The Reading Experience

Learning How to Write

William Bradley at the blog Incertus takes issue with the recommended "goals" of creative writing instruction for undergraduates as expressed by AWP. The first two goals listed are "An Overview of Literature" and "Expertise in Critical Analysis", while "Understanding of the Elements of a Writer’s Craft" comes in third. Bradley asks:

Does it seem odd to anyone else that "Understanding of the Elements of a Writer's Craft" is listed as the third goal for creative writing instruction? Doesn't it seem like learning how to write should be priority number one? Yes, getting a strong background in literature and honing critical thinking skills are important, but aren't they important in a creative writing class because they help facilitate the goal of students learning how to write?

I do find it odd, but only because I would have thought that by now the AWP would have given in to complaints about requiring literature courses for creative writing degrees and given its approval to craft-driven approaches. This would only be in keeping with the general drift toward "practical" relevance in most undergraduate degree programs, and it's to the AWP's credit that it hasn't yet gone with the flow.

Learning how to write should indeed be the ultimate goal for students in creative writing, but exactly how one would learn this without the widest possible familiarity with literary history and with the basic principles of literary analysis is not at all apparent to me. Students who take "learning how to write" seriously are not learning a set of rules or some generalized standards that simply need to be applied. They are learning how they might eventually write poems that do not just invoke the name of "poetry" as it has been codified into a set of established precepts or write fiction that does not just perform some known variations on the "well-made" story. They can do these things, in my opinion, only when they are relatively familiar with the "tradition" that gives their own work definition and that in turn they hope to revise or modify. (This can certainly be done by any aspiring writer without the mediation of an academic program, although an academic creative writing program should make this encounter with tradition more focused and more organized, or else it really has no useful reason to exist.) And I really don't understand how a "strong background in literature" can "facilitate the goal of students learning how to write" unless it comes first. Otherwise, works of literature are used only for imitation, to illustrate ""pacing" here or "characterization" there.

To approach creative writing instruction with the assumption that "the elements of craft come first" is to reinforce the idea that "writing" can be reduced to a collection of techniques and devices the student must master in order to become a certified writer. Creative Writing programs probably already do reduce the writing of poetry and fiction to a simple "how-to" process, and perhaps for reasons that at one time, at least, were unavoidable. "An Overview of Literature" and "Critical Analysis" (mostly understood as formal analysis and "close reading") were expected to be at the heart of literary study as offered by most English departments, to which was added "creative writing" as a kind of practicum. Over the past twenty-five years, most English departments have more and more withdrawn from this arrangement, offering less and less of an "overview" in order to concentrate on Theory or Cultural Study, and programs in Creative Writing, both at the undergraduate and the graduate level, are going to have to pick up the slack by providing more critical-literary instruction or else their students will have practically no "background in literature" at all.

One of the first things they should do is to insist that there is no "craft" involved in writing poetry and fiction unless this simply means that both forms have a history that provides us with models of how the form was used at some point in the past. Imitating those models might have some initial pedagogical value, but ulimately the best writers will learn how to discard them. Beyond that, craft becomes only the self-applied anasthetic of literature.

Becoming Visible

Elizabeth Baines would prefer to have bad reviews of her books rather than no reviews at all:

I'd rather have a negative review and my book be thus a visible part of literary debate than have it buried in silence. Books like mine - short stories, newish independent press - don't get reviews easily in the newspapers. . .or indeed as easily on much of the web, as those hyped by big publishers. A bad review from [a blog] would at least have made more people aware of its existence than none. . . .

It has been my practice to give negative reviews (really negative reviews) only to books whose authors can certainly withstand criticism, whether in print or in the blogosphere (authors such as Ian McEwan or Steve Erickson), or when a larger point can be made beyond simply registering a critical opinion of a particular book or author, especially if the book is not likely to gain a wide audience, anyway, or if the author is in a vulnerable state of his/her career (at the beginning, lagging in mid-career, on the verge of being forgotten,etc.). I read (or start to read and don't finish) many books that I do not discuss on this blog, precisely because to give them negative reviews just for the sake of announcing I didn't like them doesn't seem very productive and because sometimes I don't have anything useful to say except "this book didn't hold my attention" or "I liked it!."

However, Elizabeth's comment makes me wonder if it wouldn't be more helpful to unknown or midlist and small press writers (whose cause I generally support, my opinion of individual books notwithstanding) to mention their books, even if it meant passing a negative judgment or just noting I had read a particular book and offering a brief assessment. If a significant proportion of writers and aspiring writers agreed with Elizabeth that making "more people aware of" their work would be better than silence, I would be willing to take note of their books, along with some expression of my opinion.

Do you agree with her?

Conformity Between the Old and the New

In a previous post, I quoted John Dewey's description of a cycle in art and literary history, whereby works initially thought to be too radically experimental ultimately become accepted as "classics" which themselves become objects of imitation. In the second stage of this cycle, writes Dewey

the fruits of the new procedure are absorbed; they are naturalized and effect certain modifications of the old tradition. This period establishes the new aims and hence the new technique as having "classic" validity, and is accompanied with a prestige that holds over into subsequent periods.

Dewey's notion that "new procedures" create "certain modifications of the old tradition" strongly reminds me of T.S. Eliot's argument in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that

The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

Both Dewey and Eliot are suggesting that without experiment in art and literature, the "supervention of novelty," the great works of the past merely ossify into a "tradition" that no longer inspires artists and writers to, in effect, outdo the "existing monuments," to bring those monuments into active communication with the present. (Harold Bloom's notion of the "anxiety of influence" probably fits in here as well, however much Bloom would prefer not to be associated with Eliot.) "Certain modifications of the old tradition" are needed to keep the "old tradition" from becoming merely old, as well as to invigorate "the new" through contact with the genuine achievements of the past. Thus both Dewey and Eliot view experiment as a way of maintaining the vitality of the tradition, but also see tradition as subject to the revision prompted by "the really new."

Eliot is usually taken as a conservative defender of tradition, of the notion of "an ideal order," but it seems to me unlikely that the younger Eliot, at any rate, would have much use for current notions of the "canon." Any canon of "great works" would have to be subject to the kind of modification both he and Dewey identify, which ultimately means the very idea of "greatness" in literature would have to be open to such modification. Certainly Eliot's own poetry would never have qualified as "great" if the criteria to be used in judging it remained those appropriate to Pope or Wordsworth or Tennyson. Modern literature as a whole, of which Eliot is the avatar and Dewey the advocate (at least in theory), would not have been possible if poets and writers (many of them now seen as "conservative" in their political and cultural views) had not seen literary tradition both as something to be honored and as something to be defeated.

This not to say that T.S. Eliot was a pragmatist, but that the only way to view both literary history and "the new aims" of present writers in a way that respects both the old and the new is a pragmatic way. The past remains vital to the extent it continues to resonate in the present. The present produces reputable work when such work can be seen as a creative extension of the past.

Avoiding Oblivion

Todd Swift wonders about the future life of poets:

At the point where [poets] enter into the world of publication, two roads diverge. One of those roads is marked The Canon; the other is marked Oblivion. Canons are problematic, and disputed, and there are currently at least three: Mainstream, Innovative, and Outlaw. These three canons are all represented by serious publishers of real merit. However, only a poet published by a Mainstream, large press, has any chance of avoiding "oblivion".

The problem with this assertion only begins with the fact that it's self-contradictory. Doesn't the very existence of the other two canons demonstrate that non-mainstream poets do survive? If only mainstream poetry survives, how is that innovative and outlaw poetry have also survived?

A second problem is that Todd defines "mainstream" entirely in economic terms: "the large presses have marketing budgets, and the clout to distribute the work to bookstores, and critics, in major cities, around the world. It really is almost as simple as that - get published by a large press, and your work will be sold and reviewed in many more places than if you are published by a small press. . ."

I don't visit bookstores as much as I used to, but the last time I was in Barnes & Noble, or Borders, or even the local "independent" store, I didn't see many volumes of poetry on display, and certainly not many by living poets, even those one could plausibly label "mainstream." As Ron Silliman recently put it, "The days when major publishers brought out poetry as a “loss leader” (or because some poet might turn into a profitable novelist) are almost entirely behind us. The number of trade publishers who even touch poetry are so few, and their collective aesthetics so very narrow, that they have largely relegated themselves to irrelevance. And book sellers are under profound pressure from the rise of alternate channels of retail distribution, including big box retailers and the web. Each week in America two new bookstores open, but five others shut down. . . ."

Perhaps it could be argued that there is a heirarchy among publishers of poetry, certain publishers on whose list many poets would like to be included, but this is a heirarchy of community esteem, as Silliman might put it, not a heirarchy based on "marketing budgets" and "clout" with bookstores or newspaper book reviews. For all the "marketing" a book of poems gets, it might as well be hand-sold by the poet's mother in the Wal-Mart parking lot. And while publishers of poetry no doubt already "distribute" copies to book review editors, getting those editors to print reviews of them has less to do with "clout" than with happening upon an editor who actually likes poetry to begin with. (Good luck with that.)

In my opinion, the biggest problem in Todd's analysis is his very use of the term "Canon" to identify successful or important writers. Canons are neither made nor maintained by publishers, mainstream or otherwise. "Canon" was the term adopted to identify those works of literature that should be included in curricula of literary study--after literary study was itself made respectable as an "academic" subject, a process that wasn't really complete until after World War II. Thus the "canon" refers to those works that should be taught, that aided the canon-makers in their self-assigned roles as gatekeepers of our Literary Heritage. A canonical work is not necessarily one that has met the test of time, or stays in print, or continues to be a source of inspiration for other writers. It is merely one that the academic study of literature has made "great" enough to deserve placement on a college syllabus.

The poetry--or the fiction, for that matter--that will survive will do so because poets and readers of poetry continue to read and to use it, not for separate agendas on literature syllabi but for their revelation of poetry's still untapped possibilities, of what poetry might still become if approached with this or that author's courage or insight or, as I put it in describing what I look for in works of fiction, dedication to "adventurous" freedom. The world of online publishing and the literary blogosphere will only make it more possible for more poets to avoid immediate "oblivion" while this encounter between present and past plays itself out. (Here are the "hundreds of very serious people" Todd is looking for who can give poetry its proper audience and make the New York Times irrelevant.) Todd thinks that the lack of "public recognition" makes the future of poetry a bleak one, but it seems to me that the only recognition worth having is that which is forthcoming from other writers and from readers who take poetry (literature more generally) seriously to begin with. Recognition from those who don't like poetry, who have to be cajoled and manipulated into noticing it, doesn't seem worth the trouble.

Unadventurous

In the previous post I cited John Dewey's notion of "adventurousness" as the quality I most look for in new writers and new works of fiction. I also admitted that often enough a genuinely "adventurous" work doesn't finally succeed in using an aesthetically adventurous technique, form, trope, or narrative to create a fully satisfying work of literary art, judging it by the terms set out by its own methods.

It is also possible for a novel or story to be adventurous (or adventurous enough) in its formal or stylistic strategies only to use such strategies to, in effect, dress up an otherwise entirely conventional narrative. This, it seems to me, is exactly what happens in Steve Erickson's Our Ecstatic Days, which I have just finished reading.

The novel uses a number of devices--multiple narrators, shuffled chronology, various typographical flourishes (including a line of text, separate from the main text, that runs across the botton of the page and mirrors the act of "swimming" the main character has undertaken)--that most readers would no doubt find provocative, something different from the usual run of "literary fiction," but ultimately the story and the characters are entirely familiar, garden-variety elements of post-apocalyptic fantasy, yet another addition to the genre of which I take Our Ecstatic Days to be.

Like most such fantasies, a catastrophe has occured--in this case Los Angeles has turned into a lake--and the characters left to negotiate the wasted landscape do so by paring existence to the bone, surviving in an altered environment by taking nothing for granted and everything as contingent. Extremes of behavior (such as acting as an S&M mistress) no longer seem so extreme when extremity itself has come to define reality. In some way or another, the bleak world depicted in the novel is a projection of/version of/transformation of the present (in ths case, specifically Los Angeles), making this and most other apocalyptic fantasies essentially satires, but without much humor.

Thus, while reading Our Ecstatic Days I felt I had read it before, so familiar is its "vision" of the future. Furthermore, while I did find its formal features sufficiently interesting that I was able to finish the book, much of it, particularly the last fifty pages or so, was rather a slog. Eventually I had to conclude that the formal manipulations are really incidental to the vision of LA drowned that Erickson wants to express and that finally overrides all other considerations of character, point of view, style, etc. And since I am really no more interested in Steve Erickson's notions of what the future holds (or what it ought to hold, given our current derelictions) than I am in anyone else's--which is to say not much interested at all--I have to judge that the reading experience was ultimately not worth the effort expended. The typographical games notwithstanding, Our Ecstatic Days is still more concerned with the ideas its author wants to advance than with challenging readers to think and re-think about what novels can do.

In an interview at Bookslut, Erickson says "I don't think of myself as an experimental writer. Experimental writing is about the experiment, and experiments per se usually are for their own sake. My interest is in whatever serves the larger story or characters." So be it. I accept Erickson's sense of himself as something other than an experimental writer, as a writer more interested in "the larger story or characters." Unfortunately, neither the story nor the characters (most of whom are little more than ciphers) can elevate this novel beyond the confines of the genre in which it participates.

The Growing Edge of Things

The aesthetic philosophy expressed in John Dewey's Art as Experience is, on the whole, quite sympathetic to experiment and innovation in the arts, in fact in large part is absolutely dependent on it. Without experiment (without what in some ways could be called "progress" in the arts), art would ossify into dead monuments we are to extoll for their putative greatness but that would not provoke the kind of experiential engagement Dewey thinks is art's ultimate validation.

Furthermore, experimentation is itself responsible for the succession of artistic accomplishments we think of as "art history" (or literary history) in the first place:

. . .The dependence of significant technique upon the need for expressing certain distinctive modes of experience is testified to by the three stages that usually attend the appearance of a new technique. At first there is experimentation on the side of artists, with considerable exaggeration of the factor to which the new technique is adapted. This was true of the use of line to define recognition of the value of the round, as with Mantegna; it is true of the typical impressionists in respect to light-effects. On the side of the public there is general condemnation of the intent and subject-matter of these adventures in art. In the next stage, the fruits of the new procedure are absorbed; they are naturalized and effect certain modifications of the old tradition. This period establishes the new aims and hence the new technique as having "classic" validity, and is accompanied with a prestige that holds over into subsequent periods. Thirdly, there is a period when special features of the technique of the masters of the balanced period are adopted for imitation and made ends in themselves. . .In this third stage (which dogs creative work after the latter has general recognition), technique is borrowed without relation to the urgent experience that at first evoked it. The academic and eclectic result. (142)

Dewey also recognizes that artists who merely attempt to imitate the great accomplishments of the past, who don't go beyond the techniques previous artists discovered, are bound to fail:

. . .Greek sculpture will never be equalled in its own terms. . .That which Venetian painters achieved will stand unrivaled. The modern reproduction of the architecture of the Gothic cathedral always lacks the quality of the original. What happens in the movement of art is emergence of new materials of experience demanding expression, and therefore involving in their expression new forms and techniques. . . (143)

Recognizing the rather clinical connotations of the term "experimental" when applied to the arts, Dewey suggests an alternative:

If, instead of saying "experimental," one were to say "adventurous," one would probably win general assent--so great is the power of words. Because the artist is a lover of unalloyed experience, he shuns objects that are already saturated, and he is therefore always on the growing edge of things. By the nature of the case, he is as unsatisfied with what is established as is a geographic explorer or a scientific inquirer. The "classic" when it was produced bore the marks of adventure. This fact is ignored by classicists in their protest against romantics who undertake the development of new values, often without possessing means for their creation. That which is now classic is so because of completion of adventure, not because of its absence. The one who perceives and enjoys esthetically always has the sense of adventure in reading any classic that Keats had in reading Chapman's "Homer."

When I discuss "experimental fiction," either on this blog or in critical articles, I am essentially using "experimental" in Dewey's sense as "adventurous." I am always looking for adventurousness in the new fiction I choose to read (although I'm pretty sure my critical lens is sometimes too cloudy to see it when I'm making decisions about what to read, and I thus simply don't read some fiction I'd probably like), so I tend to ignore much of the most highly-acclaimed, most widely-reviewed fiction, which usually strikes me as more of the same, new iterations of work that "will never be equalled in its own terms" and therefore of little interest to me. Perhaps I could be accused of systematizing Dewey's emphasis on "new forms and techniques" too literally. If every work of fiction were "new" in these terms, there would be no "mainstream" and thus no doubt many fewer readers of fiction. I'm not sure I would find such a state of affairs all that lamentable, but there are surely many readers of "literary fiction" who would, and who would find my preference for the adventurous to be needlessly strict.

And it is certainly the case that some "experimental" fiction fails, manifests a desire to create "new values" but "without possessing means for their creation." In fact, most experimental fiction probably fails in this way, or at least doesn't demonstrate enough of the skill required to produce something so transformatively new as to initiate the cycle Dewey describes in the first passage quoted above. Still, I would rather have these failed "adventures in art," fiction that attempts to reach that "growing edge of things," than give in to a complacent reshuffling of the tried and the true, which, as Dewey points out, will never really be "true."