nevertheless judge to be compelling and aesthetically powerful books. (Journey to the End of the Night? Naked Lunch? Much of Flannery O'Connor?) Shouldn't it be a critical rule of thumb that in order to fairly assess a work of literature for what it seems to be offering us we make an effort to put aside moral judgment, especially judgment of fictional characters, until we have honestly determined the role these characters play in the work's aesthetic order and in the context of its broader thematic concerns?

However, it simply is not the case that the protagonist of Breath and Bones is the "shallow, idiotic, and careless person" this reviewer takes her to be. Famke Summerfugl (or Ursula Summerfield, or Dante Castle--her identity is as quickly changed as her location as she travels across the western United States) is determined to get what she wants (a reunion with the artist for whom she has served as a model back in her native Denmark), but her very single-mindedness is at least as much the product of an uncertain sense of self as it is a more willful character flaw. Indeed, it is her lack of a truly developed personality, her ability to become the object of others' obsessions, to take on whatever attributes are required to survive in an environment she is in some ways too inexperienced to know is hostile to her presence, that really define her as a character. Famke leaves a fair amount of distress and destruction in her wake, but little of it is due to her "careless" or "idiotic" behavior. If anything she cares too much (especially in comparison to many of the people she encounters, who have more or less acceeded to their limited circumstances), as her quest is motivated by her belief in the artistic genius of Albert Castle and in her own role as his inspiration, and she is anything but an idiot. When finally she does reunite with Albert, she has been able to learn enough both about herself and human nature to recognize he's not nearly the man she had in her earlier romantic haze taken him to be.

It might be that Catherynne Valente reacted as she did to Famke because she failed to consider that Breath and Bones is essentially a picaresque novel, Famke its picaro. One doesn't normally approach a picaresque novel with an assumption that its protagonist will be a "rounded" character who will provoke either emotional attachment or moral revulsion. Since the root meaning of "picaro" is "rogue," if we were to demand of such a character that he/she be a model of propriety, we would be denying the picaresque form its motivating agency. It's the "adventures" of the picaro that solicit our attention in this kind of fiction, and whatever change or enhancement of character that emerges is secondary to the experiences to which the character is submitted, to the process by which change or growth might (or might not) occur.

Cokal has in this case herself enhanced our perception of the picaresque form by making her protagonist a woman. Famke is neither more nor less "horrible" (or desperate or confused) than most picaresque anti-heroes, but surely one of the problems Catherynne M. Valente has with her is that she's an anti-heroine, a woman taking on the role traditionally associated with misfits and outcasts, one that inherently calls for a certain amount of guile and disregard for moral niceties. One wonders if Valente would express the same contempt for a male character engaged in similarly venturesome conduct as Famke Summerfugl. Is a picaresque narrative acceptable for exploring the moral margins of male behavior, but inappropriate for depicting women who also find themselves caught in marginal circumstances? Are women, even in fiction, to be judged by different standards than men? If we find ourselves having moral qualms about a female character acting in ways that are conventional in a literary mode usually reserved for men, should we be rethinking our expectations of "female behavior" or our assumptions about those conventions? Perhaps these are questions Susann Cokal would like us to ask while reading her book.

(And I certainly don't think that Cokal's narrative insists that "we must love" Famke. It seems to me that Cokal has written the kind of novel she's written precisely to induce in us a degree of ambivalence about her main character. To engage in the kind of questioning of literary means and ends I've just outlined almost requires that we feel uneasy about our response to a character like Famke.)

At one point Valente calls Breath and Bones "a romance novel that thinks it's too good for the genre" and at another claims it falls into a certain kind of "realist trap," so it's hard to know whether she thinks it strays too far from reality or not far enough. However, it is certainly true that the kind of quest narrative the novel uses allows for a fair amount of exaggeration, coincidence, and melodrama (think of Tom Jones, of many of Dickens's novels, or, indeed, of Huckleberry Finn.) Breath and Bones incorporates its share of all of these, but never to the extent that we begin to disbelieve in its created illusion of an historical time and place. (In this regard, I actually found the historical epigraphs presented at the beginning of chapters completely superfluous. The novel's success depends on the integrity of its own narrative logic, not on the broader historical picture it presents.) Thus, although B & B is not recognizably "postmodern," it also is not simply a "realist" novel retreating into the past. (And, again, the only reason I can see to call it a "romance novel" is that its protagonist is a woman who believes herself to be in love.)

Finally, Valente says of the style of Breath and Bones that "the language of the novel was so simplistic as to give Potter and Co. a run for their broomsticks." She must have in mind a passage such as this, as Albert Castle is working on his pre-Raphaelite portrait of Famke as Nimue:

. . .He had beautiful fingers, long and bony, with a rainbow of paint always under the nails, and to Famke's mind they produced wonders. They had drawn her as an earthly Valkyrie, in a cloak made of swans' feathers (and nothing else); painted her as a nearly naked Gunnlod, the loveliest of the primordial Norse giants, watching over the three kettles of wisdom in a deep, deep cave (Albert seemed to very fond of caves.) And now this Nimue, a wizard's lover, who could be from icy Scandanavia but would be of great interest to the English critics who could make Albert's fortune. Famke had never heard of Merlin or of Nimue, but Albert was teaching her a great deal about the mythology of her people. He liked to set her lessons from the traveler's guidebooks scattered over the mantel.

There is a certain ingenuousness to a passage like this (although the novel does not stick exlusively to Famke's implied point of view), but ultimately it works as much to expose the pretensions of Albert Castle ("Albert seemed very fond of caves") as the "simplicity" of Famke's perceptions. And this clash between Famke's innocence and the rather sordid actualities she encounters (both in America and in Denmark) ultimately provides the novel with what might be its most resonant conflict.

Catherynne M. Valente and I seem to have read different books. She read a story motivated by the actions of a morally compromised romantic heroine. I read a well-executed variation on an always-renewable form that if anything explicitly challenges a reflexively "moral" response to works of literature.

Flaubert's Children

I have not read Peter Brooks's Realist Vision, the ostensible subject of James Wood's essay "The Blue River of Truth" (The New Republic, August 1, 2005), so I will not comment on its argument until I have. However, Wood introduces many of his own ideas into his discussion of "realism" as prompted by Brooks's book, and I would like to comment on a few of those.

1) Wood begins his essay by quoting two "anti-realist" statements (one by the novelist Rick Moody) and declares them to be "typical of their age." Realism, we are told, is now widely considered "stuffy, correct, unprogressive." It's a little hard to know whether Wood considers this attitude "typical" only of critics and other commentators on contemporary fiction or whether this is a "finely characteristic" belief about realism held by most writers and readers. If he means the latter, he couldn't be more wrong. Judging from the fiction that actually gets published and reviewed, the vast (vast) majority of literary fiction is still safely realistic, even to the extent of focusing on "Mind," the source for Wood of most of fiction's satisfactions. (I have in the past referred to this kind of fiction as "psychological realism," but since Wood has expressed a dislike of the term, I won't use it here. Nevertheless, any honest assessment of the kind of novels showing up on Borders' and Barnes and Noble's fiction shelves would have to conclude that pyschological realism is still the order of the day. That Wood would disregard this fact is not that surprising, since most of these books are thoroughly mediocre and, if anything, illustrate quite persuasively that this mode of realism is indeed, as John Barth once put it, "exhausted.")

2) "The major struggle in American fiction today is over the question of realism," writes Wood. "Anywhere fiction is discussed with partisan heat, a fault line emerges, with 'realists' and traditionalists on one side, and postmodernists and experimentalists on the other." I think this is wrong as well. Postmodernism began to be superseded by various neotraditional practices in the mid-to-late 1970s, although some of the true postmodernists--Barth, Coover, Sorrentino--did continue to produce interesting work on into their literary dotage. And compared to the "experimental" work of these writers--Lost in the Funhouse, Mulligan Stew, etc.--the more adventurous writers who followed them are hardly radical innovators. I think Richard Powers is a great writer, but he's hardly a programmatic metafictionist. T. Coraghessan Boyle has settled into a more or less conventional kind of satire. In my opinion, David Foster Wallace is closer to being a psychological realist--albeit of a somewhat twisted kind--than he is a postmodernist. There are other, less well-known writers who continue to explore the possibilities of self-referentiality or who have revived a form of surrealism, but let's not pretend that they have a very high profile or constitute some kind of "movement" against realism comparable to the postmodernism of the 1960s and 1970s. If there is a "struggle" in current fiction, it is between those who write a conventional kind of character- or plot-driven fiction more or less auditioning to become movies and those who still seek to discover what the possibilities of fiction might be beyond its role as source of film adaptation, what fiction can do better than other narrative or dramatic arts. Realism itself doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this.

3) I agree with Wood that too many people think of realism as a "genre," confusing realism per se with "a certain kind of traditional plot, with predictable beginnings and endings." Moody is quoted as deploring realism's "epiphanies, its rising action, its predictable movement. . . ." But these things are more properly associated with orthodox narrative conventions (embodied in "Freytag's Triangle") than with realism strictly understood. Indeed, one could argue that truly realistic fictions would avoid neat divisions of plot and anything at all "predictable," since "real life" does not unfold like well-made stories. I also agree that the great 19th century realists were actually radicals in their time, overturning as they did the picaresque and romantic modes of storytelling they'd inherited from the first generation of novelists in favor of narratives that focused more on details of setting and on creating plausibly "lifelike" characters. And I certainly agree that "There is no writing without convention," making it most important to "be alive to the moment when a literary convention becomes dead," not to assume that the ultimate goal is to free fiction from convention altogether.

4) Perhaps my biggest problem with James Wood's approach to fiction is embodied in this statement: "There is, one could argue, not just a 'grammar' of narrative convention, but also a grammar of life--those elements without which human activity no longer looks recognizable, and without which fiction no longer seems human." Much of the fiction Wood reviews unfavorably is, in one way or another, ultimately charged with this offense, that it doesn't "seem human." He so conflates a particular aesthetic strategy with the representation of the "human" that the writers of whom he disapproves are more or less declared "inhuman," their work morally grotesque. (This seems to me the upshot of Wood's recent dismissal of Cormac McCarthy, for example.) But this is a wholly unjustified substitution of "human" for "realistic." Since all writers are human beings writing about their own human experiences or those of other human beings, how can any work of fiction be something other than "human" at its core? It may not provide James Wood with a sampling of the human that meets his high moral standards, but to suggest that the dispute between realists and anti-realists is over who gets to be more "human" seems to me supremely unjust, if not simply absurd.

Furthemore, it turns out that what a work of fiction needs to be "recognizable" as human is to conform to W. J. Harvey's "constitutive category":

The four elements of this category are, he suggests, Time, Identity, Causality, and Freedom. I would add Mind, or Consciousness. Any fiction that lacked all five elements would probably have little power to move us. The defense of this broad idea of mimesis should not harden into a narrow aesthetic, for it ought to be large enough to connect Shakespeare's dramatic mimesis, say, with Dickens's novelistic mimesis, or Dostoevsky's melodramatic mimesis with Muriel Spark's satiric mimesis, or Pushkin's poetic mimesis with Platonov's lyrical mimesis.

As far as I can tell, what this means is that fiction needs to be "realistic" enough that it doesn't collapse into the "entirely random and chaotic." (Although in adding "Mind, or Consciousness," Wood again ups the ante. Now it must not only depict "plausible human activity," it must do so with psychological plausibility.) Does Wood really think there are many works of fiction that don't meet this minimal standard? Is experimental fiction merely a descent into chaos? In order to rescue the innovative fiction he apparently likes, Wood broadens his definition of "plausible" even further: "Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Hamsun's Hunger and Beckett's Endgame are not representations of likely or typical human behavior; but they draw their power, in part, from their connection to the human." Well, of course they do. How could they do otherwise? The question is whether in so doing they have done it artfully, and whether the art involved had to be "realistic" in the less sweeping sense of the term. ("Melodramatic mimesis"?)

5) This is perhaps the most provocative thing Wood has to say in his essay: ". . .both sides in this argument are perforce Flaubert's children--Flaubert being at once the greatest realist and the great anti-realist, the realist who dreamed of abolishing the real, the luxurious stylist who longed to write 'a book about nothing, a book with no external attachment.'" Unless Wood deplores Flaubert for his "luxury," for his effort to transcend mere documentary description, one now wonders why he finds fault with the anti-realists. If they too are among Flaubert's children, then they are only attempting to live up to his ideal of the autonomy and integrity of literary art. They just don't think that realism as he understood it is the only way to accomplish this. Wood says further of Henry James that he "found Flaubert's realism exemplary but lacking, because he felt that it did not extend to a subtle moral scrutiny of the self." If Wood agrees with James, then we have arrived at his real complaint against the anti-realists: It's not that they fail to recognize the centrality of "realism" (Wood has already defined the term so broadly as to essentially render it meaningless, anyway), it's that they fail to engage in "moral scrutiny." He objects to this group of Flaubert's offspring not on aesthetic but on moral grounds.

6) In his concluding paragraph, Wood asks us to "imagine a world in which the only possible novel available was, say, Pynchon's Vineland and books like it. It would be a hysterical and falsifying monotony. By contrast, a world in which the only available novel was, say, A House for Mr. Biswas would be a fearfully honest, comic, tragic, compassionate, and above all deeply human place." Now, I happen to like both of these books (Vineland less than either V or Gravity's Rainbow, however). I'm glad we live in a world where both kinds of books are available. It would seem, however, that Wood could be perfectly content in the world occupied only by Naipaul. No variety is necessary because this would be a "deeply human place." (What kind of place would the Pynchon world be? Superficially primatial?) Note as well the way in which this comparison is made in the form of moral judgment. Pynchon is "hysterical" and "falsifying." Naipaul is "honest" and compassionate." James Wood is perfectly entitled to elevate Naipaulian realism and denigrate Pynchonian anti-realism (if that's what he wants to call them--I don't think either term does either writer much justice). I do wish he wouldn't call those of who like the sort of thing a writer like Pynchon does hysterics and liars.

(At the beginning of his essay, Wood speculates that the struggle between realism and anti-realism is especially intense in the United States because of our "anti-intellectualism" and because of "the perceived traditionalism of creative writing programs, long suspected of exerting a gray monopoly over American writing." I think this analysis is also profoundly wrong, but would prefer to put off further discussion of it specifically for a separate, and later, post.)