The Reading Experience

Moral Chaos

When reading Roger Scruton, one can always be sure that the ideas and sentiments expressed are being offered with utter sincerity. The extent to which he is willing to defend a view of the world and the place of humans in it that seems not simply conservative but thoroughly antique can be astonishing, but he does defend it, seriously and systematically. As a philosopher, Scruton sticks to the most fundamental questions of social and cultural value, in many instances raising questions long assumed satisfactorily answered and renewing conservative objections to the direction taken by much of modern culture.

Those who might rebut Scruton's case against modern art and popular culture are perhaps tempted to simply dismiss his invocations of such seemingly agreeable concepts as "order" and "beauty" as so much opportunistic cant. This would be a mistake, not merely because Scruton makes his arguments in an intellectually honest way but because the role of order or beauty in art ought not be denied outright. Scruton is not wrong to consider "beauty" a relevant consideration in the assessment of art. He is wrong in his conception of beauty as it manifests itself in works of art.

In a recent essay, "Beauty and Desecration," Scruton asserts that "the sacred task of art. . .is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty." Since the era of modernism, however, deliberate ugliness has usurped the place of beauty and "[a]rt increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes."

Note that is the transgression not of aesthetic standards but of "moral certainties" to which Scruton objects. Scruton rightly notes that in the 20th/21st centuries "expression" has become the underpinning of most movements in and commentary on "new" art, but rather than examine the specifically aesthetic flaws in an approach anchored in "expression," Scruton instead recoils from the moral anarchy unleashed by the modern Romantic rebel: "This emphasis on expression was a legacy of the Romantic movement; but now it was joined by the conviction that the artist is outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it, so that artistic self-expression is at the same time a transgression of ordinary moral norms."

Scruton uses as an example the widespread habit in productions of opera to alter the staging and the dramatic vision to produce a "modernized" version. He cites a particular production of Mozart's The Abduction From the Seraglio set "in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, copulating couples littered the stage, and every opportunity for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. . .The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the scenes of desecration, murder, and narcissistic sex."

Even if we accept that Scruton's description of the staging of this opera is true to its director's intent--and I would guess that many others in the audience that night did not see it in this way--his outrage is directed at its moral implications. It is "an example of something familiar in every aspect of our contemporary culture. It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction." Scruton manages to connect this sort of "re-visioning" in the high arts to the music video, which "is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos."

Scruton cannot appreciate that the operatic production he attended committed an aesthetic offense, not a moral one. I am quite willing to believe that those responsible for it thought it a clever idea to "set the opera in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes," but ultimately this is just an aesthetically vacuous attempt to "update" Mozart, to run roughshod over Mozart's original vision of his opera and establish their own overwhelmingly lame one in its place. It is a practice to be found not only in opera but in theater in general, whereby directors and producers with the aesthetic sensibilities of lizards attempt to keep the great works "relevant." One could, I suppose, call this artistic cluelessness a "moral" problem, but most of what Scruton sees as the unleashing of "moral chaos" is finally just the consequence of the aesthetic incompetence of some those entrused with the job of re-presenting the theatrical art of the past.

I suspect that Scruton does not want to examine the art he despises for its specific aesthetic failings because the very introduction of the "aesthetic" leads for him to the moral decadence he fears. "Beauty" is not to be found in the creations of artists separated from the moral universe to which they must conform:

We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.

In this view, beaty is not even a "creation" of artists. It is a discovery by artists of "harmony," of the "order" that is "already" there "in our perceptions." Artists, such as the great landscape painters, are, if they are to be artists at all, "devoted to moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things."

This harmony and order--a moralized nature--is what Scruton means by the "sacred," the capturing of which is the duty of artists. Modern art is engaged in desecration--the inversion of the sacred. In suggesting that human beings are other than "at home in the world" or that the world itself is not always "fit," modern artists mock and undermine the moral order that art should be celebrating and supporting. It is time, according to Scruton, to recover the sacred, "to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized."

Scruton's is an entirely coherent argument if you accept the underlying world view according to which the role of art is to "affirm" the deep, if not always completely visible, truth in "the scheme of things" that manifests itself in beauty. If you believe, however, that the world at times betrays an order that isn't necessarily beneficent, or that as Scruton puts it in his repugnance at another kind of "truthful" art, a human being can be reduced by life to "a lump of suffering flesh made pitiful, helpless, and disgusting," you might find Scruton's "truth" to be partial indeed. You might, in fact, find it a delusion and the idea that a great artist can't redeem "suffering flesh made pitiful" by an act of imagination (or, as Susan Sontag would have it, "will") anything but an affirmation of life.

Will in the World

At the center of Susan Sontag's discussion of style in "On Style" is her emphasis on the role of "will" in the creation and reception of art: 

Perhaps the best way of clarifying the nature of our experience of works of art, and the relation between art and the rest of human feeling and doing, is to invoke the notion of will. It is a useful notion beacuse will is not just a particular posture of consciousness, energized consciousness. It is also an attitude toward the world, of a subject toward the world.

The complex kind of willing that is embodied, and communicated, in a work of art both abolishes the world and encounters it in an extraordinarily intense and specialized way. This double aspect of the will in art is succinctly expressed by [Raymond] Bayer when he says: "Each work of art gives us the schematized and disengaged memory of a volition." Insofar as it schematized, disengaged, a memory, the willing involved in art sets itself at a distance from the world. . . .

Art must distance itself from the world in order to become visible as art in the first place. It comes into being as a version of the world, as an aesthetic reproduction, and for this to be accomplished as thoroughly as is necessary, both for artist and audience, an act of "will" is required. And this act could be described as "dehumanized," since

in order to appear to us as art, the work must restrict sentimental intervention and emotional participation, which are functions of "closeness." It is the degree and manipulating of this distance, the conventions of distance, which constitute the style of the work.

Although I really don't understand how this effort of aesthetic willing could itself be identified as a work's "style" (more on this below), otherwise the concept of "will" as the imposition of a purely formal status on a text, image, or soundscape seems a cogent enough formulation. Most readers of novels, viewers of paintings or sculpture, and listeners to music want to disregard art's distancing effects and recover a notional "closeness" Sontag duly reminds us is antithetical to the very creation of art.

But again Sontag can't seem to accept the full implications of her position. She must add a codicil:

A work of art is first of all an object, not an imitation; and it is true that all great art is founded on distance, on artificiality, on style, on what Ortega [y Gasset] calls dehumanization. But the notion of distance, (and of dehumanization, as well) is misleading, unless one adds that the movement is not just away from but toward the world. The overcoming or transcending of the world in art is also a way of encountering the world, and of training or educating the will to be in the world. . . .

This encountering of the world is what Sontag calls the "function" of art, which she thus substitutes for "content" in opposition to the art "object." She appears to believe that in so doing she is banishing "content" as a subject of critical discussion, but I can't really see how "function" operates as any less of an obstacle to the appreciation of style--which for Sontag remains the only "substance" of art--as the content it effectively displaces. If previously a work of art could be judged by the moral or social ramifications of its "content," what, under Sontag's formulation of "function, " would prevent it from being judged by how acceptably it performs the task of "educating the will to be in the world"? Art would still be valued at least as much--probably, inevitably, more--for its utilitarian intervention in "the world" as it would as a self-sufficient creation, an act of aesthetic will.

The function of a work of art is to be itself. It doesn't engage in "training" for anything other than subsequent, perhaps more "educated" experiences of art. No doubt some people regard some works of art as having provided them the kind of enhanced re-engagement with the world of "real" experience that Sontag invokes--keeping in mind that works of art themselves belong to the world of experience--but to posit that art has a function that makes it useful to the world for reasons other than being availabe to experience, and this function applies at all times for all people, only gives away to the philistines what Sontag otherwise seems to want to preserve--the integrity of art.

Part of the reason for Sontag's readiness to trade "object" for "function" may lie in the ultimate imprecision of her notion of "style" in art, especially as style is embodied in works of literature: "Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist's will." "If art is the supreme game which the will plays with itself, 'style' consists of the set of rules by which the game is played." "To the extent that a work seems right, just, unimaginable otherwise (without loss or damage), what we are responding to is a quality of its style." "An artist's style is, from a technical point of view, nothing other than the particular idiom in which he deploys the forms of his art." "[E]very style embodies an epistemological decision, an interpretation of how and what we see." Nowhere in "On Style" is there discussion of color or brushstroke, tone or harmonics, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. "Particular idiom" in poetry or fiction is never associated with specific effects of language, with the use of words.

The closest Sontag comes to a real analysis of style is this brief discussion of Gertrude Stein:

The circular repetitive style of Gertrude Stein's Melanctha expresses her interest in the dilution of immediate awareness by memory and anticipation, what she calls "association," which is obscured in language by the system of the tenses. Stein's insistence on the presentness of experience is identical with her decision to keep to the present tense, to choose commonplace short words and repeat groups of them incessantly, to use an extremely loose syntax and abjure most punctuation. Every style is a means of insisting on something .

It would be hard not to notice Stein's "circular repetitve style"--her particular idiom of "commonplace short words" and "extremely loose syntax"--but this sort of focus on style as the deployment of language is relevant to all writers worth our notice, and otherwise "On Style" defines style much more abstractly as "principle of decision," "set of rules," and "epistemological decision." And even here Stein's prose style is summed up as an aspect of will, as the "means of insisting on something," rather than as the enlistment of words in an aesthetically compelling verbal composition. A writer's "style" can be examined for its successes and failures in meeting the latter goal; as an embodiment of "will" it remains, for me at least, rather too mistily metaphysical.

On the other hand, Sontag seems correct to me when she concludes the essay by reminding us that "In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable," that "Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable."

In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . ., of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

I would only add that the "silences" cultivated by great art are "present" because the work makes room for them in a concrete way. They are incorporated into the work as "ineffable" but real. (The New Critics might have called this ineffable quality "ambiguity," something half-said but not fully said.) The specific way in which, through its style, the work of art invokes a fruitful silence is always still worth attention.

Book Reporting

The "book review" as we now know it is more an artifact of professionalized journalism than it is a form of literary criticism. While critical consideration of "new" books is certainly a worthy task for literary criticism--a case could be made that it is in fact the imperative task of criticism--book reviews of fiction have for decades been primarily a sub-genre of reporting. As Matthew Davis puts it in a recent discussion of Martin Amis's early years as a reviewer, for newspaper editors the book review "could be taken as one of the functions of reporting on all aspects of current affairs." Indeed, the full-length review (1,000 words or more) of single titles is almost entirely a product of the modern newspaper and the few magazines that "covered" books on a regular basis.

Since few book reviews do little more than recount plot and pronounce summary judgment, those that either manage to do more than that, or that manage to expoit the conventions of the book review particularly well, are really the only ones worth considering as contributions to literary criticism. (That these conventions usually make book reviews into a slightly more elevated version of the book report accounts, in my view, for the fact that most of the books reviewed in print publications are conventional, plot-bound novels. Innovative, adventurous fiction often resists plot summary, and thus such fiction is either ignored or regarded with palpable disdain.) Although the insights provided by even the best newspaper book reviews are still filtered through the listless idiom of the book review "craft," sometimes they can actually employ that craft to provide intelligent commentary.

Recently Heller McAlpin reviewed John Updike's My Father's Tears for the Christian Science Monitor. Although restricted to 750 words, her review nevertheless manages to convey both her sense of the value of this posthumous volume and to locate its stories in the broader context of Updike's work in general and of his late work in particular. Although I ultimately think her focusing concept of Updike's fiction as providing an account of "what it is to be an educated, thinking, feeling – and, finally, aging – northeastern American male in the latter half of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st" is much too narrow in capturing Updike's accomplishment as a writer--he's much less a conventional realist than many readers and critics seem to think he is--McAlpin's review nonetheless cogently organizes itself around the thesis that, as she puts it later in the review, the "overarching theme of Updike’s last stories is the family diaspora that is a natural but painful passage of man – a dispersal whose final stage is death but whose most effective antidote is memory."

While she may have partly been forced to do so by necessity, McAlpin is still wise to limit her discussion of the individual stories included in My Father's Tears to just four, using them to get at the thematic continuity of the book. Too many reviews of short story collections essentially just list the included stories and offer a synopsis or brief observation, substituting the naming of titles for analysis. McAlpin effectively uses the final story, the first story, the title story, and a fourth story that is representative of others to frame her discussion of the volume's merits and to give the reader an informed sense of how the stories work together. This emphasis on the broad commonalities among the stories potentially helps the reader to fruitfully approach the book far more than a series of plot summaries.

In this review, McAlpin manages to turn the limitations of the newspaper book review--its brevity and its appeal to "consumer service"--into a benefit. She succinctly indicates the nature of the stories to be found in My Father's Tears and just as succinctly links these stories to Updike's previous work. This has the effect of clearing away the detritus surrounding Updike's fiction as it has been received in the final years of his career and bringing readers back to the constant concerns--at least in terms of theme and subject--that have animated Updike's work for fifty years and that are duly updated in what turns out to be his final book.

Unfortunately, in her review of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, McAlpin succumbs to the vices encouraged by most newspaper book reviews. The review begins by stating what appears to be a thesis--that the novel is "an enormously absorbing, nuanced read that steeps us in its character's world - and gradually surprises us with its moral resonance,"  but which turns out to be just an isolated evaluative statement the rest of the review does not illuminate. Instead, it sticks to straightforward plot summary that is meant, presumably, to certify that Brooklyn is "absorbing," etc. but that really just suggests, at least to me, that this is merely a conventional historical novel about "lost innocence." Brooklyn may indeed be "absorbing," "nuanced," and full of "moral resonance," but McAlpin's review does not show us how or why these things are true of the novel. 

That the Toibin review is of a novel while the Updike review considers a collection of stories may partly account for the greater reliance on plot summary in the former (as well might various editorial policies of which we as readers of the review cannot finally be aware), but the temptation to "review" mostly by condensing story and making a few unsupported critical remarks is apparently an inherent feature of journalism-based book reviewing. No one should expect newspaper reviews to evidence rigorous critical thinking, of course--although McAlpin shows in the Updike review she is certainly capable of applying critical insight--but its absence does make it difficult to take seriously the protestations of print reviewers that they are the guardians of literary culture and thus their trade ought not be allowed to disappear.

"Journalism-based reviewing" extends to a publication like the New York Review of Books, which is often cited as a book review that does offer more rigorous criticism. If one were to judge by Michael Dirda's recent review of The Complete Ripley Novels, however, plot summary also seems to be the primary critical method valued by both the reviewer and the editors of NYRB. Dirda makes some attempt to weave in the occasional critical observation ("The hallmark of Patricia Highsmith's work is a calm, hallucinatory intensity built on sentences of unemotional plainness and clarity"), but if anyone is looking to find in his review some critical discernment beyond the usual sort of thing said about Highsmith's fiction (it "probes the fluid nature of identity," is "bleak" and "upsetting"), such is not to be found here. Serial description of the plots of each novel, in chronological order, is.

In my view, this is partly, if not largely, the fault of the Review and its editors. When fiction is discussed in this publication at all--which is rarely more than once or twice an issue--it is often through biographies of writers or omnibus volumes such as The Complete Ripley Novels, and these reviews generally follow the same pattern: rehashing of biographical details combined with superficial observations about the writer's work. The emphasis remains on "reporting" the publication of the book in question, not on providing more penetrating literary criticism.

(When a new work of fiction is reviewed at NYRB, which is even rarer, usually it considers the work of an established writer, seldom is the review allotted as much space as one devoted to nonfiction, and scarcely ever does the review differ significantly from those in other newspaper and magazine book sections. Even Dirda's review is mostly five separate brief reviews piled on top of each other rather than an extended critque.)

Print journalism is fairly quickly being reduced to its core functions of news reporting and analysis, and much of the latter is being siphoned off onto blogs and other websites, especially commentary related to the arts and "culture." Whether the newspaper book review will simply replicate itself online does still remain to be seen, but if it instead fades into literary history, it will be a form of "literary journalism" that won't really be missed.

Jim Thompson in Vermont

If I had never read Jim Thompson, I might think that Dave Zeltserman's Small Crimes (Serpent's Tail) is a neat little book, a provocative narrative of law-enforcement corruption and human depravity with satisfying doses of dark humor and an over-the-top conclusion that almost works.

But I have read Jim Thompson, and thus while reading Small Crimes I could really only register how derivative it is. A first-person narrator relates to us the story of his own dissolution from high school football star to corrupt cop and dual gambling- and drug-addict to ex-con trying to re-establish himself after serving a sentence for disfiguring, and almost killing, the local district attorney. His story includes his relationship with the local crime boss, as well as his former employer, the local sheriff, who if anything is an even bigger criminal than the crime boss himself. The narrator finds himself pursued still by the d.a., who in trying to get the mortally ill boss to implicate the narrator in his criminal operations also threatens to implicate the sheriff, and so the narrator only gets entangled further in the poisonous legacy of his past. That he won't finally escape it seems a pre-established certainty.

In its depiction of ubiquitous criminality and relentlessly sociopathic behavior, Small Crimes is a near-impersonation of such Thompson narratives as The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280. Zeltserman does try to outdo Thompson in a couple of ways, most obviously by transferring the Thompson crime narrative to rural Vermont, where the violence and other crimes perpetrated by most of the novel's characters (including a nurse with whom the narrator briefly becomes involved, who seems to be a serial killer) seems outrageously out of place. Unfortunately, so out of place does it seem that ultimately it comes to be rather cartoonish, a flaw Thompson himself almost always avoided. The second flourish on Thompson guignol is that the narrator appears to be narrating the story from hell, his descent to which occupies the novel's final scene. This actually does seem like a device Jim Thompson might have used, but again I couldn't finally accept it here as anything more than an attempt to compete with the master in the exploitation of extremes.

In most other ways, the novel can't compete with Thompson's books. The narrator has little of the creepy understatement characteristic of Thompson's unhinged narrators. He spends way too much time trying to convince himself, and us, that he's not such a bad guy after all, and it's ultimately hard to have much feeling for him one way or another, not even as someone who deserves some sympathy because he's clearly insane, or who should be feared because he's so inherently evil. Although it isn't a paricularly long novel, it still seems padded out with perfunctory and unnecessary dialogue, while the last one-third or so of the story seems very rushed and full of implausible violence, some of it made more implausible by being reported to us indirectly rather than dramatically portrayed. The constant trouble into which the narrator gets himself seems contrived, which isn't helped by the fact that the setting, against which this action ought to be heightened, is depicted cursorily at best.

I'm less disappointed by the limitations of Small Crimes, however, than I am puzzled by the effort to mimic a writer like Jim Thompson in the first place. There is inspiration and then there is imitation. This novel seems to me clearly the latter, although much crime/detective fiction I read seems largely imitative as well. Most hard-boiled detective fiction imitates Chandler, while most "noir" crime fiction imitates Thompson (or perhaps James M. Cain). This must be why I still read Chandler and Thompson with great pleasure and admirration but find most current crime fiction pallid and secondhand. Both of these writers were creating something new. The kinds of characters, plots, and narrative voices they developed were so compelling they came to define the hard-boiled crime genre, but this has become a mixed blessing, as the genre itself struggles to step out of the shadow of these writers' influence.

In her fawning review of Small Crimes, Maureen Corrigan asserts that "Zeltserman takes up all the familiar tropes of the formula -- femmes fatales, frighteningly dysfunctional families, self-destructive drives and the death grip of the past -- and shows how infinite are the combinations that can still be played on them." That Zeltersman "takes up all the familar tropes" of the genre is certainly true, but the novel demonstrates that the "combinations" available are far from infinite. More importantly, it prompts one to ask why recombining these tropes is a worthwhile activity to begin with.