The Reading Experience

A Few Ways of Looking at a Book Review

I'm pretty sure I would find much with which to disagree in Jane Smiley's new book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. I found her argument a few years ago about the superiority of Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, to be wholly unconvincing. However, Ellen Heltzel's review of the book is a little hard to take.

Athough she allows that Thirteen Ways "is hardly without merits," Heltzel's ultimate judgment is that "in its long and discursive form, [it] lacks pep and the intellectual rigor that could have made it exceptional."

Huh? It lacks both "pep" and "intellectual rigor"? Isn't the presence of the former usually at the expense of the other? Is this just a careless way of dismissing a book the reviewer didn't like, or is she arguing that a book with "intellectual rigor" might also be peppy? It's hard to conclude that Heltzel really thinks the book lacks rigor, since elsewhere she calls it "dry," "a book that contains lots of information," and one that reflects "a highly refined taste, not a welcome to all comers." That it is "long and discursive" itself suggests that Heltzel's problem with the book is that it has too much "intellectual rigor" rather than otherwise.

A little later Heltzel paraphrases Smiley's argument that "novels themselves don't send readers to the ramparts. . .but they create the psychological conditions that do," and then comments that "her reasoning seems less convincing than insular. What of Beethoven and Wagner, not to mention Edward Albee and Arthur Miller? Has Smiley spent too much time at the English department water cooler?"

Once more: Huh? When did Beethoven or Edward Albee ever send people "to the ramparts"? How did I miss that? How is it insular to suggest that it is the role of serious fiction first to be art rather than rabble-rousing? And even though the work of Wagner has been used for (unforeseen) political purposes and Miller's plays are often politically engaged, how much real political change ensues from a performance of a Wagner opera or of The Crucible?

Heltzel voices what seems to be her true objection to Smiley's book at the very end of the review:

. . .Thoughtful and informed, her responses are studied, not impassioned.

Here again, the teacher in Smiley trumps the advocate. "Thirteen Ways" is definitely a book that appeals to the mind, not the heart.

One would think that Heltzel might have concluded simply from the book's title that this is precisely a book resulting from "study" rather than "passion." I can't really see that it is a flaw in the book she has actually written that "the teaher in Smiley trumps the advocate." There are times when a "teacherly" book--that is a work of serious literary criticism--is preferable to a polemic. (And vice-versa: Why can't we have both?) And what can it mean to admit that Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel is "thoughtful and informed," but to then condemn it because it "appeals to the mind, not the heart"? Is reading fiction only an exercise in emotional outpouring? Is there no room for contemplative literary criticism? Is there any other kind?

Betrayed

Roger Ebert admits that until he saw Martin Scorcese's No Direction Home he never really forgave Bob Dylan for the behavior he exhibited in D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967):

In my review, I called the movie "a fascinating exercise in self-revelation," and added: "The portrait that emerges is not a pretty one." Dylan is seen not as a "lone, ethical figure standing up against the phonies," I wrote, but is "immature, petty, vindictive, lacking a sense of humor, overly impressed with his own importance and not very bright."

I felt betrayed. In "Don't Look Back," he mercilessly puts down a student journalist, and is rude to journalists, hotel managers, fans. . .

Well, it's hard to be gracious and understanding, I'd guess, when you're writing and recording some of the most innovative and entrancing popular music ever recorded and the best those you're performing it for can do is heckle and jeer. It's not that Dylan was attempting to be the "lone, ethical figure standing up against the phonies." He was trying to push his talent as far as it would take him, which also meant he had to leave the earnest folk music that made him popular behind. You'd think that those who had previously professed to admire him for his music--as opposed to the political posturing they apparently thought that music represented--might have been willing to give him a little room in which to do this.

People who still prefer Dylan the early protest singer probably have never really "gotten" what he was up to in such albums as Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. His turn to surrealism and other forms of hallucinatory lyricism required that he abandon the folk ballad-derived melodies with which he began for the fuller rock-based sound to be found on these records. (Although of course the influence of these ballads would always remain.) In the process he transformed rock 'n roll into a form of popular music capable of a kind of aesthetic seriousness, a form that in the hands of other talented people as well (John Lennon, Pete Townsend, Neil Young) could extend its own musical possibilities and sometimes express complex sentiments and ideas.

These albums did undeniably mark a kind of repudiation of the politicized folk music those fans in Pennebaker's film wanted to protect. But I don't think Dylan wanted to dismiss this music altogether; he merely wanted to illustrate through example that it had its inherent limitations. Ultimately Dylan was more interested in music per se and in lyrical content as a continuation and complement of purely musical values than in "protest," in "saying something." To me the hectoring audiences captured in Pennebaker's film and sampled by Scorsese represent a view of "folk music" as virtuous attitude rather than as what Dylan later called that "old, strange music." It's what makes so much of this music from the early 1960s almost unlistenable now.

Teaching Science Fiction

James Sallis informs us that:

When teaching science fiction, I always suggest that to fully understand a story, one must know the period in which it was written. A story written in the 1940s, for instance, may well come from a different mind-set and from wholly different conventions-- effectively from another world -- than our own. One has little trouble getting the story of ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers," or even understanding in large part the sources of its power: fear of being taken over, the threat of loss of self and identity, the primal fear of sleep and what it may steal from us. But how greatly is that understanding enhanced by the knowledge that, written and first filmed in the heyday of the Cold War, ''Body Snatchers" is as much as anything about the great Communist takeover?

Sallis seems to be suggesting that science fiction in particular requires from later readers a knowledge of "the period in which it was written" because it more intensively reflects the social anxieties and concerns prevalent during that period (although this does clash with Sallis's further contention, in the next paragraph, that SF often "taps into grand themes and archetypes"). Presumably, Invasion of the Body Snatchers might still reach current readers because it examines "the threat of loss of self and identity," a "universal" theme, but our "understanding" of the novel will be deepened if we are aware of the way it also embodied the local and contemporaneous fear of "the great Communist takeover."

Doesn't Sallis have it exactly backward? Isn't it our appreciation of something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the cultural codedness of which is by now surpassingly obvious, and was probably apparent enough even at the time, strengthened when we realize it is also--indeed, mostly--about such things as "the primal fear of sleep," etc.? Sallis himself seems to indicate as much later in his essay when he writes of the way in which the "art of the thing takes over" in good fiction, but why does he then also insist that calling attention to the codednes, returning us to the "period in which it was written," is such a revelatory act? That a work of fiction might have contingent ties to the social realities of its time is surely not surprising. How does an acknowledgment of those realities "enhance" our reading in any important way? Unless you think the social context is likely to be more interesting than the book itself?

The problem here probably lies in the extreme vagueness of Sallis's use of the word "understanding." Does he mean simply that we "understand" that the social context exists? This seems more a matter of fact than of interpretation. Knowing this fact surely doesn't help us much in deciding whether something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers is worth our attention. Does he mean that considering the social context is a means of "understanding" in a more concrete sense, that it is an act of literary criticism per se that illuminates a feature of the work otherwise only dimly perceived? But wouldn't identifying such a work as primarily a political allegory only diminish its appeal, affix it to its historical "period" so firmly as to make reading it mostly superfluous, literally an "academic" question? To me, James Sallis makes reading science fiction seem more like an effort to uncover "mind-set" and debate "conventions" than a potentially satisfying reading experience.

Ephemeral

In an e-mail to yours truly, Finn Harvor (whose blog is called The Screen-Novel Manifestos) observes:

. . .I think it's pretty much the case that online writing tends more toward ephemera than "permana". It's too bad, really, because I don't think most people posting online *want* their work to be read that way; it's simply that posting is easy and effective. I suppose the hope that a lot of more serious bloggers have is that one day their cyber-work will find its way into print. . . .

Is this really true? Is it the case that many bloggers harbor the hope they will be able to leave their temporary residence in the blogosphere and find a more permanent home in print? For those whose blogs are their only access to a community of readers, is the weblog a way to attract the attention of those who can usher their writing into the more upscale neighborhoods of print publishing?

Speaking for myself, I started this blog only after my writing had been appearing in print for a while. I found print-only publication (at least in the kind of journals and literary magazines in which my work appeared) to be frustrating because once your precious piece appeared it may as well have been transmitted to the outer reaches of the solar system for all the indication you got that anyone was reading it. And while people do complain about the "ephemeral" nature of blog-posting, once the current issue of a print publication is superseded by the next, only the library stacks stand between your intricately worked-over essay and publishing oblivion.

When I discovered the existence of literary weblogs, I immediately saw them as an opportunity to reach an actually existing audience and to communicate with other bloggers and readers in a reasonably palpable way. Doing so required altering my style and approach somewhat to meet the demands of the cyber medium, but to a great extent I really haven't had to define my ambitions down in order to adjust to the discursive conventions of the web. Briefer, more concise writing, less burdened with "scholarly" gestures, but otherwise no less "serious" in intent than what I wrote with print in mind. (And the ability to return to certain subjects partly compensates for length restrictions.) I now see my blog writing as a satisfying complement to whatever print writing I might continue to do, but even if I miraculously became a hit in print (I'm not anticipating the day), or even if I never published another word in a paper publication, I'd still see writing for the blog as a worthwhile thing to do.

Many of my litblog colleagues are indeed appearing more often in print (and doing a hell of a job at it), but I don't see much evidence they're planning to abandon their blogs for the presumed advantages of "print culture." The very notion that there is a "print culture" and a "cyber culture" seems to me pernicious. Good writing is good writing, insight is insight, whatever the medium in which they occur. In my opinion, we have reached the point where we're getting at least as much of these things on blogs as in the mainstream media. Long-form essays and criticism are still more often to be found in literary and scholarly journals, perhaps, but their time in cyberspace may yet come as well.

Flair

According to the editors of Poetry:

These rules [for assigning book reviews] were put in place a couple of years ago, because it seemed to us that the state of reviewing in contemporary poetry was so dire. Not only was there a great deal of obvious logrolling going on (friends reviewing friends, teachers promoting students, young poets writing strategic reviews of older poets in power), but the writing was just so polite, professional, and dull. We wanted to eliminate the descriptive review, those pieces you finish without any clear idea of whether its author loved or hated the book in question. We wanted writers who wrote as if there were an audience of general readers out there who might be interested in contemporary poetry. That meant hiring critics with sharp opinions, broad knowledge of fields other than poetry, and some flair.

But isn't there something in between "sharp opinions" and purely "descriptive" reviews? How about something called "critical judgment," an "opinion" supported by the attempt to engage with the work in some detail and on its own terms? If the reviews currently available at the Poetry website (only two of eight, alas) are any indication, the problem with its reviews is not that they are too uniformly negative, as some readers seem to be contending, but that they are all opinion and no critical analysis at all.

In a review of A.R. Ammons's Bosh and Flapdoodle, for example, Danielle Chapman devotes one paragraph to free-floating generalizations about Ammons's career, one paragraph to equally airy generalizations about his poetry (which includes one quotation, but unfortunately it is from a poem not in the collection under review), and a final paragraph in which she pronounces that:

The real problem is that Ammons had seemingly lost the strength, or the will, to suppress his most banal thoughts. Though the inclination towards praise still exists here, it leads only to frustration, even rage, and the scatological ruminations seem like expressions of that rage, as if he intended them to deface the page that no longer welcomed him. It’s harrowing to see how Ammons’s restless need to produce—however uncertainly—kept him from perceiving the magnitude of his earlier accomplishments, or taking solace in them. And while we can understand how a poet who sought greatness as fiercely as Ammons did would react this way to the diminishment of his gift, it doesn’t make it any less painful to watch.

This judgment--about Bosh and Flapdoodle and about Ammons's late work in general--may be entirely correct, but we have only Danielle Chapman's unsupported assertions to vouch for it, and I, for one, am certainly not going to take such assertions as evidence. These may indeed be "sharp opinions," but they are also mostly worthless as criticism. As Judith Kitchen puts it in her published letter, such reviews "elect negativity at the expense of informed analysis, substituting shallowness for depth, attitude for understanding."

The editors' response to Kitchen is remarkably obtuse, inisisting only that it "is important to publish these negative reviews along with the positive ones" to provide "some ballast and context to the critical praise. . . ." Why not ballast both the praise and the condemnation with some actual literary criticism?

Undoubtedly an underlying problem with Poetry's reviews is that the editors do not allow reviewers enough space to say anything of real value about the books under review. Poetry is mostly in the business of publishing poetry, not criticism. But if you're going to review poetry at all, it seems only sensible to encourage your reviewers to make some attempt at "informed analysis." The editors also say in their response that their review policy is a "gesture toward treating poetry as a public art in the same way that films or novels are, both of which are routinely and fiercely argued over in the mainstream media." God help us if magazines like Poetry are now going to submit the discussion of poetry to the same kind of inane blather with which the "mainstream media" currently considers films and novels!

It says something about the editors' perception of the potential audience for poetry--"there are all kinds of signs that a much larger audience for poetry exists in this country," they say--that their review policy encourages such superficial opinionizing. Why would you want to cultivate an audience that prefers such opionizing in the first place? Poetry for those who don't really like it but thrill to frivolous conclusions stated in just the right empty but perky phrases? Who have "broad knowledge of fields other than poetry" but don't demonstrate much "flair" for poetry itself? How does this provide "a service to serious readers"? If anything, it insults them.

Erasing Society

In an essay about the "feud" between the critic Irving Howe and the novelist Ralph Ellison about the role of "protest" in fiction, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington observes:

. . .Whereas Ellison saw a danger in collective generalizations, Howe was attuned to the perils of erasing society. In his autobiography, A Margin of Hope, Howe asks, “Since language has unbreakable ties to possible events in experience, can the meaning or value of a work be apprehended without some resort—be it as subtle and indirect as you wish—to social and moral categories?” The quote is taken from a passage on Howe’s student days, studying the tenets of the New Critics and their aspiration to substitute close analysis of a text for the study of background historical forces. Typically for projects this high-minded, the New Critics failed to see that “the evaluative terms offered by New Criticism—terms like coherence and complexity—were heavily freighted with associations drawn from history, psychology, morality. Is there any evaluative term not so freighted, and must not any attempt to find purely ‘intrinsic’ values wither into sterility?”

Howe's contention that because "language has unbreakable ties to possible events in experience" criticism must attend to "social and moral categories" is an argument that is very frequently made by those who believe that literature transcends mere "art." It is these "unbreakable ties" between language and the reality it represents that make literature different than, say, painting or music. These forms are freer to "be themselves"--to create a closed-off space where aesthetic qualities are allowed a degree of autonomy--than literature because the latter occurs in language and language is the means by which we conduct our everday affairs and through which we make the world meaningful.

In my opinion, however, it is precisely because literature is made from a medium so thorougly tied to modes of conventional discourse and ordinary communication that the creation of genuine art using such a medium should especially be acknowledged and allowed a certain degree of independence from the kind of "social and moral" criticism favored by Irving Howe and his current epigones. Creating literary art is very hard to do, and writers have had to resort to increasingly radical strategies (hence both modernism and postmodernism) to wrest it away from the moral inspectors.

Nothing we do, of course, is entirely beyond the reach of "social and moral categories" if we choose to employ them. But why must we always do so? Why is it necessary to subject that human activity we call "art" to relentless political and cultural analysis even when the artists themselves reject such an analysis as a willful distortion of the purpose of their work? Because we can? Can we not also choose to preserve an aesthetic space for works of literature? Besides, if you really are most interested in sociopolitical or moral interrogation in the first place, why spend your time trying to whip poems and novels into some suitably discursive shape?

Thus, for Howe to say that the kinds of critical terminology associated with New Critical formalism are "heavily freighted with associations drawn from history, psychology, morality" is to say something not very interesting or very useful. That human beings forge their conceptual and critical tools from various sources of human activity is not a very startling revelation. Where else could we get them? No one who ever believed in the efficacy of such terms as "coherence" or "complexity" ever believed they were "instrinsic values" separated from historical forces and derivations. They were just terms that served nicely, right now, to describe the aesthetic goals much of modern literature had set for itself. For me, it is those who cite the historical contingency of everything, as if this were urgent news, who betray a residual longing for absolutes and essences. How awful we don't have them!

Wellington admonishes Ellison for "brandish[ing] a vision of Art with a capital A," for encouraging a fruitless debate that just goes "round and round." But the argument is not circular. The dispute between the view that art is "truth telling" and the view that art is art could be settled if the parties agreed that "Art with a capital A" can exist if we allow it to (that it has its own kind of value if we allow ourselves to find it), but that this doesn't foreclose the possibility that "truth" will emerge for some readers as well (perhaps not so forcefully for others). Those of us who agree with Ellison simply don't want to rush quite so quickly from the immediacy of art to its supplementary implications.

Meaning Something

A while back, Kevin Holtsberry (Collected Miscellany) solticited a response to these questions posed by Betty Smartt Carter:

[I]sn't storytelling all about finding relationships between things? Isn't that why we write and read novels - to prove to ourselves and each other that the world means something?

Carter prefaces these questions by saying of one of the authors she is reviewing that "I like her dry style and her lack of sentiment. She seems less predictably optimistic, less manipulative with our emotions, and therefore more honest than many writers."

Carter actually seems to be suggesting that she found this writer's novel to be more artful than the second one she's reviewing, which "portrays life not as we experience it, but as it looks beyond our experience, in a place where events and people do tie together in mysterious and even sacred ways," but preferred the second because "That transcendent viewpoint trumps even style. . . ."

In a way, Carter performs a useful service by so forthrightly admitting that she would rather have a "transcendent vision" than art--even art that is ultimately more "honest" in the vision it presents--in the novels she reads. No doubt many readers, including readers less disposed to using novels for religious uplift than Carter seems to be, also prefer novels with something to "say," that reassure us that the world does indeed "mean something" and help us find "relationships between things," to those that manifest style or are "less manipulative with our emotions." These are readers who regard fiction as (potentially at least) more than entertainment but who find this something "extra" in a perceived quality of profundity or wisdom.

I'm not going to say that such readers are wrong to value fiction in this way. I object only when it is asserted that these qualities are synonymous with "art," that it is the job of art and literature "to prove to ourselves and each other that the world means something." A work of art can demonstrate to us that we are capable of creating a kind of meaning through the aesthetic order invented by the artist (although this is certainly not the only way of demonstrating this capability--art is not the sole method of "making meaning" available to us), but more often than not this sort of meaning is perceptible to us only because the "world" itself so obviously lacks it, does not "mean something" prior to our efforts to compel it into becoming meaningful. If readers find that a particular novel or other work of art communicates "meaning" of one kind or another, perhaps even profound meaning that transforms the reader's understanding of the world, all well and good. I would simply suggest that as a work of art it has been able to do this precisely because it has "style," avoids sentimentality and predictability, and doesn't manipulate "our emotions" in shabby and shallow ways.

In his own response to Carter's questions, Kevin contends that art "teaches us something about what it means to be human." Perhaps it does, but this can't be art's most immediate goal or we'll have nothing but moralizing and didactic art. Furthermore, so many of our activities (interacting with family and friends, watching the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina) teach us "something about what it means to be human" that this can't be what truly distinguishes the experience of creating and appreciating art from other ways of spending our time. Kevin makes a distinction between "Art" and "art":

. . .Art (with a capital A) can be distinguished from mere craft by rising above itself and its literal structure; by becoming more than the sum of its parts it becomes more than mere "thing." Craft, or art with a lower case "a," can be beautiful, interesting, and require a great deal of skill but it is just what it is (an illustration, a piece of furniture, a photograph, etc.). "Art" on the other hand rises above this level and gets at something deeper.

I understand the point Kevin is making, but, again, I don't think what he is after can be devised through conscious intent, by someone seeking to be an "Artist" rather than an "artist." The "something deeper" is produced by the reader or viewer rather than the writer or artist. The artist sticks to craft and hopes he/she can extend it in such a way that what is created in a sense might "transcend" its status as a well-fashioned "thing." But first of all that is its status, and in my opinion to lose sight of that is to overlook what makes art worthy of our attention to begin with.