The Reading Experience

Everyone Has Done It

Readers who would expect from Laura Mullen's Murmur (Futurepoem Books) a "plot" of the sort we usually expect from a work designated a "novel" (even if the plot is deliberately fragmented or only cursorily developed) would certainly be considerably disappointed. What we get instead is a rudimentary situation--a dead woman is found on a beach--that is either real or is the beginning of the plot of a book a woman is reading and that is repeated, in different iterations, over and over.

Readers who would expect well-developed "characters" (as Gilbert Sorrentino would have it, characters who "jump off the page") would also be sorely disappointed. The woman, a detective, potential killers appear and re-appear, changing places with one another so that, as one of the blurbs on the jacket flap describes it, we get "all possible events, all murderers and all murdered, so that, at any point in the narrative, everything has happened and everyone has done it." There are voices, drifting in and out, but no characters.

Thus the reader who would seek a stable point of view, from which we can coherently make sense of the "action," would also be frustrated, especially since the book is offered to us as, ostensibly, a crime novel, or a pastiche of one. Murmur doesn't lead us, as in most detective novels, on an epistemological journey culiminating in knowledge (who done it) but instead renders up a world of epistemological chaos, by which all our ways of knowing are mocked and travestied. Still, we keep reading (or at least I did), not to find out who did what but to find out what new obstacle to our desire for such knowledge (which has us "reading for the plot" and ignoring the means by which it is presented to us) the author will introduce. (Our tendency to read in this way is further mocked at the level of sentence and paragraph; many sentences break off at the margin, left unfinished, the connection to the line that follows short-circuited so that we must bear down even harder and search for the missing sense.)

In short, readers who would expect Murmur to be a recognizable kind of novel in any way other than the most elemental--its 151 pages seem to be related to one another, and we are encouraged through style and imagery to take it as a coherent whole--will probably not enjoy it. It seems to me the very embodiment of John Hawkes's dictum that "the true enemies of the novel [are] plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure [is] really all that remain[s]" If anything, Mullen's book is even more combative against the conventional strategies of fiction, more reliant on "totality of vision," than Hawkes's, even, perhaps, more than Beckett's. I liked it, and intend to read it again.

NOTE In this essay, Jennifer K. Dick discusses Murmur more as a long poem than as a novel.

Publish or Perish

The emerging controversy over the fate of Vladimir Nabokov's final, unfinished manuscript raises issues similar to those discussed in the preceding post. In that post I suggested that the publication of the "original" versions of some of Raymond Carver's stories will serve only to diminish readers' estimation of Carver's fiction. I further argued that even if Carver's editor in effect co-wrote the stories, it would be better for those original efforts to remain unpublished. What ultimately matters is the quality of the work, and, since I believe the impure versions of the stories (those edited by Gordon Lish) are superior, they are the versions that should be available to future readers.

In the Nabokov case, a manuscript the author felt should not be available will either be destroyed or be published against the author's wishes. Whereas Carver agreed to the publication of the impure versions of his work (thus effectively claiming them as his own), here the author wanted the impure version of his work-in-progress (impure because not completed) to be withheld from publication. If we are finally able to read The Original of Laura, we would be reading something the author had not yet claimed as his own (worthy of being attributed to "Vladimir Nabokov" on the cover), something that, to Nabokov's way of thinking, did not yet constitute a text that could be read at all in any meaningful sense. It was the finished work that Nabokov would share with his audience; the work done on the way to that finished form should not concern them.

In discussing the issues involved in this controversy, Ron Rosenbaum asks, "Does the lust for aesthetic beauty always allow us to rationalize trampling on the artist's grave?" But the unfinished manuscript could not have "aesthetic beauty" as Nabokov would have defined the term. Aesthetic beauty emerges from the work as it is fully shaped, exhausting its creator's artistic resources. The completed work might fail to have aesthetic beauty, but only the completed work manifests the aesthetic beauty the artist/author attempted to bring about. Nabokov wanted The Original of Laura destroyed because it coud not provide the aesthetic satisfaction he wanted his fiction to provoke above all else. (The "tingle" in the spine he himself most valued when reading works of literature.)

There are of course notable challenges to the purity of effect Nabokov demanded. Kafka wanted his incomplete work (including The Trial) similarly dispatched to oblivion, and most of us are surely glad that Max Brod, his executor, did not follow his instructions. Few would deny that even in their truncated or unpolished form Kafka's novels provide a distinctive aesthetic experience. Perhaps The Original of Laura would also redeem itself in its fragmentary state, although from Rosenbaum's description of it (through Dmitri Nabokov), it doesn't seem that it will. Still, Nabokov is such a beguiling writer it is certainly possible that this 30-page manuscript has a sufficiently realized appeal that it would be a loss to literature--or at least to Nabokov's body of work--if it were to be destroyed.

Nabokov would never have gotten himself into a situation like that Raymond Carver faced when deciding which version of his stories to make public, since it is inconceivable that he would have allowed an editor to interfere with his work in the way Gordon Lish apparently did in editing Carver. But the two cases are related in the way they foreground important questions: Who has the authority to decide when or whether a text should be officially sanctioned under a deceased author's name--the author, through his or her explicit instructions or tacit acquiescence, or his/her "executors," those in possession of the text in question? How do we assess unpublished works in the larger context of an author's known work? Most importantly: At what point does a text have sufficient aesthetic integrity that we are justified reading it as a text, and not just a draft still on its way to its artistic consummation?

Restoration Drama

I'm afraid that Tess Gallagher, unwittingly and with all good intentions, has done Raymond Carver's reputation as a significant American writer permanent harm. It will not be possible for future readers and students of Carver's fiction to approach it without the question of its authenticity lingering somewhere in the background--in some cases, as in academic courses featuring Carver on the syllabus, without the question being addressed directly. "Is this one of those stories his editor rewrote for him?" will almost certainly be asked by those encountering his work for the first time and by critics assessing his place in late 20th century American literature. He might utimately be remembered more as a case study in the fraught relationship between some writers and their editors than as a great American short story writer (which I think he is, even after learning the extent to which Carver's signature understated style and de-dramatized plots were imposed on him by Gordon Lish.)

However much Gallagher believes that Carvers's initial, more expansive (and frankly more ordinary) drafts are the "true, original” versions of his stories, they are not the stories that those of who read his books as they were published encountered and that made his name as a post-postmodern writer of consequence. They are not what we think of when we think of a "Raymond Carver story," and whether Carver sacrificed his "artistic integrity" by giving in to Lish or willingly took advice that actually improved his stories is by this time mostly irrelevant. Carver never repudiated the Lish-edited stories, and republished them without changing them, so this is not really a situation analagous to that of the filmmaker who later re-releases a "director's cut" to restore what had initially been eliminated by commercially driven producers. In effect, a third party is making editorial decisions the author did not and cannot now agree to, and a different writer is being presented to us in place of the one we thought we knew.

Traver Kauffman (the Rake), who prefers the un-Lished stories, suggests that "re-publishing is fine insofar as the people behind it realize that what they're putting out is going to be mostly of scholarly interest and probably will not serve to change any minds." I'm not at all sure this is true. If enough people do prefer the "restored" stories, they will remain in print and available as "alternative" versions, and some scholars will do doubt use the restored versions when teaching Carver, or at least present them along with the "original" versions as an exercise in comparative analysis. Far from changing minds about Carver, the existence of the "true, original" stories will work to influence future readers in making up their minds about this writer in the first place. At some point examining the original drafts for their "scholarly interest" is fine, but having two different versions--in effect, two different texts--competing for approbation as the "real" work of Raymond Carver is not merely an academic matter. It may finally substitute the editorial controversy for the actual consideration of Carver's fiction as literary art.

The Rake further suggests that it would be useful for other contemporary writers to publish earlier drafts of their work, allowing the reader to pursue the pressing question "How Was It Done?". For those interested enough in a particular writer to want to read discarded drafts and other marginalia, it is probably true that such an offering would simply satisfy a curiosity and wouldn't really affect their estimation of the writer's published work. I myself have never been much interested in the "how" question. I'm more concerned with the "what": What kind of work is this? What's going on? If reading alternative versions of a work of fiction helps me to better answer these questions, I am willing to examine them. If what I find there somehow enhances my subsequent reading experiences, it will have been a worthwhile exercise. If it merely illustrates "the actual human effort behind the pages, the grinding, nuts and bolts stuff," as the Rake further puts it, it doesn't seem worth the time, since I'm pretty sure I already know that writing involves much grinding.

That two separate texts of some of Carver's stories are in circulation, however, isn't really equivalent to the scholarly edition offering glimpses into the writing process. At best, it requires that we consider each of them separately, that we in some ways take them as two different stories. We can prefer one of them over the other, but the very act of reading them in this way makes it impossible to identify either one of them as the "real" Carver story. Future anthologists will have to decide which text best represents Carver as a writer nevertheless, and the decision will unavoidably be subjective, if not completely arbitrary.

As an erstwhile scholar of postmodernism, I am perfectly comfortable with indeterminacy and dislocation. I understand that texts can be elusive, unstable, self-contradictory. But a literal instability between different versions of the "same" text is a bit too pomo even for me. My introduction to Carver came through the Lish-edited stories that to me signalled a break from the formal experiments and self-reflexivity of postmodern American fiction but did not merely return to old-fashioned storytelling. The severely pared-back minimalism of these stories seemed to accept the postmodern critique of representation if not its alternative strategies. Character and plot are stripped to the bone, the former presented to us entirely through mundane actions, with no attempt at "psychological realism" (thus we never really get to "know" Carver's characters, we just watch them wandering through their lives), the latter flattening out Freytag's triangle to an unemphatic succession of events. It's these stories that offered a Raymond Carver engaged in his own kind of experimentation (how bare and uninflected can realism become while still maintaing our interest?), which as far as I can tell is mostly absent in the more elaborated but conventional Lish-less originals. Even if Gordon Lish did essentially co-author the published stories, that's still the Raymond Carver I'd rather have.

What They Are After

On the one hand, Rohan Maitzen's comments about the nature of "academic criticism" seem to me unimpeachably correct:

. . .aesthetic judgment is not currently seen as a central (maybe even an appropriate) aim of academic criticism. We are too aware of the shifting nature of such judgments, for one thing, and of the many reasons besides aesthetic ones for finding a text worth studying. If asked whether a book is good, an academic is likely to reply 'good at what?' or 'good in relation to what?' or 'good for what?' It may be that this insistence on refining the question, or examining its implicit assumptions, is part of what makes academic criticism less appealing to the 'average intelligent reader,' if what they are after is actually a recommendation. . . .

On the other, that "aesthetic judgment is not currently seen as a central (maybe even an appropriate) aim of academic criticism" is probably the ultimate reason why "academic criticism" as specifically an act of literary criticism is not likely to survive much longer.

The only period in the history of academic criticism (which runs roughly from the 1920s to the present) in which "aesthetic judgment" was seen as the "central" goal of criticism was really the period dominated by New Criticism, which was in turn the critical method that solidified academic criticism's place in academe's disciplinary structure. Before the rise of New Criticism, those who opposed converting English departments from philology (the study of the etymology of words) to literary study proper (the study of texts as texts) did so precisely because something as nebulous as "aesthetic judgment"--or "appreciation"--was not considered an appropriate focus of academic inquiry. New Criticism provided a plausible method of quasi-rigorous scrutiny of texts that finally satisfied most criteria of what constitutes a properly "academic" field of study.

Yet even New Criticism did not really rest on "aesthetic judgment" as its foundation. New Criticism's strategy of "close reading" was not primarily used to make judgments about the objects of its scrutiny, to declare some texts "good" and others not. The New Critics generally assumed the value of the works they examined (in fact mostly poems), although in some cases their readings did seek to demonstrate to perhaps skeptical readers that the work at hand possessed the requisite degree of "complexity" that New Criticism most fundamentally valued. (And in some instances, such as Cleanth Brooks's reading of Wordsworth's Intimations Ode, they also attempted to show that even works less generally esteemed according to New Critical standards could still be worthy of serious attention.) But the New Critics would never have conceded to the notion of "the shifting nature" of value judgments. The point of New Criticism was to establish that it was the critical method applying authentic "literary" criteria to the reading of literary texts. Some readers might find value in such texts for extrinsic reasons--political, historical, cultural--but for the New Critics, readers assessing them through the rigors of close reading would hardly come to the kind of relativistic conclusions Rohan's comment entails.

Still, as the New Critics implicitly recognized, it's difficult to justify the study of literature as part of an academic curriculum if the primary purpose is to arrive at "value judgments." Something more tangible than "appreciation" has to be the fruit of literary study or it does indeed become such a "soft" discipline that few serious-minded students will want to pursue it and even fewer scholars from other disciplines will consider it a respectable practice. However, the very fact that New Criticism was able to establish itself as a suitable "approach" to the study of literature utlimately became the seed of its own undoing. If appreciation is not the only possible goal of literary study, then neither is form-oriented close reading. "Refining the question," or even changing it altogether, is not only possible but, given the academic imperative to create "new" knowledge, almost inevitable. More than anything else, I would say, this changing of the critical guard, the cycling through of formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, historicism, cultural studies, is what makes academic criticism "less appealing" to non-academic readers. It is a disciplinary debate between academics the ramifications of which are of importance only to academics.

However, I also think it's a little unfair to say that the "average intelligent reader" is interested merely in a "recommendation." This only reinforces the divide between "criticism," which is perforce practiced primarily in the academy, and reviewing, the goal of which is presumably to provide a recommendation. It is the existence of this divide, whereby the academy is considered to be the place where genuine literary criticism is practiced, while general interest book discussion involves. . . something else, that has helped to make academic criticism seem so insular, so reluctant to make itself intelligible to "ordinary" readers (no relevant recognition from other "experts" will ensue) and that has made what passes for general interest criticism so pallid and formulaic. (Although certainly academic criticism follows it own kind of formulas as well.) As I have suggested several times on this blog, what both contemporary literature and literary criticism need is not for academic critics to become more "accessible" but for literary magazines and journals to publish more non-academic criticism that goes beyond book chat and conventional journalistic reviews but that also avoids the navel-gazing "refinements" of academic criticism.

And even though there are "many reasons besides aesthetic ones for finding a text worth studying," I further believe that most readers of poetry and fiction are drawn to them for the aesthetic reasons first of all. Some may later on take an interest in all those other things a text is "good for," but in my opinion most habitual readers of literary works want most immediately to have a fulfilling reading experience and, to the extent that criticism is pertinent to this goal, to use literary criticism as a way of enlarging and enhancing this experience. Thus, if "many non-academic readers would in fact like to think in more careful ways about their reading," as Rohan acknowledges, and if that's "where academic expertise presented in an accessible manner comes in," then the kind of "expertise" such readers might find helpful would be an ability to describe the aesthetic strategies and effects at work in a text, based ultimately on the ability to pay careful and focused attention to the text, in effect to let it reveal its own aesthetic nature. A knowledge of literary history and of the ways in which all poetry and fiction is finally implicated in that history could also be valuable, as long as that knowledge is put in the service of illuminating the work at hand, not of demonstrating the critic's own superior powers of discernment.

Suffice it to say that academic criticism has long abandoned this modest though still worthwhile mission. It has almost abandoned literature itself, except where it can still be used to illustrate the critic's particular theoretical construct or cultural diagnosis. Pretty clearly, "literary criticism" as practiced in the academy has shifted its emphasis to an analytical perspective more like philosophy for some, more like sociology for others. Since most "non-academic" readers read works of literature for their literary qualities (which, although they can't be defined precisely, at least not to everyone's satisfaction, are still readily enough apparent to those who are looking for them) and not as opportunities to do philosophy or study social patterns, academic criticism isn't going to become more accessible to these readers, only less so. The real question becomes whether a new kind of literary criticism will arise, one less concerned with being "rewarded professionally" by the academy and more concerned with the elucidation of literature, less concerned with providing consumer guidance (buy this, don't buy that) and more concerned with assisting the consumers of fiction or poetry to guide themselves.

Word To Thing

At Wet Asphalt, "J.F. Quackenbush" defends B.R. Myers against his blogospheric critics. (Which, of course, includes me.) As I read the post, JFQ argues that, read comprehensively (a courtesy Myers himself was not willing to extend to Denis Johnson when reviewing Tree of Smoke), Myers is focused on essentially two flaws in contemporary fiction: an overemphasis on "the sentence as a unit of composition" and a concomitant focus on "novelty at the expense of meaning," as well as a kind of slippage between "authorial voice" and "character voice." The latter seems to be Myers's special bete noire, and according to JFQ, is "the one point that his critics have to counter if they want to save Myers' targets from his attacks." Further: "if his critics are going to respond to him, they need to create an argument that supports the trumping by authorial voice. This is something that his critics do not attempt."

I hereby take up this challenge, and intend to both "counter" Myers's analysis and supply an argument justifiying "the trumping by authorial voice" in works of fiction.

As someone who does indeed read fiction more for the "sentences" than for the plot or the "meaning" or whatever it is Myers thinks is being obscured by "too much writing," I am not well-disposed to Myers's reiteration of this complaint. However, to the extent that he is pointing out an overemphasis, as much by critics as by fiction writers themselves, on conventionally "poetic," writing, on prose that, as JFQ puts it, relies on "fresh" imagery in the form of pretty figures of speech (the kind of writing often privileged in writing workshops), I actually agree with some of this line of criticism. "Fine writing" of this sort too often substitutes for more challenging explorations in style and distracts attention from relevant formal considerations (such as point of view).

Unfortunately, Myers's review of Tree of Smoke offers no evidence that this sort of stylistic vapidity is what he has is mind in lamenting the dominance of the sentence in contemporary prose. The sentences Myers isolates are either accompanyed by no stylistic analysis at all, or are criticized for their denotative lapses, as defined by Myers's own schoolmarm-ish principles of "good English": characters do and say things that Myers finds objectionable, are described in terms he can't assimilate, objects and images are deemed inappropriate according to the most narrowly-focused notions of context ("from the villagers' perspective a less appropriate word than bric-a-brac is hard to imagine"), syntax ("Johnson fills the space between purple passages by dropping his sentence subjects, leaving bursts of adjectives to stand alone") and word choice ("As for snickering and creak, they will please only those who skim for startling word combinations"). Just as often his judgments are simply wrong. There's nothing "slapdash" about this sentence: "Listening for his murderers, he became aware of the oppressive life of the jungle, of the collective roar of insects, as big as any city's at noon." This seems to me a perfectly coherent account of the character's state of mind at this moment, and I do not in the least have to "linger over" these words "in order to make sense of them."

Myers is finally not at all interested in "style" as that word can be meaningfully applied to works of literature. His bilious examination of Denis Johnson's sentences ultimately can be reduced to the charge that Johnson doesn't understand the "proper use of words," doesn't obey the rules governing "application of word to thing" that Myers wants so desperately to enforce. He understands style to mean "which words are right for a given context" and thus the most damning indictment he can make of a writer like Denis Johnson is that "he does not respect words enough to think they should mean something," a formulation by which "meaning" in construed in the most literal, predetermined, unimaginative of ways. Fiction writers should get it "right," should find what's "proper" in their choice of words, should make sure they correctly evoke the plain meaning of words and represent the transparent relationship of "word to thing." Any writing that isn't pristine in this fussy Myersian mode is, per se, overwriting.

This indignation about writing that refuses to tame itself in a manner acceptable to B.R. Myers is related to JFQ's second point about "voice." JFQ elaborates:

The argument runs that an author's voice ought to subsume itself to the voice of a character at all times through a book rather than pushing through and printing itself on the characters. The reason that an author ought to do this is that not doing so displays a lack of the multivalence that characterizes novels and a lack of sensitivity to difference in the human condition as evidenced in language.

This is really quite an astonishingly autocratic dictate: "an author's voice ought to subsume itself to the voice of a character at all times." It necessarily restricts an author using 3rd-person narration to a formulaic version of "psychological realism" in which the author's prose style "subsume[s] itself to the voice of a character," whether that "voice" is literally the character's way of speaking or more broadly the "voice" in which the character's subjective perception is expressed. (Presumably this restriction would be eased for 1st-person narratives, as long as the "voice" is plausibly the voice of the character as well, and not just a fancy or idiosyncratic style imposed by the author--but then isn't narrative voice always imposed by the author?) It essentially eviscerates the concept of literary style itself, since the writer's prose is reduced to its most functionary role, as the medium in which the character's manner of thought and speech is reflected as transparently as possible.

As for "multivalence": How multivalent is Hemingway's fiction? Faulkner's? No two writers could have more contrasting prose styles, but what they do have in common is that their work does have a distinctive style. In both cases, I would argue, the author's own voice "push[es] and print[s] itself on the characters." If this were not the case, we would have no reason to consider Hemingway's "style" to have been as revolutionary as it in fact was, since he wouldn't be using his autistically laconic style for deliberate effect but merely to "reflect" the thinking of a series of autistically laconic characters. And what about those characters in Faulkner's work who "think" in Faulkner's own circuitous, declamatory style? Is Faulkner to be removed from the pantheon of American writers because in retrospect he failed to observe the Myers Rules of Decorum? Did he show "a lack of sensitivity to difference in the human condition as evidenced in language"? For that matter, how "multivalent" is the fiction of, say, Virginia Woolf, one of the great pyschological realists? Even when she's dipping in and out of the consciousness of multiple characters, how aware are we of the individuality of each voice, as opposed to Virginia Woolf and her fluent prose style in the process of dipping?

A writer who especially challenges the Myers/Quackenbush philosophy of prose style is the American writer Stanley Elkin. No writer in literary history has ever "printed" his own characeristic style "on the characters" more than Elkin. Here's a passage from his 1983 novel, George Mills:

Mills was always thirsty now. Talking to his horse, coaxing him along the orbit of the salt carousel, his tongue flecked with salt dust, his throat burned raw with the dry pebbles, gagging and talking baby talk, horse talk, nonsense, philosophy. He did not know what the other horse talkers told their beasts--the merchant was disinterested; it made him drowsy, he said, to listen; he did not like, he said, to stay long in the farm-- because they spoke in what Mills did not even know was Polish, and in addition to his constant thirst, to the annoyance caused him by his great raw burning and wounded mouth, to his stinging eyes and smarting, salt-oiled skin like the sticky, greasy glaze of ocean bathers, there was the problem of finding things to say to it, of saying them, getting them out through the hair-trigger emetic atmosphere of his throat and mouth. And in the mitigated light, watery, milky as the hour before sunrise save where the torches, igniting salt, exploded into a showerwork of sparkler ferocity, white as temperature. But mostly the talk, what to say.

Here's another from his 1971 novel, The Dick Gibson Show:

By now he had enough experience in radio to handle anything. He was an accomplished announcer, a newsman, an MC, an actor. He could do special events, remotes, panel discussions. He had a keen ear for which songs and which recordings of which songs would be the hits, and was even a competent sports announcer. Though he had not yet broadcast a game from the stadium, he had done several off the Western Union ticker tape, sitting in a studio hundreds of miles from the action and translating the thin code of the relay, fleshing it out from the long, ribbony scorecard. More than anything else this made him feel truly a radio man, not just the voice of radio itself, the very fact of amplification, the human voice lifted miles, beamed from the high ground, a nexus of the opportune. See seven states! And everything after the fact so foreknown, the game itself sometimes already in the past while he still described it; often the afternoon papers were on the streets with the final box score while he described for his listeners the seventh-inning stretch or reported a struggle in the box seats over the recovery of a foul ball--his foreknowledge hindsight, a coy tool of suspense: "DiMaggio swings. That ball is going, going, oh, it's foul by inches."

Both of these passages are ebullient, robust, bordering on excessive. (In my opinion, gloriously so. In his later work, Elkin's prose style became if anything more mannered, more extravagant, as if over the course of his career he'd learned to shrug off the nagging demands of character development, point of view, and plot construction to concentrate solely on the still untapped resources of writing itself.) They contain truly novel and "fresh" images--"the hair-trigger emetic atmosphere of his throat." Neither of them bother with the distinction between "author voice" and "character voice," neither of them bow to the commands of critics urging "multivalence." It's all Elkin, even Dick Gibson, who is after all a radio "voice" of great skill but who ultimately still speaks Elkinese.

In the literary world of B.R. Myers's dreams, we would presumably be rid of writers like Stanley Elkin, in my opinion one of the great writers of the post-World War II era. Anyone who is inclined to give Myers's criticism of contemporary fiction the benefit of the doubt should take that warning under advisement.

Readers like B.R. Myers and J.F. Quackenbush are of course entitled to their preference for writers who toe the stylistic line, who are careful not to intrude too much prose onto their prose styles. But no one should accept their criticism of writers who don't provide this service as anything but a stentorian defense of their preferences. If they don't like writers who write too much, they should stay away from them and not elevate their intolerance of style into some sort of universal principle of literary correctness.