The Reading Experience

Above Ground

If actually bringing attention to the work of "underground" writers is his goal, "King" Wenclas does a pretty poor job of it. For years his blustering and hyperbolizing have discouraged me from reading any of the writers he ostensibly champions. Now his organization, the Underground Literary Alliance, is publishing its own books, and I finally decided to drop my resistance and sample some of what they're offering.

I've recently read Security, by James Nowlan, and The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus, by "Wred Fright," and I'm here first of all to say I thought they were both pretty good.

Security is a short (96 pages), Bukowski-esque novel about an American in Paris, a down-on-his-luck security guard who drifts from temporary job to temporary job and whose marriage, which is about the only positive force in his life, is, as it finally turns out, in the process of ending as well. In addition to chronicling its protagonist's current efforts simply at surviving, the novel also relates incidents from his horrifyingly abusive childhood, abuses which, along with his subsequent failures to "make it" in mainstream society, clearly enough contributed to his tenuous mental state (which in turn has contributed to his failure to make it, etc.) "Tom knew he had become strange," we are told during his final phone conversation with his wife, "and he didn't feel like he knew himself or anyone else including Isabelle." The novel ends with what appears to be a positive change in Tom's circumstances (a job, a reunion with Isabelle) only to lead abruptly to what appears to be the character's death at the hands of terrorists/mercenaries. (We can't really be sure at this point if these events are truly happening or whether they're some manifestation of Tom's "madness.")

In his review of Security, Noah Cicero calls the novel "concentrated human suffering," which seems about right, although Cicero doesn't really offer any analysis of how the novel accomplishes such concentration, emhasizing instead how its prose is "too concrete, too direct, too straight forward" to require much "literary terminology" to describe it. "The language resembles that of a John Grishman or Steven King," he writes, "but instead of telling the story of lawyers or a horror story it is showing the life of a man who is alone, alienated, broken, has one tragedy forced upon him after another." I think this is unfair to Nowlan's prose and overstates the extent to which his novel is formless, merely "showing" us a case of alienation rather than composing the events in its protagonist's life into a coherent whole that is, to some degree, deliberately shaped.

Security presents itself as a series of mishaps, a chronicle of Tom's misfortunes related as one damn unhappy thing after another. We could take this as simple plotlesssness, a subverting of conventional norms governing "story," character development, etc. (which perhaps it is), but surely such a strategy doesn't entail a complete lack of narrative purpose, an abandonment of all form, even that minimal formal coherence contributed by "plot." Surely Nowlan's more or less picaresque approach to storytelling in Security is a strategy, used precisely to foreground Tom's plight as "alone, alienated, broken," etc. Nowlan has adopted the picaresque narrative, usually to be found in sprawling tales spread out in both time and space, to create a more foreshortened, more intensely realized, indeed more "concentrated" work of fiction that would not have the same impact had it been "shaped" in some other way, had it instead come in the form of a conventional "well-made story" employing the contemporary default mode of "psychological realism." If the novel is "a story of an alienated human struggling and struggling and struggling without getting any rewards" (Cicero), it conveys this impression only because it has found its "sufficient form," not because it rejects form in favor of "life."

By comparing Nowlan's writing to that of John Grisham or Stephen King, Cicero must be suggesting that his prose is accessible, uncomplicated, not self-consciously "literary." I would say that while it is accessible, this doesn't necessarily make it simple or artless. Grisham and King are "accessible" because their novels are written to be movies, as substitutes for movies, their prose stripped of all distinguishing characteristics, including art. Their "plain" styles are really just exercises in banality, studiously avoiding the "literary" because to attempt something other than bare proficiency would reveal the aesthetic void at the core of their work. Nowlan's relatively unadorned style, on the other hand, is restrained in its effects because this is what is needed to tell Tom's story, to evoke his character in an honest way to begin with. It even at times has its own kind of blunt lyricism:

When he got home he tried on the uniform before the mirror. He tried looking like a security guard but it wasn't convincing. Something was lacking. Then he remembered something he had read about serial killers in America being attracted to work in security. They had frequently tried to get on the police force of several cities but had been rejected as psychologically unfit so they had to settle for the rent a cop uniform. This idea made a sly smile across his lips; he tensed the muscles of his face to hide it and there it was the expression that he wanted. You see such faces and you ask yourself is this someone angry at the world because he is too stupid to understand it or perhaps because he understands it too well? His wife came in while he was getting deeper into his act. She had received the news of his new position with happiness and she had thought they could celebrate by drinking some wine and making love after a nice meal but seeing him there in his cheap uniform turned her off and he ended up drinking the wine alone.

(Although I have to say that Nowlan's disregard of the role of punctuation doesn't always work to the benefit of his prose. At times it simply impedes the forward flow of language, which, if anything, makes the book less straightforward and accessible. And what the book's back cover comment calls the "edginess" created by the frequent "raw typos" doesn't work at all. They do call attention to the text's status as text, but I don't think this kind of accidental postmodernism is what Nowlan (or the ULA) really has in mind.)

The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus is both more constrained and more exuberant than Security. It is more explicitly obedient to the dictates of form (although its formal design is relatively distinctive), but its characters and their exploits are more raucous, more overtly iconoclastic. First published as installments in a "zine," the novel focuses on a year in the life of a rock 'n roll band whose members are also college students. Their efforts to establish themselves as a successful band fail almost as resolutely as does Tom's struggle to hold himself together in Security, but whereas Tom's failure is more or less tragic, the PFE's misadventures are comedic and mostly good-natured.

The novel's chapters take the form of "A-Sides" and "B-Sides," its four main characters alternating monologues labeled "Verse," Chorus," "Coda," etc. This faux-musical structure doesn't really introduce any startlingly innovative changes into fictional form; it essentially just allows a kind of round-robin narration, one episode of which picks up on the previous and makes possible a multi-perspective chronicle of the PFE"s activities and of university life in general. Nevertheless, "Wred Fright" should be credited for an approach that avoids business-as-usual and that keeps his novel as energetic as his characters and their frenetic pursuit of rock 'n roll crediblity.

For all its emphasis on a mileu characterized by rebelliousness (however directed in recognizable channels) and noncomformity, The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus is rather well-controlled and ultimately fairly conventional in its movement toward a kind of rounded-off closure. (I don't mean this as a criticism.) The "chronicle of a year" structure allows for a plausible degree of character development, an opportunity for the reader to witness a process of expansion and maturation in the characters' assumptions and attitudes, as several of them essentially grow out of their adolescent desire to be rock stars and anarchists. In addition to providing a satiric window onto the consequences and implications of that desire, the novel also offers a convincing portrayal of American college life. It's realistic without trying too hard to "capture" the details of university towns and campuses.

Neither Security nor The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus is as revolutionary or disorderly as the ULA proclamations about its mission might suggest them to be, but I don't see why they need to be such in order to be worthwhile. They're easily as good as what is published in many other small presses, and are in fact infinitely preferable to the eye-glazing "literary fiction" shoveled out by the bigger publishers. They provide their share of readerly pleasures while also posing some welcome challenges to conventional expectations of "good fiction." After reading these two books, I can only conclude that King Wenclas would do himself and his writers more good if he stopped attacking everyone else for their sins against the Underground and more honestly promoted--without the exaggerations and the spin--the authors and books he thinks more of us ought to be reading.

An Element of Wonder

The problem of "form" in art, especially in works of literature, disappears fairly quickly if we simply accept John Dewey's definition:

. . .form is not found exclusively in objects labeled works of art. Wherever perception has not been blunted and perverted, there is an inevitable tendency to arrange events and objects with reference to the demands of complete and unified experience. Form is a character of every experience that is an experience. Art in its specific sense enacts more deliberately and fully the conditions that effect this unity. Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment. (Art as Experiemce, 137)

Thus it is quite impossible for "substance" to precede form. All experiences are given substance by their unfolding and consummation into form, as perception itself (when it hasn't been "perverted") naturally seeks form ("a complete and unified experience"). Art makes the human form-imposing impulse itself into a subject of contemplation. Thus in experiencing a work of art we are both witnessing an "event" brought "to its own integral fulfillment" and are invited to reflect on our own "inevitable tendency" to seek such fulfillment.

For me, this is one of the most important tasks undertaken by works of art, especially works of literature. I would even say that it is a process, fundamental to the way that art works, that also has "real world" implications, a carryover from literature to life, the sort of thing I otherwise often decry on this blog when discussing attempts to make literature "relevant" to life. By encouraging us to occupy the second-order level of reflection on the manifestation of form, literary art reveals our predisposition to form, at the same it satisfies it in a particularly concentrated way. (In Dewey's formulation, it "clarifies" experience by allowing us to more fully realize what it's like for a "event, object, scene and situation" to be brought to "integral fulfillment.") Literature in particular also forces a recognition of the "formal" elements of language, the way language when arranged into complex written compositions becomes ever less transparent in its capacity to "mean," ever more mediated by the form of its arrangement.

By alerting us to the ubiquity and mutability of form, art also alerts us to our attempts to impose form on life, where it is often much less benign in its its effect, much more likely to close off experience than to enhance it. (This is my own further amplification of the implications of Dewey's thought, not something he himself says in so many words.)

At the same time, Dewey does not want us to understand artistic form as something conventional or predetermined. Indeed:

A rigid predetermination of an end-product whether by artist or beholder leads to the turning out of a mechanical or academic product. . . A statement that an artist does not care how his work eventuates would not be literally true. But it is true that he cares about the end-result as a completion of what goes before and not because of its conformity or lack of conformity with a ready-made antecedent scheme. He is willing to leave the outcome to the adequacy of the means from which it issues and which it sums up. (138)

Further:

The consummatory phase of experience--which is intervening as well as final--always presents something new. Admiration always includes an element of wonder. As a Renascence writer said: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion". . . . (139)

In my opinion, the resistance to form in some quarters of American fiction--Kerouac, say, or Bukowski--comes from a failure to consider this aspect of aesthetic form. Form does not refer to the mindless recapitulation of strategies deemed appropriate (by whatever shadowy cabal responsible for enforcing the rules) for composing what we agree to call a "novel," a "short story," or a "poem," but to what emerges from the "adequacy of means" adopted by the artist, the "consummatory phase" that always--at least in the most admirable works of literary art--results in "something new," a something new many readers will find "strange." Form ought not be dismissed because it is upheld by the literary worlds's elitist powers-that-be but should be embraced because it so often confounds them.

Discouraging to Writers

In one installment in his very useful series of reports on last weekend's flurry of NBCC-sponsored panels on book-reviewing, Richard Grayson cites these remarks (I assume they are a paraphrase) by Scribner's senior editor Colin Harrison:

. . .there's a very short period of time in which responses to a book come in and actually matter; most books are in the marketplace of ideas for only a brief moment. A lack of reviews can be very discouraging to writers.

This isn't quite right. There is no "marketplace of ideas" in American book review publications; there's only the actual marketplace, the one in which book reviews appear all in a rush over a week or two and by the commercial measures of which the immediate value of books is judged. The process of book publishing and book reviewing has become indistinguishable from that which rules the release and reviews of movies: build up interest over that opening weekend, whose box office receipts tell us what we need to know about the quality of the "product" in question.

The recent publication of the final Harry Potter book almost exactly followed the movie-release paradigm. All of the purported excitement over the book crested during that weekend in which it appeared, only to almost instantly wane in the days and weeks to follow. The long lines of ticket/book buyers must have contained all of the book's enthusiasts, since there's been very little discussion of the book over the longer haul and just this past Saturday, during my periodical visit to St. Louis area book stores, I noticed big stacks of unmoved books gathered discreetly here and there, with no more loud displays and silly promotional gimmicks accompanying them.

But if most books still don't get the full-on publicity treatment of a Harry Potter novel, the "very short period of time" in which they're allowed to be noticed is real enough. For "big" books, the newspaper book review sections quite obviously compete to get their reviews out first, with the predictable result that they all appear on the same Sunday and their mutual shout-outs to readers are lost in the din. Even the less-publicized novels and those from smaller presses tend to get their few notices all at once. Some books, of course, get no "coverage" at all, but it's a little hard to see how an isolated review here or there could cut through the noise enough to do such books any good, anyway.

(Why, for example, couldn't book review sections during the summer months, when the bigger publishers are in their off seasons, devote some space to those books that were victims of the deluge of books released in the fall and spring and didn't get reviewed then? (Or in December through February, a similarly slack season?) Instead, the same old approach seems to apply, as those few new books that are released at these times are still the focus of review attention.)

I'm sure that writers do find a lack of reviews "very discouraging." Since, as far as I can tell, publishers do little else to find readers for most of their books (other than send authors on the road to flack for themselves), no reviews sends a clear message: your book isn't worth much. But writers ought to be just as discouraged at the state of affairs that has led to the "crisis in book reviewing," as the NBCC has it: publishers who throw their books out at the public through an exceedingly narrow "window," and book reviews that abet this hidebound and increasingly loony strategy by catching them and tossing them in a pile.

Serious Criticism

Much of Steve Wasserman's Columbia Journalism Review article is concerned with delineating newspapers' obligation to cover "books as news that stays news." He suggests that this means reviewing books "of enduring worth," which in turn suggests an emphasis on work of inherent literary value. I think most people would understand this to signify specifically works of literature--fiction and poetry, although some occasional works of nonfiction might also be included as achieving "enduring worth" as well. Indeed, in further indentifying "news that stays news," Wasserman asserts that "It is through the work of novelists and poets that we understand how we imagine ourselves and contend with the often elusive forces—of which language itself is a foremost factor—that shape us as individuals and families, citizens and communities. . . ."

But in his otherwise cogent enough defense of "serious criticism" in newspapers and other general-interest print publications, Wasserman doesn't really focus with much particularity on literary criticism. It is more or less conflated with discussion of "books" more generally, as if the latest academic tome on American foreign policy or most recent biography of William Randolph Hearst were equally the subject of "criticism" as a new novel by Richard Powers or new collection of poems by John Ashbery. As if the "news" conveyed by The 9-11 Commission Report were the same kind of news conveyed by Falling Man.

In fact, what Wasserman really has in mind is the kind of social analysis or cultural criticism described by Leon Wieseltier (as quoted by Wasserman): the "long, thoughtful, patient, deliberate analysis of questions that do not have obvious or easy answers." While most good novels do not offer "obvious or easy answers," I don't think it's the interpretation of fiction that Wieseltier has in mind here. Novels might sometimes provide grist for the cultural critic's rhetorical mill, but ultimately "criticism" as Wasserman and Wieseltier understand it is an "elite" discourse through which learned commentators discuss the cultural, political, and historical forces bearing down on "society" as it is reflected in all forms of expression. (I don't object to learned commentary per se, but I do like my learned commentary on literature to be about literature.) As Wasserman himself puts it, "the fundamental idea at stake in a novel—in the criticism of culture generally—is the self-image of society: how it reasons with itself, describes itself, imagines itself." It is the critic's role to sketch out this "self-image of society."

Suffice it to say I don't have much use for this conception of the critic's role, at least not if we're going to persist in calling such a critic a "literary" critic. It's telling that Wasserman singles out The New York Review of Books and The New Republic as exemplars of the kind of reviewing practice to which he aspired when the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review (and presumably still does). As Michael Orthofer has recently pointed out, and as I have argued previously, the NYROB (for a long time now ) and TNR (increasingly) have more or less abandoned the task of reviewing fiction on any consistent basis. Only the most highly promoted, "big" novels, or novels by already established "big" authors get reviewed in these publications, and, especially in NYROB, the reviews are usually quite perfunctory, given length only by the tedious practice of dwelling on biographical details or surveying the author's career in an equally apathetic fashion. While both NYROB and TNR have sizable reputations for their supposedly weighty reviews and critical commentary, most of the weight comes precisely from discussions of books, mostly nonfiction, that illustrate how society "reasons with itself, describes itself," etc. (some might say it comes from the intensity of the commentators' own self-regard), not from "long, thoughtful, patient, deliberate" analyses of works of fiction or poetry.

Thus the whole ongoing debate about whether "serious criticism" can take place online or only in print is at best a red herring. Very little serious criticism of literature takes place in print to begin with, aside from the conventional, mechanical book-report review, which Wasserman concedes is, on the whole, "shockingly mediocre" as carried out by most American newspapers. "The pabulum that passes for most reviews is an insult to the intelligence of most readers," he writes. "One is tempted to say, perversely, that its disappearance from the pages of America’s newspapers is arguably cause for celebration." The question is, at least for me, not whether print is superior to pixels or whether the online medium can sustain serious literary criticism, but whether there is or will be such criticism available at all to those who want more than the "pablum" spiced up as criticism to be found in newspapers or the "long, thoughtul" exercises in fake wisdom on display at the "premiere" mainstream print journals. (Wasserman also mentions Bookforum, so I must hasten to add that I agree with his assessment of this publication. It is one of the few--perhaps now the only--book review that features actual literary criticism, and in more than token gestures.)

This is why I still hold out hope that blogs, or whatever subsequent online forms they might morph into, can serve as sites offering "serious criticism" of literature, both canonical and contemporary (but maybe especially the latter). Print may or may not be the more adequate medium for the kind of long and thoughtful meditation Wasserman and Wieseltier obviously prefer, but since newspapers are only offering less and less space for such efforts, and since print magazines and journals seem to favor the meandering "think pieces" over focused literary analysis, those of us who would simply like to see both contemporary literature and literary criticism continue to flourish don't really have the luxury of waiting for print editors to see the light or for would-be literary critics to quit noodling around. If blogs are attracting people, both writers and readers, who are enthusiastically engaged in discussions of literature, then I can't see any reason why the literary weblog or the online literary journal (or both together) can't be credible forums for "serious criticism."

The recent spate of articles deploring online discourse have raised various objections to this notion. The most easily dismissed is the assertion that criticism requires "authority" on the part of the critic and that blogs are too numerous and too dispersed to acquire such authority. While I can agree with Wasserman or with Richard Schickel that not every critical opinion is worthy of repect unless backed up with accompanying support and analysis (in Schickel's case, a point articulated in an essay mostly lacking either), there's nothing that automatically confers authority on a book review or critical commentary simply because it appears in print or that detracts from that authority because it appears online. Wasserman claims to agree with this ("content rules"), but also apparently accepts the further claim that most litblogs don't attempt such criticism, anyway, and that they lend themselves primarily to a cacophany of strident voices. Rohan Maitzen confesses that she, too, held such a view (actually she acknowledges she had no idea that blogs engaged in "serious criticism" even existed, a state of knowledge she also, as it turns out, shared with Schickel and Wasserman) but now, she writes: "I've been reading through the archives of some lively blog debates related to my own questions about the terms and tendencies of contemporary academic literary criticism. . .Following the long chains of arguments and rebuttals, examples and counter-examples, I'm struck with a familiar sense of futility: when so much has been said by so many so often, what can I hope to add? I'm also struck, though, by just how unaware I was that conversations of quite this kind were going on."

That Adam Kirsch hasn't taken the time to survey existing blogs to make sure his claims can stand scrutiny doesn't make his unexamined assumptions valid (precisely the opposite, in fact). Literary blogs and online publications will gather "authority" just as print-based publications did so: through what they produce.

Another objection, one that clearly underpins Steve Wasserman's essay, is that criticism must be "long" before it is "thoughtful" and since blogs by their very nature can't accomodate lengthy analysis they can't be thoughtful. It is still probably an open question whether the blog form will allow for the kind of analysis Wasserman has in mind (this will be settled at least as much by readers as by writers, depending on whether we overcome the "screen fatigue" that some readers profess to develop with longer forms of online prose), but it is certainly true there is no defensible case to be made that that sort of analyis is impossible on blogs. However, if blog detractors were to sample, say, the shorter posts sometimes offered by Steve Mitchelmore (This Space) or on a regular basis by Jonathan Mayhew , they would surely see that "deliberate analysis" can occur in shorter, more compacted blog posts as readily as in the conventionally drawn-out critical essays they champion. Jonathan's deliberately condensed bursts of insight are more discerning about poetry than almost anything else I read (and I read quite a lot about poetry, even if I don't post all that much about it on TRE.) Bloggers like these just may demonstrate in the long run that "thoughtful" literary criticism doesn't always have to be "long" and that the "patience" requested by certain windy critics might not really be worth the time.

A final objection lodged against literary blogs is that the kind of reading they encourage is too frenetic, that the hyperlinks they provide make them hyperactive. Such skipping hither and yon interrupts the cogitative process, turns critical analysis into a game of tag, a cross-blog competion for links. To me, however, the interractive and recursive features of blogs are their most valuable and distinctive, the features most likely to result in the internet/blogosphere making a real contribution to literary criticism. Of course they can be used as excuses for gossip, shortcuts to thinking, or for cheap self-aggrandizement, but ultimately their additional, more purposeful potential for exploring implications and extending lines of thought will surely be exploited more fully as well. Links, whether external to other sites considering in-common subjects and themes or internal to archived posts representing previously-expressed thoughts on a given issue, provide an opportunity to extend debate and reintroduce relevant ideas in new contexts. Even in this post, I have offered a half a dozen links, each of which if pursued through other links and comment threads could lead to substantive discussions of both the immediate subject at hand and other, related subjects to create a reading experience almost impossible to duplicate through traditional print sources. This sort of experience, by which one is led to parallel analyses and direct response, often without having expected to encounter such a vigorous exchange of views, is one I have myself increasingly come to appreciate in my own reading of literary blogs, and I would like to think that blog skeptics, if they bothered to investigage what good literary blogs actually have to offer, would eventually themselves find this form of critical discourse as substantial and satisfying as I do.

In one of the installments of the apparently eternal series of "panel discussions" on book reviewing foisted on us by the National Book Critics Circle, Dwight Garner, according to Richard Grayson's account of the session, proclaimed that he and his colleagues at the New York Times Book Review turn to blogs not for criticism but "for news of the publishing world and gossip." Other panelists seemed to agree that this is what blogs are good for. On the one hand, this is just more evidence of the dense-headedness and incuriosity of Garner and his ilk, the self-appointed "gatekeepers" of mainstream book criticism. If they were truly interested in the "serious criticism" of literature, they would actively be looking in more than the usual places for anyone, in print or on blogs, who might be offering it. But they aren't, and they don't. On the other hand, that they can and do find blogs that supply them with their gossip is evidence enough that the literary blog as it has evolved over the 4-5 years of its existence indeed encompasses a large category of blogs that do little more than gabble on about the "book business" and its hangers-on practicing what is called "literary journalism." If anything, many of these blogs are even more sychophantic than the literary journalists themselves.

This has been a fairly predictable development of the approach taken by many of the founding literary bloggers, but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient one. Most of the early bloggers did not simply link to "literary news" as an excuse for mindless chatter. They offered smart, often trenchant and contrarian takes on this news. If they hadn't, literary blogs would never have captured readers' attention the way they obviously enough did. (They certainly would never have attracted my attention as they did.) The collective existence of these weblogs, each contributing distinctive observations on books and book discussion, gave readers who happened upon them a perspective on the current literary scene that print criticism clearly was not providing. The literary blogosphere has now expanded to include more comprehensive and sustained commentary (including by many of the original bloggers themselves), but most of its critics seem fixated on what they perceive as the "chatty" qualities of the link-and-comment style of blogging. It allows them to continue in their condescension toward blogs, but I think I can even now hear the sound of their perches of "authority" crumbling.

UPDATE Kassia Krozier also gives Steve Wasserman a piece of her mind.