The Reading Experience

Where Are the Novelists With Their Indictments?

My first impulse in reading this essay by Henry Porter in The Observer was to take it as just another siren song about the need to combine art with politics, to toughen up the former by encouraging writers to tackle the "serious" issues of the day. It's a song that ought to be resisted, to be sure, but I was ultimately most struck by how thoroughly cacophonous Porter's version of the tune turns out to be. His argument really is quite astonishingly incoherent.

Porter begins by quoting a typically dull piece of prose written by a "policy expert" and suggests that commentary on current affairs might be more lively if it were in part written by real writers, "public intellectuals" and novelists or dramatists:

This may seem harsh, but where are the novelists with their indictments of government and society? Where are exposés of some unregarded part of the termite heap? Where are the dramatists who can barely speak for their anger? Harold Pinter opposed the war vociferously and David Hare wrote a terrific play about it called Stuff Happens, but there has been very little thinking outside that which isn't either controlled by or seeks the approval of the political parties.

It probably is true that the public discourse would be enlivened, its collective prose style invigorated, if such writers participated more regularly. However, it's really not very clear what Porter is asking them to do. It seems he wants them to "indict," "expose" and "speak," all of which are presumably forms of non-literary public expression. Yet he also endorses Hare for writing his anti-war play, and elsewhere he praises "engaged" novelists such as Nadine Gordimer and Orhan Parmuk. "This is not to say," he writes, "that writers should go on forced missions of social realism, give up their stylistic experiments or stop writing about themselves." Instead, they should be writing fiction that is as keyed to "issues" as certain TV dramas Porter evidently admires.

Novelists have just as much right to speak about public affairs as anyone else, and I have no problem with poets, fiction writers, or dramatists commenting on political and social issues outside of their work as poets, novelists, and dramatists. Indeed, their penchant for speaking forcefully and straightforwardly about such issues, free of the cant of media blowhards and the "professional" coating of putative experts, can sometimes be refreshing. However, if Porter is exhorting them to write more "political" works of literature, then he's asking them to abandon their art in favor of artistic cant and ill-concealed propaganda. I don't know why any novelist or poet would want to take Porter up on this offer. If political salience is the question--more rather than less--wouldn't it be more fruitful to speak directly about politics through essays, op-eds, and speeches than to distort one's "creative" work by bending it to the political winds?

But it's impossible to tell which approach Porter is truly advocating. On the one hand, "we desperately need the moral force of an independent-minded writer training his or her guns on a target that journalists may not have seen and politicians may not want us to see." This sounds like the writer as direct and unmediated "voice," the writer as citizen. On the other hand, Porter directs our attention to all the subjects that require "the urgent attention of a writer's sensibility." This sounds like political agitation filtered through the steadying perception of the novelist-at-work. Does Porter want "writers" to produce tracts, or creative works colored by politics? He doesn't really seem to know.

My biggest objection to the idea that writers should "say something" about current politics and social controversies is that I don't understand why they should be presumed to know anything in particular about these subjects. Ideally, what novelists and poets know is how to create compelling novels and poems. Their expertise should be in aesthetic invention. To assume that the writing of fiction and poetry is about intervening in public debates in most cases only warps and inhibits aesthetic invention. It encourages writers to be blowhards themselves rather than artists, fosters the perception that fiction or drama are just thinly-disguised varieties of polemic. I get enough partisan rhetoric in newspapers and magazines; I don't need any more in the fiction I read.

Ulterior Motives

George Packer's recent piece of Iraq War reportage has, predictably enough, been met with the kind of oohs and aahs that has greeted most of his writing on our Iraq misadventure. Although it is sometimes noted that Packer was a supporter of the war--albeit based on grand moral and humanitarian motives that we are assured have nothing to do with the neocons' crasser geopolitical delusions--and has never exactly backed away from that support, for whatever reason even many people who opposed the war from the beginning find essays like this one from Packer to be "insightful" and "hard-hitting" in its criticism of the Bush war policy. Myself, I find it deeply disgusting.

Packer writes of those Iraqis who have been "betrayed" by the Bush administration. They were set up by its incompetence to take the fall they are now experiencing, led to believe their cooperation would redound to their credit and help bring democracy to Iraq. Etc. It's the same line Packer has been peddling since the war began to go wrong: the goal was noble, the execution inept. The bad people in the White House ruined his philanthropic war. As Michael Hirsch puts it more charitably in his review of Packer's Assassin's Gate, "With all of his visceral experience, Packer cannot free himself, finally, of the romance of this 'war of choice' for democracy."

According to Packer

Whenever I asked Iraqis what kind of government they had wanted to replace Saddam’s regime, I got the same answer: they had never given it any thought. They just assumed that the Americans would bring the right people, and the country would blossom with freedom, prosperity, consumer goods, travel opportunities. In this, they mirrored the wishful thinking of American officials and neoconservative intellectuals who failed to plan for trouble. Almost no Iraqi claimed to have anticipated videos of beheadings, or Moqtada al-Sadr, or the terrifying question “Are you Sunni or Shia?” Least of all did they imagine that America would make so many mistakes, and persist in those mistakes to the point that even fair-minded Iraqis wondered about ulterior motives. . . .

It's mind-boggling to me that Packer could report that most Iraqis had given no thought to what might replace Saddam, had "assumed that the Americans would bring the right people" and not acknowledge how utterly irresponsible and morally unhinged this makes his own initial support for the war--couched in all kinds of slippery vacillations about the possible dangers that might ensue--seem to be. Surely Packer, who assured us that anti-Saddam Iraqis were idealistic dreamers just like himself, had to know that most Iraqis were simply counting on the Americans to make the desert bloom, and that the Bush administration was singularly unprepared to undertake such a mission, yet he apparently based his support on the assumption that the very sort of Iraqis who now seem so naive would indeed step forward and help usher in democracy. What made him think that an invasion of a sovereign country--led by the likes of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, no less--that had no prior experience with democracy, and that was apparently going to rely on Ahmed Chalabi to bring it forth, could result in anything other than the catastrophe still ongoing? To me, his tacit support of this invasion amounts to moral dereliction of the rankest kind. At least Bush has his own stupidity as a partial excuse. What excuse does Packer have?

Did George Packer anticipate the "terrifying question 'Are you Sunni or Shia'"? Did he really believe the Bush administration incapable of "so many mistakes"? If he did anticipate the "terrifying question" but he didn't envision the Bush government's incompetence, perhaps he is only guilty of his own kind of stupidity. (Although it would be nice if he would confess to it.) But Packer has always distanced himself from the administration's tactics, as if this would shield him from blame when it all came a cropper. I believe he did anticipate the ethnic/religious turmoil that followed the invasion, yet he gave his assent to the war nevertheless, since his high ideals couldn't be mistaken. And he still won't admit that his allegiance to this brand of liberal idealism turned out to be no more admirable than neocon cynicism.

Packer's essay presents a doomsday scenario in which the United States is forced to flee Iraq in ignominy. Packer thinks this will leave those Iraqis who tried to assist the Americans in bringing stability to the country to their horrifying fate. That this is a wretched thought indeed, and that the Bush administration's actions in Iraq have been morally contemptible, cannot be denied, yet Packer won't acknowledge his own part in validating these actions. I find this just as contemptible, and the mind boggles even more loudly when Packer implicity endorses the notion that we must "give the new [surge] strategy a try." "The alternative, as Iraqis constantly point out, is a much greater catastrophe." With all the loathsome evidence of betrayal all around him, Packer continues to think we might just pull it all off after all, if we just stay around longer and inflict more pain.

In Assassin's Gate, Packer writes:

The Iraq War was about something other than human rights and democracy, but it could bring similar benefits. I wanted Iraqis to be let out of prison; I wanted to see a homicidal dictator removed from power before he committed mass murder again; I wanted to see if an open society stood a chance of taking root in the heart of the Arab world."

Well, I want to see peace on earth and good will toward men myself, but I don't think that waging war is a good way of achieving it. I don't think that imposing my ideas of benevolence on people I know nothing about is a good way of eliciting their gratitude. None of his interviewing and profiling, his pretence at providing an "objective" view of what's happened in this demented war, will ever convince me that George Packer (and Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens) is doing anything other than willfully denying his own complicity in bringing civil strife and mortal danger to the people of Iraq.

Altman and the Filmgoing Experience

Although I have boundless admiration for the work of Robert Altman in general, I've never much cared for M*A*S*H, unfortunately the film of his most popular among casual viewers. Its humor seems pretty sophomoric to me (especially in comparison with a truly great work of "black humor" set in wartime such as Heller's Catch-22) and what it has to "say" about war--it's really bad, and thus invites compensating "bad" behavior--seems rather trite. Every time I rewatch it--this time as part of a career survey of Altman's films I am hereby initiating--I think perhaps I'll finally get it, will understand why everyone else likes it so, but I never do. (I actually like the tv show much better, especially the first couple of seasons.)

But at least this time around I was able to see those things in it that are of a piece with Altman's later and better work, even how directing this film might have inspired him to further pursue its strategies, with greater success, in the later films. It may not be one of his best movies, but it probably will still turn out to be one of his most important.

M*A*S*H is, of course, an "inversion" of the war film, just as McCabe and Mrs Miller inverts the Western, The Long Goodbye the detective film/film noir, Thieves Like Us the gangster film, etc. Rather than focus on scenes of battle and heroism, it depicts the results of battles--carnage--and the decidedly nonheroic behavoir of its protagonists (except when they're in the operating room trying to undo the damage inflicted by war heroism). Rather than extolling the scene of war as one in which traditionally "masculine" virtues are revealed at their best, in which boys become men, M*A*S*H shows men acting like boys. This is presented as the most authentic response to the stupidity of war. And rather than portray war with the solemnity that might seem its due, the film offers outrageous humor, humor that exceeds in its acidity all those previous war comedies that tried to find the "lighter" side of war.

The subsequent exploded genre films will continue this strategy, reversing our expectations of the genre in question, upending assumptions about gender, in general mocking the conventional practices that pretend to represent American life and attitudes in the movies. That M*A*S*H did it first and in 1970 perhaps partly explains why this movie became popular--such questioning of inherited beliefs and conventions was surely reaching a receptive audience at that time.

M*A*S*H also shows Altman developing (or refining) what will become his signature methods and techniques, an approach that here and afterward can be identified as his distinctive (and, for American cinema, innovative) fillmmaking style. Most discussion of Altman's style focuses on his use of long takes and overlapping dialogue--both are on display in M*A*S*H, although the latter somewhat less so--but to me what stands out most in Altman's use of such techniques, including his restless camera, is the way in which it works to substantially underdramatize his films' narratives. This can be seen in M*A*S*H, and also in That Cold Day in the Park, Altman's most immediately previous film, released in 1969. Both films are deliberately and episodically developed, although That Cold Day in the Park is ultimately more linear in its narrative strategy that M*A*S*H, which is literally presented as a collection of episodes. That Cold Day in the Park, in fact, could almost be called a thriller of sorts, although the story is told in such a matter-of-fact, understated way that one is almost caught offguard when it eventually makes its way into Pyscho/Peeping Tom territory. Sandy Dennis's underplayed performance as the psycho (again a reversal of our expectations of such a character), whose diffidence and adherence to class norms mask her mounting frustration and despair, anticipates all the similarly underplayed, ad hoc performances Altman managed to elicit in his subsequent films from all of his actors (occasionally at some cost, if Altman's reported conflicts with Donald Sutherland and Warren Beatty are to be credited).

Altman's style and his unhurried, off-the-cuff mode of storytelling have the effect of almost de-familiarizing the filmgoing experience. We don't expect movies, or at least American movies, to proceed in this way. Where's the melodramatic conflict, the overwrought gestures, the clearly signalled plot twists? Altman's films force our awareness of them as films, or at least enforce our recognition of the formulas employed in most other films, formulas Altman either attacks or ignores. And this happens even though the techniques Altman does employ are otherwise unobtrusive, more authentically realistic as aesthetic choices than most of those used to create "realism" in American cinema. The ultimate effect of Altman's approach to filmmaking, it seems to me, is to more fully immerse us into the filmgoing experience, make us more aware of viewing films as an experience, very much in the spirit of John Dewey's notion of "integrating the parts" I discussed in the previous post. Very few other American filmmakers encourage us to ponder the nature of aesthetic experience in its cinematic form in quite the way Robert Altman does.

In my opinion, That Cold Day in the Park actually performs this task in a more satisfying way than M*A*S*H. It is, I think, one of Altman's more underrated films, even while M*A*S*H is one of his most overrated. Its exploration of the conflict between classes and between "liberated youth" and the repressed older generation might seem to fix the film to the 60s era it to some extent does seek to render, but its very lack of affect and its unostentatious surface (the youth with whom Sandy Dennis's character becomes obsessed is not a blustering radical but for much of the film simply remains silent) lure us in and prevent it from being an obvious period piece. In some ways, M*A*S*H, with its willed anarchy and its scarcely hidden analogies to Vietnam, seems more dated. Neither film really shows Robert Altman to be the great film artist he will demonstrate himself to be in just a few years hence, but That Cold Day in the Park, at least, does announce he has the promise to become one.

Integrating the Parts

Although John Dewey believed there was an "esthetic" component to all "vital" experiences, he also held there was something unique to aesthetic experience per se:

. . .The most elaborate philosophic or scientific inquiry and the most ambitious industrial or political enterprise has, when its different ingredients constitue an integral experience, esthetic quality. For then its varied parts are linked to one another, and do not merely succeed one another. And the parts through their experienced linkage move toward a consummation and close, not merely to cessation in time. This consummation, moreover, does not wait in consciousness for the whole undertaking to be finished. It is anticipated throughout and is recurrently savored with special intensity.

Nevertheless, the experiences in question are dominantly intellectual or practical, rather than distinctively esthetic, because of the interest and purpose that initiate and control them. In an intellectual experience, the conclusion has value on its own account. It can be extracted as a formula or as a "truth" and can be used in its independent entirety as a factor and guide in other inquiries. In a work of art there is no such single self-sufficient deposit. The end, the terminus, is significant not by itself but as the integration of the parts. It has no other existence. A drama or novel is not the final sentence, even if the characters are disposed of as living happily ever after. . . . (Art as Experience, Perigree, p.55)

"Philosophic or scientific inquiry" does enable the kind of dynamic, fully aware and integrated experience that Dewey values and that does have, precisely because it is dynamic, an aesthetic character. The artist is no more "alive" at his work than the philosopher or the scientist (or the engineer or the scholar). But the work done by the artist does have a different character, at least in its subsequent use-value. When the philosopher and scientist have completed their work (to the extent it can be completed), the "conclusion" is literally at issue--for the work to be valuable, the "truth" that results must be "extracted" to be used in subsequent inquiry. The "parts through their experienced linkage" no longer matter, however much they were "recurrently savored" while the work was ongoing. Only the conclusion retains significance for other scientists and scholars.

No such "truth" emerges from the creation and experience of art. The experience itself is all. "The end, the terminus, is significant not by itself but as the integration of the parts. It has no other existence." The "end" of the experience--and with fiction, this means the "end" of the work as well--means returning to the beginning, and to the middle, and to the end again. It means "the integration of the parts" both to complete and enhance the experience and to continue the process of re-creating the work which is the reader's part of the job in producing an aesthetic experience. The reader who settles for "the end"--whether this involves accepting "happily ever after" or the solution of the crime as the "truth" of the work, its reason for being--has not had an aesthetic experience, is in practice denying the existence of the aesthetic where fiction is concerned. If a work of fiction is to be taken as art, the conclusion of the story "has no other existence" except as the remaining piece to be integrated into the whole.

"A drama or novel is not the final sentence. . ." Ultimately Dewey is questioning the dominance of "story" in fiction. To the extent that story encourages us to ignore the "experienced linkage" of narrative parts, to read headlong for that "cessation in time" when the story reaches its fulfillment and offers up its until then concealed "truth," precisely to that extent is story actually the enemy of art in fiction. This is not to say that story must be eliminated in the name of art--probably there is a point beyond which the abandonment of story in its most rudimentary sense (the sense that something is happening) would mean abandoning "fiction" as a meaningful part of the conjoined term "prose fiction." But it is to say that story should be understood as merely the vehicle the writer of fiction moves on to produce more encompassing aesthetic effects, to provoke the reader into an aesthetic experience that transcends the formulaic appeal of storytelling.

Seeing Through It

John Freeman begins his review of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End by asserting that

A thousand years from now, if future generations turn to contemporary fiction as a window into the past, they will wind up with a rather skewed portrait of America. People, they might surmise, spent very little time in cars, resolved many disputes with violence, almost never slept with their spouse, and, in spite of pulling in regular incomes, never, ever went to work.

Which is precisely why future generations should not read fiction "as a window into the past." And why we should not be reading fiction of the past as a "window" onto the "reality" of the life therein evoked. Only bad writers, writers who think of fiction as a more "dramatic" way of recording history or who imagine themselves as "saying something" about The Way We Live Now, take themselves to be providing a "window" for future readers.

Good fiction is inherently a "skewed portrait," skewed by the writer's particular vision of experience and by that writer's singular way of transforming experience into language and molding both language and experience into aesthetic form. In subject or theme, most good fiction either depicts human situations in extremis, focusing on characters and events that may illustrate more or less universal human predicaments embodied in an exemplary instance but that do not exist primarily to "represent" a specific time (Catch-22, The Tunnel, Sabbath's Theater), or does indeed center on "ordinary" experiences but emphasizes their status as experiences for the characters undergoing them, not their value as emblematic events "capturing" a moment in time. The characters in Stephen Dixon's fiction, for example, do plenty of driving (Interstate is constructed around the act of driving) and are often shown at work (especially in his earlier fiction--Garbage, for example), but I don't think "future generations" will want to see these characters as anything other than the specific creations of Stephen Dixon.

The "window" afforded by the best fiction is always clouded, distorted, self-reflective. For these very reasons, it continues to fascinate. Fiction that pretends to offer a clear view onto the events of the day will never reach those "future generations" except as a moldy sample excavated by some social historian. Thus if Then We Came to the End is intended as a more transparent portal onto Our Times, I probably won't be reading it. Although judging from Freeman's description of the book, I think I already have read it, when, windowless, it was called Something Happened, by Joseph Heller.

Mediation

Tom Lutz asserts that Harold Bloom (along with Francine Prose) believes the current generation of politicized literary scholars (what Bloom terms the "school of resentment") "are all looking at something besides the text itself, by which they mean a book that is read without theory, without reference to other values, and without mediation of any kind."

Lutz associates this view that we should return to "the text" with New Criticism, but nowhere in his essay does he reveal (if he knows) that Bloom was actually hostile to New Criticism. He considered its approach so limiting and so dismissive (in the practice of most of the New Critics, at least) of the Romantic poets, whose work Bloom so loves, that he deliberately designed his own theory of poetic influence as a corrective, if not an outright rejection, of New Critical biases. Lutz goes on to associate both Bloom and New Criticism with such disparate figures as Mortimer Adler, E.D. Hirsch, and John Sutherland, simply because they appear to endorse the idea that learning to appreciate the "text itself" is an important part of literary education.

In a move apparently intended to show that Bloom doesn't practice what he preaches (or doesn't understand the foundation of his own practice), Lutz cites H. L. Mencken's witless attacks on "The New Criticism" (as delineated by J. E. Springarn in 1911), which putatively show that academic criticism is inherently theoretical, "criticism of criticism of criticism." But again, since Bloom is/was not a New Critic, it's hard to see how this undermines Bloom's own approach to the "text itself." The New Critics did indeed have a "theory" of the literary text as something dynamic and inherently dramatic (and reading as the experience of the text's dynamism), but it is not Bloom's, however much he might accept the underlying emphasis on the integrity of the literary text, free of the demands made on it by those with their own personal and political investments.

But of course Bloom does have a theory. No one who remembers the scholarly debates of the 1970s and 1980s could think otherwise, as Bloom played a major role in these debates precisely as a theorist of literature, a proponent of the Freudian notion of the "anxiety of influence." Far from being considered a conventional formalist, someone who believed a text should be read "without mediation of any kind," Bloom was taken as a radical, even a postmodernist, a critic who was taking literary study away from its proper focus on the "text itself" into very a-textual speculations about the role of poetic influence and its rather violent Freudian implications. Anyone who's read and taken seriously books such as The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, and Agon would know that the accusation Bloom is some kind of retrograde enemy of "theory" is ridiculous on its face.

Thus, at least as far as Bloom is concerned, Lutz's invocation of his name as one of those who demands a book be read "without theory, without reference to other values, and without mediation of any kind" is simply incorrect. This is not a matter of interpretation. Some investigation of Bloom's work, even of secondary explications of that work (a simple Google search, perhaps) would immediately reveal that Lutz's account is a caricature of the role Bloom has come to play in current literary discourse (the aging curmudgeon) but has nothing to do with what he's actually written. Even a book such as How to Read and Why, a deliberate simplification of Bloom's ideas about the value of literature, reveals that he does not hold the naive view of reading Lutz attributes to him.

Unfortunately, the caricature of Bloom is widely accepted. Just recently Sandra at Bookworld (otherwise a nice, thoughful litblog) opined that she had contracted "Bloom Syndrome," a "condition in which the sufferer is unable to read any work of literature unless it is deemed Significant by Harold Bloom and which often results in the reader losing the will to live/read, crushed under the weight of canonical imperatives." To the sin of thinking that the "text itself" is what literature is all about (and in Bloom's case looking to account for the text by emphasizing the writer's confrontation with his predecessors, an emphasis that highlights the continuity-through-conflict of literature) is added the annoying belief that the literary tradition is meaningful and worthwhile, that "some books are better than others." It's telling that in our culture someone who becomes associated with beliefs such as these is lampooned as a pathetic fogey who apparently thinks those old books are important or something.

Lyrical Commentary

In some ways, the critical response to John Updike's recent work seems to me similar to that accorded to Harold Bloom's, even though Updike is a novelist and Bloom a critic. Most of it is rankly opportunistic, as if it is now clearly time, given these writers' advancing age, for Our Best Critics to prepare us for their impending deaths and certain subsequent neglect, at least if these critics' own level-headed standards are to be applied. Most of it is directed at the authors rather than the work, as if the reviewers have stored up their animus against both writers' misguided if inexplicably successful ways and are now able to let them have it. And most of it is pretty stupid.

Terrorist is certainly not one of Updike's best novels. Literary posterity will probably regard it as an interesting but failed experiment, taking Updike away from his usual themes and mileu, although not completely: its exploration of religious belief is consistent with much of his previous fiction, and the town of New Prospect, New Jersey could easily enough be a depiction of Brewer, Pennsylvania in its own decayed postindustrial latter days. But it certainly does not deserve the kind of critical censure it often enough did receive upon its publication. (Amitav Ghosh: "the end result is that Updike is unable to cut his brown characters loose from texts, scriptures and ideologies. As for his belief that elaborate descriptions of skin color are a form of insight, it is not wholly without merit, for it does serve to occasionally enliven the prose"; Floyd Skloot: "the novel is almost wholly without credibility"; Jonathan Shainin: the novel is full of "consummately pretty descriptions of everything under the sun"; Michiko Kakutani: "the ensuing developments in this maladroit novel prove to be every bit as dubious as Ahmad is as a recognizable human being."

To some extent, Christopher Hitchens's ravings can be dismissed as just further proof of what an incompetent literary critic he is. (For more on this, go here.) One combs through his review looking for substantive support for his assertion that "Updike has produced one of the worst pieces of writing from any grown-up source since the events he has so unwisely tried to draw upon" but finds little beyond dissatisfaction with the author's pop culture references and impatience with his "grueling homework." Updike's portrayal of a religiously-obsessed Muslim clearly does not satisfy Hitchens, but then, given Hitchens's own record of misjudgment of the influence of religion in Iraq, one would hardly want a protagonist who does fit his image of what a true believer might be like. If I had to choose between John Updike and Christopher Hitchens for "insight" into or "imaginative sympathy" with a young man caught up in the struggle between religious belief and the physical/material temptatations of secular American society, I wouldn't have to weigh the alternatives for very long.

James Wood, on the other hand, doesn't have the excuse of being a generally inept critic, certainly not if his hyperelevated reputation for "intelligence" and "close reading" is to be taken seriously. And, indeed, Wood's familiarity with modern fiction (especially English and European fiction) can't be impugned, and, unlike Hitchens, he does take care to cite text and offer support for his judgments (which are in turn literary judgments rather than political arguments or expressions of dyspepsia). Yet Wood's negative review of Terrorist essentially rests on the conclusion that Updike isn't Dostoevsky or Conrad and that, surprise! surprise!, he isn't a psychological realist. These seem to me to be charges Updike would pretty readily confess to, and they only seem like damning criticism because Wood, as is his wont, advances his own preference for psychological realism, for realistic fiction that gives us an account of Mind, to the front of the line where proper literary strategies are concerned. Only psychological realism is a proper literary strategy, according to Wood, and writing that doesn't conform to his prejudice gets labeled "hysterical" or worse. Wood's reviews would be much easier to take if he began every one of them with a disclaimer: I have a particular hobbyhorse I like to ride when reviewing fiction, and in this case I have chosen a writer who allows me to ride it like the wind!

Wood tells us that the fatal flaw in Terrorist is that it shows Updike's failure "at the essential task of free indirect style." Updike "will begin a paragraph in his character's voice, and then, apparently losing any capacity for the necessary ventriloquism, decide utterly to write over his character." Updike's protagonist, Ahmad, "has no personality, no quiddity as an eighteen-year-old American, so he is Updike's serf, ready for whatever the writer chooses to do with him. In Updikeland, this means lyrical authorial commentary." In other words: Updike does not give over his prose to the task of probing his character's consciousness; he does not present us with a psychologlical portrait that subsumes either style or form to fiction's putative capacity to delve within, to make characters "real" to us by inviting us into their minds.

Updike's "lyrical authorial commentary" in Terrorist is not much altered from what we find in much of his other fiction, so Wood's complaint can't really be about this novel alone. This is Wood attempting a takedown of Updike based on a perceived flaw in one particular book, in which Updike has taken a risk by treating a subject not immediately and recognizably Updikean, however much he is able to render it with his usual precisely observed style. It allows Wood to make the same kind of criticism that has always been made of Updike, but to dress it up in fancier crittalk ("free indirect style"): Updike is too besotted with language. He writes too much.

It is true that Updike does not use the free indirect style. It is true that he "writes over" his characters. Although his third-person narratives (and most of his fiction does use third-person narration) do center on particular characters and their responses to events, Updike does not "inhabit" them in a way that would erase his own stylistic tracks. As I said in a previous post, Updike's writing draws on his characters' "mental storehouse of memories and images, but does not dwell in [their] immediate awareness. It creates writing out of that storehouse." Updike does not prove himself inadequate at psychological realism. He doesn't attempt it. Wood's criticism is thus entirely irrelevant and his review utterly useless.

Both Hitchens's and Wood's reviews seem to me of a piece with Leon Wieseltier's condemnation of Updike for "aestheticizing" the ruined World Trade Center in his depiction of the scene that appeared shortly after the events of 9/11/01. Updike merely applied his considerable powers of visual description to the task of evoking the disaster and was denounced as some kind of moral leper. It isn't surprising that Hitchens and Woods, themselves both moral critics suspicious of the merely aesthetic, would join in on the faultfinding once Updike dared to write a whole novel steeped in associations with the events of that day.

The Various Rays of Culture

Although I agree with Barrett Hathcock's conclusion that the kind of "cultural criticism" represented by Greil Marcus's The Shape of Things to Come "too energetically [mines its] material for the cultural rather than the aesthetic," I can't agree with the critical typology that underlies his analysis:

. . .The first level is the most base, the easiest, and perhaps the most valuable--the thumb. A thumbs up or thumbs down? This is the criticism of a friendly recommendation; this is the criticism of year-end lists, whether they're constructed by some blog or by The New York Times.

The second, slightly higher level of criticism is that of specific, aesthetic analysis. How does this particular piece of art work? How does it function as a radically constructed whole? (Or how does it not, and why?) This is, I'll admit, rather undergraduate-heavy--art seen through a lit seminar, where students pop open the hood of a sonnet to see how it works.

The third and highest level of criticism, in my radically simplified piñata here, is criticism as cultural interpretation, where a piece of art is situated in a larger cultural context, both compared to other pieces of the culture, and prism-like, made to shine in the various rays of that culture. I think this third type of criticism is the most complex of the three, the one that rewards the most re-reading, the one that soars above mere book reviewing (this was about that, and it was good), and speaks to what it means to be alive right now in this crazy, kooky world we live in, etc.. . . .

"Specific, aesthetic analysis" is only "slightly higher" in its effect than list-making and crude value judgments? I understand that the "recommendation" function of book reviewing is important to many readers, who want to know whether a particular book is worth reading in the first place, but the kind of judgment that can be expressed through the thumb hardly qualifies as literary criticism. Indeed, I'm not likely to take anyone's recommendation seriously at all unless it's accompanied by some "specific, aesthetic analysis" that reveals to me just why how and why the reviewer reached his/her conclusion about a book's thumbworthiness in the first place.

Thus, I'm going to have to take issue with the notion that "aesthetic analysis" is an act of pulling apart a work of art "to see how it works." To my mind, "aesthetic analysis" and "literary criticism" are synonymous terms. A literary critic doesn't so much "pop open the hood"--although something like this is probably inevitable when the critic tries to illustrate his/her responses to the text: this is what worked on me the way it did--as report on the aesthetic experience the work has provided. This may require some re-reading of the text to clarify what prompted the particular experience it provoked, but ideally "aesthetic analysis" is not an end in itself, something that settles once and for all how a particular work "functions as a radically constructed whole," but the means to another critical end: to provide other readers with an informed account of what the work is like, perhaps to encourage the reader to approach it with a sharper critical eye and heighten his/her own experience of it.

My biggest problem with Barrett's schema, however, is the privileged place it gives to "criticism as cultural interpretation." In my view, this kind of "criticism," at least as it is applied to literature, isn't either literary or criticism. As soon as a work of literature "is situated in a larger cultural context," what follows isn't likely to be about the work at all--about what causes us to call it literary--but about the "context." It will be sociology, not literary criticism, intended to illuminate the "culture" that produced the art, not the art itself. This may or may not be more "complex" than actual criticism (I myself don't think it is; "situating" art in its cultural context may give such a piece of sociological analysis a patina of learnedness or the appearance of sounding out Important Issues, but it's finally much easier to make broad generalizations about "culture" based on superficial comparisons than it is to truly engage in "specific, aesthetic analysis"), but it isn't finallly about what makes art or literature worth our attention to begin with. It isn't the literary critic's job to tell us "what it means to be alive right now in this crazy, kooky world we live in," although perhaps it is part of the artist's job to do so. The critic focuses on how the artist goes about that job in a particular instance, how the artist's work encourages (or doesn't) a singular aesthetic experience.

Barrett says he would "like Marcus to pay more attention to the second type of criticism in an effort to bolster the strength of his higher cultural criticism," but Marcus is obviously not much interested in doing so because he's not much interested in his objects of analysis as art. (Which is one of the more disappointing things about Marcus's writing after he ceased being a regular rock critic. His reviews of individual albums were often quite good.) Whether Marcus himself thinks he's doing "higher cultural criticism" rather than mere aesthetic analysis is debatable, but I surely don't know what's "higher" about it. I wouldn't necessaily call it "lower" than aesthetic criticism, but unless you think it's more important to understand the cultural currents flowing through David Lynch's work than to appreciate the work itself, I can't see why we would place it on such a pedestal.

Addendum: I also agree with Barrett's assessment of Roth's American Pastoral. It does indeed "work more as notes toward a novel, notes toward a novel about the fall of American innocence" than as an aesthetically satisfying novel in its own right. This perhaps makes it just as useful for Marcus's kind of cultural criticism, but it doesn't make it a novel I'd want to read again.

Plot-Wise

David Denby asserts that

The cinema, in which actors appear to be moving in consecutive time through patches of genuine space, has always created a strong expectation of realistic narrative. But here’s the paradox: thanks to the mechanical nature of the recording medium (still photos, or digits, strung together in rapid succession), playing with sequence and representation is almost irresistible. As soon as film was invented, experimental film was invented. Some of the fooling around was just exuberant exploration of a fabulous new toy, but some of it arose from political or philosophical convictions, and was intended to turn us upside down.

In my previous post, I suggested that while fooling around with chronology is more or less identified as the one properly "experimental" mode of fiction writing, few critics and reviewers express much interest in, or tolerance for, other kinds of literary experiment. Here Denby also equates "experimental film" with "playing with sequence." He is discussing a cluster of recent films, such as Babel, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Memento (all of which in turn, claims Denby, are in a lineage that began with Pulp Fiction) that "disorder" time, and he ultimately questions the efficacy of such manipulations.

When himself casting back in time for "classic" precursors to today's fractured narratives, Denby offers Alain Resnais as an example:

Of all the highbrow directors of the late fifties and sixties, Alain Resnais, working with experimental writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, and drawing on ideas developed by those writers in their fictions, played the most extreme (and infuriating) games with time and narrative. In “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” (1959), two lovers, one French, one Japanese, mainly lie in bed trying to retrieve their memories of the war. The movie ceases to move forward in any conventional sense; and the past, it turns out, becomes ungraspable, even irrecoverable, leaving us stranded in an elegant time warp. In Resnais’s “Muriel” (1963), a variety of distancing devices hold at arm’s length an unendurable recollection—a French soldier’s experience of torturing an Algerian girl. At the same time, the present-tense narrative is developed intermittently, and without the usual climaxes and tensions, so that the structure of the story’s emotions, rather than their power, becomes the subject of the film.

That Hiroshima, Mon Amour "ceases to move forward in any conventional sense" and that Muriel's "present tense narrative is developed intermittently, and without the usual climaxes and tensions" does not, it seems to me, make them the inspiration for the jumbled chronologies of current films. Resnais is looking for alternatives to the "power" of narrative; these films want to see if cinema can carry on without "story" in the Hollywood sense, not to find novel ways of presenting story that continue to convey its dramatic force. Films like Babel and Memento (and I actually like the latter film a great deal) do not focus on "the stucture of the story's emotions." They are all "climax and tension," if anything only reinforcing the importance of story: Reassembling the fragments of narrative we are given into a conventional story becomes perhaps our primary prerogative as viewers of such movies. Story remains all.

Part of the problem with Denby's formulation of "the new disorder" is that he opposes it to "realistic narrative." He confuses "realism" with conventional storytelling. Resnais's films are hyperrealistic, even while they do abandon story conventions. Indeed, "experiment" in film is more likely to move toward greater realism than toward ever more frenzied disruptions of narrative line, at least as long mainstream filmmaking continues to be focused on delivering greater and greater narrative punch. Efforts to achieve realism in either mainstream or independent filmmaking are more likely to draw out fresh and innovative approaches to the art of cinema than the admittedly exciting but finally story-bound "scrambling of time frames" that Denby describes. This is not to say that realism is preferable in cinema, just that what Denby calls realism is really just the use of storytelling strategies that don't call attention to themselves.

Denby concludes from the perceived failings of Babel that a return to tried-and-true storytelling techniques might be necessary, that they might lead to "the paradise of a morally complicated but flawlessly told story." I'm all for moral complication, but I don't see that this must be the Holy Grail of filmmaking. I don't see why experimenting with the possibilities of film can't be a sufficient justification for making one, just as similar experiment with literary form has often been for writing a poem or a novel. If Neal Gabler is right and "movies can no longer be the art of the middle," then all the more reason not to single-mindedly pursue the mass audience with more gaudy refinements of "plot." Or mollify them with a "flawlessly told story."

Refurbishing the Wheel

K. Silem Mohammad (Lime Tree) contends that "new forms" in poetry can be just as stultifying as the conventional kind if the poet comes to believe that "the mechanics of composition are more important than the experience created by the work."

He goes on to suggest that Ezra Pound's command to "make it new"

does not mean to reinvent the wheel every time you write a poem. The original image associated with this phrase was that of the (same) sun rising every morning, always new. The wording could just as easily be "make it fresh," or "make it seem as though new." It's more about what the reader is enabled to perceive than it is about the writer's use of novel formal techniques.

I would agree that the attempt to create something "new" in either poetry or fiction does not necessarily involve the reinvention of form, if that means ignoring literary history. The poetic "wheel" would require reinvention only if it could be established that the wheel wasn't really a wheel after all. One's precursors not only wrote poems of a sort one no longer fancies, but they didn't actually get at what poetry really is, did not instigate or participate in a tradition that can now be accepted as properly "poetic."

In this sense, making it "fresh" seems entirely sufficient, although one could still be "reinventing" if this is understood to mean adding to the existing tradition something that hasn't been tried before (or something that hasn't been tried in this or that way). A writer who thinks of him/herself as "innovative" because he/she has determined to take nothing for granted, to assume that literary forms can always be reshaped and reconceived, would, in my opinion, be justified in using that designation. This would be less a matter of developing "novel formal techniques" than regarding the existing presumptions about form to be always potentially expandable.

Mohammad's own definition of form as "near-physicalizations of possibility, not yet quite frozen into fact, but charged with fact's imminence" thus seems entirely satisfactory to me, although I would be less inclined to think of achieved form as "fact" except insofar as the poem produced does indeed embody the sense of potential with which the poet began. Even here, however, the "physicalizations of possibility" would need to be inherent in the poem itself, represented in its formal turns and rhetorical processes but not necessarily literally "physicalized." The poem does not seek to be encased in its form but to demonstrate in its pursuit of form both the strugge to attain aesthetic completion and the ultimate impossibility of achieving that goal, especially if it entails reaching a perfection of sorts in the exploitation of form. Other, equally good if not yet imagined explorations in form are always possible. (The work of Wallace Stevens seems to me a good example of this kind of approach to aesthetic form.)

Undoubtedly it is still easier to debate this conception of "form" in poetry than in fiction. For better or worse, fiction is still tied to story as its irreducible form, even though "story" (telling it, relating it, making it known) is more an excuse for invoking form than a formal property itself. Thus, different kinds of narrative strategies, different ways of arranging and disclosing the story, are acceptable, are even praised as the appropriate kind of "experiment" in fiction, as long as they are there in order finally to present the story in the most dramatically effective manner. But few readers and critics seem willing to consider other kinds of formal structures, structures that foreground language and the non-linear ways in which it might be manipulated, that experiment with other "shapes" a work of fiction might take, as an alternative to the predominance of story. This need not mean dispensing with narrative altogether--although at this point the distinction between poetry and prose fiction might break down in a way that could provide further fruitful experiment and critical discussion--but it would mean acknowledging once and for all that, now we are entering a second century in which visual means of storytelling are proving more effective at satisfying most people's narrative needs, "telling a story" is not the most relevant skill a good fiction writer possesses.

It does seem to me that the wheel that has allowed the oxcart of fiction to keep moving for the past 250 years has begun to break down due to overuse and the tremendous weight it has been asked to bear. A sturdier, more adaptable model might be in order.