The Reading Experience

Esthetic Satisfaction

Chapter II of John Dewey's Art as Experience includes this discussion of the distinction made between "fine art and useful or technological art":

. . .An angler may eat his catch without thereby losing the esthetic satisfaction he experienced in casting and playing. It is this degree of completeness of living in the experience of making and perceiving that makes the difference between what is fine or esthetic in art and what is not. Whether the thing made is put to use, as are bowls, rugs, garments, weapons, is, intrinsically speaking, a matter of indifference. That many, perhaps most, of the articles and utensils made at present for use are not genuinely esthetic happens, unfortunately, to be true. But it is true for reasons that are foreign to the relation of the "beautiful" and "useful" as such. Wherever conditions are such as to prevent the act of production from being an experience in which the whole creature is alive and in which he possesses his living through enjoyment, the product will lack something of being esthetic. No matter how useful is is for special and limited ends, it will not be useful in the ultimate degree--that of contributing directly and liberally to an expanding and enriched life. . . .

Given the frequent association of the "pragmatic" with the "practical," one would assume that Dewey's appreciation of the "esthetic" would extend to the arts usually categorized as useful or "applied." (Perhaps this distinction could further be posed as the difference between "serious" and "popular" art, although the latter has by now become almost entirely subsumed within the broader category of "mass entertainment.") And indeed, while Dewey wants to preserve a role for "fine art," at least as a pragmatic term of convenience, he also wants to give the useful arts their aesthetic due. Thus the distinctions we make between the two are, as he puts it, "extrinsic to the work of art itself." Although works of fine art are more deliberately constructed to provide an intensifed aesthetic experience, works of practical art are equally capable of being experienced as "beautiful."

Sometimes the distinction between fine and popular art is expressed in terms of "intention." The "serious" artist or writer intends that his work be contemplated abstractly or dispassionately as an aesthetic experience, while the popular artist merely sets out to produce work that will fulfill a more mundane and utilitarian function--to entertain or literally to be useful in a material sense ("bowls, rugs," etc.). But this is not a viable analysis, since intentions are always mixed and frequently unknowable, and since "intention" gives all the credit (and all the responsibilty) to the artist. For Dewey it is "living in the experience of making and perceiving" (emphasis mine) that makes art art, and the perceiver has his/her responsibilty for transforming the act of encountering a work of art into one that might contribute "directly and liberally to an expanding and enriched life." It is the experience of the work, not the work per se, that expands and enriches.

The "conditions" that might prevent us from enjoying aesthetic experience are those that cut off either the artist or the perceiver from the "beauty" of creating and focus his/her attention instead on the purely utilitarian. The paragraph I've quoted above concludes with the observation that "The story of the severance and final sharp opposition of the useful and the fine is the history of that industrial development through which so much of production has become a form of postponed living and so much of consumption a superimposed enjoyment of the fruits of the labor of others." Clearly Dewey believed that political and economic conditions im modern societies encouraged an "alienation" from the aesthetic qualities of an "act of production," and to that extent Dewey's insistence that distinctions between fine and useful art are invidious is a politically-implicated gesture. But Dewey does not want to patronize the artisan by simply celebrating applied or popular art. He wants to free the artisan and the popular audience of their servitude to a system that denies them the opportunity to fully appreciate the aesthetic qualities of either the fine or the useful arts.

"That many, perhaps most, of the articles and utensils made at present for use are not genuinely esthetic happens, unfortunately, to be true." Surely this as much the case now as it was in Dewey's time (and a very long time it was; Dewey died in 1952 at the age of 92). The post-industrial age has been no more accommodating of genuine aesthetic experience than the Industrial Age itself. If anything, mass consumption of media-packaged commodities has only trivialized both the fine arts and the applied arts as Dewey would have known them. We've become more sophisticated in our choice of entertaiment "options," and we certainly have more of them, but the average American is as dead to real "experience" in Dewey's conception of it as any pre-WWII factory worker. Perhaps more so, since we could cultivate our capacity for aesthetic experience in both the popular and the fine arts if we wanted to, but largely choose not to do so. Utility and technology are in the saddle and ride mankind.

Incontrovertibly Good

Commenting on the idea that readers of Stephen King's books are at least reading, Steve Mitchelmore questions "the assumption that reading is an incontrovertibly good thing." "What this good is exactly is never addressed," he adds. Further:

. . .those who defend novels on such non-literary grounds are more preoccupied with appealing to "a higher platitude of, supposed, superior existence through Literature or Art". . .than those who want simply to explain why writers like Stephen King cannot be compared with certain other great writers; a purely literary explanation. . . .

I certainly agree with Steve in regarding skeptically the notion that reading just anything is, ipso facto, a superior use of one's time. There's nothing inherent in the act of confronting words on a page (or a screen) that makes it a more worthwhile focus of attention than, say, watching movies or tv. (And most people who make the "at least they're reading" argument are presumably hoping to wean people away from the modern visual media.) Some films and television shows are indeed better uses of one's time than most books. I'd surely recommend that anyone looking for an hour's worth of non-trivial entertainment watch House before picking up something at random from the New Fiction section at Border's. And Stephen King's own work helps to illustrate the fallacy of the "just anything" argument as well: Film adaptations of King's fiction such as Brian De Palma's Carrie and David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone are infinitely superior to the novels on which they're based, which in my opinion don't rise above the level of poorly written, sub-gothic trash. (There, I've said it.) These directors made cinematic art out of books that are not merely hack work, but hack work of even dubious "entertainment" value. (I, at least, have never been able to see what readers find entertaining in them.) They made films that used the medium in inventive and challenging ways that totally elude Stephen King in relation to his own medium.

Thus, not only is Stephen King inferior to "certain other great writers," his books can't be compared to the work of certain other accomplished filmmakers, who sometimes are using the same "material." And who would guide younger readers/viewers to run-of-the-mill literary fiction before, say, the films of Robert Altman? There are, in fact, only a handful of contemporary novelists whose books I would have turned to before I would go to see the latest Altman film. If the choice for young people is reading a trashy novel or watching a trashy movie or tv show, perhaps the marginally better option is the novel (if only to stretch their attention spans somewhat), but really I can't see it is any kind of intrinsically "good thing" for them to engage in either of these activities.

I'm not sure that those who take the reading-is-good-for-you position are more highly invested in the idea of a "superior existence through Literature or Art" than those who merely critique on literary grounds the individual works of writers like King, as Steve suggests. They probably are invested in "literacy" as a social ideal--and I don't think illiteracy is an acceptable alternative--and from this perspective they really aren't interested in Literature at all: Any port in a storm will do. They are perhaps still holding on to the model of the "general reader" as a paragon of democracy, but I myself don't think it does democracy much good if we settle for schlock simply because it manifests itself in print between two covers.

The Content and Form of American Fiction-Writing

It may be true that, as Michael Blowhard contends, Gold Medal Books, publisher of pulp/noir fiction in the 1950s, "had a greater impact on the content and form [of] American fiction-writing than any other postwar book publisher," although he doesn't really provide much support for this claim beyond citing a few films that were adapted from Gold Medal books, as well as various filmmakers who obviously enough have been influenced by the noir style. To say that "pulp fiction" has influenced storytelling in the movies, or even that some otherwise "serious" writers (Lethem, Chabon) have paid homage to it in their work, is one thing, but to assert it has "had a greater impact on the content and form" of postwar fiction than anything else is quite another. I'm willing to entertain this idea, but I'd really like to have a somewhat more specific idea of what "content and form" means in this context. Does MB really mean to say that Gold Medal-style fiction has so overwhelmingly influenced both the subjects chosen by postwar writers (is this what he means by "content," or is it a looser reference to what might be called "atmosphere" or "ideas"?) and the "form" these writers adopt? What writers does he have in mind? How does their work show this influence?

Perhaps MB clarifies his point just a bit in the sentence following the one I've quoted: "Gold Medal novels were intended as reliable, disposable entertainments: fast, short, and full of action. Noir-ish intrigue, westerns, and adventure tales were the general rule; sensationalism and sleaze were encouraged." It would seem that MB is trying to expand the definition of "American fiction-writing" by insisting we include the practice of those writers aiming for a popular audience. Postwar fiction includes the Mickey Spillanes and the John D. McDonalds as well as "Capote, Cheever, Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Pynchon," et al. Surely there is some justice in this contention, especially if the measure applied is sales or total books in print or name recognition rather than aesthetic accomplishment as determined by sensible literary standards. (And I would even concede that some of the pulp writers MB identifies--Jim Thompson and Richard Matheson, for example--have some claim to aesthetic accomplishment as well.) Undoubtedly most of the fiction published in the postwar era was meant to provide "entertainment" ("disposable" or not), and no one has ever gone broke overestimating the American taste for "sensationalism and sleaze." If Michael Blowhard thinks pulp fiction should be respected for its capacity to satisfy popular tastes, I'm not going to quarrel with him.

Yet underlying MB's paean to the pulps is a palpable resentment against those in certain "stuffy" literary quarters who just won't grant such fiction its due. And its hard not to conclude that this resentment lies not just against readers and critics who disdain "entertainment" but against those who won't admit such fiction is also just as artistic as "literary fiction," perhaps more so, since it has after all influenced Godard and Truffaut and Tarantino, who must know art when they see it. It has good-old fashioned masculine "raw energy," a better criterion for judging narrative art than that applied by those now in control of American publishing, which has become "feminized and corporate." It gives the people what they want (and makes money too!), and people who won't settle for its "gritty fun" are just "prisses."

As always in populist screeds such as this, the primary target of ire is the "canon-maker-wannabes" in universities. The professors have told an "official story of postwar American fiction [that] recoiled entirely from the Gold Medal writers." They've withheld their markers of "respectable culture." Putting aside the fact that writers who valorized "sensationalism and sleaze" probably were never looking for the approval of "respectable culture," MB really ought to take a closer look at what academic critics are actually up to these days. Contemporary literature has been a substantial part of the literary ccurriculum for only about 30 years, and "scholars" of contemporary literature have long since abandoned a gatekeeping role, anyway. Breaking the canon--in this case before it was even clearly established--is much more popular than making it. And as MB himself admits, "Many colleges now offer a course or three in the history of hardboiled and/or detective fiction." Indeed, it is much more likely for students to find "a course or three" in not just detective fiction but genre fiction of all kinds than a course designed to teach "canonical" postwar writers in the solemn manner MB describes. Genre fiction is much more amenable to the kinds of historical and sociological analyses literary academics now undertake than "merely literary" works by Roth or Pynchon.

MB imagines a critical-literary establishment that disdains popular and pulp fiction. (It's hard for me to believe that much of this establishment resides in "the New York City trade publishing biz." As far as I can tell, popularity now means everything to this "biz.") When Gold Medal Books was founded in 1949, it probably could be said that "respectable" literary opinion" was appalled. But it seems to me that genres like detective fiction and SF, "noir" fiction in general, has been embraced by many if not most readers and critics whose most immediate preference is simply for challenging and aesthetically credible work. It is just as likely that accomplished writers are going to emerge from these genres as from "literary fiction," a designation that has now become just another marketing category. A lot of dull, formulaic genre fiction gets published these days, but the same thing is also decidedly true of literary fiction.

It is also true, at least in my opinion, that most of the Gold Medal fiction was indeed "reliable, disposable entertainment." The serious writers (and also filmmakers such as David Lynch) who were subsequently "inspired" by this fiction have not settled for the disposable and the sensationalized. They have in some ways transcended the original limitations of the pulp fiction form by filtering the conventions and images of this fiction through a more developed aesthetic sensibility. They write better than Mickey Spillane. To make a case for these pathbreaking pulp fictions as art seems to me on a par with the attempts by creationists to make "intelligent design" acceptable as "science." (They want the approval of scientists, whose domain they otherwise reject.) You can believe in intelligent design if you like, but it isn't science. Have all the fun you want with fiction that is "fast, short, and full of action," but, in most cases, it isn't art.

Nugatory

Commenting on Michael Berube's What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, Timothy Burke writes:

Bérubé does a good job of explaining the intellectual constitution of the humanities at present, and of critiquing the affirmative-action logic of some conservative critics. To me, the next gauntlet to throw down to the critics, at least those who come from within academia, is to sketch out a program of “conservative” scholarly and pedagogical practice in the humanities. What I largely hear from [Mark] Bauerlein, [Erin] O’Connor, [Paul] Johnson, and many others is a complaint. What I do not hear, for the most part, is what their alternative scholarly praxis might look like, or even whom their models might be. Is Helen Vendler, for example, a good practicioner of the kind of literary criticism that Bauerlein and O’Connor see as unfairly excluded from English Departments? If so, how uncommon in some generalized sense is the kind of criticism that she practices? Is it really as despised and exiled from disciplinary norms as they imply?. . .

Although she is not in any programmatic way a New Critic, Helen Vendler does indeed write literary criticism that is first and foremost an attempt to understand what is literary about the literary works (in her case almost exlusively poems) she considers. She sometimes makes strong judgments about the merits of the work she considers. She is above all a close reader concerned with the aesthetic qualities of poetry and not with its status as ideology, history, or cultural "symptom."

For these reasons, her practice as a critic is indeed extremely "uncommon," and, whether or not it is "despised" (my guess is many literary academics are mostly indifferent to it because, having never been taught how to read poetry in Vendler's way, they literally don't know what she's talking about), it is certainly "exiled" from the disciplinary journals that are used to define the normal practice (normal for the moment) of academic criticism. Almost all of Vendler's criticism appears in publications like The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, not in the discipline-defining scholarly journals. I am not aware that any of Vendler's essays in the last 10-20 years have appeared in such journals, in fact. (In the sub-discipline I know best, contemporary American literature, I am additionally not aware of any "scholarly" journal that accepts literary criticism of the sort Vendler has mastered. Luckily she already has tenure, since no one writing her sort of criticism would otherwise have any chance of receiving tenure or promotion in the current system with its protocols of evaluation and reward.)

However. In my opinion, Vendler's brand of criticism is not what conservative critics have in mind when they complain that their own are "unfairly excluded from English Departments." No political preferences or cultural diagnoses follow from or are implied by Vendler's work. She is not shilling for the established order or decrying the degradation of culture by misguided liberal projects. She is interested in the art of poetry and in discerning accomplished poetry from less accomplished poetry. What is impled by Vendler's critical practice is the autonomy of poetry, its separation from the very political debates the conservative critics of the literary academy want to drag it into. In this way these conservatives are hardly any different than the radical critics who they contend (and I would agree with them on this) have politicized literary study. They don't want to de-politicize it; they want it to embody their own politics, their own view of the way things ought to be.

Roger Kimball, one of the shrillest of the conservative critics, not long ago proclaimed that "Art has its own aesthetic canons of legitimacy and achievement; but those canons are themselves nugatory unless grounded in a measure beyond art." The "measure beyond art" comes from politics or religion or "tradition." The "aesthetic canons of legitimacy and achievement," which Helen Vendler observes and attempts to advance, are "nugatory" unless they buttress these cultural pillars. If the "measure" to be applied to poems and other works of literature comes not from within the practice of literary criticism and through the aesthetic models provided by literary history but from the pre-established dictates of the conservative worldview, then Helen Vendler is surely not the "practicioner" conservatives are looking for.

The Concerns of Socialists

In his introduction to an issue of Socialism and Democracy devoted to science fiction, editor Victor Wallis endorses those works of SF that embody "the experience incisively identified by Darko Suvin, more than thirty years ago, as cognitive estrangement":

Works conceived in this tradition are the ones in which we find promise. The character of such works, as Carl Freedman has written, “lies neither in chronology nor in technological hardware but in the cognitive presentation of alternatives to actuality and the status quo.” Insofar as we focus on this dimension of science fiction, we encounter a body of work with obvious relevance to the concerns of socialists.

I guess it is true that works of science fiction that present "alternatives to actuality and the status quo" would be of interest to socialists, but only insofar as socialism is one political ideology among others whose adherents would like to see things change. However, to the extent socialism entails a specific vision of how things should change, what society should look like after such change has taken place, I can't see why socialists should have any particular use for science fiction. More importantly, I can't see why science fiction should have any particular use for socialists. Would not socialism only create another, albeit perhaps a more humane, status quo? Shouldn't science fiction writers, if they are truly committed to the idea of SF as a way of exploring "alternatives to actuality," be just as interested in questioning the new status quo as they were the old? Would science fiction--indeed, literature as a whole, which to my mind is, at its best, just as committed to presenting "alternatives" as science fiction in particular--cease to exist because political Nirvana had been established?

A few paragraphs later, Wallis writes:

. . .Science fiction that is produced within the tradition of cognitive estrangement constitutes what might be understood as an intersection – with the potential for mutual reinforcement – between two streams of thought and practice that have too often remained separate: social-scientific critique (analysis and proposals) on the one hand, and cultural expression (nurturing resistance and personal transformation) on the other. The dimension of social-scientific critique focuses on issues of universal resonance and impact; to the extent that it is well-grounded, its message can eventually cut across all lines of division among people except those of class interest. The cultural dimension, by contrast, draws importantly (though not exclusively) on the particularities of experience of each community – whatever its mark(s) of identity might be. Any hope of developing a popular movement that can overcome the march to destruction rests vitally on the symbiosis of these two dimensions of struggle.

First of all, I just can't accept that "social-scientific critique" and "cultural expression" have "too often remained separate." Political ideologues and social-science types have been trying to appropriate "cultural expressions" (i.e., works of art) to their own agendas for as long as art (more particularly literature, and most particularly fiction) has asserted its own autonomous status apart from "analysis and proposals." Literary study in the academy has now been overtaken almost exclusively by various hybrid forms of "social-science critique" (when it's not just outright political agitation), and to continue to assert that literature still retains too much of its autonomy in such circumstances seems to me either willful blindness or plain dishonesty.

Second, equating "cultural expression" with "nurturing resistance" and "personal transformation" seems a peculiar way to get science fiction writers and readers to join up with a program of "mutual reinforcement." Since the goal has been set by the social scientists, and since they are doing the head work (analyzing and proposing), the fiction writers and their fans have clearly been assigned a secondary and less substantial role--they get to provide "the particularities of experience of each community." Is this what science fiction writers consider themselves to be doing? Representing their "community" and asserting its "identity"? Don't some of them think they're creating works of literary art that go well beyond recommending "personal transformation"? Would they be willing to accept this secondary status as handmaidens to "social-scientific critique"?

Like most political ideologues when considering "cultural expressions," Wallis ultimately wants to glom onto science fiction because it seems expedient to his political goals: A "symbiosis" of socialism and science fiction will "provide new sources of strength for resisting oppression, while at the same time (thanks to [SF's] wide diffusion) bringing social consciousness and political awareness to constituencies unresponsive to overtly political messages." Science fiction can be a tool of consciousness-raising. Maybe it can be, but I'd hate to think that SF writers would settle for that. While I agree that, as Wallis puts it at the beginning of his essay, some mass-market science fiction (including science fiction films) is often "heavily overlaid with explicit or tacit links to Washington’s global military agenda, with the particular incarnations of evil evolving to meet the needs of the moment" and that "An important subsidiary message is that an all-powerful technology has the answer to everything, including what to do if the earth’s ecosphere is destroyed," I can't see the purpose (the literary purpose, at least) in exchanging one set of tacit assumptions (technology good) with another (technology bad). Science fiction under socialism would be just as formulaic and fraught with questionable presuppostions as it is (if it is) under capitalism.

As They Are

While I share with Steven Shaviro the inclination to "only write about books I like, letting the ones I don’t be passed over in silence," I can't share his belief that, even while writing about admired books (perhaps especially when writing about such books), it's appropriate to "make no pretense of describing them accurately, as they are — but rather [to] use them (or appropriate them) to come to some understanding for myself, which means that the author might just as well be upset by my (admitted) misinterpretation, as he/she might be pleased by the fact that I liked their book."

I'd be less concerned that I might have misintepreted a particular work than that I made no attempt to "describe [it] accurately." I'd go so far as to say I would consider any writing about literature (in particular a book review) that didn't make such an attempt to be something other than literary criticism in the strict sense of the term. (Perhaps Shaviro would as well; perhaps he doesn't regard his own work as ""criticism" per se. If so, he is assuredly following the practice of most of academic criticism, which for decades now has mostly abandoned what was once understood as "literary criticism" for more the more ethereal pleasures of Theory and other philosophy-inflected modes of discourse.) Thus, while I might wildly misinterpret a work because of my own flawed reading, if I have nevertheless made a good effort to account for the work--to describe poems and fictions "as they are"--I am still engaging in a
recognizable if ultimately error-ridden act of literary criticism.

You might think that, given my assent to John Dewey's conception of art and literature as modes of experience--which in one of its subsequent reformulations became Stanley Fish's version of "reader-response" theory--I might find the notion that I could properly use art "to come to some understanding for myself" entirely acceptable, even an immediate consequence of Dewey's own philosophy of art. But Dewey did not license an unrestrained, free-for-all approach to criticism and interpretation. (And ulitmately neither did Fish: in his schema, interpretation is limited by an "interpretive community" that can accept some some readings as accurate or persuasive while rejecting others as misguided.) For an aesthetic experience of literature to be as complete as possible, the reader must undergo "an ordering of the elements of the whole that is in form. . .the same as the process of organization the creator of the work consciously experienced." If this sort of "ordering" doesn't occur at all, if the reader is free, in effect, to create a different work than the one the artist has presented us with, aesthetic experience has been impeded, cut off. If criticism is, in part, one reader's attempt to communicate his/her own "experience" of the work at hand, some effort to put aside what I want "for myself" and to represent (re-present) the work on its own terms is required.

Certainly the reader or critic is then free to re-process what Dewey calls the "detail" for him/herself. This reprocessing is what we usually regard as "interpretation." We don't have to stop with what "the creator of the work consciously experienced." Much of what we value in some works of literature goes beyond what the artist "consciously" intended. That we are able to reassemble the details into a new synthesis of text-writer-reader only underscores the reader's contribution to aesthetic experience, and such a synthesis only enriches the text. Sometimes we might even think that what the writer intended is at odds with what the text actually does on a close reading of it. (Paradise Lost, for example.) Such an intepretation might be found compelling by other readers and subsequently become an accepted version of what the text "means." In some ways, the creator is thus left behind, the text itself taking on a life of its own, so to speak.

Still, to entirely forfeit the obligation to "describe" the object of one's reading experience does seem to me a critical dereliction. The work is there, and we should begin by acknowledging it.