The Reading Experience

Many Families Like the Ziskinds

Dara Horn's The World to Come begins with these two paragraphs:

There used to be many families like the Ziskinds, families where each person always knew that his life was more than his alone. Families like that still exist, but because there are so few of them, they have become insular, isolated, their sentiment that the family is the center of the universe broadened to imply that nothing outside the family is worth anything. If you are from one of these families, you believe this, and you always will.

Lately it had begun to seem to Benjamin Ziskind that the entire world was dead, that he was a citizen of a necropolis. While his parents were living, Ben had thought about them only when it made sense to think about them, when he was talking to them, or talking about them, or planning something involving them. But now they were always here, reminding him of their presence at every moment. He saw them in the streets, always from behind, or turning a corner, his father sitting in the bright yellow taxi next to hs, shifting in his seat as the cab screeched away in the opposite direction, his mother--dead six months now, thought it felt like one long night--hurrying along the sidewalk on a Sunday morning, turning into a store just when Ben had come close enough to see her face. It was a relief that Ben could close his office door.

No doubt this seems thoroughly unexceptional to most readers of fiction (which is actually one of the problems with Horn's novel), an expository passage that begins to acquaint us with the themes the book will explore and introduces us to the character whose present actions and experiences provide the hinge by which the rest of the novel moves. But that we have become accustomed to this kind of discourse, all but take it for granted, suggests it has hardened into a convention we simply accept as the strategy appropiate for a certain type of third-person narrative, which itself has become more or less a default setting for our sense of what narrative discourse should be like. I would submit that this strategy has outlived its usefulness and often inhibits the discovery of fresh, genre-expanding aesthetic approaches to fiction, even approaches to the representation of consciousness, which in a novel like The World to Come is carried out in such a perfunctory way that it becomes harder to appreciate some of the novel's other virtues.

Although the reader's attention is first of all directed by the Tolstoy-like opening to what presumably will be the novel's overarching theme, the encompassing context within which the story (as it turns out, multiple and intertwining stories) will proceed. To me, the real work being done by this paragraph is in the way it settles the reader into the novel's discursively shaped world, begins to evoke a particular kind of relationship between narrator and character. Are these generalizations about "family" being offered by a hovering, all-knowing narrator, or have they been filtered through the consciousness and specific experiences of Benjamin Ziskind? The second paragraph confirms that it is the latter, and we are thereafter comfortably placed as readers inside Benjamin's awareness (and, later, several other characters' awareness) and way of thinking about things.

I say "comfortably" because by now this mode of psychological realism, by which the depicted world in a work of fiction comes to us not through omniscient description but through the perception of that fiction's characters ("Lately it had begun to seem to Benjamin Ziskind that the entire world was dead"), has become so thoroughly familiar that it acts as a kind of narrative machine, spinning out sundry versions of what Henry James called third-person "central consciousness" stories in what has admittedly become a very efficient manner. In order to provide a little variety in what is otherwise a rather uniform approach, one can include multiple or alternating centers of consciousness, as Horn does in The World to Come, but even here readers are ultimately encouraged to regard the storytelling as more or less transparent, if anchored in a particular character's version of reality, and the style as unintrusive, if sometimes decorated with a suitable figurative flourish. It is precisley the expecation that the reader will be satisfied with this mechanical, mass-produced variety of storytelling that makes me unable to read a book like The World to Come with much enthusiasm, even though I can acknowledge that Dara Horn does have some narrative imagination and that the novel weaves together its various strands--which include both invented characters and real historical figures, occurences in the present interlaced with episodes from the past--with admirable skill.

In his Editor's Note to the latest issue of Agni, Sven Birkerts describes the mindset with which he approaches the submissions the magazine receives:

Basically—short version—a work of prose (or poetry) can no longer assume continuity, not as it could in former times. It cannot begin, or unfold, in a way that assumes a basic condition of business as usual. The world is no longer everything we thought was the case, and the writing needs to embody this—through sentence rhythm, tone, camera placement, or some other strategic move that signals that no tired assumptions remain in place. This writing must, in effect, create its own world and terms from the threshold, coming at us from a full creative effort of imagination and not by using the old world as a prop. Now, this last is a tricky assertion and it will be very hard to make clear, not to mention binding. I don’t mean for a moment that the world as we know it cannot be invoked, or used, or dissected. Of course it can. But it cannot be taken simply on faith, as unproblematic, treated as a natural signifier; nor can it be cashed in as if it were a treasury bond from the literature of a former era.

I agree entirely with Birkerts, and if I were an editor beginning to read The World to Come for potential publication, I would almost immediately conclude that it "assumes a basic condition of business as usual," that numerous "tired assumptions remain in place," that while the novel does attempt to "create its own world," this attempt comes not from the "threshold," but from a place where fiction is regarded as a set of fixed assumptions and techniques from which is chosen the one that will most efficaciously carry the narrative burden to be placed on it. In this case, Horn doesn't so much lean on the "literature of a former era" (she actually takes this as part of her subject, and her examination of Jewish artistic/literary traditions is one of the more compelling aspects of the novel) as on this set of presently-established conventions, themselves a product of "modern" storytelling practices but, as I have been contending, now urgently in need of reexamination. In invoking the "world to come," Horn's novel is, of course, endeavoring to capture something essential about this world, about our longings and frustrations, but it is impossible to read such passages as the one quoted above without thinking that this is at odds with its very prosaic language and method of character creation, which do depend on customary "props."

As if the author herself recognizes that this method lacks dynamism, especially when confined to a single character over the course of an entire narrative, she presents us with multiple characters and their interconnecting stories and makes of the larger narrative of which these are a part a kind of mystery tale embedded in recent history. These are Dara Horn's efforts to embody a "full creative effort of imagination." The result is entertaining enough, at least when I am able to ignore the listless "sentence rhythms" created by Horn's adherence to the central consciousness-style of narrative exposition. (And all too many other novels require that I similarly put aside any expectation of stylistic vigor, narrative innovation, or formal invention, novels that aren't even going to manifest to me the intelligence and skill with which Dara Horn shuffles around the conventional elements she has chosen to use, or won't manifest anything more than such skill with the conventional.) But, ultimately, I don't want to put these things aside, and I'm increasingly uncertain why so many writers--especially among "emerging writers"--think its appropriate to ask me to do it. There are far too few original stories and arrestingly portrayed characters around to justify losing interest in new ways of telling them and uncommon means of summoning them up.

Fixations

In last weekend's Los Angeles Times Book Review, editor David Ulin (who has, in my opinion, considerably improved this publication since taking it over several months ago) contributes a generally insightful review of the Library of America's collection of early Faulkner novels. However, in his conclusion, Ulin suggests that in Faulkner's fiction

The fixation with time is hardly a modernist sentiment. Rather, it's a classical perspective, in which everything matters and nothing is forgotten or forgiven or redeemed. Yet this is Faulkner's genius: the way he uses modernist strategies but is, in the end, not really a modernist — his ability to be of his time and timeless at once. Unlike Joyce or Pound, there is no orthodoxy in his writing; unlike Stein, he is not using language to play games. No, for Faulkner, stylistic innovation — the lack of punctuation, the run-on sentences, the blurring of chronology, of memory and action — becomes a matter of emotional impact, of the effort to re-create life as it is lived. That's an idea he had to learn how to inhabit, as he moved from the studied diffidence of "Soldiers' Pay" to an aesthetic more three-dimensional and profound. In "Novels 1926-1929," we see the arc of this development, the dramatic shift from artifice to art.

That Faulkner conveys a worldview incorporating "classical" qualities must certainly be true, but I don't see why this feature of his work makes it incompatible with modernism. Does this mean T.S. Eliot, a self-confessed classicist, was also no modernist? Has our definition of "modernist" evolved to the stage where it simply means "chaotic"? No work that moves through apparent disorder to achieve a different kind of order need apply to the "timeless" club? With modernists, nothing matters?

I'm pretty sure I don't at all understand what Ulin means to imply in asserting there is "orthodoxy" in the work of Joyce and Pound. That they are orthodox modernists? That they were thus too committed to the idea of originality, of "making it new"? This strikes me as a pretty bizarre notion. Is he suggesting that some other kind of political, cultural, or religious "orthodoxy" gets expressed in their work? That Pound had some thoroughly obnoxious political views is well known, but Joyce was surely one of the least ideological of writers. What Ulin is getting at remains to me mysterious, but at any rate his degree of orthodox whatever seems a pretty thin measure with which to separate William Faulkner from the other important modernists.

I have to say I find the claim that Faulkner "is not using language to play games" the most wildly mistaken assertion in this whole generally misleading summation. Faulkner at his best is full of game-playing. When Vardaman, the young illiterate Bundren in As I Lay Dying, narrates one of his sections of the book in hyper-fluent Faulknerese, most readers must find the device first of all hilariously funny and probably conclude it is an example, in part, of Faulkner indeed playing a game, having a little fun with the reader. (If this was not Faulkner's intent, it is certainly an effect of this section, one that only enhances the novel's appeal, at least for me.) Or to take The Sound and the Fury: Is not Benjy's chapter an example of verbal/rhetorical gamesmanship? We accept that it is an attempt to reproduce the thought process of a mentally handicapped character, but would Benjy's monologue really stand up to scrutiny as an accurate rendition of the way such a person thinks? I don't think so. It's a compelling illusion, created by Faulkner's skill with words.

The enabling assumption behind Ulin's effort to disentangle Faulkner from the modernist web seems to me to be expressed in the observation that his "stylistic innovation" is really just "a matter of emotional impact, of the effort to re-create life as it is lived." In other words, if you ignore "the blurring of chronology, of memory and action"--the textual features of Faulkner's books that are otherwise their most notable achievements--he's really a perfectly conventional novelist. To give Ulin more credit, he probably means to say that Faulkner's innovations have a purpose, that they are alternative methods of making "art" out of "life," the latter being the subject held in common by all great writers, conventional or experimental. But can't the same thing can be said of Joyce, Proust, or Kafka, of all the modernist poets? Isn't modernism all about finding new ways of portraying an enduring human reality? Ulin's prejudice seems to be for fiction that "re-create[s] life as it is lived," but no writer is in the business of "re-creation of life." As I've insisted before, a novel is a construction of words, "artifice" by nature. No "life" is to be found anywhere within it, only words, sentences, paragraphs. Some writers want to convince you that their words evoke images of the world as we think we know it, summon up "characters" we can accept as like real people; the best of these writers do produce powerful illusions of this kind, but they are illusions, the strategies involved as artificial as any of those dismissed as less "three-dimensional." Faulkner is at times a writer like this, but his fiction always forces awareness of the way these images are produced, and it's hard to believe he didn't know this. Such self-awareness makes him a quintesstial modernist.

I have highlighted this passage from Ulin's review because it encourages a view of both modernism and postmodernism that distorts and devalues their aesthetic ambitions. This view makes precisely the distinction between "artifice" and "art" that Ulin thinks distinguishes Faulkner's lesser from his greater work. "Artifice" is about style or form, while "art" is about life. But how can any work of fiction or poetry be about anything but life? On what can a writer base his art other than his experience as a living human being? That some modernists/postmodernists are preoccupied with aesthetic questions is true enough, but why are these kinds of questions not considered properly "human"? Isn't the ability to formulate the concept of the aesthetic one of our defining features as a species? Presumably Ulin wants Faulkner's books to be sources of wisdom, while I want them to be sources of aesthetic delight. But I can see no reason why the former rather than the latter should be the deciding factor in judging a writer's work sufficiently "profound" to be art.

Wieseltier's World

In his diatribe against Steven Spielberg's Munich, Leon Wieseltier writers:

The film is powerful, in the hollow way that many of Spielberg's films are powerful. He is a master of vacant intensities, of slick searings. Whatever the theme, he must ravish the viewer. Munich is aesthetically no different from War of the Worlds, and never mind that one treats questions of ethical and historical consequence and the other is stupid. Spielberg knows how to overwhelm. But I am tired of being overwhelmed. Why should I admire somebody for his ability to manipulate me? In other realms of life, this talent is known as demagoguery. There are better reasons to turn to art, better reasons to go to the movies, than to be blown away.

I do not generally count myself among Spielberg's defenders--there is something slick and hollow about many of his films--but I've just seen Munich (as well as The War of the Worlds), and I have to say that, while I've come to expect that Wieseltier's discussions of both films and fiction will be obstinately wooden-headed, the willful incomprehension in this "review" seems particularly thick. Although Wieseltier does at least in this instance make relatively clear the source of his discontent: he really doesn't care for art at all.

For Spielberg, Munich is a rather restrained exploration of moral ambiguity, although it perhaps does ultimately signal its theme--a man in a moral quandry--a little too intently. In my opinion, it does not in the least portray the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of "equivalence" or depict only "cruel Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without remorse," as Wieseltier charges. These are by now just the reflexive accusations always leveled at any treatment of this conflict that does not unequivocally take the side of the Israelis. (Note: I mostly take Israel's side myself. I think its cause is just, even while some of its actions have been counterproductive.) What it does is take the principle enunciated by Golda Meir early in the film--that the Jewish people must demonstrate they will no longer accept brutalities committed against them without a response--and examine how it actually plays out in practice. The film's protagonist decides that an eye for an eye is not itself an acceptable precept in a world where everyone has their grievances and innocent people cannot always be spared. This seems to me an entirely defensible response to his experience, and for Wieseltier to classify him as just another "cruel Israeli with remorse" is simply obtuse.

And, as even Wieseltier grudgingly admits, the film is very well made. In fact, in its understated exposition and its muted atmosphere, Spielberg risks alienating those in the mass audience who expect the usual bold-letter filmmaking from this director. So when Wieseltier complains of being "overwhelmed" and "manipulated" he is really protesting against aesthetic values in general. It's the same thing he did several years ago in taking John Updike to task for excessively pretty writing about 9/11/01 ("Such writing defeats its representational purpose because it steals attention away from reality and toward language. . .There are circumstances in which beauty is an obstacle to truth") and in reviewing Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint, which in Wieseltier's world was too "cunning" and had the audacity to "come armored in ambiguity about its own character."

Ambiguity is something Wieseltier apparently cannot abide, especially when it comes dressed up as art, but of course ambiguity is the very essence of art. Without it, literature in particular becomes just another form of moral or political discourse (which is paradoxically what Wieseltier objected to in Checkpoint), but Wieseltier's aversion to being "ravished" by art is obviously so powerful that it is a price he would willingly pay. "There are better reasons to turn to art, better reasons to go to the movies." To be instructed in sanctimony, no doubt.

Leon Wieseltier is the sort of "moral critic" who makes me even more convinced that all approaches to art that don't first of all reckon in a conscientious way with its aesthetic qualities are just beside the point. He is a self-satisfied and self-righteous moralizer whose air of smug superiority hovers over every word he writes. "The only side that Steven Spielberg ever takes is the side of the movies," he proclaims, as if this was an appalling moral failure. But if the alternative is to accept the harsh and colorless conditions of Wieseltier's world, I'll sign up with Spielberg.