The Reading Experience

The Philosophy of Shakespeare and Keats

Pragmatism is often accused of denying the existence of "truth" (small t--it does, in fact, deny the existence of Truth), but in Art as Experience John Dewey offers an account of truth through the following analysis of Keats's famous lines--"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'"--from Ode on a Grecian Urn:

Much of the dispute [about the meaning of these lines] is carried on in igonorance of the particular tradition in which Keats wrote and which gave the term "truth" it meaning. In this tradition, "truth" never signifies correctness of intellectual statements about things, or truth as its meaning is now influenced by science. It denotes the wisdom by which men live, especially "the lore of good and evil." And in Keats' mind it is particularly connected with the question of justifying good and trusting to it in spite of the evil and destruction that abound. "Philosophy" is the attempt to anwer this question rationally. Keats' belief that even philosophers cannot deal with the question without depending on imaginative intuitions receives an independent and positive statement in his identification of "beauty" with "truth"--the particular truth that solves for man the baffling problem of destruction and death--which weighed so heavily on Keats--in the very realm where life strives to assert supremacy. Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties. "Reasoning" must fail man--this is of course a doctrine long taught by those who have held to the necessity of a divine revelation. Keats did not accept this supplement and substitute for reason. The insight of imagination must suffice. "This is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know." The critical words are "on earth"--that is amid a scene in which "irritable reaching after fact and reason" confuses and distorts instead of bringing us to the light. It was in moments of most intense esthetic perception that Keats found his utmost solace and his deepest convictions. This is the fact recorded at the close of his Ode. Ultimately there are but two philosophies. One of them accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities--to imagination and art. This the philosophy of Shakespeare and Keats.

Aside from illustrating Dewey's skill as a literary critic--skills he did not practice nearly enough--this passage shows Dewey casting his lot with artistic "truth" as opposed to the conventionally philosphical version. "The very realm where life strives to assert supremacy" is of course the realm of art, and its acts of asserting "supremacy"--of affirming and extending the reach of experience itself--constitute the most meaningful "truth" we can discover.

As Dewey points out, "intense esthetic perception" was for Keats not just "utmost solace" but also his "deepest conviction." Experience of art, which is a very material phenomenon, not a substitute for "divine revelation" was/is entirely sufficient as a manifestation of "truth," and such truth is also truth about "life" insofar as both require we accept "uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge." But "intense" experience is more than just passive acceptance. For the artist, it involves turning this experience "upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities," to create the poem or the work of art that is the extension of experience. For the reader or the viewer "art as experience" involves what Dewey calls elsewhere in the book an "act of reconstruction" whereby the "perceiver" undertakes "an ordering of the elements of the whole that is in form, although not in details, the same as the process of organization the creator of the work consciously experienced."

Triage

"Nothing like a 900-page book to make me stand up for what I believe in," writes Malcolm Jones, a Newsweek book reviewer. Apparently what he believes is that books are a nuisance, unless they can be consumed quickly, without undue claims on one's time and without usurping the place one has already set aside for the after-dinner cocktail.

My time is precious. Your time is, too. Who has enough time in the day to do all that we want? When I go home after work, it’s triage every night. I can listen to music. Or I can play music. Or I can answer letters or write. Or I can read a book. Or watch TV. Or watch a DVD on TV. Or go out to a concert or a movie. And those would be the nights that I don’t have to clean up the kitchen, do the laundry or help with homework.

It's unclear from Jones's brief essay whether he had taken on Vikram Chandra's new novel Sacred Games (the 900-page novel in question) as a review assignment and decided to forgo it, or whether it was simply one of those books he tried to wedge into his otherwise busy evenings "after work." If the former, it's hard to see why he couldn't have forced himself through the book (although he claims to have found Sacred Games a good book, just not a great one) during the time he was actually at work. Is this not what full-time book reviewers for national magazines do during the day--read the books they then review? Or are they otherwise too busy taking lunches and doing meetings? Perhaps I'm not sufficiently informed about what the job description for a journalist-reviewer like Malcolm Jones really looks like.

Even if this particular novel was one Jones took home with him to read in the easy chair, it might be assumed that a book reviewer undertakes that job in the first place because he/she has some overriding interest in books that would make finding a slot for them in the evening's schedule not such a difficult decision, despite those other "entertainment options." But as Amardeep Singh puts it, Jones "comes dangerously close to admitting he'd rather be watching TV." Surely there are many people who do find that other responsibilities and time constraints deprive them of the opportunity to read, an opportunity they might otherwise take, but those who merely find reading a possible choice among others for spending "downtime" probably don't take books very seriously in the first place, and it's discouraging that a professional book reviewer would be giving them cover.

Also according to Jones, "there are few things more aggravating than getting well into a book and discovering that you don’t like it after all. You’ve wasted your time." Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "well into." Since Jones seems to prefer shorter novels, "well into" need only be, say, 25 pages. I put books aside at this point all the time, and I can't say I find it aggravating. If anything, I'm glad I can dispense with this book (and I may return to it later) and go on to one of the many (many) other books that seem worth reading, among which I'm going to discover that one gem that makes the whole process worthwhile. Jones says he abandoned Sacred Games after 100 pages, even though he thought those 100 pages well done. This suggests not a problem with the quality of the reading experience, but with the reader's attention span. As Amardeep also says, "a long novel is a qualitatively different kind of experience than watching a film, and thinking of them as interchangeable experiences doesn't speak well of Jones."

It's certainly possible that I, too, would stop reading Sacred Games after 100 pages, or even less. You shouldn't grind your way through a book "you don't like after all." But I think I can honestly say I would be discarding it not because I couldn't face its 800 additional pages but because it wasn't working for me whatever its length. I actually enjoy long novels, and one of the pleasures of such works is the pleasure of witnessing the author artistically redeem the large literary canvas. I enjoy short novels too, but the artistry involved is of a different order, an order of intensity and concision rather than breadth. In either case, they shouldn't be rejected simply because there's the Six Feet Under box set to watch.

Expressions

According to Zadie Smith, in a Guardian essay by now showered with much praise for its "honesty:

. . .writers do have a different kind of knowledge than either professors or critics. Occasionally it's worth listening to. The insight of the practitioner is, for better or worse, unique. It's what you find in the criticism of Virginia Woolf, of Iris Murdoch, of Roland Barthes. What unites those very different critics is the confidence with which they made the connection between personality and prose. To be clear: theirs was neither strictly biographical criticism nor prescriptively moral criticism, and nothing they wrote was reducible to the childish formulations "only good men write good books" or "one must know a man's life to understand his work". But neither did they think of a writer's personality as an irrelevance. They understood style precisely as an expression of personality, in its widest sense. A writer's personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. When you understand style in these terms, you don't think of it as merely a matter of fanciful syntax, or as the flamboyant icing atop a plain literary cake, nor as the uncontrollable result of some mysterious velocity coiled within language itself. Rather, you see style as a personal necessity, as the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness. Style is a writer's way of telling the truth. Literary success or failure, by this measure, depends not only on the refinement of words on a page, but in the refinement of a consciousness, what Aristotle called the education of the emotions.

Wow. Style is "an expression of personality" It's also a mark of the writer's "manner of being in the world." It's also "a personal necessity. . .the only possible expression of a particular human consciousness." It's also "a writer's way of telling the truth." It's also "the refinement of a consciousness." And it's also the "education of the emotions."

That's an awful lot of weight to heap on words and sentences and paragraphs, especially in fiction, which, except in the hands of narcissists and pseudo-philosophers, is not a medium for the "expression" of anything, but the attempt to convince your readers that words on a page evoke a "world," and to make something aesthetically pleasing out of prose. If you can do this, then all of the handwringing about "human consciousness" and "telling the truth" and educating emotions is just so much pomp and circumstance.

Frankly, I really don't know what any of the declarations made in the above-quoted passage are even supposed to mean. How the hell am I to know anything about the writer's "personality" from reading his novel? I don't care about his personality in the first place; I want to know what he can do with words. He can take his "personality" to his therapist. "A writer's personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner." Is this like "grace under pressure"? The writer goes around perfecting his "manner" and then transfers his concocted "lifestyle" to the printed page? Is anybody still buying this moonshine?

There's no way that fiction can embody the writer's personality. Personality is itself a fiction that we use to make overgeneralizations about ourselves and other people. At best, a work of fiction might create what seems to be a personality "behind" the work, but this doesn't happen with all fiction (and Eliot was right in suggesting that good writers try to avoid it, anyway) and to equate that personality with the "real" personality of the writer is only a mark of bad reading. Neither of these personalites exist in the first place.

I suppose style could be "the expression of a particular human consciousness" if the writer's "consciousness" was itself the subject being explored. That is, if the writer was writing some kind of psychological memoir rather than fiction. But I don't see how consciousness in this pretentious way of speaking about it is even at issue in the writing of fiction, and I certainly don't see how style has anything to do with getting it expressed. A good writer's style does exhibit certain continuities and characteristics over time, but is this an effect of "consciousness"? Isn't it just a function of that writer's particular way of living with language? (Perhaps in alluding to the expression of "consciousness," Smith is actually referring to the creation of consciousness in fictional characters, the pursuit of "psychological realism," but this is not how I read the passage in question.)

Similarly, style as a way of "telling the truth" might be plausible if by this we mean that the writer has found the right style--the right words and sentences and paragraphs--to evoke the fictional world he/she is after. If it means "telling the truth" about the characters and events portrayed in the fiction. If it means telling the truth in some more metaphysical sense, telling the truth about The Way Things Really Are, to me such pronouncements are just cant.

And I have to say that Smith really launches herself into outer space when she concludes that style has something to do with "the refinement of a consciousness" rather than refinement of "words on a page." "Style" in art and literature is a material characteristic, an identifiable, distinctive arrangement and rearrangement of the elements of the medium, whether that be language, paint, musical sound, etc. It is not some ineffable, mystical quality, a "personal necessity," something these people have but those do not. Literary style is the means by which accomplished writers manipulate language for aesthetic effect. You can educate your emotions all you'd like, but if you haven't created something aesthetically pleasing with your words, you haven't succeeded as a writer of fiction.

In her own response to Smith's essay, Jenny Davidson carries the argument to its unfortunate conclusion: "I find in particular as a reader that my doubts about a particular writer's style (his/her sentences, say) can rarely be expressed in strictly aesthetic terms, it always shades into questions of character--it is good to see Zadie Smith saying that so clearly here." Here we return to what I've previously described as "style as moral failure." The inevitable consequence of associating a writer's "sentences" with "questions of character" (with the "expression" of character) is to confuse a response to writing as a response to the writer. A failure of art becomes a moral defect. Conversely, an artistic success becomes a vindication of "character," the experience of art reduced to the degree of one's sympathy with the artist, however much a figment of the imagination he/she turns out to be. Compared to these "refinements of consciousness" the writer makes available, all discussion of the skill with which he/she organizes "words on a page" is, of course, "merely literary."

You the Author

In an essay at Backspace, Richard Curtis enthuses over the possibilities of Amazon's BookSurge:

I pondered – why would amazon buy a print on demand press? I didn’t have to wait long for the answer. A few months ago, they launched a service aimed at helping publishers keep their books in print. When the stock of a book runs low, amazon takes the publisher’s file and reprints the book at amazon’s own plant and fulfills back-orders. How do publishers feel about outsourcing their printing and fulfillment? What’s not to be thrilled about? They’re making money at no cost to themselves whatsoever. It’s all done virtually, and everybody makes money, including you the author.

Curtis thinks the logic behind this service is unavoidable, and might ulitmately result in making Amazon itself obsolete:

. . .Right now, in order to satisfy those subscription orders on amazon, Random House has to print five thousand copies at its printing plant and, ship them to amazon’s warehouse. Well, that’s perfectly fine if you’re in the twentieth century. But this is the 21st, and publishing is becoming virtual. How about this alternative: amazon prints all five thousand copies at its BookSurge plant in Charleston, South Carolina. Booksurge then ships the books directly to the customers who pre-ordered them months ago.

Pretty sexy, yes? Neither Random House nor amazon are out of pocket for the printing cost, because it’s covered by the price of the book; nor is there any shipping cost to the publisher, because shipping is paid by the customer. Nor is there any warehouse cost, because there are no warehouses! I used the term “virtual;” we know that in a digital world, all middlemen become impediments. I say unto you categorically that direct bookselling to the consumer, with no middlmen, is the way of the future. And here’s something more to think about: as stupendous as amazon is, it is only a middleman for book publishers. Is there any reason why publishers have to outsource their fulfillment to amazon? None that I can think of. Once the Random Houses of the world see the profitability inherent in the subscription/print-on-demand model, if they’re smart -- a condition we cannot always take for granted – but if they’re smart, they’ll realize they can do it themselves.

According to Curtis, this do-it-yourself approach will come to dominate bookselling because cutting out the middlemen and "selling directly to customers is the only way that the book industry will find its way back to profitability."

I certainly agree that the middlemen are "impediments" in the process of getting books into the hands of readers, and that their tentacles have enwrapped the "book business" so thoroughly that debacles like this will only become increasingly common.

But I'm afraid the warehousers and the sales people and the "distribution groups" aren't the only middlemen. And it's not only Amazon that will become unnecessary for publishers to "outsource their fulfillment." Bookstores, while in some instances providing a relaxing enough way to spend a Saturday afternoon, aren't really necessary if my primary goal is to purchase the book I've been reading about on the litblogs, and the days when my choices are limited by the tastes of bookstore owners and the limited storage space they have available are of course long over. Even the Borders and Barnes and Noble megastores (maybe especially them, since their inventory is now almost completely determined by big sales and quick turnarounds) cannot supply the diversity of selection now possible online, except at their own online sites. Nostalgia for the old-time bohemian bookstores will linger for a while--and such nostalgia is not altogether misguided--but the bricks-and-mortar bookstore will eventually disappear, as, literally, few people will have much use for them.

Agents are of course the most conspicuous middlemen in today's book business. Like all other agents in our entertainment-industrial complex, they exist to keep the industrial cogs running smoothly and to siphon off as much profit for themselves as possible. But then agents are really the middlemen for the next level of middlemen, the editors. The problem with editors is not that they edit--some writers need editing--but that they mostly don't. (Reportedly, much of the hands-on editing is being sloughed off on the agents. That they must take on this burden in order to maintain their place in the pecking order has to be very frustrating to them.) Instead they indulge in their own delusions of grandeur, masquerading as "gatekeeping," or else they see the writing and reading of books as an opportunity to stamp the process with their own exquisite sensibilities:

With a book that is clearly well-constructed and interesting but leaves me with no inclination to acquire it, I can see on paper why it works -- and often even anticipate that it will be very successful -- but I just don't feel particularly enthusiastic about it. . .a really "me" book feels like an intense crush, illuminating and electric -- like it was written just for me. I become infatuated. I have butterflies in my stomach, and I want to tell all of my friends about it. I can hardly think straight until I have acquired it. (Or at least tried to!)

How darling. Books as boyfriends.

Apparently this is the philosophy behind book acquisition in our time (aside from chasing after the next blockbuster and wasting all the marketing money on it, before discovering the public thinks what you're promoting is just so last year.) All the editors gather together their "me" books, and everyone's ego is suitably gratified. Who needs "well-constructed and interesting" when you can pretend to have half-written this other swell book just by discovering it?

However, even the editors are just the stand-ins for the most imposingly intermediate of middlemen, the publishers themselves. Curtis proclaims that POD will "save the publishing industry" because it can peddle its wares directly to consumers. It doesn't occur to him that the efficiency made possible by print-on-demand will almost inevitably make publishing companies as we know them obsolete as well. Why entrust the downloading of your book to self-described publishers when you can send it straight to your readers yourself? Yes, some services will still be provided by ostensible middlemen in this new process (some of them perhaps still operating as "small" presses), but I can't imagine that, eventually, the technology involved won't be sufficiently streamlined as to make "self-publishing" effectively the only kind of publishing a writer would desire.

Ultimately, Curtis's shot across the publishing bow is no doubt just a warning to the "book business" that it needs to reconstitute itself to accomodate New Media. He comes to salvage third-party book publishing, not bury it. But if his mission were really to ensure that "books of lasting cultural value" continue to be written and read, he'd acknowledge that publishing as it has existed for the last 50 years is the biggest obstacle to that goal and he'd assist in digging its grave.

Watching the Flags of Freedom

I've only just recently listened to Neil Young's Living With War, even though it came out months ago, and even though from what I could tell from reviews I was sure I would agree with its expressed outrage about the invasion of Iraq and the Bush administration more generally. Regular readers of this blog can probably guess why, since I've made my impatience with politicized art pretty clear. I admire Neil Young's body of work probably more than any other in the history of rock and roll (or at least I respond to it most readily), and although I'm willing to allow him an occasional polemical outburst (especially under the current circumstances), I assumed I would find this album fairly dispensable.

But I've actually been playing the thing over and over. Musically it's somewhere between Young's folky and his rocking modes (around the two of which he tends to oscillate). "After the Garden" and "Living With War" seem to me essentially folk-style protest songs revved up by Young's loud and impassioned electic guitar, while "Shock and Awe" and "The Restless Consumer" are hard-rocking shout-outs. Most of the tunes likewise seem pretty familiar variations on both his folk- and rock-derived song structures, which in this case only makes the songs seem more immediate, and ultimately the power trio format(fleshed out by an occasional trumpet and a choir) creates the kind of stripped-down sound that reinforces the urgency of the music.

Lyrically, the songs are equally simple, sometimes almost embarrasingly ingenuous when recited as verse: "Let's impeach the President for lying/and misleading our country into war,/abusing all the power that we gave him/ and shipping all our money out the door." But of course it's not verse, it's rhymed anger, and again the plain talk only reinforces the sense of urgency the album conveys, its high-decibel sincerity. It's reported that Young and company recorded the album in just a few days, some of the songs being written on the spot, and while the result does indeed seem rather loose-jointed, its unrehearsed quality is finally its greatest strength.

Perhaps this is the way to make "political art." Forget the art and scream, albeit with enough modulation in your voice to make the sound arresting. Admit you're not using the medium for artistic purposes at all, but to vent your rage and dissent and to provide a momentary opportunity for your audience to do the same. This is surely not an unworthy activity, although I don't see why it needs to be artificially elevated in importance by hailing it as a great aesthetic accomplishment.

Which is not to say that Living With War is all clamorous if rousing bombast. "Flags of Freedom" is almost subtle in its effect--if you weren't hearing it in the context of the rest of the album, you could almost take its description of the day "our younger son is going off to war" as a tribute to American soldiers and their martial spirit. And it is, as well as a paean to small-town values, except that the senseless mission on which the soldiers are being sent is ominously suggested in the song's images and its reference to the Bob Dylan song "in 1963" ("Chimes of Freedom"). "Flags of Freedom," as well as "Families," leavens the protest with honest observation of duty and sacrifice. Ultimately, these touches make the record somewhat less than (or more than) mere polemics.

(To appreciate its virtues, it is necessary to listen to the album as a whole straight through. Sampling individual songs precisely does deprive them of the context that allows them to transcend the limitations of the "protest song" and reduces them to artless complaining.)

I don't think that years from now I'll still be listening to Living With War in the same way I'm still listening to Everybody Knows This is Nowhere or Tonight's the Night. I agree with John Kenyon that it probably won't "age well," although he seems to have lost enthusiasm for it more quickly than I have. For now, it has helped to channel my own fury at the current state of the world, which is not nothing.

Purely Negative Achievements

Apparently there are those who do indeed regard "military sci-fi" as a forum for "taking stands." From an obituary of Jim Baen, publisher of Baen Books:

Baen Books offered an antidote to leftism generally in science fiction. It helped rescue science-fiction publishing from the leftist, nihilistic "New Wave" science fiction that had arisen in the 1960s and was concerned, in parallel with postmodernism and deconstructionism in other literature and art, with denigrating Western traditions and values. The "New Wave" was never really popular (New Worlds, the major New Wave magazine in Britain, was bailed out by public money after the buyers and readers stayed away in droves), but it might well have had the purely negative achievement of driving traditional science-fiction writers out of publishing. Baen Books gave -- and still gives -- a voice to stories of traditional Western values like honor, patriotism, chivalry, duty and military valor.

It was probably Jim Baen, more than any other, who rescued the "military science-fiction novel," carrying on into the future and to other worlds the highly honorable tradition associated with the likes of Hornblower and C. S. Forester, and offering a voice against the anti-Western adversary culture so common in modern literature. In its way, and without beating up any obvious political message, Baen Books has played its part in the Culture War, on the right side.

Link provided via Collected Miscellany.

A Convenient Facade

In a review of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream, Dave Itzkoff asserts that Scalzi might prove himself worthy of comparison with an SF icon such as Robert Heinlien "if he uses [his future] work to articulate a firm position on the political issues that will inevitably define his historical moment, take a stance that considerate readers might potentially disagree with, and even risk the possibility that a half-century later, some petulant, know-nothing critic will dismiss his ideas as dangerous and obsolete".

I haven't read The Android's Dream, but if it does not "take a stance" on issues defining our "historical moment," for me that is in its favor and only makes me more likely to give it a try.

Itzkoff's take on science fiction in general (or at least that branch he calls "military sci-fi") leads me to think I might not clearly understand the ambitions of science fiction, at least among its more serious-minded authors and critics. Although I have only relatively recently begun to sample noteworthy science fiction novels and writers (that is, I am most assuredly a johnny-come-lately), I have done so under the assumption it is a genre that seeks to provide an alternative to "realism" and other conventionally "literary" practices, not just by evoking speculative worlds and looking to the future rather than the past or present but also by creating alternative forms and experimenting with the established elements of fiction (plot, setting, point of view, etc.). That SF is inherently a kind of experimental fiction is a proposition I have been convinced to take seriously by some of the more intelligent critical discussion of the genre, both on SF litblogs and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find this proposition very persuasively confirmed. The novels I have attempted, by among others Philip K. Dick, China Mieville, and Samuel Delaney, while they certainly do engage the imagination well beyond what is offered in most humdrum literary realism, do not seem to me especially preoccupied with formal experiment or stylistic innovation. (Which is not to deny that the latter two, at any rate, do write well.) Traditional plotting prevails, setting is described in the kind of minute detail a Flaubert-inspired realist would almost certainly admire, and point of view (at least in the particular novels I have read) remains transparent and undisturbed. They are, finally, resolutely traditional novels, if anything overloaded with conventional storytelling, marked as "other" only by their deliberately exotic subjects.

And now Dave Itzkoff tells me that SF writers ought to emphasize "stance" and "ideas" in a way that makes even these exotic subjects just a convenient facade behind which to hide the writer's ultimate intent to "articulate a firm position." Indeed, writing science fiction, it turns out, is just another way of conveying a "philosophy": In one of Scalzi's other books, the characters read Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which "they collectively decide 'had some good action scenes but required too much unpacking of philosophical ideas.'" "Heinlein may have cultivated a philosophy that now seems distasteful bordering on appalling," says Itzkoff, "but it is unfair to criticize him for simply having a philosophy. At a time when endless war is not just a nightmarish fictional scenario but a real and looming possibility, there is still a position less commendable than having dangerous ideas, and that is having no position at all."

Perhaps having "no position at all" on real war isn't very "commendable," but declining to take positions in fiction, even if war is the ostensible subject, brings no moral opprobrium at all. In purely literary terms, refusing to "take a position" by sticking to, well, literature, and leaving the moral or political discourse to other, more suitable forums is as much of a "stance" most fiction writers ought to feel comfortable assuming. If John Scalzi thinks his job is to write engaging works of fiction rather than "cultivate a philosophy" by indirection, it's all to his credit. But is Itzkoff's own position, that the work of the science fiction writer can be reduced to the attempt to stake out a position on this or that, really shared by most writers and readers who lay claim to this genre? Is it the literary "philosophy" of SF?

I have every intention of carrying on with my survey of science fiction, both current and classic. The next writer whose work I've decided to assay is Stanislaw Lem. Perhaps here I will find at least as much art as philosophy, an equal effort to explore the possibilities of fiction as a literary form as to "say something." I continue to expect (hope) that eventually I will find that science fiction truly can be a genre that expands these possibilities, that in my initial forays into SF I just didn't get it because of my own limitations or presuppositions. That critics like Dave Itzkoff themselves underestimate SF's potential to escape the tedious restrictions of polemics and "message."

UPDATE In a response to this post, Niall Harrison at Torque Control suggests I am "under the unfortunate impression that Dave Itzkoff knows what he’s talking about." This may be right. I don't know much about Itzkoff, and I should certainly be wary of taking reviews that appear in the New York Times Book Review as representative or authoritative about anything. Otherwise, Niall says that my attempt to find SF that does "something formally new not found in other kinds of fiction" is probably "doomed to fail" because "sf stories won’t often look like experiments, because the point is the subject." I'm not sure I know exactly what he means by that last statement, but at first glance it doesn't seem that far removed from Itzkoff's "taking a stance" except that the "point" to be made is inherent in the act of imagining alternative worlds.

Ideological Failures

As much contempt as I feel for BushCheney, Inc. and its insane mission to Mesopotamia, I can only feel even more for the so-called "liberal hawks" such as Paul Berman and George Packer, who did as much as anyone to validate the invasion of Iraq, especially among other liberals in the political press, and who are now engaged in the most breathtaking evasions of responsibility for the ongoing catastrophe they helped to commence. Here's Packer in a 2006 interview attempting to explain What Went Wrong:

It's not just an engineering problem. There were ideological failures. A lot of the ideas were wrong. The ideas about what Iraq was and what we were going to get into and the ideas about our role, the U.S.'s role, not just in Iraq but in the world-they were wrong. People like me who were sympathetic to the possibility of getting rid of this dreadful tyranny were really in a bad position, because there was only one administration that was going to do it, and this administration had already shown some of its colors. Now, I don't think it had shown its incompetence in 2003. At that time, people may have thought this administration was ruthless, that it was monolithic in its aims and methods, but not that it was incompetent. That understanding is because of the Iraq War (and of course Hurricane Katrina was the final nail in that particular coffin). But that was not the wrap on them in 2003, and there's a bit of rewriting of history when people say, "You had to know that they were going to screw this up because of who they are." Well, that's a bit too convenient for me. What people said in 2003 in opposition to this war was not that they're going to screw this up, but rather that they're doing this for malicious reasons and it's going to create an explosion in the Arab world while simultaneously antagonizing our allies. Let's take those one at a time. Doing it for malicious reasons: I've never bought the idea that this was a war for oil. It doesn't make sense on the face of it, and that argument is in my book without being explicit. Explosion in the Arab world: not an explosion but a pretty strong wave of anti-American revulsion, and among a tiny minority-yes, they've come to Iraq to fight us, and that's something we should have anticipated. Antagonizing our allies: I've been worried about that from the start. In so many ways, this war was being undertaken at the wrong time and in the wrong way. But that's sort of the bad hand you're dealt by history.

Later in the interview, Packer elaborates some on the "ideological failures" he now concedes:

Our power is not inherently good. The neoconservatives thought it was. Therefore, they argued, we don't need Europe. Who cares if Egypt objects? Our power is good! Well, that's theology, and I was deeply worried about it from the start. Those are some of the bad ideas, and they led to other ideas, like the idea that somehow the Iraqi Shia would accept us, that they would somehow be philosophically sympathetic to us. That was a neoconservative idea in a rarefied world of a few thinkers, disciples of Bernard Lewis, and that was wrong. Totally wrong. They got a lot wrong.

"They" were wrong. Packer was "worried" about the theology of American goodness "from the start." The notion that "the Iraqi Shia would accept us" was "totally wrong." Yet he was, as he himself admits, "intellectually. . .open to hearing what [the neocons] had to say." The neocon analysis of "a deep political pathology" in the Middle East "all seems true to me today, still. Nothing in the Iraq War of the past three years has belied it." If the Shia now don't seem to appreciate our presence, nevertheless "there were many towns and cities where we were cheered" and "most of" the Iraqis were "grateful for their liberation."

In other words, the Iraq War failed because the neocons were naive, too enveloped in American innocence, not because the whole notion of invading Iraq in response to the events of 9/11/01 was inherently deranged. If Packer was "sympathetic to the possibility" the invasion might succeed, he could not really have been that worried about neocon theology, and by his very own logic, had the Bush administration shown more competence in prosecuting the war, all of these second thoughts about "ideological failures" would have been moot. There seem to be lots of things about the war that Packer, at least in retrospect, claims caused him disquiet, but not enough to make him take a step back from the precipice and warn his neocon friends their assumptions might be "wrong." The most he will accept is that he was "in a bad position," that he was dealt a "bad hand. . .by history."

The liberal hawks are very eager to blame the failure of their misbegotten adventure on the tactical mistakes of BushCheney. Not only was it "monolithic" and "ruthless," but, lo and behold, it was also incompetent! In this post at Crooks and Liars, Barbara O'Brien describes how rerunning "old tapes" of previous wars affects each generation's perception of war-fighting. According to O'Brien, much of the calamity of the Iraq war derives from the viewing of such tapes from Vietnam: Iraq was, in part, "about erasing the shame of Vietnam with a glorious victory." She worries that we will find ourselves "replaying old Iraq tapes someday." If we do, they will likely be the tapes we can see Packer recording even now. There were good reasons to invade Iraq--"getting rid of this dreadful tyranny"--but the Bush administration fouled it up. If only we'd fought the war George Packer wanted to fight (inviting our allies along in a "war of liberation" rather than a self-defensive war against WMD), things would have turned out all right. That these potential allies would have been even less willing to fight Packer's War than they were Bush's War doesn't occur to him.

Packer reveals the extent of his self-delusion (and, in my opinion, that of most of those who still won't face up to the consequences of the war they supported) when he lashes out at his critics:

. . .The left wants "I was wrong;" the right wants the media's line; and they resemble each other in the shallowness of their thinking. But this is about the war; and it's too big, too serious, too deep for it to be about whether I or anyone in my position was right or wrong. It just annoys the hell out of me, and honestly-the people who want that kind of thing are people for whom the war isn't real. It's just an argument they want to win.

How convenient. The war's "too big, too serious" to require any accountability on the part of those who truly got it "wrong." Those who got it right are so annoying when they seek such accountability! Better to be wrong than to be so "shallow" as to think that getting it so thoroughly and disastrously wrong means you ought to change your thinking on the subject.

It's pretty shameless to assert that those who want to stop the carnage think "the war isn't real." If George Packer couldn't have foreseen that BushCheney's war on Iraq would turn out the way it has, he's the one living in a fantasy world. And it wouldn't be worth arguing about it all, if his fantasy hadn't also required the deaths of 3,000 soldiers to fulfill his illusions.

NOTE Just to keep this post up-to-date, here's another bit of liberal-hawk evasion, from Jacob Weisberg at Slate:

There is, of course, no way to know what might have happened if we hadn't made these mistakes, and others. An American defeat still would have been possible with better planning, sufficient troops, realistic goals, and sound strategy. But even in this mistakenly chosen war, our failure wasn't inevitable. It is the product of blunders made along the way by President Bush and his people—and the blunders they are making still.

Always with the "they."

The Echo Maker

In his review of Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, William Deresiewicz exclaims that Powers "has been called an experimental novelist for some reason, but aside from a predilection for double plots, his approach to narrative is quite conventional, even naïve."

On the other hand, "The Echo Maker will tell you a great deal about neuroscience, environmental degradation and the migratory patterns of the sandhill crane, but like Powers's other novels, it won't tell you much about what its laboriously accumulated information and elaborately constructed concepts have to do with what it means to be alive at a particular time and place, or what it feels like," which, pronounces Deresiewicz, "is what novels are for."

Thus Deresiewicz the narrative theorist finds Powers insufficiently attuned to the possibilities of formal experiment, while Deresiewicz the "naive" thematic critic, preoccupied with "content," faults him for not focusing on "what it means to be alive at a particular time and place." It's a pretty good critical trick, to censure a novelist both for overemphasizing his "elaborately constructed concepts" and not emphasizing them enough. Powers excessively stresses "head" and "heart," all at the same time!

Always beware of literary critics who come to inform us what novels really "are for." It's the act of someone who usually doesn't much care about the artistic possibilities of literary forms at all but has decided that some works pass muster according to the critic's own selective criteria. More often than not, we're told that fiction ought to perform the function Deresiewicz appears to favor (we'll assume he's really more a partisan of the heart), that it reveal something about what it means "to be human," but whether the mold to which novels should conform is formal or thematic, a conventionalizing of manner or matter, the effect is to reinforce the notion that "the novel" is a single entity, a fixed form, something that can produce either genuine copies of itself or else some aberrational version, a mere literary pretender in prose.

The processes of self-replication are, of course, at the heart of what I think is still Powers's best novel, The Gold Bug Variations, embedded in its very formal/narrative arrangement as it tells, in part, the story of the uncovering of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. But what the novel suggests, in the intertwining of this story with the present-day story of the uncovering of a now-forgotten scientist's role in the earlier uncovering, etc. is that the meeting-up of a few basic, fairly simple parts (the DNA proteins) can result in continually new, potentially infinite combinations, resulting in both varied human organisms and, as applied analogically and metaphorically to the writing of fiction, fresh and surprising formal compositions. ("Composition" being further implicated in the aesthetic design of The Gold Bug Variations through the associations the scientist, Stuart Ressler, himself makes between the DNA strand and the musicals scores of J.S. Bach.) For the most part, Powers's subsequent books have attempted to explore the possibilities of this alernative view of "storytelling," through which stories are linked to other stories, all such stories themselves composed of the additional, previous stories making them what they are.

I actually agree with Deresiewicz that The Time of Our Singing, Powers's last novel, "represented something of a departure" from his established practice (and he surely ought not to be criticized simply for attempting something different, at least in the context of his own developing career). I also agree that it suffers from didacticism and sentimentality, although one would think that Deresiewicz would acknowledge that these flaws mostly originate from the effort to fill the prescription he himself is issuing, to depict "what it feels like" to "be alive at a particular time and place," but he instead only affirms what we long-term Powers readers already know: that his talent does not lend itself to the conventional tasks of "fleshing out" his characters in a manner acceptable to the critic looking for "real people" in fiction rather than formal ingenuity or stylistic brilliance. Since Deresiewicz concludes that the moralizing of The Time of Our Singing "make[s] you feel as if you were being jabbed in the chest by someone on the verge of bursting into tears," it would seem only logical to allow that Powers might perhaps better serve his talent by sticking to those "elaborately constructed concepts" featured in his other novels.

How surprising, then, that after correctly pointing out the weaknesses of The Time of Our Singing, Deresiewicz tells us that "The Echo Maker marks. . .a further departure in promising directions," even if it does ultimately signal "the return of old problems." Ultimately, Deresiewicz's principal criticism of Powers's work is the same criticism that has periodically been made since the publication of his first book, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. It's too cerebral, too interested in "ideas" at the expense of characters and plots, too "cold." That Powers has now chosen to tell stories that hew "closer than before to the emotional bone" would seem to take care of most of these problems, but no, the ideas still "bury the story that's meant to bear them." As it happens, I share the view that The Echo Maker continues the "departure" begun by The Time of Our Singing, but I think it's a lamentable development and that, far from weighing down "the story" in The Echo Maker, the ideas are borne much too lightly, are too facilely incorporated into a story that otherwise doesn't really convey much interest.

Part of the problem with The Echo Maker flows from the narrative technique Powers employs, quite consciously, as it turns out: ". . .my technique was what some scholars of narrative have called double voicing. Every section of the book (until a few passages at the end) is so closely focalized through Mark, Karin, or Weber that even the narration of material event is voiced entirely through their cognitive process: the world is nothing more than what these sensibilities assemble, without any appeal to outside authority." In other words, Powers has chosen a more or less conventional version of "psychological realism." Everything that happens is filtered through the consciousness and understanding of one of the three characters; their world is presented to us as they perceive it through their ongoing experiences.

To the extent that the novel is focused thematically on the way in which "reality" is affected if not determined by our own brain states, this strategy makes perfect sense, but it does make it necessary that the ideas of neuroscience, which Powers certainly does seem interested in explicating, are offered up in a version of the "infodump," scattered around as lumps of Gerald Weber's "cognitive process." To me, the conceit of "misrecognition," or other potential tropes derived from neuroanalysis, are never really integrated into the novel's narrative scheme, made into a complementary formal device in the way The Gold Bug Variation or Gain uses the double helix. The ideas are talked about, reflected upon, but never really transformed into aesthetic effects that make the novel interesting as something other than a forum for discussion of the fragility of neural networks.

A secondary consequence of this is that The Echo Maker abandons Powers's previous strategy of transposing events in time and space, hitching together seemingly unrelated stories (as in Plowing the Dark, say), to produce unanticipated correspondences. Paradoxically, The Echo Maker lacks this "echoing" effect. I could only read it as a disappointingly orthodox psychological study of three characters confronting crisis and emerging changed but more or less intact. The characters themselves are not really interesting enough to carry the weight of a 450-page narrative, and the occasional lyric interludes (some of which are nevertheless very impressive, especially those devoted to the sandhill cranes and their own environmental crisis) cannot make up for the novel's overall aesthetic lassitude. I found myself struggling to get through some of this book, which has never before happened in my reading of Richard Powers.

In his conclusion, Deresiewicz asserts that "Instead of letting the story speak, [Powers] is the only one who speaks. Instead of locating meaning in experience, he locates it in ideas. But novels should test ideas, not surrender to them." On the one hand, this only demonstrates that Deresiewicz is unable to make even the most basic kind of distinction between author and character, between characters who "speak" and authors who merely allow them to do so. He is unable to appreciate the aesthetic choice Powers has made to evoke a world that is "nothing more than what these sensibilities assemble, without any appeal to outside authority." If the characters in a novel discuss "ideas," by Deresiewicz's reckoning those ideas are perforce the author's ideas. On the other hand, he apparently doesn't recognize that in The Echo Maker Powers is precisely "testing ideas," and that this is the reason it ultimately fails to satisfy. Powers is engaged in "locating meaning in experience," it's just that the experiences being rendered are litterred with unprocessed ideas, leaving both the experiences and the ideas inadequately shaped into a compelling aesthetic whole.

It seems to me that in both of his last two books Powers shows signs of listening to the criticisms of his work that have been made by the likes of William Deresiewicz, that he is too enthralled with scientific ideas and his characters are insufficiently "human." He has tried to write novels more obviously rooted in character and emotion, but if Deresiewicz's response is any indication, trying to satisfy his critics is a losing propostion. He'll never be accepted as a writer who tells us "what it feels like." Although I fear that, having been rewarded for this latest effort with a National Book Award, Powers will conclude that his "departure" toward more conventional literary terrain has been rewarded, and he will stay for a while on this misguided path.

Note: I had originally intended that my response to The Echo Maker be included in Ed Champion's "Roundtable" discussion. However, I decided that I did not want my less enthusiastic reaction to interfere with Ed's intended appreciation of Powers's work, which Powers otherwise manifestly deserves.