The Reading Experience

The Next New Thing

"Digital Humanities" is a rather amorphous term that appears to cover just about any consideration of the "humanities"--in particular literature--as it is manifested in the existence of texts in digital or online form. Wikipedia defines it very vaguely as "an area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities."

Perhaps the most prominent area of "inquiry" in the digital humanities is "data mining," the exploitation of texts in digital form to examine them in purely mechanistic ways to uncover patterns or extract statistical, measurable "information." This is essentially the form of digital humanities that Stephen Marche attacks in a recent Los Angeles Review of Books essay. Quite simply, Marche tells us, "Literature cannot meaningfully be treated as data."

This is quite obviously wrong. "Literature" as the accumulation of written texts, like any other accumulation of texts regarded from a particular perspective, can certainly be "meaningfully" approached as a source of data. The real question, of course, is whether this is something one would want to do. To the extent this really the issue Marche is raising, his critique of data mining deserves to be taken seriously, but that many intelligent people do indeed clearly believe that data mining and statistical analysis of literature broadly defined is worth their time can't really be just abruptly dismissed.

Marche's contention that digital humanities is "yet another next big thing" at a time when literary studies needs a new big thing is a more cogent response to the rise of digital humanities, and in my opinion gets at the most significant limitation of data mining as a phenomenon in literary studies. Academic criticism has been for the past forty years certainly, and perhaps for the entire history of academic literary criticism, a series of new "things," new approaches to the "scholarly" study of literature. What all of these approaches, including digital humanities/data mining, have in common is that they take the emphasis away from "literature itself," from the inherent value of the reading experience itself, to other ways of "using" literature--for historical or political analysis, for illustrating theoretical positions, etc. Data mining is no more excessive in its abandonment of literature for other, more "cutting edge" pursuits than these earlier "advanced" agendas.

Most of the points Marche makes about the ability of literature to elude the reductiveness of something like data mining are perfectly well-taken, but in the context in which this activity occurs, the academic disciplines that ostensibly take literature as their subject, they are entirely irrelevant. It is indeed the reading experience afforded by the greatest works of literature that ultimately makes them valuable, which cannot be accounted for by this most recent development in the "literary" academy any more than the other non-literary approaches to literature that have dominated academic criticism for decades. But academic criticism is no longer concerned with reflection on or enhancement of the reading experience, is no longer concerned with literature as a subject of humanistic study at all. If Marche wants to convince the literary academy to return to the reading experience as its subject, good luck, but otherwise simply accusing digital humanists of neglecting the literary in literature is more or less redundant.

Everything In

In a review of Pete Townshend's new memoir, Who I Am, Robert Christgau observes that one of its chapters "is an extreme instance that typifies a major problem, one that worsens as the book proceeds: because he wants to get everything in, including hundreds of dropped names, Townshend can’t take the time to make much come alive." This is probably a sound enough criticism of this particular book, but it seems to me one that can be made of very many memoirs--and also biographies--at least of the sort in which the writer's goal appears to be to give as full an account as possible (if not actually getting "everything in") of the subject's life, or of some important episodes of the subject's life.

The attempt to get everything in could be taken as an honest attempt on the author's part to fulfill the presumed goal of memoir/biography, and thus satisfy the presumed interest of readers in such books: to give an account of the subject's life, to let the reader in on the details about which the reader is curious. This kind of curiosity about other people's lives--made more intense when the person in question is a celebrity or somehow regarded as an important figure--seems to me the only real reason anyone would read a memoir or a biography, the only real reason why they exist in the first place.

The attempt to make its narrative "come alive," while attractive in theory, only makes memoir shift away from its primary purpose. Mostly it means being less than forthcoming, or giving emphasis here and taking it away there, which begins to "shape" the story so it's no longer quite accurate. The most radical attempts to "shape," have, of course, resorted to outright fabrication, and the outraged response to this suggests to me that making a memoir "come alive" is valued only if it is still "true" to the same degree "getting everything in" would be. Which of course is simply not possible.

I'd say that if you're reading Pete Townshend's memoir it's because you want to know as much as possible about him, especially about his time with the Who. If the book is less than compelling as writing, perhaps you simply have to accept it, or should be reading something else. Maybe you should just listen to Who's Next instead. 

Caldwell on DeWitt

Excellent review by Edmond Caldwell of Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods in the Chicago Review:

In the unsparing light of Lightning Rods, the contemporary novel of psychological realism stands revealed as a patchwork of readymade materials—clichés and slogans, the hoariest sententia and newly-minted banalities made “original ” by the unspoken complicity of all parties involved to find each particular identikit combination worthy of suitably breathless blurbs. DeWitt’ s “bad" book makes a joke of all the agents and editors, marketing and publicity departments, booksellers and book reviewers, and readers who take genuinely mediocre works for good coin. Jonathan Franzen’ s Freedom is no less a howling absurdity than Lightning Rods ; the difference is that one of them knows itself as such.

Criticism We Don't Like

In this post about a writer's response to a negative review, Ron Hogan suggests that all writers should probably resist the urge to answer their critics, although at the same time he quotes one writer's comment that “Criticism that we don’t like is part of what we signed up for when we published." However, the example Hogan cites is probably a better illustration of the limits of snark than a case that should warn writers off of trying to engage their critics in a productive dialogue about either the merits of a book that might be in question or about the nature of literary criticism.

In fact, literature could very well benefit from more such dialogue if conducted civilly and seriously. I can't see that maintaining a firm line between writer and critic, assigning them each their own separate, non-overlapping domains, inherently serves some necessary purpose. When book reviewing/literary criticism was conducted entirely in print, such interaction, if it happened at all, could occur only long after the fact, and subsequently debate and dialogue lost any sense of immediacy. Online book reviewing, of course, can eliminate this time lapse and enforced distance, and if a writer has a legitimate point to make in response to a review, the critic ought to be willing to reply in defense of his/judgment or expand on his/her analysis.

Thus, I would hereby invite any writer who takes exception to or doesn't understand the basis of a critique I have made in a review, either here or in one appearing elsewhere, to ask for the space to respond. I would post such a response as a separate entry, to which I would reply in turn, rather than as a comment in the comment section, as a way of  equalizing the dynamics of a debate and avoiding a long and potentially fragmented comment thread. It seems to me possible that  this sort of exchange could in fact cast light rather than heat on a literary disagreement, and make both writing and criticism part of a common endeavor to more fully appreciate literary creation as well as the act of critical appraisal.

Making Sense for a Moment

I enjoyed reading Anakana Schofield's Malarky. It engaged my attention from the beginning, and it sustained attention through the appeal of its down-to-earth protagonist, its narrative of the protagonist's odyssey of self-discovery, and its quietly compelling style. It is an impressive first novel.

However, the reception of Schofield's novel has prominently emphasized its "experimental" qualities. In her review, for example, Emily Keeler refers to "its expansive and experimental spirit." Sharon Chisvin notes its "strangeness. . .in plot, structure, language and characterization." The novel's episodic narrative and fractured chronology in particular have been identified as creating this sense of "strangeness."

Despite my ultimate admiration for Malarky, I just can't accept that there's anything particularly experimental or innovative about it. The fragmentary narrative is effective, but it's hardly at this stage in literary history an innovative or shocking move. "Linear narrative" has been in retreat since modernism, to the extent that it's somewhat unusual these days to read a novel that is truly "linear" in the fashion of 19th century fiction. Similarly, the scrambled chronology works well in this novel, but Anakana Schofield is certainly not the first writer to think of using this strategy as a way of suggesting the operations of memory or of reflecting the unstable state of a character's mind. Schofield has artfully used both of these strategies in Malarky--they are perhaps the only strategies she could have used this successfully given the story she wanted to tell and the characters she wanted to evoke--but to call them "experimental" tells us less about this novel than it does about some readers' inability to consider the novel in its appropriate context.

There's nothing really "strange" about the characters in Malarky, although referring to the protagonist, an ordinary Irish farm wife, as "Our Woman," and to her loutish husband as "Himself" does create a certain oddity in the narrative. The novel's other major character, Our Woman's gay son Jimmy, is a somewhat mysterious figure, due to the fact that we really perceive him only from a distance, through Our Woman's recollections and in scenes witnessed by her but not presented to us directly. Jimmy is ultimately a mysterious figure to Our Woman as well, as her discovery that her son is gay (a literal discovery when she comes upon him having sex with another boy) is one of the events that leads her to question her assumptions about the life she has led and sets her on a journey that will end only after both Jimmy and her husband are dead and she has been hospitalized for a mental breakdown. Our Woman also discovers, through a meeting with a woman calling herself "Red the Twit," that Himself has apparently had an affair with her (Red the Twit turns out to be not so reliable a source, however). In response, Our Woman decides to engage in her own extramarital sexual explorations, encountering a card salesman (Card Man), who turns out to be something of a nonentity, and Halim, a Syrian security guard who is rather more interesting. Halim's sexual interest in Our Woman seems closely related to his interest in the biological realities of reproduction, and he repeatedly questions Our Woman about what it is like to give birth.

Our Woman's experiences are presented to us in a discontinuous form, moving freely through various stages of her relationships with Jimmy, her husband, and her lovers, including sessions Our Woman eventually has with a counsellor, "Grief," after her hospitalization. The novel might be called "expansive" in the way it seems to bring all  of these stages of the protagonist's life into the narrative "present," and eventually even to blur the line between past and present through this shuffling of chronology, but really Malarky is a remarkably honed and concentrated work that in spite of its disjunctions might be described as "poetic" in its unity of effect rather than experimental in its breaking of form. It might indeed also be called "expansive" in its portrayal of a woman seeking to enlarge her own sense of possibility (as well as her understanding of the world), but this is the novel's thematic focus, not a formal quality.

The most admirable feature of Malarky is its idiom-inflected language, which evokes Our Woman's speech patterns--sometimes directly, as parts of the narrative are related in the first-person--without losing the appeal of her Irish-flavored speech by in effect burying it in a psychological realism that goes too deeply into the perceiving consciousness of the character, where distinctions of idiom and accent disappear into generic "thought." Nevertheless, the novel's style does work to augment character, helping us to feel closer to Our Woman, at the same time it influences us to apprehend her world as she does, delineating that world in a dynamic and often memorable way, as when she begins to consider Jimmy's behavior shortly after realizing he must be homosexual:

 Of course she worried tall that it was off to Patsy's boy he was. It there was a way to separate them, she'd build a wall for the sake of it. She'd to steady herself into the chair as it came back to her again. She pulled the cushion, the strange one with off-colour ducks on it that one of the girls had embroidered for her and now she couldn't recall who and she wanted to recall who because she wanted her mind cleared of what was rolling in to remind her of that night. It was Jimmy. All Jimmy. She couldn't blame the other boy for he was the younger. If she'd turned away she could have saved herself. but she did not. Every time she saw a cup or glass of orange squash, it would come back to her. She was in it now.

Passages such as this occasionally require somewhat more patient reading in order to untwist the syntax or to "hear" the voice. One might thus say that in this way, along with the novel's fragmented structure, Malarky asks for a more active reader, but neither the structure nor the language is so utterly unfamiliar that they would really disconcert an attentive reader. Schofield has written a novel that draws on existing strategies that nevertheless don't allow the reader to fall back on the most conventional expectations of sequential plot and transparent prose, but the conventions of fiction, the strategies and techniques a writer might draw upon, have surely developed enough beyond those that existed a century ago that a work taking advantage of these later developed strategies would not still be viewed as experimental. (To regard it as such would be unfair not just to other works that might indeed be called experimental but to a work like Malarky itself, applying standards or criteria that are inappropriate for judging it.) Malarky uses its chosen strategies very effectively, and that is the sign of its artistry, not the degree of its "experimental spirit."

Perhaps the clearest mark of her artistry is the way in which Anakana Schofield employs the formal and stylistic devices found in Malarky to produce a novel of considerable emotional power. Our Woman is a convincingly invoked character who earns our sympathetic response, both to her confusion when faced with the apparent breakdown of her marriage (or the breakdown of her role as "wife") and with the probability that her son is gay, as well as to her subsequent attempts to change herself. The novel's final words has Our Woman reflecting that "It's beautiful when it all makes sense, so it is. Occasionally it makes sense, just for a moment," and Malarky is most successful as the portrayal of Our Woman's attempts to make her life make sense. In this way we could say that the novel's fragmented form reinforces the protagonist's quest by asking the reader to help make sense of the narrative by piecing together its continuity in a more exacting way than other stories of self-realization might. The reward is worth the effort, however, as when we finish the novel we feel we have reached a "moment" of aesthetic completion that might not have been possible had Schofield used some other narrative form.

It is the triumph of Malarky that by the end its main character seems conjured fully into life but also that this has been accomplished not through obvious appeals to emotion or overdramatizing but through the clarity and rigor of style and structure skillfully applied. This need not lead us to categorize it as an experimental work, but it should prompt us to call it a very good novel.

Not Quite a Manifesto

Daniel Mendelsohn contends that to be a critic requires "expertise, authority, and taste." He leaves out the most important attribute a critic should have: the ability to pay attention. In fact, without this one, the others Mendelsohn mentions are superfluous

Any defensible judgment about a work of literature must arise from observable features on which the judgment is based and to which the critic can return. This is where the distinction between having an "opinion" about a text and being able to support that opinion is real. An opinion is only a provisional conclusion until it can be allied with and clarified by specific illustration from the work, until the critic can point to those particulars of the work that prompted the opinion. An unsupported opinion may or may not contain implicit but unstated illustration of this kind, but as long as it's unstated, it is not itself "criticism." Not everyone wants to be a critic, of course, but a book review, for example, can't really be taken seriously as criticism unless some text-based "evidence" is provided.

Providing such evidence requires that the critic pay attention. Close attention. This would involve, of course, noting, in fiction, such conventional elements as narrative structure (especially variations in narrative structure), character development (especially the writer's strategies for influencing our attitude toward characters), point of view, etc., but since fiction as a genre of literature is at its core the creation of illusions of such things as "character," "story," or "setting" through skillful manipulation of language, a critic needs ultimately to be able to focus on the writer's invocation of language, on the text as an artificial arrangement of words. Attempting to explicate a work of fiction by leaping first of all to plot or character or any other imposed device rather than considering the way such devices are conditioned by and embedded in language ignores the very medium through which literature exists, as if a work of fiction was really just like a movie aside from those pesky words. (Although film criticism certainly requires attention to the use of medium as well, in this case the manipulation of visual imagery.)

Being attentive to language does not mean picking out isolated passages of "fine writing" and making a fuss over them. More often not, such purported fine writing is just the decorative cover for a work that otherwise does aspire to be a movie. Ultimately language is everything in a work of literature, and a critic needs to account for the way a writer marshals the resources of language to create all of the effects in that work. If, for example, "setting" seems to play an especially important role in a novel or story, a critic should be expected to notice the way the writer's prose works to make setting (again an illusion created with words) seem so prominent. To a significant extent, this means the critic needs to describe the work at hand as carefully as possible, or at least the work as experienced by the critic (and potentially the reader) paying close attention. Judgment, which critics such as Mendelsohn want to assign such an essential part in literary criticism, can only be justified, and ultimately taken seriously, if it is preceded by this kind of scrupulous description.

Absent the effort to give close attention to the tangible features of the literary work, to explain what the experience of reading that work is like, what Mendelsohn calls "expertise" is largely beside the point. If Mendelsohn means by using this term to suggest that someone possessing it is an "expert" reader in that he/she does indeed know how to pay close attention, then of course I agree with him, although it is not necessary to be "expert" in some credentialed way in order to exercise this expertise. If, as I suspect, Mendelsohn means that a an authentic critic is one who can cite all the myriad books he/she has read, or has read all the right ones, or who possesses the appropriate academic pedigree, then this sort of expertise by itself is mostly meaningless. An amateur critic can read just as sensitively as a "professional" critic.

Indeed, the "authority" a critic can bring to the consideration of literary works can only come from the authority that the sensitivity and insight of any particular reading brings with it (although of course some critics can demonstrate over time a consistency of insight that gives that critic a kind of default authority). Unless the critic's work earns its authority, the sort of authority that comes from the supposed prestige of the publication in which that work appears or from some other external affiliation is just specious. Whenever someone like Mendelsohn (or Sir Peter Stothard, who recently opined about the "harm" blogging is doing to literature,) complain about the loss of "authority" being suffered by literary criticism (or book reviewing), it always seems to me they're basically lamenting the loss of this latter, artificial, and self-assumed authority.

"Taste," of course, is the most subjective of the qualities Mendelsohn prizes in a critic, and the purported possession of it by some (critics) and its absence in others (too many readers) has long been used as justification for the implicit deference we are to pay to the "best" critics. At some level it is undeniably good for a critic to be able to discern the artful from the meretricious, but the notion of taste is also used, frequently I think, as the excuse for bringing attention to some books and writers and ignoring others, thus giving the former the tacitly official approval of the guardians of literary culture. When critics are presuming to act as such guardians, their "judgment" especially needs to be examined with skepticism, as this act of sorting (abetted by editors) can actually do harm to literary culture by excluding adventurous writers and elevating those more acceptable to the cultural mainstream. "Taste" is again something that can be validated only by the strength of the critic's descriptions and analysis. It shouldn't be assumed.

I do not say that Daniel Mendelsohn in particular is guilty of this offense or that he abuses the critic's privileges in the other ways I have described. I find most of his reviews to be perfectly sound, although I don't always agree with him. And I do agree with him when he says that the "serious critic ultimately loves his subject more than he loves his reader." The literary critic's primary allegiance should be to literature, to its continuation and continued vitality. If his/her "expertise" consists of ideas about how to effect this, if "authority" is something that helps to ensure it, if "taste" means being able to recognize when a writer or work is likely to contribute to the effort, then indeed the critic needs all of these qualities.