The Reading Experience

Separation Anxiety

In this comment thread on my recent post defending James Wood against William Deresiewicz's critique of his aestheticism, Richard Crary claims to be confused by my distinction between reading within an always-present context and reading "for aesthetic purposes."

. . .nearly every post you put up gives readers the impression that you do read entirely for aesthetic purposes, while strongly giving the impression that you see aesthetic issues as somehow easily distinguished from others (political, etc). I think readers might be forgiven for repeatedly coming to the conclusion that you think context can and ought to be ignored altogether!

This seems as good an opportunity as any to try to clear up this confusion, which perhaps can be reduced to a lack of clarity about uses of the word "reading." In one of my own responses to Richard, I maintained that while "Aesthetic 'issues' are easily distinguished from others," it is nevertheless impossible to read "absent any consideration of context," since it "plays a part whether I like it or not." In the latter case, I am "reading" in the common, most literal sense of the term: encountering the text for the first time, reading it as innocently as I'll ever be able to, as purely for the experience of reading the words on the page as will ever likely be possible. When I'm reading in this way, "context" refers to all of the ideas, emotions, and experiences I bring to the reading experience, which indeed I couldn't discard even if I wanted to. (Among those experiences would be my previous experiences with this author, or with this kind of fiction, etc.)

But I can also engage in a "reading" of the text following some reflection on the initial reading, after consulting critical commentary on the text, and perhaps after re-reading the text itself, wholly or in part. (This is not quite the same thing as interpretation, which generally narrows the text's possibilities in order to pin down its "meaning"; the kind of reading I am describing is an attempt to expand those possibilities, to open up the text in order to make its palpable qualities more accessible.) It does seem to me that at this stage it is entirely possible to separate aesthetic "issues" from other issues on which one might want to focus attention and that, depending on the specificity of one's definition of "aesthetic," such a separation is not difficult. Some people might think this separation is undesirable, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

It's probably because I do often insist that the aesthetic qualities of a literary text ought to be at the forefront of the reader's initial encounter with it (notwithstanding the "context" within which this occurs, which nevertheless cannot be denied), and because my own preference as a critic is to concentrate on "aesthetic issues" that I am called an "asethete" and that I am accused of believing that reading can occur in a context-free zone. I don't mind the first, but the second assumes I am some sort of aesthetic ideologue willing to deny reality in order to keep my beliefs conceptually afloat.

I insist on this blog that we attend to the aesthetic prerogatives of literature because in today's literary culture, both academic and generalist, those prerogatives are so often denied in favor of sociological analysis or a concentration on what a writer has "to say." The formal and stylistic accomplishments of fiction especially are frequently dismissed as "merely literary." My perspective on literature has become a minority view, but just because this approach to literature and criticism has become unfashionable does not make it therefore wrong. I don't know if some form of aesthetic analysis will again become more acceptable, but even if it doesn't, I still intend to speak up as one of its proponents. Thus the sometimes emphatic manner in which I do often defend aesthetic criticism on this blog.

As an illustration of the way "aesthetic issues" can legitimately be trumped by "context," by political or cultural considerations, I would agree with Jacob Russell's comments on the subject of this previous post, James Wood: "It's the unexamined claim that the books he prefers more powerfully or more accurately represent "the real," the validity of which is not a matter that can be decided within the limits of aesthetics. It's that extra-aesthetic claim that generates economic, political and social implications." Although I think it is possible to have an aethetic preference for realism over its alternatives, and vice versa, James Wood unfortunately does not really support this preference "within" aesthetics, as Jacob puts it. It's at best a metaphysical preference for Wood, and his clinging to his metaphysical conception of the "real" as represented in fiction does make his criticism useful to the "status quo" for the "economic, political and social implications" to which Jacob alludes. I cannot myself overlook these implications in judging Wood's critical writing, however much I do admire his commitment to "close reading."

The Reader and the Page

John Lingan's essay on William Gaddis in the latest Quarterly Converstation is very good, one of the best analyses of Gaddis's work I've read recently. I particularly like this description of The Recognitions and JR:

Gaddis anticipated postmodern American literature’s obsessions with entropy and the “death of the author,” but he shared the high modernists’ attention to form. Like Joyce peppering Ulysses’s newsroom scene with capitalized headlines, Gaddis constructed The Recognitions and JR as mimetic of their subjects—the former is as bulging and ornate as the Flemish paintings that protagonist Wyatt Gwyon is paid to forge, and the latter is one continuous flood of voices, frequently unidentified, that recall either a stock ticker’s relentlessness or an overlapping teleconference. . . .

I also mostly agree with this characterization of Gaddis's work:

Just as his novels JR and A Frolic of His Own announce their subjects (”Money . . . ?” and “Justice?” respectively) in their opening sentences, William Gaddis’s career could have started with the question, “Work?” No single word better encapsulates the concerns and organizing metaphor for Gaddis’s artistic project, in which he chronicles the myriad ways that postwar industrial American culture devalues and drowns out individual expression in an endless barrage of information. His concerns were weighty—nothing less than the erosion of western culture and society—but Gaddis’s novels are ultimately saved from grim systemic coldness by his emphasis on work, which he defined strictly and defended with religious zeal. To Gaddis, work equaled an individual effort (best exemplified by the sympathetic and underappreciated artists of his first novels, The Recognitions and JR) to sort through the swarming cultural ephemera and create, with monastic persistence, something that no machine or business could adequately reproduce. Since Gaddis believed the two to be tantamount, his emphasis on the value of work was nothing less than a defense of the artistic impulse itself.

I don't think that Gaddis avoids "grim systemic coldness" simply through his depiction of work (a point on which I elaborate below), but that the "work" of art holds special value for him is clearly enough illustrated in his novels.

However, I can't really accept the implications of Lingan's conclusion about the "difficulty" of Gaddis's fiction:

The Recognitions and JR. . .are not books that function as the literary equivalent of a player piano. They are not “hot media,” to borrow one buzz term that Gaddis quoted in his National Book Award acceptance speech for A Frolic of His Own. Rather, they require effort, metaphorical reading between the lines, and ideally a little research, as evidenced by the encyclopedic website The Gaddis Annotations, devoted to annotations of the novels. They require, in other words, the readerly equivalent of a Protestant work ethic.

Gaddis is indeed one of those modern/postmodern authors whose writing is considered "difficult," requiring more effort than the casual reader is likely to expend. While it is true that books like The Recognitions, JR, and A Frolic of His Own call for a special kind of attention on the reader's part, an attention capable of reading not just between but around the lines of dialogue that comprise so much of these novels, I don't believe that referring to the act of reading Gaddis as encompassing "the readerly equivalent of a Protestant work ethic" is ultimately very useful or very accurate in commending his novels to potential readers. It suggests that, as the "last Protestant," his "work" privileges moral critique over art, is more ponderous matter than engaging aesthetic manner, and I don't think either is true.

Lingan quotes Gaddis himself protesting this austere view of his fiction:

. . .I think the reader gets satisfaction out of participating in, collaborating, if you will, with the writer, so that it ends up being between the reader and the page. . . . Why did we invent the printing press? Why do we, why are we literate? Because of the pleasure of being all alone, with a book, is one of the greatest pleasures.

The perception of Gaddis as a moralist depends largely on construing his fiction as essentially a kind of satire of what Lingan calls "postwar industrial American culture." There is undeniably an element of satire in Gaddis's novels but in my view to settle for that in responding to these novels is to settle for the least possible interest one might find in them. Satire is ultimately a one-channel mode of discourse: the satirist mocks, and the reader is duly edified. There is no "participation," no "collaboration" on the reader's part--except to agree that the subject at hand is worth mocking. When Gaddis says that what his fiction offers "ends up being between the reader and the page," he is asserting that it provides a much more complex reading experience, one that is itself the source of "pleasure" and that transcends the lesser value to be found in satirical correction.

However much fiction like Gaddis's challenges some complacent reading habits, it does so in the service of expanding our capacity to read abundantly, and thus our capacity to take "pleasure" in what we read. An assumption that seems to be held by those who decry "difficulty" in fiction is that the ideal reading experience is one in which little is asked of the reader, who judges the value of the experience by how quickly we can get from one sentence to another, one paragraph to the next. A reading experience is worthwhile if reading is in effect concealed, the reader made to forget that words are interceding between him/her and the "story," that a work of fiction is ultimately a verbal composition the patterns and internal logic of which are more immediately the object of the reader's engagement than any "content."

But I think many readers implicitly reject this notion of reading, and many others could be led to do so if confronted by a text whose initial difficulty--which is to say unfamiliarity--is eventually ameliorated by the work itself, which teaches us how to read it as we go, and which proves to be as aesthetically pleasing as any more transparently "enjoyable" conventional narrative--indeed, perhaps even more so, since this pleasure has been earned more rigorously. Gaddis's novels are of this type, it seems to me, and fans of these novels are not just responding to their invocation of a "work ethic" but are finding the work exerted amply rewarded by the subtleties of effect that become available and by the very heightened attention that makes these effects more visible. Both the volubility evoked by Gaddis's emphasis on talk and the silences such talk obscures, the reader asked to make those silences speak, act to make Gaddis's fiction very active, and thus very entertaining in its own way. This is what makes his fiction appealing to most of his readers, not the prospect of gaining glory through hard work.

See also this previous post on Gaddis.

What Happened

In what is unfortunately one of the few available reviews of Rosalind Belben's impressive novel, Our Horses in Egypt, Stevie Davies calls it "a radical experiment in narrative." I think this is probably an overstatement, but there is certainly more going on in this novel, both structurally and stylistically, than might at first seem apparent.

Its twinning of narrative strands, one chronicling the the experiences of a literal "war horse" conscripted into cavalry service during World War, the other narrating its owner's attempt to track it down in Egypt several years after the war, is not particularly innovative, although it is brought off effectively. And while in effect assigning the role of protagonist to a horse does allow Belben to avoid several worn-out devices still being trotted out (so to speak) in so many contemporary novels, the notion of a story centered on a non-human "character" is also by no means especially "radical." However, Belben's novel does present itself in ways most readers are likely to find distinctive, even if they are otherwise primarily engaged by the emotion-laden story Belben wants to tell.

Most noticeable is Belben's prose style, especially the pervasive, staccato-like dialogue featured in the sections of the novel dedicated to the quest by Griselda Romney, whose own husband was killed in the war, to find Philomena, the horse requisitioned at the beginning of the war who apparently survived it. Here's a representative sample:

"In the old days, we managed."

"These fellows you found. . ."

"They said they knew what they were about."

"You're so gullible."

"I shan't be again. I had to chloroform myself when Georgie was born."

"It didn't put you down."

"How could it, a whiff or two! I was glad of it."

"Poor Bunny."

"Oh, oh, don't!"

It isn't that this conversation is disconnected or incoherent that makes it seem so elliptical. It undoubtedly makes perfect sense to the speakers, and careful reading can certainly establish the context in which these remarks are being offered, even if such context does become clearer and the subject of conversation somewhat more comprehensible in a retrospective reading of this passage. (In this way, Our Horses in Egypt encourages a more attentive and recursive kind of reading, which, in my view, need not be a burden and can ultimately enhance the reading experience.) The cumulative effect of this dialogue is a sense of thoroughgoing fidelity to the speech patterns of these characters as rooted in country, region, class, and time period. It is an actual example of "realism" unencumbered and applied with great rigor, and it is likely to unmoor the assumptions of those readers tied to a more conventionalized, less ascetic understanding of the role of "realistic" dialogue.

The second striking feature of Belben's novel is perhaps best illustrated in the section narrating Philomena's experiences in the Great War. While there is a narration of these events, it also comes shorn of rhetorical embellishment and narrative elaboration:

The Turkish machine-gunners played very freely across the Dorsets' front. Major Sandley wilted in the saddle. The dust raised was shot through with rosy rays of sun. Burgess sailed through the air, and was himself winged like a flapper. Riderless horses heaved themselves up, and thudded on with the rest. Philomena was so distracted (she had a curious view) she didn't hear the whump when, at four hundred yards, the files closed for impact and Corky was hit in the neck. She didn't pay any attention to his snort. But she saw the white of his eye. He was stubborn.

All of the narrative/expository passages in the novel proceed in this way, almost as if story were being built by accretion, storytelling replaced by listing: then this happened, then this, then this. Perhaps because Our Horses in Egypt is a historical novel, such a technique seems only the more appropriate, more faithful to the historical "record" (even when incidents and interactions have been imagined) as simply what happened, the essence of the historical past without the unnecessary intrusion of the storytelling gestures so many historical novelists seem to need.

Belben's listing strategy extends even to her sometimes idiosyncratic punctuation:

Nine yeomanry regiments had been withdrawn from Palestine. "The Bull" had lost, also, two infantry divisions; five and a half seige batteries; nine more British battalions and five machine-gun companies. He had been deprived of 60,00 battle-hardend troops. Infantry divisions arrived from Mesopotamia and India; and their transport drivers had to be trained. . . .

The semi-colons here seem to function not as a marker of sentence boundaries but as just one more way to extend the list of details associated with the withdrawal. Our Horses in Egypt, no matter how accurate its rendition of the British victory in Palestine, is finally still a rendition, its narrative method as much artifice as any other, but its triumph is perhaps in the way it skillfully employs its artifice while simultaneously appearing to conceal it. History seems to lie before us, however much it has been conjured up by a particular kind of verbal manipulation.

So skillful is this manipulation that, despite the deliberate poverty of means in the novel's construction, Our Horses in Egypt still tells an affecting story, both in the half concerning Griselda's finally hopeless effort to bring Philomena back alive and in that focusing on the Palestine campaign. And what could have been a smarmy resolution in which Griselda finally does find Philomena and spirits her back to England to live out her days in tranquility becomes instead a bitterly appropriate portrayal of a Philomena brought to ruin through overwork, beyond rescue and suitable only to be euthanized in a token act of pity. This is a novel that risks sentimentality at every stage in its development but that avoids it through unfaltering artistry.

ADDENDUM See also this interview with Belben by Mark Thwaite, and this post by Steve Mitchelmore.

Context and Tradition

Jonathan Mayhew notes that

To understand Creeley, say, you would have to know about Williams, Pound, Duncan, Olson, Levertov. Also Ginsberg and O'Hara and Lowell--representing directions he didn't take. Maybe also Thomas Hardy and some of Creeley's other favorite British poets. Some medieval lyrics. The understanding of Creeley within his context and tradition entails a very dense and nuanced positioning.

It strikes me (and this is not a new observation with me) that we tend to read "foreign" poets in a quite different way. We never see them against the backdrop of their mediocre contemporaries who never get translated. Usually it is only one or two poets from any given country who are at all known at any given time, so there is rarely a sense of Creeley's "company," the social network of poets. The poet translated stands pretty much alone.

While I ultimately believe that a work of literature can and should stand "pretty much alone" in the reader's immediate aesthetic response to the work, the provocation to which remains, in my opinion, the primary ambition of poetry and fiction under any plausible conception of their "literary" status, to "understand" a poet's, or a fiction writer's, body of work more broadly surely does require--or at least certainly is enhanced by--locating it within the writer's "context and tradition." Although this context includes both historical context and the web of direct and indirect influences, ultimately it encompasses the writer's particular relationship to his/her native language and the set of practices with which he/she most closely identifies. Such context can be "dense" indeed, tracing out its dominion not just "nuanced" but a potentially never-ending task.

For those of us who must read "international" writers in translation, we unfortunately must for the most part make do without this context. The text "stands alone" in a way that deprives us of a linguistic foundation that would give our reading experience solidity. Combining this with the vagaries of translation as part of the "book business," which leave us without knowledge of the "social network" to which Jonathan alludes, in effect puts most American readers, at least, in a position of ignorance when assessing poems and novels outside the "English" context. This problem is arguably more acute with poetry, which embodies an especially intimate connection to "context and tradition" and which is translated even less frequently than fiction, but I think the problem exists with fiction as well. Perhaps I could simply pick up one of the Roberto Bolano novels that now seems to be on everybody's reading list and read it with adequate appreciation, but I really doubt it. While the "context" provided by the "tradition" of Latin American fiction is probably more accessible to American readers than many other international literatures, somehow it doesn't seem likely that the context in which the Chilean Bolano was nourished is interchangeable with that in which the Colombian Marquez came to literary maturity. That doesn't mean I won't read Bolano, but before I do so I am trying to understand as much of his "context" as I can from the accumulating number of reviews and critical essays about his work now becoming available.

Of course, I'll never be able to acquire all the context I need simply from reading reviews and gleaning what I can from them. This is where someone like Jonathan Mayhew, who is himself a scholar of Spanish literature (specifically modern Spanish poetry), could play a valuable role in making translated work meaningful to nonspecialist readers, if publishers would allow him to do it. In my experience, most translations come without any context at all, except occasionally through a translator's introduction that usually doesn't go very far (through no fault of the translator, I'm sure, who has to fight the effort among American publishers to hide the fact of translation in the first place). Scholars and critics fluent in the "context and traditon" of the national literature at hand, ideally of the specific writer in question, could provide, through preface and appendices, relevant commentary that would surely illuminate some of the darkness in which we are now asked to approach translated work. Ideally, some sort of textual commentary (made as nondisruptive as possible) could also be included. I realize that this kind of apparatus is usually reserved for "classic" works intended for classroom use, but I don't think we can pretend that translations shorn of such support are sufficient for presenting the work, poetry or fiction, of translated authors, especially authors to whom we come completely unfamiliar.

Even if such aids to reading were routinely offered, however, we would still fall woefully short of understanding the "company" every writer keeps. Only the kind of immersion in a national language that fluency in that language makes possible would allow us to approach such understanding. And as long as only "one or two poets from any given country" (perhaps a few more fiction writers) are available even in translation, we'll get no more than a similacrum of familiarity with either individual writers or the "social network" to which they are connected. On the other hand, few of us put forth the effort to comprehend the literary context from which writers in our own language emerge, which, as Jonathan's brief survey of Robert Creeley's influences attests, can be a daunting task in itself. Whether this makes one's dependence on translation for access to so many important writers seem less, or more, futile is a hard question to answer.

ADDENDUM Miriam Burstein makes some useful remarks about this subject.

Beyond the Literary

I'm astonished to be saying so, but William Deresiewicz's review of James Wood's How Fiction Works provokes me to come to Wood's defense. Although Deresiewicz correctly points out the narrowness of Wood's conception of realism, ultimately he is less concerned with Wood's near-dogmatism on this subject than with what he considers the narrowness of Wood's approach to criticism. According to Deresiewicz, a great critic should exhibit "not great learning, or great thinking, or great expressive ability, or great sensitivity to literary feeling and literary form. . .but a passionate involvement with what lies beyond the literary and creates its context." In other words, literary criticism should not concentrate too strenuously on the "merely literary."

James Wood's greatest strength as a critic is that he does not spend much time and space on "what lies beyond the literary." He certainly could not be accused of lacking "a passionate involvement" with literary texts--even if he can be charged with restricting his involvement too exclusively to a certain kind of text--but to his credit he devotes most of his attention to a close reading of the fiction he considers and leaves what's "beyond" to those less interested in literature than he is.

According to Deresiewicz, the exemplars of modern criticism are the so-called New York critics, specifically Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe:

Wilson, who wrote about everything during his teeming career, from politics to popular culture, socialist factions to Native American tribes, warned about "the cost of detaching books from all the other affairs of human life." Trilling's whole method as a critic was to set the object of his consideration within the history of what he called "the moral imagination." Kazin, whose criticism, like [Elizabeth] Hardwick's, focused on the literature of this country in particular, sought to illuminate nothing less than "the nature of our American experiences." The goal of Howe's criticism, he said, was "the recreation of a vital democratic radicalism in America." The New York critics were interested in literature because they were interested in politics, culture, the moral life and the life of society, and all as they bore on one another. They placed literature at the center of their inquiry because they recognized its ability not only to represent life but, as Matthew Arnold said, to criticize it--to ask questions about where we are and how where we are stands in relation to where we should be. They were not aesthetes; they were, in the broadest sense, intellectuals.

With the possible exception of Wilson (who did indeed write about many subjects but whose essays on literary works were attentive to form and style and did mark him as, in part, an "aesthete"), Wood is a much better critic than any of these writers. Trilling is one of the most overrated critics of the 20th century, unwilling as he was to consider works of literature as anything other than what even his acolyte Leon Wiseltier describes protectively as "records of concepts and sentiments and values," apparently unable to describe "the moral imagination" except in platitudes. Kazin is simply hopeless, a truly awful critic whose essays and books on literary topics are simply useless to anyone interested in criticism that might enhance the reading experience. On Native Grounds is a bloated assemblage of historical generalizations mostly about writers, not writing. It's full of "remarks" about literature but no actual criticism. Like Trilling, Kazin bypasses the literary in order to arrive at banalities about "the nature of our American experiences." Howe is somewhat better--he does often enough really examine the texts on which he is pronouncing--but why would anyone want to rely for insight into literary texts on a critic who confesses he is most interested in "the recreation of a vital democratic radicalism in America"?

It's really rather amazing that Deresiewicz seems to believe that the approach to criticism represented by the New York critics has somehow been lost. In reality, criticism that obsesses about "politics, culture, the moral life and the life of society" is the dominant mode of criticism today, especially in academe and even more especially among so-called "intellectuals." These critics condescend to put "literature at the center of their inquiry because they recognize its ability not only to represent life but. . . to ask questions about where we are and how where we are stands in relation to where we should be," blah, blah, blah. James Wood stands out as a critic willing to challenge this tedious preoccupation with "context" and to make an "inquiry" into the literary nature of literature his "center" rather than the intellectual pomposity of "questions about where we are," questions that for Deresiewicz's preferred kind of critic take precedence over all that "aesthetic" fluff, finally over literature itself. In my opinion, it is all in Wood's favor that "what has happened in England since the end of World War II--anything that has happened in England since the war, politically, socially or culturally--simply doesn't enter into his thinking," and a testament to the force of his style, sensibility, and, yes, learning that he has managed to become widely known as a critic through publication in magazines that otherwise insist on relevance to politics and "the life of society."

Some of the responsibility for casting Wood in this particular sort of negative light undoutedly lies with the magazine publishing Deresiewicz's artice, The Nation. Left-wing editors, journalists, and "intellectuals" have always been particularly suspicious of "aesthetes," of writers and artists who emphasize the formal elements of their work and are too far "removed from commerce with the dirty, human world." Indeed, one hardly ever finds in The Nation reviews of fiction or poetry that isn't either obviously politically intentioned or can't be made to seem so. (Mostly, it has increasingly seemed to me, the magazine just doesn't review fiction or poetry much at all.) Attacking James Wood as a pointy-headed aesthete is a convenient way for the magazine to restate the long-standing "progressive" disdain for art in any of its non-partisan manifestations. I don't question that Deresiewicz believes all the things he says about Wood's failure to engage with the world "beyond the literary," but his conception of the role of both literature and criticism is clearly enough consistent with the Left's utilitarian attitude toward both.

Deresiewicz observes that Wood "ignores the meanings that novelists use [their] methods to propose. . . Wood can tell us about Flaubert's narrator or Bellow's style, but he's not very curious about what those writers have to say about the world." This actually makes me feel reassured about James Wood's prominence in current literary criticism. At least there is one critic with access to high-profile print publications who knows it isn't the novelist's job to "propose" anything and focuses his attention on writers' art rather than on what they allegedly have "to say."

Energies Significant for Experience

Although I frequently enough critique the practice of "realism" in fiction (behind which is usually some unsustainable theory about the adequacy of fiction in representing "real life"), I actually have no issue with realism itself, the centrality of which is finally unavoidable. As John Dewey explains it:

Taking my stand, then, upon the connection of esthetic effect with qualities of all experience as far as any experience is unified, I would ask how art can be expressive and yet not be imitative or slavishly representative, save by selecting and ordering the energies in virtue of which things act upon us and and interest us? If art is in any sense reproductive, and yet reproduces neither details nor generic features, it necessarily follows that art operates by selecting those potencies in things by which an experience--nay experience--has significance and value. Elimination gets rid of forces that confuse, distract, and deaden. Order, rhythm and balance, simply means that energies significant for experience are acting at their best.

Art must select "those potencies in things by which an experience. . .has signifance and value." That is, all art begins in "reality," but it is reality as mediated by "experience" and then further refined into "potencies" that have "significance and value." Art encompasses the "real"--where else could the artist look?--but does not settle for the merely "reproductive." This strands the artist in the "imitative or slavishly representive" when what is needed is the "order, rhythm and balance" to which aesthetic creation aspires. Yet, the aesthetic implicity retains its "connection" with the "qualities of all experience" even as it "gets rid of forces that confuse, distract, and deaden."

How could it be otherwise? How might an artist really evade "life," even if he/she wanted to? Where do any of us proceed except through experience?

Dewey continues:

The term "ideal" has been cheapened by sentimental popular use, and by use in philosophic discourse for apologetic purposes to disguise discords and cruelties in existence. But there is a definite sense in which art is ideal--namely, the sense just indicated. Through selection and organization those features that make any experience worth having as an experience are prepared by art for commensurate perception. There must be, in spite of all indifference and hostility of nature to human interests, some congruity of nature with man or life could not exist. In art the forces that are congenial, that sustain not this or that special aim but the processes of enjoyed experience itself, are set free. That release gives them ideal quality. For what ideal can man honsestly entertain save the idea of an environment in which all things conspire to the perfecting and sustaining of the values occasionally and partially experienced?

I am somewhat uncomfortable with Dewey's use of terms like "congenial" and "enjoyed experience." They come too close to suggesting that art is an escape, a reduction of experience as transformed by art to the peaceful and the happy when in fact (as Dewey frequently acknowledged) experience as rendered in and through art can be violent and disturbing. Still, it's the "ideal" quality of art that can shape such experiences into the kind of "order" that makes them not just tolerable, not just congenial or enjoyable, but at times exhilirating, ecstatic. To just "reproduce" the real is not sufficient to provoke such a response. It takes an aesthetic act that, while anchored to "real" experience, purifies that experience so that we might have access to "values" only "occasionally and partially experienced" in our real lives.

Deserving Little Praise

In the New York Times recently, Joe Queenan acknowledges that "the vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books deserve little praise." Queenan proceeds as if this were a revelation of a carefully-guarded secret, but anyone who reads newspaper book review sections with any frequency knows that they are filled with reviews that are not just reflexively laudatory but are rhetorically empty in every way that might otherwise qualify them as "criticism." Plot summary substitutes for analysis, effusive approval for critical judgment, nitpicking for reasoned objection.

Queenan believes this happens because "Reviewers tend to err on the side of caution, fearing reprisals down the road" or "because they generally receive but a pittance for their efforts, they tend to view these assignments as a chore and write reviews that read like term papers or reworded press releases churned out by auxiliary sales reps." While neither of these explanations speaks well of American book reviewing--even though Queenan does try to make excuses for it--I believe the simplest explanation goes even farther in clarifying the problem with newpaper book reviews: Honest criticism can't be found in these pages because criticism itself can't be found there, for reasons that are inherent to the medium.

Newspaper book reviews exist as extensions of "lifestyle" reporting. Some books also provide more refined grist to the conventional newsreporting mill, but in either case reviews function not as instances of literary criticism, not even in its most limited gereralist mode, but as sources of information, sometimes as "stories" in their own right. Since most readers of lifestyle journalism undoubtedly want mostly feel-good stories (negative stories only get in the way of "lifestyle" contentment), it only makes sense to provide book reviews, book coverage in general, that portrays the "bookworld" as full of pretty nice stuff. Anyone who thinks that real criticism--either as the serious examination of literary works in general or as the frank assessment of any particular "current book"--can be found in such coverage just hasn't come to terms with the shallow and complacent practices of contemporary journalism.

In the most recent issue of The Jewish Quarterly, Tadzio Koelb makes a similar point concerning the adulatory reception of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française:

Whichever approach reviewers of Suite Française took — whether they followed the ‘lost book by dead writer’ angle, or played the French guilt card — they all used the limited space left after biography to indulge in fulsome but often strangely detached praise. In a perfect example of the abdication of critical responsibility in exchange for the more sensational copy to be had from Némirovsky’s biography, many reviewers used the language of the marketing material (e.g., ‘… hailed as a masterpiece …’, Financial Times; ‘hailed as a lost masterpiece’, The Times; ‘… hailed …as “a masterpiece…”’, The Scotsman). Some reviewers compared Némirovsky to great writers (to Tolstoy in the Saturday Guardian; to Chekhov in the New Statesman). Others, however, preferred to note that Némirovsky herself mentioned Tolstoy in her journals (see reviews in the London Review of Books, for example, or the Telegraph Magazine) or wrote a biography of Chekhov (as in the Evening Standard or the New Statesman) and let the implication sink in.

Both the sensationalism and the emphasis on biography, as well as "the fulsome but often strangely detached praise," to be found in the reviews of Némirovsky’s unfinished novel are entirely representative of the kind of attention works of fiction especially are accorded in newspaper book sections. Only books that will satisfy readers' desire for "quality," or that can be made to seem such through the reviewer's hyped-up language, are reviewed in the first place. Appropriate commentary then becomes an issue of finding the right kind of perfunctory praise, in some cases an emphasis on the "sensational copy" that occasionally accompanies this or that book.

I partially blame academic criticism for the dismal state of generalist book reviewing. First the wholesale retreat of criticism behind the walls of academe and then the virtual abandonment of text-based literary criticism for the treatment of literary texts as occasions for social, historical, and theoretical analysis left serious readers with few other organs of literary discussion than newspapers and a handful of magazines. These organs have been dominated by literary journalists more attuned to the protocols of journalism than to those of literature, and by writers who proceed according to the precautions outlined by Queenan. The paradoxical result is that now criticism exists neither in the academy nor in mainstream print publications. (Which is one reason that someone like James Wood, all of his shortcomings notwithstanding, has acquired the prominence he has. As someone who both closely reads and does so in accessible language, he's such an anomaly.)

Némirovsky's Suite Française is a book that could have used some actual literary criticism, by critics (maybe even "scholars") rather than "book reviewers." Such critics might have been able to explicate the novel more rigorously and with a more informed perspective on its historical, national-literary, and biographical contexts. Tazdio Koelb maintains that for fiction to be examined adequately on its own merits "we will have to resurrect the critic." I agree, but I don't see how this will be possible from within the existing conventions of either book reviewing or academic analysis.