The Reading Experience

Criteria for Literary Value

Lev Grossman has seen the future of fiction in the digital age and has come back to tell us about it:

Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer--electronic books aren't bound by physical constraints--and they'll be patchable and updatable, like software. We'll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don't linger on the language; you just click through. We'll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.

None of this is good or bad; it just is. The books of the future may not meet all the conventional criteria for literary value that we have today, or any of them. But if that sounds alarming or tragic, go back and sample the righteous zeal with which people despised novels when they first arose. They thought novels were vulgar and immoral. And in a way they were, and that was what was great about them: they shocked and seduced people into new ways of thinking. These books will too. Somewhere out there is the self-publishing world's answer to Defoe, and he's probably selling books out of his trunk. But he won't be for long.

There's much about Grossman's analysis that is self-contradictory: If reading quickly will be encouraged by electronic reading, why would novels get longer? If online "readers" are so averse to language, why won't they just eventually gravitate entirely to purely visual communication or entertainment, as has happened already in the transferal of interest from books to film and television? What's a more "high-speeed" narrative than one without words at all? And unless Grossman sees a new form emerging from the electronic maelstrom--not prose fiction but something else--then no Daniel Defoe will appear, since Defore helped create prose fiction itself, did much more than just call attention to himself. What Grossman describes is simply a continuation of "fiction" as we know it, only stupider. It isn't a new genre of literature, only the same one published in different ways.

Lev Grossman's abilities as seer aside, however, something like the transformed publishing environment he evokes is likely to obtain in the not-too-distant future. "Old-school" publishing will continue to fade from relevance, perhaps disappear altogether, to be replaced by less heirarchy-driven modes of publication. Most of the current gatekeepers will find their gates disassembled. The current of choices already confronting the reader of fiction will become a torrent.This new dispensation is likely to strike many of us as chaotic--Grossman is being disingenuous when he writes that "None of this is good or bad," since he surely knows most of his readers judge it to be bad indeed--especially those of us who want some of those "conventional criteria for literary value" to survive.

What Grossman apparently didn't take away from his glimpse into the future (perhaps because he fears his own place as a print-based critic will simply be washed away) is any sense of the role literary criticism might play in counteracting the New Chaos. I think it will have signficant influence on the development of democratized "literary culture," arguably even more influence than criticism now has on print-centered literary culture, since an infrastucture of critblogs already exists and already focuses its attention more widely on marginalized books and presses than print book reviews ever did. Cybercriticism will probably go a long way toward meliorating the chaos lurking beneath Lev Grossman's account, even if such criticism doesn't exactly duplicate the practices of newspaper book reviews, magazines, and the few remaining print journals. There will necessarily be a less uniform focus on the same few new titles, fewer exercises in biographical speculation masquerading as criticism, fewer critical essays that are more about the critic than the work ostensibly at issue. But otherwise there's no reason why web criticism can't carry out the sorting process in which criticism has always been engaged. The worthwhile will be separated from the worthless, the most challenging work will be identified while the jejune and the formula-riven will be duly ignored. Maybe there will be more books to keep track of, but most of them will be dispensable, anyway, and many more blogs and websites will be around to do the sorting than ever was the case with print criticism.

If I'm being overoptimistic and literary criticism fails to adapt itself effectively to these changed circumstances, the disarray implied in Grossman's speculations won't really register much, since fiction itself will no longer matter to anyone.

Catch and Release

On the one hand, Peter Markus's Bob, or Man on Boat is a welcome departure from most debut novels in that it is not some form of bildungsroman, or more loosely a disguised memoir, a perfunctorily fictionalized version of the author's youthful experiences (more precisely, of the author's experience of youth). Nor is it, like most literary fiction, whether a first novel or the latest mid-career production, a mostly recognizable variation on conventional narrative or psychological realism.

Indeed, a reader expecting a conventional first novel will surely realize after only a few pages of Bob that this is not one, that, in terms of plot development, it is a novel that isn't going to go much beyond the delineation of the character and situation named in the title. The portrayal of Bob and his boat could perhaps be said to reach inward--although this is done through concentration and indirection, not through the tedium of the "free indirect" method--as well as to expand outward and around Bob in concentric circles of thinly-layered exposition, but it could hardly be said to ever really push forward into a plotted narrative. Just as Bob himself, a fisherman, generally sticks to one spot, where he knows the fishing is good, this novel remains anchored in its narrator's mostly static perceptions of Bob, with whose piecemeal revelations we will have to be content.

On the other hand, experimental fictions that try to dispense with story and character development in their conventional form run the risk of simply alienating the reader if they don't substitute for them some alternative strategy or technique that engages the reader's attention and to an extent, at least, satisfies the need for "entertainment," if only in the narrowest sense as "interest," most readers bring to works of fiction. Often this substitution takes place as the manipulation of language in odd or surprising ways, the use of "style" to create or even replace "form." Bob, or Man on Boat is a novel of this kind, but, unfortunately, in my view it doesn't really manage to play its language game with sufficient vigor or dexterity to redeem its otherwise commendable resolve to avoid the usual practices associated with fiction. It is, on the most immediate level, not much fun to read, and this problem originates not from the novel being "difficult"--it is in fact a very quick read--but from its rather unimaginative simplicity.

Although practically any brief excerpt from the book would do as illustration, this passage does exemplify both its stylistic approach and the limitations of that approach:

The fish, unlike the sun, listen to Bob.

When the fish hear Bob singing to them, singing to them through the darkness of the river, the fish can't help but take a bite: of Bob's son, of the bait that Bob is fishing with.

Sometimes, Bob takes his fishing hook and Bob digs out the eye of a fish to use this fish's eye for bait.

Most of the time, though, Bob baits his hooks with mud.

Bob is a mud man.

Some men who fish for fish fish with minnows or worms.

We call these fishing men worm men and minnow men.

We call this kind of bait live bait.

But live bait never lives long.

Live bait usually dies before it's eaten.

Which is why Bob fishes with mud.

The most obvious features of such writing are, of course, the arrangement of sentences into what seem at first to be something closer to lines of verse than to prose, the deliberate repetion of words--Bob, fish, bait, mud--the simplicity of word choice in general. It is somewhat reminiscent of Gertrude Stein, but where Stein's sentences break down syntactical sense, and in doing so paradoxically draw more attention to the sentence as sentence, as a unit of composition, Markus's approach simply breaks down the paragraph into its individual sentences without otherwise questioning their ultimate connections in an expository chain. Combined with its focus of attention--baiting a hook--such language is not only more prosaic than poetic, it winds up emphasizing the least compelling element of traditional prose fiction, namely exposition and its obsessive scene-setting, which in this novel threatens to become almost endless. It might be possible to focus on exposition as a substitute for narrative and still make such a work lively, but in this case the information we are gradually provided about Bob and his life as a fisherman just isn't of sufficient interest to keep the fiction afloat (so to speak).

In this context, the repetion of words comes off as labored, the unstudied syntax robotic and enervating, making even such a short novel something of a chore to read. In his review of Bob at The Brooklyn Rail, Joseph Salvatore claims of Markus's work that

The integrity inherent in Markus’s simple structure. . .is deceptively powerful, often leaving the reader in a hypnotic swoon. It is through the accumulation of so few words, their repetition and syntactic arrangement and re-arrangement that a kind of linguistic alchemy takes place. Inside the blast furnace of Markus’s prose, language gets smelted down and reconstituted. Words we assumed to have fixed meaning slowly begin to lose meaning, begin to take on new sound and new sense, and, finally, return to a meaning that has been enriched with new alloying elements, both uncanny and astounding.

All I can say is that although this might sound good in theory, in practice, at least as embodied in Bob, or Man on Boat, it doesn't quite work out. The arrangments and re-arrangements just get bogged down in their own aimlessness and the "alchemy" never happens. Words don't so much get "smelted down" as lost in a processing loop, and they don't really enrich themselves through repetition but simply become repetitive and don't accumulate as much as they cancel themselves out in a linguistic haze. Sometimes the postulate through which a work of experimental fiction is supposedly to be understood just can't overcome the ennui with which the work is actually experienced.

Unlike Che Elias's West Virginia, a novel which also strips fiction down to the effects of language and its rearrangements, and in which language truly does get "smelted down and reconstituted," Bob, or Man on Boat isn't going to transform anyone's expectations of what fiction might be like if taken beyond the conventional. The language of West Virginia roils in conflict with itself, setting off sparks of energy. For the most part, Bob's language just hangs there limply.

Selectivity

In a post discussing his list of "Best American Fiction, 1968-1998," D.G. Myers makes this assertion:

Literature just is a selection of masterpieces. There is no getting around this obstacle. The problem is what criteria of selection you are going to use.

I really can't imagine a more reductive and, especially for a literary scholar who professes to love literature, a more implicitly dismissive view of the value of literature and literary study. It's all about choosing up sides and announcing that your "criteria" are better than the other side's?

That "literature" is determined by selection--ideally, in Myers's case, by scholars, but presumably by whomever--would surely come as a surprise to all those writers who thought their own efforts to define and redefine the "literary" through their work had something to do with the way "literature" is received. Apparently literature has nothing to do with reflection on how a work of fiction or poetry might be created, or how it might appropriately be read, nothing with determining how literature differs from other kinds of writing, with the possibilities of language, with human imagination, nothing to do with the evolution of literary forms over time and across cultures. It's a competition to see how many lists onto which the work in question might appear. It's certainly true there's a long-term "selection" of books that make it onto our collective reading list--the test of time--and the judgments of critics play some part in this process, but individual lists of masterpieces are just momentary bursts of opinion.

Putting aside the difficulty of determining which works count as "masterpieces" in the first place, at least once you've gathered the usual suspects, why must we concern ourselves only with masterpieces? Is there no pleasure to be found in a "minor" but still accomplished work, nothing to be learned from the flaws in an unsuccessful one? I admit that I myself am sometimes overly impatient with books that don't engage my interest early enough, but in some cases I probably would have found something of value if I'd stayed with them, even if I'd never put them on a list of Best This or Best That. In other cases I really can't see any contribution to "literature," but such books still raise questions about definition and method that do contribute to the discussion about literature, and for that reason are worth reading.

Later in his post, Myers claims "For literary critics there are, as I see it, only two choices. Either the course of intellectual honesty, where a man admits that there are books that are not worth reading, or the course of literary preening, where he pretends to enjoy books because he thinks he should." I'd suggest a third: admit that there are books not worth reading but in doing so don't conclude you've engaged in an act of criticism or made some contribution to the proper definition of "literature." Making lists does not make literature magically come into existence, although it does make the prospect of teaching literature more manageable and does allow one to make one's points about whatever subjects one's selection has made available. Presumably they will be those points opposed to the points being made by the guy who has selected the books "he thinks he should." In this way, literature surely does become more than "a selection of masterpieces." It becomes the act of overcoming that "obstacle" and casting literature aside in favor of promoting one's own wisdom.

Young Americans

This, more or less, is the thesis of Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation:

Yes, young Americans are energetic, ambitious, enterprising, and good, but their talents and interests and money thrust them not into books and ideas and history and civics, but into a whole other realm and other consciousness. A different social life and a different mental life have formed among them. Technology has bred it, but the result doesn't tally with the fulsome descriptions of digital empowerment, global awareness, and virtual communities. Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them.

It is tempting to say that the condition Bauerlein describes, here and in the book as a whole, has always obtained, that the majority of American youths have always found their interest in "the social scene around them" rather than in "books and ideas and history and civics." Indeed, to judge by the majority of adults who were themselves once "young Americans," this would seem to be the case since they, too, as far as I can tell, have little interest in the "stores of civilization," little knowledge of the wider world beyond their own "social scene" as it is to be found in their neighborhoods, their communities, or perhaps on network television. American democracy has produced many admirable things, but one of them is not a widely informed and curious populace motivated by a love of learning for its own sake--however much the image of the bookish youth of the tenement or farm, of the self-educated immigrant, might still linger.

But Bauerlein acknowledges that the intellectual life has never exactly beckoned to most Americans, and that the current wired generation is neither smarter not dumber than its predecessors in terms of native intelligence. The difference is precisely the one produced by that "digital empowerment" and its "virtual communities" created by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., and even by those websites ostensibly devoted to providing real information and knowledge. The bad habits and immature attitudes to which those in their teens and twenties are prone--the belief that the past has little to offer them, the preference for the swift and flashy over the slow and cumulative, the elevation of "social life" over the academic--have been exacerbated by widespread access to the internet, which encourages them to live in the hyper present and has coarsened their reading skills.

And Bauerlein has studies and statistics to back up his claims that the Internet encourages superficial learning and that its predicted capacity to enlarge students' access to knowledge and sharpen their academic skills hasn't manifested itself:

This is the paradox of the Dumbest Generation. For the young American, life has never been so yielding, goods so plentiful, schooling so accessible, diversion so easy, and liberties so copious. The material gains are clear, and each year the traits of worldliness and autonomy seem to trickle down into ever-younger age groups. But it's a shallow advent. As the survey research shows, knowledge and skills haven't kept pace, and the intellectual habits that complement them are slipping. The advantages of twenty-first century teen life keep expanding, the eighties and nineties economy and the digital revolution providing quick and effortless contact with information, wares, amusements, and friends. The mind should profit alongside the youthful ego, the thirst for knowledge satisfied as much as the craving for fun and status. But the enlightenment hasn't happened.

The "survey research" Bauerlein cites actually does show--or Bauerlein makes it show--that the vaunted benefits of "computers in the classroom" appear to have been greatly exaggerated. One study concludes that most high school students have poor research skills online, are unable to use the Internet effectively to find relevant sources of information. Another concludes that federal subsidies for internet access in the schools produced "no immediate impact on measured student outcomes." In general, the middle section of the book, a chapter called "Online Learning and Non-Learning" makes for sober reading and ultimately a compelling case for the view that, at the least, we should be skeptical of claims for the "revolutionary" potential of computers as a pedagogical tool. This doesn't prove that use of computers and access to the Internet is actively bad for students, and it is possible that future revisions to the way "connectivity" is integrated into the classroom will produce better results, but Bauerlein's survey of its current results certainly doesn't make one sanguine about the prospects.

If Bauerlein had stopped at establishing that young people are not making good use of online resources, and that some of the practices on the web are actively encouraging their worse habits, impeding their ability to take advantage of the information that undeniably is available online, I would say he had written a valuable book. And while I would still ultimately conclude that it is a valuable book, The Dumbest Generation in its second half unfortunately descends into an ill-disguised temper tantrum against la trahison des clercs, altered by Bauerlein to "the betrayal of the mentors" but making it no less clear that those who should be counterbalancing the enthusiasms of the "masses" now are actively adopting those enthusiasms as their own. Bauerlein joins in on the now four-decades long war against the "sixties" that conservatives continue to wage, dredging up Richard Poirier's 1968 essay "The War Against the Young" and Charles Reich's The Greening of America as putative sources of the closing of the young American mind. He writes of the former that "Poirier's essay marks a signal case of the generational romance, the transformation of youth from budding egos into attuned sensibilities. . .an approach that may have respected the students but yielded a terrible outcome," while Reich "interpreted youth lifestyle as a serious expression with deep political, social, and moral content, however flippant and ant-intellectual it appeared, and while his books comes off today like little more than a dated artifact in a time capsule, shorn of the radical, Bacchic 1960s rhetoric, the outlook he promotes carries on."

While I would agree that The Greening of America seems today a "dated artifact," I find it hard to see how at the same time a book describing the efforts of a generation attempting to save the world from itself, to transform it utterly, could still account for a generation wholly at ease with the circumscribed world it inhabits. Bauerlein probably intends some version of the argument that "les clercs," specifically those associated with American universities, are themselves, directly and indirectly, the products of the sixties and are now in positions of intellectual authority, from which they continue to promote anarchy and People Power. They have denigrated the value of tradition and thus "the guideposts are now unmanned, and the pushback of mentors has dwindled to the sober objections of a faithful few who don't mind sounding unfashionable and insensitive." But, the sanctimoniousess of the invocation of the "faithful few" aside, the time when "the stern shadow of moral and cultural canons at home and in class" intimidated students isn't coming back, mostly because the assumptions about "tradition" underlying them were untenable in a culture where the concept of "democracy" is now so entwined with the unfettered practices of a capitalism that privileges change in its own right, and that is finally more responsible for the growth of digital technology than any professors, intellectuals, or education theorists. Conservatives will have to come up with a better explanation of why American youth are becoming dumber than the bogeyman of the '60s radical.

To his credit, Bauerlein does not entirely fall back on static notions of "tradition" in defending its value. He looks favorably on "culture wars" in the form of "direct and open ideological combat" that makes sectarian groups "face the arguments and strategies of outsiders." What is being lost in the cyberspheric fog, in this view, is an intellectual tradition grounded in "great books" but that uses their ideas to formulate new ideas and provide answers for current questions. While I don't think that this tradition is being lost at all--and do think that blogs and internet publications in general might actually come to enhance this tradition--Bauerlein thinks it needs to be dispersed more widely among those not self-motivated to join it: "A healthy society needs a pipeline of intellectuals, and not just the famous ones. An abiding atmosphere of reflection and forensic should touch many more that the gifted and politically disposed students. Democracy thrives on a knowledgeable citizenry, not just an elite team of thinkers and theorists, and the broader knowledge extends among the populace the more intellectuals it will train."

Frankly, this seems to me a utopian fantasy, just as attached to a sentimentalized vision of the way things could be as The Greening of America. Teens and twenty-somethings are resisting "an abiding atmosphere of reflection and forensic" because they find it boring, as do most older people as well. The alternatives to "reflection and forensic" are only going to become gaudier and more widely available. No amount of "mentoring" on the part of intellectuals browbeaten into doing their "duty" is going to compete with them. Perhaps theoretically "Democracy thrives on a knowledgeable citizenry," but in practice American democracy has thrived only as licensed consumerism, and I see very little evidence that this will change any time soon. Certainly Mark Bauerlein, if he does claim allegiance to conservatism in its current configuration, can offer few real solutions to the problem he accurately diagnoses, since conservatism has embraced capitalism as its own. It's unthinkable that, given a choice between allowing capitalism its sovereignty and encouraging more intellectualism among young people, most conservatives would choose the latter.

An equally serious problem with Bauerlein's argument, at least for me, is the way in which he largely equates "reading" with acquiring "knowledge" as usable information. Although he occasionally puts in a word for the value of reading imaginative literature, by and large he focuses on the utility of reading in forming both individual character and a "knowledgeable citizenry." There's little in the book about reading as a good in and of itself, as the cumulative sharpening of sensibility, as, specifically where literature is concerned, a respite from the ceaseless acquisition of "information." Given that Bauerlein has elsewhere expressed a belief in "the positive and independent value of literary experience and literary tradition," it's rather disappointing that he doesn't find a place in his book for elucidating the "independent value" of fiction and poetry, apart from their place in the "great ideas" approach to education.

Ultimately, however, I have to say that The Dumbest Generation did make me think through the implications of our ongoing transition from print to screen more critically and more thoroughly. I still think that critical-intellectual discourse can be conducted online, and that, used the right way, the Internet can encourage serious reading and provide knowledge that goes more than skin deep, but that "used the right way" is everything, of course.

ADDENDUM One has to wonder what Bauerlein makes of the new NEA report on reading that shows "literary reading" has increased substantially over the past several years. Especially of the finding that "Eighty-four percent of adults who read literature (fiction, poetry, or drama) on or downloaded from the Internet also read books."

Novel No Longer

Richard Crary finds the term "novel" too confining, and wonders:

Why should contemporary prose works necessarily be treated as novels? Why do we insist that of course a given work is a novel, just not the kind of novel some readers expect? Why, indeed, should adventurous or exploratory or so-called experimental prose writing be subject to the same expectations as a novel? Why called a novel at all? (As always, I am ignoring the needs of the publishing industry.) Are Thomas Bernhard's works novels? Or might it be better to call them, simply, "prose works"? What about Blanchot's récit? Is Josipovici's Everything Passes a novel? David Markson's This Is Not A Novel was titled, so I understand, in response to a what one reviewer reportedly actually wrote in dismissing Reader's Block, his previous work. But what if we just saw the title as simply accurate and then worked from there?

There's no doubt that life could be made easier, for both writers and critics, if the identifying tag "novel" were confined to that plot- and character-heavy sort of narrative into which the novel evolved between 1850 and 1950 and which a majority of readers still steadfastly associate with the term. Devotees of "exploratory" prose would not have to contend, or would have to contend less, with objections that a particular work of experimental fiction is not "really" a novel, because it would indeed not be such and could perhaps be more honestly assessed according to criteria appropriate to what it is rather than what it is not. Many of the currently contentious critical debates about the purpose and proper form of the novel would presumably disappear, and those who insist it continue to be what it's always been and appeal to the widest possible audience would have the field to themselves.

Such a dispensation would have the added benefit of eliminating obtrusive discussions of "art" where the novel is concerned, since whatever art it would still be granted would be confined to minor variations on pre-established methods, and everyone still reading novels would be able to concentrate their attention on the "ideas" they supposedly express, the political efficacy they're claimed to have, the sociological observations they're said to make, or just the nice stories they're counted on to tell, all of which, as far as I can tell, are of much greater interest to readers of conventional novels than aesthetic values or formal ingenuity. "Style" might remain a relevant consideration, as long as it's used to identify especially pretty prose. Otherwise "art" can be safely relegated to the "experimental prose writing" Richard invokes, along with the latter's contrarian habit of representing experience in ways that aren't appropriately "realistic."

I confess I find this potential reinforcement of boundaries, and subsequent realignment of the literary sphere, initially attractive and possibly liberating. The reduction of the novel to its simplist form--or at least its most readily accessible--would allow adventurous writers to follow their creative bliss in whatever directions they wished (to the extent that they, too, are finally willing to "ignore the needs of the publishing industry") and critics to extend their horizons beyond the already known. Yet I think I would ulimately resist abandoning the classification "novel" as an umbrella term naming a still-evolving literary form. For one thing, a hardening of the boundary defining the novel would surely give whatever lies outside it a bracing freedom to explore new territory, but eventually it seems likely that either new boundaries would be erected around certain kinds of "prose works," boundaries that could prove just as restrictive, or that something like literary anarchy would ensue. Perhaps this anarchy would still be tolerable, depending on the quality of what some writers manage to produce, but such a state of affairs would make it more difficult to maintain a critical perspective on new writing, which might in turn make it more difficult for "prose writers" to gather an audience.

In addition, although I am clearly enough a partisan of experimental fiction, my appreciation of the experimental in literature is still pretty firmly rooted in literary history itself, and I am hesitant to conclude that those impulses that motivated writers to begin writing what we now call novels, and that has guided the development of fiction in general, are entirely spent. Fiction, at least in the modern literary tradition, began as an experiment itself, an offshoot of "narrative poetry" that began to test out the possibilities of extended narratives written in prose. Indeed, many of the early works of prose fiction, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Jacques the Fatalist, could be described as "prose works" seeking their own conventions rather than novels per se. The history of the novel, in my view, is the continued search for subjects, strategies, and techniques that would redeem the artistic potential both of the form and of prose itself as a literary medium. Many people seem to think that this search effectively ended in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, when novelists discovered realism, enhanced by modernist experiments in "psychological realism," and thus added these approaches to the earlier emphasis on storytelling, but I think that such an arbitrary circumscription of the novel's further development is effectively a renunciation of the form's own history as an "exploratory" practice.

Perhaps, given both the adamacy with which the gatekeepers of the "novel" in its ossfied version insist on its right to the designation and the sheer abundance of alternatives to this version offered up over the last sixty years (including those written by the authors Richard mentions), we ought just to accept this renunciation and get on with writing and reading whatever fresh "prose works" continue to appear. Maybe this is the price to be paid for the novel's brief period of popularity as a mass entertainment before the arrival of movies and television to usurp that role: the "book business" expropriated the label "novel" as a marketing device and has continued to force all subsequent efforts at expanding the form back into its slim container. (Although in light of what seems to be the imminent implosion of this "industry," it may no longer be able to devote many resources to any but the most gaudily commercial novels at all.) The novel has effectively been severed from its place in the unfolding of literary history and tied instead to the imperatives of capitalism.

But would we have to discard as well the more elastic term "fiction" while we're giving up on "novel" as hopelessly constraining? "Fiction" doesn't just mean "something made up"; it's a signal that, as a prose composition that shouldn't be judged by its conformity to the prescripts of "reality," the work at hand is free to distort, embellish, pare away, redirect, transmute, or transcribe the "real" in whatever way provides the work its integrity, at whatever length, and in whatever style or form. Or at least it could mean this if we didn't insist that "fiction" is synonymous with "story." Much of the "experimental prose writing" of the past few decades has, in fact, moved fiction closer to the practices of poetry (back, as it were, to the origin of prose fiction in poetry), away from narrative toward various other arrangements and rearrangements of language. If this tendency were to result in some hybrid form somewhere between poetry and prose narrative, and were to inspire a new name to solidify its status, I myself wouldn't complain, but I'm content to stick to "fiction" and to challenging unnecessarily narrow conceptions of its scope.

Past Caring

In her Washington Post review of the book, Wendy Smith writes of Alan Cheuse's To Catch the Lightning:

The sketch of [its protagonist's] early adulthood at the turn of the 20th century is a skillful but standard portrait of an ambitious young man unsatisfied by his successful career and restless in domesticity. (His wife. . .is stereotyped as the spouse who Just Doesn't Understand.) When [Edward] Curtis takes one of his frequent walks along the beach to get away from the crowded Seattle household containing his mother, mother-in-law and sister-in-law as well as Clara and the kids, the ensuing epiphany also sounds familiar. He observes an Indian woman digging for clams and decides to take her photograph, a far cry from his professional, commercial portraits. "Their eyes met. Deep and deep and deeper -- he saw far into her foreign soul." The encounter with the Other is a fiction staple, and Cheuse follows a well-worn path in depicting a white man discovering a more authentic way of life in a nonwhite society.

While I would certainly agree with the reviewer's judgment of the novel--"standard," "stereotyped," and "familiar" are definitely terms I would use in characterizing it, although the word "ponderous" also seems appropriate as a way of describing its style and structure--I encounter very few "historical" novels that are not explicable in such terms. This one's a "true story" about Edward Curtis, a 19th century photographer whose chief claim to fame was his attempt to "document" the "fading way of life of the American Indian," as the book's jacket flap has it. Everything about it justifies Wendy Smith's conclusion that it trods a "well-worn path" in its depiction of a white man's sympathy for Indians, a feature of the novel that becomes obvious in just its first few pages and makes reading the whole of it (492 pages) laborious indeed.

In a review on this blog of Lilly Tuck's The News from Paraguay (which I found equally bland and banal), I professed uncertainty about "what the purpose of historical fiction is supposed to be. Merely to re-create the past? Why? It is, of course, interesting enough to discover what 'things were like' in the past, but what does reading a novel about the past--deliberately presented as 'about' the past--do for us that just reading well-researched history can't provide?" I'm no clearer now about the ultimate purpose of historical novels--at least about their literary purpose--than I was then, although fiction such as Rosalind Belben's Our Horses in Egypt (reviewed here) certainly does demonstrate that the historical past can be used for artistic purposes that have little to do with history per se, the attempt to pin down what "things were like" as an end in itself.

Like two of Cheuse's other novels, The Light Possessed, about Geogia O'Keefe, and The Bohemians, about John Reed, To Catch the Lightning focuses on a particular historical figure, so they could all perhaps be called biographical fictions rather than historical novels built around fictional characters. And to that point Cheuse himself has said of this work that he's doing a kind of history in reverse, that "historians usually work from the outside in, and novelists move in the other direction." But of course this is an absurd justification on the face of it. Historians work with materials actually at hand, are careful (usually) not to go beyond what the record can support. A novelist invents and supplements. Unless Cheuse has uncovered minutely detailed records of what the "characters" in his novel--at least those that aren't themselves mostly invented--really did say, think, feel, and do in all of the situations depicted, To Catch the Lightning can't really be compared to history writing at all, certainly not in the smug way in which Cheuse implies that his own moving "in the other direction" is in fact superior to the "outside in" approach of historians.

Yet a novel like this still unavoidably asks that it be taken as a contribution to historical discourse, an account of the life of Edward Curtis that goes beyond what mere history could provide and thus illuminates such an historical personage and his times even more fully. And, in a period when "serious" novelists are turning to historical fictions in what seems to me unprecedented numbers (all five of the 2008 National Book Award fiction nominees could arguably be called historical novels), recreating the historical past in this way has increasingly become a privileged strategy among both writers and critics, garnering many critical plaudits and prestigious prizes. It is apparently one of the most recognizably "novel-like" things a writer might attempt these days.

But this is so only because most historical novels, as To Catch the Lightning illustrates, invoke the most conventional, hidebound notions of what a "novel" is and does, reinforced by these novels' emphasis on story--enhanced by the broader arc of historical "story" that such novels want to expropriate--on "character" as embodied in "real people," on staged scenes dominated by "realistic" dialogue, all wrapped up in a transparent prose style occasionally colored by poetic flourishes and applications of "psychological realism." This approach threatens to recalcify fiction in its own historically contingent, now thoroughly reductive form. A "novel" becomes simply a narrative of events modeled on the writing of history, except that the characters can be made up and the story tweaked here and there. If the true purpose of the historical novel is to return us not just to the recounted days but also the literary assumptions of yore, then I guess its practicioners are to some extent succeeding.

Many of the fans of this earnest brand of historical fiction must no doubt discount "literary" values entirely, except in the simplistic sense I've discussed. One reviewer of To Catch the Lightning suggests it "will appeal to a wide audience interested in the history of the American West, Native American culture, and the origins of photography." What about readers interested in aesthetic experience, in provocative writing, in, well, literature? What would reading this novel add not to our understanding of "the origins of photography," information about which is available in countless nonfiction books and essays, but to our appreciation of the origins of fiction in literary art? It's not so much that such questions continue to go unanswered in the consideration of history-based novels; as far as I can tell, they are never asked.

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Josh Corey detects an "anti-literary" attitude behind much contemporary poetry and fiction:

We have overshot, then, the hermeneutics of suspicion that characterized "theory" in the 1970s to arrive at a poetics of suspicion: only literature that puts the very premises of the literary into question can now summon the aesthetic impact we associate with great literature. This may represent the most complete assimilation by authors of the skeptical stance that diffused itself in the last universally acknowledged great wave of postmodern fiction (Pynchon, Delillo, Coover) and poetry (Ashbery, Ashbery, Ashbery). Now it's not merely literary strategies that are picked apart and turned around through unreliable narrators, disordered chronologies, the blurring of fact and fiction, extreme parataxis, etc. It's the literary itself, the summoning and deployment of aesthetic effects, summarized in the phrase "beautiful language.

On one level, it is quite appropriate for writers to proceed on the assumption it is necessary to employ strategies that put "the very premises of the literary into question." Both poetry and fiction become dessicated and convention-encrusted when established notions of what makes literature "literary" go unchallenged. I would agree with Josh that such a "skeptical stance" is what motivated the greatest of the postmodernists (although his list leaves out perhaps the most thoroughgoingly skeptical of the postmodernists, writers such as Gilbert Sorrentino or Donald Barthelme), but such skepticism was not intended to destroy literature but to enhance it, to open up the possibilities for "aesthetic impact," not to deny the validity of the aesthetic. To the extent that "asethetic effects" can be encapsulated in the formulation "beautiful language," perhaps the postmodernists and their successors (Josh discusses W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolano in particular) were calling literature dependent on it into question, but ultimately they were themselves rebelling against the notion of "beautiful language"--and the usually quiescent formal approaches associated with it--as a defining feature of "literature" in the first place.

On another level, the attempt to "escape" the literary is, of course, doomed to failure. The very attempt to "pick apart" or "turn around" usually results in a new strategy or style that doesn't abandon strategy and style but adds a fresh perspective on both. As Josh writes of Sebald: "Sebald's work first shocked readers with its apparently artless photographs and endless paragraphs, but in recollection the work is nearly limpid, its melancholy polished to a high gleam." Once one commits to writing in one of the literary forms, poetry or fiction or drama, efforts to escape the perceived limitiations of those forms while remaining within the practices of the forms broadly conceived--while continuing to accept the designation "poet," or "novelist"--are going to wind up being not "anti-literary" at all but, if they're successful, the latest additions to our understanding of what "the literary" might encompass. No matter how "useful" you might want your poem or your story to be--which is to say, for it to be more than "merely literary"--its ultimate utility will be to those who are interested in the perpetuation of the literary.

Which is not to say that all poems, novels, or plays conceived by their authors (and perhaps received by critics) as "useful" or "anti-literary" can't be aesthetically accomplished in the way "we associate with great literature." As Josh himself notes, if the attempt to "move beyond" poetry or fiction is what is required for a writer to produce interesting poetry or fiction, then so be it. If Thomas Pynchon needed to imagine he was writing a "critique" of the emergence of the American techno-military empire in order to write Gravity's Rainbow, I'm ok with that, although it's certainly not as such a critique that I appreciate the novel (nor, in the longest run, will future readers, when regarding it as primarily an historical exercise will likely render it unreadable). It's the humor, the narrative ingenuity, above all the language, which certainly isn't "beautiful," that makes it the great "literary" novel that it is. If writers need to think they're starting a revolution against literature--and I don't really suspect Pynchon thought he was doing this--in order to create, well, new works of literature, then viva la revolucion!

The Room Indefinite

One hesitates to "review" a book like Che Elias's West Virginia (Six Gallery Press), since the conventions of reviewing require a focus on what a book is "about," where fiction is concerned on recapitulating the "story" (which, unfortunately, most newspaper book reviews emphasize most directly and at greatest length), as well as summing up the characters and situation motivating the story. Such reviews assume a shared, stable definition of "fiction" or "novel" in which these elements predominate, and to give an account of a particular novel using them is to position this novel--as well as the reviewer--in the recognizable, respectable space devoted to "literary fiction."

When confronted with a work that doesn't itself assume the stability of definition used by book reviewers, that is manifestly unconventional or "experimental," the temptation is to either label it so and let readers reach their own (usually unfavorable) conclusion about whether it's a book they'll want to read or to find a way to describe the work in such a way that it to some degree does incorporate the conventional elements--"the setting is indefinite and shifting, but nevertheless evokes a world of dreamlike dimensions," etc. I myself generally adopt the latter strategy when attempting a review of an unconventional work, although I don't so much try to make the work fit the existing categories as to explicate what it seems to me to be doing that effectively replaces or substitutues for those categories.

Even so, a descriptive review of this sort can still impose an appearance of normative coherence that the work doesn't really express, sometimes actively resists. This kind of review also risks misleading the reader, who might give the book a chance, hoping to find enough of the conventional pleasures to make it worthwhile in those terms only to find it remains alien and "difficult." Such a review does a disservice both to the reader and to the work in question, the latter of which ought somehow to be given the opportunity to be approached on its own terms. The effort to "dumb down" fiction so that it appeals to the widest possible audience is in general misguided and counterproductive, and even an unwitting distortion of a challenging novel's discernible features also does the cause of experimental fiction no favors at all, if anything drives the "ordinary" reader even farther away.

Thus I will not attempt to recover West Virginia for the casual reader who knows he/she will not find enjoyable a novel--albeit a relatively brief one--whose prose style might be captured in a passage such as this:

Now I can only listen to the smile that killed me before, to the time that ran away and the days where they say they've all left me. And the time now, the room indefinite, and the room now, the place where you were next to me, and the room said, well, you got some things you can think of being the only ones that exist, and the days being the only men you can say were human. And the people, down to the point in Wheeling, they will all say yes, we're those people, and the men, too, the ones who killed us, and the ones who only held one thing against us in Wheeling, there was just a time when we knew they were all through. And I had to walk down steps in Wheeling too, think I crossed halls and fields as well, guess these are the worst people I know, guess that I should get used to them.

I enjoyed West Virginia--in fact, read it twice--but I can't finally say what the book is "about," although the above-quoted passage does invoke several of the motifs and images that recur throughout the text: a room, "the people," an incident in Wheeling, which may have involved a rape, a killing, child abuse, a fire. There are several named characters, Andy Reed, Amber Reed (the latter of whom may have betrayed the former), Lynda Cleary, but they are hardly "characters" of the sort most readers expect to find in novels. They are essentially the locus around which the motifs and images swirl in a montage of repetition and variation. The effect is often hypnotic and sometimes dramatic--a revelation of sorts seems on the verge of materializing only to become lost again in the swirl--and the reader willing to suspend expectations of character continuity, of narrative "arc" and resolution, of style as a source of information, with the occasional rhetorical flourish, might well find the pull of language itself an adequate subsitute for the narrative devices most writers still cling to, as did I.

But I don't think many readers will be willing to suspend these expectations, especially not as radically as a work like West Virginia solicits us to do. Those who consider the usual narrative devices to be the essence of fiction would surely put the book aside in confusion after a page or two. To some extent one might say that West Virginia is a "novel" that takes "psychological realism" to its most insular extreme: We are trapped inside the memories and/or perceptions of the narrator, who is unable to exteriorize these perceptions into what most readers of fiction would consider appropriate discourse. If you want access to "mind" in its rawest precincts, this is it. I don't think too many readers, even readers ostensibly committed to realism, would find much solace in this, either. Nor would it suffice to call this text "poetry" rather than fiction (a hybrid, perhaps), as most readers already avoid poetry because it's "just language," arranged in ways these readers don't "get." To urge urge such readers to try West Virginia because it's in some deep sense "poetic" might get us over the obstacle posed by "difficulty" in fiction but doesn't get us over the remaining obstacle that poses the poetic as difficult in the first place.

Thus, if you think you might like a book that requires a different kind of reading from you, reading that asks you to avoid the paths of comprehension you've always trod, by all means read West Virginia. If you're comfortable on those paths, and think a book like this would just get you lost, you probably should avoid it.