The Reading Experience

Requirements

Richard Eder begins a recent review in the Boston Globe by telling us that

Great novels written in the first person require one of two conditions. In “Moby Dick,” Ishmael is essentially a window, though tinted with metaphysical light.

The other option requires becoming a guide of sorts. To play an active part, to become a participant with one hand while clutching our elbow with the other, it is necessary for character and voice to possess an autonomous savor and thrust. . .Huck Finn triumphs because he is, in himself and beyond what he relates, a figure of such winning crag and sheen.

There are not just "two conditions" that first-person narratives must fulfill. First-person narratives can come in all kinds of flavors and can create whatever conditions they want.

First-person narratives are not "required" to do anything, and it is not "necessary" for "character and voice" to possess any particular qualities. Writers are allowed (or should be allowed) to create whatever kind of character and whatever kind of voice suits their aesthetic purpose. The reader (or reviewer) might not be sympathetic to that purpose, but this does not sanction the reviewer to devise a set of aesthetic rules that conform to his taste and that the book under review is obliged to observe.

Eder might have said that he prefers first-person narrators that are like Ishmael in Moby-Dick or that are like Huck Finn. He might have then said that the particular book under review does not create a narrator similar to those in these two books, and therefore he didn't care for this book. That's a pretty restrictive demand to make of a work of fiction, but at least we would know that this reviewer makes such a demand and could judge his review accordingly.

Eder might also simply have said that indeed he didn't like the narrative voice in this novel and therefore didn't care for the book. He didn't need to issue an edict about the use of first-person narrative in order to convey that opinion.

 

 

The Value of the Business

In an essay at The New Yorker, Louis Menand recounts an episode from early in his career as a professor in which a student asked him, "Why did we have to buy this book?" Continuing in the student's mercantile language, Menand avers that the student was "asking me to justify the return on investment in a college education. I just had never been called upon to think about this before. It wasn’t part of my training. We took the value of the business we were in for granted."

Menand proposes three possible answers to the student's question. The first simply asserts that "you’re in college, and these are the kinds of books that people in college read." The second assures the student “You’re reading these books because they teach you things about the world and yourself that, if you do not learn them in college, you are unlikely to learn anywhere else.” The most baldly utilitarian response has it that "advanced economies demand specialized knowledge and skills, and, since high school is aimed at the general learner, college is where people can be taught what they need in order to enter a vocation."

The third answer is the one now implicitly given by the school as part of the state apparatus, and Menand expresses the usual dismay at the pass to which we have come when this is the primary justification for reading books in college (although he does also acknowledge that the situation isn't likely to change). However, I can't see that the other two answers are any better. The first would be true if this were 1935 and all college students were undergraduates at Yale, but it hardly describes the situation in 2011. The second, which is Menand's own preferred answer, spells out perhaps the underlying justification for answer one, but if college students are no longer interested in learning "things about the world and yourself" in return for their "investment" in college (which in my experience they indeed are not, to the extent they ever were), this answer is no more compelling than the first.

The problem with all three answers, ultimately, is that they tie the value of reading a book (I'm assuming Menand has in mind primarily works of literature, since he's an English professor) to its potential value to the institution of college, to the school (most charitably, to the goals of "education"). In my opinion, a better answer would be something like this: "You should read that book because it's a significant book of its kind, one that anyone studying _____ needs to read." In my opinion, a literature professor's first allegiance is to literature, or to the period/genre/national literature the course covers, and as long as the college where the professor is employed requires or encourages its students to take courses in literature, this answer should suffice. All questions concerning the place of literature in a college curriculum need to be answered by administrators or campus committees, not by the individual professor otherwise just doing his/her job.

Perhaps the time has come to reconsider the literature requirement, however. Most of the justifications that need to be made of reading assignments occur in courses in which the majority of students would not be there if taking such a course were not a degree requirement in "general education." Although generally speaking I think it a good idea for as many people as possible to read as many worthwhile books as possible, I'm pretty sure that materializing this broad aspiration into specific college course requirements has not worked out that well. It has especially not worked out well for literature. Courses in "Introduction to Literature" or "American Literature, Beginnings to the Present" are hopelessly incapable of fulfilling the aspiration, at best providing some students with some "information" about the subject they might later be able to recall, at worst making most students resentful of being compelled to take the course and less likely to follow up on the assigned reading with voluntary reading of their own. Given the career and personal goals of most of the students who take such courses, there really isn't a good answer for them to the question posed by Menand's student. Frankly, I don't see why these students should have to buy the books to take this sort of course, and I don't really want to teach them.

Students who take literature courses voluntarily, or choose to major in English, Comparative Literature, etc., are implicitly agreeing to accept the instructor's judgment about what books are appropriate for them to read. They would have cause for complaint only if it were determined the instructor's judgment is demonstrably faulty or if the instructor is a demonstrably bad teacher of the subject. An instructor (not just in literature) should be asked to know his/her subject well and to present it with integrity. He/she should not be asked to justify the entire project of higher education as it currently stands.

Of course, a great deal of instruction in "literature," particularly in the bigger universities and more pretigious liberal arts colleges (as opposed to, say, community colleges and many "regional" universities) is no longer instruction in literature. Literature is instead used to indeed "teach you things about the world" through cultural studies or to improve "thinking" through critical theory. Perhaps this development over the past twenty-five years or so has managed to keep what are still labeled as literature courses in the curriculum, but soon enough the question "why did we have to buy this book?" will be a question about some theorist's magnum opus, not Melville. At that point, the utilitarian answer may actually be the most truthful one.

Very Different from Themselves

In the previous post I suggested that too often reviews written by novelists or poets are taken as "an opportunity to disparage an approach to fiction or poetry that isn't the reviewer's." A good example of this would be a recent New York Times review by Michael Cunningham of Rikki Ducornet's Netsuke. After faintly praising Ducornet's novel, Cunningham instructs us that

By delving into a character’s motives, a writer fulfills one of fiction’s most powerful potentials — the ability to draw the reader into a character, including the most repellent of them. Fiction can show readers what it’s like to be someone very different from themselves, even if that drawing-in is discomfiting.

Ducornet, unfortunately, "has erred too much on the side of discretion":

The pure malice of Ducornet’s  [protagonist] is not alleviated by her reluctance to show us much by way of the injuries he’s inflicting on his patients. Ducornet treats the analyst’s patients as offhandedly as does the analyst himself. The book’s atmosphere of arid heartlessness begins to produce a parched feeling in the reader.

Cunningham's review betrays a lack of sympathy with the aesthetic goals of Ducornet's novel, goals that clearly clash with his own--"to draw the reader into a character"--and this unwillingness to accept a kind of fiction different from that which he writes is reinforced in the review by an unwillingness to understand what Ducornet's goals may be. He engages in no reflection on what Ducornet might be up to rather than psychological realism, and he considers Netsuke in total isolation from the rest of Ducornet''s by now rather ample body of work. If Cunningham has read any of Ducornet's previous fiction, his review seems rather determined to avoid any reference to it.

Readers familiar with Rikki Ducornet's fiction know that it does not attempt "to draw the reader into a character" in the manner--adopted, no doubt, from Virginia Woolf--that Michael Cunningham himself favors. This is not because she has no interest in character, but because in her fiction character is just one element that works to help give it its distinctive signature. Ducornet is not a realist, psychological or otherwise, but a fabulator, and were she to focus on drawing the reader inside the characters in the mode of Woolf or Faulkner she would either be undermining the very mode in which she has long worked, or be turning herself into a different kind of writer. Still, to say that Ducornet to some extent subordinates character to plot, setting, symbol and imagery, or, especially, style, is not to say that her fiction shows no concern for the "motives" of its characters. Indeed, long-time readers of Ducornet's work must be taken aback by Cunningham's suggestion that Netsuke exhibits insufficient attention to motive, since Ducornet's fiction so relentlessly chronicles what it represents as the motive force behind all human behavior: the unavoidable power of "desire."

In Ducornet's story, "The Word, 'Desire'", the protagonist, who is still experiencing the intense, intoxicating effects of new love, comes to appreciate this power when she notices her lover looking with obvious desire at another woman. She imagines herself into the perspective of both the lover, gazing, and the other woman, being gazed at, and finds herself concluding: "How far the word 'desire' goes! How it tugs us along! How it worries us, daggers us. How it lights our path." Ducornet's fables are fables of the manifestation and the consequences of desire, how it "tugs us along" and both "daggers us" and "lights our path." Her characters are driven by desire, experiencing both ecstasy and pain, come to a healthy acknowledgment of it, disastrously deny it. Desire in such works as The Stain, The Jade Cabinet, and Gazelle leads the characters to both become more human, and, in some cases, descend into the monstrous. Ducornet isn't really interested in showing readers "someone very different from themselves" because this fundamental human motivation is one to which we are all equally subject.

Thus the claim that a novel like Netsuke fails to explore "motives" arises both from a weak reading of the book and sheer ignorance, either literal or willed, of Rikki Ducornet's work as a whole. Cunningham asserts that the psychiatrist protagonist acts out of "pure malice" in seducing his patients, that he "systematically and without guilt soul-­murders" them. While it is not necessarily surprising that a reader might cringe with horror at the actions of a character like this protagonist (readers have expressed similar distaste for some of the actions and events depicted in her other novels), one might expect Cunningham to examine his response, to more fully appraise the text and more carefully measure his response against what the novel actually conveys to us about the protagonist. Because this character as subject to the inescapable influence of desire as any of Ducornet's other characters. He is not motivated out of "pure malice"--he may be malicious, but the malice isn't pure, uninflected by deeper impulses that are themselves neither benevolent nor malevolent but simply are what they are.

"My clients are thwarted, famished, and lonely," the protagonist tells us. "Inevitably, sooner or later, I seize upon and penetrate the one who has wanted this from me from the first instant. Or has taken time but has come around to wanting it." The narrator both believes what he is doing is of benefit to his clients--it's what they want as an assuagement of their pain--and knows he is exploiting them. He knows also he is exploiting his wife, Akiko, an accomplished and compassionate woman he both loves and despises. In betraying his wife with his clients, the narrator is acting on desires his marriage can't fulfill--that he doesn't want it to fulfill. Cunningham is correct to say that Netsuke is "a story about a man trying to bring his own house down" (although this isn't all the story is about), but this very insight implies he isn't simply acing out of malice. His accomplishments as husband and professional are being overrun by elemental impulses for which those accomplishments are an inhibition and a nuisance. In Ducornet's fiction, carnal desires must and should be expressed, but that doesn't mean the consequences will aways be "healthy."

Ducornet admittedly makes it difficult for us to grant the psychotherapist his portion of a shared humanity by making him the narrator of his own story. Novels narrated in the first person by morally compromised characters, such as Lolita, Thomas Berger's Killing Time, John Hawkes's The Blood Oranges, or, more recently, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones can charm us into a kind of moral complicity in which we come to regard our identification with the narrator with some horror, but can also lead us to recoil at too obvious violations of ethical norms and decorum. We can both lull ourselves into overemphasizing the narrator's "human" qualities, and allow our disgust to overlook them. Judging from Michael Cunningham's response, Netsuke can provoke the latter reaction. A first-person narrator is always unreliable to some degree, but some writers especially exploit the capacity for first-person narration to create ambiguity and instability. Rikki Ducornet is this kind of writer. Whenever she uses a first-person narrator, as readers we need to be prepared for, and willing to accept, the resulting ambiguities.

 Netsuke, like many of Ducornet's novels, is relatively brief, which also no doubt adds to the possibility it will be misread in the manner exemplified by Michael Cunningham. We don't "get to know" the character as we do in longer works, especially those devoted to the kind of psychological realism in which "getting to know" is largely the point. Ducornet's kind of fabulation, which can draw on the elements of the fable or fairy tale without incorporating the movement toward narrative closure ("the moral of the story"), works best both through brevity and a deliberate avoidance of psychological "depth," at least through explicit strategies of point of view or style. Anything longer could mar the delicacy of what she is after, and "delving into a character's motives" would only undermine its subtlety.

Perhaps writers who take a much different approach to their own work will be unsympathetic to Ducornet's methods, but they ought to consider that bias before agreeing to review her work.

(June 13, 2011)

The Kind of Work That You Like to Do

In a recent profile of Stanley Fish, Fish is quoted as having said, "Literary interpretation, like virtue, is its own reward. I do it because I like the way I feel when I'm doing it." He further amplifies:

You do this kind of work simply because it's the kind of work that you like to do, and the moment you think you're doing it to make either people or the world better, you've made a huge mistake. There's no justification whatsoever for what we do except the pleasure of doing it and the possibility of introducing others to that pleasure. That's it!

There is, of course, a paradox at work in Fish's formulation: To provide yourself and others with a positive pleasure is, however slightly, to "make. .  .people or the world better." Since the pleasure that "interpretation" provides comes from the invigoration of one's mental faculties, it might be said that literary interpretation--literary criticism more generally--performs an especially useful service. But Fish is cautioning against the hubris of believing that literary criticism will perform any service beyond this modest one of engaging the mind in a productive activity.

This view is no doubt uncongenial to both those academic critics who want their work to be an "intervention" in culture that transcends the "merely literary" and to those traditionalists who think that literature itself can make us better, a goal to which the scholar or critic should help lead us. In my view, the "justification" for criticism and interpretation indeed cannot be found outside of the activity itself, although it is certainly true that any particular act of interpretation can prove useful or enlightening for others. And to the extent that the critic intends his/her analysis to be enlightening, this sort of utility could be said to "justify" critical analysis as well. Such analysis might even be narrowly and tendentiously focused, an attempt to "use" the subject text for partisan purposes that go beyond simply understanding or appreciating the text. But criticism has then become something other than literary criticism. "Interpretation" as Fish would define it becomes instead the means to some other end, an end deemed more important than simply coming to terms with the text itself.

Fish is perhaps the most well-known literary critic associated with philosophical pragmatism, as descended from John Dewey through Richard Rorty. His version of reader-response theory, in which meaning can only arise "in the reader," is a clear descendant of Dewey's notion of "art as experience." Since the highest pragmatic value is generally considered to be that of utility--an action or belief is justified if it produces an efficacious result--one might think that when applied to literary criticism whatever "use" might be made of a literary text is perfectly acceptable if it works to some desired end, but while of course finally  any reader can make "use" of any text in any way he/she wants, this does not mean that all such readings contribute to the integrity of literary criticism understood as a practice or a discipline possessing definitional coherence. Indeed, if any reading can be appropriately considered "literary criticism," then the term has no meaning at all, no object that is its proper concern. Fish is implicitly insisting that the proper concern of criticism is the free play of "interpretation" unconstrained by agendas other than the imperative to carry it out intelligently and attentively. Interpretation of texts that do not themselves communicate meaning fully or directly is what literary critics do, and the most appropriate affirmation of its value comes from the critic who is able to convey "the pleasure of doing it" to responsive readers.

There are, alas, too few critics of this kind around. In my opinion, this is only partly because critics themselves cling too firmly to various non-literary and non-critical agendas. Those in charge of the most widespread source of literary commentary, book review sections of magazines and newspapers, seem seldom to assign works of fiction or poetry to capable, disinterested (as in "impartial") literary critics in the first place. In fact, a significant majority of reviews of novels and poetry collections seem to be written by other novelists and poets, a practice that is apparently founded on the assumption that novelists and poets are in the best position to assess other work in their chosen forms. This is a mistaken assumption.

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom observes that "when a potential poet first discovers (or is discovered by) the dialectic of influence, first discovers poetry as being both external and internal to himself, he begins a process that will end only when he has no more poetry within him, long after he has the power (or desire) to discover it outside himself again." Bloom is acknowledging that while the poet--the fiction writer as well--is initially inspired to write by the discovery of previous writing "external" to his/her own need for expression, eventually he/she finds it difficult to still "discover" poetry in other writers because his/her own work now so thoroughly defines what poetry should be. This is especially true of the best poets and novelists, which all the more makes it a good idea to view even the most accomplished of such writers with suspicion when they turn to reviewing. We will probably acquire more understanding of the reviewer and the reviewer's perspective on his/her own work than we will get a trustworthy account of the book ostensibly under review.

There are, of course, always exceptions. Some writers are also such penetrating critics that one wants to read them even if it is likely the critic's analysis will reveal more about the critic's assumptions than about the subject of the analysis. William H. Gass would be one such writer, but as much as I value Gass's criticism, I would also acknowledge that it is at least as valuable as an adjunct to his fiction, helping to explain the nature of its departures from convention, or as part of a philosophy of literature that works in tandem with the fiction. Certainly Gass engages in this critical work because it his work he "likes to do" (or at least this is the impression his criticism leaves with me), but as much as Gass lends credibility to experimental fiction through his essays and reviews, ultimately such fiction is well-served as well by critics able to more comprehensively assess its failures as well as its successes.

The kind of work novelists and poets most like to do, presumably, is writing novels and poems. They might also like writing reviews perfectly well, but this is inevitably a secondary sort of gratification, and in most cases not something done for "its own reward." My impression of the reviewing done by these writers considered collectively is that all too often it is either an opportunity to disparage an approach to fiction or poetry that isn't the reviewer's or to praise one's colleagues, perhaps in the hope that such generosity might be reciprocated when the reviewer's own book appears. The first approach is an especially good way to dismiss unconventional fiction that might pose a threat to established practice, while the second helps to build "community," to elevate the status of current writing more generally.

Ultimately none of these motives do current writing much good, however, if it is to be considered as potentially part of "literature," if "literary" is to be a term that designates more than a lifestyle choice. Judging a work according to principles the work has rejected is hardly criticism in the first place, and seeks to encourage a conformity of method that would really only drain literature of its vitality. "Community" is a pleasant notion that might help to blunt the edges of literary rivalries, but finally it has nothing to do with writing worthy poems and novels. Praising fellow members of one's community for anything other than creating worthwhile literary art is just a free form of publicity and reduces literature to just another act of social networking. New books need critics willing to regard them as efforts to be taken seriously as literature, to survive in the long run, not just their notices in the weekend's review pages. They need critics who regard criticism as the act of considering books in this way, and who want to engage in it because it's a good thing to do.

June 6, 2011