The Reading Experience

Elemental

Yuri Rytkheu's A Dream in Polar Fog (Archipelago Books) is a very readable novel that also usefully illuminates a corner of the world with which most readers must be entirely unfamiliar. It tells the story of a Canadian sailor who finds himself living with the Chukchi people of northeastern Siberia at about the time of the Russian revolution. Along the way we learn a great deal about the Chukchi way of life and are provided with several adventure-type setpieces that are quite dramatic and entertaining. Rytkheu's prose has been rendered by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse into a clear and immediate English that no doubt reflects Rytkheu's own functionally plain style. I would never think of the novel as a classic of Russian literature, but all in all I'm glad I read it.

Thus I find Neil Pollack's review of the book notably overwrought, probably more indicative of Pollack's notions about what fiction is for than of the place A Dream in Polar Fog might hold in the canon of world literature. "Yuri Rytkheu's A Dream in Polar Fog is a reminder of a time when novels had adventure and mystery," he writes, "before the ubiquity of video made everything on Earth seem familiar, yet also abstract and distant. Its themes are grand, elemental, and simple, comprehensible in the junior high school manner of discussing literature (Man v. Nature, Man v. Himself, and soon), but also tricky and subtle. This is the work of a writer in full command of the novelistic form. It recalls, in both substance and style, the best work of Jack London and Herman Melville, and it is a novel in the grandest sense of the word."

Pollack doesn't elaborate on what he means by "tricky and subtle" (or explain how this is compatible with his follow-up statement that Rytkeu "isn't looking to impress us with his cleverness or with narrative trickery"), other than to repeat in his conclusion that the novel "is both elegant and exciting." It is not necessarily a disparagment of A Dream in Polar Fog to say that its themes are indeed "comprehensible in the junior high school manner of discussing literature," or to conclude that subtlety isn't something a novel like this really needs. Pollack seems to be straining to defend it as also "artistic" at the same time he is elevating "adventure and mystery" to pride of place in our consideration of novels--these are what allow us to call a book like A Dream in Polar Fog "a novel in the grandest sense of the word." He wants to split the difference between Jack London's compelling if not particularly subtle tales of adventure and Melville's more aesthetically intricate metaphysical reveries masquerading as adventure stories.

A Dream in Polar Fog is essentially an ethnographic novel. Whereas the anthropological "information" to be found in London's fiction is generally secondary to the drama of his adventure plots, in A Dream in Polar Fog relaying this information is really the novel's primary objective. In keeping with the strictures of socialist realism (under the authority of which this book was originally written and published), the story of John MacLennan's induction into and embrace of Chukchi society is a vehicle for the portrayal of the Chukchi people as wise and indomitable (although I agree with Pollack that Rythkeu makes an attempt to portray individual Chukchi as motivated by the same human impulses as anyone else) and for providing readers with a detailed portrait of their ways and their way of life. It does succeed in this effort, but I can't see that this warrants declaring that in so doing it "accomplishes everything a novel should." It's defining the form down in the extreme to describe it in terms acceptable even to the Union of Soviet Writers.

Again, I don't mean to belittle Rytkheu's book. Among the officially sanctioned fiction published during the Soviet era, A Dream in Polar Fog is probably less compromised than most by its fidelity to the principles upholding the "truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development." It holds up as a work of literature despite the deformations imposed by the processes controlling its publication--albeit a work of a certain kind, a "simple" story of "simple" people told in a more or less documentary style. By sticking to the descriptive method of fiction-as-ethnography, Rytkheu preserves the integrity of his account of Chukchi culture, and the novel otherwise qualifies as a recognizable piece of adventure fiction. But Neil Pollack seems to think that this particular conception of what novels ought to do is really the definition of the "novelistic form." Presumably, novels at their best are long on narrative, on ethnographic description, on "elemental" themes.

In my view, what this leaves out is the possibility that novels might aspire to be works of art rather than simply rousing narratives. Pollack almost implies that "a novel in the grandest sense of the word" necessarily avoids any artsy-fartsy "trickery," even while he praises A Dream in Polar Fog for its elegance and its "maturity" of approach. I don't know how many readers agree with Neil Pollack that narrative simplicty combined with anthropological detail makes for the "best" kind of novel, but surely such a view at the very least implies that aesthetic values are secondary in our consideration of fiction, that literature is most acceptable when it avoids being too, well, literary.

Disentangling

I mostly agree with Guy Dammann on Gunter Grass:

. . .the trouble with Grass's case is that just as it is impossible to disentangle his literary from his political legacy - his works of fiction, from the Tin Drum to 2003's controversial Crabwalk, are both driven by and intent on driving towards a particular moral and political vision of Germany - so too is it impossible to separate Grass' works from their author. In Germany, at least, having made himself so visible as the author of his works, it seems impossible that the damage done to his personal reputation will not leave deep scars on his books.

In an international environment, though, the case is somewhat different. Further removed from the struggle that has marked the last 60 years of German history, the sense of betrayal is bound to be less keen for those whose relation to Grass's work is a literary and aesthetic one. In a climate where it nowadays seems possible - if not uncontroversial - to admire the films of Leni Riefenstahl, the belated revelation of, as it were, "yet another" shameful episode in the wartime past of a prominent creative personality seems unlikely to make any lasting difference. Moreover, besides its purely literary merit, for non-German readers much of the value of Grass's work has been in the powerful access it provides to the complex morality and psychology of post-war Germany. Given that hypocrisy of precisely the kind now on display by their author is portrayed in his works as having been such an important feature of this psychology, whether you see the books through their author, or the author through his books doesn't seem to make much difference.

It is also arguable that having the kind of growing psychological burden that Grass must have had to carry all these years may in many ways have acted as a kind of stimulus to sustained activity and effort in what may be independently judged as the right direction. His response to the current situation - "My silence all these years was one of the reasons I had to write [my autobiography]" - seems uniformly weak if nonetheless highly plausible, but, as with Conrad's Lord Jim, those with a guilty past are often the most zealous when it comes to repairing the present. If Grass's silence is also partly what spurred him on, then the route to condemnation is less easy.

Hypocrisy is always ugly, but ugliness is no less important to literature than beauty. Grass's crime is to have betrayed those whose spokesman he has sought to be. For those of us lucky enough not to have required his services in this respect, he remains as powerful and as interesting a writer as before.

As far as I can tell, Grass's primary moral failing lies in remaining silent about his service with the Waffen-SS. Essentially, he is guilty of hypocrisy in not heeding his own demands of his fellow countrymen that they face up to their past. To a limited degree, then, he has lost the authority he once might have had in his chosen role as "spokesman"--limited because surely he was and remains correct that Germany must acknowledge its descent into fascism and mass murder. Do we now think Grass was wrong in his analysis of Germany's responsibilities because he apparently did not have the courage to admit he too was caught up in its historical madness?

Yet I can't see why even on a national level, Grass's reluctance to confess should "leave deep scars on his books." Won't their "literary and aesthetic" merits still be available to those readers who retain a respect for "purely literary" values? Won't German readers of the future, themselves no longer in need of his "services" as moral exemplar, be just as able to appreciate Grass's accomplishments as a novelist as those of us outside of Germany who never considered him to be one in the first place? (As opposed to those conservative readers and critics, in Germany and elsewhere, who will always judge him by his "leftist" political sympathies and don't otherwise really care about novels.) I can't imagine that, in the long run, The Tin Drum will be accepted as anything other than the powerful and beautifully rendered work of literature that it is.

The Specific Aspects of the Trouble

Brock Clarke does an effective job of undermining the assumptions about "realism" embraced by the likes of Tom Wolfe and Rachel Donadio:

. . .as Wolfe makes clear, a writer needs to be big and strong because a real writer is more warrior than artist: “At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.” According to Wolfe, once we have mounted our steeds, we should turn to journalists for our riding lessons: “The answer is not to leave the rude beast, the material, also known as the life around us, to the journalists, but to do what journalists do, or are supposed to do, which is to wrestle the beast and bring it to terms.” Or, if there aren’t any journalists on hand, we (meaning literary novelists—that is what I mean, and that is what Wolfe means as well) should look to writers of popular fiction, who “have one enormous advantage over their more literary confreres. They are not only willing to wrestle the beast; they actually love the battle.”

The hilarity here is high (one imagines Wolfe in his famous white suit wrestling and defeating a beast—any beast will do—and one feels sorry for the poor beast, too, who no doubt entered the wrestling match thinking he was about to do battle with a mere writer of literary fiction and not Tom Wolfe), but to be fair, the metaphors of the hunt, the battle, are merely goofy and shouldn’t concern us overmuch, except that we’re still using them, and we’re also still repeating Wolfe’s dire warning from seventeen years ago: “If fiction writers do not start facing the obvious, the literary history of the second half of the twentieth century will record that journalists not only took over the richness of American life as their domain, but also seized the high ground of literature itself.”

The question of whether or not journalists have “seized the high ground of literature itself” aside, that verb—“seized”—is a significant one, in part because Donadio uses a similar verb in her essay. Her essay’s first sentence, for instance, aligns itself with V. S. Naipaul in claiming that “nonfiction is better suited than fiction to capture the complexities of today’s world” (emphasis mine). Later in the essay, Donadio repeats that “To date, no work of fiction has perfectly captured our historical moment” (emphasis mine). What we’re meant to learn through Donadio’s use of capture is that literature at its best doesn’t evoke its subjects, or create them, or transform them, or render them, or distort them, or reinvent them, but rather captures them, as though they were enemy soldiers or Wolfe’s beast. This is not so—in fact, the idea that fiction can or should “capture our historical moment” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what fiction can do to and with the world, and what the world does to it. But it is a useful misunderstanding, and we should be grateful for it, and for Donadio’s use of the word capture, too, because if, as both Donadio and Wolfe claim, one of nonfiction’s unique capacities is to capture our historical moment (I have doubts that this is so, but so many nonfiction writers insist upon it that I’m just going to go ahead and agree with them), then Donadio’s use of capture lets us know precisely how far afield the tools and goals of nonfiction have led some novelists, and it also lets us see how important fiction is to our world and our imperfect understanding of it, even (especially) if fiction is never able to capture anything. Nor should we expect it to; nor should we want it to, except insofar as we’d like to live in a world simple enough to be captured.

Clarke correctly maintains that the call for writers to "capture" their times is really a plea for simplicity, for easy answers and for a brand of fiction that differs from nonfiction only in that novelists are able to use their "imaginations" to make up stuff in a way forbidden to journalists. This attitude toward the role of fiction results in the kind of cartoonish simplicity to be found in Wolfe's own novels, but this is just one method of, in Donadio's words, "illuminating today’s world most vividly," which is presumably what journalists like Donadio want to get from the fiction they deign to read.

Which makes it all the more mystifying to me that Clarke goes on to asset that "Wolfe believes in width (as when he casts his wide net and hauls in the names of New York’s neighborhoods and nationalities), but a novel is a novel not because it spreads wide, but because it goes deep, just as a novel is a novel not because it captures our troubled times, but because it illuminates and imagines the specific aspects of the trouble."

I just can't see that there's that much difference between capturing "troubled times" and imagining "the specific aspects of the trouble." I'm not even sure what the latter means. Unfortunately, Clarke's subsequent discussion of Heidi Julavits's The Effect of Living Backwards doesn't do much to clarify. Julavits "creates a stylized, surreal, but not unrecognizable version of our own world, a world which evokes our own world’s confusions and contradictions without attempting to be a replica of our world." This is fine, but if the author's ultimate goal is still to provide "a vantage point from which we can look at our moment," as Clarke puts it later, what does it matter if the novel otherwise pretends to be a "replica" or is instead "stylized" and "surreal"? Ultimately, in both cases it is the "trouble" that is being brought to the reading's attention, not the novel's own formal and stylistic features, nor even the specifically aesthetic implications of the fictional world being evoked. The focus is on the sociological, not the literary.

And then there's that familiar assertion that what distinguishes fiction as a form is that it "goes deep." At the risk of repeating myself too often on this subject (see this post, or this one), I will again say that, while it is true that some novels have explored human consciousness in very interesting ways, and that fiction generally provides an opportunity for this sort of exploration more readily than film or narrative nonfiction, this approach is one among many available to fiction writers and in no way defines fiction as a literary genre. It's an approach that long ago ossified into convention, and most literary fiction that continues to adopt it, and most critics who defend it, strike me as, frankly, just plain boring. Furthermore, I don't understand at all what relevance "going deep" has to Clarke's broader argument. Apparently, The Effect of Living Backwards is a first-person narrative, so it's ability to even go deep at all is inherently limited--to the narrator's understanding of her own mental processes. We are restricted to the narrator's point of view, which necessarily does introduce a degree of subjectivity ("uncertainty," as Clarke would have it) that we as readers must accept, but a) this kind of narrative uncertainty is a far cry from "going deep" in the stream-of-consciousness mode, and b) providing us with a "vantage point" on the confusions of post-9/11 American society still doesn't seem to me qualitatively different from attempting to render our "historical moment" in more straightforwardly objective ways. The ends are the same: to depict the times in which we live.

Clarke essentially admits as much himself in his conclusion. "Wolfe," he writes, "argues. . .that 'The future of the fiction novel would be in highly detailed realism based on reporting.' By this, Wolfe means that fiction best approaches its big subjects directly, head-on, which—to use Wolfe’s rhetoric—is the only effective, honorable way of wrestling the beast." On the other hand, "Julavits shows [that] we might better take on such massive subjects intelligently, indirectly, in ways that might not exactly comfort us but are surprising, irreverent, provocative, entertaining, and edifying." "Direct" vs. "indirect." This is a difference in tactics, not in strategy. Presumably both Tom Wolfe and Heidi Julavits (as well as Brock Clarke) agree that summoning up an era ought to be one of the novelist's objectives, it's just that Julavits's novel has more subtly "represented our era in its difficulty, in its absurdity and tragedy." Julavits has shown "that fiction doesn’t have to capture an era to engage with it."

Again, this seems to me a distinction without a difference. If your ultimate purpose as a writer is to "engage" with the sociopolitical conditions of your time, you would indeed be better off sticking to nonfiction. Or at least not claiming that in being more "indirect," you've thereby seized upon what "literature at its best" is all about.

Rambling Man

Andrew Palmer at the Avery blog commendably champions the work of Stephen Dixon, but I can't completely agree with this account of Dixon's fiction:

Many readers, even ones I like and respect,. . .find Dixon infuriating or at least fatiguing. I always tell these people that they haven't read enough Dixon to like him. It's precisely the "word pranks," repeating, explaining, digressing, etc.--each novel a near-infinite digression, if you'll allow me my own word prank--that makes Frog compelling--moving and hilarious in equal parts, often at the same time. Its prose attaches itself to whatever its characters' minds alight upon, and because it's so often tied to the minds of its characters, it seems to flow at the speed, and rhythm, of thought--or, because the novel is packed with extended passages of dialogue, of speech. And his characters, in thought as well as speech, tend to ramble, often about seemingly banal topics, often about their own rambling or tendency to ramble. To steal another self-descriptive from Frog, it reads like "jerky nervous diversionary chatter."

I really don't think it is accurate to describe Dixon's prose as consisting of "word pranks," unless you think its repetitions, ramblings, and digressions are unfaithful to the way human beings actually confront the world and attempt to make sense of it. Sometimes, as in Interstate or Gould, Dixon uses repetition and variation to deliberately distort "normal" reality, but even in these cases the strategy is used to intensify the reality of his characters' experiences as they perceive them. In Interstate, we can finally understand the depth and intensity of feeling the protagonist has for his children and his own role as their protector only by sorting through each of the different scenarios the novel provides. But the digressive quality in Dixon's prose style is generally an attempt, or so it seems to me, to capture the immediate, frequently dissociative nature of ordinary experience. This is not an exercise in "word pranks" but an effort to represent that experience in something other than conventionally pretty prose.

I especially question the claim that Dixon's prose "attaches itself to whatever its characters' minds alight upon, and because it's so often tied to the minds of its characters, it seems to flow at the speed, and rhythm, of thought." It is true enough that Dixon's language reflects his protagonists' perspective, their "situatedness," but that it "attaches itself" to the flow of consciousness seems to me a misperception of Dixon's approach. There is very little "probing" of Mind in his fiction, simply an attempt to render experience as it actually unfolds, in all of its contingency and specificiity. This passage from Phone Rings is illustrative of Dixon's method:

Phone rings. He's too busy with schoolwork to get up to answer it. Anyway, during the day, nine times out of ten it's for Janice. Rings twice more and stops. Minute later she raps on the bedroom door with something--probably her reacher. "Yes?" "It's for you; phone. You didn't hear me yelling?" "No, and damn, I'm very busy." "It's Manny. Want me to tell him to call back, though it sounded important." "He probably wants advice where to send his stories. He's begun writing them again, Dan said, and that he might call. Okay," and she says "And keep your door open," and he gets up and gets the receiver off the dresser and says "Manny; what's up?" "It's Dad. Something terrible's happened." "He's not dead, is he?" and Manny says "I'm sorry, Uncle Stu, he is." "Oh no, oh my God." Later--days--he thinks every time something like this happens--someone tells him such bad news--he always says "Oh no, oh my God," and in that order.

One could say that Dixon proceeds through a kind of expository shorthand--"Rings twice more and stops"--that while "attached" to the character as a frame of reference is otherwise a way of dispensing with the overscrupulous explication of consciousness that so often and so tediously passes for "psychological realism" in contemporary literary fiction. In fact, while Dixon's fiction could hardly be called plot-based in a conventional sense, most of the emphasis is on activity and behavior--characters are called to the phone, take walks, move around the house, talk to one another. Indeed, in Dixon's most recent work conversation predominates. And not only "in thought as well as speech" do Dixon's characters "tend to ramble," their rambling in speech sounds almost exactly like what we might be tempted to identify as their thought processes separate from their spoken words. "Thought" and speech are practically indistinguishable. If anything, the emphasis on dialogue (which in novels like Old Friends and Phone Rings sometimes become more like alternating monologues) beomes a way of externalizing thought (see also Heather McGowan's The Duchess of Nothing), of reuniting what we think with what we do.

(It must also be said that, more often than not, the characters in a Dixon story or novel also sound like one another--the same hesitations, digressions, and fragmentary constructions, as if he is suggesting that in most of our discourse with one another we are all equally prosaic.)

I do think Andrew is correct in advising that readers not draw conclusions about Dixon's "infuriating" refusal of conventional narrative and expository strategies before reading several of his books. In many ways, these books are really of a piece, an ongoing effort to focus on those moments in our lives that most works of fiction ignore in the name of drama and narrative efficiency. What takes place off stage in these works becomes in Dixon's fiction the whole show. It can take a while to fully appreciate Dixon's resourcefulness in presenting us with these episodes of the ordinary.