The Reading Experience

A Quirk of Language

Most of the reviews of Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States (including the British reviews of the book under its original title of Miss Herbert) concentrated on its idiosyncratic structure and unceremonious tone (idiosyncratic and unceremonious for a work of literary criticism, at any rate). Reviewers seemed to find both annoying distractions from the occasional critical insight Thirlwell offers, and their reservations about Thirlwell as a critic were generally confined to these admittedly unorthodox features of his book.

While it is true that the central argument Thirlwell wants to make in The Delighted States could probably have been made in a much shorter book, perhaps even in a critical essay, I can't say I found either Thirlwell's circuitous method of analysis, which proceeds both back and forth across time and national literatures and sideways from author to author (at times providing unusual and surprising juxtapositions), or his conversational style particularly bothersome. I take the travelogue approach to be Thirlwell's attempt to reinforce the book's overriding point--that fiction in effect speaks an international language that manages to survive its migration through translation from one literary tradition to another--in the form his book assumes, and it is an effective enough device. It might not be the sort of method one expects from a work of serious literary criticism, but there is no inherent reason criticism can't accomodate such an alternative strategy.

Further, both the looser, more informal structure and the reader-friendly critical language Thirlwell employs seem to me to work to accomplish one of criticism's legitimate tasks, which is to explicate features of literary works that are not necessarily obvious to all readers, that require the critic to call attention to them as evocatively as possible. In The Delighted States, Thirlwell is making a case for the efficacy of translation that calls for numerous and at times subtle comparisons and analogies, and his manner of leading the reader along his route of unexpected congruences, pointing out the connections more as an enthusiastic guide than as a source of critical pronouncements, is a perfectly sound way to proceed. If the test of a worthwhile critic is whether his reader is able to regard an author. a text, or literary history with enhanced understanding, then Thirlwell passes this test readily enough.

Something that may have contributed to reviewers' lack of enthusiasm for The Delighted States is Thirlwell's emphasis on innovation in fiction, a preference that consistently informs his survey of literary influence and the role of translation in the evolution of fiction as a form. Along with his related emphasis on form (which he often conflates with "style"), Thirwell's focus on aesthetic innovation must have grated on the sensibilities of mainstream reviewers, who generally look askance at innovation as manifested in contemporary fiction and mostly ignore form in favor of what a work of fiction has "to say" (when they're not simply judging it for its superficial entertainment value, its success or failure at being a "good read"). For me, that Thirlwell's book illustrates the extent to which the history of fiction is the history of inspired change is its greatest virtue, but for some of its reviewers its own unconventional form as literary criticism may have only reminded them of Thirwell's implicit defense of the role of the unconventional in literary history.

None of the book's reviewers, however, chose to examine what to me is its most problematic claim--or, as it turns out, series of claims. In his commitment to the idea that all works of fiction are translatable, even down to a particular writer's distinctive "style," Thirlwell makes the following observations:

. . .A style may be as large as the length of a book. Its units may well be moe massive, and more vague, than I would often like.

A style, in the end, is a list of the methods by which a novelist achieves various effects. As such, it can seem endless.

In fact, it can become something which is finally not linguistic at all. For the way in which a novelist represents life depends on what a novelist thinks is there in a life to be represented. A style is therefore as much a quirk of emotion, or of theological belief, as it is a quirk of language.

A style does not entirely coincide with prose style, or formal construction, or technique. (20)

In order to maintain his position that fiction can be translated without appreciable dimunition in the integrity of the translated text, Thirlwell needs to minimize the obstacles posed by "style" understood as a writer's characteristic exploration of the resources of his/her native language. One way to do that would be simply to dismiss the importance of style in comparison to all of the other elements of fiction that could well come through in a good translation without loss of effect. To his credit, Thirlwell does not do this; instead, he radically expands the meaning of "style" so that it includes. . .well, just about everything: It is "a list of the methods by which a novelist achieves various effects. As such, it can seem endless."

But, of course, if style is everything, so "various" as to be "endless" in its features, it is actually nothing. Thirlwell in fact deprives it of its one materially definable quality when he asserts that it might be "something which is not linguistic at all." This notion, that style is not fundamentally a phenomenon of language, recurs throughout Thirlwell's discussions of his international (although primarily British and European) cast of writers, even of those writers, such as Flaubert or Chekhov, known for their attention to "linguistic" style. He picks up on Marcel Proust's comment about style as "quality of vision" and uses this phrase as a kind of summary concept encapsulating his definition of style in ist most "massive" incarnation. What persists in a translation, then, is this quality of vision, which in its grand scope dwarfs mere facility with language.

I confess I don't finally understand the need for this erasure of style in its tangible, most coherent form. However much it grasps metaphorically at a less tangible if still apprehensible object of our experience of fiction, to speak of "quality of vision" does not adequately account for the concrete achievements of writers as stylists. However much I value Flaubert's "quality of vision" (which is a lot), it just seems to me manifestly obvious that reading Flaubert in English is not the same experience as reading him in French. Reading Virginia Woolf in French cannot be more than a necessary if barely sufficient substitute for those French speakers without English who want to read her work. While I am reasonably sure that the comic vision of Stanley Elkin would still be preserved for those reading his fiction in a translation, how in the world could this writer's style survive the crossing-over?

Near the end of The Delighted States, Thirlwell scales back the grandiosity of his claims about translation:

All through this book, I have been arguing that style is the most important thing, and survives its mutilating translations--that although the history of translation is always a history of disillusion, something survives. . . . (429)

Yes, of course something survives. What serious reader sadly restricted to one language (or even two or three) would claim otherwise? Certainly I wouldn't. But I'm comfortable with accepting that this "something" includes inspired storytelling or formal inventiveness or compelling characters, but not style except in a more or less successful approximation. To stretch "style" into "vision" or "theological belief" is way too misty and metaphysical for me. I'm willing to settle for style as irretrievably "linguistic," a writer's artful way with words.

Litblogs and Critblogs

The increase in numbers of what are still generally called "literary weblogs" has been really quite astonishing. When I started this blog 4 1/2 years ago, there were a few dozen such blogs, perhaps 15-20 of them blogs I tried to read regularly. (I still think of these as the "original" literary blogs, and many if not most of them are still around.) By now, there are so many literary weblogs, approaching all genres of writing, literary news and the publishing business, and the role of literary criticism and book reviewing from so many different angles and to so many different purposes that the very term "literary weblog" does seem hopelessly imprecise. And even if one wanted to keep up with all the blogs that concern themselves in one way or another with literature or criticism, that would now be almost impossible.

Some of the new blogs that have appeared in the last couple of years, in particular blogs such as Paper Cuts, The Book Bench, and The Book Room, all sponsored by various print publications, have not, in my opinion, contributed much to the development of the litblog as a medium, however. These blogs have only reinforced the most reductive and stereotyped views of the litblog as a source of superficial chitchat and literary gossip. Few of the posts on these blogs explore any issue in depth or examine any particular book with even cursory specificity. There is no attempt to provoke cross-blog critical discussion, either vis-a-vis specific posts or generically--of the blogs I have named, only The Book Bench even includes a blogroll, and it is very short and limited to the usual suspects. Whatever links that are provided are to the same old mainstream media stories to which so many other blogs are also linking and which, of course, ultimately only reinforces the supposed first-order authority of the kinds of print publication hosting the blogs in question. I don't know if I would go so far as to speculate that these newspaper and magazine-centered blogs are deliberately working to undermine the potential authority of literary blogs by creating examples demonstrating their vapidity, but the concept of the "litblog" they embody surely does trivialize what literary blogs have accomplished and might still accomplish.

Admittedly this concept was not created out of whole cloth by those operating these print-adjunct blogs. From the beginning, one model of the literary weblog has been the daily digest, brief entries on media-reported literary news along with links to specific news items or reviews or opinion pieces. Often enough, however, the blogger's underlying attitude toward the item at hand, the blogger's own literary sensibility, was really the point of such posts, and so even bloggers who stuck to the digest form usually managed to convey a point of view about the subject at hand--indeed, litblogs would never have captured the attention they did attract, prompting the appearance of these old-media blogs in response, if they hadn't offered a perspective on current books and other literay matters not to be found in existing media. Nevertheless, the literary blogosphere as a whole relatively quickly progressed beyond the daily digest, and while posting became less frequent it also became longer and more fully developed. If literary blogs have not exactly become substitutes for book reviews and critical journals, they have become sources of genuinely engaged literary discussion, ranging from conventional book reviews to both short and long-form critical analyses to full-blown scholarly essays. Combined with the ability through commenting and linking to extend critical discussion immediately and directly, the scope and the quality of literary blogs have allowed them, at least for me, collectively to supersede in interest and utility most of the remaining newspaper book review sections and those few magazines that still occasionally offer literary content. (I stopped reading scholarly essays published in academic journals a long time ago.)

As a way of noting the evolution of the literary weblog to its current form as a medium for serious literary inquiry (and as a way of calling attention to the retrograde assumptions of the old-media blogs), I have re-categorized my blogrolls to reflect the present state of the literary blog more accurately. I have made a basic distinction between what I would still call a "litblog" and the kind of more critically expansive blog I now think of as a "critblog." (Not all of the blogs listed under "critblogs" are focused only on literature.) The line I have drawn between the two is no doubt a little blurry in some instances, but the litblogs are the blogs that still fulfill some of the functions assumed by the first wave of literary weblogs but do so in a particularly enlivened and useful manner (I think them useful, at any rate), while the critblogs feature, either regularly or with some reliable frequency, posts explicitly intended as criticism. The latter may or may not be conventionally discursive literary criticism, but sheer length and adherence to the customs of critical writing are not the qualities I necessarily look for in a critblog. Quality of insight and/or specificity of analysis are what I hope to find. I will continue to identify blogs that exemplify these virtues and will add them to the blogroll as warranted.

And as a way of perhaps further contributing to the evolution of the litblog to the critblog and beyond, I am planning within a few months to inaugurate a new project that will, I hope, extend the reach of the kind of critical writing originating on blogs, the kind of writing to which I have mostly restricted myself on this blog, to encompass more formally-developed critical essays, specifically essays on contemporary American fiction. I intend to write some of the essays myself, but I would like to open up this new site (which will still be attached to The Reading Experience) to other contributors as well. However, unlike, say, Scott Esposito's The Quarterly Conversation--which has otherwise led the way in demonstrating what a web-based literary review can accomplish--I would like this site to focus not on new books but on books from the recent past (post-1980) that deserve additional close reading beyond the attention they received in their initial reviews, by writers who deserve careful consideration (perhaps more careful consideration than they've previously received) as writers whose work may last. At this point, the plan is for these essays to appear on an ongoing or rolling schedule rather than in separate "issues" so that the whole archive of posted essays would always be readily available. I am currently writing an essay on Russell Banks's Affliction, which will presumably be the first of such essays to appear, but I will have more information about this projected site in the very near future.

Finally, I have reconfigured my "literary criticism" blogroll to include in one place all of the non-blog websites I can find that offer reviews and criticism (not including newspaper book pages). The list contains both web-only publications and print publications that offer at least a significant portion of their content online. If there are other sites that might be added to the list, I would appreciate being notified of such.

The Inner Needs of Writers

There is much in Ron Silliman's recent post on the process of historical change in poetry with which I agree, and in fact I would extend most of what he says to include the history of all literary forms. Among his most salient points are that "the history of poetry is the history of change in poetry," that the critics of innovation in literary practice are themselves writers and critics likely to be swept away by the historical currents that favor innovation and are thus mostly engaging in "tantrums" over their own unavoidable fate, and that the "new" and the fashionable are not synonymous terms in our appreciation of the innovative in poetry (or fiction.).

Literature certainly is more the history of its own evolving forms than it is an assemblage of "great works," although I would substitue for "change" John Dewey's notion of "growth" as the inevitable outcome of artistic traditions that manage to extend themselves over time--"growth" not as simplistic "progress" but as the expansion of available approaches to the form, an increase of insight into the variety of its possibilities. Indeed, even if we were to consider literary history as the accumulation of great works, in most cases these works are great precisely because they represent some new direction taken by the form employed. Surely English drama was not the same after Shakespeare finished stretching its boundaries, nor was English narrative poetry (narrative poetry in general) after Paradise Lost. Although we now think of the realistic novel as the epitome of convention in fiction, there was of course a time when it was on the cutting edge of change and writers like Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Henry James were writing what was for the time experimental fiction.

Thus I am less willing than Ron to dismiss the "well-wrought urn" as a metaphor for aesthetic accomplishment in works of literature. A poem or novel may indeed be "well-wrought" without conforming to pre-established models. Perhaps the passage of time does allow us to see more clearly the craftedness of some works of art that at first seemed simply model-breaking, but ultimately I see no conflict between innovation in poetry or fiction and the skillful construction of individual poems, plays, short stories, or novels.

On the other hand, Ron is certainly correct in characterizing most of the critical resistance to change in literary forms as a kind of lashing-out against writing implicitly recognized as destined to be remembered precisely because it exposes most of the otherwise critically favored writers of the moment as aesthetically tame and unadventurous, tied to the critical nostrums of the day (which, especially with fiction, are typically not only aesthetically conservative, but often not really focused on aesthetic achievement at all but on what the writer allegedly has to "say" about prominent "issues"). American experimental fiction of the post-World War II era has been especially subjected to these "tantrums"--if anything they have only increased in intensity--concerted efforts to marginalize this fiction by accusing it of lacking seriousness of purpose, of indulging in games and jokes rather than sticking to straightforward storytelling, of striving after effects that turn out to be "merely literary." In my opinion, however, it will be the work of writers like John Hawkes, Robert Coover, and Gilbert Sorrentino that will be recognized as the indispensable fiction of this period, not that of the more celebrated but less formally audacious writers such as Bellow or Styron or Vidal.

Eventually almost all postwar writers whose work departs significantly from convention have come to be labeled "postmodernist," a term that has definable meaning but that also has been used as an aid in this lashing-out, a way to further disparage such writers both by lumping them together indiscriminately and by identifying their work as just another participant in literary fashion. Ron Silliman points out that a distinction can be made between fashion in the arts and the truly new:

Each art form has its own dynamic around issues such as form and change. For example, one could argue that the visual arts world, at least in New York & London, has become self-trivializing by thrusting change into warp drive because of the market needs of the gallery system. There, capital demands newness at a pace that hardly ever lets a shift in the paradigm marinate awhile. I seriously wonder if any innovation in that world since the Pop artists let in the found imagery of the mid-century commercial landscape has ever had a chance to settle in. That settling process seems to be an important part of the run-up in helping to generate the power of reaction, to motivate whatever comes next. The problem with the visual arts scene today is that innovation is constant, but always unmotivated.

Poetry has the advantage of not being corrupted by too much cash in the system. That ensures that change can occur at a pace that has more to do with the inner needs of writers as they confront their lives. . . .

The New York art world has become so dependent on "the latest thing" that aesthetic change becomes "unmotivated" except by the need for individual artists to enter the system that confers purpose on their work. And although fiction is probably more tied to the cash nexus than poetry, most serious literary fiction is much less so, and the degree of change and resistance to change, while perhaps somewhat less pure than in discussions of poetry, is largely determined by honest beliefs about the direction fiction ought to take.

In this context, to regard experimental fiction as "fashion" is essentially to believe there can be no "shift[s] in the paradigm" in the development of fiction, that the experimental must always represent an irritating deviation from the accepted unitary model of how fiction should be written. It forecloses the possibiltiy that the established paradigm might "shift" if something genuinely new were to appear and transform our assumptions about the nature of the novel and/or the short story. Even if it is allowed that the occasional genius comes along to produce work that stands out from the mainstream, such work is considered a singular achievement, a momentary departure from the otherwise settled paradigm granted only to the genius. The exceptional, extraordinary talent thus helps to preserve the status quo since no one else can be expected to rise to his/her level.

In reality, the "postmodern" period in American fiction came close to establishing a new paradigm insofar as it seemed to validate the experimental impulse behing modernism, its own even more radical experiments extending the reach of literary experiment beyond modernism and implicitly suggesting it can always be extended farther still. But ultimately experimental fiction can provide a paradigm only if it is one that rejects the creation of paradigms except in the loosest possible sense of the term--the model fiction writers should follow is the absence of a model. However desirable such a model might be in the cause of aesthetic freedom, it isn't likely to offer much stability to literary culture, and thus it was almost inevitable that some sort of reaction against the postmodern would set in to restore good critical order. The past thirty years or so has not seen a shift in paradigm but a reinforcement of conventional practices, a widespread return to narrative business as usual.

Such an embrace of convention--of the assumption that the art of fiction = storytelling, that the writer's job is to create characters who can be regarded as if they were persons, persons with "minds," etc.--can't really be said to be a part of the kind of dialectical process Ron Silliman describes. Postmodernism in fiction didn't "settle in" and then become the impetus for a new a refreshed practice but was considered a temporary aberration until writers could be brought back to producing "normal" fiction. Experimental writers have not disappeared altogether, but those sometimes still called "experiemental"--Lethem, Saunders, Wallace--are surely much less resolutely so, much more restrained, than Hawkes and Coover, et. al. Normal fiction is precisely what is taught to aspiring writers in most creative writing programs.

Literary change will continue to occur, of course, but in fiction it won't come in paradigm shifts but through the persistence of individual writers impatient with normal fiction. These fiction writers will be motivated by the need to preserve the integrity of their own work and by the desire to ensure that fiction has a purpose beyond providing the "book business" with a commerical product designed to be another entertainment option. Their work will continue to demonstrate that the aesthetics of fiction are manifested more in the continued reinvention of the form than in the successful reinscription of the existing form.

Localized

Many of the posts on this blog are concerned with what is loosely called "experimental" fiction. Some people object to this term, finding it either overly general or awkwardly clinical, conjuring up images of the novelist in a lab coat. I find the term problematic only in that I think all fiction should be experimental: no fiction writer should rest satisfied that prose fiction has settled into its final and most appropriate form such that only reiterations of the form with fresh "content" is needed. However, to the extent that "experimental fiction" denotes the effort explicitly to push at the limits previous practice has seemingly imposed on the possibilities of fiction as a literary form, I am comfortable enough with the label and see no reason to abandon it altogether.

At the same time, "experimental" does cover a very broad range of strategies and effects, and some distinctions between different kinds of literary experiment and between works manifesting experiment to different degrees could certainly be made. Just to consider "experiment" in fiction at the most general level of adherence to convention--convention understood as a definable feature that has come to make fiction recognizable to most readers as fiction--it is possible to distinguish between works that set out to transform our conceptions of the nature of fiction in toto, and those that focus in a more limited way on producing innovative changes on specific conventions. The former might be called "transgressive" experiments that overrun the extant boundaries observed by most readers, critics, and other writers, while the latter might be regarded as "local" experiments that challenge "normal" practice but do so from within the boundary that otherwise marks off the still-familiar from the disconcertingly new.

Novels like Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable or Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew would be good examples of the former, while Jeffrey DeShell's The Trouble With Being Born (FC2) is more appropriately considered as a local experiment. Readers of The Trouble With Being Born would probably find it accessible enough, a family chronicle that traces the lives of a husband and wife from their youth to their extreme old age. Its autobiographical roots are explicitly exposed, as the family is the DeShell family and the couple's only child is named Jeff, but the book's most provocative feature is undoubtedly the way in which the couple's story is related. The husband and wife tell their own stories in alternating first-person narratives, but while Mrs. DeShell's story is presented in reverse order, beginning with her affliction by dementia in old age and proceeding backwards into her childhood, Mr. DeShell's story proceeds in the opposite direction, from childhood to lonely old age. The two stories meet at numerous junctures, and the overall effect is to provide a convincing account of a mostly dysfunctional marriage.

The novel's twinned first-person narration spares us the kind of tedious psychologizing to which we would potentially be subjected through the use of a third-person narrator "going inside" the characters's heads in order to understand them, but it does pose a problem shared by other first-person narratives that do not make clear their source in a plausible narrative situation--the narrator committing his/her story to the page directly (albeit in any number of possible forms of notation), or speaking it directly to some identifiable audience. Both Mr. and Mrs. DeShell tell their stories in seemingly disembodied voices that represent neither their attempts to reckon directly through writing with the direction their lives have taken nor the recitation of their experiences before at least a potential audience. It is understandable that the author wished to explore these characters' sense of themselves through ventriloquizing their voices, but such an unmotivated mode of narration occasionally calls attention to itself in a way DeShell probably doesn't intend:

My fiftieth birthday. I don't look fifty. I'm driving Jewell's Firebird with her to meet Tommy the Rock at Mr. Z's, a nightclub in the Springs. Tommy the Rock will be sure to have some broads with him. Too bad Dominic is sick. I told Frances that I was going down to the Knights of Columbus, but I don't think she believed me. Screw her. She doesn't know fun. If she hadn't gotten so fat, maybe I'd be with her more often. She can watch the fireworks at home with Jeff. The two of them deserve each other. My wedding ring is in my pocket.

In a passage like this, DeShell is forced to use his narrator to present information so transparently and so implausibly (no one really says such things to oneself) that narrative continuity is broken. Since it seems to me that DeShell is ultimately attempting to maintain the illusion of realism in character and narrative voice, and is not indulging in postmodern tricks by calling attention to narrative artifice, this storytelling strategy can make suspension of disbelief difficult to grant.

Perhaps it was necessary to employ this style of narration in order to allow the characters' voices their necessary role both in the unfolding of their separate stories and in the larger story those stories together create. Both perspectives must be provided. And despite the awkwardness occasioned by the choice of point of view (and by the consistency of its application), the novel's aesthetic strategy essentially does succeed in making The Trouble With Being Born a compelling read and in chronicling the fortunes of what is probably an all-too-common American family. It succeeds in turning our notions of chronology and contiguity against themselves to create a locally satisfying narrative experiment, even if in the final analysis narrative itself as the central focus of interest in fiction is not challenged and the protocols of point of view are actually reinforced. Such a book won't revolutionize the art of fiction, but its does perhaps help remind readers that the requirements for creating this art are not fixed in place.

The Minds of Characters

The contributors to the blog OnFiction profess to be doing "research on the psychology of fiction." If we take this to encompass broadly the increasing popularity of "cognitive theory" and neuroscience in the analysis of literature and our response to literature, "psychology of fiction" attempts to describe our reaction to fictional characters as if those characters were real people with minds, who, as a recent post at OnFiction has it, provoke us to "wonder what they are up to." In this view of the reading experience, "we readers imagine ourselves into the minds of characters as we run the simulation which is the literary story." So do writers, which accounts for the reported instances of characters "exhibiting apparently autonomous agency" during the composing process.

As a reader, I have never "imagined myself into the minds of characters" while running "the simulation which is the literary story." Neither can I really believe that anyone else has done this. In the first place, in most fiction that to any significant degree asks us to consider the mental life of its characters, we are not encouraged to imagine ourselves "into" their minds. Their mental life is presented to us explicitly, often in the narrative mode called the "free indirect" method, sometimes directly through a stream of consciousness, or near stream of consciousness, point of view. We don't have to "wonder what they are up to" because the author/narrator makes it perfectly plain what they are up to. Perhaps it is the case that in some first-person narratives we are invited to read between, or behind, the lines the narrator literally offers us, resulting in a perception of the narrator's state of mind to which even he/she has little access, but I don't think this relatively special circumstance is what the "psychology of fiction" generally emphasizes.

Second, in what way does "the simulation which is the literary story" differ or depart from the literary story itself? Are we being told that the "literary story" exists as a way for us to imagine the characters in other situations, situations the story doesn't relate? That the story is merely an excuse for us to wonder abstractly about the characters in all of their "autonomy"? Or is it that the "simulation" we "run" is just the story itself and that when we "imagine ourselves into the minds of characters" we are simply envisaging what it would be like to be these characters involved in this story? If "character" is so overridingly important in a work of fiction that we are led to detach it from all other elements of the work and regard the characters as real people we might ask over for drinks, then why bother with the other elements of the story? The author could just send us a character sketch of his protagonist, whom we could then imagine in any circumstance we'd like. And while I do believe some readers project themselves into the situations in which fictional characters are portrayed, this has more to do with the operations of the readers' minds than those allegedly at work in the characters' minds. Such readers are more engaged with the story in which the characters appear than with the characters themselves, certainly more than they're connected to the "minds" of those characters.

Similarly, I'm sure that some writers do experience their characters exhibiting "autonomy," taking the narrative in directions the author didn't anticipate, but I doubt that very often this is a result of the author dwelling in the characters' "minds." In my own on-and-off career as a fiction writer, I have had characters wander off the plotted path, but never because I could read in their minds that they thought it best to do so. Either the character's voice seemed to provoke a change in plan, or the story itself prompted a change in character, or the character just didn't seem in general to be the sort of character who would do that rather than this. Realizing that a narrative needs to be readjusted because one's preconceptions about a character's role in it have been altered is an aesthetically sound decision, but it has very little to do with remaining alert to the "psychology of fiction."

If anything, a fixation on "character," even more reductively on the "inner life" of a character, only makes our response to the whole work of fiction more impoverished. The very best fiction, like the very best art in general, widens our perspective on the possibilities of the form as a form. It helps us enhance our experience of fiction by remaining alert to all of the artistic choices the writer has made. In John Dewey's words, "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." Isolating character as the most essential element in works of fiction potentially circumscribes our response to them, blinkers our awareness of the other aesthetic "operations" at work in the text. It inherently declares fiction to be this sort of thing--a way of meeting up with imaginary characters--rather than all the other things it might be. It renders stories and novels into case studies for psychologists rather than complex works of art.