The Reading Experience

An Energy of Expansion

John Dewey:

While there is no difference that may be exactly defined between prose and poetry, there is a gulf between the prosaic and poetic as extreme limiting terms of tendencies in experience. One of them realizes the power of words to express what is in heaven and earth and under the seas by means of extension; the other by intension. The prosaic is an affair of description and narration, of details accumulated and relations elaborated, It spreads as it goes like a legal document or catalogue. The poetic reverses the process. It condenses and abbreviates, thus giving words an energy of expansion that is almost explosive. A poem presents material so that it becomes a universe in itself, one, which, even when it is a miniature whole, is not embryonic any more than it is labored through argumentation. There is something self-enclosed and self-limiting in a poem, and this self-sufficiency is the reason, as well as the harmony and rhythm of sounds, why poetry is, next to music, the most hypnotic of the arts. (Art as Experience)

For me, novels and stories can also be "poetic" in the sense Dewey delineates here. Indeed, my previous post was meant to illustrate exactly this claim (while abjuring the reflexive association of the poetic with "pretty words"). Too many works of fiction are content to be affairs "of description and narration, of details accumulated and relations elaborated," while too few attempt to give "words an energy of expansion that is almost explosive," to become "self-sufficient" in their effort to create "a universe in itself." To take Dewey's notion of "art as experience" a little farther: Too many novels and stories settle for describing experience; too few manage to become experiences in themselves.

The Silence She Sought

On the one hand, it is easy enough to see how Sara Greenslit's The Blue of Her Body (Starcherone Books) could be called a "poet's novel." It makes no effort to "tell a story" in the ponderous, pedestrian mode too often adopted by novelists who come to fiction through an interest in narrative (as exemplified either in other fiction they've read or in movies) rather than an engagement with language and the possibilities of language in creating verbal art and exploring fresh ways of representing experience. There's no facile psychologizing of characters portrayed as "real people," no faux-dramatic plot points, no perfunctorily inserted dialogue straining to be "believable." No exposition, rising and falling action, or contrived resolution of the artificially induced "conflict." Instead, The Blue of Her Body is an artfully arranged construction of words, a novel that asks the reader to infer the "story" between the lines of its brief prose passages.

On the other hand, one would not call this novel "poetic" because it indulges in conventional figurative phrasing, lunges after arresting tropes, offers up an ostentatious display of "fine writing." Greenslit's prose is more matter-of-fact, more objectively descriptive:

Her rented house on the edge of town is small, chipped paint, all her own. She likes the windows, large and filled with trees. The morning light on the wood floor reminds her of her mother's caramel. The dog clatters through the house, pet hair collects in the corners. She no longer needs a vacuum. The broom is easier.

She has chosen birds over the soft other.

A week before her new job at the aviary starts, boxes are left stacked in the living room. She is afraid to put everything away. She fears the open space. She fears the silence she sought, the echoes. She had wanted these things, but now they loom and hover.

She brought only what was hers. But everything reminds her of Kate.

One chapter consists entirely of mostly one-sentence "paragraphs":

Whenever it was summer, I fell into a trance watching leaves on windy days

The sky was cloudless and blue like the spaces inside loved ones

Peregrine hacking box, nestling feather fuss down, eyes and beaks

Mother's summer garden: Asiatic lilies, red as a South American carnival, coneflowers about to unfold

When I was in love, I couldn't imagine any hands but yours. I smelled you while I worked, I saw you in our bed.

When I left, you wouldn't look me in the eye.

I was fool, fool to my mood.

I ate my pills day after day, unable to see.

One could say that the novel unfolds in lines and stanzas, rather than sequential prose paragraphs that disappear in the narrative flow they are meant to serve, although this does not so much make it a kind of prose poem as provoke us into considering the sometimes fine line between prose and verse, fiction and poetry. Why can't a novel proceed via evocative, carefully crafted sentences rather than routine, narrative-bearing paragraphs? At what point does the novelist leave to the poet the care and tending of language at its most fundamental level, the habitation of the word, the phrase, the sentence?

Much of what The Blue of Her Body is "about" is expressed in the first-quoted passage above: "She has chosen birds over the soft other." The novel's unnamed narrator has broken up with her lover in the city and moved into the country to work at an aviary. In her isolation, she considers her own history of depression, broods on her relationship with her mother (also a depressive) and her failed relationship with Kate, and takes the opportunity to further cultivate her love of animals. The novel in effect chronicles the narrator's convalescence, concluding with a variation on Emily Dickinson: "Hope is a damaged bird. She heals and then stays. . . ."

The narrator's dilemma and her attempt to work through it, however, are presented almost entirely through inference and suggestion. The story is purely backstory. In addition to the brief expository passages and the declarative sentences (sometimes stated in the third-person, sometimes in first-person), there are fragmentary accounts of the activity in the aviary, haiku-like descriptions of animals and of nature in general, and cumulative bits of information about the various efforts to treat the narrator's depression. While Greenslit thus avoids converting the narrator's circumstances into narrative melodrama, ultimately her novel does present a coherent and convincing, if oblique, portrait of its protagonist's struggle to gather her life into some semblance of order and purpose.

I believe that the future of prose fiction will only lead it closer to a kind of rapprochement with poetry, where the novel began as a splintering-off of narrative from the storytelling mode of epic poetry (just as drama appropriated the "dramatic" in dramatic poetry). Now that film and television (as well as what is called "creative nonfiction") have in turn taken over the storytelling function, at least for the mass audience, fiction's continued relevance, aside from those novels seemingly written with the film adaptation in mind, will perhaps require that it return to its origins in the poet's attention to language per se. Experimental fiction almost always points us in this direction, as challenges to the hegemony of conventional storytelling usually entail a reinvigoration of the resources of language, highlighting the capacity of prose fiction to do something else. The Blue of Her Body is an admirable addition to this effort.

Only Read By Literary People

It's too bad that the National Book Critics Circle has now so thoroughly discredited itself and its "save book reviews" crusade through its inability to curb its blog-hatred, since buried beneath the ignorant rantings Critical Mass has been posting is also this short piece on the role of criticism in literary journals by novelist Eric Miles Williamson, who is also an editor at American Book Review.

And while our efforts are noble at saving the book review sections of newspapers, it seems to this Board member that the battle we're fighting will ultimately be lost. Newspapers exist to make money. They are commercial enterprises. The Hearst Corporation (from which I receive checks) is not, ultimately, concerned with advancing culture or belle lettres. It wants, like any other creature, not only to survive, but, as Faulkner says of man, to prevail. . .

This said, I believe the book review is in better health than it has ever been in this country. I have in front of me a recent issue of Kevin Prufer's Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, the literary journal published out of the University of Central Missouri. It comes out twice a year, and the issue on my desk has 27 reviews totalling over 100 pages, some as long as 4500 words. None of these reviewers get paid a nickel. Also on my desk is American Book Review, for which I edit. We publish six times a year, and our most recent issue has 30 reviews, each of which is at least 1000 words. We pay fifty bucks, but we beg our reviewers to accept a subscription or a gift subscription, and most of them forgo the cash. Then there's The Georgia Review, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Chelsea, The Southern Review, The Arkansas Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and hundreds of other literary journals published both independently and by universities. . . .

I certainly agree with Williamson that the book reviews to be found in publications like Pleiades, ABR, Bookforum, and Context (alert: I've written for three of these journals) are more fully developed and considered, are better, than most of the glorified plot summaries that pass for fiction reviews in American newspapers. Good reviews are to be found frequently enough in the literary magazines Williamson lists as well (further alert: I've also written for two of them), but unfortunately the ones on the list are just about the only print literary magazines that do regulalry publish book reviews and literary criticism. The principle, and partial reality, that Williamson champions in his post is well worth stating and defending. Literary magazines (what used to be called "quarterlies" or "little magazines") should play a vital role not just in publishing fiction and poetry but in maintaining criticism as an ongoing practice. However, this principle is not followed, perhaps is not even recognized, by the editors of most of these magazines (of which there are indeed hundreds).

(I have to say I think online literary magazines are doing a better job of providing reviews and criticism than their more-established print brethren. Why this would be true I can't quite say. Perhaps there's a feeling that print space is too valuable, more long-lasting, and thus ought to be taken up primarily by fiction and poetry. It is true that perfunctory reviews of the newest and the latest aren't likely to seem that urgent in retrospect, but good reviews that aspire to the status of criticism don't have to be mere book reports and don't have to focus only on upcoming releases. Some extended discussion of books that have already passed the window of immediate critical regard but that remain well worth readers' attention would do American fiction a lot of good right now.)

A very good reason why literary magazines ought to cultivate critics and criticism stems from Williamson's own honest assesement that "the battle we're fighting [on behalf of newpaper book sections] will ultimately be lost." It will be lost. Newspapers are well advanced in their furious endeavor to alienate as many of their natural allies (readers) as possible, and in a few years we may well look back on the idea that serious book reviewing could be sustained in American newspapers with some hilarity. Without some system of critical support, none of the writers featured in our literary magazines are going to be able to make much in the way of long-term connection to readers who might be interested in their work. The mere appearance of the work in these magazines, absent attention to it when it later appears in a collection or leads to a first novel, isn't going to suffice. Simple concern for the careers of the writers they're promoting ought to motivate litmag editors to include thoughtful reviews among their offerings.

There will continue to be resistance to the idea that book reviewers should seek the more congenial, if also more narrowly focused, space afforded by the quarterlies (or, for that matter, literary blogs). Such resistance is vividly illustrated by the very first comment offered on Williamson's post: "I'm all in favour of literary journals; but they are only read by literary people. Surely the importance of having fiction and non-fiction reviewed in daily newspapers is that books remain an essential part of everyday culture, rather than becoming the preserve of a select few." Martin Levin also voiced a similar objection in last weekend's Globe and Mail: "Here's what worries me: The malignant idea that books, and book talk, are culturally marginal, even irrelevant, to be consigned to special publications and websites. Newspaper book reviews are often the first voice in public conversations about issues and ideas and writing that matter. And that's what we're in danger of losing."

I just can't agree that book reviews have ever been, or are ever likely to be, part of "everyday culture." Like or not, book culture is "the preserve of a select few," although a "select few" in a population of 300 million can still add up to a lot of people. "Book talk" may not be entirely "culturally marginal," especially if that includes talk about nonfiction books related to current events, public policy, and history, but it's hard to make a case that book talk about fiction and poetry occurs anywhere but among the "select few" who think such works are important. Perhaps it is true that "Newspaper book reviews are often the first voice in public conversations about issues and ideas," but those conversations also take place mostly among a "select few" and again the books Levin must have in mind are mostly nonfiction. Moreover, this more rarefied view of the role of book reviews seems at odds with Levin's previous claim that "book review sections are still where casual readers, and that's most readers, go to find out what books they might possibly want to read." (I don't think this is true. I think most "casual readers" go to libraries and bookstores and look around, or get recommendations from their friends. I doubt that many such readers ever seriously consult book review sections to determine what "they might possibly want to read.")

There's something very peculiar about the notion that literary journals are insufficient because they appeal primarily to "literary people." Literary people are people who take books and reading seriously. They want to know not only what new titles have been published this week but also how these books relate to other books (including other books by these authors) and what the experience of reading any one of them was like for an engaged reader. Book reviewers who want to keep plying their trade are going to have to get over the idea that they're bringing culture and edification to the great unwashed. Even if the unwashed wanted to get clean, newspapers (and many magazines) clearly are no longer going to pay for the effort. We should be content discussing the literary with literary people.

Vanity

According to Jonathan Gottschall, a critical proponent of what has come to be called "literary Darwinism":

Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.

According to Sabrina Seelig, in an article on translated fiction:

. . .the works in The World Through the Eyes of Writers, while dealing with the same painful things that are covered in the news all the time, take the same hashed-out facts and gave them sense, potency, life. Reading stories that do this lifts a curtain: not on some generalized world or broad state of a country, but on specific realities about the ways people live.. There is a vast difference between reading about a killing in the news and listening to, getting inside the head of the mother of that victim. Not only getting inside her head, but picking through the rubble guided by a skilled author drawing out colors, textures, whispering names and prayers.

I bring together these at first only marginally related quotes--both writers agree that reading fiction is about "getting inside the head," but Gottschall is ultimately taking literary critics to task for their insufficient understanding of human nature, while Seelig is (admirably) calling for more English translations of "foreign" fiction--because in their assumptions about the ultimate purposes of fiction they perhaps reveal why innovative or "experimental" fiction is so often dismissed by both readers and critics. And, as it happens, the inadequacy of both of these views of what fiction is for is brought into sharp relief by a very provocative (and translated) novel I've just read, Vain Art of the Fugue (Dalkey Archive), by the Romanian author Dumitru Tsepeneag.

Gottschall's notion that fiction presents the reader (the critic being a more skilled reader) with the opportunity to scrutinize characters as if they were real people whose "craniums" can be opened to discover "what makes them tick" is no doubt widely shared. "Psychological realism" in the modern novel provides us access to "the Mind," which apparently many critics think is a very profound thing to do and makes the novel distinctive from the other forms of narrative art that have arisen to challenge the novel's hegemony. The Literary Darwinists accept that something like psychological realism is the novel's raison d'etre, but they feel that most literary critics aren't sufficiently knowledgable about the biological imperatives instilled in us by natural selection to be able to discuss "evolutionary psychology" intelligently. Only by understanding how these imperatives influence human behavior are we really able to understand fiction credibly.

Vain Art of the Fugue makes all of this utterly beside the point. There are characters in the novel, but they keep changing in their identities and behavior. In the first brief section, a man steps onto a bus, thinks someone has called out to him and so turns to look, sees nothing and moves on into the bus. The second section, at first still narrated by the man in the first, follows him on his trip to the train station but is soon interrupted by a third-person account of what happened to the man prior to catching the bus. He was apparently visiting a woman named Maria (or is she his wife or his mistress?), who urges him to go before he misses the bus. He leaves the house, passes a dog "with the mouth of a fox," as well as a man killing a pig, being watched by "several women in pink dresses." Getting closer to the bus stop, he also encounters a a cyclist carrying fish in his saddle bag.

The first-person narration begins again, as the man urges the bus driver to hurry. Now it seems he is going to the station to meet a woman named Magda. He imagines the confusion he'll find on the train platform and projects seeing an old man "dragging along a kind of box with a handle." The narrator continues to nag at the bus driver, who finally tells him to stop. He looks outside the bus window and sees a woman smiling at him. "If I hadn't been in such a hurry, I think I'd have jumped off the bus and gone after her," he tells us. At this point the imagery begins to repeat itself in different iterations, as it will for the rest of the novel: The man is at the station where the woman is now looking at him "vacantly"; the dog appears again, blocking his path; he walks along the street, where "a cyclist is trying to pedal along," the fish in his saddle bag now joined by a loaf of bread on top of it. The narration continues to switch from first-person to third-person as the man is back to the beginning of the story, racing to catch the bus. As the section comes to an end, we are introduced to other characters who will make subsequent re-appearances: the engineer, the conductor, the ticket-collector, an attractive woman with "tanned thighs."

These characters and their bare-bones actions are shuffled and reshuffled throughout the novel. This reshuffling is, in fact, the novel's fundamental structural principle. No plot beyond the effort to get to the station, no character development beyond what is added in each transmutation, which sometimes subverts and contradicts what we think we've learned before. We couldn't crack open craniums and "spelunk through the bewildering complexity" even if we wanted to (and the novel gives us no reason to want to) since the "bewildering complexity" is all external, in the mode of storytelling itself. The characters are the interchangeable bits, strips of narrative possibility, that make the storytelling possible.

The novel's title, of course, tells us that the specific formal inspiration for its unconventional approach is the fugue, the musical form in which an initial theme or "voice" is repeated numerous times through imitation and variation. As in a musical fugue, the effect of this strategy in Vain Art of the Fugue is to take our attention away from simple linear development (in fiction, "story") and to consider instead the way a theme or episode can be developed laterally, so to speak, through a kind of accumulation of slight changes. And the art of the literary fugue is "vain," that is, unapologetically aesthetic, without pretense to psychological enlightenment or social commentary (although the occasional image of a tank rolling through the streets of Bucharest does certainly evoke Communist-era realities). The primary interest in Vain Art of the Fugue is formal; it substitutes for the easy "entertainment" of story a delight in formal manipulation. The reader must give up an accustomed passivity for a more active alterness in the face of the novel's constant (and constantly inventive) metamorphoses, but is this really more onerous than relying on the critic-drudge who will "pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators" and reveal to us the secrets of human motivation? More boring?

Tsepeneag's novel also fails to provide the "news" that Sabrina Seelig thinks is the hallmark of translated fiction. Its focus is resolutely on the commonplace, the habitual, the universal elements of human experience. The "events" related in Vain Art of the Fugue literally could happen almost anywhere. There really are no "specific realities about the ways people live" except the realities about the way everyone lives. The novel does not act as a travelogue or newsmagazine, offers only a few ordinary names (that continually shift--sometimes Maria is Magda and Magda is Maria), whispers no prayers. The only thing that's "exotic" about this book--exoticism being what Seelig really seems to be after--is its aesthetic form, its challenge to casual assumptions about what fiction--translated or otherwise--is supposed to be like. You're not going to learn much about Romania as "other" from Vain Art of the Fugue. You'll just see yourself and your own immersion in the inescapable flux of existence.

Both Gottschall and Seelig are working with a conceptual model of fiction that sees it as a fixed form--in Gottschall's case a model that applies (partly) to the kind of fiction that was dominant prior to World War II but that has been shaken up and spun around in all the years since. It has recognizable characters whose psyches we can analyze (if we accept the Darwinist tools) and tells stories that "lift a curtain" on "the ways people live." Vain Art of the Fugue is one of those frame-breaking novels that demonstrate such a model only constrains the adventurous writer's imagination and encourages a dessicated understanding of fiction's still unexploited possibilities for aesthetic surprise. It's the sort of novel everyone who thinks he/she knows what novels should be like ought to read, and be utterly disabused of such certainty.

Application for Admittance

Dear Richard,

I have a Ph.D in English. Before abandoning academe, I published about a dozen academic articles in peer-reviewed journals and book collections. I have also published another dozen or so essays and some reviews in print magazines and journals. Finally, I have published a half-dozen or so lengthy essays in online magazines, of the sort you've probably even heard of. Most importantly, I have 3 1/2 years' worth of posts on this blog, many of which have been linked to and discussed by other bloggers, who thought they were pretty good, and about which I've received e-mails from real print writers telling me they also thought they were worthwhile. You can read these posts for yourself and tell me whether they meet your high standards for "logically reasoned discourse" rather "mere yammering." I did my best to meet them, I assure you.

Are these "credentials" sufficient? What else should I do to be granted your favor? Maybe you could invite me to some of your own big-time cocktail parties and introduce me to your cool Hollywood and publishing friends? Maybe I'm just a bon mot away from establishing my "right to an opinion."

In the meantime, please keep writing ignorant, uninformed, embarrassingly smug articles in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times. They really keep us bloggers in our place and make you print "scriveners" seem oh-so insightful.

Tethered to the World

I stopped watching Saturday Night Live a number of years ago. I did so primarily because I no longer found it very funny, but I was also able to determine exactly why I didn't find it funny: Since I had little familiarity with the pop cultural referents--the tv shows, the pop bands, the reigning celebrities of the day--I almost literally couldn't get the jokes. It wasn't that the current version of the show (which was roughly the latter days of the Will Ferrell-era cast) had suddenly become dependent on popular culture and thus required the viewer's "knowingness"; this had always been the case, going all the way back to the golden era of Aykroyd, Belushi, and Radner. But then I had been knowing. I knew the names, the styles, the programs. The jokes seemed pertinent to the world in which I was immersed, and thus I found them funny (sometimes).

(I realize that SNL is also know for its occasional "political" sketches, but even these I always considered part of the focus on popular culture--politicians as another kind of celebrity who was famous through being on tv.)

In the previous post, I defined literary satire as "corrective, a way of using laughter to mock attitudes and behaviors the author wishes to reform." Satire is a form of commentary on human misbehavior and social stupidity, usually anchored in a particular time and place. Daniel Septimus puts it this way: "satire must be tethered to the real world in some way. It must reference a reality we know in order to enlighten us with its absurdist twists." Satire points us to "a reality we know" in order to highlight its implicit if concealed deficiencies, which are mocked. Like SNL's Weekend Update, it is news with a "twist."

Septimus believes that satire without such a "tether" to the world it presumes to mock becomes merely "cartoonish." I think there's something to be said for cartoonish comedy, although I agree that if it is indeed presented as satire its satiric edge is blunted. Catch-22, it seems to me, is cartoonish comedy that is not primarily satirical. It presents us with a world that has itself become cartoonish; it can't be mocked because it can't ultimately be escaped. The comedy in Catch-22 penetrates all the way down because its "reality" is itself absurd, not merely in need of improvement. The fiction of, say, George Saunders is, on the other hand, cartoonish but also clearly meant as satire. In my opinion, the result is a brand of surrealistic comedy without sufficient roots in the "real world" to be anything other than silly. Its humor is whimsical at best and it doesn't really engage the world we live in firmly enough to be effective as satire.

But I digress. Saturday Night Live qualifies as satire, in my view, but the "world" it surveys is circumscribed by the narrow measurements of American popular culture. Those who enjoy the show inhabit that world, and presumably wish to continue living there, and thus the mockery of its manifestations and assumptions remain usefully "corrective," reminding them that it can all be quite ridiculous. SNL, of course, occupies its own fairly prominent place in that world, so its humor ultimately can reach only so far. "TV" is an open target for ridicule, but not to the point that we'd want to see it smashed up altogether. And SNL's own role in maintaining pop culture's hold on us couldn't be questioned. As I also said in the previous post, the satirist doesn't willingly satirize him/herself.

Those of us who no longer pay much attention to the world as rendered through tv and other forms of mass media (and perhaps wonder why we ever did) thus are outside the circle within which the humor of SNL and other tv comedy shows seems humorous. This isn't to say that the objects of this humor don't deserve to be mocked. It's just that they generally seem to survive such mockery perfectly well.

Undervaluing Comedy

In this essay at Prospect, Julian Gough lucidly describes the kind of comedy he traces back to the Greeks and that the Russian linguist/theorist/philosopher M.M. Bakhtin called "carnivalesque." In this tradition of comedy, the comedic text (or performance) presents a thoroughly undeceived view of human life, responding to "our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it," with unremitting laughter. Although Gough doesn't use the term in his essay, Bakhtin further called such an attitude toward human affairs "radical skepticism." No authority is spared the corrosive perspective afforded by this sort of laughter, no conduct or discourse presented with "straightforward seriousness" can finally be taken seriously.

Such later European writers as Rabelais and Swift were literary comedians of the radically skeptical kind, but, as Gough also emphasizes, it was the development of the novel as a literary form that really gave writers the opportunity to exploit this comedy to its full potential. Gough includes Swift and Rabelais as "novelists," but even though Gargantua and Pantagruel and Gulliver's Travels could be called proto-novels, the tradition of carnivalesque comedy in the English novel would include some of the very first writers to produce what we now agree are novels: Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, as well as their greatest disciple, Charles Dickens. Bahktin admired all of these writers, and the broad, thoroughgoing comedy they practiced--separate from whatever "happy ending" their books supplied--is what Gough seems to have in mind when he writes of the novelist as one "who did not have a holy book. The novelist was on his own. Sometimes he's even a she. There were no rules. The chaos of carnival had found its form. The fool's sermon could be published, could live on."

Gough is right to assert that

The novel, when done right—when done to the best of the novelist's abilities, talent at full stretch—is always greater than the novelist. It is more intelligent. It is more vast.

This is especially true of comic novels, or at least those novels that are truly "comic" in the Bakhtinian sense and not just "satirical." Satire has traditionally been corrective, a way of using laughter to mock attitudes and behaviors the author wishes to reform. In other words, satire is usually another way of "saying something." It is not radically skeptical because it holds out one source of authority--the writer him/herself--as immune from such skepticism. The author's ultimate goal, cloaked in humor, is to be serious about the errors both individuals and society are prone to. He has a point to make, and the point exceeds the reach of comedy. The satirist doesn't willingly satirize himself.

Perhaps this is one reason why, after Dickens, comedy in fiction--satirical or otherwise--recedes in importance, replaced by realism and naturalism, both of which assume the structure of tragedy and essentially express the tragic view of life. This is, of course, "straightforward seriousness" of the highest order, and, as Gough points out, to be taken as a "serious" novelist required privileging tragedy over comedy:

. . .western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. . .

The fault is in the culture. But it is also internalised in the writers, who self-limit and self-censor. If the subject is big, difficult and serious, the writer tends to believe the treatment must be in the tragic mode. . . .

With the occasional exceptions Gough notes--Evelyn Waugh, Flann O'Brien--comedy essentially disappears from fiction, or at least so Gough appears to believe. He certainly does imply that little noteworthy comic fiction has appeared since Waugh, especially in the United States. Through the professionalization of fiction writing via creative writing programs, he writes:

The last 30 years have seen the effects of turning novel writing into an academic profession with a career path. As they became professional, writers began to write about writers. As they became academicised, writers began to write about writing.

And the language of the American literary novel began to drift away from anything used by human beings anywhere on earth. Thirty years of the feedback loop have led to a kind of generic American literary prose, instantly recognisable, but not as instantly comprehensible. Professions generate private languages designed to keep others out. This is irritating when done by architects. But it is a catastrophe for novelists, and the novel.

Here, I'm afraid, Gough really misses the boat. Comedy in fiction--comedy as Bakhtin would recognize it--has flourished in American fiction since at least the 1960s. One of the few postwar American novels Gough mentions is John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. This is a fine book, but it is far from the only "carnivalesque" novel to be found in postwar fiction. (And I'm not sure I would finally identify it as truly carnivalesque, at least not insofar as this kind of comedy requires "radical skepticism." Ignatius J. Reilly is surely a Rabelaisian character who rejects the authority of everything associated with the "modern," but his own superior status--despite his vices--as one who sees through it all is never really questioned, nor is the authority of his anti-modern views, which have been especially lauded by contemporary conservatives who see Reilly as a kind of moral hero.) Perhaps the finest postwar American writer (in my view) is Stanley Elkin, whose work is relentlessly comic in an almost vaudevillian way, and which implicitly includes within its comic purview Elkin's own hyperactive, gloriously excessive style, its at times ridiculously extended tropes and setpieces offered up as the focus of laughter in and of themselves. Gilbert Sorrentino takes fiction itself as a subject of merciless laughter, in novels such as Mulligan Stew submitting all of its assumptions and devices to his inspired mockery. Novels such as Catch-22, Portnoy's Complaint, Gravity's Rainbow, and The Public Burning stretch satire almost to the breaking point, using comedy to deflate even the most "profound" of subjects--war, sex, democracy--and reveal them to be laughing matters like anything else.

Furthermore, despite Gough's quick dismissal of writers "who began to write about writing," this particular mode of postwar American fiction--metafiction--is actually the most radically comic writing yet produced in American or English fiction (with the possible exception of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, which was uproariously metafictional before its time). The fiction of writers like Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, as well as Sorrentino, through its self-reflexivity, its insistence that readers be aware of writing as writing, exposes the act of writing, of fiction-making, to a kind of ridicule. These are the calculations that writers make? Here's how a "story" gets strung together? This is what writers do? In the end, the grand pretensions of fiction are shown to be very artificial indeed, novels and short stories unmistakably disclosed as only words. These writers have been accused of frivolity, of--wittingly or unwittingly--undermining their own craft. But this is the very goal of this kind of comedy. Only by stripping even literature itself of its dignity, of its pretensions to "signify," can fiction keep faith with what I agree with Gough is its real mission: "The task of the novelist is. . .not to fake a coherence that does not exist, but to capture the chaos that does. And in so doing, perhaps we shall discover that chaos and permanence are not, in fact, opposed. The novel, self-renewing, self-destroying, always the same, always new, always… novel… is the art of permanent chaos."

I also agree with Gough that the academization of fiction through creative writing programs has probably discouraged writers from further exploring the possibilities of Bakhtinian comedy. It probably has contributed to the creation of "a kind of generic American literary prose." But I can't agree that it has done so by valorizing metafiction. The problem is not that there's too much postmodernism floating around; it's that there's not enough of it. In my view, only someone who's willfully misreading American postmodernism--the most indispensable ingredient in which is laughter--would say that "Since Joyce and Woolf (and Eliot), the novel's wheels have spun in the sand." Postmodern comedy has taken the anarchic comedy implicit in Joyce and made it explicit. It's the rejection of this liberating anarchy by "professional" Creative Writing that has stultified "literary prose," not the acceptance of a "private language" too influenced by postmodernism. If Gough wants American writers to again see the virtues of his "divine comedy," he could start by urging them to read carefully the very postmodernism he for some reason wants them to think "never happened."

Literary Reputations

Kelly Jane Torrance believes that while "Experimentalism — successful or not — has often counted highly in making a literary reputation," fortunately "there are signs that literary modernism. . .is not aging well."

Torrance provides no evidence for this assertion, aside from her own impatience with William Faulkner (as well as that of music critic Tim Page, for whom Faulkner does "absolutely nothing") and a recent book listing the "favorite" books of 125 current writers. Curiously, Torrance claims that "The closest thing to a modernist book on the list is Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby," when in fact The Top Ten includes both Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Nabokov's Lolita. This already suggests that Torrance has a somewhat. . .incomplete understading of what "modernism" refers to, but she is correct to suggest that modernist fiction initiated an emphasis on "experiment," and it's obvious enough she doesn't think much of it. (Whether she dislikes the stylistic gymanastics of Proust as much as she does those of Faulkner remains unclear.)

Unfortunately, Torrance is incorrect in maintaining that "Experimentalism counts for a lot" when it comes to judging works of fiction. While the passage of time has made it impossible for us to discount the work of Joyce or Proust or Faulkner, whose books will remain on all serious readers' reading lists, "experimentalism" in current fiction is more likely to be dismiseed by reviewers in much the way Torrance does in this article. It's too "sef-indulgent," too "clever," too inaccesible. Many of the writers who are deemed "experimental" and have managed to garner some critical acclaim, as well as some popularity--Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer--are not really experimentalists at all but more or less conventional social realists who give their books an occasional postmodern tweak. Others--George Saunders, Aimee Bender--are at best mild satirists pretending to be daring surrealists. For the most part, American fiction is dominated by writers engaged in standard-issue storytelling influenced by modernism only--when at all--in the use of "psychological realism" as a device for representing events subjectively (from a character's limited perspective) rather than objectively through an omniscient narrator, or for pretending to portray "how we think." If Kelly Jane Torrance believes otherwise, she needs to read more contemporary fiction.

Regrettably, Torrance launches these fusillades against experimentalism in defense of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Dawn Powell, all of whom are allegedly undervalued by canon-makers and deserve to be placed among the very best modern writers. (Torrance compares them only to other 20th century writers, so I presume she's leaving writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, and James--experiementalists all, at least in the context of their time--for another attack.) I don't myself need to be convinced that Wharton and Cather should be included on Modern Novel syllabi and should be considered the literary equal of contemporaries such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. (I'd even judge them superior to Fitzgerald, who has always seemed to me a very minor writer whose "reputation" is built more on the facts of his biography than on the quality of his work. His fiction is mostly noteworthy as social history rather than literature, as is the work of Dawn Powell as well. I've tried reading her, but I'll just have to echo Tim Page in saying her books do "absolutely nothing for me.") I don't think too many other readers of American fiction need to be convinced, either, and thus Torrance's attempt to elevate them by simultaneously diminishing their supposed modernist rivals is a particularly egregious zero-sum move. Their work isn't better than we thought because we've suddenly discovered that Faulkner's is worse.

In fact, Torrance does a disservice to both of these writers in insisting they be considered rivals with Hemingway or Faulkner or Proust, as somehow anomalous figures in early 20th century fiction. Really the best she can do with Wharton is to celebrate her prodigious output (more prodigious than Hemingway's or Fitzgerald's) and her avoidance of "booze-fueled antics," and in discussing Wharton's great book The House of Mirth she can give us only this lame account:

The novel is a profound exploration of American society through the story of one woman trying to hang onto her soul. It's all there — the pursuit of wealth, the American dream of social mobility, social expectations versus individual desire, the plight of women.

"It's all there"--all the great "themes" stuffed into the novel like an overlarge pillow into its case. Nothing about the way in which Wharton rather daringly plays with the convention of the "rogue" character, substituting a woman protagonist for the usual male figure to be found in many 19th century novels. Nor is there any mention of Wharton's modernist-like preoccupation with matters of form and style. As Herminone Lee herself says in a recent interview: "She was wedded to the idea of objectivity, control, shape, form -- she's a great shaper of sentences, sentence by sentence on the page; at her best she's a remarkable stylist." Similarly with Cather, Torrance doesn't mention the Wharton/James-inspired craftsmanship of Alexander's Bridge, the manipulations of perspective in My Antonia, the formal "shapeliness" of a book like A Lost Lady. Instead, she gossips about Cather's purported lesbianism and gives us a few platitudes: Cather's work explores "the spirit that built America"; it "has so much to do so directly with the most central problems of living," or so says Joan Acocella, quoted by Torrance. Why would any of this provoke those who haven't read Wharton or Cather to do so, except as a gesture aimed against "modernism"?

Experimental fiction attempts to explore the unexploited possibilities of fiction beyond its established function as a medium for prose storytelling. The fiction of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather is not self-consciously "experimental," but neither is it merely prose storytelling these writers fastened on "to chronicle the American psyche," as Torrance also puts it. Torrance underestimates the extent to which both of these writers regarded fiction first of all as an aesthetic form to be "shaped" in distinctive ways. This conception of fiction's purpose, that it is available to the literary artist as a form without pre-established limits, I take to be one of the guiding principles of literary modernism. What good does it do to the "reputation" of either Wharton or Cather to suggest they rejected this principle?

Notated

In a recent Los Angeles Times article about Granta's "Best of Young American Novelists" issue, there is a great deal of talk about the "themes" that the included writers are said to be addressing. While immigration and its legacy seems to be the common theme of this particular "snapshot" anthology, we are also told that some of the issue's judges "were dismayed by the lack of attention to social class in the work of these young novelists across the ethnic and national spectrum." Laura Miller believes that neither of these subjects is really where it's at with current young fiction writers: "The real themes in American fiction these days, she said, are the seeking of 'authenticity' — which sometimes works itself out in stories about immigrant communities — and interpreting the highly mediated, pop-suffused culture."

Nowhere in this article about supposedly important new writing is there any discussion, not even the briefest mention, of the aesthetic features, formal and stylistic, that characterize the stories collected in "Best of Young American Novelists", features that presumably ought to count for something when determining what makes these paticular selections the "best" that might be found. What formal innovations, if any, are these writers pursuing? What insights into the possibilities of language in representing human experience, immigrant or otherwise, might be found in the stylistic explorations of their work? Such questions are not addressed; from the comments made by those involved in putting the anthology together, one has to conclude they were not considered relevant to the larger question of what fiction writers of this next generation are trying to "say."

The view of fiction implicit in this article's discussion of the newest and the latest is that it is a forum for "expression." Writers "express" themselves, and through them their ethnic or class heritage gets expressed. Taken as whole, the writers included in the Granta anthology express the concerns and preoccupations of their generational cohort. Why exactly such writers would choose the indirect and rhetorically impure mode of fiction--which unavoidably is going to disperse and obscure your "themes" unless you run them diligently roughshod--in order to give "expression" to such things is never made clear. Nor is it ever quite clear why anyone would care about such expressions in the first place. If "saying something" is important to you as a writer, perhaps nonfiction is a better choice. Better yet, if sociology or cultural anthropology is what you're really interested in, become an actual sociologist and ponder the effects of immigration or class or interpret mass culture to your heart's content. Perhaps some people might even be interested in what you thus have to say. But don't reduce fiction to a more entertaining branch of social science.

In fairness, it's probably the editors and the critics who contribute most to this metamorphosis of literature into sociology and politics. It gives them something to write about at a time when most of them don't know how to write about the aesthetics of literature, anyway. It's an easy way to convert literary criticism into "literary journalism." And it's this focus on the "journalism" of literature and the avoidance of the "merely literary" that largely explains the impatience and incredulity with which so many editors and critics confront works of fiction that do manifestly ask the reader to consider their formal and stylistic qualities above whatever "theme" they may be assigned, especially if such works can be regarded as "experimental."

Joshua Cohen's Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press) will surely strike most readers as experimental, and, although the novel does in fact raise issues related to immigration and ethnicity, few would ultimately conclude that the author's primary purpose is "expression" in the sense I've discussed. It is resolutely an attempt to reconfigure the formal elements of fiction (although not to dispense with them.) Like any good experimental novel, it first of all provokes us to ask: Is this a novel at all? And, as good experimental novels do as well, it ultimately leads us to answer our own question: Why not?

Disinguished virtuosi, acclaimed virtuosos and virtuosas of this greatest orchestra in the world, members and memberesses of this fine ensemble, tuxedos and dressed of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, you behind me I've stooped to rehearse with for far too many seasons now and have yet to conquer, consider this your cue! to draw out the longbows: downbows for the 1st violins, upbows for the 2nds--the bowings are as necessary as they are Schniedermann's written into your parts, yes believe it or not, in his own hand, and such hands! (though I helped some, because among many other lacks in this country was a publisher) and, yes, let's have the final cadence, drawn out to the last and stiffest hair, to the frog and to the tip of the bow as they're called,

okay! gasp, and we don't want anyone asphyxiating on us, now do we?

Will the orchestra please stop? desist?

Everyone finished?

Gasp, it's okay! If you all just remain seated, and listen, I promise that no one will get hurt. Trust me, everything's going to turn out fine.

So declares renowned violinist Laster as he is about to begin his solo (the cadenza) in his friend Schneidermann's concerto. As we will discover, the elderly Schneidermann is missing (he excused himself from a matinee showing of Schindler's List and Laster hasn't seen him since), possibly dead, and Laster has apparently decided that a proper tribute to the composer requires him to speak instead of play. Which he does, for 380 pages.

You'll never find answers in music, only more questions, and so, yes, I have a speaking part, not quite notated, not quite mentioned in the program you've glanced through and idly referenced, riffled through the least piano of my pinanissimos and are manically flipping through to see if I have a history of mental instability, some schizoid personality disorder that would serve to explain this away.

My decision to address you with my voice instead of with my violin.

Schneidermann, as it turns out, is a Holocaust survivor and, in Laster's view, an unjustly neglected composer, the "iconoclast even the iconoclasts worshipped," while he, Laster, has lived a relatively privileged life as a soloist:

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, good evening kids of all ages, good evening my exwives and my wife and prospective wives, good evening some of my own children out there in the audience, good evening my lawyer, my agent, my accountant, good evening my recordlabel execs, good evening my podiatrist (who just last Thursday she told me that my onychauxis it had developed into onychogryphosis, had a professional trim my nails). . . .

Through Laster's mammoth spiel, we learn about both Schneidermann's and his own past, about how despite Schneidermann's experience in the Shoah he considered himself one of the last Old World Europeans, about Jewish history, about music. . .It's a fragmented piece of storytelling, to be sure, but eventually we learn those sorts of things we need to know about the characters--and really Laster and Schniedermann dominate the story--and their circumstances that we would get from a more straightforwardly related narrative. Laster is an unusual first-person narrator, but that's what he is, and we ultimately must judge him and his roundabout tale in the same way we would judge a more conventional first-person account.

In other words, the conventional elements of fiction are in play in this novel (substituting for the real playing of the concerto, as it were), but they are rhetorically shuffled in Laster's discontinuous streams of speech. The reader is asked to show a little patience, do a little honest work for his/her pleasure. The novel implicitly asks that we take the reading of a novel to be a unique experience, not just another rote variation on an a pre-established theme, just as Laster's "cadenza" is unlike any previously heard.

And there certainly are pleasures to be found in this novel, however much the easy ones are deferred. Many of the anecdotes Laster relates are compelling, some hillarious; over the long run, Laster's voice, and thus Laster himself, is vividly rendered, leading us through what becomes an hours-long exhortation, even if what we finally remember is probably less Schniedermann (who remains, perhaps unavoidably so, somewhat distanced and enigmatic) than Laster's own desperate attempt to make us remember him. More than anything else, however, there is the language, the Yiddish-inflected, frequently over-the-top speaking style exemplified in the passages I have already quoted. Cohen is skillful indeed in deploying this language, and if readers are able to accustom themselves to Laster's strung-out, stop/start way of summoning up those events that have culminated in this night at Carnegie Hall, they will surely find themselves enjoying the jokes, the deliberate or not-so-deliberate malapropisms, the puns, the occasional passages of real eloquence.

Some readers might balk at a novel that at first seems so determined to avoid "entertainment." (Laster, after all, himself seemingly interrupts the entertainment in order to berate his audience with his words, to get them to pay attention to his verbal cadenza and not just passively admire his musical one. At the same time, one could regard Laster as a kind of Catskill tummler, a stand-up comic who in discarding his role as Serious Artist discovers another talent for schtick.) But I have to say that ultimately I found Cadenza for the Schniedermann Violin Concerto to be abundantly entertaining, both as a "story" that is satisfying if deliberately circuitous and as an experiment in storytelling. I enjoy witnessing a writer, any artist, imaginatively transform the medium in which he is working, and I believe Cohen does an impressive job at sustaining his experiment--to make this rambling kind of storytelling itself part of the "point" of the story--over 300+ pages. (The jokes and the fascinating tidbits of information help.) Cohen has succeeded in taking one man's headlong attempt at "expression" and, through relentless artifice, almost a parody of the will to express, created an aesthetically complex (and engaging, precisely because it is complex) work of fiction.

Note: In a review at Barnstorm, Tim Horvath discusses the "content" of Cadenza more fully than I do here.

Past the End of the Year

Cynthia Ozick makes at least one very important point in her essay, "Literary Entrails," in the April, 2007 Harper's Magazine:

. . .in searching for the key to the Problem of the Contemporary Novel (or Novelist), there are cupboards where it is useless to look. And there are reasons that do not apply: writers vying for the highest rung of literary prestige; potential readers distracted by the multiplicity of storytelling machines. Feuds and jealousies are hardly pertinent [e.g., Ben Marcus vs. Jonathan Franzen], and the notorious decline of reading, while incontrovertible, may have less to do with the admittedly shaky situation of literary fiction than many believe. The real trouble lies not in what is happening but in what is not happening.

What is not happening is literary criticism.

Unfortunately, Ozick isn't very precise in explaining what she means by "literary criticism," beyond conjuring up a critic possessing "a powerfully persuasive, and pervasive, intuition for how [novels] are connected, what they portend in the aggregate, how they comprise and color an era." Even more unfortunately, she doesn't bother to bring poetry within the purview of criticism, which might have forced her to identify those elements of the critic's task that take criticism beyond taxonomy ("how novels are connected"), which is an important but by no means sufficient activity, and beyond noting what an era's fiction "portends," how it "colors" its time and place, which seems to me to be the job of sociologists and historians, not literary critics engaged in what I take to be their most indispensable work: reading individual novels (and poems) carefully and insightfully, giving other readers a sense of what a particularly dedicated reader experienced while attending closely to the text. The most efffective critics also bring a familiarity with literary history to bear on the text at hand, but simply pointing out "connections" and keeping track of the "aggregate" won't really do.

Ozick invokes James Wood, apparently now almost everyone's default setting for the category "critic," as an exemplar of the kind of criticism she presumably has in mind, but she quotes some of his more pompous, oracular pronouncements--"Belief is a mere appendix to magic, its unused organ. This is a moral problem" [referring to the work of Toni Morrison]--rather than any specific instance of critical analysis that might help us actually read the text more efficaciously, as opposed to admiring the critic's cute phrase-making or joining in on his moral sanctimony. Wood does frequently enough mix in plausible analysis with his moralizing, but it would seem that Ozick prefers his rhetorical posturing to his usable criticism.

Nevertheless, Ozick is right to distinguish between "literary criticism" and most book reviews and between literary criticism and academic criticism. While some book reviewers are also skillful critics (Sven Birkerts, Louis Menand, Daniel Mendelsohn) able to use the book review form to more precisely critical ends, Ozick is right to maintain that the judgments of book reviewers, even reviewers who are themselves writers, are too often "capricious," too often constrained by the formulaic structure of the book review. She is also accurate in her description of "advanced" academic criticism as limited by its "confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multi-syllabic pidgin," reducing literature to dogma. (One can only hope that she is correct in predicting such criticism is "destined to vanish like the fog [it evokes].") The success of academic criticism in appopriating "criticism" to itself, however much it has devolved into an insular discourse that long ago left any real interest in literature far behind, has created a situation in which the brief newspaper/magazine review has to suffice as "literary criticism." Ozick justifiably calls for the development of "a broad infrastructure, through a critical mass of critics," for the more amply developed kind of criticism she at least gestures toward in this essay.

This perceived need for a renewal of criticism is where I myself began when creating this blog. To some extent, I have become only more aware of how the absence of such criticism, less deadline-driven and publishing-centered, has created a situation like the one Scott Esposito describes:

Enough with the mad rush of literature where we barely have time to contemplate spring's hot titles before summer assaults us with its books. Why not linger over those spring books (and the winter ones as well), think about them a little longer, say something about them that will last past the end of the year?. . . .

Such a "mad rush" of superficial discussion can only result in a brand of reviewing that emphasizes the trendy and ephemeral, that elevates the "book business" and its trivialities over the long-term consideration of books that more people ought to read, of books that might even stand the test of time and still be read a generation from now, not just next year. One thing Ozick overlooks in her discussion of the current state of criticism is exactly where good literary criticism might appear. (One place to look would be Scott's own online critical journal, The Quarterly Conversation.) Certainly newspapers and magazines are not suddenly going to publish more of it. The current effort by the NBCC to "save" the book section at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is not likely to succeed,and if it did wouldn't make much of a difference--I can't remember the last time I read the AJC's book reviews with any seriousness. Literary quarterlies might usefully devote more of their space to criticism, but that really hasn't been happening very much, either.

In starting this blog (and joining up with other literary blogs in implicitly attempting to create a "broad infrastructure" of serious literary discussion), I was making a judgment that the blog post could come to approximate (in a perhaps more condensed form) if not replace the critical essay--the available forums for which have long been dwindling in number--as the vehicle for "literary criticism." Not only could an individual post attempt critical readings of various kinds and lengths, but that post could be linked to other posts (both of one's own, and of others considering the same subjects) in a kind of chain of critical discussion. I still believe that literary blogs can perform this function (especially since numerous other bloggers have since appeared taking what seems to be the same approach), although Cynthia Ozick either hasn't considered this option or shares the same blinkered attitude to online discourse expressed by Michael Dirda, Keith Gessen, etc. Her one mention of blogs is dismissive, as she refers to "blogging and emailing and text-messaging" as among the distractions the younger generations have succumbed to. I assume she's one of the print fetishists who can't imagine serious literary debate occuring online.

But I can't share either her snobbery or her conviction that, whether serious criticism survives or not, "novels will be written, whatever the conditions that roil around them." I think the existence of literary criticism is a necessary condition of the survival of both fiction and poetry. Without thoughtful discussion of what's being done by interesting writers, as well as continued discussion of what's been done in the past, "novels" as a form of "literature" will descend into further irrelevance. With no one to argue over what makes writing "literary" in the first place, or why such a concept even matters, novels will at best be only the first step in developing the script for the possible movie so many novels already want to be. Unless folks like Cynthia Ozick think rigorous print-based criticism is going to make a miraculous comeback in newspapers and magazines whose editors suddenly come to their senses and seek to safeguard the literary tradition, she ought to contemplate the possibility that "pixels" can form words and paragraphs and essays just as readily as ink.