The Reading Experience

Something Fundamental

David Ulin sees similarities between Norman Mailer and Denis Johnson:

Regardless of what you think about Mailer, his death is one more signifier of a literary culture in transition, in which the old guard is disappearing faster than we can figure out who might fill the void. This is why Johnson's prize is so compelling -- because he may be the one American writer of his generation (the generation raised on Vietnam and Woodstock) who consistently writes with that overarching standard of engagement, who's not playing games but going after something fundamental, using literature to get at the essence of who we are.

I have to assume that in Ulin's reference to "playing games" he is taking a swipe at postmodernism, using the same stale cliche those critics who want to valorize the "engagement" of writers like Mailer and Johnson in contrast to the aesthetic affectations of formalists and metafictionists always seem to use. The former don't mince around with "art" but grapple with "the essence of who we are," while the latter are preoccupied with surfaces, with the "merely literary."

It's a tiresome enough exercise, as much as anything else unfair to Mailer and Johnson, who are being judged as philosophers and seers rather than novelists, archaelogists of the soul rather than artists. Surely Mailer's most ponderous and pretentious books are those in which he self-consciously assumed these roles, and it does Johnson no favor to describe his work in terms as trite as those Ulin later uses to capture that "something fundamental" he is putatively "going after":

These are strange books, no doubt about it, built on the notion that reality is a veil behind which we might discover the truer nature of things, if only we could see it for what it is. Occasionally, we are offered glimpses but that just adds to our confusion -- or, worse, puts our most essential selves at risk. "Did you think we were just thinking?" a character asks in "Already Dead." "Thinking forbidden thoughts? Imagining heresies? Pretending to recognize moral systems as instruments of oppression and control?"

What Johnson is saying is that this is not a game but deadly serious, that what's at stake is how we continue in the face of mysteries so large they threaten to overwhelm us -- and ultimately will. The only answer is to continue moving forward, to accept our small graces and benedictions where we can.

The vapidity here is striking: "reality is a veil"; "our most essential selves"; "not a game but deadly serious"; "[t]he only answer is to continue moving forward." What does any of this mean? Why would anyone want to read a body of work that can be reduced to this sort of night-school existentialism? Most importantly, would Denis Johnson be satisfied with such a flavorless characterization of his fiction? I can't imagine that he would. While I would not call Jesus' Son "the most potent work of American fiction in the last 20 years" (among other reasons because it was actually published in 1992), I did enjoy reading this book (as well as Angels and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man), and I can't at all say it was because Johnson had pierced the veil of reality or dug down to our "most essential selves" or because it signalled to me that we should "continue moving forward." In fact, it seemed to me a rather delicate book, working through style, nuance, and indirection rather than a heavy-handed "engagement" or utilitarian view of literature as spiritual guide.

It remains unclear to me why we should hold novelists to an "overarching standard of engagement." Why should I care whether Norman Mailer or Denis Johnson have anything at all to "say"? They're novelists, not soapbox orators, and should be judged by the quality of the literary art they make, not their efforts to discover the really real or stare down the "face of mysteries." I'd rather have writers playing games than aspiring to be sages.

Ian McEwan

If I were to write a straight-up review of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach that expressed my honest reaction to the book, I actually couldn't improve on Steven Augustine's review:

Ian McEwan is the gothic poet of British class anxiety. Over an arc of novels including The Innocent, Black Dog, Enduring Love, and Atonement, McEwan has polished a talent for giving his readers nasty and sometimes bloody surprises when the classes interact on too intimate a level. His most recent, On Chesil Beach, however, is both a perfect specimen of McEwan’s hardening suavity as a prose stylist and the latest example of an ongoing renunciation of his greater gift. As Saturday did before it, this novella-length book promises much, initially, but ends up being deeply unsatisfying before its conclusion. A necessary catharsis has been frustrated for the sake of a decorous treatise on the grim predestinies of class.

I would only add that I also found Atonement "deeply unsatisfying" by its conclusion and that Enduring Love was the last Ian McEwan novel I both enjoyed and could identify as an "Ian McEwan novel" as I had previously known them. The Cement Garden, The Child in Time, The Comfort of Strangers, and the stories in First Love, Last Rites were all chilling tales of innocence lost or corrupted. I remember the grotesqueries of First Love as especially disturbing when I initiallly read the book (my first McEwan) twenty-five years ago.
But Amsterdam, Atonement, Saturday, and now On Chesil Beach, all attempts (in my opinion) to broaden his appeal, to bring a little "warmth" to his work in response to criticism of the "forensic" iciness of his early books, only leave me out in the aesthetic cold. I'll take disturbing over "decorous" every time.

But I then think of John Updike's first rule of reviewing, which I paraphrased here as : "Judge [the book] according to standards appropriate to the sort of thing it is, not to the sort of thing you'd like it to be." McEwan has gone from writing gothic-tinged fables of disintegration to writing conventional psychological realism presented as slices-of-life. I like the first; I don't like the second. If McEwan has now become a more or less recognizable kind of hyper-realist (with now and then a sharp plot twist introduced to keep things moving), shouldn't this now be the standard by which he is judged? Ought not the question be whether his fiction is effective in its hyper-realism or not?

Perhaps. But there still ought to be room for saying that McEwan's early work was arresting and rather daring, completely unlike most British "literary fiction" that preceded it, and that his later work is predictable and often tedious, a pale imitation of the British modernists it seems to take as inspiration. And that the cutting precision of his early style has now become the limp, undistinguished prose of a writer cashing in on his newfound popularity and exploiting his previously-established critical reputation. And that the general aimlessness of On Chesil Beach in particular as anything other than a "treatise on the grim predestinies of class" in pre-60s England makes one wince at the thought of reading the next McEwan opus.

Thus not only do I think that McEwan's early, more innovative fiction is better than his later, more orthodox fiction, but I also don't find that these later books succeed on what could be identified as their own terms. Indeed, since I could not finish Saturday, I can only conclude that this book failed the most basic test any work of fiction shoud pass, that of maintaining my attention at all. I did manage to finish Amsterdam and Atonement, but it is nevertheless a telling measure of its lack of any distinguishing qualites that I now remember nothing at all about the former, and that, although I do remember most of the latter, this is largely because I was so struck by the thoroughgoing banality of its extended denouement.

On Chesil Beach does seem to return McEwan to the fabular form taken by his best work, but its narrative has none of the enlivening angularity of The Comfort of Strangers or Black Dog. It unfolds in a leisurely, unimaginatve (first let's introduce the characters, then let's go back and see how they got here), frequently eye-glazing pace, and takes us nowhere surprising. Indeed, it seems almost designed to reinforce the most banal stereotypes of both class and gender in pre-"Swinging London" Great Britain. Its own post-dramatic denoument, taken together with the sexual histrionics of its core narrative, serves to complete an allegorical tale that reveals mid-century English men and women to be, well, class conscious and sexually repressed. I don't think I ever realized that! The male protagonist's later, rueful conclusion that "Love and patience--if only he had had them both at once--would surely have seen them through" is insipid in the extreme.

Thematically, the only mildly interesting idea the novel communicates is the suggestion that, had the frigid female protagonist come of age during the sexually liberating period just a few years off, she might have been able to express her lack of sexual desire more freely, without so much of the accompanying guilt she does in fact feel. This is a provocatively contrarian notion, but it is mostly just a passing fancy, not a motif wound into the narrative and pursued with the steely-eyed vigor one finds in McEwan's fiction of the 80s and 90s. It's one of the various bits of allegorical meaning strewn about the text, and the reader, for all the energy and aesthetic ingenuity with which it's offered, can simply take it or leave it.

But I suppose readers unfamiliar with McEwan's early work, or who found it too disquieting or idiosyncratic, might read On Chesil Beach and find it a compelling enough portrait of an historical era, a relatively quick read with enough McEwanesque touches of trauma and unease to distinguish it from most other routine works of literary fiction. (And it is about sex, after all.) But my own formative reading experiences of Ian McEwan's fiction led me to expect much, much more (and something much different) from what we're getting at this later stage of his career. Perhaps others (including those print reviewers who gave On Chesil Beach such ecstatic praise) will continue to be satisfied with the tamer McEwan, but I'd still suggest they read First Love, Last Rites to understand what's missing.

Getting to Know You

This article on the adaptation of Russian "literary classics" to tv concludes:

One argument that producers brought forward when defending TV adaptation of classics a few years ago, when the trend had just started, was that teenagers who would have never read a book would at least watch a TV series based on it and get acquainted with literature classics in this way. And that argument seems to be valid. The rationale of those who argue that contemporary TV adaptations of classical novels are vulgar and simplistic may be right to a certain degree. But they are definitely missing one important point: literary classics have become part of pop culture and should be viewed in that way, not like something sacred.

What exactly does it mean to "get acquainted with literature classics" by watching a tv show? Simply to know that they exist? This was for a long time one of the implicit justifications of "exposing" students to great works of literature--make them aware that these books exist so that they might know where the "best" examples of human expression can be found, might be able to follow a conversation in which these illustrious names are mentioned, or might even--gasp!--one day read the books and take them seriously. But I doubt that E.D. Hirsch understood "cultural literacy" quite to mean that "literary classics have become part of pop culture and should be viewed in that way, not like something sacred."

I've tried as earnestly as I can to understand the logic behind the notion that it's good that "teenagers who would have never read a book would at least watch a TV series based on it." This is also a long-standing justification both for making adaptations of "literary classics" and for showing such films and programs to students as either a supplement to or an outright replacement for reading the works in question, but it has never made sense to me. It's based on the assumption that "literary classics" (specifically works of fiction) are stories about characters and that, since these visual media are able to tell stories about characters, if you faithfully tell the stories and present all the characters you've adequately reproduced the book. (Or even if you haven't, it's not a big deal because viewers will still get "acquainted" with it.) While it's true that some "literary classics," especially those written in the 18th and 19th centuries, have stories and characters, surely it isn't the case that they are conveyed to us in the same way from "classic" to "classic." What gets lost in the adaptation is narrative voice, fluctuations in point of view, subtleties in characterization, shades of description. Most importantly, what gets lost is the encounter with language. And this is unavoidably true even in adaptations that are not "vulgar and simplistic."

To believe that adaptations are acceptable substitutes for the works adapted is to believe that the experience of watching a film or television show, even the most intelligent and well-wrought shows, and reading a novel are essentially the same. Or at least the differences are negligible enough that the "essence" of the work is still getting through. It seems to me an implicit devaluation of what is actually the distinguishing feature of fiction--its status a patterned prose, as writing--to maintain that it can be translated into visually realized images without sacrificing its essence. A given adaptation of The Master and Margarita may work on its own, visual, terms. It may even be more successful than another adaptation at capturing something recognizably "Bulgakovian" in the treatment. But it still isn't The Master and Margarita, and viewers of the film who don't become readers of the novel still don't really know what it's all about.

A good television or film adaptation can certainly provide pleasures of its own, but they are the pleasures available in that medium. A good film requires careful attention, just as does a good novel, but the kind of attention being paid is not the kind required by fiction. It can provoke us into immersing ourselves into the mise-en-scene (in a way perhaps analogous to painting but not continuous with it, since the image moves) or force us to keep track of the information conveyed through editing, but this is ultimately the work of the eye and ear keeping pace with appearances. We have to look and listen. Fiction requires a kind of looking, but even our visual registering of word, phrase and sentence, and the way these elements arrange themselves in a "style" distinctive to the author we're reading, is more an internally-oriented mental process than an externally-oriented process of sorting sights and sounds (although a kind of "listening" is also certainly involved, as language manifests itself to our mental "ear"). Our imaginations then have to finish the job the writer has started. We have to mentally transform the words, phrases, and sentences into the "actions" or "thoughts" or "emotions" of the "characters" we agree are being brought to a kind of life. (Films, of course, do this work for us.) And we have to keep straight the way in which the characters and their actions are being presented to us in a particular sort of formal arrangement, an arrangement that is again mostly a phenomenon of our mental engagement with the text. Sometimes--as in some modernist and postmodernist fiction--this formal arrangement overrides our immediate connection to the characters and the actions and has to be processed before we can even comprehend the characters and actions.

I don't say that fiction is superior to film (I have a background in film study and criticism myself), but to the extent it makes the kind of demands on us I have described, it certainly is different in its aesthetic and psychological effects. For a "literary classic" to finally be appreciated, it has to be appreciated as literary. It probably doesn't do any harm to people (as opposed to literature) when they're allowed to be "acquainted" with literature through film, but I can't see that it does them much good, either.

Lonely Humans

Of the reappraisals of Michaelangelo Antonioni that have appeared since his recent death, this one by Seymore Chatman at Artforum is one of the most incisive:

His greatest films appeared just after cinema moved to the wide screen. That was no accident. With the exception of Il grido (The Cry, 1957), which relied heavily on the bleak, broad landscape of the Po valley, his films of the narrow-screened 1950s were too crowded. He needed a larger format to create mise-en-scènes with enough space to evoke the emotional isolation of the characters. In L’avventura, when Anna’s friends search for her on the tiny island of Lisca Bianca, they cross the steep terrain, with the endless horizon of the sea always visible behind them. When Lidia wanders around Milan in La notte, she is isolated by the emptiness of the urban background and, in a visual climax, stunningly dwarfed by crowded skyscrapers. In Il deserto rosso (Red Desert), characters emerge singly from the ghostly fog as they watch Giuliana walk away from the car that she has almost driven off a pier. One of Antonioni’s favorite painters was Giorgio Morandi, from whom he surely learned the art of grouping. But unlike the painter, the filmmaker found no tranquillity among scattered groups, for his were composed of lonely humans, not pots.

To an unusual degree, Antonioni’s art is governed by his keen attention to the ground against which he placed his figures. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Antonioni, with his telephoto lens, flattened things against broad surfaces. Particularly in the ’60s, he sought out framing boxes; for instance, to pin Monica Vitti against the wall in L’eclisse and Red Desert. Rothko’s signature bisection of the horizontal dimension (and Barnett Newman’s of the vertical, and Mondrian’s obsession with the whole box) may well have lingered in the filmmaker’s mind. (Antonioni once famously compared his work to Rothko’s, saying that it is “about nothing . . . with precision.”) In L’avventura, he revisited de Chirico, showing Sandro and Claudia fleeing a deserted Sicilian town built in the rectilinear Fascist style. In Red Desert, and again in Il mistero di Oberwald (The Mystery of Oberwald, 1980), he experimented with background space by introducing a subtle movement in texture—a kind of crawling of the colors on walls; for example, the wall in Corrado’s hotel room after he and Giuliana make love. Like Rothko, Antonioni manipulated saturation, tone, and hue to suggest emotional turbulence. . .

Beyond brilliantly meshing visual form with theme—empty canvases with empty lives—Antonioni contributed early to cinema’s migration from Victorian narrative modes, as necessary and welcome a move as was that from Great Expectations to Mrs. Dalloway for literature. Beginning with L’avventura, his films are firmly liberated from Hollywood’s obsessive insistence on the conclusive denouement, on tying things up, whether for better (Mildred Pierce; Stagecoach) or worse (Sunset Boulevard). This was not easy or profitable for the director. The sophisticated audience at Cannes in 1960 was no more prepared than the general public to watch a film whose ostensible heroine not only disappears but is forgotten by the other characters. Probably expecting another film noir, where the body would be found and the mystery solved, the Cannes crowd booed vigorously. But, as Antonioni explained, L’avventura was a noir in reverse. Fortunately, the audience’s disapproval was quickly rejected by great cineastes and critics alike. Antonioni’s later films were no less rigorously open-ended: La notte’s tormented couple lie loveless after sex in a golf-course sand trap; L’eclisse’s couple vow to meet again and again but never do, leaving us on a dismally empty street corner in a Roman suburb; Red Desert’s neurotic heroine fails to communicate her despair to a Turkish sailor who speaks no Italian; Blow-Up’s photographer protagonist is literally erased after playing an imaginary tennis game with mimes; The Passenger’s burned-out hero, after a fruitless attempt to change his identity, lies dead in a provincial hotel room, without even the sound of the assassin’s pistol shot to mark his passing.

It is undeniably true that, whatever one thinks of individual films made by the great "art film" directors of the 1950s and 60s such as Antonioni, they did bring modern film closer to modern art and literature in their innovations with cinematic form and style. Indeed, one of the reasons the films of Antonioni and Bergman and even Robert Altman might now seem dated, quaint, out of synch with current cinematic practices is that Hollywood films since the late 70s (with exceptions, always exceptions) have essentially returned us to the days of conventional framing and Victorian narrative modes (although probably not back to the predominance of "invisible editing"--American films in particular have become increasingly hyperkinetic). If the films of Antonioni and Bergman and Bresson seem self-consciously "arty" it's partly because current films have again become so utterly formulaic.

The influence of art and literature on a filmmaker like Antonioni was not to move him to, say, adapt literary works in order to bring us filmed versions of fiction, to borrow the presitge of literature in order to convey a ready-made "quality" on the adaptation. Instead it moved to him to further explore the unrealized potential of his own medium; in Antonioni's films (as in Bergman's and Altman's), there is an effort to elevate film to the status of the other major art forms by implicitly asserting that its powers of aesthetic representation go well beyond its beginnings as "moving pictures" and "screen plays." Antonioni's films are "serious" because they take seriously the formal and stylistic possibilities filmmakers had yet to exploit in the relatively brief history of cinema. Paradoxically, the inspiration of modernist art and literature in Antonioni's case served to help him reveal more of the latent properties of film itself.