The Reading Experience

The Bizarre Extremes of Human Existence

Citing a recent news item relating bizarre human behavior, Peter Kerry Porter at his blog Read, Write, Now writes:

. . .one looks at this stuff published daily and has to say helplessly that Dickens and O’Connor and Faulkner have nothing on this. Stephen King could do no better in calling up the bizarre extremes of human existence. No wonder contemporary readers have little taste for fiction, and novelists feel compelled to present their fictions as spurious memoir. With a world as it already is beyond all imagining, what role for the writer who wants to imagine what is not.

This is remeniscent of Philip Roth's essay from the early 1960s in which he too lamented the fact that truth is often stranger than fiction:

. . .the American writer. . .has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of Amerian reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.

There is certainly much truth in these observations, and if we conceive of the fiction writer's task as one by which the writer depicts a set of characters and events that transcend ordinary reality in their extremity, evokes a landscape that strikes us as intensely strange yet still faithful to "actuality," then perhaps fiction cannot compete with reality. But is this the writer's task? Should fiction be in competition with reality in a search for the "bizarre extremes of human existence"?

In its way, the notion that fiction should be engaged in such a search only reinforces the underlying idea that realism is the novel's natural mode, that the novel exists to "record" reality, even if it is reality in its most outrageous manifestations. If William Dean Howells believed that the novel provided an opportunity to record the ordinary course of human reality, the 21st century realist may choose to portray that reality through its outliers, its most outlandish displays of human behavior, but the goal, to re-present "reality" as it is lived (by someone), remains the same. Peter qualifies his own conclusions about the difficulty of the writer's job by adding that "Imagination isn’t just an effort to invoke the extreme, but to shape it, to tame it to a tale," but while this begins to consider the art involved in fiction's confrontation with reality ("to shape it"), it finally equates that art with pruning and trimming, with taking the edge off reality (or maybe sharpening it) rather than creating something new--an addition to reality rather than a meticulously groomed version of it.

All fiction begins in reality--where else could it begin?--but why must it end merely in offering a plausible version of "real life"? Is the goal of writing fiction to lure back those readers so obsessed with the superficial appearance of reality that they've turned to memoir? Writers of fiction ought to take the opportunity to transfigure and re-imagine the real rather than just describe it. More than that, they should be seeking out fresh ways of using language to invoke the real, fresh ways of making language itself up to the task of engaging with all levels of "human existence." The writer's job is to "imagine what is not" first of all in imagining what words can do that they haven't yet been made to do.

Living On Earth

Kassia Krozser is

baffled and amazed by authors who do not see marketing as part of their jobs. First off, is there really a job description for authors? If so, please forward to me as I have a few holes in my resume and I’m too lazy to do the work myself. Second, what planet are you living on? Very, very few authors have the luxury of not engaging in marketing. And even they have to do talk show appearances or “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”.

Why should this be baffling? If writers wanted to be marketers, presumably they would have become. . .marketers. Instead they chose to be writers, presuming that marketing was the job of publishers. Admittedly, publishers now do a terrible job, not just of marketing, but of judging talent, editing, and nourishing careers. Indeed, they're terrible at all the jobs writers once thought defined the very word, "publisher." That writers ceded editorial control to the publishers was the devil's bargain they had to strike with modern capitalism, something they had to exchange in order to get matters of business taken care of. I suppose that, in the wake of the violation of this deal on the part of publishers, writers who still want the benefits accompanying the bargain--placement in bookstores, reviews in important newspapers, etc.--might be forced to do both the writing and the selling, but I don't see why they should have known this would be part of their job, and I certainly don't know why they would continue to regard mainstream publishers as the arbiters of "success." If these publishers are not publishing their books with any care, if they're dropping them after the first book flops (due mostly to the publisher's own incompetence), and if they're going to force writers to do all the grunt work, anyway, what earthly reason do writers have to endure the situation and submit themselves to such humiliations?

Now, I know that Kassia has the best interests of writers in mind. And I also know that if the publishing of fiction were to move farther toward self-publishing as a viable mode, the need for writers to become marketers and promoters would no doubt become even more acute. But it's the publishers themselves who have brought things to this pass, and it won't do to let them off the hook by claiming they're "book-focused" rather than "author-focused" and noting they're "juggling hundreds, maybe thousands of authors." If they've let their business practices spiral out of control, whose fault is that, exactly? Should we really compound this failure by now chastising those writers who haven't yet gotten with the new program and become their own publicists? The "marketing" crisis is a failure of capitalism, yet another example of its increasingly crude, bottom-line mentality, with the marketing of books now being outsourced to the writers themselves. Should we cheerfully give in to this?

Kassia concludes by urging us to accept the new paradigm in which "the author as a business" holds equal place with "the writer as a creative being." Given we live in a culture that post-Reagan capitalism has transformed into one that is "all-business, all-the-time," acceding to the new paradigm might be inevitable, resisting it futile. Acquiescing to the notion that "Marketing might be a distraction for a writer, but. . .essential if you’re an author" may well be necessary to "succeed" in the brave new world avaricious publishers have created, but one might still hope that some people will choose to be writers nevertheless, and let the authors be damned.

The Books of the Future

Regardless of whether his own novels will stand up as important instances of "a new departure," Alain Robbe-Grillet thoroughly understood what it would take for the novel to survive as a credible art form:

There is no question. . .of establishing a theory, a pre-existing mold into which to pour the books of the future. Each novelist, each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual reflection. The book makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone. Indeed the movement of its style must often lead to jeopardize them, breaking them, even exploding them. Far from respecting certain immutable forms, each new book tends to constitute the laws of its functioning at the same time that it produces their destruction. Once the work is completed, the writer's critical reflection will serve him further to gain a perspective in regard to it, immediately nourishing new explorations, a new departure. ("The Use of Theory," in For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard)

So much for the notion that "The ultimate test of any writer may be taking on the most traditional of genres. . .and pouring new wine into old skins." This may be the "test" for a certain kind of commercially-minded writer, the "professional author," but as Robbe-Grillet explains, the writer who truly takes his/her form seriously is willing not only to reject the "old skins" but also to discard the "new wine" once it has been made. Continuing to use the same "recipe" only shuts down the process of "continual reflection" on the possibilities of fiction needed to keep it vital. What has already been done--by the writer, by previous writers--however much it might continue to please readers, for the writer serves ultimately as the motivation for "new explorations," without which the novel will devolve into mere product and survive only as an historical curiosity. "The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date," writes Robbe-Grillet elsewhere in this essay, "knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history, and that they survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future."

Middlebrow Mediocrity

Everything that keeps our current literary culture mired in midddlebrow mediocrity is exemplified in Amy Bloom's novel, Away, and its reception by mainstream book reviewers when it was published last fall. The novel itself is not per se a "bad" novel--many worse ones are published and reviewed every season--but it is entirely undistinguished, to the point that my most immediate reaction to it was to wonder why it needed to exist in the first place. Moreover, that book reviewers would so exorbitantly praise such a novel, as in fact most of them did, strongly calls into question the standards being applied by those working in that branch of "literary journalism" represented by newspaper book sections. If Away is considered by "professional" book reviewers to be an exemplary work of serious literary fiction, which my reading of the reviews leads me to think is the case, then as a culture attuned to the possibilities of fiction as literary art, we are in a sad state indeed.

In her Los Angeles Times review of the book, Lionel Shriver writes:

Amy Bloom's new novel, "Away," could be called formulaic. Her protagonist, Lillian Leyb, is on a quest of the most classic variety: to be reunited with her young daughter, lost in a Russian pogrom. Yet. . ."Away" testifies to the truism that execution is all. Bloom isn't fighting traditional forms; in some respects her second novel is one more standard American immigration tale. But her execution is exquisite. . . .

Later she adds:

Bloom breaks no new formal ground, yet not a line is trite nor a character stereotypical. Working comfortably within a conventional form, she renews and redeems it. The ultimate test of any writer may be taking on the most traditional of genres -- the love story, the ghost story, the immigration story -- and pouring new wine into old skins. . . .

Shriver's review reeks of the kind of rationalization book reviewers constantly offer when recommending "formulaic" fiction written "comfortably within a conventional form." Such fiction may otherwise seem "standard" in its use of all of the hand-me-down practices of traditional narrative, but it's still full of "finely wrought prose, vivid characters, delectable details," as Shriver puts it a few paragraph later. It may be utterly predictable, reinforcing safe and complacent reading habits by going no farther than to pour some "new wine into old skins," but if its "execution is exquisite," then no more should be asked of it. Who needs fiction that challenges formal expectations, offers an alternative to our hackneyed notions of "finely wrought prose"? Writers who pursue such challenges and alternatives are just "game-playing," anyway, so why not just settle for another feel-good novel and its "soft-smile, along-the-way humor."

Away is in fact just what Shriver initially judges it to be: a tired piece of formula fiction rehashing familiar themes of immigrant stories that cannot be redeemed by its "colorful" characters" or its "soft-smile" humor. In fact, both the characters and the "humor" with which their stories are larded seem only more cloying for the obvious effort being made to use them to inflate an inherently cliched narrative--a mother treks her way across the continent to be reunited with her child--into something less sentimental and more "vivid." Unfortunately, the vividness of the characters is almost entirely a result of their being enlisted in the attempt to justify retelling a "standard" story that otherwise has no real justification. As the novel's protagonist, Lillian, meets up with these characters--a homosexual actor, a black prostitute, an isolated telegraphist in the Yukon, etc.--the narrative becomes only more labored and the characters themselves only more an obvious effort to compensate for the fact the Lillian is essentially a cipher. It's hard finally to care much about her journey, or about the people she meets along the way, since she is so resolutely a blank slate on which these melodramatic adventures are being written--which is not, I don't think, the role for Lillian the author intended.

In her review of the book, Heather McAlpin observes that "Away is a compact epic, an adventure story, a survival tale and an incredible journey wrapped up in a historical novel cloaked in a love story. It evokes E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime in its playful fusion of fiction and fantasy and its exuberant tone. . . . " I don't know if Doctorow could have foreseen the influence Ragtime (as well as his subsequent historical novels) would have on writers following him, but contemporary fiction has indeed become inundated with novels whose primary purpose, or at least so it seems to me, is to "recreate" the past. If Away has any reason for being at all, this is it, to recreate a period of early 20th century American history (with the requisite allowance made for the "local color" as necessary literary device). Since I have frequently indicated my impatience with this sort of historical fiction--in which no other aesthetic purpose beyond evoking an historical event or period can be discerned--I will not dwell on its shortcomings here exept to note that Away is apparently based on historical fact, gleaned from several historical and autobiographical sources Bloom lists in her acknowledgments page, although "reconfigured. . .when it suited the story" (Author's Note). That reviewers would still be welcoming this sort of thing over thirty years after Ragtime, would even extol its virtues in the hyperbolic language used to praise Away, seems to me to indicate an even more impoverished attitude toward fiction's potential to continue to surprise than that illustrated in Amy Bloom's decision to write such a novel.

In what she apparently considers praise for Bloom's writing, Shriver exclaims that Bloom "conjures the kind of specific details that creative-writing teachers are eternally begging their students to generate." However, it is precisely Bloom's "finely wrought" prose, cut to fit the sort of default narrative realism encouraged by creative writing programs (or any other kind of systematic writing instruction) that makes Away seem so perfunctory, so indistinguishable from all the other manufactured works of narrative realism produced--with a few acceptable variations--according to a preconceived model of what a "well-made" novel should be like. That a novel like Away would be widely reviewed and favorably received is probably not surprising, since book reviewers, may of them "creative-writing teachers" themselves, generally seem to accept this model as well. But American fiction is not well-served when book review pages (the few of them that are left) give over so much of their space, and so little critical judgment, to such backward-looking, unimaginative work. Perhaps it is too much to ask that the editors of these pages more often consider art over commerce, the interests of literature over the interests of the status quo, but must they so consistently valorize the mediocre?

The Winds of the World

As someone who would probably be associated with promoting the sort of novel being described here, I nevertheless have to say I find Alan Massie's evocation of the "self-enclosed novel" mostly incomprehensible:

One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. . .By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world.

I really have no idea what it would mean for a work of fiction to make "no reference. . .to anything beyond itself." It would at the least require that such a work be written in an invented language--and thus have no audience beyond the author him/herself--a language that would carry none of the "references" that English carries simply by being a historical language spoken by billions of people. And even if such a thing could be done, the invented language itself would have to make no reference to the "world of fact" its author would nonetheless still inhabit, presumably focusing entirely on an alternative "world of fact" that somehow only the author has ever experienced. This would indeed be quite a feat of self-isolation, and the resulting fiction would be cordoned off both from the actual "world of fact" and everyone inhabiting it, but the notion that some writers do this, or try to do it, is, of course, resolutely absurd.

In suggesting that certain fiction does "not appear to be set in time," Massie must mean that it does not directly refer to either current events as described by journalists or past events as related by historians. There's no other way to understand the bizarre claim that some novels want to deny "that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters." Since all humans live in the world of fact and are subjected to the "winds of the world," and since writers are themselves human, the stories and novels they write bear all the marks of that wind, even if some writers are less concerned with charting it directly than other writers.

Presumably a story like Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon" is the sort of thing Massie has in mind (although he gives no examples at all of the sort of thing he does have in mind). Or a novel such as Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association. "The Balloon" is an obvious fantasy, in which an infinitely expandable hot-air balloon is inflated until it spreads out and covers all of New York City. The story records the way the city's people adapt to and come to understand this "phenomenon": "There was a certain amount of argumentation about the 'meaning' of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena." Massie no doubt objects to the way in which a "self-enclosed" fiction like this casts doubt on "meaning," portrays meaning as something always up for grabs. But who could assert that this story rejects "the world of fact"? It is all about New York City, a "fact" that informs every line and paragraph. It's about New Yorkers, whose residence in the city most assuredly "influence[s] their behaviour" and "affect[s] the course of their lives."

The Universal Baseball Association is about as "self-enclosed" as a novel can get. It takes place completely inside the head of a man playing a game of fantasy baseball. He has created an entire league and invested it with a glorious past. He further invests it with a life-and-death significance that culminates in a horrible accident that tears his world (the baseball world) apart. Ultimately the novel is a kind of meditation on the interplay of fantasy and reality (the "world of fact" represented most obviously by baseball, a very real pastime in whose intricacies millions of people do become entangled), but it does subject its protagonist, however indirectly, to the "winds of the world." Those winds "impinge" on J. Henry Waugh in a particularly destructive way. He wants to be the God of his invented world, but the real world of chance and human imperfection intervenes nevertheless.

Massie essentially uses the distinction he draws between "self-enclosed" and "open" fiction to marginalize the former as "merely literary," while lauding the former for its willingness to "take on" history, "the world of harsh political fact which, working in conjunction with personal qualities, forms or deforms men’s lives." In Massie's view, the open novel "was invented more or less by Walter Scott," whose novels for Massie are exemplars of the kind of fiction that is "open" to the currents of reality. But I think he has it exactly backward. It's fiction like "The Balloon" and UBA that depicts the forces of "contingency" through exercises of the imagination, while writers of historical and "documentary" fiction are stuck with what was and what is. Self-enclosed fiction is actually "open" to any and all kinds of aesthetic innovation, while the "open" novel is closed to all but the most conventional approaches that allow the "world of fact" to predominate.

The important distinction to be made is not between "self-enclosed" and "open" works of fiction. It is between those works whose authors think of fiction as primarily an aesthetic form and those who think of it as a form of commentary on human behavior or the state of the the world, on "the world of harsh political fact" or some such thing. If you want to think of the latter kind of fiction as more "open," more "engaged" with facts and thus more relevant to your concerns as a reader, so be it. Some readers are impatient with art and want their novels to be like sociology only with stories, or like journalism with better stories. But this is no justification for defining a whole other kind of fiction almost out of existence and distorting it beyond recognition in the process.

The Road of Skepticism

In a series of posts about director Frank Tashlin and one of his early films, Son of Paleface, Ray Davis writes of the film's star, Bob Hope:

Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields drift mildly upwards into their personal unreal, tethered by rude tugs of slapstick and abuse. The Marx and Ritz Brothers drive reality squealing like a moneylender from the temple. Approaching sometimes the misanthropic babble of Groucho and sometimes the nightmarish openness of Fields, Hope is the first movie comedian to attain enlightenment by the road of skepticism: an absolute distrust that undercuts narrative drive, filmic convention, and his own part. On the other hand, he's not a delicate instrument; like a cartoon star, you know that if a bomb dropped on Hope, he'd be nervously wise-cracking in Hell next scene.

I agree with Ray entirely. In the great tradition of American slapstick comedy (what I also like to think of as a tradition of "carnivalesque" comedy as described by M.M. Bakhtin), Bob Hope is one of its most important figures, and perhaps the figure most unjustly left out of critical considerations of this tradition. Ray captures his "carnivalesque" qualities precisely: "an absolute distrust" of everything "serious" that informs all of his best films, right down to a distrust of his own role in the film. Not all of the jokes in all of the films work equally well--certainly not as consistently as those in the Marx Brothers films--but as a "movie comedian" his persona is just as acerbic as the other comedians Ray mentions and his best film work just as rewarding. (It must be admitted that he did make more bad films than most of the other great screen comics, especially later in his career, but his early work still holds up.)

Some viewers might object to Hope's films based on a dislike of his conservative political views. But, as with Charlton Heston, such viewers should reconsider the extremely tenuous connection between those views expressed offscreen and Hope's considerable skills as a skeptical comedian.