The Reading Experience

Words Poetically Grouped Together

Andrew K (In Abstentia Out) can't be a "real writer" because

For instance, I look outside. "The roof was wet with rain." That's all right, but anyone could write that. That's not really writing. "The roof was wet with rain like ..." like what? I have no idea. It must have been wet like something else, some lovely little selection of words poetically grouped together, but I have no idea what they are.

Allowing for some degree of facetiousness on Andrew's part, he is otherwise highlighting the assumption that "good writing" consists essentially of deploying figurative language--in this instance specifically a simile: "was wet like. . ."--in strategically chosen flourishes as a way to "describe." As Andrew implies, such figurative language is commonly thought to be evidence that a writer is "really writing," indeed, that he/she has any claim to be a writer at all.

The use of figurative language is one of the few ways in which modern literary fiction is allowed to affirm its origins in poetry (in all other ways "narrative" and its various presumed requirements supersedes "writing" per se), but unfortunately in the hands of most literary novelists it's no more than a decoration, fiction's version of the "quietude" Ron Silliman identifies in mainstream poetry itself. We're to admire the loveliness of the well-formed trope, but it ultimately deflects attention away from our verbal and conceptual experience of the text and toward the writer's insight into the similitude of isolated objects and images in the world at large.

And it certainly isn't the only way to produce suitably "literary" works of fiction. Some great writers don't use it at all. Stephen Dixon, for example, presents us instead with long strings of declaratory sentences stating the plain facts of things, such as these opening lines of Interstate:

He's in the car with the two kids, driving on the Interstate when a car pulls up on his side and stays even with his for a while and he looks at it and the guy next to the driver of what's a minivan signals him to roll down his window. He raises his forehead in an an expression "What's up?" but the guy, through an open window, makes motions again to roll down his window and then sticks his hand out his window and points down at the back of Nat's car, and he says "My wheel, something wrong with it?" and the guy shakes his head and cups his hands over his mouth as if he wants to say something to him. He lowers his window, slows down a little while he does it, van staying alongside him, kids are playing some kid card game in back though strapped in, and when the window's rolled almost all the way down and the hand he used is back on the steering wheel, the guy in the car sticks a gun out the window and points it at his head. . . .

In Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrention asks us to take as good, if parodic, writing, long passages of otherwise quite bad writing such as this, its first paragraph:

How absurd it is to find myself in this dilemma! It was I who made Ned Beaumont what he was, anyone can tell you that. Perhaps not "anyone." Why should I kill him? If I did. Why should I even want to kill him? All I ever wanted to do was keep him out of trouble. He was getting himself deep into it too, that's for certain. The way he was going, the things he was doing these past few months, portended nothing but disaster for him and Daisy, Daisy with the dark, shining hair. Of course, I wanted to help. They were both dear to me--dearer, perhaps, than I can bring myself to say. Well, let that go?

One could say that Mulligan Stew is an extended example (450 pages) of how very bad "experimental" writing can be converted into great experimental writing with some chutzpah and a vast sense of humor. No sham poetry needed.

Some unconventional writers, such as Stanley Elkin, invoke figurative language only to blow it up, calling attention to its more outlandish possibilities, as in the first paragraph of George Mills:

Because he knew nothing about horses. Not even--though he made wagers--how to what would not then have been called handicap them. Betting the knight, his money on the armor, the intricate chain mail like wire net or metal scrim, being's effulgent Maginot line, his stake on the weighted mace and plate mittens, on the hinged couters and poleyns, on vambrace and cuisee and greave, banging the breast-plate and all the jewelry of battle for timbre and pitch like a jerk slamming doors and kicking tires in a used car lot. Not even betting the knight finally so much as his glazed essence, his taut aura. (And in winter something stirring and extra in the smoke pouring through the fellow's ventails, as if breath were a sign of rage or what would not then have been called steam a signal of spirit). . . .

One can always count on Elkin to take figurative language to comedic excess ("being's effulgent Maginot Line"), demonstrating both his own mastery of the technique and his inability to employ it with a straight face. A passage such as this one is much more interested in setting up Elkin's signature lyric rhythms and, in this case, doling out strange and, in context, goofy words--"vambrace and cuisee and greave"--than in establishing Elkin's ability to dispense "some lovely little selection of words."

Writers such as these--and many more stylistically "adventurous" writers could be cited as well--do not settle for the sanctioned practice of "really writing" by inserting conventionally poetic turns of language now and again. They attempt to transform literary language by disregarding its conventions.

Qualitative Variety and Subtlety

Since "the movements of the individual body enter into all reshapings of material," all art, according to John Dewey could be described as performances, or at least as encompassing " the rhythm of vital natural expression, something as it were of dancing and pantomime" ("The Varied Substance of the Arts," Art as Experience). But the "shaping arts" (Dewey also calls these the "technological arts) transform and extend the possibilities of performance:

. . .print has acted--or reacted--to profoundly modify the substance of literature; modifying, by way of a single illustration, the very words that form the medium of literature. The change is indicated on the unfavorable side by the growing tendency to use "literary" as a term of disparagement. Spoken language was never "literary" till print and reading came into general use. But, on the other side, even if it be admitted that no single work of literature excels, say, the "Iliad". . .yet print has made for an enormous extension not merely in bulk but in qualitative variety and subtlety, aside from compelling an organization that did not previously exist.

Still, the "vital natural expression" we think we find more directly in performing arts--which is itself, of course, not exactly spontaneous--can still be attributed to poetry or painting or architecture--or at least to the semblance of "performance" embodied in the poem's lines, the painting's brushstrokes, or the building's contours. The reader or viewer "appreciates" the performance not as a passive spectator but by actively attending to the "shaping" that is the performance. Here lies, I think, the crucial difference between an aesthetic experience as conceived pragmatically by Dewey and an aesthetic "object" as implied by the practice of, say, the New Critics. The reader of a poem or novel in Dewey's formulation seeks to trace the "subtlety" of the work as manifest in the writer's aesthetic choices. The reader tries to re-create the writer's performance as much as possible. For the formalist, the object itself, the text, is the sufficient focus of interest, the "shape" rather than the shaping. The distinction here might seem itself rather subtle, but Dewey's insights help us avoid fetishizing the art "object" and push us harder to think through the implications of an aesthetic strategy in the context of strategies not pursued. They help us see "aesthetics" as an always renewable process rather than as the fixed qualities of a particular work.

One could say that reading involves becoming aware of that "organization that did not previously exist" when language was/is a specifically oral performance. As the most highly organized constructions of language, poetry and fiction especially solicit our attention to the way their "words" are organized. They allow words to become a "medium." I tend to think that those who do "use 'literary' as a term of disparagement" ("merely literary") ultimately don't want to accept language as a "medium" in Dewey's account of the term. As a medium, the language of fiction and poetry precisely mediates between "natural expression" and the reader's response to what is expressed. The act of "saying something" becomes unavoidably dispersed in the entangling energies that literary "organization" brings forward. Many readers seem to find this frustrating.

One naturally wonders whether Dewey would find the cyberspatial revolution to be a sufficient change in our encounter with language that it would again "profoundly modify the substance of literature." I believe he probably wouldn't. The internet, whether through blogs or online versions of literary magazines, is not inherently incapable of the "extension" and the "variety and subtlety" introduced by print, and if that extension now seems somewhat circumscribed online, it doesn't always have to be so. When everyone is online, cyberspace will be just as capable of displaying language as an aesthetic medium as print has been. Some of its features--instaneity, linking--might even work to "extend" the medium even farther.

The Names of Our Predecessors

In his essay "New Novel, New Man," from For a New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet defends the "New Novel" against some of the main criticisms directed at it (and at Robbe-Grillet's previous defenses of the practice). Among those criticisms was the charge that the New Novelists devalued the past, or, as Robbe-Grillet put it, that they "made a tabula rasa of the past." Robbe-Grillet replies that this charge can only itself proceed from an incomplete appreciation of the history of fiction:

Not only has the development been considerable since the middle of the nineteenth century, but it began immediately, in Balzac's own period. Did not Balzac already note the "confusion" in the descriptions of The Charterhouse of Parma? It is obvious that the Battle of Waterloo, as described by Stendhal, no longer belongs to the Balzacian order.

And, since then, the evolution has become increasingly evident: Flaubert, Dostoevski, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett. . .Far from making a tabula rasa of the past, we have most readily reached an agreement on the names of our predecessors; and our ambition is merely to continue them. Not to do better, which has no meaning, but to situate ourselves in their wake, in our own time.

Robbe-Grillet has himself, of course, now become one of those "names," one of the predecessors in whose wake writers inspired by his adventurousness might wish to "situate" themselves. But his account of the impulse behind experiment in fiction-the New Novel being a very prominent variety of experimental fiction in the post World War II era--is still compelling and goes some way toward clearing up a confusion about what motivates the best experimental writers.

Such writers do not consider themselves or their work either as cut off from the flow of literary history or as actively hostile to the acccomplishments of the past. Indeed, as Robbe-Grillet points out, they are likely to see the history of fiction as itself a history of innovation and the greatest writers as the greatest innovators. Experimental writers such as John Barth or Donald Barthelme or Robert Coover saw themselves as continuing the adventurous spirit embodied in their esteemed predecessors (Borges for Barth, for example, the surrealists for Barthelme) and Barth, for one, reached back for inspiration all the way to the beginnings of the novel for his first foray into "experimental" fiction, The Sot-Weed Factor. I'm certain that most younger experimental writers similarly look to the past for innovative touchstones, including the work of Barth, Barthelme, and Coover.

Those who don't risk producing fictions that seem merely eccentric, idiosyncratic, unattached to the historical tradition that itself represents a "development" of a form without "strict and definitive rules" and that proceeds through challenges to "order." Experimental fiction that seeks to be perceived as irrevocably "other" implicitly does regard the history of fiction as without notable predecessors and its writer does suggest he/she can "do better" than Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, et al. (or better than Balzac, for that matter). Absent this tradition, such doing better would, as Robbe-Grillet reminds us, have "no meaning."

Colored Drawings

In Chapter IX of Art as Experience, "The Common Substance of the Arts," John Dewey discusses the artist's special awareness of his/her medium, a focus on "means" utterly unlike our ordinary utilitarian notion of "means" as "preparatory or preliminary," simply a way to get from here to there we would gladly skip if we could "get the result without having to employ the means." According to Dewey, "sensitivity to a medium as medium is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception." For the artist, a medium--paint-and-canvas, sound, words--is an employment of "means that are incorporated in the outcome." They don't disappear into the results. They are the results.

Dewey illustrates his point by noting the methods of "inferior" artists:

Something which Delacroix said of painters of his day applies to inferior artists generally. He said they used coloration rather than color. The statement signified that they applied color to their represented objects instead of making them out of color. This procedure signifies that colors as means and objects and scenes depicted were kept apart. They did not use color as medium with complete devotion. Their minds and experiences were divided. Means and ends did not coalesce. The greatest esthetic revolution in the history of painting took place when color was used structurally; then pictures ceased to be colored drawings. The true artist sees and feels in terms of his medium and the one who has learned to perceive esthetically emulates the operation. Others carry into their seeing of pictures and hearing of music preconceptions drawn from sources that obstruct and confuse perception. (200)

As with painting, so with fiction: The inferior writer fastens words onto his/her "represented objects" rather than making them out of words. In both cases, the artist fails not only to show "sensitivity to a medium as medium" but essentially denies the value of the medium as anything other than the laborious means one would readily avoid if the "represented object"--presumably locked up in the artist's head--could be accessed in a more immediate way. The medium and its "objects and scenes" are kept so far apart that the former collapses into its barest utility.

It is typical of Dewey that in this passage he stresses both the procedure of the artist and the aesthetic perception of the viewer. Throughout Art as Experience, he insists that an aesthetic act is not complete until the viewer/reader/listener is able to "emulate the operation" undertaken by the artist. When the painter and the poet succeed in incorporating "medium" in the outcome, that is, in creating a work of art, the work in turn provides the viewer and the reader with a potentially rich aesthetic experience that becomes all the richer when they are able to perceive the way the medium itself is being "used structurally" to create an aesthetic whole that precedes any "idea" the work putatively conveys.

Unfortunately, the "other" kind of audience that "carry into their seeing of pictures and hearing of music preconceptions drawn from sources that obstruct and confuse perception" is all too prominent, even including some critics. If anything, the preconceptions that obstruct and confuse are more seriously debilitating in literary criticism and discussion, which often introduce not just preconceptions about appropriate form but also about the non-literary ends to which artistic means are presumed to point. A preoccupation with ideas, with "themes" or social commentary or political efficacy or the author's biographical circumstances, deflects attention away from the work's primary reason for being, its exploitation of "medium," and reduces the experience of literary art to an ordinary form of communication.

Snarking On You

One might at first assume that David Denby's short book, Snark, is the latest in the line of anti-Internet polemics, such as Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur or Lee Siegel's Against the Machine, but it really isn't. It's a critique of media discourse more generally, and Denby focuses some of his most withering criticism on such "mainstream" journalists as Joe Queenan and Maureen Dowd. The closest he gets to targeting Internet practices per se is his citation of such gossip-centered sites as Gawker and Wonkette, both of which almost all serious readers can agree are worthy of contempt.

Denby does, however, repeat the mantra by now chanted regularly by print journalism at large that bloggers and other anarchic inhabitants of cyberspace threaten "authority," that "agreed-upon facts and a central narrative" will disappear into the "many niches and bat caves from which highly colored points of view will fly wildly like confused vectors, and in that situation no one will be right, no one will be wrong, and everything will be a matter of opinion." (Denby and his fellow fetishists of "authority" must have an easily provoked fear that "facts," what's "right" and what's "wrong," are pretty unstable concepts to believe that a motley collection of folks publishing their thoughts from basements in Terre Haute or Sioux City could eviscerate them so readily.) More plausibly, he asserts that the Internet has helped to proliferate an alreadly existing tendency:

It turns out that in the wake of the Internet revolution, snark as a style has outgrown its original limited function. The Internet has allowed it to metastasize as a pop writing form. A snarky insult, embedded in a story or a post, quickly gets traffic; it gets linked to other blogs; and soon it has spread like a sneezy cold through the vast kindergarten of the Web.

The metaphorical association of Internet and disease, as well as the assignment of bloggers to their playrooms, certainly betrays a low opinion of online writing habits, but there's probably no point in denying that snark as a rhetorical strategy has gotten more widely dispersed through its use on the Internet, even in particular through its adoption by some bloggers. Here, however, a little care ought to be taken in distinguishing between honest snark--biting words that contain an element of truth and cut through the tangles of false decorum--and what Denby calls "low snark" the latter of which finally degenerates into "bilious, snarling, resentful, other-annihilating rage." The former can ultimately become wearying if such snark is the *only* mode of commentary offered up by the blogger, but the latter doesn't even rise to the level of "snark" in the first place. It's simply biliousness.

I'm not sure I've ever really run across much of this "low snark" on the blogs I read. Like many critics of the blogosphere, Denby seems particularly fixated on the comment threads that develop from many blog posts, where "low snark" perhaps does occasionally slip in. He seems to think that attracting as many comments as possible is the point of most blog posts and assumes most readers of blogs make their way dutifully through the subsequent threads, but in my experience this doesn't usually happen. Blogs that attract a modest number of considered comments (I like to think this is one such blog) can spark worthwhile give-and-take, but posts that result in hundreds of comments, as on most of the prominent political blogs, for example, are just too unwieldy, and I, for one, don't bother with the comments. Denby really gives few examples of bloggers who indulge in "low snark," and it's pretty hard to take seriously as informed criticsm an analysis that takes the occasional loud-mouth comment as reason for alarm.

Denby doesn't discuss literary snark per se all that much, so it's hard to know whether he thinks the discussion of books online is as endangered by snark as a cultural style as political debate or personal interactions conducted on social networking sites. I assume he isn't really aware of the hundreds of blogs devoted to the serious consideration of literature, as well as philosophy, history, and film and the other arts (surely he must be generally aware of his own online competition as found in film blogs) and that, far from "ruining our conversation" where literature and art are concerned, are perhaps in the process of renewing it. These blogs aren't necessarily always free from what I've called honest snark, and to this extent they might prompt him to reconsider his blanket assertion that "contemporary snark is postaesthetic. . .produced by people living in the media who know, by the time they are twelve, the mechanics of hype, spin, and big money. Everything that isn't part of the entertainment business cyle seems lifeless and unreal to them." Certainly this description aptly fits many "people living in the media" (including some bloggers), but the sort of snark occasionally to be found in otherwise seriously-intended blog posts is often squarely aesthetic in its attempt to focus attention on issues that aren't "part of the entertainment business cycle." Snarky comment about books clearly intended to find their place in this cyle, or about "criticism" that merely observes its movements, is actually an attempt to identify the Entertainment State itself as "lifeless and unreal."

Denby does devote a couple of paragraphs to the well-known efforts of Heidi Julavits, editor of The Believer, to distinguish between snark and honest critical judgment, wherein, as Denby puts it, "Julavits found it hard to separate justified cruelty in criticism from mere critical showing off." By now one can say that the entire run of issues of The Believer has mostly been an attempt to banish "critical showing off" from its book reviews, which has, in my opinion, resulted in a style of criticism that is uniformly bland and mostly useless. The latest issue I have read (January 09) contains six reviews of 5-7 paragraphs, each of which consists almost entirely of plot summary or cursory description with a few dashes of empty praise. The usual sappy cover accurately enough signals the sort of inflated cheer that characterizes most of The Believer's content. (It is altogether revealing that far and away the best piece in the January issue, Gary Lutz's essay on the art of the sentence, was not commissioned by The Believer but is a lecture reprinted in the magazine.) If what is required to remove snark from critical discourse is the prominence of a publication like The Believer, I'd prefer bile and resentment--or at least more appreciation of "justified cruelty," the systematic exclusion of which only renders literary criticism toothless.