The Reading Experience

"Literature"

Jonathan Mayhew affirms the notion that poetry aspires to the condition of music, arguing specifically that "poetry is closer to music than it is to 'literature' as conventionally defined." Since Walter Pater's original assertion was that all art aspires to that condition, in making this distinction between poetry and "literature"--which encompasses mostly fiction--Jonathan must be insinuating that fiction is not finally "art" at all. Indeed, he explicitly suggests that the novel is "centered on the mimetic portrayal of society on the broad canvas," which itself implies that fiction has primarily a sociological or documentary function. And in further asserting that this association with music would make poetry "one of the arts," he seems to be implying that "literature as conventionally defined" is not.

I think that Jonathan is probably right that fiction as "conventionally defined" by many readers and critics is not first of all regarded as art, and is precisely distinguished from poetry by the latter's more apparent homologies with music. Fiction is considered by too many to be a mode of discourse separable from nonfiction in its insistence on communicating indirectly, but otherwise still a mode of cultural, moral, or political description and reflection, another way of "saying something." For these people, to claim that fiction is, or ought to be, more akin to poetry in its aspiration to music is to trivialize it, deprive it of its mandate to "engage" with the "real world." For others, such a connection would inflate fiction beyond its actual merits, which are limited to its role as a medium for spinning a yarn.

Decoupling poetry and fiction as the Siamese twins of literature thus might have the beneficial effect of either redefining "literature" as that writing which does aspire to the condition of art by invoking a comparison with music or of sending the term into disuse altogether. The former would allow those who favor fiction-as-discourse to continue mining works of fiction for nuggets of "meaning" without being nagged by those favoring fiction-as-art about all that fol-de-rol known as "aesthetics." They might be hesitant to lose the term because by now it does confer an honorific status on the texts they examine--and thus also on their own endeavor as critics--but ultimately their interest is in literature as illustration, not in the integrity of literature itself, so they really would be able to keep doing what they do now even if fiction is finally identified as just another cultural form without the burden of being "literary."

If the latter, the abandonment of the term as an umbrella concept loosely uniting the primary modes of "creative" writing, were to occur, perhaps we might return to the use of "poetry" as a designation for all imaginative writing, a state of affairs that obtained before both "plays" and "novels" broke off from poetry to become separate forms of imaginative expression and before "poetry" became almost exclusively identified as lyric poetry. Speaking for myself, I would find this development heartily welcome, as it would allow some writers of fiction--those who think of themselves as artists rather than commentators, or simply entertainers,  to align themselves more with poets and poetry without necessarily writing what is now called "poetry" per se. Fiction might become more "poetic" not by emphasizing conventional figurative language--which is what most reviewers identify as "lyricism" in fiction--but simply by implicitly acknowledging its own status as an artificial construction of language. Such traditionally constitutive elements of fiction as "plot," "character," or "setting" might remain as notional devices, but would recede in importance to the structural patterning of language the author has employed.

Already, of course, the boundaries between "prose" and "poetry" have become blurred, especially among contemporary poets. Moreover, there have always been fiction writers who have conceived their work to be "poetic" in the sense I have just described. (A good case could be made, for example, that the fiction of Gilbert Sorrentino was always more a variation on his work as a poet than an adaptation of the novel "as conventionally defined.") But either a further blurring of the lines or a further reinforcement of the lines so that "the mimetic portrayal of society on the broad canvas" isn't the default definition of "literature" could each bring a refreshing clarity to debates about the nature of literary art and its relationship to the other arts.

 

Thinking

D.G. Myers is pretty sure that plot in fiction displays "how the greatest novelists think." I surely can't agree either that plot is always relevant to how the "greatest novelists" think, nor that it necesssarily has anything to do with how novelists "think," although I would concede that it does sometimes indicate a kind of "thinking" in some fiction, including in much bad fiction. I can't say I follow his reasoning, either:

"Although an ingenious plot is not a logical structure, it serves the same purpose in fiction that argument serves in philosophy—and may even rival philosophical argument in brilliance."

If plot is not a logical structure, how can it serve the same purpose as argument? An argument depends on its logical structure. If plot has no logical structure, how can it be an argument at all, much less a brilliant one?

". . .when it is airtight, the plot succeeds in establishing, I would hold, the validity of the novel’s central theme."

Why is it assumed that every novel has a "central theme"? Don't some novelists work without the assumption of a "theme"? And even if readers deduce such a theme from the plot, how could the latter being validating the former if the writer had no notion there was a theme to validate? Further, don't some novels have more than one theme? How do we decide which one the plot is validating? What if the theme is carried explicitly through dialogue or associated with some other element, such as settting, and the plot merely allows the theme to be developed?

"[The Age of Innocence] is written, as I have argued before now, to verify a “tragic view of marital duty.” The verification is accomplished by the plot, which I now proceed to reduce to a sequence of necessary steps."

How do we know that the novel was written to "verify" this theme? Did Wharton ever herself say such a thing? Nowhere in this or the previous post on Wharton does Myers provide any evidence that she did, or that, absent such warrant, we couldn't find any number of other reasons why the novel "was written," at least according to our own particular reading.

"In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton does not build an intellectual case for the tragedy of marriage. She lays it out—by plots and errors moved."

The Age of Innocence may or may not be about the tragedy of marriage. I could just as easily say it's about the vanity of human wishes or the tyranny of social customs. To the extent it is about the tragedy of marriage, it becomes so because Wharton has adapted the tragic plot, made Newland Archer the tragic hero, etc. I can't see how such a move constitutes "thinking," however. If anything, Wharton is following a centuries-old formula, substituting different circumstances and modern characters. That she might see marriage as potentially tragic strikes me as essentially a platitude.

Which is not to deny that The Age of Innocence is a provocative and worthwhile novel. Wharton adapts the conventions of tragedy in much of her fiction, and does it very effectively. The House of Mirth is among other things a compelling variation on the tragic plot, inserting a woman as the tragic hero. I guess one could construe Wharton's strategy as a form of "thinking," but it's more like simply an experiment with the possibilities of tragedy in the modern age, not really an "argument" of the sort Myers finds in The Age of Innocence.

It seems to me that the thinking-through-plot Myers describes is just another way of identifying plots that are more allegorical than others. Sometimes a novel's plot does obviously enough carrry great thematic weight, but just as often it's an excuse for a bad novel to take on the pretense of "saying something." If Myers were to claim that "In some novels the author carefully constructs a plot so as to reveal some unstated truth," it would be hard to argue with him, but to generalize that plot is always the great writer's way of "thinking" seems an overreach, to say the least.

Subject-Matter

John Dewey's notion of "experience" in Art and Experience cannot be equated with what some aestheticians, following Kant, refer to as "contemplation":

To define the emotional element of the process of perception merely as the pleasure taken in the action of contemplation, independent of what is excited by the matter contemplated, results. . .in a thoroughly anaemic conception of art. Carried to its logical conclusion, it would exclude from esthetic perception most of the subject-matter that is enjoyed in the case of architectural structures, the drama, and the novel, with all their attendent reverberations.

This last sentence would seem to suggest that Dewey believes there is something called "subject-matter" that exists apart from the formal qualities of art and that can properly be the point of the reader's "perception." However, it is the way in which "subject" contributes to aesthetic perception, subject as part of aesthetic perception, that is Dewey's focus, emphasizing a kind of perception that produces "reverberations," not conclusive "meaning."

Indeed, Dewey immediately adds that "Not absence of desire and thought [as would be the case with 'contemplation'] but their thorough incorporation into perceptual experience characterizes esthetic experience, in its distinction from experiences that are especially 'intellectual' and 'practical.'" Those who wish to "contemplate" a work of art want to avoid the projection of desire or the imposition of thought, but for Dewey a fully engaged aesthetic experience finds the subjective response of the "pericipient" satisfyingly integrated in all of its facets with both the matter and manner of the work: "The rhythm of expectancy and satisfaction is so internally complete that the reader is not aware of thought as a separate element, certainly not of it as a labor."

The percipient who settles for contemplation is unable to experience art in quite this active way, but neither is the one driven by the sheer desire for beauty, who is willing to sacrifice the particularity of the work for the abstractly sensual, nor the "investigator," who, in his/her preference for "data" or illustration can only be impatient with the "uniqueness of the object perceived." Both the sensualist and the investigator "want the object for the sake of something else," while anyone open to genuine aesthetic experience will find his/her thoughts and desires "fulfilled in the perception itself."

I myself have some sympathy for the sensualist, who properly seeks out art for its aesthetic value but has a undiscriminating conception of "beauty," but I don't at all comprehend why any "investigator" would show even a passing interest in art or literature--unless it is to deliberately devalue and dismiss the aesthetic as frivolous, not worth the "serious" critic's time. The investigator relegates the formal qualities of literature to the "merely literary," but then approaches works of imagination as if those formal qualities don't exist at all, don't have the effect of bending and conditioning meaning beyond any useful paraphrase. Why concern yourself in the first place with what a poem, story, or novel has to "say," the intellectual or practical "truth" it supposedly reveals, when such works are (at least at their best) so indirect and oblique in their ability to communicate anything?

In my view, Dewey's core notion that art is most valuable as an agent of heightened experience, that it is best appreciated as experience, undercuts all forms of critical investigation--moral criticism, political criticism, cultural criticism, etc.--at least to the extent that such approaches assume that "subject-matter" is easily detached from "perceptual experience." Subject matter exists, but it is the means by which the work of art comes into being, not its end.

A Sad Decline

Lorrie Moore's first two books, the story collection Self-Help (1985) and the novel Anagrams (1986), introduced a writer possessing an appealing comic touch, lightly applied but not reducible to mere "humor," and a modest if still palpable impulse to formal experiment. Self-Help incoporated as a formal strategy the conventions of direct address found in the genre of nonfiction named in the title. Thus this passage from "How to Be the Other Woman": "Shave your legs in the bathroom sink. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition. Wives are like cockroaches. Also part of a great historical tradition. They will survive you after a nuclear attach--they are tough and hardy and travel in packs--but right now they're not having any fun. And when you look in the bathroom mirror, you spot them scurrying, up out of reach behind you." Or the beginning of the book's fourth story, called simply "How": "Begin by meeting him in a class, in a bar, at a rummage sale. Maybe he teaches sixth grade. Manages a hardware store. Foreman at a carton factory. He will be a good dancer. He will have perfectly cut hair. He will laugh at your jokes." Anagrams presents us with the stories of "Benna" and "Gerard," except that in the novel's five sections these are never quite the same characters (although also not completely different, either), their lives rearranged and recombined as narrative anagrams. It contains the kind of verbal comedy also characteristic of Self-Help and that would come to be a distinctive feature of Moore's fiction: "Eleanor and I around this time founded The Quit-Calling Me Shirley School of Comedy. It entailed the two of us meeting downtown for drinks and making desparate pronouncements about life and love which always began, 'But surely. . .' It entailed what Eleanor called, 'The Great White Whine': whiney white people getting together over white wine and whining."

These two books made me think Lorrie Moore might be counted among a younger generation of adventurous writers neither programmatically postmodern nor retreating to the sparer comforts of minimalism, following up on the radical departures of postmodernism in a perhaps less confrontational, more accessible way. Unfortunately, her subsequent books have evidenced a sad, uninterrrupted decline into bathos and convention, each of them more disappointinly trite than the last. Even the story "People Like That Are the Only People Here" (collected in Birds of America), which is ritually cited as Moore's finest work, seems to me mostly an exercise in sentimentality, its supposed mordancy of tone notwithstanding, invoking that most maudlin of narrative devices, a child in distress, without redeeming it. It relies entirely on the reflexive emotional reaction many readers have to this device, but I, for one, don't really need to be convinced that having a sick baby is a woeful state of affairs or that the American health care system is deplorable. As far as I can tell, this story only exists to "say" these things.

Neither Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? nor any of the stories in Like Life or Birds of America exhibit the interest in alternative narrative forms found in Self-Help and Anagrams. They are all conventionally structured narratives employing the kind of strategies designed to "connect" us to their characters, establish appropriate narrative "arc," and provide "telling" and "vivid" detail reinforced by every creative writing program in the country. And while many of them are leavened by what the dust jacket of Birds of America calls the "wit, brio, and verve" manifested in dialogue and by the occasional first-person narrator, the "wit" becomes non-threatingly humorous and essentially ornamental to the "human interest" most reviewers now find central to Lorrie Moore's approach.

Moore's 2009 novel, A Gate at the Stairs, shows the most precipitous decline into banality and unearned emotion yet. It may be the worst novel by a "name" author I've ever read, which is made all the more dismaying by the fact it comes from a writer I once admired. Once again this is a story that leans heavily on the initial emotional appeal of children, but in this case although an orphaned child is introduced and her plight made a center of interest for a while, utlimately this narrative thread has very little emotional weight and is finally dropped, not to be taken up again. Other potentially emotion-laden episodes are introduced as well, but they all remain surprisingly inert, both in narrative and emotional effect. Thus, while the situations evoked in the novel are potentially mawkish, they are executed with so little imagination and formal integrity they essentially just arise and recede without making much of an impression at all. The death of the protagonist's brother, for example, seems so arbitrary, so clearly the product of narrative convenience that her reaction to it is almost grotesquely overwrought. We've been given so little reason to care about the brother, or so little insight into the relationship between sister and brother, this episode as the novel's climactic event falls disastrously flat even in a narrative that never gets off the ground anyway.

A Gate at the Stairs chronicles one year in the life of Tassie Keltjen, a Midwestern college student, shortly after the events of 9/11/01. Apparently, this context is meant to be significant, the story Tassie tells in some way inflected by or representing allegorically the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but exactly why it is significant or how the story "responds" to the period after the Twin Towers collapsed and before the Iraq war began I am not able to say. In his review of the novel, Ron Charles asserts that it contains "profound reflections on marriage and parenthood, racism and terrorism, and especially the baffling, hilarious, brutal initiation to adult life." I can't find any "profound reflections" on any of these issues, most especially terrorism, although this may be a function of my disinclination to read fiction for "reflections" on anything rather than the failure of the author to make her reflections more tangible. Moreover, if  the nature of her reflections were suddenly to become more apparent to me, I'm pretty sure this would only clarify further exactly why I find this novel so unpalatable, providing additional evidence that Lorrie Moore has abandoned aesthetic adventurousness for dreary "engagement."

The novel certainly does depict "marriage and parenthood," as Tassie finds herself working as a nanny for a couple who have adopted a biracial child. This presumably also introduces the issues of race to which Powers alludes, but the closest we get to "reflection" on racism is through a series of inane conversations among a group of adoptive mothers of cross-racial children that Tassie overhears. Tassie's employers probably are meant to be "colorful" characters whose marriage provides a contrast with Tassie's own parents back on the farm. They are, however, so superficially portrayed--the menu at the wife's gourmet restaurant is more interesting than she is--that "reflection" on their obviously foundering marriage is hardly possible. Further, the eventually revealed backstory explaining their situation, including their desire to adopt, is so astonishingly implausible that whatever resonance Tassie's experience with them might have is completely lost. Tassie's parents are actually more interesting, although their son's death at the book's conclusion reduces them to a generic set of grieving parents, emblematic, I suppose, of the many other grieving parents created by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The scenes focusing on Tassie at home and interacting with her parents are the best in the book, but they are overshadowed by the interminable accounts of Tassie at work and at school.

The latter include an interlude in which Tassie takes up with a fellow student named Reynaldo, who presents himself as Brazilian, but turns out to be an American muslim from New Jersey. I think. Apparently he's a proto-terrorist, or terrorist fellow traveller, or something. If we are to take seriously the notion that a Wisconsin farm girl at an upper Midwestern state university finds herself involved with a budding terrorist, then these scenes are unquestionably the most embarrassing in the novel. Otherwise, they're just impossibly muddled.

One quality of Lorrie Moore's fiction that initially made it attractive to me does survive in A Gate at the Stairs. As narrator of her story, Tassie Keltjin frequently enough exhibits a comedian-like sense of humor:

Adoption seemed both a cruel joke and lovely daydream--a nice way of avoiding the blood and pain of giving birth, or, from a child's perspective, a realized fantasy of your parents not really being your parents. Your genes could thrust one arm in the air and pump up and down, Yes! You were not actually related to Them!

"You know," Tassie recalls saying to a date who has just announced to her he's gay, "if you concentrated you could be straight. I'm sure of it. Just relax, close your eyes once in a while, and just do it. Heterosexuality--well, it takes a lot of concentration!. . .It takes a lot for everybody!"

On the other hand, there are passages that struggle for cogency, as when Tassie muses about women's fashion:

What would be cool was something different, more murderous, and not depticable. From what I could see, the best look would involve not just something new, but something with insouciant jewelry and ominous leather goods denouncing something old that lay within yourself and others. Probably I would never accomplish this. Without explicit instructions I had no feel or instinct, at least not for the new part. I felt, however, that if called upon, I could do the other part--denunciation--but privately. Privately part cool, since I partook of denouncing (silently, violently) all the time.

These reflections are clearly enough laboring to "say" something significant, but I don't really know what it is.

The contrast between the sure-footed comedy of the first two passages and the straining for effect of the last seems to me to encapsulate the fatal flaw of A Gate at the Stairs. Moore retains, on a verbal level, her essentially comedic vision and skills but ulimately allows them to be subjugated to a ponderous effort to be "about" something more "serious." A writer who began by writing funny, formally agile fiction has now produced an emotionally overworked, formally dull novel only intermittently relieved by a funny line or facetiously rendered scene. I have said this is one of the worst books I've read, but the experience of reading it is really more depressing than anything else.

 

Only Change and No Urns?

While reflecting on the role of "innovation" in poetry, Ron Silliman pauses to offer this comment:

I have written before that any history of poetry is inevitably a history of change in poetry, and that an inevitable consequence is that the well-wrought urn is almost invariably a trivial accomplishment. Indeed, it’s a trivial goal.

The "Well-Wrought Urn" is of course the title of Cleanth Brooks's "Studies in the Structure of Poetry," as the book's subtitle has it. It is probably the most important critical work to emerge from the practice of "New Criticism," and it can still be read as a primer of sorts on that approach to literary criticism.  New Criticism was dislodged from its place as a dominant academic critical strategy long ago, but it continues to draw much abuse from those who associate it with an apolitical formalism or an almost religious reverence for the poem as "verbal icon" or, in Silliman's case, view it as a critical adjunct to the "school of quietude" in poetry.

It is true that in invoking the "well-wrought urn" Brooks was trying to call attention to poetry as a verbal equivalent, a poem as an art object sufficient unto itself. But the trope can be dismissed as a "trivial goal"--indeed, as a "goal" at all--only if you assume that the urn is well-wrought because it successfully attains a level of "beauty" that conforms to pre-established formal requirements. Literary history as a series of such skillfully-fashioned verbal objects reinforcing aesthetic norms would indeed be a tedious procession, and the goal of adding yet one more "fine" work would indeed be trivial.

But I don't see why "well-wrought urn" has to be taken in this way. A poem, or any other work of art, could be still be admirably made even if it departs from norms and conventions, although it might take some readers a little longer to recognize the "well-wrought" qualities of such a work. Time might be needed, or a perspicacious critic who can illuminate the aesthetic strategies employed, but surely there are too many "great" works of formal splendor that at one time were perceived as ugly or misshapen for us to accept that the notion of the well-wrought can only apply to conventionally beautiful art. Who now thinks Joyce's Ulysses is not carefully wrought, even though at the time of its publication it was perceived as chaotic? If a work carries out its own aesthetic assumptions in a deliberate and coherent way (and even apparent incoherence often has its own justifying logic), why should we not call this effort "well-wrought," even if the results are at first unfamiliar?

So, yes, the history of both poetry and fiction is a history of change, but that is not inconsistent with a literary history featuring "well-wrought" works that were also, in their time and, in some cases, are still, challenging and unorthodox. I agree with Ron Silliman that what is presented as new and innovative in art is often just "fashionism," although it seems to me that Ron's emphasis on the "evolution" of poetry, on literary history as only change and no urns, threatens to make poetry even more into fashionism. There has to be room for the recognition of aesthetic success that remains successful.

Going Truly Global

In her recent consideration of Dalkey Archive's anthology, Best European Fiction 2010, Ruth Franklin wonders:

Other than the language in which they write, is there anything that unites [writers such as Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and Nathan Englander]—all of whom have spent long periods of their lives living in places other than the United States—as definably American?

This immediately seems to me rather insipid. In taking full measure of all writers' work, "the language in which they write" is everything. If the language is English, then whatever is "definably American" about the work can only reach us through the Americanized version of this language. (Luckily the reach of English into many countries and cultures gives us Americans additional direct access to the work of many non-American writers, although I would still maintain that American readers are going to respond most fully to American fiction simply because they "know" the language as inflected by American culture, just as Australians will respond most strongly to Australian fiction. This does not seem to me a matter of "preferring" one's national literature to translated literature. It's simply a matter of fact.) As to what else might mark a writer as "definably American": Who cares? It's an exercise for an American Studies scholar, perhaps, but otherwise not a question relevant to the our encounter with the text.

I have written before that I feel comfortable engaging in literary criticism, at least that form of it I generally favor, close reading, only of English-language fiction or poetry. I am not able to get close enough to do a close reading of translations, since I can't be sure the text in front of me is an adequate realization of the original--indeed, I know it's not, as the only adequate realization would be the original. I cannot immerse myself in the language of the text, only the translator's rendering of the text in another language, and I don't see how a critical reading of this text would be a fair judgment of the writer as a writer. It's literally not his/her writing.

I experience this dilemma not as a reason to elevate literature in English above that produced in other languages but as a reason to focus my critical energies (although not necessarily all of my reading time) on work that I think I can assess accurately. I experience it ultimately as a forfeited opportunity to widen my own reading horizons, a result of my inability to pick up languages easily, or at least to learn one well enough to read an untranslated text with any degree of confidence I am "getting it." There's certainly enough that I can get from a translated text--most of its formal qualities and a general comprehesion of character or setting or theme, etc.--to make reading translations worthwhile, but I would venture into extended critical analysis of a translated work only when I think its most important qualities obviously enough survive the translation--as I did most recently with Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones.

According to Franklin, "There’s something a little bit ridiculous about continuing to use nationality as a primary label for writers now that literary culture has gone truly global." Nationality itself, perhaps so, but there's nothing ridiculous at all about using national language as "a primary label for writers." There may be an increasingly shared "sensibility" among "global" writers, but finally the way in which that sensibility is embodied in the available resources of the writer's medium--the particular language in which he/she writes--can't simply be ignored. To the extent it is being ignored, both in the commentary about Best European Fiction (where language differences among the included writers themselves are also being subsumed to the imperatives of the "global") and in discussions of translation in general, a fundamental fact about literature is simply being elided. I can't see that it does a writer from any country any good to encourage readers to think that language can harmlessly be tossed into a melting pot of flavorless "international influences" and be served up as a stew.

Sorrentino Review

My review for The Quarterly Conversation of Gilbert Sorrentino's posthumously published The Abyss of Human Illusion is now available in the new issue, number 19. As usual, lots of other good stuff there too.