The Reading Experience

The Condition of Our Senses

In his review of Susan Sontag's journals, Daniel Mendelson contends that Sontag, in her practice at least, was not really "against interpretation" at all:

The essays in Against Interpretation and in Styles of Radical Will may champion, famously, the need not for "a hermeneutics but an erotics of Art," but what is so striking is that there is not anything very erotic about these essays; they are, in fact, all hermeneutics. In the criticism, as in the journals, the eros is all from the neck up.

A little later he asserts that

this astoundingly gifted interpreter, so naturally skilled at peeling away trivial-seeming exteriors to reveal deeper cultural meanings--or at teasing out the underlying significance of surface features to which you might not have given much attention ("people run beautifully in Godard movies")--fought mightily to affect an "aesthetic" disdain for content.

Mendelsohn is pretty clearly attempting to turn Sontag's own strengths as a critic--"peeling away" and "teasing out"--against her in order to question the critical agenda with which Sontag began her career as literary critic, and for which she is still most prominently known. To so baldly label her an "interpreter" is to dismiss her early efforts to rescue the aesthetic pleasures of art from the maw of interpretation and its attempts to "dig 'behind' the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one." She was an interpreter all along and thus the "disdain for content" she expressed could only be an affectation.

Furthermore, Mendelsohn finds that Sontag is untrue to her call for an "erotics of art" because her essays mostly fail to confine themselves to the "sensuous surface" such a call seems to emphasize. Partly this accusation is a necessary gesture in reinforcing Mendelsohn's biographical approach to Sontag's work, through which he maintains that her purported sexual inhibitions fundamentally determined the orientation of her critical responses. "I do not doubt that [Sontag] genuinely wished to experience works of art purely with the senses and the emotions," writes Mendelsohn, "but the author of these celebrated essays is quite plainly the grown-up version of the young girl who, at fifteen, declared her preference for "virtuosity ... technique, organization. . . ." If there is truth in Mendelsohn's remarks on this subject, however, I don't see why it's necessary to speculate about her sexual hang-ups in order to account for it. In some of her essays Sontag is more of a theoritician than a close reader, but this hardly disqualifies her from holding at the center of her theory about the appropriate resonse to art a view that such a response ought to be closer to "erotics" than to hermeneutics.

A criticism that lingers over the "sensuous surface" could indeed provide a valuable service, especially if it's a "surface" that might be overlooked in the rush to uncover "content." But it hardly seems contradictory or inconsistent to go beyond the immediate surface to consider, say, the way various aspects of the surface work together, the way surface sometimes occludes other aesthetically relevant elements, such as the more subtle effects of point of view in fiction or of editing in film. Ultimately, to expect a critic, even one ostensibly dedicated to "sensuous surface," to confine herself to describing those surfaces is to ask her to self-proscribe other critically useful tactics that might be employed. Moreover, it is possible to approach a work of art in a move that might be called "interpretation" but that does not amount to interrogating the work for "content." The critic might go beyond obvious surface features to point out less discernible qualities that are relevant to an aesthetic appreciation and do not attempt "to translate the elements of the [work] into something else," as Sontag puts it in "Against Interpretation.

Mendelsohn is suggesting that to be consistent Sontag should have contented herself with the innocent pleasure to be found in the surface features of art, but as Sontag herself reminded us in "Against Interpretation," "None of us can ever retrieve that innocence berore all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art." Sontag wanted to defend art against those who would say that "sensuous surface" is merely a distraction, that the role of the critic is to assure the audience the work is "about" something. For the interpretive critic:

interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

To combat this anti-aesthetic emphasis on "content," Sontag naturally enough sought for a criticism, epecially literary criticism, that "brings more attention to form in art":

If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary--a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary--for forms.

This sort of focus on the manifestations of form, more than on the "sensuous" per se, is really what "Against Interpretation" wants to encourage. Sontag wants us to stop looking past the aesthetic thing-in-itself toward the "meaning" it supposedly conceals. This approach to criticism is just a way of making art "manageable," ultimately of making art itself essentially irrelevant. Why go to the trouble of fashioning a "sensuous surface" in the first place if all we're interested in is the latent "content"? Artists just get in the way of our making sense of things.

"Sense" understood as intellectual comprehension. Otherwise, of course, "sense" is precisely what Sontag herself wants to retrieve from the interpreters, although this includes the sensory as part of a unified experience:

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditons of modern life--its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness--conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

If anything, the conditions making "sharpness in our sensory experience" difficult to attain have only become more pronounced since Sontag wrote this paragraph. Our sensory faculties are surely even duller than they were in the early 1960s, which in retrospect seems a golden age of quiet contemplation. Although I think more than just sensory experience is at stake in the effort to restrain interpretation--"experience" extends to a purely cognitive level as well--that is again the subject for another post. That the critic must not take "the sensory experience of the work of art for granted," however, still seems to me a first principle of criticism.

So:

At this late stage in his career, John Barth is probably in a kind of no-win situation. Those who identify him as a first-generation postmodernist, and have probably never had much admiration for postmodern fiction, anyway, will see every new work as an example of postmodernism's obsolescence. Thus Gregory Leon Miller proclaims that in Barth's most recent book, The Development, "Emotional moments - mortality is a major theme of the book - are undercut by narrative games that have become cliche, as narrators reveal themselves to be someone other than we were led to believe, and then someone else altogether. . .The tedium of these gestures strongly suggests that it is such postmodern fiction itself - at least in its purest, initially conceived form - that has run its course."

On the other hand, those who do consider themselves admirers of Barth's work are more likely to find a book like The Development, which undeniably is more accessible to the non pomo-inclined, disappointingly ordinary. Thus Christopher Sorrentino concludes that "Barth once talked about embracing 'another order of risk,' in which one would test one’s ability to hold an audience with narrative complexity. Here, though, we have stories about community that, while not without their appeal, are as bland as the homespun Americana of Garrison Keillor."

Although I am more inclined to agree with Sorrentino in his judgment that The Development is "a modest addition to [Barth's] oeuvre," I can't quite agree that the portrayal of the gated community on Maryland's Eastern Shore that is the focus of the nine stories comprising The Development bears comparison to Keillor-type sentimentality. Indeed, to the extent that Miller's criticism has validity--and only here does it have validity--it is true that Barth's fiction rarely lingers over "emotional moments" without resorting to distancing effects such as verbal irony or authorial self-reflexivity. While it might seem "conventional" for John Barth to write a sequence of stories about elderly couples trying to cope with the fact that the horizon line of their lives has come much closer, I don't think either the subject or the setting is inherently "hokum."

Indeed, the most emotionally unsettling moment in The Development occurs at the conclusion of "Toga Party," in which the story's husband and wife protagonists decide to gas themselves in their garage rather than continue on their life's "crappy last lap," as the husband puts it. The story is unsettling precisely because there really has been no emotional preparation for this almost spontaneous decision and because it is carried out with little emotional display:

. . .Already they could smell exhaust fumes. "I love you, Dick."

"I love you. And okay, so we're dumping on the kids, leaving them to take the hit and clean up the mess. So what?"

"They'll never forgive us. But you're right. So what?"

"We'll each be presumed to have survived the other, as the saying goes, and neither of us'll be around to know it."

The car engine quietly idled on.

"Shouldn't we at least leave them a note, send them an e-mail, something?"

"So go do that if you want to. Me, I'm staying put."

He heard her exhale. "Me, too, I guess." Then inhale, deeply.

It is true that this event has emotional resonance throughout the rest of the book--other characters refer to it, its possibility as the final act for these characters as well can't be dismissed--but I don't see how it can be taken as "a virtual Hallmark card for suicide." That people like the Fentons might indeed resort to this kind of clear-eyed suicide in the midst of modern "retirement" only seems to me an equally clear-eyed indictment of the very middle-class lifestyle to which almost all of the characters in the book have readily acceded, to one degree or another. There is a repressed but still palpable disappointment with the outcome of American "success" permeating The Development, not an affirmation of it.

Some of the characters are more resistant to the illusions of the American Way than others. At the end of "Progressive Dinner," about the annual Heron Bay Estates social, we are left with Peter Simpson, an associate dean at the local college:

From the porch Chuck Becker adds loudly, "God bless us all! And God Bless America!"

Several voices murmur "Amen." Looking up and away with a sigh of mild annoyance, Peter Simpson happens at just that moment to see a meteor streak left to right across the moonless, brightly constellated eastern sky.

So what? he asks himself.

So nothing.

Most of the characters are presented as financially comfortable and as having accomplished career success, but many of them don't seem to regard their careers as achieving anything very important. Some are outright failures, as for example George Newett, a creative writing professor at the same local college, who confesses to having published little and who settles for "trying to help others do better" than he did, although "as of this writing no Stratford alum has managed that not-so-difficult achievement." None of them are held up as especially insightful, morally or intellectually. They may indeed be "bland," but this seems to me at least the natural outcome of their author's vision of Heron Bay Esates,the small but representative world John Barth wants to invoke.

Given the extent to which in The Development Barth has trimmed back what Gregory Leon Miller calls the "meta-fictional [sic] flourishes" for which Barth has become, at least to critics like Miller, infamous, it is rather astonishing that Miller would insist on charging it with "excessive self-reflexivity." There are a couple of stories--in particular, "The Bard Award" and "Rebeginnings"--that feature Barth's trademark dual emphasis on telling the story and on relating the story of the storytelling, which makes some of his most notoriously postmodern novels and stories more like narrative puzzles than narratives per se. But for the most part, the stories in The Development are surprisingly straightforward suburban slices-of-life joined together to create a surprisingly earnest work of late-life realism. One suspects that for readers like Miller, Barth could never be less than "excessive" unless he were to stop writing altogether or start being an utterly different kind of writer than the one he's always been.

One "self-reflexive" feature of the book that even Miller does not bring forward for censure, and that might be considered an addition of "narrative complexity," can be found in its title. "The Development," it seems to me, does not refer merely to the housing development itself, nor to the "development" of the characters' lives so far, but to "the development" as one of the elements of narrative. Most of the stories (except, of course, for "Toga Party") consist mostly of "development," most of them beginning in no particularly urgent situation and trailing off before the "tale" could be said to have reached its dramatic apex. "The End," which ostensibly tells the story of HBE's destruction by tornado doesn't actually narrate that catastrophe and registers the deaths of two of the community's members in just a couple of sentences. But this seems to me to reinforce the book's portrayal of the characters' "last lap." As Paul Lafarge puts it in his review of The Development, "The open-endedness of these stories is not mere trickiness. The tired reporters and washed-up teachers of creative writing in Heron Bay Estates are, like Barth himself, close enough to the end of their lives that the autobiographer's paradox is more than a theoretical worry. How do you tell the conclusion of your own story?. . .there is perhaps no better way to face the certainty that your own consciousness will cease, than with a defiant colon, so:"

Barth employs such a strategy of inconclusiveness, it seems to me, with particular skill in this book, so much so that its more subtle effects are apparently lost on his harsher critics who see only the more obvious "meta-fictional" touches.

Drowning

I do not at all understand what David Rieff thought could be the justification for his book, Swimming in a Sea of Death, about the death of his mother, Susan Sontag. It contributes nothing to our understanding of Sontag's work as critic or novelist, and even as a chronicle of Sontag's harrowing death it seldom seems more than tacky and sensational. Sontag herself isn't even given much of a role to play beyond that of victim and object of Rieff's endless rationalizations about his own behavior during Sontag's struggle with the blood cancer that finally killed her. Besides leaving us with an unpleasant depiction of Sontag in her last months, the book is difficult to admire simply for its repititious, turgid prose, which constantly circles around Sontag's illness, always seeking to extenuate Rieff's response to it.

The portrait of Susan Sontag that does emerge is of a woman utterly unhinged by the prospect of her own death. She is unable to summon any degree of composure or self-possession, and is unwilling, at least in Rieff's account, to acknowledge the reality of her situation. She comes off as cowering, irrational, selfish. Perhaps this is an accurate portrayal of Susan Sontag in her confrontation with death, but I am reluctant to accept it as such, since so much of Swimming in a Sea of Death keeps returning to the effects of this confrontation on David Rieff, on his own struggle with how to mitigate his mother's inappropriate responses. This narrated struggle seems to me both narcissistic and futile, since ultimately he doesn't really do much of anything, preferring to passively acquiesce to Sontag's illusions. If it was the case that Sontag was unable to face the truth about her condition, I am not going to take this book as evidence.

The implicit damage that Swimming in a Sea of Death does to Susan Sontag's legacy as writer and critic will be registered primarily by the degree to which its "revelations" about Sontag's difficult death will come to dominate future discussions of her work. These revelations will be trotted out again and again as some sort of clue to "vision," dominated by her fear of death and her own puzzling sense of immunity to it as that vision must surely have been. The image of Susan Sontag as, in Sven Birkerts's words, "an isolated, deluded figure, terrified of death and filled more with regret than any satisfaction at her achievements" will linger. The biographical will triumph over the exegetic, as it always done in our gossip-obsessed excuse for a literary culture, and even though Sontag's work, especially the criticism, is focused on the sheer pleasure of life as represented by our encounter with art, the terror of mortality rendered in David Reiff's book will overshadow continuing encounters with Sontag's essays and books. How lamentable that this process will have been initiated by her own son.

The lure of the biographical can also be seen at work in Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Sontag's journals. (Although the primary culprit in encouraging biographical readings is again Rieff, who made the decision to publish the journals in the first place.) Although I agree with much of Mendelsohn's commentary on Sontag's writing per se--that her criticism is much more important than her fiction, that her taste in fiction became much narrower and more conservative in her later years, in particular that she had a large and debilitating blind spot where American fiction was concerned--I cannot countenance the basic split in Sontag's sensibility that Mendelsohn finds by focusing on her personality, on her supposedly conflicted sexuality.

"Here again you feel the presence of an underlying conflict: Sontag the natural analyst against Sontag the struggling sensualist," Mendelsohn tells us. He would have us believe that her reticence to speak about her sexuality somehow indicates a "hidden emotional life," that she was essentially asexual. (I don't really know how otherwise to interpret his gloss on Sontag's sexual life: "So the sex is not that good. That leaves the ambition.") From the fact that Sontag apparently didn't use her journals as an opportunity to emote, Mendelsohn concludes that "the outsized cultural avidity, the literary ambition to which these pages bear witness, seems eventually to have occluded the more tender feelings." How does Mendelsohn really know the degree of Sontag's sexual desires or the extent of her "tender feelings"? Should we be making any judgments about Sontag's emotional life based on the selections from these journals? (If she preferred to use them as a way of recording "the cognitive and the analytical" in her experiences, does this make her emotionally enfeebled?) Above all: Should we be using stray comments in a writer's journal and speculations about her sexual nature as the basis of a theory about the disposition of the work?

Mendelsohn thinks that despite her call in Against Interpretation for an "erotics of art" to displace what Sontag calls in that essay the attempt by literary critics "to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else" through interpretation, she was finally herself an intepreter:

Again and again, the essays themselves give the lie to her agenda of devaluing interpretation: even as she appears to swoon over "the untranslatable, sensuous immediacy" of, say, Last Year in Marienbad, you can't help noticing that there is not a single sensuous surface that she does not try to translate into something abstract and rarefied, that is not subject to the flashing scalpel of her critical intellect.

There is truth to this assertion (especially that Sontag's "critical intellect" could wield a "flashing scalpel"), but it exaggerates the role that "sensuous surface" plays--or should have played--in Sontag's criticism. "Sensuous surface" is where criticism begins, in the actual experience of the work of art, but it does not limit the critic's attention. Indeed, in "Against Interpretation," Sontag is more interested in redeeming "form" than "surface" per se, but this is the subject for another post. The most immediate flaw in Mendelsohn's analysis is still the effort to appeal to Sontag's personal lack of "sensuous" feelings in describing the attributes of her criticism.

In the conclusion to his essay, Mendelsohn tells us that Sontag has now herself become the "text" that must be interpreted. "Infinitely interpretable, she has at last ended up on the inside of a book." I don't know if this is some sort of backdoor justification for his own focus on Sontag's personal quirks or is just a cute way of referring to the journals as Sontag's private--now public--"text." But I fear it does signal the direction much subsequent discussion of Susan Sontag's career will take.

Rx

Fiction has always shown itself capable of absorbing other texts, other forms of discourse, into its own formal repertoire. Indeed, fiction as a literary mode began in attempts to mimic history (as in Fielding's novels) or as the fictional exchange of letters, as in the epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson. This ability to enlist various kinds of writing not themselves per se "literary" in the creation of literary form is part of what has allowed fiction to retain its vitality; there is no one proper "form" that a novel must take, despite the efforts of editors, creative writing programs, and many book reviewers to force it into a conventional mold combining plot, character, and setting in an identifiable formula.

Matthew Roberson's Impotent (FC2) is an example of this practice of assimilating other texts, although in this case Roberson perhaps takes it a little farther by fashioning what might be called a "formal correlative" whereby his novel's themes are mirrored in the form by which they are presented. Impotent is "about" our increasing dependence on pharmaceutical solutions to our various physical and psychological problems, and to that effect it incorporates the rhetoric to be found in drug labeling, drug advertising, and drug studies as devices in the serial narratives relating its characters' resort to prescription drugs. These devices become, in fact, the primary way we come to know the characters, as the kind of pharmaceutical intervention they require signals to us the sort of lives, usually stressful in ways they seem not to have anticipated, they find themselves maintaining.

One could say that Roberson has found a way to merge form and content, although this ends up, in my view, emphasizing the latter more than might be expected from a novel so unorthodox in its presentation. Impotent has no unifying protagonist but instead introduces a succession of characters related by their use of pharmacological helpers. (The book might plausibly called a collection of stories, but the repetitions of structure and theme encourage a holistic reading rather than one focused on individual episodes.) These characters are never given names other than identifying initials--M for male, S for spouse, C for child, etc.--and this almost inevitably accentuates the behavior in which they are engaged, behavior that both the several narratives and the text as a whole want to call into question. At best such a focus on "saying something" reduces Impotent to a kind of social satire that almost makes the novel's formal experiments seem superfluous.

A work like Impotent does, however, usefully remind us that the novel is an open-ended form limited only by writers' ability to reach outside established forms and claim modes of discourse seemingly beyond the compass of a "literary" treatment as adaptable to their purposes. Roberson's novel held my interest readily enough, and if the execution of its formal strategy ultimately seemed to me somewhat contrived, Impotent did expand my sense of what additional strategies writers of fiction might discover.

Knowing Lots of Other Writers

In his frequent posts on the goals of literary criticism, Nigel Beale often falls back on his core notion that criticism is essentially an evaluative act, an attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff in literature, to identify those works that are worth readers' further attention and those that are not. I have on several occasions responded to Nigel's assertions by emphasizing that criticism should be at least as much descriptive as evaluative, an effort to account for a work's effects as honestly and thoroughly as possible--and to do so on its own terms--before passing critical judgment. Indeed, I have argued, and continue to believe, that literary criticism in its most useful form more or less takes for granted the superior accomplishment of the work at hand and proceeds to illuminate the strategies by which the work has brought this off.

But then I am reminded when reading something like these remarks by J.R. Lennon at the blog Ward Six of the need for honest evaluation, at least in book reviewing:

. . .knowing lots of other writers is nearly inevitable, especially if you study or teach at a college, and for the most part it's desirable, too.

It becomes problematic, though, when you wish to perform the geuinely useful act of substantively criticizing other people's work. What if you end up on a panel with that writer someday, or have to deliver a reading together? What if that writer reviews books, as well, and yours falls onto her desk?. . .

Writers should criticize one another, respectfully and carefully. To offer only praise for the things you like doesn't quite constitute a useful dialogue--if something bugs you about a peer's work, and you can support your views, you ought to be able to express them, calmly, without the fear of making an enemy--and you should have the humility to accept similar criticism yourself. . . .

It's at first hard to disagree that a writer acting as critic would want "to perform the genuinely useful act of substantively criticizing other people's work," but unfortunately Lennon frames this discussion of "criticism" as a criticism useful mostly to the writer on whose work the critical comments focus. They shouldn't be so critical as to make the next panel discussion uncomfortable; they should be in the form of "useful dialogue" between colleagues; above all, presumably, they should be "respectful" and "careful," the sort of comments that can be supported with specific examples.

This is criticism as derived from writing program workshops. It's a "dialogue" among "peers" learning, and later practicing, the craft, but it doesn't take either the reader or the larger context of literature itself, within which the reader must approach the work, into account. The service it provides is a service to a fellow writer, who would no doubt benefit from the constructive criticism Lennon advocates, but it hardly acts as "substantive" criticism except as advice to fellow writers about ways to improve their practice. Surely it does not amount to the kind of substantive criticism one would hope to get from literary critics who conceive their first and primary commitment to be to literature as a whole, defined as an ongoing collective enterprise with an identifiable history to which current works inevitably have a meaningful relationship and among whose current exponents some equally meaningful connections can be made. Such critics must take works of fiction and poetry to be important (or not) beyond their origins in the effort of any one particular writer, certainly beyond their status as samples of "other people's work."

Not only, then, is Lennon mistaken to suggest that "the only people who are really qualified to review books are other writers," but to extent that these writers are unable to transcend the kind of "respectful" attitude their workshop training instills, they are probably the least qualified kind of book reviewers. Literary critics have to make judgments that leave behind concern for writers' self-esteem, even when this exposes one's own writerly self-esteem to similar injury. They have to accept being occasionally, perhaps always, unpopular. Probably they have to forego the opportunity to attend dinner parties with other writers.