The Reading Experience

Something Wrong

A reviewer of Joanna Rucco's Dan tells us that

Reading Dan is like having a bot worm medically expelled from your body. You suspected there was something wrong, something in you that wasn’t right, and by mysterious ways of medical linguistics Ruocco has not only identified the parasite, but found it in the deep recesses of your soul and pulled it out through your tear ducts for you to see and examine. Or perhaps reading Dan is more like the act of having your ears cleaned. With each page a tube is stuck deeper within your drum and Dan mounts, pushing warm alien water into your skull, pulling out chunks of orange gunk so big you end up questioning your true size. I conceived my ear canal to be X size. But, my god, my ear canal is triple X. And dear lord can I hear better. After reading Dan you’ll hear things in the way you speak, in the way others speak, that you simply did not hear before.

It is admirable that the reviewer wishes to convey a sense of what reading this novel is like. That is, in my opinion, the most important task a conscientious reviewer undertakes. Too often reviewers take this task to require plot summary--indeed, many reviews are presented as nothing but plot summary, with perhaps a spicing of judgment to give the review some suitable critical flavor. Description, however, goes deeper than plot summary, attending instead to the author's way of telling the story, to the effects of point of view, the particularities of style, to not just the narrative but the way the narrative has been shaped through a larger conception of form.

Unfortunately, this description of Dan, carried out through two rather bizarre extended similes, actually takes attention away from the novel itself and places it on the reviewer: Hey, look at the colorful comparisons I can make, one after the other and stretched out to outrageous length! Perhaps if these similes actually worked, actually captured some important feature of the novel under review, the device would be justified, but these similes are so labored, so opaque, it's difficult to know exactly what they're supposed to illuminate. Why a bot worm, exactly? (I'll confess I had to Google the thing to even know what a bot worm is.) Surely the medical linguistics can't be so "mysterious"--linguistics is a science, isn't it?--that whatever the reviewer means by this term can't be identified more specifically, and how can this process be first of all expelling the worm from the reader's body, then turning to "the deep recesses of your soul" only to wind up more corporeally pulling the worm through the tear ducts? The second simile, about pages sprouting tubes and sticking them in the reader's ear, is so thoroughly confused I don't at all know what it's trying to get at. 

This sort of out-of-control figurative description is not the norm, of course. It is distressingly indicative, however, of an apparent belief that subjective impressions expressed in sufficiently "vivid" language can substitute for actual analysis in book reviews. Probably this assumption arises from the further belief that book reviews of fiction function precisely as the register of subjective impression, balanced by the "objectivity" of plot summary. But where does criticism enter into the agenda of book reviewing? If we believe the review has a critical function, if it is not simply an auxiliary of publishing and publicity, it can't just be a "personal response" more often than not meant to celebrate the book under review. At some point there must be some closer reading that attempts to account for the work's success or failure, not to record the reviewer's feelings in ostentatious and overheated prose.

The notion that the primary purpose of a book review is to be "lively," that it should itself be a "fine piece of writing," might seem unobjectionable, especially if you regard reviewing as journalism more than criticism. Perhaps this admonition does discourage reviewers from becoming too pedantic, but at its core, I believe, is an implicit assumption that all criticism is pedantry, so that liveliness and attitude (the former manifesting the latter) takes the place of any real critical scrutiny. At its worst, such an assumption is reflected most acutely in reviews like the one I have quoted, in which the groping after verbal cleverness overwhelms even coherent communication. But even when kept under better control, the attempt to produce "a fine piece of writing" in the guise of a book review still draws more attention to the reviewer endeavoring to produce it than the book the review presumably should explicate. This is not criticism by any definition, just self-indulgence.

Taking Down the Gates

It seems safe to say that Literature as an identifiable category of writing the characteristics of which can be specified and defended has never been under greater suspicion. Even those who still believe that the term has not been emptied of all of its meaning must finally concede that, yes, the concept of "literature" is to an extent a social construction, that what gets counted as literature is subject to historical shifts and is ultimately determined by contemporaneous social and cultural assumptions. Works of literature and the standards we use to judge them can never actually be timeless or universal in the casual sense in which he often use these words.

And yet judgments about what is good or bad, worthy of attention, "literary" or not aren't entirely socially determined. "Literature" is heavily freighted with the judgments of the past, and present notions of what makes a poem or a novel literary can't escape the influence of the poems and novels that have previously been considered such, even if their influence has resulted in the effort to counteract or negate it. More often, writers attempt to incorporate or creatively transform their influences, so that the work produced by current writers certainly is not free of already established conceptions of the literary as exemplified by the poets and novelists these writers have found important to them. Readers as well are inevitably shaped by the "great books" they have encountered (even if there is disagreement about what those great books are), and their experience of the writing of the present is surely in part conditioned by what these books have prepared them to expect a work of literature to be like.

Skepticism toward the exaltation of Literature, especially when embodied in an unofficial "canon," is expressed by those who feel the concept of literature as we have inherited it is inappropriately exclusive, as well as by those who believe it is still possible to credibly distinguish between works that are more and less significant, but that setting up inflexible criteria for determining what is literature and what is not actually gets in the way of being able to do so fairly. But of course the canon is in fact unofficial, developed mostly as a pedagogical tool in university curricula, and it has been expanded so thoroughly beyond the narrow conception of a canon that might have existed 50 years ago that to believe it still exerts an unduly restrictive influence on the reading choices of most readers is to live in the past at least as stubbornly as any hidebound traditionalist. And far from being unwelcome in most "serious" literary discussions, genre fiction and other forms of popular narrative have never been as influential on writers trying to blur distinctions between the popular and the literary as they are now, nor as accepted by readers prepared to accept that, say, science fiction or crime fiction can be as "serious" in intent as any work of "literary fiction."

Those who object to the preservation of Literature as a measure of the quality of imaginative writing are really objecting to the perceived influence of critical "gatekeepers," self-appointed arbiters of quality and guardians of the canon. After all, no literary work ever elected itself to the canon. This task has instead been taken up by literary scholars and critics, although of course no particular scholar or critic has ever actually been asked to cast a vote, except insofar as English professors choose certain books rather than others in the courses they teach. If for a while--keeping in mind that the academic study of literature as we know it now became widespread less than a hundred years ago, and thus the canon as we speak of it today is also a century or less old--the choices by and large reflected the demographics of the professors (that is, mostly white and male), this certainly had the effect of restricting canonical literature to an overly narrow range of writers and writing, but the gatekeeping done by this old guard of academic scholars was more likely to be of the sort that worked to distinguish between "major" and "minor" writers, the lattter themselves mostly white and male but not as worthy as the former. Certainly it would not have ocurred to these scholars to include what we now call genre fiction, and, sadly, women and minority writers were radically underrepresented because it also would not have occurred to this first generation of literary scholars that such writers existed in large enough numbers to warrant much attention.

It would be difficult to maintain that academic literary scholars now play any gatekeeping role at all. The university curriculum is loaded with courses on genre fiction, popular culture, previously neglected writers of all kinds, as well as courses on canonical texts designed not to foster appreciation but to "interrogate" underlying historical and cultural assumptions making these works anything but "timeless." Academic literary scholars do not currently patrol the gates protecting literary greatness but have taken down the gates, leaving an open field in which virtually no writing or reading practice is disallowed. If Literature remains an oppressive symbol of elitism and exclusion, it is certainly no longer being perpetuated by academe.

This would leave only non-academic literary critics as the guilty parties responsible for using the pretentious standards of Literature in judging writers' work. Presumably a figure such as James Wood, sometimes regarded as a harsh judge indeed, is the sort of critic who won't let Literature go. But while certainly Wood can be dismissive in his reviews of new work, the standards he applies don't come from Literature per se but reflect his own parochial conception of the proper goals of fiction, standards he habitually applies, finding some books that meet them and, unsurprisingly, many that don't. Perhaps all critics develop fundamental principles by which they exercise their judgment, but Wood takes this to a particularly doctrinaire extreme. Still, if you resist Wood's at times imperious pronouncements, you are not resisting an appeal to the haughty demands of Literature but the requirements of James Wood's tendentious notion of "how fiction works."

Capital-l Literature has been permanently reduced to the lower case, and claims that it still lords over lowly readers just can't be sustained. But to insist that critics and reviewers refrain from making any distinctions or rendering negative judgments amounts to declaring that no standards should be applied. Merely because we no longer believe it necessary to permanently enshrine books and writers worth reading into a canon, or judge all literary works by supposedly timeless standards that hold up all new work to comparison with the "existing monuments" of the past doesn't mean critical evaluation itself is obsolete. Critics can surely still provide compelling reasons why a given work is more or less successful. Further, those reasons might be informed by familiarity with a few of those literary monuments, not to mention less imposingly monumental works that were nevertheless good and served for the critic (or the reader) as exemplars of possibility in literary art. Perhaps some great works truly are great, and perhaps some books really are better than others.