The Reading Experience

Deeper Into a Piece

Gary Kamiya tells us that

The truth is, you have to learn how to be edited just as much as you have to learn how to edit. And learning how to be edited teaches you a lot about writing, about distance and objectivity and humility, and ultimately about yourself.

Translation: Editors are needed to make sure writers don't get too big for their britches. To "learn how to be edited" means learning what it is acceptable and unacceptable to say according to establishment protocols of discourse.

"Distance and objectivity and humility" means staying in your place and not offering any insights that aren't pre-approved by your editor according to his/her understanding of what conventional wisdom can sustain. (This might include "contrarian" opinions, as long as they are recognizably contrarian--good for a momentary frisson of perverse delight but not to be taken seriously as a threat to the cw--and not actually expressions of dissent.)

Learning to be edited teaches you that writing can be dangerous in the wrong hands and that editors need to be respected as the arbiters of what can safely be committed to print. What it teaches you about yourself is that you are the sort who will trade your integrity to be a duly sworn member of the club. Perhaps one day you can be the one doing the swearing-in.

Kamiya continues: "In an odd way, the exchange between writer and editor encapsulates the process of growing up." It isn't so odd. Editors view writers as children, and "learning how to be edited" is the crucial stage in learning to respect your elders. (Even when they help plunge your country into a brutal and immoral war, they're always right.)

And continues:

In the brave new world of self-publishing, editors are an endangered species. This isn't all bad. It's good that anyone who wants to publish and has access to a computer now faces no barriers. And some bloggers don't really need editors: Their prose is fluent and conversational, and readers have no expectation that the work is going to be elegant or beautifully shaped. Its main function is to communicate clearly. It isn't intended to last.

Articles in newspapers and magazines are intended to last? Until tomorrow, when they go out with the trash? Exactly what has Kamiya himself edited that will be included in some future version of the Norton Anthology of American Literature? Or that might even be studied in a journalism class at the local community college? When did newspaper and periodical editors convince themselves that what they print is superior to what can be found in blogs because it is "intended to last"? Are they this far gone in their delusions?

And speaking of delusions:

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It's about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It's a handmade art, a craft. You don't learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

The fear among editors and journalists that their comfortable positions within a "professional" elite are threatened could not be more palpable than in this inane analogy. The San Franciso Examiner (where Kamiya once worked as an editor) as Stradivarius!

Editors as skilled second-readers may survive the implosion of the American print media. Editors of the grandiose kind Kamiya describes are doomed, partly because of the goofily elevated image to which people like Gary Kamiya continue to cling.

Goodness and Functionality

In this essay called "Our Creed and Our Character," Terry Teachout notes:

No less deeply rooted in the national religious past, one might add, is our distrust of art for art’s sake. Over much of the country’s history, many artists, like most of their countrymen, have favored an art that exists not autonomously but in the service of some cause whose goodness or functionality justifies its existence. In the 19th century, that cause was usually religious; nowadays, it is far more often political. But in both cases, it is hard to escape the conclusion that something in the American national character is inimical to the uncomplicated enjoyment of beauty. We prefer our art to be earnest, and that preference is another survival of American Puritanism.

One might expect Teachout, who has been known in his own criticism to take pleasure in beauty, to point out the way in which this Puritan distrust of the aesthetic and accompanying demand for "functionality" distorts and marginalizes American art (not so much among artists as among critics and audiences), but instead he seems to accept David Gelernter's mawkish notion that there is such a thing as "Americanism," essentially religious in nature, of which American art is, or should be, an expression. "Secular-minded historians who fail to acknowledge this fact—and like-minded aesthetes who believe only in the gospel of art for art’s sake," writes Teachout, "are incapable of seeing either America or its earnest, achieving, incurably idealistic, and wildly gifted people as they really are."

So those of us who are "secular-minded" or who do profess "an uncomplicated enjoyment of beauty," or both, are not real Americans, are irreparably distant from Americans "as they really are"? Only those who accept "Americanism" in all its anhedonic glory need apply for citizenship, a precondition for which is knowledge of Gelernter's "sacralized reading of American history"? Only paintings of kittens or poems about Thomas Edison can really capture "earnest, achieving, incurably idealistic America," an endorsement of which is the true test of art?

Teachout almost says as much when he asserts that "one learns surprisingly little about American religiosity from modern American art," as if this does indeed disqualify it from being considered art, disqualifies it from even being accepted as truly "American," since "religiosity" defines us. "Though some of our major novelists, most notably Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, have been preoccupied with religious matters," he continues, "it is far more common for American writers either to ignore religion altogether or to portray it as a destructive feature of American life. Similarly, few of our major composers have produced religious compositions of any significance—there is no American counterpart to Verdi’s Requiem or to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s G Minor Mass—and even fewer of our major painters have made use of Judeo-Christian iconography except as a kind of cultural local color."

Is Terry Teachout proposing "earnestness" (understood mostly as an expression of "religiosity") as the primary standard for judging works of art? Is indifference to religion among artists a crippling flaw? I realize that this is a view very commonly advanced by certain "conservative" cultural commentators, but I always thought Teachout managed to avoid such a narrow, agenda-driven (indeed, thoroughgoingly "political") approach to art in most of his better criticism. I'm disappointed to find him vouching for it here.

UPDATE Terry Teachout responds.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Anyone who doubts that fiction has largely become subsidiary to film, even for writers, should look at Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories for the Screen, an "anthology" recently published by St. Martin's. It is, literally, American Idol brought into print. From the introduction by editor Steve Cohen:

. . .The voice of the marketplace--indeed the wisdom of crowds--is far more powerful than the taste of any one studio executive. True, the studio executive can "green-light" a project. But they can't ignite a trend, build word of mouth, or get people to watch films they don't want to.

We believe there is a fundamental transformation taking place in the entertainment business. It is a shift in power from a few "experts" to the consumer--and Next Stop Hollywood is part of it.

That is why we are asking you--the readers, the moviegoers, the trendsetters--to tell us what you like and what you don't. Tell us, via our Web site. . ., which stories should be made into movies and who should star in them. We are also conducting competitions for the best move poster and trailer based on these stories. . . .

The stories were not chosen by Mr. Cohen. He sent submitted stories around "to lots of readers," who were asked:

[D]id a particular story work for you as a potential film? Were there characters--either heroes or villains--that you cared about? Was there a plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end? Would this be an easy or hard story to adapt to the screen? And lastly, would this story have a narrow or wide appeal?

In addition to revealing what Steve Cohen (a self-described "entrepreneur") thinks are the characteristics of a good movie--characters we "care about," linear plots, and a "wide appeal"--his project also reveals what, apparently, large numbers of people think fiction is worth: not much, unless it can be seen as a "potential film."

The stories in the anthology range from the professionally competent (Perry Glasser's "An Age of Marvels and Wonders" is probably the most proficient story, although it also contains the requisite degree of pathos to make it potentially appealing to Hollywood) to the utterly atrocious. Most of them lean to the latter. Very few of them are genre pieces. It would seem from the selections chosen for this book that appropriate movie narratives (which are, after all, what these stories ultimately aspire to be) are essentially realistic, with suitably dramatic plot twists and turns, and involve characters not so far removed from the ordinary that we can't identify with them.

To the extent that writers of "literary fiction" (here defined as the sort of thing encouraged by most creative writing programs and the editors of most literary journals) are also usually enjoined to think of fiction in this way (absent the more melodramatic flourishes of plot and executed more adroitly and in more polished prose), I find it hard to consider most of what gets published with that tag attached as any less designed to attract the attention of those holding the "green light" than what has been gathered in Next Stop Hollywood.

Market Penetration

In his recent disquisition on fiction's loss of audience to television shows about the Mafia, John Freeman opines that "America's most powerful myth-making muse long ago moved in to Hollywood" and that the novel has additionally "been whacked by a number of things," such as the decline of public education and the rise of advertising.

While the spread of a kind of voluntary illiteracy in American culture certainly doesn't help in the effort to perhaps entice a few current nonreaders into becoming readers, I really don't think The Sopranos has likely distracted the attention of many people who might otherwise have been reading novels, certainly not many people who under different circumstances might have spent their time with Nabokov or Beckett. Would it really be a coup for literature if some of those watching The Sopranos were instead reading James Michener or Mario Puzo, in reality the true "myth-making" alternatives to "the screen in its many incarnations"? And if by pointing out the dominance of the "language of advertising" Freeman is criticizing the "book business" for its marketing of trash of all kinds, including that which is sandwiched between covers and called a "book," then I certainly agree with him, although presumably he would be satisfied if such advertising were used to attract readers to real books. Indeed, later in his article Freeman lauds the way such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Ralph Ellison, and Jack Kerouac managed to combine literary ambition with "market penetration."

Freeman is probably correct, however, to cite competition from Hollywood as a detrimental influence on the standing of fiction, but its influence is not of the kind he imagines it to be. If the novel is being marginalized, it is not because too many people are watching HBO; it's because too many novelists are writing novels that are clearly meant to be made into movies. If fiction is being undervalued, by readers and critics alike, it's not because shows like The Sopranos are better, or more accessible, than contemporary novels; it's because fiction writers themselves implicitly concede that film and television are the narrative forms to which they ultimately aspire. If certain movies and the various cable miniseries programs seem livelier than fiction, it's not because fiction no longer "develops characters" on a grand scale, or has abandoned "some of the primary themes of the Great American Novel" or fails to render itself in "a deeply American language," characteristics Freeman believes are positively in evidence in The Sopranos; it's because too few novelists manifest any interest in sounding out the yet undiscovered possibilites of fiction as an alternative to the conventional narrative practices upon which film and tv continue to rely.

It is precisely the desire to achieve "market penetration" (a market that the movie business has not only penetrated but has saturated with its seed) that has caused fiction to become less and significant to the development of American culture.

I began to ponder these issues well before reading Freeman's article. I have long thought that most mainstream "literary fiction" was inspired less by writers' familiarity with literary history and more by the narrative demands of film. This doesn't necessarily mean that most writers want to produce plot-driven thrillers and melodramas or sweet romantic comedies. Indeed, the sensibility exhibited in much contemporary literary fiction is perhaps closer to that informing the "art film," the "independent" movies that can be described as "quirky" or "offbeat" or, simply, "serious." This kind of film has the advantage of combining a degree of artistic credibilty with some plausible prospect of popularity, should the film in question "find its audience," manage to accomplish a measurable act of "market penetration." With many writers, my impression is that their most deeply-held ambition is to see their work adapted into such a film, which would allow them to maintain their artistic cred while also having the work affirmed by those attuned to and sanctioned by our "most powerful myth-making muse."

But I was especially provoked into examining this phenomenon more closely when I recently watched Todd Field's adaptation of Tom Perotta's novel Little Children (screenplay written by Perotta himself.) I found it to be a reasonably pleasant, mildly "quirky" satire of suburbia, one that especially zeroes in on Americans' increasingly fraught attitudes toward parenting, fraught because so many parents have hardly ceased being "little children" themselves. My impression of the novel, based on the reviews and weblog discussions I'd read at the time of its release, was that it was a relatively unquirky literary satire written by someone specializing in the "youth" scene (his previous novels were Joe College and Election, the latter also made into a well-known film.) I decided to read Little Children to see if I had perhaps too quickly discounted him as a writer, although I suspected I would find the novel just another in the very long line of mediocre works of fiction that Hollywood directors and scriptwriters had managed to elevate into better films.

What I found was not just a mediocre work of fiction that managed to be transformed into a watchable film, but a mediocre novel that was mediocre precisely because it was obviously written in order to be so transformed.

If ever a movie could be said to have "filmed the book," the Field/Perotta version of Little Children is it. Very little of the book is left behind in the transference to film. The plot remains virtually undisturbed, much of the dialogue comes from the novel verbatim or with very minor changes, and almost all of the characters introduced in the novel are included in the film (although a couple of them, such as the husband of co-protagonist Sarah, have a diminished role, and the husband's subplot in particular--concerning his obsession with an online porn vixen--is pared back). The novel's scenic narrative structure, by which relatively brief, self-enclosed scenes, alternating primarily between those involving Sarah and those involving Todd, the "Prom King" with whom Sarah begins an extramarital affair, move us forward in a leisurely, episodic fashion is faithfully reproduced in the film. The ending is changed slightly, but not in such a way that the novel's underlying point ("boy, aren't these people pathetic!") is lost. One can easily imagine the screenwriter making his way, page by page, through this novel and converting its prose into scene headings and dialogue.

And yet the film, as an aesthetic experience, is an improvement over the novel. It's not a great film, but as "quirky" independent films go, it holds one's attention and provides the occasional amusing insight into the reverse trajectory (it's all downhill after college) so many Americans have followed in the last few decades. (In this way the film--but not the novel--is reminiscent of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, although Yates's novel is much bleaker, less content with mere amusement.) The novel, on the other hand, is a slog, full of uninspired prose and hackneyed observations. And this difference, in my opinion, is all the difference in the world. The movie spares us Perotta's labored, cliche-ridden, "unobtrusive" writing. It spares us passages like this:

Aaron had discovered his penis. Whenever he had a spare moment--when he was watching TV, say, or listening to a story--his hand would wander southward, and his face would go all soft and dreamy. This new hobby coincided with a sudden leap forward in his potty training that allowed him to wear big boy underpants at home during the day (at night, during naps, and in public he still needed the insurance of a diaper.) Because he often had to sprint to the bathroom at the last possible moment, he preferred not to wear pants over the underwear, and this combination of easy access and an elastic waistband issued a sort of standing invitation that he found impossible to resist.

Almost every sentence here is built out of banal phrasing and worn-out expressions: "had discovered his penis"; "a spare moment"; "soft and dreamy"; "a sudden leap forward," etc. The last sentence in particular is a headlong accumulation of cliches. (I can't decide if the "standing invitation" is meant as a pun--a bad one--or is just lazy writing.) This is supposed to be a "plain style," but its effect is precisely, through its very shoddiness, to draw attention to itself rather than away. I spent more of my time wincing at the woodenness of the prose than following the story, and without "story" a novel like Little Children has nothing. The film rescues the story from the writer, as the director has at least some "style" in cinematic terms. The novelist has none.

One might say that since Perotta himself wrote the screenplay he was able to preserve most of the story another screenwriter might have altered, or that since it is his story he clearly does have some talent as a writer. But these claims only reinforce for me the conclusion that the novel was probably written with the screen version in mind and that the talent Perotta has is precisely a talent for screenwriting. The concepts of "story" and "character" his novel manifests are those prized by moviemakers. Aside from the adultery plot and the supporting cast of "offbeat" characters, Little Children (the novel) has little else to offer, nothing readers who read novels that in one way or another advance the form (even a little bit) would find compelling. I understand that practically everyone in the world has a "screenplay" in the works, and that few of them will ever be produced, but if you're going to write a novel that exists only as a proto-movie, why not just write it up as a script to begin with?

"The Circuit I'd Been Following Up to Now"

For me, the most indispensable element in the aesthetic success of Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder is McCarthy's use of the novel's brain-damaged protagonist as its first-person narrator. Not only is this unnamed narrator's earnest but affectless voice crucial to the novel's cumulatively mesmerizing effect, but none of its other pleasures--its deadpan humor, its wide-eyed fixation on the details of mundane and seemingly trivial activities, its creation of "plot" out of the narrator's own incurable plotting--would be possible if this otherwise undistinguished man who happened to have been hit by "something falling from the sky" and is now trying to cope with the aftermath were not telling his own story.

One review of Remainder maintains that in reading this story we readers "remain firmly inside the narrator's head." Another has it that McCarthy's intention is to "understand how a traumatized mind might put its broken pieces back together again." But this emphasis on the narrator's "mind" is not quite right, although the seeming disorder of his mind (which, in my reading, at least, is actually an attempt to reassert order) is certainly pushed to the foreground of the novel he is (unwittingly) composing. We are not, as in most conventional "psychological realism," thrust "inside the narrator's head." We are thrust into his words, where we are, undeniably, caught up in the same obsessions and compulsions, the same damaged processing, that he is. But in dramatizing the way "a traumatized mind might put its broken pieces back together again," McCarthy is not ""exploring" his character's thoughts or attempting to track those thoughts in its "stream." He is personifying the character's state of mind through his words (often enough words whose import the narrator only dimly recognizes, if at all) and his seemingly deranged actions.

In effect, McCarthy reverses the conventional approach to "Mind" in fiction as advocated by the likes of James Wood and others. For Wood, fiction itself exists to reveal Mind; this is its raison d'etre, its claim to superiority over other narrative arts that are not as supple in their ability to "get inside" the human head. Pyschology uses fiction to render itself more dramaticaly. McCarthy, on the other hand, uses Mind to render fiction more authentically. Remainder doesn't pretend to anatomize the human mind, translating its ineffable qualities into sensible prose, as so much middling psychological realism post-Joyce and post-Woolf generally settles for. It re-enacts the irresistable impulses and the skewed perspective the narrator's altered mental state is producing, just as the narrator himself re-enacts events that make him feel more at ease in his transformed world, that give him a sense of belonging in an environment that has otherwise become unacceptably alien.

Often the narrator's actions seem wholly devoted to materializing these impulses, although the narrator isn't fully aware of his submission to them:

I was heading down the hallway back towards the main room when I noticed a small room set off the circuit I'd been following up to now; I'd moved round the kitchen each time in a clockwise direction, and round the main room in an anti-clockwise one, door-sofa-window-door. With the short, narrow corridor between the two rooms, my circuit had the pattern of an eight. This extra room seemed to have just popped up beside it like the half had in my Settlement: offset, an extra. I stuck my head inside. It was a bathroom. I stepped in and locked the door behind me. Then it happened: the event that , the accident aside, was the most significant of my whole life.

It isn't so much that the narrator seems to have "lost" his mind. He has lost the part that made his actions seem natural, unpatterned, subservient to his own will, however much they were always already a product of the brain's mechanical operations. Now those operations have been laid bare, the clockwise motions and figure-eights of his damaged brain compelling his movements just as much as his undamaged brain had done, but without that "extra", naturalized patina that allows us to overlook our actual subservience to the brain's creation of patterns. He's lost the "remainder" that makes us feel at home in our reality.

The "event" that proves to be the "most significant" in the narrator's life thus ensues, his account of it typically (and hilariously) straight-faced:

. . .I'd used the toilet and was washing my hands in the sink, looking away from the mirror above it--because I don't like mirrors generally--at this crack that ran down the wall. David Simpson, or perhaps the last owner, had stripped the walls, so there was only plaster on them, plus some daubs of different types of paint where David had been experimenting to see how the room would look in various colors. I was standing by the sink looking at this crack in the plaster when I had a sudden sense of deja vu.

A memory from his pre-accident past has apparently emerged, complete with "a window directly above the taps just like there was in this room," outside of which "there'd been roofs with cats on them." "People had been packed into the building; neighbours beneath me and around me and on the floor above. The smell of liver cooking in a pan had been wafting to me from the floor below--the sound too, the spit and sizzle."

With the help of his large "Settlement" vis-a-vis the accident, the narrator goes about trying to re-create this scene. Much of the novel is devoted to this effort, and it makes for surprisingly compelling reading, the sheer audacity of it (both on the narrator's and McCarthy's part), as well as the unquestioning participation in it of those the narrator enlists to bring it all off, both strangely entertaining and just strange. Eventually other events are re-created as well, as the narrator increasingly becomes dependent on the "tingling" he feels whenever the recreations work especially well.

In her review (linked-to above), Margot Kaminsky asserts that Remainder is a "chillingly clever novel of patterns that fools you into thinking it's a novel about plot." Chilling it certainly is, but I'm not sure "clever" is exactly right. Relentless in its unfolding of the narrator's, and its own, inherent if scary logic is more like it. And I don't really think it's accurate to call it a "novel of patterns" rather than "a novel about plot." McCarthy isn't so much imposing a "pattern" as exposing our human preoccupation with pattern-making (which includes our need for "plot"--the narrator's reenactments are nothing if not precisely crafted stories in which he is the protagonist), a preoccupation that of course extends to and finds culmination in fiction itself, as well as art more generally. One could say that the only thing that really separates the artist from McCarthy's unnamed narrator is that the artist indulges his/her taste for pattern-making in works of imagination that merely echo life. Our narrator tries to make his life conform to patterns, to force it into order and meaning, climaxing in events that only confirm and disastrously reinforce the closed loop his life has become.

Readers who like to have an immediate, transparent "bond" with their first-person narrators may or may not find Remainder a comfortable read. It surely isn't easy at first to like, or even to understand, its narrator-protagonist, and his behavior only becomes more extreme as he figure-eights his way through his story. His narrative voice remains spookily matter-of-fact throughout. On the other hand, it is hard not to summon up some sympathy for this character, since we, too, if befallen by our own "accident," would likely find ourselves confronting a similarly alien world and might respond to it, almost certainly would respond to it, in the best way our addled brains could contrive. Our mental machinery would be exposed as similarly fragile. We would become our own remainder.

But even if you're not sure this kind of character would appeal, you should read Remainder nevertheless. It's not only the most impressive debut novel I've read in a very long time. It's one of the best novels I've read recently, period.

Of Limited and Personal Interest

John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? is a very strange book. It's first half seeks to demonstrate that art doesn't really exist and that, if it does, it doesn't do anyone any good. The second half essentially ignores the case that Carey has just made and asserts that art does indeed exist after all and does some people quite a lot of good.

The first half is actually the more interesting and lively part of the book. Here he surveys all the various efforts made to define art and finds them wanting, concluding that "Anything can be a work of art. What makes it a work of art is that someone thinks of it as a work of art." The relativist in me wants to concede that ultimately this is true: no Platonic definition of art that thoroughly delineates those properties inherent to art and that marks it off from all those other phenomena that are "not art" exists. We wouldn't want one even if we could get it. Rogue artists who confabulate our notions of what art is and isn't are always going to come along, and we should be grateful for them, even encourage them. "Art" is, finally, whatever succeeding generations of human beings determine it to be.

On the other hand, when we all put on our logical thinking caps, we know that if "anything" is art, nothing is. There are just "things" that provide us with enjoyment, pleasure, instruction, or whatever we want to call whatever it is we get from these things. One could plausibly enough adopt this view (the pragmatist in me thinks it wouldn't ultimaty matter because it wouldn't really affect our sense of the value of what it is we do "get" from these things), but Carey himself finally doesn't want to go this far. He wants to retain the word "art," even if it does it does reduce art objects to those "things" someone, somewhere, thinks to call art. (Later in the book Carey tries to raise "art" back up to a more dignified status by stressing its utilitarian applications, but for it to have such applications it surely does have to exist in the first place, or those using it won't exactly know what they're applying.)

Thus Carey is able to argue further that "art" as it is celebrated by its snootier adherents doesn't have the morally elevating qualities they want to claim for it. No plausible evidence exists that art makes us better people. Most of the rhetoric used to pronounce on its spiritual qualites Carey incisively, and rightly, points out is so much bluster and metaphysical cant. If we can't provide specific scientific descriptions of the effect art actually does have on us (and Carey maintains that we can't) then better to remain silent than to make grandiose assertions about its "spiritual authenticity" or its ability to evoke "a peculiar emotion" that is "independent of time and place," as Clive Bell had it. And not only is the "religion of art" rhetorically bankrupt but it in fact "makes people worse, because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic."

Curiously, then, Carey winds up not so much rejecting the ethical function of high art but affirming its ethical dimension: Too much attention to the wonders of art and too much discussion of those wonders only work to make us bad people. That art turns out to be morally enervating rather than elevating doesn't make it any less "moral" in its implications.

Carey's inability to rid himself of the very assumptions he wants to decry runs throughout the chapter charging arts enthusiasts with turning it into religion. Such enthusiasts apparently are wrong not so much in thinking that art might have beneficial effects but in failing to spread those effects around widely enough: "Turning art into religion often carries with it the assumption that there is a higher morality of art, distinct from conventional morality." The religion of art "devalues, by comparison with itself, ordinary life and ordinary people." Furthermore, it is the focus on the appreciation of, rather than participation in, the arts, that keeps it floating above the outstretched arms of those "ordinary people" who might after all be made into better people if they were to experience the joy of art for themselves. As evidenced by various studies Carey cites, feelings of powerlessness might be alleviated (resulting in a decrease of violence), self-esteem might be raised, and an epidemic of depression might be halted. Thus, "Another thing we should do is to switch the aim of research in the arts to finding out not what critics think about this or that artwork--which is necessarily of limited and personal interest--but how art has affected and changed other people's lives."

Notwithstanding that Carey's contentions in this chapter essentially contradict everything he's said before--art can't be "anything" or there would be nothing specific to apply in the kinds of arts programs whose beneficent effects he lauds, and there would be no reason to enlist the arts at all in such programs if they can't change lives--they don't even count for much in Carey''s own ultimate valuation of "art" in the second section of the book, "The Case for Literature." It turns out that Carey's brief on behalf of participatory art was only a kind of gesture toward a quasi-Deweyan program of "making art," good for bashing the swells and the necessarily limited efforts of critics, perhaps, but not really a serious defense of an alternative to Art. Literature, it would seem, actually is art, and its primary effects are to be located in the secondary act of reading. (I agree that they are, but in the context of Carey's overall argument about the subjectivity of standards, it nevertheless brings the critic back into prominence, as the reader who proves to be especially attentive.)

Carey titles his first chapter on the subject "Literature and Critical Intelligence," but his initial argument seems to place "critical intelligence" in literature rather than the reader: "The first claim I would make is that, unlike the other arts, [literature] can criticize itself." It "shows itself more powerful and self-aware than any other art." Perhaps this is true, but if so, it very nearly belies Carey's larger point that art--even the premier art of literature--doesn't have any particular, objective value. (Yes, Carey assures us that his valuation is indeed his unavoidably subjective own, but still. Carey's very attempt to offer concrete reasons for literature's superiority seems to assume at least an objective method of assessing its superiority.) "More powerful" suggests that works of literature do have some experiential qualities that can be measured. Furthermore, Carey believes that literature "is the only art capable of reasoning" and that "only literature can moralize." (He seems to be using "moralize" in a sense that makes it a good thing, something like a "critique" of human behavior.) Swift and Johnson are presented as authors whose works illustrate these capacities.

Carey appears to have adopted some variation on the otherwise presumably "elitist" French-theoretical idea that language, not writers, create texts, since it is "literature" that reasons and moralizes. If he means instead to say that individual authors such as Swift are moralists, this is just another way of describing their particular interests. It says nothing about literature as "art" per se. According to the terms of Carey's discussion, it is literature that moralizes, literature that reasons.

I confess I find this idea absurd in the extreme, essentially insane. Carey is hearing voices speak through literary texts that no critic or reader with a decent respect for fiction or poetry as distinctive modes of discourse would hear in such an unmediated way. Moreover, Carey himself apparently doesn't really accept these formulations. The final chapter of What Good Are the Arts? tries to make a case for literature based on the its characteristic "indistinctness."

All written texts require interpretation and are, to that extent, indistinct. But with Shakespeare something new happened. An enormous influx of figurative writing transformed his language--an epidemic of metaphor and simile that spread through all its tissues. . . So when writing is dense with metaphor and simile. . .the imagination has to keep fitting things together that rational thought would keep apart. It has, that is, to keep ingeniously fabricating distinctness--or whatever approximation to distinctness it decides to settle for--out of indistinctness. . . .

As it happens, I thoroughly agree with all of this. "Indistinctness" is a perfectly good name for that evasive quality in works of literature that sets them apart from straightforwardly discursive forms of writing, that in the most intensive way requires we really read the text before us. But I don't see how at the same time we are grappling with the "indistinctness" of literature we can also comfortably accede to its "reasoning"--after all, "the imagination has to keep fitting things together that rational thought would keep apart"--or its "moralizing." Either literature "says something" about morality or politics or ideas in the kind of readily accessible way Carey's discussion of it implies, or it is "indistinct" and thus all of its putative messages are unavoidably ambiguous when they're not just hopelessly garbled.

Carey wants to have it both ways: it is because literature can "communicate" more effectively and it can also remain "indistinct" in the manner common to all the arts that it is ultimately the most valuable of the arts. Perhaps this is just the consequence of the fact that literature emerges from language as its medium and that language is inevitably burdened with "meaning" (although it is also the consequence of a failure to consistently distinguish between the use of language for meaning and the use of language for aesthetic effect), but it nevertheless results in the most crippling contradiction in a book full of contradictions. Literature can't both produce an indistinctness that every reader makes distinct in his/her own way (or leaves it indistinct) and make moral and rational claims that are presumably universal in their appeal.

As far as I can tell, Carey seems to have written this book in order to upbraid the likes of Geoffrey Hartman, who, according to Carey, believes "the experience he gets from high art is better than that others get from the mass media." Since there is no way of establishing that high-art lovers do obtain a "better" experience therefrom, or even of establishing what "better" might mean, all defenses of high art are simply expressions of elitism dressed up in patronizing rhetoric.

But what if the experience of art does contribute to human improvement? Not because art's moralizing or "spiritual" qualities directly lead to social change or self-actualization, but because close consideration of art enhances our ability to have fulfilling experiences? Because complex works of art encourage us to pay attention in a way that does not direct it into pre-existing channels or entirely cut off the very possibility of sustained, fully-engrossed attention by settling for the superficial or the sanctimonious. Even if there is no way of measuring the quality of experiences of this sort vs. the quality of the "anything" someone might want art to be, who really thinks that anything will do? Near the end of the book, Carey offers a sop to art-lovers: "That the arts are enjoyable to those who enjoy them is a fact that it may seem I have not emphasized enough in this book. If I have not done so, it is partly because it is obvious, and partly because being enjoyable does not distinguish the arts from a vast range of other human activities." But what if it's why the arts are enjoyable "to those who enjoy them" that's important? Not because it confers some special honor on their declared tastes but because the enjoyment comes from having one's powers of apprehension challenged?

And why can't the objects of this particular kind of enjoyment be called "art" by those who care about it? Why does John Carey want them to stop calling it that, unless they also stipulate that "anything" can be art if claiming otherwise makes the "inartistic" feel bad? It's finally only Carey who seems to believe that "art" must have a metaphysically-fastened, all-encompassing definition, or else there's nothing.