The Reading Experience

Just Do It

I finally managed to watch on C-SPAN the "Ethics in Book Reviewing" panel discussion from the recent Book Expo America. Quite frankly, most of it was pablum (except for John Leonard's remarks and some of David Ulin's), when it wasn't largely just self-serving. The discussion really wasn't so much about "ethics" as it was about insuring that most of the assumptions motivating mainstream book reviewing remain resolutely unexamined. The general impression I got from the panelists was that what reviewers and editors are doing these days is just fine, except in the rare instances when it's not, but those don't really matter since print book reviewers are clearly so well-intentioned.

One of the unexamined assumptions that seems to be shared by these book reviewers is that the reviewer should not look at other reviews before doing his/her own, an issue that came up near the end of the session. "Just review the book" seemed to be the consensus advice among those left to discuss the matter.

There are several problems with this notion that reviews should be written in a critical vacuum, however. One is that it implicitly posits a recognized, shared set of criteria by which reviewers should go about "just" reviewing the book at hand. The reviewer needn't look at what others are saying because everyone is applying these same standards, even though they might come to different conclusions in the process. Ignoring those other reviews presumably avoids contaminating one's own conclusions with theirs, leaving the purity of one's response intact.

There is no such purity of response. If there is a shared set of critical standards that reviewers must apply, that in itself is the product of reviewers' assimilation of those standards through reading other reviews. If there are no critical standards to be uniformly and objectively applied in particular cases, then the reviewer's response is unavoidably intuitive and subjective, and while this sort of encounter with the text might thus be more recognizably "pure," I don't see the point in protecting it from intelligent or provocative things other reviewers might be saying. As a reviewer, you might be overlooking something in your own apprehension of the text, and to be alerted to this by another review can only be helpful. Why let your impoverished reading stand when you can easily enough enrich it?

In my opinion, this hands-off approach to reviewing only reinforces the idea that book reviews are essentially "consumer reports," an attitude to which Francine Prose earlier in the discussion took exception. Each reviewer goes about his/her business of "just" reviewing the book and sends the results out to the reading public. These readers then consult a sampling of such assessments and make a decision about which one to trust, or how each one contributes to an overall assessment that helps the reader choose to purchase or not to purchase the "product" in question. Unless you think the reader is only going to read your review, which is possible but not likely, and certainly not likely among readers of the more intellectually weighty book review publications such as the NYTBR or Bookforum or The Atlantic, to refuse to consider the commentary other serious reviewers and critics have already provided seems to me a refusal to engage in the kind of ongoing critical discourse about new works they most decidedly need if they're not to become like most movies--appear with great fanfare in the form of reviews (mostly offered up over the same weekend) and then, after the equivalent of the obsession with a movie's "grosses," effectively disappear.

Certainly not all reviewers would be able to cite other reviews even if they wanted to. With every new book, some reviewers have to go first. But surely Prose and Leonard and Carlin Romano don't really have these kinds of "notices" in mind. (Although there probably is some pressure among editors to get his/her review out first, itself a destructive impulse that's all about bringing attention to one's own publication rather than considering the literary quality of new books.) They're interested in the kinds of reviews that might also claim the status of criticism, even if of a relatively preliminary sort. I, for one, don't see how serious criticism can occur without the critic taking some account of what other critics have said. Moreover, to maintain that reviewers ought to actively avoid engaging with other analyses, should consider book reviewing as the opportunity to "just do it," seems to me an outright repudiation of criticism as anything other than the insulated opinion-mongering of self-appointed "experts."

A Retroactive Historical Trajectory

It's good that Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss print at the end of the book an interview with themselves about Interfictions, an "anthology of interstitial writing" they've edited and published through the Interstitial Arts Foundation. Otherwise I, for one, would have finished the book, including its nominal "Introduction," without having much of an idea what either "interfiction" or "interstitial" are supposed to mean.

Heinz Insu Fenkl's intoduction tells us that a book of his was published as a novel, even though it was really a memoir. Later, a publisher wanted to "repackage" the book as a memoir. Presumably, then, the book is neither a novel nor a memoir, but something "in-between," even though Fenkl's account makes it perfectly clear that it is a memoir, its "tropes, its collaging of time and character" notwithstanding. Using what Fenk thinks of as "novelistic" devices not make the book a novel. Not wishing to have it understood as a memoir does not make it other than a memoir.

After this thoroughly confusing initial illustration (confusing in terms of what an "interfiction" might be), Fenkl goes on to tell us in jargon-clogged prose such things as "The liminal state in a rite of passage precedes the final phase, which is reintegration, but an interstitial work does not require reintegration--it already has its own being in a willfully transgressive or noncategorical way"; "Interstitial works have a special relationship with the reader because they have a higher degree of indeterminancy (or one could say a greater range of potentialities) than a typical work"; "Once it manifests itself, regardless of the conditions of its creation, the interstitial work has the potential to create a retroactive historical trajectory"; "An interstitial work provides a wider range of possibilities for the reader's engagement and transformation. It is more faceted than a typical literary work, though it also operates under its own internal logic."

This is all well and good, but I finished Fenkl's essay still wondering what an "interfiction" is. How does it differ from other literary works that also manifest a high degree of "indeterminancy" but no one ever thought to call "interstitial."? (In my opinion, all great works of literature are inderminate in this way. It's what makes them literature in the first place. And Fenkl's invocation of "a retroactive historical trajectory," by which literary works of the past are transformed by new works, seems to me just a restatement of T.S. Eliot's notion that "The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them," which applies to all new works, interstitial or otherwise.) Does it merely have to be "transgressive" of genre boundaries? Where do we mark those boundaries, anyway? And what exactly is a "typical literary work"? I always get the sense that when intense partisans of genre fiction, SF especially, get wound up about "literary fiction" and its discontents, they usually associate such fiction with "realism," against which all genre fiction transgresses in one way or another. But is Finnegans Wake realism? The Unnameable? Catch-22? Infinite Jest? If not, do they also qualify as interstitial or as interfictions? Are or they just not "typical" literary fiction? (In which case the whole notion of "transgression" becomes just a convenient buzz word. It only applies to the most rigidly conventional or the most really boring literary fiction.)

Sherman and Goss clear things up a little bit in their interview. "An interstitial story does not hew closely to any one set of recognizable genre conventions," says Sherman. This makes it sound like an "interfiction" blurs the lines between genres, although from my reading of the stories collected in the book it seems that most of them mostly revolve around a fantasy/science fiction/horror axis that, as an only occasional reader of these genres, I often have trouble seeing as radically opposed forms that need bridging or boundary-smashing. But then Sherman says of one of the stories ("Climbing Redemption Mountain," a kind of cross-breeding of John Bunyan and Erskine Caldwell) that "If I tried to read it as realism, I ran up against the fact that the writer had made up this world out of whole cloth. If I tried to read it as a fantasy, I ran up against the story's lack of recognizable genre markers." This suggests that the real "boundary" the book wants to question is again that between "realism" (literary fiction) and genre fiction with its identifiable "markers."

Reading the book as a collection of stories that are "willfully transgressive in a noncategorical way" did me no good at all. Notwithstanding that most of them were "transgressive," when at all, in rather tepid and formally uninteresting ways, I simply was unable to understand what they shared in common that made them "interfictions." The editors' narrowing of focus to the contest between "realism" and genre fiction did allow me to reexamine the stories in this more concentrated light. (Although not all of them. Apparently some of them are "interstitial" because they portray characters who feel "in-between" or because their authors themselves feel this way, as revealed in the authors's comments appended to each story.) But ultimately I am still puzzled by Sherman's explanation of how it is that interstitial ficion avoids "any one set of recognizable genre conventions." She continues:

An interstitial story does interesting things with narrative and style. An interstitial story takes artistic chances. . .[E]very interstitial story defines itself as unlike any other. . .The best interstitial work. . .demands that you read it on its own terms, but it also gives you the tools to do so.

I am hard-pressed to understand how these characteristics of "interfiction" distinguish it from other, non-genre, "experimental" fiction that also "does interesting things with narrative and style" and "takes artistic chances." Experimental fiction (which ultimately I would have to say is a part of "literary fiction," representing its vanguard in exploring the edges of the literary) precisely "demands that you read it on its own terms" rather than according to pre-established conventions. If interfictions are just versions of experimental fiction, why coin this additional term to describe them? If there is some significant difference between interstitial and experimental fiction, something that has to do with genre, why not be more specific and delineate exactly what that is rather than fall back on the usual language about taking artistic chances, etc.? Or is the purported conflict between realism and genre really meant to blur the fact that plenty of writers, writers who are otherwise thought of as "literary," have already deconstructed this oppositon and created work demanding "you read it on its own terms"?

On the other hand, if the stories in this anthology were to be presented as simply "experimental," without the accompanying claims that they alone challenge the "typical literary work," it's not likely they could stand up to scrutiny. Adrienne Martini's review of the book in the Baltimore City Paper asserts that the first story, Christopher Barzak's "What We Know About the Lost Families of -------- House," "feels wholly unique, as if it is rewriting our expectations about what kind of story it is even as we're reading it," but it's really just a haunted-house variation on Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." The second story, Leslie What's "Post Hoc," about a woman who tries to mail herself to her estranged boyfriend, strikes me as standard-issue surrealism, with perhaps a chick-lit chaser. (I guess this might itself be "interstitial," but it's not very interesting.) "Climbing Redemption Mountain" doesn't really go anywhere with its blending of allegory and rural Gothic except to a mountaintop rendezvous with banality.

Of the rest of the stories, Matthew Cheney's "A Map of the Everywhere" is pleasantly odd and Colin Greenland's "Timothy" has an amusing premise (a woman's cat is transformed into a man) that unfortunately doesn't go anywhere. Most of the rest are forgettable exercises conducted on what seem (to me) familiar science fiction/fantasy terrain. Some of them, such as Anna Tambour's "The Shoe in SHOES' Window" and Catherynne M. Valente's "A Dirge for Prester John" are essentially unreadable, full of pretentious declamations substituting for narrative: "Truly, where chaos reigns, even at night, nonsense and evasion shine where people look for straightforwardness, but where they look for inspiration, something beyond the realm of daily existence, they are then shown only things, and who can feed his soul with that?" Too many of the stories, in fact, are like this, straining after Meaning where some "merely literary" formal and stylistic pleasures would go a long way toward deflating the pomposity.

Karen Jordan Allen's "Alternate Anxieties" is the best story in the book, but it also only highlights the book's overriding weakness. The story's protagonist is a writer attempting to write a book about "mortal anxiety," which also appears to be the defining condition of the writer's own life. The story is presented mostly as a series of notes and brief episodes to be incorporated into the book. In the course of accumulating these notes, the protagonist latches on to the "alternate universe theory," according to which "events may have more than one outcome, with each outcome spinning off its own universe, so that millions of universes are generated each day. . . ." This notion then leads the author-protagonist to further reflection on the events in her own life (are there other universes in which her actions led to different outcomes?) as well as on the capacity of fiction to embody such alternate universes. It's a compelling enough metafiction, but again I can't see what calling it an "interfiction" instead of a metafiction accomplishes. Nor is it that clear why it would even be categorized as science fiction, despite the toying with the theory of alternate universes. It's a pretty good story, and trying to espy its "interstitial" qualities adds nothing to its appeal.

In her review, Martini asserts that "The stories in Interfictions operate. . .by existing in the spaces between what we want our genres to be." Speaking for myself, I don't what my genres to be anything but sources of interesting fiction. When it comes down to it, I don't even want genres, just worthwhile stories and novels. Whether you want to call them "interstitial" or "metafictional" or "postmodern" doesn't really matter much, and I suppose by that principle calling a group of stories "interfictions" isn't finally that objectionable, although in this case it is a needlessly byzantine way of arriving at the conclusion that a good piece of fiction "does interesting things with narrative and style" and, unfortunately, turns out not to be the most efficacious way of finding good fiction.

Pay Attention

Eric Rosenfield underestimates the capacity of book reviewers and arts journalists for self-aggrandizement:

Now, granted that the Pulitzer is a prize given by journalists, and so they may have a stake in aggrandizing the newspaper reviewer, one of their own. But regardless, the fact that the Pulitzer committee could give a dyed-in-the-wool book reviewer like [Michiko] Kakutani an award for "criticism" indicates to me that a distinction between reviewing and criticism isn't quite a forgone conclusion, and that the NBCC might not be so much blurring the lines between book reviews and criticism as unaware of them.

That someone as critically cluesless as Michiko Kakutani once received a Pulizter for "criticism" is entirely a consequence of newspaper reviewers rewarding "one of their own." She works for the New York Times, she hadn't previously won the prize, and it was her time around. Anyone familiar with the history of literary criticism going back to Coleridge or Johnson surely would read Kakutani's hapless "criticism" as the palest kind of imitation (assuming Johnson's stentorian way of asserting his opinion but none of his intelligence), unworthy of serious consideration.

It may be that some in the NBCC are "unaware" of the distinction between book reviews and criticism. If so, this doesn't speak well for their own familiarity with literary criticism as the attempt to describe a deeper engagement with works of literature that goes beyond recounting a novel's plot and pronouncing a judgment on its attractions. They may think they're doing criticism, but this only makes them even less trustworthy as sources of illumination on the books they read. They think they're serving literature with their superficial observations, but they're really trivializing it.

If "[James] Wood is a critic and Kakutani is a reviewer, then why has only the latter won an award for 'criticism'?," Eric asks. "It would be tempting to call this yet another example of awards being meaningless and unimportant, but I'm not sure the problem can be written off so easily. Yes, Wood generally goes into greater depth than Kakutani, and Wood certainly has a keener sensibility than she does; he is capable of startling me with new interpretations of fiction in a way that Kakutani never has. In fact, he is simply a better, smarter writer. But these seem like statements of quality rather than of genre. On a basic level they seem to be performing the same task, that is evaluating fiction."

The essential task of criticism is not to evaluate fiction. It is an essential task of reviewing, but criticism can take place entirely outside the context of judgment and evaluation, or at least it can take place in a context that assumes evaluation and judgment have already taken place. Some of the best criticism attempts not to argue for the merits of a particular work but to describe and analyze a work the critic already values and wants to "read" more closely. Sometimes this results in convincing readers of the quality of the work, but doing that has not been the critic's primary task. James Wood is actually a good example of this. His more harshly evaluative essays, in which he's trying to disparage those texts that don't square with his own "sensibility," are his least convincing efforts. He's being a reviewer, and often not a very good one. On the other hand, he also writes about authors and books he already intensely admires, and his essays analyzing these works are often helpful and insightful. Here he's being a critic, focusing not on whether these books deserve high marks or low ones but on how they work and what readers should notice.

Eric writers further:

And the truth is "critic" and "criticism" are routinely used to mean reviewers and reviewing; heck, there once was a television show called The Critic about a movie reviewer whose catch phrase was "It Stinks!" "This is literary criticism and this is not" rubs me the wrong way for the same reason that "this is literary fiction and this is not" rubs me the wrong way. It's a form of snobbery.

Literary criticism is only a form of snobbery if you assume that it is ultimately a discourse about taste, a forum for affirming the elegance of one's own. But it isn't. It's a way of paying attention and of perhaps assisting others in the effort to pay closer attention. As far as I'm concerned, everyone can learn to pay attention more efficaciously. "It Stinks!" is a way of encouraging readers to pay less attention, since even bad books can be bad in instructive ways. If readers want to settle for this kind of petulant and reductive "evaluation," I suppose it's their right, but it isn't snobbery to suggest they could do better.

The Pleasure of Reading a Story

In my previous post, Christian Wiman is quoted as saying about poetry that "It's thought of as a subject to be taught instead of simply an art to be enjoyed." In a post called "Reading Like a Reader," Cam at her blog Cam's Commentary makes a related claim:

. . .I think that even an unschooled reader, that is one who hasn't been introduced (is indoctrinated too strong a word?) to literary studies, can certainly enjoy a work of literature without needing to be able to dissect the manner in which the writer developed the character. One can read a short story by Chekhov. . .and enjoy the pleasure of reading a story, perhaps connecting to it on an emotional level. On a different level, the same reader could reflect on how Chekhov crafted his story, analyzing the way in which it was built, the seemingly effortless technique used to develop his characters. This leads to a different appreciation of the story and a deeper understanding of Chekhov as a master craftsman of the short story, but does not necessarily reflect a closer -- or better -- reading of the text. This is just a different kind of reading of the text. . . .

I actually agree with the general proposition that reading fiction should be "enjoyable," certainly that it should be "pleasurable," although usually the assertion of enjoyment or entertainment as primary criteria for judging the value of works of fiction is a kind of defensive gesture meant to ward off the "snobs and professors" who want to take the pleasure out of reading for those not "indoctrinated" into the protocols of litcrit. That a novel or story is entertaining certainly does not disqualify it from being considered "literature," but neither does is it insure that it will be so considered. If, like poetry, fiction can be taken as "an art to be enjoyed," it first of all needs to measure up as "art." Simply holding a reader's attention through to the end is not finally an adequate measure, although surely a work of literary art does first of all need to do that. (And, regarding Wiman's remark specifically, simply to "enjoy" a poem surely cannot be the primary motivation for offering or taking a course in poetry, if it is to be regarded at all as "a subject to be taught." Directing everyone to take 50 minutes and "enjoy" cannot be very pedagogically sound.)

More to the point, readers who reject all approaches to fiction that go beyond its potential to entertain or provide pleasure are not thereby safeguarding the purity of reading, nor are readers who attempt to in one way or another to "dissect" works of fiction violating that purity. Reading includes re-reading, and it is in the act of re-reading that criticism really occurs. Indeed "re-reading" and "critical reading" might be considered synonymous terms, as it is almost impossible to resist in a subsequent encounter some degree of scrutiny of the way the text works, some examination of what exactly it was that captured one's attention in the first reading and makes it difficult to put that text out of mind. In Art as Experience, John Dewey describes the critical impulse in this way:

. . .after an absorbed enjoyment of the poem, one may reflect and analyze. One may consider how the choice of words, the meter and rhyme, the movement of the phrases, contribute to the aesthetic effect. Not only this, but such an analysis, performed with reference to a more definite apprehension of form, may enrich further direct experience.

In this chapter of Art as Experience, Dewey is concerned with the relation of "content" to "form." He believes that "The fact that form and matter are connected in a work of art does not mean they are identical. It signifies that in the work of art they do not offer themselves as two distinct things: the work is formed matter. But they are legitimately distinguished when reflection sets in, as it does in criticism and in theory." It is possible, and in no way objectionable, to settle for that initial experience of a work of art or literature in which form and content "do not offer themselves as two distinct things." Most people precisely do experience art in this way--including most critics. There is not one way of reading during which the reader allows the text to be itself and another in which the reader/critic is on the look-out from the beginning to analyze "the way it is built," at least no good reading adequate to what the text does indeed have to offer. Critics read for pleasure too, but most surely believe that a more "critical" re-reading only enhances the pleasure, producing a fuller, more expansive experience of the work.

In this way, I have to say that I do believe this sort of additional "appreciation" of fiction or poetry ultimately produces a "better" reading. It's not an alternative to "the pleasure of reading a story" in "absorbed enjoyment" but a supplement to such reading. It doesn't replace "absorbed" reading, but contributes something extra, something that, in Dewey's words, can contribute to "a more definite apprehension of form" which in turn "may enrich further direct experience." It is not a "different" kind of reading but a part of reading more amply defined. Not all readers will want to take advantage of the "extra" that critical reading can provide, but simply dismissing it as the possession of "snobs" does not really do justice to the full range of pleasure that literature might supply.

Who Killed Tennyson?

Here is Lev Grossman's account of the alleged demise of poetry:

If poetry is dead, who killed it? In the 19th century it was a vital part of Western culture. Writers like Byron and Tennyson were practically rock stars. "Every newspaper in the U.S. printed poems," says Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. "At the end of Longfellow's life, his birthday was like a national holiday."

But the 20th century saw the rise of Modernism and brilliant but difficult and allusive writers like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. (Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was first published in Poetry magazine.) Poems became less like high-end pop songs and more like math problems to be solved. They turned into the property of snobs and professors. They started to feel like homework. "It's thought of as a subject to be taught instead of simply an art to be enjoyed," says Christian Wiman, Poetry's editor.

This historical narrative is frequently enough recited that I have to assume some people actually believe it. Poetry was a "vital" art, read by one and all, back in the good old 19th century (when poets still knew how to rhyme, dammit!) but has been destroyed by putatively "brilliant" but in fact dastardly Modernists intent on making poetry too "difficult" for the average reader, a private possession of the "snobs and professors." (If it were only true that professors still admired poetry, difficult or otherwise, homework or not. Unfortunately, academic literary study has mostly turned poetry into the same simplistic source of sociological critique and political agitation it's turned fiction into--although this does, admittedly, drain all the enjoyment out of it, if not in the way Wiman thinks.)

What this story leaves out is the evolution of mass taste--and the emergence of other forms of "entertainment" to satisfy it--that occurred between Longfellow and John Ashbery. While it is true that some poets in the 19th century (but not all: think Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins) were popular in a way we cannot easily imagine for poets in our time, poetry was an early beneficiary of the spread of literacy both in the United States and Europe and was regarded as entertainment because it was accessible to many people at a time when few other "entertainment options" were available. Gradually poetry lost this audience to fiction, but both poetry and fiction ultimately lost it to the popular arts as we now know them: film, television, etc. Poets were no longer "rock stars" because that role was taken over by, well, rock stars.

It could be said that the "difficult" writers of the 20th century began to experiment with the conventions of poetry and fiction for the same reason that painters in the 20th century began to turn away from the conventions of representation to produce various forms of irreal and abstract art. Painters no longer saw the point in reproducing reality in the era of photography; poets and novelists no longer saw the point in clinging to traditional narrative and familiar forms, in straining to entertain "the people" in the era of vaudeville and movies. Instead, both painters and writers began to examine their media for other possibilities to be explored, to find other ways to engage their viewers and readers, even if that meant potentially alienating some of those in the mass audience who just wanted painters to paint pictures and novelists to tell stories. Or poets to rhyme and express nice sentiments.

Gioia and Wiman would like to reverse this history, to take poetry back to a more innocent time when pretty words made young girls swoon. This isn't going to happen. Poetry is now written and read by people who actually like to write and read poetry. (To "enjoy" an art doesn't preclude enjoying informed criticism of that art, either.) I honestly don't understand why it's necessary to change that. Poetry is as vital as its ever been, judging by the number of journals, small presses, and blogs devoted to it. "Western culture" should have to take care of itself.