The Reading Experience

Stories About People

Jim H. at his blog Wisdom of the West quite correctly takes issue with Jill Lepore's shallow comparisons of history and fiction:

Lepore, I believe, misunderstands fiction. She says: "Fiction, in other words, can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people." As she acknowledges, this view is a bit outdated because much current history is precisely the study of private life. But, her equation is at the level of story: history and fiction tell stories about people, great and small. This is a shallow view of fiction. Sure, history can tell stories about events—how they happened, why they happened, what their consequences were, etc. And fiction can tell similar stories, the only difference being that the fictional stories are putatively made up.

Unfortunately, he then reverts to the usual sort of explanation of what makes fiction unique:

However, as a historian, the writer cannot enter into the consciousness of his subject. The historian cannot say how richly succulent the juice from the veal loin Henry IV ate the night he learned of Richard II's death tasted as it dribbled down his chin. The historian cannot say how delicious Cleopatra's wet sex smelled to Marc Antony as their boat sailed down the gentle Nile on a warm summer evening. The historian cannot say how the point of the ice axe felt as it entered Trotsky's head. . . .

Actually. the fiction writer can no more "enter into the consciousness of his subject" than can the historian. There is neither a "consciousness" to enter nor a "subject" whose consciousnesss is revealed. There are words on a page. The skillful fiction writer might make us believe we are observing a "person," that we are exploring his/her "mind," but such explorations are hardly authoritative soundings of what the human mind is really like. They are a convention of fiction writing by which an illusion of intimacy is created, but they certainly cannot withstand scrutiny as an account of human consciousness.

Neither can the novelist, any more than the historian, "say how delicious Cleopatra's wet sex smelled to Marc Antony" (I'm pretty sure I don't want to know that, anyway). Or rather, both the historian and the novelist can say what this was like, but I don't see how the novelist has any more special access to such information than the historian. It's a convention of history-writing that the author doesn't ordinarily dwell on this sort of thing, and a convention of a certain kind of fiction ("psychological realism") that the author does, but finally the novelist has no more idea than anyone else what olfactory sensations Marc Antony might have experienced on his trip down the Nile. A writer might offer us a fictional "Marc Antony" whose sensory experiences are described for us, but this hardly gives the novelist an edge over the historian when writing about actual historical events.

Fiction does do more than tell stories about people, but it can also do more than pretend to "enter into the consciousness" of people. To believe this by now fairly standard technique of faux-psychological probing into the minds of characters is the only thing that separates fiction from history, or from film, is a rather impoverished view of the possibilities of fiction as a literary form. Indeed, the purely literary possibilities of the "interior" strategy were, it seems to me, pretty much exhausted in the fiction of Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner. Adventurous writers following on their achievement--Beckett, Burroughs, Barthelme, Sorrentino--discovered fresh ways of extending their experiments in form, of showing us how fiction can be different not just from history or film, but from previous versions of fiction as well. More such discoveries can be made.

Pyschological Occurences

In The Logical Structure of the World, Rudolph Carnap attempts to show how a "constructional system" can be built the purpose of which is "to order the objects of all sciences into a system according to their reducibility to one another." Among these "objects" are what Carnap calls "cultural objects" (which include works of art) and "pyschological objects." The former, Carnap maintains, are reducible (for the purposes of this system) to the latter:

The awareness of the aesthetic content of a work of art, for example a marble statue, is indeed not identical with the recognition of the sensible characteristics of the piece of marble, its shape, size, color, and material. But this awareness is not something outside of the perception, since for it no content other than the content of the perception is given; more precisely: this awareness is uniquely determined through what is perceived by the senses. Thus, there exists a unique functional relation between the physical properties of the piece of marble and the aesthetic content of the work of art which is represented in this piece of marble.

To put it another way, the aesthetic experience includes an awareness of the piece of marble in all of its physical attributes, or of a page of text with its words printed in a particular style on paper of a particular color and weight, but it only begins there. "Aesthetic content" requires another step to be fulfilled:

. . .if a physical object is to be formed or transformed in such a way that it becomes a document, a bearer of expression for the cultural object, then this requires an act of creation or transformation on the part of one or several individuals, and thus psychological occurences in which the cultural object comes alive; these psychological occurences are the manifestations of the cultural object.

Although he uses the word "experience" rather than "psychological occurences," and although he is more rooted to the "physical object" than is Carnap in what seems an essentially phenomenological analyis of the experience of art, John Dewey in Art as Experience offers a philosophy of art and the reception of art that at least has a family resemblance to what Carnap is suggesting here. Both Dewey and Carnap avoid attributing metaphysical status to the "beauty" of art (a beauty that is intrinsic to the work) by locating the aesthetic in our apprehension of the work. As Carnap puts it, for the work to become a "bearer of expression," there must be "an act of creation or transformation on the part of one or several individuals." Similarly, Dewey would maintain that these "several individuals" include both artist and audience, as the work is not really complete until the viewer/listener/reader is able to "recreate" it in perception: "Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art. The artist selected, simplified, clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest. The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest."

Thus aesthetic judgment is unavoidably subjective, requiring the "transformation" Carnap describes, a process that will be bound to the "point of view and interest" of the "beholder," as Dewey has it. Still, the "sensible characteristics" of the work remain what they are, and aesthetic judgment cannot simply be cut loose from the work's sensible properties. Indeed, the more fully one experiences art according to Dewey's account of the process, the more, and the more intensely, those sensible properties will be felt.

It seems to me that both Carnap and Dewey remind us that, although the aesthetic is consummated in the "psychological occurences" experienced by readers or viewers, the sensible charactertistics of works of art and literature cannot be denied or dismissed. Thus, in reading fiction, we should not forget that neither people nor "things" are the subjects of perception. Words are. If, for example, we are reading a realist novel, we are not experiencing "the world" faithfully reproduced at all. We are not even, finally, experiencing a world of the author's creation, whether it's a world meant to be taken as a version of the real world or one the author has imaginatively brought into being. We are experiencing writing, which, through the psychological processes Carnap and Dewey invoke, is "transformed" into a world of characters and their stories. Ultimately a sufficient accumulation of responses by readers in turn transforms the work into a "cultural object." In our haste to describe that realist novel as a convincing "picture" of reality or as something "that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict," we should not forget that it's neither. As an object of aesthetic experience, it's just writing, skillfully arranged for your act of recreation.

No Ideas But In Things

In the first chapter of his 2005 book, Realist Vision, Peter Brooks writes:

With the rise of the realist novel in the nineteenth century, we are into the age of Jules Michelet and Thomas Carlyle, of Karl Marx and John Ruskin, of Charles Darwin and Hippolyte Taine: that is, an age where history takes on new importance, and learns to be more scientific, and where theories of history come to explain how we got to be how we are, and in particular how we evolved from earlier forms to the present. It is the time of industrial, social and political revolution, and one of the defining characteristics of realist writing is I think a willingness to confront these issues. England develops a recognizable "industrial novel," one that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict, and France has its "roman social," including popular socialist varieties.

To the extent that Brooks wants to link the rise of realist fiction to the rise of science and "theories of history," I can't really see how the former is influenced much by the latter, except specifically in the fiction of naturalist writers such as Emile Zola or, in the United States, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. These writers did indeed try to depict human behavior as it was defined by science--especially Darwinism--and by the forces of history. But these were writers who were deliberately using realism to illustrate a view of human life as determined by such external forces, not exploring the purely literary possibilities of realism as a still relatively new aesthetic strategy. They may have in a sense been portraying "things as they are," but they were doing it from an abstract philosophical perspective, not as an attempt to first of all render life in all of its particularities.

I equally don't understand why a defining feature of realism would be the willingness to "confront" issues or to "take on" social problems. If works of fiction are truly "realistic," immersed in the details of life as lived, they will naturally, sooner or later and in one way or another, engage with the issues and the problems of the times. There is no need to take that extra step, to insist that "issues" be confronted, unless the writer's (and the critic's) real interest lies in "taking on" social problems, on using fiction as a tool of social amelioration rather than regarding it as a self-sufficient form of literary art. To me, a "defining characteristic" of any fiction that can make a claim to be literary art, that can still be taken seriously in the long run, after the "social problems" of the day have been replaced by the next set, is that it not "confront" any issues or problems other than the literary problems immediately at hand.

Brooks's own insistence here that realism must "take on" larger social and cultural questions is actually contradicted, it seems to me, by what he asserts just a few paragraphs later:

You cannot, the realist claims, represent people without taking account of the things that people use and acquire in order to define themselves--their tools, their furniture, their accessories. These things are indeed part of the very definition of "character," of who one is and what one claims to be. The presence of things in these novels also signals their break from the neoclassical stylistic tradition, which tended to see the concrete, the particular, the utilitarian as vulgar, lower class, and to find beauty in the generalized and noble. The need to include and to represent things will consequently imply a visual inspection of the world of phenomena and a detailed report on it--a report often in the form of what we call description. The descriptive is typical--sometimes maddeningly so, of these novels. And the picture of the whole only emerges--if it does--from the accumulation of things.

This seems to me a pretty good account of what the best realist novels do: Draw the reader into a meticulously described world that the reader can accept as like the "real" world (keeping in mind that realistic description in fiction is just another device the writer can use, no more "authentic" than any other, given that what the reader is finally "confronted" with are just words on a page) and allow the reader to "see" the approximated world as fully as possible. If this sort of realism does bear philosophical implications, they are centered around the idea that the real is what is perceived. (Later, the "psychological" realists such as Woolf and Joyce would reject this; their fiction finds the real in how things are perceived, by focusing on the internal processes of consciousness.) But finally the art of realism lies in the way "things" are organized, in the manner and the skill with which the writer entices the reader to take note of the illuminating details.

Such an approach seems wholly at odds with the notion that realist fiction makes the reader aware of historical abstractions and social "issues." (The "generalized" rather than the "concrete.") "Things as they are" in the one seem on a wholly different scale than "things as they are" in the other. We can be made aware in fiction, subtly if implicitly, of historical change or social conflict, but only by acknowleding that the "defining characteristic" of realism is its particular approach to aesthetic representation, not its willingness to "take on" non-literary "problems." I am still reading Brooks's book, and I hope he will demonstrate to me how these two discrepant impulses can be reconciled in an account of literary realism.

Stock-Taking

The Litblog Co-op is closing down, mainly because so many of its members have become so preoccupied with their own blogs, as well as other literary endeavors that in some cases their blogs helped to make possible, that they could not devote the kind of time and attention required to keep a loosely-affiliated group like the LBC functioning adequately. The LBC was formed with a specific mission to highlight books that weren't being discussed much, or at all, in mainstream book sections by putting the collective authority of the then better-known literary weblogs behind the selection of one book per quarter the group believed was worth readers' attention.

I'd like to take the LBC's dissolution as an opportunity to not only reflect on its success in highlighting such books but also on the evolution of the literary blog from the time (actually only 3-4 years ago) when "literary weblog" seemed merely a peculiar conjunction of words to the present moment, when the litblog has become sufficiently established that numerous print-based critics have attacked literary blogs for encroaching on their territory (the gates to which they apparently intend to keep).

When I discovered what I would identify as the original group of self-identified literary weblogs--Maud Newton, The Literary Saloon, Moorish Girl, Golden Rule Jones, The Elegant Variation, The Return of the Reluctant, a few others--I had for a while wondered why there was not more web-based literary discussion and criticism, since such discussion on the internet could be both more widely disseminated and more up-to-date than what was published in magazines--most of which had actually been moving away from providing their content online--or even in newspapers, only a very few of which printed literary-related commentary on a semi-regular basis, anyway. What I found on these ur-litblogs was, if not fully worked-out literary criticism, an obvious enthusiasm about books and an admirable interest in serious fiction. As a lapsed academic, I was especially pleased to find such an interest among people who, in most cases, were not academics, since living in the world of the academy can lead one to suspect there are no serious readers of serious fiction outside its insulated walls.

My alienation from academe was in part a reaction against the prevailing modes of academic criticism, which in my view had essentially abandoned "literature itself" in favor of critical approaches that were mostly just a way of doing history or sociology by other means. I had pursued a Ph.D in literary study in order to study literature, not to validate my political allegiances on the cheap, or to study something called "culture," an artifact of which literature might be considered but given no more emphasis than any other cultural "expression." I was looking to find a way to write literary criticism that continued to focus on the literary qualities of literature, and to that end had published several critical essays in publications that would still print such efforts when I happened upon the literary weblogs I have mentioned. I soon enough concluded there was no reason the literary blog could not accomodate a form of literary criticism--longer than the typical kind of post I was seeing on the extant litblogs but shorter than the conventional scholarly article or long critical essay. Trying out these possibilities has been the ongoing project of this blog over the now four years of its existence.

At a time when still print-bound critics and book reviewers seem to be handing off a rhetorical baton in their eagerness to keep ahead of the perceived threat posed by literary blogs, it is rather difficult to recall how thoroughly marginal to the established critical discourse the literary weblog was in the first months and years of its existence. Among the criticisms that were directed at literary blogs in this initial stage of audience-building was the accusation they were too insular, too preoccupied with linking to each other in a kind of in-group celebration. And indeed there was a good deal of cliquish cross-linking, but this was mostly, it seemed to me, a function of the litblog's presumed marginality, a way of creating a community of engaged readers--the early bloggers were readers first of all--who could communicate their interests, insights, and enthusiasms to like-minded others. While most of us exploring the boundaries of the new medium were surely hoping our posting might attract a wider audience, I don't think many anticipated such a dramatic increase in attention paid to litblogs as did indeed occur. (The suddenness of this increase can be illustrated by the fact that as recently as BEA 2005, efforts by the then just-created Litblog Co-op--specifically by LBC mastermind Mark Sarvas--to interest the powers that be at the BEA in a panel discussion of literary blogs were rebuffed because few people associated with the event had heard of literary blogs.)

The Litblog Co-op was created during the first wave of interest in literary weblogs from beyond the small corner of the blogosphere litbloggers and their initial audience had staked out for themselves--a few noticies in newspapers, links from more established, non-literary blogs, comments from "name" authors and critics increasingly showing up on various litblogs. As I recall it, the LBC aimed to accomplish two related goals: to bring attention to small-press books and less-known writers, and, implicitly, to raise the profile of literary weblogs even higher, to make them, through the authority the LBC might acquire from its selections, more of an accepted presence in the national conversation about books and writers. These were both entirely laudable goals, one directed toward showcasing alternatives to the fiction most loudly celebrated by the "book business," one directed toward providing alternative sources of discussion and debate about current fiction.

I'd have to say that our success in accomplishing the first goal was mixed. Several books that received little or no attention in the mainstream review pages did get some exposure as LBC nominees. Some of these were books by first-time authors, while others were by more veteran authors (some in translation) whose previous work had not gotten them the recognition they might have deserved. However, I don't think the LBC was ultimately able to establish itself as an authoritative guide to small-press books and overlooked fiction, judging by the degree of notice taken of our selections by blogs not themselves part of the LBC or by the literary community more generally, as well as by the number of comments most of the postings on the LBC blog received. The LBC's Read This! selections just never seemed to achieve the status with readers of current fiction that they were originally meant to achieve.

I believe that one explanation for this failure is that the LBC never really recovered from the disappointment spawned by its very first selection, a more or less mainstream work of "literary fiction" that had already been widely reviewed and whose selection seemed to many (including me) to be inconsistent with the LBC's stated mission. This selection perhaps indicated that the LBC was going to be business as usual, choosing the same old books published by the same old publishers and reviewed in the same old high-profile book reviews. Our subsequent selections mostly demonstrated that this was not the case, but it may be that an impression was left that the LBC wasn't quite the champion of unduly neglected fiction it was claiming to be.

It may also be that, eventually at least, the Litblog Co-op was perceived as a too narrowly-constituted, "clubbish" sort of group. When the LBC was formed, it could plausibly claim to represent the "leading" literary weblogs, but the litblogosphere has so dramatically expanded, both in sheer numbers of blogs and in the quality of the posting to be found there, that it really could no longer assert itself as the collective voice of the preeminent litbloggers. The LBC did enlarge its membership, and continued to invite new members when places became available, but this only made the process of nominating titles, choosing a favorite, and posting on the ultimate selection increasingly unwieldy, and it would have only gotten worse if we'd expanded the membership once again. When the litblogosphere was a fairly self-contained space, populated by bloggers united by a desire to identify worthy books and confer a kind of "indie" credential to these books, it was still possible for the member bloggers of the LBC to consider themselves the vanguard of a new online literary movement, but by now such a claim just isn't credible.

As for the second goal of bringing more attention to literary weblogs, there is no doubt that litblogs have established themselves as part of literary culture, but I don't really think this was a direct result of the actions of the Litblog Co-op. Perhaps the existence of the LBC did contribute to the increase of weblogs dedictated to literature, both past and present, but it was only a modest factor among those that led more readers to litblogs and ultimately led some of them to become litbloggers. I think it's probable that the individual members of the LBC did more to make the litblogosphere an accepted source of information about and judgment of current fiction on their own blogs than did the LBC itself. It's likely that a given title can be exposed to a potential audience just as effectively when two or three or more individual bloggers discover it and consider its merits as when it is in effect made the winner of a competition conducted by some such organization as the Litblog Co-op.

In this way the LBC may have unwittingly performed at least one useful service. Its relatively brief existence, and the reasons for its brevity, suggests that probably there will be no online version of the National Book Critics Circle, no self-appointed arbiters of literary value on the net to rival the NBCC and other print-based critics' associations that exist mainly to bestow awards. This does not mean the litblogosphere, for example, cannot wield the authority represented by these kinds of groups, but it does mean that whatever authority literary blogs do attain will be much more widely dispersed, not concentrated in organized groups pretending to encompass the "best" available judgment about current fiction or poetry. Since there is no such "best" judgment, just as the books chosen as "best" by the NBCC, The National Book Awards, or, indeed, the Litblog Co-op are no such thing (except by accident), readers will need to find the litblogs that consistently examine the sorts of books they find they like to read. This may result in a further fracturing of the litblogosphere into zones of "niche" interest, but this will only reflect an already existing diversity of taste and preference and will hardly lead to the destruction of a "common" literary culture, the existence of which is and always was a myth.

I expect the litblogosphere to continue to grow. I especially expect an increase in blogs offering longer-form commentary and criticism, as opposed to the link-centered blog that defined the literary weblog in its first years of existence but that by now has become just one kind of litblog among others. The more that literary blogs become credible contributors to critical/literary discourse, the less will be the need of an organization like the Litblog Co-op, or for any other effort to unite bloggers on behalf of the literary blog as a medium for serious literary discussion. Considering that all signs point to a decline in literary coverage in newspapers and magazines, I still believe the time may come when blogs and other forms of online publishing will dominate the literary discussion. If so, the LBC will have played some short-term role in underscoring the potential of literary weblogs, although their long-term potential is still to be tested.

Skunk Hour

Justin Courter's Skunk: A Love Story (Omnidawn Press) is a gimmicky novel whose gimmick almost works. To the extent that it makes the novel consistently enjoyable to read, in fact (it if is appropriate to call a narrative in which the main characer lives with skunks and drinks their musk "enjoyable"), it does work well enough. But ulimately the bizarre behavior that motivates the story recounted by the novel's first-person narrator seems designed to signal toward some broader thematic relevance I, for one, was unable to fully work out.

The narrator himself accounts for his attraction to skunk musk by connecting it to memories of his mother:

My mother drank quite a lot of beer when I was growing up. She always drank McDougal's--an imported brand that comes in a green bottle and has a slightly skunky aroma. This was the first scent to greet my nostrils in the morning and the last whiff I sniffed before falling asleep at night. I awoke each morning to the clanking of beer bottles as my mother opened and shut the door of the refrigerator to get out her first McDougal's before starting my breakfast. Then I heard more clinking of empty bottles, as she cleared the kitchen table, filled a large garbage bag with the previous day's bottles and carried them outside to put in a can by the street.

One day the narrator, Damien, brings home a dead skunk, thinking his mother will be able to brew her own beer using this "raw material out of which beer was made." Suffice it to say that his mother doesn't appreciate his gift, and it is only a few days after this incident that the mother is put into a mental hospital, where she eventually commits suicide. Out of this noxious mixture of childhood associations and ultimate trauma emerges, presumably, Damien's adult fixation on skunk musk.

The adult Damien is a loner and something of a misanthrope, although his misanthropy does not seem founded in an excessively high estimation of his own worth:

. . .My eyes are as dark as my hair and are extremely weak. For this reason I have worn thick glasses since I can remember. When I worked at Grund & Greene, I still had the same pair of black frames that had served me since high school, though my prescription had changed many times. Despite the fact that I am quite capable of making my way in the modern world, I know what a miserably inadequate creature, despite my efforts, I truly am. My constitution is so delicate and my eyes so weak that I would not have survived if I had dwelt in an earlier era of history, say, in the Stone Age. I would have been one of the casualties of natural selection--either killed by a wild boar during a hunt because I could not see it coming, or maimed by one of the bigger, stronger boys of the tribe before I reached the age where humans begin copulating--and thus would have been unlikely to pass my defective genes on to future generations. Hence, the race would have continued to grow stronger, as indeed it should. . . .

Still, Damien's inability to come to terms with the modern world, and all of its ways of reminding him he is "defective," is reminiscent of John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius J. Reilly, although Damien's later experiences with what can only be called musk-addiction (he eventually learns to "milk" his skunks and drinks the musk), read like a farcical turn on William S. Burroughs, and Courter's depiction of Damien's retreat to a rural area to become a farmer seems to draw strongly from T.C. Boyle. Ultimately, however, Damien's voice is distinctive, and it is to Courter's credit that this voice has a kind of compulsive power that keeps our curiosity alive despite the fact that Damien Youngquist is in many ways a pretty repulsive character.

Early in the novel Damien meets up with a woman named Pearl, a rogue marine biologist who has on obsession with fish similar to Damien's obsession with skunks. Thus able to tolerate each other's fetish, the two begin a sexually acrobatic love affair that is interrupted when Damien's skunk house is raided and the skunks killed, and when he encounters Pearl's self-described fiance and subsequently embarks on his rural adventure. Later Pearl returns, but she is unable to prevent Damien's apparent ruin: A latter-day hippie neighbor begins using Damien's skunk musk to create a new recreational drug and is busted; to get a lighter sentence for himself, he fingers Damien as the drug ring's mastermind. Damien is carted off to jail and later to a drug-treatment facility.

One of the reasons I liked this book is precisely its skillful use of first-person narration. I have more or less come to the conclusion that the only way an otherwise conventional narrative (and Skunk is, depite its unconventional subject and eccentric characters, essentially a narrative-driven novel, without much in the way of purely formal experimentation) can succeed, post-modernism and post-postmodernism, is through first-person narrative. The third-person central-consciousnes mode of narration (sometimes called the "free indirect style"), which has become the default mode of storytelling, providing us with both story and "pyschological realism," is now so worn out and tepid, at least for me, that only first-person narratives can poke through the narrative haze emitted by so many indifferently-related stories to capture my attention in the first place. Much can be done with first-person narrative, starting but not ending with the manipulation of the reader's trust in the story being told.

Thus, Skunk presents us with a first-person account by a character we have every reason to believe might not be clear-sighted, both literally--Damien's poor eyesight continues to deteriorate throughout the narrative, but whether this is a side-effect of the skunk musk or just a natural decline, given what we've been told about his poor vision, we really don't know--and figuratively. Might Damien, like his mother, be prone to mental illness? Might the skunk musk have exacerbated this problem? How much do we trust Damien's narrative as the accurate account of what "really" happened? For me, the existence of such potential amibiguity only deepens the novel's interest, creating layers of "meaning" that the third-person method necessarily excludes.

Unfortunately, as the novel nears its conclusion, the events become increasingly contrived and its portrayal of addiction heavy-handed. It seems as though Damien's story of addiction and recovery (as comical as it is) is being offered to us as containing some essential "truth" about addiction. Are we being told that the modern world has become so alienating that we are all led to our own addictions in order to cope with it? That, if so, we should be left alone to indulge them? That we ought to rise above them and find a way to live a productive life? These seem rather pat and familiar themes for a novel otherwise so unfamiliar in its style and its cast of characters.

Nonetheless, Justin Courter has admirably succeeded in taking a character so odd and behavior so potentially repugnant you might think nothing can be done with them and creating from them a surprisingly engaging novel. If it seems that Courter is daring you to read on after learning about his protagonist's habit, you should take the dare because you might find yourself hooked on Skunk.