The Reading Experience

The Burden of Criticality

Johanna Drucker sums up her argument in her book, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press, 2005), as follows:

. . .the critical frameworks inherited from the avant-garde and passed through the academic discourses of current art history are constrained by the expectation of negativity. Fine art should not have to bear the burden of criticality nor can it assume superiority as if operating outside of the ideologies it has long presumed to critique. Fine art, artists, and critics exist within a condition of complicity with the institutions and values of contemporary culture. (247)

According to Drucker, artists of the 2000s (representatives of which her book discusses in some detail), no longer see "complicity" with mass culture as an evil to be avoided. These artists use mass culture to create dynamic, visually arresting works the ultimate ambition of which is to be aesthetically pleasing. No requirement of "criticality" is necessary for ideological correctness: the purpose of art is to be aesthetic, and contemporary artists are exploiting the aesthetic possibilities of mass culture to create "fine art" that doesn't pretend to an inherent "superiority" over that culture. Complicity is ok, as is taking sensory pleasure in art.

I'm ultimately fine with this argument, although it's unfortunate that a defense of aesthetic value in art has to in effect make common cause with mass culture in order to ensure that "art" survives as a viable endeavor to begin with. (It's the devil's bargain that's unfortunate, not popular culture, or at least particular productions of popular culture, some of which I enjoy just as much as the next guy.) And why is it necessary to equate autonomy in art with a claim of "superiority"? Earlier in the book, Drucker tells us that the high modernist view of art as in its separate sphere actually did damage to the aesthetic claims of art:

By appearing to be entirely aesthetic (its forms and expressions entirely contained in the visual appeal to the senses and lacking in any prescribed or circumscribed purpose), fine art sustains the concept of value as a notion by pretending to be autonomous. The "value" of a work of art is never to be accounted for in the costs of materials and labor or in the investments in production. Fine art appears to be far from the crass worlds of commerce and remote from the real of factory production. Fine art distances itself from the systems that in turn exploit these myths to advantage. Art is not a shell game or a poker bluff, but an assertion of the symbolic basis of value production. . . .

It seems that Drucker is reciting the oft-told story of how modernist art took itself to be free of complicity, innocent of ulterior "purpose," by "appearing to be entirely aesthetic" and "pretending to be autonomous" but really wasn't after all, blather, blather, blather. It's an article of faith that academic criticism clings to like piranhas: art can't assert autonomy or singularity, can't carve out an aesthetic space beside the "crass worlds of commerce," because all expressions are socially or culturally or historically determined. Works of art can be studied alongside tv shows and pop albums because they're just as inevitably a part of "culture" as any other commodifed object.

I say this is an article of faith because although it is true that all human beings creating works of art are subject to the prevailing assumptions of time and place, this does not seem to me to be a very profound observation. It amounts to saying that living artists are, well, alive rather than dead. (Or that deceased artists lived on this planet rather than on one in some adjacent solar system.) Yet is is held as an unassailable truth in post-New Critical academic criticism that literature must be historicized, that the unavoidable fact that writers put the fruits of their influences into "circulation" means that culture authors texts to the extent that the notion of aesthetic autonomy is just a nefarious illusion.

But why does the fact that any artistic work can be seen to one degree or another as illustrative of cultural forces rule out the possibility it might also be granted a kind of autonomy? If your goal is to show that all cultural expressions are subject to the historical mediation demanded by a properly Marxist view of culture, you can certainly do so, and arguments about the "autonomy" of certain excluded expressions would correctly be dismissed as incoherent. But they would be incoherent only when considered from within this interpretive framework, which is being posited as the only acceptable way of making sense of works of art or literature.

However, if this particular way of making sense of artistic and cultural expression has the virtue of being "true"--albeit in the trivial sense I have indicated--it can hardly claim exclusive rights to truth since its own investment in it rests on the underlying assumption that truth is relative. If literary texts cannot claim to embody universal or unmediated or noncontingent truth because everything is an artifact of incidental human activity, I cannot see any logically disallowed reason why one such activity could not be the study of literary texts for their posited "literary" qualities conceived as separate from their status as cultural representations, congeries of historical forces, conduits of sociological information, or whatever else works of literature can be considered good for. To object that such an approach to literary study (or the study of any of the arts) presumes itself "outside of the ideologies" is either irrelevant--since all critical approaches must scramble to the "outside" in order to speak authoritatively about the "inside"--or just wrong. The "autonomy" game does not presuppose itself outside the rules of relativism; it simply solicits recognition as one game among the others. "Pretending to be autonomous" is good enough for those who think this particular aesthetic game yields interesting insights. "Appearing to be aesthetic" is, in fact, to be aesthetic.

Thus the real question at issue is not whether autonomy is a valid concept in art/literary criticism but which concepts are to be accorded primacy in academic criticism. If the notion of the "autonomous object" is accompanied by close and accurate reading that results in a coherent account of a text or work of art , it can hardly be dismissed as fallacious. It can be assigned a lesser significance in the critical heirarchy, deemed less "serious" in an environment in which the merely literary and the merely aesthetic are identified with a dandy-ish formalism and can be marginalized safely enough while real scholars get on with the business of interpreting history, explaining culture, and intervening in politics. It can be made the scapegoat for all the shortcomings of the previous generation's critical assumptions and duly assigned its own historicized place in the critical, and curricular, past. In the struggle for dominance in that small part of academe originally (if reluctantly) set aside for "literature," the proposition that poems, stories, and novels are best regarded as wholly unlike other, more transparently discursive verbal texts, self-enclosed, formally intricate, autonomous, and that the critic's job is to advance ways of reading such textd that enhance the reader's experience of them, has clearly lost out. It is unlikely to make a comeback, although periodic efforts like Drucker's to defend aesthetic pleasure will no doubt still persist.

Although it does seem to me that a debate about terminology, about the conventionality of the critical lexicon, is still in order: When the powers that be in literary study want to show they have not entirely abandoned the old critical order, they like to point out that much current academic criticism is underpinned by what they want to still call "close reading." But this term has become so overstretched through misuse that, at best, it now merely means "paying attention" and at worse means "interrogating" the text vigorously enough that you finally do find there what you wanted to find. "Close reading" for the New Critics was a reading adjusted to the contours of the text, a reading that seeks to conform itself to the demands made by the text itself and doesn't demand that the text conform to the critic's preconceptions. It does so by, indeed, assuming the work's autonomy.

"Literary criticism" is still identified as the task undertaken by academics who study and write about literature. But academic criticism often seems to have little use for the "literary" as a subject of inquiry except when it can be shown to be illusory, or elitist, or a prop supporting various evil hegemonies. Since it is clear enough that many academic critics would rather be engaged in cultural criticism, ideological criticism, or sociological analysis--anything but the lowly explication of literary texts--perhaps the term "literary criticism" could be turned back to those who do have an interest in exploring, even "appreciating" the possibilities of the literary when considered as an autonomous practice. I'm really not sure why cultural studies scholars and historicists would want to hold on to the designation, anyway.

Then there are terms such as those used by Drucker: "negativity"; "complicity." By the first, Drucker seems to mean the incorporation of images, motifs, and sensibilities from mass culture only to "subvert" these references by using them to implicitly critique the insipidity of mass culture. This has been a common response to the encroachment of mass culture on high art, and Drucker is right to suggest that sometimes high art simply borrows from popular culture and that such borrowing is not always an attempt by the artist or the writer to "say something" about culture. That this move attributing "criticality" to works is so familiar only reinforces (for me) the extent to which criticism of art and literature has become wholly fixated on the something said at the expense of the forms of saying (and how form itself mutates straightforward "saying"), but I'm not sure why she needs to use "complicity" as a description of the act of avoiding negativity.

The term only reinforces the notion that artists and writers must be judged by the sociopolitical consequences of their work. Drucker wants it to be acceptable for them to refuse the "burden of criticality," but to be inevitably "complicit" with cultural practices and attitudes expressing sometimes dubious "values" can't help but suggest there is a lack of integrity in the art work found complicit, a lack of purity that makes art and literature questionable allies in the fight against temporal Power.

For me, that they are weapons of questionable efficacy in this ideological skirmish is the mark of their most indispensable value. In their excesses and frequent ungainliness, their refusal to submit to the expectations of ordinary discourse, works of art and literature manifest an a-temporal power that compels succeeding viewers and readers to consider them anew (sometimes to enlist them in ideological skirmishes), to regard them as representations informed by their origins in historical circumstance but not bound by them, however culturally complicit they ulimately must be. If this is not quite metaphysical "autonomy," it's also not an illusion.

Analytic

In his post on "Everything Studies," Joseph Kugelmass suggests that

If the humanities were to re-shape itself in order to accomodate the changing shape of culture, all of the analytical disciplines would combine—Philosophy, Political Science, English, Comparative Literature, History, Sociology, Anthropology, and the rest—while the creative disciplines would remain separate, including Creative Writing, Dance, Theater, Visual Arts, and Musical Composition. Critics and scholars are not always good artists, and vice versa. The grounds for such a merger would be basically ideological. If we accept the idea that our beliefs about the world are essentially constructions, then it makes sense to give the study of those constructions the widest possible scope . . . .

I would be willing to accept this proposal (with one proviso, discussed below), but there are actually a number of assumptions about both art (the "creative disciplines") and about academic study that need to be unpacked from this passage I've quoted.

That the humanities needs to be re-shaped because of the "changing state of culture" signals the extent to which the "humanities" as a marker of a certain kind of academic study has completely lost its original meaning. The "humanities" disciplines were those that resisted the scientific modes of inquiry in favor of a more impressionistic, a more humane (as in "humane learning") approach to certain kinds of human productions and experiences. That these disciplines now focus almost exclusively on a quasi-scientific study of "culture" suggests that "humanities" as an umbrella term ought to just be dropped in favor of the more descriptive "cultural studies," which might indeed include "everything."

"Analytic" is of course a nice term to be used whenever it's necessary to distinguish between mere emotional and instinctual artists and real thinkers--the intellectually rigorous (and properly credentialed) "scholars" who can cut through all the artsy-fartsy rigamarole favored by the "creative" types and let us know what all cultural activites are finally really about. Thus dividing existing disciplines into the "analytic" and the "creative," while potentially liberating for the "creative" endeavors, is also partly a good way to get the academic dilettantes out of the way of the Serious people.

The notion that "our beliefs about the world are essentially constructions" (revised in the next paragraph to "the world is constructed by human beings"), however much it may ultimately be true, is also a neat way to marginalize the "creative disciplines," which are merely engaged in fashioning aesthetic objects and not "the world" (at least not until such objects are interpreted by the analytic disciplines.) The Everything Studies or Cultural Studies or Symbolic Systems Studies scholars are dedicated to understanding "the world," not just the trinkets or the word-games created by artists. Art and literature are useful tools if they can be enlisted in the larger "ideological" project of establishing social constructionism as the dominant worldview (at least among intellectuals), but they surely don't merit consideration as aesthetic constructions in their own right.

Joseph's distibution of "disciplines" to be included as "creative" is tellingly literal: "creative writing" but not English or Comparative Literature; "Visual Arts" but not art history; "Musical Composition" but not music history or analysis. It is certainly the case that "Critics and scholars are not always good artists, and vice versa," but surely the study of artistic forms is enhanced by some appreciation of artistic practice, just as, more importantly, programs focusing on artistic practice benefit from some attention to "analytic" questions. Partitioning the "creative" subjects so thoroughly from criticism and scholarship may seem to remove a source of contention so that both the creative and the analytic disciplines can get on with their "real" work, but I think it would ultimately only make disciplines such as English or Art (to the extent they don't just collapse into the sociology that "Everything Studies" wants to be) even more unappealing to students (who usually pursue these disciplines out of an initial enthusiasm for reading fiction or poetry or for experiencing works of visual art), and would almost certainly further marginalize creative writing or theater or music as "soft" performance-based programs useful mostly for "nurturing" writers and artists.

Thus I would endorse the Kugelmass Proposal (as if it needed my endorsement or not) only if, say, "creative writing" was understood to include not just a series of writing workshops but also a critical component that offered some exposure to literary history (emphasis on "literary" rather than "history") as well as some focus on literary criticism. This ought not to bother the faculty in Everything Studies, since this criticism would be "analytic" of literature as literature, not as another way of registering "the changing state of culture." It might have the happy consequence of returning the term "literary criticism" to its rightful place as the criticism of literature--especially new works of literature--and of transforming the academic criticism that has so misleadingly appropriated the term into something else--"everything criticism," I guess. But since academic critics have long eschewed examining anything so trifling as the merely literary, and are so eager to move on to Everything, I can't see why they would object.

Note: You can read my lengthier proposal for an expanded Department of Creative Writing here (text here).

Open Paths

King Wenclas is not wrong:

Literature can't be taught. All the instructor can do, at most, is leave the student an open path. Then, through reading, the student finds the meaning, his own meaning, for himself.

Rather than classrooms I would have silent reading rooms with widely spaced armchairs, so the student can read-- whatever he wants, but read. Reading is the only way to learn what literature is about.

On the other hand, he's not completely right.

"Literature" can't be taught, unless it's construed as a unified collection of "great works" embodying "the best that has been said and thought." That is, unless it's viewed as Universal Wisdom or essentially as propaganda, to be used to illustrate cultural or national greatness.

Students can be taught to read more efficaciously, however, thus sending them on their "open path" more prepared to find what they're looking for and better able to determine what's worth reading and taking seriously in the first place.

They can be taught to read for style and form, for subtlety and implication, rather than for just "the meaning," whether such meaning is subjectively held or not. This can be done not to satisfy the fancypants vanity of the overeducated instructor but to enhance every individual reader's ability to have a fully satisfying reading experience, an experience that includes but goes beyond extracting "meaning" and allows the reader to reconstruct the aesthetic strategies the author employed in embodying meaning, and in some cases to perceive effects of both manner and meaning of which the author him/herself was not necessarily aware. That some "plegmatic professors" use critical discussions to reinforce their own authority does not make all methods of critical reading and analysis inherently invalid.

However, by and large I agree with the King. Beyond a certain point what readers "get" from literature comes directly from, well, reading. There were times in my otherwise benighted career as a literature instructor when I did indeed think the best thing I could do for my students was to lead them to "silent reading rooms with widely spaced armchairs" where they could burrow deeply into the text at hand. But this is not an MLA-approved pedagogical procedure, and I can't say I miss the days when I would desperately search for an approach to teaching literature that was pedagogically sound and that would justify my taking up space at the front of the classroom.

This essential incompatiblity between the protocols of the classroom and the imperatives of literature--defined as particular works read for their immediate literary value--is probably what most explains the decades-long move in academe away from an emphasis on "literature itself" to an emphasis on literary theory and cultural studies. At best, the literature classroom can only be talk about literature, not the opportunity to experience literature. Students can share their experiences after the fact, but this has limited value as well; it's not a practice around which an entire curriculum of study can be built. Theory and social analysis lend themselves much more easily to classroom pontification, and more readily provide a patina of coherence and intellectual sophistication that focusing on the "merely literary" cannot so easily provide.

The student who would prefer to study literature for its own sake might indeed have to do that "for himself."

Going Feral

Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown is this quarter's Read This! selection by the Litblog Co-op (of which I am a member), and while I agree with its selection--it was the best of the three books under consideration--I am nevertheless ambivalent about the novel itself.

For me, the least compelling element in this novel, one which was brought up in almost all of the reviews and in interviews with the author, is its political satire, its putatively allegorical rendering of a post-9/11 America and the Iraq War, etc. Although Sharpe himself said in one of these interviews that "If my goal had been simply to state my opinion about the Bush administration's egregious mistake of invading and occupying Iraq, I'd have written an op-ed rather than a novel," he also admits that his novel's evocation of "the Bush administration's rhetoric regarding the war in Iraq" is not a "coincidence." Indeed, one suspects that the machinations of the Bush administration provided the most immediate provocation for writing the novel, and to that extent Jamestown risks being viewed in the longer run as a curiosity, a book-length comedy sketch skewering the powers that be of the day.

On the other hand, in using one of the American foundational myths--the Pocohontas story--to create what he calls an "ahistorical fantasia," Sharpe does broaden the focus of his satire to include the very assumptions through which Americans understand their history and their national purpose. As John Clute puts it in his review of Jamestown, "Jamestown tells two stories of the terrible cost of living in order to demonstrate not only that the two stories told are the same story, but that laid on top of one another they make the lines of the map clearer, that they are diagnostic. That the doomed utterands of Jamestown past and future do not only tell us that scarcity and stupidity and the male fist and hierarchy commit suicide in this particular context, but that Jamestown is us. Not just us as spear carriers in the drama of the suicide of the West, but us inherently."

From this perspective, Jamestown does not re-tell the story of Jamestown in order to comment on the present (or the near future, at any rate), but uses current historical developments to re-tell the story of Jamestown. It doesn't indulge in "fantasia" in order to illuminate current affairs so much as it recasts the present as historically-grounded fantasy in order to illuminate the continuities of history, to show where present and past meet.

This is a plausible interpretation of Jamestown, and for me does push it beyond the contemporaneous confines of satire and also allows it to transcend the equally enervating constraints of the "post-apocalyptic" genre in which it does otherwise seem to belong, as well as those of the historical novel concerned most of all to recreate the past "as it really was." (Although Jamestown's comic distortions do encourage us to see historical events as they more likely did occur--which is to say, not like they are depicted in most historical narratives.)

However, to the extent that Jamestown does belong to the increasingly popular genre (increasingly popular among writers generally considered "literary" writers, that is) of the post-apocalypse narrative, it shares an aesthetic problem I have with the genre itself (and to some degree with science fiction as well). According to Laura Stokes, "Perhaps because of these more “literary” novels, the focus of post-apocalyptic literature has also shifted away from the logistics of the world’s end to the specifics of survival—that is to say, less of a preoccupation with how the world ends, and more of an interest in who is left behind." Jamestown certainly appears to fit this description--it focuses primarily on "who is left behind"--but I don't think the "logistics of the world's end" is ever very far removed from the writer's, or, more importantly, the reader's interest.

Because the ostensible emphasis in Jamestown (or in Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro or Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things) is on "the intimate details of apocalyptic experience," as Stokes further puts it, any simple exposition of what happened is excluded, the details of the apocalyptic event are delayed, only alluded to, left cryptic. The reader surely wants to know what happened--a generic "things went bad" seems like cheating, especially when one feels that things are already going bad in reality--and thus is likely to read largely for clues, for those moments when the backstory gets moved to the front. To say the least, this makes attending to the "intimate details of apocalyptic experience" problematic, since such details seem like part of a concerted effort to avoid the real issue at hand.

Jamestown's final chapters actually do clarify the backstory, clearing up most of the uncertainties the reader might still have about just what has happened to prompt the return to northern Virgina and the building of a new Jamestown. Yet, for me at least, the very attempt to avoid passages of "infodumping" and to stick to the perceptions of the novel's main characters as they are recorded in various kinds of first-person accounts (variations on the epistolary form, as Anne Pelletier points out) paradoxically converts the entire novel into a kind of infodump leading us to the revelations of its final pages.

Many readers and reviewers of Jamestown have dwelled on its humor, its lively prose, and its creation of distinctive voices among the various narrators who collectively provide us with this account of a new Jamestown. But I was unable to fully appreciate the humor (too much of which is, in my opinion, created by the rather cheesy use of anachronism) or the prose and its evocation of voice because I didn't understand the context in which the jokes were supposed to be funny or the reason why, for example, Pocohantas talks in such a late 20th century, young girl idiom (even at times breaking out into what seems an African-American dialect of sorts). I just didn't get it, although after finishing the novel I was able to retrospectively recognize the skill with which Sharpe manages to get his story told (not settling for the plodding conventions of "psychological realism") and the energy he invests in his prose from sentence to sentence. Still, I also finished the novel thinking that too much of that energy had been expended in painting a portrait of the post-apocalyspe that seems rather tepid and familiar in its depiction of human society gone feral after the worst, predictably enough, has happened.

This doesn't mean I think Jamestown is an out-and-out failure. I would call it a worthwhile experiment that only partially succeeds. It may turn out to be the kind of novel I think more highly of as time passes or when I ultimately decide to read it again. It also makes me want to read more of Matthew Sharpe's work, which probably is more indicative of my response to its particular, and real, strengths, as opposed to my more general reservations about the genre in which it participates.

Fantastic Elements

In her Strange Horizons essay registering her curiosity about the current SF scene after several years' absence from it, Susannah Mandel notes a loosening of the idea that science fiction is "a ghettoized genre form, excluded due to its fantastic elements from the realm of respected, 'artistic' literature, which is dominated by the mode of narrative realism." She further notes that a number of those previously associated with "artistic literature"--including Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, and John Updike--have recently at least dabbled in the "tropes, concepts, or premises historically associated with fantastic fiction" and wonders "How many of these writers have, historically, worked only as realists?"

To me, it isn't so surprising that writers nominally associated with "realism" would occasionally try out the tropes and premises of SF and other categories of genre fiction. Most such realists actually have a lot in common with most genre writers: Both are wedded to story, and both are motivated by an essentially realistic approach to storytelling. Although the stories being told in SF/Fantasy are more expressly "make-believe," they don't thereby get extra credit for being somehow more legitimately make-believe than realism. And even at its most conceptually fantastic in terms of plot and setting, most science fiction (at least in my reading experience) is even more earnestly realistic in presenting its characters and their interactions with their surroundings than most realism. Great efforts are made to present these characters and their actions in minute realistic detail, as if the author is describing a real world that just happens to be strangely transformed from ours.

Richard Larson, in his own response to Mandel's essay, puts it this way: "many of the most prominent mainstream writers are. . .stretching the boundaries of realism to fit their needs within particular stories." These writers are "stretching the boundaries," not abandoning the territory. They are working "within particular stories," using genre "tropes" to create compelling narratives, a conception of the writer's job shared by both realist and fantasist.

Richard suggests further that" People who like Cormac McCarthy and John Updike are not likely to enjoy Dan Simmons or William Gibson, no matter how much people within the genre community say that the books are just so similar" and that this is because these readers will notice in reading The Road or Toward the End of Time a difference in form that will override any similarities in content. While I doubt that either of these novels departs so thoroughly from the conventions of storytelling as to seem that alien to most readers of SF (I think the differences with these two writers are primarily stylistic differences), I do think Richard is pointing out a salient distinction to be made between SF and a certain kind of "literary fiction." It's just that the literary fiction I have in mind has little to do with "realism."

Although Matt Cheney thinks the "form-content distinction" is "more an occasionally-useful illusion than an idea that really fosters good analysis," in this case the distinction is not just useful but absolutely necessary in understanding why the conflict between SF as "a ghettoized genre form" and "artistic literature" as "narrative realism" is largely illusory and certainly not a worthy battle to fight if the stakes include the right to claim the genre as an "alternative" to stuffed-shirt "literary" writing.

To put it succinctly: Why does Mandel, or any partisan of genre fiction, believe the relevant opposition is between realism and not-realism, the latter defined crudely as "fantasy"? Why does she assume that the dominant mode of "artistic" fiction in the 20th and now the 21st century has been and continues to be "realism" in the first place?

If we take the modernists as the founders of "artistic fiction," is it entirely accurate to think of them as realists? To be sure, Proust, Joyce, and Woolf pursued their formal and stylistic innovations partly to achieve what we would now call "psychological realism"--the idea that perception, what goes on inside the human head, is just as vital part of "reality" as what goes on "outside"--and thus Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway could be called works of realism, if not conventionally so. But what about Finnegans Wake? Orlando? What about Kafka or Bulgakov? Is Faulkner best understood as a realist? Is this where his "artistry" lies?

Is it really plausible to claim that the important postwar, postmodern "artistic" fiction is realist? John Hawkes? Nabokov? Donald Barthelme? William Gass, Robert Coover, John Barth? Gilbert Sorrentino?

Among the younger generations of "artistic" writers, which are rightfully called realists? David Foster Wallace? Jonathan Lethem? George Saunders? Granted, a great deal of "literary fiction" of the past 25 or so years has turned away from the formal experimentation and stylistic chutzpah of the postmodernists, and even writers such as Ian McEwan and Richard Powers, whose earlier work could not at all be easily located in the realm of realism, have devolved into something resembling realists, but this sort of retrorealism hardly seems a worthy opponent in the war between reality-bending genre fiction and "artistic literature."

The most distinguished American realist currently still at work, Stephen Dixon, perhaps does stand as a worthy opponent in this conflict. Is Dixon's style of "narrative realism"--which leans heavily on the "realism" at the expense of "narrative"--what those who decry it have in mind? Certainly it eschews fantasy for an obsessive chronicle of the particulars of "real life," but his methods hardly seem representative of the "mode" Susannah Mandel thinks is dominant in current literary fiction. Indeed, one wonders whether Dixon's radical suspension of scene-setting and narrative drama isn't just a little too, well, radical for the genre radicals who think realism is too stodgy. Dixon's fiction illustrates just where the narrative realists and the narrative anti-realists are dancing to the same tune. It's experimental where they are stubbornly traditional: it implicitly posits that fiction has many more unexplored approaches to the depiction of human experience that go beyond the tired storytelling formulas shared by many narrative realists and narrative antirealists alike.

Authorities

What I take most from Sven Birkerts's contribution to the anti-blog campaign is that there are some critics who have so utterly fetishized ink-on-paper, or who are so thoroughly invested in "print" and its its "biases and hierarchies" (Birkerts's own words) that they will attach themselves to the last sheet of paper passing through the last printing press before they will turn to the pixel as an alternative. (At which point they will no doubt endorse it as if their protests had never been never uttered, since where else are they going to go?)

Birkerts has been worrying over the transformation of print-based reading into digital-based reading for quite a long time now, so he is probably more entitled than most of the other blog-bashers to question the value of literary blogs. And his criticism is less that any particular blogs are deficient in critical standards or acumen than that the blogosphere as a whole is not able to provide "authority and accountability," which are apparently Birkerts's bottom-line criteria for worthwhile literary criticism. For Birkerts, there is an inherent, metaphysical difference between print and blog that makes the former not just superior but absolutely crucial in maintaining anything that could be called "literary life" at all.

Suffice it to say I find this notion absurd. Birkerts proceeds according to a number of fixed assumptions that to me are not fixed at all. One is that blogs are "predatory" on print sources. This is, of course, the same old charge that's been leveled against blogs since they first began to threaten the hegemony of print, and where litblogs are concerned, it becomes less true with every passing day and with every new litblog that comes to my attention. Increasingly, litblogs use print articles as a jumping-off point for further commentary that has much more in mind than simply pointing readers to the source. This sort of thing has long gone on in academic criticism, which often similarly uses previously published commentary as a touchstone, something that motivates additional commentary, a response that broadens the critical discussion. Journalists and book reviewers, it would seem, are not to be responded to in this way. Their words have authority.

Another such assumption is that the blogosphere is "fluid," a "slipstream" in which the unwary reader can get too easily "lost," whereas print book reviews provide an "echoing wall" back from which "the sounds produced by individual writers and thinkers are returned as a larger coherence." I suppose it is possible to become entirely passive when navigating the blogosphere, letting the links and cross-references lull you into a critical somnolence, but I don't quite see why this is inherently a feature of blog-reading. Couldn't you pull yourself out of the "slipstream" and exert some critical intelligence of your own? Couldn't you muster up some "coherence" yourself, rather than waiting for some "authority" to provide it? Besides, the days when most blogs provided primarily links are coming to an end, for the reasons I indicated above. The free-standing blog post, without "predatory" designs on print sources (or in which such sources are themselves "supplements" to the post), will only become more common. (Are in fact already common: many of the blogs listed on my blogroll to the right consistently feature these kinds of linkless posts.) At the very least, there's no reason to believe that the "slipstream" defines the blogosphere, except insofar as there are many good blogs, and you could get "lost" trying to keep track of them.

Perform a thought experiment: Sven Birkerts publishes one of his reviews on his own blog rather than in one of the newspaper book review sections. Does it thereby get lost in the slipstream, its content too "fluid" to manifest "authority and accountability"? Does it automatically lose its authority? Having "New York Times" stamped on it is what finally confers authority, regardless of how compelling the review is in and of itself? Is literature really well-served by this specious, artificially-induced authority?

Predictably enough, "editing" has its role to play in the print world of authority and accountability:

The implicit immediacy and ephemerality of "post" and "update," the deeply embedded assumption of referentiality (linkage being part of the point of blogging), not to mention a new of-the-moment ethos among so many of the bloggers (especially the younger ones) favors a less formal, less linear, and essentially unedited mode of argument. While more traditional print-based standards are still in place on sites like Slate and the online offerings of numerous print magazines, many of the blogs venture a more idiosyncratic, off-the-cuff style, a kind of "I've been thinking . . ." approach.

I really don't understand why Birkerts would so directly oppose "editing" and "thinking." I myself, I now admit, do a fair amount of "editing" of my own posts. I try to put them together with some care, and I think I'm my own best editor. But I edit precisely to clarify my thinking, enhance my thinking, not to erase all signs of its taking place. If it nevertheless comes off as "idiosyncratic," so be it. I'd rather encounter the idiosyncracies of writers thinking through the implications of their responses to books they've read than most of the book reviews published according to "traditional print-based standards," if what I see in most of the Sunday book reviews are the fruits of these standards. Birkerts's "authority and accountability" and Gary Kamiya's "distance and objectivity and humility" are just self-justifying buzzwords invoked by writers who seem increasingly desperate to differentiate themselves from anarchic bloggers who won't hold themselves "accountable" to the powers that be (and who might be in the process of stealing their audience).

Ultimately, Birkerts wants to preserve a space for "unhurried thinking," a phrase he takes from Cynthia Ozick's recent essay on the decline of literary criticism. I do too, but I can't say I think he makes a very good case that the conventional book review as practiced in mainstream book review sections is a good forum for this kind of thinking. Some good critics (Birkerts frequently enough among them) are able to exhibit considered judgment and unhurried thinking in their reviews, but by and large the newspaper book review is a lost cause, done in by the consumerist approach increasingly adopted by most newspapers and by editorial myopia. Not much thinking at all goes on in most newspaper reviews, just rote plot summaries and stale recitations of received wisdom.

In my opinion, "unhurried thinking" is more likely to be cultivated in literary blogs than in the dwindling pages of newpapers and magazines. Bloggers have no imposed deadlines, no restrictions on the kinds of books that can be discussed, no need to stick to the stifling conventions of "literary journalism." As Frank Wilson (himself the editor of a newspaper review section) puts it in his own response to Birkerts, "Nothing is stopping anybody from being unhurried in their thinking, letting their views ripen, so that no nuance is released before its time - and posting the results online when they feel ready to. Just because the Web allows one to do things quickly doesn't mean that everything done there must be done quickly." The "fluidity" about which Birkerts complains can just as easily be channeled into productive chains of discussion that far surpass print book reviews in both depth and breadth and that will establish their own kind of "authority." Litbloggers don't have to be "accountable" to editors or to Sven Birkerts or to anyone else beyond the curious readers who can regard literary weblogs as "echoing walls," or can just go with the flow.

UPDATE See also this response to Birkerts's essay at The Wooden Spoon.

UPDATE Also this.