The Reading Experience

Literary Illiteracy

Reason editor Nick Gillespie reports on a panel entitled "English Studies and Political Literacy":

The University of Chicago's Kenneth Warren emphasized the role of pre-college education, even as he gently chided moderator [Donald] Lazere for subtly equating "political literacy" with agreement on a particular political agenda. Lazere argued that instructors shouldn't shy away from politics in their classroom, because "literature can't be studied independent of political literacy." In fact, he said, they should bring in a wide array of sources, including The Nation and The Weekly Standard, where appropriate or relevant. That's all well and good. . . .

No, that isn't "all well and good." The notion that "literature can't be studied independent of political literacy" is bullshit. It's this idea that's brought ruin upon "English Studies" to begin with. It's just another way of trivializing literature, making it subservient to politics or culture or history or whatever. What other academic discipline has to endure this kind of marginalization, even on the part of those who belong to it? What would political scientists say if it were asserted that in order to understand politics one must first know poetry? Is it the case that, say, microbiology "can't be studied independent of political literacy"? Why is it only literature that can't be allowed its own autonomy, its own integrity as a subject that might be studied for its own sake and might provide its own kind of knowledge?

I am just old enough to have gone through graduate school before "English Studies" became entirely a hostage to political advocacy. I can attest that many of my fellow students were apolitical, at least as far as their approach to literary study was concerned. Some had decided to study literature precisely because it was removed from the hectoring insistence of political debate and required no political "literacy" in the sense this term is being used by Gillespie and the participants in this panel--i.e., they were free to ignore the inanities of politicians and other self-appointed cultural savants. Few of these students had any trouble separating politics from the study of Medieval drama or 18th-century fiction. Now we're being told it's necessary to consult The Weekly Standard in order to appreciate Wordsworth and Coleridge?

That Gillespie would so readily agree that political literacy is a necessary prerequisite to the study of literature only underscores the fact that conservative and libertarian critics of the academy are not opposed in principle to the politicization of academic literary study. They'd just prefer that the propoganda disseminated to college students be of the right-wing rather than the left-wing variety. Gillespie quotes Mark Bauerlein on the "diversification" of literary study: "Bring in a little less Foucault and a little more Hayek. Some Whitaker Chambers to go along with Ralph Ellison." Wrong again. Get rid of both Foucault and Hayek. Neither of them belong in literature courses. Pair Chambes with Ellison if you're interested in postwar intellectual history, but leave out Chambers altogether if you're teaching postwar American literature.

According to Gillespie, "Bauerlein also pushed for instructors to provide students with an American identity that is positive. 'Often the identity students get is too negative,' he said. 'We need not uncritical patriotism, but some line of argument about American history that students can espouse while criticizing other elements.' That sort of positive feeling would, he argued, make it easier for students to want to become engaged politically and civically." This is where the transformation of literary study into another mode of "political literacy" gets us. Left-wing "scholars" want to indoctrinate students with a "negative" view of American history, while their right-wing counterparts want to cultivate "positive feelings." A pox on both.

Dizzy

This post is an addendum of sorts to Mirian Burstein's excellent critique of Lindsay Waters' essay "Literary Aesthetics: The Very Idea." Miriam has insightfully pointed out the essay's conceptual flaws, and I would just like to amplify her suggestion that these flaws ultimately undermine what otherwise might be a valuable argument on behalf of aesthetic analysis in literary study.

"Literary criticism no longer aims to appreciate aesthetics — to study how human beings respond to art," Waters asserts. "Do you get dizzy when you look at a Turner painting of a storm at sea? Do certain buildings make you feel insignificant while others make you feel just the right size? Without understanding that intensely physical reaction, scholarship about the arts can no longer enlarge the soul." As Miriam notes, the ease with which Waters slides between "literary criticism" and "literary scholarship" is quite conspicuous. While I think it is manifestly true that "scholarship" (defined as the disciplinary discourse of literary study) has abandoned aesthetics as a focus of attention, it is harder to maintain that "criticism" has similarly turned its back on aesthetic "appreciation," especially if you are willing to grant that literary criticism might still be produced by critics outside the ivy-covered walls. Waters apparently shares the now reflexive assumption that all seriously intended literary commentary originates from the academy, but a more useful approach to the problem he identifies might be to encourage a renewal of non-academic criticism that does take "literature itself" as its object, rather than the maintenance of specifically academic norms and protocols.

Waters is if anything even more vague and amorphous in his ostensible definition of the aesthetic as the "feeling" one gets when experiencing great art. Nothing in Waters's essay conveys to me a very clear sense of what it is exactly that Waters wants us to return to when we finally do return to aesthetics beyond a rather saccharine idea of "emotion"--our "intensely physical reaction" to art. Waters doesn't seem to realize how close his notion of studying "how human beings respond to art" is to Stanley Fish's version of reader-response criticism--which posits that what counts in the literary experience occurs "in the reader"--while at the same time he identifies Fish as one of those pied pipers leading academic criticism astray. One could argue that both Waters and Fish are too quick to dismiss the formal qualities of literary texts--in my opinion, the elements with which all aesthetic analysis must begin--in favor of the reader's response, but if I had to choose between Fish's overemphasis on interpretation and Waters' overemphasis on psuedo-sensation, I think I'd take the former.

I agree with Miriam that Waters' concern for the reader's soul "treads close to elevating art to a form of religion." In their weakest moments, the New Critics were guilty of this as well, and in my opinion it was a discomfort with this tendency that led to New Critical formalism being supplanted by "harder" kinds of hermeneutics, reader-response theory being among the first. While feeling "dizzy" over a great poem is a perfectly fine response by individual readers, at some point one's light-headedness has to be dispelled for further discussion of the poem to take place. It would be hard to maintain that very much of scholastic value is taking place in a classroom full of vertiginous students.

I find Waters' invocation of Whitman particularly puzzling: "We cannot help feeling when we read Whitman's Leaves of Grass, for example, that we are being inundated by words, as the poet piles clause after clause after clause upon us. We have to grapple with finding order (not to mention a verb) — to assert some kind of control. That kind of experience embodies the experience of the new democratic order that Whitman was celebrating, gives us a sense, not an idea, of that order." The inundation by words in Whitman is real enough, but it seems to me that Waters has skipped over several steps in the reading process in his conclusion that we end up experiencing "the new democratic order that Whitman was celebrating." Isn't the first kind of "order" we struggle to find precisely a formal order, an aesthetic patterning or arrangement of the "clause after clause after clause" that will help us understand the innovations Whitman is introducing to poetry, the "sense" in which we are to appreciate Whitman's overstuffed lines as verse? Miriam contends that Waters "keeps moving back and forth between the critic's aesthetic response to art. . .and claims about what art itself does," but I never get even an "idea" of what Waters thinks "aesthetic" means as applied to Walt Whitman's poetry. It seems to me that he merely ushers meaning as proposition out the front door as he sneaks it back in through the side door.

A coherent account of the aesthetic effects of literature would have to include the reader's experience of works of poetry or fiction, but I don't see how a concept of aesthetics that focuses entirely on that experience could even be called "aesthetics" to begin with. The psychology of reading is a worthy subject of investigation, although surely the aesthetic is not simply a psychological state. Fish began emphasizing the role of the reader in the study of literature because some forms of "appreciation" threatened to devolve into simple veneration of the "verbal icon." Although I agree with Waters that in subsequent years literary scholars too often "continue to shuck text of its form, reducing it to a proposition to be either affirmed or denied," as far as I can tell what he calls "free aesthetic response" is just as oblivious of the effects of form in provoking "aesthetic response." In seeking to be "free" it substitutes emotional immediacy for attentiveness to the designs and devices that determine (and often defer) meaning. As John Dewey maintains in Art as Experience, such attentiveness is itself ultimately liberating, as it expands our apprehension of what "experience" might be like. When Lindsay Waters asserts that Dreiser's portrayal of Carrie Meeber allows us to "experience ourselves as vain and frail and ambitious," he's actually describing a response to the novel that constricts the literary experience, that reduces it to an opportunity for vicarious self-dramatizing.

Nattering On

When a writer has been an important literary presence for as long as John Barth (his first novel was published in 1956), and especially when his work has been as steadfastly unconventional as Barth's, it is no doubt inevitable that such a writer will provoke his share of reactionary, willfully ignorant criticism. In this regard, Ethan Gilsdorf's San Francisco Chronicle review of Barth's new collection of novellas, Where 3 Roads Meet, does not disappoint.

According to Gilsdorf:

When Barth finally gets on with the story and loses the postmodern soft-shoe routine, the "extended interruption-of-an-interruption" in "Tell Me" begins to build an engaging story. In spite of the tangents that get tangled in their own thought processes, the shock ending manages to deliver a punch. The reader is left wondering how much more poignant it could have been were the narrative less afraid to confront sentiment head-on.

A) Barth can't "get on" with his stories without the "postmodern soft-shoe routine" because performing such a routine is precisely his way of telling stories. Asking him to lose his "verbal pyrotechnics" and his "sef-consciousness" ("talking about the telling itself," as Gilsdorf clumsily puts it) is asking him to lose his authorial personality, his reason for telling stories in the first place. If you don't like Barth's approach to the writing of fiction--by which everyone has to agree that stories are all made up in the first place and that reflecting on how stories affect us is a satisfactory substitute for the "suspension of disbelief"--the appropriate response would be to read someone else, someone who won't "frustrate our expectations of conventional narrative," not to ask Barth to become a different kind of writer.

B) Barth doesn't do "poignant." At heart Barth is a comic writer, and all comic writers worth their joke-making will scrupuloulsy avoid the "poignant." The "poignant" is precisely the sort of thing comic fiction attempts to deflate. (And by "comic" here I mean the kind of comedy one finds in, say, Beckett, not in Garrison Keillor.) Neither Barth nor his postmodern colleagues have ever been writers to turn to if what you want is to "confront sentiment head-on." Again, to ask him to do this is to ask him to renounce what has always been an important part of the postmodern mission: to resist reducing fiction to the expression of cheap sentiment. (I know that some current writers, including David Foster Wallace, have wondered whether it is possible to infuse postmodernism with more "sentiment." My answer is "no," but then I don't understand why anyone would even think of blending the two. If you want to write sentimental fiction, just do it.)

Later, Gilsdorf ruminates:

Whether Barth is long lost in his own funhouse of verbal trickery, or is parched from a well of inspiration run dry, it's clear he's not changing. Still, "Where Three Roads Meet" raises useful questions: If a writer insists on (or is obsessed by) returning to the same themes and forms, must his readers remain impressed, or are they permitted to grow irritated? Does the author's knowledge that he's trying the reader's patience permit him to natter on?

"If a writer insists on (or is obsessed by) returning to the same themes and forms"? Well, now, in my reading of Shakespeare, of Dickens, the Romantic poets, Hawthorne, James, Thomas Hardy, Hemingway, Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Yeats--actually of almost all serious writers still worth reading, I seem to find constant return to "the same themes and forms." Am I supposed to have grown "irritated"? Silly me. I just assumed that this was the mark of poets and novelists "obsessed" with the subjects that most interested them, that most strongly provoked their own powers of invention and led them to invest their "forms" with both imagination and authenticity. If I had only known they were just nattering on.

Go Your Own Way

Laura Demanski (OGIC) quotes an e-mail from a reader taking exception to criticism of writing workshops:

As a veteran of a famed MFA program in theatre directing and several playwriting workshops, I must take issue with your complaint against MFA programs. Granted, some of the craft “rules” taught there are arbitrary, based on the instructor’s whim (for example, one of my favorite playwriting teachers hated all plays set at Thanksgiving). But such “rules” are made to be broken when the artist does so for an effective artistic reason. The point is, master the form first, then learn how to bend it to your own ends.

The problem with this, at least as applied to, say, the short story, is that there is no "form" to be mastered in the first place. The short story (the novel as well) is not an identifiable entity, a vessel into which a succession of slightly modified concoctions are to be poured. It is a name for all of the various kinds of shorter fictions writers have produced, a convenience for readers that indicates the larger group of related works in the context of which the "story" at hand would like to be considered. If there are "rules," they are only those that ought not to be violated if the writer wants his work to be included in this category. (And the number of such rules continually diminishes. One could say that a short story should not look like a newspaper column, or a set of instructions for operating a DVD recorder, but it is of course entirely possible that an enterprising writer might indeed be able to make interesting stories out of such non-storylike forms. In other words: fiction is not itself a "form." It feeds on forms.)

Laura agrees that "if the 'rules' are taught with some nuance and flexibility, and as a foundation rather than an ultimatum, they should do more good than harm." Laura is right to stres "nuance and flexibiltiy," but I really can't finally accept that "rules" have anything to do with learning to write worthwhile fiction. It's not even that what workshops most often produce is "a lot of pallid if technically unimpeachable writing," as Laura further puts it. "Technically unimpeachable" in relation to what? Other workshop-derived stories obeying arbitrary rules? The point of Sam Sacks's essay, it seems to me, was precisely to protest the creation of these rules in the first place, to point out the insipidity of such formulas as "A Story, as it progresses, is counterbalanced by a Backstory, which informs the reader what of importance happened beforehand. Both Story and Backstory must have a pronounceable Why Now. . . ." Etc. This isn't just rigid, it's silly.

How might such "rules" be applied to the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne? de Maupassant? Kafka? Faulkner? Beckett? Donald Barthelme? What set of rules could be devised that would cover all of the demonstrably great fiction writers who have otherwise not just resisted the kinds of prescriptions the workshop system likes to issue but would have laughed at the idea that what they were up to had anything to do with "mastering the form" as academic Creative Writing understands it? The best thing a workshop instructor could do (and I agree with Laura that "MFA programs neither can nor should be abolished"--too many truly good writers have emerged from them to conclude that they really manage to inflict permanent harm, and the chance to read and to practice one's craft is an unqualified good) would be to familiarize students with as many of the current and past practices of fiction-writing as possible and encourage them to find their own way.

Deep Significance

Grumpy Old Bookman sums up his impatience with Serious Fiction and those who promote it:

The attitude in question takes the form of an assumption that this stuff is far superior, in every way, to books which just tell a story. It is held to be self-evident that a novel which concerns itself with Big Issues is, by definition, more worthy of attention, shelf space, and sales than is a book which contents itself with telling a story.

Later in the same post, he elaborates:

Finally, I want to return to my point that the novel which eschews all attempt at Deeper Significance, and just tells a story, is at least as valuable (actually rather more so) than one which seeks to weave in some message or other. . .A story, in my opinion, doesn't have to mean anything. But it does have to have an effect; otherwise both writer and reader are lost. And the story also has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I agree with GOB that novels treating "Big Issues" are usually not worth reading and that critics who laud works of fiction for raising such issues are usually less interested in fiction than in advocating their own favored "ideas." But the alternative for the writer who doesn't pretend to dispense great Wisdom is not necessarily to produce "books which just tell a story."

GOB appears to reduce novels to only their narrative details. A coherent plot--"a beginning, a middle, and an end"--is not just necessay so that all parties concerned don't get "lost," but seems to be entirely sufficient. Simply "telling a story" discharges the author's duties, exhausts the possibilities of fiction as a literary medium. But this view of what is involved in writing fiction doesn't actually cede much room for "writing" itself. It doesn't seem to make any difference to GOB that fiction is made of words and that words can be made to perform many interesting tasks in addition to, or rather than, telling stories. Story is all. But to demand that writers confine themselves to storytelling of a sort that might be done just as well and just as readily in another medium seems arbitrary and short-sighted indeed.

What of the stylistic pleasures a work of fiction might provide? The pleasure of witnessing language used in novel and challenging ways (or even just moderately interesting ways), of experiencing the transformative power of written language (the power to transform perception as well as our understanding of what language itself can express) when it is wielded by a particularly venturesome imagination? Or the potential capacity of form to sustain the reader's interest, either by altering narrative convention in some dramatically compelling way, or by substituting its own kind of dramatic effect for narrative convention altogether. The way "story" is disclosed to the reader--not to mention the way point of view affects our response to narrated events--is surely just as important as the story itself, since story is really just a secondary quality that we habitually abstract from the immediacy of the work as a dynamic organization of words. Would GOB really say that a writer's attention to the formal and stylistic possibilities of fiction count for nothing compared to his/her obligation to "tell a story"?

GOB maintains that he doesn't so much begrudge writers with literary ambitions as "resent" readers and critics who use "Serious Fiction" for their own purposes: "it's the attitude of those who sell, review, and -- above all -- use the damn things as teaching material." He wants fiction to be allowed its "emotional" impact and literary critics to otherwise leave well enough alone. This is an entirely defensible position, except that he clearly does take out his frustrations on the overly ambitious writer--in this case Dara Horn and her novel The World to Come. He goes out of his way to point out flaws in the novel that, in his opinion, serve to diminish its emotional impact (all the while insisting he did like the book, sort of) and interprets any deviation from traditional narrative form as an example of putting on airs. I maintain, on the other hand, that truly serious writers deviate from the tried and true in order to enhance the reading experience, not to subvert it. "Emotion" is a feature of this experience, but not the only one. It is futile to demand that readers refrain from reflection on the nature of the reading experience, especially when we believe that what we've read has been paricularly rewarding. It's something we do. At its best, this is called criticism, and it doesn't have to go on a quest for "Deeper Significance" in order to be useful.

The Center of the Critic's Task

In his attempted take-down of Edmund Wilson, which is largely of the "he was a very bad man" variety, Joseph Epstein does say this about Wilson's literary criticism:

As a critic, Edmund Wilson was at his best explaining how literature worked; what seemed to interest him most was the mechanics of creation. He was able to demonstrate why the modernist writers were important by showing precisely how they went about doing things not hitherto done. He was less good, I think, at what Henri Bergson defined as the center of the critic’s task— namely, “developing in thought what artists wanted to suggest emotionally.”

I'm not familiar with the definition by Bergson he cites, but presumably Epstein agrees with it. In that case, the problem with Wilson as Epstein sees it is not a consequence of Wilson's limitations as a critic but with Epstein's own conception of what literary criticism is all about. (If Epstein does not agree with this notion that the critic primarily translates "emotion," then he's merely exploiting it for its value to his broader argument that Wilson was a cold fish, a drunken sot incapable of emotional responses in the first place.)

The literary critic's task is not to meditate on "what artists wanted to suggest emotionally." Insofar as the critic is first of all a reader, he/she does experience the same emotions in reading works of literature as any other reader, but the emotional effects are inevitably particular to, and not detachable from, the reading experience itself. How exactly is it possible to "develop in thought" an emotional suggestion? How could such a "thought" be anything but incomplete and lifeless in comparison to the actual emotion? And why would we need a critic to expatiate on his/her emotional reactions in this way?

If Wilson "was at his best explaining how literature worked," then he was indeed a very successful critic. (I tend to think he was good at this only fitfully, his interest in history otherwise overwhelming his skills as a close reader.) That "[h]e was able to demonstrate why the modernist writers were important by showing precisely how they went about doing things not hitherto done" is highly in his favor, and books like Axel's Castle and The Wound and the Bow remain valuable works of literary criticism precisely because they are descriptive and analytical rather than registers of emotion. So much so that it is puzzling why Epstein has concluded that Wilson's books and essays "no longer fortify me." The two books I have mentioned provide plenty of nutrients if what you are interesed in is literature and not some inchoate sense of "mystery," which, according to Epstein, characterizes the sort of writer--Conrad, Kafka--Wilson could never understand. (Epstein's description of these writers strikes me as willfully reductive.) Take "mystery" far enough and there's simply nothing a critic might say about such writers at all. Everything disappears into mysticism and, yes, "emotion."

Epstein further sketches his idea of the critic's role in the conclusion to this essay, in which he announces that "Critics are not permitted such large margins of stupidity [as are some artists]. It matters that they get things right; their opinions, which is all they chiefly have, are crucial. Wisdom, in a critic, is never excess baggage. . . ." Critics don't just have "opinions." They have informed opinions, which are supported by careful explication of the text at hand. Critics are "wise" if they restrict themselves to this task (recognizing that this is far as "getting things right" goes--there are always other opinions that are just as informed) and do not cast about for "Wisdom" of the more pompous kind. Joseph Epstein apparently wants the literary critics he admires to be sages (anti-Communist and anti-Freudian sages). I'll allow them to be ordinary humans and to direct their attention primarily to the "mechanics of creation."

Blind Alleys

Steve Mitchelmore quotes this passage from Reiner Stach’s biography of Kafka:

[Kafka] demanded much more from his texts than formal unity; he sought a seamless linking of all motifs, images, and concepts. Beginning with "The Judgement," he was generally able to achieve this unity in the stories he completed. These writings leave no narrative residues or blind alleys. Not one detail of Kafka’s descriptions, whether the color of a piece of clothing, a gesture, or simply the time of day, is merely illustrative. Everything carries meaning, refers to something, and recurs.

He then asks: "Curiously, one might compare this with the detective novel. So why do I loathe that kind of book?"

I'd volunteer this answer: For the most part, detective novels create a "seamless linking" that's meant to point us forward, to the solving of the crime. "Motifs, images, and concepts" are the means to an end, interlocking parts to a puzzle that is finally assembled in its entirety, only to then be disregarded except insofar as it gives us a finished picture--mystery resolved.

Kafka's fiction evokes a unity that points only to itself, to its existence as an aesthetic creation. Kafka directs us not to the resolution of his metaphysical mysteries but to the impossibility of such a resolution. His "motifs, images, and concepts" are ends in themselves, interlocking parts of a puzzle the signficance of which lies in the process of their assembly, not in the finished picture, which can never be brought quite into focus.

Detective novels explore guilt--the specific guilt of specific characters in specific circumstances. Crimes have been committed. Kafka's fiction also explores guilt--the guilt of being alive, of feeling one's existence cannot be justified and will never measure up. Crimes have been committed before we were born, but we must pay for them nevertheless.

Once a detective novel has been "consumed," the reason for its being goes with it. How many detective novels bear re-reading? (There are exceptions, Raymond Chandler for one.) Kafka's novels and stories must be re-read because they can never be consumed. They're poison to the system. They leave their readers as perpetual hunger artists. The next time we read, say, The Trial, perhaps we will finally perceive it for what it is, not ask it for answers to questions it never promised to provide.

If "everything carries meaning" in Kafka's fiction, it is meaning that ultimately undoes itself. Everything portends, nothing is settled. Detective novels assure us that things will be settled, that knowledge is possible. Our world, although brutal, makes sense. We exchange the one for the other. Kafka tells us that this a delusion. The world may be cruel, but it also makes no sense.

Native Sensibilities

In his otherwise very interesting Bookforum essay on Georges Perec, James Gibbons asserts that

. . .there is also something about Perec's brand of postmodernism that seems inimical to many American writers' attitudes toward their craft. The encyclopedic expansiveness of Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, William Vollmann, et al. has never been harnessed to an especially exacting formal rigor, and the impulse of meticulous description so fundamental to a writer like Perec may seem, to native sensibilities, overly fussy, even effete. Put another, metaphorical way, American writers tend toward an expressive register commensurate with the open spaces and endless distances of our continent; Perec's magnitude is no less great, but his vastness is essentially urban, highly structured, and by necessity constrained, entailing complex negotiations and yielding delight in serendipity, surprise, and incongruity.

Gibbons draws a viable enough distinction between the intricate formalism of Perec's fiction and the "expansiveness" of Pynchon, Wallace, and Vollmann (whose work might be more accurately characterized by what Tom LeClair has called the "art of excess"), but I wonder about the utility of of attributing these differences to national or geographical qualities--"commensurate with the open spaces and endless distances of our continent." (I would also question the extent to which Pynchon in particular lacks "formal rigor"; V seems to me a "highly structured" novel indeed, one that requires multiple readings for its skillfully patterned motifs to become entirely visible.) At best this seems to suggest that American writers are simply energetic primitives, at worst that the likes of Wallace and Vollmann are "manly" writers, while Perec is some sort of pantywaist.

Vollmann was born in Los Angeles, Wallace in upstate New York, Pynchon on Long Island, so it would be hard to argue that they have literally channeled these "open spaces and endless distances" in their fiction. Perhaps Gibbons is only attempting to account for some essential difference between the "postmodernism" of American writers and that of Europeans, or, indeed, between American and European fiction in general. But this difference surely wouldn't be something bred in the bones or absorbed through the soil, but is instead a matter of influence. American writers are more likely to be influenced by other American writers--many of whom have written fiction that does attempt to capture those things that are peculiary "American" about America--while, say, French writers are more likely to have gone to school, so to speak, on their own literary tradition. This isn't so much a question of how culture and environment themselves shape an artist's sensibilities or predilections but of the way in which culture unavoidably points the artist in one direction rather than another. What might American fiction look like if Perec and his fellow Oulipians--including the American Oulipian Harry Mathews--did become more fully available to would-be writers?

But then we Americans inhabit a culture that seems to find "literary" writing in general (much less the "complex negotiations" of a Perec) to be suspiciously "effete." That American postmodernists might seem laggardly in their capacity for game-playing and their delight in "incongruity" when compared to a Georges Perec or a Raymond Queneau would no doubt strike certain no-nonsence American readers and critics as outlandish. Too many American writers disdain "psychological realism" or good old-fashioned storytelling as it is. Thus, except through the admirable efforts of publishers like Godine (publishers of Perec) or Dalkey Archive, we probably shouldn't expect to see books by such unmanly Europeans make much of an incursion on American literary life any time soon.