The Reading Experience

Belittling Art

I agree with Jerry Saltz that it is a mistake to think "that art is about understanding, when, like almost everything else in the everyday world, art is about experience; it's 'I experience, therefore I am.'" Unfortunately, Saltz only muddles this valuable insight when he goes on to observe that:

Art is often political when it doesn't seem political and not political when that's all it seems to be. Neither Andy Warhol nor Donald Judd made overtly political art. Yet both changed the way the world looks and the way we look at the world. That's because art creates new thought structures. Imagine all the thought structures that either would have never existed or gone undiscovered had all of Shakespeare been lost. Art does far more than only meet the eye. It is part of the biota of the world. It exists within a holistic system.

Saltz wants to wrest art away from what he calls "neo-Cartesians," those "dogmatists, ideologues, academics, and theorists who demonize and belittle art as a gratuitous, semi-mystical, merely beautiful, purely formal amusement." This is a noble enough ambition, but, unfortunately, Saltz's own language only gives the neo-Cartesians additional reasons to dismiss the "semi-mystical" descriptions of art that too often accompany the claim that art is experience rather than a means of acquiring knowledge. What exactly is a "new thought structure"? What's new about it, the thought or the structure? Shouldn't the encounter with art give us a new way of structuring experience rather than our thoughts, and isn't the emphasis on "thought structure" just another way of conceding that the Cartesian approach to art is correct--that what art provides is "ideas"?

The "biota" of the world? Is this just a way of saying that art is a "natural" or "organic" product of the human imagination, itself a biologically determined phenomenon? (Thus no artistic creation is "unnatural" in the way some dogmatists of the religious kind sometimes maintain.) If so, why the clumsily scientific term "biota"? Isn't this also just a concession to the intellectualized approach to art favored by the academics and theorists? Except that in this context the word seems emptied of all meaning, a frivolous gesture toward science that no scientist could take seriously.

As for "holistic," Saltz never really gets around to explaining what he means in using the term to illuminate works of art, aside from a concluding story about the difference between cats and dogs, through which "holistic" is also equated with "nonlinear," "indirect," and "circuitous." I can see the relationship between these latter three concepts, but how they work to create something "holistic" remains a mystery to me. All in all, Saltz's language is precisely of the vague, inconsistent, "mystical" sort that gives aestheticism (even the metaphysicalized aestheticism Saltz seems to favor) a bad name.

Saltz seems to be one of those embarrased aesthetes who appreciates beauty but who doesn't himself want to settle for the "merely beautiful" (like those literary critics who scoff at the "merely literary"). Art needs some transcendental plumping-up, even if only to protect it from the intellectuals and pedants who might trample on it otherwise. I, for one don't see the need to reassure everyone that "art is often political when it doesn't seem political," even if most present-day "theorists" can see only the political implications of whatever art or literature they deign to consider, and I can't agree that artists like Warhol and Judd "changed the way the world looks" or the way I "look at the world." Warhol marginally did change the way art looks (at least for me), but his experiments in the demystification of "Art" did nothing to affect my perception of "the world." Nor did they need to.

Beautifully Written

I have not read, nor do I intend to read, Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, so this post is only tangentially related to that book. But in a discussion of "style" prompted by her reading of the novel, Laura Miller makes this comment:

. . .I think the novel is flawed, but worth reading, while [a novelist and a book editor who had both read the first 40 pages or so and quit in exasperation] had not been able to get past Pessl's style, which does try way too hard to be inventive and clever. The editor suggested that if a writer doesn't have a "voice," or a pleasing style, right out of the box, there's no point in persevering. I argued that bookstores are already overflowing with novels by people who write beautifully but have nothing very interesting to say and that once you got past all the forced stylistic pirouettes, Pessl's novel actually makes you care what happens next. . . .

Miller wants to raise the perennial "style vs. substance" debate in order to elevate the latter over the former, but the problem with an assertion like the one above is that it's so very vague. Exactly what is a "voice" in fiction? Is it simply a "pleasing style"? But what makes it pleasing? For that matter, what makes it a style? Most obviously, "voice" is an illusion created by a first-person narrator the novelist wants us to accept as "speaking" in some tangible way, even though his/her words have been written down, either by the character him/herself or by the author ventriloquizing the character (the latter leaving open the question of how the words were recorded in the first place.) In this sense, "voice" is an aesthetic effect the full exploitation of which is a standard we apply in judging the success of a first-person narrative. Is this the sense in which Miller (and the editor she quotes) is using the term "voice"? It doesn't seem to be, since it is the "writer" who needs a voice "right out of the box." Where exactly do we find the writer's voice in a work of fiction?

It would perhaps be more accurate to speak of the writer's voice in a third-person narrative, except that third-person narrators can't really be identified directly with the writer (the narrator's voice being a construction almost as artificial as that of the first-person narrator), and, in today's literary climate at least, readers and reviewers often bridle at the third-person "voice" that is too intrusive or too "clever." Thus, I'm forced to conclude that by "voice" and "style," Miller means little beyond "fancy language," an indulgence she dismisses through the sardonic praise of "beautiful style," later amended to "exquisite style." (I don't really know what novelists Miller has in mind in her condescension toward "exquisite" styles. If she's thinking of the bland figurative prose found in most run-of-the mill literary fiction, I share her impatience, but if she's including the transformative styles of great writers like Stanley Elkin or John Hawkes or Richard Powers, I must say I think she doesn't know what she's talking about.)

Miller goes on to conflate style with "technique," quoting Pauline Kael on movie audiences who "don't notice or care about how well or how badly the movie is made." But how a movie or a novel is "made" can't be reduced to its "style." Technique includes form, point of view (and the manipulations thereof), as well as approaches to narrative development and character creation. And even here, surely readers and viewers are affected by skillful applications of technique, even if they can't identify them or weren't consciously aware of their operations while watching the film or reading the book. Most readers, even the "common reader," are aware of "how well or how badly" (especially the latter) a work is constructed on an intuitive level, just as readers in particular are aware of how a writer's style has affected them while not necessarily being able to pinpoint exactly how this has happened. Like Nick Hornby, Laura Miller reveals a palpable contempt for the very "common" readers she ostensibly defends.

And even if she is right that many readers "don't care" about the matters of technique and style she says critics often "overvalue," does this mean critics should abandon more purely literary standards for the vague and untroubled standards she attributes to her infantilized common readers? Are critics now merely in the business of safeguarding mass taste, confined to being the licensed distributors of processed pap?

Staging Resistance

Recently I quoted John Hawkes's assertion that he "began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained." I thought of this statement when reading Josh Corey's discussion of the "poetic" as "the staging of resistance toward the means of narration we associate with prose and the 'true story' alike."

Josh's post is actually about the films of Terence Malick, of which Josh feels the term "poetic" is an accurate description. "This quality," he writes, "is easier to define negatively: plot, characterization, and dialogue have diminished importance in the films I've seen. . .Then there's the voice-over, which imposes a single startling subjectivity over the action and more or less substitutes for the usual through-line of fiction films, plot." Ultimately the films are poetic because they embody "a desired stance toward experience" that can't be resolved into the usual narrative conventions.

Not only do I agree that Terence Malick's films have this "poetic" quality, but I would argue further that much of the best post-World War II American fiction is similarly poetic--or, to use Hawkes's words, in this fiction "totality of vision or structure" is what remains after "plot, characterization, and dialogue" have been displaced. Hawkes's own fiction (The Lime Twig, Second Skin, The Blood Oranges) is among the best examples of such an approach (and Hawkes's work is due a revival), but the fiction of such writers as William Gaddis, Gilbert Sorrentino, Walter Abish, David Markson, Donald Barthelme, or William Gass manifest the same kind of "resistance" to conventional story-telling Josh Corey perceives in a film like Days of Heaven, although certainly each writer stages this resistance in a different way and few of their fictions seem poetic in the more or less rhapsodic and pastoral mode we find in Malick's film. Along with metafictionists such as Barth and Coover, these writers end up foregrounding "story" (either through its conspicuous absence or through the exposure of its conventionality) in such a way that the reader is encouraged to question the extent to which we associate the art of fiction with "narrative."

Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room has suggested that "Stories are how life could be if we cut all the dull bits out where nothing happens, and fast-forward the snail’s progress we make towards understanding. They are condensed, compact, sharp-edged versions of the real thing. And for what it’s worth, I do think that they are the only means we have of making sense of this crazy business of living." I agree that stories as they are customarily described (linear, or at least triangular, as in the Freytag version) produce an illusion of "how life could be if we cut all the dull bits out where nothing happens," but I don't think this necessarily commends them as the means to create literary art. Indeed, Litlove's language here--"understanding," "making sense"--stresses fiction's ability to bring us knowledge (albeit an "uncertain, enigmatic" kind of knowledge) rather than its capacity to produce aesthetic pleasure. And I'm not sure that we want our fiction writers to "cut all the dull bits" if we also want them to represent life as it's really lived rather than as "it could be" if we all lived our lives like the protagonists of "sharp-edged" novels. (I'm particularly thinking of a writer like Stephen Dixon, whose work often concentrates entirely on the "dull bits," making great art--indeed, "poetry"-- out of the most prosaic of situations and resisting the pull of narrative toward melodramatic distortion and artificial resolution.)

In my opinion, to value fiction (or film) primarily for its ability to "make sense" through story is to move it even farther away from poetry (itself the fountainhead of all literature) and to align it with--even make it subservient to--all those other areas of inquiry where "understanding" reigns, however intuitive or partial such understanding might be where literature is concerned. Casey at A Voyage Thither seems to appreciate this danger when she writes that "the most fundamental source of literature's value may stem not from its usefulness, but precisely the opposite: from it's uselessness." But he then partially retreats from this insight when he goes on to affirm for his students that a literature class "also may be the most important" class they'll take in college. Beginning to read works of literature seriously may indeed be the most important thing some (but not by any means all) students do, but to teach literature as "useless" and therefore all the more useful in a liberal arts curriculum is to restore with the right hand what the left hand is taking away: an externally grounded justification for reading literature that emphasizes why it might be good for you rather than how it works to produce a distinctive kind of experience that is its own compensation.

Undoubtedly Casey's students would find poetry the most "useless" kind of reading. Without "plot, characteriation and dialogue," perpetually staging that "resistance toward the means of narration we associate with prose and the 'true story'" to which Josh Corey refers, poetry is the purest expression of language as play, as the potential source of beauty or delight. And what is the good of that? In his insistence that "the true enemies of the novel [are] plot, character, setting and theme," John Hawkes was proposing that fiction also might exhibit such a dispostion toward language, that it might be "poetic" and thereby defiantly, exultantly useless. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.