The Reading Experience

Something New to Do

Britt Peterson's Chronicle of Higher Education article on the champions of "literary Darwinism" portrays these "scientific" literary scholars as threatening to overturn the currently entrenched academic approaches associated with Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. But at the level of its basic assumptions about literature--about why we study literature in the first place--there's absolutely nothing "new" about literary Darwinism, as Peterson makes clear, perhaps unwittingly, in his description of this method:

The most prominent [of the new science-based scholars] are the Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism.

To emphasize "evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts" is not different in kind from an emphasis on cultural patterns or historical patterns or, indeed, the kind of class-centered "patterns of behavior" emphasized by Marxism. What all of these appropriations of literature have in common is that they're really not about literature. Marxists have their political agenda for which literature seems a useful prop, cultural critics have theirs, and the literary Darwinists are now making a play at getting theirs a prominent place within the scholarship factory that academic criticism has become. Readers truly interested in the study of literature--not the study of science or sociology--have no more interest in reading Jane Austen for her representation of "mating rituals" than in reading James Joyce for his putative insights into the nature of Empire. These readers want to "study" both of these writers in order to more fully understand how their texts work, how they expand our ability to experience works of literature, to transform experience into aesthetic "patterns." Literary Darwinism will do nothing to assist such readers in the goal of engaging with literature as a singular form of art.

In this way, it isn't surprising that the Darwinists are encountering resistance from from "those you might think would be allies — other members of the loosely defined group of literary critics breaking new ground with studies that incorporate scientific theory and even, in a few cases, empirical method." The "science" being employed by the Darwinists is not quite compatible with the "science" used by those enamored of "cognitive psychology," and thus the latter consider the former to be rivals in the competition to create the latest academic fad. And it is certainly not surprising that this whole "loosely defined group" would be opposed by the theorists and the sociologists, since they are in danger of being unseated at the academic big table, just as the theorists themselves began unseating the New Critics and the traditional historical scholars thirty-five years ago.

Prominent Darwinian Joseph Carroll gives the game away when he observes that

"The stick is that [mainstream academics are] going to feel more beleaguered and provincial and left out in the cold, and the carrot is that they're going to feel that here's something new to do."

The worst thing that could happen to an ambitious academic critic is to be "left out in the cold," methodologically speaking. One wants to have tenure and as many publications in prestigious places as one can before the next group of promising scholars looking for something "new" comes along.

Carroll's Darwininian colleague Jonathan Gottschall makes it even more explicit:

"I think that ambitious young scholars, graduate students and so forth, will see something of glamour in here, something that can motivate their studies."

I don't know if Gottschall is being unusually honest or if he simply got careless in his word choice, but his invocation of "glamour" as the motivating goal of literary scholars, however dim and degraded such glamour might be--these are professors we're talking about, after all--only underscores how utterly trivial the "discpline" of academic literary study has become. It is about, and only about, itself as a "field" in the academic curriculum. All concern for literature as something that might be valued in its own right dissipated into the ivy-scented air long ago.

Peterson wonders whether literary Darwinism will "save literary criticism," but the only thing that will save literary criticism is, well, a revival of actual literary criticism. What the Darwinists are proposing is certainly not that. It's an effort to dislodge the "literary" from literary study once and for all. It seeks to subdue literature and all the remaining "subjective" responses to it and pin it to the wall of scientific scrutiny (at least to the extent that "literary Darwinisim" is actually science, which is altogether questionable). Gottschall is pretty clearly contemptuous of the established approaches to literary study, which, astonishingly enough, he seems to consider still too literary to be taken seriously. He's apparently an advocate of the notion that literary study has to be destroyed in order to be saved, although what remains as the object of scholarly study will then have no resemblance to literature whatsoever.

Lost in Translation

In a recent post at his Sentences blog, Wyatt Mason examines a passage from Robert Chandler's translation of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate and enthuses over its wonders. Although Mason acknowledges that it is a translation, and rightly notes that without it we who have no Russian would have no access to Grossman's writing at all, still, I am reluctant to myself conclude definitively that the quoted passage has precisely the qualities that Mason otherwise ably explicates. Indeed it is a translation, and it is possible the translator has actually improved it in its transformation into English, or made it worse, or in some other way failed to adequately render the original in a way that would dupicate the Russian reader's experience of Grossman's text.

This is not to say that the passage does not have the qualities Mason describes, and certainly not that Chandler's translation is ultimately a failure. I have no way of knowing whether it succeeds or not, and while I am usually willing to take the word of a critic proficient in another language that a given translation is acceptable or not, I am not thereby sufficiently emboldened to approach the text as a critic in the same way I am willing to work with a text written in English. Since I am a critic still attached to "close reading," to examining a work for its stylistic felicities and its formal characteristics, the awareness that with a translated text I am at best confronting it in a second-hand version is enough to warn me away from making any confident assertions about it.

Which is why I concentrate, both on this blog and in my other critical writing, mostly on fiction written in English, even more specifically on American fiction since I feel most able to engage with texts composed in American English (and also with the cultural realities often underlying American language conventions). In a sense I feel I am only capable of making specifically literary judgments on works in English, although I'm relatively certain the kinds of judgments I might make vis-a-vis American fiction are also relevant to fiction written in other languages. I just can't get close enough to such texts to be sure. There are times when the formal invention in an other-language work is evident enough that I can point it out with some confidence my critical eye is appropriately focused--most recently this happened with Magdalena Tulli's Flaw--but generally I stay away from making pronouncements on texts that in a sense I have not really been able to read in their native state.

I recognize that there are some critics fluent enough in second or third languages that they are perfectly reliable close readers of both English-language texts and of literary works in other languages. Unfortunately, the Spanish and French I learned well enough to pass a proficiency exam in graduate school are not good enough to allow me to pretend to read works in those languages other than in translation. This is probably a kind of self-imposed limitation on my range as a critic, but on the other hand I do feel that by restricting my critical commentary to (mostly) American fiction, I am able both to anchor my comments more firmly, and more deeply, in a particular literary tradition and its distinctive practices and to provide a context within which new works can be profitably read. It allows me to, perhaps, speak with somewhat more authority about American writers and writing by demonstrating a familiarity with the enabling assumptions, including assumptions about language, that have characterized American fiction over the long run.

I certainly don't want to imply that translations perform no useful service or that we in the United States need fewer, rather than more, of them. It's a scandal that so comparatively few translated works are made available to American readers and that so comparatively few of those readers seem to be demanding them. Translations allow us an important, if ultimately somewhat cloudy, window on the literary practices of the rest of the world, practices from which both readers and writers can and must learn. But given the haphazard way in which translations come to us (without much useful information about why this writer has been translated or why that writer is important), as well as my professed limitations as a reader of translations, I expect to continue emphasizing them on this blog only periodically.

"Might Not the Painted Knife Slip From the Painted Table?"

Steven Millhauser could not really be called a neglected writer. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, his books are reviewed relatively widely and usually respectfully, and he has his share of admiring readers. But I don't think he has been sufficiently recognized as the important and accomplished writer he really is. Since the early 1970s, he has produced a series of novels and short fiction collections that easily rival the fiction of any of his contemporaries in their imaginative depth, stylistic vigor, and formal ingenuity.

Millhauser's novels Edwin Mullhouse, Portrait of a Romantic, and Martin Dressler form a significant part of his body of work, each of them singular achievements that nonetheless display Millhauser's signature preocccupation with the processes of imagination and with protagonists who become obsessed, even possessed, by the need to explore the limits of their own perpetually active imaginations. Each of them provides a reading experience unlike any the reader is likley to recall, and each of them should be included on any list of superior American novels of the past thirty-five years. But in my view, Millhauser's short stories and novellas are even better and constitute the core of his achievement. While the longer form allows Millhauser to demonstrate the breadth of his inventive powers, the concentrated intensity of the shorter forms seems especially suited to his particular kind of storytelling.

Millhauser's fiction is a variation on the mode of postwar American fiction Robert Scholes labeled "fabulation" (Fabulation and Metafiction, 1979). According to Scholes, "Delight in design, and its concurrent emphasis on the art of the designer. . .serve in part to distinguish the art of the fabulator from the work of the novelist or satirist. Of all narrative forms, fabulation puts the highest premium on art and joy." The work of few other writers manifests in both its own formal patterns and its emphasis on protagonists with various kinds of of artistic ambitions as much "delight in design" as Steven Millhauser's. While the "joy" that this art produces doesn't always lead to fulfillment in life, Millhauser's characters are nevertheless fixated on perfecting their work and cultivating the satisfactions that only it is able to bring them.

A very good example of this sort of art-focused fabulation can be seen in "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne," a novella from the 1993 collection, Little Kingdoms. J. Franklin Payne is a newpaper cartoonist who begins to apply his talents to the then (1920) embryonic form of the animated cartoon. His efforts prove artistically successful, but as he explores the possibilities of this new medium, continuing to use thousands of individual drawings rather than adopt time-saving background cels, he finds his painstaking art already at odds with the increasingly commercial practices of the film business. Franklin remains faithful to his artistic vision and methods, even as his domestic life is falling apart and his wife leaves him. He completes his magnum opus, Voyage to the Dark Side of the Moon, but by this time he is not only the work's one true audience but in fact its only audience, however much he might imagine others there "to applaud him in the warm and intimate dark."

Like most of Millhauser's fiction, "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" is partly about an individual human being with intensely focused creative impulses, and partly about the way those impulses are transformed into works of aesthetic beauty and complexity. LIke many of Millhauser's protagonists, Franklin Payne's imagination leads him to unorthodox expression, to forms, such as the animated cartoon, that allow for the transgression of realism and aesthetic convention. Franklin, we are told,

. . .felt the desire to accept a certain challenge posed by the artificial world of the animated drawings: the desire to release himself into the free, the fantastic, the deliberately impossible. But this desire stimulated in him an equal and opposite impulse toward the mundane and plausible, toward precise illusionistic effects. As the violations of the real became more marked, the perspective backgrounds became fuller and more detailed; and as he gave way to impulses of wild, sweet freedom, he found himself paying close attention to he look of things in the actual world: the exact unfolding of metal steps at the top of a down escalator, the precise patterns of reflections in the panes of a revolving door seen from inside. . . .

This view of art's purchase on reality is in keeping with that delineated by Scholes in his section on "fabulation and reality":

Fabulation, then, means not a turning away from reality, but an attempt to find more subtle correspondences between the reality which is fiction and the fiction which is reality. Modern fabulation accepts, even emphasizes, it fallibilism, its inability to reach all the way to the real, but it continues to look toward reality. It aims at telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional.

The pursuit of "such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional" leads Millhauser in other stories to more openly experiment with form rather than narrate the stories of fictional characters such as Franklin Payne who themselves are driven to artistic experimentation. "Revenge," from Millhauser's 2003 book, The King in the Tree, is a good example of such an effort. It takes the form of a woman showing her house to a potential buyer, who is addressed throughout, in the first person, as "you": "This is the hall. It isn't much of one, but it does the job. Books here, umbrellas there. I hate those awful houses, don't you, where the door opens right into the living room. Don't you?" Gradually we learn the "buyer" is a woman who had a long-term affair with the narrator's now-dead husband and that the narrator is taking the occasion to exact a sort of revenge by informing the mistress of the damage her actions have inflicted. The narrator takes the mistress on a tour of each room of the house, in effect using them to present her (and us) with an anatomy of the narrator's life and marriage.

"The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" and "Revenge" show Steven Millhauser to be a writer of great inventiveness and storytelling prowess, one whose work emphasizes the wonders of artifice--including the artifice that is fiction--but also tempers our delight in its artifice by truthfully depicting the limitations of such artifice in its ultimate confrontation with the irresistable forces of reality. These qualities can be found in equally compelling measure in Millhauser's most recent collection of short stories, Dangerous Laughter (2008). The author's use of fabulation to evoke fantastic worlds is memorably evident in "The Dome," a Barthelmean story about the erection of domes above and around homes, towns, and eventually whole countries, "The Other Town," about a town that has replicated itself, creating an "other" town the citizens of the "real" town visit in order to give themselves a more vivid sense of its (and their) existence, and "The Tower," about the aftermath of a multi-generational effort to build a tower that "grew higher and higher until one day it pierced the floor of heaven."

The focus on artist figures perfecting their craft in their own visionary if idiosyncratic ways can be found in "In the Reign of Harad IV," which tells the story of a court miniaturist who is able to reduce the size of his miniatures to the point of invisibility, in "A Precursor of the Cinema," which relates the life and career of a painter able to create such realistic effects that his subjects can be seen moving on the canvas, even to leave the canvas altogether, and, in its way, in "The Wizard of West Orange," a story about Thomas Edison and his work on the "haptograph," a device that simulates tactile sensations. "Cat 'N' Mouse" is a verbal rendition of a Tom and Jerry-like cartoon, "History of a Disturbance" is a final communication from a man who has given up on words, while "Here at the Museum" is a docent's guide to the "New Past" on display at the institution named in the title.

"Real life" is portrayed more directly, if still with Millhauser's usual fanciful conceits, in "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman" and "Dangerous Laughter." In the former, Elaine Coleman has indeed disappeared, although she has neither run away nor been abducted. She has simply ceased to exist, a condition that, as the story makes clear, essentially mirrors her circumstances when she ostensibly did exist. As the narrator of the story puts it, "If it's true that we exist by impressing ourselves on other minds, by entering other imagainations, then the quiet, unremarkable girl whom no one noticed must at times have felt herself growing vague, as if she were gradually being erased by the world's inattention." The latter story relates how a group of teenagers during summer vacation begin holding "laughing parties," in which all involved break out in willed laughter. (Later, the laughing parties are replaced with weeping parties.) One girl, Clara Schuler, proves particularly adept at laughing out loud (it may be her only talent), but when the laughing fad fades she holds one last party at her own home, after which "The local paper reported that Mrs. Schuler discovered her daughter around seven o'clock. She had already stopped breathing. The official cause of death was a ruptured blood vessel in the brain, but we knew the truth: Clara Schuler had died laughing."

Both of these stories use fabulation as the best way to get at the reality experienced by those like Elaine Coleman and Clara Schuler, who feel marginalized and ignored, to find those "correspondences between the reality which is fiction and the fiction which is reality." They don't allow escape from the world through simple fantasy but aim at "telling such truths as fiction may legitimately tell in ways which are appropriately fictional."

Millhauser's most provocative fantasies generally explore explicitly the gray areas between art and reality. In Dangerous Laughter, the most striking example of such a story is "A Precursor of the Cinema." Harlan Crane is a "Verisimilist" painter whose invention of "animate" paint allows him to to take his paintings a step beyond realism to the kind of photographic illusion of the real achieved by film. According to the story's narrator (an art historian of sorts) "Harlan Crane's animate paintings are more unsettling still, for they move back and forth deliberately between representation and deception and have the general effect of radically destabilizing the painting--for if a painted fly may at any moment suddenly enter the room, might not the painted knife slip from the painted table and cut the viewer's hand?"

Part of the humor of the story (and there's almost always an embedded humor in Millhauser's fiction) is in in the narrator's matter-of-fact way of presenting Harlan Crane's "invention" as if the idea of animate paint were not manifestly ludicrous, but the notion that art can "move back and forth deliberately between representation and deception" in a move that has the effect of "radically destabilizing" the work is one that has resonance not just for the paintings of Harlan Crane but also for the fabulative fiction of Steven Millhauser. His fiction consistently moves "back and forth" between the world we think we live in and the invigorating deceptions with which it both warps and truthfully renders that world. It "destabilizes" our idea that these two things are incompatible if 'realism" is the goal.

Steven Millhauser is one of the remaining postmodernists (a late postmodernist, perhaps) still publishing vital, challenging work. Dangerous Laughter is a book long-time readers of Millhauser's fiction will certainly value, but also one that could provide readers less familiar with Millhauser a compelling introduction to that fiction. Although such readers will then want to turn to the previous books for a more complete appreciation of one of the best living American writers.

Potentials for Literature

Pacifist Viking (Costanza Book Club) frequently posts about the need to grant both reading and literature "multiple uses." In a recent post, PV writes:

I try to avoid [a] narrow, limiting definition of what literature is, what it can be used for, and how one ought to approach it, for two clear reasons. First, approaching literature is primarily an individual activity, and the great diversity of humanity must call for multiple subjective approaches to literature. And second, there are so many potentials for literature, it seems harmful to try and limit those uses.

Now, on the most fundamental level it is of course not true that "approaching literature is primarily an individual activity." Not only does the reading of works of literature involve at a minimum an interaction between writer and reader (and thus a kind of partnership), but "literature" is itself unavoidably a social/cultural/historical phenomenon to which the "individual" comes only through the mediation of cultural processes and of literary history.

Literature is "literature" because we have inherited this concept as a way of identifying a certain kind of imaginative writing deemed worthy of consideration in and of itself as something separate from ordinary discourse. The term has always been somewhat unstable (or at least so capacious in meaning that it can accomodate changing tastes and assumptions), but never has it been so completely relative as to mean whatever the "individual" reader wants it to mean, which is to in effect render it meaningless. If we want to hold on to "literature" as a category of writing acknowledged by everyone (or everyone interested in this kind of writing), then we have to also acknowledge that its contents can't be judged simply through "individual activity."

Previous readers and critics have inevitably left their traces on the books we now want to read "on our own." The very availability of these books for our reading pleasure has largely been determined by those previous readers' choices (many other books might have made their way to us, but haven't), and the urgency with which we want to read some books (the "classics") is also to a significant extent a consequence of critics' evauation and discussion of these books. This is not to say that works of literature must always be "historicized" in the manner now de rigueur in academic criticism, but simply to recognize that what we call "literature" is so as part of an ongoing historical process of reading and analysis.

Literary criticism as the act of sifting through what is offered as literature, of making discriminations and of judging works of fiction or poetry, is thus as integral a part of the literary enterprise as the creation and the "individual" reception of literary works. To suggest that a given poem, story, or novel is especially accomplished or disappointingly weak, according to articulatable standards, is not to rob the reader of his/her "subjective approach" but to provide a context against which the reader might measure his/her own response. To apply critical criteria derived from careful and extensive study of literary history and aesthetic precepts is not to belittle the reader's own standards but to encourage the reader to engage with that history and those precepts and apply them as well--an activity that will always have a "subjective" character to it.

I don't deny that "multiple" readers will ultimately find different "uses"--different elements of value--in the books they read. And I don't fully disagree with the notion that reading is at some point an "individual activity." The experience of reading poems and novels does indeed consist of the reader's fully attentive encounter with the text, but that encounter is first of all with the author's aesthetic methods, his/her "making" of the text, in the same way we encounter a painter's execution on the canvas or the composer's shaping of sound. Those methods are always themselves informed by the author's influences and familiarity with the past practices of the form, however, and thus we are returned to literature as a collective, and to that degree objective, endeavor.

Waiting for Waiting

Joshua Cohen's A Heaven of Others (Starcherone Books) could not be more different from his previous novel, Cadenza for the Scneidermann Violin Concerto. The latter is long and (literally) garrulous, a crazed monologue by a concert violinist who seizes the opportunity to regale his captive audience with the story of his friend, the composer Schneidermann, rather than play his scheduled cadenza. The former is short and fabular, narrated by an Israeli boy who has been blown up by a suicide bomber and finds himself in the wrong heaven--the Muslim heaven.

Cadenza is a maximalist novel that attempts to encompass--through Schneidermann--Jewish history in the 20th century, while A Heaven of Others is a minimalist novel that focuses on a single Israeli family without particularly emphasizing its Jewishness. And while Cadenza relates the stories of two older men and their accomplished, eventful lives, A Heaven of Others presents us with the abruptly terminated life of a ten-year-old yet to experience more than the formative days of youth.

Yet both of these books show Joshua Cohen to be a writer of determinedly innovative inclinations and should impress readers--whose numbers ought only to increase--both as already accomplished works of fiction and as harbingers of further engagingly experimental efforts to come. If A Heaven of Others is not exactly the book one might have expected from the author of Cadenza for the Scneidermann Violin Concerto, that very fact on reflection seems only to indicate this is a writer who will not necessarily pursue the same set of unconventional strategies (unconventional at first) but will produce experimental work in the purest sense: fiction that continues to surprise.

Perhaps the most noteworthy achievement of A Heaven of Others is the style Cohen has fashioned for his recently deceased narrator.

Now that he has made his ascent, he is wrong. In the wrong. Being dead, he's correct. But being dead where he is, he's in error. Incorrectly mistaken. Not him but here is what's wrong, all wrong, and the timing of it, too, for him, for now and for here.

Pigs tried to take me unto their squigglies, their hypnotically spiraling tails and their hairy and rotting though seemingly citric oiled flanks, exposed hunks of bunched phosporescent bone to hug tight with your thighs tightened against the grease of the wind, oinked me to grab on, snouted me out to hold on and hold tight, offering me to ride them out to wherever their flights might end, terminus, maybe hoping I'd guide them to safer, smoother landings. But I ignored them because of climbing, climbing is enough.

This is a nicely-calibrated blending of the natural ingenuousness of a ten-year-old boy (presumably rendered in Hebrew-inflected English) and the free-flowing perspective of one who has just become disembodied and finds himself inhabiting a realm where terrestrial linguistic conventions probably no longer apply. It lends the novel a kind of dreamlike poetry that is its most distinctive, and most compelling, quality.

What begins as a "mistake," a misplacement of the Israeli boy in the wrong heaven, becomes a realization on the boy's part that heaven must ultimately be the abandonment of all earthly religious divisions:

Listen and I will say what I have said. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no longer a Jew. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no more a Jew than I'm not. Jewful and Jewless. Listen. Then hear. Understand. To be religious in heaven is to be truly fanatic. . . .

And he learns to face the only eternity likely to be in store for us:

. . .Mostly however I am ambivalent about and to this death. Thriving off the fund of numb. And so to my death, too. Sunned. Both were inevitable. Are. Or at least one happened and another will happen, and so you will notice that I still say and so think Will happen becuase a mind of mine wants to believe in a future. Listen that that, too, will pass. Into waiting for waiting. Which will pass as well, on its own. There is not waiting in the future and there is no future in the (you understand). Listen and then passing will pass. Hearing, too. Again await the all over again. Understand, then listen anew.

An interview with Joshua Cohen can be found here, in which he discusses his work-in-progress, a novel that will apparently continue the thematic focus of A Heaven of Others, about "the last Jew on earth."

ADDENDUM A Heaven of Others is accompanied by numerous illustrations by the artist Michael Hafftka. While the drawings are, as far as I am able to judge, interesting enough, I can't really say they add much to or work very provocatively with Cohen's text. Perhaps a hybrid of fiction and art that truly reinforces the former, creates something new from the interaction of each, might still be created, but I don't think this is it.