The Reading Experience

The New Equivocation

    Readers familiar with Rebecca Goldstein's previous fiction would no doubt find that 36 Arguments for the Existence of God has much in common with the earlier work. It concerns itself with the intellectual nexus formed by science-mathematics-philosophy, is set in the campus world of academics, and supplements its focus on the life of the mind by introducing questions about Jewish identity and Judaism as a side interest. It is the sort of thing most readily identified as a "novel of ideas," although this novel may be the most insistent on foregrounding the "ideas" themselves as its central interest.

    In novels such as The Mind-Body Problem (1989), Mazel (1995), and Properties of Light (2000), Goldstein takes as her subject characters working in the "hard" disciplines who struggle to reconcile their commitment to the intellectual rigor of these disciplines with their physical and emotional impulses that tempt them away from that commitment, in some cases toward the suspension of reason and rigor represented by religion and religious tradition. 36 Arguments continues the preoccupation with this subject but does so in the form of a conventional academic satire, a mode the earlier novels, for all their focus on academics and their eccentricites, did not really approach. These novels (as well as the short story collection, Strange Attractors) seemed to manifest an effort to satisfy both the demands of philosophy and of literary form (perhaps analagous to their protagonists' efforts to reconcile head and heart). Properties of Light, for example, finds a provocative way to use science to create a ghost story of sorts, as one of its characters comes back to quantumly "haunt" the woman responsible for his death.

    36 Arguments for the Existence of God, however, doesn't really exhibit the same concern for transforming philosophy and science into literary devices. Granted, the "36 arguments" construct is used as a structural element, incorporated literally in the form of a series of propositions and their refutations as the novel's concluding section and metaphorically by providing the novel's chapter titles, but otherwise this novel presents few surprises either formally or thematically, proceeding as a garden-variety academic satire complete with bursting egos, pretentious-sounding projects, and fierce political in-fighting. It provides Goldstein with the opportunity to portray the current phenomenon of "new atheism," but its appeal is largely restricted to the examination of this phenomenon as a "current issuue." While some marginal interest might be added by dramatizing this phenomenon through attributing positions to fictionally depicted characters, finally not much about the controversy over new atheism is really illuminated by dressing it up as fiction rather than addressing it more straightforwardly through analysis and explication.

    The most serious limitation of 36 Arguments, however, is that as satire it isn't very funny. None of the characters rise above facile caricature--the female characters are all in one way or another too much woman for the diffident protagonist--and emphasizing the decidedly Jewish names of campus buildings (at "Frankfurter University") and a college president named "Shimmy" only goes so far. The most egregious failure is the portrayal of Jonas Elijah Klapper, "Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values" and embodiment of pomposity, clearly enough modeled on Harold Bloom. Once one "gets" that this character is based on Bloom, the endless reiterations of his girth, his affected speech and mannerisms, and his encyclopedic references to Jewish mysticism become almost unbearable. It's never clear whether Klapper is meant to represent the foolishness of literary study in general, or of a particular kind of anti-scientific literary discourse, or whether he just signifies that it's inappropriate to be Harold Bloom. Whatever the case, we can only conclude that, as Gordon Haber puts it in his review of the novel, Klapper "is supposed to be a comic figure because his interest in Judaism leads to messianic delusions, and because he’s fat."

    Because so much space is devoted to Jonas Elijah Klapper, and because presumably something is to be made of the contrast between Klapper's approach to "faith and values" and the approach the protagonist, originally a disciple of Klapper, eventually favors, or between Klapper's take on Judaism and that of "true" Hasidic Jews, or something or other, the insipidness of the novel's portrayal of him subverts any purely literary claims it might have to make on us. The flashbacks to this period in the protagonist's life prove almost completely superfluous and little in his interactions with other characters is of much interest. We are left with a subplot concerning the "Valdener Hasidim," a community of Hasidic Jews for whom both Klapper and the protagonist develop an increasing fondness. Interest focuses in particular on the current Valdener Rebbe and his heir apparent son, a mathematical genius in the making who is ultimately forced to choose between the potential of his genius and his responsibility to the community he is apparently destined to lead.

    The protagonist, Cass Seltzer, a Frankfurter pyschologist who has written a surprise best seller called The Varieties of Religious Illusion, is himself not a very compelling character. He exists mostly as an opportunity for Goldstein to evoke the mileu he inhabits and to raise the issues of faith and belief with which the novel is principally concerned. He has the consumately "moderate" personality that allows him to empathize with believers even as he is chosen to make the case for nonbelief in a setpiece debate near the novel's conclusion. He is clearly enough regarded as the "winner" of the debate, yet his admiration of the community spirit that maintains the Valdeners in their traditions and of the decision by the son to continue those traditions after his father's death is also palpable. The narrative never deviates from Cass's perspective, and we are inevitably led to appreciate both his intellectual toughness and his soft spot for tradition and solidarity.

    The novel's concluding episode, a joyous celebration of a Valdener wedding, veers away from satire and rests ultimate sympathy with the community practices of the Hasidic Jews. This is the sort of thing some readers find "moving" or "transcendent," but I find it muddled and maudlin. It doesn't seem to me to rescue a sense of "mystery" about human life but indicates a willingness to disregard the truth. It doesn't invest Cass Seltzer with additional "humanity" but confirms his ability to equivocate. Cass may not be a believer, but he'd really, really like to be one, the irrationality of belief notwithstanding. The right kind of religious belief--not too intense, but with a lot of dancing-- would be so nice and agreeable.

News of the Poetry World

    The Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog recently announced it is abandoning the "discussion model" to provide instead "a daily news feed with links and excerpts from other outlets around the world." This means that the site will no longer feature blog posts from a selected group of poets "discussing" poetry but will become like every other digest blog offering "news."

    The PF is making this move because "The blog as a form has begun to be overtaken by social media like Twitter and Facebook.  News of the poetry world now travels fastest and furthest through Twitter. . .with the information often picked up from news aggregator sites rather than discursive blogs." Further,

. . .anyone involved in the more dynamic discussions of poetry, poetics, or politics in the past year knows that more and more of the most vibrant interactions have been found on Facebook.  We saw this happening last month as our National Poetry Month posts traveled far and wide through various status updates, wall postings, and links.

    I always thought the "discussion model" used at Harriet was a little too chatty, too often short on extended analysis, but nevertheless I checked in on the blog several times a week and usually found some posts on the practice and reading of poetry that were well worth my time. I can with some certainty say I will never look at the site again, as it now gives in to the preoccupation with the "fastest and furthest" that characterizes too much of the blogosphere. "News of the poetry world" will replace the consideration of actual poetry.

    I don't know whether "the blog as a form has begun to be overtaken by social media like Twitter and Facebook," at least where serious commentary on poetry and fiction is concerned. That it has overtaken the blog as a source of quasi-public instant messaging is probably true, and to the extent this leaves the weblog as a space that might be put to use for more substantive discourse is a good thing. But why the PF would think that Twitter-type shout-outs would be better for poetry than the "discursive blog" is not something I can understand.

    Is more "information" what we really need? Does the rapid-fire posting of ephemera amount to "dynamic discussions" or does it just reduce the discussion of poetry to the same relentless focus on trivia that characterizes the coverage of movies, of celebrity culture in general? What seems to me to be motivating the Harriet change of approach--what seems to be motivating the Twitterization of online discourse in general--is precisely the desire to see what is posted disseminated "far and wide through various status updates, wall postings, and links," not a concern for the substance of the post. The mere accumulation of friends, followers, and hits, evidence of "interaction," is the end-in-itself.

    The digest form of weblog has existed from the beginnings of the blogosphere, is probably the original, most recognizable form of blog. Plenty of them still exist and provide useful "news." If Twitter now performs this function more efficiently, so be it, but that doesn't seem to be a good reason to transform all blogs into versions of Twitter. Both poetry and fiction need more "discursive blogs" examining the news that stays news, not fewer.

NOTE Andrew Wessels at A Compulsive Reader has some similar thoughts.

Outside the Realm of Poetry

    David Biespiel is convinced that "America’s poets are uniquely qualified to speak openly in the public square among diverse or divisive communities," despite their current "intractable and often disdainful disinterest in participating in the public political arena outside the realm of poetry." Although he assures us he agrees that "a poet must make his way in the world as best fits his vision for himself as an artist," nevertheless his essay is so filled with apocalyptic urgency about the need for poets to reclaim a role in "civic discourse" it clearly implies that those who settle for "quiet rooms of contemplation" are neglecting their responsibilities both to democracy and to poetry.

    Biespiel wants to maintain a distinction between poets writing a deliberately "civic" poetry and using the "gravitas" that comes from being a poet simply to speak out on public affairs, but ultimately he really can't keep his frustration with the "cliquish" and "self-reflexive" nature of contemporary poetry from condemning it outright, not just for its civic derelictions but for its retreat into "art-affirming debates over poetics and styles." In other words, poetry has become satisfied with the "merely literary."

    To an extent, Biespiel's essay seems to me an effort to shame poets into entering public debates by comparing their retreat into insular "coteries" to the larger retreat of Americans generally, who are "self-sorting into homogeneous enclaves," becoming "a collection of increasingly specialized interests":

Like Americans everywhere, America’s poets have turned insular and clustered in communities of aesthetic sameness, communicating only among those with similar literary heroes, beliefs, values, and poetics. Enter any regional poetry scene in any American metropolis or college town, and you will find the same cliquey village mentality with the same stylistic breakdowns.

Surely poets don't want to be like those huddled suburbanites in their gated communities, damaging the public weal in their very tendency to huddle. "Aesthtic sameness" must surely be avoided in poetry as in lawn care. What good is poetry if it gives us only "stylistic breakdowns"?

    Biespiel's call for poet-sages to emerge is predicated on the belief that  "Poets are actually uniquely suited and retain a special cultural gravitas to speak publicly and morally about human aspirations." This seems to be an assumption shared by all those who would have both poets and novelists "engage" with the public sphere, but it's a claim  that cannot be sustained if what Biespiel means is that poets have some special ability not just to speak "publicly and morally about human aspirations" but to speak more intelligently or more persuasively about "human aspirations" than anyone else as part of "civic discourse."

    Certainly the examples Biespiel provides to support his assertion do little to give it credibility: Allen Ginsburg certainly had plenty to "say" in the public realm, but who doesn't think that a good deal of what he said now seems--probably seemed at the time--rather embarrassing in its simple-mindedness? Adrienne Rich may have spoken up from a feminist perspective, but what kind of public impact did it really make, as opposed to the statements of non-poet feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan? Robert Bly is a crank, Dana Gioia a conservative shil, and I'm not sure what Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, or Charles Simic have ever said that has reached anyone other than their devoted readers who already agree with them.

    Biespiel's argument essentially rests on the notion that poets have "the ability. . .to write poems that penetrate differences and discover connection" and partake of poetry's "ancient predisposition for moral persuasion." One could argue that what distinguishes the poet is not primarily his/her ability to "penetrate differences" but to put words together in aesthetically provocative ways and that the connections made are connections between poetry as it has been and poetry as it might be, not between competing "communities," but even if we were to accept Biespiel's amorphous formulation it does not follow that this ability is readily transferable from page to public square. It especially does not follow that whatever "predisposition for moral persuasion" has been attributed to poets over time so naturally manifests itself in modern poets, to most of whom the title "poet" applies in a much more restricted way than it did to Dante or Milton, who did not limit themselves to the lyric mode and who saw fewer differences between poetry and other forms of moral or religious discourse. If most poets now cultivate their own lyrical gardens, it is because that is seen as the appropriate task for the poet, not "moral persuasion."

     Even more dubious is Biespiel's accompanying proposition that "when more poets participate in the public sphere of democratic discourse and even politics, then I’ve little doubt that one consequence will be greater public enthusiasm for the private revelations of our sonnets, odes, and elegies." Exactly why the heretofore unenthusiastic public would suddenly find an interest in sonnets after sampling the poet's political discourse is left unexplored, unless those sonnets turn out to be about "issues" after all--a list of those the "citizen-poet" might take up include "cultural fragmentation, national health care, decrepit infrastructure, threats of terrorism, energy consumption, climate change, nuclear proliferation, warfare, poverty, crime, immigration, and civil rights"--and are not really separable from his/her civic pronouncements. It's hard to know otherwise what would lead people indifferent to poetry to seek it out, so wide is the gap between private and public, at least according to Biespiel in the rest of his analysis. If the sonnets, odes, and elegies are primarily concerned with "memory, private reclamation, and linguistic chop-chop," as Biespiel has it, why would a public yearning for "moral persuasion" bother with it?

I don't want to suggest that poets, or any other writer, or any other citizen, should not enter into "civic discourse." As concerned human beings, of course they should take whatever actions, rhetorical or literal, they think they must. I suppose that the residual esteem still attached to the vocation of "poet" does even give their public words some additional weight, and if particular poets exploit the opportunity given to speak wisely or act courageously on matters of public importance they perform a commendable service. Such a public intervention is only tangentially, even accidentally, related to their work as poets, however, and to laud them for doing it (or condemning them for not) while ignoring the work devalues poetry rather than saving it. It suggests that poetry is mostly good for something else, something other than being itself. Why must the value of poetry be judged by its potential to be a good tune-up for speaking out on more important matters?

    

Readers in the English-Speaking World

    Among the many unsupportable assertions made by Stephen Marche in his semi-infamous 2008 diatribe against Alain Robbe-Grillet was the following:

The "new novel". . . as Robbe-Grillet defined and explained it in his famous 1963 essay, was high art at its unpalatably highest. It applied rules and regulations, opposed subjectivity and tried to dissolve plot and character into description.

I would challenge Marche to re-read Robbe Grillet's fiction, especially those novels written before the publication of For a New Novel, and try to make a case that any of these points can be sustained. Most of them, in fact, are precisely the opposite of what one finds in novels such as The Erasers, The Voyeur, and Jealousy, but I would like to focus in particular on The Voyeur as a work against which accusations such as Marche's simply aren't credible.

    Like its immediate predecessor The Erasers, The Voyeur is essentially a detective story, although the earlier novel (Robbe-Grillet's first) literally includes a detective in its cast of characters while The Voyeur asks the reader to do the detective work its story calls for. It includes a murder of a young girl and a possibly psychopathic killer, both of them elements that would seemingly be attractive to the "popular" readers Marche believes Robbe-Grillet spurned and as far from the assumptions of "high art" as one could get. What is missing from its mystery plot is a firm resolution of the mystery, and while this refusal to accede to the conventions of the genre might be frustrating to some readers, it also manifests a commitment to the depiction of life's complexities, which are not reducible to the neat resolutions of mystery stories. This commitment is not a characteristic of "high art." It is a characteristic of art.

    What most readers who find themselves alienated by The Voyeur would cite as their source of disfavor surely would not be its application of "rules and regulations" but precisely the absence of such rules. A proper novel of this kind (a proper novel in general) should establish a stable relationship between reader and protagonist, should lay out its plot as a discernable series of events and should ultimately fill in whatever gaps might be left over, should use description to fill out the narrative not to substitute for it, should leave the reader with the impression its narrative has been appropriately developed and completed.

    The Voyeur does none of these things. Its protagonist, a watch salesman named Mathias, initially provokes a mostly impassive response, although eventually we are led to exchange this neutrality for a more decisive attitude: either we are appalled and think Mathias is a monster on the loose or we have some sympathy for a character who is clearly insane and can't even remember whether he committed the act or not. Given that finally we don't know which person he really is, the original more affectless reaction seems the right one, but many readers might find this unregulated drift in our disposition toward the character unsettling.

    The Voyeur begins as a relatively straightforward account of a day the watch salesman spends on an island off the French coast, which is initially presented as the place where the salesman himself grew up. However, this item of information is not the first we come to suspect might be questionable. Soon enough the narrative begins to circle around itself--reflecting perhaps the figure-eight pattern that Matthias uses to navigate the island on his quest to sell watches--and to shuffle between past and present. We become uncertain whether Mathias is simply following his route or whether he is engaging in dissociative reveries. We become concretely aware of the murder of the young girl about two-thirds of the way through the novel, but there may be hints that something untoward has happened through these reveries or in the spaces opened up by disruptions of narrative continuity. The murder is the narrative's central event, yet it is the one episode in the novel that remains undescribed.

    Description is indeed a dominant strategy in The Voyeur, but only a passive and inattentive reader would conclude that it is used to "dissolve plot and character." Both plot and character are revealed through description, not annulled by it. Although the point of view in the novel is ostensibly third-person, we would be mistaken to take a passage like this, a description of the island's harbor as Mathias's boat approaches it, as originating in an "outside" narrator:

    The pier, which seemed longer than in actually was as an effect of perspective, extended from both sides of this base line in a cluster of parallels describing, with a precision accentuated even more sharply by the morning light, a series of elongated planes alternately horizontal and vertical: the crest of the massive parapet that protected the tidal basin from the open sea, the inner wall of the parapet, the jetty along the top of the pier, and the vertical embankment that plunged straight into the water of the harbor. The two vertical structures were in shadow, the other two brilliantly lit by the sun--the whole breadth of the parapet and all of the jetty save for one dark narrow strip: the shadow cast by the parapet. Theoretically, the reversed image of the entire group could be seen reflected in the harbor water, and, on the surface, still within the same play of parallels, the shadow cast  by the vertical embankment extending straight toward the quay.

This is what Mathias sees as he stares as the scene from the ship, but, more importantly, it is the way Mathias sees it, complete with the attention to specific detail and obsession with geometric patterning. These qualities are not just those that are brought to passages of description like this--and the novel contains many, many more--but help to constitute Mathias's character, help constitute him as a character. He is precisely the sort of man who keeps careful watch of himself and his surroundings and whose apprehension of the world takes special note of its geometric attributes--its existence as "a series of elongated planes alternately horizontal and vertical," etc. The "plot" in which he figures as the primary character, furthermore,  is not "dissolved" into description of this sort but is enabled by it, the "mystery" at its center evoked by it. Does the omission of description of the act itself signal that Mathias didn't do it, or that he did but can't bring himself to confront it? If the "real" is what is able to impress itself on Mathias's awareness, then the fact that the murder has not done so means he had nothing to do with it, or that there's only some reality he can face?

    These questions are not answered by one's reading of The Voyeur, and that is because, far from "oppos[ing] subjectivity," Robbe-Grillet builds this novel on it. The descriptions offered are not "objective" renderings of a reality presupposed to exist but indeed the subjective perceptions of an ultimately very flawed and uncertain character. The reality he constructs is a vividly rendered one, and it is the reality we as readers must also inhabit, but ultimately it is a rendered one. There is no reason why an approach emphasizing description must therefore necessarily be an approach seeking objectivity. A novel like The Voyeur leaves us with the conviction that subjectivity is all.

    In her book Inventing the Real World: The Art of Alain Robbe-Grillet (1998), Marjorie H. Hellerstein explains that Robbe-Grillet "began by looking into the possibilities of expressing subjectivity while seeming to be objective in descriptions without emotion." That Mathias's perceptions are related "without emotion" is probably what bothers someone like Marche, a characteristic he translates into a rejection of subjectivity. Marche believes that Robbe-Grillet "convinced a generation of talented novelists that there was something vulgar about attracting a popular readership," and presumably the lack of "emotion" in Robbe-Grillet's work acts as an impediment to this "popular readership." It's too "puritanical," too hostile to the "pleasurable" in fiction.

    I doubt that Robbe-Grillet would have objected had his books managed to reach a wider audience. This audience would, of course, have had to accept the books on their own terms, as harbgingers of a "new" fiction that renounces the easy pleasures of traditional fiction as distortions and misrepresentations of the very reality it was purported to be portraying. But I don't see why these books can't be taken on those terms, why they can't be enjoyed for their own ingenuities and mischievous challenges to our expectations. There is pleasure to be had in allowing one's assumptions to be challenged and following a work's alternative logic where it will lead, especially if that alternative logic provides new insights into the still possible permutations into which fiction writers might shape their work, which I believe The Voyeur and Robbe-Grillet's work as a whole does. Finally it seems to me that Stephen Marche is being "elitist" when he assumes that "readers in the English-speaking world" are incapable of reading in this way.

Confusion and Turbulence

In an essay defending historical fiction, Allan Massie concludes that

There are essentially two sorts of novel, the open and the closed, even if many straddle the frontier that divides them. The closed novel is self-sufficient, free of the influence of public events. In the open novel, such events become characters in the action. The open novel is exposed to the winds of the world, its characters actors in history or victims of history. Given the difficulty of understanding the confusion and turbulence of the ever-changing present, it is natural that authors drawn to the open novel should turn to the past.

I am always skeptical of assertions that fiction is "essentially" this or that, and I am particularly skeptical of simple dichotomies such as this one.. Although Massie acknowledges that many novels "straddle" these oppositons, nevertheless the clear implication is that novelists are generally faced with an either/or choice: write novels that are open to the "winds of the world" or novels that are closed off, insular, neglectful of "public events." This particular kind of simple-minded classification is frequently used to dismiss overly aestheticized, formally adventurous fiction as insufficiently engaged with the real world, "merely literary," and it isn't any less obnoxious here because Massie finds the winds of the world blowing predominantly toward the past.

The notion that any fiction is "free of the influence of public events" is, of course, absurd, if by "public events" what is meant is "life," "experience," "reality." What work of fiction isn't influenced by "public events" because, ipso facto, the author is a human being drawing on his/her experience of the world? What text could be truly "self-sufficient" unless it generated itself, free of the writer's unavoidable immersion in "reality"? Perhaps my objection is too literal-minded, taking Massie's talk of self-sufficiency and "winds of the world" at face value as descriptions of our perception of certain kinds of novels rather than metaphorically, approximations of the reading experience--"it's as if this novel wanted to be self-sufficient, turned inward into language" or "it's as if this one is trying to take stock of historical circumstances." It is true, after all, that the closed novel is not really self-sufficient, nor is "history" or "the world" really to be found in the open novel. Both are verbal compositions, constructions of words, and Massie is just commenting on the effect some novels sometimes create.

But Massie certainly doesn't give the impression he's speaking metaphorically about the mission of historical fiction.

Why do novelists turn away from the present day to the past, and sometimes, like Harris, to the now far distant past? There is evidently no single reason. The writer may have become fascinated by some historical figure. . .Obsession with a particular period — the First World War, for instance — may suggest the theme for a novel. The author may wish to explore the past for its own sake, or to use it to point up the present.

The writer turns not to the printed page in an exercise of imagination but "from the present day to the past." Historical figures and periods, not language, is the root of his obsession, and he wants to "explore the past" not the possibilities of fiction. Massie seems to be describing someone whose primary interest indeed is in the "world," at least as this can be known historically, not in literary art. The latter is left to the narrower ministrations of those writers less committed to their creations as "actors in history."

It seems to me that Massie's historical novel is actually more "closed" than those stuck in the present and stuck with their author's commitment to art. "The past is more manageable and easier to grasp than the present," he writes. Further, it is "our present uncertainties" that account for "the attraction of the historical novel and the vogue it once again enjoys." That the present is full of "uncertainties" must surely be true, but then again it must have always been true, and it hardly seems appropriate to suggest that fiction's job should be to avoid those uncertainties. It may be that "the past is more manageable and easier to grasp," but since when has it been deemed that the art of the novel lies in seeking out that which is manageable and easy to grasp? The greatest fiction has always opened itself up to uncertainty and portrayed existence as something difficult to grasp indeed. By this measure historical fiction is a retreat not just into the past but away from what should be the fiction writer's most overriding responsibility. It cuts itself off from fiction's true subject.

Some historical fiction assuredly does open itself to uncertainty and doubt. Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones succeeds precisely because it subverts our confidence that we know what Nazis were, that we have adequate explanations for what motivated them. Thomas Pynchon's recent Inherent Vice was an attempt to "capture" the late 1960s in Los Angeles, but while it does surround the period in an idyllic (and marijuna-produced) haze, at the same it shows the idyll to be inherently unstable, setting the conditions of its own dispersement. It is a period that is far from "manageable" in our assessment of its rise and fall. Some novels are set in the past, but do not take the past itself as subject, do not take the re-creation of historical characters and events as a self-sufficient ambition.

But for me the vast majority of historical novels are just an effort at such re-creation, and, given that I am motivated to read fiction for the aesthetic experience it might provide and not to learn about history, they are therefore mostly irrelevant to the consideration of fiction as a literary art. Whether it is an attempt to "explore the past for its own sake" or to use the past "to point up the present," historical fiction is an effort to use the form for a purpose other than, or secondary to, creating an aesthetically credible work of art--ultimately the only purpose worthy of motivating us to designate writing as "literary" in the first place. It can be defended as such, but the reading experience it provides directs our attention toward extra-literary "content" rather than expanding our attention in the present as art is able to do.